salt and light

H.C.Pipkin, Burning Bush 1947

You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.
-- Matthew 5:13

Is it right to raise one’s voice when other’s are being silenced? Yes…Another way of formulating the question is, Is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and thereby gain a slower death…And again the thought we already know: Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions is good and which is bad is that in a given situation, we can make only one decision…
--Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being


I viewed my grandfather from a remote corner of my soul. I don’t know at what point I recognized myself in him, but he never, as far as I know, recognized himself in me. I was the dark, saturnine child in a family of golden children, and perhaps my brother and sister served up the hope of our being a golden family. But I was evidence of the strange currents that coursed through our veins, always watching, missing nothing, remembering everything.

One of the facts about my grandfather that had always intrigued me was that at one point in his life he almost became a man of God, a preacher in the Baptist Church. This strikes me for several reasons, not least among which was that he never once, in my lifetime, attended church. My grandmother said that as a young man he preached powerfully on the Sermon on the Mount. But there was another young man within the church who also had his sights set on becoming The Man of God in the Baptist church, and the rivalry between them grew so bitter that my grandfather walked away one day and never again set foot in that edifice where he had experienced those deep yearnings.

Where did that all go? How can a man be consumed with passion for what is holy and then turn his back on that forever over an earthly quarrel? I know when I turned my back and why. It is a “humorous” family story that my mother used to tell to amuse her friends. By the time I was ten, we had become Episcopalians. I had decided that I wanted to give my life to the church, to the sick and the suffering and the poor. For Christmas, the only thing in the world I wanted was a communion set so I could begin administering to my flock as soon as possible. My mother said nothing, but she arranged an appointment with our priest. I don’t remember much of what was said in that meeting, but I remember the bitter heartbreak. It had been made clear to me during that meeting that God neither wanted nor needed me. I am still trying to forgive Him for it. But I patiently hold that fervent sense of Presence, of almost touching, and apprehend it all around, in cottonwood seed drifting down, in a dragonfly alighting on the water, in the reflections of light in the leaves of trees. I do this as if the world depends on it.

Salt prints were the earliest positive prints and were invented by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1840, as a direct development from his earlier photogenic drawing process. A salt print was made by soaking a sheet of paper in salt solution and then coating one side with silver nitrate. This produced light sensitive silver chloride in the paper. After drying, the paper was put directly beneath a negative, under a sheet of glass, and exposed to sunlight for up to two hours. Salt prints were made until about 1860 having been gradually replaced by the albumen print which gave a clearer image although the process was sometimes revised later.

dialogue

for y.o.



The village of Kibabwa is located about 7 km from town of Iringa. The land is elevated , looking down over the village. It takes 10 minutes to walk to the Ruaha school from the site of the school land. In the images the ladies are standing on the flattest area where it is suitable to build. You can see the big rocks of granite and the native trees. The land is 100 metres lengthways along the site. It slopes upward at about 25 degrees to the big rock, then it rises steeply at a 45 degrees angle. We get to own the little mountain, too. The steeply sloping land is ours as well. The owners just measured it out along the front, lengthways. It has been recorded in the local lands administrative offices in our name.

Sleeping beneath the snow-banked windows of the Ft. Green apartment, the girl with the magical shoes dreams of the lakehouse, where footprints crazed across the linoleum to the barely audible memory of Glenn Miller on the phonograph. The lake water laps somewhere far down on the rocks along the shore. The boat rocks in the water forever. Maybe each night she dreams the world into being.

"Your witness is but a rushing moment in my long lifetime. I've seen so much already, and will see so much more." Catching even a fragment of this is what a true story is made of. Believing (it doesn't require belief) that most of what is there is behind the visible.

