'If you'll take my advice you'll get a needle and cotton and start right in to mend the mosquito net,' she said, 'or you'll not be able to get a wink of sleep tonight.'
The Trembling of a Leaf - W. Sommerset Maugham

I wrote this blog about the mosquito net related to a quote by Somerset Maugham above. And this one with a story by Julio Cortázar that has no translation.

I would like to go to those two blogs with new photographs. Not exactly the new ones as I have modified the negatives of my original session with a poet by scanning two negatives at a time.

I was inspired by the death of Jerry Uelsmann in the beginning of April who did lovely and startling work before Photoshop came into the picture. I wrote about that here. And then I wrote a blog with additional scanner negative sandwiches in the link below..

The Excitement of the Smell of Metal

The Hour Glass

With thousands of negatives and slides I have a new project going here which keeps me off the streets and busy from thinking too much of the absent presence of my Rosemary. 

Bronwen - December 2013

It was around 1958, while at St. Edward’s High School, a Roman Catholic boarding school in Austin, Texas that Brother Emmett, who was in charge of the PX, told me that I had a package. The package was from Olden Camera in New York. Inside the shiny box there was a brand new Pentacon-F single lens reflex. This was my first real camera. I was excited. I will never forget the smell of the metal of the camera and the determined shutter click. Since today April 22, 2022, I can look at my Pentacon-F here in my office and to assert that it is in perfect working order. I can re-live that excitement.

Something like that feeling of excitement has hit me as in this last week that I have been at making my scanner negative sandwiches. I wrote about the process here.

I am going through my extensive files and I even (to my delight) thought of two negatives of my Rosemary. When I scanned the pair the result was perfect the first time. It is here.

Because most of my peers have died, disappeared or switched from their film and digital cameras to their phones, I feel a tad isolated. But my excitement is not diminished.

The pictures here are of my longtime friend and subject Bronwen Marsden. She has always been a delight to photograph. I believe I could have a big stomach ache if I were to sandwich all the pictures I have of her. Who knows I just might do that.

Alex and Abuelita - 1951 - Buenos Aires

 In recent years I have been told that just because I am an old man it does not mean that anybody has to respect me.

I do not understand that. I was raised not only by my mother but also by my grandmother who by 1969 had advanced Alzheimer’s. She got to meet my Rosemary in Veracruz.

All my life my abuelita gave me advice that came from a Don Quixote via Sancho Pancho and also with a smattering of Spanish  from Spain or from Spanish from Argentina.

My favourite was, “El diablo más sabe por viejo que por diablo,” which translates to, “The devil knows more not because he is the devil but because he is an old man.” Close to that was, “Cuando el diablo no tiene que hacer con el rabo espanta moscas.” That delightufully  translates to, “When the devil is bored he swats flies with his tale.”

My grandmother took me to the movies and when my mother was about to whip me with her Chinese slippers she would intervene and point out that I was an artist just like she was and that she should spare me the punishment.

Now in this century seeing how I adored, admired and respected my grandmother I cannot understand the treatment I sometimes get.

In order to stay centered, particularly this melancholic year in my life, I return to two writers. One of them is Harold Bloom and I have many of his books. But there is one in particular called How to Read and Why. I have written about it many times but I will put the important quote below:

There is no single way to read well, though there is a prime reason why we should read. Information is endlessly available to us; where shall freedom be found? If you are fortunate, you encounter a particular teacher who can help, yet finally you are alone, going on without further mediation. Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who might become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial life.

Perhaps it is because of Covid that I have been experiencing Bloom’s

but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial life.

Many of my friends are dead and many others have drifted off. I sometimes think I may have phone bad breath.

The other writer is Joan Didion. I do not have any of her books but after she died in late December I noticed a quote of hers:

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

What is most interesting is that American photographer Gary Winogrand wrote something that is close to Didion.

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

And so with Joan Didion, Harold Bloom,Gary Winogrand  and with some help from my Abuelita I believe my compass is on a true course.

I find that writing my daily blog and somehow, in some way connecting almost every one to the memory of my Rosemary,  I feel calmed and a tad less melancholic. Winogrand’s statement about taking photographs to see what one sees, so close to Didion, has enthused me to explore new ways of exploring my photography and going in directions that are all new. I believe that in spite of being an almost 80-year-old man it is cutting edge.

It was Erich Fromm who wrote that in order to love one had to love oneself. Could it be that to find respect one must first respect oneself?

Bruce Conner (in tub), Toni Basil, Teri Garr and Ann Marshall, 1965 - Photo by Dennis Hopper who was documenting the Los Angeles Art Scene in the mid-60's

 One of the wonders of this strange 21^st century is that communication is altogether different and surprising from that conventional last one.

Sometime in the 80s I worked once with then Vancouver Magazine sports writer Brian Preston. I remember having to photograph three Vancouver Canucks. According to my files where I found the negatives and this scanned photograph I have written on the file envelope 3 Czechs. I thought they might have been Finns. 

Brian Preston lives in Victoria, B.C. and I recently received a short communication with a link to a photograph.

Just messaging you to share a post that came up on my feed today-- I really enjoy your multitude of posts, and when this one arrived it took me awhile to clue in that the guy in the tub was not you, because it looked so much like an Alex W-H photo...

And of course I do have a connection with Dennis Hopper as I did photograph him in Seattle in 1988 for the Georgia Straight. 

It was sometime around 1988, two years after we had moved to the large corner garden in Kerrisdale, when Rosemary informed me that in the evening we were going to a meeting of the Vancouver Rose Society. We went.

I was sitting on an uncomfortable chair at the Floral Hall of VanDusen Botanical garden looking at 100 bad slides of roses. I could not believe I had been dragged to something that boring.

As a few years passed I became as keen on Roses as Rosemary and by 1990 our garden was a paradise of varied plants including many roses.

Rosemary in all her wisdom prepared me for a life love of plants and roses and all that led to my scanning those plants beginning in 2001. It would seem that Rosemary always knew what I would like even though there had to be some not too gently coaxing.

Today, April 19, 2022, Rosemary’s birthday, I went to my first in-person meeting of the Vancouver Rose Society at the Floral Hall.

It was mostly a happy occasion to be in a roomful of people with similar tastes. At the same time it was impossible for me not to think of the many pleasant times that Rosemary and I had in those meetings.

This last week I have been experimenting with a new technique that I call scanner sandwich negs. I wrote about it here.

But today, in such an important day I thought that the least I could do was to do a sandwich scan of Rosemary. I believe I chose the two perfect negatives for this. It is all about time. In a previous blog (this one) I included both of those negatives separately with one of my favourite poems by Jorge Luís Borges. While that poem is both in Spanish and in English in tha tblog I am going to place below the English version.

I have to admit that rarely did I think in all those moments (52 years’ worth) that I would be looking back on them without having Rosemary around. But even though it is late I have learned my lesson. As I lie in bed with my affectionate cats I look at them and enjoy the moment and I think in a future when either they or I will no longer be together.

I am furthermore saddened today by the fact that both Rosemary and I did not believe in a hereafter. We knew we would never see each other again. I call this Astor Piazzolla’s Oblivion.  

The Hourglass, by Jorge Luis Borges

It is appropriate that time be measured

by the stark shadow cast by a stake in summer

or by the flow of water in the river

where Heraclitus saw time’s ironies

since, seen as time and fate, they are alike:

the movement of the mindless daytime shadow

and the irrevocable running on

of river water following its flow.

Just so, but time discovered in the deserts

another substance, smooth and of some weight,

that seemed to have been specifically imagined

for measuring out the ages of the dead.

And so appears this instrument of legend

in the engravings in the dictionary,

an object graying antiquarians

will banish to a dusty underworld

of things— a single chessman, a broadsword,

now lifeless, and a clouded telescope,

sandalwood worn away by opium,

a world of dust, of chance, of nothingness.

Who has not hesitated, seeing that hourglass,

severe and sombre, in the god’s right hand,

accompanying the scythe he also handles,

the image Dürer copied in his drawing?

Through a top opening, the inverted cone

slowly lets fall the wary grains of sand,

a gradual gold that, loosening, fills up

the concave crystal of its universe.

Pleasure there is in watching how the sand

slowly slithers up and makes a slope

then, just about to fall, piles up again

with an insistence that appears quite human.

The sand of every cycle is the same

and infinite is the history of sand;

so, underlying your fortunes and your sorrows,

yawns an invulnerable eternity.

It never stops, the spilling of the sand.

I am the one who weakens, not the glass.

The rite of the falling sand is infinite

and, with the sand, our lives are leaving us.

In the timing of the sand, I seem to feel

a cosmic time: all the long history

that memory keeps sealed up in its mirrors

or that has been dissolved by magic Lethe.

All these: the pillar of smoke, the pillar of fire,

Carthage, Rome, and their constricting wars,

Simon Magus, the seven feet of earth

the Saxon offers the Norwegian King—

all are obliterated, all brought down

by the tireless trickle of the endless sand.

I do not have to save myself— I too

am a whim of time, that shifty element.