Folkcal Fraim 12
Dactyl Fathoms Flood Darkness / Tampa, Florida / TSE / 2019
Human Twin-lens Observations (H2LO)
A low one, alone, walking along the rim of the Gulf of Mexico with a camera (as if looking for an animal to reverse sacrifice) through the foam of shore foreclosure, of coastal rebirth. Libation pour, contact weight, evocation. Second only to semen, male and female menses, liquid form, the milk of matter and “bottom stay” paste of organic sculpture, water is the most programmable substance in our reproductive pond. Separated by our breathable atmosphere, water is also a twin, above and below, of its own continuous duplication. If there is such a thing as “after water,” then after water comes language (angle, agua, and age), an inserted logic, marine cement, the written version of two-way pouring. It comes, solid as sound, to make categories of us. Surface runoff, spoken, pour down. Info in, hardening, info out, softening, the way fish whip down for floorcovering. Flight of the stingray, wet silhouette migration, the sibling rivalry of rivers that switch babies, the Niagara Movement. All ships, according to Maritime Admiralty Law, are female. In the V formation of history, the changing images of gender are the alphabet agencies of seafaring. Camera housing, barreleye, porthole. The photographer as iris island, as plantar wart, a castaway camera outcast. Exiled in peace, old receipts of the sea. The fisheye lens did not know that the camera liked to get nude then wet but it was prohibited by the poorly trained lifeguard atop the wooden beach tripod. More rules of the pond. And the same can be said of the natural world from human waste to geological phenomena, the call to continue creation, the original creative process, the process of changing humanity is not without adblockers, both sentient and supernatural, the revenge of the ciliary liar. Birth needs a new Pictionary, one of those pitch men with a briefcase of second chances––medicine bottles with long glass droppers, squeezable rubber tops. Everything, including a photograph, is either alive or contains the material of something that once steered the living through the fog of life. Yo Adverse Yaw, dat rudder ain’t no shutter. There are degrees of perpetual control, moments of fluid medium, still as the incubator’s grasp, in all born and non-born objects. Life levees the reservoir like a lab rinse of snowmelt, the EMP blast of photosynthesis leaving a birthmark. My camera, which is a bit of a hovercraft and guide from one realm of earthly rehab to another, is also the opener and closer of all non-stabilized floodgates. An atom is mostly empty space, a loophole of spin. The faster the spin the stronger the electrical field. Substitute atom for atmosphere, spin for splash, field for realm. All life is reliant on realm, and our life realm, being sonar-mosaic-bubbly, contains old wavy, windowed walls of water, the various forms of the shiny one. Unknown bacteria, an inefficient eye sensitivity to black water. Trigger weight overboard into the blues, night’s stream of consciousness and the dark vault of all souls not to mention all the lapses and boundaries caused by the mental blockage of the doorway effect, those rooms of memory purification. Mosh pit hearing aid, elm arm, lap of ash. This tri-alliance, this gyro compass, is the offshore stern of knowledge, the sea snakes that drag you under higher…but not having access to the proper pools, the clearance to rant, surge and surf, I can neither prove nor photograph this belief as truth but sure as a blood transfusion is a fuse, an inner fire refueled, I am bi-informed by soda rose, by prosody and prose, by (minus the great wrath of regret) the non-spill deep reflectors of the imagination. Water is human and we, imbued with a singular sense (disguised as five) are simply one of its chimes, subject and sovereign. Water is the original inhabitant of the earth or, better yet, the earth lives in water and cannot survive outside of it. When it tries, as in the shallow past, it becomes rock, something of a situation room: Oz, ooze and ozone zoo. The entire water-verse. Transmutation, water to wine and wine to blood but not in that order. Thus, once you realize water is a hard drive, every wave hurts. Do so without dying, do so without dying. The thirty-third age of Aquarius, uncaged, an animal pharmacy that never consisted of primary water, the unhealthy atmospheric behavior we now call weather––bottled prescriptions, pills beneath clouds, the cotton that swabs the deck, reoccurring swordfish jabs, a pair of parrots on the shoulders of Captain Healthcare, but it is not that, care or cure, not that at all. These climate creatures, critters of creation captivity, are simply the midlife crises of wildlife, sensual storm-beings, fussy environmental renovators––the sperm whales of our realm; the spermaceti found in their heads is used in oils lamps, lubricants and candles. Armpit and groin, the sea was once the secret scent of more than a thousand centuries, the last kingdom of seduction. Modernity is just a moat. Pursued by climate click bait and the photography of aquatic pornography, more fish are twins, hemispherical bits per flicker, than you think.
