Renunciation of Time
I pulled up an hour before sunset. Fallen trees. I burned driftwood. Sent a photo to Bo who had just arrived in the city. Rilke spent a lot of time writing letters. After ten years he wrote to a friend with excitement because he completed a work. The coastal light faded. The gradual decline was longer than I was used to. Through the phone Bo heard the fire crack. At the water’s edge, a photograph of me as a child standing by a pond. Mess my mother nurtured.
My brother took a photograph of our mother as she was carried from the house. He showed it to me months later, after the film was developed. We made a fire. To forgive the past. To stop time. It rained the morning our mother died. No lights were lit. Thunder tore like pages.
When I returned to the city the lines for things had gotten longer. I walked along the shoulder. Headlights aimed towards me grew brighter. I saw the light fold as we sat on her porch. My mother and I. It was difficult to make eye contact. Gravel beneath my feet gave way before feeling my weight shift. A cloud of birds murmured. A plane ascended. The chemtrail retained its diagonal form and the birds dissolved. The end is not as I imagined. Trees stood bare. Leaves had fallen. It rained.
Zig zag along the shoreline. Layers of desire and violence cancel each other out. Chance builds the landscape. Forming and reforming. A series of blockages and openings. The horizon, the ocean, the surface of the earth. I walk along the beach stopping at the water’s edge atop a ledge formed by incoming waves. Overlapping ridges, push and pull, smearing. Flatness and its natural breaks.
This project is shaped by images collected from my family archive during the final months of my mother’s life, writings, a class I took at the International Center of Photography, Res, Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil, Ben Fama’s poetry reading group, and the Montauk Residency with Bo.