Oliver, Wisher & Watkins
Yolanda Wisher’s 5 South 43rd Street, Floor 2 is an address filled with the ache of the past. Of the neighborhoods we remember from our childhood. But on which the sun is always setting. The kind of neighborhood filled with moments we aspire to hold on to ‘as if time is taking your blood pressure’. It’s an ache for the eclectic local characters of grocery, hustle and retail. Those who ‘sold everything from evening gowns to soup’ as much as it is the memory of stains left by winos or the thick wooden doors outside which murders are remembered. It mixes these together in memory to produce the hot breath of a West Philly which always lives in the past. Reaching back in time and amplifying our own nostalgia for homes long since left, and for whom our recollections will always be preserved inside an opaque amber. Wisher’s memory echoes our own as we see ourselves in the remembrance of the people and places of our past. We remember the good but still fail to forget the bad. Gone are the people, and many of the buildings, lost to the economics of progress, but also the natural migration of families in and out of the area. The demographics and facades might change, but our memories of them remain.
Wisher writes with precision and detail to create a return to the neighborhood of her past. To create ‘one of those days to come home from walking’. But she also uses the same language to create the kind of sense-making and meaning which comes with loss. We smell the food and recognize some of the people, but they are not the same, because we are not the same. It’s a grief of location as much as it is the longing for a former self. The place is different because we are different. Any return can only echo that which was once familiar. And she reminds us that all of us have the ache of a 5 South 43rd Street, Floor 2 within us.
If Wisher takes us back to the neighborhood, Mariana Oliver’s Blueprint for a House takes us inside the home. If Wisher gives us the sights and smells, Oliver gives us the nuts and bolts. The carpentry and geometry which comes with tightly crafted grammatical accuracy. And helps us understand that rooms are just as much ‘collections of statements’ as they are ‘stitched to our bodies and live within us’. The framework of grammatical rigor orders not only a sequence of blueprints which walk us through the house, but serves as a construct for using sentence structure to turn those rules into the language of home. If the blueprint of a house remains rigid and adherent to rules and geometry, the ordinance of a home serves the opposite. They ‘allow for change, variation and displacement’ and ask us to picture the motion a space holds. These are the spaces not of construction, but of memory. Spaces for which we can only call them home as we ‘fumble through in the dark’. Oliver orders her work in the traditional real estate framework of a walkthrough. Crafting a tour which travels from room to room, revealing more about the house as it transforms into a home with each wall traversed.
Furniture is particularly potent. We learn of the ‘orange area rugs’ where ‘we sort through words that are not ours’. The ordering of shoes by the entranceway as metaphor for love and friendship. And how the color of the furniture in one of the most intimate spaces in the home, the study, reflects its users. One brown, one white and separated by a loveseat meant for reading. In this space we are drawn ever closer to its occupants, where Oliver describes how she likes ‘listening to the sound of typing as the house fills with the drive behind those long fingers. It’s nice when an arrhythmic noise begins to feel comforting. Learning to write in company means getting used to sharing an unavoidable series of smudges and cross-outs’. It’s the smudges of relationship and the arrhythmia of life. The irregular heartbeat which always shows up in the limbic space between house and home. How we fill our spaces not just with objects, but with sound. And how the more filled these spaces become over time, we realize how ‘if I lived in another house I’d want it to be just like this one’.
Oliver also draws in those who pass through, often those with four legs. The kinds of temporary friends we give all our love to, but who rip our hearts out when they pass away. Oliver frames these feelings as an empty house in the yard, surrounded by holes in the ground. And how ‘every hole in the earth was a profound loss’ and ‘letting the eyes dwell on an absence while ignoring the surface around it’. How the holes in the ground echo the holes left in her heart. The pet-shaped holes they leave in our lives. It’s a simple metaphor which screams absence. Not in the way in which empty rooms hold the promise of life to come, but absence in the way in which such emotional space will never be filled. Less filling a space with sound, more filling it with silence.
Only towards the end of the piece does Oliver reveal the home is that of two women, and speculates if others can tell simply by the objects and rituals they’ve surrounded themselves with. But that their home was something they willed into existence just as much as their relationship was something built from nothing. The raw material of love in both home and life. A space filled with the objects of living as well as the cacophonous motion of lived experience.
Both Wisher and Oliver’s pieces draw upon the past to make sense of a present. They recall explicit detail and the objects of neighborhood and house to draw portraits of home. In Wisher, it is a home which has moved on. An echo which grows fainter with time. In Oliver, it is a home which quietly persists through love. Filled with the sound of memory but also the silence of loss. Both neighborhood and home are filled with the motion of others, through whom both writers find meaning and metaphor in their sense making of home. For Oliver, it’s the others of friends and family who visit and line their shoes up without being asked in advance. For Wisher it’s the local merchants and familiar faces she sees as the sun sets over a West Philly which may never have existed. Both pieces are filled with an ache for the past, but Wisher’s is a restless ache. An ache which holds on to a feeling as it slips through her fingers as she types. For Oliver it’s an ache of satisfaction and a peace in the present which is built upon the labor of past. The two works speak back and forth to each other, moving inside and outside, past and present, but in doing so, hold a mirror up to our own experience of what it means be part of something bigger than ourselves. And what it truly means to belong.
