Folkcal Fraim 5
Recognizable Symbolism / Brooklyn, New York / TSE / 2013
In 2012, as an experiment of intuition and a sort of photographic sight-trust (or new sight discovery) exercise, I took off my eyeglasses and made a series of images using only what I perceive to be my natural, flawed eyesight. Full retina disclosure (not a portrait): I have my mother’s eyes. They are brown. I am far-sighted with an astigmatism in my left eye. I have a dark brown, raspberry-ish mole on the lower eyelid of that same eye, near where the lashes begin to talk themselves into becoming wings. My lashes, I was once told, are long for a man. In recent years, the mole has varied in size but only slightly. Tri-lateral hot air balloon. Geodesic Bundt Cake, soft as Epcot. A miniature Mount Meru above the eye above a middle age pyre, measuring instruments unfinished. Blame diet, blame the birth of Buckminster Fuller, blame mood. It looks like the lumpy, border patrol man who would not let me photograph him as I crossed into Juarez, Mexico from El Paso, Texas in 2007. When I touch it, I feel nothing but I have often wondered what it feels when touched, minus noticeable weight, sectioned in its own soft, terra firma, sitting (or sewn) like an owl (or a satellite) above a half-exposed globe, the wet eye, or inverted crater where the skin makes a choice to either evolve into black feertype or pass through the pillars of Hercules. Feathers belong to the Book of Genesis. Skin, Gas Burst Agitation. I doubt that it was a tower or a towering inferno, but in the micro world of uncomposed blur, this mole must be as enormous as one of the melted tree stumps of Babel. Buried beneath every well-focused photograph are the ingredients of a chemical oxidation, the conversion from roll of film to realm of matter, non-numerical as the quantum fabric of Mercury, the disagreement etched in daguerreotype, exposing the basic lack of unified reality.
As much seer as seen, some photographs guide the world back to itself by pulling the world apart then putting it back together very quickly but not quicker than the minds of our eyes (not our brains) can perceive. To look at a photograph and see more than (or other than) the photographer saw is to be a seer. A seer knows where to look and when simply by always looking as if see is never-ending. A seer’s eyesight has no limit despite the limit imposed on human eyesight. All of the methods and photographic equipment used by a seer exist within the body of the seer’s Noise Power System. A seer is more than an operating system. To a seer, a blur is the equivalent of food. The physical head of man is the forefather of modern photography. The external tools of photography, the apparatus that make apparition available to aperture and that make aperture a portal between variants, visual variations, are only useful when attached to the dot org of organic life. A seer need never aim outward because the goal of the seer, internally, is not to end the act of realization. Focusing (or a visual finish) is not the goal of the inward seer. The inward seer receives and communicates its message by the mixture of a mess, messing around, messing up, the arranging and rearranging of texture, light and the surface of time (not time as we have been taught or time as we have fallen into or time that has fallen into us). By stopping motion, the inward seer is able to offer the viewer a chance to pull apart the stuff of material of the world as well as the organizational properties of the mysteries of the pictorial organism. All photographs contain mysterious missteps. An inward seer does not fully trust the camera and in so much as he or she is not a creator of self and cannot truly differentiate between man-made and made man, he or she prefers the look and odor of over-development and over-exposure to the educational and industrial purposes of an overhead projector. The Inward Seer is a surgeon in the cave, cavity, crater in service of the Creator and the will of the creation. They both think in terms of a Beauty that is complete, despite, and complemented by aging.
To determine the age of a photograph by the era or year it was taken, is to do a great disservice to reality, real reality, not museum reality. Museum Reality is the conquest-timeline of things taken from the mind and body of mankind by mankind and organized into viewable fashion or a linear intellectualization of history in order to keep mankind operating “in” the image of those whose image it was created in. This “in” (along with the “in” of “in good health”) are perhaps the two most important “ins” in the English language. I apologize to those who would include “in love” but the keeping of time within an image is a very different thing than the keeping of time in the place (or frame) where an image is kept. We’ve been given a clock but not the clocks within the clock. Missing spirals replaced with the little circles (rings) of seconds, minutes and hours. Believe it or not, they are all the same word for silence. Let me ask: is there a photo-less, literary event more irony-loud than the imagined sound of Fortunato drinking from a bottle of De Grave in The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe? Closeup, medium shot, or long shot, which would you attempt if you were standing near Montresor, a shutterbug among bones, the hold-all of horror, shooting around the height of a vengeful masonry? To be created “in the image” and to be created “in the image of” are not the same thing. The age of a photograph is always older than the age of photography. The latter is a wrinkled container with healthy bones and the former depends on the quality of the skin of light. Having been lied to about travel, pattern and brilliance, the ultimate question of blurring is, “Does light age?” Blur light burns without the assistance of fire and unlike an oil or oral painting, it bleeds without losing blood. Photographic composition, memory-solid, does not decompose with time.
