by Shawna Lemay
My writing practice involves a lot of sitting, waiting, napping, dreaming, looking out the window, making tea, reading. The act of writing can be easily confused with doing nothing.
Many of the lessons of photography that I have come to internalize are things I had already learned through long years of writing. I’ve been consistently and constantly and madly writing since my undergraduate days. I say madly because one is alone at times for years with a work that may never be seen by more than a few, and those just might be the people rejecting it. If the work is published, still one is not guaranteed a readership. On the contrary.
I have learned about ISO, aperture, shutter speed, composition, editing. But these are technical things that anyone could absorb. I’ve learned about time, about weather, about the effect of low grey clouds and I’ve learned about the golden hour. I’ve learned about patience and waiting, and in doing so my seeing has become refined. I’ve learned about pursuing recurring themes, staying with them, doggedly. I’ve learned to look for the oddness in things, the strangeness.
I’ve learned about silence, how to let that enter, first myself, then the photograph. I’ve learned about happiness and holiness. I’ve learned that every day is beautiful and worthy of deep and difficult contemplation. I’ve learned how to walk through the beauty of the days with a camera weighted, strung, around my neck. I’ve learned to look at the dog, the way he finds a beam of light in the afternoon and lies in it until his fur is warm and he’s dreamy and filled with the light itself.
Over time I have come to see photographing as a way of thinking. Not just that the image might replace whatever words I could say about the subject, but as a way of thinking without words, speaking silently.
Early one morning, before breakfast, before sunrise, I took Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek off the shelf and read this: “The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.”
Later that same morning, I looked out my study window, through which I can see a sliver of the highway, a sliver of the utility corridor where I walk most days. And there was fog. Which is rare enough here, so I hurried to ready myself and the dog. By the time I made it out there, fifteen minutes later, the fog had mostly burned off and, as I walked toward the entrance to the field, had vanished entirely. I continued on, expecting nothing then. Emptied. I had no thought to photographing anything. I dawdled, I let my gaze wander, I kept a sharp eye out for the coyote. Which is when I reached a point in the field where the sun had risen high enough to make it over the tall houses.
I kneeled down on the damp and dewy path, I looked and squinted. I received. The tall, brushy weeds were bathed in a golden light, and also illuminated were myriad webs, stretching and arcing, scribbling amid the twiggy tendrils. I entered a dream-like state, photographing the filigree and scrollwork of the world. Letting the light into my camera, into my heart. It was changing every minute, and was so bright I couldn’t see the preview screen. So I just clicked and embraced the light and was happy.
I only know that some mornings, beauty calls, and I am obligated to answer.
And it’s like this when I’m writing. I carry it around, not unlike the camera around my neck, this desire to capture the world in words. I never quite take the photo for which I hope. The photograph, I go on learning, is just as elusive as the poem.
Reading Retreat Dream
***
I dream I’m packing to go on retreat. A silent retreat where one is meant to solely spend one’s time reading. I pack my agonizingly chosen books and a suitcase of loose fitting gray linen clothes. I don’t know where the retreat is to be held. A taxi collects me. Upon arrival, I’m both surprised and unperturbed to discover I’m at the public library. Yet, if I’d known, I could have used David Foster Wallace’s line on the taxi driver, “the library, and step on it.” Such are the disappointments of dreams.
Appointment
***
It’s snowing and snowing. The proper task would be to sit in the window and drink tea. See it through. Later, with wine. In the dark watching it gather around the streetlight. I hope the young poets have time for such appointments. I hope they care to care about the weather. To look after it while others complain. To remind us how beautiful it is, how necessary.
For two days it snows and between errands, work, and various obligations, I go to the window as often as I can to keep the falling snow company. I apologize, then, for my own petty complaints, for forgetting the yearly pact I make: to honour my obligation to find peace in winter.
Atonement
***
Every few years, I weed my personal library. Several weedings ago, I felt ready to part with a heavy tome: the collected work of a well known poet. I hadn’t found my way into the music. Hadn’t developed an understanding. So donated the book to a worthy cause. Lately I keep coming across this flower or that healing herb by the writer and now I feel the poems. I like them. I esteem them. The purchase of a new copy will act as reparation.
In the Realm of the Poetic
***
It’s all too possible to forget that we live in or very near the realm of the poetic at all times.
You’re in the realm of the poetic when you notice what had become dulled anew. When you notice something beautiful, or something not so beautiful. Something unjust. Something incongruous. Something weird or cool or lovely or something that makes you want to laugh or weep or scream. Your heart twinges. You feel hope. You’re angry, so angry you could spit. When you develop a hard won understanding. When you overhear words on the bus or in a cafe. A stutter. A gasp. A quiet hum. Potentially, you’re in the realm of the poetic.
