Dark Room

Spring or summer of 1986. Karen got her drivers license well before me, because, well, her birthday was before mine, and I think, she had her shit together; my shit was unequivocally not together: it was all the hell over the place. I was spread out all over the map, almost the opposite of a patient etherised upon a table: not numb, still, and incapacitated but more like a bag of sunburned snakes: hypersensitive, twitchy, and incessant: perilously in love with Joann Bolte; vestigially compulsive about tennis; neurotically self-obsessed in poetry. Karen also needed her license because of the Midmar Imperative: a long trip from out there to LHS, to downtown, and everywhere else. When I got mine, I slowly earned access to the two-tone tan Chevy Malibu. On Fridays or Saturdays, and sometimes weeknights if things were clicking, I would drive over the hill, past the Alpenrose Dairy—which seemed a kind of strange theme park-slash-bovine playground-slash-array of sports fields that somehow kept a small part of some older Portland alive—and down to her house. But once Karen started taking photography and became friends with Matthew, a new and, to me, both odd and cool scene presented itself: Matthew had a darkroom in his basement, and Karen would go there to develop prints, even when Matthew and his dad were gone. Traditionally parented to a bewildering degree, to me, being alone in a house with a friend was disorienting; being alone in a house with a friend unrelated to the owner of the house was completely strange. Add a darkroom and it was a displacement: plucked up by a starry hand from where I was and gently ensconced in a calm parallel cosmos. All in a good way. It was there, in the tangy moist air, in the warm dark lit occasionally by the red bulb, enveloped in the delicate sounds of trickling water, that Karen talked me through exposure times, shaking the paper, and other tricks she used to make her pictures so compelling: we’d work on contrast or how to develop a razor sharp line; how to solarize with a flash of light or make images grainy by blowing up a detail. In the dark and water and quiet, with bleached pride and washed out defensiveness, I actually picked up the careful movements and their underlying principles. Karen was a good teacher: steady, calm, funny, nice. I have utterly forgotten all of the steps now, how the machines and chemicals worked, learning each action’s legible consequence. I remember instead the feel and taste of the air, the measured directions, the music beneath the water, and Karen’s intense focus and stillness.

The Velvet's "After Hours" is kind of exactly right: we were doing a lot of VU then, and the close miked fragility of the song is perfect. Gavin Bryars' "The Sinking of the Titanic" (here, "Hymn III") is the slow submarine music; not something we listened to in 1986, but K gave me the CD.

The Velvet Underground, 'After Hours'


Gavin Bryars, "Hymn III"

January 29, 2011

On my way home in the late afternoon, despite five years of living here in Canada, it still surprises me that evening twilight starts pulling across the sky before 4. The dark comes too soon, over and over. Crowds of crows—a murder I suppose—black and delicate, swirling with their wingtips in the streaky pink and gray indigo. The colors are stretched, a tympanum, immeasurably vast and immeasurably thin, hiding the depthless empty black behind. I am listening to the crow-like squall of The Tallest Man On Earth, who appears to have no self-doubts about his pinched, gravelly, nasal twang of a voice. I tend to doubt my bleating volume when I blare out my lectures on Dylan Thomas or Elizabeth Bishop or ‘Westron Wind’. The Tallest Man doubts not. I press on home. Even though I have Greta and Ev and Silas waiting in a discombobulated house, a mess of Mexican dinner, and dozens of student emails asking stultifying questions (I think, also, large groups of students’ emails should be called a ‘murder’ like the crows), I am alone and cold slender fingers rasp at my pericardium, lifting layer by layer it all away; with their filigreed and iron grip, they clutch my trachea. This desolation is all anatomical. The branches of nearby trees groan with the heavy black bodies of the birds; the dark figures against the fading light like an exploded Rorschach. New York is buried in white blank heavy snow and New York is far away: nothing is not there and nothing is. It is not just another day, and I am really terribly sorry.

Elizabeth Bishop, ‘One Art’

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

I usually laugh, seeing as this poem is a villanelle, and Hein and Schmeer used to mock such a pretentious form, shouting after Gerry Foote’s class (which Karen wasn’t even in): ‘Vee Yah Nay Yah!’ in a terrible fake French accent.

The Tallest Man on Earth – ‘A Lion’s Heart’ and ‘Kids on the Run’