Sometimes he would go to the library and dream. His body was not divisible from the aura of books. Without knowing how, the books came to him, not their contents, exactly, but the ideas they strove so hard to contain. It had always felt that way. But instead of feeling “overwhelmed,” by these literary ghosts, he was comforted by them, even when he didn’t speak their language. (He was attracted to French literature, but could only enjoy it in translation.) In the world of books was the world: Europe, Asia, Africa. He would never get to it all, but that thought didn’t overwhelm him, either: not knowing was part of who he was, and liked being. People he knew were not separate from him, and he assumed that they, too, lived with the ghosts–vapors of words. And so they did at times. A year or two years ago, sitting in the beautiful old library far from the city where he had grown up, there was his own thought, about the design team that goes under the name Rodarte. In their e-mails to him there were many images–images as words–that conveyed their feeling about a given event, like Thanksgiving, or Spring. A recent image they sent was of a swan. He thought: Perhaps they would like to read the poet Marianne Moore’s essay about photographs of the prima ballerina Anna Pavlova, the sleek-haired Russian star and legend whose projection of perfection was not inhumane. So, he found a copy of the essay in that library–unread for many years, apparently, pages yellowed, but it’s ideas not forgotten. He xeroxed it and sent it off. The Rodarte design team–Laura and Kate Mulleavy, sisters–did not respond. Months passed, and he attended a party for the designers at the close of one of their seasons. In the dark, wearing dark clothes, Laura said: When you sent us that beautiful piece about Pavlova and the swans and her dance, we were working on “Black Swan,” and couldn’t talk about it, but it was so spooky, you sending us that beautiful piece then. Particles of ideas connected the designer to him, and he to her. Library-based ideas as a source of inspiration for a project he did not know about until he was involved with it, too. The summer before, at Telluride, he had interviewed the director, Darren Aronofsky. And he knew that if he was open enough and patient enough, channels would and could open further, too. Some months after that conversation about “Black Swan,” he met someone who could pass as another. It was winter, 2011. At the Studio Museum in Harlem, he was on a panel devoted to the work of James Baldwin, an early and forever influence. After the event he talked to a young man who was interested in talking to him. As he listened, he could not place the young man, but he looked so familiar, and then the young man shared his name: Trevor Baldwin. He was the great author’s nephew, whose long neck and calm-eyed vision resembled nothing so much as a black swan floating “with gondolier legs” (Marianne Moore) on a body of black water, which can sometimes be the color of remembrance.
