Art & Photography

To Be as Aware and Alone as Can Be — Naturally

February 18, 2022 by John 7 Comments

[Image: “Sedona: Leaf and Shoe,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I’d titled the image before realizing it actually depicts two leaves — the obvious one, and the ageing, deteriorated thing up there in the northwest quadrant — which maybe makes the whole thing more poignant, I dunno. I certainly didn’t mean it as a comment on the shoe-wearer’s age and deterioration!]

One of whiskey river’s offerings in the last week was a poem whose ostensible subject might have been familiar to romanticized-nature poets like Wordsworth: the multi-sensory beauties of the natural world. Yet there’s also something distinctly modern about it — something about the natural world as it could be regarded particularly “nowadays,” immersed in a global pandemic and buffeted by techno-socio-political turmoil:

The End of The World
“We’re going,” they said, “to the end of the world.”
So they stopped the car where the river curled,
And we scrambled down beneath the bridge
On the gravel track of a narrow ridge.
We tramped for miles on a wooded walk
Where dog-hobble grew on its twisted stalk.
Then we stopped to rest on the pine-needle floor
While two ospreys watched from an oak by the shore.
We came to a bend, where the river grew wide
And green mountains rose on the opposite side.
My guides moved back. I stood alone,
As the current streaked over smooth flat stone.
Shelf by stone shelf the river fell.
The white water goosetailed with eddying swell.
Faster and louder the current dropped
Till it reached a cliff, and the trail stopped.
I stood at the edge where the mist ascended,
My journey done where the world ended.
I looked downstream. There was nothing but sky,
The sound of the water, and the water’s reply.

(Dana Gioia [source])

Oh, sure, there’s a mention of a car. But that’s not the modern touch I’m thinking of. I’m thinking more of the sensibility: a progression — from being with others to being by oneself, from a shared to a personal experience. But notice, too, the touch of an ancient tradition: if it were truly modern, that focus on the personal would force an observation on the self. (Y’know, like, “What does this all say about me?”) Instead, Gioia’s poem regards — very obliquely — a self only in a context of nature… as an elementary particle within a molecule, perhaps.

It reminds me of this (not from whiskey river, although it possibly could have been):

Let us change our way of thinking and our way of looking. We have to realize that silence comes from our heart and not from the absence of talk. Sitting down to eat your lunch may be an opportunity for you to enjoy silence; though others may be speaking, it’s possible for you to be very silent inside… Being alone does not mean there is no one around you.
Being alone means you are established firmly in the here and the now and you become aware of what is happening in the present moment. You use your mindfulness to become aware of every feeling, every perception you have. You’re aware of what’s happening around you in the sangha, but you’re always with yourself, you don’t lose yourself. That’s the Buddha’s definition of the ideal practice of solitude: not to be caught in the past or carried away by the future, but always to be here, body and mind united, aware of what is happening in the present moment. That is real solitude.

(Thich Nhat Hanh [source])

Always with yourself, aware of what is happening but not really aware of your self as such. Real solitude. And a real comfort.

By the way, for anyone who might be wondering: the cataract removal surgery in my right eye went just fine. The only real hitch (aside from — surprise! — my elevated blood pressure): the doctor could not use his beloved femtosecond laser, and had to resort, after all, to the good old manually wielded scalpel. But the eye is fine — presumably all but healed. (Next week I meet with him for the last time about the surgery, and also probably to discuss a follow-up surgery in the left eye, sometime in the next few weeks.)

As you may know, I was quite nervous about how or even whether I’d be able to understand the voices of any of the attending medicos. As it happens, they were all very good about either wearing clear plastic shields or simply tugging their masks out of the way, so I could see their mouths as they talked. But… Well, I’m not sure how to explain this… Picture me lying on my back on a gurney or surgical bed-type thing, looking up. Positioned at the top of my head is the surgeon; to the right and left, nurses or other aides. So from my perspective, none of their mouths were right-side-up. It turns out that I can’t lip-read a mouth that’s turned sideways, and can do so for an upside-down mouth only with great difficulty.

There’s always something, as they say. (Only I can’t hear them when they say it sideways.)

