pimpin' the piña:
just testing the scanner, brand new paid for with cash; because my father didn't want his day ruined
he scanned inch-thick stacks of official-looking documents but when i went downstairs last night to mix coffee he had a battered shoebox on his desk, overflowing with childish drawings, crayon portraits, a snipped-out-of-red-felt heart -- love, your little twit, which is what he called me until i was old enough to mix & drink my own coffee
brought him a cup while he was out smoking on our porch, asked how his work was going
going good, he said; it's very important, you see.
yes, dad, i do.
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larger of the scan; if you're dying to see how my mind scribbles at 4 in the morning
the poem in question, in an entry two years old
Light, Arranged and Concealed
The word “flash” in the title of Eric Gamalinda’s lyric poem Flash Photography is key to this explication of the poem. Flash photography is accompanied by a signature burst of light, which - by fully illuminating the subject of the photograph and therefore shrinking the eye of the camera in protection - will freeze the subject in sharp relief, ensuring that you will see your dog perfectly forever running toward you, that you will recognize the individuals within a sports teams despite their movement as one. This ensures that you will see, distinct and glowing, each of the faces around a dinner table, and not a drunken blur, even if that is all you remember about last night. Examining this particular way of seeing - often criticized as harsh, as washed-out, as unmerciful - can illumine the understanding that photographs are not perfect repositories of memory, and that despite the numerous faces that one can cram into a frame, the real subject of any photograph will always be the viewer.
The poem, like a photograph, begins with the brightest flash of light - metaphorical and otherwise: the first stanza claps open with death by lightning, the violent image of a skull exploding, and fulguration, which can also be understood as death by light. To be understood then, is that the flash in flash photography is at the same time illumination and destruction. As the subject is fully lit, they are fully arrested as well; we see everything that the light was able to capture, but we see nothing of movement, or of time.
The first stanza introduces the flash that freezes time; the second stanza expounds on that frozenness, and the consequence of the elimination of time from a frame: that this flash photograph is an electric “current impervious to the ordinary run of lives,” and is therefore “meaningless.” In arresting Time, time is cut out of the picture. Without context, (a Happy Birthday banner, the exchange of two rings, or even the dates scribbled on the back of the pictures) we are left with nothing but speculation about the time and place of such images, made suddenly alien by their lack of motion and history. This is where viewers are led into the perplexity, which is bound by the cropping of time into the smallest of seconds. Recalling the first stanza, the image of a person struck by lightning is “easy to imagine,” but to be known, it must be seen with the eyes. The persona steps in at this point to declare the one and only I in the poem, emphasizing the importance of personally being witness to such an event, rather than settling for a creation of a “world spun of rumor.”
The third stanza deals with a different and more temporal kind of cropping, which also does its damage in terms of exclusion: the frame of a photograph. We see that a photograph “chooses what it likes to recall, [and] selects not with love, but light.” The theme of concealment by exclusion carries into the fourth paragraph, as the development of photographs “does its harm in darkness, in the thrall of poisons,” as opposed to the completely organic way memories develop - with time.
Notice the unusual syntax: each sentence fragment is a fragment precisely because it lacks the subject of the sentence, instead of beginning with the verb. It is as if the speaker is afraid to name photography, as the speaker cannot name anything at all. That is the plight of a photograph - the viewer must be introduced to that frozen moment, to once more reorient himself within the place and time that the photograph was taken, in order to remember the names.
The cataloguing in the first two lines of stanza four also lack essential nouns; who are the portraits of, the still lives with, who? yet more importantly, portraits and still lives and soft pron are all posed photographs which are arranged for maximum effect on the viewer. Nothing is said of candid photographs; flash photography is one that calculates, that “chooses” and “selects” the most appropriate arrangement of figures in the light. This loss of the essential (essential in a sentence: the subject, essential in a photograph: the moment) is an analytic shape in these stanzas that discuss how a photograph - in attempting to capture a moment in time and space, may have captured nothing but light arranged and concealed.
The thesis statement of the poem, therefore, is that “the photograph is a way of not seeing,” and that this harsh and clumsy attempt to remember presences - your dog, or the sports team the year you graduated, or last night’s party - tells us more about absence than it does about moments. The truth is that the photograph conceals more than it shows, and we must come to realize the inadequacy of this false eye, which is false precisely because it belongs to an “indifferent apparatus,” trained to recognize shadows and contrasts, but not “the light of… meaning [held up beside] the darkness in us.” We, perpetual subjects of freeze-frame and perpetual viewers of photographs, are forever left grasping for personal connection and meaning within that three-by-five platter of light and dark. Photography is not expansive enough to dispel “the terrifying realization that we are alone” in what we see with our own two eyes, because we are not alone in the incompleteness of photography; sharing becomes a matter of handing a picture to someone else, telling him or her: this is what not what I saw, but this is what I remember. Or, correctly, this is what I want to remember.
Does memory now become the answer to photography’s selective blindness? We understand that photography is the playground of contrasts, and that the right picture is merely a matter of light and dark at work concealing and revealing only the most beautiful parts of each other. In memory, however, nothing can be shut out. “Those who gave meaning to the darkness in us” encompasses everything and everyone we treasured, whether we photographed them or not, whether we even ever saw their face. As long as it mattered, if it was there - it is remembered, even as “the world [and its photography] forgets.”
Unlike photography, one cannot only ever remember just the right half of a lover’s face, in order to disguise a scar, a blemish. Memory illuminates all, in stark contrast to the properties of photography as enumerated in stanzas three and four. Time and the amendments it brings to memory only intensify the truths of light and dark: what we remember is more important to us than what we saw, and nothing of value can be shut out from the all-encompassing mind’s eye.
All told, not absence but memory
takes what it can,
and we pay our debts
by remembering completely.
The end of the poem’s thought process begins with the most appropriate adverb: “all told,” as it echoes the play of photography’s concealment and memory’s epiphany. Desirable, then, is revelation. Memory is identified as the ultimate light by which to view the world, because it “takes what it can” from that world - including the sense of temporal space, the awareness of shifting time - as opposed to photography, which cuts recognition off at the border of a frame.
Photography is a flashlight, and memory a floodlight, but the price of full illumination is that absolutely everything - remembering completely - is in view, and nothing can be shut out. The loss of the power of selection leaves us indebted and vulnerable to the world, to the recognition of the presence of absences; to love memory is to treasure even that which is ugly, which is horrific. To love memory is to watch the skull exploding, to refuse to hide behind an “indifferent” lens. Our own burden of remembering rests on the truth that so much light in memory is what can blind us, we who are all too easily overwhelmed because we have too long chosen to look at life through a lens, to develop it in a darkroom. To love memory is to step out of the frame, and back into the ordinariness of life that moves alongside and within time; it is to remember completely, it is the provocation to look directly into the unmerciful sun.
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it's awfully prosaic; i sure hope he doesn't fail me for florid language/watery ideas. :(
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little brother in grade school: have you seen my barong? it's what i'm going to wear to my graduation
he holds it up, feathery fine & translucent, expensively embroidered. smells like green leaves;
little brother: yeah on the back it says PIMPIN'