Buber 8

 

What counts is not these products of analysis and reflection but the genuine original unity, the lived relationship, writes the philosopher. I’m not biting at “genuine” or “original,” though I like “unity” a lot. I and Eucalyptus live our relationship in spells, one visit per day. I talk to my dog, but not to the tree. Would talk be analysis? Is the problem that it lives at one remove, is not genuine or original? Ceaseless pursuit of silence through noise. The cat in the blue chair chases his tail. The meaning of his phrase has to do with futility, but the actual chase is fun. He pushes his paws together around his gray striped ribbon of a tail, lets go to play again. Analogy need not be exact or original or analytical, just moving image. After divorce, a new unity, unoriginal but more carefully shaped, pieces of cardboard jutting out from the two-dimensional canvas, flattened again by a photograph. The photograph chases its other dimension, but is most honest when it represents a flat surface with its own. Our era lives on fictions, but demands fact. My students preferred non-fiction “because it really happened,” but the real tear in my heart depended on a missent letter. A postman in Egypt opened the mail he was intended to convey. He was not author or audience, but interpreter at the point of transfer, like a rogue sign interpreter. One puppet slipped out of hand, out of its role, walked toward a child with hands outstretched. We want to be part of creation, even if we’re not its instigation. We want instigation, even if it’s not equanimity. The cliff diver needs the cliff like the tree needs its canopy. A worker weaves wires, as his umbrella collapses in the wind. The wires are transfers, the worker a double-agent. There’s an original doubleness we might leave to its own devices, casting off the nostalgia for one. Casting out the transgender kid is evidence of unitary desire. You are one or the other, Eucalyptus or Monkey pod. But there’s the space between you that promises transformation. The original is change, multivalent. Where silence was is now weed-whacking. It cries like our one cat, wanting the attention of its person, willing to cut and cut to earn its keep. Whackers propped upside down at the back of a worker’s cart beside two or three red rakes. It’s not the handlebars that become the bull, but the bull redefines handlebars as adjuncts to a living being. Take the bull by its horns and steer your way through. The language is full of beef.

A Review of Lilith Walks by Greg Bem

 https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2023/03/01/lilith-walks-by-susan-m-schultz/

In Lilith Walks, no description lasts long, though, because of the remarkable temporary qualities of the “dog walk.” As a literary form, a dog walk feels like a remarkable hybrid between inspiration and constraint. The “dog walk” is descriptive yet concise. It balances deep engagement with time and place and often relies on a lightheartedness to carry forth the spontaneous flashes of experience. Even the usual and ordinary are elevated because dog walking is often about established routines and norms. In Schultz’s approach, the form is opportunity to document where norms are broken, where the exceptional occurs.

 

Buber 7

 

If my photograph of Eucalyptus is abstract, then who am I to Eucalyptus? Two-dimensional woman with blue-framed glasses and a flat dog, caught in the act of trying to take a photograph? The sublime melancholy of our lot [is] that every You must become an It in our world. But the tree takes my melancholy and absorbs it into its bark, its colors, its substance, which are not abstract. Because I cannot see far up the tree, my photos are of a narrow band near earth. Does the tree’s curvature make it less abstract? The photograph seems to make it more present to me, as I carry it home, stare at it on my screens. Presence isn’t reality, but the object in relation to the space it’s in. But this is to get too abstract: what I love are the reds and greens, the gaps, the way the tree seems to open mouths (at all angles) into which I can look. Some sap drips look like tongues. `Ahuimanu Bronx cheers. I gave up metaphor for prose, but now it’s back. The It is the chrysalis, the You the butterfly.

I: What do these colors allow you to do that plain bark would not?

Eucalyptus:

I: Do you get lonely standing up all the time?

Eucalyptus:

I: Do you resent the reputation you have of not casting any shade?

Eucalyptus:

I: With what other beings do your roots communicate?

Eucalyptus:

I: Do you find me and my dog half as fascinating as I do you?