Write things down. Text yourself.
An unseen bird twitter-click-chirrups. You’ve never heard this particular sound. The following week you hear it again.
You’re in the realm of the poetic.
At your desk, as you look out at the small sea of your co-workers in their boats, wondering what they’re going through. Sitting down to lunch, to dinner, at your kitchen table. As you walk through deep snow. As you line up for a coffee at the café down the street. As you watch a magpie flit across the cityscape. As you flip through People magazine or eat an orange.
Days will pass, weeks. You’ll even hear a voice in your head saying dryly, you’re just going through the motions.
Take out your notes, read them. Nothing has changed.
Spaces Like Greenhouses
***
I find it difficult to be a good friend to anyone in winter when I’m working on perfecting my secret ability to disappear.
In January our habit of hoping for good news and wishing on stars can be set aside while everything is asleep, deeply now, in extreme temperatures and this makes us more open to remembering the dreams of others. Kerouac said, “Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use Poetry.” I think he meant to say, don’t use the internet.
I use flowers to forget about and to construct my online persona. If I can breathe enough of the fragrance into my lungs I might be able to speak more gracefully in spaces like greenhouses. In winter I bring home flowers from the grocery store knowing their travels through the cold to home are perilous.
The conversation resumes. I remember what I want to say in the way you remember everything about a poem you want to quote to a friend except the words. The fragrance of the poem is palpable and might resemble the fresh scent in the cooler at the florist.
Another day I have a friend over whom I’ve not seen for a year. I make sure there is a bouquet of flowers on the kitchen table to greet her and to say things I won’t be able to articulate and to be an intermediary or a crystal ball. The flowers act as
a medium so I can communicate with lost feelings.
There is a lull in the conversation. She reaches out and touches a petal absently and withdraws, as though it were a flame.
To commune with flowers one must know what it feels to despair but not necessarily lose heart.
When I present my photos of flowers, there will be some who think I spend money and time on a frivolous and decadent exercise. There are others who wonder why I don’t work more at becoming famous. But if I were going to be famous it would have happened by now so I can relax and be content and work instead.
I see and admire someone else’s photo of a leggy plant reaching toward a leaning tower of books, and the words imprinted on the image are: I’m okay, you’re okay. I’ve been sitting with uncertainty for so long, I would have used: am I okay? are you okay? which wouldn’t have had the same effect.
To finish writing this, I must go out to buy flowers or a small plant. Since I began, the flowers I was talking about have perished.
I paint a scene of myself at the kitchen table with a vase of white freesia and yellow tulips, and it might seem appropriate to ask why the flowers are there at all. Why is anything in art where it is?
I buy flowers and take photographs of them while I write this. I go back and forth between my study and the room where the flowers have been placed. The methods of composition become intertwined or braided like a fig tree. There are intervals of silence when I’m waiting for the light. Having lived with an artist for so long I have picked up some things due to propinquity but I’m not quite an artist.
Immediately someone reading this will think, she’s denigrating herself, and I’m not but I know what an artist is and must do. And in fact, I’m a writer, even if I’m not a household name.
The thing is that books aren’t always wide enough for the thoughts I wish to convey and I can’t help but imagine a book shaped liked the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Once you open the book you would circle around so you could see a line or part of a line from across the central space. Even though you’re squinting, there are vantage points where you can’t read the rest of the line you’re circling toward or away from. There are doors to rooms through which you can glimpse many other words and you can feel their emanations but you can’t see them.
When I put the flowers in a clear glass vase and then place them in the center of the kitchen table, my world rights itself once more and my breathing gentles and I remember that one strategy is to play hard to get. Another is to breathe with the flowers rather than against them. Yet another is to talk about the silence as you would talk about the infinite variations of weather.
Working in a Library
***
I’ve worked in libraries for so long I forget what it is to browse. To have a long luxurious browse, bathing in possible books. To linger in the 750s or the 800s. To seize a stack of art and home décor volumes and look through them on a table, abandoning them when my eyes are full.
When I come across someone in the stacks and query, ‘are you finding what you’re seeking?’ and the answer is, ‘just browsing,’ I nod in approval, not without melancholy.
In Lieu of Flowers
***
A few years ago I read a friend’s father’s obituary on Facebook. His father had requested in lieu of flowers, please take a friend or loved one out for lunch.
Although I love flowers very much, I won’t see them when I’m gone. So in lieu of flowers:
Buy a book of poetry written by someone still alive, sit outside with a cup of tea, a glass of wine, and read it out loud, by yourself or to someone, or silently.
