UNDEVELOPED FILM
By:
September 3, 2025
Cross-posted from Josh Glenn and Rob Walker’s story telling experiment GIVE IT UP. Earlier this month, GIVE IT UP mounted exhibitions of meaningful objects in venues around Kingston, NY… and asked the general public to help persuade the experiment’s participants to let these objects go.
HILOBROW readers, we need your help! After reading the story here, click on the response link below and share your advice with the author…
1998 was the year Winnie was born. A time capsule, then, this forgotten roll of film, an Aladdin’s lamp containing the imprisoned arcana of our transformation. I have no idea what’s in there, what testimony it will offer when rubbed, sixteen shards of evidence happened upon that first summer in the Catskills. Who were these people? The farmhouse, the dog, the big old bench-seat Cadillac. The barely-clothed companions, sunkissed, meandering up through fields from the pond, linen rags for towels. Will it alchemize the quotidian air of an ordinary miracle; children having children? Weary travelers on different sofas, one gazing into the sightless eyes of a new knuckle of human, not yet human, still pantomiming the motions of the womb? When the cosmos spasmed and became something else? A keyhole onto some devout nativity, two refugees, sudden custodians of a third, shadow-vaporized by the blast wave, understanding that nothing would ever be the same? Did it watch us from under the kitchen table, hip-to-hip, while friends careened around us, thigh-to-thigh as the air crackled with love and normal hearts seemed spun from gold? The furtive fur of your sock on mine. Then in the dark, shepherd-crooked, my arm around your waist where it reared up like a blade, double-bass, mossed like an antler, my palm along the soft wince of your belly edging the first skein of hair. Did it see all that? The bathing hours and the bare arms, the untroubled artlessness we have mourned for since. What was seeded in us, our best selves, curled and pocketed in kindness, some Genesis of hope undiluted. Because this was our Eden, or Eden was below us, its lakes unruffled, fields stretched out in the sun like a tapestry, its apples and snakes untroubled, waiting.
Would you like it? Could it be of use? I’ve carried it with me through decades and houses, a separation, a fire, tossed into a box each time it might have been discarded. It’s taken me decades to understand that I’ve had it all the time. In the mitochondria of each cell and the cells of my kids. When everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
If you were in Julian’s place, what would you do with the film? Please SUBMIT YOUR PERSUASIVE RESPONSE HERE.
All GIVE IT UP stories can be found here.