Month: March 2012

Springing…forward??

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Photography, Writing2 Comments

Either you build on what you already have or you start something new, something fresh (building on what you already have), I thought to myself as it was raining that day, that wonderful unimaginable and rainy wet first virile fertile day of Spring of that year, that crazy, tremendous ice block glacier of a year full of so many things I couldn’t keep up with, so many changes happening like quicksand, or coming upon the Great North, vast tracts of undiscovered frontier, snowy land, gargantuan and open, that year, that future, the future of the end of the world.

I was, you see, attempting to make my way there – to find my way, feeling about like a blind man frightened in the dark (why should that matter? I thought, why should it matter to the blind if it were dark?  Still, things are more ominous in the night, more unknown, seeing or not, more uncertain, more uncertain indeed, I thought).

And perhaps that’s it.  Perhaps that’s the whole story right there, a little library card-sized description, my now, that now-past experience dragging on as a present unopened, some blinding night setting at what seemed a foreboding and wide-open end of the world?

Let’s revisit where we’re at here, it will help me get my bearings, help me decide how to proceed – do I build, do I set out?  In one case I work with what’s already there (here) all my work and toil and worry, all my whereabouts and wherewithal; on the other I construct, invent, create, here in my whereabouts and utilizing my wherewithal, I craft something not already here around and within me, make something occur, I act or continue, by acting continuing, in what direction, that is the question, how here now, this interminable present situation I am coming to find myself in, how shall I go on, proceed, in what manner?

Where am I, for starters, and am I alone?  I find myself wanting, quite naturally, spontaneously even, it seems, to be inclusive here, to desire (apparently) inclusion, to say “let’s” and “where are we” to establish a location, a whereabouts, a “situation,” as if the feeling of lostness of untrammeled terrain will forever be my sitz em leben as long as left to myself alone, as long as I can espy no reference points, no company, no where-with-al to my whereabouts.

Where were we, then, I’ll assume we’re together, that there are many of us in similar straits, coterminous, co-traveling, travailing, up into up against up toward this vast unknown expanse, this blankness, empty landscape thick as ice and night, as blindness.  We should reach out our hands perhaps.  Extend our arms, get a feel for things, touch what might be there in this dark, or rather this milky grey of blindness, this lack of distinction of specificity of landmarks, with no map, nothing we could read, could decipher or chart.  I grope.

First day of Spring, did I say?  Is that a location though?  A place?  A place in time perhaps, discoverable square on a grid, a 21st, an equinox in things, in elements cycling and shifting about one another, out into the galaxy, some enormous imaginative gyre, it is raining, blind or not, on this first day of Spring of this particular year, haunted and mystical year, it is raining – we can hear it, can feel it on our skin, we are wet.  I am wet.

Determing then, our whereabouts: it is wet, it is Spring, let me describe it for you this thick endless open night of a year –

It is blinding – a glaring brightness that equals blackest night – one imagines it with the help of images – photos and films of discoveries of the glinting scintillant wastelands of the Poles…a disorienting everywhere one must forge ahead through, one needs ropes and flagpoles, say Everest in storm, say outer space, say vertiginous void, perhaps one’s own mind in nightmare, or depression, shock, grief.

This is where we are, some of us, in a saturating rain at the edge of a great blank expanse, blinding in its sheer whiteness, its big empty, darkening the brain, cancelling out the signposts, fogging the familiars, there is rain there is blindness and void.

I love the rain.

Maybe we love the vast expanse – the future – the unknown?  Perhaps we feel ourselves at the edge of tremendous, breathtaking, thrill-seeking adventure?  Perhaps it calls for a hurtling, what do they call this?  A point of no return, of lift-off, all systems go?

