Category Archives: personal

Past Selves, Meet Yesterday’s Flood

by stacy platt | Leave a comment

O my floating life
Do not save love
  for things
    Throw things
to the flood.
—Lorine Niedecker, Paen to Place

Untitled, from the series Waterlogged, by Stacy Platt

Untitled, from the series Waterlogged, by Stacy Platt

How do you tell yourself to yourself?

What is your process for remembering, for mediating experience, for archiving the self?

Are you someone that has meticulously kept all of your correspondence—from a lifetime before email, when handwriting was personal, and a natural individual identifier—and bad adolescent poetry, journals, videos, photographs and ephemera? Is it packed away in boxes and covered in dust or is it somewhere accessible, that which you access with something approaching a kind of regularity? Do you know, to the precise location, exactly where all of your hidden, secret, past and present selves reside?

Maybe you identify with this and have these collections, these accumulations of your autobiography. Or perhaps you’re the other sort: the person that has been able to light a match to her past, put it into a bonfire when it no longer serves you. When those important junctures have occurred where you are, to paraphrase Rilke, required to change your life or die, you are that one who is determined to move forward into an unscripted future, never looking back at those relationships and events and interior monologues that drove your past feelings and actions. A person emphatic and decisive, even when they cannot be sure of outcomes. A person less concerned with what-ifs, and not particularly nostalgic for the past. Yours or anyone else’s.

Untitled, from the series Waterlogged, by Stacy Platt

Untitled, from the series Waterlogged, by Stacy Platt

So I’ve always kept a journal. And had the old ones stashed in various places, but always together. In the past year, the place where I live has experienced an extraordinary amount of rain. In May and June, this spot of land where the prairie meets the desert got twice the expected rainfall for the whole year. Sometime last month, I chanced to open the closet where the journals resided after a particularly heavy night of torrential storms. I didn’t open it to check for water damage, but instead to retrieve a book. And then I saw: all of my journals, twenty years or so worth, were all soaked through with storm water. They were stacked neatly atop one another, directly under the only spot in the entire space that held water. The journals swollen and sticky with gum residue and running ink. Dumbstruck, I immediately scooped them up and, not knowing what else to do, carried them outside to a table, opening them up and leaving them in the arid Colorado air.

I began to survey the damage.

Untitled, from the series Waterlogged, by Stacy Platt

Untitled, from the series Waterlogged, by Stacy Platt

Untitled, from the series Waterlogged, by Stacy Platt

Untitled, from the series Waterlogged, by Stacy Platt

I’ve always joked to close friends that the universe doesn’t bother to deal in subtleties where I’m concerned. Only heavy anvils of allusion and metaphor will do. In  extreme examples, some higher power surmises, will I ever truly “get” any lessons and take them to heart. So it seemed particularly inauspicious that of the entirety of our household goods, only these personal historical objects were affected. Affected probably isn’t the right word. Laid waste. Obliterated. Unrecognizable.

If the universe was trying to send me a message, it seemed particularly pointed and blunt. Let go of your past, could be one of those messages. Get over yourself, already, could be another one.

It was certainly a past, or a record of a past, that had been transformed.

Untitled, from the series Waterlogged, by Stacy Platt

Untitled, from the series Waterlogged, by Stacy Platt

First loves. Failed loves. Bad choices. Life-changing travel. Things that inspired me. A record of lovers. My unwritten, unknown future, written and wondered about by my past self. Some of it still legible. Much of it looking like another language, or pentimenti, or a secret code.

Untitled, from the series Waterlogged, by Stacy Platt

Untitled, from the series Waterlogged, by Stacy Platt

I have always been the collector. The archivist. The keeper of words and images and past longings and past potential selves. I don’t revisit these accumulations often, but there has been something reassuring about knowing that they are there, that they exist. As if my hand on a page spilling words and sentiments five, ten, twenty years ago can, if coaxed, relay something back to my present self, fill in some gap of understanding, if and when the need arises. It’s been an equal, if converse, comfort to revisit old journals and commonplace books, photographs and letters and know how far from those persons, those could-have-been-selves, that I’ve come and detoured from. The many doors and rooms of the psychic mansion that remained closed (some, after venturing through for a short time); a fact for which I remain grateful.

Beyond anything else, the thing that is most striking in this is the revelation that is handwriting. The notion of handwriting itself has almost become anachronistic, a throw-back to an inefficient and sentimental way of doing things and communicating. I’ve heard that penmanship, and even cursive, isn’t taught to children any longer, and that seems to me both sad and to make a kind of pragmatic sense. Who writes in longhand anymore? When you once were able to identify someone, in voice and person, by their hand, what takes the place of that now? Their email address? Their social media handle? Caller ID?

Untitled, from the series Waterlogged, by Stacy Platt

Untitled, from the series Waterlogged, by Stacy Platt

When my mother died last year, I immediately set about searching for things in my possession that she had written to me. Something about her handwriting was evocative in a way that little else was. Throughout her prolonged sickness, I found witnessing her handwriting deteriorate as her illness progressed touching and poignant in ways that were gut-wrenching, reminding me that even while she was still alive that everything shifts and will come to an end. One’s entire life and conception of self, how they understood time, and people, what they valued and what they reviled—all the things they both could and could not say, that they knew or never cared to know, that all ends when they do. What’s left behind is everyone else’s interpretation. Their conjecture of another’s lived life.

