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In the Blur

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Only recently, after having written the first draft of this essay and assembled the first group of pictures to go with it, did I learn, if it is even true, that blurry pictures have emerged as a trend among photographers. If I had known, perhaps I would have avoided the blurry. 

But, as with most of my ideas and opinions, the final versions of many of my pictures and images are hazy and unclear. Ambivalence has long been a comfortable place for me, though I resisted it. And it it is not that I have lost the art of the vivid or that I have rejected the possibility of certainty. I am capable of taking nice, clear pictures -- and of having the occasional clear thought; I can even be decisive -- but increasingly I decline to push past the literal blur in my pictures. It is as if the vivid has lost a certain relevance, and that for me this is a time of acceptance.

Fortunately, I like the sound of the word “blur” and the phrase, “the blur.”

 
I have fans of my images but I sense they continue to live, or to cling to, the old familiar vivid. I worry they tire of the blur. I don’t want to alienate them; if I didn’t know the point I was trying to make, if I didn't know the meaning of the blur, at least to me, I might willingly regress toward clarity. At any rate, I have become increasingly reluctant to publish my abstract images while feeling the strongest affinity for them.
 
It is one of those conundrums for an artist: create and release what your mind, eyes, instincts and urges see, tell you and want, or release what will please people immediately, so they will like your work, and possibly you, more urgently. Be difficult, or a little difficult, or be companionable. Be blurry or clear. Obscure or transparent.

I believe in clarity, in giving viewers and readers something to cling to. The most time I spend on a poem or picture I've made is in trying to make it accessible to readers or viewers, without losing its original meaning or spirit, like I'm my own foreign translator.

 

The problem is that I see the blur as clarity and the greatest clarity in the blur and I want others to see what I see.

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The blur my images acquire comes from overexposure, which is ironic, I suppose, and a nice metaphor for how impossible it is, no matter how much we think and try, to know what is happening in our world, or in the minds and souls of others. Sometimes, one blurry item on a blurred canvas can stand for more than anything clearly seen. Interrogating it, staring into it, can be time consuming, labor-intensive, can seem frustratingly futile, possibly even frightening, and I don’t want to frighten, but then again, there be monsters about.

As I get older (and older), increasingly I consider the dying of the vivid, that for me there might be no such thing as clarity anymore, if there ever was, that everything and all of us function based on a highly individual, utterly peculiar, inaccurate understanding of everything and everyone around us and that it is a daily, an hourly miracle that the whole world doesn’t just crash into itself and cease to function. I think this view of a Bay Area freeway crash that never happened expresses the chaos.

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Though our assumptions and interpretations are misguided, we think, often with a ridiculous, a clueless certainty, that we know the intentions and motivations of others, and we act and react in ways that block or favor them; perhaps our assumptions, our “knowing,” reflect our own motivations, our own private, singular lifetimes of joys and traumas, triumphs and setbacks, exclusively. This is not to say we are not insightful and correct sometimes. We certainly are, some of us more often than others. Nor is this to say we lack all understanding of ourselves and each other, that we can never know the why of a person, or of a mob, for that matter. Only that if we get anything right, it's random, its luck, or at best the result of an educated guess.

The fact is, like governments have since the birth of civics, we promote the blur by the things we keep to ourselves. We do it because we think it is safer, because we are ashamed, because it is none of your damn business, because there is never the right time, because you wouldn’t understand, because it might hurt you, because you might tell somebody else. On the other side, we promote the blur by playing the game of interpreting without probing, without bothering to ask, or by succumbing to a kind of fear of the truth. Well, I do, anyway.

 

One of the few things I know about myself for sure is this: I hate the moment of truth.

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In trying to protect each other and ourselves, we inadvertently cause increased hurt, hurt that lingers. Because, so often, the reasons and motivations we imagine in the actions of others are far more hurtful than the real, actual reason someone acted the way they did.

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Finally, I think it needs to be said, that as our nation prepares to destroy itself over a mass, a vivid, delusion, the blur may be the safest, sanest place we have left.

Fortunately, there are pictures to please, distract, inform, confuse, amuse, or to be our muse. One of the best short stories I’ve written was based entirely on an abstract picture I’d made. Not to say it is a good short story, but just that it is one of the best I’ve come up with, and I am happy to have written it, and I owe it to my musings over an image I was trying to give a title to. I called the story "My Beautiful Oubliette" and the picture "Oubliette."

