A New Disaster
3

A NEWDISASTER

Half Dome under a red sky, Yosemite Yosemite, 2026
Covered alley between houses, Kyoto

Kyoto, 2026

The Window

O ne of my own pathologies, running like mutant tendrils through my life, is the tendency for anything I engage in to eventually become a crushing obligation. Even the lightest and most ostensibly avocational activities can become weighty and oppressive, through no fault of their own. Relatedly, over the last couple of years I haven’t taken many photographs.

Recently, though, I took a trip. Ahead of travelling I had burned myself out a little, overcommitted and underdecided, and eventually had to consciously close some things off.

A combination of the novelty and the space to explore somewhere new led me into seeing all sorts of compositions. It felt like I had made some room in my mind and I was filling it with what was around me. It was absorbing and relaxing, just being able to look around and see shapes and visual relationships.

A few days later, I still saw these compositions, but I started thinking about them as pictures. How well would they come out? How would people react to them? It was like there was a window that opened when I was unobstructed enough to experience the world, and closed as I started to self-edit that experience.

Iris Murdoch has written about the fight against the “overwhelming ego” and the process she calls “unselfing”: rejecting that part, keeping the window open. I’d been aware of this, but it hadn’t helped too much in opening the window in the first place. There the self was not getting in the way, it was some place else entirely.

Francis Bacon, when he talked about his painting process, described it as accident plus selection. The overwhelming ego, in my experience, was the selection part coming forward before the accidents had a chance to occur. But push that back too far and you end up as Garry Winogrand, with thousands of undeveloped rolls and no more life to develop them with.

There is a degree of disquiet for me, too, in the idea of waiting for accidents. I’d always assumed that when you got to a certain level of skill you would gain this kind of involuntary visual salience. You would see potential photographs in the world, the way you can hear your name across conversations in a crowded room. But hearing your name works because someone has called your name. Nothing in the world is trying to give you pictures to make, or everything is all at once.

Because I was in Japan, I got a Kodak Charmera blind box. It was a camera deeply free of expectations, and largely short of the capabilities to meet any. Even there, the ego was lurking, and the desire to just check on what I had taken was strong, despite, given the tiny screen, being largely pointless.

As I edited through the pictures, revisiting and reflecting and selecting, I felt that same kind of absorption and relaxation I’d felt at the very start of my trip, when the window opened. And, though there weren’t many happy accidents, I didn’t feel any obligation, at all.

Fiction

An Untimely Arrival

O scar always knew the time. His circadian rhythm was metronomic, his sense of timing impeccable.

He never wore a watch, as a matter of pride. Oscar used to state that he lived his life one minute per minute while mutely observing that everyone else drunkenly wobbled between seconds and hours, just existing through the day without ever really feeling the time passing.

This is why he hated to fly. Time would pass abstractly, the cabin a kind of cramped casino with terrible food. This trip was particularly unpleasant, as he was flying across several timezones. At his destination, it was an entirely different day. The sun rose and set at the wrong times. He woke up with no sense of whether it was the middle of the night or late afternoon, unmoored from his sense of time passing. He felt like he had lost a limb.

His first indication that something was awry was at a presentation. The department had sent him to explain their - his - professional approach, in the spirit of transnational cooperation. His nominal counterpart went first, giving an overview of their attempts to address similar issues. The presenter read from their slides and attempted to compress five minutes of actual information into thirty minutes of speaking time, successfully. Oscar read ahead, his mind leaping through the points. Eventually, the presentation finished to polite applause.

The subsequent presenter was expected to connect via a video conference, but they weren’t there. It transpired the room had joined twenty-five minutes early. There was much consternation, then general agreement that, being such an enthusiastic group of participants, they had started the prior session half an hour early. Oscar was skeptical, but what other explanation could there be?

Unfortunately, incidents continued. He sat down to dine that evening at his intended time. His dining schedule was rigid, deeply tied to his body’s rhythms. The flight had thrown them into disarray as well though, and he was fiercely hungry. Despite having allocated sufficient time for the meal to be prepared, the wait stretched much, much longer. As he finished, having eaten more hastily than he should have, Oscar realized it was significantly later than he anticipated. The staff also seemed confused, flipping the door sign to closed and engaging in bemused discussions.

That night his dreams were frantic, and then frozen, and he slept poorly. The next day, he went to have breakfast in the hotel. They had a section for a kind of slow-poached egg, with a chef standing by a vat of warm water. Oscar requested an egg, and the chef obligingly added it to the water. Oscar concentrated. He felt his damaged but exquisite sense of time and slowly squeezed. After a few seconds, he reached over, took the spoon and lifted his egg. The chef began to protest; it was far too soon. His voice stumbled as Oscar dropped the egg into the iced water at the end of the station, then peeled it. It was perfectly cooked.

Oscar cut his trip short, adjusting his reservation to come home early. On arrival, the pilots had to circle the airport for some time on account of being unexpectedly over-fueled for landing.

Home, Oscar could finally relax. After a couple of days his sense of time returned. Minutes passed, appropriately, one minute at a time.

He would decline future invitations to travel.

Boston, 2017 Boston, 2017
Dog on Rocks, 2015 Dog on rocks, 2015
Blue flames spreading across dark ground Gas, 2026