"We have of the universe only formless, fragmentary visions, which we complete by the association of arbitrary ideas, creating dangerous suggestions."
-Marcel Proust
The postcard poems of Seeking Frozen Sound arose from the author's discovery of his deceased father's large collection of vintage travel postcards. These hundreds of postcards (more than 750) were, it appears, never sent to anyone through the mail and were instead collected and later carefully catalogued, as souvenirs, perhaps as a means of remembering the many places visited.
One day during the spring of 2020, with COVID's arrival, and the consequences of suddenly spending so much time at home (and, importantly, of not traveling), he began sorting through the box of postcards. Looking closely at those that were particularly striking or strange, often oddly beautiful, he was drawn to how so many of the colorful pictures vividly spoke of other times, other places.
At about the same period that he was rediscovering these postcards, the author happened upon (largely by accident) ways in which small fragments from a copy of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past(shredded for another project that he was working on) could be provocatively placed directly on the postcards, glued into the image.
As a kind of poetically clandestine caption, or as a fissuring mark of dislocating intervention, Proust's broken lines of language were suddenly seen as if commenting upon their estranged new setting. There, these words of remembrance were now newly remembering, onto the postcard's photographic surface, into its space of things past, "where thinking," as Walter Benjamin noted of photography, "suddenly stops in a constellation saturated with tensions."
Over time, the postcard project developed and grew, offering even a means of imaginative travel (in time, in place), while also allowing a collaborative engagement with the author's father, with Proustian memory, of the father's own past, the author's own present, and of their own time together, and apart.
