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.
