September 21st, 12:40 AM, five months to the day since I first set an easel down in front of this thing. The upper ticking has gone entirely from the foot end. What is left there is the spring bed, open to the sky like a shallow tray, and growing up out of the coils are perhaps a dozen thin grasses, gone to seed, tall enough to reach my knee. They came up through the rust. Their roots are wound around the wire. Nobody planted them and nobody will pull them and the frost will have them inside a month, but tonight they are green enough to take the lamp from the far end of the street. The head end is still intact and still carries its blue rosettes, so the painting has two halves: manufacture on the left, wilderness on the right, and the border between them about as wide as your hand. There is a picture in my monograph of a boy holding a basket in which the fruit is already turning and the boy is not. The book gives it to Caravaggio, the library to a follower, and both are describing the same border. This is the sixth station and the first one that is not a loss. Something is using it. The mattress has stopped being a discarded object and become a site, which is a promotion, though nobody on Dunning Street has been informed. The viewer should note that nothing in the frame is trying to be beautiful, and that this is reliably when it happens.
Prints available. Acquire this work as a fine art reproduction, worthy of any wall that deserves better.
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