Lassitude and Longitude

I recently came across this video thinking it was a very convincing documentary spoof. To my utter astonishment and ongoing fascination, objectumsexuality is a very real psychological condition in which a person experiences ‘love’ toward a non human object.

What I found intriguing about the three featured objectumsexuals is that they were all female and shared in common, a history of emotional/physical neglect and abuse.

My first reaction was disbelief coupled with ridicule. I mean what fool would invest love in something that cannot return love? But, suddenly I began seeing myself as the fool because…well, isn’t inequity the case in most human relationships?

If we consider conventional practices of intimacy and romantic pursuit ‘objectumsexuality’ strikes us as an unusual departure in human relationship behavior and perhaps an aberrant disorder whose common denominator is psychological trauma.

I watched these videos several times, until what previously occurred to me as strange seemed no more remarkable than any other performance or act that comprises the social carnival.

For me, objectumsexuality is a rather unique and exceptional perspective on love. It challenges ideas and beliefs to which we have become accustomed and attached – that ‘real’ love can only take place between two people (of course, we’ll also accept animals into that equation since they possess ‘life’ and are animated, thus possessive of souls).

How does objectumsexuality mesh with our moral purview – is it ‘wrong’ to love an object with the same intensity and affection as one would love a friend, family member, or lover? How many of us are closet objectumsexuals and live in denial about our torrid object attachments?

What I found most intriguing were the uncanny parallels between the way objectumsexuals love objects and the way humans love humans. So, if we choose to look at objectumsexuality as some absurd, aberrant personality disorder – then we must realize that this judgment is relevant both sides.

I know I have been guilty of attributing qualities and characteristics to people in my past that were completely void of what [I later learned] I was projecting upon them. I have also been guilty of carrying on untenable relationships devoid of equity and completely one-sided. I believe we have all experienced love for or toward another person who was just as cold and austere as any object, so where does that place us?

ps. if you’re traveling to Paris, France to see the Eiffel Tower – be sure to bring your hand sanitizer…

With my greasy index finger I pressed down the stiff red button on my father’s tape recorder and annunciated the words, “ I hate you”. I was ten years old, hiding in the hallway closet, and hurt by something my sister had said to me.

Like a cat maneuvering around an unplugged vacuum cleaner, I always maintained a constant level of alert in her presence. In her youth, my sister was a volatile synthesis of instability and unmet emotional need; a tomboyish bully with the disposition of an unfed ogre. Even to this day, despite her domestic guise (the Kathy Ireland cardigan and khaki capris) she remains a tyrannical bitch with the stature and temperament of some fabled woodland foe. When she was on my side I felt safe and secure, but for the other 23.5 hours of my day I lived in fear.

My mother worked three jobs and attempted to go to school in the evenings. She was never seen and her presence never felt. My father was a brain case, a survivalist Vietnam vet with who’d smack the teeth out of your head if you wandered too far within his perimeter. He was the household’s daytime dictator, ruling from his crumb-covered armchair with merciless impunity and a penchant for corporal punishment.

My sister and I were his designated grunts, carrying out his domestic duties so he could sit in his underwear and perfect his vacant, deranged dad face while watching tv. If we weren’t vacuuming up the wake of what he had just eaten, we were preparing his next meal.

He was a sloth, unclean, unkempt, and under our roof where neither of us wanted him. Most kids I went to school with spent their summers playing in parks or swimming in pools. For my sister and me, manual labor marked our summers. The day would start with a swift kick to the box springs, flipping me from my dreams to the living nightmare that was my life.

If I wasn’t stripping peanut butter off the kitchen counters or vacuuming chips and cookie crumbs from the crevices of dad’s recliner, I’d be exiled outside into the hellish midday heat for a day full of yard mowing.

I was a fat kid, I mean truly, honestly, fat. I had bitch tits and started sweating at the site of stairs, so carrying the literal weight of this burden only made my duties more difficult to perform. Risking hemorrhoids and herniation I would hoist the large wooden garage door to reveal the lawnmower leering at me from the other side of an impassable gauntlet of garage artifice; table saws, tool boxes, and cardboard boxes brimming with garland and Christmas tree ornaments smudged with grease.

After a clumsy extraction, accompanied by a few asthmatic episodes, I pushed the lawnmower to the edge of the lawn. Usually, it needed gas, which meant I had to maneuver a five gallon gas tank out to the front yard and risk a HAZMAT incident due to my weak, pudgy grasp and poor aim.

The gas container is a perfect example of how everything was always so goddam difficult and impractical. Most folk keep a half-gallon or one-gallon container for gas in their sheds or garages, but my pops, no… he needed a gas tank big enough to refuel a small jet or burn down 500 acres of jungle.

Even the lawnmower was archaic and impossible. I didn’t know of one other single lawn mower in our neighborhood or in existence that had a grass catcher. If you’re not sure what that is let me explain…Designed by some lawn snob with a fetish for colostomy bags, it’s that useless scrotum sack that sags off the back of the lawn mower that gorges on grass clippings.

I could cut two lanes on a decent day before having to empty the catcher, which meant the grass wasn’t wet and heavy with dew or yesterday’s rain. Then, I would have to stop the mower and remove the catcher, which was now completely full of hot green yard guts. The bag weighed about 20 pounds and when attempting to empty it the trash bag would always collapse and grass clippings would fall anywhere but into the trashcan.

Invariably, this meant I had to reach down into the foul smelling dankness and scoop the shit out. I ask you, who does this, and why? Every now and again, during lawn mowing season, while driving through the city, I catch some old bastard mowing his lawn with this dandy catcher device and the urge never leaves me to get out and whip him with a garden hose until his flip flops fall off.

