(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.

.

Scripting the Photographer: from the Notebooks

“It’s more likely that we take pictures in order to come closer, yet again, to an unsolved contradiction: the desire to ‘photograph’ something lying beyond the jurisdiction of the eye – and likewise beyond light, shadow, chemistry, polygraphs, time, memory, hope, etc.; something that preceded by a vague certainty that this ‘future’ image (not yet extant) has already been thought, already been in the mind, yet without a concrete ‘image’; the act of manipulating physical substances (such as glass, plastic, metals), distributed in time and shaped by the logic required for the execution of an ‘intention,’ is in fact a method of ‘visually’ demonstrating this ‘mental figure,’ which itself asserts the reality of one’s own existence whenever it becomes necessary to make such an affirmation, or else repeat it – which affirmation and/or repetition are, perhaps, ideal, tautological rituals that don’t derive something from something else but merely change one’s perspective.  When ‘experiencing’ or ‘studying’ a photograph, however, one is, in fact, less inclined to start an investigation, to engage in an aesthetical einfuhlung, into the simultaneity of absence/presence.

“What we want, simply, is to study ourselves through photographs, ourselves looking out onto the field of depiction; and our desire to conclusively combine the outside view with the inside is like bridging ‘tomorrow’ with ‘yesterday,’ deleting the space ‘in between,’ which is of course impossible, since we can exist only in this ‘between.’  In our desire to overlap these concepts – we are caught ‘between.’  The present will never be ‘complete.’  The figure of death doesn’t clarify a thing, no matter how many times it’s exposed.  One hardly ever succeeds in even grasping a simple feeling of empathy.

“Every photographic attempt to capture a wedding, vacation, funeral, statue, roof, bed, etc., etc., etc., is yet another meaningless attempt to convince ourselves that we exist.  Unfortunately, we are never wholly convinced.”

-Arkadii Dragomoshchenko-

“Images are not everything, but at the same time they manage to convince us that they are.  There is a peculiar tendency of images to absorb and be absorbed by human subjects in processes that look suspiciously like those of living things.  We have an incorrigible tendency to lapse into vitalistic and animistic ways of speaking when we talk about images. ..In its most extended sense, then, a picture refers to the entire situation in which an image has made its appearance…it is a very peculiar and paradoxical creature, both concrete and abstract, both a specific individual thing and a symbolic form that embraces a totality.  To get the picture is to get a comprehensive, global view of a situation, yet it is also to take a snapshot at a particular moment…”

-W.J.T. Mitchell-