HAPPENINGS
IN A MUSEUM

     Emile Charpentier, collector, mathematician and intermittent composer, deals with randomness and the study of randomness in our intimate lives. Emile Charpentier is also, although he does not acknowledge it, a historian and a Keeper of invisible stories. Like all historians, he is possessed of nostalgia for origins, origins that have no existence. Moving forever backwards, to a point of departure, he eventually arrived at a place where beginning and ending coincided. When this first happened he was startled into silence. He had been moving towards this place for so long now that, having got there finally, he had no idea where to go next. Such is the nature of aspiration that it leaves one exhausted once attained. Or so it seemed to Emile Charpentier, the collector of randomness and disjointed narratives. Worn out by this search for origins, faced only by absences and the spaces they occupied, he began to see the potential of what once was but now was no more.

He had his own story to tell of course, some parts of which were linear and some of which were naturally random. He could have, had he wished, described his life in the Paris apartment where he had lived since his mother's death, and where the germ of his collection developed. But he did not wish it. More significantly, he might, had he wished, have described the very essence of his study. Described the exquisite and precise moment when, sometime after the funeral in Provence he acquired a sample of his mother's ashes. How he acquired it is irrelevant. Enough to say that he had done so. It sat snugly in his coat pocket in a phial as he walked in the woods, with the twigs crackling underfoot and the frost barely off the ground and the ivy clinging to bare branches. It was not spring yet, nor would it be for sometime. Emile Charpentier appeared to be hunting for truffles but in reality he was conversing with Charlotte his mother, as she sat in her phial. He wondered which parts of her were with him. She would not tell him. The question, in any case was not important. Her ashes, or her dust, as she wished him to call it, was distilled and concentrated.

Much of his mother's narrative, her life, interests, etc. was in his pocket. As he walked with the twigs crackling underfoot, head down, looking for the truffles that someone had collected before him, his mother suggested to him in a symbiotic way, that he write down her fragmented narrative. Write down, classify, and collect the strands together so that her absence could be gathered rather as pollen is gathered from mimosa in order to make perfume.