elizabeth bishop made several points

Photo taken in Tompkins Square Park a couple weeks ago on a different chilly spring walk.

Hello friends—

first, un petit bit of good news: Filthy Animals is a finalist for The Dylan Thomas Prize, which is very exciting and good news. Short stories! Full announcement over here: [link]

---

On Saturday, I woke up just before noon. In the living room, sharp, white beams cut through the gaps at the edge of the curtains and lay perfectly still upon the floor. I was tired and sore, but underneath the discomfort, I felt rather awake. Equal to the day. I made coffee and broke down boxes left over from deliveries I’d gotten the day before. My friend called and wanted to talk back over a conversation we’d had late Friday night. At the time, I’d been stepping on the escalator to leave the subway. They called in order for me to talk them out of quitting their job. I did my best, but I wasn’t sure I’d actually succeeded. But on Saturday morning, as the coffee brewed, we revisited that conversation. They were happy they had called me after all. What they’d needed was not someone with fresh perspective or new information, but someone who cared about them and knew about their feelings to say that it was alright to feel confused and frustrated, and that wanting to quit a job after three days off when you were staring down the barrel of a long weekend of brutal clinical work was a totally acceptable thing to feel.

My friend works remotely for a call center that serves as a subcontractor for various companies. If you sign on to a new job and that new job promises you access to a 24-hour telecounseling service, then you might be one of my friend’s clients. All night long, while most of us sleep, my friend and their colleagues field calls from the distressed, the weary, the anxious, the afraid, the miserable, the suffering. They log the calls and direct counseling services and sometimes wellness checks to people in crisis. While I am out taking pictures, my friend is sleeping. And then, they are up, taking more calls. Listening to people and listening also to the pulsing underside of what they say, trying to sense if there is more distress than is being communicated. It’s hard work. It’s brutal work. For most of us, we have the luxury of being able to look away from someone in the midst of crisis. But my friend’s job is not only to not look away, but to go with people into their crisis. To trace out the edges of their feelings and to figure out optimal arrangements of resources to get them through. My friend is a way station for such people. Taking their calls. Logging. Checking their needs against their qualifying packages of services. My friend gets calls from the unhoused, the addicted, the pained, the mentally ill. He gets calls from white collar professionals. Overworked millennials. From people in the medical industry. In my friend’s queue, they are all equal. They all need something. To be heard. To be seen. To be helped.

The result is that my friend sometimes gets overwhelmed. So they call me and I stand by the escalator at the bottom of the 72nd Street Station, saying, “Well, of course you want to quit. That is totally normal. A very rational response to a very difficult situation.” And they say, “Yeah. I know it’s not sensible.” And I say, “But it is. Totally sensible. Wanting to quit, totally normal. Absolutely. Because, well, capitalism. Money. You know. But if you do quit, I will help.” And they say, “I am not quitting. But I just feel like I needed to say I want to.” “You can say it as much as you need to. I am not doing anything. I am literally just in the subway.”

After that call, I came home and went to bed. But on Saturday, my friend called and we talked it over again. They were happy they’d said how they felt and they were okay after that first, hard call. They’d get through it. And I said, okay, great.

On Friday, while my friend had been taking calls from clients, I was taking self-portraits. I had these new lights I wanted to test out. A strobe (flash) and a monolight (continuous lighting). I shut my curtains and turned out all of my lights. The monolight cast a vivid circular whiteness against the back wall. The whole apartment filled with light and shades of light, tapering into soft, fizzy gray at the edges. I thought, wow. I had considered my apartment relatively bright until that point. But in the dark with the monolight beaming down on me, I realized how silly that had been. The strobe gave a soft pop with each exhalation of flash. I made a lot of fuss moving around the lights, setting up the camera on the tripod, trying to make sure that the flash synced with the camera. I made a lot of mistakes. The flash didn’t trigger on some. Did on others. But other times, there was just a dimness. I am not confident about the quality of these self-portraits. I didn’t really take them seriously. I just wanted to test out the gear so that I can take other people’s portraits. But I was the only subject I had on hand. So I used myself.

