Ara Guler, a 21st-century photographer known as the Eye of Istanbul, once told an interviewer, "I waited a damn hour and a half for a cat to show up," referring to his method of taking photojournalistic captures of the streets. In other words, he saw the convergence of elements that touched him on some level inside and demanded a story to be revealed; now all he needed was the subject to show up.
This is metaphorical for me. For the past months, I have been caught in stasis. I keep on appearing at the backdrops. I know I have worked hard in this time period to construct a framework: I have many of the pieces I seek, but I keep on having a problem showing up.
At the end of last year, my world blew up. Months later my world blew up again. And then it happened again.
I returned to a flat in Medellin, Colombia. To a half-empty closet. All my cash in the flat, missing. A hastily scrawled note. “I will never forgive you…” it began or ended, I am not sure. But five years to the day of on-again-and-off-again-trials-and-tribulations, separations sometimes stretching for more than a year, reparations short and sweet and hopeful, finally reached a conclusion.
Just a week before I flew to Colombia with a certain hope in my heart that things were finally coming together. Later that day, after tearing up and flushing down the toilet that goodbye note, I was on a flight to Cancun, Mexico.
Weeks later, back in the United States, I read a different kind of message, factual and conclusive. I had a form of cancer. “Thank you,” the lab tech wrote to my doctor in the notes, “for bringing us such an unusual case.”
I am anything but predictable. It’s nothing for me to make a grand sweeping life-altering decision and say, “This is now what I am going to do, with whom, and fuck you all who don’t get it, it’s my life, I am full of love and ridiculousness in equal measures, and this is the artist in me that flies my freak flag completely and to the limit.” Either love me for the version this year that I am, or run, or better yet, don’t answer my texts.
So after the shit storm that circled that Katy Perry drain-- sometime in August-- fortunate to be cocooned at my sister’s beachside home, I repaired all the bits of me that were broken. I let go of those that let me go. I got treatment and dodged a dire diagnosis: I am okay and just have to do that annual check-up to make sure I remain okay. I stopped writing poems. I still took lots of photos, because, I told myself, I was getting ready for Star Trek: Jay Goes to the Outer-verse.
I stopped writing poems. But I did not want to stop writing. I stopped writing poems because in truth I was sick of myself. Let’s face it, most of my poetry is diary, and most of that if too much, is just diarrhea. I wanted a fresh start, get back to art, so to speak.
I put together my web page, long overdue. I planned a way to share my photos beyond book projects. I began to curate photographs into collections and share my montage art pieces with the idea of providing a way on my website to buy prints. I decided to fill the vacuum of poem-writing with a blog, this blog, I made a pact with myself. Less Jay drama, more time spent on the subject of photography and what and how it shapes my thoughts and life. I wanted a break from the theatre of Jay's life. In addition, I wanted once again to find a place somewhere in the world where I could settle for a while, get back to a healthy way of life with ‘right-sized’ chocolate chip cookies, good coffee that didn’t cost $5, and my feet and legs as the mode of transportation.
And then the world blew up. And the politics at home became even more ridiculous. And add to the list of unsafe places; bowling alleys.
I admit. I spiraled. I walked around in a daze. All my good intentions took a nosedive. I felt I was no longer on the Enterprise, boldly going on, but in the in-between being of Scotty beaming me down to somewhere else, and still not arriving….
Ara Guler said, “The most essential thing is love. Everything depends on it. Because everything even photography is for humans. There can never be a person devoid of love and photography, devoid of people.”
…still not arriving, and then a wizened 90-year-old Istanbuler (who died unknown to me at the time during my first visit to Istanbul in 2016) hit whatever touch screen button on my heart. I crashed into the earth.
In August I spent hours walking coasts in California, awaiting test results, doing a pretty good job of not texting those that shredded me, of plugging into a new art-related expression, of putting distance to the past and harrumphing to a future, of thinking I had to zip up me to get to me. And in the clouds, I still did not see, an aura that you spell as Ara bid its time waiting when I would find a quote that told me so; photography is love, and love without others is something pretty much limited to cats that can lick their own, um, you know.
I can do my best to be my best by ignoring myself, but come on, how can I even think of taking a photo or writing a line without some Jay-Smear on it?
Back in 2010 after my partner died, I made this unplanned pact with myself; I would not live the rest of my life to please others. I would live the life I wanted to live. For ten plus years I sorta did that. I learned a lot. I lost a lot. Weight gain and weight loss, love gained and lost, not so many people left pissed off, but me, me, me… the Jayverse.
Ara Guler said, “I do not take photographs for people to look at and be impressed. I photograph what I see. Some see. Some don’t”
On the streets of Kadikoy this morning, a bohemian enclave of Istanbul, I hunted for a coffee shop to sit and try to write. On the way, I took a photo. I saw the scene in an instant, a culmination of so many things. I fumbled with my iPhone, hoping I was quick enough to capture it before the scene changed, determined to get it because I knew I had just an instant and no matter if I stood there for another hour and a half, or a day and a night, that particular convergence of fact and how I framed the fiction, would maybe never happen again.
I got what I got, and I then sat with filter coffee and painted on my Jay, and somehow it made me think of the aura in the clouds (in the morning still there were some, but now a couple hours later, the sun has won), I let the convergences happen as is their wont and did not try to write this as an ode to photography, but more to a remembrance of what makes me, me.
Still roiling in a romantic fog in a bohemian neighborhood I now call my temporary home, I saw on the hood of a parked car something we would have trouble thinking could share the same space, a cat and a seagull.
I stopped for a moment; I saw the wary regard of one creature watching another, both cautious yet somehow finding a space of comfort, examining differences and perhaps indecisive. Was friend or foe? In the background, the flag of a country I knew was foreign yet proud in its celebration this month of its 100th year of history. The tableau stirred something in me; these months where rage is the color of the day and seethes inside all of us and we do not really know what to think or how to be. Our opinions form from what we read and see, and that is why these months I have not been able to write or even believe any photograph I could take could mean anything.
I forgot this simple fact. Time doesn't care who we are. We do what we do not to impress moments. We do what we do to live moments. Our own moments. The role of my life is not to be at the epicenter of the world but to be my own world. That crazy romantic bleeding heart poetic soul who is for me, and those that want to come along for the interstellar ride, welcome.
The photograph I finally ended up taking was not actually what I saw; I saw a certain betwixt, the before, two potential combatants more curious than letting the blood rise, a brokered peace possible, the expanse of the car top large enough to contain differences without any need for a line drawn down the middle.
Ara Guler said, “Me and my photographs are a bit romantic… every image has to have a message.”
The picture that I took is the one shared, where I fumbled to move in the correct position, where I struggled to grab my iPhone without disturbing; I saw what could very well be, yet by adding in my presence, I inserted into the scene something too overwhelming; the tableau shattered.
I don’t know what Ara Guler would say about this photograph, perhaps “Meh.” Or he would respect my reason to stop and snap, attempting to capture what I saw, my little street side of love, my message. My breath.
It is very much in the realm of possibility that I could once again come across a cat and a seagull sharing space on the hood of a car, and with some predestined intuition capture the photograph I intended. But as I finish this contemplation I realize it would be foolish to chase second chances when the first one filled me with the gift of shaking out the words. That. For. Months. Have. Been. Clogged.
