Pink

from the prose sketchbook: a vignette on slow appreciation, slow making, slow erotica

Quarter of a century ago I bought a photographic book documenting the life of Greater and Lesser flamingos in the volcanic Rift Valley. It is called Pink Africa. At 18, I don’t remember being more or less interested in these idiosyncratic birds than any other, but I still recall the appreciation I felt – no, the relief - for the book’s specificity and clarity. A single colour denoted, a single bird in profile. A singular focus.

The cover shows one Lesser (though never less in my eyes) flamingo, striding purposefully through a blue-slash of water it is mirrored in. Its pink eye finds you from the centre line of the cover, which is otherwise a blurred green of volcanic soda lake, beneath a title all in serif lower case. Beneath the dust cover the cloth-bound book is Greater-downy-powder-puff, with its title subtly embossed in leg pink.

This is one of my oldest books, many having got lost over several house moves or taken to charity shops, believing (erroneously I should think) that I would never be interested in them again. I have many older books of course, but they are younger to me (Greater? Lesser?) Yet, Pink Africa has always survived, migrating from one oversize shelf to the next, lake to lake, since the beginning of the millennium. The flamingo, the authors note, is fifty million years in the making (a bird as ancient as the rocks I studied for my PhD I note for no one) but this millennium could, as with all species, be decisive for their future. We know why.

I have spent over half of my life catching sight of this book as I pull down a blind, hurry a spider, or – very occasionally – dust the shelves. There it stands as if on one leg itself, roosting in perpetual and untroubled sleep, on the edge of my world. Like a poolside dream. I have not looked at anything more than its spine in twenty five years. Still though, it has taken up a presence in my life, in the way that objects can, and do. Books are especially good at this; patient witnesses to a future thought or care that might never come. It is, and makes, an eccentric observer of me I recognise, just as its photographer must be of their subject.

I take the book from the shelf. The birds eye that has been closed for twenty five years, opens. Does this feel like slow radio? Or watching a migration, live? If so, then you know something of me, today. This is the pace I have been moving since I returned from Italy, from Etna and Stromboli. I stand for a long time looking out of the window. There are flamingos in Maremma on the Tuscan coast but we didn’t see them. A drop falls from the tap and I stop and listen. I unwrap a sweet, take its wrapper to the bin on the other side of the house, and then return to the window before I put the sweet in my mouth. This is the sort of slow. The slow of a single colour, a single focus. Making the work I want to make, takes time.

Twenty five years ago I bought a book. Twenty five years later I make an entry of twelve photographs into my long-term project Pink Rock. A photographic compendium of blush rocks from across the world found by chance encounter or detour. If relief were a colour it would be rose quartz. Making the work I want to make takes attention. Inspiration itself is not slow, only the recognition of what it means, how long it really takes, to build substance, to catalogue love. The slow erotica of time opening and closing. Cleft and wing. Taut and breathing. Acid-sugar on the tongue. Hundreds, thousands, millions of flamingo.

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