Either I build on what I already have or I start something new, something fresh (building with what I already have), I think to myself in this rain on this day, this wonderful unimaginable and rainy wet first virile and fertile day of Spring this year, this crazy and breathtaking, frightening ominous glacier of a year full of so many changes and detours, jagged peaks and harrowing cliffs, quicksand and mountain range and all at once undiscovered future frontier, scintillant, open, glaring and flood-drenched and dark, my blindness, my groping here at the edge of the future of the end of the world

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Blogging Reality – stumbling upon an addenda

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, Journallings, Traces, Writing2 Comments

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Blogging Reality – Other’s Thoughts

After completing some thinking-in-action-in-words-as-blog earlier this week, I took up a book and read…the section following where I’d left off in the illustrious and continually praised and most highly recommended text (now in my seventh turn…) Dust by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, I stumbled upon this smattering of letters:

 

“In reality, the logic of these changing textures and modes of writing bear witness to something altogether different, and applies to their various manifestations.  Generally speaking, each new mode seems richer than the preceding one; and while the new one does indeed repress what came before it, it also adds new possibilities to what already exists…the means by which new forms of writing subsequently influence ‘writers’ is a history of a different kind.

“In the course of the last decades, with the creation of the Internet and the Web, we have seen not only a gradual revolution in the perception of time and space, and consequently of the possibilities of expression, but also – strange as it may seem – one other fundamental phenomenon: a return to writing, perhaps to virtual writing, but nevertheless to writing.  It turns out that we have unconsciously come full circle, returning to ‘paper’ in spite of all the ardent speeches in defense of the new, digital order of things.  Indeed the Internet has turned us back toward the past because, as Adam Gopnik has written, the Internet is a kind of writing, given that it is literally written ‘from beginning to end.’

“This can of course be refuted: even assuming that you’re right, what is the ‘carrier’ then of this writing?  Can it still be considered ‘writing’?  Paper can be touched.  A book is a tangible, physical object; moreover, it has a smell: printers’ ink, manufacturing chemicals, etc.  And how priceless is writing paper itself, its special, unique odor and color, to which literature has paid much homage so often!  Finally, what separates the first, primordial sign etched in stonen from the image on a computer screen?  To this imaginary question I give the following answer: what is most important to consider are the changes in the concept of materiality, as well in the system of concepts – a process stretching back over the last hundred years – relating to the very possibility of describing any material object whatsoever.  This object, the description of which previously relied on the coordination of the concepts ‘beginning and end’ (every object had both), is now conceived as some kind of oscillating point of a perpetual ‘now,’ a definitive account of which is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to obtain.  Indeed, isn’t it rather naïve to claim that we can feel a sign, as if it were a slab of painted, reinforced concrete that could be dragged up to the forty-fourth floor?

“All in all, ‘to be online’ signifies, on the one hand, a perpetual ‘now,’ real time, but on the other hand it means reading words written by others, no less than typing out one’s own words, addressed to someone else…

            “…writing.  Written language has the inherent ability to create a salutary barrier, a kind of second skin or distance that allows one to disappear from sight whenever one wants.  This is a space in which no one can deprive you of the right to instantaneous solitude on this otherwise all too overcrowded, unlivable island.”                                                    –Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

 

So…skin, perpetual ‘now,’ “real time,” without beginning or end, a “salutary barrier,” “textures,” “changing forms” and so on….writing…

What we do.  What we love.  What we need / depend on.  How we “touch,” of a barrier like skin…flexible, moving, light and air and signs…

Flow on bloggers!  Flow on!

The Fine Line

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, Journallings, Traces, Writing2 Comments

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The elusive and ever-present “fine line”

So-and-So comments on my poem “Corpus:”

“Gratitude.  Yes, without flesh, our emptiness would show – more than it already does”

Soooo…what if we stripped it all down?  If we could see through the surfaces and veneers?  Could X-ray skins and masks, barriers and betweens?  What would we find?  What would be there?

I’m not certain I know what Arkadii Dragomoshchenko was writing when, in sort of remembering a painting by Edward Hopper while looking at, listening to, and thinking of other things, he said he caught something the artist had “kept silent about” – “I saw the fine line that separates emptiness from plenitude…like the memory of something that never happened, and which sinks then to the cunning bottom of words…” he says,

which suddenly plunged my own mind/imagination into a fictional mind and body of Alberto Giacometti, strafing and violently thumbing and stripping at sloppy wet clay glopping off wires, or scratching scattering lines upon lines upon lines around toward across and through the densities of a head’s face, a skull’s gaze, to – “get at it,” “down to it”…it, it, it.

