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Scenes From A Wedding
first draft excerpt completed Thursday March 29th, 2024 at roughly 3:00 am
Preface Note: I've been experimenting with a late-era typewriter that I received from a friend of mine a few weeks ago. Writing on one of these machines has always been a dream of mine, but I couldn't initially think of what purpose it might serve given its impracticality. There's a certain amount of tension in typing with something so much less forgiving in its editing. I tend to spend a lot of time deliberating on a single sentence, and I'm constantly rearranging the structures of paragraphs. The pace at which I write slows down dramatically when I use a typewriter; I have to commit to a thought with a sharper awareness of what I'm going to say a few lines further down or within the next few paragraphs.
Of course, much of this is due to the free-form nature of my writing habits. I'm sure many people who used typewriters never dealt with this issue because they did a significant amount of outlining before their fingers ever touched a key. I enjoy writing as things pop into my head and more-or-less just formalize my abstractions.
All that being said, the following is a copied transcript of what I wrote using the machine. This significant restructuring of my writing style was very stimulating in its difficulty, but I'll admit that this combination of committing to paper with my loose sensibilities means that this isn't my strongest work. I ask that you give me a little bit more grace in reading this material, especially in the areas where I fail to elaborate properly. I did my best to make necessary adjustments with spelling and grammar, but otherwise, this is an exact copy of my original transcript. I wrote this in one sitting very late at night with a bit of a headache, satiated only by the excitement of the machine to finish it then and there.
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september 11 2022
scenes from a wedding
"There's a certain enchantment cast upon the landscape of an endless green pasture resting beneath the unobstructed firmament that has penetrated the dreams of my generation. I speak on behalf of those my age, but I suspect that this vision of a place has existed in many iterations of imagination across time. The Idyllic as a genre of art is one such reference-- paintings of picturesque landscapes set in an idealized memory of country life, where man and nature coexist in a covenant of peace and mutual stewardship. It is in a sense a vision of heaven or "hiraeth" if you desire to refrain from the religious. Either way, there is a yearning in the heart as it is called home though the mind may be unable to recall its origin. In my generation, it is more concretely recognized as the Nostalgic even if the imagery remains spiritual.
“Bliss” or “Bucolic Green Hills” by Charles O’Rear
"Bliss", as it is titled, is a photograph of a rolling green hill along Highway 12 in Sonoma, California taken by Charles O'Rear. What was initially uploaded as a stock image was acquired by Microsoft and used as the default wallpaper for Windows XP as well as its marketing campaign. O'Rear's photograph would ingrain itself in the zeitgeist of the Internet age and in the minds of those whose earliest memories were shaped by the dawn of the home computer. The reality of this hill has been lost to those of us who gazed at it only in a state of transition between applications or upon moments of decision: its open expanse calling us to explore the unfathomed vastness of the web. It was also a threshold, a point that was crossed upon entering and exiting. We clicked "Log Off" and watched as the icons on our desktop vanished one by one until all that was left was the pasture. And when we booted up our towers, there it was, greeting us with a splendor of musical fanfare. In some regard, it is the most universal liminal space, a point of transition shared by millions.
Windows XP is no longer the primary point of entry to the Internet. And so it becomes a digital relic, and "Bliss" is its nostalgic face. There brews in that photo a collection of feelings almost too immeasurable to articulate: the Idyllic landscape that calls to home and heaven; the emptiness of its field that mirrors the low-poly edges of unexplored virtual worlds-- the inherent contradiction between the World Wide Web's interconnectivity and loneliness; the repetition of its face so that it is no longer a field, but an unreality, a simulacra of a field; the hauntology of the space, its liminality. It's no surprise then that its likeness is now in much Internet art I see today-- in Liminal Spaces, Vaporwave, and now Dreamcore, which seeks to merge all of these ideas in a Surrealist digital dream. The green pasture and the blue sky have been a point of location in my own dreams. Unlike the Idyllic though, the call to heaven is at its vaguest. Many artists may still portray this place with the aesthetics of the angelic, but there is only a faint longing and a sad resignation of its absence. Reflected in the art that appropriates "Bliss" is a cultural loss of faith, but also a preservation of its memory especially as it relates to our own childhood, and a deep-rooted desire for its fulfillment. The religious undertones can never be truly lost though.
