附文 | Text
然而，不要费心去天空以外的任何地方？
- Jo Shapcott，关于可变性
I
太阳在天空中低垂，温暖了二月花园的雨水。橡树的湿润树皮闪烁着，反射出不同的的颜色，绿色的叶片在窗户上留下边缘模糊的影子。影子中透出点点亮光，散漫在整个视野中，又在脚下汇聚在一起。膝盖微曲，双手交叉，发着微光。左手搭在右手腕上，手指像是在拨弄着无形的钢琴，发出无声咒语。
视线模糊，隐秘的音乐的潮涌涨起，他就如同在这音乐的摇篮中。宁静像是一层柔软的薄膜隔开了我们。回忆的洪流与内心的故作坚定交织在一起，被他的招手唤起。它们围绕着鲜花床罩和灯罩旋转，闪烁着迷人的光芒，几乎无法认出他们原本是什么。他沉入了时间发酵成的万花筒中。我坐在旁边，看着启示聚合，但它们闪烁着、变化着，它们在我接近时分散，遥不可及，无法静止。
在剩下的空间里，房间里熟悉的、亲密的温暖占据了我的注意力，可见的形式和肉体创造了一种精雕细琢的本质幻觉。褶皱和凹陷在我的凝视中具有了如此稠密的色调，它们逐渐衰弱下去。这些可以在照片中追踪：薄薄的正方形副本。它们呈现出表面碎片的形式，通过镀金的纸的表面显现，在特定的蒸馏中被吸收、触摸和重新排列。
永恒的和最终的，这些图像似乎来自于死亡降临之前，是关于结局的。然而，当彩色的小方块移动，开始被重新理解，它们折叠了时间。预示重生，他们仍令人无法捉摸，与外部经验交织在一起：像铺路石，铺成了另一个人的旅程。
II
强光和空气一起穿过多孔玻璃，像一簇簇飞矢射中室内的墙壁。风拍打着透明的皮肤，希望得到陪伴，却丝毫不起作用。皮肤封存了内里，使其免受侵扰。光电的反复无常的气氛，坚固的机器嗡嗡作响警告危险，四肢弥散着爆发后的沉重的宁静。
在严密的监护下，他的身体受到了精心的照料。他的头像孢子一样从广阔的白色中升起。时间掌握在机构手中，机器高效运转，嗡嗡作响，也只是为了维持身体的物理机能。优雅的习惯已被打破，毛发胡须破坏了他柔软的皮肤表面。它阴暗的存在是时间的标记，没有它，人们便不会注意到时间的流逝。
在这座物质性的身体殿堂中，遍布了不够典雅的细节，这些细节反而引起了不必要的审视。我“贪婪”地盯着他的头发、眼睛、颧骨和鼻子，看着如透明画布般的皮肤，那上面画着他的一生。这是一个有着细微孔隙的界面。肉与光的容器，是一座有着古老的缝隙的大山表面，欢喜而热烈的生命在上边流淌。我对存在和不存在感到困惑。我专注于他裸露的喉咙的小美和可怖。我在寻找那咝咝作响地，掠过肌肤的，连接内外的喃喃的呼吸。物理性的凝视会引起哲思，因为出神之后是突然的、对呼吸的渴望。这是间歇但永续的存在的证明。
III
黑暗笼罩在沉默花朵弯曲的茎上。花朵被深红色吞噬，城市的无声的折射被吞噬一切的天空吸入。它像是给整个房间穿上了隔音的寿衣，压在砖块和石板上，像冰一样在自身重量下断裂。房间里，灯在闪烁，被角落和家具遮挡的远处，愈发湮没在黑暗中。他的脸上，被光线刻画出平面和轮廓，脏器用红色想线条勾勒出来。
眼帘在睡眠和清醒之间缓慢跳动。凝视的目光改变，阴影随之从肌肤上升起，打了破细骨的轮廓，在新的空洞中重新聚集。当他徘徊在消失的边缘时，我的认知崩溃了。这一时刻的存在以虚无作为标志。后来，转化完成，内在的永夜在图像表面变成了血液般温暖的微光。颜色凝固，存在与虚无之间的通道仍在胶片的药膜上存在。石灰通过化学作用给自己留下印记，图像的黑暗产生了某种极度失落的不确定性。空无自知，没有光亮的痕迹就像老树身上的球结和树洞，洞中充满了无言的黑色。
图像在提前预知了死亡。然而，就在它的消散中，在灵魂的夜，它提供了感官的净化。死亡在我出生时就已经铭刻在我的身上，在我身上染上了一层黑色的黑色圆圈。我的基因有前摄影的印记；它既是一个封印，将我与折磨我的尸体绑在一起，又是一张地图，描绘了他们离开的路线。摄影的启示是让我们看到何以经过。
IV
长矛般的草生长茂盛，上边有绿色和金色的尖角在闪闪发光。挥之不去的色彩残影温暖了冬至的阴影。云在干净的蓝色中勾勒出丝绸的轮廓，鸟儿在耀眼的苍穹上穿出转瞬即逝的洞。天空和大地之间一阵阵旋风掠过。光浸透了一切，溶解了形式，直到形式本身似乎也由光构成。
她就在这生命的浪潮中平静地站着，一个小小的身影凝视着她的领域。在这里，家庭领域与外部世界无缝连接，她就是脐带。光触到她，揭开她皮肤的缝隙，在空中投下柔顺的阴影，并从她的身体泻落，它们展开、卷曲、收缩，并重新形成了一再重复的无声吟唱。这是一个始终在屈服与重生间变化的星群。
我回到这个空间，这个永不停歇的棱镜，它的存在超越了今天生活发起的冲刺和进攻，也超越了他、她和我。我选择它来重新描绘我们之间微妙的依恋。在粗纱布上用汁液厚涂出乳白色的圆形标记，我制作出与子宫和星球共鸣的形状，它们象征着起源。在阳光下，它们渗入半透明的薄膜。即使我将它们固定在相机中，它们也不会持久。它们会褪色，将被光擦去痕迹，而正是在光的作用下，它们才得以产生。但在制作过程中，这些抽象符号与初恋相呼应。它们的循环往复的形式是无法言说的经验的带着韵脚的遗存。它们是突破不可能的突破的界限的愿望，也是必然的回归的渴望。它们是使我之为我的，存在于主体间的亲密的关系。
