An eclectic reflection about life in the present. Photography. Brief writings.
Thursday, October 2, 2014
Heart on Fire
Originally Posted Sunday, June 22, 2014
Yesterdaywasa long day as days can be when something you want badly is just out of reach. But it is no good to count on what you don't have and better to think about what you do. Three packages arrived yesterday, thrilling and unexpected things. The first was dropped through the mail slot by my friend. "girls." I began reading it last night. It gave me a sort of neuralgia, I think, for not having done it first. I am only a bit in, but the first pages say things I thought only I said aloud, things that everyone must think but few articulate. Kelman has.
The second was a package from a friend of this site. I hadn't any idea that it was coming. I opened a box full of vintage slips and bras, things that I must either wear or use in the studio, and since it is well-known that I am not a cross-dresser, I assume I will need to continue to shoot the Lonesomeville series. Wait--it is not well-known, perhaps. I do have a feminine side and have been known to wear only a sarong in the summer and to photograph myself in full mirrors and email the images to girls my heart longs to impress. But that was before the belly when I still had a couple rows of abs, anyway. Now. . . all photos are an accusation. The box had a few other items, too. "For Boys Only" was one. I looked inside right away, but there weren't any pictures, neither as part of the book nor just snapshot additions of a girl's life unbound. There was, however, a vintage nude print in the box that I will post forthcoming. Treasures unexpected. What a wonderful first day of summer. But there was more. Another package came as well. I had flippantly asked for something, but everything I ask for from this person, I am given. And more. And so I got three sheets full of modeling photos from when she was fifteen. Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ. There was more. . . always more. My head is spinning. Words. I am not the only one who uses them. I burn, you know. It is my heart. I burn elsewhere, too, but never anything close to the burning in my heart. Day and night. An entire lifetime of it. It was a hell of a first summer's day.
"The only thing that ever stood between me and success was me."
Woody Allen
Arrested Development
"You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development."
- Chapter 6, The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
Tiziano Terzani
"The truth is, at fifty-five one has a strong urge to give one's life a touch of poetry, to take a fresh look at the world, reread the classics, rediscover that the sun rises, that there is a moon in the sky and that there is more to time than the clock's tick can tell us."
Wild At Heart
"This whole world's wild at heart and weird on top"
Barry Gifford, Wild at Heart
Secret About A Secret
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
Diane Arbus
I am, I am
Blind moil in the earth's nap cast up in an eyeblink between becoming and done. I am, I am. An artifact of prior races.
Cormac McCarthy
Suttree
Transformation
The photograph isn't what was photographed, it's something else. It's about transformation. . . . There is a transformation, you see, when you just put four edges around it. That changes it. A new world is created.
Gary Winnogrand
LIfe Is Short
Life is short, But by God's Grace, The Night is Long
Joe Henry
Safe Passage
Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?
Peter Matthiessen
A Generation of Swine
"What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death?. . . [T]here is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation."
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
Orson Welles
"If you try to probe, I'll lie to you. Seventy-five percent of what I say in interviews is false. I'm like a hen protecting her eggs. I cannot talk. I must protect my work. Introspection is bad for me. I'm a medium, not an orator. Like certain oriental and Christian mystics, I think the 'self' is a kind of enemy. My work is what enables me to come out of myself. I like what I do, not what I am. . . . Do you know the best service anyone could render in art? Destroy all biographies. Only art can explain the life of a man--and not the contrary."
Orson Welles, 1962
Late Work
“ ‘Late work.’ It’s just another way of saying feeble work. I hate it. Monet’s messy last waterlilies, for instance — though I suppose his eyesight was shot. ‘The Tempest’ only has about 12 good lines in it. Think about it. ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood.’ Hardly ‘Great Expectations,’ is it? Or Matisse’s paper cutouts, like something from the craft room at St. B’s. Donne’s sermons. Picasso’s ceramics. Give me strength.”
"Engleby" Sebastian Faulks.
The Sun Also Rises
It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing."
Ernest Hemingway
What's Remembered
"The only things that are important in life are the things you remember."
Jean Renoir
Winesburg, Ohio
"One shudders at the thought of the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant. . . one love life so intensely that tears come into the eyes."
Sherwood Anderson
Perception
“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
Henri Bergson
Joyce's Lament
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
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