Introducing the Collaboration
When I accepted Stephanie’s invitation to engage in this creative collaboration, I entered into a unique form of multi-layered dialogue, not only between Stephanie and me, but also with my own younger self, broadening into a kind of polyphony: present and earlier eras of myself met in metaphoric tête-à-tête with versions of Stephanie across different eras. The writings here are a distillation of those hybrid and time-traveling interchanges.
In her exploration of sensuality, Stephanie wants the viewer to experience mystery and enigma, to feel a degree of complication that mirrors her own unsettled relationship to beauty, embodiment and eroticism. During an early discussion about this project, Stephanie emphasized the importance of her images resisting a fixed narrative and remaining defiantly open-ended. My thoughts detoured into ruminations on the subjunctive mood, self-representation, and the formative role of grammar in how we understand identity. Hence the structure and title for this series of poems: The Grammar of Possibility.
Stephanie has at her disposal numerous ways to evoke a sense of ambiguity: the lens allows her a technical sleight of hand, enabling her to slide in and out of identification with the present and the past, the subject and the object, self and other, confusion and clarity.
In The Grammar of Possibility I have tried to internalize both the longing and the formal ambiguity of SDR’s images. Grammar is not only a metaphor for the nexus of questions these photographs explore, it is also an analog to what the lens affords: ascribing temporality, identity, certainty and potentiality. Each poem in this collection utilizes a grammatical element as metaphor and structuring device, playfully deploying the term of its title in a series of reflections about identity, memory, sensuality, and suspending time, which is the province of literary as well as photographic arts.
Sensuality remembered differs fundamentally from experiencing sensuality, but also from representing remembered sensuality. Drawing inspiration from authors and artists who shaped my understanding of the losses time imposes and the gains art recaptures, The Grammar of Possibility registers a nostalgic, bittersweet identification with the subjects Stephanie frames and the act of framing those subjects, with my own lived history of desiring and being desired.