The Cruelest Month
Illustration by Marion Fayolle.
Dritero, Eric and I started KSB Build last year as a business which prioritizes two things: people and spaces. During a time, which redefined the ways we engage with both, we aimed to prototype our business model by the lessons learned in 2020. We considered ways that we value both impermanence and durability, we considered how to honor people and their needs both in the present and in the future.
My first job out of college was studio manager for a painter who made large scale paintings made up of tiny letters, as if the text blew off a page like leaves to the wind. My job was to start with a selected text, break down each word by letter, then manipulate each letter to be printed as a stencil. It was a surreal way to engage with language, taking it apart piece by piece, turning a poem into a picture. I first read T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland, a poem written in the aftermath of war, by physically dissecting all 17,564 letters in it. It was chaotic and sad and hard to follow - a portrait of a city that had survived something awful and would never be the same.
I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you
My Grandfather died last April, when travel was strictly forbidden, when only nurses and grocers weren’t home, when New York was a city of mourning. Grandpa was my role model, an artist, a business owner, a builder, a teacher. This past July I spent a week alone in the house he built when my Mother was a toddler. How foreign the most familiar place I’ve known suddenly seemed. It has been a year of grieving, for the people we lost and the world as we knew it. And now it is April again.
Last week, I was walking my dog on the beach when my phone pushed a notification for “one year ago today”, when I was walking my puppy on the same beach. It’s the beach where Dritero grew up, although he says now it’s much cleaner. It’s the same beach my grandfather was stationed near for naval training in WW2. Along with driftwood and sea glass, pieces of buildings and asphalt from the city wash on shore. The bricks are rounded and worn from the tide; the asphalt polished to terrazzo. Imagine going from clay to brick to structure to rubble in the sea.
I w i l l s h o w y o u f e a r i n a h a n d f u l o f d u s t
These bricks remind me that New York City isn’t a wasteland, but an amorphous place. It reminds me what a curious vocation we’ve chosen, to build in a world that is new each day.
-AK