My dad liked making life miserable almost as much as he liked his peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches. There was never an opportunity for my sister and I to commiserate over the unfairness of our father’s abuses and the plantation like politics of the house. And, for this, I have to give my old man credit because this is surely where his military training paid off; keep the prisoners divided so their strength can never combine to equal or rival that of your own.

My father treated us differently. He rarely ever struck my sister and when he did it was out of love unlike the blows bestowed to me, which lacked any restraint. With me, he had no reservations when it came to ratifying his authority with physical assertion. His hand was a hammer under which he drove me down like a bent nail beneath the boards that sealed shut my childhood fate.

My sister would eventually form a coalition with my father, using him as an ally to carry out punitive damages against me when her and I were at odds. Sometimes we got along, which basically meant she was bored and sought entertainment, so she might ask me to play with her until one of her friends came over or the weekend went by. During all other times there were no rules of engagement. If my sister’s bangs went limp before the school day had ended or if she was forced to sit alone at lunch, I was the one who would suffer the consequences.

One glorious afternoon she chased me down, clutching a wad of toilet tissue in her hand, which I could clearly see, was used to wipe her ass. I’ve never known another girl as ornery or wicked as her. She loved to fart and simulate shitting on my face on a daily basis. I believe it’s what kept her regular.

On this particular occasion she backed me up against the only phone in the house which happened to be in the kitchen – a black AT&T rotary that rested on a hook big enough to hold a coal shovel. As I groped for something to grab or cling to behind me, she beamed as if overcome by catharsis and went to make her move.

High on the body’s fight or flight pharmaceuticals and feeling my life in imminent danger, I responded with a crushing blow to her forehead with the receiver of the rotary phone. I should have given more thoughtful consideration to the placement of that blow and killed that bitch when I had the chance, but there’s no time to think when a wad of shit shoved in your face

Five minutes later she used that same black phone to call dad who was at the VFW deeply involved in a game of clabber and drinking beer from a can. He answered her distress call, accepting another commission to carry out justice in this case where I was the criminal and my sister the subject of another unprovoked attack. She was rehearsing and perfecting the role of the victim and emulating my father long before she became his full-fledged female facsimile.

My father took pride in beating me the way a Canadian seal hunter enjoys bludgeoning baby seals. I still remember the taste of his boot – the angle of his jaw and complete absence in his eyes.

Jack Nicholson scared the tube socks off of audience’s feet nationwide starring as Jack Torrence in the Shining. Post-it notes revolutionized the way we sabotage ourselves, and while Richard prior freebased cocaine, Mount St. Helens Erupted, darkening midday skies with over 600,000 tons of ash and claiming the lives of sixty people.

Saddam Hussein waged war with Iran over oil rights as John Lennon bled to death in the back seat of a taxi cab after being shot three times by Mark David Chapman. People were drug to inevitable ends on the cold steel rails of circumstance just as in years before and in years to come.

While the world outside committed some of history’s most heinous fashion gaffes, I was kicking in my mother’s womb as she sat cramped and uncomfortable in waiting room chairs. She was a regular at the VA clinic and the temp agency, as well as all of the municipal buildings downtown that doled out public assistance.

I could say a lot about the nineteen eighties if, in fact, I was in business or politics at the time or if at the very least, I was cognitive and not preoccupied with shitting myself or wailing for something to suck. Chronologically, I was the second of only two children, born five years after my sister. My recollection of early childhood is gauzy and inconsistent; forever out of focus like a hastily made photograph shot from the hip .

My memory begins with my first day at kindergarten with the blurred faces of five year olds, like day old dreams with forgotten plots and indistinguishable characters. A dull euphoria filled with game shows and girls with big hair, balloons pouring over presidential candidates in black and white on a twelve inch set.

On another channel, a space shuttle sifting through bad reception, returning to earth in pieces while I waited for the yellow bus. I recall copious amounts of wood paneling and glass bottles of pop; Michael Jackson’s thriller album on vinyl and my mom’s big plastic eyeglass frames.

Outside of school, my world was no bigger than a city block. I entered into Head Start at the age of four. I remember my mom’s powdery face and the drive downtown on days when she was able to take me. I spent more time in the laps of large black women while being read to than I did with my own mother.

I remember big cars, Monte Carlos and Cutlasses cruising streets, which were narrower then and interrupted by fewer traffic lights. From a socioeconomic standpoint I would later learn that my family was white trash and that the Head Start program was just one of the many government amenities my mother took advantage of in order to keep her kids out of foster care.

My arrival into this world occurred during the initial stages of  my father’s physical and psychological decline. Since before I could speak, I have been forced to suffer my father’s war stories and hard luck sagas. The area of my brain which I allotted to record my father’s lamentations is like a landfill where the grandiose garbage of his invented self sifts down, decaying and dissolving into the acrid soils of abhorrence.

What I remember is muddled and messy, a bit incoherent, but so were most of his stories. I can tell you that he was a demolitions expert in the US Army which meant one of his duties entailed cooking up batches of foo-gas and agent orange – the shit they used to incinerate villages and jungles in North Vietnam.

He had survived the Tet Offensive in 1968, returning home in 69 to picket signs and anti-war propaganda. He met my mom outside of nightclub called “Nippy’s” in Martin Co Indiana. Underage and fleeing from a police raid she jumped into his Pinto and never looked back.

Shortly after my sister was born in 1975, my father was admitted to a Veteran’s Hospital in Marion, Illinois. He was under the care of Hung Che, a Chinese physician or in my father’s affectionate words, a “fucking gook”.  My father entered the VA suffering from phlebitis which was confirmed by a Doppler that revealed a massive blood clot in his upper right leg.

Che, an illegal immigrant and unlicensed physician [later discovered] ordered physical therapy instead of immobilization and coumadin [an anti-coagulant] which was and still remains standard procedure for treating severe blood-clots.

A day later, the chief of medical staff was recording the time of my father’s death when suddenly my father produced a life sustaining heart rhythm that registered on the monitor of the EKG. The prescribed physical therapy had caused the clot to dislodge creating an embolus. My father suffered a massive stroke and heart attack, both at once but lacked the sense and regard to stay dead.

From the time of my birth my father was unable to work. He had once been district manager of a Canadian based trucking company which garnered a heft salary and all the amenities bestowed to top officials; paid vacations, holidays, trips taken under the guise of business meetings/conferences, company cars, top shelf living to say the least.

While seated in a booth with my father, watching my mother sweep floors at Hardees for $3.50 an hour – it was hard to fathom that my parents had ever lived with a future in mind. Between anger management sessions and PTSD support group meetings hosted by the local VA clinic, my father put together a legal malpractice case against the Veteran’s Hospital in Marion, Illinois and against the United States Government.

Neither my mother nor my father was gainfully employed. My father was unable to work since he was fighting for his disability rating, so a local law firm working on contingency picked up the case.

The legal battle spanned a period of fifteen years, addling my father’s discontent to a thick, whipped state of mental devastation and inciting a deep, profound hatred of United States Government.

On a snowy March first morning while my shell shocked father watched cartoons in the waiting room my mother pushed me out into a blizzard of overdrafts and overdues.

Awakened by the sound of black birds bickering on the wires outside the second story window, I sat up from where I had fallen asleep on the floor and flicked a pillar of ash from the butt still wedged between my first and second fingers. It wasn’t uncommon for me to pass out in random rooms, fully clothed, clutching a cigarette in one hand and my wallet in the other.

Tim was collapsed on the couch either overdosed or still sleeping. I could see him, hazy and blue beneath the fog of burnt food and incense that had floated up from the first floor where his brother Greg, a thirty-year-old, unemployed, internet predator, and connoisseur of vintage rock band tee-shirts slinked around in silence, knowing that he was resented by everyone, including ‘alfie’ the family dog.

The house was a shit hole but saying it was a shit hole implies that one might have been inclined to take a shit in such a place. The truth is, I wouldn’t even touch my ass to the toilet in that place which was precisely why I was rushing the blood back into my head and extremities, preparing for my routine exodus to the local Shell station for my morning evac.

Tim had lived with his grandparents since he was born and given up for adoption by their only daughter who suffered from a multitude of psychotic disorders and drug addictions. She came around from time to time when her boyfriend became bored with beating her, or when no one else would have her or listen to her dazed, indigent banter; a sort of drug induced double-talk that had a spooky evangelistic quality.

She would amble around in the glow of muted morning shows mumbling incomplete sentences about dime bags and prescription pills, until Tim would yell at her to shut-the-fuck-up, and she would. She’d steal our cigarettes while we slept and leave in the am in a primer gray late model sedan driven by one of satan’s foot-soldiers.

Jimmy and Linda [Tim’s grandparents] were hard workin’ folk, but neglectful parents. After all, they were responsible for rearing and letting loose into the world a sibling duo of degenerates incapable of cranking up carnival rides.

Jimmy was a large man, big enough to back a bull into a butcher shop. His hands were the size of pork butts and he had a wild look in his eyes like those people you drive by that wander across bridges in the middle of the night.

Linda was a frightened woman with big yellow eyes with wiry wisps of hair shooting from her scalp like fake snakes from a can. She worked at the nearby Sate Hospital where they boarded the local lunatics and psychotic progeny of lobotomies gone awry.

She worked in the laundry tweleve hours a day loading shit stained and vomit soaked linens into the fiery furnaces that tumbled like rows of rusty wheels. She was thin and trembled when she came to pause or light another cigarette. If Elvis were still alive, she’d have left the whole freak show behind and hit the road long before her looks left her.

Before leaving, I took one last hit from my morning menthol, then spit a long stringy globule onto the arm of the couch. Over the hiss of cooking phlegm and carcinogens I told Tim I was cutting out and that I’d be back after nine. I opened the door and was met by the stale sunlight and steam of the adjacent upstairs room used to store Christmas ornaments and rusted weight bench equipment.

We had painted Tim’s room black three months prior, at the beginning of that summer. The intention was simple, snuff out the sun so we could sleep while others worked and waded through the sobriety and regret of their daily shuffle.

Stepping beyond that threshold was like entering into a decompression chamber where the body was purged of euphoric aura and illusion and prepared for assimilation, but this was only a changing room, a room where make-up and wardrobe was kept; we never wore those costumes very well or for very long.

For inspiration, two porno mag posters hung on either side of the door. The first was a blonde in butt-less leather chaps centered on a Harley with feathered hair, wearing a state trooper’s sunglasses. The other was a nubile teen tennis player suggestively clutching the thick foam rubber handle on her racket. She was bent slightly forward over the net with a white pleated skirt that was hitched up enough so you could see that she was shaved.

I always imagined the one on the left to be Tim’s girl, after all he was into heavy metal, and MILFs. I wasn’t real big on bikes or blondes, especially not the vintage hairspray whores with teased bangs. So, I locked eyes with the one on the right and let my focus adjust while the dust fell from my vision. I could hear Jimmy’s voice in the kitchen below, which brought me around real quick and cut off my little love affair with the poster prostitute.

If there was anything Jimmy despised it was teenage boys, especially ones that descended from the stairs of his grandson’s bedroom at three in the afternoon red-eyed and woozy. When I met with the last step and unhitched the door the sounds of Sunday’s supper preparations stopped and Jimmy looked up at me from his sink full of fresh tomatoes. “Goddamit boy, you just getting’ up, I oughta break your fucking neck boy – little bastards got no sense of nothing.’”