Always wet, always hexed on the double conveyor belt of convex, always kneeling holding a photo tray of diamond needles, maybe a few sapphires, the eye is an aquarium of tropical strobes, soylent algae-braic and rimmed in orbit, black light, a whirlpool beneath the facial surf of sight, fatty fish foo young (no roe), the recipients of every optical aberration in the watercolor’s pigment ratio––astigmatism, chromatism, and sphericity––once drowned by neutral buoyancy. Fins, lens span, upward shots, wings. Saline broth. Starfish on the same plate of moon as digestive delirium, grilled lunar tuna smothered in coral gravity. In lieu of the wish and shine hidden in Lewis Hine, I offer thee a grouper bribe, one of the geopolitical nuggets FDR couldn’t confiscate, welfare people (not social welfare) exterminated for not agreeing with the future. For years it slept at the bottom of history’s stovetop, boiling, the sound of approaching gargling like the death talk of gargoyles planning to slay another Christ. Cooking now in pure scope, like a boat of sabotage suffering through simmer, the chief chef an origami of mischief, his whole pot an overpopulated flood of disinformation minus nuance, the rainbow bridge between the New Age and an old cage both above a stew of fishy fiscal agenda. Thine seed has never been lower, and thine egg has never been lonelier. Trout mouth of the monastic order, angry adept, the puddle's perspective of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s not quite so graceful jumper would have been a far more interesting photographic savior than the one of a banker’s escape taken from the sniper laziness of well-timed patience. The leap on the poster in the background is better executed than the failure of monopoly in the foreground, money ignoring the rule of thirds. Always the legs, scissoring. Always the water, mentoring. A promissory bloat is like a flaneur of withdrawals, one of those improperly washed images of bathers becoming birthers. Galilee, a circle of water, the circulatory stem of aperture in ache. Wade on the watery avenue, cool folks hanging out car windows, hair laid to the side in waves of wealth. Wet between the pineal lens gland, one whispers to the other, “Viagra is melanin.” The other responds, “My sac of Prozac too!”
Under an umbrella and carrying a briefcase, the woman in Puddle-Jumpers, Berlin, 1925 by Friedrich Seidenstucker deserves a photo club of high fives, more lonely hearts than diamonds, “hippos and other humans” in the gut flora, as famously as forever. Gilded Age spacewalk, gloves and gills galore. Mr. Clean (also known as Hercules) is still laughing at our law-filled flaws, “You are not a native. You are the alter-native, the rogue ram in the program.” An operative in a fishbowl, a fathom of mother and father from the phantom memory of home: No soft drinks for you until you have fully developed, body and photos. Muscle tone is relative. Do your homework, no carbonated songs or longing. Another bell ding, another round of public-school age trafficking, between classes, eight glasses a day including homeroom twice. Leaving gym, I feel dry inside, so I swim, urinate, and chlorinate. Coach whistle, lanes. The bottom of the pool photographs my Australian crawl. A.I. in the bait, the lure of tackle, one on each side of the snapping turtle center, ancient head poking out of the huddle. Hold last place ribbon and say cheese! Water weight of camera, a hammer, a hammer in my hand next to my head, hammerhead, an amber alert of pool sharks, dead ahead distortion on the Kinoptik tip, cue the victims. Like fishing rod lure made of nylon, soon a Tolkien acid trip will eclipse the bowsprit of my heart. I feel dry not in the eyes but near the brightest details of my Speedos, growth hormone causing the colors to be more violently vivid. Green pool, blue pool, spotted yellow from the pee of intramural champions, it’s all an illusion. Terry cloth robes that make us Aqua Roman, woven. Stay curious or become a crustacean of the cosmos. Portrait of a cognitive sand dollar, feverish in its mystic virtue. Lungs, a mossy sponge. With this new peephole and squint logic, battery under the mirror, I can proofread any tree still rooted in the dormant thermostat of picture judging. I can Vaseline the leaks in the breathing system till the sentence, like silver zinc masked in a secondary light source, sings sideways. Mine is the lowest dive. The ocean my bon voyage petite app lies over has consumed a small portmanteau. Insight, dryer inside than a funeral arrangement of ocean wreaths, oxygen less than low. My deluge navigation ain’t too thankful for drought. In fact, this be the most reinforced, flexible training video that has ever been asked to be an umbrella organization for a grant proposal, the needy and demanding electrical cable of pushing film speed, rolling over the very visible white-on-white detour of duty through the hustler’s desperate attempt to photograph the dry adrenals of his own survival, another beginner’s guide too vast for dilation.
Human Twin-lens Observation: one for the taking, human; one for viewing, the machine; both in one body, one triple earth (like an eye): flat, round and hollow all at once. Sea and see level: waist. Eyes on the hip near the reproductive box. Image beings, birthdays and bayonets on the mountaintop held steady against the volcanic navel of the body, more great fires than the 1800s. Reflex and bone structure, a bowlegged cable release, nearly fluid, reason for the magnifying glasses’ loyalty to the mirror. Pop-up hood, a square hole punched in the back like a form of urban renewal. Leaf shutter, blackout, matte screen. Dark filters, like feelings, under the knife of lag reduction. Eureka, a Yashica! And a superb Voightlander in a shin guard to prevent damage to the soft tissues of the lower extremities. This is not an advocacy of tin foil camera polyamory but a short description of the collaborative merger between the practitioner and the apparatus, the hunter captured by the game. A catch, a keeper. But first there will be thirst, pestilence, parched doppelgangers easier to bottle than a tsunami. My bright blister––the sun with seven pilots, our undrinkable rivalry, the one between the economy and the bomb. I see twice, two levels, double tomorrows, twice the shapes, shadows and space but I cannot bring the experiment together, equally, in either of my labs, my eyes, unless I drench the syllables. Whichever way the water flows, our yacht and house will Ark-up, lock like canals, the masculine Ijmuiden and the feminine Brouwersgracht. And, on some spiritual territory type shiznit, the entire card game below deck might misdeal the secrets of naval astronauts, all their harsh gravities lay lined like graves. Wind in a gangster lean, a tornado every time Caliban advances the film, the one photograph he had of Sycorax, his witchy mom, now lost in the post tempest cyclone of servitude. Not a good look, mutable lips, or a good time in the origin story to run out of water pills. Code of the EEG, the heretic known as Diuretics, soul scales that make the body of the fish impossible to 3-D print. An interior exposure so surgical an enormous hearing aid will suck out the master-slave relationship between water and its aria of hernias. Limp in the walk removed, profile of swollen knee no longer an exhibition curiosity. While liquid peppermint soap makes the new scar sting, Epsom salt makes it sing. Sitting on the sink, witness to the shapes of resistance the government of the body makes as I try to photograph the scar tissue, the Death Valley of light brown skin, from a previous operation. Gold, iridium, copper, cropped person. As an exiled bard, bearded by autumn gardening, I rate this Op: psycho, another Darwinian fairy tale paperclipped to a series of signatures––letters with swag, curves that swerve. Allow me to take the secrecy out of the explaining and make it plain: I received a postal letter, not an email. Nice, bonded paper with a faint watermark, hard to make out. Someone with four names was starting a camera club. No guests, invites only. Every attendee would receive the camera of choice, used models only, manufactured between 1950 and 1975. The requirements were to accept the invite, RSVP, state the desired model of camera, and return the letter to the post office box at the bottom of the letter. One could not choose a large format camera, and once the offer was accepted attendance was mandatory. Once the camera was received, we were never to use it from the position of our faces, never, nor were we to use it while standing still. There had to be motion no matter the limit of the lens, and there had to be alter-native anatomy eye guessing framing: shoulder angle, waist perspective, knee point of view, etc. “Please keep your choice of model private.” Invitees would only be admitted with an unopened package or box of film manufactured by a company that had gone out of business before 1990. The letter arrived in March. The meeting was scheduled for July. Like the watermark, the month and year began to vanish the moment the letter was opened. Don’t get me wrong, I was flattered (which is the same as being flattened) but I already knew individuals, mostly artists, who had joined The Secrets, folk who had become human antennae for one of the barely afloat, square and wooden rafts of the Academy, so I promptly burned the invite. Stamped on the back of the envelope, there was this: THE NAVEL EYE.
