19 July 2020
Dearest Fazal,
Everything about this image before me is beautiful—the funeral pyre cut, stacked, and built for Kulprasadh Subba, his body draped in white cloth with care, the necklace of marigolds that adorn him in death, and a celebration of his life that is about to be ignited as his flaming body is sent downriver. The four pliable stalks of plants that secure his body with ropes mirror the verdant landscape that will witness his undoing on either side of flowing waters.
So tell me Fazal, why did I almost immediately distract myself with the music of Janis Joplin? I went from entering your serene documentation of a body on a pyre to watching Joplin sing her bluesy guts out on stage at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 where she sang “Ball and Chain,” solidifying herself as a woman with the trembling voice akin to aftershocks of an ongoing earthquake.
Why?
Because if I follow my thoughts of a life on fire, I think of Janis—how she burned hot and bright like a meteor with all the cosmic speed and flare of being a rock star and falling just as fast with an overdose of heroin at twenty-seven years of age. But my god, how she sang. Maybe coming from a family where most of the women died young from cancer, I saw in her a guiding light who exemplified in the extreme how to give all you’ve got to all you do, even if in the end it kills you. I think I learned from listening to her albums over and over which I still do that death doesn’t matter as much as the passion you bring to your life does.
Janis Joplin died on October 4, 1970. I was in high school. My mother was about to be diagnosed with breast cancer with a prognosis of less than two years to live. I would no longer feel safe. I would no longer be able to count on anything because what I counted on was my mother to live forever. This was a lie. No, this was my fantasy. Death became my haunting until I realized I would live my life so fully, I would not fall prey to fear, I would just defy what scared me by using my voice like Joplin did when she sang “Ball and Chain”—how she sang that song would be how I would sing my life and survive whatever would keep me shackled unable to move forward be it death or loss or loving what wasn’t good for me. I would find something to serve larger than myself because myself was just a body meant to be burned. So much for taking care of myself. I would take care of others like Janis Joplin took care of me. She is still burning bright as the dead do by those who loved them.
They say that when Joplin would perform “Ball and Chain,” she would often improvise at the end of the song with the lines “Love is such a pain, love is such a pain,” her voice reaching a repetitive and ecstatic pitch and fervor that would collapse the audience into a state of rapture.
I turn to another artist who burned bright for me, Johnny Clegg, who died a year ago almost to the day. The South African musician and dancer sang a song called, “Dela.”
Here are the lyrics:
I’ve been waiting for you all my life, hoping for a miracle
I’ve
been waiting day and night, day and night
I’ve been waiting
for you all my life, waiting for redemption
I’ve been
waiting day and night, I burn for you
A blind bird sings
inside the cage that is my heart
The image of your face
comes to me when I’m alone in the dark
If I could give a
shape to this ache that I have for you
If I could find the
voice that says the words that capture you
I think I know,
I think I know
I think I know, I think I know
I think
I know why the dog howls at the moon
I think I know why the
dog howls at the moon
I sing dela, dela
Ngyanya,
dela
When I’m with you
Dela, sondela mama
Sondela,
I burn for you
Sondela in Zulu, a language Clegg spoke, is both a name and a verb that translates to “approach.” How do we approach our lives? How will we approach our death as death approaches us? When I hear the words “I burn for you,” I want to burn for what is good and right and just in the world. It is beyond human love, though not apart from it. I want to write my words on the page until the pages ignite with what is beautiful and hard and true.
That could be a definition for the comet NEOWISE suspended in the night sky just after dusk. It is a harrowing presence made of rock, ice, and dust that measures three miles across, traveling at about 40 miles per second, that translates to 144,000 miles per hour with two tails streaming through space. The comet became visible on July 3 and will be brightest on July 26, then gradually fade out of view. Without binoculars or telescope it looks like a smudge of stardust slightly above the horizon in the northwest corner of the sky—near the Big Dipper. I see it best with my peripheral vision—a side glance with my naked eye. We have watched it nightly for most of the month knowing it will be another 6,800 years before it travels this way again.
“Tyger, Tyger, burning bright…” I might as well bring Blake into this mix, a comet in his own right, alongside the rockstars Janis Joplin and Johnny Clegg. My grandmother read this poem to me as a child and we memorized it together, it returns to me now:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the
night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy
fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine
eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand,
dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of
thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What
dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy
brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its
deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their
spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he
smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What
immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
The world rarely makes sense. This letter may not make sense to you, but I am following where your images lead me, Fazal. I trust you as the people you photograph trust you. It’s all about the relationship. In this way, there is always the surprise, not knowing where we are going, but the pleasure of trusting where we will be taken—even if the journey is internal.
I am tired of writing in a way that is orderly and symmetrical, easily understood, pleasing to the eye. Nothing is ever equal on both sides of anything. Balance is momentary, not a permanent condition. And maybe not even preferable. As much as we want to believe in equality, even the symmetry between life and death, I believe it is an aspiration not an abiding principle. Asymmetry is closer to the path I follow—crooked, irregular, arresting, a disturbance. There is an asymmetrical truth to this picture that moves me, and it begins with the eroding banks of the river.
Kulprasadh Subba will be set free downriver as he follows the way of his ancestors as they followed theirs. Here are the questions you have brought me to: Will the eyes of the tiger watch his body erupt in fire and follow him downriver? Will his fleeing spirit ride on the back of an orange and black tail, another kind of flame in the night? What is passion but the risks we take in the making of our own “songs of experience”?
There is no such thing as death. We simply shape shift into other forms until we are a smudge of stardust best seen as a glimmer.
In the preparatory drama of this photograph, I hear the voices of the Dead singing through the living, anticipating their seismic and stellar approach.
Love,
Terry