Linda always knew there was some good in me and never let Jimmy go too far with his husky half-hearted beratings, which was his way of showing affection. Jimmy hollered at me to stay as he wiped the seedy slime from the fillet knife, breathing in such a loud, labored manner that his enormous gut lunged with each gulp of air ingested.

“Boy…, I went to that doctor’s today…” Linda lowered her paper and looked at Jimmy pleadingly, but Jimmy kept his head turned towards me with his wild eyes fixed on me. “I’m a goddam dead man, dead as fucking nails boy, take look at me! Your looking at a goddam dead man, that’s right! Might as well put a bolt in my brain and spread me out over them maters’ in back cause I’m a goner, dead as fuckin’ nails boy. They says I got that cancer all over my body, head to fucking toe boy.”

Jimmy rested his hands, folding them on his bare white belly swollen with cancer, and laughed like a storefront Santa. I laughed too, but laughed like a dog bites at air trying to catch gnats, because I knew of nothing else to do to fight back against the buzzing nuisance of awkwardness blackening the voids between our places at the table. I looked to Linda to either confirm or deny, but the stillness of her stare accompanied by a pale yellow glaze quickly wiped and removed with a dishtowel told me this was truth.

For the first time in my life I was sitting across from a man about to die, a man I would wake to bearer, in the milky morning fog of factories and freeways, across a frozen field of plastic vases and flat stones to his final destination. Jimmy died that November, just two months after his formal diagnosis.

The funeral home was filled that day with flannel shirts and stonewashed denim jeans and men with slick hair and scabbed lips. The women congregated near the kitchen and kept mostly to themselves, they’d talk in short slangy spurts between drags and brandish their newest tattoos like flashcards of trailer life literacy.

I poured my paper cup full of cherry pop and gazed across the two card tables they pressed together in the recession hall. All the food looked the same, processed chesses and meats mingled together and gilded to the sides of glass pans, bowls full of bacon and beans and of course coleslaw. Fat, bumbly winter flies with iridescent green bodies gorged themselves along the tips and tines of forks while a dirty unclaimed kid licked cake from his fingers.

In the fluorescent light of the funeral home everything looked green, even the water that sputtered from the calcified faucet in the bathroom where I used my finger to brush my teeth. I stood in the wood paneled prison cell stuck to the floor by piss and overflow looking into the mirror that returned an image I never recognized as myself. I looked back down, dried my hands and pulled at the doorknob with the corner of my shirt.

Jimmy’s coffin was a plain plywood box wrapped in a bolt of lavender fabric. I sat in the front row with the other pallbearers, Tim, Greg (Tim‘s uncle/brother), and Shawn, a kid from the block who robbed garages and dealt drugs, a porch-kid roped into the responsibility by his parole officer. The four of us carried Jimmy’s four-hundred pound person, fifty yards, across the frozen dirt to a hole that steamed with dark heat from the earth’s dank basement.

I looked down into the hole past the writhing worms, past the grayish layer of clay, down deeper than I had ever looked before until I was finally behind myself, somewhere else, where baked foods no longer tasted of smoke and perfume, where toilets flushed and screen doors didn’t sag, where flies stuck in the scrim of storm windows and stayed outside, where all the things that crept and crawled kept to their cellars, where all trash and sleaze bided beneath the dirt of freshly dug graves and landfills.

I leaned over as we lowered the coffin onto the lift, and the only thing I could see was the certainty of dirt and darkness, the non-negotiable decent of death. I extended my head forward and spit into the gape just to see how deep it really was, but the only thing I heard in return was the faint hiss of autumn leaves sliding over the stone faces in that cemetery and the work bell whistle at the Whirlpool factory signaling the second shift.

Truth is a slippery substance, a serum, an antidote for inexplicability. Our quest for ‘truth’ is an awkward improvisation, a futile lunge to catch a falling knife. Lies, like ligaments conjoin our implausible past with our impossible presence and unforeseeable future, providing us with a point of articulation; a protrusion, an arm that allows us leverage and reach so that we may grasp not what’s true, but what’s real.

What is true…? me, you, tomorrow, these words, this single sheet of paper? Rene Descartes proved incontrovertibly that we do [in fact] exist and that our existence is the only ‘truth’ man will ever possess. With this, we were able to find the self to be evident and a priori, but remain unavenged by truth in the pursuit of purpose, i.e. the God concept.

What we can know is greatly limited and governed by our senses of perception. The way we navigate through our lives and plot our passage across this suggested plane of linear progression is not contingent upon what’s true. Rather, it is contingent upon what we perceive – that which is real.

Memory is neither to be trusted or disinherited. Like a dank forest floor quietly consuming the sodden refuse of last year’s legacy, our memories, in time, will turn to fodder; sifting beneath the surface to sustain another season’s strife. Memory is impermanent and unenduring. Its factualness is replete with inconsistency and tendency to convolute and omit certain details seen as superfluous to some, fundamental to others.

At the age of seven, when I viewed my uncle’s body, dead in his coffin, did I really touch his hand the way I recall or did I, instead, pinch the back of my own imagining the waxy turgor and unresponsive weight of death – thereby eliding the truth? I tell you, I’m can’t be sure. What little I am able to exhume from my recollection is neither fact or fiction to, but what I know as real – what I remember.

I have forgotten most of my life. I have misplaced the firm details and demographics of my past. Like a Degas or Renoir, the loose impressions of the life I’ve left behind are mosaics of inference and incompleteness, broken lines and unfinished brushstrokes implicating a past, a presence, or something real to be realized.

