There's nothing terribly current in the photoblog, but as you might guess, I'm posting constantly over at Flickr. From a Basement on the Hill — Elliott Smith Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. — John Berger The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. — Virginia Woolf New poem up. A new poet to me, and an awfully good one: Stephen Dunn. I can be reached at romanlily ~at~gmail.com. Or you can join the notify list here.	October 28, 2004 Aphrodite ashore Sometimes these journal entries are really hard to write. Or is that painfully apparent? Sometimes I sit for minutes at a time, watching the blinking cursor as it waits on the screen. Writing about flowers and footwear is easy enough, and occasionally a relief, like talking about the weather with someone in the elevator. But writing about what's really happening is more complicated, less precise. Like trying to catch a fish with my hands, or plow a field with a fork. Yet I'm pointed constantly toward that work: that river, that field, that uncertain harvest that may or may not come. Everything I've got is tied up in that pursuit. The moments lately when I have the most clarity come when I am alone. Words arrive unbidden durng those times. Strangely enough, I find that they are words that need to be spoken by me to me (and I make a very receptive audience.) So there's an overwhelming urge lately to cocoon, draw back, hem in, preach a little sermon to myself. When I am free with my thoughts, new ideas arrive unbidden, sometimes arriving complete and unblemished, whole new organisms, like Aphrodite washing up on the beach, stepping from her seashell (long blonde curls, enigmatic smile). I feel like I've been handed a divine map to a treasure of vast depths. The only hitch is that the map is written in a foreign language in invisible ink and can only be read by the light of a sputtering candle in a darkened treehouse. Okay we'll just go ahead and tell you that the treasure is actually buried at sea somewhere off the coast of the Maltese Islands. Okay, go get it! The trick is joining language to these deep processes, naming the roads on these underwater journeys. Language is key to this discovery. So poetry is coming alive in a way I've never before experienced. When I read the words they vibrate. Poems I read before and never really appreciated now ring clear, churchbells at high noon. Books I read years ago and felt like I didn't really "get" are coming back now, knocking on the door, taking up permanent residence. Images and themes snapping into places I hadn't realized I had prepared for them. Photography overlaps with all of this somehow. I don't know how it works. I can't pretend to describe it. The complexity and beauty of its contribution taps out my tongue. I just know that I'm grateful for it. On Saturday morning I had the house to myself. I had an idea for a self-portrait I wanted to take for a Flickr group ("Chase"), which requires participants to shoot a prescribed list of photos. A "blunt self-portrait" was at the top of the list. I had a dry-erase marker and an idea. I chose some music (I've been listening to some k.d. lang lately, some Hem, some Leonard Cohen). I hung a sheet in the bathroom to serve as a backdrop. I wrote some words on the mirror. I started shooting. Making pictures heals something that's broken down in there. It makes sense of the jumble, provides a visual clue to what is basically an undisciplined, frightened trainwreck of emotion and thought. This is the image I ended up with. I wrote a little about it on Flickr: For this shot I copied some handwritten lines out of my private journal onto a mirror. As I shot the photos I noticed that the auto-focus feature on my camera struggled with whether to focus on my image or the words written on the mirror. This suggested my struggle in this moment to know how much of my true self to reveal to the world around me. The portrait I got seems just about right. It's me, all right. I look at this and I see both the ugly and beautiful, fear and courage, love and anger all having their way in this dance below the depths. I've gone deep enough now that I wouldn't know how to find my way back to where I started. The seaweed marker I left on the beach months ago has been gathered by the waves, relocated to a different shore. So I'm learning to breathe in this new climate, and swimming as if my life depends on it, proving myself a mermaid yet.