Noctilucent

Five more minutes

Internet animism

On taking photographs, on eating rice

    

       When I took that photograph of the look you gave me on one such afternoon, it was not because I loved you, but because I wanted to keep you— to preserve forever that curiously soft gaze which questioned the intrusion of my camera.  I can't remember if I saw you through the viewfinder, or if I tried to make the photograph less threatening by holding the camera some negligible distance away from my face.  Either way, the image came into existence, falling out of the continuity of the world like a playing card from the middle of its sequenced deck. Days passed, and though the image appeared on variously glowing screens, it did not fade.  But our conversations began to yellow around the edges, and what would be turned into what had been.

My mind began to slow, until time found me wondering why I had ever started.

When I began to photograph, I created space—between bodies, between myself and the image, the image and itself.  Slicing through this tenuous fabric made rifts that endlessly expanded, so that I could then slice through the slices, and so on.  The blades of the aperture sung through threads of time, cleaving them in two, in four, in exponential shards of themselves.  I found, in my grasping for these pieces, that they could not be obtained, and my fevered reaching only made them drift further away.  So I pursued them, against all logic, propelled by an insatiable desire to absorb them, to inhale them into my being and keep them there.  But just as lungs blacken with polluted air, the self can grow heavy, stagnating beneath the weight of future pasts. 

And then I don't know why I sent you that photograph.  You had cooked me so many meals in between twilight and dawn, feeding precarious hopes, those mistaken rumblings of hunger that made me believe you would stay.  And maybe you will, if only among the faint luminescence of screens, in the spaces between pixels; in sentences with apostrophes in places they don't belong.

       These beginnings were soon followed by an equally exasperated middle, a half-hearted attempt at pulling from life several rectangles, and once or twice a circle.  These dimensionless forms drifted through the air, through the fluid substrates of thought and dreams.  Disregarding gravitational pull, they faded and eventually began to disappear; although by then I had understood the impossibility of keeping them.  Endless numbers and shades and squares drained my eyes, and for a time I did not sleep at night.  Wandering along quadrilateral paths, I contemplated these objects.  Their shuddering flatness would become dust, or images, or the fleeting sense of urgency carried in the wind on the first bright days of the end of winter.

       Now I sit before you.  I don't want to watch you.  I don't want to watch you watch me, taking in the lines of face and eyebrow and night.  Your music and your bending of time continue to elude me.  Why should I dismantle the moments you've created, cutting through their uroboric writhing until hot blood escapes, staining the ground upon which they struggle?  It’s an impulse it seems I cannot avoid.

       It's that taste you get inside your mouth, the dryness of anxiety and cigarettes and  “don't get too attached”.  That closing of the throat that doesn't allow you to eat, that desire to lay on the floor so at least you won't be able to fall any lower.

       But sometimes the floor also dissolves, and bodies sink, permeable, into an unknown apartment two floors down.  And sometimes it doesn't matter if you're walking on the ground or on the sky because either way you're in between the buildings.  So why would you serenade me, make me omlettes of butter and sweet onions, drink whiskey from the neck of a bottle—I don't want to watch you, I don't want to watch you watch me, I would rather lay with you in silence, on the breathing floor, perhaps yawning, and not moving for days and months and years, as wind blows a cold springtime to pieces outside.

             Your eyes will continue gazing, vastly night-colored, one thousand and one velvet shades of black.  Now you'll stare back at yourself, at mirrors within mirrors within your eyes within that image, which will remain pinned to my mind like a disintegrating specimen, struggling against my will.   Now that it's too late to remove the pin from your middle, I watch your defensive thrashing, but you're no longer there, I've looked away, suddenly you're where all the other butterflies go in winter.  Standing still, I am weighed down by opaque exhaustion and the empty pin in my hand.

       Forced to find other ways, I pass streets and skylines on my own feet, sometimes walking next to my shoes.

       Now I must photograph without a camera, without film, without a lens except for the imperfect vitreous bodies of my I's.  Now when I photograph, there will be no pictures. The light on the walls of buildings, on one city block, can be an entire universe.  There are enough things to see, to think about, to smell—lifetimes could be lived in the expansion of a second, or a square inch of filthy pavement.  This cannot be called everything, or nothing, or anything at all.  It cannot be imagined; it cannot be imaged.

       But if each photograph taken and each word are one moment seized from life or death, or neither, how shall I press the button, hold my pen in hand, hold my pen in hand. Perhaps in the quiet consumption of rice, and sometimes bread, and sometimes wine, I will convey the nothingness between breaths, the vast worlds beyond the words "thousands of years".  In these moments, we would see more than glass lenses, in all their static reincarnations. Either we shall succumb to this gaze, or look away— perhaps at the fading marks the sun leaves on the floor as it traverses the afternoon.

            Light must flicker with indecision, if nothing else.

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Is this who you were looking for?

  Is this evidence enough?
  Is this evidence?  For what?

Let us go then, you and I...