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| Sunil Sharma |
“I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in a circus sideshow, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.”
---Ralph Ellison
A woman with a cap looking out of the window at the nightly world rushing by.
A picture of the urban disconnect, desolation, reverie.
Lonely in a crowd!
The fellow commuters are also mere outlines, shadows,
blurs---reflections on the glass, each atomised, withdrawn, a study in
isolation, ironically, on public transit.
The focal point is a female figure staring and slightly detached from
the surroundings. She may look a descendant of a Toni Morrison or Richard
Wright or Ralph Ellison; surely a proud offspring of Rosa Parks, confidently
commuting in the bus/train, ear hoops and cap defining her identity, yet
forlorn, part of a gloomy scene, typically urban, maybe, neo-noir. An
illuminated interior, fellow humans as distant, part of the scene, yet away.
Some surreal moments!
Sharing his perspective, the noted young photographer Jerome Berglund
says of the moment that presented itself to his artistic side and
compelled him to freeze it for posterity:
This was snapped on the subway when I was regularly riding public transportation around the greater Los Angeles area in my California years. It's a rare example of an isolated individual I captured amidst general cityscapes and street scenes. Something about her expression continues to captivate me, I'd like to know more about who she is, what she was thinking, what experiences were underway at this particular moment in time frozen forever, encountered in media res. The image always also reminded me of the painting Girl At Mirror by Rockwell and its cubist cousin by Pablo Picasso...
As Haruki Murakami observes so well about this modern characteristic of social living:
Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person’s heart and dissolve it.
Jerome captures the isolation and a deep desire for connections most poignantly in this frame.
Robert Maddox-Harle, a regular contributor and on our editorial board, published another of his cerebral collections of poetry---Archetypes of Doubt.
Robert Maddox-Harle is an artist who needs to be discussed more regularly and frequently.
This month's Special Focus is on his latest literary achievement and features a recording by him as well.
We wish him critical and commercial success and a long productive life.
Enjoy, please!
The Ralph Ellison quote made me think of my translations of the Uyghur poet Perhat Tursun...
ReplyDeleteThe Fog and the Shadows
adapted from a novel by Perhat Tursun
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
“I began to realize the fog was similar to the shadows.”
I began to realize that, just as the exact shape of darkness is a shadow,
even so the exact shape of fog is disappearance
and the exact shape of a human being is also disappearance.
At this moment it seemed my body was vanishing into the human form’s final state.
After I arrived here,
it was as if the danger of getting lost
and the desire to lose myself
were merging strangely inside me.
While everything in that distant, gargantuan city where I spent my five college years felt strange to me; and even though the skyscrapers, highways, ditches and canals were built according to a single standard and shape, so that it wasn’t easy to differentiate them, still I never had the feeling of being lost. Everyone there felt like one person and they were all folded into each other. It was as if their faces, voices and figures had been gathered together like a shaman’s jumbled-up hair.
Even the men and women seemed identical.
You could only tell them apart by stripping off their clothes and examining them.
The men’s faces were beardless like women’s and their skin was very delicate and unadorned.
I was always surprised that they could tell each other apart.
Later I realized it wasn’t just me: many others were also confused.
For instance, when we went to watch the campus’s only TV in a corridor of a building where the seniors stayed when they came to improve their knowledge. Those elderly Uyghurs always argued about whether someone who had done something unusual in an earlier episode was the same person they were seeing now. They would argue from the beginning of the show to the end. Other people, who couldn’t stand such endless nonsense, would leave the TV to us and stalk off.
Then, when the classes began, we couldn’t tell the teachers apart.
Gradually we became able to tell the men from the women
and eventually we able to recognize individuals.
But other people remained identical for us.
The most surprising thing for me was that the natives couldn’t differentiate us either.
For instance, two police came looking for someone who had broken windows during a fight at a restaurant and had then run away.
They ordered us line up, then asked the restaurant owner to identify the culprit.
He couldn’t tell us apart even though he inspected us very carefully.
He said we all looked so much alike that it was impossible to tell us apart.
Sighing heavily, he left.