I sit outside in the fading light after a day at the factory with the feral cat, a male cardinal, a glass of scotch and a bad belly. The feral cat stays around after eating much longer than usual. She preens herself on the deck or in the mulch, ignoring my overtures of friendship but enjoying, I think, the safety I seem more and more to her to provide. I don't want a pet, but everything desires safety if not love. In youth, I distrusted safety, of course. It was a bourgeois concept. There is no safety, I would say, only the illusion and entrapment, remembering the old fable of the wolf and the dog. But I am safety for the feral cat and she looks all the better for it.
The whiskey is merely to counter the bad belly. It is not a terrible belly, but it is a bad belly that is actively uncertain. The whiskey settles it for which I am grateful. There is a utility in liquor for sure. I don't usually have my first whiskey this early, but tonight I do out of necessity. As it settles the stomach, it dulls the senses. The sun is sinking. It is dark.
I took all of these color slide images in one afternoon walking around a part of town fairly alien to me. I must have been on fire. I remember getting them back from the lab thinking that they were really something. I was becoming a star at the university then, but I was soon to leave and return to a normal, working existence. I would strive and struggle, and for a long time, photography was left behind. These were in many ways the end of the beginning of what might have been a photographic dream. But that story is familiar beyond fascination.
ReplyDeleteI "feel" like I stayed at that motel. Every Spring vacation (summers were at the Jersey shore) my parents took us somewhere - we drove. Sometimes as far as Arizona - where my father's brother and his family lived - sometimes Washington D.C. - sometimes Hershey Park or Monticello - sometimes Florida.
It isn't really nostalgia that I feel when I look at these photos. It is something else. Better than that. I'm trying to think of the word - reckoning - perhaps? of time and place.
The Poet - well. He was a poet but never a recognized one. I mean he actually once turned down being published in "Poetry" because they wanted him to sign a release form that read - to him - like the editors could change his poems - and he refused to give up that control of his work. Who knows what would have happened if he stayed the "course" and done what they wanted him to do.
I did motivate (and once self-published a book for him) and then nudged him to organize his poems into "Future books" - which never happened (yet). He didn't have much money - none really - cause he was a Poet first and foremost. I always asked him - to leave me his Work and I'd take care of it.
Where am I going with this? I don't know. i'll leave you with Mr. Thomas.
In My Craft or Sullen Art
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.
ReplyDeleteI'm roaming. Like I said. :)