Straddling the Margin Between Art and Life

February 11, 2022 by John 1 Comment

[Image: “Khamir,” by John E. Simpson — one of my #jes_storypix series on Instagram, in which generally heavily edited photos of “real life” are used to illustrate imagined narratives. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) The caption: “Khamir had been staring at his phone for what felt like an hour. He couldn’t believe she hadn’t called yet, couldn’t believe she’d stoop to such a… a betrayal. A lazy betrayal at that! She knew how much he depended on her, needed her. Now the whole thing had fallen apart… Blinking back bitter tears, he finally punched in their private number, held the phone to his ear. When her voicemail picked up, he spoke rapidly: ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘I’ll call off the air strike. Happy now?’”]

This week, whiskey river points us (in the case of this quotation) in the direction of an old, real-world debate:

Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames]
I am signaling you through the flames.
The North Pole is not where it used to be.
Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.
Civilization self-destructs.
Nemesis is knocking at the door.
What are poets for, in such an age?
What is the use of poetry?
The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.
If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.
You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words…

(Lawrence Ferlinghetti [source])

Maybe it’s not so much a debate as an assertion, or maybe even just a forceful suggestion: that in order to accomplish sweeping societal change, the poets must lead the charge. (References to poetry really may mean art in general, but I’ll stick to Ferlinghetti’s script for now.) Well, no — maybe “must lead the charge” overstates the case; perhaps the point is more like “Even poets can and should contribute to the revolution.” In those terms, I can buy it — I strongly doubt that anyone but poets themselves looks to the poets for political, social, cultural guidance.

On the other hand, poetry — again, art in general — certainly can and sometimes does help shift the Zeitgeist in one direction or another, especially in concert with other cultural influences. Poetry — especially recent poetry — may suffer a bad rap (it’s too dreamy, too moody, too confessional, too abstract or weird), but it’s difficult to separate what we know of a given age’s general nature from the poetic (etc.) movements it engendered — the Romantics pushing back against the Enlightenment, the Beats excavating the hollows under the postwar-US bourgeois civilization, and I guess even the Zen poets’ and artists’ fascination with nature at a time when Japan was ruled by warlords…

Calling the 2020s something like The Pandemic Age — I don’t know, a bit premature, yes? (Together with everything else — climate change, political upheaval, economic crises, and so on — in my worst moods I sometimes fear we’re seeing The Last Age.) But I wonder what the art of now will look like in the rearview mirror, decades hence. What — of early 21st-century neuroses, preconceptions, perspectives, emotional states — what will linger in human consciousness of what, at this point in history, it means to be human? What will poetry and the other arts have, y’know, wrought in the meantime?

The past year has rewarded me with, among other things, a burst of reading, both fiction and non-fiction. When I was young, as I remember those years anyhow, I read constantly. But over time it became a habit experienced in hindsight rather than in a given moment: a book, even a short one, might take me two or three weeks to finish. My reading took place only in a blurry sort of half-hour or so each night as I descended into sleep, and that was it.

One book I read last summer was a 2014 novella called Sleep Donation, by Karen Russell. It posits a world in which the United States suffers a plague (!) — one of insomnia. The ailment becomes so widespread that an entrepreneur has developed a means to transfer excess sleep from those who get through the night without difficulty to those who lie awake staring into the dark. The most highly valued donors, of course, are those who sleep without interruption… and without nightmares.

The system works pretty well, except — well, how do you know if someone has awful nightmares? (You ask them.) And if insomnia, and nightmares, can be passed around like a virus, what happens when a donor with a godawful recurring and communicable nightmare either doesn’t know it, or chooses for whatever reason to disguise the fact?

Meet Donor Y:

“Donor Y” walked into a sleep bank in San Diego and asked to register. It was his first time donating sleep. According to his file, he is a forty-two-year-old white male, five feet seven, 189 pounds, 128/67 blood pressure, no sexual partners sharing the bed with him, no children. He checked no on all the disqualifying boxes: Sleep apnea: no. Sleepwalking: no. He was next handed the CDC alphabetized list of all three hundred known contagious nightmares —

Abomination, horned

Ambulance, frozen yellow siren

Anthill, no queen

Ants, flesh-eating

Aorta, burst

Asteroid, green

Attic, grandmother’s ghost

Attic, padlocked toy chest

Avalanche, death of self

Avalanche, death of spouse

Avalanche, live burial

Et cetera. Donor Y did not check a single box.

(Karen Russell [source])

Donor Y’s sleep donation has terrible consequences both foreseeable and surprising. (For instance, people who “catch” his nightmare often choose to give up sleep entirely rather than endure it again, becoming amphetamine-dependent… and, of course, they eventually go mad and die.)

By posting this excerpt along with whiskey river‘s, I don’t mean to suggest that Lawrence Ferlinghetti had science fiction anywhere on his radar when composing “I am signaling you through the flames.” But yeah: good science fiction always says at least as much about the author’s time as it does about the future or the past. When Sleep Donation came out, nobody had ye heard of COVID-19, but even a casual reading of the book could’ve told an extraterrestrial being some valuable lessons about human behavior in such an event.

A Worldview Shaped by Others’ Eyes and Ears

January 21, 2022 by John 5 Comments

[Image: “The Curse of Milhaven,” by Elias Ruiz Monserrat. (Found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you very much!)]

Like many (most? all?) people, at least those influenced by Western culture and values, I go back and forth in my general outlook: Things are so bad, as opposed to Things aren’t as bad as they seem. I’ve been kept awake at night both by crippling, flailing despair and by excited anticipation. But also like many people, I tend to occupy one end of the continuum vs. the other. And for me, the world is generally happier than not.

Many times over the years, I’ve thought about why this might (or might not) be so: why do we favor one vs. the other? The thought experiment that finally nudged me towards an answer was to imagine myself born into a world with no other people at all. (Yes, yes, I know: if there’d never been any other people, I couldn’t have been born at all. Repeat after me: thought experiment.) In such a world, would I — or anyone — tend to be more one than the other?

Last week, as though reading my mind on the subject, whiskey river offered me this:

For when cynicism becomes the default language, playfulness and invention become impossible. Cynicism scours through a culture like bleach, wiping out millions of small, seedling ideas. Cynicism means your automatic answer becomes “No.” Cynicism means you presume everything will end in disappointment. And this is, ultimately, why anyone becomes cynical. Because they are scared of disappointment. Because they are scared someone will take advantage of them. Because they are fearful their innocence will be used against them — that when they run around gleefully trying to cram the whole world in their mouth, someone will try to poison them.

(Caitlin Moran [source])

Suppose I pose to myself a question: what is this passage about? The answer might unfold like this:

Oh, surely it’s about cynicism… No, wait, it’s actually about cynics — people afflicted with cynicism… and it’s about innocence, and fear, and…

But that doesn’t seem right. Or not complete, anyhow…

And then I got to thinking about Charles Foster’s Being a Beast, the book which I mentioned in last week’s Friday post. In particular, I thought about the chapter in which Foster tries his damnedest to “be” a badger; here, he’s writing about his eventual comfort — his deep satisfaction — with finding himself lying in a Charles Foster-shaped hollow in the earth, about his no longer feeling hemmed in and claustrophobic in such a setting:

…all that swirling atavistic panic slowly cleared. I didn’t hyperventilate if I wasn’t on my actual and metaphorical hind legs, manfully scanning distant vistas and making sense of and plans for the big picture. It was okay to lie in the dark, surrounded by the scratching and humming and thrashing of animals that would one day eat me. From there it was a small enough step not to mind being eaten, and not to mind being in, or getting toward, the state in which one is eaten. And once you’re there, you’re at last a proper ecologist, knowing your place, all ecocolonialism gone. Only then, at the end of a weary and distressing metaphysical road, can you really begin the business of being a badger…
What does the individual badger “hear” as a result of the changing pressures on its tympanum that we choose to call a sound? Strictly speaking, I have no idea. I have no idea what Mozart sounds like to anyone apart from me (and even that sound changes massively with my state of digestion). This isn’t a problem of physiology; it’s the problem of otherness, which we inadequately physiologize as a difficulty in inquiring into the nature of complex central processing. We can’t know that we’re not alone. It is an act of pure faith for me to declare that there are some things I share with my children and my best friends.

(Charles Foster [source et seq.])

Back to my thought experiment: had I been the only human ever on the planet, I would never have known cynicism. Fear, sure; desperation even, of course. (Never having known another person, I doubt that bitterness would have ever occurred to me.) But cynicism (like envy, jealousy, and so on) — that requires an Other. It’s a response not to the way the world is, but to the way people are in the world.

And yet it’s not the only response possible to a world shared with others, as Foster seems to be saying. Once we get to know the others, we can choose to like them, to not like them, to be indifferent to them. If we try hard enough, we can even become them, to a limited extent. But to be cynical about them is no more than a glib prediction of their behavior and its effects on oneself. It’s a vow, furthermore, never again to be surprised.

I think I’ll choose surprise, thanks all the same!

To Know the Unknowable Other

January 14, 2022 by John 6 Comments

[Untitled image by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) The photo’s caption on Instagram read: “The end-of-year holidays are a time for families to draw together and, as families will, poke one another to the point of discomfort”… Now I’m thinking I should entitle it, “Poking the Unknowable.”]

This week, whiskey river reminded us (via its characteristically impeccable curatorship of others’ words) that (a) this is a very weird time to be traveling, but also that (b) aside from current travels, just the memory of past ones feels a little alien — even to those who haven’t been on the road:

But time has got very slippery these days. Days, weeks, months and years merge into one another. Images will pop up of work trips to the US, or Australia in the Photos widget on my phone and not only will I struggle to remember when the trip happened, the very fact that it did is becoming increasingly unreal.
All I know with any certainty is that I get up, stuff happens, and I go to sleep, over and over again. The past is a dream that I have here and now, the future a fantasy that likewise is a figment of my imagination that I experience here and now.

(Euan Semple [source])

The book I’m reading now, too, feels rather alien, exactly because it records an itinerary — several of them — formerly unimaginable to me. The author, Charles Foster, is a British naturalist; the book itself, Being a Beast, is predictably therefore about the natural world. But it’s “about” the natural world in the sense (as the title suggests) of inhabiting the natural world — not as a human, striding about on two legs and occasionally crouching down to observe wildlife, patronizingly, as though doing the creatures a favor. No: Foster set out to live the daily lives of the animals he discusses — badgers, otters, foxes, red deer, and swifts.

Like most journeys, Foster’s — into the heads of the creatures he’s curious about — mix aspirations satisfied with intentions foiled, plans (always for good outcomes) with surprises (disappointing mixed with good). (I’m only about halfway through the book so far, but have not yet encountered any disasters or tragedies. Foster’s a gifted writer, an entertaining eccentric, so perhaps he simply avoids reporting of great and genuine unhappiness.) As a badger, he manages to adjust his sleep cycle — creeping out of his Welsh hillside burrow for nocturnal foraging — and learns to eat worms, to recognize their varieties by their textures and unique slipperiness. As a fox in East End London, he’s awakened by a policeman from his daytime snooze by “under the rhododendrons.” The policeman says:

“Why do you have to sleep here, may I ask?”
“You may indeed ask, but I don’t suppose you’ll like the answer. I’m trying to be a fox, and” (I rushed on, trying to avert my eyes from the torrential hemorrhage of the officer’s residual goodwill) “I want to know what it’s like to listen all day to traffic and to look at ankles and calves rather than at whole people.”
This last observation was a bad, bad mistake. I knew it as soon as it was out…
Uncertainty and workload trumped his instincts, and he told me to “bugger off home, sir” (the italics were powerful on his lips) “and get a life.”
“That,” I said, “is exactly what I’m trying to get.”

Comedy aside, note about this passage that it presents a Janus of alienness — an animal’s face gazing at the human, a human’s at the animal, across a barrier which neither of them can ever actually climb or penetrate. The same barrier, indeed, exists between you and me, or between you and anyone else you have ever encountered — will ever encounter. Foster himself acknowledges this, in a sort of side jaunt into the nature (!) of animal/human consciousness:

The universe I occupy is a creature of my head. It is wholly unique to me. The process of intimacy is the process of becoming better at inviting others in to have a look around. The sensation of loneliness is the crushing acknowledgment that however good you get at giving such invitations no one will be able to see very much at all….
What might it mean for an unconscious creature to dream? Indeed to sleep at all? What’s being lost when “consciousness” is lost? What accompanies the creature into the world beyond the veil? If badgers aren’t conscious in a sense comparable to us, their sleeping smiles and winces are more inscrutable than consciousness itself. I prefer the lesser mystery…
When I experience a pleasurable stimulus, my facial muscles contract in a particular way. When a dog experiences a stimulus that indicates a benefit to the dog that is comparable to the benefit of which my pleasure is an index, its facial muscles contract in a more or less identical way.