Spend some time with a single flower. A rose maybe. Smell it, touch the petals. Really look at it.
Drink a really nice bottle of wine with someone you love.
Or, Champagne. And think of what John Maynard Keynes said, “My only regret in life is that I did not drink more Champagne.” Or what Dom Perignon said when he first tasted the stuff: “Come quickly! I am tasting stars!”
Take out a paint set and lay down some colours.
Watch birds. Common sparrows are fine. Pigeons, too. Geese are nice. Robins.
In lieu of flowers, walk in the trees and watch the light fall into it. Eat an apple, a really nice big one. I hope it’s crisp.
Have a long soak in the bathtub with candles, maybe some rose petals.
Sit on the front stoop and watch the clouds. Have a dish of strawberry ice cream in my name.
If it’s winter, have a cup of hot chocolate outside for me. If it’s summer, a big glass of ice water.
If it’s autumn, collect some leaves and press them in a book you love. I’d like that.
Sit and look out a window and write down what you see. Write some other things down.
In lieu of flowers,
I would wish for you to flower.
I would wish for you to blossom, to open, to be beautiful.
Untitled
***
Unlike the other seasons, as winter nears an end, I feel obligated to come up with a title for it, as you would title a poem.
In Space
***
Take courage, life is beautiful are words I receive one morning sitting in my study, drinking coffee, picking up this book and then that one. Messages from two writers whom I will never meet and who never met.
I dream I’m sitting in a classroom taking notes and the professor is talking about poetic forms. Villanelles, sonnets, sestinas. Then she becomes animated and describes a new form no one has yet embraced: the dream poem. Characterized by fragments, lines that fade and escape, and lines that are entirely lost but which are still deeply felt.
You can never learn this sort of poem by heart but you will remember how it moved through your veins and it will come to you, surge through you, at crucial moments.
I used to imagine I would receive a message in the form of a letter in the postbox, but hardly anyone writes that way anymore. Messages are more likely to arrive in dreams, or to float in space like the Voyager Golden Record. Sounds of birdsong, whales, wind, and surf, along with greetings of peace, and recordings of “The Well-Tempered Clavier” by Glenn Gould and “Johnny B. Goode” sung by Chuck Berry.
They often arrive in the past tense sent all the way from your childhood. The horse’s muzzle on your cheek, the soft blowing on your face. The day the sun broke out of the clouds simultaneous with your arrival in the deep forest clearing.
Whatever it was that led you to sit on the fallen tree for as long as it took to clear your mind.
As you get older, the messages are no less astonishing and yet harder to receive. The “innumerable wings” on the trees you walk below in summer. The way you learn to pray from poems. The way the plant beside your desk grows toward the window, leaves like open hands.
Often messages are found in the way people act and which you are allowed to observe but upon which it would be socially fatal to comment.
A woman I once knew combined reticence and an effusiveness so that I could hardly fathom what to say about myself when she finally asked. Another person I briefly met used the word karma so alarmingly in a sentence and in such a way that it could only contribute to bad karma.
Some messages are indecipherable or out of time. Others are about forgiveness, about becoming, learning, kindness. About feeling loved or not good enough. Some messages travel into a space where others will struggle to understand and translate.
We are merely attempting to survive our time.
Every sunrise is a message. You’re still here. Be glorious.
I Answered the Question Badly
***
Do you have time to go out for coffee sometime?
She reached out in friendship, and my blunt, no, arrived and hung between us like a cloud in a Turner study. Bleak and full of blinding rain but with hopeful pink edges. I flustered
out a list of where my time goes, which seemed a succession of floating excuses.
I should have mentioned my potential to betray. Who knows what I saved her from?
The Stars
***
The stars are at home in their pajamas at night with a glass of wine at their side, sitting on the couch watching TV out of one eye and Googling us on their laptops. They’re conducting searches on ‘normal people’ and ‘ordinary folks of average income and tastes.’ They’re checking out waffle recipes, reading knitting blogs, mommy blogs, and the blog you write about your cute adventures. They’re imagining themselves as you, wondering what would it be like to be so astonishingly ordinary.
Living as a Civilian
***
There are times, long stretches, in your so-called literary career when you hardly exist. You will contemplate and maybe even fantasize about giving it up, living as a civilian. You do this many times through your career but there will be one time when you are utterly serious. You feel like surrendering in the same way a person who has hypothermia wants to go to sleep in the deepening snow. It’s not so much that you’re called back to warmth, or discovered under the snow, but what saves you is the realization the civilians don’t want you either.