“As a result, this verb is considered a hapax legomenon, a word that occurs only once in a text, an author’s oeuvre, or a language’s entire written record.

The Satyricon contains a number of hapaxes, including “bacalusias” (possibly “sweetmeat” or ”lullabies”) and “baccibalum” (“attractive woman”).

The Song of Songs, which is the last section of the Tanakh and part of the Christian Old Testament, contains an especially high number of hapax legomena, forcing scholars to rely on the Greek version for translation hints. The Song of Songs is, at the surface, a story of love between a man and a woman, in which they describe their passion for each other. It has the greatest number of hapaxes in the Bible, rendering the book enigmatic and mysterious. For instance, in 4.13, the male compares the lady’s “selahim” to an orchard. The term is a hapax, but scholars have suggested “branches” as a translation, such that the text describes the woman’s body:

Your breasts are two fawns,

twins of a gazelle,

grazing in a field of lilies.

…

Your navel is the moon’s

bright drinking cup.

May it brim with wine!

…

Your vulva a rounded crater”

“At her hob or her table, hospitality often holds hands with its brother word hostility. Both are birthed from ghos-ti, their ancient Indo-European root, which meant host, guest and stranger—the trio of roles through which we shift all our lives. So apt that this inescapable flux was once contained in a single word.”

Has anything ever posed a threat to you?
Have you ever run from that threat?
Was something else chasing you long after your aggressors were lost?
Are you still running?

Could you stand still?
Could you let the running run itself out?
A predator on the edge.
A man on a ledge.

I was watching the sunset, turned wrong way round. The gravestones fluttered and the trees stood still. An angel crossed my path. Her long curls hung in the twilight. She came to sit next to me on the mowed cemetery grass, clippings billowing around us in a light wind. She spoke, but not out loud. Saying, “she was I and I was he,” for her face was now   his and the spirit let forth a husky laugh. I did as was told and took a photo…this is how it turned out.

“Whether I have imbibed or not is not part of the answer, but it would not hurt to question. I feel the souls of the sleeping city, close around me now; the halogen bulbs sufficiently light my body as I slink down the sidewalk. But the light is blinding too, and I feel it stab through my abdomen as I become translucent. Water drips down grey cracks, and either hollers or sirens from a couple streets over caterwaul off the concrete masses which block me in. I know I am a vital part of this machine, but no matter how much I query, I can’t find even whispers of what my function might be.”

What if you’ve already grabbed what you are reaching for? Case in point, this image is almost wholly a byproduct of my lack of knowledge of film processing and scanners.

A premonition made non/physical. The first time I saw this image, I knew in the future I would look at it as something that predicted the future. I knew I wouldn’t realize until it was too late. Time and love, and the Great gradual fading away. Even if my camera can only grasp halfway, I am going to hold on as tight as I can.

The temple band rounds the corner in resplendent sound, their amps creaking in the back of a blue pickup that conveys them across the city from temple to temple every night. Their notes shimmer in the evening haze. The humming thrum of the pummeling drums skittering slowly to nothing as the bugs of the night take up the song. The fireworks have already ended, and the band has surely pulled up to the next temple they were scheduled at. That day, a temporary action yielded a permanent change. Walls are an illusion. Everyday life often a ridiculous farce. A collection of moments we call a life. But for a collection disinherited, the permanent could become temporary.

For two months, I was all alone. Every evening, my body hurled between the ocean and the mountains. And every evening, when the light signaled my brain/camera, I would pull off the highway and take a picture of the sky as the sun departed again, leaving us always in deepest night. Eventually the road exorcised all my melancholy, and yet this crystallized fragment still remains.

It’s interesting, I had gotten to a point where I stopped taking photos. I was afraid, even when my eye was not gazing through the lens. I was afraid that I was beginning to see the world as if it were a photograph. Thoughts like, “if only I had my camera,” or, “that would make such a pretty photo” whisping through my head constantly. I began to not bring my camera with me places, or at the very least I would stuff it all the way to the bottom of my bag. I didn’t want another layer of opaque gauze between me and “it”. I didn’t want to see the world as even more a simulacrum, the glowing trace becoming ever fainter in my eyes. Eventually I almost completely ceased taking photos. Months passed. I lived, perhaps. I existed, at least. I began to pay less attention to the visual. An erring motor, the night cries of birds and owls stilling my body. Living with eyes open and eyes closed. As it always is when you compromise. It would be like that whether you chose one or the other.

Now, this episode is in my past. Now, my trouble with the visual world and the photograph reaching, not a conclusion, but a resting point, I continue to take photographs whenever the urge strikes me.

Image(ined)

Just as our perception of the written word warps the way we think, our perception of the image warps the way that we see (though the movement probably goes both ways, senses all clanging off each other and the world, the twisted feedback loop that is life). In my movement away from academic modes of viewing art (which have been invaluable in a training of my perceptual faculties and undoubtedly still, and always will, color my seeing), I have found a new way of seeing images (a feeling like catching a strangers eye), and I propose that it is due to the ubiquity of the image today. Everyday I am continuously bludgeoned with the image. I crane my neck as if under barrage. I move in a fog. I see the world as if composed (I soon am led to believe that I compose the world). The screen you read this on is framed after all. But sometimes a light cuts through; the fog thins out.

It is probably unique to each person, but there are certain images that seem to alight upon us — images that arrests the seer, images that strike at some place in the body (the pupils, the diaphragm) — but that is nothing new. What is new is the world we live in, the constant flow of information. We see so many images that time ceases to be experienced as a constant flow. We chop it into moments and experience each as an image, sitting with each moment for however long seems necessary and natural. Something like the stage sets of The Color of Pomegranates; life distilled into an aesthetic-material haze. Anything the eye experiences, there is never space that does not belong to the image. There are no gaps between sensation, images harkening from Riemann sums towards a more advanced calculus as they flit past the eyes. The once strong borders between the world and the image have come to blur. There is no more need to talk of images as simulacra for reality, we see all on the same plane.