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Oubliette

My blur seduction began with a picture of the shadow of a fence and tree on the outside wall of a cafe in my neighborhood. The shadow was such a beautiful sight to me because of the precision with which it cast the actual fence and tree, the absolute clarity of the lines on a glowing whitewashed wall; it looked as if the fence and bush were behind a scrim under a well-directed spot. So why did I blur it? I think because the blur took the feeling out of time and I needed to be out of time, at that time. It took the image and the moment away from a place where frank sunlight created precise shadows, to a stormy twilight place, like Dorothy’s black and white Kansas just before the tornado hit (I accidentally typed "tomato" as in Kansas just before the tomato hit). It made a pretty picture ominous, I admit, and that was my choice, my expression, not necessarily one I was pursuing consciously, but when I saw it I knew that this is what this picture was meant to show. In this case, it was a very personal expression, in the depths of the COVID lockdown and as my mom was dying on the other side of the country, where I couldn’t get to.

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Since then, it has been an easy decision to make any self-portrait blurry, for the very trite but true reason that, as the poet Robert Hass put it, not tritely, “I know myself no more than a seed curled in the dark of a winged pod knows flourishing.” Self-portraits, like many of my images, have gone beyond the blur to the abstract over time. Often I wish they could have gone the other way.

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I like to use the blur to metamorphose one thing to another. I think this is a perfect metaphor for human memory; eventually we forget what the original looked like, in a fugue of mercy.

Still, as with memory, I do get frustrated sometimes, when I can’t decipher what the thing in the picture is now. And then I worry no one will be able to see anything in it at all, beyond pretty colors and vague shapes. But I hope they’ll see what their eyes and mind call them to see, or feel what they are called to feel.

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The blur is full of beauty

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Sometimes the light or the weather do all the blurring work for you. As in Minneapolis on a rainy Easter Sunday. Often the choice to go abstract is arbitrary, just whatever looks prettier to me.

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Or to show a mockingbird launching itself from a wire

But the blur was the only way I knew in a still to tell the story of a beloved dying dog

A blurred and dark portal is probably the most expressive -- and obvious – metaphor I have used. It is about a choice we make, on a daily basis -- a sometimes difficult, sometimes easy, sometimes scary, sometimes joyful choice -- to pass through the portal into the day or not; but what is your decision based on, really? For some, the decision is pure courage. Daily we take all the individual motives, intentions, desires, hopes and fears, all based on our shaded and siloed visions of the world and those around us, our hit or miss conceptions of their visions and motivations -- actually so mysterious to us -- all the misunderstanding of the world that we base our lives on, and make your decision to pass on through or not, to our day; or to ask that person to coffee; or to send that handful of poems to a journal; to post that picture on Instagram; to not call out sick to work when you are hurting or afraid; to push forward in a hard life in an increasingly, unjustly hard world of bitterness and uncertainty.

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This is not to say there is not reality which approaches the objective. Only that the blur is real, and maybe more real, and capable of being more beautiful and more interesting and more compelling and yes maybe more frightening than you might think. You can see a lot in the blur.

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Parked cars in my city, which is suffering a rash of bipping, can look properly concerned in the blur, as does a nervous driver in my city during a car-jacking wave.

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In the blur you can see my city striving and failing.

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It is also the very best way to show my city having fun.

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And the best way to show the action of larvae swimming in a wheelbarrow filled with rainwater or a mockingbird launching itself from a wire.

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You can find harmony, discord, kindness, humor, a blank slate or a clear message, all at once. You can find peace in the blur. You can definitely find a kind of freedom. Also exploding heads.

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The blur was best for a lively Montreal Sunday morning.

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In the blur, like some Irish myth, shorebirds becomes a child running in the Atlantic surf.

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In the blur, another thought-provoking conversation with my wife becomes light bleeding out of our windows at night.

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So too the blur is god and faith for me is the blur I am often interrogating.

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In nothing have I found the blur more adept than at expressing the abyss.

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Most of my favorite and prettiest pictures are made in the blue and the blur.

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I don't seek to correct anything with my pictures or my words, but instead to embrace the blur, which I see as an invitation and an opening to the soul. The blur is an opportunity, to question, to breathe, to open back up to possibilities, even ambiguities. If we accepted our own ignorance of things and the reasons for things, if we took a deep breath, identified and accepted the spaces between us, and then interrogated them with honesty, we might clear a few things up. We might begin to fill up the abyss with meaning.

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