Tag: beginnings

Fictional Singular Beginnings

With Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa.

Light through a lens, an entire image. It appears whole, complete. And it is, but it is also what you said: the fiction of singular beginnings.

When you added, every image is saturated, we thought you meant with meaning, and we said sure. We are big fans of your work.

––With origins, you correct us, and there you go again, making and remaking our capacity to see, and we begin to get a sense that any of the meanings we saw––anywhere, were nothing but beginnings.

***

Inspired by the essay “(W)hole” by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, appearing in the most recent issue of BOMB magazine, in which the photographer and writer reflects on some of my favorite themes. Italicized phrases are from this text.

Origin Points

About beginnings.

One problem, when it comes to beginnings, is that it is difficult to pick a point of origin when you are dealing with a substance that seems more wave-like than particular, when even if you could separate particles, there would be so many.

But it’s hard to resist trying to identify these points of emergence after the fact and harder to know how and when to jump in. Still, a wish to know and name is innate. Maybe this has something to do with pride, or a misplaced survival instinct. When I was five or six, I hatched a plan for counting raindrops. If I could isolate the amount that fell in a given measure of time before the five or six inches of my face pressed against the window, then I could multiply this number (about 15-20, I supposed) by another number to get the number of drops that fell in the square foot in front of our house in the space of––say, a breath. I measured a complete breath to be about six seconds (inhale: one two three; exhale: one two three). Then I would know what it was that was falling before me in the span of a single breath and then I would know––

Not much, apparently. But I couldn’t help myself. I needed a place to start, some foothold that would allow me to do the climbing that everyone was always talking about, except that what I saw before me was no ladder or stairs, not even a climbing wall. It was glass and falling water and the only response I ever seemed to have when it came to noticing anything, was wide-eyed awe, and it was clear that this wasn’t going to get me anywhere, not by the standards that were quickly becoming apparent. Among the adults, there seemed to be a consensus that expertise was valued above all else, and I seemed to have a natural immunity to it. This was terrifying. If I couldn’t be an expert in anything, at least I could learn to climb, I thought, so that I could manage to pass among the other climbers.

But this experiment failed. I couldn’t hold the drops in my gaze long enough to count them, not even for the space of a breath. And absolutely nothing about this solemn revelation seemed to relieve me of the pressure to find some way to begin.

Not Enough Dream

Holding on to dreams, holding on in a dream, and the question of how we are dreaming.

I used to have a friend who would ask, in all seriousness,

How are you dreaming? like that was something anybody

necessarily did. Like being made to dream meant you could.

It felt like he was asking after a dead friend.

I envied the time he had for these questions.

If not for the alarms, I might have had better answers. 

If not for the constant interruptions to the dreams I meant to live inside, 

I might have had better answers.  Not enough, I would say, 

but I remember one now.

In the dream there are two small eggs in a nest in one hand.

The other hand holds on tight to a bar above a narrow ledge.

Toes curling, too; I wait on that ledge between What and Never.

What and what? Who knows,

––eggs, nest, birds. Some imminent fall or drop implied,

I hold on. What’s next, death? An eagle? Rescue?

I wait, my grip slipping while my wrapped hand sweats.

Who else is watching these eggs? I want to know. 

No answer comes, and I am still waiting, but that

was the end of the dream.  

Still, the same answer applied to his original question,

and it was still not enough, and I was still envious of the

way that someone could take it for granted that they

might follow such visions to whatever dream message

they were aiming for before the alarm shot them, 

execution-style, as we all lined up, backs against the concrete

wall and the relentless clock above us, holding 

for the start of the next day, our tentative beginnings and

the open-air eggs we were forever trying to protect.

Before the Storm

Drunk on abundance, they weren’t ready to accept any limits. They had no practice. It was not as though there was a choice to be made, though later it would be framed as though there had been.

“Eclairs lointains” by jmbaud74 on flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivs 2.0 Generic License

Consider one beginning, how above the blue carpet of a grandmother’s living room, there had been a painting of a small boat in a storm, against a dark sky. 

Below this, on a stand, an oversized bible, the pages slightly gilded at the edges; what it meant to wonder, in this place, on a summer afternoon, back against the blue carpet, how it was that anything at all had started, how from this wonder a body might get up and walk to the book on display, turning to the beginning, and puzzling over the words, in awe of the poet’s certainty.

Only words and nothing else until a command came, and then it was Light,  and after that, the seas and the forests and the beasts and a man and after him, it is said, from a bone taken from the center of his breathing, a woman; consider learning, how she met him in the garden; consider wondering how they knew how to play, and imagining the horror of living ever after, dying to know it again, after they beheld in the center of the garden, the tree of the knowledge the limits of what they could know. Drunk on abundance, they weren’t ready to accept any limits. They had no practice. It was not as though there was a choice to be made, though later it would be framed as though there had been. In the beginning, knowing nothing but abundance, how can anyone look away when the very source is given, to taste? 

They say she bit first. Of course, she would have been the one among the branches, gathering fruit. Later she would be painted as a sinner, but how could she be anything but a child in these original days? Here, someone whispers: serpent, man, or God––in the beginning, does it matter, or is this a moment when it is possible to imagine a single hope, constant as a pulse? How it whispers, like the rustle of leaves at the edge of a branch at late afternoon, “Stay.”