I think the longest Hour of all

635

I think the longest Hour of all

Is when the Cars have come—

And we are waiting for the Coach—

It seems as though the Time

Indignant—that the Joy was come—

Did block the Gilded Hands—

And would not let the Seconds by—

But slowest instant—ends—

The Pendulum begins to count—

Like little Scholars—loud—

The steps grow thicker—in the Hall—

The Heart begins to crowd—

Then I—my timid service done—

Tho' service 'twas, of Love—

Take up my little Violin—

And further North—remove.

Emily Dickinson

 

Harvey Lee Oswald

Multiple events in my life last Sunday conspired to make it difficult for me to sit at my desk and write as I am writing now.

Sunday came first with the snipping of the tip of my middle finger (left hand) with my rose clippers. It has been difficult to write with only one hand. The bleeding came with an ancillary bad back that had me not being able to go up or down the stairs of our bedroom. A respiratory infection, brought about my highfalutin arthritis medicines and arthritic pain, in spite of my miracle drugs, all kept me out of commission during the day. Insomnia kept me awake at night.

 Relief seems to be almost here as I hunt and peck with the left hand (the finger, a smaller one now, is healing just fine).

 This last week I have been thinking about photographs and as many synonyms of the word as I could. I have enclosed here two scans of reference to those words as in my Roget’s International Thesaurus – Fourth Edition (1984). My thesaurus is much too old to include selfie or capture which are words of this century.

In that last century when I attempted to parade about town as a an artist who displayed photographs in galleries I absolutely despised art lingo and what I thought was the pretension of calling one’s photographs images.

Now with selfie and capture, plus, of course Instagram, image doesn’t sound so terrible. But I do prefer photograph and with tongue slightly in cheek I sometimes call myself a scanographer and my rose scan giclées (another new Word) scanographs.

Spanish, rich in words most of the time does not always do justice to the words of my English vocabulary. I thought there was no equivalent to snapshot or snap but I was wrong. In Spanish we call such a photograph an instantánea. You get the idea.

 When magazine photography provided me with a comfortable income in the 80s and 90s there was a constant see-saw between the slick, well exposed photographs and the more edgy ones of avant-garde fashion world. Fashion art directors liked to use a word (I loathe it) in this fashion, “I need some edgy photographs with lots of attitude.” I was never able to figure out what they meant by attitude. 

In the several assignments I obtained from the on again and off again Saturday Night I was asked to take pictures like the ones in Vanity Fair or pictures (with no styling or lights) as if I were a fly-on-the-wall.

Many times that snap look could be achieved with a Polaroid or with the blast of flash on the camera.

All that, is long gone and dead. The camera phone and all those devices that capture everything except perhaps our souls. 

 There is a new movement by a younger generation tired of digital perfection. That diffuse glow is now tarnished. With plastic cameras, plastic lenses, badly expose film and or re-manufactured Polaroid they are attempting to bring back surprise. That it can also bring failure is considered an asset.

I would like here to expose those reading this to a quick little personal story of the snapshot.

For me the first one has to be the picture of Lee Harvey Oswald. This is a snap. My guess his wife Marina may have taken it.

Second there is this picture of yours truly with his father and mother taken in the Argentine shrine, Nuestra Señora de Luján. I have no idea who took the picture but I am sure it was one of those box cameras with an uncertain viewer.

The third shot of two sisters who happen to be twins, I took in the 80s. I was told by the art director to make it look like a snapshot. I took it in the kitchen; I fully lit it and used a big camera. It does not look like a snapshot.  

Then there is this picture which I took last week. Is it a snapshot? 

Before you decide there are these two photographs which I took with my Fuji X-E1

Lisa, my subject was sitting on the left of the second photograph. On the right hand side there is a Mamiya RB-67 Pro-SD shoting through a Profoto ring flash that I adapted some years ago to be charged by a Norman 200B pack. Not seen in the picture is the fact that my camera lens is swung to one side so that when I took the picture the camera would see the edge of the flash. 

Most important, mounted behind the camera is my old Polaroid back. For the snap you see of Lisa I used the-not-quite-yet discontinued Fuji FP-100C Instant Colour Film.

The resulting picture, which I planned with a lot of thought looks like a snapshot. Is it?

The Spirit lasts—but in what mode—

Emily Dickinson 

The Spirit lasts—but in what mode—

Below, the Body speaks,

But as the Spirit furnishes—

Apart, it never talks—

The Music in the Violin

Does not emerge alone

But Arm in Arm with Touch, yet Touch

Alone—is not a Tune—

The Spirit lurks within the Flesh

Like Tides within the Sea

That make the Water live, estranged

What would the Either be?

Does that know—now—or does it cease—

That which to this is done,

Resuming at a mutual date

With every future one?

