The Observer in the Frame

We spent the last days of August backpacking in the Three Sisters Wilderness, one of my favorite places on earth. Camped on a mini-ridge above Camp Lake, we watched the moon rise--fast!--and then the sunset and then, just barely (hurling myself out of the tent toward the pink glow, tangled in tent flaps and sleeping children and boots that wouldn't find my feet) the sunrise. Pink, and then bright yellow light, and then sharp shadows. And lots of photographs.

Two images from that trip in particular seem to focus my current revision preoccupations.  

I have been amply persuaded that the manuscript I'm working on (a novel I had fondly believed was finished, and beautiful, and ready to greet the world) is in need of major revision. I even have some ideas about the form that revision will take. But I'm caught between planning the revision--mapping out what I intend to do--and just jumping in. And how much will be enough--is it a matter of cutting or of adding, or more properly of replacing? It's a question, too, of framing and motivation: I know what the story is, but why is the narrator telling it? And just how far should the territory of that story extend?

Sunrise, then, above the lake, trying to arrest its different colors against the trees, and finding my own shadow contaminating the frame. Lean back, then, lean away, move the camera a bit. . . until I thought, here's my point of view picture, the narrator just off stage. But not all the way off. Whether visible or not, choosing what to include.

Framing the story just right is part of the problem. There isn't a story without a frame, something to give it shape--beginning, ending, even words trailing off at the end of the page or when the ink runs out, a de facto border, no less real for being accidental.

Other times the borders of story or observation become less and less clear. Heading up the hill above Demaris Lake, I almost walked into this spider and its home. And here's the story again, but the frame's disappearing, the web that barely shows up once I have the spider well in focus.

I don't know what kind of spider it is. That's one of the story's unknowns.

Orientation: Stone Windows

alabaster window

It's orientation week, for students and visiting faculty alike. I want to say disorientation as well (notice my self-restraint--no parenthesis around the prefix, though both training and inclination leave me tempted to ask a word to be its opposite even as it is defined, greedily hoping to hold ambivalence and precision in the same little bundle of sound). But orientation, whenever someone takes the trouble to offer it, inevitably seems disorienting as well.

Recoleta Cemetery (from the--open--stone window)

Librería Ateneo Gran Splendid (Buenos Aires)

Before catching the bus to Rosario, I spent a couple of days beginning to find my way around Buenos Aires. At the Claustros del Pilar, an old section of the church beside the Recoleta Cemetery, I especially admired the stone windows, thin, translucent sheets of alabaster. There is something about the idea of a stone window that intrigues me (though I suppose glass, with its origins in sand, is only a more refined stone). Maybe it has to do with direction and enclosure: these windows are translucent, not transparent; they let light in, but you can't see out. 

I attended the theater-- the theater of live performance, and the theater of books. 

Rosario

I'm living in an eleventh-floor apartment downtown--not what I'm used to at all. My Buenos Aires hotel room, with its sought-after view of the air shaft, was much quieter. But I like the view from the enclosed balcony, and the cafés up and down the street, and the elevator with its complicated, manually-operated double doors.

Río Paraná

Rosario is a river city, with the Paraná, running roughly north to south, marking the eastern border. I walked to the shore yesterday and again today, noting the "No Fishing" signs next to the numerous fishermen (I don't know what they were hoping to catch) and watching a couple of ships pass. The water is brown; the current looks fast. I met a professor the other night who's training to swim across the river--it's an annual event. From the riverbank, it's a daunting proposition. I'll stick to running for now.

The contemporary art museum occupies a reconditioned grain silo. The driver of the paint truck parked beside it was likely just having a late breakfast at the museum café, but the truck seemed well-placed all the same.

All the benches on Blvd. Oroño are held up by paired sphinx. They look recently painted, for the most part, well-tended. I'm trying to imagine the civic boosters meeting where such a design plan was proposed and endorsed. Many of the benches seem to be work stations for the itinerant car-washers tending to the late-model vehicles parked nearby. No riddles, just small change.

Orientation can be a series of rules and expectations and procedures, neatly outlined and carefully explained. It's is also a spatial concept, one that implies attention to both context and perspective: what we see and from what vantage point. Sometimes there's not a lot to see. Sometimes it's a matter of waiting for light to penetrate stone.