14 april 2010





Chicago, Illinois. Summer, 2004.



The above photograph was taken in the last days of film photography. It looks so alive! It's as though you can hear that water.


Brumble was visiting me in Chicago and I snapped this shot on her 35mm manual SLR from the passenger seat. I have no recollection of

what we did that day, where we were going and where we were coming from. All I have now is this photograph.


Times are gone, never to return. It's so strange, photography. I can feel that balmy breeze coming through the window. There is music

playing, but I can't quite identify it. That sunset hurts my eyes a little bit through the viewfinder. And I'll feel those things again

someday. But not precisely this moment, in the car with Brumble, in 2004.



Is time a loaf? Is each moment a slice of that loaf, and does it exist somewhere in the past - if only we can get to it?



When Brumble sent me this photograph in the mail, she wrote on the back, "Note: You know what else is fluid..." This must have been a

reference to an inside joke that I've since forgotten, but now I know the real answer that we did not consider back then: time!


--


I've been rereading Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, which was a favorite of mine in high school.

Here is an excerpt:


The grass whispered under his body. He put his arm down, feeling the sheath of fuzz on it, and, far away, below, his toes

creaking in his shoes. The wind sighed over his shelled ears. The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like

images sparked in a crystal sphere. Flowers were sun and fiery spots of sky strewn through the woodland. Birds flickered like skipped

stones across the vast inverted pond of heaven. His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire. Insects shocked the

air with electric clearness. Ten thousand individual hairs grew a millionth of an inch on his head. He heard the twin hearts beating in

each ear, the third beating in his throat, the two hearts throbbing in his wrists, the real heart pounding in his chest. The million

pores on his body opened.


I'm really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don't remember!



--


Sometimes, it's better not to know you are alive. Once, the sound of my own heartbeat woke me up from my sleep. I was terrified. I heard my heart beating in the pillow.

It was as though the bed and the pillow had become a stethoscope or some other acoustic mechanism.





archive

transit