Quiet London.
The Road to Damascus concept is overwhelmingly too dramatic: My lives as a photographer are quiet and simple: The zen wars that collude with my daily sensorial encounters are enough to contend with: Just hear what I need to:
I imagined as I do, purposefully passengering on a local train from New York City, America to Montreal, Canada: Traveling north between cities and countrysides is an exercise for any mind: Riding any train to anywhere and nowhere reminds me of an army of Galileos embracing centuries of histories, histories of centuries: A world of place and person unfamiliar to me becomes: My camera would become an experience to celebrate: To celebrate for myself:
My thirteen hour journey was to bring me to photograph at the Canadian Centre for Architecture: The venerable Phyllis Lambert and the esteemed Pritzker architects Herzog & de Meuron awaited: I had imagined that the train to, was an easy way to imagine my camera work ahead: The extended train ride was to compel my mind to imagine what the session would look like when completed: I had imagined many things:
A German Interior Designer had given me a book to read for my travels: W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz was a novel that apparently all of the architects had read or…: I thought a perfect companion might be a book to hide inside for the travel and duration: I could listen to the rumble and screeching train: The industrial noise machine might be a good way to fend off the din from the outside world: I was wrong:
Herzog& de Meuron Parrish Museum Long Island.
A neuro map of my past and future brain blasts like Led Zeppelin‘s Black Dog: My eyes see broken prismatic schemes across the sky: A circus of imaginary acts perform for some, today for one: My mind traveled: My eyes transported: Atop a vacant globe I dance along the seven seas: Whales and the entire “deep” performs: My eyes melded with maps of the ancients: Discovery ahead? My mind was on a collision course with dreams: My eyes pierced through and beyond galaxies of time travel: Explorers march on: Normalcy is not convenient when I travel: Alien nations ahead: Montreal will be near: Music plays: Austerlitz is quietly remarkable.
I take a word, a place: I follow it like Pynchon’s “dancing ball”: Sebald’s Austerlitz in many ways disorients: My natural me snaps a frame: Sebald diagrams whispers: His words whisper: My eyes respond: I conjure action and surrealism: I close some pages: The train passes battlegrounds for war: Landscapes are where nations and cultures battled: Revolutions and settlements lived and died: Austerlitz becomes symbolic of a greater universe: My eyes travel to the 19th century Battle of Austerlitz: My eyes marvel at the grace and elegancy of the Gare d’Austerlitz:
My train gurgles a bit: The book reminds me of cultures flooding my eyes like salmon spawning in their seasons: Nothingness become dreamscapes: The train rolls north. I am witness to life forces that will forever alter my visual perceptions: There is a real invisible Chemin de fer that surrounds me and challenges the course of my visual future: Along a path to: I step: My train lurches: My mind realizes I am witnessing the history of mine as a history adjoined by others:
On the Road from Yusuhara, Japan.
Paul Auster’s City of Glass reminds me of my mind drifting into insanity: Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poet in New York has a particular symbiosis to Auster’s “City..”: My mind is in theirs: I hear another more enviable voice: Miguel de Cervantes winks at my camera: His Quixote is my entertainment: Joined by Lorca, Auster and Sebald the four scribes ride atop my train: One whispers: Another finds frantic: Another swallows insanity and finally the last most fraught, fights the tilting windmills. Different voices but eyes that are mine: Their history belongs to us:
Thirteen hours on a train: An ephemeral spiritual life says hello: I learn to dance: Dance is known and sometimes taught: I feel movement: I learn that the sensational Fred Astaire’s given name was Austerlitz: From today back in time when I photographed Astaire( Austerlitz) all of my naked dancing atop whales becomes inordinately clear: I was meant for this moment: I was meant to dance with words and places: The tides await: I will swim.
Words are becoming my path to pictures seen and not taken: History of centuries are upon me:
A few guys with words on paper walk with me into the Canadian Centre for Architecture: Phyllis, Jacques and Pierre greet me: The journey north enlightened my journey: Max Sebald whispers: Paul stands quietly: Federico’s eyes plead: Cervante’s Quixote marches me to my dance.
Dubai to Bangladesh.