Joy, Arson, and Saturday Night

Her name was Joy, and I thought I could love her.

Joy was beautiful, fierce, independent, smart, and tragic.  In part her beauty was the result of tragedy; there was a profound sadness to her that made her so much more desirable.  One was drawn to both her body and by empathy.  She had been living alone since she was 15 or 16, both her parents died in a car accident while traveling in Africa.  She was independently wealthy.

One Saturday night in April, a rainy night, I went to Josh and Johns, and ice cream store in downtown Colorado Springs, to meet Joy and a group of our friends for a simple night out.  There were about 6-7 of us total, mutual friends all.  I was struck down that night, Joy was with another boy.

I didn’t stay long.  Feeling rejected,  I walked home alone.  The rain had stopped, but the streets were still wet.  It was about a mile back to my apartment.  Half way home, I cop car pulled up next to me.

Two policemen got out.  They walked towards me aggressively.  They opened the back door and pushed me in.  What’s going I asked. With anger, unapologetically, one of them said, A fire was started tonight, and you fit the description of the young man we are looking for. The police cruiser pulled away, heading south down Cache La Poudre Avenue.

After about 10 minutes, the two cops in the car exchanged a conversation on the radio I couldn’t understand.  The cruiser pulled over.  Get out, they said.  What?, I responded.  Get Out!.  I did.  The car pulled away.  They took me about 20-30 minutes out of my way.  I walked home, feeling more angry, rejected, and misunderstood.

Search and Seizure

It was a beautiful spring afternoon, and we had an itch to get outside.

I was in Colorado Springs at the time, with my friends Brian and Raoul.  It was a Saturday afternoon.  We were all bored and frustrated, and needed to go.  We’d made the decision to drive into the mountains outside of the city, and perhaps go for a hike.

Brian walked to his desk, pulled out a large bag of weed, looked at as if considering, then threw it on the couch.  The three of us got in the car and left.

We drove to Upper Gold Camp Road, a dirt pass that runs between Pikes Peak and Cheyenne Mountain.  We were in an old Volvo, orange and in sorry shape.  Driving slowly on the narrow pass, our car stalled.  The three of us got out to investigate.  Just as we got out, from around the curve in front of us, a cop car pulled up.  They got out to see who we were and what we were doing.  They treat us aggressively.  They had all three us put our hands on the roof of the car, legs and arms spread, and then frisked each of us down.  After padding us down, they told us to leave the mountain.

At once pissed to be called out for no reason, and then thankful that Brian left his weed at home, we got the car started and inched back down the pass.  When we got to the bottom of Gold Camp Road, we parked the car back at home and walked to local jazz bar up the street (Brian and Raoul were both jazz musicians, and were good at getting club managers to give them free drinks).  Together we all got drunk.  Our itch was never scratched, and we returned home feeling even more frustrated than when we left.

Philips Creek

Wednesday morning I woke early to a cold and rainy day.  The skies were grey and heavy, and the air had a bite.  It changed quickly.  By 11am, the air was warm and the rain became more intermittent.  The skies remained heavy.

By noon I just needed to go.  I spent all the morning holed in an office talking to undergraduate students about their scheduling needs.  I was quickly reduced to boredom and frustration.  I drove out to Philips Creek State Preservation, a small park between the villages of Belmont and Alfred, New York.  Part of Philips Creek is groomed for cross-country skiing.  I went to hike.

I was there alone, at least at the beginning.  I changed into a old pair of running shoes, and began walking down one of the trails.

It was amazing, incredibly beautiful.  Despite the grey skies, there was a warmth to light because of the yellowing leaves.  I could hear the sound of running water, run-off from the rain reaching for the creek.  I saw deer cutting through the trees, startled by the sound of my walking, and I heard coyotes or wild dogs in the distance.

The trail changed constantly.  Sometimes it’d be a muddy mess, other parts of the trail a short grass, just enough to wet the toes of my sneakers.  I relished it all.  I saw the whole world for a moment, and it was all living and changing before me.  Too often we forget how alive it all is around us.  We forget how little we are in life, and how much less we control it.  Times like this – alone, alive, and connected to the world – I feel more resolved; my smallness in the world feels comforting.

When I returned back to school, I had mud up to my knees.

Cut with a Kitchen Knife

Confusion is the well-spring for creative thought.

 

Wild Flowers

Photography is like seeding, it lets people know we are alive.

Camera Obscura

Three out of every four terms, I teach a beginning photography class.  Often, for an introductory lecture, I assign several Wallace Stevens poems.  One of my favorites is Prelude to Objects

If he will be heaven after death,

If, while he lives, he hears himself

Sounded in music, if the sun,

Stormer, is the color of a self

As certainly as night is the color

Of a self, if, without sentiment,

He is what he hears and sees and if,

Without pahtos, he feels what he hears

And sees, being nothing otherwise,

Having nothing otherwise, he has not

To go to the Louvre to behold himself.

Like my teacher Abe Morell before me, when we meet to discuss the Stevens’ poetry (I love Stevens, as so much of his writing is about the phenomenon of seeing), we sit in a camera obscura.  The windows in the classroom are all along one wall, so it is easy for me to transform the room into a camera.  I blacken the room by covering the windows with heavy, black plastic.  Once all the windows are covered, I cut a small hole in the middle of the plastic.  Projected through the small circular aperture, he view from the window suddenly appears on the blank wall of the room, everything upside down and backwards.

We sit in the camera obscura for 20 minutes or more, talking about Wallace Stevens and the phenomenon of seeing, the phenomenon both physically and metaphysically, and then I try to convince them that it is possible to see things as you’ve never seen them before, even the simplest things you see everyday.  And this is illustrated by the camera obscura.  It works everytime; I still love it too.

