The seminar finished with a most enjoyable presentation by Jonathan Tyrrell—now just back from a reading-week sojourn in Rome—concerning laundry: laundry as a surrogate body, as flag, banner, message, bridge, as connective tissue, as language, as a symbolic discourse, as intimacy (as second skin), as ghost—during the course of which he both shared with the seminar his excellent laundry photographs from the Trastevere in Rome, but also offered a small but exquisite short-short story—printed below.









VERONICA'S LAUNDRY FESTIVAL

Many years ago on the 12th of July, Veronica Della Fontanella who lived at 5 Vicolo Del Battistero in the town of Vasca, decided to do the laundry. She washed everything that she owned down to the undergarments that lay coiled in the darkest corners of the deepest drawers in the biggest chests of closets that were all but forgotten. Then she tied clothes lines across the street to the iron hooks on the marble window sills of the furthest windows of apartments that were all but forgotten, and hung it all out to dry. Realizing that she had no clothes left to wear, Veronica Della Fontanella walked out into the middle of the street and read the paper.

One by one the shutters opened above the marble window sills to which the clothes lines were tied, and one by one the residents began to do their laundry. When all of the clothes from all of the drawers in all of the apartments on Vicolo Del Battistero was clean and hung out to dry, the residents, having nothing left to wear, walked out into the middle of the street and began to celebrate beneath a canopy of magnificently pearlescent laundry.

NEXT WEEK: SEMINAR 6