For Nicholas Walton-Healey the true fact is that I am invisible the light that bounces off my skin through the aperture of a lens is quite a different phenomenon and is possibly a spectre who will walk around inside the shape my name is supposed to be ordering books on the murderousness of opera or secondhand Dior nighties or committing acts of production that wake me in terror at 2am or conversing with unsavory strangers on the corners of the internet it is very confusing like invisible clouds that liquefy the tundra the phantoms won’t stop proliferating they keep sending me emails that I can’t read no matter how hard I squint they are never about what they seem to be success love happiness no one seems to know how to escape into another dimension stuck on our mundane sofas watching that movie where the monster wriggles inside our own skin and up in their mansions on the hill the dead-eyed madmen whisper it out and feed it every morning it all ends in explosions that’s what it’s for and then we export the virus to another planet as if there had been a time when once we were more than data transmission in brutal economies yet still we go on imagining rainbows and other physical objects hovering beautifully in the vapour of our breath I am never quite sure who is thinking perhaps it is me or perhaps it is my photograph who maybe went fishing which I have never liked and is admiring how the light ripples its endless changes over the same river when I’m especially sad I like to read Viktor Shklovsky who was the saddest critic of all time and who always began his books with a description of a landscape those were optimistic days he said the nightingale doesn’t know that it has been refuted he said a riddle always has two answers one is literal and wrong and the other renews meaning by rearranging things I wonder if there are still crows in Yalta one day I would like to buy him coffee and we could converse in cyrillics about fairytales and how art has its own laws and how a poem is a riddle of sorts and not like a photograph which may be another kind of riddle but dissimilar of course
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Why I Don't Like Being Photographed
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