Whether you can hear it or not, the music of this sphere, of this space, is water––the key being the distance between natural and artificial wavelengths. The lyric of the lake, the rhythm of the river, the persona of the pond. Three bowls: sink, toilet, tub. A faucet is form functioning like formlessness. Test photo, the faux set of purpose. Between 2020 and 2023, we washed our hands so much that the engraved lightning bolts on our palms became defenseless canals. Dead fish on the surface, celebrity octopus, the editorial messiness of physiological nature, more than enough antiseptic know-how to cause stay-at-home professionals to obsessively Zoom. Lamp body, stimulant. The creative process is a processed ocean. Craft, the sea. Metaphors like tadpoles. Similes, frogs. For a while, photography was wise enough, dry enough, to leave the leagues alone. Seamen, a seminary. Scum looks like and sounds like that other bad word, noun and verb, the crisis actor in the biological operation of birthwater. Crystals oscillate. Baby pictures. Water cannot live in you (and you in it), if neither is alive in the melt. A clock turns to the creek for structure, the spring for movement. In Churchill, you see church; I see the chill. I absolutely love it when, after an unfamiliar meal and lively conversation (creative and conflicting), I excuse myself from the table, walk down a hall of oil paintings, and am met by a choice of doors simply tagged WC for Water Closet. Inside, there’s a chain above the toilet with a wooden handle. If you stand up before pulling it, the miracle won’t happen but if you sit there and pull it, well, you might experience the spray of flush, bowl marina, bio mythology on the buttocks, another firework of water, the lower mission of skyrockets spread out into a full rise as if blown away by a dolphin’s breathing, the exclamation of intelligence, many, so many micro launches. Regatta de bacteria, a coxswain swan in bloom. Oz Baum at Wounded Knee calling for the genocide of Native Americans. Like non-sinkable energy, also known as solid waste, some streams save its poetry to the end of the feathering or pack it away (daring it to leak) in the indent of blade release, clean catch marked by a grease pencil, the dream of a teardrop tired of tap.
The upside down basic-basic test strip, decisive and dodging, existed long before Henri Cartier-Bresson, in waiting, orchestrated it into a singular moment of photographic serum. Skinwalker, killing curse. No one to photograph me as I photographed a woman standing on a huge rock at Big Sur (2014) but I thought the mist would eat her and I would capture it and analyze it––scale to model, libra, model to scale––all the way back to Yamo’s elbow to elbow counter top dining where I tried to hide how excited my camera was seated so close to the cooks, but the two women kept shouting, “Ma, No MSG is taking pictures!” No MSG, what a name to be nicked by…by fish in black bean sauce. The moment I asked for my meal to be prepared without MSG, I became “No MSG,” every visit, as soon as I walked in the restaurant. “No MSG, No MSG, No MSG,” a mix of chastising operating systems: English, Burmese and Chinese. More than patient they were with me in that popular rectangle. There was never room to jump like the man in Cartier Bresson’s photograph. More than twins, they were, before birth so might the dark figure in the background, mid left, of Behind the Gare, St Lazare, 1932, be watching himself escape the circus of drying time. Railowski, Railowski / Railowski, Railowski, I type and ask thee four times, twice in air and twice in water, can thirst be bracketed like individual exposures, broken into seconds, uninvited then cropped? A demand regulator of clowns, compliments of Auguste Denayrouze, those days when the circus was the devil’s church, tent sermon and freaks, a mobile miracle, river town to river town. This traveler, this shadowy figure, the third man of the timetable of train schedules, wants more, more of the spirit of the juggler; in trapeze we trust the death-defying prayer, the leap from legionnaire to leper, but Cartier-Bresson, between planks, conjuring photographic phytoplankton, is busy being worried by the horizontal limits of the unknown while simultaneously honoring the chance of vertical surprise. Lazare from Lazarus, latinized from Lazar, a poor and diseased person. To cause discomfort to the gut of mythology, I say, scatter the etymology. Collage hated being transformed into college. You cannot, until you have traveled, properly understand art, how so-called masterpieces interlock into an agreed upon lie, how strong sunshine creates contrasts. Cartier-Bresson’s boat, moored or floating by on the Marne? Cézanne makes the river wet glass. Cartier-Bresson, a solid mist. The banks own Sunday, every white plate and glass of wine in the grass. No bottled agua, though distilled, anywhere near the panaflex of folding cameras. So many refreshing poetic potions, mineral rich mighty miniatures (Graphite 35, Konica II, Vito B, Kodak Retina), bothersome broths, on a mission to reclaim the temporary darkness of wastepaper baskets. Their backs to the photographer, the dust of privacy cleaned from the camera, a silence: pouring, knitting, watching, eating.
