In progress

You
were not here twelve years ago when my young sister, then very much neophyte in the world came to Pullman- crying. The transfer from the security of home in the comparitively under-developed suburbs of Redmond in 1995, and indeed from the comfort of being possessed of a very tangible family, to the independence of an isolated, small town and its bustling university was rough. She wept for weeks into the starchy blue comforter my parents bought just for the regulation twin xl dormitory bed she often foresook to call home (still crying) to beg for a chance to come home from this "hell hole." It was not that my sister's contempt for her new life in Pullman derived from the painful emotional cramps of comsopolitian withdrawl that often plague young, West-side men and women accustom to a life of traffic choked highways, tall buildings, and an array of shopping outlets to appease their boredom and desire. This (the) one-grocery store, one-book store, no-mall town terrified Heather not for a lack of variety and urban development but because the wide open swath of wheat in which she floated, lost on a sea of her own tears seemed to tremble with the signicance of loneliness she- alone for the first time in her life- suffered.

When mom and dad, having decided even before her departure that college education trumped all other concerns or complaints (be it loneliness, depression, or nervous collapse) from their daughter, she turned to me. You were not there in those days, when having taken my place in the vacant bedroom she left behind I listened with guilt - and a little fear- to her describe the landscape of her exile. On those long phone calls Heather took me on a tour of what seemed like a agrarian hell, surrounded on all sides by miles of nothing but wheat. I was quite sure listening to her talk about the miles and mies of wheat that nothing else existed in Pullman but her cramped dorm room (which she alternately described as "suffocating" and "big and lonely") a few classrooms where she was forced to sit out a few hours of the day. I imagined her wading through wheat back to her bedroom, back to the blue comfortor and telephone- te only human being for miles (excluding of course those few cranky professors that when they weren't hiding in the wheat emerged to torture her). It was not until her graduation, when dad and mom packed me in the car to head to Pullman that I discovered in fact much existed in Pullman beyond wheat. There were at least some shops to speak of, a grocery store, and much larger university than I'd imagined (complete with several dorms and departmental buildings no less). I was likewise surprised to see how many people there were in such a small town. Even over the years, when Heather moved in to a Soriority and began to acquire a clutch of friends, it seemed only these few girls existed beside my sister, as if like refugees of loneliness they'd stumbled upon each other one day and formed a bond against the wheat (and the lurking professors). When I arrived in the front hall of Alpha Phi, I was shocked to see so many women, parents, siblings, and friends moving about in the same space. A series of photos picturing classes of soroirity memebers over the years suggested that in fact there had always been a gathering of people in Pullman. One picture, in which my sister smiled sweetly from a row of other girls her age suggested that she in fact was only one of many that had lived some years out in the the town.

However, I confess that back then on my first encounter with Pullman, I like many present visiting loved ones was a mere tourist. Although, having become quite accostum to and dependent on the increasingly urbanized world of Seattle and it's East Side, left in my mouth a taste of disdain for such a removed, and what seemed to be underdevelped town I was shocked by the disparity between my expectations and the reality of the place. In fact, my sister's complaints about the "alienation" and "emptiness" of Pullman seemed to me then to be more mellow dramatic than true. Sure, we had to drive to Moscow, Idaho to see a movie, and yea, the grocery store was miniscule compared to the massive markets the family frequented at home, and yes, the mall was really more of a collection of small shops- most of them uninteresting, but the town was in fact a town rising up from, rather than drowing in the wheat.

But tourists seldom know what it means to immigrate, and assimilate to the reality of a place, and how doing so can both open up and shrink the geography of both the home departed from and the home made. A tourist then, I merely observed with a sense of detachment the difference between the images trasmitted home from my sister over the years and what I now saw for myself. I do not know if you came to Pullman before immigrating here yourself as a graduate student this past fall, but back then the town was indeed much smaller, and what we now take for granted did not exist- even in a whisper. In 1999, when my sister graduated college the same old buildings that exist now, existed then, but with far fewer new developments to break them up. In reflection, the absence of new infrastructure did indeed make the distance between Pullman and the larger cities of Spokane and Seattle seem farther.....

What I cannot collect, but in memories.

