Someone had filled it with bottles. This is the fifth station and it is the one in which the basket changes profession. August 26th, 2:55 AM. It had been moved to the far corner of the laundry room and loaded to the rim with empty glass: green wine bottles, clear soda bottles, a few brown ones down in the dark where the light does not reach, all of them dry, all of them rinsed, stacked with the crossways carelessness of a person who fully intended to drive them to the depot on a Saturday that had not yet arrived. A dozen more had migrated onto the floor around it and lay on their sides, catching the bulb in long white highlights along their shoulders.
Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit hangs in Milan, and it is the first painting in the Western tradition in which the container is the subject and the contents are only the argument. He set the basket on the very edge of the table so that it projects into your space, and he painted the leaves already going brown, because he was never interested in fruit. He was interested in time. I have been to Milan only in a book. That book gives the year as 1650, which makes it a late work, painted by a man who had nothing left to prove to anybody. What I have taken from that painting is the tilt. A vessel that has stopped doing its first job and has been given a second is not a failure; it is a promotion. This basket held clothes for perhaps nine years. It held glass for eleven days. The viewer will notice that glass sits differently in a lattice than cloth does. It does not bow the walls. It rings against them. Vas vasorum.
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