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Two Photographs – A Surprise

Sleeping between books, in the firstdays of the year, surprise falls out toward me in the form of two. Two persons, two photographs, surprising joy. Perhaps I tell you about them, for they drive my pen to paper, to tell myself. Writing comes about for me when I want to tell myself about something I seem unable to know.

Not even for certain, but merely to recognize, although like-recognition is the sort of feeling that spurs me. Then I want to tell myself about what I think I almost recognize but am unable to say. To claim. Only, apparently, to guess. And guessing into writing enables an object that might be examined. Scientifically, almost. Constructs an object that is there, to be perceived, rather than a deep in moving waters that might be called intellect or subjectivity. Perhaps intellect is just that – subjectivity cluttered with objects?

In any case, while reaching the book to its resting place, two surprises slip out I almost recognize a secret in. A secret that I think I might discover by telling about them (it) on paper, in pen. The photographs are objects: they represent, image-in, two figures against a slab of wood (it appears). I remember, immediately, and happiness as well. But between myself and the photograph-objects, what is recognized founders. I almost remember, almost recall what the photographs imagine, imagining to myself, and therefore losing objectivity – a certainty, a palpability, as it were – in a kind of alpine air, like memory.

As if visualizing distance. Spontaneously – surprise. It takes up 8 inches between my eyeballs and the glossy surfaces of 4”x6” rectangles of graded color making shape and form. Of two faces, my wife’s and my own, before she is my wife, before I am my own. Cheek-to-cheek in the one, lip to lip in the other, taken minutes apart in a restaurant booth by friends across the table. Our eyes and smiles say joy is frozen there. Not many years ago. By friends no longer friends, in skins that have slackened and wrinkled, from eyes the worse for wear, with different combinations and cuts of hair.

Surprise! A “shock of recognition” emotionally evocative, rationally unsure. Distances of many angles – 8 inches from my spectacled eyes, thousands of miles from this desk, years of days from the present.

The gaps are the voids that vacuum certitude. What looks like a record of an instant or instants of time passed, vortices layers of interpretation. Viewing the photographs is a NOW, an actual happening, a direct perception of images of my wife and I very close and notably happy – no suggestions of misgivings. Great pain lies before and ahead of these recorded moments. This I know from experience. Experiences as tangible as this Fujifilm Crystal Archive paper held between the pads of my fingers and thumbs.

We are beautiful. The surprise lands like sunrays warming the chest on a porch in Winter. I am not surprised that we are happy. What takes me off guard is the unexpected and unpredictable re-cognition of what must be called re-imagining experience through objects, fragile paper objects featuring a depiction. Light – ephemeral and enormous light – bounces off a substance that must be real enough to reflect it, gathers onto chemicalled plastic, negative-thin, gets held there, imprinted and re-produced in darkness, transcribed into colors like our flesh, our clothes, our hair, our eyes. As we were. The photograph is.

These happy chance surprises come to me in the first days of a difficult year, out of Helene Cixous’ Firstdays of the Year. This is part of the surprising. That the rising (or falling, really) of the physical objects imagining us, the photographs, should tumble today, from there, to here, just now.

Into the midst of, I feel certain, millions of other circumstances and situations contingenting a new instant from the instants recorded there. And yet… and yet… the immediate almost-recognition they provoke is also familiarity. A strange agreement, a feeling of compatibility with what I see. That is me, that is her (is it not?), we are happy. I know that press of shoulder, that squeeze of hand and silken neck. Those eyes lit with verve and passion, with gratitude, with pleasure. And my own – tired from wandering, matched to hers. Our life, emblematically.

Two heads and partial torsos. Two lives held on a dime. Before and after pouring from the back of the papers. Clipped. Shot. Stolen. Photographic terms. Seconds we are gathered for, doing nothing but presenting.

More than that. The chosen action. What’s deliberate. We are sweet, close and radiant, but look here – we are joined. It is clumsier, not posed. At times to near to see one another, not ready, we are there one to the other, in one another’s space and face, mid-sentenced and off-guard – surprise!

This is how we arrive, and select, falling always from betweens, in instants, we appear, we draw nigh. With barely a moments notice we are made objects, describable and frozen. Until we act. Say, believe or move, and we are subject again, alive and becoming, undoing. Which is why it comes as a surprise, an almost-but-not-for-certain, neither cumulative nor complete at any click.

I don not know, do you know? Who these two are. They are perhaps, but not yet done and never-ending. Even eventual stillness, like these photos, continues on. They say “this happened” “is a once” among billions of particled others. “They were there.”

If only a fleeting moment.

I digress.

Like a vase of perfume in the passing, it alerted and re-minds. Somethings and manythings, unsure and inconclusive. We began and we begin, and always further on. I almost remembered what is not quite known and began telling. I went further. Did I?

 N Filbert 2012