frustration

This was supposed to be a concept elaboration, but I ended up going off on a tangent. I've been feeling very frustrated lately, and I guess I was needing to get it out in some way or another (and trying to learn guitar is additional frustration rather than expression--unless you count a high action twanging fourth string as a channel). Anyway, this is more of a rant than a work, but I need to put something up here. (Eek... I just realized every sentence has the same syntax. Can I blame it on being tired for now?)

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1/26/09

Every thing left undone is an image trace. The shadow that never quite makes it to completion. The stark peripheral ghosts are the ones that pull the most. The beauty of a pale hand gliding in the light of night cannot imitate the light motion that preceded it, but it is all that can be seen.

What happens to the light that fails to reach us—due not to distance but to our narrow vision? Will we turn and face it later? The right shade of night, a repeated posture leading to a moment reincarnated.

It’s the soft focus motion preceding hard reality that I am looking for. The thing is: soft focus can never be the focus. Soft focus is for yearbook pictures of acne-marked high schoolers made glamorous. Soft focus is for Hallmark commercials—red poppies, green grass, golden puppies. Soft focus is when I take my glasses off in the almost dark. Soft focus is unseeing and unseen.

Soft focus is captured by thick-skinned 35-mm film and matted with black paper. The image has no context and is allowed to make real impact by forsaking reality. The blur of a dancer’s leg betrays beauty, but it is also a still life by its own right. A span of seconds is crushed into the moment it takes for the photograph to reach the brain. Soft focus is the three dimensional, or even the four dimensional, squeezed down to two.

So what happens to those dimensions shed? What if they were to stay behind to form the negative space of a moment of memory? Could it continue on according to its own will?

The air above the dancer’s leg pushes back, and a knee bends. What happens to the angles that are never arrived at? The tasks? The healing?

Is there a world where people dance backwards and all the negative space that builds up maintains the separation of individuals? Lovers back down hesitantly. Dismount. Dress with experienced yet unnaturally shy eyes turned away. Mechanical, angular contact—no collapsing into a body lest a body be given meaning, life, soft focus. Back up onto the stage to make perfectly isolated angles. Intersecting lines are too traditional, too comfortable.

What happens when a soft focus instant of a person joins this world? Where does a person defined by the soft motion of a jaw nestling into a neck fit into a modern dance formed of points A, B, C, D, etc. with no AB, no BC, no CD, no Detc.? Can she make the image traces of a gliding fingertip connect the dots and ruin the fractured dance? What happens when the points move and lack the motion to guide her to their momentary destinations?

Perhaps I have gone too far. I am a soft focus, near-sighted girl, and, ironically, the glasses that bring points into focus also work to cancel out the periphery. I cannot balance on a point; I’m far too traditional, a creature of comfort. I form a triangle with my love and my mind. Regardless, I have found myself in this strangely pointed angle-dance. My love has collapsed, and I am acutely pained by my awareness that I am a painfully acute angle—without a line to bring me from one place to another, just a sense of falling into a violent mind-ocean without a life vest.

Can I go home now?

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Once again, comments rock my world. (Thank you, Michael Jackson.)