consider the lilies

which were sitting in the bedroom this morning, neither toiling nor spinning, until one of the cats knocked them over in a moment of panic (I was at Rutgers, but there were workmen in the house taking out the a/c units - so that we now have windows with views through them, rather than large solid chunky ugly things that we never use), and, in the process, drowned John Tagg's latest book, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning - interrogating why photographs seem to carry such compelling evidentiary weight, when they aren't anything more than pieces of chemically discolored paper (or, as here, images on a screen - which might make a difference, since their fragility and ephemerality is of a different order). I felt at the time of taking this that it was one of those pictures that's an insurance policy against later (wisely so...) - but in fact it turned out to be a real record of ephemeral lily-presence.