(for wordpress weekly photo challenge – broken)
*shot with nikon d700 and 85mm f/1.8 lens at ISO200, 1/200s and f/7.1 edited in lightroom cc and photoshop cc with words written in iA Writer Pro, promises promises*
broken on belgianstreets
broken on belgradestreets
Do you need, desire or crave a new challenge? Are you open to sharing your dark side? Then read on.
Do you have a dark side?
Or, think you may have one. Or indeed worry that you might have one. Or, for that matter, worry that you don’t and would like one? If so, join me here each week for dark | side | thursday.
Over a period of 52 weeks, I am writing a story. A dark story that will unfold as the weeks pass. Each Thursday, at 13:00 UTC, I will post a new chapter. Each chapter will be exactly 500 words long, and will be accompanied by a photograph. You can catch up on the story so far by clicking here on dark | side | thursday
Share your dark side?
I invite you to join me either by writing your own dark story, week by week, or, if that is too much, by dropping by, now and then, perhaps when the mood suits you or, perhaps, when it doesn’t, and by sharing a photograph, poem or a suitably dark piece of prose. To cross over to dark | side | thursday create your post, tag it dark side thursday and link to it by clicking on the dark | side | thursday badge below, where you can also find all the contributions so far. Or you can simply share your link in the comments section of my weekly post. And, should the mood take you, you can add the badge to your post.
dark | side | thursday | one
It stopped. Suddenly. Under the spring sun.
Over. All done. Nothing more.
A soft wind caressed the few hairs left on his head. As he gazed, without care or regard, over the serried ranks of headstones.
All those names. Those faces pasted to the marble. Staring back at him.
The fake plastic flowers. Their fake, plastic, feelings.
Death. Decay. Despair.
He had been shocked, by the flowers. The intensity, of the flowers. Their lack of life. Lack of pollen. Lack of decay. Their, lack. Their fake colours spoke to the horror. In his heart. In his soul. If he had one.
Walking, among the dead. The cold gaze of the stone sentinels. So little to do. Just staring and waiting until the wind abraded their faces into anonymity. They left their statues, to absolve their conscience. Standing. To do the bidding of those who no longer care.
He felt it. Even before then. That moment. He felt it.
He had come to learn, to capture the essence, to absorb his new culture. Familiar, and, not.
And all those names and dates and faces and false, fanciful, fake, flowers.
He pressed the shutter release over and over. Yes, he did. That’s what he did. Over, and over. Recording, reporting, revealing. And, later, he would know. More than he wanted. He would. Know.
Pollen covered his shoes. A light dusting. Dust, that troubled him.
And, those massive, stone, slabs. Sealed. Suffocating. Echoes of Poe. That damp earth. The broken finger nails. The strangled cries, of despair. Beneath.
He continued. To walk.
Among those slabs. Those inscriptions. The man, hanging on the beams of wood, one vertical, one horizontal. A fractured world. Lost hopes. Lost dreams. Always fighting. And, then, a photo on a stone. A photo.
He was incensed by the injustice. The rows of small stones. The mausoleums of the rich, the mayors, the benefactors. Who decides. Of all those faces, gazing out from the stones. Which deserved his care? His attention? His lens?
Troubled. He pressed on.
Soon, he found it. It, found him. They, found him. And it, they, will never let go.
The space. The emptiness. Between the stones. That stopped him. Made him think. Too much, as always. He had always thought too much. Without thinking.
There was no grass. No marble. No stone. No written homage to the great and good. No stone sentinel.
What had been there, was gone. No smooth marble cladding. Only bricks, scraped, exposed, bare. Industrial. Yes, industrial. The stark futility, pierced him.
What of those who had knelt here? Those, who had been left behind. What of them?
He stared at the bare boards. Those rough hewn, wooden, boards. The concrete lintel. Surrounding that terrible open hole. The slates. Dragged across that gaping, terrible, hole.
He knelt. He looked. He, saw.
A cold pit. Filled. With water.
Cold walls. They no longer constrained their bitter cargo.
And, he looked. He heard. He saw. He felt. What had been there.
The end.
The portal to dark | side | thursday opened on the twenty first day of may in the year twenty hundred and fifteen and will remain open for fifty two weeks.
one | fiftytwo
dark
long night
night crawling dark thoughts
thoughts spawned dark endless night
night terror cracked dark gnarled fingers
fingers slithering scraping grasping fingers
fingers gnarled dark cracked terror night
night endless dark spawned thoughts
thoughts dark crawling night
night long
dark
(for mara’s poetry 101 rehab – dark)
*shot with nikon d700 and nikkor 70-200mm f/4 lens at 70mm, ISO200, 1/250s and f/8.0, edited in lightroom cc and analog efex pro 2, wet plate filter applied, fingers over eyes*
“i was enveloped in numbness, and absence of feeling so deep the bottom was lost from view” ― haruki murakami, the wind-up bird chronicle
enveloped in pain
by something that knows
no name
don't give it house room
turn up the
volume
and just
dance
(for wordpress weekly photo challenge – enveloped)
*shot with nikon d700, nikkor 70-200m f/4 lens at 1/250s and f/8, no edits*
real world in trouble everyone lives in a bubble does any one care about the trouble under so much rubble can it really be so much trouble eventually -
real world in trouble everyone lives in a bubble under so much rubble so, are we really in trouble eventually -
real world in trouble everyone lives in a bubble can it really be so much trouble yes, they will burst our bubble can it really be so much trouble look out, I told you, they’re really gonna burst our bubble eventually -
(for mara’s poetry 101 rehab – recycle)
*shot with iphone 5, edited in snapseed mobile, adverbs reduced, reused and recycled*
(advertising hoarding, havenlaan, brüssel)
shhh...