When I gaze into the well of recollection I never see a true reflection of myself. Instead, a distorted, dappled image of fluidity upon the surface of something I have never been able to touch or understand. Realizing this, I cannot help but sometimes wonder if, in fact, those undulations and bent images are the truth and that everything else, still and fixed is a great fiction or foreplay to what’s really true or yet to be told.

I do not refuse the existence of truth. I believe in in axioms and maxims and deductions arrived at through reason. I believe that man can know himself, his own existence and a great deal of the natural world, but what I argue about now is the integrity of memories, the truths by which we conduct ourselves; the construction of morality and the convention/s of society; ideas of right and wrong.

As constant observers we bear witness and more often than not (false witness) to our own lives and the lives of others. We forge fictive memories of indelible delusions to which we conform and covet, thus consummating the co-dependant union between ‘truth’ and truth seeker. What is so important about truth is if says nothing about what is real or how you felt at any given moment in your past?

What’s so important about truth if it only scratches a surface – if it only conveys logistics like a police report? The more precise question is, do you know what’s true, could you ever know the truth, your truth? And, if so, could you protect that memory from the deceptive tendency that reassigns recollection to the acquiescent realms of repudiation where narratives are rewritten as fictions or fairytales.

If a writer can use metaphor to finish a unfinished circle and thereby apprehend their meaning, their fleeting existence, then they have, indeed, achieved victory over those who kept journals, notebooks, and even recordings, but have yet to extract the spirit or substance from their life.

What impresses me is narrative, and not just any; narrative that denotes a frequency of humanness so profound it pounds in your ears and eyes, forcing you not to fawn over facts, but to cower with quiet consternation for the presence of its humanity.

With every entropic tick of the clock there is a face blurring over in ambiguity in the audience of my recollection. One day, I will forget what I remember, all of it. I will forget the street name of my family’s first house (McArthur) and the color of its inner walls (English apple). I will forget the sound that my mother’s wallet made when hitching shut…(snick), but I will never forget how I felt.

As artists we owe nothing to the truth and everything to our emotions.

—–Original Message—–
From: d’Autremont <ktda@excite.com>
To: Fotographicmail@aol.com
Sent: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 20:33:11 -0500 (EST)
Subject: RE: ok i’ll stop

paul,

okay so it seems to be kind of hard
to have a real conversation during class

but i want to know what you where asking about perfection
do i strive for it , or wish for it?
those are very different things

i don’t strive for it
i know i am sloppy
always have been
wondering if that may actually be my strong suit
rather than something to be avoided

i am not sure
but it is part of my personality to want the perfect
to wish i spoke 7 languages
and that my mom kept me in ballet when i was 8
those sorts of things

and i am hard on my images the same way
but not actually sure how to go about changing them
well we all know how
but actually doing it is different, right….

anyway so the question goes to you
do you want perfection?
is it connected to beauty?
can you make a really ugly image?

i was also trying to think to answer your question about a favorite
i think i have been trying to look for a picture that appeals to me
in the appealing sense
but i realize i am mistaken
because in way i (sorry if this is wrong) think they really are grotesque
they are not meant to be apealling

they aren’t gross but there is something that is asking the audience
to look away
maybe that is connected to the sense of voyeurism

and also that we relate
sort of what you said about everyone pulling on their own experiences
i think you are asking your audience
to think of what they look like in the mirror

and maybe most people dont want to….

okay talk to you tomorrow

-katrina

Katrina, bear with me as I attempt to do my best to field all of your recent questions.

I began shooting ’street photography’ the day after my arrival in Rochester in late July 2005. I forced myself to shoot at least one person I did not know or feel comfortable approaching every single day. I suppose I’m a bit of an oddity that way. As a photographer, I like to place myself into uncomfortable situations as much as possible.

I possess an exquisite fear when it comes to shooting ‘street photography’, and at the same time – it’s what I love most. My images are my ‘babies’ as you put it – they are the descriptive artifice and record of my experience/s. They corroborate my existence and my vision – they are indeed close to me… every last one of them.

However, I should warn I am an awful hypocrite and feel passionately about many things that clash and contradict, even ideas and issues that seem so inseparable to who I am. There are many ideas and beliefs, which I take full responsibility for – but by nature I am a skeptic. By this I mean that I have never believed or trusted anyone but myself. I am incredulous and weary of all things born of consciousness. I am most skeptical of myself – my perceptions, interpretations, etc.

Some days photography is only a mechanical process, on other days, it is an experience unparalleled by any other. Some days, it is my most passionate lover and on other days it is vacuous void or vacancy if you will; something I feel entirely dispassionate and resigned towards.

Going back to what I said earlier, about believing only in myself (my experiences) – such skepticism may seem unwarranted or unwise (at the very least, inconvenient), but it is the defining characteristic of the photographic process. In fact, it is so enmeshed in my own personal experience with photography that the two have coalesced and become indistinguishable from one another.

I have always been most suspicious of images. In that sense, I have never accepted that photographs possess truths. But, I will not deny or refuted their ability to reference or serve as resource in the dialectical apprehension of truth.

I am a deconstructionist at heart and my process involves using still image to study relationships. Within these relationship I always find something more valuable than meaning; I find more questions; questions, which ultimately shape my character and contribute to my identity.

Often times, questions that are much bigger than me and beyond the scope of my intellect and understanding. For me, photography allows me meditate on thoughts that would otherwise escape me, much like a dream. It’s the only way I am able to reconcile my world. But, then again, tomorrow it just might be a clever contraption made of metal sent here to destroy all of mankind?

My photographs are the distillates of a process that occurs only once and is unrepeatable. That’s not to say that an individual image can’t be recreated, it’s the experience specific to the image that can never be duplicated.