And so on.

Being a Beast was published in 2016, well before the coronavirus tide flooded the world. But — in that context, and taken together with Euan Semple’s words above — it’s interesting to note: even when we’re sharing life only with other humans (and some animals, if we’re lucky), those we already “know” intimately, even after a seemingly interminable period of adopting one another’s rhythms as our own, the barriers of consciousness remain. We still live in our separate heads. We may think — fool ourselves into thinking — we know the minds on the other side of the impermeable membrane, because we know the behaviors which (surely?) highlight those minds’ motivations, decisions, and, well, essences. But no: as always, the operative word there is impermeable.

There is no challenge, no mystery at all, in thinking “I know X.” No, what makes each “same” day different, and differently worth living, is always trying to know X: trying, failing, trying again. There’s an inexhaustible source of surprise, delight — and sure, occasional disappointment — to be found on that journey. Maybe, in this small way, we can regard the pandemic as an opportunity we’d never have been offered otherwise, as — gasp — as a blessing?

A Vision of Future Sugar Plums

December 24, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: partial screen capture from a photo of Michael Heizer’s monumental artwork, City, as found via Google Maps.]

Even reliably non-sectarian whiskey river finds itself in a holiday spirit today… although, since it is whiskey river, after all, it carries a bit of a knowing twist:

The Christmas Letter
Wherever you are when you receive this letter
I write to say we are still ourselves
In the same place
And hope you are the same.
The dead have died as you know
And will never get better,
And the children are boys and girls
of their several ages and names.
So in closing I send you our love
And hope to hear from you soon.
There is never a time
Like the present. It lasts forever
Wherever you are. As ever I remain.

(John N. Morris [source])

The Missus and I have followed an annual tradition, every December 23rd for the almost 30 years we’ve been together: we go out for a nice dinner. It’s a tradition with twists of its own, of course; in our case, The Missus never knows where we’re going — I selected the venue, make the reservation, and drive us to the place. (When we lived in North Florida, as we did until this year, I generally took a roundabout route as well, just to keep her guessing as long as possible.)

This year, as I’ve mentioned, we’re in Las Vegas to spend some time with The Stepson. So this year, he generously offered to drive us to the restaurant and back. As we made our way from his home in the northern fringes of the city to the Las Vegas Strip (the restaurant is actually in a casino), I was struck by a sudden image of the place in, say, 500 years or so… something like the climactic conclusion of Planet of the Apes, say, or like Michael Heizer’s monumental sculpture, City, not far from here in the Nevada desert.

I imagined, see, not just how the landscape might be different, nearly buried. I imagined as well the remnants of human culture after some colossal catastrophe, probably climatic or geological. In the terms offered by John N. Morris’s poem, for instance: what might be the very last Christmas letter composed and distributed by a Las Vegas resident? Will its author know of the onrushing finality? What on earth might such a letter say, as Christmas letters are traditionally practically required to say, about the preceding year? To whom would the letter even be addressed? And so on.

Not exactly the sort of stuff one would expect to have in one’s head on a December 23rd Christmas date, eh? And yet Christmastime in Vegas worked the magic that could be expected of it: covering up the dark thoughts not in sand, but glitter and noise…

Turmoil in the Thing Observed, Serenity in the Observer

December 17, 2021 by John 1 Comment

[Image: “Work Glove and Woodpile (Livingston, NY; October 2021),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

The Missus and I have made it to Las Vegas for several weeks’ year-end downtime, here at the end of Roadtrip 2021. We’ve little idea what’s ahead for us in ’22 (aside from threading our cautious — and a bit nervous — way among more coronavirus mutations). We’ve considered a few further destinations, but thanks to winter weather they are by and large inaccessible to us… for a few months, anyhow.

And really, the big question remains: wither, ultimately, goeth we? Where are we gonna live?

Came across this item yesterday, posted earlier in the week on whiskey river:

I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents, like the themes of one’s life, are borne along during the waking hours, and at their best they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They may be not quite right, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of strange combinations moving about, not necessarily forward, against each other, contrapuntally yet without one central theme. A form of freedom, I’d like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is. That skepticism, too, is something I particularly want to hold onto. With so many dissonances in my life I have learned to prefer being not quite right, out of place.

