~~For the past two weeks or so, my colleague and friend Rose Cummings, keen photographer of natural calamities which befall our New England landscape, has been posting images of the storms that have been pounding Massachusetts. They are terrific photographs, turning the familiar into something utterly strange and otherworldly. In these photographs, strangeness is suggestive of an eerie beauty, yes, but also of isolation, desolation, and the illusory nature of perspective itself as though the capacity for creating meaning out of such images — and of the snow itself that has brought our city’s public transport system to a standstill — has somehow been arrested.
Arrested, in both senses of the word. Which, in the end, may be the lasting taste of this chain of storms that, we are told will extend into the weekend. Not so much the frustrations, the crises, which we will forget. But the gradual diminution of our pace to a crawl, then a pause, then a long, sleep-like through which the world looks like a mass of unfolding waves, too close, too far, outside our grasp somehow.
Thank you, Rose. Looking forward to your writing, too!~~
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