photo by Robert Adams from Summer Nights, Walking: On the Colorado Front, 1976-82 (2009)
photo by Robert Adams from Summer Nights, Walking: On the Colorado Front, 1976-82 (2009)
photo by Robert Adams from Summer Nights, Walking: On the Colorado Front, 1976-82 (2009)
photo by Robert Adams from Summer Nights, Walking: On the Colorado Front, 1976-82 (2009)
photo by Robert Adams from Summer Nights, Walking: On the Colorado Front, 1976-82 (2009)
In the Thousand Year Empire the crust of the earth will grow thinner under our feet... could we slip and fall through?
photo by Robert Adams from Summer Nights, Walking: On the Colorado Front, 1976-82 (2009)
photo by Robert Adams from Summer Nights, Walking: On the Colorado Front, 1976-82 (2009)
photo by Robert Adams from Summer Nights, Walking: On the Colorado Front, 1976-82 (2009)
photo by Robert Adams from Summer Nights, Walking: On the Colorado Front, 1976-82 (2009)
TC: Thousand Year Empire (1972-2014)
if i had seen the photographs without your poem juxtaposing them i'd have been warmed by the photos, felt intimate with night, however your poem disrobes all ambiguities or delightful preoccupations. in a word, is - chilling. by the second shot i am scared stiff, "In the Thousand Year Empire even the most idle neural signal will be monitored."
ReplyDeleteit is not idly that we are monitored, and not even for capitalistic gains, even if the capitalists think so, believe so. the other face to capitalism is power. power - what an aphrodisiac in this thousand year empire orgy, where sex invariably is not loving, but turns brutal.
throughout the whole evening walk i could not help but call to mind
"the pedestrian" by ray bradbury.
and something is so important here. (my god, we are such fools.) the necessity of connection in all ways, but especially in body, walking being emblematic of touching the earth, the truth, being slow, allowing connection.
so much could be deciphered from this post, tom. it could save us. but we won't choose to be saved.
i don't understand. there is such awesome glory to be had, but it is the understated glory, not the one with big factory manufactured pulsing cherry-red gonads, but the simple glory of being, more like a field mouse scurrying beneath a layer of snow, an elusive heartbeat in a vast winter.
xo
erin
What a beautiful and powerful combining, Tom: your poem, and Robert Adams photographs.
ReplyDeletepowerful ...necessity of connection...yes!
ReplyDeleteWell, I guess the monitoring of every idle neural signal would no longer be fantasy, as it may have seemed when this piece was begun c. 40 years ago, but something that will probably be possible by next week, thanks to a handy app.
ReplyDeleteIf only we could turn a corner on the data (packing pocorn), and start jettisoning two bits for every bit that is stored.
Date is all lies anyway.
I don't know, maybe it's just the first nine hundred years are the hardest to endure.
We spent a few years in the late Seventies living in the Front Range, in the area where Robert Adams was working. His pictures are really meditations, they capture the distances between people that characterize that territory. Perhaps Americans feel uncomfortable in proximity to other Americans, particularly in the so called wide open spaces of the West. In any case, Colorado seemed a pretty spooky place then, and looking again at the Adams work reminds me how that felt.
The writing's staggering, prophetic.
ReplyDeleteThe photographer's the most sinister figure in those images.
This is a wonderful post.