Tom Taylor - These images
These images ‘retrieved from the fires’ enhance the balance of the day which is coming out far better than yesterday, that’s for sure. On yesterday’s plate, depression and nausea made their coequal appearance and by dint of drugs and hard work were beaten back by dinner with friends and neighbors and enough wine to make the evening bearable. Why is it so? Why do these feelings of remorse worthlessness and general ‘self loathing’ SSN called it, why are they present at all? I know there’s plenty of smart answers, but screw that, it’s no fun and they should cease and desist. On another day, any other day, today for instance, the color of the light is new the strange feelings running up and down my spine seem to have averted, so now it’s a matter of trying to appear useful and not too autobiographical, but shit, man, enough is enough.
So there seems to be a history present in all this stuff, not like anything devoted or predicated on something as profound as Yourcenar’s ‘Memoirs of Hadrian’, as I’m looking at it, a vast enterprise which carried her across many years, lives, lovers and continents arriving finally to ‘die with my eyes open’ or something like that. I first heard of this from Betty across the canal, a retired nurse and long time writer, so I gave it some surprised thought, since I’d never really thought about dying with my eyes open or shut, just images from western and war movies where someone reaches down and shuts the dead person’s eyelids, out of respect, I always thought, or maybe because we don’t want to look into that emptiness, or maybe it’s a spiritual act of closure…. We don’t know the answer to these small entities and let them flower like the recovered photographs, they emanate from the realm of the moment they were made and if you relax you can feel your finger on the shutter release and recall the mood of the moment where you interfered with the flow of time for your own purposes. Then, too, the variety of these rescued moments indicates the restlessness you knew was there, and also a sense of having looked at too many photographs over too great a period of time, but that’s probably the least important, more so to me than to you
The times mix between the strangeness of the here and now and the peony nightshade gladhand of the moment rescued from memory, edited no doubt from all the dross that got lost and tossed, yet here is a sacred narrative of which only these parts remain on the dresser, piled into their respective folders, as you put it. They are addressed to this moment where we view/review them into density which is the three-D of life’s irony itself, and the images which are not remembered seem to have no place, except that when they are found, images of any sort, in attics of rental houses, in boxes under the floor of construction projects (we used to find boxes of cancelled checks in the flowery writing of the preceding period, and for amounts we didn’t find small or trivial) makes the photoimage real, yet neither Mario nor I can figure out where the image goes when you delete it, George says every keystroke is burned into your hard drive somewhere.
But the problem of the images, well, there is no problem, really, it’s more like an enhancement to existence itself which lies beyond the dimensionality of the print itself or even its surficiality on the screen where it lives in the mind and then in the emotional nest that is the person experiencing who is also real and alive and an adjunct to the image as well as harping inside the range of motion you might find in the collection of the material as a newer part of being alive yourself, as your past comes back to haunt you, ah yes.
So there seems to be a history present in all this stuff, not like anything devoted or predicated on something as profound as Yourcenar’s ‘Memoirs of Hadrian’, as I’m looking at it, a vast enterprise which carried her across many years, lives, lovers and continents arriving finally to ‘die with my eyes open’ or something like that. I first heard of this from Betty across the canal, a retired nurse and long time writer, so I gave it some surprised thought, since I’d never really thought about dying with my eyes open or shut, just images from western and war movies where someone reaches down and shuts the dead person’s eyelids, out of respect, I always thought, or maybe because we don’t want to look into that emptiness, or maybe it’s a spiritual act of closure…. We don’t know the answer to these small entities and let them flower like the recovered photographs, they emanate from the realm of the moment they were made and if you relax you can feel your finger on the shutter release and recall the mood of the moment where you interfered with the flow of time for your own purposes. Then, too, the variety of these rescued moments indicates the restlessness you knew was there, and also a sense of having looked at too many photographs over too great a period of time, but that’s probably the least important, more so to me than to you
The times mix between the strangeness of the here and now and the peony nightshade gladhand of the moment rescued from memory, edited no doubt from all the dross that got lost and tossed, yet here is a sacred narrative of which only these parts remain on the dresser, piled into their respective folders, as you put it. They are addressed to this moment where we view/review them into density which is the three-D of life’s irony itself, and the images which are not remembered seem to have no place, except that when they are found, images of any sort, in attics of rental houses, in boxes under the floor of construction projects (we used to find boxes of cancelled checks in the flowery writing of the preceding period, and for amounts we didn’t find small or trivial) makes the photoimage real, yet neither Mario nor I can figure out where the image goes when you delete it, George says every keystroke is burned into your hard drive somewhere.
But the problem of the images, well, there is no problem, really, it’s more like an enhancement to existence itself which lies beyond the dimensionality of the print itself or even its surficiality on the screen where it lives in the mind and then in the emotional nest that is the person experiencing who is also real and alive and an adjunct to the image as well as harping inside the range of motion you might find in the collection of the material as a newer part of being alive yourself, as your past comes back to haunt you, ah yes.
posted by jim leftwich at 10:32 PM
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