Luca never told us where we were going. We were told to pack a bag and that we’d be back in a few days. The ferry rolled and rollicked for eight hours. I am not nautical. In fact, I get nauseous on the moving walkway in the airport, so by the time I reached Olbia, I felt inside out. And by the time we reached Mamoiada, up endless switchback roads (ideal for kidnappers) I had no insides left. I was so unmoored, I remember drifting up the grey dripping streets, not just not knowing what I was doing here, but not knowing who I was. Then, out of the early morning mist, came men in black masks, covered in sheep hides and dozens of heavy bells, dancing, stonefaced, creating an incapacitating rhythm by jumping simultaneously. They’d appear in a small, irregular piazza of damp grey concrete and dance back and forth with jolting movements so out gamut of the distinct domestic pace of any Mediterranean mountain village that they felt like death throes, throwing off medieval terror. I’m from small towns in upstate New York and Massachusetts. We may have had witch trials and headless horsemen, but mostly our mythology stays on the page. It was often hard to believe my eyes. My delirium was aided by the dozens of glasses of homemade wine every grandmother poured into me (I was told it was rude to say no). By the time we were pushed through a steel door into a family’s courtyard, where a sheep’s stomach was being pounded in a cauldron of boiling blood, I gave up trying to remember the world before this moment, and succumbed to the vision. Whatever was in front of me, was what was.

When I was sixteen, I walked into a douglas fir clad A-frame in the New England countryside, to attend the First Church of Fun.  This was an LSD-taking affair organized by a psychedelic prankster named John Dwork. The house was wired for sound and lit with all sorts of strange effects. The very high-quality, liquid LSD they’d brought had spilled on a paper towel, so no one knew exactly how much we were taking. I chewed my two-inch square of Bounty and waited for something to happen. The next thing I really remember is waking up in my friend’s house back in town, wrapped in a sheet. Over the next months (and continuously to this day) I pieced together what had happened, feeling empty, not spiritually empty, but scraped out like a jam jar. There’d been something with looking in a mirror (a rookie psychonaut’s mistake.) Then there was some bit where if I reversed all of my bodily functions, I would become the messiah. Some cleanup ensued.  According to my friend, at one point I walked up to the main shaman and announced, “I am God. You are the universe,” and bit him very hard, drawing blood.  For about two weeks, I drove around bottomlessly grey New England listening to the soundtrack of the movie, Paris, Texas on a wavering cassette unsure what was what.

I never took LSD again. And I’ve never stopped knowing that nothing is what it seems. When the critics start bonking their noggins about whether photographs are real, and what they owe the world for their depictions of the truth, I give my best archaic smile, lift my left eyebrow and wait for the conversation to be over, like at a holiday dinner with vaguely fascist relatives. There is no way that anything is truly true. What you see and what I see are different. What you see by letting the saccadic movements of your eyes off the chain of focusing is different from one millisecond to another. Look at the picture on your passport. Is that you? Is the you that stood there in that photographer’s studio (maybe in the back of a farmacia) the same you who woke up this morning in the arms of your lover, years later?  On the other hand, it is in the nature of the camera to entirely believe whatever is right in front of it. The camera is a total convert to whatever religion is being discussed, is totally in love with whatever pretty boy is walking down the street right now, having entirely forgotten about the last gangly 35. Everything the camera sees is a hallucination, overwriting and outhowling whatever came before. And every photographer is looking for that hallucination, for that sense that the flux and flow of the world might leap into a picture frame and announce it means something significant. The photographer suddenly stops on the street, gazing off at something you can’t see. She kneels down on the wet ground and watches a puddle. She can’t stop staring at a distant flutter in the trees. Maybe it’s a magpie.

The third time I visited Sardinia, I hadn’t left my country in two years of pandemic lockdown. I flew across the ocean in a mask so uncomfortable no Ambien could knock me out. After so many months of seeing people only outside I felt like a sardine intentionally leaving its family for a cramped, oily can. I was driven up to Gavoi, to an utterly empty hotel next to the Lago di Gusana, and as I lay down to try and sleep, the room began to rumble. Sardinia, I had read, is an “earthquakeless” place, so I rushed out onto the balcony, only to see an enormous yellow plane lowering toward the lake as delicately as a soap bubble. The plane skimmed the water’s surface, picked up a load of water and flew up again, releasing it in a hazy spray. Apparently Sardinia does have forest fires. I was devastated that I’d missed photographing it, but it circled around for another try, and did it over and over. Sleepless, but certain that I’d have no trouble hallucinating my way through Sardinia, I walked the five winding kilometers to Gavoi and the Photo Solstice, where I met the students I would watch opening their first, second, and third eyes to hallucinatory power of this magical land’s impossible images.

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