I diverge slightly; this is not a photo of a photo but a photo of a showbill. I was living in Manhattan. I had a small apartment on 36th Street between Fifth and Sixth. The apartment was in a four story walk-up tucked between two larger buildings. On the ground floor there was a very busy deli with its own entrance. I don’t recall going in there a single time, though I must have. The closer I came to leaving the city, the fonder I became of it. I went alone to events, as if practicing for the day when everything around me would be unfamiliar. I walked the few blocks to the Macy’s July Fourth Fireworks display, lavishly staged on the East River. In pre-September 11th New York, viewers were free to go as near as we wanted. Cracks of sound banged against buildings on both sides of the narrower streets. At the river’s edge, light and color exploded overhead like Close Encounters of the Third Kind come true. I went to museums, the theater, as often as possible. I was like some rabid tourist with a dire need for overstimulation. In AAAH OUI GENTY!, there is a puppet, described by John Corry (whose NY Times review I liked enough to clip inside the showbill) as “A Pierrot who looks uncomfortably like an unborn child, despite his floppy clown’s clothing...” The puppet realizes it is strung at the shoulders, neck, and wrists. Corry writes how the puppet “stares mournfully at the puppeteer. He is mournful because he is being manipulated,” Corry writes, “which tells us something about the nature of despondency.” The puppeteer, I remember, was way at the top of the stage, where long, dark curtains dropped from a height of at least fifteen feet, covering the entire back of the stage. The puppet, to see who was holding the strings, had to crane his head back and up. I remember this part of the play moving slowly as the puppet came to his realization and then made a decision, but I can’t say that memory is true. I know the section concluded with the puppet cutting all the strings and collapsing to the floor. I don’t remember if there was music. I don’t remember if the people around me, all strangers, cried out. I hope they did, and I with them.
Soeur Caritas and I became friends one summer at an academic program in literature. As a non-practicing Jew, I didn't know quite what to make of her. Soeur Caritas was in France on a scholarship. She was from Burundi. Her country was dangerous, she told me. She had been jailed there several times for political reasons. One night, we were strolling Avignon’s balmy, crowded streets and a homeless man caught at her robe and told her he was suffering. He asked her to pray for him. He spoke slowly, his French easy to understand. She told him he didn’t need her prayers; she asked him to pray for her. After we moved on, I told her her answer had surprised me. She said she believed the man would help himself more if he stopped thinking of himself and offered her help instead. I left Avignon a few weeks earlier than Soeur Caritas. She’d admired my oversized tote bag, and I left it with her. I also had a device I’d purchased there to kill the mosquitoes that swarmed our rooms. It looked like a night light and plugged into the wall socket. It came with pink paper inserts that stank of chemicals. The mosquitoes were tiny, but loud and insistent; they buzzed your ears all night, making it impossible to sleep. I used the device sparingly, weighing sleep against the inhalation of toxins. I asked Soeur Caritas whether she wanted it and she did. She gave me her photo. We exchanged addresses. We stayed in touch via mail until I didn’t hear from her.
How do we get from here to there? Does Point A fling itself toward Point B? Is Point B unaware? This photo was taken in West Virginia. I was standing in the doorway of a cabin, shooting out. The evening before, three of us sat in these chairs, just talking. I was in graduate school; the other two had just finished college. Each chair is different, and I liked that for the photo. This particular print was a test strip. The differences in exposure time account for how the image goes from darker to lighter. Point A and Point B are designations. How do we get from there to here?
The photo wasn't taken in Brooklyn but the memory it triggers was. Several blocks from the first floor apartment in the two-story, attached brick rowhouses where I grew up, there was a magical garden that both lured and repelled me. A neat array of vegetables, brightly flowering plants, lush bushes, swaying grasses, the garden was the size of at least three of our cement backyards. It lay at the bottom of an incline like a sunken rectangular paradise at the back end of one of the rare, single-family, homes. It seemed a different species from the repeating squares of thorny barberry hedge and patchy lawn that comprised our front yards. I walked alone to the magnificent garden, only a handful of times. I never saw anyone tending it and never saw it go from soil-turning to seedling. It spoke to me, but, having no context for its language, I couldn’t understand what it was saying.
The photo was taken just outside Philadelphia. Drawn initially by the family framed by river (barely visible in this iteration) and trees, it was only later, printing the negative and varying the exposure time, that I saw that behind the family was a doll; above, a child in the branches; between, a stairway pointing at a dot of light. By nine, all I wanted was mystery. Mystery in the books I read, in the stories I wrote, in the movies and television I watched. One day, we found scraps of paper outside and tried to stitch secrets from their words. What were we looking for? If I had to guess, exclamation and explanation.
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