Filaments Sensitivity and Connection in the Work of Dario Robleto Jennifer L. Roberts
It’s well after midnight, sometime in 1997, and Dario Robleto is slipping quietly through a dark street in the San Antonio neighborhood where he grew up. He carries a step stool and a package of 120-watt light bulbs. Crossing up to the front porch of one of the modest two-bedroom houses, working with surgical stealth, he unscrews the existing porch light and replaces it with one of the higher-wattage bulbs. Over a series of nights, he secretly exchanges all the porch lights on the street. We cannot know whether any of these furtive transplants were ever noticed by the residents of the neighborhood. But here’s how I imagine it might possibly have happened: A woman arrives home, exhausted from working her usual late shift. Clutching her purse, keys in hand, a car-radio song still echoing through her head, she begins walking numbly toward her front door. She suddenly stops at the edge of her driveway. Goosebumps rise on her arms; the hair stands up on the back of her neck. Something is different; she can’t put her finger on it. But she’s wide awake now, senses at attention, standing stock still, listening, scanning the block around her. After a long time in this state of heightened sensitivity, she begins to notice something odd about the light. The objects around her that would normally withdraw into nocturnal indifference — the fenders and flowerpots, mailboxes and trash cans — loom forth now in some mysterious luminescence. They have taken on a faint touch of color even in the dark, and their edges bend around in a way that suggests they have been subtly re-sculpted, remodeled, by an inexplicable force. Is it just that her eyes have adjusted to the dark? That must be it. Puzzled, she continues up to her porch, and after she unlocks the door she turns back and looks at the house across the street. It seems to be somehow closer than it was before — leaning in toward the glow of her own house, whereas yesterday it was floating remotely in a gulf of darkness. She stares up and down the street at
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