Rearranging Things

I’ve been writing a long essay in diary form through the pandemic, mostly for myself, as a reminder of who I was and who I’m becoming, of what we’ve left behind, of how I see what is right in front of me, and how that has changed incrementally. I’m writing this diary essay intermittently, and through the lens of my still life photography project. I began a little late, I suppose you could say. The first entry is on April 3rd, 2020. The working title for the piece is, “What is Ordinary Life, Now?” And ordinary life has changed so much but also not as much as I thought it would have at the beginning. That is to say, for me, it hasn’t changed that much but I know for others it’s changed a lot. Or, it changed a lot and then it stayed mostly the same. We’re in a holding pattern of sorts, and maybe that’s if we’re lucky. If you’ve lost someone then the world will feel as though nothing will ever be ordinary again.

Still life has been referred to as a world on a table, planet on a table, and that seems to help me sort out my thoughts. There’s so much chaos in the world. At least on the table of things, order can be found or made or at least composed temporarily.

I’ve been thinking about my process of taking these still life photos, the way it starts off maybe with a single object that calls to me. A lemon that I’ve sliced open, or a a cantaloupe. Maybe I look at an image of a painting from the 17th century and then I notice I also have a melon or a nautilus shell. I start to gather things and then I see where the composition takes me. I arrange and rearrange. The first image I set up is usually not the best one. I add, I subtract. I rearrange. I cut into fruit, I slice. Sometimes things fall off the table. Others are propped up at a certain angle. I play. I hurry, I wait. The sun comes, the sun goes.

I have the benefit of having watched my husband set up traditional-ish still lifes for years for his paintings. He paints floral pieces mainly these days, but he spent years setting up table top stills. Then, I was busy with a small child, busy getting an MA in English, writing books, working multiple jobs. I always envied him, you know? But I was doing what I chose to be doing, at the same time. And him doing it really was enough, then. I got to live a bit vicariously. So it’s interesting that he’s gone in a different direction now with his paintings, and I’m sort of coming up from behind having a go with the still life in photography.

The thing about still life is that even with it’s defined parameters, it’s such a huge field. The possibilities are endless.

What I’ve been thinking lately is that it’s a lucky bit of luck that still life is a project I started before the pandemic. And that for some reason I guess because it was on the go already, that I was able to use it as a point of reference, a point of meditation, as a bit of a touchstone or a way to see what has gone on in my own ordinary life even when I was too mired in said life (still am) to see it. I’m just trusting that a year or two from now, I can look at these photos I made and go, oh yeah, wasn’t the pandemic weird?

So yes, I keep thinking about how everything in our lives is getting arranged and rearranged on the regular. We get laid off from our jobs, we’re called back, only to be laid off again. Or we’re kept on, in my case, but the job is radically different. The numbers are high and we’re told to stay home, then they drop and guidelines are relaxed, then it’s all reversed. You all know how it goes by now. You had one plan, and now you have another. You looked forward to this thing, and now you tend to look forward to other smaller things, closer to home.

In a still life, you move one object, and three more slide off the table. A glass gets broken occasionally, or the unwinding rind of the lemon becomes detached from the fruit and you stick it back on with a toothpick. Scotch tape is hauled out. A dish is propped up from behind by a couple of walnuts. Everything is too much. You start to subtract. You go minimalist, and that’s fine for a bit too.

Next thing you know you want to order in take-out, and do a giant fast food still life. But that, my friends, is for another week :)

For now, I’ll leave you with a link to a poem I wrote 10 thousand years ago, about how marriage is like a still life, titled “Daring Instruction.” (You have to scroll down a bit to read it). How would I have known then, that a pandemic is perhaps even more like a still life.