The classical world with its classical floods, lead-soled boots and silt layers that muddy the programming with every step. Firedamp a lab coat of Merlins to protect me from the rescuers of the Tin Woodman, whilst no stupid intelligence takes hold of my lack of kindle. To hydrate is to replenish the body with the information carried in water. To dehydrate is to deprogram the whole rogue department. Dry again yet gaseous, “excuse me.” When we sweat, our bodies are notifying the civilizations of the past, those deep dictionaries of dioxide, that we are ready for more Old Norse and Middle Low German, ready to inflate the life preserver like a pencil drawing of mechanical specialties, vaporous and vague, and that the organic exchange between classes of diving suits: soft (ambient pressure wet suits) and hard (atmospheric pressure armored suits) remain perpetually open to all forms of underwater darkroom deprivation. The information in water, hail mary water, is amniotic. A diver pursued by a camera cannot afford to tangle umbilical lines with a photographer. Neoprene free radical polymers. Seas are satellites of one another, fragments of an ol’ whole hole. They only exist, geographically: north, south, east, and west. The ocean, however, is both above and below us. A place, where photographs can return to, has been reserved for us in its center. It was separated so that we might survive (in need of laptop sleeves) in the middle where the simulation thrives, its dim Northern lights on a rigid horizon of ice. Mildew avoider of the Dos and Don’ts of wanha hara care. Shower drain, star trails, sky blue toner. Industrial X-ray films so devoid of moisture, Fomapangea becomes the liquid concentrate of Gods. In the middle where the old gentleman once thrived, photography is a powderless gun, a pawn shop Pow Wow. Just add the tachoscript of fixed sight, foil, a few gelatin lifters for criminal investigations. A flower left in a book for a century, dry inside. Antonio Machado’s mournful and dusty afternoon, the time alone of the countrified poem being composed by la noria. Translation: the treadmill. Translation: the water wheel. Check the background like a background check of bounced light, another box jellyfish ready to sting the gray edges of any spirit that takes flight. No duende or greasy baby oil, the golden handbook of my lips cracked down the middle from being given too much scholarly instruction. Programming protocols, grade A distractions. How do we know our work is not being corralled? Input in, Antaeus in malt liquor. Input out, a chubby Ganesha. Agitation in the hypo, fixing solution, I can predict the reality before it becomes reactionary like a moment frozen in candid examination. Ultimate omega backgammon, King Agamemnon. A lack of strong shadows means the forecast calls for an increase in processing power, soft gels in the rain, the whole tribe jumping into the photograph all at once, fiending for more microplastics and deep rovers than fish markets.
Just following (badly focused) orders, the people in the room, the ones trained to doom-stroll the nets, the ones drowning in mental internment, don’t have a single photograph (of any size) of what they are building. They say I worked on the lens, and I helped with the physics to bring our boys’ home. They can’t say much more than that because their signatures live on lines beneath small, legal print. Their writing, guarded by thought, resembles barbed wire and they are prohibited by the troops of decorated theories to tell the truth. Their beach photos with their families look like all beach photos of families, although their cameras resemble safe deposit boxes on neck straps. Mid paragraph, less latitude with color, the perspective changes according to cash flow. Some professionals suffocate the subject with a reflector, no cardboard diffuser. I’ve never owned an underwater camera, never shot with anything waterproof, nothing amphibious. I’m not attracted to scuba. Would I French squeeze-kiss a monogram-mouth trout for an Arbus, maybe so. However, grey imitation sealskin ain’t really my thang. When I think of rubber, the feeling of speed caused by excessive photofloods, I see blubber. After that, it’s Jonah in Nineveh, Ahab’s leg, and Santiago’s skiff. My inner frogman prefers open-heel fins to water shoes, combat diver to combat swimmer. I ate too much dried seaweed once near the Charles River and was sick for three days. Stay away, I say, from nuclear-powered search engine submarines like The Nautilus. The verdict on Jules Verne, a Nemo or an omen? Certain fish refuse to glow when they sense a diver with a camera swimming towards them, others pretend they are sea flash to confuse the diver into thinking they themselves are magical swimming cameras. Not a seabed urchin of the ocean floor universe, not a chewing organ, not one of Aristotle’s lanterns, but close. Tales of ancient camera fish (also known as foto soles) were once told in fishing villages throughout the world only to be, in modern times, regulated to rumor and myth, along with seahorses and mermaids. The last sentence is a fiction, a bit of Ishmael or fish mail, head off and split. The only known foto sole in captivity was the organic prototype that became the Spiro which became the Calypso which became the Nikonos, all underwater cameras, the first of which was designed by Jean de Wouters, and the second of which was used by Jacques Cousteau. A real-life buddy movie. More proof of the magnetism of water: I spy a private spa in a gated community, an anti-Pequod, unable to turn water into a lens of wellness, but magnificently photographed none the less.
