The Language of Nouns
Sunset Sailing By Michelle Murphy
Dania Beach - May 2012
The evening is humid, I feel dizzy – Sweaty. The ocean speaks the language of loneliness, maybe it is peace wearing a different costume. All nouns speak a language. The Atlantic up here connects me to her - her ashes long gone, but I go to the ocean to see her, to talk to her, to feel like I am close to her memory. The boat is leaving, I am told – the song tells [me] a story similar to mine. She isn't here anymore.
This photo was taken by a woman - I start thinking about some of the women who are and were important to me. Some musical references like Elis Regina, Mercedes Sosa, Violeta Parra and then some family members: my grandmother, my mom, my aunts, my cousin – how do they relate to this notion of a female identity and their stigmas. The boat is heading north. It has been eleven years since I left home – today. My heart belongs to the South. South America. Atlantic South. But my roots have been growing here. Sweet illusion, I ponder - I have no roots.
The moon is shy. I know she's out there - somewhere. She's in the title. She is. But I prefer the image like this: made of three characters in a play: the sky, the boat and the ocean. This is a bare image of an evening that didn’t happen to me. Or is it the ocean, the boat and the sky that compose an evening that I have imagined? I don't see Hopper in this photo. Hopper is always so precise. There's a resemblance, though: [but] her picture is dense, the people are distant and cold - I presume. The boat's color is of a moon-ish orange hue that captivates me.
The picture itself has a loneliness that speaks to me: a beautiful and peaceful loneliness. This loneliness is the same loneliness of a piece of fruit that is taken from the fruit itself; just like I was taken from my family, eleven years ago. Why do I keep counting? Does it matter anymore? My father doesn’t live in Porto Alegre. My brother has a daughter. My mom isn’t here. The axis of my family has changed drastically. Why do we document the images we see- why do we crop images? Why do we write about these things that are so ephemeral. Thirty years from now this won’t matter. Even if I created a story for this photo, I would still be aging. Stories do not stop the cruel and inevitable flow of time. Perhaps the ocean was in love with the sky. But they had a boat setting them apart.
Who were those people in that boat? Do they have a lost love? Are they happy? What are the nouns that speak for them? I am listening to "You Aren't Here", which is a great tango song, but if I translate it, it loses a lot of its beauty. I hope not to be trying to translate the image. I am not. The thing is that ocean talks to me. It always has. As well as the songs I listen to in the mornings I feel like the world is weighing on me. Those songs somehow speak the language of beauty and Moon is the beauty of a story born from someone else’s hands, someone else’s eyes.
I am an intruder. I bring music to her scene, even though I am sure the ocean was talking while that boat was passing by. Maybe I only invent stories that are not there. The ship will sail away tomorrow (just like in the tango song). I will stay grounded, focused, and yet again I will stay behind. That’s the only possible freedom I envision for myself - that's the trade-off I am making with life. I need the ground to tango. I need the freedom of the language of love. But I also need to visit the ocean even if the ocean is brought to me through eyes that are not mine. The language of beauty makes my solitude more bearable, only eyes that see beyond the mundane are capable of minimizing the solitude of others. Gratitude is also a language.
This photo was taken by a woman - I start thinking about some of the women who are and were important to me. Some musical references like Elis Regina, Mercedes Sosa, Violeta Parra and then some family members: my grandmother, my mom, my aunts, my cousin – how do they relate to this notion of a female identity and their stigmas. The boat is heading north. It has been eleven years since I left home – today. My heart belongs to the South. South America. Atlantic South. But my roots have been growing here. Sweet illusion, I ponder - I have no roots.
The moon is shy. I know she's out there - somewhere. She's in the title. She is. But I prefer the image like this: made of three characters in a play: the sky, the boat and the ocean. This is a bare image of an evening that didn’t happen to me. Or is it the ocean, the boat and the sky that compose an evening that I have imagined? I don't see Hopper in this photo. Hopper is always so precise. There's a resemblance, though: [but] her picture is dense, the people are distant and cold - I presume. The boat's color is of a moon-ish orange hue that captivates me.
The picture itself has a loneliness that speaks to me: a beautiful and peaceful loneliness. This loneliness is the same loneliness of a piece of fruit that is taken from the fruit itself; just like I was taken from my family, eleven years ago. Why do I keep counting? Does it matter anymore? My father doesn’t live in Porto Alegre. My brother has a daughter. My mom isn’t here. The axis of my family has changed drastically. Why do we document the images we see- why do we crop images? Why do we write about these things that are so ephemeral. Thirty years from now this won’t matter. Even if I created a story for this photo, I would still be aging. Stories do not stop the cruel and inevitable flow of time. Perhaps the ocean was in love with the sky. But they had a boat setting them apart.
Who were those people in that boat? Do they have a lost love? Are they happy? What are the nouns that speak for them? I am listening to "You Aren't Here", which is a great tango song, but if I translate it, it loses a lot of its beauty. I hope not to be trying to translate the image. I am not. The thing is that ocean talks to me. It always has. As well as the songs I listen to in the mornings I feel like the world is weighing on me. Those songs somehow speak the language of beauty and Moon is the beauty of a story born from someone else’s hands, someone else’s eyes.
I am an intruder. I bring music to her scene, even though I am sure the ocean was talking while that boat was passing by. Maybe I only invent stories that are not there. The ship will sail away tomorrow (just like in the tango song). I will stay grounded, focused, and yet again I will stay behind. That’s the only possible freedom I envision for myself - that's the trade-off I am making with life. I need the ground to tango. I need the freedom of the language of love. But I also need to visit the ocean even if the ocean is brought to me through eyes that are not mine. The language of beauty makes my solitude more bearable, only eyes that see beyond the mundane are capable of minimizing the solitude of others. Gratitude is also a language.
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