Eucalyptus:

I: I don’t resent your silences. They cushion me against paving equipment, the guy who doesn’t want me taking a picture of his truck, a dog behind the nearby fence.

Eucalyptus:

I: Yours is not a silence that fills in, but one that lives beside the noise.

Eucalyptus:

I: Your sticky black sap clings to my dog’s red leash. I'll up the contrast later.

Buber 6

 “Perhaps I myself am the enemy who must be loved.” Carl Jung. The sentence presumes an “enemy.” It presumes that enemies can be loved, and that by loving them they dissolve. It’s the Henry James School of Buddhism I’m in; we tell the stories of our actions, then think about those actions, and then think again about how we blew it, act again in (or not in) kind, rinse and repeat. In the tragic farce of daily life, we are both actor and spectator, and we know the spectator to be an actor, rather like the baseball umpire who refused to shake a manager’s hand. His refusal inserts him into the game he’s there to represent behind the curtain of his chest protector. No one to protect us now: over half of teenage girls have considered suicide. The tree self-destructs, though that is its process. The girl self-destructs, though that is part of ours. The tree stands alone, like a old woman who believes she can still drive her car, and that’s the pathos of it.

My You acts on me as I act on it. Acts like a tree with two trunks, the one who talks and the other who listens. Tim said, Susan, half your pieces are about listening, while the other half are about arguing. It’s a character feature. The It that is my kindness makes a You of me. The You that is angry, makes an It of us. I can’t say it’s balance, but it’s as close as I come these days. One pan holds as much flour as the other can bear to pull up to level. When we get to level, we’re not happy there. It was so much more fun jumping up and down, telling only enough gossip to make everyone curious. Curiosity’s crucial to your practice, but not the niele form of it, googling friends and relatives to find what traffic violations haunt their digital records. Or worse. Curiosity with no malice seems best, wanting to know more so that sympathetic joys and sorrows appear like colorful beads on a long piece of dental floss. Is Eucalyptus curious? May I interview you to find out? When you respond with reflections of color and not thought, what am I to do with that? Am I given total freedom or has a trap been set for me? Do trees cancel those of us who fail to understand their need for identity positions? Long considered invasive, the eucalyptus has a cross to bear in this regard. The very thing that renders its peeling bark beautiful is what speeds a forest fire towards habitations made of better woods, words. The tree must have a sense of itself as misunderstood, alone in this grove of monkeypods, their trunks dancing upward. Eucalyptus stands like a Puritan, straight, tall, solitary. It has work to do, but some rejoice when it’s cut down. Another in this park was. I don’t remember that, which tells me something now.

Lilith and the laundry line

 

I was trying to take a camera photograph (the wheels, the buttons!) of a line of laundry through a garage, when an old woman poked her head out from a side door of the house. "I'm taking pictures!" I said, foolishly. Her face was placid, smooth, her dark eyes patient. "You want to take a picture of my flower?" Yes, of course. Lilith and I walked through the garage to her side yard, just past the hanging laundry. There was a gorgeous red amaryllis, with four large blossoms on it. It's the fifth time this flower has bloomed. So I took photos, then Lilith and I turned to leave. I asked if I could take her photograph. She said no. Then: "I'm scared of dogs," she said, as we stood not three feet apart. "One bit me." I assured her Lilith was peaceful, as we left. Two doors down, I took a photograph of two lines of bras hanging in someone else's garage.

