Photo Booth
The MacBook Pro comes equipped with a little camera, enabling video conferencing, and more relevantly, a little program called Photo Booth. You can launch this program, click the camera icon, and see yourself as you appear to the computer’s camera eye. (This can be unnerving. It is certainly revelatory, if you need an update as to how your neck is aging.) You can take a picture of yourself and manipulate it in iPhoto. I experimented with this briefly, sent a picture or two to a friend, and removed the icon from the crowded line-up at the bottom of the screen on my menu bar (or whatever it’s called).
My daughter discovered this tool within days (admittedly, I showed it to her), and one day, while I was out, she took more than 200 self-portraits and made a slideshow to burn to a DVD. At first I was a faintly repulsed by the vanity implied by the enterprise, but when she showed me her shots, I realized that she is an artist at work, both behind the lens and in front of it. Every teenager is in the business of defining a self, in refining persona(s). I was fascinated and impressed.
So this morning, I clicked down into my Applications folder and launched PhotoBooth.
No make-up. No shower and ministrations of hair dryer and curling iron to tame a light case of bed head. Just me up on a Sunday morning, reading the news and writing an email or two, with bright sunlight shot through the window warming one side of my face. If I sat just so, I could capture half my face in light, half in shadow, like the moon was the other day. This time, it was strong light, not deep shadow, that blotted features out, leaving only a lighted eye and a bit of curve around the mouth.
Last night on the phone, a friend asked me what metaphor had been mine that day. I had busily cleaned house and was not thinking then of metaphors. Instead, I was watching Off the Map on the laptop, curled up in bed with the cat at my feet, letting my mind float like a leaf down the darkening stream of evening. But this morning, looking at this image as I did the moon the other day, I know I’m all wrapped up just now in light and shadow. What one makes visible, the other renders invisible. There is a part of myself and a part of being that I can’t apprehend except in darkness where all the edges of things are erased and one slips into all. I have dreamed of flying, on a dappled grey mare with wings, and all on my own, low over fields just where the wind meets the grass, then over water, at the lake at home. I do not dream of flying during the day, but only at night.
In darkness all the words ever printed in black ink on white paper for a time mean nothing at all. I can know the curve of your face only by its touch, your thought only if you speak aloud. I will know the sound of your breathing, and mine. I can meet you - and the sky above, the grass beneath my feet, the night breeze - sans exteriority. I know the cat in the basket by the little sigh he makes in his sleep or the sound of his rough tongue raking his fur. And I am a part of the dark. I know unboundaried belonging to everything that is.
Light on the other hand, defines the otherness and distinctness of all around. The cat is a cat, gray and white, sleeping under the camera tripod at the window, where I took a pre-dawn picture of cresent moon and the morning star. I am the woman sitting cross-legged on the bed in front of the computer, looking through the lower half of her glasses to see the screen. This daylight world is a world full of nouns designating difference, of seeing and being seen, of walking in one’s own shoes one’s own way, of making impressions; even the shoes themselves make impressions. Text reappears on pages, on screens - the drumbeat of messages and ideas intensifies to cacophony.
Daylight is also the time to slip into the garden early; it is all the colors that life is; it is the dappled sea of leaves above on a lazy afternoon in the forest where it is possible to fall asleep midday and dream while a bee gathers pollen from a flower and flies away with golden thighs. Daylight illumines my children’s faces. When they were younger, I thought it beamed right through their faces, as if they were themselves dazzling little suns.
Light grows all things, sustains all things.
The brain takes light for a brush to paint all the beauty that we see - the endless sky, the wave arcing and pouring itself into the shore, the spring duckling cracking through its shell, the crystal under the microscope, the green rock I found 35 years ago in the desert, sitting now here in my garden. Likewise light tells all the horrors, of faces and bodies torn irreparably by wars, of the polar bear drowned. It reveals the concrete hives of our cities, their honeys and their stings, the labyrinths of our perceptions in art. Light tells our justice and our injustice. It supplies metaphors on which we rely for truth. Yet too, too much of it blinds, blots out, just as darkness does.
We are made to partake of the gentle revolutions of light and dark - these are a part of the gift, for we need both ways of knowing.
ehj2 wrote:
I’m afraid to write to you. But I’m more afraid to not write to you.