Examples of Dreamcore Genre by theresalwayssomeonewatching and etern4lxm1sery
In the Orthodox tradition, heaven is often likened to a wedding, referring specifically to the Wedding at Cana and more broadly to the practices of the time in which the host invited guests with the gift of wedding garments to share properly in the union of love. It's fitting then that I find on this green hill the remnants of a wedding party-- rows of white chairs frozen in time. I enjoy the ambiguity of their placement, not just in the oddity of their appearance, but in their origin: whether they are waiting for a future event or if they are the remains of something long finished. Either way, they are Liminal in its purest form: a state of in-between-ism. Admittedly, I take a chair from the group and place it alone for a shot. I can't help but progress the narrative of this dream: that perhaps at some point there was only one chair left or that it was the first arriving. There is a lonely patience in its singleness, a quiet devotion to waiting in hopes of a sign."
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The Hidden Pass of Cirith Ungol
- Figure 01 -
aerial apparition phenomenon / recorded wave transmissions
- Figure 02 -
visitor / further wave phenomenon
- Figure 03 -
curtain simulation memory / day
- Figure 04 -
indivisible universe diagram
- Figure 05 -
documented mercury tree
- Figure 06 -
final visit
october 10, 2022 - 1:27 am
Suspended to the northeast of my apartment is a thick sheet of cloud saturated in an ill-lit, oppressive orange light. During those apocalyptic months of the pandemic when the fires were at their worst, I would see this aurora approach me as I drove home and assume it to be some distant inferno. Eventually the flames died out and the ash was wiped from my windowsill, but the light still lingered. In the late evenings, I’d stand outside my car and watch it cast its reach over the eastern hills. It did not move, but hung silently, interrupted only by the descending tone of passing vehicles. I became fascinated with a nearby tree that silhouetted itself against this murderous orange sky, the leaves of its great branches harshly revealed by a streetlight bent over in its inspection. I was almost afraid as the landscape watched me.
I remembered as a kid when I had to walk out into the night to dump the trash out at the far end of my street— the urgency that compelled me to hurry my task. As I’d turn home, an irrational idea of Dark overwhelmed me, igniting a primitive fear that lay deep beneath the foundations of my modern mind. I felt an intense movement of malevolence emanating from its blackness, trailing behind me, chasing me, its many arms extended to grasp my body.
If I stood by my car and stared too long at this tree and the sky beyond it, I felt much the same.
At my age, I think less of my own loneliness at night. I wonder if I should be more afraid. To my younger self, I must seem very brave for sleeping alone, left to deal in isolation with the nightmares that wake me and figures that stand at the far corners of my room. Entirely separate from those childhood fears, I hold a renewed paranoia of the night from the trauma of my previous assault at the train station, but it competes with an intense curiosity to explore and photograph new dark corners. I wander about the suburban streets on foot, sometimes driving, but always feeling this strange contradiction: that I am both afraid of being attacked and that I am myself a figure of suspicion.
I eventually discovered that the strange light originated from a nearby neighborhood, which had planted a multitude of eerie street lamps that sat tall above the sidewalks, nestled in trees, casting an eternal, sickly yellow-orange glow that clung to every surface. This plague of hue was hidden in plain view, and only when the clouds gathered low in the hills could it be projected onto the sky. I was afraid of visiting this neighborhood because of the people I might encounter and because I was a stranger. When I did, I felt myself being watched.
These images are mostly of the light as I saw it from my home. It still watches me now and then. It has reached an almost literary status in my mind as the perfected metaphor—an anxiety captured in this concentrated location, manifested in physical form as a radiating light.
I extend this metaphor to these photographs, many of which are laden with noise due to the low lighting of the scene. In these extreme exposures, the curvature of the camera’s lens is almost visible, creating waves that disseminate from a central point of the frame. I did what I could to manipulate and exaggerate these features in what is admittedly a retread in aesthetics. It’s been about eight years since I was first interested in documenting the suburbs at night. At this point, it is undoubtedly a permanent fixture in my art.