shining forth
Long before iPhones and digital cameras, there was film. When you released the shutter to take a photograph, light reacted with the silver-halide particles in the film emulsion. Until the film was developed, it’d be an invisible reaction — and so she floated there, her image captured in darkness.
I make lists to remember.
She used to sit at the desk next to mine in the darkened lecture theatre as the professor ran images through the slide projector — Doric, Ionic, Corinthian columns, the caryatids of the Erechtheion. Sometimes she’d reach over and draw in the margins of my notebook: spirals reminiscent of Klimt. Eyes. Calculations of how many Drachma she would keep for souvenirs as we traveled through the Greek Islands. In return, I’d scribble cryptic messages, written in the International Phonetic Alphabet we learned in linguistics, when the lecture was dull: | sh ut mi |.
What we shared.
A large house that permitted us to live with four of our closest friends. A collage of black and white photographs of faces we’d snapped in the street, each one enlarged and cropped close so that their eyes and cheekbones filled the frame. Meals of pistachios and diet Coke. Cole’s electric kettle we’d fill to make jasmine and camomile tea. A maroon university sweatshirt with a hole in the left sleeve. Michelle’s expansive collection of operas and classical music. Gia’s massive professional video cassette recorder that I simply couldn’t rewind. Bret’s vinyls of Van Morrison. A bicycle pump. A sense of despair, that we had so little time.
A tiny dent I can still trace on the bridge of my nose, sustained when three of us crashed our bikes head-on as we peddled home from a late-night showing of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. A scraped knee. A cracked rib. Two hairline fractures in her left arm. I think she called out to us, or we to her, and we each turned in a wide, slow, graceful arc directly towards the other, colliding in the middle of the street. For some inexplicable reason, none of us was able to swerve out of the way. At first, I seemed to be the injured one, with blood pouring out of my nose, and a huge black gash under my chin. She and Cole wheeled the bikes home, he balancing one with each arm, patient as I limped slowly along beside them. Inside, Gia helped me rinse the blood out of my clothes before she insisted I go to bed. As she turned out the lights, she placed one cool hand on my forehead, and it seemed for a moment to still the pain. But she came to me later, in the middle of the night, pulling me out of the dark, out of a dream in which I wandered blindly through a labyrinth, inching forward with arms outstretched, afraid I would smash into a wall — “I think my arm is broken.” No moon that night. Lucid, luminous details return to me, intensified by the constant dull throb of pain in my head and the sudden plunge out of sleep. I can still feel the skin taut on my knee where the blood had dried. I remember the damp grass soaking into my sneakers and a shower of icy raindrops as I tore off a handful of sumac from a hedge outside the house. It must’ve rained in the night, while I slept. We walked along the empty sidewalks, along the paved path that runs through the medical buildings, slipping between the sulfurous pools of light along the way. There were stars overhead, glittering through the bare tree branches. Orion, Cassiopeia. In the emergency room, a nurse filled in a chart and led her away. I sat in a hard, plastic chair and waited. A radio played jazz quietly in the background. She came back two hours later, her arm tightly bound in a white cloth sling. Grinning, she held out her wrist to show me the plastic ID bracelet fastened there with a metal clip, spelling out her name in smudged purple letters, identified as female, blood type B negative.“He let me keep the x-ray of my arm.” Euphoric. “That’s why it took so long. They had to find a technician.”
“Does it hurt?”
“I can’t feel a thing.” She shook the bottle of painkillers the doctor had given her like a castanet as we retraced our path, the world filling in now as the dawn light grew, clumps of emerald moss between cracks in the pavement, the bright light of the hospital sign. People passed us heading for their morning meetings and lectures and commutes and I wondered if they could see us, if we walked invisible through an overlapping universe, jarred out of focus when we crashed into one another in the night. I bent down to pick up a worm stretched out swollen and purple on the asphalt and placed it gently in the soil. Back at the house, she asked me to tape the x-ray to the window. Radius. Ulna. Fine striations, our collision etched in the bone.
