Introduction
Dear reader,
Welcome to the first issue of my newsletter! I’ve spent numerous years writing, but haven’t really shared a whole lot. Now, I’m trying to collect my pieces, be it more finalized-ish ideas or some smaller sketches, into an ongoing web-zine/newsletter via Substack. I hope you enjoy it.
♡ Luke
Memory for the Fruit to Grow
Part 1 of an ongoing series
From the cardboard box I pull out several green sleeves of photos. Written across the front of each plastic sleeve is the apt title, in gold, “Memories.”
Nothing indicates when these photos were developed, nor their exact context. Just that my father had gone on a trip to Germany years ago, and this had maybe been his second or third time. Those years have faded. Faded, for one, on the account that I have no knowledge of what years they were, neither does my mother. And faded, too, because I like to think of those years that none of us can remember, the years of these photos, as his years, that somehow he took them with him when he passed away.
Scant memories of him telling me about Germany, and anything related. He had gone there once in the Nineties. In college, he had taken several German language courses. I remember, as a kid, a small bright red translation book, feeling much the same consistency as the green sleeves of photos over which I pass my hands. German English English German. I remember, too, that he liked sausage and sauerkraut. But, of course, little insight here beyond the matter of tastiness. I’ve never heard anyone make the claim that they like a food simply because of origin.
At some point in his engineering career at Westinghouse, the German company Siemens bought Westinghouse and became Siemens Westinghouse. There had been talk, then, as I recall, of the company splitting into two offices, one in Pittsburgh where he was and one in Florida, and that much of the staff would go to Florida, a place he didn’t want to go. My father, an avid baker who often made treats for the office, had baked a cake with the Vietnam War protest slogan “Hell No, We Won’t Go,” written in icing on the top. I wish to think he had made a Bienenstich (bee sting) for the extra irony, but I am pleased enough, knowing his popularity at work, that his wry humor was likely well received.
My knowledge extends no further on his German associations. Nor do I know of my father as a photographer, a mysterious pursuit of his that grows greater in mythos the more distant I am from his passing. Did he actually take these pictures? I sometimes think, unfairly. Are they someone else’s, switched at the photo lab? Many have an air and quality to them that I could not link to who my father was. Not to disparage my father, whose plentiful and varied hobbies he handled with a polymath’s skill, but I never witnessed much of a certain type of artistic pursuit from him. He did not, with mindful purpose, dabble in art in that emotive sense, contrived or not, attributed to the many creations labeled as “art house film” or “literature.” He did not like his movies with subtitles. Preferred big explosions and heroes with machine guns and martial arts skills. His main reading material consisted of hunting magazines and Popular Mechanics. The closest I ever saw to a novel in his hands may have been a book on the mechanistic aspects of Luftwaffe aircraft (okay, one more German connection).
He liked creating, but in that way of a wonder and joy at building and constructing. An art of a different make and model. He built radio-controlled airplanes, the tiny balsa wood skeletons whose seams oozed with wood glue on his work bench. He was part of a club, in fact, mostly older men and my father, all flying their R/C airplanes on the weekends. He assembled bottle rockets that he shot off in the park. He was well-known for the art of bug extermination, as was witnessed on the day he blew up a nest of ground hornets. The art of mushroom cloud explosions. He was an engineer, had a brain for design, but carried that dude-like quality of his younger years, a teenage vivacity, a woodsman Red Ryder BB gun fascination.
I make too much of these photos, I know. These are not the work of a Sherman or Bresson. Though, who can compare? You will not find these photos in a museum or gallery. They will not be displayed in the annals of photographic history. Nor would they muster social media sensation, having its own language and dynamism that these photos predate. They are random shots from a plastic point-and-click camera developed at a Wal-Mart photo lab.
I am too close to the subject, then. A wonder to me because I knew him. I am aware of their difference to who he was. Or, really: I am aware of their difference to who I thought he was. What makes them unique lies in their aura. An atmosphere exists that I cannot claim to have known personally. They are his framing eyes, but with no one to vouch for their effect, why he chose this shot over another. In some sense, that I could never imagine him realizing, he has attempted Faulkner’s artistic ethos. That is, to create as if the work alone will stand, the ego demolished, the creator gone to ashes. To so separate your self from your work that there is no realization you are doing it. Being it, and no more. You do not exist, the work does.
▨
Fanned across the floor, five green sleeves of memories greet me like doors to open. I've pulled out the other sleeves besides the German ones. Behind certain doors will lead me to old family photos. Those I know, as far as I can know them, if only because I am one of their subjects. Others are as mysterious as the shots from Germany. Ones of Western plains, desert scenes, empty lonely shots of dusty or snowcapped mountain ranges. An entire set of shots from a Pennsylvanian forest, on different trails and mountain sides. Oblique angles, abstract shots down forested hills. The intention seems somewhat there. This is a beautiful scene and therefore I will take a picture of it. They aren’t the photos of memories, sometimes, as much as photos of scenes for a film shoot or the discarded takes of a front cover for an artisanal garden magazine.
