Fathom Deeply: Celina Su and Wah-Ming Chang in Conversation

I took each of my three previous blogposts this month as an opportunity to write an open letter about different ways of relating to text and poetics, and different ways of knowing. For this blogpost, I wanted to experience image and text through an exchange. I invited Wah-Ming Chang to engage in a Google Doc conversation with me.

Looking at these images and texts together, there’s no obvious progression. They are neither a series of diptychs nor an explicit series, but a visual essay, a flip book, moving images with an absurdly slow frame rate. I’m taken with how the exchange surfaces the many steps of production each of us undertakes before writing a response—choosing an image or an idea for a text, labeling the context (at least city and month) of a photograph, writing the vignette or observations or thoughts we would like to build upon, sending off a note before we could revise further. Each step is a questioning of constructions and uses of memory. To me, to be in this conversation with Wah-Ming is to emphasize process and care, to steal our memories away from abstraction.

—Celina Su

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Wah-Ming:

There are some, I am told, who never walk with beauty, though I am as yet unable to believe it. She is in the folds of a cotton sleeve. She is in the indentation of a pillow, she is in gesture, she stains, she multiplies and she withholds. Once in a while, she places the horizon far from us. This is so we can watch our impossible hopes form, and then approach us as a tall, undulating wave, as sensuously folded as that sleeve.

Celina:

There is a right to be forgotten, the courts ruled, but not one to forget. It is as if she searched the lines of her palm for the answers, as if her hand could hold, indefinitely, a cup of light. She thought of the digital as immaterial; she did not think of cables underwater, the vast warehouses holding servers in the desert, pixels in the figurative cloud. She thought of clouds—whether they would produce rain again, how much, whether she might taste the land she loved as evaporated, as condensated, as acid, as acrid, as sweet. 

Wah-Ming:

For the past one hundred days, he told me, he’s written three pages every morning.

Later in the conversation, he wondered, startled, what these thoughts wanted with him.

I told him: They are your habit. This is the way—one of the ways—to construct for yourself the right to write.

For example, I said, take the threads of your questions.

Then I asked: Do you know how to comb long hair.

Take reverie, for example, I said. What lives inside reverie but the preparation for your habit, your discipline? What lives inside this preparation but the combing of these strands, through them, disentangling them, oiling them? For some, we are separating them constantly with our fingers during the day, or before bed, or as soon as we get up. For some, we were taught “One hundred strokes.”

For the past one hundred days, you have been combing your thoughts.

Do you know, I asked, how to braid.

Yes, he said. I do.

Celina:

For three hundred days, she has been sleeping well. And then, three nights ago, she started bawling in what sounded like unbearable pain as soon as we turned off the light. Tonight, she screamed as she grabbed my sweatshirt, and refused to let go.

I Googled her age, and the words “sleep regression.” The problem is that with young kids, there are hundreds of articles on sleep regressions at any age. It is a cottage industry. There is solace in that, too—the reminder that habits are not extensions of our essential being; they reveal both our inclinations and our potential for change. I wish that we were all allowed “regressions” at random moments.

It could be because we are traveling, because we cannot rely on our Pavlovian instincts in this different light. No matter how well cushioned our step, we feel disoriented; we cannot see clearly. It is as if we were sleepwalking through layers of diaphanous gauze. 

It could be because of growing independence; it could be because of attending separation anxiety. Every force attended by a countervailing one. Each contradiction comforting in its opacity.

Wah-Ming:

Each contradiction comforts an opacity.
He said we all have the right to one.
 
Each contradiction confronts an opacity.
I couldn’t take her apart, this twist of shadow.
 
Each contradiction contains an opacity.
We are larger than we think, or remember, or can fathom.
 
Each contradiction performs an opacity.
Fathom less or more, but fathom deeply.
 
Each contradiction perforates an opacity.
Who is allowed to see through, and who is not? Who will insist, and who will not?
 
Each contradiction percolates an opacity.
To see this through—constancy.

Celina:

What I’m grateful for in this conversation between images and texts is, once again, the feeling of collage, parataxis, unexpected continuities. The texts do not feel like captions. I photograph in the moment, usually while traveling. I don’t have the instincts of a reporter or pundit, writing and disseminating quickly; I take a long while to write reflecting on the moment. In this way, there’s an immediate time lag and dissonance between my images and my texts. I wonder if, in my writing, I hope to create an afterimage of the unbearable weight of experience, and then, because pain (or, for that matter, heady romance) has such a poor sense of memory, to retain the texture of attachment, to combat the executive summary version of life’s vicissitudes.

To me, so much about writing is an exercise in wrangling words, in control—how to present prismatic and visceral thoughts, and constellations of moments, in a somewhat linear fashion. Even in most poems, a word comes after another, hopefully in the right order. And yet, when I read texts, I often stand in awe of the author’s writing prowess and somehow, simultaneously forget about their process. By contrast, when I see a photograph, I don’t forget its mode of production, the equipment involved—cameras, lenses, light(s), possible post-production software. An acknowledgment of material realities. And I immediately think about issues of consent, and public space, and conjecture on who or what is outside the frame, whereas it takes me a while longer to reflect on who or what is not represented in a text.

Wah-Ming:

I play a game of memory whenever I look through my photographs: Where was I when I’d taken this? With whom? At what time of day had this been taken? What was the year? What do I remember of that moment? These simple questions then lead to simple anxieties, many about accuracy of detail. But the most pressing anxiety has to do with understanding that I am looking at a capsule of forgiveness.

One day I will not remember the answers to these questions. And then, on another day—soon after, or farther down this short timeline—I won’t be around to address them at all.

When you suggested this project to me, I did not realize I had been counting my days.

Celina: 

To me, each image and text reflects an absence made conspicuous, a longing made public, a palimpsest of a feeling. Each one you presented was so rich, my mind spun in five directions at once. The first would be a mental image of a similar scene, but each subsequent direction came from a less obvious detail in margins of the photograph, or the text. A color, or a sensibility, rather than an object or signifier of place. I loved thinking about which direction I would pursue, and pursuing it before I could think too hard and doubt myself and retract or revise my response. I knew that, if I waited an hour, my response would be completely different. In this way, this conversation shares different moments, but feels very much of a specific place and time.

Wah-Ming, I remember the day of your last image here—we visited Basquiat’s grave in Green-Wood Cemetery. It took us a long time to find it, since it was so humble. Someone left a handwritten note that read, “SAMO: Tu me manque,” and a yellow rose. There was a piercingly cold drizzle the whole day, and we had seen no one, so I was surprised to find a note so intact. In these surroundings, the rose took on the quality of technicolor.

Now, in my mind’s eye, the day’s images flicker and alternate between color and grayscale, between my subjective memories and your images. They feel mutually constitutive. I’m especially smitten with your text here—each stanza a flicker as well, an emphasis on cloud cover, on opacity when photos are usually bantered about in terms of transparency and light. I like individual winter days, but dread slogging through the still-short and cold days of February each year. I remember thinking that if I could carry this feeling of care and contradiction with me, if I could craft texts to serve as afterimages, the winter wouldn’t be so bad.

Wah-Ming:

This image was taken in December 2014 with a film camera. We walked through Green-Wood Cemetery searching for Basquiat. I don’t remember why we were looking for him, I was only glad for this mission you had proposed and then to see the charms and flowers that surrounded his grave with such love. A month later, my friend Drina would die, and I would cry for five months straight. The month after she died, I would finally develop the roll of film from our walk through the cemetery and I would write a note to you asking if you could see the ghosts in the images too. You could. When I think of your eye, I think of a mystery being rigorously solved. That we could look at the ghosts together was so invigorating and comforting for me. That we continue to parse texts and images today is like that “cup of light” you mention, a practice indefinitely—infinitely—held in both our palms.

***

 

Wah-Ming Chang has been awarded grants for fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation for the arts, has had work published in Joyland, Documentum, and The Literary Review, and is the managing editor for books at Catapult.