transit to the lake
fresh from the ocean of sensation, i was born into a world of concepts, my face eclipsed by expectation the passage of a wide brush shading my features before they'd become my own. from left to right the brush drew red pigment to determine my direction, thick with promise at first, then reducing to scratches where it was thought my progression would stall, separating into bewilderment as age dissipated all certainty. after this hiatus the brush pressed down to depict my final contribution, before i merged golden with my backdrop to begin the next stage.
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at eleven i was lost in the woods with my paintbox. stars rained on copper leaves and the remains of a tree green with moss brought me to my knees. where the curtain of starlight bordered the thick dark, i cast my hope that i wouldn’t be forgotten before i remembered why i’d chosen to enter the woods alone, ignoring the warnings, or pressing ahead because of them, because through the woods there had to be a path and if i couldn’t find it i’d make it.
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at twenty-two i burst into yellow bloom, my orange hearts hidden from myself but too often revealed to others. my face was still unreadable, still eclipsed by the similarities of youth except to those who knew how to translate my intentions into scent and follow without hindering, to meet me mid-air as i bounded, as i burned, dressed head to toe in solar energy.
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thirty-three was a long way down. i thought i’d reached the bottom with my arms outstretched, half in, half through the window about to slam shut, to cut me in two, not into before and after but into north and south, so i could walk two ways to midnight. a canopy of evergreens appeared to cap my potential and though i believed i was climbing down, it was the only way up into the branches that divide as they grow weaving the lattice of the new ceiling. as i explored the world stripped to the horizontal and vertical, the permeable ceiling became the next floor.
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a child who wasn’t mine expected me at forty-four with a face that couldn’t be painted without confronting the challenge of yellow and turquoise, the movement towards the simple identity i’d been running from through paint, through the woods, through all my riotous blooming and onwards through the abstract forms that would unfold from my script to become water and animal symbols again, loosing spirits to reverse my path back to the original brushstroke and reinterpret the past that had brought me to the child who wasn’t mine, who now wouldn’t belong to my successor.
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fifty-five undulated, curved asymmetrically as the turquoise of forty-four greened to fill the lagoons. rising walls divided the sea and linked stairways that dreamed of shallows but heard the depths, greener, bluer, sounding my own spectrum, reproducing the returning echoes, speaking dolphin, speaking whale. when asleep one half of my mind was always awake, swimming alongside the coming years, able to glimpse a preview of where i was taking myself consciously, in spite of the rising walls and eroding rock silting up the channels through which i swam.
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deceiving the eye at sixty-six, two-thirds of the way to birth, i discovered how to exist in three dimensions, then four, then five in miniature while friends saw only the driveways, the lawns, the roofs of their subprime crises. with their mortgages approaching redemption, they paid out in early deaths and sprawling settlements, blue lilac rose, set back from the parallel routes untrodden. abandoned by vehicles for their continuing transit it was only transference now for those tricked into accepting models, into swapping the pioneering of opposites
for intricate architecture.
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the piercing red flare of seventy-seven illuminated my winter river weaving through snowy islets. evergreens shouldered the weight of crystals, molecules realigned by the freezing out, but now connected in new bonds stronger than before, able to withstand the wilderness temperatures and the plunge of night. eerily disciplined within my ecology, i sparked a change to repel the blue skies before they fell to earth. i swam my own river to emerge barefoot onto the snowy bank, then stalked the fragile night along the edge of my voiceless time.
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eighty-eight was too gold, too geometric but i found my way to be dual, to be hybrid, to speak in symbols while upholding tradition. i wore my animal hide and bird of paradise flowers, with my feathered foliage green as my early years. i existed between worlds and paired my gaze with the other. i questioned the date of my mask, which recalled the glare of the child who’d never been mine. i coloured in the patchiness of the obliterating brushstroke i was born with –– what had been predicted wasn’t illness or loss, but this reality of becoming the fabric brightly coloured and geometric in my repeating patterns. i grew snug in my animal hide and defiantly owned the fade.
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the pink patterned moon rose over ninety-nine, my solitary house more window than wall. pleated curtains concealed my interior as the whole abode descended into the lake. the reflected pleats shimmered as light in the lilac water and illuminated my passage to iridescent birth. on the shore, flowering cacti bore witness to my transit, as directed by the moon drawn by a larger body beyond this blue dome. i sank into the glittering lilac water inside the pink curtained house of my geometric dreamscape
my island dissolved
my island that i’d abstracted, rotated, to reconfigure my dwelling
finally out of reach
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on the last night i dreamt of white horses
i was above them
looking down
they moved as if swimming through pink water
but i couldn’t be sure whether it was the sea or a lake
a reflection on reflection
the distant recollection of white space
Written in response to the ten photographs in ‘Defining Photography – Celebrating 20 Years’ in Aesthetica Magazine, Issue 111, February / March 2023