(Edward Said [source])

Hmm, I thought. He preferred a dissonant life? One of my pet terms for The Missus is, “my personal disruptor” — it sums up her (to me) charming habit of overturning my own best-laid but generally trivial plans with her more impulsive, grand-and-sweeping ones. So yes, I know the pleasures of occasional dissonance. Even so, I find them pleasing in contrast — against a more neutral, conventional backdrop: colorful accents placed on a tweed fabric, say…

Las Vegas (or anyplace like it) will not become our hometown. I know many people live here in stability — in quite-rightness and in-placeness — despite the conventional view of the city as a place where anything can and often does happen, at any time. But I also know myself: freeing the elephant, right?

I couldn’t possibly regard Edward Said’s view of his life as “wrong.” On the contrary, I think he was right in a way: his self seen as “a cluster of flowing currents,” for example. But I don’t think he had to stop there and say, in effect, I choose a dissonant self over a static one. All that noise and clatter and all those free-flowing forms needn’t be participated in to be appreciated. Regardez, s’il vous plait, this morning’s whiskey river meditation — a sort of “on the other hand…” response to the week’s earlier one:

Time for Serenity, Anyone?
I like to live in the sound of water,
in the feel of mountain air. A sharp
reminder hits me: this world is still alive,
it stretches out there shivering toward its own
creation, and I’m part of it. Even my breathing
enters into this elaborate give-and-take,
this bowing to sun and moon. day or night.
winter, summer, storm, still—this tranquil
chaos that seems to be going somewhere.
This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it.
This motionless turmoil, this everything dance.

(William Stafford [source])

On the Road to What Lies Within, by Way of What Lies Without

December 10, 2021 by John 4 Comments

[Image: “Eclipse Crescents,” by Jon D. Anderson. (Found it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) The photo was taken during an eclipse, obviously; the photographer had the camera pointed at the ground, in a filbert orchard — where he caught all the little pinhole-camera-style images of sunlight created by the leaves overhead. My favorite thing about this photo, though, is the scattered greens of fallen leaves and blades of grass: beautiful reality superimposed on the monotone dreamlike nominal subject, as though to remind you where you are.]

On our Roadtrip 2021 mini-adventure, I’ve probably taken thousands of photographs just with my “real” camera (i.e., not counting the — hundreds? thousands? — taken with my phone’s camera). I haven’t done any kind of statistical analysis, but I bet well over 95% of them will never see the light of day, so to speak: “public” exposure here on RAMH, or over on Instagram or (rarely) Facebook. I doubt that I myself will ever go back to look at the unused ones.

About a month ago, the absurdity finally hit me: by far, most of the photos I was setting aside or discarding depicted subjects already publicly available — generally, depicted them better. Consider, for instance, the hundreds I’d taken while touring the interiors of a couple of the Gilded-Age mansions of Newport, Rhode Island. Oh, I’d shot a handful which turned out satisfactorily as photographs, and I’d kept and “promoted” them, so to speak. The rest, though? Why did I take these half-dozen shots of a grand entry hall in The Breakers — you know, the same entry hall depicted in all the postcards and coffee-table books in the gift shop, or even at The Breakers Web site? (Especially considering that flash photography of the interiors is forbidden to the public, but professionals engaged by the governing body may use soft but artificial lighting under controlled circumstances.)

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

So I’ve worked at no longer photographing subjects easily available, in better form, from other sources. Which begs the question: why take photos otherwise? (Note the similarity of this question to the one, “Why write?,” which has obsessed me in the past. For instance, scroll down on this page to the section headed “Background, for Interested Parties.”)

With such thoughts in mind, earlier this week I read the following, on whiskey river of course:

To restore you and myself, I return to my state of garden and shade, cool reality, I hardly exist and if I do exist it’s with delicate care. Surrounding the shade is a teeming, sweaty heat. I’m alive. But I feel I’ve not yet reached my limits, bordering on what? Without limits, the adventure of a dangerous freedom. But I take the risk, I live taking it. I’m full of acacias swaying yellow, and I, who have barely begun my journey, begin it with a sense of tragedy, guessed what lost ocean my life steps will take me to. And crazily I latch onto the corners of myself, my hallucinations suffocate me with their beauty. I am before, I am almost, I am never.

