Tag Archives: photography

Home Sweet, Nebulous, Home

Looking Homeward“Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are.” – Marcus Aurelius

“Loss is nothing but change and change is nature’s delight.” – Marcus Aurelius

“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood . . . back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time–back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.” – Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel

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I.

What does it mean to leave everything behind? To leave one’s home thousands of miles behind. So far in the distance it cannot be seen only remembered as though it were an island you once passed by on a ship at night or a place that was part of a long elaborate dream that caused you to smile upon waking.

And like a dream, that home is intangible – has become intangible now that you are not within it – a place in which you have stopped the momentum of its essence into your psyche like a high speed train suddenly emasculate on the tracks so a haggard man with ruddy skin and ghostly hair can stumble vertiginously back into the darkness.

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And it will never be the same. Now that you’ve left. It will always be a slightly foreign place. That home which once was a place where you lived with a slight level of unconsciousness – because you could – because you knew where everything was and how to get there, and you knew many of the people and their names and their children’s names and where they dwelled and their intimate stories – and you could make your way through the streets with a bandanna tied over your eyes.

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And in addition, you loved the city where you resided. Was there any place on earth like the Paris of the South?167

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And you loved the people with their fresh faces and audacious ideas, their ornate bicycles like whimsical piñatas speeding through the streets, their dense forest mountain paths full of fiddlehead ferns, trilliums and deciduous trees that in the fall look like the most extraordinary display of parrot feathers; their gypsy jazz and traditional Bluegrass, the rhythm of contra and clogging and hollers so green -so, so, green and contained content worlds in themselves- the youthful itinerant anarchists with their dogs and washboards and banjos, worn out fatigues and body odor; the woman who plays spoons on the street who would be beautiful were in not for her missing teeth, the persistent smell of hops and yeast with hints of citrus as the sort of eau d’ cologne and live bands of every sort in the street – 057Afro-pop, punk, experimental rock, electronica – the dolce vita flows as easily as the drinks and everyday life can be like the most gorgeous Felinni scene and just as surreal: an orgy of food and drink and friendship and fun, with an eccentric  purple bus that jets around its route each day, with laughter and music blaring from open windows, and a cross dressing nun on a tall bike as part of its shtick.

II.

In what felt like an instant, it would never be the same: the child’s bedroom, the family car, the dreams for the landscape we tended and pruned and poured over and petted for over a decade.

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We left our residence of eleveIMG_1949 (2)n years in a quick three and a half weeks: the house where we conceived our son, labored, planted fruit trees for him to climb and eat from (to nourish him) that we thought he, and I suppose we as well, would grow along side. Trees to grow old with, to love. To observe. To be in awe of how fruit grows from flowers where bees orchestrate their usual miracles.

The Buddha left his home and family to be unfettered. How would things have been different, or even the outcome of thousands of years of human history, had he taken his family with him, so that he would have been half-fettered or partially tethered? Could he have done it with them? Become enlightened that is.

I don’t stand a chance.

When I was eighteen a boyfriend wrote to me in a postcard, “Home is where I set down my backpack.” Somehow I never forgot that line or the sentiment of ecstatic freedom I sensed he felt when he wrote it. The open road, no roof, few possessions, bringing him fully into present.

The places where I set down my bags, now, full of mixed-up wrinkled clothes that are thrown on hastily each day with little care or pleasure, do not feel like home.

If anything my body is the closest thing to home – the shell that carries me from place to place and allows me to embrace those I love so that I can feel my arms around them and squeeze them to bring us heart to heart, to feel the rhythm of the organ that pumps blood and warmth through us, to feel the tributaries, rivers inside our bodies that are the same as those outside in the landscape our bodies are moving in now.

There is a great wilderness, wildness, openness to the wide-eyed sky and Sonoma coast where fault lines remain invisible to the naked eye under the earth, under the sea from this vantage, where we stand now, rolling hills dotted with tribes of cows, so far from the Blue Ridge Mountains.

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When I was in high school my parents lost everything, our home and their livelihoods, in what felt like a sudden whoosh once the eviction notice was stapled to the front door. We drove around recklessly, we had no where to go: no home, no place, no money. We were looking for a miracle, a handout, a roof over our heads – who would be the benefactor of such a great act of compassion?

“Maybe I should just go the Yogi center and make yogurt,” my mother said as we drove down the bumpy gravel road in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, and I couldn’t stop laughing but I was so sad, and the dust of the road rose up behind us like smoke, and I felt elated and light like I was levitating above the gray-blue Volvo station wagon the further we traveled from the cherished shelter of my youth and all the memories that resided there – all the joy and everything else in between.

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This is the first Key.

The sky: that expanse of gray with shading rendered to give it depth and dimensionality.

Then the sun daggers straight down like an arrow through the sheath, illuminating a minute circumference of the sea, for a brief second, before shielding itself again.

The tide rises toward us. The toddler’s footprints erased within the first few waves, as though we were never here.Footprints on the beach (2)

Yesterday, the beach felt like the end of world. There was a subdued quiet – so few people – and the sand and the water splayed out in such a cool muted palette like the contrast had been lightened to the extreme, a pale pastel, the water a ghostly turquoise and the sand a light gray to white gradation that began to fade until it disappeared.foam key

There were no waves, which caused the rhythm of time to stop, just a true silence except for the slightest ebb on the shore from the, barely there, subtle licks of gravity. No one worked or cleaned or hammered or used machinery, as was the custom in this region.

