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.