Engelbrecht Beach - The Monday Morning Memo

A beautiful photo, right? Let’s talk about why.

First, notice where each person is looking. Second, look at the positions of their legs and feet. Third, the slanted horizon, blue waves at the left, trees at the right with water-blue clouds, low over the trees. But these are the kinds of things you can see in every good photo. None of them explain why this image is so striking.

The effect of this photo is due largely to
the colors and arrangement of the fabrics.

We’ll name the figures from left to right 1,2,3,4,5, and 6.
TEAL – the shirt of 1, the bow of 2, the blouse of 5.
GREY – the shorts of 1, the stripes of 3, the shorts of 4.
WHITE – the dress of 2, the stripes of 3, the shirts of 4 and 6, the shorts of 5.
And then we have that splash of DARK BLUE in the shorts of 6, the boy with the fascinating body language. And did you notice how the WHITES and GREYS echo the colors of the water, sand, and sky? These remarkable clothes weren’t chosen by the photographer, but by the wife and mother, the lady in the stripes. You go, girl!

“

She says, ‘There’s universality in the specific.’

and then she recites a deeply unpleasant poem by Eva H.D. called Bonedog. David Fear in Rolling Stone magazine said the poem is about ‘the way regrets have a way of eclipsing the bright spots of a life.’

It’s an eviscerating poem. If you’re not unhappy, it will make you unhappy. I suggest you do not keep reading. – Indy Beagle

BONEDOG

Coming home is terrible whether the dogs lick your face or not; whether you have a wife
or just a wife-shaped loneliness waiting for you. Coming home is terribly lonely, so that you think of the oppressive barometric pressure back where you have just come from with fondness, because everything’s worse once you’re home.

You think of the vermin clinging to the grass stalks, long hours on the road, roadside assistance and ice creams, and the peculiar shapes of certain clouds and silences with longing because you did not want to return. Coming home is just awful.

And the home-style silences and clouds contribute to nothing but the general malaise. Clouds, such as they are, are in fact suspect, and made from a different material than those you left behind. You yourself were cut from a different cloudy cloth, returned, remaindered, ill-met by moonlight, unhappy to be back, slack in all the wrong spots, seamy suit of clothes dishrag-ratty, worn.

You return home moon-landed, foreign; the Earth’s gravitational pull an effort now redoubled,
dragging your shoelaces loose and your shoulders etching deeper the stanza of worry on your forehead. You return home deepened, a parched well linked to tomorrow by a frail strand of…

Anyway . . .

You sigh into the onslaught of identical days. One might as well, at a time . . .

Well . . .
Anyway . . .
You’re back.

The sun goes up and down like a tired whore, the weather immobile like a broken limb while you just keep getting older. Nothing moves but the shifting tides of salt in your body. Your vision blears. You carry your weather with you, the big blue whale, a skeletal darkness.

You come back with X-ray vision. Your eyes have become a hunger. You come home with your mutant gifts to a house of bone. Everything you see now, all of it: bone.”

- Young Woman, in the movie "I'm Thinking About Ending Things."