As for perfection – I asked if you sought it in your work. I once did but found only emptiness in that achievement. Beauty to me is a fallacy; it’s a bullshit word, an idea that doesn’t exist or one that if it did exist – would collapse without consensus to support it. I believe that beauty is where the language of art became illiterate and has struggling to resurrect itself from the banality and wastelands of ‘beauty’.

To me, fuck it… if it doesn’t have something to say it’s not important. Pretty things are just that… pretty; they are empty objects of distraction. It’s not unlike like the affliction of poets and writers. They love and covet their own words and eventually forget what those words meant; its vanity and conceit. There’s no message in beauty.

HOWEVER, the importance of beauty, its seduction and allure, should never be overlooked or underestimated. Beauty is perhaps the most reliable and effective way to captivate the fleeting and fickle interests of an audience. Beauty is only a bait.

-Paul

ps. same questions back to you…?

I never had anything that I didn’t take,
that wasn’t taken, first, from someone else.
Hand-me-down diaries – someone else’s words.

Like narrative for a life not worth taking, but took.
Bargain bin religion – someone else’s god.
Backwashed blood of Christ  – someone else’s spit.

New-used cars, wrecked and romanced
like women drunk and dumped. Born again
virgins – other men’s ex-girlfriends. Second hand
smoke and triple distilled déjà vu.

Being a photographer, I have a few friends and fellow colleagues that are photographers as well. We often discuss the politics of image, as well as photographers and photographer’s works that happen to catch our attention. Rarely do we echo one another’s viewpoints and when this happens, an email war of attitude and opinion ensues…

Recently, my Parisienne-American photo friend (Walter) emailed me a link to a photographer’s bio that had made an impression upon him. In the email he provided me with a link to this particular photojournalist’s bio and that’s where this exchange begins.

Here’s the link – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jalpeyrie

(my reply after viewing the link)

So I actually read this bio three times and just didn’t glean anything I found interesting…. I kept asking myself…. what is the purpose or intention of this particular essay. It was effusive and redundant – seemed like a name dropping campaign dispatched by a photojournalist who can’t quite quench his thirst for fame with the by-lines he receives in the many (important and renowned) publications he cites?

All to often I find myself saying….(WHO CARES?) but you must understand where I stand on language and communication in general. Very rarely are people ever saying anything – discourse and conversation to me, is just a reheated casserole of trite leftovers. Personally, I’d rather starve to death and stab out my ear-drums before having to suffer another chorus of common sense.

I did however find this little bit interesting – “The photojournalist cannot lie, what he sees, he photographs, later to bring it back to his world to be shown and appreciated.” What a foolish young man…to think that first of all there is such a thing as truth or lies to begin with, let alone that a human being can ever recollect or re-present an event with even a scintilla of objectivity.

Photography is a lie beginning with it’s design…its view of the world in monocular? And second….when a subject is chosen and a frame is placed over a world that exists without a frame….something always gets left out/edited/cropped/omitted. The very nature of photography places a value and assigns a significance to its pictured (chosen) subjects, and all that is subsequently omitted becomes less significant, hence a bias is born.

Truth – ha truth…. truth be told, I can’t stand photojournalists – they need to just admit what they are and retire their anthem of amelioration. They’re thrill junkies, voyeurs, watchers, warmongers, ‘whores for war’. They are the peasant class’s paparazzi; they pick on the sick, suffering, and subordinate because they’re easy targets. They’re perhaps the most overtly vain and narcissistic creatures that inhabit god’s green earth – for them, exiting this world without being a part of history/history-making scares them beyond death itself. However, if they knew anything of history (the history of news photography and its impact/affect/s on its readership and society at large) they’d know they are fighting gravity and inevitably doomed to fail.

The truth is… they do know, but continue to practice under a doctrine of false logic and foolish beliefs that photographs of others pain and suffering can induce sympathy or affect change. At best, we (as viewers of news images) might whence or grimace and feel a fraction of fortune that its not our sorry asses being slaughtered in the streets. The photojournalist knows this apathy and indifference above and beyond all – for it is the photojournalist who passively stands-by (not intervening) while such ‘crimes against humanity’ are carried out, but yet they expect their audience to react differently….

No.. we experience the same frissons of excitement and arousal that they did while standing-by. We gorge on the grotesque and then move on (we are all vampires of the visual) photojournalists and their audiences alike. At best… they are merchants of misfortune and the macabre who serve our insatiable need to spy on the suffering of those less fortunate than ourselves.

They not only want to possess and collect bits and pieces of history’s archive and the collective social conscious – they want the kudos that comes with saying they authored it. They think news is war, starving Africans, civil unrest, etc. What they don’t know is that everything is news – even their own pathetic vicariously invested lives.

-p

(Walter’s reply)

Gee… what a bleak vision of things and motives… The point to me is that he left his safe routine life and actually went out to do something with it. Search for truth, find himself, see the world, whatever, that’s more than most people even dream of. Yeah, the guy is not a good writer and he probably doesn’t understand why he’s doing what but like you say, so what?

The problem with photojournalism nowadays is that we’re already seen the crying mothers, the starving kids, the dead bodies, the killing and we’re all “used” to it. Nobody gives a crap anyway. As long as Me is OK, to hell with the rest of it. I’ve lived here a while and I see a weird trend in this culture. What used to be individualism, think for yourself, has now turned into “my interests” before anything else. I hear Republicans say “America first” whereas it should be the people first.

The rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, the middle-class that used to be the strength of this country, frankly idiotic. People seem more interested in gossip than issues. Anyway, I always salute those who try, even if they’re off or if they fail.

