5 April 2020. Salt Pond Road.
A Rastaman elder, seated on a driftwood log, evening light. Next to water, so I have to imagine the place--and in any case, I'll never know. The map tells me it might be Hellshire Main Road (my first guess, with the island penensula in the distanxe) but nearby is Salt Pond, and I'm creating these figures, these settings, in any case. From reading, from the music, from imaging. Truths about that world form a backdrop, of course--that Salt Lane (where Mortimo Planno had his grounations--like the one filmed by Lambros Comitas in 1969--where the individual young people came forward, each holding a word printed out by hand on what must have been pieces of cardboard. The first one reading CONSENT, such a strange beginning--and I never knew if this was Ras Planno's intention, or a function of how it posted, on the internet, half a century later, The words were like a sentence--I'm sure he would have had this in mind--the opportunity to speak in this way to people in another time, to remind them, so much in his own present, that this miracle took place, that we could see these young people's faces, that we might get some sense of what it meant to them...
Jah Rastafari...
Walter Benjamin, in his essay on the History of Photography--that in the very beginning, before people knew what it meant to have their pictures taken--before they had seen themselves in the printed image, that is--the expressions on their faces were a form of wonder, incommensurate--looking into the beyond...
Jah live...