Seeds stopped down too far, fuzzy spots and chips, the bitter language of sea education, an additive color plate, hyphenated by an eel in culture shock. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s nude (Italy, 1933), shot from above the water, is anecdotal and divine, no adult gaze shadow ban. The eye needs a camera to spill but the soul of every good negative is the light in water. Call on spirit if you don’t believe me, spiral into inner space, the prisoner of warmth personality of peace. In HCB’s photograph, both water surface and splash have agreed to abolish the suave and the grotesque. Pool, a frame. From whiteness comes a foot, and to whiteness her hands have returned, the quiet witness of the camera as sketchbook and bookie, recording bets. Parallel techniques of twin discovery, raw photography and graphic drawing. If not for the knee bend, there would be no dark triangle, no sacrifice of witchcraft. Inseam, ink well. The whole headless body held afloat by the abundance of breastwork like an unfinished commission left behind by a frustrated Impressionist. Stop looking for the water lilies! We are as much observed by them as they are observed by us, portrait of a human upgrade in ambrosia not Giverny. One wonders about the missing arm, the ripple-less hexagonal projection, her limb still developing a vibrant amputation rather than embrace an exclusive seafront villa or a spacious duplex for sea lovers. The afterlife won’t listen so don’t act like you knew her when you are gone or low on upper chakra dollars. Desire had a spirit animal, but it made it cry. Cartier-Bresson’s nude will never be a result of mere technique, difficult or damned. When the fire, the fire of consciousness, hits the water, you die. All used up. All used up like a campfire in daylight. Camera knows no one, camera ignores, “Out of many, one.” Photographie sous-marine et poésie. Jack Spicer in a snorkel, “What’s true of oceans is true, of course, /Of labyrinths and poems.” Exit, exterior, the great beyond: the underworld is underwater. More Spicer, “That’s when the fun starts / Unless you are a poet or an otter or something supernatural / You’ll drown, dear.” Tank dactyls, fingers. The midwife maze, a sensitivity to shells as transparent as the early stages of eggs, the round edges of life. Close the book of images, the early work. Accept the weightlessness, its plunging spires, the only UFO you will ever know is a fly agaric, an amanita muscaria mushroom. You will need another snort of Spicer, “When you start remembering…” But the camera, the rare came ray of every era, the device of deity that dragged you above water, won’t be there in the ripples, not without the rough riffs.
