Interrogative

1. Falmouth, Massachusetts, 1972

Oak table, knotted legs, the chirp
And scrape of tines to mouth.
Four children, four engines
Of want. That music.

What did your hand mean to smooth
Across the casket of your belly?
What echoed there, if not me—tiny body
Afloat, akimbo, awake or at rest?

Every night you fed the others
Bread leavened with the grains
Of your own want. How
Could you stand me near you,

In you, jump and kick tricking
The heart, when what you prayed for
Was my father’s shadow, your name
In his dangerous script, an envelope

Smelling of gun-powder, bay rum,
Someone to wrestle, sing to, question,
Climb?


---------------2. Interstate 101 South, California, 1981

Remember the radio, the Coca-Cola sign
Phosphorescent to the left, bridge
After bridge, as though our lives were
Engineered simply to go? And so we went

Into those few quiet hours
Alone together in the dark, my arm
On the rest beside yours, our lights
Pricking at fog, tugging us patiently

Forward like a needle through gauze.
Night held us like a house.
Sometimes an old song
Would fill the car like a ghost.

-----------------------3. Leroy, Alabama, 2005

There’s still a pond behind your mother’s old house,
Still a stable with horses, a tractor rusted and stuck
Like a trophy in mud. And the red house you might
Have thrown stones at still stands on stilts up the dirt road.

A girl from the next town over rides in to lend us
Her colt, cries when one of us kicks it with spurs.
Her father wants to buy her a trailer, let her try her luck
In the shows. They stay for dinner under the tent

Your brother put up for the Fourth. Firebugs flare
And vanish. I am trying to let go of something.
My heart cluttered with names that mean nothing.
Our racket races out to the darkest part of the night.

The woods catch it and send it back.


----------------4. But let’s say you’re alive again—

Your hands are long and tell your age.
You hold them there, twirling a bent straw,
And my reflection watches, hollow-faced,
Not trying to hide. The waiters make it seem

Like Cairo. Back and forth shouting
That sharp language. And for the first time
I tell you everything. No shame
In my secrets, shoddy as laundry.

I have praised your God
For the blessing of the body, snuck
From pleasure to pleasure, lying for it,
Holding it like a coin or a key in my fist.

I know now you’ve known all along.

I won’t change. I want to give
Everything away. To wander forever.
Here is a pot of tea. Let’s share it
Slowly, like sisters.

-Tracy K. Smith, 2007

The Sycamore on Balance

A symmetry of forces, yes,
but not of shape. The roots: a mess
of curves. Like slow snakes
they incorporate
rocks. The tree's full weight press-

ing down, the trunk arrows skyward.
For humans, centering's awkward.
You lack longevity,
can't fight gravity,
grow heavy. What wayward

cantilevering keeps you calm?
When sorrow settles, blights your limbs,
what dark contortions
fix you to the source?
Contrition. The light-aimed psalm.

-Katy Didden, 2012

i thank You God for most this amazing

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

-E. E. Cummings, 1950

It's been a little while since we've had any music here, so...here's a song.

Prairie, Under Full Moon

In the blooming period, everywhere is open.
Winds make you arrive where you do not want to go.

Disrupt the
Sequence of the hours.

Everything starts talking: bract, awn, butterfly,
Godwit.

------------------*

You collide with the place,
Leave tattooed and bone crackled.

Even the chickens shout. Such that these are called
Booming grounds.

The sun appears to set unexpectedly.
The earth, to widen and shrink to a moving flatness,

As if Jacob’s ladder were built sideways.
Angels roam restlessly

Anxious to deliver
Their burden. They make crossings of weird

Gravity and synaptic light.

------------------*

You see words are not always accurate.

Sometimes they are prone
To excess. And mutiny. What does the body mean to say by

Trembling?

------------------*

O sparrow, speak the bird’s O until the breath runs out

You can read your wound. Its hidden seam.
Its slip-knot.

-Eva Hooker, 2012

I've haven't written much about my research here, which is odd because it's something I think about rather a lot. The reason for my taciturnity is maybe that I have a tendency, lately, to be taciturn in this here blog, or maybe to do with that quote from 'Walden': "The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels." Once I've cycled back and cycled back, it's hard to believe everyone else hasn't heard it all before; a bit like the stretch of road you walk so often that you hardly see it, much less think to record it with words or photographs.

And that's something I've been thinking about a lot lately: the relationship between research and photography. A friend of mine got back from Cumberland House yesterday, and yesterday night a few of us gathered in her apartment and discussed the trip. Cumberland House is a community of about 2000 in northeastern Saskatchewan; it is mostly Cree and Métis¹, and it has seen its fair share of researchers. And now the community is tired of people who come and mine them for information and then disappear like so much ephemera--really, it's hard to blame them. In modern Canada there are certain bureaucracies around research with First Nations to try to avoid echoing past exploitation: researchers are expected to approach the Chief and Council of a First Nation for permission and embark in a partnership; even once this happens, the data ownership is with First Nation, which means they could retract rights at any point. This is intended to push researchers towards conducting research that is valuable to their participants, to ensure collaboration. It isn't quite that straightforward, but I think a lot of people would like present it as just that straightforward.