I posted a few weeks about about the things I love- the things that inspire, shape, and stir my heart to passion. Here is a compilation of these "things"- call them muses- that to me, are so sigh-worthy, so inspiring. I might add, that I regard the following collection as an unsucessful attempt to capture what can never full be captured, like the delicate body of an insect perserved under glass that once kept is rendered artificial, inanimate, and empty. However beautiful each piece of my assembly may be, it is only a vain image of what, experienced first hand (be it glimpsed on a walk through the city, or heard read aloud with passion or pain, or be it felt- really felt) simmultaneously lifts up and tears apart the heart. Or at least my heart.

That said, look and imagine these things as realities. At the very least, enjoy.

Imagine we are seated at my small wooden kitchen table, between us over-stuffed shoe boxes and manila envelopes spew forth their contents. We've had a few drinks, and I sip from my glass- plied enough by now to share this once-loved collection of images and words that for years I compiled with care, only to pack away in the closet and various drawers for the dust and moths to admire. I sit quietly as you sift through the heaps of Polaroid’s, each with a different face, each from a different time and place in my life and the lives of the people pictured.

You notice each Polaroid is marked at the bottom with a word or phrase. "Happy Birthday," is scribbled in blue ink on the bottom of a Polaroid of a girl draped glamorously over the edge of the empty bath tub she, in her panties and blue sweater, sits in, gazing at the camera. "Blessings" reads another- this of the rich, chocolate face of a waiter at Ihop. His smile dominates the glossy panel of the picture, which I admit is a little blurry and off-colored. No camera could ever really capture skin so deep dark, a smile so electric. His teeth in the photo look like creamy pearls, in life they were white.

You look to me for explanation. "He was a waiter that served my ex-boyfriend and I milkshakes on the only day I can remember when it snowed enough in downtown Seattle to shut the city down. I had a thing for chocolate shakes then. He was nice, and laughed at my order." You hold up the picture of the girl as if to say "and her?" Her name is Virginia. She was my neighbor the old, sterile dormitory I lived in as a sophmore in college. The rooms smelled like dust and the faint odor of bleaching agent. We use to pretend the dorm was once a hospital ward, and make up stories about the patients that held our rooms. I can remember none of them, but I can remember the smell of the place, and Virginia. She was a story too beautiful and complex to write. I tried. But there were never words enough to capture her. "She is the reason this all began," I'd tell you. She, and all the strange and complex people that nothing- not writing, nor a picture could ever fully express. "This all began, because of people so beautiful, and complicated they defied and yet inspired words to try to capture them." I think I was in love with everyone I photographed. No, I know I was.

Virginia was the first love (and perhaps curiosity) to pose for me, to tell me what I wanted to know. "What is your favorite word? What words make you feel profoundly?" I wanted to know how these ineffable beings would vocalize themselves; what words resonated deep in their characters- those places I wanted to go but could never get to. When I asked her, she said without a second's thought "Happy Birthday!" and laughed. She was beautiful, and the phrase somehow fit her perfectly...although of course neither of us could ever express why. That was true for almost everyone I asked over the years for the word or phrase that moved them or "spoke" to them more than any other; many people could offer their choice without much thought, but all struggled to vocalize why this word, this phrase meant something important to them, or why they loved it. We were both always at an impass. Even when explanations were offered they felt flat or incomplete. I liked it better when people would speak without explanation. Imagination could prevail in the absence of explanation. Imagination is the only thing that can even come close to capturing the essence of a person; it is that which allows one to on the evocation of a word transcend themself to merge with another in some way, to get inside, perhaps just a small corner of them.

More than the desire to understand people, the desire to capture and preserve them in some way drove my collection. It wasn't enough to simply remember these people, and their words, or jot them down in some one-dimensional note book- I had to somehow capture the origin- the face, the body, the personality from which the meaning of each word derived. The people were always more important that the words they provided to explain some aspect of themselves. I believe now I may have been out to collect them, these strangers who's lives crossed with my own sometimes only for a moment, or sometimes in friendships or affairs that linger still now. I wanted to know, and try to identify with them in some meaningful way, before they drifted away from me- before they became ghosts of a moment, and then only shadows, dissolving, forgotten. It is true that there is something unrepeatable about these people at the moments when I asked them to consider themselves, their lives, and the function and meaning of language in their existence. What one day represented the word that in some way summed up a profound belief or desire- or perhaps their sense of self- would, I know, change just as people change. For some, these words, which they claimed as the most powerful or expressive they knew, have been forgotten, and that once important meaning lost. Just as you cannot replicate a Polaroid, you cannot replicate a person at a single moment in their life, especially those fleeting and seemingly insignificant ones when you delivered an order of milkshakes to a strange couple with an old camera on a snowy day or picked passenger up in your cab one winter night, or stopped by to chat carelessly to an old friend. I loved taking advantage of these moments. With these pictures I tried freeze time and people, holding on, and preserving them together the only way I knew how. As for the question I ritualistically asked of each subject, I can only say I loved slowing people down in their daily business to consider the value of something so easily taken for granted, and yet as powerful and necessary as language is to our lives, and selves.

