continuing ... memory and architecture

Window and tree, or windows and tree ... views from one way considered from another. When did I do this image? When would someone else have done this image, or wanted this sort of image? When would someone want an image of a tree caught between two windows, on either side of an architectural/continental divide? I did it when I was thinking of going into medicine, after a life-time of wanting/hoping to be a writer, or its defunct (to me), a painter: A person who had the fantasy of being noticably by what she had to say. As a painter, it was as someone who was noticable by what she could image forth. No one wants to be "something" (a painter, a writer, an accountant, etc), without wanting to be noticed for something, or at least to have experienced at some point that one's skills were well put. One hardly waits around to be nothing.

And yet, recently, I found myself strangely overjoyed by a small moment in the movie Man on a Train, where the poetry teacher in a small French town who has fantasied all his life about being a famous bank robber, comes home only to be confronted by his gardener. He arrived home, heard noises, obviously fantasized that something dangerous and exciting was happening, turned the corner, and was confronted by his gardener. He asks the gardener how it is that after so many many years he still can't get used to the gardener, though he comes once a week (like someone going to therapy?), and the gardener says, "No one remembers a gardener."

Oh. To be a normal everyday nobody, but be handy, content, and indispensible, after all.