Circa 1990

When one has too much to think (lyrics from Captain Beefheart’s Ashtray Hearts, and that’s me, I think about all sort of things.

Captain Beefheart & Ashtray Hearts

I have written many times how when I was 8 or 9 my mother took me to the Filipino Embassy in Buenos Aires which was in the same building as the American one. Also there was the Lincoln Library, an arm of the United States Information Service (many were spies). She left me in the library and I opened a magazine that was called American Heritage. In it I saw photographs taken by a man named Timothy O. Sullivan of dead Confederate soldiers. These were some of the first ever photographs I ever saw and particularly of dead people. I went into what I consider my first example of human association of contrasting the dead soldiers that looked very much like the live one walking outside on Calle Florida. I thought, “At one time these soldiers were alive.”

As so many people I have photographed in my life have died, I am constantly thinking that. Further thought tonight took me to thinking about grammatical gender in language. Examples:

Machines in Spanish are la máquina. So sometimes cars are seen as feminine and thus as women. A house is la casa, and sex (surprisingly) is el sexo.

March 29, 2025

That association brought me to the idea that many years ago I photographed a lovely woman with a clematis on her chest for a show in Calgary that was called Mother Earth. So in English to make earth feminine we attach mother to it. And we have Father Time. But death and life - la muerte - la vida.

There are two exceptions (as far as I know). We have Latinas and Filipinas but we must write a German woman.