i have always wanted

i had always wanted to see everything, in every detail possible, and to hold on to what was seen.  

(oh and how unabated and fiery i was in my passion)

it was only in the end that i realized that grace was to be found somewhere else 
(if it could be found at all).

searching for beauty

as i was playing with my lens to have the frail dry leaves in focus, curiously glued unto the windowpane because of the extreme condensation in the room, i accidentally changed the depth of field and suddenly got an image of the outside world, where, rummaging through the garbage behind the block of flats, two homeless people were collecting plastic bottles, or so i imagined (they usually do this, taking them to plastic collection centers where they get paid a couple of cents for each bottle). the first, instinctive response was irritation: their ugly apparition had ruined the perfect composition for my image! then i stopped and pondered the entire situation: the sheer ridiculousness of my attempt at "capturing the beauty" of two deep red leaves against the frame of a winter window, when outside people were dying of hunger and cold that very minute. only by a generous twist of fate had i been allowed to be inside, to enjoy the warm room and all the other privileges going together with it, allowed the luxury of "searching for beauty"...

i remembered Sei Shonagon's dismay at the view of moonlight ruined by the shabbiness of poor people's huts (dwelling for a moment on the plausibility of my being her late 21st-century avatar):

Snow on the house of common people. This is especially regrettable when the moonlight shines down to it.

as Jeffrey Angles stresses in his comment of these lines, it is not only class-based elitism which motivates such a view, but her appreciation for the ability to produce poetry, art, out of this scene: "the beauty of moonlight on a snowy roof would be wasted on a poetically unskilled member of the lower classes". this moral naïveté is of course justified by the social conditions defining class and class behaviour at that time. but we still perceive poverty and suffering as "ugly", don't we? thus the mixed response to Salgado's photographs, Susan Sontag writes, which portray the lives of the powerless in images which are nevertheless compelling works of arts which seem "beautifully staged": "Transforming is what art does, but photography that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticized if it seems "aesthetic"; that is, too much like art. The dual powers of photography—to generate documents and to create works of visual art—have produced some remarkable exaggerations about what photographers ought or ought not to do. Lately, the most common exaggeration is one that regards these powers as opposites. Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize. In this view, a beautiful photograph drains attention from the sobering subject and turns it toward the medium itself, thereby compromising the picture's status as a document. The photograph gives mixed signals. Stop this, it urges. But it also exclaims, What a spectacle! ..."

(Regarding The Pain Of Others )

is it possible to accept the paradox of such an existence where contemplation of a red leaf and aesthetic pursuits go hand in hand with the awareness of the pain of others? mostly, we end up living by closing our eyes and turning our backs to this essential issue, otherwise living wouldn't be bearable at all. Brecht's lines sum this up, as actual now as they have been in 1938, as they have always been:

It is true: I still earn my keep
But believe me: that is only a coincidence. Nothing
Of what I do entitles me to eat my fill.
Only coincidentally am I spared. (If my luck fails, I am lost.)

People tell me: Eat and drink! Be happy that you have!
But how can I eat and drink, if
What I eat, I take from the hungry, and if
My glass of water deprives the thirsty?
And yet, eat and drink I do.

(To our posterity, trans. by Arden Rienas)

Levinas is quite radical on this: "There is something vicious and egoistical and cowardly in aesthetic pleasure. There are times when one should feel ashamed of it, as if one celebrated during the plague". 

and yet: what if such celebration were the only possible way of surviving, without - to put it simply - going mad?

on a tide of time

I’m so conscious of the evanescence of experience, so conscious of the fact that everything we do, everybody we know, is carried along on a tide of time and will disappear, that I have a strong sense of wanting to pin experience down before it disappears.

Frank Auerbach

nothing can be pinned down, though~

this is reality

why is it that you need to show three glasses when even one glass holds more emptiness than wine could ever fill? do you think that paint coming off the wall symbolizes loss and decay of the soul - generally speaking? or perhaps your own, tiny wound? do you think that flowers lose petals for the sake of your weeping? don't you see that you are still saying this and that, and your speech is flowing over the brim of every empty glass you might show?

i haven't invented anything, i pleaded, this is what i found on the balcony when i could finally bring myself to open that door, there was even a small heap of ashes there, which i could not get into my frame. this is exactly what i saw. somebody smoked there every night, the window wide-open, before leaving. some-body. a body pushing against the wall. this is what was left behind. this is reality.

you haven't looked properly.

furiously, after much pondering and fighting against myself, i weighed all the lines of the composition and went around them for many days, in search of the perfect angle. i removed one glass. still, it didn't seem enough. with one glass left, i was much closer to the truth, it seemed. yet it too needed to be broken into pieces. i handed you the barren landscape.

still overflowing, i see.

why the many crumbles, when even one grain of sand is enough to reflect the moon?

like this, like this? i asked, scraping off this layer of my self, and another one, and another still. when the new, perfectly empty vistas of my gaze presented themselves to you, i myself had long been gone, fading away like a whisper or some animal's breath in the icy air.

yet what one stared at now, from beyond the silence, was nothing less than three empty glasses, stained, full of ashes and dregs, placed on an old print of one of her photographs, fallen petals scattered across the table, paint coming off the mildewed walls of the balcony where someone would smoke late at night, and once bit her lips when kissing her against the frozen window, dust on the wooden table, the wet grayness of the air - each of the thousand colours alive and exact, each of the myriads of hues precisely delineated, the smallest detail of the smallest curve and angle present with all its impossible truthfulness.

..

black calla

they often long for what could render all questions useless, or so they seem to believe: a single, perfect - because beyond any naming, untouched by the notion of presence - flower.

at other times, though, they find themselves longing for neither the flower nor the skin against which it rests. they seem to yearn for precisely that which only a word could bring into presence, the contrast between the dark of the petal and the ivory shimmer of skin. a single word, which could, then, redeem their lives, even if for just one moment, the perfect moment when the shadow of the black calla merges with the warmth of flesh.



..

more of cats and balls

Working on the last post, I thought I needed a photo which would mirror that last line, for some reason the image of that ball was very appealing to me. So I took my camera and went to my mother's, who was ready to mock me: "You don't really believe the dark one will comply?"

And indeed, the dark one didn't.

I took out all my mother's balls of yarn, I tossed them about, rolled them, dangled them in front of her, called her in all tongues and voices, threatened, begged. Unmoved in her otherworldly sovereignty, without even a look of mercy (disdain would have been sweeter), she kept ignoring me, bathed in her luxurious black languor like a haughty queen whom a writer of a different age would have called Salammbô.

And now I am forced to wonder, yet again, why it is that cats hold this strange power over us, such a mythical mix of fascination and fear. And I remember a certain poet obsessed with the dangerous perfume floating about her body, praying, Come, my fine cat, against my loving heart. Sheathe your sharp claws, and settle. I remember Bastet and also a certain Bysshe, the black cat whose owner, a somewhat demonic figure himself, had recently written to me how possessed he was by this dark love. And I remember Kuroneko, a classic Japanese horror film of the sixties, which shows, in scenes of breathtaking beauty and eroticism despite their inherent violence, two women returning, as evil spirits in the shape of black cats, to avenge their cruel death at the hands of samurai. Or Tanizaki's novel A Cat, a Man and Two Women, in which a man is so in love with his cat, Lily, that he ends up choosing her over the two women in his life, his former and new wife, both sickly jealous of the cat, more than of each other.

(Why is it that men are typically subjects of such depictions? What makes them frailer and more easily prey to feline fascination? Or is this just another myth?)

And as I couldn't find the thread leading out of this ball of tangled thoughts and memories, I decided to make a post about it and dedicate it to all the cat-lovers among the Bridge-lovers, some of whom I already know.

..

a request

somebody asked me:
"i'd like to see you write a post about life and what you find beautiful. i know you won't do it (and despise me for asking such a thing)".

i must confess i was puzzled (also slightly amused about such a mis-representation of my - otherwise undeniable and unshakable - cynicism) : about life and what i find beautiful? what on earth have i been posting all this time? no matter how hard i looked at my pictures, all i could find there was: amazement at life and what beauty does to my heart.

i had been pondering for long and was about to give up my (inconceivable, as it seems) intention of fulfilling that request when this revelation struck me: i would make a post about Sunday mornings at my mother's.

a moment of fullness, not yet tinted with melancholy: the first moment when i open my eyes, only half-awake, the vision still blurred. neither wild passion nor ecstasy of happiness: the simple and quiet joy of breathing. above nothingness and below the conscious mind, the zero point at which a self starts taking shape. i am the first breath and the first vision, long before a word falls down into my flesh and makes me aware of silence. i am at the center of the world, because i am at the center of nothing: i can quietly slip back into my sleep, cradled as i am in the warm safety of night. or i can keep my eyes wide open until what has been only possible becomes firmly rooted into the ground: the only real. yet i delay the moment of choice. indefinitely, i savour the richness of this "not yet" - which was not a 'not' and not a "yet' back then, since time hadn't been invented, neither mine, nor that of the world.

this woman hadn't yet been invented who, years after, reading a sentence about the first brush stroke of a chinese painter, lifts her head and quietly gazes at the play of snow by her window, the book forgotten on her lap, vanishing away into the dim light of the afternoon:

"At the junction between the two, it is both the stroke of emergence and of ascent, at the starting point of every variation of later lines, and of submersion and return, with all previous lines culminating in it, becoming confused and losing their individuality."

is every moment of her life this starting point of all variation of later lines - yet also the ending point of other countless lines which could have been, or are just tired of being? why does she have to choose?

yet implacably she chooses. she chooses now. to look at this walnut tree which is the same as it was back then, when its huge branches used to tap the high window of her room.

muffled sounds come in from the courtyard and the light sharpens. soon, she will be wide awake.

she doesn't know how old this porch is.

it was not here when i was a child. my grandmother also had never seen it, that much i know. every time i push the door handle, i have to pause for a while, as if my gestures, too slow to follow through the history of my blood, were still amazed and reluctant to begin. there, at that precise point of time and space, memory refuses to be born. an enclosure, this porch, for sure. yet whose body is secretly kept inside, nourished as if in a wooden box?

oh, but not so in the kitchen, not so.

i remember her in the long winter evenings, her white hair a radiant halo in the shadow of the gas lamp. you think you know whiteness yet you don't, if you haven't seen her in the small kitchen, light gathered in her hair as if the rest of the world had all been carved in darkness. a cake was being baked, we were waiting. then it wouldn't turn out as she had wished, oh, her love was forgiving but who could ever have measured the precision of her attention, and she would immediately take it out into the night and throw it into the snow, muttering angrily all to herself and how delighted we were, and how we secretly wished, every time, that the cake would be burned again and again, and we got to witness her white upon white, once more, and listen to the melting song of snow.

you do not know what is behind this curtain. oh but i do. only i do. the wooden floor upon which i found her lying one day. i took her in my arms, wondering at how small she was. she is so light, like a doll, i thought. crepe paper feet. she had always had beautiful feet and i was happy to resemble her. they said i did. i put her back into her bed, she had already lost her voice by then. she had no gestures left, only her smile.

the floor is bathed in the same light, now as it was then, almost aglow, flooded with silver and so smooth, i almost wish i put my face against it. only the curtain is different. we had a brown one, with scattered green petals which would change into flowers if looked at from a certain angle. you see the red one now, yet i still see the brown curtain, and all my angles are now flowers.

once, a man wrote a poem about a calla lily between my breasts. all callas smell like him since then. i don't remember when my mother has started to grow calla lilies. surely, it must have been before that poem. or have i just invented it myself, gazing at this flower long ago, unaware of the future hand scribbling down a few words on a piece of paper, as white as my breasts? this flower i haven't imagined, that much is sure. or have i? what is its time then?

which moment is the true one? which hand and which word? which white?

ribbons of past float around me, my past, the invented past, the past that could have been mine, that could have been ours, all of them torn apart from myself, swirling freely through the hazy air of this winter afternoon, as if they had never belonged to me. as if they had never been lived by me. by her. by anyone.

the lost kiss

this is what i obsess with in photography. the Glimpse. for one moment, i am there. i witness life, unknown, unnoticed. a Glimpse into the life of others, majestically indifferent of my existence. (oh, i know, i betray myself when i say 'majestically', only because i resist to give in to the thought of pure and absolute indifference. something in me dreads this abyss, and wants to hang onto an adverb which, somehow, still conceals the illusion of a possible humanity. yes, i am still weak, yes, i still lie to myself).

a foreign city. i was there for one day and one day only. i saw a bus station in front of a park covered with snow. young lovers were there, so beautiful under their winter coats. they kissed. there was a longing tearing through me like a knife, for what? i don't know. for the fullness of that reality, of that life? what was happening in front of me, no, that happening itself, beyond any need of a subject, was revelation.

that picture, now. already during the scanning i saw that i had failed. i had been one second too early? or too late? what difference does it still make? and yet it makes everything different.










she still has her face hidden in his hand, perhaps shy, perhaps smiling, one moment before he lifts up her face to him. surely wondering how his mouth tastes, if they kiss for the first time.
she has her face already hidden in his hand, her mouth still half open with desire, her cheeks red. or pale as the snow which has ceased falling for a while, allowing this clarity of the air suddenly on the verge of breaking around me like glass. i look at him, somehow awkwardly erected, a little clumsy and fearful, yet a bit proud too. a bit sad? as if not knowing yet, not fully grasping what has happened to him. his eyes look over her head into some sort of distance that already tells of frailty and loss, of regret, of the hundred million angels of the future marching in, with their golden trumpets and drums, already erasing them, erasing me, erasing that moment, that kiss.

that kiss lives only in me now. no photograph can return it to the flow of time. yet, i tell myself, even if i know it is silly and absurd, if there were to be some day a tribunal of time, or history, and if the question were to be asked, this question precisely, which could save mankind, the question about this kiss, i could still stand up, myself alone, testify to its revelation, advocating redemption. i would do that, even holding this mocking photograph in my hands, this failed photograph, even then i would have to right to defend this truth, myself alone in the world, because the energy of that moment, of the Glimpse, when i took the picture, unknown, unnoticed, still lives in me now. and i could say: i am thus. i am thus, forever.

this miracle, i don't understand it. to be the depository of such sacred truth, how is it possible that i still dare to move through my life, thoughtlessly, instead of fearing that each moment i might break into pieces and lose it. what would still remain, then. perhaps the two have long forgotten this kiss themselves. perhaps they are together right this moment, making love, that kiss one among countless others, not even special, not even that good… maybe that was their last kiss and they never saw each other again after that day… maybe she lives with someone else in a little house just around the corner from that bus stop, while he has travelled to Prague and is wandering tonight through strange little streets in an unfamiliar part of town, having lost his way, his footsteps echoing on the sidewalk as he looks for a lighted café and someone who can offer conversation, though he knows he won’t find anyone, it is too late, this part of the city is too dark…
and then the same absent look comes back into his eyes, and once again he startles, not knowing what has happened to him, and how the hundred million angels of the future are marching in, with their golden trumpets and drums, already erasing him, erasing that moment, that already unrecognizable memory of his own life, which suddenly seems not his any longer.










i imagine stories. countless stories. i hunger for these stories, as i hungered for the Glimpse, back then, when i failed at taking that picture. one can say there is something indecent in this hunger for something which doesn't belong to me and doesn't need my presence. i know that. why should i care. not everybody who thrives to know like this is an artist, but for sure every artist knows this hunger.

the poet says:

I wonder if I will pass him later,
weeping in the parking lot,
staring at the sky,
tears glittering in the sun.
You would look away,
but I want to know everything.

(James Owens)

yet this type of knowing, which is everything art builds upon, is also the sign of our defeat. the poet knows this also:

Knowledge is the last resort of nostalgia. It emerges in poetry after defeat and might confirm our misfortune, but its ambiguity – its fallacious promise – lies in maintaining our awareness of the situation in which we were defeated, and even of its future, from which we expected so much and which has vanished.

(Yves Bonnefoy)


this failed photograph i hold in my hands is at once the sign of my victory and my defeat.
i know this, and it hurts to know.

erasing that tree

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking.

The idea, for example, that each particular erases

the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-

faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

of that black birch is, by his presence,

some tragic falling off from a first world

of undivided light.

from a poem by Robert Hass

I wanted to write about these lines that I had received some days ago, from somebody who is very dear to me. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't come up with something more beautiful (and 'beautiful' means here 'round', or 'whole', too) than the gift that I had been given along with this poem, and which is this small confession:

'I want all the little details of the world, I want to see them and touch them with something like love, the woodpecker and the knots and hollows of the birch - but, at the same time, I long for that “undivided light” so much that my eyes fill with tears and I ache with a feeling like thirst. I fear myself a little, because I think I might be willing to erase the birch and the woodpecker (a terrible, terrible thought) if that meant I could stand in this light.'

Tonight, looking at the tree in this picture, my friend's words have come back to me (they hadn't left me at all, to tell the truth). I remember how I stood on the shore of the frozen lake and opened the back side of my camera, slowly, letting the light in. The unbearable light of the winter sun.

And then other words have come, ancient words, that I had thought long forgotten, the words of the God echoing thus, in my mind:

'The Blessed Lord said: There is a banyan tree which has its roots upward and its branches down and whose leaves are the Vedic hymns. One who knows this tree is the knower of the Vedas.

The branches of this tree extend downward and upward, nourished by the three modes of material nature. The twigs are the objects of the senses. This tree also has roots going down, and these are bound to the fruitive actions of human society.

The real form of this tree cannot be perceived in this world. No one can understand where it ends, where it begins, or where its foundation is. But with determination one must cut down this tree with the weapon of detachment. So doing, one must seek that place from which, having once gone, one never returns, and there surrender to that Supreme Personality of Godhead from whom everything has began and in whom everything is abiding since time immemorial.'

Bhagavad Gita, from Chapter 15