Guess What #8

Nature is full of abstracts. That’s the clue for this “Guess What” :

The previous Guess What is a macro (close-up) of a wasp’s nest. That daubed texture could pass for pavement, weaving or an aerial view of a landscape.

What Katherine Saw

My niece Katherine wrote me the other day, out of the blue. I have not seen her in six or eight years, I think. She is my niece by virtue of the fact that she calls me “Auntie” and that her mother, Penny, is like a sister to me; we played racquetball together when she was pregnant with Katherine.

Katherine is now 14, um, 12 years old, and she had an assignment to write about a painting that inspired her. She went to my web site and contacted me from there, saying that the photos were “breathtaking” and made her happy to look at them.

That was wonderful to hear, of course, but I was curious about which photo she’d chosen to write about. A placid landscape? A blossoming flower?

But when she sent me her essay, I was astonished to see that she’d chosen to write about an abstract – one that some people find disturbing or spooky, and others dismiss as meaningless computer-generated garbage.  It was a piece selected for an exhibit last year called “Body and Soul.”

“Essence of Shell: Eyes” is one in a series that I worked on shortly after leaving Afghanistan. My husband and I were recuperating at the beach, and I spent hours photographing the intimate interiors of seashells, then playing with their form and color to pull out the themes I saw in them.

I was wounded, exhausted, and unsure of whether the two years of difficult work had really accomplished what we’d set out to do. I had left Kabul reluctantly, longing to stay with my colleagues and keep up the good fight. These things were in my soul when I made this piece, but I did not consciously set out to tell that story.

Katherine, though, divined the story behind the image without ever having heard it from me. Here is her version.

Of course he had read all those stories of fantasies and wild, conjured dreams from the darkness of the mind, those musings and wonderings and rantings of the philosophical among us.

Of course he had known cheerfully, tramping through foliage and getting soaked and getting bitten by bugs and eating moldy ration bars and running from monsters-but you know, when you were on a Quest like this, it was the end that mattered.

Not the journey.

Right?

…

Right…?

His heart almost seemed to shatter as he remembered tearfully those days when all he had to fear was getting eaten by a Soul Breaker. That was simple.

This was not.

The dark edges of his brain whispered conspiratorially, time will go quickly and don’t you worry, because soon you will be buried without a name or a cross to guard your rotting flesh, like those warriors you see on the side of the road.

Swirls of frenzy stirred him up; was that his fate? He had come to the end of the journey, he was about to win against the monsters…every thought linked to another, and eventually he had come to conclusion that soon, very soon he would leave on another Quest.

But to where?

And without his beloved companions, who now were dearer than life to him now? It seemed incomprehensible, those souls who were so close.

It hurt.

And he was not going to deny it.

Those halcyon times seemed so far away. Romping and laughing and complaining…would that all come to an end? He saw now, that he had been foolish. The pink swirls of joy had all too soon slipped into black curls of venom and bleakness.

It wasn’t the ending that counted, was it?

It was the journey.