“How much do you love me?” asks a girl in Haruki Murakami‘s very short, short story (see below). The boy responds, not by gathering her to his arms, not with the fidelity of his kiss, but with the only other thing commensurate to love’s interminable estates: the measure of his own loneliness.
“How much do you love me?” she asks. “As much as a train whistle in the night,” he says.
It’s not an answer to “how much?”; it’s not even an image. It’s just the faint hint of something other than nothing. But even so thin an apparition can sometimes restrain the ill effects of loneliness: the depression, the anxiety. I’m just as content as the boy to call that sense of reprieve “love,” inspired, as it is, by something beyond himself. But the word doesn’t really matter. What measure do you give to that which stalls, however briefly, hopelessness and desolation?
If we feel a similar complexity at work in the photographs of Philip LePage, it may be due to LePage’s own fascination with Murakami’s story. LePage’s series, “Still,” unfolds in the aftermath of a kiss that, in reality, “never happened.” Call it a fantasy, call it a dream, or call it every kiss that has ever happened, distilled as archetype. Whatever the case may be, the story loses none of its emotional credibility as, image by image, we’re reminded (as the poet Wallace Stevens put it) of our own “Grievings in loneliness or unsubdued / Elations when the forest blooms; gusty / Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; / All pleasures and all pains . . .”
“Still” suggests immobility, as in stillness, and its opposite, as in “ongoing.” An impasse? Maybe. “How much do you love me?” Some questions are so fatally human, so suffused with yearning, that only the question ever survives the response.
But it’s the third meaning of “still” that brings LePage and Murakami together, and that’s the persistent notion that things could be otherwise—as in, “and yet.” The photographs in this series tremble in that hopeful space between the how-much of love and the too-much of loneliness.