Notes on shadows in time.
A white screen waits at the drive-in, illuminated promises unknown. Give me the absent past, someone whispers, and a stream of yesterdays flow in. A scene, the bodies in it, may be utterly artificial. Once photographed, they become real. To the tall silhouette waiting in the hallway, absent the rush: sing in praise of shadow in the empire of light.
***
Inspired by the photography of Hiroshi Sugimoto and also his Coffin of Light.
These growing beyonds.
An old problem: how to phrase
the far-away steeples.
How to abandon a conversation
made of one part memory
and the other projection?
Which time is it now, the world
of memory or the procession
of days marching to the iron-fisted clock?
What grows beyond the window over there,
and who has a mirror?
Let’s shine it by the opening buds, a signal
to ourselves and our aboves:
Look, here.
***
The opening line references Marcel Proust’s recollection of the twin steeples of Martinville.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and––
Show me a straight line in nature. And yet, this insistence on the fastest means from point A to point B. Not to mention, the idea of this continuum: Then, Now, Tomorrow. As if.
Well, there is the horizon, as seen from anywhere on water.
Touché.
Come to think, it was the seafaring people, wasn’t it, who so ardently embraced the linear alphabets and syllogisms and systems for organizing space?
True. Inland, its all curves and oases, mountains and arabesques, and everywhere space fracturing into its heavens and black holes, not to mention time and alphabets, and when the temple veil tears the shelter from the old masters, so do notions of antiquity shift away from what is solidly past to include what also was dreamed and may yet be, and there we are in it, singularities before our own consciousness and the moment among us, these mortals chanting to our own heartbeats and also to the the origins of time, insisting at each beginning, World without end.
