Registro | Dust in a Beam of Light: On José Emilio Pacheco, Stephen Shore, and Modern Instances

In Registro, Pablo Íñigo Argüelles writes about the world he observes, but above all about photography and all that it implies.

Texto de 23/12/24

In Registro, Pablo Íñigo Argüelles writes about the world he observes, but above all about photography and all that it implies.

Tiempo de lectura: 4 minutos

I read José Emilio Pacheco for the first time when I was in college. In audio production class, we had to do a sound adaptation of an excerpt from two novels to choose from: Steinbeck’s “The Pearl” or Pacheco’s “The Battles in the Desert”.        

Almost no one in the class knew the first one, but everyone knew the second one. I was the only one in a group of fifteen students who had never heard of either the author or the title of the book. Someone asked me incredulously how I had never heard of it, while another classmate quickly explained the influence the book had had on his school and his life.

Later, I would understand that the Catholic school I attended as a child had omitted the essential Pacheco (and other authors) from its Spanish program; I had to make up for lost time. I bought that same afternoon at the university bookstore the ERA edition, with the unforgettable cover designed by Vicente Rojo. I read it in a matter of an hour. Then I read it again, and again: that afternoon an inexplicable connection with Pacheco and his writing was born in me. I felt understood.

María Prieto

The next day, I got “El principio del placer”. The following week, I bought “De algún tiempo a esta parte”, a compilation of his stories. This work includes “The Blood of Medusa”, a story that narrates in parallel a passage from the life of Perseus, in Micenas, and Fermín, in Mexico City.

Near the end of the story, after Fermín is captured by the police in the Alameda, Pacheco seals his character’s fate with a simple sentence:

“Today he spends his days trying to capture the dust suspended in a beam of light.”

It was as if I had taken a bite of something that suddenly transported me back to my childhood. The image of light streaming in through the trees of Juarez Park, illuminating specks of dust, dead skin floating in my room, defied the notion of time. 

That image, interrupted only once when my mom covered the windows with red  paper the day my brother and I had chicken pox, was something that had never had words; it existed only in my mind, had never been mentioned, and was only a latent image that lingered in my head. 

When that paragraph of Pacheco’s caught me off guard, it was as if, suddenly, a dark room was illuminated or someone threw a pot of paint on a blank canvas, discovering invisible textures before the color.

From that moment on, my mind, my work and my life would be eternally linked to those fifteen words of Pacheco.

***

A week ago I found Stephen Shore’s Modern Instances in the East Village. In the book, Shore, who since 1982 has directed the photography program at Bard College and helped, along with the New Topographics generation, to shape the notion of contemporary landscape and color photography, unpacks, in the manner of an autobiography, his photographic endeavors through short essays that function as walks through the history of art and culture.

In one of them, “Form and Pressure”, the author analyzes two of his most famous photographs, taken in the same place one day apart: Beverly Boulevard & La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975, and the one taken in June 22, 1975. From these, he discusses form and substance, and how the photographer does not compose an image, but structures an image.

It is at the end of that essay that Shore quotes an excerpt from the Persian poet Mahmud Shabistari, written in the 14th century to explain his point:

“The speck of dust that sparkles in a beam of light is nothing by itself, but by external cause obtains existence and apparent form: but as without the dust no form appears, so without the form neither does the dust exist”

***

The year ends, and it is in the same room where I read Pacheco for the first time that I find myself again with that image (that of dust, the beam of light), but now quoted by Shore, to help us understand a tiny aspect of the reasons why we like to press the shutter of a camera or why we construct a paragraph.

Somewhere in that universe of dust and light, Pacheco, Stephen Shore and the Persian poet are right now, talking centuries away about something as simple as the morning dust that floats and tells us something, perhaps we will never know what.

To find in the content the form and vice versa, to search in the dust for the light and vice versa: maybe that’s what it’s all about. EP

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