Tree house, Topanga, March 2009

I have wasted the morning on this image and still can't decide what it is I'm trying to get at.  Something about what happens to space and time in photographs, at least that is what I'm thinking I've been doing.  Looking and being vaguely dissatisfied is more like it.  How do time and space work in photography, or do they, is what I'm thinking about.  That, and other things. 

Time, of course, being confined necessarily to the past, and the element of Space -- of dimension, presence, awareness of distance, height, vista, and how far it would be to walk to this or that -- all of it simply lost.  You can't see space in photographs, I don't think.  Not really.  I can't give you any sense of space this way.  Does a drawing or a painting?  I think perhaps, yes.  At any rate, movement. Following the sweep of the line some hand drew you can feel it, sense it, the brush stroke of a brush, a hand holding a brush, the stroke telling you where and how, light or hard, quick or slow and languid, implicating, hinting, pointing to, suggesting a depth because that's what movement is, what the sense of movement does.  You get it from walking in places by yourself sometimes.  An awareness of being more than just in your head.  Being in all of yourself and then flowing out of you into the rest.  Meditation does it.  Driving rarely.  Rarely when driving.  Not in traffic, or if you can, I don't see how.  Maybe driving out in the desert, and even then I'm not so sure.  The vehicle gets in the way.  You have to stand and move around in a landscape to properly feel space.  People don't do that as much nowadays.   You have to take the time and stand around under that tree, approach it and walk around it with the hillside beyond, the sky overhead. 

What's the point?  My dear friend, if I knew, then -- I don't know what.  In the meantime, there you are, the tree house.  Something that reminds me of E.H. Shepard's illustrations for the Winnie the Pooh books.  You must admit there's something Hundred Acre Wood about it, right? 

Wondering if that was it, I discover that Ernest Howard Shepard married his first wife in 1904.  And there you are.

This treehouse that's intrigued me all morning then.  Built by hippies maybe -- for their kids or for themselves to climb and get high in, up in the branches, in the leaves, in the right light and time of day -- the idea of it does sound lovely as I'm sure you agree, California Dreaming and not in a Manson Family way.  People used to live down here in the lower part of the canyon close to the beach until it was cleared recently, most of the human evidence bulldozed away. 

Is there an archaeology of plants?   I see it more clearly back east, the rose bush gone wild in the middle of the woods, admired by the occasional moose or deer; the trace of a yew or privet hedge near a pile of chimney bricks. You see it here, but lushly -- the lone Queen palm surrounded by weeds and tall grass, the once tidy row of aloe that's gone all raggedy, the clump of bougainvilaea run rampant where there might have been a fence or a wall once.

There's so much to catch you up on, and no time.  So much going on, lots of it new.  So much to absorb and be new at.  

This afternoon a photographer coming here to shoot some models, a boy and a girl I think, because he likes the light in my apartment.  He likes the space too, he says, but he means that in a different sense of the word.