Jiaohe -- First Draft

At 6000 inhabitants, the ancient city of Jiaohe in Xinjiang Province of northwestern China held almost twice as many people as my hometown in Iowa, when I grew up there in the 1950s. If the reports of friends and high school classmates are to be believed, that little Iowa town is well on its way to being as extinct as the Chinese city, though probably with less spectacular physical qualities.

Jiaohe, which means something like "at the fork of two rivers," was built on an island and was not the usual walled city of ancient times. Except for the artificial structures of the tourist industry, there is no clear entryway to the city. The photos above and below show entryways to the remains of buildings within the city.

The building that most attracted my attention was the Buddhist temple that stood at the far end of the main street that ran down the middle of the city. 

You can see in the niches of the tower that the Buddhas have been disfigured or totally removed, probably during the Cultural Revolution, but perhaps also at some other time by thieves who make a living by stealing and selling such antiquities. Western museums are full of such stolen properties and still somehow manage to maintain their legitimacy as cultural conservators.

Watching

My loft opens onto a small balcony that overlooks the canal behind my house. From this vantage point I have views of the birds and boats and often dramatic morning skies. Once, early in my residence here, I put breadcrumbs on the balcony and set up a video camera to catch the seagulls competing with each other for their daily bread. "Watching" is the theme here, whether it issues in writing or painting or photographing or nothing but its own activity. Near the end of a thin volume called Letters on Cezanne, Rilke comments on "how great this watching of his was." It's a theme for Rilke, too, and this little volume is so instructive just for the care with which Rilke looks at Cezanne's paintings during a few days in Paris in 1907.

I try to practice careful watching myself (though I am afraid that I do not often enough practice careful watching of my self). This frequently results in works in a series. Li Yu has encouraged me to post some images of tulips that I have made (the making, too, has been under her encouragement, over the past eight years). 

I keep coming back to this flower under the original influence of the poet Denise Levertov with whom I was beginning to be friends shortly before she died. I even edited an issue of Twentieth-Century Literature devoted to her work. She wrote a poem about tulips and the wildness with which they fling themselves at death.


Levertov's images have stayed in the background of my consciousness for decades, and I enjoy keeping vases of tulips around the house through their full cycle until the petals have darkened and fallen onto the table leaving only their stalks and their sexual parts rather embarrassingly exposed. And I frequently photograph them in their various stages of richness. For me, my images of tulips are closely linked to feelings of death and loss of love and...oddly enough...beauty. "Death is the mother of beauty," Wallace Stevens wrote. I don't think he was looking at tulips, but he should have been.