Beckett writing round after round, chicken scratching sludgy paths, barnyard maneuvers after…it…

anyone obsessed…the idea of North, a perfect composition, to say something truly or clearly, the search for love, for that specific yellow, for shadow, emotion…anything,

that craving driving hounding driving us after “it”…limned so elastically with emptiness…plenitude apparently (possibly?) impossibly just the other side, just “through,” beyond, “it.”

So let’s Giacometti the flesh, tear it away to tendons and strips, resistant clumps and stains clinging to the fresh gruelly bones.  Empty the organs, scoop out the brains and guts…get rid of the extras, trim the fat, we’re after the core…”it.”  The “plenitude” just the other side of skin, of bone, somewhere…it must be somewhere in all this mess of in-between the structuring holds, no?

Dig to the center of the earth.  Scoot on out of the galaxy.  Find “it”, “it,” “it” – the plenitude…what will it be?  What will you swallow, cuddle, absorb, grasp, “obtain”?

I can’t remember if “empty space” is an oxymoron now or not, akin to the wonderfully wise and riddled aphorism of Wallace Stevens: “Nothing is itself taken alone” – STOP.  Think of it.  “It.”  Is he right?  Anything “taken alone,” “in itself,” is NOTHING?

In other words – pursuing some “essence,” some “right” or singular universal (or personal) “truth” is destined to leave us empty-handed?  Grasping “nothing”?  “Absence”? “Empty space”?  “Void”?

Or the human (we, us, you, I), body stripped apart in a search for a “soul”…

             On the other hand…sometimes Giacometti added.  Put wire together with string together with plaster, clay and cloth, plus chisel and hammer and hands, also paint; and sometimes he kept tracing more and more and more furious lines, strokes, deepening (thickening) eye sockets, figured shapes…

sometimes Wittgenstein multiplied words after word after symbol and equation, sign upon mark attempting to scratch them away…

And there’s the other half of Stevens’ aphorism: “Things are because of interrelations and interactions.”

Perhaps the “fine line” separating (or incorporating?) emptiness and plenitude is the very mess of glop of surface and structure, blood and mud, skin and bone and tangled nerves, oil and pigment, letters and lines, sounds and shapes, all the mixed-up pieces and parts, mushy impurities, congruences and convergences, masses and movements smeary and ever-so-tenuous…

perhaps that’s “it”?  Emptiness and plenitude mutually dependent like each side of this sheet of paper?  Indistinguishable?  The same-different “it”?

So put the body together, love the skin and the noises and fluids that issue from beneath it.  Slap words and songs, shapes and colors, space and time and breadth and depth, subject object, idea emotion and everything you’re able to in your quest for…

well, perhaps actually, your experience of…”it”

Everything composes this line.

Blogging Reality

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Experimenctes, Graphotos, Journallings, WritingLeave a comment

Blogging Reality

“we should start from the notion of actuality as in its essence a process”

-A.N. Whitehead-

“there is only one thing you can do about the kinetic, reenact it…which..is why art is the only twin life has – its only valid metaphysic.  Art does not seek to describe but to enact.”

-Charles Olson-

“life is preoccupation with itself”

-Robert Creeley-

            If indeed “reality is continuous, not separable, and cannot be objectified [read “stopped” or “paused”].  We cannot stand aside to see it” (Robert Creeley), as our sciences and philosophies have come to speak of it.  If language is an enormous fluid complex of systems, of ideologies and referents, socio-physico-psychological sounds and gestures always forming their contents and functioning their forms, as it is currently prevalently demonstrated to be.

In other words:  if life is a process we are unable to abstract ourselves from without thereby ceasing to live.  And “the reality of life is organized around the ‘here’ of my body and the ‘now’ of my present” (Peter Berger) our organizational notions of space and time, or mass and motion…and therefore all existing things are moving about, around, against, in or through one another (“Nothing is itself taken alone.  Things are because of interrelations and interactions” – Wallace Stevens).

“If” these faith-based-in-observational-perceptive-categories are anything like “on the right” (correlative, coherent fluctuating track) “path,” saying something functional or “meaningful” (say here “true”) about humans and the world – how might we be conscious of it?  How align ourselves mind and body with an unceasing flow we are unable to “step aside” or “back” from in order to observe or reflect, remember, recount or experiment “on,” but can only, in reality/actuality act “in”?

Another version:  how might we have some idea or “knowledge,” apprehension of what we “do” living?  (“we do what we know before we know what we do” – Charles Olson).

