When the boring repetitiveness seeps into your life, what will your writing be like? If you write about your life, I mean. If you are a gamer, perhaps you would write great works of sci fi or wonderfully insightful religious tracts. But for the writer who writes about his experiences in the world. . . well, he'd better get up off the couch and go forth into the world.
That is what I thought all weekend long. I thought about it a lot. I sat at my computer and looked up things that might help me. There is Cuba, of course, and the dream of Thailand. But those are far away, and I remembered that I had passed up a trip to Sundance this week. I had planned to go. I am without explanation. There is something terribly wrong with me, I guess. But in looking things up on the computer, I got enamored of the pictures on the screen which lead me to look at photography things, and I began thinking of the pictures I wanted to make. I looked at cameras and gear and some of the weird shit I needed to process images the way I wanted to process them, and then I got avaricious and wanted to bid on a Hasselblad camera on eBay and a very expensive Kodak 305mm portrait lens (pretty rare) for the 8x10 camera I don't use but think I would if I had that lens. I pulled out some of the camera gear laying around the house and held in my hand a tiny miracle, the Olympus XA film camera, the smallest and one of the best film cameras ever made. Not having been used for years, the camera was hopelessly dead. I needed to go to the camera store and buy a battery. But first I had to look up some other things, props for the studio, vintage things, and of course I needed to look at wallpaper. The days wore on, but sometimes I managed to get out for a bit as the afternoon waned.
Not good for writing.
One day, I went to the gym. The afternoon was sunny, so after I worked out, I went to lie by the pool.
I don't mean to say that life is bad. It isn't. I am just not living the writing life. I could write about the lifeguard and how she came over to talk and what she said, about my wondering if she were doing what I hoped she was doing or simply checking to see if I was healthy enough to lie poolside, but that writing would come off wrong in some way, I feel. People never believe me when I tell the truth about some things. Sometimes truth is too unbelievable for people to comprehend. They resent such truths, and so they become private truths that can only be told to those who have seen it firsthand and can testify to the facts they have witnessed. Selah.
After the pool, and after eating a very, very late lunch, and after a long shower, I did make it out into the world one day. I visited two vintage clothing stores and found things I could use in the studio. At one store, the girls were young and model-ly and I had them hold up pieces to see the sizing. I wanted to ask them to come to the studio, of course, but that would not be appropriate. At least it didn't feel that way. They will be there, I thought. They will always be there. And then at the camera store, in the parking lot, I looked through the big windows of the building next door into the ballet studio. Young girls in black leotards and leggings were standing straight, hands above their heads, bending left, then right. I wondered how I could ever ask to photograph them, thought of how wonderful my pictures of them would be, thought of the way I'd shoot, the tonalities and the light. And then I thought of the mothers who had brought them. I could never do it, I thought, though I knew I should.
The camera store did not have the battery I needed, so I returned to the car and sat for a moment to check for messages and sip from the glass of scotch that I had poured at home to help settle my stomach after lunch. The sun was going down. The light on the dancers was warm and inviting.
That night, I got a text from one of the mother's of a young girl I used to shoot with. We shot together for many months and I got to know her parents, would go to their house for dinner and drinks. You might remember that I helped her sign with an agency. . . and that was the last I saw of her. That was a couple years ago now, but the mother was anxious to have me over to dinner with her and her husband this weekend. I wrote her back and said I would not be able to make it this weekend, that I was all booked up, but that she might tell her daughter to come shoot with me sometime and we could all go out for dinner afterwards. It was late at night and we were texting back and forth like kids, really. She said she needed to go to bed and goodnight, but being in my cups I offered that she was invited to come shoot, too, as I remembered her telling me things and showing me old photographs of herself as a model that obviated her desire. "Come, "I said. "You will have fun."
Then she wrote something that woke me: "You are such a hypnotist, aren't you?"
I thought about the incredible truths that I can't tell that are true nonetheless, and I was pretty certain she was right.
"You will be thinking of this when you go to bed," I wrote. "It is o.k. It will be fun. I'm an artist and we will make beautiful things. Lie down and think about it. You will want to and you will come."
"Of course I will," she said. "Sweet dreams."
In the end, though, it was I who lay in bed and thought of images and how they seduce. I saw the pictures I wanted to take, saw them as clearly as if they had already been made. It is a danger, though, to live in your head. It is time to go into the world and live.
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