Lydia·Goldblatt，2013年7月
Don't trouble, though, to head anywhere but the sky?
- Jo Shapcott, Of Mutability
I
As the sun lowers in the sky, it warms the garden's February rain. The bark of listing oak trees glimmers with wetness and reflected colour, green parchment leaves darting shapes through the window. Inside, shadows leak underneath the brightness, lapping at the boundaries of vision and pooling at the ankles. Seated knees and folded hands glow in the remaining light. Left hand clasped over right wrist, fingers picking out the silent incantation of an invisible piano.
In this gathering myopia, he is cradled in rising tides of secret song, yet a viscous layer of quiet demarcates the altered space between us. A flood-song of memories mingles with the domestic order, invoked by his beckoning hands. They eddy around flowered bedspreads and lampshades and shimmer, mesmerizing, at the edges of recognition. He is immersed, drifting in a kaleidoscope of fermenting time. I sit close by, watching for the gathering revelations, but the flickering, shifting forms scatter at my approach, out of reach and impossible to still.
In the remaining space, the close, familiar warmth of the room holds the focus of my attention, visible form and flesh creating a finely wrought illusion of essence. Folds and valleys greet my gaze in colours so dense they are on the verge of failing. These can be traced afterwards in photographs: squares of thin facsimile. They assume the form of surface fragments emerging through the gilded skin of paper, to be absorbed, touched and rearranged in a circumscribed distillation. Constant and final, these images seem a pre-death, the stuff of endings. Yet as the coloured squares are shifted about to form a set of understandings, they collapse time. Promising re-birth, they remain unpredictable and interfused with outside experience: paving stones laid down to hold the tread of another's journey.
