Esse

Czeslaw Milosz

I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of métro stations flew by; I didn't notice them. What can be done, if our sight lacks absolute power to devour objects ecstatically, in an instant, leaving nothing more than the void of an ideal form, a sign like a hieroglyph simplified from the drawing of an animal or bird? A slightly snub nose, a high brow with sleekly brushed-back hair, the line of the chin - but why isn't the power of sight absolute? - and in a whiteness tinged with pink two sculpted holes, containing a dark, lustrous lava. To absorb that face but to have it simultaneously against the background of all spring boughs, walls, waves, in its weeping, its laughter, moving it back fifteen years, or ahead thirty. To have. It is not even a desire. Like a butterfly, a fish, the stem of a plant, only more mysterious. And so it befell me that after so many attempts at naming the world, I am able only to repeat, harping on one string, the highest, the unique avowal beyond which no power can attain: I am, she is. Shout, blow the trumpets, make thousands-strong marches, leap, rend your clothing, repeating only: is!

She got out at Raspail. I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

Chris and I had already bought bus tickets for D.C. for a friends opening when he called to tell us about the upcoming blizzard.. living in New York, I guess we've been spoiled by nothing closing due to snow, and decided to go ahead and go. We were at the National Gallery on Friday, when we found out that even though there wasn't any snow on the ground that all the museums, and indeed the government, were closing for the rest of the weekend... so we saw what we could (most importantly the Chardins and Vermeers) and went and ate an amazing lunch that began with perfect raw oysters and ended with apple pie. As it turned out we had a great time playing dominoes with our friends and wandering around the city, which despite my assurances that nothing was going to stick, was indeed covered in a couple of feet of snow the next morning.

I went out when it was snowing hard the first night, with an absurdly heavy camera (RB67, on a grip with a gridded Vivitar strobe mounted on it) and an umbrella. I've been trying to photograph sensations that I've avoided dealing with directly until now.. thinking particularly about the moments that pass when I'm walking somewhere.. not walking with a camera, but commuting from point A to point B. Walking with a camera is different.. it assumes a heightened awareness to perception as a continual mental state; a sort of anticipatory blankness, hoping to be able to see clearly. For me, this state is almost counter productive. I find it hard to see in the way I want to see- freshly, without any preconceptions -when I'm intending to.. it seems more often that I'm hurrying along, preoccupied with something more or less trivial or important to me, and will suddenly look up and see a conjunction of light and form that may be a tree, a lit window, and a streetlight, but before they resolve into these recognizable forms.. before they are categorized as what is signified by the words "tree" "window" and "streetlight"... in that split second before they are consumed, they are the ever desired "other"... there is something here other than yourself, and it is infinite in possibility because you can actually SEE it, that it exists, and if one thing exists truly, then all things exist, including yourself, and for a moment you are truly engaged in it. Something suddenly springs into existence that is at once itself unique and discreet from all others, and a combination of all nights walking under trees lit by streetlights, and the passing glance takes on layers of years of experience, and the moment passes. I'm trying to find some way to make photographs that have some of this quality... a sort of infinite glance.

There's something unsatisfying about photography, because all the hard work is conceptual, or cerebral.  Unless you have your own darkroom, you don't spend much time actually physically making any images.  I do take lots of photographs, and the building of a body of coherent work that is satisfying is really hard.. but it's not the same as pushing around clay or paint.  The medium, in those cases, poses physical problems that require solving and often involve just messing around until things work themselves out.  (Or more often don't work themselves out and end in a drink and a long walk.)  Photography, at least the way I work, is more like writing.. a writer (as Walker Percy points out) is trapped in his cerebral cortex.. marooned and waiting for an idea, or a sentence, or a word to begin with.  A painter can stretch and prime canvas, fiddle with pencil drawings, pastels, paints.. anything to trick yourself into overcoming the inertia of not painting until you find yourself working on a painting.  A writer sits and looks out the window and thinks.  Or sits and looks out the window and drinks.. or wages an attack of his choice on his brain that refuses to cooperate.  For me, photography is like that.. I don't shoot any particular subject as a documentary photographer would, or fashion, or portraits.  What I want is complicated to explain (and I'm not going to try right now) but essentially it is based on being able to see in a way that I can't bring about by force of will.  I just wait, and have a camera around, and try to look hard.  Unfortunately what I want is very specific, and elusive, and borders so closely to being wrong in so many different ways that it can be very frustrating sometimes, and I just switch to painting for a while.

I worked in ceramics for about ten years, and the images above are from that time.  I don't have but a couple of small things of the couple of thousand I guess I made.. they were dispersed as gifts or mostly sold at shows and the gallery in Atlanta that I was represented by.  I stopped working in clay because I didn't see anything to do that felt right.  I couldn't find any way of working that felt relevant or personal.  It seemed like I was trying to hang on to a period of time that ended with the industrial revolution, and I was just very unsatisfied with everything about clay.  Maybe I'd like it better now; I don't know.  What I do miss though is the ability to sit down with a hundred pounds of clay and make pots on automatic pilot for an evening.  To be totally out-of-mind in the best way.  Nothing is so immediately responsive to your hand as clay.  I used to have a recurring dream that I would walk through the wood-fired kiln I used, and stand in the fire arranging pots so that the flying ash that glazed them would fall in the pattern I wanted.. standing in the white-heat turning large jars on their sides so that ash would melt and run around them.

I've been taking a break from shooting anything for a couple of weeks, and working on a few paintings instead.  It's not automatic like ceramics was, but I like standing there and physically pushing around colors.  The two paintings above are from the past week. 