A weekend trip with all the roommates. On the plane, Gia’s seat neighbor showed her a photograph of Queen Elizabeth, resplendent in a blue cape, diamond-encrusted tiara, and wristwatch. Airplane food — two scoops of reconstituted egg garnished with a slice of orange and dry wheat toast. A woman arguing with the crew about checking her bicycle, trying to find room to place the carton filled with giant bunches of lychees and lavender, a tiny tortoise-shelled cat embroidered on the bag. The scent of lavender enveloped us as she wobbled past. Staring out the window into the various patches of land below, rock pools set deep in sandstone, a dark astronomical lens peering back through time.
A typology of stone. The night before her term paper was due, she stood in the center of her room surrounded by hand-drawn diagrams, lab reports, and the photographs from the trip, trying to piece them together. “I don’t think I can do this.” She looked up at me, then crouched down awkwardly, her arm still in a sling, to pick up a cross-section, leaving a gap of hardwood floor in the paper mosaic. I opened the window and the breeze smelled faintly of freshly cut grass; it rippled through the pages bleached of color in the dim light. I could see her face reflected in the mirror above her desk, concentrating, biting her lower lip. Her father had insisted she take geology as a minor, something to fall back on, the gravitas of stone. And she attended every lecture, getting up at seven in the dark winter mornings as I only wanted to lie in bed, deep under the covers in a cave of warmth, sometimes catching a glimpse of her shadow underneath my bedroom door as she walked through the hall, dressed in her brown corduroys, ragged at the hems and just an inch short so that her socks always showed, her cloth backpack crammed with books and slung across her navy wool jacket. Then I would fall asleep, waking again when I heard her return, her face always bright from cycling through the cool morning air. She took detailed, elaborate notes, carefully wrote up each lab, spent hours sitting at her desk, her head in her hands, studying the 600-page textbook. Once she showed me a Burgessia Bella, a dark round body with a skinny whip-like tail, embedded in gray stone. “My professor says it’s exclusive to the Burgess Shale in Canada — 530 million years old. It swam along the bottom of the sea and then one day it sank into the sediment and died. Isn’t it strange, that I can hold it here now, in my hand? It looks like a shadow burned into the rock. Somehow it survived.” She was especially interested in trace fossils — not the remnants of the animal but some record of its movement, burrowings, tracks, the imprint of a body, captured by a pocket of clay or mud and then baked hard by the sun or buried under layers of moss. It wasn’t the discovery that interested her, whether by accident or erosion, but more the knowledge of it lying there in the darkness, tremulous, secret. I think the idea of it being uncovered upset her, the earth sliced open by a sharp metal blade revealing the imprint, the exposure of something that should remain silent and numinous. It was better left sealed in the stone matrix, protected by thick layers of soil and clay.“I don’t think I can do this.” She studied the cross-section, passed it to me, bent down again, and reorganized a series of photographs. I looked at my watch — past midnight; panic had set in. It was always like this with her, panic needing to reach a certain critical mass, engulfing her, usually carrying me along with it, before the words came, still tortuous and slow. She preferred working by eye, by touch. She couldn’t sit still but needed to rearrange the pages of notes, feel the rock samples in her hands, scratch them with her fingernail, a penny, a nail, even taste them as if she could swallow their essence, her body always in contact with the hard surfaces.
It took all night; I sat cross-legged on the floor with her typewriter on my lap and typed up the report as she dictated it to me, making corrections, interleaving the typed pages with figures, and glossy photographs. The printer ran out of paper on page 17 and we had to make do with green-tinged sheets taken from her sketchbook. It came to sixty-two pages, “Profile: North American Geology,” a patchwork report fastened by a large butterfly clip. She asked me to type all the names in red capitals, to bold them so that they stood out sharply — SHALE LIMESTONE MICA QUARTZ. I remember the feel of their imprint as I ran my fingers across each completed page, garnet inclusions in a metamorphic rock.
Postcards she sent us over Christmas break, from her home in Seattle. Gandhi in a loin cloth, staring out between the spokes of a spinning wheel. A black and white photograph from Life Magazine of a nuclear test, “Yucca Flat, Nevada, 1953.” A Georgia O’Keefe print of a patch of sky seen through the hollow of a pelvic bone bleached white in the sun.
