direct link: Three White Images. (Watch at 1080p -you'll be given this option once you press play- and full-screen - the resolution YouTube offers is excellent.)
Three White Images
...................................................................dark, quiet, stillness of the night
Tonight on my walk I came across three white images that
caught my heart. Should I carry a camera, or would that
undo what memory does?
...................................................................images of the inner
...................................................................soul
...................................................................remembering
And what I mean is writing about the images in the cryptic
...................................................................criss-crossing of white branches
ways I do in my poetry contains a way for me
...................................................................against the white grate
to remember those images in an almost dream-like way
....................................................................an elephant in a yard, white,
that raw video footage might not
...................................................................full-sized, the Hindu Airavata who
...................................................................upholds the
...................................................................worlds
So I have a camera I resist using.
...................................................................the branches walk with us
Sometimes the photographs become the memories of the
...................................................................their lines against the dark sky
past and you forget what wasn't there. I find it strange
to look at photographs of my childhood, for instance, since
...................................................................cross-walks, roar of air
they are removed from what I remember. In that way
...................................................................we are alone in the night
I'd prefer to write of what I see than take a picture of it. But
...................................................................lights, unknown
the camera is glamourous, an amazing contraption,
...................................................................memories
and images can be shared, and so we take a lot of
...................................................................Tibetan prayer flags criss-crossing
...................................................................a yard
photographs of ourselves and our world. So I think
...................................................................devotionals, offerings, requests
...................................................................a peace tree
both, remembering through writing, that way, and the
...................................................................where the wind moves
...................................................................pieces of woven material
image, even if the image wouldn't look to someone else the
way I compose it.
...................................................................lanterns of love
...................................................................and then I lifted myself
...................................................................and it was bright
Three white images that caught my heart-
........a white elephant,
................prayer flags,
........................a white birch tree.
___
Music from BertycoX's "Light of Abysses", go and listen to the whole track, from an album of two songs, beautiful.
The line spacing isn't my formatting, in which the italicized lines are deeply indented in a staggered way, I have done an indent with white dots - hopefully it's readable given the site's html restrictions.
This videopoem was inspired by a question I sent out on Facebook on March 3rd. The question is the first stanza (non-italicized) to which there were many responses from artists for whom taking images of the world in their motions to and fro are an important part of their oeuvre, Richard Kattman, Elissa Malcohn, Kim Walker, Sandra Machado, and Irena Strzinar, and I'd like to thank them. I went back a few evenings later with my video camera and shot the footage and edited during a day and a half marathon.
One of the issues I have with videotaping is camera shake, and as soon as I can afford it, I'll buy iLife and pull my videos in there to remove camera shake and then take them into Final Cut Express to edit them. It'll be far cheaper than an add-on, if such a thing is to be found for FCE. In this video I slowed the footage of the branches to half speed which helped considerably, and then geared the words to accepting that hand-held quality.
Also, in this video I am excited to see a discovery of ways to continue my aim of creating art with 'multiple voices,' 'multiple styles,' multiplicities. Although this video is now posted at YouTube, and I won't remove it, I think I have figured out how to get Garageband to save each voice in a left or right pan. If I get it right and it works, I'll upload the video elsewhere and see if the left/right stereo split of the voices is maintained in a posting. That'll be cool!
One voice is a conversation about doing the video, what memory is --if memories that are written are a better representation of the memories we hold than photographs might be, that photographs of a time period might even supplant our own memories from then-- and perhaps is the voice of ruminations. The other voice speaks poetry. A poetry that dances off the ruminations, echoes, and transcends it.
I am happy with this video and feel I've come far in my self-taught videopoetical route; if it doesn't quite work for you, read along with the film and see if that helps, and remember that I'm still learning and will get better at this.
___
Guy W. wrote a comment that I liked - he raised good questions, his response was sensitive to the work and yet expressed his difficulties with the style of aural presentation - and he gave me permission to include it here:
"Very captivating multi-media concept.
Maybe I'm just not good a multi-tasking, but with both poems being read simultaneously, I couldn't hear either one, so I had to scroll away from the video to read the lyrics. Perhaps if the audio stanzas were spaced instead of directly on top of one another.
I might have misinterpreted, but one poem seemed to argue against the existence of the video. Perhaps if all the lyrics were in the video.
I would like to have heard how the commonality of whiteness of the images unified them in your mind."
And so I had to reveal, O to reveal, and said, "Have you heard of double-induction subliminal hypnosis tapes? That is a technique I've transposed to my poetry. Yes, it is supposed to undo the logic of the mind so that a deeper listening can emerge. I have included the text, which isn't ever included with tapes in that style.
And you are absolutely right... one voice does argue against the use of images to accompany memory. Sometimes the photos can become the memory, supplant it so to speak, and one forgets the actual time or the real flavour of it, or how one felt...
