Emerging by Chipka

Photography • Photo Manipulation • posted on Sep 17, 2012

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Description

The descent of autumn marks itself, as always, with the spiraling fall of leaves from The Grove; they turn from green, to yellow, to red, and at last, to brown before the winds take their leathery corpses and blow them into corners and to the feet of the city’s great walls. The city’s homeless may claim a leaf or two (each the size of a child’s blanket) and fashion them into crude, but effective shelter. Municipal rakers gather them for the bonfire heaps out past Fisherhouse Street. Belam, in walking from the shadowed interior of his apartment lobby, does not take notice of the leaves. A few have blown across the wide, pebbly expanse of pavement before his paint-flaking building. He has other concerns. Far from home, but still within the city. He emerges, as always, casual in his indifference. It is nothing to him that his apartment occupies the husk of an ancient, wooden wall: Taramin’s Wall, as history books might call it. Few know Taramin or his legacy. Few care. In some ways, Taramin is like the leaves blown through the city. Far from Belam’s concerns, and soon forgotten…. * Whether there will be more to this or not, I cannot say. All I know is that there’s a guy named Belam. He lives in an apartment carved into the body of an ancient, improbably wooden wall. He has somewhere to go, and he’ll probably get there on foot. If this manipulated quasi-photo is any indication, he will get there to the sound of sole-slapping sandals. If he decides to tell me where he’s going and what his life is like, I’ll write it down. But until then…here is an image…of a wooden door with windows in it…a wooden door found in Chicago’s gallery district. It marks the northern face of the building in which I work. I suspect it’s the door to a storage facility of sorts, a double-wooden door without a contemporary function. It’s little more than an architectural doodle now…but the pain on it flakes in the most appealing of ways. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.

Comments (34)

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aksirp

4:05PM | Fri, 02 November 2012

a real master piece, great combination with colors and dimensions! first i was stunning about this enormous wall with the uncountable layers of wall paint ;) good job!...

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anahata.c

5:26AM | Sat, 15 December 2012

another short narrative, though this with the focus on one person. You have taken an image and crafted the beginning of a tale, or perhaps a snapshot from within the tale's interior, replete with a mysterious history, including something deftly suggested and then dismissed---it, the Taramin specific, love how you handled that. And flowing with genuine nostalgia and memory; in fact, the mystery of lost memory, and its indelible heft and weight as it calls out to us from within. That's another thing you do so well in your short and long narratives: There are always lost worlds which we don't see but which are whole, huge, and calling out to your characters and to us. Whatever worlds you illuminate are surrounded by, and underflowed by, other worlds; that is so often present in your work. And some of those worlds are lost but so very rich, always penetrating the dream of the present world like a deep call in the night. In the two Belam paragraphs above, you've managed to create a real world and another one, some of which is forever lost and some of which is waiting for us. (That is, if we pursue the narrative further, or find the manuscripts and artifacts that contain its history, images, etc). In the meantime, the evocation of a crumbled and barren space, bristling with human stories that counteract that barrenness, is tactile, palpable. And your treatment of the image---where you've transformed a decayed wall (suhu? somewhere around there?) into an almost high-prison wall is superb, from the green to the heightened (I assume through postwork) cracked paint to the blurred strange pavement/ground, and that chasm in the center of the building which seems be the deep gorges of life that have unfolded in its bowels. And I love the huge leaves, and how they can be used as blankets; and how you meld those with the dark vision of homeless in these strange streets. And finally, there's real truth to the notion of your characters/places speaking to you, asking you to pursue them or to leave them be: That's not fantasy in the slightest, that's truth, because art is forever calling your just as you're forever conjuring it. (Art, as in creation, not just visual art.) A wonderful glimpse-piece with terrific specifics and a terrific image to match. That chasm in the building is a whole world unto itself. Wonderful, truly wonderful.