The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.

I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

A disenchantment falsified and blunted my usual feelings and joys: the garden lacked fragrance, the woods held no attraction for me, the world stood around me like a clearance sale of last year’s secondhand goods, insipid, all its charm gone. Books were so much paper, music a grating noise. That is the way leaves fall around a tree in autumn, a tree unaware of the rain running down its sides, of the sun or the frost, and of life gradually retreating inward. The tree does not die. It waits.

Sometimes it seems to me that things hold together only thanks to the borders, that the true identify of these lands and peoples is the shape of their territories in an atlas. It’s a stupid thought, but I can’t shake it.

zoom

Donata Wenders, News in Warsaw, Poland, 2006

Alienation? No, let us try to admit that this alienation is not so bad… Emptiness? The absurdity of existence? Nothingness? Don’t let us exaggerate! A god or ideals are not necessary to discover supreme values. We only have to go for three days without eating anything for a crumb to become our supreme goal…

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.

Loved, idealized voices
of those who have died, or of those
lost for us like the dead.

Sometimes they speak to us in dreams;
sometimes deep in thought the mind hears them.

And, with their sound, for a moment return
sounds from our life’s first poetry —
like distant music fading away at night.

Nothingness haunts being.