Forward 

I promised you a forward. I am writing this from Toronto while waiting for my bus to Buffalo, on my way home. It turned into what it is pretty organically, picking up around Mar 14 and the peak I believe is the 18th, at the cottage.  I hope by the time I run out of ink this all wouldn’t have been too much. I took two and a half weeks, it may even be three by the time this is all on its way, you can take as much or as little time as you’d like, and I have certainly spent more time writing than making photographs.

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03/09/18

I was curious to how this would change things, because the writing would happen anyways. I would have still been sitting at this table, across from Paul’s roommate Jo’s dad, who speaks mostly French… So little of communication seems to be what is said, but rather, how it’s said, the energy exchanged, eye contact. He and I don’t need to know the same words to get a sense for each other, we enjoyed our coffee together, cheesecake, and the little overlook to this small neighborhood in Monkland Village, a little southwest from St. Henri where Paul and his sister used to live, all just a little south of Montreal.

The towns outside of the city absolutely have personalities, are all so distinct, in energies, or what I make of it, and project onto it, I guess. Here it’s in the way the snow falls and collects on the thin power lines connecting brick house to brick house across small yards and pathways, blending in with the trees. I would have been sitting here anyways, looking out the same window.

We had gone to see an orchestra downtown last night, and even then, I was wondering how my thoughts would change, how my own process of reflection would change when it is directed to another person. Further, how does the individual that the reflection is directed, change that. How does the choice to share experience affect the experience itself, how does the choice of who to share it with affect one’s outlook of their own self and the world they are living in?

In respect to you, I am thinking of corrected vision. I would be unable to take in anything clearly without being only a few inches away - the adjustment, the application, corrected vision completely changed the way I experienced life. I don’t see how this is any different. 

I keep reminding myself to experience life for the sake of experience itself, but there is poetry in the simplest of things, there is a song in the stranger bumped into while crossing the street, the dreamer gets to live imagining the life and work and family and troubles and doubts and passions of the poet, of the musician.

The medium has certainly affected me, has taught me to search for meaning and understanding, clarity in the chaos, connections between the ubiquitous and the elusive. For better or worse, looking at things in a very final way, as if every single moment big and small is of the absolute most importance, as if all of space and time is just hanging on to the way someone looks at you or ties their hair back.  In any singular moment, the weight of the world, the way of things, the entire universe utterly dependent on the way the sun just shines through the window, bringing out colors hidden in her hair.

Everything is happening, and the way it should. I believe in all of this, I believe in all of us. This life, that is unfolding before me, I believe in it. I’m not sure what any of it means, but living, it all seems so damn sacred to me.

Some of my ambition, I guess, reflects something of what we talked about in your hotel room, about the mirror beneath the veil at the end, the reflection.
I think everything will be okay. My first few days of this trip in Toronto, I got to know my friend Jeanne a little more. She had said what I fear the most, that when I open my mouth, what’s said isn’t really the surface of things, but a weight, a heaviness, a burden, and this was intriguing to her, it was refreshing, it was interesting. I’m exhausted, feel like I’ve been here since the beginning of it all. And I told her that sometimes I wish it wasn’t like that, that that burden wasn’t a part of me, that I might feel disconnected from every passerby someday. She has been challenging to me though, in great ways, and had changed some ideas I had held onto for some time.

I wanted honesty and transparency to be so commonplace that it wasn’t recognizable, that it wasn’t an event, that the photographs might just be examples of how we could all see or live, that an openness could be normal and just the way of things. But it would have been a shame if I couldn’t recognize and respond to this all now, as I am.

I want to say that this all will have been deliberate, and when it wasn’t, it was in trust that there would be some way it might become meaningful to myself or others, always hopefully both, or that my crossing into someone’s path, sometimes crashing, will have at least have had an impact worthwhile on their own journey. Everything is happening, and the way it should.

An old man on the metro in Toronto, eyes crossed, of the many things that he asked, “What do you believe, in life?”

