October 2nd, 6:15 AM, behind the community centre on Delacourt, where a contractor had spent the summer cutting cords off appliances for the copper and dropping the ends in a paint bucket by the door. Sixty-eight of them. I counted on the sidewalk, again in the truck, and a third time at the kitchen table, and got sixty-eight all three times, which felt less like arithmetic than like confirmation.
Each one is a socket and a short tail. The cut is clean. Somebody with a good blade and no interest in the object took the useful part and abandoned the rest, and what remains is the end that receives. Not the end that gives. The seventh station mounts forty of them on the long wall in no grid at all, each socket held an inch off the plaster so it throws its own small shadow, each tail curving downward under its own weight the way a stem does.
The window at the left lays flat morning light across the whole wall, which is not the light I would have chosen but is the light this room has. Zurbaran, who took vows young and painted only what he could see from inside his own monastery, lets a white habit do all of the labor while the men wearing it stay down in the brown, and I have studied that reproduction for twenty years without once being able to explain why it holds. Here the plaster does the labor and the sockets stay dark.
Sixty-eight cords went into the bucket. Forty are on the wall. The remainder are in a box beneath my bed, and I will not pretend that is curatorial. It is hoarding, and this chapel is built out of it. The viewer will see a constellation. I see forty things waiting to be given something, arranged in the quietest room of the sequence.
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