Here time ceased, and it was only the rhythms of the earth by which she measured the turning of days—the cooing of the mourning dove, the insect songs of the midday heat, the rise of the wind in the evening and eventual hesitant glittering of eastern stars. So immersed was she in the mysteries of the walls, that she wasn't sure where the perimeter of her flesh ended and the house began, whether they breathed together or separately, if she was it's mistress or merely an organ within it. She felt that it permeated her being all the way to the cellular level--that she dissolved into its memories, or if she had ever even existed outside this house at all. Within it she was a vaporish transience. A cold feeling began to settle in her bones, and sometimes she would consider the lives of others outside this house, those who seemed to progress in search of presumably attainable rewards, where she, on the other hand, had all her life been hanging onto threads that she dared not let go of, afraid if she did she would just disappear with the ghosts, haunting her own flesh and the rooms of her mind, which always were, and forever would be, empty.

Why, or how, do two rather different individuals (you and me) arrive at such a similar obsession. For years now, I've held the notion that place is saturated with its own memory. I've held it like a personal secret. That the molecules retain a record, however faint, of what they have witnessed; that if we are sensitive, we can pick up the past's belated glow.

It is such fragile skin she lives in, so permeable, so penetrable--the past seeps into her flesh, percolating like groundwater. Somewhere in the shadows she is vaguely aware of a man, carved away from her by a separate truth, a separate continent, who walks the streets, aching to see with his whole body.

a note on narrative

It occurs to me that she is writing me. I am narrating her, after all, not the other way around, but it occurs to me, as I said, that as I write her it might just be me that changes, just a bit, with every turn. Kundera said, The novel form is almost boundless freedom. Throughout its history, the novel hasn’t taken much advantage of that. It has missed out on that freedom. It has left unexplored many formal possibilities. But still this presupposes a freedom of the author (certainly not the freedom of the character) and supposes a form whereby there is fluid interchange between these norms.

I mentioned that I wrote and rewrote Redemption Shoes,

In the spring semester of my program at NYU, and kept re-writing all the way back to Austin and for many years after I had abandoned writing for philosophy. It never unfolded any further than the seven corners of Ft.Green--the blanket of snow that covered the streets below which had never before, as far as I know, been quiet--the girl with the magical shoes which she had procured on one of her many adventures through Greenwich Village, repeated herself perpetually, dreaming and being dreamed by the reclusive photographer, a century before, in Prague. The sky was always grey. She might notice, not a flock of birds, but a dim shadow of a flock of birds, just at the moment, repeated forever, that his shutter snapped in another fold of time’s cloth.

And then came the Great Misunderstanding. I wrote, maybe they changed just so slightly with each rendering? Perhaps if I had continued tirelessly to re-write them, with the passage of many, many years, they might have finally found their way to one another, resolved the minutiae of space-time mathematics through persistence, and finally resolved the cruel temporal dilemma that plagued them both.

What I have not realized (or have I?) is that all along she has been rewriting me. And what of the grandfather, of Sudek? Are we all then marching toward redemption? There is so much to redeem, so much to be redeemed. For now, it is my task to accept the wilderness that is her heart, that remarkable well of wonder and sensuality that she has shown me through her footsteps ringing out upon the air with hope and longing (can they ever be separate?) She was just a girl who one day stepped out upon stone, and then into air, flung into brightness, into light.

almost a girl

I am not sure what happened to the other half of this girl, or who she is. That she lives in my collection among the objects of my chaotic passion and desire requires significance of her self, of her dis-membered anonymity. In a way her absence touches me more profoundly than if she were whole, the mystery that surrounds her ultimate, unassailable unknowability. Perhaps she contested something about this betrayal of her, as almost a girl, while fiercely clutching what remained as the requisite feature of survival in the world, what she privileged as necessary in this life--not the head or the heart, but legs, to run away.

And it was almost a girl, and she came out of
that single blessedness of song and lyre,
and shone clear through her springtime-veil
and made herself a bed inside my hearing.

And slept within me. And her sleep was all:
the trees, each that I admired, those
perceptible distances, the meadows I felt,
and every wonder that concerned my self.

She slept the world. Singing god, how have you
so perfected her that she made no demand
to first be awake? See, she emerged and slept.