It was about this time last year that I went to Europe, so it's on my mind... This was the bed I had (upper photo) in a hostel in Paris, near Sacre Coeur.  The flight was supposed to leave in the evening, and after everyone was aboard, we were stuck on the tarmac for about three hours, while some mechanical problem was being addressed.  Eventually we all had to de-plane and get hotel vouchers, and go to a nearby hotel.  It was Newark, so I took the voucher instead of taking the two hour (at 2am) local train home.  Since I had to be back at the airport early to try to get a flight, I only had a couple hours sleep.  The flight I got on left in the evening, and then I couldn't sleep on the plane... so I arrived in Paris alone, no knowing a soul in France, and a jetlagged nightmare.  I speak equally small bits of French, Japanese, and Spanish, and have been learning sign language over the past year, starting a few months before this trip.  The problem is, that for whatever reason my brain doesn't access these languages separately, but there is a big bag of "other language" that I reach into in desperation when asked a question in a foreign language, even if I know the question and the answer.  

Having never been to France before, or really having any idea what to expect, I felt like things were going ok as I got on the train from DeGaulle to find my hostel.  However, I forgot that many hostels (such as mine) have lock out times, and won't let you in until, say, 4pm.  That's a drag if it's 11 am and all you want in the world is a few hours sleep before heading out into Paris.  Instead, I dropped off my bag, and wandered the maze of Montmartre, eventually winding up at Sacre Coeur, and not knowing in any way what to do with that view.  I stumbled up and down the streets, and found a cafe, and promptly panicked at my first French person speaking French to me, and asked in a combination of French, Japanese, and Spanish for a glass of water.  When she just stared at me with a particularly French form of disdain, I violently tapped three fingers in the shape of a "w" against my chin, signing for "water".  I think I actually sank to the universal language of pantomime before she poured me anything to drink.

All ended well, as it became my regular morning place, where I would have several cups of coffee (Cafe' Creme, disastrously pronounced) and "read" LeMonde before wandering around the rest of the day.  Having regained some sense, I ordered everything in French, and enjoyed the lovely French habit of mocking you to your face by repeating everything you said in exactly the slightly wrong way you said it. 

The guy in the bunk beneath me was a saxophone player, who worked the streets and bridges all night.  He would come in around 5 or 6am and slam a few doors before taking a loud shower punctuated by flatulence and scream/yawning.  Then he would flop on the bed (lower photo), roll about twenty times in a circle, and then start scream/snoring.  

This was during the four months that Chris was in Taiwan, and so she usually had written me and sent it while I was asleep, so that as this wondrously loud man fell asleep, I would read about fleas, and insect swarms, and how Chris was bringing home a suitcase full of river rocks, because they are pretty.

We're getting married.

This was from the opening night of a show Chris designed for a theater in Portland Maine.  She had an apartment and I had flown up for opening night.  She wore this dress for the first time, which I bought her last summer when I went to Europe.  She was designing for a series of parades at the time, and was to be gone four months.  I decided to use some savings I had, and went to Europe alone.  I was in Florence, and basically broke, but I saw this dress in a vintage store and bought it.  It wasn't at all expensive, like maybe 30 euros, but since I think I had about 60 euros total, and still had two days in Florence and then the train back to Paris, it was expensive to me.   I thought it was made for her though, and it was actually a defunct Florence label from the sixties, so I think it was worth it.  Later that night, I was doing what I did every evening, which was to take a bottle of wine and sit on a bridge over the Arno and watch the swifts and swallows come out in acrobatic masses to feed at twilight.  It was June, and sweltering, and the sweat from walking all day would evaporate in the breeze.  

I was wondering whether our sense of time is fundamentally different in America, since we are such a young country.  For example, the bridge I was sitting on is two hundred years older than our constitution.  So, I was thinking that it could be a qualitatively different sense of placement in history that you would have if you were a product of such a place, rather than growing up in a country where almost nothing is built for it's inherent beauty, but firstly for it's economic value, and is quickly replaced if it becomes financially unproductive.  I guess what is bad about that is obvious, but I will say that Florence and other parts of Italy felt really stifling.. like it was stuck in amber as a thing to be observed and not experienced newly and directly.  Maybe it was just the weight of centuries of great art bearing down.  An artist I talked to hated living there, and longed to move here to New York, for just that reason.  So, I don't know how much we are affected culturally by living in interchangeable cities.  It occurred to me that what I was watching- birds feeding at twilight when the bugs are out and the air is cooler, skimming along the river and plucking insects off the surface- was the same as when the first version of that bridge was built in the 1200s, and is the same as I've seen all my life here in America, and will be the same a thousand years from now if we've managed not to kill them all yet. 

I was talking about this with a guy sitting next to me who turned out to be Andre 3000 from Outkast.  I didn't realize it until some girls came up and asked for a photo with him, and then I recognized him.  He was in town because it was fashion week there, and he was starting a clothing line, and that evening he was alone.  We talked a while longer, and then he left, and I sat there for a while longer, and then wandered back to my non-air-conditioned cubicle in the cheapest hostel I could find.

So I lived in Bensonhurst the for the past year.  There were really good things about that, but the bad was that there were no coffee shops, bars, interesting stores, or friends (besides our roommates) nearby.  Chris and I just moved to Williamsburg, where there are all of these things, plus a whole hour of my life back every day, since it's so close to Manhattan.  Also, the new apartment has a pink bathroom, which may be a new mandatory condition in a living space for me.  Granted, it's not the glory of the pink sink in Bensonhurst (top), but the new bathroom (middle) is great.  And having Gimme! coffee (bottom) on the way is pretty nice too.