II
High light, carried on gusts of air and drawn through porous glass, hits the interior wall with a fitful quiver. The wind jealously pursues its companion, beating uselessly at transparent skin. Sealed within, the protected room barricades itself against attack. Capricious atmosphere of light and electricity, solid and stuttering machines alerted to danger, limbs suffused with the heavy serenity that follows eruption.
Closely monitored, his body is swaddled in a benign litany of care. His head rises like a spore above the expanse of white. Time is in the possession of the institution, a humming efficiency serving only the totem of physical well-being. Superfluous habits abandoned, hair breaches the soft surface of his skin. Its shadowy presence is a marker of time without which one would not know it had passed.
In this temple of physicality, the omnipresence of bodies in immodest detail lend themselves to scrutiny. I absorb his hair, eyes, cheekbones, nose through the stretched canvas of translucent skin upon which a lifetime is painted. This is a porous boundary. A container of flesh and light, a mountain surface housing ancient seams of boiling life passed down in rapture. I am confused in being and non-being. I concentrate on the small beauties and terrors of his exposed throat. I am searching for the murmuring breath that sibilantly sheds its skin and connects outer to inner. Corporeal scrutiny courts metaphysical wonder, as absent impasse is followed by the sudden, gasping rush to life. This is the intermittent but ceaseless proof of existence.
III
Darkness bears down on the bent stalks of taciturn flowers. Their veined blooms are swallowed into cardinal black, while mute refractions of the city are inhaled by the devouring sky. It shrouds the house in soundproot torpor, pressing on bricks and slate, cracking like ice that snaps beneath its own weight. Within, a bulb flares, eclipsing corners and furniture, heightening the oblivion beyond. It plays in widening curves over the planes and contours of his face, visceral mass outlined in red.
Eyelids hover in slow beats between sleep and waketulness. Shadows roused by altering gaze wash over his skin, breaking against fine bone and collecting in newly tound hollows. I suffer a collapse of perception, as he lingers on the verge of disappearance. A moment of presence is marked by absence. Later, the transtormation Is completed, as domestic night becomes blood-warm glow on the photographic surface. Colour coagulates, as the passage between presence and absence is stilled in viscous film. lime imprints itself through chemical action, and the darkness ot the image yields the uncertainty of something terribly lost. Emptiness makes itself known, lightless markings like the knotted hollows of old trees, cavities filled with speechless black.
The image perceives death before it occurs. Yet, in its very dissolution, its dark night of the soul, it offers a purification of the senses. Death is already inscribed at my birth, stained upon my body in a pigmented circle of darkness. My genetic signature is a pre-photographic imprint; it is both a seal, binding me to the bodies that tormed me, and a map, charting the course of their departure. The revelation of the photograph is to see what is passing through.
IV
Sharp triangles of green and gold glitter in the spears of grass, abundant. Lingering afterimages of colour warm the solstice shade. Clouds trace their silk silhouettes through clean blue and birds pierce fleeting holes in the incandescent canopy, Whirligigs spinning continuously between ground and sky. Light saturates everything, dissolving form till form itself seems made of light.
She stands calm in this surge of life, a small figure gazing out over her territory. Here, where domestic domain sways seamlessly with the outer world, she is the umbilical cord. Light touches her, uncatching the seams of her skin and casting pliant shadows through the air. Shedding her body they unfurl, yielding, contracting and re-forming in a muted hum of to and fro. It is a shifting constellation of surrender and regeneration.
I return to this space, this ceaseless prism that endures beyond the tilt of the day, and beyond he and she and me. I choose it to re-draw the delicate attachments between us. Marked in milky circles of thick sap on coarse-grained tissue, I make shapes resonant of womb and planet, of origins. Held up to the sun, they seep through the translucent membrane. They will not last, even though I fix them in the camera. They will fade, erased by a light that destroys as well as generates. But in the making, these abstract symbols echo first love. Their cyclical forms are rhythmic legacies of wordless experience. They are the wish to breach impossible boundaries, and the inevitable return. They are the intimacy that I am myself through others.
Lydia Goldblatt, July 2013