One possibility is to enact our own forming processes in/into the motion of all things.

i.e. “everything, always, in life just as much as art, is precarious – since it is mutable, everything is a disappearing act.  Things only survive if given an artistic form.  Art is, therefore, in a way, more real than life.  It is only art which is not mutable, which does not disappear: everything else is transient.  Only art, with its passion for form, makes up a permanent version from the made-up things of this world” (Nabokov as termed through Adam Thirlwell).

But art does disappear.  It is mutated by translation and new readings in different times and languages and contexts, different versions/pictures of the world held by each and every member of its audience.  Is worn away, stolen, lost, damaged.  Art is also part of the fluid precarious flow of actuality/reality.

And yet, perhaps, the work of art, the making process itself, provides us with something like a “knowing” or apprehending process within the process life is?  Adding rivulets to the river in the river, additional possible processes in process.  If the artist seeks to make from the full experiencing of its present motion, the many layers and currents a human touches, senses, perceives (and imagines to themselves – a “putting-together,” “drawing,” “enacting presentation”) converting them through one’s self into text, paint, clay, dance, song and so forth…

…no “product,” like no “event” is immutable, spaceless, timeless or immobile, any more than a stone or the earth or sun or moon is, and yet…

“electronic writing will give us a deeper understanding of the instability of texts, of worlds” (Carole Maso)

“What I seek is an active seriality…I write because it is there to be written…it keeps happening and the way the world then enters, or how I’m also then known to myself, is a deeply fascinating circumstance…a deeper fact of revelation I feel very actual in writing, a realization, reification, of what is” (Robert Creeley)

In other words, art-making, enacting in paint, in text, in images, sound and movement, is activity, not a “subject.”  We cannot complete a story or poem or song about what is, because what is always keeps occurring, to blog, to write in such an unstable, ephemeral and mutable medium as light and electricity is, perhaps, an extremely mimetic, representational forming of life itself.

It’s there, it’s gone, it’s always in process, revision, adjustment, open to alteration, deletion, disappearance.  Arising and passing, like thoughts, emotions, utterances and sensations.  Like beliefs and love, wars and peace.  Nothing is stable…blog it so!  The medium chosen, like film, like music, like the fluids of paint and possibilities of stone, paper, clay – themselves are our activity and process of being.

Precarious, mutable and disappearing…and important (to us) and beautiful (at moments)…instants processed in the flow, circumstances in the ongoing situation, new contents and obstructions in the river.

Flow on bloggers!  Flow on!

“You’re simply stuck with the original visionary experience of having been you, which is a hell of a thing…

that which exists through itself is what is called meaning”

-Charles Olson-

and facts are just points of departure

 

On Friendship: dialogue, conversation and becoming

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Journallings, Traces, Writing9 Comments

A Letter to Friends (far and near, now and future):

On Friendship, Dialogue and Conversation

(even those “silenced to pieces” – Paul Celan)

 

Addressing an interminable oath, a perhaps-always, perhaps-never, but surely an “only.”  Friendship.

Either there runs an essential conversation, in the realm of the impossible, that is, the meaningless, or there does not.  Meaningless, like infinity, like being, like love – each lying somewhere beyond rationality, or knots of multiplicity, that is, items we are capable of naming, or calling (calling-out toward) but which do not, ever, add up.

Things that are, that are unable to be explained.  At times we call out to them as “paradoxes,” “mysteries,” “ideas,” “sensations,” “beliefs,” and so on, these “entities”(?) “concepts” (?) – “observable creations” that require one another to be, but cannot be identified in themselves (e.g. “same”/”different”; “self”/”other”; “silence”/”noise”; “presence”/”absence”; and so on).  “Things” (?? – but what to name them?) impossible to know/comprehend/understand (even simply perceive!) as themselves, rather only and ever with; each “it” requiring, to be perceived/conceived, “not-it.”

In human relations, when this reciprocal necessity is “felt,” “per-/con-ceived,” “experienced” – when I, in some layered mixture of reason, emotion, situation and manufacture determine that the “I” which I hope/select/choose/desire to be does not exist, is unable to manifest or become without the “not-I” which is you, and You, likewise have this experience/sensation…we call out toward it – “Friendship.”

