An unexpected rediscovery....
A new masters student wanted to talk about archetypes and music – she is composing a set of songs, she came over on her bike today, when it was cold and windy, when trash had blown onto my front porch. I showed her a pile of books and gave her a video of the seminar I've been teaching for Johannesburg and Zürich on individuation, archetype, and music, which will give her some useful basics.
But to dig up that pile of books - well, five books, to be exact, plus one ebook – I unpacked the two boxes of books in my living room that were kept back after I moved my music office into storage, early in 2022.
(And yes, it's exasperating to pay monthly rental on forty-odd boxes of books, as I continue to be uncertain over where to move next. The cost of making decisions, as well as the cost of apartment living – no, let's be fair, the cost of owning too many books.)
In the past few years I have made several of the usual presentations on AIDS and history; each time I've looked for a large booklet from 1993, one with a remarkable series of personal black and white photographs – a booklet I treasure, and one for which I also know that, if it were lost, I would never again find a copy. The archives that have grown up in the past two decades in San Francisco probably have copies, but only probably, as it's just the program for a fundraising dinner – but it has beautiful photographs by Annie Leibovitz, a bit in the style of Avedon portraits, though these are much more human.
The cover photo is especially remarkable in showing two women, one of color – as there were far fewer lesbians with HIV than gay men or straight women or men in the 80s and 90s, there remain far fewer representations of any kind from that time. (And you have to treat this with care these days – contemporary youngsters are easily enraged by any representation that doesn't include all categories; they don't seem to understand the vast distance between reality and representation in a pre-phone world, and they assume that any cluster of pictures that focuses on white gay men must somehow reveal a calculated ideological exclusion of others.)
But the pictures are so beautiful, aren't they?
Since I've dug through shelves looking for this pamphlet in the past few years – to the point of taking all the magazines and ephemera off three or four of the shelves in my middle room, where the philosophy and AIDS and psychology are – and had actually thought, with unhappy irritation, that I dropped it somewhere, or someone pilfered it when I handed it around in some library or lecture room – it is a great pleasure to find it again. And, of course, it was only missing because I had put it in a box with other things... which ties it to my current, private and admittedly slightly ridiculous, concerns: not merely, how will I move all the books, if I move, but – how much will I lose track of the ones that matter most. Exaggerated anxieties, I know, but – I still feel fairly helpless, physically and energetically, in the face of a major move.
But here is one of the pictures – several are astounding and important, but this cover photograph is worth seeing.
So, you see: things can return from being lost.
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