Goodbye Grandma

Forensic Portraiture

February 16, 2005

There are more than a few instances of Photo Phazer images serving as the foundation for finished drawings. Some of them have a presence that I can't quantify. They may be crude and jagged, but they express something about those fleeting possibilities for beauty that we so often miss. 

* * * * *

What is it about an x-ray on the light box that is beautiful? Is it the subconscious reaction to associate anything glowing with the mystical, or is it the subtle colors that ribbon around the junctures of dark emulsion and transparency? Is it the memory of lingering pain behind the molars where the plastic-coated film cut into the gum as radiation hummed behind my ear? Maybe it's just the fact that it generates a memory at all— that this one moment has been elevated to importance among a sea of forgettable days and months.

And does finding the "why" really matter. I love the off kilter composition and macabre implications. It becomes a meditation of mortality; a dualistic record of the transient moment and the timelessness of carbon. It is a self portrait. It is artistic forensics.

Death Tones

February 2, 2005

Have you ever tried photocopying your body? It's fascinating to see how the technology, combined with the flattening of your form against a pane of glass, transforms your figure. You realize that your physicality is really just another type of meat, this pulpy mass that's eternally subject to gravity— it's only allowed autonomous form through the mystery of biological complexity and spiritual will.

A classmate in college made a book from images of his body. He methodically placed a piece of himself on his small color copier at home to gain a life-size self portrait. The images were startlingly repugnant in the way that the skin grew more and more pale as it came fully into contact with the pane of glass. Body hair was squished and angled unnaturally. The natural pinks and peaches of flesh had bled away into cold aquatic tones, and the form of the body seemed flattened by an oppressive black behind it. The whole project reeked of death.*

When I filmed myself brushing my teeth under florescent light I wasn't thinking about self portraiture, but I was thinking about the action of snarling; of jutting out the teeth and glaring forward, as you do when brushing (or, as I do when brushing). Strange how this act also forces a foaming at the mouth, and it made me wonder if a correlation could be drawn between hygiene and aggression. It may seem like a bit of a stretch, but much of the language we apply to cleaning ourselves and our environments employs the lexicon of warfare. Even the Almighty once chose to wash away the scourge of humanity. Perhaps it is implicit in new beginnings that they are born out of violent endings.

*For the definitive exploration of this sort of subject matter I refer you to the work of Jenny Saville who was picked up as one of Saatchi's Young British Artists in the early 1990's. She continues to produce a mesmerizing body of painted work that manages to both rob, and simultaneously endow, the human form with life.

The Sweep

January 14, 2005

I don't often get to be the passenger. When I am, even the most familiar routes seem infused with novelty. Tunnels and bridges hold a special fascination during night time drives. With tunnels I love the sudden entrapment of sound around the car and the rush of lights on a parallel, but opposing, trajectory with mine. Bridges at night afford a sweep up into darkness that I always find extremely comforting. 

Requiem

Eating Squirrel

On the hunt for a letterbox last weekend at the Audubon Center in Forest Park I heard a peculiar squealing ahead of me on the Woodpecker Trail. It came in spurts and had the high pitch of an animal in extreme fear or pain. I moved slowly down the trail toward the noise until I saw a spastic burst of writhing fur in the ferns just a few feet ahead. Each fit of movement would immediately be halted and then the horrible noise would ensue until another flurry of movement sent the furry bundle scurrying erratically through the underbrush. I briefly considered that it might be squirrels mating. After all, I could clearly make out the bushy brown of a squirrel's tail whipping around, but the sound seemed too deathly to be anything that might contribute to further life.

I stood very still for a minute or two trying to catch a clear view, and eventually the squirrel rolled onto the clear patch of trail a few feet ahead of me. It lay there panting, with a horrible glazed look in its eye, already clearly past the point of saving itself. From its back sprang a spry little short-tailed weasel. The weasel had been slowly killing its prey with a bite to the neck; even as it pinned the squirrel's franticly kicking legs with its own small limbs. The weasel was clearly startled by my presence and it stood stock still for a moment to consider what threat I might pose. After only a second, before the squirrel could do much more than roll his eye imploringly in my direction, the weasel seized upon it again and yanked it into the ferns. The death cries continued with less urgency, and I walked on.