It is this deep reciprocation, this sensation of “identification”-without-which-not identifiable as such I am naming essential dialogue, through conversation – the activity of friendship.  “Dialogue” I conceive of as a process of speaking and listening, a taking-turns enabled by agreed-upon, co-crafted understandings (co-mmunication), filling the inherent gap between, accentuating and bridging this “lapse” between you and I as individuals…become/ing friends.  “Conversation” I am considering as entering into speech with unknowns…hesitantly and impatiently concocting utterances and responding, languages inviting, striving toward, asking for…dialogue (its possibility).

Friends:  I hope you recognize yourself in this address – you I sincerely hope I have communicated with in some form of dialogue, an ongoing essential conversation – that I would not be, or be able to become, that which I impossibly wish to be, without your specific “not-Is” founding, grounding, in-forming and co-rrelating with me through what experience, encounter, and engagement we share.

This is for you.  For many of you I am no longer in dialogue with, in fact I currently enjoy dialogue with so very few, two or three “friends,” but you are not the less essential, less becoming – we for that.  I am saying that the conversation goes on in me, the calling-it, calling-out, the naming and mystery of our initial and originary correspondences through, across, greater and lesser gaps and lapses.

I believe the conversation-toward-dialogue, the deep and ongoing querying after what is unknown in/beyond those whom one has ever had the intimate understanding of reciprocated dialogue, in general is or is not.  There must be changes chosen or lived through that indeed have the possibility of so altering an individual’s-becoming-I that those corresponding partnerships of dialogic interaction no longer serve their becoming, but I find personally, as I review you who have so significantly shaped me, that my calling-out really does not waver, only the directness of my voice.

I want to thank you each (and in advance those possible future friends out ahead of me) for engaging mutual becomings with me, opening and becoming always being process and present in silent infinite impossible conversation between known unknowns.  At some point we found our paths to dialogue(s), intimate paradox, and that does not come undone, but remains as fact and experience and fuel for our becomings.

Without-you-each : not-I.

Thank you.

For long lapses and enormous gaps I call out: may dialogue be reached yet again, somewhere, someday.

And above all…to become.

Today

On By NW FilbertIn Current Reading, Journallings, TracesLeave a comment

A steady, raining day (rare) for Kansas.  Filling it with Blanchot, Kafka, Beckett, Jabes, fervent standbys, companions in favorite times.  Stumbled across this while playing around with making a business card for myself (for a “Writer for Sustenance” – a “Heteroglossic Hominid”)…

for bloggers, then…

“right near the center lies a choice: to speak – a swift, unhesitating, irrevocable choice that leaves everything undecided…to choose speech turns out not to consist in choosing so much as in maintaining the wavering, undecided movement of the either-or (self-other)…What is it that must be said but not the only way it can be?…All that counts is to play; that means seriously.  Without reserve.”

-Ann Smock, What is There to Say?-

Scripting the Photographer…the Photographer attempts a poem

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Photography, Poetry, WritingLeave a comment
from Alejandra Figueroa's
book "Corpus"

Corpus

(after Alejandra Figueroa)

 

Here I cover the surface of the body

the body the surface, the covering;

One begins by entering the frame

the body the frame, a welcoming,

a focusing and open terrain,

I advance

 

A boundary frames a region

one must discover how to explore

a removal of the covers

may expose the surface display

the region, the mounting and frame are one

to the senses

 

I attend

with hands and smell and vision

I cover the surface of the body

bringing the cover to surface

entering the frame and mounting

I go on

 

To penetrate the body,

uncover what the covering covers

seek what surfaces in the surface,

mysterious border

pliant and porous

a solid liquid, an ever-forming form

 

I retreat

impassable yet liminal

covering countering my own

I give space

to space already withheld

and everywhere available

within its frame

 

The asking gaze

ensnares what it questions

but cannot possess

the living surface does not answer

but responds in its covering

at one with what’s beneath

 

Inseparably inhabitant

to countenance this cover

is to uncover, to discover –

surface to surface –

indecipherable content

Wisconsin

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(this piece is derived from and to be read in the accomaniment of Bon Iver’s “Holocene” song + video)

Wisconsin

            My fingers felt the indents.  I knew I was alone.  Had been left, alone.  Had left myself, alone.  A jagged vacancy, thick without “us,” and filled with pounds.  Each weighty page struck and branded, burned with this black blood of ancestors.  I could feel them, gentle as I turned each page, hard and sharp in each dark divet.

