Chelsea Woodard, Last Ice, Loons II, Mooselookmeguntic, 2020
Digital photograph
(n.) Originally a medical term from Medieval Latin: ephemera (febris) meaning fever lasting a day.
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Greek ephemeros meaning daily, living only one day — short-lived.
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Greek ephemeroi, meaning “creatures of a day.”
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Pinned to the present. A kingdom of smoke & spindrift.
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“Paper is the medium of permanence & ephemerality at once.” [1]
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My father's archive of ephemera: letters, postcards, birthday cards, stamps, his mother's birth certificate, newspaper clippings from his father’s amateur softball games, baseball cards.
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Some anagrams of ephemera are: (a) harm – cause hurt, injury or damage; (b) remap - to map again, to lay out in a new pattern. (c) père – French for father.
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An abridged catalogue of ephemera: breath, ash, faith.
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efeméride: the Spanish word for the commemoration of an event on its anniversary, or how a narrative attaches itself to a particular day, like a ghost.
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In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes said that with “the photograph we enter into flat death.”
A hologram is a three-dimensional representation of life that is already dead. An enlivened shadow that glistens with the inevitable tension between past & present. That flickers like a phantom.
What else might prism out of the cage?
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Hologram as suspended dream sequence:
Scripture in scintillas: summit of fir, nadir of dew, daylight’s curfew.
Icicles on sumac. Paper-limbed crickets. Clouds shaped like foals.
The world's soft hollow fills with snow.
I fortune vowels from the sky.
The veins of a map branch over acres of frost.
My father walks ahead of me. A flame blooms between his palms.
I stow away in someone else’s dream —
[1] The Multigraph Collective (2018). Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation.