shovels

Today's left-out-for-recycling contributions - next door - a whole flock of winter snow shovels.   One hopes that they won't be needed again this winter... What I like about them is that they are so utterly, emphatically, themselves.   Since we'll be discussing Barthes' Camera Lucida tomorrow, and starting to think about photography and memory, I was looking in one of the two books that constituted the catalog for the Roni Horn exhibition: this one is a "subject index" - a kind of idiosyncratic lexicon not just of her subjects, but of her preoccupations.   I wanted to see if she had anything to say about memory.   Nada between "me" and "metaphor" other than "me see you" and "mes see tongue twister" - which turned out to be "me" pluralized - Horn thinking about self-replication, about "PALIMPSIZING MYSELF" - about, in telling a story, the fact that she may actually be "imitating memory" - thinking her voice through thinking through her voice - turning herself into a palindrome, since she has no idea if she is remembering accurately.   In other words, o clever woman that she is, one can read this entry as displaced memory...literally...

Which I hadn't realized before I started to follow this through.   What I wanted to borrow (but am now cautious of doing) is what she says about metaphor, which I think (as befits what she's talking about) is relatively straightforward: "Looking for metaphor can be limiting, it is usually at the expense of the work.   People often reject a work if they can't find the metaphor.   But when metaphor is not there, you have to be more present.   I prefer to look at less familiar things, to allow the vocabulary of the thing to educate me.   It's the opposite of cloud watching - where you're projecting yourself onto the cloud and trying to make it more like yourself."   I'm very much in sympathy with this aesthetic - letting the photographed thing just be itself.   Sometimes a spade is just a spade.