I would have been sitting here anyways. I know for certain that the choice to share the experience is going to affect the experience itself and that the choice of who I share this experience with is going to affect the outlook I hold to myself and the world I live in. And so if all of those pieces work in a manner that is right, then it is corrected vision, then it is corrected experience.

I had some trouble at customs, said that I really don’t have a concrete return plan, just that I’ll return in a few weeks, or when I run out of money. Should have said that I have come here to find myself again, to learn in micro-moments while wandering the streets, not belonging anywhere, not needing to, not knowing where I am and again, not needing to, and while sort of freely existing in that suspension, will continuously come back to my self, will find him again. I came here to learn, through life, to live, to see the letters on the signs and not know the words, to hear the sounds being spoke and not know what they mean.

A letter between from Edward Steichen to  Robert Frank, two photographers, read, “You must let every moment of freedom you are having contribute to your growing and growing.” Sometimes I fly so I can see what things are like from up there,  and sometimes I fly so I can come back down.

I had often referred to the camera as a mirror, and it all as “mirror work”, seeing yourself in the world, the world seeing itself in you, the physical mirrors inside of a camera, the soul mirrors in a body. The shutter closes and captures a connection, not necessarily a moment; if the sensor were facing the other way, there would have been made a self portrait for every portrait, always two, both the outside world and the inside world captured simultaneously.

In a way, I think we all live like this, it remains when the camera is lowered. To know someone may also in a way be to become someone, to absorb them, to bind and connect. The poet is his poetry, the songwriter is his song, the dancer is his dance, the photographer is his photograph. The dreamer is his dream. The ubiquitous is the elusive.

We’re a part of everything we see, everything we do, everything we believe. Everyone is a part of another, every passerby is also me, is us. I’m pulling the hell out of my beard right now so I’m going to get back to walking around, now a sunny afternoon in Montréal.

//

Tristan, the last letter was written in the kitchen of Paul’s apartment and a coffee shop in the city on the same block that he works at as a barber. Right now I am at his brother Robert’s house, and it’s him and his wife Cynthia, their newborn Sarah, Paul, Paul’s sister Catherine and her partner Jeremie. We’re eating homemade pizza and drinking beer.

The language barrier, it’s not as fine in this case, here at the moment. I am incredibly slow with French. It’s only enough to navigate the city and to have generally decent manners. It’s harder now because I have a had a relationship with everyone here for years and all I want is to be able to engage in these silly conversations, in the laughter, in the concern, in the meaning.

All of the deep conversations had happened with Jeanne in Toronto, so I felt a little bad when I didn’t have much desire to restart that whole process with Paul when I arrived in Montréal and transitioned to him being the sole person I was around. We’ve had our own share and in our own ways, so I am fine with it all. It’s a little awkward because they used to date for a long time and that’s how I became friends with her, as well as her family. My relationship is still solid with both of them, and I have always considered Paul to be one of my best friends, but I am used to it being them together, us all together. Anyways, I’m sure that they don’t realize the language thing, and it’s not to intentionally make me feel isolated, I still feel more at home and at peace with the six of us here than I do in most other families.

The traffic is still rolling past outside, through the windows their lights shining dimly. There is jazz playing gently in the background, soft French conversations ceaselessly carrying on, and on to them it’s just conversation now, but I am hearing their sounds, just the sound of voices, it’s a music, a rhythm, and here I am to listen to it, the only one in the room who can hear it without recognition of the meaning, without the language. They don’t hear this like I do right now, another symphony.

//

Mar 14 - Second Floor of Megabus en route to Montréal from Toronto

When you and I left the store of overpriced fake pearls between performances, wool coats, and dresses, I mentioned the top of a thought that I feel a mix of wanting to be completely away or completely integrated. I had spent a great portion of my time here just wandering. We were all nomadic at first. By not belonging anywhere, we were free to find our selves everywhere.

Nowhere = Now/here = Now here

By my last walk and ride on the metro, I had lost that sense of freedom, I was like everyone else there, just another passenger. The interesting thing about Toronto’s culture on the subway is that in the mornings, you could hear a pin drop. A couple thousand people all so alike, yet completely closed off to one another.

I was listening to a concert, a dialogue between,  “With all the trouble in the world, the first thing you have to do is be hopeful. The second thing you have to do is say what you think.”

Bouclez votre ceinture abroche su cinturon. I think that means to fasten your seatbelt.

Writing for me, is a big tangle of strings, but condensed so much into one small concentrated mess that I have to untangle it and write out every inch, what it actually is. I think many people write what they think the tangle says or what they imagine it to say, rather than what’s really deep in there. It’s harder to do this while I speak, so most of the time I stammer and end up feeling stressed, anxious, or completely misunderstood - which is fine too, are all still very effective driving forces. I need to teach myself to be less cryptic, or at least I need to take the time to trust that given enough time, there will eventually be an understanding.

It’s time to leave Toronto. Everything became too regular, and quite soon I think I’ll be saying the same thing for Montreal, and for being gone too. Eventually I am going to be tired of not being bound to anything, there’s a lot that I am presumably missing  by never really letting my roots take hold of anything permanent. And permanence being something I question and fear just a little bit more than other things. It’s something I haven’t given myself an opportunity to understand. It could be a fascination I have with making photographs. There are things that last forever that are real, and then there are things that last forever that are only representations of things that are real. They are not the same thing.

//

Mar 16 - Shaika Coffee Shop

Tristan, I was here yesterday and the whole building was so damn stimulating. I was sitting there with a Montréal newspaper reading their local news, turning the page to see world news, and little bits about the United States. It’s sort of like when I was traveling with Madison, a new small town every day and once in a while you remember “This place is real, people actually live here, it’s not just a laundry stop,” while in the mind, every town is in one straight line one after the other after the other, or just is imaginary and you feel like the world just doesn’t exist past what your eyes can see and there is no understanding at all of where exactly on the earth you are, and once again, that little piece of information doesn’t exactly matter.

Sitting at the the table yesterday, the table and the bathroom walls papered with pages of a dictionary. One of the words right below my coffee is “je-m’en-fichisme : I couldn’t care less attitude” and under that, “je-m’en-fichiste : he couldn’t care less attitude”, and further, “je…foutisme : couldn’t give a damn attitude” , “je…foutiste : I couldn’t give a damn attitude.”

Even though I am only a few miles north, my mind has no concept of it. With all the French, I could have been in Paris on a spring day, turn around and see a completely different world out the windows. There is a snowy park outside and it’s fucking freezing. After I chipped the ice off my face I saw that it was a lot more busy compared to yesterday, but my seat was still open. I asked the guy across from me if anyone was sitting there, he moved his stuff and I sat down and began to write immediately.

A middle aged guy and girl are next to us talking about his film class, their food show, their depression, their talk of gym memberships.

It is incredible to me, always, the intersection of human lives, all integral to keeping this thing spinning around the sun. We make our own symbols and see our own spirits. January 24th I wrote;

//

“All time is always

before everything has changed

Snow is falling”

//

I guess this could be read a few ways; “All time is”, in one sense, meaning to simplify, and in another, to quantify. “Time is always”, “always” to signify permanence, and to say also “time is surely”. “All time is before everything has changed” vs “Time is always before everything”.

I wrote that after my brother left, and through emotional breakdown I found myself in. It wasn’t quite about him specifically, I came to realize, and not exactly about the change of he and I’s relationship, but about beginning to understand that my life is turning into something completely foreign to me, and the old bits of myself will begin to disappear, begin to change forever. Time won’t leave us as we are.

There were several moments during my age out year with the corps that I felt that same cold breath, that understanding. One rehearsal in Chicago, I recall in a basics block, one of the alumni military guys screaming straight into my heart, while just standing there at the beginning of the last chapter, “What do you want the end to be? What’s it going to look like? What’s it going to feel like? For some of you, these next three months hold your last shot to carry this thing, to move it. What does the end look like, now, as you are standing here?” And I thought, aging out after all those years and my fraction of a legacy and whatever I was able to contribute to it - I thought that was going to be the biggest “before everything has changed.”

I am finding there are things much bigger, much closer to home than I had ever imagined and that time will not stand still for me. For anyone.

Life is mirror work unfolding before me, such incredibly ordinary experiences.

I spoke to you once of a poem I wrote while flying,

//

“transport depart

thirty four thousand feet

once more this intermediation

always here something more

our worries should not as much matter how

down there ranks and rows

houses and highways

falling into place so lift me up again

I can learn to understand

and know revelations once not seen by man

here now a landscape just past the clouds

one white sea beyond all things

clear space to think and dream

to soon return, exodus

to earth and standing

on solid ground and pretensions

gesture, personality, separation

we’re not that big you see

A world turns now on and on

no quiet smile just passengers so

far from the broadest lens of the universe

too distant to judge or break averted gaze”

//

“Meanwhile” in some dictionary was defined as “in the intervening period of time” and for me that meant to call attention to what is really happening in the space between two points. It makes everything matter.

Dann, the director at Madison in my time, always said my microscope was top of the line, but I carried no understanding of the macroscope and the world outside of my experience of it. I trust that you understand this all anyways.

//

Mar 18 - Jean-Guy Vaillancourt’s Cottage, Small Botobi Lake, La Valleé-de-la-Gatineau

Actually on the lake. I brought a patio chair down, and my coffee from this morning. There are a few feet of completely solid ice below me, and earlier this trip to the cottage, we got to dig out holes to ice fish. That was yesterday, and they have frozen over since. All useless now, we’ll have to cut out the lines or something. I hope he doesn’t lose the hooks and sinkers.

It is quiet, a sense as perceivable as the roar of the city, and they carry the same weight, as long as I have ears and the capacity to hear and the understanding to actually, truly listen. The same can be said for the stillness I am experiencing in the world around me at this moment. The cities have been fast. This stillness feels like an aspect of the same thing. And something surely interesting happens when you are the fastest thing in your environment, still patient, still deliberate, but there are larger forces, I realize, and truths here that are even more still, that are even more patient, more deliberate.

From where I sit, it looks like a giant field, the great plains, the flatness the lake brings is a strange and stark contrast to the mountains and trees beyond it. It’s nice not to have to look up. And to not “think up.” The way of thinking in a city is much like that of the buildings, it’s all very vertical, a race to the top, levels, hierarchies. Here, it’s horizontal thinking, holistic being, I guess. Think wide, think broad.

There had been talk about “event photography” with a professor at Syracuse when I applied, and in response, I realized that my issue in perception is that there is only really one event in my mind, and that is “all things happening”, all “one”. My inability to differentiate “moments”, I’ve entered a sort of space where everything is equally important, all absolutely necessary. Things have become very broad. Yet a choice is made every time I press the button, everything is questioned and decided instantly, though it is so easy to be unaware of what exactly that impulse to make the photograph decided. What was really put in the frame, what idea, and am I still distinguishing, still sorting importance?

Paul and Steph left early to go to dinner at her parents, that’s why I stayed to help Jean-Guy today. In many many cases of my life, I feel childish compared to those who I surround myself with, but right now I feel the opposite, taking responsibility for this place and pretending like I live a life where this could be my cottage on a lake in the wilds, that it would be my thing to share and take care of and come to identify with, to be moved by.

In the last two years with my life being trademarked by a theme of uncertainty, all of the questions asked and very few answered. There have been a few moments of self-assurance. And within these pages too, I guess. It might be all a silly search, and we’re never finished.

I’m now sitting in a van with five strangers on a ride-share back to Montreal from Ottawa. Roads are bumpy. On our drive, Jean-Guy was in high spirits. He said in the thickest Canadian accent he could muster, “Life’s good, it’s fun, ya know? We have to enjoy it. Love what you do, do what you love, all that. It’s all so important to be happy. This is fun, no?” I wish I could write his accent. He’s one of my favorite humans I have somehow been lucky enough to get to know and call my friend. Our friendship is more playful and fun-loving. Elements of the serious might spoil something. One drive up to his cottage a few years ago we debated about what it meant to be a man for a few hours, getting nowhere. I envy the version of myself I get to be when I am in his company. I get sick of the depth.

It is interesting to start to know this person I am becoming as a result of my uncertainty, and forcing myself to grow more comfortable with it. I wonder who else I would have been, because at any rate, he’s just as much a stranger to me as the other five in this van, but I would have liked to have met him, if his bravado and outlook and energy and charisma would have lasted until he was 23, in a van going back to another city he doesn’t belong to. It’s a challenge for me to be weightless and I am always in a deep admiration for those I have seen in my life who don’t feel so heavily or do, but have somehow let go of their tie to it, and no longer feel it as a responsibility.

//

Mar 21 - Megabus from Montréal to Toronto - 12:02 am depart, 6:05 am arrive

In the same way that my arrival to this city was like coming home, this feels an awful lot like leaving home and away from a part of my chosen family until next winter, for Jeremie at least, and others maybe in August. Paul walked me to the station and we had our last talk for a while. It’s just sort of how we work. He’s decided to walk home tonight, all the way from the Bonaventure station to the Véndome station. I know that he’s going to find something there, in that space. I could hear it in his voice when he decided out loud, “I think I’m going to walk home. Give me some time alone for a while, and it’s nice out anyways.”

On my last metro ride, I saw a little shadow of myself reflected in the speeding train flying past on the opposite tracks. He wore a black coat, jeans, brown boots, gloves, and carried a suitcase and backpack. Maybe someone else saw him in that passing train and wondered about him, where he was going. I did. I wondered of his spirit, of his hopes, of the things he doesn’t have the heart to write.

//

7:21 am - Dundas Street - Toronto

This city welcomes me like an old friend. Here and Montréal seem to be connected, and through all of this back and forth, I’m getting aspects of each confused with the other. I’m the connection, but only one of the many connections. Everywhere I’ve been, everything I’ve seen, and everyone I’ve known are connected by that mere fact. Beyond that, I think that we all carry each other, we all contribute to “contribution” and “the growing and growing”, the endless formation and reformation of all each other.

Where do I belong?

//

Mar 21 - Greyhound from BUF to ERI

Tristan, in the same way that I felt a little shell shocked arriving in Toronto the day after the last performance weekend in Meadville, I’m not feeling so at ease with the whole United States thing. It may just be the station at Buffalo that put me in this space.

With that last weekend with the ballet, I hadn’t felt that good in a very long time. I was talking about it more than I was about my acceptance to Syracuse - that company had given me an incredible joy and optimism, and you were right, I should have worked in some decompression time. I’m afraid that I lost some of that emotional momentum in those initial travels - having to go to the back room at customs, and shortly after, peering out the bus window to see someone get socked in the face. The guy went down and just kept getting kicked.

It’s been twenty days since I have been home, and I have a feeling that deciding to go back to Edinboro for the next few days will be a bit of a mistake for the same reasons as going straight to Canada from Meadville was. A few excerpts from what I had tried to write out that first night in Toronto about the last weekend with you all;

“I’m at The Rex Jazz and Blues Bar by myself, drinking a Creemore Springs lager and writing on this piece of paper. Apparently it is Oscars night, but I’ll support live jazz. Last weekend was incredible, and completely different from the ‘incredible weekend’ I had had just before in Franklin. I was let in, and that was enough. To the company - my first clue was when someone had called the time I shared with you ‘a project’ and you all ‘subjects’, and my resulting infuriation. This meant something. It all starts with the heart. It starts with the heart and it moves into every inch of the body, into the soul and all of its depths. It starts with the heart, it always starts with the heart.”

Something I’ve been turning over a lot lately, a part of what I do that I love, is that I get to decide to believe in them, to keep them believing in themselves. “I’ll watch you make good.” I know that there are many people in my life that I know I will never see again, that I know too, have become very important to me. I believe in their journey, ordinary and extraordinary. A bit of a heartbreaking theme to have become used to by now, I’m only 23, there’s a lot of time left. But this may be why I try so hard to find my self in the hearts of everyone I encounter, and to absorb as much of everyone I can.

//

Mar 22 - David’s House - Edinboro, PA

Two kids needed to sit together on yesterday’s bus, but for that to happen, someone had to move and nobody was moving, so I did, went a seat behind me. The older woman and I had sort of made an eye contact agreement when the driver initially asked its passengers, so we took action. We talked the entire way, she was from Puerto Rico. We shared in our similarities and exchanged understandings of our differences. All talk of values and love and character and community and family and fate and friends and the way of things. It was a very worthwhile decision to let each other into the other’s worlds, at least for our hour and a half intervention together.

On my first Greyhound this summer prior, I was initially ready to vomit because of the physical conditions of that space, but was changed by the human condition of it instead, and felt an overwhelming connection to the people of our world. Fifteen minutes in, I was helping this lone mother change the diaper of her kid, right in the same seat as me. Got shit on my sleeve. All the same beyond everything.

It’s bizarre being back at school. I had no intention of returning after graduation, turned a little page in me while being home, and very quickly I see that I am different now than a few months ago. I hope to never stop changing.

//

Mar 23 - My Old House - Boro

A strange experience waking up on the couch I used to own. I’ve put a considerable effort so far to track everyone here down, and what has been a surprise to me and reaffirming in some ways, the people that I didn’t expect, coming up to me and saying, “I’ve missed your face, I’ve missed you being here.” The being, not the photos, not the job. This time back here, now actually me, at least closer to me, and not the me that I was while caving under my own delusions of social pressure, of responding to what I thought they all thought of me. It might have been my fault all along, but either way, that person’s gone now, and it has been thrilling to reintroduce myself coming from this short period of growth, these last twenty three days specifically, but also these last three months. I’m going to walk over to softball practice soon to surprise the coach. When I was talking to some of the girls on the team, they said to leave the camera, they just want me there. That’s what I’d been fighting for it seems for some time now. Happy to have it.

//

Mar 27 - Russell, PA - Kitchen Table Again

Tris, I’m home now, still adjusting to the speed of things around here.

But I’m looking out this window again. Isn’t it always though? Sometimes the window comes with a small box and a button I get to press, I carry it around with me and it somehow lets me into the worlds of others, incredible people that I otherwise would have never known.  You said I don’t seem sure if I even like being behind a camera. I don’t like it, I do not like having one more wall separating me from any moment of exchanged transparency or honesty or intimacy or trust or love or anger or fear. But I know too that when I lower the camera, I am going to still see how I see, I have grown the machine to the man, I have tried to redefine the whole nature and relationship of the human being with a camera. I am driven more by the fact that the camera exists, and that the photographs that I want to see aren’t being made by someone else, that so much has not been recognized, that so much has been looked at and never seen.

Lately I’m trying to make music that can only be played once. It gives it a sort of character, a sort of life. It’s all a chance encounter, like discovering someone you love, the feeling that disappears or stays, but never felt the exact same way again, all as it is instantly turned to knowledge, to fact, into experience, into reality, all continuously happening and vanishing at the same time, a one of a kind encounter with silence that must be replaced with sound, organically unique translations of feeling expressed in the moment - it can never be felt or thought the same way again because it was never intended to. Work produced by feeling, like the photographs, the poems, the letters, the conversations.

The art of letting go, I want to recreate the fleetingness of time, of feeling, art that disappears, that is made and let go of instantly, simultaneously, in the same way you question and decide at the click of a button. Out of stillness we dance.

If I someday “find myself” in the heart of the world, like I said in the hotel room, then maybe it’ll feel like any great small moment lasted forever, of a comfort in knowing, and not really having to say a thing, just bliss in existence, where the only art left is just to breathe.

I keep looking out the window, wondering about the boxes of photos in my room, and the boxes of notebooks. Pages and pages, and what to do with it all.