Written for FRAGMENTS OF A SPINNING ROCK: Photography by Kaushal Parikh.
Wading, with eyes, with camera, through the sheer thickness of things, you find sometimes a dog’s tail has lassoed the moon. Or a tattered man laughs with imperfect teeth. Other times, a swing heaves a child, eternally, into space and time.
Often on these streets, you are not a man. You are not a woman. You are not a dog, a goat, or a lizard. You are animated flesh, jostling and wrangling, making a little space for yourself among millions of veins, vertebrae, eyelashes. A hustler among hustlers.
Is it possible to journey into yourself through the experiences of others? Or more accurately, the perceived experiences of others? Is there an Other at all? Pigs root just as people do. Babies everywhere cry in the same voice. Pregnant women and mother wolves are ferocious in exactly the same way.
We are all subject to the same rules. Except sometimes. No cargo, too much cargo. Nothing to lose, too much to lose. Servants, masters. Having, not having. Human, non-human. A din so loud, it deafens, annihilating all thought into a vacuum.
Occasionally, eyes lock. The polarities won’t stick. The grid dissipates. The labels, so closely held, peel off. We all tumble in here, learning on the way down. But as moments endlessly follow other moments and lines on faces deepen, sometimes a vision persists, scrubbing the window. Stalling the flow.
An image, a representation of the outside of a person or a thing. Yet the eye of the beholder delivers an inside response. A feeling you’ve had before. A feeling you’ve never had before. A firmament in a bat cave. A devil by a deep blue sea. The heart soars, the mind reels. The real and the imagined take flight.
Pictures are adjectives. Every retina, a ticket to ride. A photograph, a freight train that arrives simultaneously at a thousand different destinations. Down here, billions of electrical charges shoot around synapses. Out there, billions of stars shrink and expand. And sometimes, a recording of light on a sensitive surface
becomes mirror, monument, and offering to the
staggering bounty of it all.
©Tara Sahgal
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