Seeing in the Dark

The attraction to photography
is about its reversed paradoxes
the negative is what you strive for
a good negative makes a good positive
these concepts were lost on me, metaphorically
till recently...
hanging out there a long time
you see that you can see in the dark
that it too has information
that can register as helpful and orienting.
We strive for having details in the shadows
a little something in the clear thin parts
of the negative.
One of my favorites is that you need
a dark cloth to see
to focus with the 4X5
too much light, normal light –
and you can’t see to focus at all
and with the 35mm you really
can’t focus well in the dark...
I love shooting at night
and learned to give myself
depth of field
to focus by knowing
rather than seeing
Its stuff like this
that taught me how to survive
the impossible logic
of my complicated family.
Delivered by a visiting mailman
a stack of the undeliverable
a new world of perception
arrived suddenly the year the music died.
I needed to make friends with the dark
because that’s where I lived for a time,
eclipsed.
It wasn’t that I was locked in the cellar for years
to live like an animal by my crazy parents exactly
but there was the month in the psych ward
and being grounded for a year and a half
for trying to escape my entrapment
up on the mountain at Field Stone Farm
which says just how fertile that place wasn’t
growing up an oxymoron
with alcoholic annihilating sadist
shadow masculine
and the requisite passive aggressive feminine
not what I respected, expected
in my coming – of age.

I came to having walked around entombed
in the fortress of myself for years and years.
From behind the polished ground glass and hard metal body
I could meet you, tolerate my proximity to you
have some control over how it would look
how things would develop between us.
I could handle seeing you in two dimensions.
I could start to see what was really going on
but my images lacked emotion
had a flatness, a detachment
that made it something other than art -
which requires feeling.
I loved
the technical aspects
machine printing...processing
the magic of chemistry
in tanks, trays and in my blood
customizing titrations for the right effect...
got me by for the next dozen years or so...
and then it all stopped working...
Light, dark, chemistry, mechanics,
all paradox and false imagery for a while.

Years later it’s a different world.
Heart opened, self restored, revised
strength and knowing
in touch, listening, vibrational fields.
I still love the light, the textures,
the raw beauty of the physical world
am all the more curious
about the dynamics of proximity
the movement between souls
between times in life
dancing the cycles of the year,
seeking only love and truth.
Freedom is to move about and among.
Eye to eye, seen and seen, known and known
selective internal armor
only when necessary, not all the time...
Seemingly secure and self possessed
Secretly to this day preferring to walk about at night
Inconspicuous, quiet, less stimulating, less invasive
leaving more room to enter and perceive the world
compared to the bright busy light of day
that is just so full of itself...
so exposing, illuminating, of everything.