mills

Chad, with whom I have rather a lot in common, took this after finding a fallen street lamp and putting a wireless strobe inside of it.

I happen to love this image in itself, but also as several potential texts; indeed, one of the things I like most about visual art is that it permits a free and fluid series of readings to congregate in and emerge from works like this. Usually, these occur as sentence fragments or short narratives: this dying light still charged by the high-voltage grid, illuminating little as its peers in their plumage of color look on; or: the pure white light of death; or: dying just beyond the source of all things, the door to which reads “KEEP OUT.”

I am clumsily literal-minded, I know; it is why I struggle with poetry. But for me, images which permit the casual and associative narrativizing of their content are something more than beautiful. And that this was a chance encounter coupled with a deliberate artistic step makes it even more delightful to me; I love the photographic combination of happenstance and intentionality.

Since I can remember, I have loved sodium-vapor light: the orange low-intensity glow from municipal lamps that for me recalls the warmth of a sunset but in a sea of night’s blackness: a concentrated sunset, a sunset threatened by oblivion.

The other night, taking photos of sodium lights, I recalled a possible explanation: my father used to tell me stories when I was very young about a telephone pole / streetlamp that faced our house in Mississippi. I remember little except that, incredibly, he would make them up as he went, narrating adventures in which I would confront some danger and would require the assistance of this telephone pole, which could magically move and bash foes into the ground. In one, I think he saved me from a demon wearing a cloak.

If I recall correctly, this pole looked a bit as though it had a face, at least to a child, and while I am not sure whether it was sodium vapor I do suspect that my fondness for such lights is at least connected to these memories.

I also find it extraordinary and moving to imagine my father twenty years ago, tellings such stories -of a boy and his sidekick / protector, the magic telephone pole from Bay St. Louis- to his son on summer nights, a small act of creation, a tiny narrative gift of remarkable ingenuity and invention.

On a windy night, one sees that the ground is grounded; the higher one goes the greater the wind’s effects. I don’t care what anyone says: it must be hard to be a leaf.