Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Travel North

January, from September is the first month since moving to Kosovo where reality came to slap my face. Ana, having escaped France and her situation for a time came to her flat in Belgrade and there are problems – the pain, the flight, the fight, the resounding effects of being a foreigner returning, of never expecting to return, two children, one an infant, a failed marriage, abuse. What problems, she exclaims, can this be, I’m only three hundred kilometers away from you. Trapped in circumstances that are all too clear, I cannot save her and she has done a good thing by coming but I may not be able to come. Afraid, she lashes out at not connecting, at differences in speech and language. And of course the silent fear of being left alone, left without love. So she presents a difficult situation at a difficult time. I understand so I cry for her. I cry for myself at not having a better answer. And then there is my reality which is shaped in the space and pace of just existing and living to observe. Two nights prior I hand Shawn, my boss, the phone after Ana had called to free me from a night of obligatory drinking in which I was caught – alcohol an increasing problem for everyone around because without opportunity people drink and with opportunity people drink. It’s not a Bukowski pastime here though, here it is empty space, unproductive space. Ana makes a stand and it is received poorly. Let my man go for the night because I need to speak with him. In their minds she is now a crazy Serb, a wild woman making demands with even less to offer. Whatever was said it was not the thing to say to 2 forty something bachelors drunk and chasing girls in the impossible Prishtina space. Kolja, in Belgrade, saved me twice now. Both times from the depths of depression by a diagnosis that sadness is a part of life, disappointment a part of life, and that people will usually, on most occasions, look out for number one. A truth I’ve heard time and again and time and again I’ve been surprised at my own lack of submission to the truth preferring instead belief in the impossible. That is the way it will go with me. The road north to Serbia becomes even more entangled…

Sunday, January 2, 2011

2011

Brother, what has this year been? This year has been a long climb. Too long. So long in fact I have a hard time determining now which year it is and from which view I stand. Some say I have a failure of patience and move on too quickly. Others say, it is a long life and you are in movement. I tell them I want a silent year, a good one with beautiful happy endings and health and wisdom. And they look back as if I am already arrived, wise and prepared. So what is this life like? This year, for now I say, this one life is like climbing a tall building in the fog. The Fog envelopes the building and gives it a new life, one that extends indefinitely its limits both vertically and towards the horizon. I am scaling the building either in descent or climb but not knowing for sure which at most moments because in each window lay some distraction. On each new story and in each new window I look in and experience a real desire to be content inside or to be held by the space and looking out. Inside each window I may find a warm home or cold flat. Inside looks enticing, like relief, a place to hold onto and breathe with. Inside some windows I see fantasy, sex, desire, hope, family, life, everyday living. And then from time to time an inhabitant will catch my silhouette against the fog and I am invited in. Usually I go and think, this is where I am supposed to be. I stay for a time and describe to my host or hostess what the climb is like and reinvent how and where I started from, having forgotten just why I had left in the first place. I tell of the fog and how each grip of the climb leaves a small trace. How the winters are long and cold. The climb, I imagine, is worth a good story and as a guest I feel obliged to tell one. Then, after a time in some comfort, with a new love, I get the feeling that this is not the place for me, that I have not arrived and that I will need to go back out the way I came and continue on. I fight this impulse and try to stay on anyway; arguments and misunderstandings ensue, then anger until I crawl reluctantly out, or force myself out with a grand gesture or, as has happened on some occasion, I am pushed.

This year, at its end, I have said goodbye to Lord Byron whom took the opportunity to tell me (yet another woman to do this) that I am not a good person and in her state of feeling trapped lashed out in spiteful anger and murderous charge. I am already healing like a god damn wolverine. This year reintroduces Ana, from eight years ago. Ana, one of the few women whom I’ve photographed – whose photograph now sits in a collection at the University of Iowa. Ana, who when we met had recently buried her mother, whose body was eaten by cancer. The woman I brought my wife to and whose home we slept at as 2003 rolled in. Ana and I are survivors but at this point survival may just kill us before our time.

And then there is Kosovo, my new home, fraught with every problem in the book save for the love people here have for one another. Kosovo, the ultimate place to be an outsider, because getting in means being married in and marrying in means to surrendering to the cause of paternity and social dogma. I think 2011 will be a lonely, productive year. I think I should just photograph it. I think.