107 Shandon Street

If you follow the river that meanders through Cork, you'll eventually come across Shandon Street. Take a right and walk up the narrow street. If you're not careful, you'll almost miss the weathered red building, 107 Shandon. It will be on your left. The words "the gallery with no name" will be typed on printer paper, and taped to the inside of the window. A woman sitting behind a low table, sipping her coffee, will look out at the sleepy street. Does she see you?

This summer, I took a similar journey up Shandon Street in search of the gallery with no name. A member of our group wanted to see a photography exhibition, and I, being the true daughter of art collectors, could not refuse. So we set out and found the place, the taped up letters, the woman with her hair swept back, the peeling paint. The photographs that I viewed in the twenty minutes that followed changed the way I thought about my summer in England and Ireland--and much of my life. You've probably never heard of Taf Hassam. He was born in England two years before I was born in the States. He is an actor and a musician and a photographer. This exhibition, "Traces," was his first solo show.

The idea was simple enough: capturing moments from life through still-lives and portraits. He called the still-lives "traces," and the portraits, "glances." Mr. Hassam didn't attempt to tell us what happened before or after each image. Nor did he concern himself with developing a coherent narrative to link the photographs. He permitted the impressions to be precisely that--seemingly insignificant glimpses that somehow lingered long in the mind. A poet noted:
It is fitting, therefore, that so many of these works are printed on cartridge paper and notepaper. For they are like pages ripped from a journalist's notebook, presenting us with fragments and suggestions, with scraps of story rather than any sustained and continuous narrative.

I find that immensely helpful. This summer I spent so much energy trying to figure out how everything connected: wonderful spaghetti eaten in a London cafe and the terror attacks, and the salt breeze on the southern coast and Oxford students gratuitously making out in the gardens, and used bookstores, and rain and heat and homesickness. I believe that somehow it all really does fit, even though the narrative is not apparent to me. Perhaps one day all will be made known, and I will see. But until then, let things be what they are: glances and traces, incomplete but no less beautiful. I've titled this "the blog with no name" in honor of that gallery in Cork. And, like the exhibition this summer, what will fill this space will most likely be "fragments and suggestions...scraps of story," my story. Glances of thought and traces of life. Part of who I am today. Let the before and after take care of themselves.

Becky early in the morning

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, "See, this is new"? It has been already in the ages before us. Ecclesiastes 1:9-10

"He cannot be Adam early in the morning. There have been too many Adams, and they have named everything." Yeats by Harold Bloom

Starting a blog feels horrifically unoriginal. "Everyone's doing it." And it makes me not want to. But if I simply react against what others do, I still allow them to control my behavior. So tonight I will choose to take a risk that countless others have taken, but that nevertheless feels terrifyingly unique to me in this moment. And I will start by acknowledging that

this will not be terribly original.

Although it is early morning, I am most definitely not Adam. I am deeply indebted to the names other Adams--people I've loved, listened to, read, simply observed--have given to pieces of life. The vocabulary they have passed to me is so rich that at times it seems as though there really is nothing left for me to name. But even if that is true (and I'm not completely convinced that it is), I can at least string those names together, like brilliant beads, and make something that someone just might want to slip around her wrist.

The adventure begins...