“I was not wholly conscious of myself, but was more keenly alive to the fire within. It was as if I were the activity, and my hands and feet were only experiments for my spirit to work upon…A wee child toddling in a wonder world, I prefer to their dogma my excursions into the natural gardens where the voice of the Great Spirit is heard in the twittering of birds, the rippling of mighty waters, and the sweet breathing of flowers. If this is Paganism, then at present, at least, I am a Pagan.”
“The Japanese, aware of the loss of Attu and the impending arrival of the larger Allied force, successfully removed their troops on July 28 under the cover of severe fog, without being detected by the Allies.
On August 15, 1943, an invasion force consisting of 34,426 Allied troops, including elements of the 7th Infantry Division, 4th Infantry Regiment, 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment, 5,300 Canadians (mainly the 13th Canadian Infantry Brigade from the 6th Infantry Division, with supporting units including two artillery units from the 7th Infantry Division), 95 ships including three battleships and a heavy cruiser, and 168 aircraft landed on Kiska, only to find the island completely abandoned.
Allied casualties during this invasion nevertheless numbered close to 200, all either from friendly fire, booby traps set out by the Japanese to inflict damage on the invading allied forces, or weather-related ailments. As a result of the brief engagement between U.S. and Canadian forces, there were 28 American and four Canadian dead. There were an additional 130 casualties from trench foot alone. The destroyer USS Abner Read hit a mine, resulting in 87 casualties.”
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.
Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki is said to have taught his students: the ideal Japanese translation for “I love you” is “Tsuki ga tottemo aoi naa” (The moon is so blue tonight).
“They prayed, they grew dates, they performed pilgrimages and welcomed visitors to the oasis like we do today,” Tarek says as he stops to pose for a selfie in front of a rock engraving.
“After Jerry Garcia died, his wife [Deborah Koons] and Bob Weir had already dumped half of his ashes into the Ganges. I don’t know what in the world was behind that. The rest were to be scattered in the San Francisco Bay. All The Dead were going to go out on this boat that had been rented by Debbie, the ‘black’ widow. Mountain Girl [Garcia’s ex-wife] showed up with her daughter Sunshine and all the girls, and this Debbie went nuts. She said, ‘If she tries to get on this boat I’m calling the cops and having her arrested.’ Debbie was frothing at the mouth and so Mountain Girl backed off.
Finally they got on and Sunshine was just so sad to see her mom standing there on the docks as the boat pulled away, with all The Grateful Dead and the managers out on the fantail of the boat. It was a windy, rainy San Francisco morning, miserable, cold outside, and Debbie was sitting alone in the cabin just fuming. She finally came out with these ashes and flung them over the fantail. Sunshine said, the wind caught them and swirled them all over everybody, and they were all wet and stuck with Jerry’s ashes. All of their pockets, seams, shoes, ears and mouths were full of Garcia’s ashes.
Herbert Tichy was in the area in 1936, attempting to climb Gurla Mandhata. When he asked one of the Garpons of Ngari whether Kailash was climbable, the Garpon replied, “Only a man entirely free of sin could climb Kailash. And he wouldn’t have to actually scale the sheer walls of ice to do it – he’d just turn himself into a bird and fly to the summit.”
“The walk to Base Camp took only 13 days. As a newcomer, I had a vague sense of deprivation when I realized I would miss that exciting event which is part of every Karakoram expedition from the Duke of the Abruzzi to the present day—the porter strike. Our porters were good- natured and long-suffering. They even made the final stage to Base Camp without rations. Our worst problem was their insistence at the top of every pass that we dance with them in the broiling sun to disco music from a cassette recorder instead of collapsing in the shade.”
