It seems no work of Man’s creative hand,
by labor wrought as wavering fancy planned;
But from the rock as by magic grown,
eternal, silent, beautiful, alone!
Not virgin-white like that old Doric shrine,
where erst Athena held her rites divine;
Not saintly-grey, like many a minster fane,
that crowns the hill and consecrates the plain;
But rose-red as if the blush of dawn,
that first beheld them were not yet withdrawn;
The hues of youth upon a brow of woe,
which Man deemed old two thousand years ago,
match me such marvel save in Eastern clime,
a rose-red city half as old as time.
Bresson mentions the geometry of a moment, the triangulation of forms. He says of one photo, “Pure coincidence. I was standing on a bridge and at that moment everything fell into place, but only for a second. That’s photography. You have to seize the moment. Like here,” he says of another, “that’s the joy of taking pictures, ‘yes, no, yes, no – YES!’”
And at 3:00, Bresson pauses to decide where to place his signature on a photo. Nine seconds pass before he lands on the spot – yes, no, yes, no – YES! – and there he scribes it with care over the span of the next fifteen seconds. And like his photos, his signature is well-formed with that same learned aesthetic of charming imperfection.
One autumn afternoon, a girl falls off her bicycle and lands on her face. Decades later, a woman wakes to a twinge of pain in her head.
All those years before, my busted teeth got braced, bonded, bound, and bionatored. But beneath the teeth, below the skin, a fluttering butterfly-shaped bone froze in time and threw me off balance forever. Year upon year of off-kilter growth twisted my spine into a helix and a phantom half-rib poked at a nerve running down my left leg.
Then one day, a woman with an angled but somehow soft-featured Nordic face hovered her kind hands over my head and worked some fluid magic that set my sphenoid bone free from more than 2 decades of tensing in the trauma of the accident. My eyes overflowed with tears for I don’t know why. And the headaches disappeared for a long, long time.
When that complex, gorgeous bone locked in place, the constriction triggered the tight jaw, the ringing left ear, the left swinging scoliosis, the overall muscle and joint tightness that makes it feel like my skin doesn’t fit right. I worry now that it’s locked again, or that one of the sphenoid’s many points of contact has fallen into dysfunction again – the aches, the tugging muscles have returned.
I’m far away from the woman who first fixed me. Wonder whose hands will free that butterfly bone now.
I’m not the one who took this photo. I doubt I’d ever have the courage/audacity to ask a small stranger child to pose for a photo,but I’m thankful rwhite2109 mustered up both.
She and her captured expression set this Walkmen song inside of my head: “kissing your skin your skeleton splinters my daydreams/under this other street everything sings/shadows slide across the wall/i walk outside and i try to see you right in front of me/a silhouette of something sweet, and so bright.” She’s so ramshackle beautiful, and when I look at her portrait I catch a scent memory of that airy, sun-and-wind, ruddy, dirty odor of children who spend so much time outdoors.
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