I wanted to know what the grain in a photograph is, a film photograph, knowing or suspecting already that it is caused by low light, or rather light having gone somewhere else, beyond the frame, which is a place that we, viewing this image, cannot know, but guess, and in that sense much like the afterlife, if you believe in the afterlife, which, despite stubborn superstitions, I do not, or like the room you construct in your mind, having heard the voice on the tape (the tape it no longer, usually, is) and the way it echoes back what must be walls, and furniture, and the sort. Grain in a photograph presents an optical texture: your eye, truly, might feel to you as if it brushes against it, and the larger a photograph becomes, the more grain appears, or seems to appear, unless it is a digital photograph (as often, and really most often, now, it is), where it is the pixels that suffer from a lack of light, the noise of which can resemble but is not the same as film grain. I looked at the photograph and I wanted …