As I took those portraits, I thought about how when I was younger and living at home, we didn’t really have any pictures of ourselves. My childhood went mostly undocumented, my adolescence too. I didn’t get my first real camera phone until I was in grad school. Before that, I took some pictures of myself, but nothing amounting to a real record. Nothing amounting to much of anything, not even in digital space. The result is that the first twenty or so years of my life are only spottily recorded except in my memory. My uncle used to take a lot of pictures. He was rather known for it. He was everywhere with his Polaroids and disposable cameras. I remember how he’d go to the drug store to pick up the pictures after they were developed. But he mostly took pictures of his family. My aunt and my cousins. His own extended family. They were a very photographed group, those McCalls. But my own family, on the Taylor side, we were not much for pictures. We were country people. I think that the suspicious and distrustful religion of rural Baptists precludes things like photographs and images. Or else, the hardness of farm life did not seem amenable to record keeping. There was too much to do. Who had money for a camera anyway. The result is that we don’t have a lot of pictures of ourselves. We don’t have our history captured on glossy picture paper.

It’s strange that I, who was raised with a hostile ambivalence toward pictures, am now so obsessed with taking photos. But I think, too, that early family attitude to picture taking is why I have such a strong sense of fear when it comes to taking people’s pictures. I feel a sense of implied shame. But I also want to take the pictures. But anyway, I don’t really know what to do with myself in a portrait. Even in the last ten years since I’ve been living with a camera in my pocket on my phone, I don’t know how to arrange myself in front of a lens. The result is that I just stare. I look askance. I don’t know how to marshal my body into good form. Good poses. Even when I’m the one taking the picture, all I see on the other side is a black hole. An emptiness. I fall in. I fall out.

After I took the portraits, I realized it was very late and I wanted to drop the film off to be developed. Getting out of my apartment was rather complicated—I couldn’t find my wallet. Then I couldn’t find my computer. Then I couldn’t find my shoe. Then I couldn’t find my mask. It seemed, increasingly, like there was something trying to keep me in my apartment. I grew sweaty. My head hurt. I was frustrated and anxious. Time was getting away from me. I’d get to the store with just twenty minutes to spare, and that was if nothing went wrong. And I still had to shoot out the rest of the Lomo 800 in my Contax and I had to burn through the last little bit of the Lomo in my Mamiya 645. Taking pictures always adds more time, plus, the light was getting away from me. There is only so much light in the day, and once it is gone, that’s it, you’ve missed it.

Anyway, I got out of the apartment, frustrated and sweaty, and made my to the subway and then to Canal and then up Lafayette to the film store. And then made my way back. I thought it might be nice to get some dinner out of my apartment for once, but I was so tired, and my mood was bad. I still had to clean the apartment and put away the new lights and tripods and figure out the source of the strange smell in my apartment. So I got back on the train and made my way back uptown.

On the Q, we passed another train, the R, I think, maybe the N, but the two trains slid by each other in the dark. I could see in the illuminated windows of the other car, people in silent tableaux. The Q nudged ahead and then the other train nudged ahead, back and forth, the dark plinths of the tunnel slipping past like a shutter on a camera. I like that part. Seeing people in the trains, going so fast that they seem to stand still, until the Q pulls free and the whole length of that other train passes before us as we speed by them.

On Saturday, the light was good so I went to the park to take pictures. I tried to dare myself to speak to strangers. I tried to imagine that we were on two passing trains. I ended up behind this trio of incredibly dressed young men. I went up to them and asked if I could take their picture because their fits were sick. They said, of course. And they proceeded to ham it up and pose. I immediately liked them. I took their picture in the spring sun. One of them blew me a kiss. I wished them a happy spring.

Despite the excellent light, the day was a little cool, chilly. People were out in their sweaters and quilted jackets. Their puffer coats, their flannels. At the Sheep Meadow, I saw three young men laying out in the sun, shirtless. The muscles in their backs were like something from a sculpture, liquid and shifting. I admired, too, how the light made deep shadows down the spine when one of them twisted to laugh at a joke. Or when they bent forward and put their arms around their knees and their shoulders rose and seemed to knot momentarily before opening. I imagined that they were happy. Free. I imagined that they had been friends for a long time or maybe just a little while. That they were talking about plans they had later in the afternoon. I took their picture from behind on Kodak Gold. I wonder how that shot will turn out.

I thought a lot about those guys and their backs as I made my way around the perimeter of the meadow. There were people playing all sorts of games around me. Soccer, football, some game involving a net trampoline and a ball, frisbee in various iterations. I passed a group of people speaking French, looking like something out of fashion drawing. They were bickering about whether it would be better to sit in the shade or the sun. Two women, two men, but the men were gay. One of the women had this incredible yellow silk scarf and a wonderful overcoat. The other woman was in blue jeans and a striped sweater, gray hat and sensible boots. One of the men wore a wool overcoat and a beret, the other a denim chore coat and slim-cut jeans.

They were in some sense a direct opposite to the shirtless men across the field, who were almost garish in their frattiness. Here were two tall, elegant men, perfectly clothed, but something in their expressions seemed quite naked to me. One of them looked up and out just as I was passing them and our eyes met. He wasn’t wearing sunglasses, I was. I turned my head and realized too late that this implied that I could understand them and had been listening. I was a little embarrassed at that. Btu when I looked back, he was smiling and leaned in to whisper something to the other man. Who looked toward me but then I was moving away.

At the camera store on Friday night, I while I was waiting to drop off my self-portrait rolls, a group of camera bros were dropping off film too. I was getting the Lomo800 out of the back of there M645 when one of them turned to me and said, “Dude, that’s sick, what are you rocking with?” And I said, “Lomo 8.” And he said, “Oh, nice, do you like it?” They crowded around me and inspected the camera, “Is this digital?” “No, it’s autofocus tho. It’s nice.” And he said, “Oh sick, how much?” People in New York are always asking how much things cost. When I told him, he said, “FUCK. That’s not crazy! I paid too much for then Mamiya 7.” Then he grinned. “But it’s fucking sick, bro. I love it.” Ever since I’ve started carrying the M645, people stop to ask me questions about it. They want to know things about the camera. I understand. I personally find it to be a singularly impressive piece of equipment. But then another part of me is always a little surprised that people notice me at all. They aren’t noticing me, obviously. They are noticing the camera, but it is attention just the same. I kind of like the idea of getting to know more camera people. Getting to know the camera people who frequent the same store as me. It’s fun.

In the park next to the French people, I thought about the camera bros. And the shirtless boys across the field. I thought about my position as a viewer, a voyeur, one who watches and sees. I thought about asking them to take their picture, but then I thought better of it. They’d already seen me see them. I was compromised. But I thought, oh, this is kind of like cruising. The mutual fantasy of it. You pretend not to see each other until one of you can’t stand it any longer and then there is mutual acknowledgement. I see you seeing me. I see you wanting me. Photography and sex have a lot in common, I think. But, then, so does violence. And theft. Someone is always taking something from someone else. I didn’t want to fuck the French guys. I didn’t want to fuck the dudes across the field. I didn’t want to fuck any of them. But what I wanted was to capture the wanting that occurs between two people. Between the observer and the observed.

On the other end of the meadow, I saw several birthday picnics in progress. Balloons marking 67 and one set of balloons marking noth a particular age so much as a general excitement about the day. Behind them, way in the distance, a shelf of perfect golden buildings. Trees in bloom. People lying out as if in a painting. And in the foreground, happiness, celebration. I took pictures of people lying around. People laughing. People deep in concentration. When I came close to a person, I asked if I could take their picture, and they often said yes, okay. They were a little amused by it. But mostly, I think the spring afternoon had put people in a good mood. Even if it was too cool to really call it a true spring. The wind cutting in across the water made my eyes well up. There was something curiously hostile in the deep blue of the sky. It was a spring day like an Elizabeth Bishop poem—beautiful, fragrant, but severe.