Walter

(My reply)

I think, in the eyes of most, my opinions and personal beliefs/philosophies resonate with cynicism and may appear bleak for that reason. But just like you, I have arrived at certain understandings by way of experience and reason. One thing that I have come to understand is that good and bad do not exist. So, in that sense you could say I’m amoral – but make no mistake, I’m still very aware of conventional morality; how to act in accordance with and relate to its constructs (they are far from alien to me).

What enriches my life and gives me hope (and I shudder at calling it hope because hope is dumb). So, instead, I should say what gives me satisfaction in this life is questioning; deconstructing and exposing hypocrisies of human existence and tearing at the fabric of a false human ideals. This may seem nihilistic and anarchical (and perhaps it is), but I assure you that it is only he who is willing to confront his true identity, who can reach any sort of actualization in this life.

It is he who masquerades as an altruist and heir to a constructed god’s false fortunes (the reward for a life devoted to ignorance abnegation) that delays the evolution of mankind and condemns his own fate – it is he who poisons the well and sedates us with superstitious yarns and fables of selfless acts. You could throw away most of what human beings believe in or wish believe about themselves and nothing real would be lost (nothing about man’s basic nature would change).

Such grandiose personifications of man exist only in theory, suspended in the duplicitous web of human belief – they are evidenced nowhere in reality. There is the surface…comprised of fictions, facades, performances, deceit, camouflage, subterfuge, and abstraction. Then there is simply what is…that which exists without representation, that which needs no hyperbole or dramatic distortion. It is man’s pathetic and futile quest for meaning that has condemned him to a life of denial and evasion – a life spent worshiping image.

Image (if we consider image to be the manifestation of language and consciousness) is the nexus of this conundrum – image is perhaps the most deceptive of all human contrivances, it lures us into its trap by pandering to our vanity and possessive nature. It ensnares us with its descriptiveness and accuracy, image leads us to believe that accuracy is tantamount to truth, and that truth can be made tangible, that truth exists at all…

We invented the trap and we are now stuck within its snare – it’s poetic justice, very much like the Hellenic version of Narcissus, but in our version we don’t realize that mirrored image is simply a reflection upon the water’s surface. No… we dive in head first and drown in our own self interest. And, self interest…. hedonism… what is wrong with that?

I’m directly asking you this question? It’s almost as if you suppose without really questioning that man should live for men and that living to fulfill one’s own desires is in some way deplorable? It’s almost as if you assume that man is capable of doing anything without his own interest being the incentive for whatever action or decision he takes. This leads me to believe that you, yourself, believe in altruism. Me, I’m an egoist so this is very hard for me to reconcile or relate with in any fashion.

To me, it is obvious that the selfless act is the white elephant of intellectual and ethical mythology – in order to maintain this idea we compromise and sacrifice more than what the idea alone is worth. Altruism can only exist in anonymity, the charitable party’s identity must never be known to anyone, but this only satisfies part of the equation, for we cannot guarantee that this philanthropist isn’t swimming in self praise and basking in the perceived reward that comes with being ’selfless’…. yea, it’s a big problem.

Photojournalists aren’t out to stop hunger or the spread of HIV, they’re surely not taking on mortar fire or embedded with rebel forces to put an end to war (not even the images of Brady and Sullivan, Eddie Adams or Phillip Jones Griffiths could slow the rate of slaughter in the wars to which they belonged). PJ’s are not there for the money, hell we both know that, but they are there for the acclaim, for the thrill, for any reason that might make them feel good that is only know to them – or else they wouldn’t be there.

But the last thing on this earth they’re there for – is to affect change. Change just so happens to be the anthem and respectable reply for why one whores for war. I don’t have an issue with what ppl do; I have an issue with lies and misrepresentation, with pretenders. I, as well, salute those who try for betterment and amelioration, but also brandish a grimace beneath the brim of that salute for their cause is still one of self interest and the perceived reward that follows ‘the success of their mission’. But even terrorists and serial-killers have standards and benchmarks by which they measure their success.

Sure, being a Christian and a countryman [an American] is deemed ‘good’ while terrorism and murder are ‘bad’ – but this is neither here nor there because at the end of the day, my good friend… there is someone’s loss, pain, and suffering in all that we gain, no matter what side of ‘right’ or ‘good’ we fight for. And beneath that there is only the self that motivates us, even in our missions of mutual consent to fool one another that we do what we do for anyone else BUT ourselves. Accepting this, knowing this actually makes me feel good – it’s revelational, I know that must be hard for you to believe, but admitting hope, altruism, and objectivity is a hoax and looking sternly at what is real actually gives me reason to believe that something better can exist beyond the lies and denial.

-p

I recently began writing a personal essay/article on love after suffering through some random television ad that briefly referenced ‘love’ and everyone’s inborn ability to give and receive love (probably a hair replacement or cat food commercial?)

It occurred to me that love is often presumed to be an inherent attribute of all human beings – how funny it seemed that this belief/notion is rarely (if ever) questioned or challenged. Even more interesting to me was why I, myself, never challenged this notion that all human beings are equally capable of love.

I thought about what love is, sans its musical accompaniment and drug induced nirvana (dopamine) , and it occurred to me that love is wholly about action, deliberateness, and discipline. It is entirely the product of one’s decisions and intent, but more importantly love requires us to resign what most consider, our irrational and selfish desires; our autonomy.

Love requires us to deny ourselves under a mutual contributional agreement to a ‘perceived’ greater good. Parenthetically, I realized that love was yet another fabrication and social construct – an identity that is alien to us considering who and what we are in absence of constructed social ideals and adherence to those ideals.

Stripped of its soundtrack and poetic flourishes love is a performance, a ritual, a routine of discipline, submission and obedience above all, (often times, blind and begrudging obedience for most human behavior [conformity] is born of fear and flight from judgment and criticism). Regardless, love occurred to me as just another role to which we assign ourselves or take on out of necessity or circumstantial obligation – much like a job.

