My photo lab works with software1 that detects how many pixels there are in the photos I submit for printing. If they are below a certain number, a red-light blinks to tell me I am out of focus!!!
It is quite fascinating for me to realize that most of the lives I have lived were pre-determined…
Today me and my friends, we talk about algorithms, artificial intelligencies… some of us talk about subtle bodies… talk about gratitude, energies, and extra-terrestrials… others devote their lives to the basic search for money and or alternative gods and goddesses…
And I am repeatedly told I can appear blurry if I do not fine tune my views…!
It bothered me to automatically delete my low tech (I thought), out of focus attempts at photography. Until quite recently, when I started to cultivate an absurd delight in my discoveries of endless points of view…
Yes, I have lived my life quite out of focus!
My views were called iconoclastic then. I was told often that I showed so much potential, if only I could focus and pay attention!
Rightly so, but most of my idols eventually showed up with mud in their feet and deserved to be toppled… they still do. I can now hear the distant echoes of Nietzsche and all the men who shaped my destinies!! 2
And I also hear the absurd, almost comic anguish of all of us, the women who attempted to word voice and were silenced, and still are. Forever becoming…not ever to be.
One of my problems is that I learned my lessons early, dutifully in life, as a good woman, and now I would like to kindly and somewhat happily continue to topple the icons, the images, the idols, the lineages, the foci!
Not angrily now, like I did then, but slowly and carefully, sometimes all at once, cut off their mud feet and watch their fall.
Great imagery for a soft design of a falling angel in a tropical bamboo grove, no, that’s not it, it is a marsh banana bamboo grove of knowledge, an amphibian place, an archery of martial arts flight and dive into a welcomed female demon world, the mud around their feet as they work, daily, as the mud becomes the walking slushing through and with the mud mind, in a 4-minute video…
I wonder how the imagery of the companion animals fits in with the women of mud. A green parrot belongs not here… ^-^ or could my green parrot find his/her way in? Yes, the companions appear in fine cartoonish line drawings, popping in and out of the moving landscapes of bamboo, in between the breakages of banana groves, winking at us and telling the story. Fun of work in progress…3
If there is a world today, in my life, it is reality that approaches the variations in the images, not the retreats from them…
I want to learn to breathe not just air, I want to learn to breathe underwater again. And I want to learn to breathe plastic microfiber well, so that I might travel again to the Sargasso Seas.4
Take a step back, one, many, and let go of focus… eventually then I may find myself at the peripheries of another dream…
How can I capitalize on my words, my wisdoms, my humilities too…? What values can I possibly assign to my “productions”?
Can I ever escape from this pull towards the alchemic greenish fedorent colors of limelight?
Can I, somehow, begin to love this now, as if IT is a never ending beginning…? Not the idea of a start, not an expected Leonid meteoric formation in the skies of tonight, that I might miss…
Not an attachment I find no reason to pull away from, not an old red wool sweater unraveling, a thread at a time. No, not quite. And not instead… maybe in tandem with a perch on the wire, quiet, tension vibrating in the high intensity of steel…
Dear god almighty. I begin to glimpse why we may not wish to see the out of focus peripheries of our own worlds!!!! Our very own incessant dreamy bus rides…to unknown destinations, biological entries into non-evolutionary writings, and the forever receding mysterious crumbling walls of our futures…
Mud feet? Chop them off and reshape them in clay, on to a new dream… once again, go in for a walk… slowly, a step at a time. Soon you will happily fall out of focus again…
FOOTNOTES:
I love my photography printing lab, here in Maryland, and do recommend them to you, if you are looking for a lab: Nations Photo Lab.
Nihilism with Nietzsche, the impetus of equality with Marx, the questioning of authority, with Wittgenstein… and the avalanche of female writers who continue to counter argue the male views, with small sprinkles of original thought.
My main inspiration here comes from one of the scenes in one of my favorite movies - seen at least five times - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The protagonists fight and dance in a flight across the luscious moving foliage of tall bamboo shoots…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crouching_Tiger,_Hidden_Dragon
“bold types are mine”
“The title "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" is a literal translation of the Chinese idiom "臥虎藏龍" which describes a place or situation that is full of unnoticed masters. It is from a poem of the ancient Chinese poet Yu Xin (513–581) that reads "暗石疑藏虎,盤根似臥龍", which means "behind the rock in the dark probably hides a tiger, and the coiling giant root resembles a crouching dragon".[16] The title also has several other layers of meaning. On one level, the Chinese characters in the title connect to the narrative that the last character in Xiaohu and Jiaolong's names mean "tiger" and "dragon", respectively. On another level, the Chinese idiomatic phrase is an expression referring to the undercurrents of emotion, passion, and secret desire that lie beneath the surface of polite society and civil behavior,[17] which alludes to the film's storyline. “
Again, back to this little and significant manifesto by Heather Davis in Plastic matter https://www.dukeupress.edu/plastic-matter