Folkcal Fraim 4
The Mirrors And Races Between Potential Running Mates / TSE / 2019
Spelling is a spell, spellcraft, a way to craft sound, written and pronounced. This means that the craft of spelling and misspelling also has a visual component or its own continuous cultural literacy of signs and symbols. In what is called Black English, there are community rhetorical strategies (games and thangs) that both service and break the spells of such soundings. All tongues are witches. All words are warlocks. And, in the beginning, before the genetic rib incident, they were one. The most powerful spells come from the mouth. “Cam-mirror” (not the so-called proper “camera”) is one of many signifying ways to disrespect or denounce the Queen’s English. A slight of tongue or a linguistic sampling of geographic region, the speed of the mouth slowing down between the m, the e, the r, and the a and a looking glass is produced. A glass you look at and a glass that looks at you. The mirror is the tongue of the camera, an internal one, seeing and speaking through darkness.
If you are over 50 years old and now use a digital camera, chances are you once owned a Single Lens Reflex Camera, an SLR. And like me, you may have even taken the little league to adult learning-journey from Instamatic to Polaroid to Lomo to SLR to DSLR to Rangefinder with frequent stopovers in the medium format lands of Hasselblad and Mamiya with a few slick looking Point and Shoot cameras thrown in just to satisfy your curiosity for all things compact, shiny and modern. My first 35mm camera was a Chinon CE-4, sold to me in 1986 out of the trunk of a car on Georgia Avenue in Washington, D.C. for $40. At time I had never heard of Chinon and just assumed it was a fake Nikon but this is the cam-mirror I took to James Baldwin’s funeral in 1987. And while those images and negatives have long been lost, my so-called “photographic memory” or photographic mirror can recall, as if walking through a mental reconstruction of the virtual reality of the event, many of the photographs from that day.
The Lost Photographs / James Baldwin’s Funeral
Sometime during the 1990s, I gave them to a young editor at the Harvard Advocate who said she was working on an issue about Blackness and never heard from her or got the negatives back but hopefully they are in a file folder at the Advocate waiting for some energetic undergraduate to come along and unearth them.
1) The first few images I took were horizontal and vertical shots of the crowd standing on the steps of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. The cathedral looked like an evil spaceship eating humans — the colors of life against the architectural stone, the small humans at the base of the giant doors, rectangles with a triangular, curved tops, each sculpted to suggest the physical layers of motion or portals or dimensions, echoing inward and outward. If I had never seen a cathedral before and were born anew in its presence, I might have thought it was an energy eating machine. Every inch of it suggested feeling. Extremely hard to believe that construction on it began in 1892. The first photograph was taken in 1826. The cathedral looks like something from a much earlier (though more advanced) era.
2) Taken from the side, as she walked down the steps of the Cathedral, alone, was a photograph of Dr. Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow, in a beautiful brown fur coat, carrying one of those medium size purses that you see women digging into as if they are bottomless. Visually this was not the Betty Shabazz who looked like she could have been cast as Beneatha in A Raisin in the Sun (1961) but a more Madame C.J. Walker-esque Shabazz on her way to embodying, perhaps, the presence of Mary McLeod Bethune. Her purse did not swing from her arms by the straps. Whatever was in it anchored her and she anchored it leaving yet another funeral. It barely moved.
3) Pretending not to be scared and trying not to be disrespectful, I quietly positioned myself directly in front of Max Roach and Cicely Tyson, who were standing next to each other but seemingly having the kind of conversation where neither of them was looking at the other. They each looked more distinguished, more real, than I had ever seen either of them look on a record or in the unreality land of TV. I don’t recall Roach in a suit just something casual with a nice coat, not too heavy. The thing I remember the most about the image are Tyson’s fly-ass shades and how, standing next to Roach, she looked a bit like a spirit kin of Miles Davis. I raised my camera, silently and slowly, in a manner that was very respectful of the moment. One snap then I bowed, slightly, in gratitude, and moved away from them.
