John Tilley: Born to Blog

I like to find art and write poems and read magazines and listen to my iPod and daydream and walk my neighbor's dog - that one's my favorite

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Grace Bauer

The Eye of the Beholder


by Grace Bauer


after Diane Arbus



All human beauty is
an aberration, a mirror
trick drawing us
into itself. Into what is not.


And what is desire? A lack
invented by belief,
a return to the thrill
of the unfamiliar we recognize
in an instant as ourselves.


I know this in sight.
In the click of a shutter
revealing the barely real.
Strip glamour of its thin
veneer and you find something
raw. Elegant. You find the part
in us we're all afraid of
staring straight in the face.


But I can't turn my back
or blink. I feel myself
connecting through captured light
to a darknss that beckons, a darkness
much less frightening than you fear.


My subjects appear calm
because they are. They compose
themselves before my lens
like hallucinations we have
all shared, metaphors that suspend
us between what we want
to be and what we become.


Try to picture yourself
beyond denial. Run your hands
across your average face,
your normal body. And tell me
how you differ from these
miracles that always make you
want to look away.



-from Bauer's book Beholding Eye 2006, CustomWords

Diane Arbus is the subject of the recent Nicole Kidman movie, Fur: an Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus

Click here for a sampling of Arbus' photos


King and Queen of a Senior Citizen's Dance, NYC 1970 by Diane Arbus

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The thing about blogging is that it has now become the new tool by which the world is changed. Politics, fashion, art, television – you name it, we got it. It's not just the Internet anymore: it's YOUR Internet, it's OUR Internet. You can put your whole life online, and people will actually look at it, read it, feel it as if they almost knew you. Maybe that article you uploaded just for fun and because you thought it was cool will be discovered by a magazine editor who happens to be a blog junkie, or maybe that geeky little film you made at film camp will be watched by Wes Anderson – and even if he doesn't call you up and “discover you,” it's still really cool that he saw your video. When thinking about the Internet, I think of the ocean (and this metaphor is purely because I live in the Midwest): It's always there, it affects the weather, it affects the moon, it affects our lives even in Nebraska. Same with the Internet. It's there, it just affects different things.And you can't just yank out a big plug and BOOM, there goes the Internet. So this is my contribution to the huge ocean of Internet, the gigantic voice that we can all use.