parmi-les-hommes

[parmi-les-hommes]

2019.5.4

i’ve been up since 5am

my room was filled with the soft light of down

i felt exhausted

from last night’ excessive drinking perhaps?

why was i drinking?

i think i know why

i’ve been talking to myself again recently

the thoughts about love

i like thinking out loud

do i?

i miss you, and happy birthday

[parmi-les-hommes]

a love letter from me

Call me a thief! For I am cursed.

The camera obscura is my nocturnal mask, calibrated to capture, like a predator in its most heightened sense, that passes through my disinterested gaze.

The camera lucida is my reality. I see bright sunlight reflected upon both our skins, our pores open like paper: a resemblance that is more enigmatic than a touch: of the paintbrush; of the tip of a fountain pen; of your|my index finger.

The touch is the answer that I’m missing!

I’m wrestling with the morality of photography.

Oscar Wilde wrote ‘the highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.’

Let me indulge, indulge, indulge in my indecisiveness at precisely that decisive moment.

No need to pose for me: I see what you do not see: I see what the mechanical eye sees: the mechanical eye does not see: I see what I do not see: I see what the light and shadow gave you at the moment of seeing, however belated.

click: click: click: click:

REPEAT: REPEAT: REPEAT: REPEAT:

All of my pictures are useless to me:

They do not tell. They do not tell. Instead I freeze. The consciousness projected through my iris meets the light reflected through the picture meets. I chase a meaning, at a speed measured by Kairos. And I shiver. Your appearance does not tell. It does not tell. It does, yet the iteration intractable. It is your tease with light and shadow. It does not belong to me.

All of my pictures are useless to me! But let me indulge.

[parmi-les-hommes]

This bitter earth Well, what a fruit it bears What good is love Mmh, that no one shares? And if my life is like the dust Ooh, that hides the glow of a rose What good am I? Heaven only knows Oh, this bitter earth Yes, can it be so cold? Today you're young Too soon you're old But while a voice Within me cries I'm sure someone May answer my call And this bitter earth, ooh May not, oh be so bitter after all

Clyde Lovern Otis, “This Bitter Earth,” rendered by Dinah Washington

[parmi-les-hommes]

Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today -- that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past. The splendid word "incarnadine," for example -- who can use that without remembering "multitudinous seas"?

Virginia Woolf, “Words Fail Me”