" I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we think we won't, that we are different. As a child I thought I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old? "

from M Train

by Patti Smith

Friday before we left to visit our friend's farm by Drumheller Alberta I finished Patti Smith's M Train, a wonderfully atmospheric and evocative memoir. It was illustrated with Smith's stark b&w photos of objects, Hesse's typewriter, Frida Kahlo's crutches, cafes she visited etc.,which reminded me of the photos in the works of W.G. Sebald, especially in The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz (which Smith mentions ).  Indeed Smith's work shares many of the same features as Sebald's, part memoir, part history, part dreamscape, part pilgrimage, haunting the reader with a life of small unimportant moments and soul shattering events. All the things that make up a life. The photographs also reminded me of Jonathan Carroll's story, A Wheel in the Desert, the Moon on Some Swings in which the main character attempts to deal with his upcoming blindness through photography. So I decided to try my hand at capturing some moments of our trip in b&w photos.

" Until he died, blind or not, he would share the feelings and adventures of the part of him that was universal and curious. The part that was travelling, experiencing, knowing the lives of things. Things like wheels, like swings. One more bustling soul out there looking for what to do next."

from A Wheel in the Desert, the Moon on Some Swings

by Jonathan Carroll