The commonality was that I saw all three on a walk one night and all three images struck me with their poetic quality. Though I understand what you mean, and perhaps could put something to that effect in the written transcription that accompanies the videopoem.
Also, I've also been listening to Laurie Anderson lately - O Superman - and feel like experimenting a little with various soundscapes... I even was daring enough to add sound effects to the voice, a little echo here, a little reverberation there :))"
_
Postcript, June 13, 2010: Take a look at Loftus' work on memory: http://www.slate.com/id/2256089/pagenum/all/
[from old ning site]
ReplyDeleteComment by John F Walter on April 9, 2010 at 7:41pm
What I also mean to suggest, following Peter Brook's notion of ' negative action', is that the subjective lyrical account that your poem shimmers your imagery luculently into full radiance through syntactical juxtaposition, repetition, and limning of birch, flags, elephant with exact detailat the same time that your spoken poem video, as Bill Viola's video of man, woman, water and flame commented on Wagner's Tristan And Isolde, provides counterpoint to the 'wind' of the holophonic voices, is contrasted with the action not taken, the memories not recorded by either camera and video. The final result--the poem image video itself--is a simulacra of something denied by the intention of the speaker to bring reader and listener attentionality to the images themselves, and yet this simulacra lives on in the literal images you provide us on YouTube, the way they are edited to simulate another meaning, the structural tension between being the experience or having it through technology and immortalizing it within the frame negated, using the tools denied by the poet and poem themselves.
Comment by John F Walter on April 9, 2010 at 7:17pm
I'm also impressed so much with the starkness of the entire video poem, how it draws strength from focused imagery, and the words themselves incanted in your full spectrum hypnotic voice can share their fugue space and flow into each other's juxtaposed phrases and meanings.
Comment by John F Walter on April 9, 2010 at 7:13pm
The interrogatory mode, investigating one's own way of mapping memory, of reconstituting the essence of things on the fly, is also suberbly accomplished. I suppose in theatre its akin to what we call 'the negative action', the action not taken but fully realized as a hypothetical through examination of the experience left behind. Here that is the full sensory assault and reconstitution through words of bound qualia, transforming symbols beyond their whiteness and their social ontology (flags as representing a nation, people or culture, white elephant a gargantuan mistake, white birch Nature herself in a forest of symbols) into a consciously held moment, itself a prayer for extended consciousness.
Comment by John F Walter on April 9, 2010 at 6:18pm
This is your most direct, daring, flowing work yet in new media, in my view, Brenda, a real breakthrough for you and a challenge to the rest of us to reshape the culture more through novel approaches with single/minded focus and intent, reconstituting language from the detritus of fleeting glances and inert cliches into charged experience, without need of frame or the lens that frames.
So many dynamic elements meld in both these pieces, the poem and the evocative video that speaks it and visually counterpoints. Polyphonic rhythms, above all, in the voice layerings that resonate the different paths toward the final stanza that now poses the three images conjoined as a unitive vision of the poet's experience (considered with an aesthetic definitional theory through the building tension of the speaker to live the vision, rather than shoot, store, and relive it in memory, that makes one recall Wallace Stephens in his poetry of the imagination's extent)
The reconstitution of 'white elephant' from its old derogatory associations into a triumphant bearer of light was audacity itself, and beautifully accomplished.
[from old ning site]
ReplyDeleteComment by Brenda Clews on April 10, 2010 at 10:46pm
John, your reading is amazing and I am honoured. How I've missed you! I think you take us -all of us pre-Simmers, your on-line group- seriously as artists in ways no one else does. You can have no idea of the gratitude towards you, your sensitive and erudite readings, your vision.
Without your response here, I may have left these ideas and gone in another direction. But now you re-ignite the passion that I felt for experimenting with videopoetry in the directions I began here - working with layerings, multiplicities, but not necessarily with images, rather aurally.
I don't think I got it quite right in this piece - and went back and listened more closely to how paraliminal double induction tapes are composed - there's more of a dialogue between voices.
An interesting direction for intellectuals who are poets, huh. Two voices - one that critic who speaks about; the other the poet who is living, feeling. Ways not necessarily to merge them, because they each maintain their autonomous vision, but a way to present them together.
But then we can also include a discussion on the nature of the medium itself, on reconstituted memory through the photograph, the video. And is this memory? Indeed, Three White Images calls into question the perspicacity of a lense-captured memory container -the photograph, the video- as an alteration of it and as potentially not saving the actual event for recall but supplanting what consciouness unaided by the camera might remember.
Even as the video tells its story in images and words it is suspicious of these media and their claim as memory-placeholders.
This is a fascinating topic.... certainly for me, and perhaps you, and certainly might be something to continue to explore -
Again, thank you for your in-depth, insightful, relevant, warm and inspiring response... I was, as they say, blown away.