Olympics of the Mind

I had a good friend in high school who really liked to drink Everclear.  I’d never touch the stuff, thought it was like gasoline.  He and I became friends during the eighth grade when we were both selected to represent Smiley Middle School in the Olympics of the Mind.  We were the only boys on the crew, along with about 4-5 girls.  Our crew was given two tasks.  First we had to read Moby Dick, and after completing it, we had to write an epilogue, and then turn that epilogue into a play that only lasted 8ish minutes.  The second challenge was a brainstorming excercise, in which a selection of our crew sat in a semi-circle with a teacher/referee sitting at the open end.  The teacher/referee would pose some kind of question or guideline, and then we were expected to come up with as many answers as possible in just a few minutes, the answers scored for creativity – the least obvious answers getting the highest scores.  We’d go around the circle, each of us taking a turn before starting back at the beginning.  The brain-storming was me and the girls.  My friend Hal was in the play, it was a solo.  He was Ishmael.

Late in high school, after discovering Everclear, Hal’s family moved to St. Paul, Minnesota.  He was angry before he left, but after he left he fill apart.  He did a lot of drugs, a lot of acid.  Hal would  come and visit from time to time.  He would always astonish us with the depth of his drug consumption.  None of us could keep up.

In school, Hal had to be one of the smartest kids I knew.  I wonder what he is doing today?

Decisive Again

It happened again; I feel like it has been too long.  I opened the visual flood-gate.

For a while now, I’ve been feeling stalled in my picture making.  Today it happened, a full visual connection.  I felt everything I saw with excitement.  The world became whole, though it only lasted a little over an hour.

I wrote in my journal sometime ago Beauty is an intoxicant. Intoxicants can be thrilling. Sometimes a straight line can move you to tears. I found that with a camera again, something thrilling and moving, a sense that I can see creatively and with feeling.

It’s been too long, but I suppose that if that kind of feeling and clarity were easy to find it would all lose its value.

Decisive Moment

Yesterday was rainy and dreary, cold and miserable all day.  I spent most of the day sitting on the couch by the woodstove reading The Possible Life of Christian Boltanksi, a sort of autobiography by the great French artist.

Truth be told I’ve been feeling a little frustrated lately.  I’ve been feeling stuck with my work.  As a result, I’ve decided to focus all my energies into the camera, and to spend my time and money making new negatives rather working in the darkroom.  Focusing solely on the camera, I’m hoping to find something new, the next thing to really pursue with my work.

Insight with the camera seems to come and go.  Sitting there reading, I was feeling incredilby anxious about my work.  On such a grey day, the light was terrible, and with the book in hand, I was tossing and turning, looking for inspiration, something to get me over the hump and start making pictures.

Around 4 o’clock, the sun broke through.  The light was amazing.  The sky was still think and grey, with a warm, rich light peeking through, leaving strong shadows, and with a depth to articulate any object.  I dropped the book, picked up the camera, and rushed to find something to photograph under the light.  I tried several things, and hope I found something that worked.

What matters most, however, was the release.  The anxiety peeled away.  The light didn’t last more than 10 minutes before the grey consumed it, but for this brief time I felt resolved.  When I set the camera down and returned to Boltanski, I actually found myself thinking about Cartier-Bresson.  I thought about the Decisive Moment, and that perhaps there is a different way to think about it.  Rather than looking for a moment to reveal itselt – the apex of a dramatic moment – perhaps the Decisive Moment is more about a personal feeling boiling up until it is ready to be articulated.

Sitting by the woodstove reading, thinking, and trying to see my next picture, I developed a real anxiety and doubt about my photography.  In just a few minutes the light revealed some possibility to me, and with that possibility I had ten minutes to relieve all this doubt.  The Decisive Moment was a resolve of a personal feeling.  Rather than the drama of the world around me revealing its meaning, the moment was a release from myself.  The drama was all my own.

On the Bus – Verse 2

(I used to hang around the cafes in Cambridge on Sundays, reading women’s handwritten poetry journals while in the Fold, but the surprising thing was how little you learned about what the women were really like, by reading their poetry journals – though their handwriting told you something.  Eventually I found that a more dependable way to get an idea of a particular woman without actually talking to her was by hitting PAUSE, finding her address, and borrowing her keys to see how she actually lived.)  Or I could put one my special homemade editions of a pamphlet called “Tales of French Love and Passion” in a trash can just as Joyce was tossing something out, so that she would find it and perhaps read it.

It was a crowded bus going from Forest Hills in JP all the way into downtown Boston via Center Street.  It was very cold but sunny outside, and the bus was standing room only.  The heat was blaring on full, and the bus smelled like carbon monoxide, as if the heater were working to recycle these fumes rather than providing any kind of comfort.  It was too cold, that bitter New England cold, to open the windows.  You could see it in every face as you looked around the bus, collective misery.

I caught her eye for just a second.  She was about my age and exceptionally beautiful, with long dark hair and a dark complexion, perhaps Latino.  With just an instant of eye contact, it seemed we recognized in each other that this was all so miserable that it was indeed comical.  Everyone on the bus wanted to vomit, but we all kept it inside as we leaned against each other and went wherever we had to go, each getting on and off eventually.

I caught her eye a second time.  We both smiled again.

We did this a number of times, but each time the smile was loaded with more.  It started with misery – something all of us on the bus could sympathize with – became laughter, and soon became more passionate, even filled with lust.  As with each passing glance and smile, an erotic tension built between us.  When I couldn’t catch her eyes, I’d stare at her ass (lovely, in a tight pair of jeans).  Her look and smile reciprocated, offering the same kind of lust, passion.

This went on for about 15-20 minutes.  It staved off the nausea caused by the heater, the constant stopping and starting of the bus, and the over-crowded conditions.  I was hoping her stop would be mine, but in the end I got off alone.