What I remember

That camera was magic.  A simple 35mm SLR, Praktica LB, I think I was using Fujifilm I'd bought in Russia that summer.

Chicago: hometown, two generations removed. My grandfather never really lost his accent and at 97 still says: "And I says to him, I says..." That's the generational and geographical gap. I'd just turned 19 and was visiting the city for the first time with my mother. It felt more like home than the city I'd spent 18 years of my life in: more chaotic, darker and brighter at the same time, more colourful, but indifferent about that fact. Certain parts of New York, too, had this quality. The wall of the Jewish bakery in lower side Manhattan, 5 in the evening, late autumn, papered over with old news paper clippings. This photo came later. But at some point, the two photos mean the same thing.

Manhattan had a way of being unintenionally colour-coordinated, a lot like Paris, and sometimes Boston. Or at least I always managed to find those secret spaces of spontaneous order.

Like the luck I had with buying wine, or earlier, buying classical music CDs I'd never heard before, selecting them based on intuition and whim. I always managed to find good ones. Brahm's 4th symphony and the Deutsches Requiem; Tristan & Isolde; Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto and the Isle of the Dead with the corresponding Böcklin painting gracing the cover of the CD-booklet.

Charon... maybe we do not need Charon. Maybe we need only the green light in the subway on the other side of the world.

The Woodpecker-Woman

If Ovid were alive today he might be inspired to add another story to his Metamorphoses: The Woodpecker-Woman. This strange hybrid creature must, like all the rest, have formed out of a kind of intractable Necessity, set-off, I can only imagine, by anxiety. What the particular circumstance(s) was or were are not terribly important. But maybe it happened in her schooldays; perhaps at that time speaking quickly and with an artificially higher tone of voice was the best way to be overheard. Perhaps, in mid-stride of a sentence and gasping for breath, the young girl was struck by Necessity and transformed into half-woodpecker, half-human; the woodpecker form is of course more gracious, more organic than the alternative: the jackhammer. It was out of mercy and kindness that Necessity lent her the form of the head-banging bird.

Now, fully grown and social, she is always eager to be heard, but always -- perhaps because of her curious form -- afraid of being lost in the sea of voices. Always gasping for breath, she creates shockwaves of sound around her and does injury to the poor listeners' ears as well as those of innocent bystanders. In her wrath, like a Fury, she hacks at the air and behind every word the desperate sense manages to leap out: 'Mine! Mine! Mine!' Or maybe it's 'Me! Me! Me!', but they amount to the same, for she is cursed with the desire to present herself, to take up space and sound, to get your attention and win -- by deafening force -- your benumbed acquiescence. As with other Ovidian metamorphoses, she is cursed with a kind of stasis, for although she wants to move forward with every peck of the air, she is stuck, petrified in her desire -- the mask for her fear.

 

Of course, Ovid's version would have been much more entertaining!