An agate marble that shone a dusky silver-red, the cracked blade of a pocket knife, the ID bracelet from the hospital, five or six rings she often wore. She had been assigned a self-portrait in her studio class. She took a wire coat hanger and undid one end, twisting it into a spiral, then hung these objects from it with varying lengths of string. Her instructor gave her a B+, saying the sculpture was too abstract, lacked feeling, it was only a cage. But I found it beautiful, ethereal. It had a certain asymmetry to the eye, yet every part balanced perfectly. I hung it in the window and would watch from my bed as it spun gently in the breeze, a kind of armature, netting her heart as the dull metals caught the light.
Someone drinking tea at the table next to mine, the scent of jasmine. A cover at a local bar, vaguely familiar, disguised at first by the unusual rhythm but the words seeping in, Well it’s a marvelous night for a Moondance, With the stars up above in your eyes … A certain quality of light, granular and blue, at dusk, when there’s been heavy rain. What sneaks up on me when I’m least expecting, takes my breath, catches me unaware.
Her photographs. The faces like stonefish, floating above the blue afghan on her bed. Photographs of rock pools in San Francisco, always with my sneaker or my hand along the rim for scale. The series she called “Camera Obscura.” This involved photographing round objects in square containers, or square objects in round containers (“Even Aristotle questioned how the sun could make a circular image when it shined through a square hole,” she explained), or in making her body look like what it wasn’t — an arum lily, a marble column.
A weekend in late January, a gray, cold day, everything slightly damp. She took us all to Chicago as a thank-you for our help. We walked along the Chicago River, and climbed through a sort of hollowed cliff, searching for toe-holds in the dirt and overgrown roots, coming out at the base of the DuSable Bridge. She asked us to photograph her, sitting by the water underneath the bridge; peering through what I think was a hollowed-out log. We found a metal ladder used by a work crew that was screwed to the wall of the bridge and climbed from the darkness below up onto a wind-filled platform. She balanced there, a white fragile body on the ledge of the bridge’s dark eye, her arms raised so that she appeared to hold up the flat roof — a caryatid. A photograph taken from above as she clung to the ladder, her sharp face and round shoulder emerging through the lens. After an hour, shivering with cold, we had to stop and find warmth. We sat huddled together on the platform below the bridge as protection from the wind and drank from a thermos of tea. Cole draped a wool blanket over our knees and slowly a little warmth came. I tasted rain on my lips. Shallow waves echoed in the stone hollow, and entered the spaces between words. I would’ve stayed there, enduring the discomfort, dampness seeping in at the small of our backs, curling up in the bone. She jumped up and handed me the Thermos, the cold air digging deeper into my bones. “Look at my skin — it’s blue,” she said, and laughing, held her hands out to show me. She stood up, her feet still bare, cracked and bleeding a little from the crushed stones, to spin around and around with a kind of heavy grace on the dirt, then ran across to the far wall and pressed herself, her palms and her cheeks, against it. This is what I most remember. An ability to metamorphose, to sink into her environment, to embrace it, smudges of ink or clay on her hands, her cheekbone. Pressed against the curved wall of the base. Maybe her trace is there still. She pulled me up, and we both leaned out over the ledge, reaching out our hands to catch the drops of rain just starting to fall.
She told us later that she had lost the film. And then, even later, that she had found the film, but that none of the photographs had turned out.
What’s left behind.
A taste for pistachios at odd hours. A paperback I’d lent her on the beat poets, boldly underlined in red. A surprising knowledge of marine geology. Tapes of Van Morrison. Memory hollowed by time.
When the film is finally unwound in the red light of the dark room and dipped in the chemical bath, the exposed silver-halide particles turn into silver, a black metal. The dark areas in the released image carry the least trace of silver and appear transparent while the light areas appear opaque. The image is transferred from the negative to a sheet of light-sensitive photographic paper. As the transferred image is dipped once again in the chemical bath, the areas of darkness and light are reversed. She appears slowly before your eyes: a sharp face peering up at you, her round shoulders, luminescent, shining out of the dark square, as if her image has been captured at the moment of birth. The Mohists (after the philosopher Mo Ti, 470-391 B.C.E.) knew and taught that objects reflect light, and called this “shining forth.”
Shining forth. What a perfect description of the lingering effect of her attitude and grace.