As well, it occurred to me that love could also be considered an aspiration (a goal) for some, primarily of those who covet the assigned values and subsequent rewards of ‘being in love’ or being a ‘lover’ and the significance/value of those titles/attributes, as they are commonly perceived in our society. After all, what human could survive or succeed without love…? (Interesting  how Maslow never made mention of this in his hierarchy.)

I recalled how, when I was a child, I aspired to be a famous basketball player but after years of try-outs, training camps, practices, and riding the pine I was forced to abandon my aspiration of becoming an NBA legend and face-up to an impassable reality… which was…. being a great ball player meant having more than a big heart and big hopes, it required a breadth of skills, a repertoire of talent – that which I just did not possess.

From this I eventually came to the conclusion that love is no different – that this role which requires great skill… LOVE… is one that some of us are capable of and others are not – that the notion of equality when it comes to love is as much a myth as anyone believing that we are all equally capable of becoming great pianists, painters, poets, or master chess players.

This, simply, is not true. I realized that no matter how much or how many of us say we want to love or be ‘in love’ only a marginal number of are capable of such a feat; a feat I believe is far more strenuous and demanding than what is required of any intellectual or athelete. Love is above all the most difficult task we have ever assigned to ourselves – it requires people to be something else… something that we are not in love with…. ourselves.

Occasionally, I receive ‘fan mail’ in the form of emails; people writing in to tell me their thoughts, ideas, and reactions to my work. Others, who are seeking internship positions or those who wish to interview me about my work/career. Depending on the time of the year and my present mood/state of mind, I will often issue a brief reply.

However, back in October of last year, I received my very first hand-written letter from a student interested in a career in documentary photography. It made such an impression on me that I wrote a very lengthy and personal  reply. In an age of advanced communication technologies – text messaging and emails, the rarefied hand-written letter has become a superlative way of communicating.

October 30th 2008

Paul David Van Hoy II
One Pleasant St. Suite 605
Rochester NY 14604

Kacy Gray
C/O Mrs. Tomlinson
Cabot High School
401 N. Lincoln St.
Cabot, AR 72023

Kacy, let me first start by thanking you for taking the time to write me such a thoughtful letter. I’m not sure how you came to discover my name or my work, but I am flattered that my imagery inspires you so. Meaning is a topic I’ve been trying to tackle and make sense of since I began my first years as an MFA student at RIT here in Rochester NY.

Throughout your life I will venture to guess that the pursuit of meaning will run parallel with all that you endeavor especially as it pertains to photography. Some-days its existence will be obvious and evidenced in all things around you, others you will doubt any and all notions associated with the word itself.

I use language, signs, symbols, etc. to suggest or to allude, but even I don’t know what my images mean.  Know that meaning is not fixed in the intentions of the artist nor is it fixed in the artwork he or she produces. Know that meaning is not universal or everlasting. When the last human dies there will be no more meaning in the world.

Meaning is something we construct and like so many other constructions born of consciousness these things reside within us they are finite and impermanent. I resigned myself to making meaningful images many years ago. I prefer to make images that contain evidences of our true identity, candid revelations of who and what we are, perfect and imperfect – beautiful and grotesque.

As a photojournalist you will witness and experience a gulf of awe and horror – you will one day be forced to abandon your moral/cultural bias and contemplate beauty/meaning from an amoral perspective. You will construct and deconstruct for this is the process; the pain, punishment, and pleasure of a true artist unafraid to question the world…even god.

I tell people that I have always been a photographer because I can’t remember a time in my youth, even from my earliest memories, when I wasn’t arranging the world, composing, recomposing, cropping, recording, and most importantly, omitting. If you are truly a photographer and sincerely passionate about looking, life in an office will quickly become boring. You will soon discover the right path for yourself, if not already – so I wouldn’t worry too much about that.

I have officially worked as a photographer and earned my income from photography since the age of sixteen, but acknowledge this is highly exceptional and uncommon. I first pursued an Associate’s degree in photography and then went on to earn a Bachelor’s degree in fine art. In the spring of 2007 I earned my MFA (Master’s of fine art) in photography from the Rochester Institute of Photography.

Sources of inspiration are images, moving images, and words. I love movies; even the really shitty ones that make people leave the theater angry before the movie has officially ended. I love poetry and autobiography – a beautiful poem is a great image and a great image is a beautiful poem, for me they perform and accomplish the same task. Read Li-Young Lee or Franz Wright sometime, you may agree?

I am inspired by human interaction, whether that be how we interact with ourselves and with our environment when we are alone or amid a crowd of thousands. I love humility, vulnerability, and transitive and introspective moments (moving from one emotional state to another) – I would say these are more the subjects of my street photography than are the actual people pictured in my images.

I am most inspired by a curiosity and a sense of exploration that has been with me since childhood. The camera is a remarkable device for many reasons, but above all, it gives us license to explore our worlds and set out on adventures – even if we are restricted to our own backyards.

I got into photography because I was a very unhappy child who despised the circumstance/s of his youth – I wanted to escape or at least create a world more beautiful than the one I was stuck in. I was raised poor by very simple parents. I was the target of anger, abuse, and constant ridicule. Photography was the only thing that made that world redeeming. The only thing I could control in a world that was always out of control.

I hope my replies have helped shed some light on your questions. At this stage in your life some of my replies may seem strange or irrelevant, and if they do, keep this letter nearby and reread it often. I promise everything I said will ring with honesty and accuracy if you choose to pursue photography as your chosen career/lifestyle. Most people think that photography is about equipment locations, and subjects. I will tell you that photography is about nothing if it is not about you and your pursuit for something more meaningful in this life.

Sincerely,

Paul David Van Hoy II