Bachelard « leo photophile

Reverie

I believed at first that Gaston Bachelard was a postman, in the same way as Kafka was a clerk. I thought of him riding round the French countryside on his bicycle in a dark tunic with red flashes. Now when I think of him, the wind rattles the slates, mice run in the rafters and the timbers crack in the grip of the ice, and, by that very consequence, I am snug within. “Great passions,” he wrote, “are prepared by great reveries.” I wonder now if my nature is longing – because I have named my picture thus:

My end is my beginning (from the helicopter)

The year was 1976 and later that year my younger daughter was born. When the news of her mother’s pregnancy came over the ship’s radio, I was in the company of roustabouts, roughnecks and Mexican welders, even an Oxford graduate. I was called an aged hippy and likened to Lee Marvin in Cat Balou. I chose to be flattered by that, but still I have not seen the movie! It felt like a liberation from a false self, but did not touch the deeper condition of distance.

Chopper landing on oil rig, Fortes Field, 1976

There were some lovely guys out there. Many were from Mexico. One young cook’s assistant was always stationed like a gracious host as we filed into the comidor for our meals. He always greeted me with the same question: “Are you angry, Sor?” Of course I always denied it – until eventuallly I realised why he always looked a bit crestfallen by my reply – hungry it was he was saying.

Welder, North Sea, 1976

Bachelard in his work The Poetics of Reverie (1960) poses the position of arriving at one’s imaginative self in words that make a man the author of his solitude. It sounds to me like the achievement of a lifetime that: to be able to grasp the full intent of that phrase of his; and certainly in 1976, exactly 30 years ago, I was far from any such blessed state, whether now I am any nearer. And, of course, poets die young, don’t they. But anyone who knows the writing of Melanie Klein will know that a position is not a state, and, although dependent on capacity, is always temporary and reached only from time to time. The depth of imagination must be like this, and the camera, therefore, a ritualistic reminder of such wonders.

Anyway –

Mary (19), mother of Sophie, 1976 in the woods on the banks of Loch Lomond

August 23, 2006 Posted by photophile | Bachelard, black and white photography, Melanie klein | Leave a comment

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.

Who am I?

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.

Case-hardened

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)