Into the silence of the space

NOTE: A SENTENCE ON MIEKE WRITING ABOUT UWE, KATARINA AND PHOTOGRAPHY

He has taken Katarina out into the evening black, into the fog and wetness of the snow in Riverside Park, their rubber boots plashing down the part-lit paths, in hopes that they will work up a bit of hunger, and later on return to the apartment tired, famished really, almost spent, and find Elisabeth has set up on the table in the kitchen Tuesday’s meal where they will all sit down and eat in silence as they do each night, for the apartment has no dining room, but a kitchen and a bathroom and a space for Uwe’s work, and there’s a room for Katarina, as Elisabeth and Uwe go to bed now on the foldout in the living room, and there’s a window, you can see the park, though the curtains have been drawn, for it has been long, a very long day, and while the editing at Houghton Mifflin might be easy, it is plentiful, too plentiful these days, and goddamned tedious as well, and though this evening Uwe is feeling unusually tired, he still gets out of bed and goes into the kitchen where he reaches up into the highest cabinet and finds a bit of scotch to serve himself a drink before he crosses over to the other side where he unlocks a door with a key he keeps attached to a little black string around his wrist before he enters closes locks the door behind him and sits down over what now, that he has snapped the little lamp into its light, appears to be a mass of papers, open notebooks, typed up sheets and maps, that he adjusts his glasses and he looks at as he writes, a heavy mechanical pencil in his right hand which he is now replacing with a red felt tip, the glass of scotch hovering beside him in his left, annotations into the margins of his notes, the way I’m doing now, rehearsing what I did last night into this grid, after having spent the morning out of the apartment in the city here with Geert who will be staying in New York for several months to curate what she says is an enormously exciting show of photographs she’s busy setting up at Milchan’s Gallery on Twenty-third, I mean, she said at morning tea, that many of these artists, these photographers are new to me and how to deal with what they’re doing or they’ve done, to hang their work, and make them speak to one another, is a problem that I haven’t really figured out in any way, at least not yet, and she took me to the gallery to walk around the space so I could have a look at what she means, and then she suddenly was called away and I was left there in this straight-backed wooden chair with a view of all these framed up pictures lined up on the floor in rows and snaking round the space against each wall, I have been taking photographs myself, of course, as I’ve been taking notes on all the things I read each day, my empty park bench series and the photographic archive I’m constructing of Solonga’s things, annotating oftentimes with comments or quotations, and I wonder if these practices are somehow similar, and is there an effect, and which way does it go, are these photographs the seeds of what I’ll work out later in my words, are my words anticipations of my photographs, or are they unrelated, disconnected and absurd, while it is dark now and I look outside my window at a post which hangs a bluish light and a number (I have seen it) you should call if you should find yourself involved in some emergency, in something that emerges, an ‘emerge,’ or is it, now that I zoom in a little closer with my camera, absolutely nothing but an image with a bluish glow and words that make you wonder why it’s dark, why is it, despite it’s being quite so early, quite so dark, with Uwe walking through the park with Katarina, lost perhaps out there tonight, and when will they be heading back to sit and have their dinner as, however strained, a family, to sit down the way that I was sitting in that straight-backed chair with Geert before she had to leave, looking at the photographs that were on the floor and propped against the walls, one of them, in color, showed a page of someone’s notebook or a diary, the handwriting neat and quite severe across the unlined space, leaving no room at all between the entries, not on either side the slightest margins, neither on the bottom nor the top, and on the edge one gets a glimpse of what might be a table or a floor, what seems to be a dark brown surface, that the notebook or the diary is propped on,  above which there’s a sliver of blue (perhaps an indication of a view from someone’s window), and if you do not get too close and try to read the words themselves it is an abstract composition, something taken from the world as it exists in space, that sheet, those words, the color of that table or perhaps that floor or maybe even window sill, the blue from what appears to be outside but might just be a poster or a shade of wall, how all of this is taken through a camera’s lens and turned into a photograph, which makes me think of something Susan Sontag said or maybe wrote, about the way a photograph can be described as a quotation, how a book of photographs’ a book of quotes, the way that Benjamin would write about photography and dedicate the last years of his life to the compiling of exactly that, a book of quotes, the way a text is something larger that we take from and compile to build another kind of place, create a world all of its own, to take a photograph, writing by light, to take from the world,  isolate, sequester it, and print it on a piece of paper, maybe later bringing it into the company of others, other pictures, ‘takings,’ quotes, in just the way that Geert is doing now by curating this show, cumulatively building something else, a selection or a group of pictures, art, and I can see the image of Uwe and Katarina now quite vividly, they are coming into focus, frozen in that pathway in the park, the faintest light so vaguely now defining them as figures in an abstract landscape so like a pair of Beckett’s tramps forever and precariously placed before a storm, maybe they are in the middle of a conversation, how was Katarina’s day at school, or maybe they are not, for the photograph is silent, the acoustics supernumerary, brought inside by us into the silence of the space.