CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/10/2015

David Wojnarowicz: Brush Fires in the Social Landscape

"A friend of mine recently killed himself," David Wojnarowicz wrote in 1990, "and I can't let go of him; he has followed the first flight to Miami and now it is going towards dusk and I'm sitting in a replica of the earlier waiting room waiting for the plane to be announced. My boyfriend Tom is wandering the billion shops of the airport and I am smoking a cigarette and thinking about Death. A man on the balcony takes a Kodak picture of the sunset and uses a flash attachment—what does he hope to illuminate? If I could I'd descend the stairs and run with my eyes closed all across those runways to the far horizon and break through the screen of dusk as if it were a large screen of paper held vertical, and enter a whole other century of life. If I could I'd jump into the warm ocean and swim until I disappeared like a cartoon dot on the horizon. Once, years ago in a warehouse along the hudson river I wrote on an abandoned wall about a man who flew a single-prop airplane out over the ocean until it ran out of gas and I envied that man so much it hurt. That was years and years ago so does that mean up until now I have been living on borrowed time? Should I count backwards like the Mayans so that I never get older? Will the moon in the sky listen to my whispers as I count away?" Featured passage and "Something from Sleep" (1987-88) are reproduced from Aperture's expanded and redesigned new edition of Wojnarowicz' seminal Brush Fires in the Social Landscape.