Into the dark
Oh dark dark dark, wrote Eliot, they all go into the dark?
Charing Cross Underground, October 2006
It all begins with failing eyesight and the impact of metaphors of fading light – Out out brief candle, life’s but a walking shadow.
In Great Suffolk Street SE1, October 2006
And I am old, Father William.
Or hasn’t it always been a kind of love of the dark with me? – low lights, sitting in the dark by the light of one small candle, the darkened theatre, never drawing the curtains to keep out the night, and, in recent years, night sailing when we passed through a dark deserted world of unsleeping sea that I would otherwise never know, yet dream of.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, I believe, defined “authentic” human being as a permanent state of “being-towards death”.
St Martin in the Fields, October 2006
I took this next picture during a south easterly gale in the Cornish village of St Mawes on 8 October 2006. It was at springs and that month the tides were predicted to be exceptionally high; at full flood the sea was breaking over the street and overflowing the harbour. The forceful moon was hidden. The wind had been freshening all day and by nightfall had reached its full force, gusting to force 8 straight at the village. In the dark and rain-swept harbour it was hard to see to set my old Nikon F. At first I went for sharpness in the distance and then, in the almost imperceptible foreground. I took maybe ten shots and this is the one that satisfied me.
Ship and Castle Hotel, St Mawes, October 2006
Lucem demonstrat umbra – the darkness shows forth the light.
Rilke ends his Elegies thus:
But if the endless dead woke a symbol in us,/ see they would point perhaps to the catkins/ hanging from bare hazels/ or they would intend the rain, falling on dark soil in spring-time. Rainer Maria Rilke: Tenth Elegy, Duino Elegies
But, as far as I know, this is not about death. Bion, the psychoanalyst, has much to say about being without memory and desire, but in a very specialised context, namely in his receptivity to the unconscious psychic events in the analytical couple. Here is the point at issue:
This is the dark spot that must be illuminated by blindness. Memory and desire are illuminations that destroy the value of the analyst’s capacity for observation as a leakage of light into a camera might destroy the value of the film being exposed. W.R.Bion: Attention and Interpretation.
It is that phrase: illuminated by blindness (where blindness is used paradoxically as both that which conceals and that which reveals) that strikes a chord for me as a photographer. Calanit Schachner has a series called Seeing Blind. There are two images of the West Pier, Brighton in there, which have particular appeal for me.
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. T.S.Eliot: East Coker
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About
July 2006
Through a glass darkly is my metaphoric allusion to looking through the lens of a camera, awaiting the psychological moment (in the dark). It is also the title of an Ingmar Bergman film I saw a long time ago, and because of one scene in that film, I always remember it: a view of a northern lake in the midnight sun hypnotises the camera. I hold that scene within like a communication with an unknown self. Perhaps had I something of the imaginative grasp of Robert Musil, there’d be no need to take photographs. Here is part of a sentence from his strory The Perfecting of Love: “now and then it happens that one sees something in the distance, an unfamiliar thing and walks towards it, and at a certain point it enters into the circle of one’s own life; but the place where one was before is now strangely empty.”
To the woods
It is, of course, a phrase, from 1 Corinthians 13, followed there by another phrase: “face to face” as a now-and-then, a before-and-after. So, as usual, quite a process is constellated in the space between. This web-space, to an extent represents, a space between. Images are one of the things that tag to such happenings, words also, but ineffably, in one way or another, meaning eludes one.
And now a picture to hold that space.
I think my search for meaning in empty spaces may partly derive from growing up in a culture of mystification. Walker Percy has an interesting slant on this. It is pivotal to his novel The Moviegoer? I’ll have more to say about Binx Bolling sometime. By the way, I am Lyon, hence Leo. I am called that after my father who died when I was five. The woman in my imagination is Lyones after a character in Arthurian legend. Anyway what interests me is the meaning that momentarily emerges from the subliminal choices that register the activity of imagination – in an apparition, or a form of words, perhaps in the threatening surprises of a psychoanalysis – when I sense myself prompted towards a reality other than what I was thinking was real, the way of being I was accustomed to. It seems like a moment of acceptance of aloneness, not such that instills despair, but rather suggests a precarious balance above an abyss of unknowing, an insupportable freedom. In the next breath perhaps, he says, Musil, that is, ” a moment always comes that is like an abyss, and, left behind at its brink, there stands a sick person whom one does not know and who is gradually fading from sight.”
The next picture is from the spring of 1986 – a rusty incinerator aboard the crane barge Thor in the Fortes Field 140 miles offshore in the North Sea.
21 August 2006
And now I’m picking up the thread again. And time has passed. And a phrase has come to mind: an image darkly forming is the phrase. It is the title of a book, and a Jungian might well take it as a metaphor for individuation. Jung thought of the progress of the soul as a night sea journey; he talked of Jonah and the whale. It is not a metaphor, however, when used another way, as a rather nice way of referring to the photograph: an image forming in the dark, first in the split-second piercing of the dark inside the camera, then developing in the dark of a tank and at last in the obscure light of the darkroom, and before all that, conceived in the dark processes of the mind’s eye. I want to use it in another sense to mark a trend in my interest in picture taking. I mean an image formed of the dark. Brassai’s Paris by night, has the glossy magic of the sensuous and romantic dark.
Prostitute at angle of Rue de la Reynie and Rue Quincampoix From “Paris by Night” 1933
In contrast, there is an image by a young Israeli photographer that cast a spell on me very different from that of the brilliance of the dark of Gyula Halasz Brassai. Sensuous, yes, but there is nothing sensual or romantic in Calanit Schachner’s picture. It takes me back to being a boy sitting in the darkened local cinema and being confronted by the unthinkable, moving black and white pictures of the relief of Belsen on the Gaumont British News. That this had been going on at the same time as my everyday life as a schoolboy! What I couldn’t get out of my head was the footage of the interior of the crematorium. And people can deny that these terrible things ever happened!
Space 5 (from Attic)
It is the image darkly forming that I am drawn to if somehow to try and understand my fascination with it. And so – into the dark.
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