I smelled it.  Them.  I deciphered their messages, long ago and near.  From ages, this age.  I smelled it.  I looked out.  I heard these smells, ironed leaden letters smacking, tracking, leaving.  Open sky, soaring bird, jagged peaks, thick with ice.  Each ominous digit of tongues, hammered black to brown to rusted and yellowing green, bantering about the walls of my emptying skull.  The lost decree, saying nothing, enough for me.

And at once I knew I was not magnificent.  From my fathers burdened library of laws and languages to the clean green and snow, silvered bleak of lake and stone, the clouds beyond.  And beyond.  I could see for miles, miles, miles, following that bird.

I set out.  Into the jagged vacance, thick with ice.  Thick without.  My legs weighed, I could feel the imprints’ stains on my hands, spines entangling my own.  Pulling on a woolen coat, full and encompassing, and handling a sturdy stick, I set out.  Away, toward.  From the windows I could breathe the miles, their width, their breadth, their depth.  I would be in them like a bird, once beyond.  I climbed.  I trod.  I set out.  I carried with me what I knew for certain and would always know and all at once each time: I was not magnificent.

Partway through the day I met a lake.  Mirrored, grey, and deep in silences, the whispering began.  Voices from here and there and far away, the hallow bright, jagged vacancy of my memory.  I smoked the screen to hear what they might be, hands cupped to mouth and breathing deep – hah…hah… forming curls of smog to make the utterings appear.  To make it what it was to be, not the needle, nor the thread, but echoes, echoes, whisps of hollowed wind, odd edges of light around crooked lines of night.  Wordings, phrases, myths and murmurs, poems and songs from long-fingered wraiths scribbling my mind.

These had carried me, stolen and created me like dreams and nightmares, goblins and godparents, stitching and twisting me like frost along rails and tunnels and streamings of light.  My body, and all that’s immaterial in me had portaled through them all my years.  My openings, my escapes, inscribed riddles of the dead.  They rhythmed and rhymed me, cradled and rocked me,

I could see through them.  Their spines and tangles, the jagged vacancies they ripped into my home, my school, all my solitary life.  I clutched the light of them tearing their screeches and lullabies, dancing, shrieking, rumbling their caresses.  The path of the wide-winged bird so high.  I set out.  The lost decree.  Each wave and ripple of this mimicking lake an intimate familiar, voices echoing from the leaves, the papers, the books.  My fingers felt their divets.  Sweet long Braille of what is gone, my companies – the gone, gone, gone.

At once I knew…I was not magnificent.  Not unique.  I looked around.  My chest and limbs a giant valley, empty and overcast.  Thick with absence.  I knew I was alone.  Miniscule.  At the mercy of.  Full of insignificance.  I scrambled and scaled.  From here, high above, left behind, I could see for miles, miles, miles.

I spread my meaningless arms.  Wind.  Water.  Jagged vacancies thick with ice, without an “us,” with or without a me.  The bird circled slow.  It trembled.  It swooped.  It dove.  I followed.  Not me.  Not anyone.  I knew I was not magnificent.  I could see what forever might be.

At a precipice I flew.

Perhaps I circled, perhaps I swooped or even soared as I fell.

This I do not know.

But I smiled.  I laugh and smile.

I am not so heavy after all, not made of wood and wire.

I know I am not magnificent

but I could see for miles,   and   miles,

and    miles.

.

Transcription: Re-re-readings

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for any of you also fascinated by photography as an art, or the pull of images from movies to family albums, travel brochures to advertisements, even how you ought to “look” or you images of yourself…traversing literally hundreds of studies of images and their pulls, powers, possibilities…these I reread again and again – to argue with, learn from, investigate myself and the world:

“Another Way of Telling” by John Berger & Jean Mohr

“The Photograph: A Strange, Confined Space” by Mary Price

“Camera Lucida” by Roland Barthes

“On Photography” by Susan Sontag

“What do pictures want: the lives and loves of images” by W.J.T. Mitchell

and for core mechanics:

“Looking at Photographs” and “The Photographer’s Eye” by John Szarkowski

“The Nature of Photographs” by Stephen Shore

Scripting the Photographer, Pt. 6

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Scripting the Photographer: The Photographer Discusses His Many Eyes

I did not choose the square, I merely direct it, I “aim” it, what philosophers refer to as “intention.”  The rectangl’d eye limits me, but also sees things I’m unable to.  I need extra eyes, to see.  As you know, my vision has been bad from birth, have required many assistants.  Left to my own body I see a fuzzy swollen version of a clear night sky lain over transparencies of its negative.  Clouds and pom-poms.

