John Biscello

It was a town caught in the thorny stasis between living and dying, between mortuary and chrysalis. I want to examine why it is I am drawn to places like this, why I always return to this specific feeling of haunt and desolation, want to make inquiries into the nature of my bent and predilection. I start by asking: do these places visually and externally correspond to a world within, to psychic zones and aspects of my interior? If extrapolated and perceivable as place, as geography, as topography—would it match the desolate, degenerate, eroded and scarred? Do these places call to mind, or call into being, a deep loneliness—am I finding my ghosts mirrored in the world without? I believe there are cities, towns, neighborhoods, locations that are our geographical alter-egos, or replicas of our inner world, of our emotional tonescape. There’s something about, a) Time as a silent assassin, with its efficient scalpel, b) Time as a hooded ninja that no one ever sees, c) the call to lonely places, d) we are ghosts in our own lives, e) what fades, remains, f) the allure of lore, g) there is crackly resin in the air that gives ephemera its due, h) nostalgia is a death trap, i) empty motel swimming pools contain secrets j) You think you are arriving in a certain town and quickly realize the town doesn’t exist, because, k) you have effaced that town with a town of your own narrative and imagining, you have prematurely buried one town and in its place superimposed another town over its bones, which leads to l) becoming a witness to a geography that is both mimic and delegate to one’s inner—to zero in on cracks, ruptures, fissures, and the music of geographical scars is to reflect oneself and through oneself the fractures detailing one’s interior.