Sitting before my fast assembly of photos I would explain all this to you, while we surveyed all these captured moments, all these captured souls- so you could see them for what they were suppose to be, and what now I can only explain as my love of people manifested in squares of light and echoless sound. And I expect that you would ask what I sometimes ask myself: "Why did you stop collecting? What will you do with all this...what did you want to do with all this?" I don't know. I would sip my drink, and look searchingly over it all, thinking "I don't know" and saying finally to you the truth...I collected without knowing why, or without a thought about what to do with the collection. At the time, the motives for collecting waxed and waned in my consciousness. I did not always remember why I began this venture. It is only now, after I've put away my questions and camera to consider the collection that I remember why it all began, although I cannot say that remembering the motive much explains it. What did I want from this collection? To what purpose was it intended? I don't know.

All the pictures live now in cupboards, closets and drawers, not unloved but without a purpose for me to put them to. They simply exist. I have begun to think about returning to collection- it has been months since I last asked my question and photographed anyone- but without a sense of purpose I cannot bring myself to continue. At one time, the experience of collection was enough, and I use to look over the images with a sense of awe for the beauty and complexity of human lives. Now, I feel that I must have a purpose greater than simple love and desire. Even preservation is not possible while these images rest in heaps, hidden away, uncatalogued, unexplained, and without display. What use are these things without some end to put them to? Why collect only to stuff away somewhere in darkness? I feel I have done no justice by these subjects, and I loved them. I saw in them some part of myself that I wanted to understand, as much as I wanted to understand them, and yet I remain without a clear sense of what it all means. I believe the collection deserves explanation and order, something more than simply being hoarded and by and by forgotten. If I begin again, I will do so with the intent of creating (or recreating) something from all these voices, all these words, all these glimpses of lives captured on film. I'm not sure what yet, but perhaps in time it will come to me. As I sat with you before my strange assembly I would tell you this ("One day, I'll figure out what it means and what to do with it") and turn the subject to easier things. I would show you my favorites, the one's that touch and move me in some way still- the ones I can feel....:

1. Terra Clarke, a friend and possibly one of my great crushes:
In the picture she lays with her head on her stretched out arm, the acres of brown hair that in memories of her cascaded down her back in the picture softly frame her face, which is blurry- like a dream. The picture reads: Strawberry Fields

2. Joseph, the cabby that picked me up from the bar late on my 21st birthday in Seattle:
The picture is dark and Joseph is barely discernible against the lights of passing cars and the darkness of that wet night in January. He looks like a ghost, his rich olive skin bleeding in to the darkness. I remember his voice; it was rich with an accent I could not place. Soft. Subtly seductive. The picture reads: Blessings

3. A girl I met at a party, whose name is now utterly lost to me:
In her horn-rimmed black glasses and tight blue cardigan she looks like she would be called Olive, or June...something dated, something sweet. She is pretty in an unusual way. She brushes her hair from her face as she laughs, seemingly unaware that she is being photographed. Tattoos mark her neck and forearm. The picture reads: Phantasmagoric

4. The waiter at Ihop the day it snowed so hard the city shut down:
He laughs uncomfortably. He did not like being photographed, and it shows even through his smile. He was kind, though, and intrigued by my question, although he struggled to think of a word that he found particularly meaningful. I liked him, his warmth and the way he teased me for ordering a milk shake on a day so cold, and I wanted an answer from him. I rephrased my question: "What about a word that feels really good to say, something that you love the feel and the sound of?" The picture reads: Hey-yah!

Reflecting on these photos, I admit I feel the same desire to discover new faces and identities, or new corners of those familiar people that I call friends, family, and lovers. Perhaps, I might return to people I've questioned before, and ask them to revisit their relationship to language. What has changed? What moves you now? Perhaps, I will discover entirely new people; or rather discover in them some kernel of personal meaning or truth bigger than us both. Leafing through my collection, with you I might ask for your answer. Now that we have shared these lives and words together, what moves you? Or perhaps, I would simply sigh over the faces smiling, staring, or glancing away from me and begin to pack it all up again, to take out some other date, perhaps over wine, perhaps with someone else, perhaps with a discovered sense of purpose.

