The Looking Glass
The poignancy of a photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world. The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred. —Allen Ginsberg
Eight years of Polaroids, stacked and unsorted, cover my workspace. Tiny picture planes with obstinate white borders stare back. All born in an instant, they contain the uncontainable—otherworldly, ordinary moments glossed with an atmospheric punch. Drunk with reflections, they remain adrift, two by two, recording a passage of time when mystery’s voice continuously beckoned me to build “The Ark”of summer.
The world was my darkroom.
The Minimalist painter Agnes Martin once said, “When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind.”
Souvenirs of strange cognizance flood my senses. These black and white images are nuanced and holy—howling of a wilderness untouched by modernization.
Wanderlust arises within for Ark Lodge, our cabin of refuge, and its uncharted roads and woods. New thoughts of memory and the value of time pulsate with the hum of a steel fan wedged in a window frame. Woven together in an open ended narrative, the river Polaroids now describe more than documented time spent with my family in rural South Carolina. They weave within a visual language of their own complete with a plethora of symbols—the radiant particulars from a dream within a dream that pummeled me under and up, repeatedly.
Baby alligators,
Cypress knees,
Bubbles,
Twin reflections,
Wet hair, floating
Water moccasins,
Snake skins,
Dirt roads,
Sycamore bark,
Camouflaged bodies,
Mud-covered legs, feathers, skulls,
And ‘Maman’ —
spider leg roots reminiscent of
Louise Bourgeois’s famous sculpture.
I remember wading in the shadows, peering down into the glassy surface of water. Surrendered to presence, light through the aperture tingled nerves as movement hard-pressed the breath of thick ether into my bellowed camera like what Nabokov once described as a “prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life.”1
When I was 4 years old, I survived a near drowning in our neighborhood lake. On that July afternoon, I was seen trance walking along the water’s edge down a wooden dock until dropping into deep water. My mom ran after me; the lifeguard followed. When they arrived, my little body was submerged, my long hair was floating atop the black water. The lifeguard pulled me out just in time. No water made it into my lungs. The seizure had stopped my breath. Within seconds, I came to on the sandy beach surrounded by flashing ambulance lights and a crowd of people. Soon after, I was diagnosed with epilepsy.
A prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life.—Nabokov
My memory of that mid-summer day remains an unsolvable riddle2 that I carry with me everywhere, including my studio.
Why is a raven like a writing desk?
Nabokov’s words read like an epiphany; they articulate my transitory experiences with both epilepsy and creativity. My seizures and my artistic process sequence similarly: first an ecstatic illumination (aura or prefatory glow) proceeded by a plunge into blackness while holding my breath (subconscious action), next a falling up into confusion (disordered chaos), followed by an abrupt gasp taken in a new reality (finalized or redescribed work).
Looking back, the poignancy of these fleeting moments represent the long arc of my sacred relationship with uncertainty.
[full quote] One can distinguish several types of inspiration, which intergrade, as all things do in this fluid and interesting world of ours, while yielding gracefully to a semblance of classification. A prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life. This feeling of tickly well-being branches through him like the red and the blue in the picture of a skinned man under Circulation. As it spreads, it banishes all awareness of physical discomfort — youth’s toothache as well as the neuralgia of old age. The beauty of it is that, while completely intelligible (as if it were connected with a known gland or led to an expected climax), it has neither source nor object. It expands, glows, and subsides without revealing its secret. In the meantime, however, a window has opened, an auroral wind has blown, every exposed nerve has tingled. Presently all dissolves: the familiar worries are back and the eyebrow redescribes its arc of pain; but the artist knows he is ready. —Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
[Riddle], quoted from the Mad Hatter to Alice, Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland