hmmm.

thank you for your kind thoughts and comments. i'll have to do a bit more considering.

i think there are many blogs out there that narrate lives, and maybe if what i did was go whole hog narrating my life, then what would come out of it would be interesting, but the thought of it makes me blush, seeming too audacious. then again, if what i really want to do is write an autobiography, maybe a blog would be the best place to begin. so maybe a blog in a different format is the next thing. maybe i'll call it "surreal hawaii childhood" and tell its strange, dark stories one by one.

"it's quite funny with memories and sights and sounds.

you sometimes think you can stop seeing and listening, but memory keeps playing its gramophone records without a break. you cannot close your eyes because the images unfold in one enormous reel after the other. my grandfather would have said that the sound lies in the brain in a horizontal line, like records, while images stand up vertically like film reels. then they mesh into each other in some wonderful interplay. sometimes it's only sounds and sometimes it's just pictures and now and then it is synchronized. but most of the time the projectionist is drunk and without judgement. he refuses to work at all for some people and for others he works overtime." ~reidar jonsson; "my life as a dog"

"the windows are normally independent of one another, although you may pass back and forth from one view to the other..."

"...this absurd interdependence is like a lark at break of day." ~barbara guest





"absurd interdependence". that so encapsulates what obsesses me, the kind of accidental interdependence of things that brings me the strangest solace whenever i encounter it in the world.



brilliant photo by sassy artz on flickr.

"time is a funhouse mirror on our lives." ~sean jones

i took this picture on the bus with adam's sixth grade class. we were on our way home from a field trip in which we spent the day on a ship sailing all around the bay. his friend, whose name i've forgotten, leaned over the seat to be in the picture. the kids were all serene from spending all day at sea, in the sun. at the helm and learning knots.



i love this picture of our cat sera, who died last year. the distortion such that she seems to fit into the fishbowl except for that little spotlight of tail.







this is my grandmother lucille and i on waikiki beach in 1969. i especially love her swimcap, and the sandpail between us. i think she had her straps down because she was trying to even out her tan. she told me years later the little ways that my stepmother was mean to her when she came from the mainland for this visit. rewashing any dishes she'd washed, as if she hadn't done a good enough job, throwing any towels she'd even just dried her hands on into the dirty clothes hamper. my stepmother, she was a wicked one.

frozen in time

i found this photo of sophie today, in a box of pictures that have been in the broom closet since we moved here, going on four years ago. i don't think it was as interesting of a picture back then as i find it today, maybe because it was too recent, and i had no distance from that time. it was a frozen moment of the way things were all the time. but to have unearthed it a few years later, it has tremendous ripples all around it. just seeing it transported me back to that time, and made me miss it, and to realize that time is indeed moving at such a pace, though in the present i never feel it. somehow it reminded me that i will be an old woman, and that it will probably take me by surprise. i'll probably not even realize it until i see myself in a photograph, maybe even a blurry one.
but i love this picture of sophie. i have never been the kind of mother who wanted her children to stay babies so she could have them to baby. i've always looked forward to them growing up and becoming independent individuals. but this picture, and many of the others that were also in this box, made me nostalgic for my children's childhoods, though life was much more difficult back then when there was no time, or money, or privacy, or selfishness allowed. i am much more selfish now because i have the luxury of being so. sometimes when i think back to those days, all i can remember are the things i think i failed at. but then i see a picture like this one and i think, well, it must have been alright most of the time.

forget me not

it's uncanny sometimes the way subjects coincide. for christmas i received a book from kay titled "forget me not: photography and remembrance," by geoffrey batchen, concerning the embellished photograph to enhance memory-- the way the photograph embedded into a treasured momento makes it more saturated for the purposes of memory.

then from chris at bright stupid confetti i was given this link to square america, a gallery full of vintage photographs. one of the most compelling sections of this website is called 'defaced,' all pictures in which faces have been somehow obliterated.







in some of them the faces have been scratched out with something sharp. they seem to belong to a different category than these, in which the faces seem to have been lifted out to put into something smaller and easy to keep with its admirer at all times. these pictures seem less ghostly if we think of the part missing as not a part discarded, but a part kept, even more important than what it was extracted from, even; worth defacing the original for.




and then, on top of this, i'm reading austerlitz, by w.b. sebald, a story about making up one's identity from scratch, from objects and photographs left behind, from scraps of others' identities.







what is it, if not loss, that makes the collector?