Seven WalksFIRST WALK (Once again the plaque on the wall had been smashed. We attempted to recall the subject of offcial commemoration, but whatever we said about it, we said about ourselves. ‘This way the day would proceed with its humiliating dili- gence, towards the stiffening silver of cold evening, when the dissolute hours had gathered into a recalcitrant knot and we could no longer stroll in the fantasy that our waist- coats were embroidered with roses, when we would feel the sensation of unaccountability like a phantom limb. But it is unhelpful to read a day backwards.) My guide raised the styrofoam coffee cup as if it were the most translucent of foliate porcelains. During the instant of that gesture mort something quite ordinary to be treated with love and intelli- gence. From our seat on the still, petal-choked street we ig was all recollection, vestige—224 THE OFFICE FOR SOFT ARCHITECTURE re-conjured the old light now slithering afresh across met- ropolitan rooms we had in our past inhabited: rooms shrill and deep and blush and intermediate, where we had felt compelled to utter the grail-like and subordinated word “rougepot” because we had read of these objects in the last century’s bawdish books; rooms with no middleground, differently foxed as certain aging mirrors are foxeds shaded rooms pleasure chose; shabby, faded rooms in which, even for a single day, our paradoxical excitements had found uses and upholsteries; rooms of imbrication and claboration where we began to resist the logic of our identity, in order to feel free. And specifically we recalled the small pinkish room above the raucous marker street, the room whose greenish sconces had seemed to transmit new conditions for an entire week. This was the room where, in first light, a rhythm was generating some sort of Greek Paris, the room where, still-too-organic, we discovered we could exude our fumbling as a redundant architeceure. My guide deliberately swirled the final sugars into the steaming fluid in the cup. “The fragile matinal law makes room for all manners of theatre and identity and description of works, the tasting and having, bagatelles, loose-vowelled dialects—lest we get none in paradise.” We rose from the 4 wooden bench. We felt limber and sleck and ambitious: Ready. We agreed to prepare the document of morning. When we built our first library it was morning and we FIRST WALK 225 were modern, and the bombed windows admitted morn- ing, which flowed in shafts and tongued over stone. Paper documents had been looted or confiscated; new descriptions became necessary. Twelve pixilated scenes from the life of a teenager replaced walls. The pigments were those of crushed weeds under skin and just for a moment we left our satchels leaning on the fone ‘The satchels, the pixilation, the confiscations: What actually happened was a deep split, deep in the texture of mortality. We had been advised in the morning papers that there was no longer a paradise. Hell also was outmoded. ‘That is why we were modern. We buile this library with an applied effort of our memory and its arches were the chic curvature of our tawdry bead necklaces turned up on end, We laced its hollowness with catwalks, to make use of our intellectual frivolity. We could survive on these catwalks, slung across the transept, the emptied stacks, the nave, the richly carved choir, dangling our litele bright plastic buck- ers for earthly supplies, and the bombed windows served as passages for our smoke. Always we were waking suspended in this cold library, as our neighbours were waking on their own narrowr scaffolds and platforms, performing their slow, ornamental copulations, and we called our matinal greet- ings like larks. Te was a preposterous reverie, borrowing several of its aspects from stolen engravings we had seen and coveted and surreptitiously slit from expensive books in order to