Writing: Framing Time

I've always been of the mind that Hemingway was correct, the most terrifying thing in the world really is a blank piece of paper. He also said that "all good books are truer than if they really happened." I'm thinking about that one. It has to do with what I've been saying lately about framing, that making a scene work, even if it's a memory of something that actually happened, is a matter of finding a way to frame it. Our words are like a camera pointing at a subject.

When I was in Paris, one of the things I did was go to a hotel that advertised its 19th century lounge, The Hôtel Royal Fromentin—formerly Le Don Juan Cabaret. I wanted to try absinthe using the whole sugar cube ritual and they advertised their historical presentation. I wrote about it in a previous entry, La Nouvelle Athènes. The reason I mention it is because of one of the photos that came out of the experience. I managed to capture a drop of water falling from the chalice to the sugar cubes below. I took a lot of pictures that day. It never crossed my mind that one of them would catch a water drop in action.

The picture went black and white. For some reason, as it stop-actioned that drop, it caught the light waves in a way that stripped the color from the moment. It has always looked kind of surreal to me because it's not exactly realistic. The room and the experience looked more like the other pictures I took, none of which capture the "feel" of the experience as well. I'm convinced this is an example of what Hemingway is talking about: the framing makes the image "truer" than what actually happened. And the "truth" of it is internal or essential. That's what evokes emotion and memory, what makes it seem so real.

There's a lot to be learned from that for me because the picture I like so much was also mostly an accident of persistence. I don't remember how many pictures I actually took, probably ten or fifteen. I remember the waiter giving me a look like I was strange. I told him I was doing research, and I was. I wanted to taste the absinthe, although I'm not sure it tastes like it did in the 19th century because it's no longer made with wormwood. But more than taste it, I wanted to see how it turned all foggy and green and how the whole sugar cube thing worked so I could write about it. I learned all that, but in retrospect, the real lesson emerges from the photograph. I looked at it at the time and thought, "wow." I look at it now and think, "yeah, it was like that somehow."

The "that" is what the photo "feels" like. Because the color is stripped and the scene is not quite natural, but something slightly "super" natural, it looks to my eye like it happened in a different time. It looks old, just like I wanted it to "be" when I went there. That was the point, everywhere I went in Paris. I was always hunting for scenes and settings for my book, looking to frame them in the context of how it must have been in the 1800s. Paris in another time. Paris out of time. Eternal.

I seem to be glorifying Hemingway this morning, so for those of you who hate him, my apologies. I've always admired his ability to write. And one of the other things he said was, "I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can." My photograph is also reflective, I think, of that. It's "better" than I could actually do, and yet there it is. I have no idea how it happened. I didn't change the settings, I don't think, and I wasn't trying or expecting something as unusual as I got. I was after documentation, that's all, archival shots, not art. I've always thought what I got was art. And, of course, what I want when I write, is just that: art.


Cross-posted at Paris on My Mind