Old(er) Art

This is one of the only photos I still have that I developed myself, and I don’t have the print, just this scan. I took it on my first “real” camera, a Canon AE-1 with some sort of prime lens — I don’t even remember anymore. It’s of a building at Bard College in upstate New York. Frank Gehry is the architect.

I took the photo during a weekend trip to visit my then-boyfriend in 2005, and developed it shortly after returning to North Carolina. I made at least one print that was fairly large, and I remember how exciting it was to see it develop. At the moment, I was so heartsick and lonely in the place where I was, and there was something really transporting about seeing a memory I already missed become something that I could hold in my hand and hang on my wall. I would change some things about this photo if I took it today — I don’t think I really understood what an f-stop was — but I still love looking at this view that I had during a really important and tumultuous period in my life.

2013 II

I’ve started 2013 twice now: once at the proper time, on January first, and then again later that month when I decided that I didn’t really want to continue a year that started with a pretty major disappointment.

This fresh new 2013 (2Q13?) is a few weeks old now. It’s been strange and disorienting, but also pretty beautiful. One of the hard things about falling (or being jerked abruptly) out of love is that suddenly a thing that imbued your life with a lot of loveliness is completely, irretrievably gone. At first, it’s easy to confuse the loss of a very important source of joy with the loss of all joy — the world, for a moment, is ugly, small, and empty.

But then, of course, it isn’t. The really wonderful, impossible thing about heartbreak kicks in: being alive starts to become lovely again in very unexpected ways. At that point, you almost become thankful for the terrible rupture:  it lets you be reborn, and whatever happiness you can find is new and wholly yours. I felt really enlivened and illuminated by being in love; it’s painful but exciting to find a way back to that feeling on my own.

I don’t think of myself as a particularly serene person: I get angry too often and too intensely for that. Being angry feels awful, though: even when someone has hurt me pretty deeply, thinking about how furious I am makes me feel diminished, not righteous or strong. So instead, I’m really focusing on everything and everyone I’m thankful for. It’s a pretty long list.

I think this year is really going to be something good.