I’ve turned to lenses.  They transcribe the world to me.  They record for me, cross-writing the world through direct impressions of light bounding off objects.  My boxed eye evidences existence and matter I might never know.  Where my vision is rounded and illusory, darting and fluid, my extra eyes, borrowed eyes freeze it a moment, show me distinctions and planes, colors and forms, what, perhaps, is really there?  Or also there?  Out there, out beyond the gauzy curtains draping my own eyeballs, spotted and stained and all warbly.

My four-eye captures shapes, tones, responds rather than interprets or occludes.  Perhaps mine is not a misfortune?  Perhaps multiple visions would benefit everyone?  Perhaps all human eyes inherently skew to their shapes, their veils, the thoughts and feelings of the bodies that house them, now constricting, now expanding what they perceive?  Smearing discrete objects and occurrences into a wash of associations, altering what they take in into an image of what they actually apprehend?

Sunset seen, described into a version of sunset seen, concocted over said sunset, compared to still other forms, visions, images of “sunset”?

I cannot speak for those of us boasting the proverbial 20/20, clear in-sight, for this I’ve never experienced, enjoyed?  I only know my many apparati that combine to provide, present, re-present an interesting show of the “world.”

Including myself.  Snapshots and Polaroids taken of me and those I know rarely reflect the image we have of ourselves, like hearing my own voice through a machine or over a wire or recording.  I never “feel” identical to what I see or hear.  I notice those around me (more reliant on other eyes than they might think) repeatedly and continually (constantly?) comparing what they are seeing to images, other visions – “that looks like a photograph!” (which photograph?), or “if only I had my camera” (how would that change, signify, preserve?), or “I don’t remember it like this” and so on.

My many eyes help expose each other’s deficiencies, particularities, distortions, additives and deletions.  I’m not certain I can ascribe purpose to any of the various visions, it seems that the blurs and framings, foci and subjects/objects chosen are particular to each kind and moment of eye.

But its why I listen to the speech of eyes, listening also to my own (“reading” – listening with the eye?).  The eyes of children and foreigners, the aged or disabled, the rich or the poor, males, females, video, color, black & white.  Every eye seeing its own reality, even from camera to camera, lens to lens, light to light to photograph (after all, once developed and materialized, the print has gone through processes replete with adjustments and accidents, alterations and mediums becoming yet another subject/object to be variously, multifariously “seen”).

Nothing exists unchanged or unaltered.  This is the message of my many eyes.  “Original” is an illusion – a manifestation of disappearance – a mirage.  This is part of the reason I suggest you grab for eyes, multiply eyes, hear eyes out from any direction or make – to “see what you can see.”  For each and every I/eye reports individually, uniquely, distinctly.  Layering and unlayering veils of vision, the optics demonstrate convergences and separations, agreements and arguments that help me, at least, to “see” what might possibly be “being seen” of this fluid process we call “world,” call “vision,” call “life.”

“But them…they’ve got…no eyes.  More precisely: they’ve got eyes, even they do, but there’s a veil hanging in front, not in front, no, behind, a movable veil; no sooner does an image go in than it catches a web, and right away there’s a thread spinning there, it spins itself around the image, a thread in the veil; spins around the image and spawns a child with it, half-image and half-veil…and in my eye the veil is hanging, the movable one, the veils are hanging, the movable ones, you lift one and the second one’s already hanging there…”

-Paul Celan-

“the camera may be thought of as comparable to the eye.  The difference is that the camera is not more than an eye.  It does not think.  Any connection with judging, choosing, arranging, including, excluding, and snapping has to be with the photographer…what the picture is of limits meaning while it encourages the exploration of meaning”

-Mary Price-