i was looking at the environment like william eggleston after watching william eggleston in the real world last night. it's a good documentary. he's mostly silent and i wonder how much his silence is organic to the way he views the world and responds with pictures. he says it's not about words, and i can see that, but also he seems haunted by years of alcohol and brain erosion. there's a scene near the end with his drinking buddy who said she would be dead within ten years. they were listening to roy orbison's in the real world. they're drunk and dreamy, and saying how lucky they are- it doesn't happen to everyone. but the music is too loud and he seems sad. it feels like a room at the end of the world, and that's how his photographs seem to me, reminding me of myself, how i drank and hungover went on expeditions to catch fragments on film and both stop and edit and carry them with me. i understand why they say take about photographs, you take them out of the world into the way you see the world, as consolation. i felt watching him that there's a peace in the photos that is only there, and only for the moment of looking, and that the objects don't matter, or the words. but there are a lot of words unsaid, and i felt sad watching him gleaning pictures like a ghost moving about gathering ghostly remnants of passage, of a passing world. 
eggleston said "i am at war with the obvious", which sounds strange to me, but in the essay that comes with the film it says he was at war with himself. i think that's what alcoholism is. and then the photos seem like vestiges, parts of an alien world culled by an alienated man.

In dreams we do so many things
We set aside the rules we know
And fly above the world so high
In great and shining rings

If only we could always live in dreams
If only we could make of life
What, in dreams, it seems

But in the real world
We must say real goodbyes
No matter if the love will live
It will never die

In the real world
There are things that we can't change
And endings come to us
In ways that we can't rearrange

I love you, and you love me
But sometimes we must let it be
In the real world
In the real world

When we were dreaming heart to heart
I wish that we had stayed right there
For when the dreamers do awake
The dreams do disappear

If only we could always live in dreams
If only we could make of life
what, in dreams, it seems

But in the real world
There are things that we can't change
And endings come to us
In ways that we can't rearrange

I love you, and you love me
But sometimes we must let it be
In the real world
In the real world