When do we meet? What do we meet?
The face. It speaks. The eyes, the mouth, all the little lines, all the little
curves: signs readable and unreadable.
The angular vision and its
different contours change them . The faces alter but does the gaze
alter? From deep down, the eye sees the
object standing out: from a body with a face to a face with a body. Does the
body need the face? Perhaps! A painted face…a real face…a body hiding the
face…that little glint in the eyes stretching out. They all tilt the frame and
push it from within.
Then we have a two. A two of
faces: two different gazes but more or less in the same direction. Difference
remains though; both in the subject and in the object.
How the form of the body and the
face mingle with the space around and how the space constitutes them
differently are our possibilities.
Possibility. That’s the key word.
Let us possibilitate.
The
face is one of the sacks. It’s a face when it’s not a sack. It’s the sacks
which create a series and the face participates.
The
body is coming into being. The hands and legs are crawling their way out of the
womb. That’s motor function for you…still in a dream…still not born properly.
Is
this a light where you see faces? How much does it keep back? How much it lets
go or how little! Where there was a face once is a blank page with its dull
white virginity!
Dream
is a screen. It hides the face like a shroud but screen is also where you see
images…the horses in an archetypal dream, as it were! The more you try to hide your face, the more
they catch you! The psychic history of anxiety knows a good deal about horses!
Who
said you dream inside? Do you see the without as you go within?…as your eyes
grow within. The masks are caving in and you think all life is inside? Huh!
Each
position restores silence to the objects. A photographic task indeed! And then
comes your time to be a shaman…dream with masks while faces evaporate in this
half-light that sometimes visits our world! Not all. Not always.
The
face is gone but there is shame left still! The breasts are all cloaked. It’s a
she-body as if the mudra of the hands could say more! A body on the verge of
breakage, she holds on to her femininity!
Somebody
said: “ghosts are unresolved issues!” Precise, I must say, absolutely precise! To
de-familiarize an object is the task. Unfamiliarity is something else though.
This is familiarity turned on its head! It brings out the ghosts in all of
us…Let us have a long life! Long live ghosts!
How
a photograph merges objects! The balloon-man’s approaching hand is at one with
the balloons. We are in a world of metamorphosis.
Motion
arrested in time and space is how photography declares its arrival. That’s how
it reflects itself or its ontology better still. This frozen dance of forms,
human and then no longer human with each passing frame…is this all happening inside?
It’s
a collective nevertheless. The bodies that hover, go into the air as if
offering a dolly, hands that look for warmth in this penumbra—all collective.
Dream is something we do not like to reveal. It’s a private thing , we think!
But what if we do not dream our own dreams?
The
dream of the other spells out an enigmatic carnival. In the mean time, the
world keeps moving and the sun sets as if one last time. A truth is beginning
to revolve itself. A truth with horns seeped in dark water. A search-light will
hardly illumine it.
The
tiger descends through the tree as I listen through you. The tiger is stretched
out in punishment but the growl is intact in the night lamp alit inside.
Oh!
The difficulty of making out the difference between an attack and a caress! The
cats know better. The food chain continues in the dark. The carnage goes on in
fangs and snarls. The positions are curiously poised between ecstasy and
violence.
The
beach is all ears and the void lets us in. The void which hooks the eye burns
with desire still. Foreplay is where their god lies but for them pornography is
not a prayer. Making out, they do not
mouth the divine name!
To
make out the making out is the task of the dream. It is moving towards its
navel now. It’s a button without the buttonhole. The orbs of instinct are at
play in this dying light of other times and places.
We
strike against a dark wall of vegetation where opacity writes her masterpiece.
She is alone with the sea, teasing its magnitude with her feet. She comes back
again and again and the sea does what it does best: recede and recede farther.
You
see yourself carved in stones. She feeds and you look on. Are those eyes
anxious? Is the zone marked yours? How does one own an inscription? You are in
search of milk…milk to pour into the depths of the well. There’s man for you. A
dream re-turns to his ontogeny.
