The Fig Tree Is Still There

Inkjet print, silver gelatin print, video loop, 3:52  min

Sylvia Plath wrote more eloquently than I ever could about the weight of life’s choices. She compared them to a fig tree heavy with fruit, each fig representing a different possible future. One held a husband, children, and a happy home; another, a famous artist; another, a brilliant teacher; others contained strange lovers and stranger professions, so many possibilities that the tree could barely bear their weight.

Plath wrote: “I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”*

Institutionalization is a difficult word. I’ve always resisted its meaning, until it seemed that resistance became me, and I became it. I don’t choose, and I don’t institutionalize my choices, neither here nor there. It’s like the flickering motion of a stretched thread, almost invisible but held with great effort. What if I had chosen, from here to there, not the other way around? If I were not myself, I’d be someone else, less questioning, further from who I am.

I photograph my sisters and myself as parallel versions of womanhood, different bodies in different times. The female body matters to me. It’s not just a cultural symbol, but a raw form that allows for the creation of tension and balance.

I unsettle it, re-balance, stretch. I stay just a moment longer in the space before the choice. I try to assert control in places where there is none, to hold together opposing forces without falling apart. Not just to survive, but to be present in the indecision. To anchor feeling in the physical world, to make it into matter, into an image, into action. In that space between the moment before and the moment after, I find infinite focus. A pause.

*Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, trans. Ortal Ericha, Hakursa/Modan Publishing, May 2019.