PLANS

These are plans. She is making plans. The sharpness of her plans. Plans for her next project. Plans for her first book. Plans for People Who Died Alone. Though it is not the photographic project by that name, but the book that she is planning, but the book which is borrowing its title from that just completed project. Borrowing from herself this title and making it a part of her plans. An integral part of her plans. One might say they are photographs as well, or will be photographs as well, but only, strictly speaking, metaphorically, as they are word photographs. They’ll be word photographs. These are her plans. The plans she plans to configure, for the book she plans to write. Planning it now. Here. In New York. Now. While she is staying in Solonga’s flat. Or is it loft? Plans hatched inside this loft belonging to a Danish sculptor named Solonga. She writes through other people. Other artists help her do her work. Other lonely people. Solitary people. Artists like herself. People other than herself and yet somehow herself. Somehow herself. They are themselves and yet herself at the same time. They are herself and they are themselves at the same time. She is herself and she is them at the same time. It is always the same time. The time of reading. The time of writing.  It is a kind of compounded I that she is making, a we that she constructs. Falls into. Once I know I’m here, even if I am not here, even if I am there, I can move on. Move on with my thinking. Move on with my writing. Move on with my life. With my life which is an other life, another life here in these words. These words that are not in Dutch but are in English. She has gotten accustomed to thinking in English, to feeling in English, to reading and writing in English. She is deterritorializing her thoughts by putting them into words, inside words, in words, that aren’t, or were not originally, her own. And like many of her subjects she is a guest here, she does not belong here (she does not belong anywhere – not really), in New York, though she is staying here for herself and for her work for a time, if only for a time, a certain time, for quite some time it seems, probably for quite some time it seems as Solonga will likely not be coming back anytime soon, as her friend who got her this apartment, who made it possible for her to inhabit this apartment, to stay inside this loft, her Swedish friend, her close friend Geert, said that Solonga would likely not be coming back for at least a year, or more than that even, more than a year in fact, maybe two, maybe three years, so it is yours until then, she said, it is mine to live in and to work in until then, whenever then turns out to be, even if then turns out to be now as it is always now when I am writing, when I am planning to write or thinking about writing. Now even when it’s then. It is now and I am here. Wherever here is. On this page. And this is something that I know as I proceed to make my plans. To plan as I often do when embarking on some new artistic project. Planning, as my parents have often said, is a forte of mine, using that word, that word forte, conspicuously, even though when they were speaking to me they were speaking to me in Dutch, as they usually, though not exclusively, not always, as sometimes they speak to me in English, speak to me in Dutch, which is, after all, their native, and I suppose, my native as well, tongue, unlike English, which is a tongue that is not my own tongue, but a foreign tongue which is now inside my mouth and slowly, ever so slowly, and deliberately, perhaps overly deliberately, haltingly perhaps, beginning to speak.