|
St. MALO, FACSIMILE: AN ESSAY IN 3 PARTS
1
Returned, the site surfaces in gradations. A camera angle roots in the frame
of a building, body parts puncture the image [these: the precise coordinates
where the x of the present greets the y of the past]. In the distance
the image thickens, and then up close. So the subject presses through
and beyond its frame; that liminal space becomes the subject, unbounded,
sutured to the world around it — and the world around it always an impossible
subject. In Nabokov's Pale Fire Kinbote chides, "We are absurdly
accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain
immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people..."
Consider this accretion of signs a sieve, the imagery as having sifted
into the cracks of the city wall. How, when a pink shell
attracts the eye, the camera — blinded by the zoom — swiveled
fretfully across the beach, could not frame it; but in skimming the sand
revealed how the eye might mimic the hand, might accumulate texture.
How sight might harvest space [what I mean by harvest is materialize], and materialize
via touch. See it pass through the image, surface? Consider y
this caption; x, 25 frames per second of the world beyond the word.
Killing time, a lens cap — tethered — swings to and fro, keeps time.
2
A person [I mean the subject she] cannot walk without meaning
when with a camera, cannot be, naturally, both the movement
of a body and the movement of an eye. She realizes this is learned,
and not instinct. Off-frame, the water thrums, attends its close-up,
is indistinguishable from sky. At dusk will come a sunset, a purpled
and orange-roughened screen that does not cede to seascape or
stone; but now, dissipated, the subject finds the horizon untraceable
and, like memory, that it cannot be recovered, but reappears.
For example, the hostess offers her the same window-
seat in a cafe she once occupied years ago and, quelling the impulse
to choose another, the subject settles over herself in the chair,
sees rain where there is none. The vision: a return. Across the wall,
the sky, bruising between buildings, distinguishes itself. Where past and
present gather, something waits; the seeing in them and the seeing of them.
And these, eventually, become the seeing toward. Consider the following
passage of Heidegger: "and once we, being so attracted, are drawing toward
what withdraws, our essential nature bears the stamp of
'drawing toward'... We are who we are by pointing in that direction."
3
This is from What is called thinking, but the subject found it quoted
elsewhere, thought: yet how can a person recover how she was first drawn toward
what withdraws once it — or the withdrawal of it — has been stilled, made
many frames? Her shot: an accumulation of those accretions we call
memory. The image of it rooted in the horizontal, or now; and the impulse to rotate
the camera 90˚, its desire for a vertical, confounded — the need for another method
of easing past into present. How high tide overtakes the piscine plein air,
approaches the wall; inside the city, abstracts of stained glass lend the cathedral
a watery light. It's the way the light takes to the stone, grainy, or the simple
disregard the cleaners, running their vacuums, have for the aura of it all.
[This purple, pew-rooted frame I refuse you.]
So place directs its re-collection, and the practice of language.
The syntactical positioning of sun vis-à-vis clouds; i.e., gray.
How a subject here might press again and again towards an image, still
each pass through the city produces a different dead-end, alley or elusive
texture slipping from the view like vertigo. For, you see, it is this elusion
that attracts: how by she I mean I and surface, an eye — at last appear
to inhabit this depth of si[gh]t-e which even now ascends the vertical.
Works Cited:
Heidegger, Martin. an epigraph found in Region of Unlikeness by Jorie Graham. Hopewell: Ecco Press, 1991.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. London: Penguin Books, 1991.
St. Malo/East Aurora, 2003
|
|
|