Icarus at home # 8

1992

In And our faces, my heart, brief as photos, John Berger writes: ‘That a poem may use the same words as a Company Report means no more than the fact that a lighthouse and a prison cell may be built with stones from the same quarry, joined with the same mortar’. By the same token this picture might be of me but not, it was built with stones from the same DNA but time has passed, adding lines and wrinkles and wisdom (oh yes). I can still do the pose but not the hair, I fear. But this links me back to Baudrillard on time and how it creates this twofold illusion of what is real. This picture is really me, as I feel, and even then I could have been thinking about now, just as I am thinking about then. I know where I was when this was taken, the south of France, Villefranche-sur-Mer to be precise and it was a time when you could ask, is the blue sea really blue without really caring for a reply because it just was and is and this was an act of free will, captured in a photograph which can never be anything but a snapshot of the temporal - this is a Villefrance-sur-Mer song, it has that feel to it, like a Woody Allen film: dance me to the end of love.