Obscura

Many days I spend playing hide and seek with furniture that I need to track down and photograph. Most of it I find but there are a few things called oiled oak spheres at the store that have alluded me for months. I think they see me coming and roll out of sight. I hold no grudge.

It sounds ridiculous but today I realized I had eyeballs in an actual sort of way. We do take our organs for granted, don't we? No, well, then when was the last time you noticed the nose on your face while not looking in the mirror, and honored its wondrous capacity for smelling? Some Kiki Smith drawings I once saw remind me of this habit, she drew organs–hearts or kidneys or livers–that were scribbled over, as our organs are always there in the background humbly working away underneath the ephemera which seems so important in the moment but that's forgotten so quickly. The woman is the master of rendering soul via the body.

I started to weep over the little tender jelly balls of my eyes while surrounded by furniture and customers out there on the sales floor, tears in honor of those things I see out of but never acknowledge, the fragile lens suspended within projecting an upside down world I never see. I imagined I felt the light entering them as it enters a camera, filling the lens completely, windows of the soul, so they say, and also containers of light, and color.