I have been thinking a lot about the first stanza of Elizabeth Bishop’s “A Cold Spring.”

A cold spring:
the violet was flawed on the lawn.
For two weeks or more the trees hesitated;
the little leaves waited,
carefully indicating their characteristics.
Finally a grave green dust
settled over your big and aimless hills.
One day, in a chill white blast of sunshine,
on the side of one a calf was born.
The mother stopped lowing
and took a long time eating the after-birth,
a wretched flag,
but the calf got up promptly
and seemed inclined to feel gay.

That’s how we all were on Saturday out in the cool as the dusk crept in from over the tops of the trees like something commuting from the city. We were like the little leaves waiting, indicating our characteristics. The particular vividness of cold amid the deepening green, the flashes of white t-shirts or pink hats or windbreakers.

I love the Bishop poem for the same reason I love all of her poems. They are cold, piercing. Their insight comes indirectly out of a system of images arranged with the permanence of rock formations. She is not blasting her way to meaning so much as waiting patiently for it to arrive through the careful and close observation of a world already in progress around us. A cold spring afternoon provides a moment of death and birth, beauty and wretchedness, the brutality of life’s most common things. A cold spring feels at once like a betrayal and like a promise. There is something so rewarding in the wind’s sting amid the flowering trees. The sun on the grass. The darkening avenues at dusk and the high white cliffs of the stone buildings. Something in all of that, some swirling sense of being in the world again.

On my way home, I was coming up on that Ralph Lauren store with the outdoor café. I looked up and saw some small dark birds coming from the direction of the park. They swooped overhead and passed from a region of shadow into the light, and I thought about taking their picture. Reached for my camera, but I didn’t. I let it go and instead watched as the last of the birds flew up and rounded the corner, flitting up the avenue, out of sight. There was something in that moment. All those birds coasting and then swooping and rounding away, something fluid and alive in it that would have gotten lost in the picture anyway. I was glad that I didn’t try to capture it. That I watched it with my eyes. Sometimes, I worry that I will forget the pleasure of seeing something without any attempt to pin it down. When I go to museums, I don’t take that many pictures though I always take a camera. Sometimes, I just want to be in the presence of something without trying to marshal it into something else, something to be used later. I like to let things wash over me. To just be in pure relation to them. Not everything has to be machined into shareable aesthetic experience. Some things can just be.

I was asked recently if photography helped my writing, if I thought about narrative at all while I take pictures. I don’t really know. I think it helps in the sense that whenever I feel anxious or stressed, I can just go take pictures and not worry about writing. I used to feel like if I quit writing, I’d die because I wouldn’t have another way to express myself. But now I feel that I could very easily leave writing. My life doesn’t feel so contingent on my ability to write. I. have a friend who I know would consider this a betrayal of my purpose. That this means I don’t care enough about writing. That true commitment can only be measured in one’s willingness to be destroyed by the thing you are committing to. I know I used to believe that. The pain writing caused me was evidence that I gave a damn. That it mattered to me. But now I feel differently. Photography allows me to love writing on better, healthier terms. I’m able to write when I write and when I can’t, I don’t take it so personally. Writing used to be the thing that I did when my real job didn’t go well. And then it became my real job and I had no way to survive the difficulties and random cruelties of this calling. But now I have a way out. An alternative means of expression.

As to narrative, I don’t know. I don’t think about my pictures like that. Which makes sense because I also don’t think of my writing like that. When I write and when I take pictures, all I am after is a feeling. A sensation. I am trying to commit a sensation to the living record of life. Sometimes I see interesting shapes and try to capture them. But I never really have a sense of how thing will come out until I get the scans back. There is something nice about that. A feeling of inevitability and fatedness. That’s kind of how my stories come together too. I feel that whatever narrative ends up in the pictures arrives by way of curation and cropping, the way that my stories acquire their narrative by way of revision and editing. Perhaps a narrative is really just a framework we apply to the shaggy raw material of life. Perhaps narrative is always extrinsic to experience. Curious because we always have this sense that we are excavating the narrative from our raw substrate when in fact we are the ones supplying the narrative in the first place.

