The Burning House

David Wojnarowicz with Tom Warren, Self-Portrait of David Wojnarowicz (detail), 1983–84
"I was reading Close to the Knives in Mexico, where David Wojnarowicz spent significant amounts of time—Oaxaca, mainly, and Mexico City and the border towns—though I didn’t know that then. I was staying at an expensive resort, which was in a state of constant repair, as those kinds of resorts always are: stucco was being smoothed and repainted, bright clouds of bougainvillea were being trimmed, concrete was being resurfaced. It was an ultimately futile tussle between man and nature, one frustrating and poignant to watch; it took teams of people, and their collective diligence, to try to undo what nature would keep doing. One day, the resort would close, and within months or weeks or days, all of those years of vigilance would mean nothing—the rains would rust the metal lanterns, the sun would leach the color from the walls, the hibiscus would grow stalky and shaggy. ..."
The Paris Review