4) There was a sequence of images of Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou. One of the images from the sequence survived and was scanned from the negative to a digital file and has been circulated widely on the internet, often (as is the practice) without a photographer’s credit. It was taken after the ceremony, during the procession from the cathedral while Angelou, Baraka, and Morrison had all stopped to watch Baldwin’s casket. Two of the pallbearers leaving the cathedral with Baldwin’s body were Davids, David Baldwin (Baldwin’s brother) and David Dinkins, a future Mayor of New York City (1990–1993). Two Davids leaving the house of a giant carrying the small, loved body of a giant. I didn’t recognize or have time to identify the faces of the other pallbearers. Twice I snapped the casket coming down the stairs. Both were overexposed. I was distracted. I knew the newspaper photographers and freelancers were all, also, getting this same shot with better cameras than mine so I tried to get closer than them. Somewhere there has to be a photograph (or a negative) of me kneeling between the other photographers and the pallbearers carrying Baldwin’s body. If not, it certainly exists in the cam-mirror in my mind. While making my photograph, I felt myself being pushed into all of their photographs, every angle. I could hear myself being framed, very quickly and I remembered (and could feel) Angelou, Baraka, and Morrison behind me to the right. I retreated, turned, trying to get close. I only had one lens, the 50mm that came with my cheap Chinon. Angelou seemed to do the most public mourning, her face changing temperature and muscular shape with every shot and set of tears. Morrison’s expression was neutral, a sort of soft masonry. Her hair, a pre dreadlocks feathered bouquet but not very high and there was so much living literacy, the light of race, in her eyes as she anchored the taller and sobbing Angelou. I tried to angle myself to get them together, alone, without Baraka but couldn’t. They looked like women who (maybe) called each other “Sis.” Of the three, physically, Baraka had the most Baldwin in him and appeared closest to a smile and the closest to being the holder of a sly secret, something wisely funky but easily identifiable as old school hip — like maybe he had made a deal, pre-funeral, to have a drink of new ideas with Jimmy (the name he used to eulogize Baldwin) in Harlem after the ceremony. If you’ve ever wondered what Stagger Lee wondered, well, the new Stagger Lee wonders what they would have said to each other, in Harlem, after surviving such a titanic as the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine.
5) Sometimes the act of taking a photograph is so powerful that the actual content of the image becomes a part of reality and the photographer, in turn, enters the realm of the image. You don’t have to wait until the image is developed by a lab because the mind develops it first in its mental chamber. St John the Divine contains an antechamber, a poet’s corner, and lighting that creates an anti cam-mirror energy. The mental chamber of a photographer has the ability to time travel just a little bit to the moment before the reality becomes a photograph. Of course, this is an act of imagination but it is also an active response to the unfolding events taking place within the photographer’s will to view. Stored within the photographer’s organic chamber are the souls of all of the pictorial scenarios, still and motion, he or she has ever encountered. The photographer never feels the weight or burden of them but their presence within this picture reservoir acts like a lightning-quick rule book or guardian of the aesthetic every time the camera is raised and the cam-mirror is entered. I asked myself that day on the steps where had I seen a version of this scene before? Is this what’s missing from the Odessa Steps scene of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin? Where was I in history, in what preface? Was I acting? The actors in Eisenstein’s film did not seem to be acting. What world was that, what world is this if not that one? Turning away from the dispersing crowd, toward the cathedral, I saw an elderly woman dressed in all black being carried down the stone stairs in a wheelchair. The woman was James Baldwin’s mother, her hand shielding her face. There were black men on each side of the chair, lowering her from the heights of the Cathedral through mourners who were all being middle-managed by their small, holy roles as admiring empathizers and followers of the fallen. She was the very low tear moving down the face of the day. After the ceremony (ceremony is the mirror of money), after Odetta made the entire narthex weep, after a recording of Baldwin singing “Precious Lord Take My Hand” unlit every tall cathedral candle, the funeral was still not real for me until I kneeled on the steps of the cathedral and pushed the little button at the top of my camera as Mrs. Emma Berdis (Baldwin) Jones rolled into my lens in sorrowful triumph.
• • •
I’ve always wished that I had been using a Rangefinder instead of a SLR that day on the steps of the cathedral but since there is no such thing as a SLR Rangefinder, my human sight, complete with farsightedness and astigmatism in the right eye, had to do. SLRs contain mirrors. Rangefinders do not. The word camera means chamber. When a judge asks to see council in his chambers, He is saying step into my camera where the mirrors of law (land, air, water) operate (in a different format) to create a mirage, the illusion of justice and injustice. The mirror of verdict is abracadabra. Language is a cross between a belief system and a behavior manual. And the spell cast by any word has the potential to create a world or a body of an ultra sound. When you look into a mirror, you assume that you are seeing a silent image or realm, a copy minus sound. He who hears what occurs in a mirror is hearing the beginning of the other side of eternity. You assume, too, that the sound you are hearing is all yours. Cameras (or Cam-mirrors) hide and protect the sound of the other world from the sound of this world. Where ear accuracy is concerned, under or in water is akin to in or behind glass. Not a single one of the people on a roll of film can communicate with one another until after they are re-developed and nothing that stands in a mirror or sits for a portrait is facing itself. The mirror of portrait is portal. The mirror of manual is mugshot.
