Knots

Random quote of the day:


"If I were untied, it would be easy. How to undo this knot, how not to want any more, or to want to be, or else to want to be the water that can be placed in all vases...Me, I am nothing but knotted knots, I am made of nothing but knots that resist, that want to be knots. I cannot, I do not want, I cannot, I do not want..."

—Eugène Ionesco, Journal En Miettes





( Visual aid. )

The mystery of the marbles

Those of you who have been reading this journal for a long time may remember this story. I recently posted a shortened and amended version to mourning_souls because I was way too excited to find a community that shares my love of photographing cemeteries. Who knew? There's apparently a community for every interest, no matter how disconcerting.

And the other interesting thing? In the process of posting, I added to the mystery by discovering something I hadn't noticed before. But I'll save that for the end of the post...

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I thought I'd share a small mystery I encountered in a local, urban cemetery.

Back in June of 2005, I wound up at Woodlawn Cemetery up on 14th and Pico in Santa Monica, California. I hadn't been there in while, but I used to like to walk through the place. Not a huge cemetery, surrounded by urban blight on three of its four sides and a junior college on the fourth. But it's a beautiful place, lots of old and gnarled and interesting trees, and since it was established in 1847 it has a wide range of dates for the headstones.

Because the sun was so bright, the sky so blue, and the trees so plentiful, I got lots of shadow and light shots. Lots of poignant stories in the headstones, too. Mysteries that are nearly a century old. I doubt anyone knows the story behind them anymore, probably not even the folks that keep the cemetery records.

The next night when I was going through the pictures, I discovered another little mystery. I like to view all the pictures in super blow up, quadrant by quadrant. Partly that's because sometimes a piece of a photo will be more interesting than the entire shot; partly because I like to look for anomalies. My favorite shot was a shadow and light shot of a child's grave. And that was the beginning of the mystery:




( The small mystery. )