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.

through the waters of the blind

they say that history repeats itself:
what should we do
with the old communist buildings
which we have grown to call
home?


---


and if we had wanted to burn
them down in the rage
of our late autumn
and if we had wished for
the knife of day
to cut through them
like a seed tearing
through the flesh of time...

yet we stood there, weary
not even holding hands
and no one from the angelic orders
forced our mouths to open
and our flowers to turn silent
against the sun
we who got drunk on waiting
that darkened within us like wine
we who couldn't even remember
why our limbs were numb
and why we cried for words
like ripples through
the waters of the blind

yet we stood there, bewildered,
and failing to notice
that our mirrors, stubbornly
buried in the wormwood of memory
had started to outgrow
the shabby contours of living
that a forest had begun to move
towards the barren centre of our sleep
that we ourselves had come to hang
like giant globes of light
from within the dead body of time.

what should we do

with the old communist buildings
which we have grown to call
home?



come -
let's paint them in the colours
of our pain,
in the dimness of what they call
history
but we simply call
our lives.










































(the doorway of my block of flats)

simple, old truths

a man walks slowly in the fields of autumn. he sees tall grass swaying in the cold breeze, here and there a tree. the sinking sun, the sky suddenly yellow. at some point a dog comes along and rubs against the man's legs. he bends down and strokes its head. every now and then he thinks of himself as a child, he thinks of lost loves. fleeting images, no more substantial than the meeting of a fallen leaf and a branch reflected on the water's surface. perhaps even less trembling of his heart. but most of all, he remembers voices, a certain music which had always seemed to punctuate the quiet unfolding of what others had called his life. for no reason at all, two fragments of poems return now and then:

Yet he says much who utters "evenings,"

A word from which grave thought and sadness flow

Like rich dark honey from the hollow combs.

and

this was “absolution”
we turned the words in our fingers

like coloured pebbles
smiling vaguely, shy,

wondering what they meant,
wondering what we had been.

reaching the top of a small hill, he stops for a moment, leans against a tree and lets his eyes roam over the horizon and what slowly begins to take the shape of distances.
"if i die now", he says to himself, "then everything which is held inside the word evening as i am uttering it exactly this moment, is lost. no clinging to memory, no dream of absolution. this precise and stunningly clear configuration of the universe, as it is right this moment, the shape of these fields, the cotton-like grasses i passed by, the warmth of the dog fur lingering in my fingers, my shadow as it is stretching now across the path, these glowing colours of autumn and i myself, my body heavy with the world that i carry inside, not simply mirroring the one outside but lending it the clarity of a soul, the singleness of a purpose, will be lost. as if they had never existed. countless mouths will still open to say evening all over the earth, yet this particular weaving of time and space and soul, which now seems to be, as i feel it, essential, perhaps indispensable to the universe, will be no longer."

while his lips are still rounded, once again giving birth to the same order of seemingly meaningless sounds which compose the same word, "evening", all over again, he notices that this thought has ceased to fill him with the absolute horror he had so often felt in his younger days. instead, he smiles quietly at the way the sun, suddenly bright yellow, seems to be caught in the black telegraph lines cutting through the red of the sky. the colours hurt for a moment, though this too might have only been a fleeting impression. then he sees a flock of crows flying low over the disappearing fields.

the man lies down in the grass. the light falls obliquely upon his chest, briefly, as if splintered. in a bush nearby, leaves rustle, for just one moment.
the crows, no longer held in sight by a gaze, fly low through the darkness.

will i cease to be,
or will i remember
beyond the world,
our last meeting together?

Izumi Shikibu

like the rustling leaves

His heart, grown cold,
has become my body’s autumn.
Many sorrowful words
may yet fall
like the rustling leaves.


Ono no Komachi
(tr. Hirshfield & Aratani)

degrees of burning and exhortation

Like a buoyant thrush
In the happy wind above young meadows,
My arms know you are light, come.

We will forget this world,
Its ills and curses and the sky,
And my blood that is quick to war,
Forget those passes mindful of shadow
In the flush of new mornings.

Where the light no longer moves a leaf,
Our dreams and troubles gone to other shores,
Where evening rests,
Come I will lead you
To the hills of gold.

Free from age, time being still,
In its lost halo
Will our sheet be.



Giuseppe Ungaretti, Where the Light
(tr. by Patrick Creagh)

degrees of absolution

experimenting: first attempt at video

View on ExposureRoom

i have played with my new Nikon D90 and now you get to suffer the consequences :-)

if you'd like to watch in high-definition, please follow the link to Exposure Room. unfortunately there are some technical problems with this upload that i haven't been able to solve, but if i don't post it today i will never decide to post it at all :-)
i and some of my friends get to see fractured lines during a couple of sequences while it appears that others have no problem whatsoever. i still haven't any explanation or solution for this, so i would like to hear what you see (except my shaky and blurred shooting, of course :-)

oh, and if you happen to be in the unlucky category (my pessimism says that this will most probably be the case) but you are also in the "stubborn"-one and still want to take a proper look at it, you can download the original from the Exposure Room site, that works perfectly.