| Monday, June 16, 2008 11:53AM | | | | In an Undisclosed Location (1) | Posted By: Eric Kraft
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The Secret History of It
Part One
When B. W. Beath delivered the images, he suggested calling the book Lotus Land. As soon as Kraft looked through the images, he sketched in his mind a straightforward plan for presenting them. It was based on the idea of a couple of visitors—the unidentified man and woman from Just Now, at Present—approaching the place, wandering through it, and then leaving it, moving on.
A Beautiful Gem in a Beautiful Setting
An aviator might see this view of the undisclosed location. (Google Earth™ Mapping Service)
To some degree, that plan was suggested by the images themselves, but it also grew from a vicarious experience that Eric and Madeline had shared for several years, individually and privately. They didn’t realize that they had shared this experience until one evening in 1997 or 1998, when Kraft had finished Leaving Small’s Hotel and was at work on Inflating a Dog.
At the time, The New York Times ran a regular feature in its real estate section under the series title “If You’re Thinking of Living In.” That title was followed by the name of a community in New York City or its environs, so that the title of an individual article might become, say, “If You’re Thinking of Living In / Hell’s Kitchen” or “If You’re Thinking of Living In / Sleepy Hollow.”
For Eric and Madeline, the series might better have been called “Close Your Eyes and Imagine Yourself Living In,” because that was the invitation that each of them accepted with every installment of the series, every time, for every place that was presented, however peripheral it might previously have been on the map of places they might have imagined living. For a while, in the theater of the mind, they lived there. They would, in imagination, walk its streets, shop its shops, have lunch or dinner in its restaurants, ride the train or take the subway from wherever it was to wherever they might want to go. They would, usually, decide that living in that place might be nice . . . for a while.
Though each of them visited the places in the articles nearly every week, neither of them spoke to the other about it. Why? As they do now, they ended each day with a cocktail hour, a time when they drank a couple of martinis and talked. There was hardly anything that didn’t get said during those cocktail hours . . . but their imagining living in other places remained off the table. Why? I don’t know. | | | |
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