It’s more difficult for me to capture an intentionally out-of-focus and backlit portrait in service of Winter Obscura than it is to get a clear, well-lit shot. All efforts for artifice. All in the name of grit and raw reality – and all in vain. By the time I got it to anywhere near a natural, on-the-fly catch, it was already a pose – a pretense – an assembled portrait. After fifty years of artifice, it’s all I know now. And maybe that makes it more real than not posing.
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have an image.
This winter was supposed to tear all that down, and all that I find is more layers of protective artifice, more distance, more removal from the moment at hand. In trying to catch up to myself, I’ve only given advance warning and the opportunity to escape, right under my own nose. Mr. Oud has nothing on me; he was quicksilver, I am light. And shadow. And an unfixed heavenly body dangling far in the distance, and moving further away the closer I sense I’m getting to myself.
What if I never catch up?
More frightening, what if I do?
It’s not as easy to lose yourself as you might think. It’s like playing yourself in chess or checkers.
It takes years, it takes effort, it takes repetition and commitment to the process. It takes a reckoning and a ravaging, and a certain penchant for self-destruction and utter annihilation – neither simple to authentically effectuate. And when you do, when you finally attain the state and status of being lost, all you want to do is find yourself again.