H.

Having determined to help establish a consul in China, and to satiate the buring curiousity of nations about the forbidden interior of the last great civilized country unknown to Europeans I embarked on the great ship Lion with a crew of 45 men on mission of exploration and diplomacy. History is likely not to remember to her children the story of my part to this endeavor, I being but a assistant to greater men, but thinking it worthy to record, I will write for her my true trials and curious observations of a curious land.

My name is Peter J. Williamson, the son of an the most upright ale-house keeper Peter D. Williamson Sr. of London, and good woman Alice Williamson, formerly of South Hampton. The eve before my departure I took a last drink with my good father, my mother standing by, stroking my pale hair with much pain, and thought what a place I am to leave for the misty terrainn of the unknown. Though, I was not to travel alone, as so many have, and will I think for sometime forward, I felt in that moment surrounded by my family in the ale-house whose roof hung affectionately over my infancy, adolescents, and early manhood, that I was leaving to plunge into a land wholey apart from the world. Would I return? When? God knows, voyages of exploration have a unpredictable appetite for men. That said, I kissed my beloved and parents, took my last strong mouthful of ale and strode off for the east.

Our ship, the Lion departed early the following morning into a gray mass of morbid clouds that seemed to dip down to the very face of the see. Needless to say, what excitement I felt was a bit tempered by this dark departure. I'd imagined setting sail for a golden orb of rising sun. I'd imagined song on aboard ship, and many thrilled looks from the men. I saw niether in this solemn business of departure. Rather, all about the ship were about some specific task, and all tended to their works without so much interest purpose as would startle a fly. Indeed, except for the diplomats who conversed about and planned in anticipation of the great hidden East they were to probe, and with hope establish a station in the rest of the ship seemed not to realize, or perhaps care for the adventure ahead.

What excitement their might of been, even in my own heart shrank by and by as the long voyage stretched on, seemingly without end. The greatest excitement came when, landing on the shores of very stopping points we began to notice a change in the terrain, which turned variously more green or more rocky, and showed in places artifacts of man that suggested a difference in cultural domain. By these moments alone, could one feel our progress. By theses moments alone, could I feel that I was progressing toward a reality, much fantasized about. The dream became more and more solid in the progression of land masses, and yet still formless and shifting. At times I struggled to comprehend the solid earth that seated China, our destination, and doubted much if, even as I stood upon it, I would be able to believe or explain it's solidity.....

positano. going back- inside

What is left but memory to recreate that niche in the Italian coast, its cobbled corridors and alley's, roofed with spindling, leafy vines, that held my life for a moment in dreamy stasis. I took no pictures there, nor bought any trinkets or took any artifact that now endures. Even those gorgeous, horribly uncomfortable sandals I bought to replace my busted sneakers are a mere memory- one whose beginning I cannot trace. When did I loose the thing? When did its shape and weight on my foot transform into a feeling, and image only?

Five years removed from what I sometimes now believe really was the dream it felt, Positano is more a harbor in my imagination than reality. The place itself like its people- whose faces long ago melted- has at turns gradually dissolved, shifted shapes, grown more beautiful, or a times, more ghostly; it is as much feeling and image as the sandals whose place among my possessions is in my mind only. In reflection, I wonder if there is something to be said of those cheap tourist t-shirts and countless pictures of sun-touched tourists smiling in front of some local novelty. At least through these- these things- you can pretend to own a piece of what you really only pass through momentarily on your way to somewhere else. But it is pretense only, isn't it? What is the souvenir but a shred of "evidence" you hold up to remind yourself and others that this place, and you occupation of it, your memory, your story is real. “See, I really did walk the streets of Positano, and touch the sand where the street bleed away into the blue water. I really did taste the salt on my fingers and hear the laugh of richly olive-complected children at play in the drift near by. See, my photo? My shirt? See the evidence?”