Photography, though. I remember years ago going to a show--at the Eastman House, I think (Dad?)--of early photographs of American Indians². As I recall, the photographer was fairly famous. I think he may have traveled around with a darkroom in the back of a wagon. Regardless--my point is that those early photographs are similar to early anthropological research, in that the intent was for the images to be brought back to 'civilization' to show people what these Indians were like. Much has been made of the soul stealing powers of cameras; I couldn't tell you where that story comes from, or whether it's a true myth or a myth about a myth. What I do know is the way the camera, like the research process, serves as a technique for creating and recording individual data points, which eventually become a narrative. The riddle, then: what is the narrative? Who tells it?

I don't think anyone believes the camera is objective anymore, but there was a time when it seemed so: it is, after all, light writing, exposed via chemistry, with the camera obscura serving as a sort of mechanical eyeball (and if we can't trust our vision, what can we trust? Nevermind the fact that my vision is terrible). The research process was also long suspected to be objective (this, as has been hammered into my head, stems from positivism).

I had to do portraits for one of my photography classes. I'm pretty sure, by the end of that unit, everyone in the course knew I hated portraits. I didn't like any of it: the studio, the lights, asking people to come in and then sticking a heavy camera (I couldn't use my camera, which only made me more ornery about the whole process) in their faces while strobes went off. I can't even articulate my resentment fully, but I think it has to do with the fact that, with my photographs as with my research, I feel a certain self consciousness about what I'm taking. I don't think it's necessary for a photographer to feel that way, but I do believe the camera as an object has the potential to change a relationship. It is, after all, a thing you place between yourself and the subject being photographed. The process of observing, recording, and eventually reporting for research functions in much the same way.

A few months back when I was browsing the 'Berkshires' tag on Tumblr I found a post, presumably from someone's vacation, with a photograph of the view down our valley (my photograph of the same view, different season, is here). This is the stretch of road I walk so often when I'm home that I rarely record it. Seeing it through someone else's lens made me distinctly uncomfortable: our road isn't the most direct route to anywhere in particular (though it is an exceptionally nice road, if I do say so myself) so it feels just a bit private. It makes me wonder who these people were, and what else they took from the valley. For them it was a vacation; for me, it's home. That will always be the gap between the tourist and the local (as hesitant as I am to call myself 'local' to a place I haven't lived very long). Yet we can both take the same picture. It's the narrative behind the photograph that shifts.  And that's just the landscape; that's hardly comparable to someone taking a photograph of myself and imposing a narrative onto it, placing words in my mouth or pairing them with my image.

Let's wind back to Cumberland House, then. Recall: the people there are tired of having visitors tell their stories. The solution hasn't been to forbid visitors from collecting and telling these stories, but to ask what can be given in exchange. How will this information will be used? Who will it be served? Within academia, the goal of research is to push the boundaries of knowledge (or so I've been told). But outside the ivory tower, we're looking at something else entirely. The current philosophy is to marry those two ideals, but they don't always come together well or easily, even with the best intentions.

And the camera? For the purpose of this essay it's halfway to being a metaphor, but I have another essay in the works that's centered on photography rather than research but address similar questions (I think?), so we'll see what comes of that. Hopefully, it'll be a little more cohesive than this.

It occurs to me I've still managed to sidestep any actual discussion of my research project. But this post is already longer than maybe 100% of the other things I post, so to save your eyes and everyone's time, I'll put that off a little further still. 


¹'Métis' is the term for individuals of mixed aboriginal and European heritage.

²I'm hardly an expert on this, but as a general rule I use 'First Nations' to refer to aboriginal people/tribes in Canada and 'American Indian' to refer to the same in the U.S. Describing someone as First Nations has certain political connotations--not every tribe in Canada identifies itself as a First Nation because doing so involves certain treaties with the Crown--and thus is inapplicable in the U.S. According to Census interviews conducted in '95 'American Indian' was the preferred term there, hence things like the American Indian Movement and the National Museum of the American Indian (conversely, in some part of Canada--at least, as far as I know, Alberta--'Indian' has heavy racist connotations). (This is why political correctness is hard.)

The Cromwell Gorge

The sun is in its glory. Pitiless
And supreme, its furious visage

Spins in the limitless blue
And turns into powdery dust

The rock floor and shining cliffs
Above an unquiet stream. The hawk

Hangs in a gem-hard sky,
On motionless and lazy pinions

It glides down the hot tired
Corridor of the gorge.

This is the kiln that fired
My shaping mind—a brilliant waste

By wind and rabbit toothed
And honeycombed, an orchard land

Where a child still dreams
Among the time-lost apple trees

While his heels take root
And his forehead wakes into flower.

-Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, 1948