The Moviegoer « leo photophile

The Search

So something lies in wait. To be discovered. Ah but, the intrigue is not always there. All anyone can do is wait or half-heartedly try to push through. But no, not even then does it happen. All unsuspecting, however, I may catch the scent on the breeze and desire kindles.

Staircase to the Herb Garret, St Thomas Street, SE1, September 2006

A year or two back, I had the urge to reread a book I read for the first time over thirty years ago. I recalled nothing about it except for a girl with an exotic name that figured somehow or other; the only impression she left on me was of someone standing in a doorway dressed in something silvery. That’s it. Even her name I couldn’t remember. And leaving through a secondhand copy I found – there it was between those unturned pages still -Sharon (not Rose of Sharon like in The Grapes of Wrath) Kincaid. Sharon Kincaid was the name. It sounded too plain now, not showbiz like then. I remembered the title of the book. Of course, I did.

So I started to read and as early as page 7, this:

This morning, for the first time in years, there occurred to me the possibility of a search.. As I watched, there awoke in me an immense curiosity. I was onto something.

An immense curiosity!

What is the nature of the search? This is page 9.

Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me: so simple it is easily overlooked.

This is Binx Bolling.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island. And what does such a castaway do? Why, he pokes around the neighbourhood and he doesn’t miss a trick.

Taking out the rubbish, Borough Market, September 2006

To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

To think my eyes had passed over these words before without registering, at least not consciously. It must have been the bit before it that set up the bookmark, and which, with the passage of time, had become planted in my mind as being about Miss Kincaid. Such are the mysterious processes of memory! Here it is:

Standing in a doorway, 1993

This is page 8:

The idea of a search comes to me again as I am riding the Gentilly bus down Elysian Fields… Directly next to me, on the first cross seat, is a vey fine-looking girl. She is a strapping girl but by no means too big, done up head to toe in cellophane, the hood pushed back to show a helmet of glossy black hair… As the bus ascends the overpass, I discover that I am frowning and gazing at a noble young calf clad in gun-metal nylon. Now beyond question she is aware of me: she gives her raincoat a sharp tug and gives me a look of annoyance – or do I imagine this? I must make sure, so I lift my hat and smile at her. But it is no use. I have lost her forever. She flounces out of the bus in a loud rustle of cellophane.

Then it is the idea of the search occurs to me. I become absorbed and for a moment or so forget about the girl.

This is in fact not Sharon Kincaid. She turned up later on.

I felt on to something the moment I stepped into 12th Century priory church of St Bartholomew The Great, and returning with an air of high expectation I found there the shot I wanted.

A sacred space, St Bartholomew The Great, founded 1123, September 2006

September 28, 2006 Posted by photophile | black and white photography, The Moviegoer, Walker Percy | 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)