In the museum gift shop, a coffee cup made in the shape and length of a 90mm lens. A decade or so ago (if not longer), I received one in the mail from a friend. I thought, “Would an intimate, one who knew me well, one I argued with about the predictable mental template of so many books for years, send me such a thing? No.” I gave it away, still in the box. Had I a charming home on the Baltic Shoreline with ample greenery, I might have kept the silly thing to laugh at when my address became too peaceful, or the view became torturously endless. But let me ask, “Have you seen my cameras?” They are old and have been dropped numerous times. One of the lenses is deformed by a very dramatic dent, the vulcanite cover of skin peeling, sacrifice incomplete. The M has removed itself from the maximum strength minimalism; the metal underneath the paint job is now the surface of the paintjob. The red dot has donated so much blood to the image world, its brand no longer bleeds the one-drop law. In Soho 2.0, they laugh when I come in for repairs. So much damage in just a decade, programmed for ruin, “rough on cameras,” they say. The absurd optimism of juxtaposing sight-similar words to creatively arrive at the proper exposure is how the young photographer made a large format recreational fungus, a cloudy canvas from candid to Candide to Candida. Siren parasites in the gut, right and wrong just to please sound. The strangest word of my gram-negative childhood: bulrushes. Convinced by water to drink, swim, bathe, boat, fly, fish, leak, drip, wipe, irrigate, travel, and evaporate, you ever be a youngblood, growing up in the hood, and one of your uncles takes you with him to see his lady friend in a dark apartment that feels like a darkroom overlooking a parking lot of faded Lincolns and Buicks and inside the apartment there ain’t nothing but wall to wall carpet, a couch, some fake plants and a big ass television that looks like a flattened fish tank in charge of other fish tanks, so many fish tanks, and you are left there in the living room alone because they have disappeared into the back; and all you can do is wish you had a camera with a silent line spool, one built for drag control, the enjambment of the colors of the fish, especially the gold ones with white and black spots. How the outdoors got indoors, how the urban world ate the natural world is what you want to know. Is touch possible, no. You are not one of the bad kids. You don’t want to watch them flop on the dirty carpet for air. You just want to communicate with all the invisible species within the bubbles before they pop. Gots to wait till you grow up because the manufacturers of drugstore cameras don’t want brilliant youngins’ taking deep dives, just shallow snapshots. Nowadays, I live on a peanut head peninsula. I live in Florida so shouldn’t baby Moses have been eaten by alligators, the remains captured by retired Osceolians with drugstore cameras, the bright yellow ones? Yeehaw, Kissimmee and Poinciana. Appearing and disappearing in the sky over St. Cloud like the upside down of matter, Type F (indoor) water is everywhere air is found. Flip the camera. Fish above, me in the middle, birds below.
According to the space saver known as ibid, one must bait the writing as if one is peeling the surface off the catch (not explaining it) while they are both, bait and catch, still attached to the rod. Same soreness, source, and search. The catch must be photographed and edited while it is still flapping between life and death. Our nutritional needs, crowded together like the seeds of stars in ancient music and mulch, come from the composts of decomposing watery compositions. Some kids are afraid to open their eyes underwater when learning to swim. The harder they hold their breath, milkfish, the tighter their faces get. To make an expressive portrait, ask a very young person to make a hold-their-breath face. Puffer fish personality is what you get, the head of a helicopter with a propeller-ish aura, the same medium in the grammatical gush as in the deep vaults, undertows of conjugation. Specific shadows on specific dates, an alignment ordered by photographic blotters to make the camera think that it is an organic agent of electroculture, gardening and discarding the additional chemicals. The oceans used to be so full of beautiful pre-life, none of this age of reality throwing us off its scent. If you can say "I" without overusing it, you might be God. Aerial view of any body of water, an angelic boredom, the truth of what becomes of the oatmeal of human foam at the request of divine form. Lens craft is when an eye breaks through the clouds. “It’s such a beautiful day!” Oh yeah, that annoying watercolor again. Shipwrecked bards, healing magicians, hands against the earth in oath. Approach the speck of feeders from the bottom up where the angle is so wide the viewer won’t notice the dry lumps of uproar, then solemnly swear like a Louisiana Pelican in love with the reliability of brown jetties. He, too, is catch, one of those mythic male beings associated with the Great Mother. Labor squat, fingers dug into the peeling, but first the surface of the language must be soaked with the tremendous slowness of prose feeling, that horrible shark of English meter. Nothing electric at the lectern, but the slideshow of photographs behind the author looks like skinned eels. Along came a well-fed diminutive spirit captured by swimming film but not one of its permanent, smart hostages. A thus reformed to remain a thus and placed in the lane where thus belongs, stationary in the position of preface, is no different from one of those photographers who thinks too much (before taking a photograph) but doesn’t move very much, physically, while taking photographs. Dry inside but not depressed, not yet. I almost married a seabed scallop, the false bottom of melancholia, the infra-red birthing process that erases then rewrites the heroes’ journey of extreme close-ups.
