A launch for LILITH WALKS at DaShop (Kaimuki), Saturday, Feb. 25 at 2 pm

 

 

 https://mailchi.mp/b8f679434265/escape-into-sci-fi-fantasy-magical-realism-10135863?e=32386e6331

from Eucalyptus and I: Buber Variations

Buber 3

Eucalyptus and I exist outside of context; I am the eye of the eye of the camera that fixates on one drop of mahogany sap, casting its shadow like a lure. The text is not I, though I watch its black drip on a virtual white page. But everything else lives in his light. Not a sacred light, unless you nail the bronze label on, name to make it so. Tree is light insofar as it reflects; so am I, it seems, on this morning when there is varying light. Yesterday was mock-eternal, unvarying in gray rain. This morning colors distinguish themselves. It’s all in the contrast. One woman stands beside one tree (her dog on a red leash, tugging), taking photos for no reason she understands. If it’s to stop time, the eucalyptus is already pretty slow. If it’s to memorialize the moment, the moment insists it’s alive as flashback (technical word for memory). This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Is the tree then a form that I confront? Or is the form the photograph, operating through me at a second remove? A friend sends me this: “Anyhow, Daido Moriyama used to tell his students, ‘Til you've taken 10 rolls of film of a single building in one shooting session, I won't believe you even really *looked* at the building.’" 

 Seeing-machine, attending-machine, life support for eyes. 

 Where I place my frame frames me, though I’m not seen here (abhor the selfie!) I am that bit of grass from which the tree grows into the light of morning, or I am that patch of yellow-striped asphalt over which mountains show, bearing their clouds like cakes. Such work is creation, inventing is finding. Or a sub-creation folder, tucked inside the external hard drive, exported into Lightroom, then meddled with. Is the meddling invention? I can't reproduce color tones I don't remember, so I produce what I hope is close. Neighbor to “true,” not figment or fragment, however imagined. But this is getting quite grand, this lexicon of invention and creation; back in Mosquito Park (as we call it) all actual life is encounter. As I pull my camera away from Eucalyptus, some brown tar sticks to my dog’s red leash, feathered there. We take the tar away with us. Something of this moment sticks.

Buber 2

 

Martin Buber Variations: Two

After I said, “look at the tree,” a woman walking by termed it “magnificent.” Adjective as abstraction; it (neutral pronoun) is magnificent (blanket term). Tree covered in a multi-colored blanket of reds and greens and blacks and browns, but only where reading lenses meet distance. I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. This is not to say the tree is he or she or they, and thou seems an antiquated intimacy. If the relation is reciprocity then what does Eucalyptus get from me? Am I an it to it, who is not an It to me? I take photos of the tree, and note the verb. Appropriate is not appropriation, but something more decorous. In this decade I better know the self’s fragility as memory, self-contained upon a stage, a series of events to watch rather than to leap in like a river, seductive. You know you want to leap into what will destroy you, for you are American, so you focus on a tree behind you. Stolid, it doesn’t succumb to desire, though sometimes to wind, an uneven heating of the earth. Two eggs stand on the bottom of a bowl, a light shining down on them. Like two boxers before they dance. A brown egg kisses a white egg, and it’s not allegory, though we notice it. Only the cops wore masks, not against covid, but against our attention. They are not You, though they might be. They are not It, though they acted as such. The tree navigates its colors as if there were meanings to its palette. Red is not anger, but reflection. Green is not jealousy, but the grass around the tree. Brown is not mud, though the rain makes it appear so. Is rain the artist? Is wind? Am I, for taking the picture, downloading and fiddling with it? Is the picture then a Thou, related or unrelated to the tree? If a bot can tell a lie, can the eucalyptus? Or is your accident a form of truth that carries no ethical weight? My photograph becomes the tree’s memory. Yesterday there were streaks of sap; today there’s a gecko stuck in it; in three days, the gecko’s skeleton is held against the light, a jaw, a back, a tail entangled in the tar. The photographs are still, but it’s sequence that interests me, not the one-off, the beautiful image. Abstraction as dopamine trigger. It’s the silence between the shots (remove word from gun and give it to art) that gives us pause. Generous pause. What we don’t remember we see again as flat and new and still only as it sits on its canvas. I look at a tree photo, see two profiles of demons, one eye on each. Demon in foreground has a mouth shaped like a Valentine’s heart. I and Eucalyptus exchange our vows, before dog and I turn to trudge through the nets of other shadowed trees. That was not in the photograph.