The truth is even evidence fails to say anything of the reality of the place you dwelt within. It is only piece, sometimes- as with those t-shirts- a manufactured symbol, that signifies nothing of the local, only the novelty. What I mean is, the trinket- if we will call it that- is a symbol of a place manufactured for a foreigner, intended to be taken away. It has no real connection to the earth, the sound, the energy of the geographic space it was taken from. An artifact, that is a piece of the space (like a rock or pressed flower) is perhaps more closely linked to its source, but it too- once it is taken out of its context- becomes a symbol for the taker, it’s meaning and use permanently altered to suit a new context (that of memory). It is cut from the heart, from its source, and it alone can never recreate the wholeness of the space from which it was pulled. But, unlike the t-shirt or photo, I think it might perhaps retain the spirit of its origin, like a ghost hanging on. Can’t you feel sometimes? When you hold a piece of a place you went that you took home with you, can’t you feel its origin pulse lightly, can’t you feel a sense of the wholeness of which it was once a part? And it there was a wholeness, from which you took a part what happens to that wholeness? It can never be whole- not completely, once it is taken from. Do you feel then, a sense of what you’ve stolen? Do you feel the ghost of what has been broken, sulking somewhere at the periphery of your consciousness? And when the thing looses its potency for you- when it’s symbolical meaning, the meaning you, the tourist, designated to it- and you pack it away in some attic box or toss it out with the trash on a whim of tidiness do you feel anything?

What troubles me further is memory, especially when memory alone is what you take from a place. To think of it, memory seems part manufactured and part truly connected to that wholeness you were a part of once- maybe a foreign part, but still somehow a part of. It seems part tourist t-shirt, part artifact. What do I mean by that? I guess, I mean that memory is in some ways a production, forever in a state of production. As with my vision of Positano, memory is colored by our heart, and desire. Memory is a paper crane, a production created to mean something, to symbolize something. Memory is not a photograph. By that I mean it is not fixed as a single vision, printed forever, unchangeable, but true both photograph and memory are subject to interpretation, and desire. That is, both shift slightly, sometimes dramatically, depending on the way one wants to perceive something- be it an image framed behind a glass screen or the floating images that change color with the weather of our imaginations, and emotions. But memory is also, still I think connected in some very real way to the origin of its creation. That is, if we are still talking about the memory of a visit taken to a geographic reality. The reason I suggest that there is something potent, and connected to the origin of the traveler’s memory of a place is this idea I have that when you create a memory from a lived experience, you take elements of the “remembered” in to your self. The scent, the sound, the weight of the air, the light of the hour, the feel of the crowd or the sand or the living creature at your fingers, as parts of the cognitive processes that are involved in the moment of perception and the creation of a memory imprint themselves on you. They are translated if you will into the chemicals that as much as they will make up your sense of a place when it’s gone, also make up a part of you. You see, so I think (unless I’m wildly off my rocker) there might be something- I hesitate to use this word, but pure or original about a traveler’s memory, as much as it is fallible and shifting, and produced. Maybe, when you come from your travels, with artifacts or with nothing but the imprint of a place (or places) on your memory, you return with these things inside you- as part of you. And maybe in these things, as much as they are cut from their original context, and given new context in you, retain some of that original wholeness of which they were a part.

The place becomes a harbor in your imagination, uprooted from its geographic certainty, drifting within you as a sight for endless recreation. The place becomes a reflection of you, of you remembering, or you (re)remembering a memory of you in a place that is no longer significant because it is a place, but because it is a part of you. Positano was but two days in my life, too sensation-rich, visually stunning, days of my life that I expand and contract according to my place and situation at the moment of remembering, for as long as I remember, and recreate it in me. In a way I think, my location at a given moment of memory has become more important that the location I remember. How have I blurred the lines between my self and this place? How have I recreated that cascading city and its brilliant harbor? Sometimes, the place becomes so gigantic; it expands out and envelops me again. What were vague impressions have at times become gigantic in my memory- the smell of the ocean actually tints the flavor on my tongue and the sunlight filtering through that vine-covered alley shines golden on the backs of my eyes. And yet, there have been years, during which time I failed to practice that all preserving- all distorting- action of re-creative remembering, so that the place shrank, grayed and became a ghost, looming at the rim of my mind. And I think it would be this way, even if I had those sandals still, to remind me. Even if I could still lace their thin leather straps up the length of my calves, and feel my weight settle on the thin leather sole I would have to travel back within myself to that niche in the coastline of my memory, to conjure and recreate (again) the place, the feeling, the moment that wearing them signifies. I suppose that’s it, when you come back with your trinkets, artifacts, or maybe only memories you always come back with nothing, except that which through some strange magic you might endeavor to recreate.