force(s) of
nature
can
lead
to
trouble
(for wordpress weekly photo challenge – forces of nature)
*shot with nikon d700, nikkor 70-300mm lens, at 70mm, and 1/125s at f/5.6, edited in lightroom cc and analog efex pro, make up optional”
(nijverheidskaai, molenbeek)
(for mara eastern’s poetry 101 rehab – couple)
*shot with nikon d700, nikkor 70-300 mm f/4.0-5.6 lens at 300mm, 1/320s and f/9, edited in lightroom cc, aperture efex pro 2 with multi lens filter applied, poem added in photoshop cc, no couples were harmed in the making of this post*
So, here we are, four weeks later (ok so I’m late, this last post was prompted yesterday).
The last and final prompt for day twenty of Writing 101 from WordPress is
“Tell us the story of your most-prized possession”
For this final assignment we were urged
“to lead us through the history of an object that bears a special meaning to you”
And the twist?
“We extolled the virtues of brevity back on day five, but now, let’s jump to the other side of the spectrum and turn to long form writing. Let’s celebrate the drawn-out, slowly cooked, wide-shot narrative.”
So here we go.
See you on the other side, when I’m done writing.
I have an intense dislike for any question that starts with
“what’s your favourite colour / animal / number / song / food”.
Yes. So, when asked to write about my “most-prized” possession, guess what, that is if you are still with me after my four week long assault on my English language, I reacted. Badly.
Then, I thought.
I know, collective *gasp*.
I know what I will write about.
So, I will. I am.
And, it may take me a while to get to the point. And, I will, in time. I need to talk a little first.
My first thought?
I don’t think any of us ever “possess” anything.
We look after things, we rent things, we are custodians, stewards. We don’t possess a thing. Not a single thing. Not really.
Not in any sense that means a damn thing.
And even when we think we possess something. Does it bring us happiness? I mean the possession of things.
Is a billionaire happier than the man who sleeps under a bridge at night. Really. I wonder.
Reflecting, I thought about the things that I might have valued, counted, as “possessions”, if I was so inclined. And I’m not. But, hey, bear with me. My childhood is something I may write about, but the memories are not something I cherish. Far from it. I wrote here about the death of my father. Later, my mother died of a terrible cancer when she was still quite young. I have lost touch with many who are very important to me, my two daughters for example (and that’s a story for another day, another life).
Those relationships are not “possessions”, but many cling on to them as if they were.
Their very existence in some way defining us.
So, no, I don’t “possess” those things.
Not any more.
I walk alone. Often. Or so it seems.
I once had religion.
Well, I was indoctrinated, force fed, I embraced, I knelt, I prayed. And then, I lost my religion.
For good, or bad 😉
Teach a kid when he is four that God made the world in six days, then that he sat back and had a rest.
Then, later, introduce Schrödinger, quantum mechanics, the holocaust, and relativity theory.
Light blue touch paper. Retire to a safe distance.
I may sound cynical.
I assure you that I am not.
I may be free writing a little.
But, I do have a point and plan to get there.
When we are born. We come with nothing. We leave with nothing.
We will argue with each other, and ourselves, until our sun immolates itself and vaporises our little pile of dust, that we take something to the “next life”. Maybe we will or maybe we will not.
But when we do, if we do, we sure as hell (if it exists) will not be taking a single one of our “most prized” possessions with us. No, those poor Egyptian Pharaohs, those poor workers sacrificed to honour them, were wrong. Ask Howard Carter.
Memories? What of them? People we knew, once knew, now know no more. If we ever did.
Do we possess those memories. And if we do, what of it?
Not so long ago, in relative terms, I lost pretty much all I had worked to “possess”. Did it matter? At the time, I thought it did. Only the things I really possessed in any material sense didn’t matter a damn.
The things that mattered were more elusive. Deeper down.
There is only one thing that we possess. That we can possess. Any of us.
Our sense of who we are. What we are.
Maybe not why we are. But hey.
That is the only thing that we possess and we must take care of it. If we don’t we not only hurt ourself, we hurt everyone around us.
We take so much care for those around us.
And so often, neglect the one person who really relies on us.
There is a reason that airlines advise us to secure our own oxygen mask first.
(inspired by this, #am_still_learning)
“the soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter - in the eye”
― charlotte brontë, jane eyre
(eye -bar restaurant, ijpromenade 1, amsterdam)
(for wordpress weekly photo challenge – intricate)
(also for lucile’s photo101 rehab, with thanks…)
*shot with nikon d700, nikkor 50mm f/1.4 lens at 1/250s and f/8, edited in lightroom cc and silver efex pro 2, eye’s left*
intricate on belgianstreets
intricate on belgianstreets
andy townend 