If I ever thought about what might happen to these journals, it was always something mundane: my daughter would get them at some point, or, in a pleasant anonymous fantasy: they would be found at an estate sale or thrift store, and sifted through and wondered about by strangers. Instead, the flood has answered this question with emphatic disregard for any desired outcomes. It has rendered the reliquary of my past an offering of object-ness from which to make something else. In making these images, I am offered the opportunity to refashion my past, look at it as a thing-in-itself as opposed to a thing (a life) that happened to me, make peace with it, and then be granted permission to tear all the pages out, and allow them to continue to deteriorate.

Photographs Not Taken and Photographs Stolen

by stacy platt | 2 Comments

There was an image that I did not take when I was in India this winter, but the image is burned in my memory.

I did not take it on purpose. It was the kind of photo that I would have felt unkind in taking, a moment that would have been nothing more than exploitative gawking. But the moment and its full context unfolding in front of me was just too overwhelming in an East-meets-West/cognitive dissonance kind of way.

R. and I were in the northeast mountains of India, in an area that you had to have a special permit to travel in, called Sikkim. We were visiting one of the famous Buddhist monasteries there, and this was the only monastery that we visited where there were armed guards with machine guns outside the gate (and for those not versed in things political in India, those guards were not there to protect the monks). The whole place had a very different feeling–repressed, strict, somewhat unfriendly–than any other religious site we had visited. We had walked around most of the grounds, and were about to wind up our visit and get back into a rented car for a multi-hour bumpy ride on roads-that-are-not-roads. We were headed back to the main gate outside the monastery when I saw the woman with the bamboo basket.

First, a contextual note: on roads winding up mountains we saw for miles and miles the same scene playing itself out. A slight woman or man–but most usually a woman–carrying a basket on her back with a strap that wrapped itself from the basket around the top of her head, with the basket’s contents almost certainly weighing as much if not more than the person. In more populated areas we would see the same slight frames carrying impossible loads of other people’s luggage, barefoot, up steep hills, all with the same strap around the back reaching to the tops of the bearer’s forehead. On the roadsides, the contents were almost always rocks the size of a human head, or dirt. People carrying dirt and rocks were doing so to actually make the roads as we were driving up them. Endlessly, for hours, we would see small collections of humans sitting atop piles of rubble, with small hammers in hand. They were making smaller rocks out of bigger rocks– literally making gravel to fill the road that they were seated on the side of. So. There were these women and men, and these baskets for carrying heavy things, using one’s head as a fulcrum.

Back to the monastery: there are three people. Two monks, clad in scarlet robes. Shaved heads, dusty, sandaled feet in the winter air. There is a young woman standing between them. She is maybe in her early twenties, maybe younger. In the mountain areas there is a tangible mixing of ethnicities, and it is not a given that everyone is “Indian.” Her wide face has the reddish complexion of Tibet, or Mongolia, maybe. In any case, she is there. With one of those bamboo baskets on her back and a strap wrapped around her forehead. Her basket is half-full. The two monks are filling it the rest of the way up, with the same contents as what was in it to begin with: rocks the size of her head. She is wearing flip-flops, a skirt, a t-shirt and a cardigan. Her cardigan was embroidered with the phrase, in cursive–I could not make this up–“Always Look On the Bright Side of Life.” Her gaze was vacant, and enduring.

I didn’t take that photo, but here is one that I felt less bad taking, out the window of a moving car. It has one of those baskets in it that I described:

The stolen photograph was stolen two weeks ago. Not in the cheeky sense of a photo taken with the subject unawares–although it was that, actually. I mean in the literal sense. The photo that cannot be taken again was on a memory card inside a camera that was stolen from my house two weeks ago in a break-in. It was a photograph of my mother.

It was April, and I had gone to take care of her for the month while she was recovering from her second major abdominal surgery following an ovarian cancer diagnosis. That month was fraught with so many things and so many emotions, and most of what I felt during that time was just that of willful pulling through in a prolonged moment of crisis. It had been rough going. She was moody, afraid of eating and so not eating. Every day was a struggle between us, and I worried that she might die while I was there. Or shortly after I left. She slept all the time, though not well. She was exhausted, existential and shrunken. Truly a shadow of her former self.

The photo on the memory card was one I snuck of her while she was asleep. She was buried in her bed, cocoon-like under an avalanche of comforters and pillows. A narcotic-induced deep and restless sleep. Her shaved head with bits of black stubble growing back in, a strong oblong outline of her skull while she lay on her back. The covers had her obscured totally up to her neck, and she was clutching them to her. There was a small light turned on at her bedside. What was most memorable about that photo was that she was half-smiling, half grimacing, in a very pronounced way while she slept. Her expression and her mouth jutted out in a focused, deliberate manner. It was intensely private and intensely something that was just for me to remember of that time. And I had not unloaded it from the memory card before it, and the camera, were unloaded from my home.

I don’t have any other photos of that time with her, though I do have another stolen image (again: semantics) to act as a placeholder. This image I stole–again literally–when I fled the homestead at eighteen, full of righteous anger and purpose, but still feeling homesick even as I was leaving. So I swiped some meaningful photos. It’s my mother, at eighteen. The photos were taken by a lovestruck serviceman, who dabbled in photography as a hobby. He wrote captions in red felt-tip on the backs of all the photos. The first time I ever saw these photos, as a teenager myself, I was struck by the fact that I make this exact same exasperated face.