Who said clicking on strangers' profiles on Facebook and then visiting their websites yields no treasures? In between long stretches of basement hardcore, this person's Flickr account reveals as riveting a vision of Baltimore as I have ever participated in. Aside from the obvious, e.g. the old folks line dancing in (what appears to be) a community center, the heavyset Hampden hairdresser, the shopping cart vagrants, etc., what particularly fascinates me are the photos, augmented by a liberal incorporation of shadows, of nothing in particular: rowhouse facades, half-lit neon signs at night, chairs against a cement wall, and so on. Photos which present no obvious subject, diffusing the focus of the image, or where a subject is apparent, but diminished and shunted aside. These are images which focuses one's attention on the negative space itself; either what is not reveals itself with the blurring of what is, or what is not looms large over and subjugates what is.
This is similar to the spirit of most photos I attempt to take (and would no doubt be more successful at taking were I less shite with a camera), and the spirit of Baltimore in my mind--the essence is in the unseen, silent, and intangible. Baltimore is in the abandoned and boarded-up houses, not the packed clubs; in the deserted street corner after midnight, not the bustling harbor; in the old people selling balloons and casting piercing gazes from unknown living rooms, not the front row scenesters on venue homepages.
The contraband One Hour Photo artifacts are just the icing on the cake. I need to see this city more often in Polaroid. Although some of the older, summery ones make the city seem like a faded frontier town, which perplexes me.
I went up on my apartment's roof tonight to see the lunar eclipse. It's a good thing the stairwell door was unlocked, because the fire escape ladder was iced over, and I wasn't about to risk climbing it five stories above ground level. I saw mostly the initial stages of totality, as the Earth's rust-colored shadow engulfed the last ivory tusk of the moon over about twenty minutes. (I think I saw the "blue light," which is sometimes caused due to a small portion of sunlight passing through the ozone layer and having the longer wavelengths filtered out, but since I have no idea what it's supposed to look like, I'm not actually sure.) It was cold up there, and quiet; I saw someone in one of the upper-floor windows of the Broadview looking out in the same direction, presumably also watching for the eclipse. A column of steam rose from the chimney of the squat apartment on the other side of the block. It was one of the clearest nights for quite a while, fortuitously, and besides the moon, I could see as many stars as I could remember ever seeing in Baltimore. And I wondered: how could I ever leave this place?
I talked to Sarah--of all people--last night in what ended up being a thinly-veiled confession of my neurosis toward grad school. It's ironic that I should have to ask anyone about this; you'd think I'd be the leading authority on moving on, given my history, but I've really grown attached to Baltimore in a way that I never really did with Minnesota, or Taipei, or New Jersey. I think it's both because of timing and the city itself. In childhood, one lives with one's parents and is not tethered to the earth by one's own roots; all connections to geography are filtered through the lens of familial life. And in New Jersey, I was in boarding school, so I didn't get out much, not that there was much to get out to: we were pretty restricted to a few shops in Princeton and a couple regular diners.
But Baltimore--I arrived just as I was learning to spread roots of my own to a city that, when it loved you, if it ever loved anyone, felt so much like it loved you and only you. Maybe your few close friends, too. Amber-tinted streets and fire escapes and freak underground DJ sets and band members who offer you appletinis when you go to see their shows. Who knew you couldn't hold without being held in return?
Anyway, Sarah brought up a point that nobody had actually raised thus far: that five or six years wasn't that long a time, in the grand scheme of things. Huh? I had never thought about it that way until then. It's true the average Ph. D. stint shouldn't take me farther than age 26 or 27, and I do expect to live at least a little longer than that. (Being only a rock star in pretense, I have no intentions of joining the Forever 27 club.) However, the whole problem with "this too shall pass" is that it makes falling into nihilism that much easier. I'm fairly sure I can get through the better half of the next decade however things go, but I don't know for sure, and I don't know at what cost to my general mental well-being.
I've no answers yet, but at least my anxiety has exhausted itself after leaving me in full-on Damocles mode the past two weeks. Checking mailboxes both physical and digital has more or less returned to the mundane routine it used to be. This is a good thing; I have things to do. Not that I'm doing them (see entry title).
Last night I stayed up until 6AM wrote a poem titled, "On His Twenty-First Birthday He Became A Tree" and it was about just that, more or less. Then after I turned it in today I found that one of the lines scanned more as tetrameter than pentameter. Real surprise, there.
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2 comments:
Sarah voit des choses dans toi qui sont comme des choses a Baltimore que tu vois et que tu aimes: the overlooked, the lacunae. This lends itself to poetry, coincidences, synchronicities of half-thought out philosophies, tu sais.
I know what you mean about a city hold you, about planting roots. Funny that you wrote this now actually, that I read it in this moment, because it's a realization I just came to myself the other day about Boston and what it means to me. You are amazing with words. I'd love to read the poem if you'd be willing to share.
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