Feb 15

Feb 15 We Live in Time

We live in time. Tim Carpenter quotes Mark Strand, the poet, who said “Even when poetry celebrates something joyful, it bears the news that the particular joy is over.” Honestly, I cannot go on enough about Tim Carpenter’s book, if you’re a photographer, a poet, an artist, someone who enjoys using their own eyeballs and heart and who gets that everything we do is in/significant but we must make our art with rigour, you will enjoy this book.

We must not squander our gifts, in spite of the world. Carpenter talks about the “rigorous use of your imaginative gift to get at what is ineffable.” Well, the camera as a way of life. A way of living. A way of Yes.

I keep bumping into the word “punctum” as one does when one is interested in photography. It’s from Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Of course, one is looking or thinking about photography in all new ways in the age of sloppification, degenerative-AI (as folks are calling it). But I don’t want to talk about what I hate but what I love. I love photography. I love thinking about the punctum. I love this book I’ve been picking up and just adoring by Sofia Samatar, Opacities, which I’ve written about recently.

I love, above, that the vintage photographer is checking his phone. The people over his shoulder content to be sitting on the steps of a famous church, checking theirs. (Maybe they just took some great photos of it?)

Samatar talks about reading Barthes’ book, “Studium is the message of the photograph, its genre, its way of participating in a symbolic system. Punctum, on the other hand is the incidental detail that seizes a viewer “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” What is it about the punctum that makes one happy? That wound…

What is it about the bag the person is holding in the above photo that stands out for me, which I took in Florence last year that says HU MA NA? We might know that Hu is used as a gender neutral term. It’s a divine vibration, a divine utterance in many belief systems.

Ma is the word we cry out. Mama! Think of the Queen song. In Clarice Lispector’s work The Message, Hélène Cixous says, “Whoever says ‘mama’ calls for help.” Lispector’s work ends, “Mama, he said.”

Manamana, say the Muppets.

I’m assuming the bag in the photo I took is from the second hand shop Humana. But I don’t know for sure. I think of James Joyce and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life!”

NA = no, or, not applicable, not available. I’m sure there are other meanings, too.

Well, human (a). All of this meandering is very human, yes?

And this, to bring it back to the word punctum, is what photography is.

Meanwhile, the song:

When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school
It's a wonder I can think at all
And though my lack of education hasn't hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
Give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama, don't take my Kodachrome away

Again, mama! don’t take my Kodachrome away.

It is worth taking the time to look at a photograph. That instant holds so much. If you have read my favourite book, Lispector’s The Stream of Life, then, you will have thought of the “now-instant.” “Each thing has an instant in which it is.” “Is my theme the instant? my life theme. I try to keep up with it, I divide myself thousands of times, into as many times as the seconds that pass, fragmentary as I am and precarious the moments…”

Mama! O Life! What is the heart? What is it to be human? This instant is already the next instant. What divine frequency are you on so that I might connect to you with my own divine frequency. Hello, I am here! In a world where we paint blue hearts on walls by photo booths and dress them in protective vests. Someone else comes along and writes Gaza in a small black heart.

Nothing will be forgotten though it will take some time to see.