The image I have used in the above logo is a section of a iconic photograph taken by Eudora Welty in Mississippi during the Depression.


(Click to view it larger)

I find this photograph to be very beautiful for a very simple reason: the way it depicts both a journey forwards into time, and that backward look of the woman whose face we cannot see. While Miss. Welty is considered one of the essential writers in the 20th century American literature ( her slender memoir on writing, <a href=”www.amazon.com> “One Writer’s Beginnings” is a must read for any aspiring writer), she was a fine photographer as well. To me at least, her photographs rank right there with the more well known photographers who had worked with her for the W.P.A. during the Great American Depression, including those made by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange.

While I was aware of Miss. Welty's fiction, it took a lucky invitation to a dinner at the house of some serious photography collecting couple (folks who have a couple of signed Heri Cartier-Bresson's can only be called very very serious collector; obviously they were reasonably prosperous as well!) , to reveal this aspect of Miss. Welty's work to me. That evening, I spent quite a bit of time gazing at a Welty photograph that showed a full dunkin baptism by the bank of some Deep South river. It was as if a Negro' spiritual had passed from music into image. So the following weekend I checked out all the material I could find on her photographs, and had myself a little visual feast.

In <a href='www.nytimes.com">this lovely New York Times interview, Miss.Welty talks about the connections between writing and photography. A quote:

"..because in both cases, writing and photography, you were trying to portray what you saw, and truthfully. Portray life, living people, as you saw them. And a camera could catch that fleeting moment, which is what a short story, in all its depth, tries to do. If it's sensitive enough, it catches the transient moment."

You may read here, the NYT book review of "One Time One Place", the book from which the above photo comes from. Also, more recently, this photo has also been used on the book cover of Edward P. Jones' Pulitzier Prize winning novel "The Known World".

“Each ray of sunshine is seven minutes old,”
Serge told me in New York one December night.

“So when I look at the sky, I see the past?”
“Yes, Yes,” he said, “especially on a clear day.”
On January 19, 1987,
as I very early in the morning
drove my sister to Tucson International,
suddenly on Alvernon and 22nd Street
the sliding doors of the fog were opened,
and the snow, which had fallen all night, now
sun-dazzled, blinded us, the earth whitened
out, as if by cocaine, the desert’s plants,
its mineral-hard colors extinguished,
wine frozen in the veins of the cactus.
       . . .

The Desert Smells Like Rain: in it I read:
The syrup from which sacred wine is made
is extracted from the saguaros each
summer. The Papagos place it in jars,
where the last of it softens, then darkens
into a color of blood though it tastes
strangely sweet, almost white, like a dry wine.
As I tell Sameetah this, we are still
seven miles away. “And you know the flowers
of the saguaros bloom only at night?”
We are driving slowly, the road is glass.
“Imagine where we are was a sea once.
Just imagine!” The sky is relentlessly
sapphire, and the past is happening quickly:
the saguaros have opened themselves, stretched
out their arms to rays millions of years old,
in each ray a secret of the planet’s
origin, the rays hurting each cactus
into memory, a human memory —
for they are human, the Papagos say:
not only because they have arms and veins
and secrets. But because they too are a tribe,
vulnerable to massacre. “It is like
the end, perhaps the beginning of the world,”
Sameetah says, staring at their snow-sleeved
arms. And we are driving by the ocean
that evaporated here, by its shores,
the past now happening so quickly that each
stoplight hurts us into memory, the sky
taking rapid notes on us as we turn
at Tucson Boulevard and drive into
the airport, and I realize that the earth
is thawing from longing into longing and
that we are being forgotten by those arms.
              . . .

At the airport I stared after her plane
till the window was
                again a mirror.

As I drove back to the foothills, the fog
shut its doors behind me on Alvernon,
and I breathed the dried seas
                the earth had lost,

their forsaken shores. And I remembered
another moment that refers only
to itself:
                in New Delhi one night

as Begum Akhtar sang, the lights went out.
It was perhaps during the Bangladesh War,
perhaps there were sirens,
       air-raid warnings.

But the audience, hushed, did not stir.
The microphone was dead, but she went on
singing, and her voice
 was coming from far

away, as if she had already died.
And just before the lights did flood her
again, melting the frost
    of her diamond

into rays, it was, like this turning dark
of fog, a moment when only a lost sea
can be heard, a time
          to recollect

every shadow, everything the earth was losing,
a time to think of everything the earth
and I had lost, of all
that I would lose,

of all that I was losing.

from "A Nostalgist’s Map of America" (W.W. Norton & Company, 1992).

...

Whenever I turn to ghazal - the most appropriate poetic form to listen to, translate, and deploy when one is heartsick, mindsick, bodysick or simply sick- I also turn to the ghazalesque of Ali's poetry.