we live fixations, fixations of happiness.

Here are some images from the day I spent shooting interiors of my room in Reykjavik (see post from one month ago today). I remember feeling a calm descend as I focused and worked, holed up in my tiny space. I am thinking now about some of the questions I was asking myself then. I consider the last month since then.

I look at these images and I can remember that near-cozy feeling, of reality suspended, even for a moment... 

I am here alone in my kitchen now, a month later. A cool sunny Saturday in September, with my coffee and toast. I am trying to paint a cozy picture for myself - it sounds nice, doesn't it?  In reality, I am trying hard to breathe, trying hard to be, trying hard to focus, trying to hard to find my voice under a crushing and endlessly perplexing, unexpected grief. I stretch my hand out through a fog and reach nothing. There is literally no making sense of any of it. And so I need to pull back into myself.

As I write this, and consider this moment, I feel a simultaneous tiny release of pressure followed by the self-consciousness of overexposure. Ah well. 

I had a great phone meeting with my advisor Jan Avgikos last Sunday. She looked through my recent work, and I expressed this concern about being too self-revelatory, too overtly emotional in the work. She quelled those fears and encouraged me to just make the images and to see what came of it. To not hold back in this moment.

I'm currently reading The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, and I'll leave you with this passage:

"We live fixations, fixations of happiness. We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of the home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost."