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Eros & Thanatos

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I believe this is the fourth volume of Duane Michael's work to be published by Twin Palms. This relationship has provided Michaels with a well-deserved vehicle for his creativity. If Alan Ginsberg is the quintessential gay poet, drawing on his sexuality when needed, but never letting his work be overwhelmed by it. Then Michaels holds the same position in the world of light.

"Eros & Thanatos" is a combination of verse and photography that probes love and its mortality, seeking wisdom, and, of course, peace. The metaphysical nature of its theme is echoed in the artist's choices of printing styles and manipulations. Often there is a sense of 'looking through a glass darkly," at some distant hermetic time. The images are dark, with careful use of composition and focus. Many pages are black which makes the images alternate between leaping off the page to floating delicately beneath it.

Michaels use of male models works perfectly for this setting. There is nothing to offend here, the models have a quiet beauty and sensuality that blends with, rather than intrudes upon the images. This allows Michaels to escape from the sometimes cliche-ridden atmospherics of the female figure, and leaves his innovation undiluted.

The poetry that frames the images is surprising. Michaels' writing is misleadingly primitive, lacking in the slick polish that contemporary criticism seems to prefer. Yet, the words and phrases themselves are rich in content, and touch on the myriad forms that love can experience death. Loss, betrayal and grief all make their appearance and are expressed openly. Nor is this mere expostulation. Instead, Michaels has invited us to share some of his own experiences.

The final poem is an homage to Paul Cadmus, an important American painter, who, like Michaels, has shared his homosexuality in his art. Indeed, a study of their images shows many common threads and a shared sense of lighting and imagery.

Twin Palms production qualities are, as usual, immaculate, with much attention paid to the tonal quality of the images. I am reviewing from the limitied edition, which includes a fine slipcase. Other than that, and the signature page, there is no difference from the regular edition.

Duane Michals' book Eros and Thanatos is a beautiful product. Michals combines poems and photography in a way that is not sentimental and seems fresh. The reason for this fresh view on a format that has been repeated by others, is that his photography is very direct with minimal manipulation of the setting and models; his poems are not polished but rather straight-forward rhymes that seem familiar, as if you found them in your own diary.

The photos and poems explore the love of human life and the creeping sensation of approaching death. Sometimes the poems become prose as "Death was not invented just for me alone. Armies of armies have proceeded me, marching into the shadows, not once turning back to look, singing their songs until their sounds become a whisper, and the whispers becomes a silence". The pensive handsome young male, sometimes nude, sometimes in costume, runs throughout the book. The young male is shown fully aware of his life force while simultaneously aware of the distant call of forces that will one day draw that life away. One of my favorite photographs and prose poems is a photograph of a beautiful nude young man, wrapped in thin cotton sheets, laying on a mattress on the floor with the phrase: "The father prepares his dead son for burial. He washes his body slowly, deliberately,looking hard at him for the last time. He touches him with oil, carefully as if not to awaken him. The father leans to his ear and whispers something. He wraps him in white cotton like a child asleep and embraces him. Then the father begins to quiver with grief, and the vibration of his movement becomes a sound, like a deep moan and grows louder and louder, into a terrible shout of anguish." Michals knows death well to have written this. Another photograph shows a young male holding a photograph to his face in an act of quite grief. The prose says "Only one person could console him, and he was the one mourned." Michals knows mourning well.

The theme of the book is captured in a wonderful photograph of a strong young man, holding a candle, bare chested with the prose "Eros, that dazzling sun, attracts to its light, and burns us in the consumation of our desires. Thanatos, that enigmatic moon, pulls us inevitably to its shores like the tide."

Another series of photos shows a nude boxer in a fighting pose and then in a pensive pose looking at sea shells with the prose "But most of all, in my bodies deepest consciousness is the memory of touching you."

The book ends with a wonderful self portrait of Michals and a touching poem on his own mortality. The strength of Michals lies in his transparent vulnerable willingness to reveal himself in the poems and photographs with a sincere directness free of artifice and over-intellectualism. This book is a lovely statement of his philosophy and vision.