* * * * *

I decided to tell the docent at the Audubon Visitor's Center about what I'd seen. After relating that I'd accidentally interrupted a weasel taking down a squirrel she stopped me abruptly and asked if the weasel had gotten away with the squirrel. I assured her it had. She breathed a small sigh of relief. 

"It would have been tragic for all that energy to have been wasted." she said.

Ten Months of Goodbye

Pneu passed away on Friday, December 14th, 2007. She had bravely contended with renal failure since the last days of January— putting up with daily injections of fluid to help flush her system, an inconstant appetite, queasiness and fatigue. At the time of her diagnosis we were told it was unlikely she’d see the week through. In classic Pneu style she amazed everyone and comforted us for another ten months. We were so profoundly grateful. . .

Pneu is a legend among cats. Born feral in Atlanta, a mother by one year of age in Oregon, and a skin cancer survivor after relinquishing her ears in California: I’ve never known a cat of such character. She was small but fierce, and as loving towards people as she was disdainful of other felines. Pneu boldly slept in the middle of roads, consistently woke me at 5am for years, and slept, without a note of self awareness, on a hot tin roof for a handful of summers. Even before her death she was the subject of a comic, numerous artworks, and countless stories, but she used one of her nine lives per year to build her mythology.

Now that she’s gone it is easy to dwell on the unfairness of her illness. For the most part she did not suffer and we did our best to make her comfortable as she slowly slipped away. Perhaps the hardest thing is to come home with her name on my lips, only to open the door to an empty house and no greeting. Then I remember that she’s gone and I wonder. I sit and wonder in the quiet. And the whole house is an ache.

Pinch Me

We arrive to a lightning storm over the Atlantic. Out at sea massive thunderheads are periodically back-lit by the quiver of lightning. They appear as puffy silhouettes with halos of orange and purple. Some of the strikes surge down toward the blackened sea and create a momentary reflection in the water. The air is dry and warm as we stand parallel with the storm on the third floor deck.

* * *

The current Cape Hatteras lighthouse in North Carolina was moved a couple thousand feet to avoid being swallowed by the sea. That was the fate of the first lighthouse over a century ago when the dunes retreated from her base. The current lighthouse is meticulously painted with a black and white candy stripe. The interior is whitewashed with the winding staircase a deep red. This brick column is almost more picturesque then the view it provides from its wrought iron balcony. Part of the lighthouse’s allure is the romance of its function- warning ships of danger in the darkened stormy seas, but part of it is also the incongruous form it adds to a landscape of scrubby trees and rolling dunes.

* * *

There’s a constant wind here. Out on the beach someone is flying a kite that looks like an orange shark. It dives about in the currents of the air: a furious flapping of streamers trailing behind its fins.

* * *

Blue crabs are red when cooked. You flip them over to find a “key” tab on their sternum. Lifting up and breaking off this tab allows you to pry off the upper shell and reveal the innards. At that point the experience can vary. Once you’ve peeled away the inedible lungs you might be confronted with bulbous globs of goo ranging in color from yellow to blue-green. This goo usually graces the tips of the sweet white meat that you are seeking. I’m told that the goo is considered a delicacy but I suspect this might be a diversionary tactic to keep my thoughts away from food poisoning. Crabs are scavengers after all- quick moving sea insects that feed off the bottom of the ocean. However, they’re also mighty tasty cooked in Old Bay seasoning. I crack off legs in hungry abandon, hardly noticing when a barb on a claw slices open my thumb as I try to free a morsel of meat from cracks in the exoskeleton.