Buber 1

 Martin Buber Variations: I and Eucalyptus

If there is no I as such, then who are you? I contemplate a tree. I am not such as the eucalyptus promises to be. But much as time enters a photograph as blur, the eucalyptus enters as tar, as sheets of bark separating from the trunk, as greens and browns and the reflected red of my cap. Jewel sap, sap as trap (leaves and geckos stuck), black when it’s dry, brown after the rain. Stained, solitary amid the monkeypods. Standing near the swimming pool’s chain link, an invasive of one. The monkey pods bend their branches, braiding shadows on green grass. The eucalyptus is tall and stiff, casting no shadow that is not the stickiness of tar. A rock at its base black with such, two small brown leaves its wide eyes. Whatever I might be stands in relation to whatever the eucalyptus is. My dog gets bored by these ritual visits, despite the scent. It is like an egg you think you’ve seen until you take its picture. Photographs trace a border between seen and unseen, real and surreal. I take them because I see something that is something else again when I download it. (This used to be called developing.) The tree’s undoing is development, almost a narrative, if we could hear it in words. If relation is reciprocity, then we're in relation, this self a blurred egg, this tree its peeling skin. One wonders if the tree feels pain at its self-loss, each day a newly detached wall of bark, smothered in black goo. I have come to think of self-loss as a mixed state, best described apart from loss and gain, terms capital imposes on us. The eucalyptus was planted to make money, but it’s failed, loitering on the lawn beside the community pool. Freed from the economy of planks and paper and wind screens, it claims an economy of meaning, which is itself a seesaw process. What the image creates sometimes is a place that sits between color and meaning, like the space between the blackened bark and the light color of the tree. Between the meaning and me is abstraction. It’s unconsidered, no artist to write its plot, or take its measurements. What to make of the tree’s art is mystery. Stories are how we solve mysteries (so often crimes) but these leave us puzzled. I can see a face in the movement of sap against the jagged bark, but I know it’s not a face. Is it accident? Does accident depend upon there having been an intention, or can we make an accident of what appears to us as accident already? I and eucalyptus fail to communicate, though we commune. After an arbitrary last photo, my dog and I return to the side walk. The side is of a road, but we’ve been on the other, the green side. My shoes are covered with seeds acquired earlier in higher grass. My dog carries the promise of a weedy afterlife on her gray haunches.

Meta-Lilith

"His father gave her a Biblical name," the woman told me, who'd asked if I have any grandchildren. (It was one I didn't know.) The little girl had a bright purple shirt on, with a black bow tie to the side; she wore white sandals and colorful socks.) I said that Lilith is a Biblical name, except she's not in the Bible, and told her the story of the first woman who didn't require Adam's rib. Across the road, another older woman beckoned with her small dog. We crossed over. She thought I'd like the movie, "80 for Brady," about old women who like the quarterback. I watched the Super Bowl, I said, but no other football because of the brain injuries. She'd told her son he was not allowed to play football for just that reason, but he did. And now he's a psychiatrist, or is it psychologist? "There's a lot of demand for mental health services," she said, gesturing toward the parking lot. Her son had bought a car (not the cheapest one, mind you), which was parked outside their unit. I mentioned today's _Washington Post_ article about teenage girls and suicide. "They're trying to grow up too fast," she said. As Lilith and I started uphill, we turned to say good-bye. A large black BMW stood out in the parking lot of smaller Japanese cars.

 

Lilith talks, and talks

Lilith and I walked quietly around Min Soon, who was meditating on a bench that looks out on preservation land. We walked down the hill behind the townhouses, where the plants grow extra large, pausing at the eucalyptus tree that coughs up tar, and then up some stairs to the back of a maintenance shed. A short man in black baseball cap is standing inside. "Nice camera!" he says. He used to work for the Nature Conservancy on Maui as a photographer; went up in helicopters, looked down on ridges too narrow to see otherwise. But lots of people had left, so he became their grunt. Lived in Ewa, has a standard shift car that he bought from a friend for $100 (down from $500 because he didn't know how to drive it), is now resident manager up the hill from us. "Mind if I take some photos?" I asked. "Lucky I cleaned up yesterday." When I said I prefer scatter, he said, "oh you should have come by last week." He remembered me as the woman who once came around and took photos of sheet metal. Lilith was pulling on the leash, because chickens. I told him about our book, _Lilith Walks_, and the odd conversations we have with people when we walk. He said that was a great idea, and he wished he'd written down what happens when people come by the shed or call him on the phone. We introduced ourselves, and then Lilith pulled me away.

 

 

At the rec center down the hill, a woman in yellow shirt and shorts, big framed glasses, approached and asked if Lilith was friendly. Would she meet her dog? Of course. So she walked to her ancient blue SUV, opened the front door, and out leaped Boba, a poi dog with a bit of a boxer's nose. He greeted Lilith, then walked to the nearest light pole, lifted his back leg and fired. Then fired again.

 

Chronicle of an photograph not taken

She was leaning on a concrete wall, smoking a cigarette and looking at her cell phone screen. A young woman dressed in a SUBWAY teeshirt, outside an empty SUBWAY, across a narrow road from the empty movie theater, devoid even of its letters now that deconstructors came to take them down. Lilith and I walked past, gazing at the empty theater, its brown papered doors, its EXIT signs with nothing to exit. Mostly, all we saw was ourselves, reflected. On our way back, she looked at us and smiled. "May I take your photo?" I asked, thinking of the way she'd bent down with her cigarette, reading her screen. "Why?" she asked. "Because I like to take photographs." Lilith sniffed her ankles, and she was happy her own dog had been noticed in its absence. She came up with the idea of having us take a selfie together, so I took one of her smiling and my one spectacled eye peering into the small square, STL logo on my head. But of course that was not the photograph I'd wanted. As we left, I read a long tattoo down her arm from elbow to wrist. The letters were big, stenciled in a fancy font, and added up to a phrase about being true to yourself (but not that, exactly). That was the photograph, in the end, I didn't take. Then I'd better remember the sad beauty of the phrase. Maybe I'll get myself a sub sandwich one day (though I hate Subway) and ask to take the photo of her arm. She said the empty theater might turn into a Planet Fitness, if they could ever fix the air-conditioning.