To get to the primordial truth of any representation of reality, the substance from which the form emerges must be willing to disobey the laws that frame the integrity of likeness. One must instinctively obey the phenomena of flow not geometry. To get to the cell lives of a picture, its bright source, the focusing hand must seek out the stain of interest at the center of the field in front of the photographer. First dial, light motif, light meter. A return to the print embossing of ageless illuminance, the pre-research of shadow work, why, because our insistence on foundations of artistic agreement (being able to identify and move through darkness) has made us susceptible to the contaminants of lifelike portraiture, the artifice of perfect knowing. A blur, the lure of a next level pre-blues, is so “ignant” (vernacular for ignorant), so integrated to grey, that it is more elemental than any named recognizable form or unit of natural design. The soil in the solvent of an unfocused image is an elixir, not a Xerox, scratch-proof energy, scratch-proof origin, a portable road in the opposite direction of perfect vision, the visor of the sun’s square foot retina, an additive transparency any boy can make one of his legs look like one and ride through.
An exploration of the photographic limits of my own sight, several narrators mean a severed perspective, all eyes on the green table, racked in an unlit Totalitarianism like a model of camera-ready baby formula, the human figure at the center of the class, parallel warfare, my own private room of acoustic challengers all awaiting a black ball, the two vertical eyes of an 8, group poetry with a broken lens, a hall of men charged with the meaning of a pool stick, the sound of sight being broken into by flashback and rolling in many directions, like a roll of acrobats governed by sprockets, a rotating first person, Boll’s Billiards, the solid colors of livelihood, sharp sharks and gun cam hustlers, becoming fuzzy, the edge of one thing confiscating the edge of another thing. Did the player forget to call a pocket? Chalk on the stick means chalk in the eye, faint background, light-headed foreground, beast and lamb. Did someone by the spinning paperback rack place a bet, worth shooting a show horse for? Wired to eyes, skin blurs differently in color than it does in black and white. Bruce Davidson’s circus clown, the cigarette smoke moving the wrong way through pores.
Blur Boy Triple Bypasses Recognizable Symbolism
1. Solarization
As if any of us
is the age of our bodies
or anything more than erupting wetness
from a substance
composed of
the electrical sweat in sweetness,
a spark on a sheet of paper
beneath an eye,
both soaked in solution
but not
something
that can solve or so love the world
back to word,
the visual equator of tension
between vowels
a rash-like sound
like an itch of atoms,
scratched and salved into the meat of meaning,
and carbon
and catchlight
and categories of belief,
I be life and life be like
exposed tissue,
throat slick
and unable to fly
away from dangerous situations like the gelatin layers of home
where ink on the spectrum
is a flesh-desperate speech
of absorbent cork,
so sayeth the self-maker
of all rapid winding systems,
including the wind,
recently known for fleeing the concrete poverty
of plate changing.
Film packs.
Half-tone blocks.
Filter bags.
2. Hypo Eliminator
The world’s youngest lyric relic
in photographic captivity
gauges the fuse
of himself
by way of refusal,
by way of not entering the ring of arc,
acid and transport,
or becoming solid
in the gamma weather
of spirit,
legged as a needle,
surfer, skater, scooter,
mobile chestpod and monopod,
the unfinished volume of re-screening
not its residue
of retouching.
The speed midget bulb that comes
into the camera as a boy,
avoiding firing delays and stray dogs,
then departs as the symmetrical reflex focusing
of all symbolism
like one of
the large-scale alphabets
of salvation,
swinging from
the necklace of a tree.
Daylight loading tanks.
The great oak
of distortion.
Wall-hung like a seed gone
to an opening
in an art gallery
because the birth of all black boys,
blurred or buried,
must be known
to the state.
