White Noise

I was going to call this The Unbearable Whiteness of Being, but I hear Milan Kundera is easy to piss off and I kinda like his work, so I refrained from the truly awful pun.

Of all the chronically scary things in this wide world, this is easily one of the top five…

The others? The night before the beginning of a great adventure, first time sex, jumping from a height, and the moments before giving a speech – and for much the same reasons. As a writer or as an artist, being faced with the blank sheet of paper or canvas is to be faced with the fear of failure, the adventure that might go horribly wrong. The trick is to not let that fear stop you from diving in. You might fail, but even if you do, it is almost never the end of the story. And if it is the end, there is probably another story. What does not kill us only makes us stranger.

But snuggled up to that apprehension, there is also an appreciation of the clean perfection of that blankness. There is almost a part of me that wants to apologize for mucking up that simple beauty. Almost.

I have been lately fascinated by empty space. Letting images fall to black is more acceptable. Inky blacks are sexy and moody and mysterious. It is a given in photography that blown out whites and hot zones are to be avoided like the plague. It speaks of a less than masterly control over technique and makes an image hard to look at. Generally, I am behind that, but do like pushing rules. Here, I’ve allowed (to varying degrees of success) that clean emptiness of white space to take over at the expense of detail.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

White

How I hate white;
the death of summer
a torpid soul
the color that burns one’s flesh away
then bleaches the bones for spite,
’tis purity, an innocence, a veil
too heavy and full of expectations.
It is all the things left unsaid
when the arguments are over.
How I hate white.