 |
The Sasse: Where love stories develop between art and viewer | ||||
|
|||||
Shapes Left Behind |
|||||
There is a person in this rock. Once you have found them, you cannot put them back. I made this at Fossil Falls. Nothing lives there now. The lava cooled long ago, black and pitted and hard. But it did not stay sharp. A river ran here once, over these rocks, and the water wore the edges down until the stone went soft to the eye. The river is mostly gone. It comes back only after a hard rain, runs for a day, and leaves again. What smoothed this shape is no longer here. Find the head first, high on the left. The shoulder below it. Then the body opens out. An arm reaches across the stone. A knee rises at the far side. The figure does not fold in on itself. It lies back and lets the light run the length of it, the way a body settles when it is tired, or resting, or done. None of that is there. It is rock. It is only rock, rounded by water that stopped coming. But the eye will not leave it alone. The eye is built to find us. It finds a face in the moon. It finds figures in the fire. This is not a flaw. It is the oldest kind of seeing. Before we had names for anything, we were already looking for each other. That is the part I did not plan. I thought I was photographing rock. The rock had someone in it. Maybe every surface does, and the photographer is only the one who slows down enough to notice. Who is it? The rock will not say. I will not tell you either. Name them and they stop being yours. Look again. They are still there. The water that shaped them is gone
|
|||||
| by: Gene Sasse | |||||
|
|||||
|
|||||
