Wildcat

             When I set out to find the visual images to accompany Wildcat, I was initially unsure of what route to take. It was clear, at least, that I needed to avoid any outright associations with the song’s title. Right off the bat, then, anything with a cat or cougar in it was right out. I’ve listened to this song for a few years. As I have considered it at length, it has come to represent personally the chaos and disarray that emerge in artificial constructions of order—and the chances for a new beginning and a fresh start these afford. For what is a beginning but the end of some pre-existing condition to allow the resurgence of something that was there all along?

                In Annie Dillard’s Seeing, she emphasizes the importance not of looking, but of seeing.  When do I look? Glancing up at passersby while eating at a table, noticing a bird, or watching a car zip by, then returning to whatever I was doing before—I have looked up and decided at some level these things hold little interest because I presume to know what they are. I’ve seen it all before, so I can return without guilt to whatever self-engrossed activity I was engaged in before. Seeing requires disengaging from my prefabricated conclusions and re-engaging with the holes in my perception to see what I might find.      

A look at William Bliss Baker’s Fallen Monarchs reveals some trees in a forest. Trees are kind of boring. They’re all over. Don’t do much, just sort of sit there. Wait, though. I need to open my eyes and see it. Now, I see the centuries-old trees, the eponymous monarchs, rotting on the forest floor. How long had their order lasted before they lost grip and toppled into oblivion? Squinting my eyes, I see it is fall. It won’t be long before the status quo of the painting is revealed to be just another perceived construct.

                In my photographs I have sought to portray how we as humans sometimes look at ourselves. We reach out and try to impose order on our surroundings, sanitize the dirty, tidy up the crooked lines. Because we’re Orderly, and Clean, and we Subjugated the Wilderness, so now we’re Civilized and Good.  We persuade ourselves a few moments longer to ignore the duality of our nature, packaging and boxing our monochrome realities. But when we turn around to go home for the day, these ideas--the unpredictable, the bent, the loopy, the smudged that is in us and is us leak and gush at the seams of our self-image.

              Pausing in mid-stride, we will slowly turn and see who we are,  finally understanding where the looping edges, dappled light and surging colors of our humanity lie.

Listen to Wildcat here.