From: marek@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Marek Lugowski)
Subject: last night i murdered my camera / Marek (1990)
Organization: Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois.
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1993 07:00:31 GMT


		last night i murdered my camera
		---------------------------------------------------------------
		
		camera: praktica l.l.c.
		type: match-needle single lens reflex.
		place of birth: east germany.
		date and place of the union: 1975, warsaw, poland.
		
		cause of demise:  violent death
		instruments:  sheffield-regent carbon steel utility knife,
		tip broken off in the process
		and a screwdriver beyond dull.  a real bad tool.
		motive:  ritual murder rationalized as
		attempted repair and then some.
		sentence:  loss of last link with childhood for life.
		now serving: without parole.
		
		so.  i did it.
		i did it.  i did it.  i did it.
		to you.  i did you in.
		few hours of morbid fascination under
		first the sunset then a halogen sun.
		my feather on a desk has never witnessed
		such mayhem.
		
		you know i didn't mean it.
		you know.  but they don't know.
		and then i took pictures.  yes,
		a whole obscene roll.
		careful on composition.
		like you've taught me
		over the years
		long time ago.
		
		clinically snapping away at the disemboweled you
		aesthetically laid out on funeral white
		one heaving aching chunk hunk
		sprouting exposed gears and ravaged tinfoil springs
		and tens of little gizmos
		little shiny screws
		little black screws with mauled heads
		some miniscule toothed wheels and springs
		coglettes and wheeletes.  snaps and leverettes.
		a long-deceased battery, rotting.  duracell p.x. 21,
		four point five volt.
		some elan you had had...  some elan.
		
		remember, i took you to niagra falls.
		and to hopiland.  and to sonoma.  to oregon.
		we stole spirits, echoes, really, of women
		no longer around.
		remember that afternoon in death valley?
		or the mornings atop colorado.
		or that night in the ghetto in st. louis, at four in the morn.
		you were my protection.  unneeded.  you were my eyes.
		lens uncapped.
		
		in sum.
		i.  i can't think.  i can't think of another
		inanimate object from nineteen seventy five
		still alive with me.  you were my last link to my
		teenagehood poland.
		
		you died a slow death.  no amount of fiddling
		uncovered what breaking your mold finally did.
		i had no idea your top was plastic!  with a metallic coat
		of paint.
		so i learned of ingenious methods of screwing
		things down.  by breaking you apart.
		
		you died a long time ago, i'll claim
		but you and i know better.
		you could have lived on
		given better medical care
		than my back-alley unwanted mirror jam
		abortion.  aborted, at that.
		
		yes, my alibi is nominally true:
		first to go in you was the timer,
		several years ago.  stuck in the cocked but
		off position.  then broken off.
		over they years the match needle light meter
		got senile.
		now reacting to no light at all.
		
		i remember that last roll i took with you.
		it was cathy. i didn't listen to you at all.
		by then, you were too fargone.
		i guessed the correct exposure from the film box.
		and we did a good job anyway!  those pictures are ektar
		sharp and ektar color bountiful.  last supper.
		
		then, just today, days after the pentax
		came home, after a summer-long repair
		carelessly dropped from an upended kayak
		onto lakeshore rocks.  cheap little expensive electronic
		pigshit.
		you would have not snapped open like that on me.
		or broke your "main electronic board".
		... 'cuz you never had one, toots!
		
		anyway, just days after the pentax came home
		you threw a fit and refused to shutter click.
		then the mirror.  at last permanently up, for no good reason.
		then the advance lever would do it all,
		not waiting for the shutter release.
		no longer a release.  sigh.

		you knew the jig was up and
		no money
		or expertise in town to heal you.
		they said so.  they laughed when i told them
		i have you at home, with a dead battery
		and a cocked timer.  we don't work on those
		they're pretty screwy.
		
		so i took to you with a slow knife.
		calmly.  slowly.  finiding the obvious gripholds
		on the short climb to a sheer wall.
		i loosened everything there was to loosen.
		except that weird hold.
		which you taught me postmortem.
		
		thank you.
		
		never know how complicated a simple mechanical
		device really is.  goddammit not simple at all!!!
		until you dress it like meat.  and see it live.
		
		never quite die.  even when still.
		
		some would say that the economics and time
		did you in.
		some would say, my impatience.
		some, my impudence and ignorance.
		they would all be right.  but, i know
		love did you in.
		you won't lie in a dust bowl of any basement.
		debased to disuse.
		not while i can still leverage a screwdriver
		and do you in.
		
		fifteen years of pictures and never a maintenance
		call.  fifteen years.  could have been fifty.
		we part in good solid german pieces and polish sorrow.
		you left behind a collage of images
		and a myriad of children
		some gifted, some exceptional.  all yours.
		and there is a roll of you now
		it will be a collage too
		if the pentax is really well again
		though it will never focus down
		to less than thirty three centimeters
		with no abberation to speak of.
		though i saved the 1.8 50 millimeter pentacon.
		so maybe it will now.
		
		so long, vehicle.  of my youth.
		chronicler of my travels.  some would say, just a tool.
		
		little do they know.  little did i
		know.
		
		i'm such a hothead.  and you are not mine
		anymore.
		
		
				Marek Lugowski
				16 July 1990
				Bloomington, Indiana
		

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