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If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two, Thy soul the fixt foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if the other do. -- John Donne (1572-1631), A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, st. 7
As a child I discovered I could see things, all things, from a great height, so all was flat and mapped out before me -- it was my steepest and widest avenue into the world, into beingness. My sense of self, then, seemed to be geographically determined and seeing was literally a territory from which all else could be described. And so, over time, I became many sorts of places. In the past few years, I have been keeping a photographic night diary of those moments where I awake and the world has rearranged itself in ambient city and moonlight. The 3 photos shown here were taken within a couple of minutes of one another, in available light only (the TV & the full moon) and then the photos were digitally retrieved from the near dark. For me, these kinds of moments signal the union of time/place/meaning, demonstrating what I have always known -- the questions so many of us ask in our search for ourselves, who am I, why am I here, are indivisible from the question where am I. Where more than who or why has a bold utilitarian disguise (should I go left or right) yet it is a piece of the same experiential, ontological (geographical) puzzle that is the here and now.
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