In the musical key of E comes carbon, and in the muscular key of G comes hydrogen, Neptune’s new economic policy, the penmanship of misty and mystic tuning. The moment it starts to rain, Skyfall, we hide our cameras in ugly fishing bags as if one drop (on the lens) is a cosmic ray, never realizing that those drops add small moments of magnification to the final image. Dew of the elements, a prosthetic device, hermetic in double vision-hood, worn on the eye. Nothing on the back of the picture because, like an arc of vibrating wisdom, pictures have no crystalized end. Next to the underground telescope known as Ice Cube, a camera with a great lens set at the right shutter speed can capture a shower of neutrinos, a celestial calamity in the water, the astral liquor the photographer loves: a burning cognitive quest, the cobalt blue of quench, all the windows of the world stained with rot. Brain food cravers, mistaking fatty fish for one of Louis Boutan’s rubber bladders. Hot water bottle in the tub of tombs. We do exactly what the atmosphere tells us to do. Our mental equipment. Under umbrellas go those protected by an outer canopy and the upward jab of the end tip, both slick as spit. Don’t be the idiot who slips in the street running with an expensive camera just to hook a flick, don’t. O, my Voyager, please don’t. The scars resulting from sound vibrating in water takes longer to heal than the voltage of philosophical pangs. I become an island when I land on my ass on solid ground. The lens itself, come to rest, is not an embarrassment. And yet, surrounded by fountains surrounded by mountains that surround found towns, I feel dry inside, de-hyped and at the end of hypnosis. I feel a stiffening, stellar by solid light. Mud lungs, stomach sand. My dramas can’t be cured by salt like meat, so much wet wood between Florida and the cigar tip of Cuba. My so-crawled “issues,” the non-shedding armor of lagoon snipes. Ghosts in the machine, a no rope nope. Ghosts in the beverage, I declare ye a yes. The right opinion, straight as orthos, hidden in the history of baptism––holy creed, parable and sacred mystery. Water is the machine, rapid and brackish. St. Estuary the holy roller, sea grays (like sinners carrying white stones) by the enchanted river. Nothing like a courtroom sketch to create media bias, medieval jurors, medicinal connivers. Cameras are a distraction, no recording of residence chambers allowed. Acoustic wave goodbye to the vocal track, the pitch of verdict, the whole jury pissed when told the human voice, song, is being replaced by instruments unable to feel through thought. Wisdom tooth sentenced to the original role of truth: chewing. Chevron geometry, zig zag watermarks, like dying serpents, sea monsters, and the little fishes of Christianity in the throat all in the name of the constant promotion for support. Your honor, his whole pose is a bluff, a chokehold, a council of Born Again(s), encore protruding. His skin does not receive the sun. It swims in reverse, the verse of earned servitude. High and low tones turned into tides, tides into time, time into the doors of secondhand touch, the never arrival of feeling. Kingdom closed; came the era of no cameras once again, pure and flowing. Mode of womb, the bloodstreams of fairies. The back of the camera is where bacteria gather, wayfarers in (well, you guessed it) Wayfarers. No way to photograph the Fae, Wray and ray, without succumbing to the Kong of empirical optimism. Pangloss and matte in a photo finish. Kingfish out getting ribs to spare. Pan loves silk like a secret. Extremely undercover and current, water may be a worse governor than alcohol. You are being watched then controlled by what you watch. Your whole culture was forced upon you then stripped from you then used to make cities to kill you like the casing stones of Giza. I haven’t felt this dry since before I was light. Due to ruah (breath, air, wind), the camera had no choice but to agree to make the human cruise, every cuisine, a slice of sexy brainwave influence. Fingers round and round the growth rings of a tree trunk, I am dizzy and I was wrong. Water is not programmable. It is not in conflict, camera in tide, with the underneath of itself. It is the programmer, a gamer, the Church Father of all metaphors, an eternal reality not a timeline.
Poet, photographer, professor and bandleader Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc. He co-founded The Dark Room Collective and The Dark Room Reading Series in 1989 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught in various Universities and published, both poems and photographs, in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015). In 2015, he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a literary free Jazz band of artists who were awarded the American Book Award for Oral Literature in 2018. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry. His latest book Crank Shaped Notes was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2021. TSE was recently named the first Photo Laureate of St. Petersburg, Florida.