Sandra Smith 2003

Happy Birthday, Russ!

I celebrated SA4QE 2 on Sunday 2nd, the only day I had available to get outside for a photo shoot. My idea for this year was to invert the process slightly, and pair appropriate quotations with specimens of the scenery here in Lincoln County. The pictures are my birthday gift. A powerful windstorm came about and caused me to alter my locations, but I did find places that I felt illuminated the quotations in some way.

All the best for this solar return...

The first drop took place in a dingy back room of the Old Courthouse Museum in Lincoln. A bare bulb shines down on the life-size poster of Billy the Kid, an image copied from a tintype taken in 1878. Behind the board on which this is pasted is the wooden grave marker of his mother, Catherine McCarty Antrim. Here is the quote --

from The Raven

(a short story from The Moment under The Moment)

One says "a black time" but actually the black of things is all kinds of colors. Sometimes it's the gray rainlight in an empty room; sometimes it's the sound of one's own footsteps under yellow streetlamps; sometimes it's an unaccompanied cello from a long time ago. It was difficult to understand the reality of my days, that this was now my life that would last until my death, that I had closed a door and gone, that there was no going back, that no-one was there any more. No-one was there because you don't just leave people, you leave a time. And the time wasn't there any more.

The second drop is thrust under the threshold of an ancient adobe building in Lincoln County. You can see the bricks beginning to melt, the sills starting to spring away from the structure. Here is the quote --

from PILGERMANN

Jesus said, "I am the energy that will not be still. I am a movement and a rest, but at the same time I am all movement and no rest and you will have no rest but in the constant motion of me. Do you believe?"

"I believe," I said.

"Why do you believe?" said Jesus.

"No belief is necessary," I said. "It manifests itself."

By the time of my third drop, the wind was becoming seriously gusty, so I had to fold the paper and stick it in the wire loop that held the barbed strands to the old fence post. That is Sierra Blanca in the background, sacred to the Mescalero Apaches upon whose reservation the mountain exists. Here is the quote -

from PILGERMANN

Even a small mountain is always a surprise, it is always so much itself.

I did not photograph my final drop, but it was true to certain traditions. The fourth sheet of yellow paper went into an open freezer in the meats section of the WalMart in Ruidoso, and it says --

Move in behind the flickering to the moment under the moment.

- from My Night With Leonie

(a short story from The Moment under The Moment)