Left and Right, Black and White

A small girl floats in the darkness of the photograph, slightly above center, two long arms extending from left and right holding her hands. We see her from behind. Her little hands are like boddhisatva hands. The fingers seem like prescient mudra. I say she floats but it is a lie.  It is a true lie though. She's actually seated on a picnic table, but the table is so dark, a solidity of black, that it seems the child is floating towards the table. It seems she is located closer to us in the foreground than she actually is. So she floats. It is a joy and a panic. It is a joy and a panic as it usually is when people float, whether in dreams or in their waking lives. This is one of those calculated lies photographs can tell and which we believe. It is this lying which so often gives photography its unique charm. But the toddler's satiny dress has a sash that hangs over the back of the black picnic table like an animal's tail. This helps us to see she is actually on the black table. One detail leads us on to another. Details hold hands like this in photographs. They dovetail consciousness in its looking. It is not the same way details hold hands in writing. That is a different way. The child is tiny, probably two years old. I imagine the dress is pink. The arms that stretch out from the sides of the photograph feel stretched beyond what one would expect in reality. Like a Stretch Armstrong figure, but the arms are slender and young. It must be the lens. Lenses are chimerical things. Are they the parents? You can see the dark back of the head of the figure at left. The arm of that figure is more tanned than the arm which comes in from the figure at right, who is cropped out, unseen. That figure "feels" male, but what does it mean to say something or someone "feels male" when there is nothing there to "feel?"  The arm doesn't really look any different than the arm at left, except for the absence of tanning. Maybe one expects the expected. You think "young woman" from what you can see of the figure at left,  but it could be a boy with long hair. It feels like the safety of family, the glowing arms in the darkness of a summer evening. The figure at left is wearing a tank top, so you do think summer. The picnic table is tilted so much from left to right that it just adds to the dream quality that the impossibly stretched arms have already created. The baby feels like a small buddha and like a prize given out in a dream, if you have one of those dreams in which babies are given as prizes. There is a forest in the background, but we can only see in dissolve a few little openings in the trees at the top. We can see only a few dark tree trunks and a few motes of light that hint at an evening sky both left and right at the top of the photograph. We will never see the child's face and besides she is grown up now, a woman and no longer a child, if she lived, if she wanted to live and this happened, if she wasn't only a bit of a dream or a doll that fooled us.