Thoughts, and a precaution about words
I once read an interview with photographer Lee Friedlander that said he used to think very often about why he was a photographer, and why he made images. These were the questions that constantly confronted his work, until he got older and realized that “why” didn’t really matter.
I sometimes compare myself and my process to such great artists as Lee Friedlander, and wonder about the connections that have yet to be made in my mind about my own work. For I often think about words. How they shape our experience of ourselves and of the world. How I have come to have such a fascination with them, and why that matters.
I do not consciously lead myself to cross examine why I pay so much mind to words. The inquiry comes up naturally. Like yesterday evening, listening to a song that reminded me of a tender moment from my past. Words fell away then, yesterday evening. Perhaps because the memory was more feeling than thinking. I was recalling a moment when simply being inside a body, at the right place and the right time, was transcendent enough to shatter the memory into millions of tiny particles that scatter across the five senses. Of this memory moment, words can neither offer explanation nor reason. And if we boil the memory down to its essence, we reveal the purest worldly experience: touch. Here, words can do no justice, for touch is the most primal language, and words were born from its sensation. The memory of touch is the remembering of life as it lived you. The memory of touch is the first promise to you; that you are alive. And when you remember that you are alive it is like you are also a forge, burning and shaping the forms of your aliveness. Words may come like the red and white debris of heat that flies outward from the blacksmith’s hammer when they work. Byproduct. Seedling. Becoming.
My words help me tell you what it is that I’m thinking and feeling, but they are just a gatekeeper to what is beyond, intangible and without end.
I sometimes compare myself and my process to such great artists as Lee Friedlander, and wonder about the connections that have yet to be made in my mind about my own work. For I often think about words. How they shape our experience of ourselves and of the world. How I have come to have such a fascination with them, and why that matters.
I do not consciously lead myself to cross examine why I pay so much mind to words. The inquiry comes up naturally. Like yesterday evening, listening to a song that reminded me of a tender moment from my past. Words fell away then, yesterday evening. Perhaps because the memory was more feeling than thinking. I was recalling a moment when simply being inside a body, at the right place and the right time, was transcendent enough to shatter the memory into millions of tiny particles that scatter across the five senses. Of this memory moment, words can neither offer explanation nor reason. And if we boil the memory down to its essence, we reveal the purest worldly experience: touch. Here, words can do no justice, for touch is the most primal language, and words were born from its sensation. The memory of touch is the remembering of life as it lived you. The memory of touch is the first promise to you; that you are alive. And when you remember that you are alive it is like you are also a forge, burning and shaping the forms of your aliveness. Words may come like the red and white debris of heat that flies outward from the blacksmith’s hammer when they work. Byproduct. Seedling. Becoming.
My words help me tell you what it is that I’m thinking and feeling, but they are just a gatekeeper to what is beyond, intangible and without end.
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