Solecistic spine splitting spreads? What in my alliteration obsessed head am I getting at? Am I out of my gourd?!?!
If you can bear with me for a moment or three I’ll get to that. But first, by way of preamble, I’d like you to flashback with me…
Since its first wobbly steps this esoteric adventure has offered a sort of “midlife inside out” perspective. A lyric look under the hood of middle age. For newcomers, the early vision was an introspective look at the transition from my 30s to my 40s. Too early for a midlife crisis, you say? Perhaps.
So I decided that it wasn’t a midlife crisis. But it was a time of anxiety and reckoning and resolutions. It was a time that prompted me to really assess what was important to me, and why it was important to me. It was a time to realign my lifestyle with my values and ambitions. It was a time to accept that I needed to change in some important ways. And it was a time that didn’t come and go as quickly as I had anticipated. As quickly as I had hoped.
I started documenting my process at 40×41.com during my 39th year, chronicling the ominous advance of my 40th birthday. I defined the end game as 41. Get this meditative midlife makeover done!
But my 41st came and went without delivering the clarity and closure I longed for. So I kept at it.
I revised and adapted some of my visual and verbal poems from the blog into a book called 40×41: Midlife Crisis Postponed. It was a surprisingly rewarding experience. Emancipating even. As if publicly owning the awkward but increasingly meaningful transition gave me freedom and courage
- by virtue of shrugging off the fact that I wasn’t quite myself;
- by acknowledging challenges and disapointments and setbacks and a few somewhat shallow aspirations;
- by proclaiming lofty hopes without hedging against the risk of failure;
- by conceding that middle age — however you define it and even absent the proverbial midlife crisis — introduces a parade of challenges psychologically akin the adolescence;
- and by deciding that I would do everything in my power to embrace midlife as an opportunity for creativity and growth and revitalization and healthiness and happiness.
I’ve revisited many of those poems on this blog since publishing 40×41: Midlife Crisis Postponed, and many of the images accompany (or sometimes illustrate) earlier posts. In the gallery below you can see the the black-and-white images that are included in the book but that did not previously appear on the blog, at least not in their final ink-on-paper format that you can witness below.
Gallery: Spine Splitting Spreads
Alright, you’ve made it to the good stuff, thirteen lucky solecistic spine splitting spreads. These are black and white photographs taken from the book, randomly cropped snapshots that take you into the book a bit like a voyeur sneaking a peak over a shoulder. The result is a sort of digital collage. A sort of combinatorial creativity that exists somewhere between documentary and collage. Maybe?
Thanks for taking a look. Images of images. Hope you get the chance to hold the book in your hand. Old school. Black ink. White paper. A spine that splits if you open it wide enough to observe the full spread. Analog.