GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT

My head gets crowded; I feel I am continually trying to clear my head. These days, it's a matter of competing goals, projects, desires of my own vs. the demands of others. There's my dayjob, my schoolwork, my writing life, and my publishing life, to name a few. My weekends prove too short to finish any given to-do list.

When I was a photographer, I used to complain that my head was too full of images. Modern critical theorists spend a lot of time telling us that we live in an image-driven, image-crowded world, and I believe them. The first time I moved to New York City, I found myself feeling worn out by the proliferation of billboards, magazines, and the population that imitated them: I used to say that living in New York was like living in a magazine. When I left New York that first time, I moved to Texas, saying good riddance to density, billboards, and other visual littering: I wanted a blank sky and darkness at night. I had grown up, after all, in a county that made billboards illegal.

All this was still years before the internet was a factor in my world, let alone a daily one. At the time, the only computer I owned was a Brother typewriter/word processor with a 5-line screen. It was unevenly heavy, and it had a flip-out handle on one side for carrying. I carried it, in fact, all the way to Texas (via Amtrak), wrapped in a blanket and thrown into a large black trash bag.

Today's computer is my desktop at my work office; its weight is irrelevant since it's a fixed object. It has an 18-inch screen but the size, too, is irrelevant: it manages to fit my whole life into it, 40 hours a week. The lit-up computer screen with its hypertexts, its icons, its graphics, and other illusions of coding--this space may as well BE my office. As long as I'm there, navigating among the emails and the spreadsheets, the directory lists and the downloadable forms, the websites and the Ads by Google, there is no blank blue sky, there is no gentle night darkness. The computer IS my city inhabited, crowded with visual demands and competing requests, competing desires, repeating values, and billboards at every turn.

WEDNESDAY MORNING: OFFICE AS CAMERA


In my office, I work with my back to the window. Just now I turned around and saw something I’ve never seen in life before, only in the darkroom: the light was trying to take over the picture.

The sky has been hazy all day, though “hazy” doesn’t describe the mood. I woke this morning to find a pink fog had settled into the gorge below my seventh story window, distinct and barely perceptible at the same time. But just now the white sky above Squirrel Hill (the hill not the neighborhood)--a sky of diffuse, post-foggy-morning light--is trying to eat the whole view. The light is hiding things rather than revealing them: I can’t see the tree branches on the top ridge of the hill where they meet the sky, the reflection coming off one rowhouse roof is brilliant-white, blinding me. The tiniest tree branches closer to me have become light, as have the electric lines. The newest and ugliest buildings are lower contrast, less noticeable than usual.

I’m reminded of my earliest days in photography, working with hopelessly overexposed shots I nonetheless was determined to print to my liking, because I had been there, on that day, because I liked that composition, because I wanted that record of my angle of witness. But those skies never budged, not without minutes of exposure under the enlarger, sending the rest of the scene into blackened oblivion; those skies over train tracks, over low mountains, over four-story brick buildings; those skies of silver, dense and stubborn on the negative.

THE QUALITY OF LIGHT IN STEEL CITY IN DECEMBER WHEN YOU’RE WATCHING FROM BEHIND OFFICE WINDOWS THAT DON’T OPEN

Pittsburgh precipitation doesn’t fall subject to the laws of gravity. No, as Thomas likes to say, we’re in sort of a weather bowl up here, something to do with being a valley of hills among mountains, and we catch all sorts of air currents that look nothing like life at sea level.

Friday there was a snow squall in late morning, and the view out my office window looked like a glittery snow globe. The fine, dry snow flakes flying every direction, in nonsensical circles more than any one line, catching glints of the soft-bright sunlight as they did so.

I found myself marveling at the quality of the light shining through the clouds—the clouds soft white, edged with hints of pale blue, yellow, and pink. A three dimensional sky--no, three dimensional clouds, there was no “sky” behind them to contrast, only this soft, beatific pink-yellow light passing through them, bathing the street below. I wondered about such a light, as I have a few times these past months, is it so bright because Pittsburgh is closer to the sun? I remember my childhood with the humid Virginia haze, the flat white sky; even sickly blue with some cirrus clouds seemed unusual back then. We concerned ourselves with creeks and basements and cul-de-sacs instead.

In Texas, I walked around in awe. The wide, wide, Technicolor blue sky! Puffy white white clouds against 2-D blue like only Hollywood could offer. Something about that clear blue sky and the word Texas and the number of navy blue Cadillacs on Guadalupe made me laugh, made me walk back from some job-training seminar (north of my usual haunts) the Airport Boulevard way wearing a flannel shirt and my leather jacket in the summer sun, because the sky was so very clear and the cotton flannel was so clean and there were no sidewalks only gravel and no pedestrians only me, so I laughed and I didn’t mind sweating. But I also knew that sky had capricious powers: the power to blast me with a sunburn in the space of a fifteen minute walk. Or the power of an August thunderstorm, which could blow through with little warning, rattle the wooden houses to their shingles, and leave huge trees felled in the Austin streets.