We
are looking at knots, webs, networks and cross-passages. These intersections
are the props of a mirrorical return. We are going down the stairs, counting
them as we descend. There is always that one count more, uncounted so far.
We
are getting a move on here. It’s an on
which is in, to be more precise. Do you get the creeps? Light makes the web go
all saliva…the gyres are revolving…revolving it all but is this all within your
poor mind? I doubt.
The
roots have encased the air. Is this the death of air? There is still a wee bit
between the horns. They are turning into cactus. The light is all desertion
now.
Tree
trunks are opening their claws…their mouth. Every mouth…a potential story,
always retold in a different life.
The weeds
are dreaming an inverted dream. They cannot be fully seen but the dream sees
itself carefully. There is serious dreaming in this water. It protects your
sleep.
Empty
spaces wait for occupancy and there is a series of skulls which have the dead
power of gaze. The sea leaves you all glistening thereafter. Each object, a
rollicking history but do they really rollick? Theirs is a stumbling history, told,
retold and re-retold in an interminable murmur over centuries.
Sprinkles
of time and the bulwark of a dance, occlusive again. The image disperses to
allow time and space to have their poignant comedy. Three moments of fall: the
yet to fall, the falling and the fallen bond like multiplying children in the
fog. Photography generates an integrative capsule here. It caretakes time and
space. The dream reduces without being reductive though!
The balloon ghosts are on the rampage and the
menaced faces know little about the floating temple of ghosts. It’s a light dream, dreamt inside a balloon
which is left off with love. It relieves us of our inexcusable lightness of
being.
Two
thieves at the cross; they do not look at each other. Who’s damned? Who, saved?
The ropes know a touch more.
Three
moments again: before flight, about to fly and observing the flight. Shadows of
time interwoven in a spatial configuration. Does every dream lead to Plato’s
cave?
The
sand parts with the wind and he sees through. He can see only when the sand
parts. He has not been given a head and still he dares to think.
An
acephalic thought is all hearing. You are dim in the porous sand and there are
gigantic footfalls around you. There are marks on the sand which help breathing.
As long as it breathes, you are there or dreaming perhaps.
The
porous surface promises a way out. The head is elsewhere and not absent. The fragments of a body shuffle in between
the fragments of a dream. Do they dream the same dream?
The
gaze opens a slit and he stares at the half-lit, half-open window. Are you
there inside? Can you hear? This is a promised encounter. All promise is
hypothesis though! Dream too! Dream too, another hypothesis!
She
is constituted by your ruins. Don’t you know, dearest? The lower part of her
body has stiffened into a stick now. She is one of those ancient provincial performers
on long legs. Look! There is a
multitude! Alas, ‘they’ is devoid of a gender.
Darkness
makes up for the vanished flesh. The fish is flying with clenched feasts.
Objects are laced with this rare valiance when we bring them down to their bare
bones. There is strength in all helplessness, the sea revives to the shore.
The hanging
shards signal an arrival…a fabled arrival of the punctum to confront the line.
Death is always to come…dying but never really dead…dreaming and still not done
with it…never to be done with it.
Dogs
are busy with life as another man turns into body and then the body into ashes.
Images of life and death love to live together with or without marriage!
What
if love-making perpetually joins two bodies? What if the dogs in love are
inextricable twins? These are only possibilities on offer.
Death
writes itself into time and onto space. Nameplates reveal the original and the
final address. And yet they are not addressed to anyone in particular. Claws
have inscribed death on names. A proper name dies soon.
The
hand and the foot look alike. Image is a great leveler. There is a dream atop
the monkey-mountain and it knows the precise interval between the dead hand and
the living foot. The dead hand holds on to the thread still claiming more life
than life itself. Death smoking up into a shrine halts for a moment and sees
life in a succession of dreams.
Photographs by Arko Datto
