Towards the Within/
I Don't Know What I Saw

What you are looking at is an exploration of trauma that remained active through the passage of time. It is not the event itself that you see, but a possibility of its retrieval and transformation. The experience of the post-trauma is of an inner space within the troubled self, where past mixes with presence,

Images with thoughts. In a place of solitude, exposed

But out of light

To the experience that locks one in and

Makes one

cast out.

 

The eye is posed here as both the point of first entry,

And of later access.

Vision as the recorder, and later, the record.

 

What the eye could not grasp the mind cannot un-see.

 

The snap of the exposure turns into a bleak beam, both sharp and soft,

Diffused by time.

Like a lighthouse at night that just spins and spins, blinding

Each time it reaches the eye the light

Is still trapped there though it passed by.

 

In this disorder of time the past has an echo.

Like a multiple exposure,

But to the same view. Captured.

But not developed, stuck in the process.

Sticky, absorbent

Watch your fingers, DON’T touch. A mark that doesn’t come off.

 

A stain that does not dry.

And all of it came through the eye.

 

To get in, or to get out

It follows the light: left-right, left-right.

Seeing but not knowing what is being seen.

It was a flash of an image too fast to be a thought.

A flicker. A beam.

 

“I don’t know what I saw”