I want to be in your presence, and I know I have to earn that, but I don’t want to change you, or for you to be different because I am around. More. I actively want to not change you. I want to know who you are “naturally.” I want to know “You.” I want to be supportive, but only in the sense that if you are engaged in a task, I want to help with that task, not take it from you.
I love this photo of you more than any other I have seen. I want to be able to compliment this photo without changing the nature of your photography or the nature of your expression.
This photo of you is, in some poignant way, deeper than any other image you’ve shared. For me, it easily contains all of the other images of you. I see the twelve-year-old and the twenty-something and the mother and the writer and the gardener and the dreamer. I see the Librarian, the modern metaphor of a woman with all her full feminine powers who is in equal mastery of — and steward of — all the logical knowledge of human achievement.
This is your face in my meditations. This is the you that walks with me in my dreams.
I love your smile and pictures of you smiling. But I am also afraid of your smile. I want to contribute to your joy, and so I long for some clear expression that I have touched you in a favorable way. But I know how easy it is for you to smile, and I know that women are ingrained to smile — to show interest, to be pleasing, to smooth over the moments … and I am terrified of that smile. I ache when I am the cause of that smile.
I want more than that. I want shared awareness. I want shared joy that is closer to tears than laughter. I want shared sadness that is the appropriate response to a world slipping into madness. I don’t have much time left and I want to feel the deep raw powers of your light and darkness for every moment left to me.
I love the way your hair is slightly askew here, as if we awoke together on a soft morning wrapped in each others’ arms beneath wool blankets on wind-swept sand by an unknown sea. You are, of course, a metaphor for the sea and all the mystery it contains, and the moon that moves it, and the wind itself that shapes your hair.
I love the light and the shadows of you and I want to know them both as deeply as possible. I want the full expression of you over a million years, like cycles of pure waves pushed up from the ocean floor and covering me like tides of light that wash across the universe.
Said differently, the feminine points to the true north within both men and women. And a compass needs all the points of expression to be useful in serious navigation. Not just the lighthearted expressions, not just the pleasant feelings, not just the culturally sanctioned ones. To be a functioning compass, all of the directions have to be present and the needle has to float freely and unimpeded, without falsity or artifice.
In all of our mythologies, it is the way we listen to the feminine, listening for true north and true meaning, that points the way.
We recall that the Myth of Troy revolves around a woman named Helen, and the end of the city was presaged by a woman named Cassandra. The horse itself (that brought the destruction) is the symbol of natural instinct, and if it dominates one’s life completely (if one seizes it — must possess it and own it — as an obsession), one loses one’s head and must perish in unconsciousness. The myth began with a failure of consciousness associated with instinct (unbridled lust / yes, a related term from the same metaphor, “horsemanship”), led to endless and useless war, and was ended by the city’s incorporation of the symbol of obsessive instinct into its center — into its heart. (Note that the horse with a rider is a symbol of balanced mind and instinct; the horse by itself as a metaphor — or archetype — represents pure instinct.)
Many forget that the Myth of Ulysses also revolves around a woman; the mysterious Penelope. Like Ariadne, she too was a weaver and understood the nature of golden threads, the subtleness of fate and destiny, the path that is narrow, the razor’s edge, the cosmic line followed by Theseus through the labyrinth.
There are long conversations to be had, over tea in the moon gardens of the world, or with water from each others’ hands on bike rides between bed and breakfasts, or with wine from plastic canteens on canoes drifting slowly down lazy rivers. There is dancing to be done, and long desert hikes, stars to be found and named, gardens to be planted, pictures to be taken, poems to be shared …
This mysterious deep beautiful face of you draws me in. I pull small treasures from my pockets and place them in your hands. If it is a tool you need for a task you’ve chosen, I will try to bring it to you. I know how to straighten what’s disorganized, clean what’s dirty, and bring quiet to noise. I’m a boy who brings flowers. I come with a handful of my own books. Some rocks and shells. I bring all the words in my soul. I simply want permission to linger in your presence and see what comes next.
/ehj2
Posted on 29-Mar-06 at 11:36 pm | Permalink