* * *

The fourth floor of the house (named “Pinch Me”) has a tromp l’oeil ceiling painted to resemble a cloudy blue sky. From the vantage point the room offers you can watch the moon rise over the Atlantic or cars queue up for the ferry to Ocracoke island. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the room is a coffee table that’s built like one of the wooden boats Major John Wesley Powell used to brave the white waters of the Grand Canyon after the Civil War. There is a glass top over the boat and it sits atop a little stand. The stand is quite the liability, with the two back legs listing heavily toward the stern of the ship. Someone has moved the table to the periphery of the room with the hopes that it will remain there unnoticed. Sadly, I doubt it will survive much longer in a vacation rental that sees a new group of vacationers nearly every week.

* * *

Scattered throughout the island you’ll find tiny fenced plots tucked haphazardly around the water-ways and tourist developments. Foot-and-a-half tall white pickets randomly partition off the yards of vacation homes. Or they rise from the marshes below the wood plank boardwalks that surround a shopping center. These small fenced yards house the eroded tombstones of early families that settled the Outer Banks. There are many diminutive stones poking from the sand- children lost on this tiny finger of sand out at sea.

The South is hardly afraid of, or inconsiderate towards, the past. Most of the graves are well tended with fresh flowers, urns, and mementos. It’s odd in this day to consider a municipality without an established graveyard, but is seems that the randomness of the ocean itself has inspired an organic approach to interment. The deceased were laid to rest on the high spots of the island or on a family’s property. Time has shifted property lines as surely as its shifted the dunes, and now the dead are part of the backdrop in a community established to help people forget about life during a week or two of vacation.

* * *

We cross the Virginia line and a bug lands on my hand as I drive. I brush it away quickly, fearing all of the bugs here equally due to a general ignorance regarding their relative dangers. The bug clumsily bounces onto the dashboard and begins to asses its situation. A few quickly aborted attempts at flight confirm that my rough hand has damaged one of its wings. So ends that insect. Or, so I think. . . As the miles tick away on the odometer the tiny trespasser proceeds to very slowly remove its wings from its thorax and leave them on the dashboard. They look like the smallest of fish scales as they glint in the sun bouncing off the black dash. With the wings discarded the insect looks very much like an ant with a black and white striped abdomen. It explores the dash with great care before finally settling on a steep ascent toward the roof of the car. I follow its journey out of the corner of my eye, wondering what fate awaits it when the rental car employees vacuum away all trace of our presence from the car.

Claudia

She seemed to have a preoccupation with weeping that was incongruous with her demeanor. I didn’t want to presuppose anything overly melodramatic, but I did make note of it. Once she showed me a series of photographs that were to be bound into a limited run book. She displayed them in a matter-of-fact way that indicated that I wasn’t to critique, just observe. I observed that she lingered longer on an image of water droplets sliding down a car door. The tracks of the water moving down the side of the car mimicked the path of pigment that was being created on large sheets of paper outside of Claudia’s tiny studio. She had deliberately put these pigmented sheets of paper into the rain over a series of weeks. As the water fell from the sky it would run down the paper and pull some pigment with it. Over time these monolithic sheets of white paper were covered with the pigmented traces of falling rain. Visually they resembled the branching of streams and rivers. Metaphorically, they were about sorrow. That much seemed obvious. I should have known that I wasn’t seeing the whole picture because Claudia was never “obvious.” At that point, perhaps even Claudia wasn’t seeing her whole picture.

I was reading about rain recently. Apparently, precipitation within clouds is in a constant state of movement. These tiny particles of moisture are blown about on the currents of the wind. As they travel they bump into one another and join to form a larger water particle. Rain occurs when so many of these collisions have occurred that the particles have grown heavy enough to be pulled to Earth by gravity. Each drop of rain is a massive collection of individual particles that found one another. When I think about Claudia’s death I think about how her passing will bring together many individuals. Some will have known her in passing, such as myself, while others will have traveled with her for a much greater portion of her life. Regardless of the duration or intimacy of our knowing Claudia we are all joined together through her life.

Open. . . That was the name of the book she shared with me. It had only one page of text. It read:

“Open your eyes when you cry.”

“Look, it’s raining.”