Mug is slang for face or a certain type of face, a certain look. Baldwin had a great mug. The world is still deciding if his public mug was a mean mug or a moderate mug. His smile contained a cathedral but his laughter was not a choir. English is an insufficient translator of Black laughter. Within the tradition, Chester Himes comes the closest to expressing its multi-purpose sonic uses. He is also, like Baldwin, one of the few Black Writers (at least to this photographer’s eye) to use his author photo to attempt something of a mean-mug to his white readership. A person who mugs (as in makes an intimidating facial expression) is said to be mean mugging and thugs who try to bully you are often called Mugsy. In the coffee and tea world, a mug can be poured into. Open at the top, as if scalped, some mugs have faces and can be poured into and drunk from. What ritual has us drinking from heads that hold liquid? Can this be shaped into a metaphor for reading? An author’s photo is a bit of a fake mugshot. A mugshot is a bit of a fake author’s photo. A traditional mugshot contains clones, twins, a body double, a dynamic duo. A traditional mugshot contains running mates. Who has not seen the word ug or ugly in mug shot, who has not considered the duality of the opposing voices on each of our shoulders and in each of our ears? The word meme contains running mates. The mirror of meme is milk. And, like milk, male and female milk, memes are alive.
Pictorially, a running mate is the person you are standing next to, facing you. It can be someone else — a twin (identical or fraternal), a sibling, a double — or another image of you as in a mugshot. To some extent (at least in sound) mate means match, A running mate, mate meaning match, runs next to you and gets in the way of the other runners so that you can win the race that’s not really a race. Your running mate is your ace in a well-dealt hand. Without a fairly decent mirror, there can be no running mate. There can be no ticket, no final kick, no stretching out across the finish line. Aided by the wind or atmosphere, a pairing makes a win. Note: there are two wings, V(s), in the word victory but one has been clipped and the other has a lower stem. Despite the little ‘lit” within it, a man or woman with feathers growing from his or her back or ankles has absolutely no use in this world for Equality. The field of runners has no depth. The length of the reach of the race is, by design, limited. It is as fixed as the most expensive lens. The mirror of lens is legs. This is what the campaign ticket, made of shot smiling mugs, knows. The mugshot wants to be a Wanted Poster. The Wanted Poster wants to be a Campaign Poster. Both want to be wanted by the viewer and both contain subjects that contain within their gaze a thirst for the frame-escape of freedom. Ever notice how certain civil rights leaders look very comfortable in their Police mugshots? Comfortable, clean and not an ounce of fear in the portrait. Self-thrown into the flames of a relentless American racial fire (as we all know they were), one might wonder why we have also seen very few photographs (especially in color) and mugshots of any of them with bloody noses and swollen eyes, etc. Surely, they exist. The mirror of fire is blood but the mirror of fear is split evenly, top half and lower half, between faith and fight. Many Civil Rights mugshot portraits look as if they were photographed by Richard Avedon, Baldwin’s High School classmate at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx.
No one actually sits for a portrait and the image of the subject is just one of the components of the exchange that creates an unseen portal, one that is not complete until the viewer makes a connection with the other two openings of the image. The is the opening of the subject, the opening of the photographer and the opening of the viewer. What is lost in a portrait, to the eye (anatomically), is regained via these various portals which is why, perhaps, the last opening, the changing gaze of the viewer is the most important one within the construction of the photographic portal. Sitting, let’s say, after a few minutes, for a photograph or a painting, becomes something of a farce, externally, and something of an opportunity, internally, to move (in terms of motion) as much as possible without the cam-mirror knowing or, the sitter believes, having visual access to the constant activity escaping, in a portrait through the eyes and the other pores and orifices that make slight gesture and muscular expression. There is so much (theory) about the importance of the use of light in photographic portraiture but the truth is when it comes to the face, light is just bait. Its purpose is to lure living movement from the sitter into stillness and into the image. No one sits. The mirror of motion is image. Still Photography is full of inner life lured into a larger inner life. The mirror of inner is cosmos not intellectual, although it is the intellect that seeks to widen the inner not knowing that the inner is already wide and cannot be widened unless it escapes its own infinity. The mirror of infinity is life.
