Alan Pittman. March 22, 2014. A portrait of Jesus hangs near the bell-tower rope in one of the classrooms at Valley Grove Methodist Church, Charleston, Kanawha County, West Virginia.
As I page through all the photographs for West Virginia I stop at one with the sort of sunlight I know. The sheers are in a living room that I know, and the white wood chair is my white wood chair. I know that picture of Jesus in a robe. The benevolence of holding a lamb. He stands among sheep that crowd and follow him. I know the elements of this photograph, and I know the symmetry. I’m drawn to them. But it is the hanging cord that makes me shudder. It’s a rope for a church bell, soft and unfrayed with a trim tassel, but honestly it is awful in its off-centeredness and the way it ends in the top third of the photograph. The rope lacks a symmetrical twin. Its darkness interrupts the light from the windows. I think of it as malevolent. It immediately takes me to what must be in the back of my mind. A hanging. A hanging of some kind, either self-inflicted or as I write it just now a hanging inflicted by someone else. But the rope is quite slender. It could not cause that much damage to another person. Surely. A female, though. It could have hung a slender female. The tensions in this photograph are many. The benevolence matched with the suggestion of malevolence, and the symmetry matched with the sole dissymmetry of the rope. What I know to be true is matched with what is unknown. There is anxiety. I struggle with what I know compared to what I want to be.
Mary Ann Bragg. Provincetown, Massachusetts.
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