The purple flag on the pole indicated that dangerous marine life lurked, but no one was threatened or submersed in the waters of that flat mint julep sea.

Two pelicans flew in tandem above me, but even they seemed to know how to silence their wings during this obscure moment full of stillness and stops.

 

Blinding Gold

“A kind of light burned within me.” – Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 2

I have five pages left of My Struggle: Book 2. I will board a plane for Canada in a few minutes.

Had I not, simultaneously, become obsessed with Sally Mann’s photographic memoir, Hold Still, My Struggle: Book 2 would have been completed by now.

In need of traveling light, a thought comes before I enter the airport. Yes, of course -tear out the final pages – no matter how sacrilegious it might seem. My copy is already battered.

One night, late, I enjoy a glass of wine while reading Book 2. I lounge on the couch, read a few pages and then whoosh – sleep. The old vine Zinfandel makes maroon Rorschach stains on page after page.

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Another day, while checking out books at the library, the entire contents of my son’s water bottle spills and heavily soaks a quarter of the book. I pull it out of my bag, make sure to point out to the librarian, “This is a book from home,” and then because I can’t stop there I say, “It’s one of the greatest books I have ever read. I love them so much and the library doesn’t have them, only four have been translated so far.” She hands me a paper towel, says, “It’s the kind of book people wouldn’t check out here.”

Once home, I open up my adored book like a fan and place it on the deck, the off white newsprint pages splayed so the light can reflect off them. Some of the wine has washed away, transparent violet watercolors fade in the sun.P1130116

In the end, I simply forget to tear out the pages at the last minute. I will now carry a five-hundred and ninety-two page, mostly completed, book on my back during a week of travel in Canada and realize it as I place my mahogany leather boots on the conveyor belt at security check where I am felt up by a woman with a Russian accent. When I question the necessity of this, she points at her evidence, an x-ray of my body – a yellow blip marks one breast.P1130135

Disconcerted, I pick up my backpack at the other end of the conveyor belt and feel relief and comfort already by the weight of My Struggle: Book 2’s nearly six-hundred pages, knowing it’s with me, knowing I can disappear into it and take refuge in the heights of Knausgaard’s passages which knock me like a wave and suck me into their undercurrents.

I then carefully place my laptop back in the backpack and watch, out of the corner of my eye, each body behind me, robotically, go through the motions: shoes off, jackets off, belts off – a river of disheveled humans passing unevenly through gates.

Were the next Walt Whitman in this line, or wandering the halls of the airport or waiting for his/her flight – I’d like to think I would notice him or her standing out from the crowd – bright-eyed, thinking something privately to him/herself, ruminating deeply on some topic, face not epically cast down, illuminated by a handheld screen in the terminal, but facing toward the world, alert and awake, eager to make eye contact with another human being who has chosen to step off the electricity powered walkway and take notice now and then of the natural light outside the vacuum sealed windows.

On the first leg of my flight, I finish the rest of the book before the plane lands. A tear, held captive on the surface of my eye, wavers. I’m moved by the book’s conclusion and totality, but also I’m away from my son for the first time and alone for the first time since I gave birth to him.

My impulse to wake at his subtlest note in the night will have no purpose for a week. I don’t know where these instincts will take me left to flounder. The image of a fish, without the luxury of arms and legs, violently thrashing and flapping its entire body on land comes to mind – the desperate act of being driven toward water.

Barely gone, but 30,000 feet above the earth where he plays, where he puts the magnetic pieces of his wooden train cars together, I already feel a stabbing, tugging ache like the prick and release of a needle.

Alone, even the seats beside me vacant, I look out the window of the plane. I see a circular rainbow form around the sun while it remains obscured by clouds. Then later the sun, as it begins its ritual descent, illuminates the uppermost cloud cover, shadowing its undulations in blinding gold.087

The Art of Seeing a Gallery Curated by No One

“An alchemist puts the phenomena of the world in another context” – Anselm Kiefer in an interview with art critic Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times

Rust Petals

Perhaps the greatest gallery of all is the one in a city’s abandoned spaces, outdoors, left to chance, curated by no one and left to evolve by the hands of strangers and the elements of nature – all rust and chipping away layers – creations where permanence and impermanence entwine nonchalantly – and through the alchemy of these forces something new evolves.

These collaborative art works with egoless, anonymous creators and no monetary value, made by everyone and no one, change subtly over the seasons. Sometimes flowers and plants interject their presence into the compositions, sometimes they appear barren, sometimes spray paint is applied to their acts of rebellion.

Tall Grass Tails Meet Steel

What might be called “graffiti” is painted over, but even that is done unintentionally in a way that resembles or becomes “contemporary art.” The pieces are abstract and complete, whole finished works in themselves, without effort or ambition.

Geometric LayerEach time I walk to the café where I write and pass through this gallery, I see something new as if the art gives my eyes greater acuity. I have to stop and look – I am drawn toward them like a Lepidoptera to light and I want to get that close to see their every layer and contour.

I must look like a peculiar woman as I stare scrupulously at what might appear to someone else as nothing, a woman photographing nothing, but I can’t help myself. In the detritus and rust and brokenness of these pieces, I see something sublime and illuminating that I must frame; compositions worthy of greatness, a place where art, alchemy, the natural landscape, the city’s history, and randomness meet, like a mushroom blooming out a rotting log, a place where the cycle of creation and death reveal there is really no end to anything and that art is everywhere and in every thing.IMG_2194 - Copy