In photography, knowing is a slippery pursuit for those studying the photos long after their development. Even slipperier, when I ponder my memory of an event without the photo there to guide it. The image I carry is often emulsified with emotions, much of it a scaled range of morphing nostalgia, and I have nowhere to be led. The event’s liquidity, the movement of that time from one thing to another, has vanquished, not to be resurrected again. A certain presence or weight of bodies cannot be found. And the event’s active and aware sensation, the time being now and never any other time, has turned from lava into porous rock. The last thing moving, this layer of gelatinous emotion melting on top.
I am reminded here of Jurassic Park, a film that revolves around bringing presence, actual weight and heft, back to things long gone to their hardened shells. Dinosaur DNA is found in a mosquito encased in a ball of sap, an inflexible jaundiced marble of the past. From this source, the scientists succeed in bringing back dinosaurs, renewing a time to that of, presumably, its old motions and flow. But, the egg is rotten. Past events can never sustain beyond the moments allotted to them. The violence committed by these Frankenstein creations is a formidable act of past time revenging itself for having ever been brought to tangibility again.
Home movies go one step further than photos ever could, and bring new sensations that lead us closer to complete resurrection. It’s in the very name: movies, moving. But I find the movement of old memories difficult. Home movies hurt in a way, especially. They inject a plastic reality to the time and memory of it. They feel put on, because everyone is conscious of the camera. And the farther back in time, the more sizable the technology, the more difficult for people, then, to not be aware of the recording apparatus perched on someone’s shoulder like a crow, the squinting eyes of an uncle looking through a viewfinder.
Of course, nothing may capture real time and place. But photos may do more than home movies when applying the work of our memories to them. Old family photos give me enough, and let my mind work in what I wish to. They are my guide to memories. Remembering gives me an approximate sensation of moments lived, but photos tend to buttress this work into a felt realness. They help to solidify my perspective because they give me just enough proof of the way that I remember an event. A photo’s proof is not definitive enough to convince me otherwise, thus my personal interpretation is born and an artist’s rendition is made. Home movies give me too much. They don’t allow for the more powerful work of my creativity in remembering. I think of the photo’s magic as a sun-lit surface reflection through where we put our minds, like dipping hands breaking a golden water, to find below alive with fish, algae, murky silt kicked up by our disturbance. An entire world moves underneath: a little of our memory and a little act of creation, a little guesswork of what’s below, sustains a suitable reliving of the past.
A caveat here. One may think I am leading to the adage Time can heal all wounds, a saying that should come with a litany of postscripts. Time could maybe heal some wounds, if the wounds have the ability to be healed. Some wounds can’t. Certain trauma cannot be healed by mere temporal distance. Their severity leaves them irreparable. In skin, chronic conditions exist that produce wounds over and over. Pyoderma gangrenosum is an immune disorder that can perpetually cause sores on the legs. Or think of a brown recluse, a spider whose fangs have the ability to cause necrosis, a death of skin tissues, creating wounds that grow upwards of ten inches. A difficult wound that could send anyone to the hospital, and can often leave scarring, itself a sort of wounded healing, that can never be brought to full restoration. Time can’t heal all wounds. And photos can cause whole parts of our past lives to hit us sudden and fast like the dark wall of a tsunami. Photos, and all memory-causing things, should come with warning labels and skull-and-bone poison stickers. Some photos are simply better thrown into fires.
But what of photos like the ones before me? They are not anyone’s memories but my father’s. The photo’s magic is much harder when you are given no context, when the loved one who took the photos took them alone and in a place you have never been. Much of my father’s photography reminds me more of my own memories, as if his photography was not there so much for himself and his reminder, he never did look back through photos anyway, but another purpose entirely. ▨
Glimpse of the Shadow
A sketch
Spirit hovered over the waters and found a double of itself, crumpled and askew, oceanic.
In ancient Egypt, you put blood on the door frame or it would eat your firstborn.
A ghost that tries so hard to know it’s there, but can’t find a marking to know where it is.
Something that follows unseen, felt in the fabric of one’s clothes or breath.
Japan, when the bombs hit, captured in stone walls, on the streets, like ash smeared on foreheads or rough charcoal drawings.
What we swore we saw, a thing adrift, quick and horrific, on closer inspection reveals the mundane and familiar; that disappointment to follow, that elbow-nudge for our lives to change.
In Pittsburgh, downtown, when the sunlight sifted through buildings, when their shadows sauntered across the street, and I thought it was the asphalt molting its skin. ▨