A cathedral is no more carved and chiseled than a camera or a human body is. However, some statues look 3-D printed from real people. There’s no lens between the viewer and the object, no invisible distortion. cathedrals, with their reoccurring moments of sculpture, look cast not carved. Those of us who are learning to read beyond the limitations of written language, to become completely literature — beyond Discipline — have also begun to demand that history either match what we were taught in school or offer us more accurate alternatives or truthful narratives in categories other than race. Race is not, not really a construct (as lazy intellectuals like to say), but it is the biggest (body) cover story ever perpetuated on our anti-modern civilization. It was impossible for me, standing in St John the Divine, holding a camera at the crowded crossing, to not wonder why such a figure of protest was lying in a huge and glorious cathedral unless, of course, it was not a huge and glorious cathedral but something else. The mirror of voice is vibration. The mirror of modern is muddy (but not necessarily made of dirt and water) but this won’t make any sense unless you can look through a camera and, first, accept that the mirror of almanac is thalamus.
Baldwin, I thought, should have been in a little black church whose pastor preaches truth to power. Why was he leaving us here and taking with him “our love for him.” Translation: “the energy we transferred to him.” Long before Egypt melted, the Pharaohs gathered energy from this life for the afterlife in the same way. The mirror of life is infinity. This is what the camera cannot communicate, spiritually, unless it contains a certain grade of mirror or glass mind. A mirror is a form of AI more potent than its imitator, the censor.
Like the use of black and white and color film to reset or control the mood of history, perhaps, nowadays, with so many digital filters, we are being shown that the texture of reality is interchangeable and (despite all of our learned notions of nature and paradise), multi-seasonal. With the proper digital filter, I can manipulate the appearance of the sky and the clouds. I can enhance the conversation between them with just enough contrast to allow the viewer to eye-eavesdrop on an essential conversation between a major Massa and a major servant of our realm. With Photoshop, I can show you a time before clouds and a time before the moon. I can remove the map of the entire earth from its surface of lunar light and replace it with anything I want. The mirror of digital is almighty. Rereading Camera Lucida and Mythologies, I wondered how Roland Barthes would have responded to the burning of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, what hellish empire of signs and symbols might he have discovered in the event and the tunnels of historical bones running beneath it. Would he have read a few sentences of this and added, “Mais chère, TSE, avec toute votre formation au compteur, vous avez manqué l’évaluation du miroir le plus important de tous: le miroir d’Osiris est Isis.”
Imagination
Imagination
creates the situation,
and, then, the situation
creates imagination.
It may, of course,
be the other way around:
Columbus was discovered
by what he found.
James Baldwin
Do cameras copy or create the realms we exit and enter? The answer to this question is probably one of scale, not the scale of sight but the physical size of the traveler within the knowable space. That sound that your camera makes when the lens zooms forward is the sound (or language) of knowable space being moved through. The lens cast a spell on the eye and the eye, in turn, casts a spell on the mind. The mirror of mind is master. Place your camera on a table or floor and surrounded it with such items as paperclips, erasers, pencils, thumbtacks, a thimble, keys, cotton ball, tweezers and maybe even a travel-size tube of toothpaste, then using your imagination, close your eyes and shrink yourself to a size that would make each of those objects your physical superior so much so that they appear to have, let’s say, the power to communicate some religious significance to what you perceive as the existence and windows of your soul. Look up at and into, as much as possible, each object — the camera being, by far, the largest, larger than ten temples. Enter the camera through the lens while at the same time, someone who is still the size you used to be and who cannot find you in the room, turns out the light thinking no one is there but you are there in the narthex, in the nave, in the transept and in the towers. You notice this, this new and vast darkness, and you shout out loud and every time you speak, there is light, light that lasts like the grammar of flashcubes diagramming themselves in the chevettes. The mirror of small is savior. And, as small as you are, you realize the cam-mirror was never a camera any more than the cathedral was ever just a church. They were both power plants and sound machines (the mirror of stomach is machine store) and they will stay that way until you grow smaller and undetectable by all of their looking glass tech looking back.
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.