3. Flying Spot Scanner
Dichroic Fog, a bloom.
Fog level, the end of density,
degraded.
UV, Blu-ray, blur.
It won’t reproduce.
Having dug
into the lucid fire
of digital printing,
of watermark, one never develops
(without fear of incarceration)
an appreciation
for Brodsky's New York City Police Department flashlight,
the authoritative tone
of fiat lux.
Lyin’ ass Gemini,
not a lion just a lynx
beamed
by electrons.
It won’t reproduce,
no way to photocopy a cathode,
image down,
supercooled liquid
protective of whites and moving light.
Glauber’s Salt.
Depth of feeling aside,
every diffusion transfer,
is the enemy
of single-sidedness and summer,
sterilized in the sanitizer
of contact sheets,
of contact tracing,
of splicing
the dimensional stability of cloud consciousness,
heaven as a hive,
artificially carried through time
to upload us.
Gateway, getaway,
grainy utopia.
Like the wedding photographer of camera walks, without any eyewear, I took to the streets with nothing but energy, frequency and vibration. I put my glasses in a hard case in my square, well-worn leather satchel. I hate backpacks. My view of backpacks is that they are for college professors, students and children, same as buttoned collared shirts. Cones in the retina, a high discrimination of color. Camera more against face than in hand, the metal felt like autumn. No prescription, no plan, yet curiously hesitant about everything I approached and everything that approached me, sonograms and the x-rays or the map (of our realm) on the face of the moon came to mind which also made me think of Calvino’s “stretching towards the earth like the drip of a candle.” I allowed myself to bump into people, always an “Excuse me” ready. The magnetic aid of an overcast sky, pictorial refraction. I dripped through the streets in search of the place where photographs make a lux alum of chrome. I passed a hardening bath in front of grand public library, walked-up the stairs toward its giant doors (or doors for giants) and turning away took the image, a blur, that appeared on the cover of Spencer Reece’s The Road to Emmaus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). Abundantly possessed with illumination, the light source within this photograph presents a sacred intensity, one I might have turned away from had I been properly protected by the limits of prescribed eyewear.
Since everything is surrounded by air, all photographic views are aerial, aerial and of service to more than observation. An observation is the visual equivalent of a conversation. A conversation is the oral equivalent of an observation. A city block, a snap shot. Halogen holes. At most, the atmosphere is full of heat recording portfolios, Observation decks, a platform for photography. The decks of ships, the decks of empires like state buildings, washing soda. Haze or no haze, no one has ever taken a perfectly focused photograph of the sky. Thus, a draft of writing (the drive from blur to book) should contain the equivalent of the various chemicals used in photography, the ones that need special care, the poisons. In “The Laboratory,” Robert Browning might as well be describing (with lyric instruction) the substance of a blur, “Grind away, moisten and mash up thy paste,”. In Photography, there are two types of poisons. Those only sold by chemists and those sold by authorized sellers. A camera walk is a kind of container, unnamed, unlabeled. Its spontaneity does not fall under the jurisdiction of pharmacopoeia or codex. A blur should contain graph, grid and ground. It should look like it just escaped a glass bottle chased by elegant apostrophes.
The boy in the photograph is pre spirit level, a balancing act of upright swimmer and summer, the acceptance angle of a non-limiting device, or a rock. Traveling through centuries of cement, he is one of the trees that line the street. The perfect key tones of his arms steer him out of the age of balloons and kites, no faults identified in the calibration. Tank top, shorts, white tube socks, all dissolving into the invisibility of technique. Depth and lustre not a factor, not an exhibition print, no beeswax. If he knows anything, he knows that all things are eye level and that our eyes are mini gyroscopes. If you are looking at the photograph, the boy is the center of your gyroscope. Each of us has a built-in level––level marker, horizon, created by our eyes not by a line between land and sky or by stalking birds in the open. It is determined by height, tilting and pivoting accessories, eyeballs on a line. A kid shaped like a re-tensioned scale, aleph and tau, posing the sitter in particles of water vapor while the flywheel cometh like the tones of the lower sky darkened by psychological opacity. Facial features lost in the newsreel-like soup. Mineral hydrocarbons, the bitumen known as asphalt organized to sparkle. Out of a box of film, out of a plastic, can of human storage comes a Celestial boy. No cast iron core only the pan and tilt head of agreement, a vertical panorama.