Where is her death? O, will you still discover
this theme, before your song consumes itself? –
Where is she falling to, from me?...a girl, almost...
--Rilke, from Sonnets to Orpheus

mercy street

House on Hughes Street, 1939.

In the winter of ’39 there was a terrible ice storm on Hughes Street. The erratic frames of the film snap and leap as I watch my grandmother, starkly beautiful at eighteen, leap across the snow to hurl a snowball at my grandfather. All of us lurked somewhere in the ether of that icy air--she was already dreaming us into being as she slept beneath the quilts as the snow fell heavily throughout the moonless night.

When they woke, the trees were encased in ice like vases of crystal. It was so quiet. They wandered the glittering, frozen streets beneath the smooth arcs of glassy branches of the giant American Elms. I watch, holding my breath, the rarefied beauty of a wintry dream. The film leaps and whirs. How much time had elapsed, maybe an afternoon, a day? The spell is broken. The trees stand dark and amputated against the dimming light. Piles of branches lie on the street, people wander among the ruins, the same ones who hours before had been leaping across snow mounds, awed into silence.

Fifty years later they were resplendent again, but my grandfather was already gone. He had nursed the trees back like infirm children. I remember him applying salves to their wounds, administering to their mute needs, at rare times carefully removing the cast off shell of one of the cicadas that sang us through the lazy summer heat. Tonight I walked beneath the mangled boughs of another American Elm neglected by its owners. It struck a melancholy chord that remains. I want to think that we could save anything through love, through the persistent application of mercy, all of us patiently tending the garden that is the world we inhabit.

...and the street is unfindable for an
entire lifetime. --Anne Sexton, 45 Mercy Street

ekphrasis

Miss Boo, 1945

It is dangerous at thirty-five to cross over into the mythical. Not that you, yourself, are, but your thoughts, from the moment you woke at three in the morning with a migraine and discovered that you could see through your closed eyelids. And now you walk as if in a dream, with fragments of elegies slipping like silvery fish in and around you. As you walk beneath the cottonwoods, a burst of dove erupts in waves from within the leaves and you know that birds are the thoughts of trees. You wonder if there are angels and how will you ever shake this feeling of passing between the sheets of the living and the dead, and how suddenly it feels as though you are lugging sloshing buckets of the emotions of the world, and how you would like to unload this burden, dump it into a river or into a field of wheat, or hurl it up into the sky to rain down on every one so that the world could taste your tears. --from S. Halley, Gravity, 2000.

I have lost the story. Some stories are too painful to tell, and though I had written this one, when it emerged it frightened me. It had begun simple enough, a scene in a family kitchen where three generations of women are arguing over the fate of a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket that contained a history of photographs. I had an artistic concept for this story (something about which we should always be suspicious) of weaving throughout the text a history of the geology of the canyon into which the generations of my family had descended over the years, its red sandstone and whispering cottonwoods, the arrestingly cold water of the Little Red River.

Also interwoven in the story was a peculiarity that had intrigued me (perhaps repulsed me as well), a punctum as Barthes would say, of a series of photographs taken of my mother by my great grandfather. There was nothing but innocence and amusement throughout my childhood looking at these photos. But they emerged here in this story as something dark and threatening, evidence of a possibility that I had not considered but that erupted fully formed on the last page of this story I had entitled, “Lover of Stone.”

In the final scene of the story we see the youngest of the three generations, final victor over the bucket of photos, traveling down into the canyon where one by one she sets each of the images adrift on the water of the Little Red, watching the past float away in baptismal solemnity, unburdening herself of the knowledge she has inherited with the photos.

The photograph is literally the emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. (Barthes, Camera Lucida)

evidence

A record of a dream, evidence of something that happened (possibly) around my great Aunt, the playwright and composer mentioned in the last page of lens. Sometimes what we exhume in our lives and the lives of those we love is less a fragment of beauty than of atrocity.