Buber 5

The tree is not art, but its photograph is. William Eggleson never dates or titles photographs because they are photographs. Nothing more or less than. Now there’s an equation I can work through, though the boundary between tree and photo begins to blur. After I take a photograph of a truck bed—the rusty toolbox, the tangled rope—a man asks me, “You going take one pikcha my truck, too?” It’s what’s in the truck, not the truck itself, I try to say, before Lilith sees chickens and pulls me away. I do take photographs of chickens, but they’re in relation to my dog, pulling on her red leash, an umbilical between eye and object. The photograph is the subject, if you’re lucky, the force of relation between me and my dog, my dog and the chickens (these bear very different affects). Time in the photograph turns to artifice, gesture or blur. I am still not seen to myself, because I don’t take selfies. Teenage girls are burdened less by history than by social media, a columnist writes. But we put ourselves inside of history in our self-portraits. Wim Wenders’ double-lens effected full focus in Paris, Texas, so that our sad hero could drive through the clear-as-a-bell mesa in his red shirt, shadows falling over his cheeks. He’d forgotten his past; the mesa replaced it with a dry present, and a bird of prey. Memory is more urban, a peep show we narrate because narrative isn’t collaboration, but instruction. We ask someone to act inside our re-invention of an already invented space (pool, restaurant, hotel room). It’s pre-fab formalism that structures dialogue, unless you invite Socrates to the pool party and pepper him with questions. Better to keep photographers out of the Republic, too, for they know best how seriously we take our realism.

The essential deed of art determines the process whereby the form becomes a work. A sidewalk is constructed of forms, square by square laid down inside a carpenter’s frame. There’s the urge to write in concrete before it sets, to scrawl our name, the date, and whom we loved. To take a photograph of that is to make it present, cleanse it of its dates and names as narrative pegs, pretending there’s no time like the present. Each time I and Eucalyptus meet, I take something away. Image thief. What I have to offer is some form of company I can’t comprehend. Autistic children farming in a French film say nothing, but their eyes follow the saw, the hammer, the dough being fisted into shape. No one speaks to them. Is this silence a comfort? Our walks are visitations, accruing meaning through repetition, not words. Eucalyptus is cryptic. Every word must falsify; but look, these beings live around you.

Buber 4

 

Asked to take photos at different times of day, I walked out into gray rain this morning. I walk out into gray in the afternoon. I walk out again at evening into the gray. “If weather gets in the way, take photos of the weather,” I remember saying, but this assignment presumes different weathers. Whether gray or gray again, attend to its layers. Then attend to trees, their ribbons of wet bark like highways to an approximate gray heaven. Wrote “bard” for “bark,” though bark is what we need in this after-drought of flood watches. Who watches the flood still gets drenched by it. We don’t get to Eucalyptus today, the dog and I, though I imagine (as in remember) the blacks that turn to brown, the sap drops like jewels reflecting my red cap (when it’s not so gray). The relation to the You is unmediated. But gray is our medium, foretelling more. From this room I sense the tree in the park. We’re taught to avoid the present tense, but the tree feels present, tense. There's a light in my room, more white than gray.

Insofar as a human being makes do with the things that he experiences and uses, he lives in the past, and his moment has no presence. To what end do I use the eucalyptus? Is use without use-value still use, or does it better approximate recycling, where objects have more value in their transfer than in their being? If I use the image I see in a photograph, what is its purpose, being different from value? Eggs are being rationed, a neighbor tells me, so expensive now they’re shipped to the mainland to be sold. Tell that to the chickens who roost beside McDonald’s; one laid an egg on the concrete pedestal to a sign, and I took that. The photo. But the tree feels present to me now, a sturdiness inside my gray day. The gum’s colors aren’t quite defeated by the gray, awaiting a camera’s lens to emerge, drip-paintings on a peeling canvas. Water drop drops off sap drop drops off bark off trunk off colors. How I negotiate a shift from narrow to wide-angle lens, from vertical to horizontal vision, has something to do with this tree. There’s more canvas, less detail. So I move closer, until the tip of my nose nearly rests on sticky wood, and turn the focus wheel. Focus is presence, an instant when the sap drop leaps out from its still yet moving frame. The rest forms a blur, but blurs are artistic! What is essential is lived in the present, objects in the past. While I do remember the tree (I took photos yesterday), I seem still to carry it with me. Not as a cross to bear, but as a kindness to be held, like the light that shifts when I pull a lever in Lightroom.