Looking From Either Side of the Same Frame

"The friendship was all in my mind, but Bill was not. I saw him once or twice a week. He worked in the Museum of Art. I often visited a particular drawing there, and Bill was the guard who generally stood near it, wearing blue pants and a white shirt with a breast tag bearing his name: W. Connors. I introduced myself once, and he told me his first name. A black man, somewhere in his late forties.

That I should be so affected by this drawing as to come around all the time, hungering at it, I thought might be understandable to a person who'd spent enough time in its presence to have been penetrated, similarly penetrated, maybe without the complicity of the artgoer, but penetrated anyway by its message. I felt a kinship with Bill--an illusory kinship, like the strange shocking wedding you experience with a figure who turns his face toward you as you flicker past in a train--to inhabit a frame for them, as they inhabit a frame for you--looking from either side of the same frame, I think you get it, in a moment that blinks on and blinks off, but never changes, a picture, in other words. Anyhow I liked thinking we shared something, each of us involved so much with what was going on in the same frame, Bill Connors and I."

--Denis Johnson, The Name of the World (2000)