I have been thinking more about narrative than usual because this semester, I’ve been teaching in an MFA program. I find myself coming again and again back to the idea of structure and rhythm as the apparatus of storytelling. How to use narrative as a system of conveyance for meaning. For mystery. Trying to sharpen scenes, making them clear and vivid, so that the deeper, stranger motions of the story come through. I never considered myself much of a structure person when it comes to writing, but as an editor, I am very keen on structure. It’s the part you have the most control over. The part where your interventions yield the highest payoff for the effort you put in. Fix a story’s structure and you take it from kind of okay to excellent, though to take it that narrow stretch further into masterful requires more than mere narrative structure. It requires something more mysterious and hard to pin down. I think I am trying to get after that in my pictures. That stranger, harder thing to pin down.

Charlie D’Ambrosio used to say in workshop that he wanted us to strive beyond what we could articulate. That true fiction, real fiction, masterful fiction existed outside of the realm of the articulable. You were really writing when you struggled at every turn to find the words for it was you wanted to express. This goes by different names and guises: some call it mystery, some call it honesty, some call it truth. But in the end, we all trying to evade our conscious selves and to tap into something more primal, something more true because it exists outside of our cowardly capacity and desire for control. I want my pictures to speak of that world.

The next thing I want to do is shoot some Vision3 500T film. This is motion picture film but converted to still photography film. I’ve shot Cinestill 800T, which is motion picture film with the ramjet layer removed, meaning that it can be processed like any other color negative film. I like Cinestill, but the removal of the remjet causes halations, little red halos around sources of direct light. This could be good, stylish, interesting. But as I’ve shot more and more pictures, what I realize is that I favor the naturalistic. The subtle. Vision3 500T is flatter than Cinestill, less lifelike in some ways, but it doesn’t have the halations because its ramjet layer is still in place. I’ve done some research—looking at sample images from both film stocks—and I think I do prefer the look and feel of Vision3 500T. Something in its melancholy blue hues feel true to me. I think it’ll suit the cool spring weather have coming up. All those tender blossoms dropping off in the cold.

I’m still trying to take more portraits. I’m hoping to get better at talking to strangers so that I have the opportunity to take more portraits. My New York friends are, well, useless to me on this score because they have jobs or live in Brooklyn. But if I can get good at talking to strangers. Bridging those little gaps, I’ll be able to take more pictures. And once I do it once or twice, I feel like I’ll be brave enough to keep doing it. People are happy that spring is coming. Maybe I’ll make some new friends. Maybe I’ll take their picture.

I think what I do with my pictures is try to capture that sense of peering into the next train car. What my friend does when they take their client calls. Perhaps that’s all any of us can hope to do. To observe in fleeting passages of illumination some truth of other people’s lives.

That’s how I felt out in the meadow on Saturday. Children’s screeches of joy and pleasure, their delight in seeing the sun spread out over the grass for the first time. A little boy kicked his ball at me and wanted desperately for me to kick it back, so I bunted it back over to him and he fell out in delirious happiness. A little girl wanted her dad to fly a kite for her. She wanted it to go up. So much so that when it was a loft she yanked at it until it came back down so that she could see him put it back into the air.

That is how happiness feels, I thought. I don’t know if I meant the girl or the kite.

I called my friend on Sunday as it rained to say that I had written about them and our talk. I read the passages to them and asked if they wanted me to change anything. If they found anything inaccurate or trivializing or perhaps too identifying.

They said, “You make it sound so much prettier than it is.” I laughed. They went quiet a moment and then said, “But honestly, it’s nice to hear that. To hear that’s how you think of my work. Sometimes it’s so hard. Sometimes I just get stuck in doing it. And it’s nice to have some perspective from the outside.”

"It matters,” I told them. “You do real shit. It matters.”

They laughed. “Yeah, but sometimes.”

“Yeah,” I said.

b