8 February 2024

May I be alive when I die. After taking photographs of discarded things, a friend thought I was doing a sequence on death. To do that would be to be alive when I’m alive, perceiving death as ground work: receipts for poke in the grass; cigarette tucked into a tree crevice; chip bag crumpled in chain link. It’s witness that brings death to life, or abstraction to the Eucalyptus. But that’s only half the equation. Who was the author of the bag, smoker of the butt, eater of the fish? They’ve signed their disappearances as material. Consumption invisible, the product is now worthless except to my eye. Eye and Eucalyptus would be another title, as E and Y rhyme inside the short and longer syllables. A dull photograph is perhaps more real than the saturated one. The word “putts” pops up as alternative to another in that sentence. Mechanical word play; now it reads “word-word,” as if word said twice meant something other than word said once. Who’s the maker there?

To be aware of death as one is dying is no different than an awareness of ordinary objects. It’s death that turns us from subject to object in a sentence. But you can’t get there without active verbs. My work as a teacher of writing should help me learn the grammar of life’s sequences. "From here on out" is a cliché that escapes the fate of other cliches; not dead but odd. Because she stayed up to watch the Grammy’s when her house started to burn, she thinks Taylor Swift saved her life. Miracles do happen between advertisements. Or, there’s a “barren terrain of feeling,” a parched surface on which we laugh and weep, unaware there’s a deep discount on affect. The affectation of old men erasing teenage girls. Their tears don’t change the world. “Their” is ambiguity, according to the Court.

******

There’s modern art in your nature photographs, a friend tells me. Kinda calls into question the difference between realism and abstraction, doesn’t it? If a tree makes abstract art, is it a painter? Or is a painter a tree when she does same? The photographer comes along at one remove, takes the photograph and is comfortable to be seer and maker both. Is there a place for volition where image meets thing, at whatever remove? The ascemic text of a burned out city confronts us with our inability to read it. 

Note: the first phrase is by DW Winnicott, quoted by Jacqueline Rose.