A blur is the evidence there is a way to the sun, a way to those who live there. A way to those who weaken when we weaken. A blur is an anti-event, the ever-ready peeling of language from landscape. If you gaze at the sun in its lower positions of sunrise or sunset, it will make a negative-like hole on the retina that leads back to your inner sun and the mind of God. This portal, and navigating it, is the true purpose of the afterlife of art. It is not the false or Falstaff or fallen staff or towering Eiffel lie one is offered after the closed eye examinations of death. The eye of the ear of the eye of the earth never closes and cannot be incorporated. It is a convex cluster of interlocking bubbles and stray light due to leaks, flare and scattering. Everything in this process, this enlarging of the heart, is torn from the fabric of the unfocused things on the other side of the stages of focusing which is merely a form of visual fermentation. Formlessness or formalin, each a solution to the problem of complex waveforms: blur to arrive, blur to survive. A strategic morphing of eras. Reality as a form of readership. Readership as a form of reliable cargo, the bodies where worlds are stored, an archival climate of storage. Frozen film, freeze frame. Blur Boy emerges from a block of hot ice like a Nasopharyngeal swab and defeats the cicadas hired to report back to the CDC. One might use the focal lengths of language, vows to el included, to share a new way of dismantling mandates, a removal of cloth, a reduction of masking. Glazed by lab squeegeeing, Blur Boy wants to be boxer, letterboxed. El is God (or a god), same as “it’s all good” even when it’s not, even when there is no evidence of an Almighty in the photosensitive plastic where much post blur flammability occurs while worshippers of new glass are constantly referring to pictures as plates as cartels (or congregations) of madness
make mental shipments, velvet along the edges of the light trap, containing the description, cause and treatment of images that lack details. Nothing worth learning can live within a sentence that does not contain rapid processing. Rapid processing is to prose as line breaks are to poetry. An intimate familiarity with the fixed names, procedures and purpose of ownership, criminally or copywritten, creates the limitations we encounter when trying to force or bring into focus a filter-less version of the external world. The lantern of nature, a slideshow of how lids prevent the effects of prism showering. Blur Boy makes it rain because the rain is instructional. Red is not fire. Yellow is, the former color of the sun. Blind, not eyeless, the internal world is infinite (in a fiery net) and eternal as the infinity of night, a sort of aqua fortis, dead in the water of a maritime monobath for black and white conflict. Outward boy perishing, inward boy renewing day-by-day.
Like an average drop of splendor, minim again. An avoidance of mottle, buckle brush. Alphabets from the stars are spells, inaugural and incandescent, hand signs included. Blur as a negative carrier of permanence. Wading through a framed tube of luminous flux like a dialog floating on the vitreous fluid of fireflies, a narrow gate of pearls, variants of light and electricity both altering life, the moment before an image makes a deal with a rectangle to be represented by words, it must have already proved there is no such thing as the lap of time or an infra-red horizon. It must not scare children who have no church basement to hide in with tintype tales of hell. It must not flare, flash or half-peak near a photo album. Unless it contains content, emulsion highlights, that cannot be proven, prose will never fully curse out the real foe. It will always be a snowflake faker, a synchro-sun unaware of fill-in ratios like: an eclipse is a kiss, a file of eyes not lips, shot in raw, a representation of a nitty gritty reality with a life-wish to return to dirt. Optic disc, bowing to rain. Cable release, brain sand. Blur Boy was once an upside down child posed in nourishing placenta. Before I catalogued him, his blood was dust. The new meanings in these phrasings and their phases are designed to roll and re-roll the film till it is too heavy for the chambers of the hand-held mind, yet another cube within a cube in the palm of a medium (photography) that has become something of a public villain, a spiritual awakening disguised as telephoto trauma. Know that I pulled my face apart developing this; I even reduced it to a pool of rubbery, dot matrix distortion, a mixture of varnish and glossies I applied (with a lens cloth) to gradients of sightlessness then I sat alone, juxtaposed between the polarizing shadows of pigment, and ruined a few dimensions, where my eyes (spinning on a forehead tripod) are the sun and the moon above my heart lit in candle power.
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.