{"id":425,"date":"2014-07-10T03:25:27","date_gmt":"2014-07-10T03:25:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/djhatfield.com\/blog\/?p=425"},"modified":"2014-07-28T07:12:43","modified_gmt":"2014-07-28T07:12:43","slug":"when-i-recognized-that-shadow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/djhatfield.com\/blog\/?p=425","title":{"rendered":"when i recognized that shadow…"},"content":{"rendered":"

“it took me awhile,” said a member of an age set named for the 10 national construction projects of the late 1970s, before i recognized the man in the pictures, that young man with my mother. i remember that i called him ‘uncle’ \u00a0for a long time. it took me a long time before i really knew that he was my father” the uncanny appearance of someone known only as a reflection of another time, an adingo,\u00a0<\/em>his father seemed to lack a position in his life as a real presence, a\u00a0tireng<\/em>.<\/p>\n

in sowal no ‘amis, mirror, reflection, shadow, glass, and spirit are all called\u00a0adingo. <\/em>rahic, an ‘amis artist from makota’ay who goes about collecting glass on the beach every day–he wants to collect an entire ton of it for a piece in construction–calls his practice\u00a0mikilim to adingo ako\u00a0<\/em>finding my glass \/ soul. he tells me that in the past, many elders, including his grandfather, did not like to look into a mirror: the uncanny appearance of one’s image there suggested that one could, if not careful, lose one’s soul to the soul-showing glass.<\/p>\n

yet, today, we are a people obsessed with images, constrained to leave shadows behind…. one wonders, then about the technologies of creating images and their relationship to the longterm absence of men on the boats.<\/p>\n

as i’ve written before, many lyrics associated with the far ocean fishing trade center on bodies,\u00a0tireng:\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

dipoten to tireng namo \u00a0<\/em>(take care of your body)<\/p>\n

akato piharateng to tireng ako\u00a0<\/em>(don’t worry about my body)<\/p>\n

halafin ca ka’araw to tireng iso, idang\u00a0<\/em>(it’s been so long since i’ve seen your body, my friend)<\/p>\n

cowa to maan ko maharatengay no mako, o tireng iso<\/em>\u00a0(i think of nothing but your body)<\/p>\n

although photography takes the japanese loan word, sasin<\/em>, which looks like “writing reality” in chinese characters, photography works through glass and captures shadows. it is the printing out of an adingo<\/em>. the discontinuity between the image, say of a young man with a woman one might recognize as a younger version of one’s mother, and the physical presence of a body makes the appearance of the father uncanny.<\/p>\n

for the child, the problem is the lack of a referential chain–not iconic because the resemblance between adingo and tireng is evident–a series of indices that could connect the tireng to a possible statement by the mother: this is your father (pointing to the picture), call him father (pointing to the tireng).<\/p>\n

the problem for the father, i suspect, is how to find the adingo. to bring the adingo back into the sphere of one’s embodied existence when the adingo, caught in a picture from another time, had replaced him<\/p>\n

cima cimira? o ama ako han? <\/em> cima cimira? o adingo kinia tireng han?<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“it took me awhile,” said a member of an age set named for the 10 national construction projects of the late 1970s, before i recognized the man in the pictures, Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":431,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,4,54],"tags":[55,121,30,90,123,122,124,125],"class_list":["post-425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faroceanfishing","category-research","category-sowal-no-amis","tag-amis-language","tag-adingo","tag-far-ocean-fishing","tag-featured","tag-photography","tag-reflections","tag-the-missing-father","tag-uncanny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/djhatfield.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/djhatfield.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/djhatfield.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/djhatfield.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/djhatfield.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=425"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/djhatfield.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":450,"href":"http:\/\/djhatfield.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/425\/revisions\/450"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/djhatfield.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/djhatfield.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/djhatfield.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/djhatfield.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}