LESLIE HICKEY // www.lesliehickey.com

Three quotes from the appendix in Woman Pissing by Elizabeth Cooperman titled "Discarded Epigraphs":

“I had no idea of what to expect, who was doing what, who was alive and who dead: the years in between were a chasm of darkness between me and a brilliantly floodlit corner of my memory.” 110

“In a way, her strangeness, her naïveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.” 121

“Americans don’t just have cultural, mass amnesia; we fear we have cultural Alzheimer’s.” 327

"In Pliny’s time, Kora’s act of tracing may have been overshadowed, as it were, with the cluster of associations swirling around the word eidolon, which, according to Hagi Kenaan, 'held together the symbolic connection among images, shadows, phantom phenomena, apparitions of the dead, and dreams'."

“The generations of grudge, courage, forbearance, and surprise generosity: everything a human being might call the story happens outside his photos’ frame. Inside the frame, through hundreds of revolving seasons, there is only that solo tree, its fissured bark spiraling upward into early middle age, growing at the speed of wood.” 16

“A portrait not only documents the likeness of someone at a particular time in a particular place, but it also records the photographer and model’s relationship to one another in that moment. Their combined energies are projected and preserved. The most captivating portraits contain an energy that is palpable—an intense desire or an active and revealing awkwardness that peels off a surface layer to show something raw underneath. We can change dramatically in the presence of another person. Sometimes, we see ourselves in them, and they in turn, see themselves in us: we become mirrors.” 137

“Do other organisms experience pleasure and desire? Do they respond to beauty? Western science has resisted the idea, and humans like to refer to our capacity for art as evidence of our sophistication and exceptionalism. Charles Darwin, struggling to understand the role of seemingly superfluous beauty within his theory of natural selection, wrote, ‘The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!’ All adaptations, he thought, should provide a species with a better chance of overall survival, but peacocks’ dramatic feathers make them easier targets for predators and limit their ability to fly—a phenomenon that scientists now call ‘arbitrary’ beauty. Arbitrary beauty does not necessarily protect animals or make them better hunters or help their organs function more efficiently. Such beauty, it would seem, is for beauty’s sake alone.” 119