Instinct pursues the Adamant,

Exacting this Reply—

Adversity if it may be, or

Wild Prosperity,

The Rumor’s Gate was shut so tight

Before my Mind was sown,

Not even a Prognostic’s Push

Could make a Dent thereon—

I have been thinking that 14 years ago, seem not too long ago but time has passed in a way that I am reminded that 14 years (I am 71) from now statistically speaking I will be dead. So little time, but time enough to remember and contemplate.

Getting out of the tub is now a chore that I must accomplish with great care. I know that tons of old ladies fall in the bathroom, break their hip and go to the hospital. Most always never return home. Now I am not a little old lady but… and going up and down the stairs is another painful activity. I am sure that if I filmed a week’s goings up and down I would notice that incremental slowing down.

Food is not so important. The idea of food is, but like the smell of coffee and sex, perhaps, the actual consumption of it does not match up to expectations. It could be that I am losing, little by little my ability to taste. I over-pepper my food with no appreciable improvement.

But smell, the smell of roses, is a sense that was hyper good for me last year. I cannot understand that if smell and taste are intimately related, why the divorce now? 

By now many reading this will have left suspecting I will go on a rant about getting old. A pity for them because this is not a rant.

My eldest daughter, the one that lives and teaches in Lillooet told my Rosemary a few days ago, “Now that you are retired you can do all that.” My wife had complained that lately she had been sleeping in and doing little. To this I can add that sometimes (hey sometimes I feel I am cutting edge) I must stare at my iPhone 3G to find out what day of the week it is.

Retirement if one does not park incessantly in front of a TV can give one time to reflect, think, invent, plan, compare. It seems that my wife’s complaint of inaction can be easily converted into something quite transitive in a verb/grammatical sense. René Descartes would approve.

If food is not as pleasant as it used to be and a large, very hot and very strong mug of good tea now pales to my former idea of it, I must latch on to other events of my existence that might give me pleasure. Reading is one of them an since I stopped buying books some three years ago my VPL has provided me with lots of reading material as well as some of the best old or uncommercial movie DVDs.

They say that eating and its opposite are two almost supreme (superior to skiing they say) pleasures. Of the latter I can attest that I have no problem and I enjoy in the process reading Pauline Kael’s 5001 Nights at the Movies and The New York Times The Best DVDs You’ve Never Seen, Just Missed or Almost Forgotten Edited by Peter M. Nichols and with an Introduction by A.O. Scott.

At age 71, as I may have hinted above, the idea of sex like the smell of coffees is supreme.

I sort of know just about everything I need to know about the sex act and I am not in the least naïve about it. 

And so I can now get to the reason (justification?) for inserting the pictures you see here. I will be perfectly honest. I looked at them in a file in my computer and I asked myself how I could write about them so that I could put them up and perhaps begin to fill some of those blog vacancies of the last few weeks. The slicing off (rose clippers) of the tip of my middle finger rendered my ability to type in a most limited way. It is better so here we are.

The justification? When I looked at these photographs I could remember the smell of the tiles of my old studio on Robson and Granville. I do not want to reveal here the identity of the two women but they were and are my friends. I especially appreciate their sense of trust and their understanding of what I was trying to achieve. I remember their laughter and the smell of those Doc Martens. The stocking did rustle.

In this age of pornography, of unsubtle pornography, of banal pornography, of boring pornography, of unimaginative pornography, of lurid pornography, these images do more to erase years from the age of my imagination that I feel young again. I feel young enough to look forward to smelling my roses this May. Now where would I find women, in this age of facebook (not that it must be written in lower case) willing to trust this dirty (?) old man? 

Omphaloskepsis is contemplation of one's navel as an aid to meditation. The word comes from Greek omphalos (navel) + skepsis (act of looking, examination). Actual use of the practice as an aid to contemplation of basic principles of the cosmos and human nature is found in the practice of yoga of Hinduism and sometimes in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Some consider the navel to be "a powerful chakra of the body". However, phrases such as "contemplating one's navel" or "navel-gazing" are frequently used, usually in jocular fashion, to refer to self-absorbed pursuits.

Wikipedia

In English we generally call the navel with a far most unromantic name, belly button. In Spanish we call it ombligo. My on-line Dictionary of the Spanish Language (RAE) defines it as:

ombligo. (Del lat. umbilīcus).

1. m. Cicatriz redonda que queda en medio del vientre, después de romperse y secarse el cordón umbilical.

Juan Marsé, the renowned Catalonian writer who writes in Spanish has often lambasted what he calls the literature of the ombligo or metaliterature. He says this narcissistic writing leaves him cold.

For me el ombligo is one of the most beautiful parts of the human body. It occurred to me today that a blog that would glorify the female belly button (I leave it to others to document the male navel) would be a good thing. When I shoot portraits I am careful in showing hands and when my subjects are undraped as the ones I shot below, I try to show when possible el ombligo.