TIME AND PLACE

I’ve just made myself dizzy, trying to sort a very small Tasmanian picture project. (Very small—it involves 12 photos of 800 or so…) While I was resident at Lake St. Clair I decided to photograph Mount Olympus from the viewing platform, on different days and at different times. I wanted to note the changing weather and light. And I actually managed to record the dates and times when I took those photographs in my field notebook.

Consider this project my variation on Monet’s haystacks, if you like. I love the repetitions one finds in visual art and have often wondered how or if such repetition can occur in poetry. How many poems called “Haystacks” could I write before someone muttered: well, she’s run out of ideas, hasn’t she? (I’ve recently completed a short haibun series that partly investigates this question—mapping a repeated winter walk at St. Peter’s Abbey in Saskatchewan—but it remains to be seen if anyone will consider it publishable.)

But back to the pictures. Several weeks ago now I pasted them, in chronological order, into a Japanese accordion-style notebook. It makes me happy to page through it—even if it usually also occasions a sudden longing to be back looking across the lake at the mountain. I hadn’t gotten around to labelling the images with date and time, and it’s that task that made me dizzy. Well, my inability to do so accurately, an inability spawned by what I discovered to be my original inability to in fact keep the pictures in chronological order. In spite of having another set of the images, plus index cards to the photographs that demonstrate their order …

Among other things, I discovered that I’d missed one photograph altogether. Mind you, it was the photo I took the day the cloud cover settled low over Lake St. Clair and erased Mount Olympus altogether—but had I read my notes re time and date carefully I’d have seen that one day there was “no mountain”. And had I written my initial labels with a pencil and not a fountain pen I could have corrected them neatly instead of scratching out wrong times and dates, and hoped that a couple of slight breaks in strict chronological order might have seemed some idiosyncrasy rather than total confusion.

This confusion seems another repetition, I realize—a variation on the off-kilter sense of time and place that seems all too characteristic of me since I’ve come back to Toronto.