lily 2

A little bit further towards full bloom. The trouble with this sequence is that there is not - or is not, as yet, a whole lot to say about it. But it offers the opportunity to turn back to David Shields' Reality Hunger, and to one of the aphorisms, or miniature essays, under E, subtitled "reality". Which ought to make one's antennae quiver, given the direction of the whole book - maybe this is the important, key chapter? But why E? (R, which might have been a long time to wait, is for "autobio"). I'm tempted to find a reference to Georges Perec's La Disparition, which was written without the letter "e" at all, but that might be stretching it. Section 137:

"Why do you take photographs so constantly, so obsessively? Why do you collect other people's photographs? Why do you scavenge in secondhand shops and buy old albums of other people's pasts?

So that I'll see what I've seen."

But this, of course, isn't Shields at all, but Janette Turner Hospital, in The Last Magician. So one might rephrase this: in what way is a photograph a quotation? Why do you scavenge obsessively in other people's written works? So that I can see what I've seen...? Is this the nature of the intertextual? It seems to be not at all true of today's particular mode of taking photographs (with a macro lens, with a 550EX speedlite, extracting one little frame of lily) - this is what the lens sees, focused on one part of a flower: this is not what the brain registers the eye as seeing, for it scans backwards and forwards and gives depth to the image).