(Clarice Lispector [source])

And a day later, not on whiskey river, I read this:

Song of Ryokan: III
(excerpt)
True, all the seasons have moonlit nights,
But here’s the best night to see the moon.
The hills never so aloft, the streams never so clear,
In the infinite blue of autumn sky flies a disk of light,
Neither light nor gloom is graced with a life of its own.
The moon and the earth are one, and myself one with them.
The boundless sky above, and autumn chill on my skin,
I stroll about low hills, leaning upon my priceless cane.
Quiet night has held firm the flitting dust of the world.
The bright moon alone pours streams of rays all about me.
I mind it not if another like-minded is also admiring it,
Or if the moon deigns to look on others as well as on me.
Each year as autumn comes, the moon will shine as before,
And the world will watch it, will face it, till eternity.
Sermons at Mount Ryozen, lectures in the Vale of Sokei,
Were teachings so precious, the audience needed the moon.
My meditation under the moon lasts till the ripest night.
The stream has hushed its cry, dew lies thick everywhere.
Who, among the moon-viewers tonight, will have the prize?
Who will reflect the purest moon in the lake of his mind?

(Ryokan, translated by Noboyuki Yuasa [source])

I’m still working my way through the answer(s) to the “Why photograph (or write) at all?” questions. But I sense the presence, in these two passages, of something verging on understanding.

In a State of Grace, Where We Can Find It

December 3, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “The Missus in the Temple of Athena (Nashville Parthenon; November, 2021),” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I’ll let my anonymous friend from over the way do the verbal honors solo today; nodding in agreement, I’ll just, well… just point, so to speak.]

From whiskey river:

In a state of grace, one sometimes perceives the deep beauty, hitherto unattainable, of another person. And everything acquires a kind of halo which is not imaginary: it comes from the splendor of the almost mathematical light emanating from people and things. One starts to feel that everything in existence — whether people or things — breathes and exhales the subtle light of energy. The world’s truth is impalpable.

(Clarice Lispector [source])

“Food Is Very Important”

November 26, 2021 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Bark Studies #1,” by John E. Simpson. What is the single most significant feature of the tree depicted in this image? Of everything you see here, what — which crevice, which ridge, which color tone, white or black or gray or sepia tint, which individual pixel — what “counts” as the single most important? Now pretend that what you see here is not just this image, nor even the entire tree itself, but the whole world. Now ask yourself those same questions. Whatever your answer, does your answer hold a lesson within it? If so, is that lesson more important than any other… or than any single pixel in the image?]

Certainly as The Missus and I live out in the world at large, we come across one thing or another which we consider important: noteworthy, appalling, annoying, beautiful, and so on. And we know, at some level, that “importance” isn’t either-or or black-and-white — it’s not the flipside of, say, utter irrelevance. It’s just a point in a continuum, in a context: the context of the moment…

But anyhow, in thinking about that the other day, I came across the following Zen story:

It was the summer of 1971. I was living at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center—the first Zen monastery in America. Its founder and resident teacher was Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen master who had come from Japan to America to teach meditation to Americans, mostly young. One of those young Americans was Robert, well known among us as a nonstop talker and a fervent proselytizer of brown rice as the perfect spiritual food.
One afternoon I came across Suzuki Roshi and Robert in the courtyard, and Robert was, as usual, talking animatedly. “Wouldn’t you agree, Suzuki Roshi, that brown rice is the perfect Zen food? Isn’t it the perfect balance between yin and yang?” The brown rice diet was trendy in those heady counterculture days, and we served it every day in Tassajara’s meditation hall. Suzuki Roshi was unusually accepting of our counterculture ideas, and rarely criticized us. In those days, brown rice was rarely eaten in Japan. White rice was the norm. For all I knew, Suzuki Roshi was eating brown rice for the first time at Tassajara.
“Don’t you think brown rice helps us attain enlightenment?” Robert was saying.
Suzuki Roshi listened to Robert talk on for some time without saying anything. Finally, when Robert paused for breath, Suzuki Roshi said quietly, “Food is very important.”

(Lewis Richmond [source])

I laughed to myself. And then I flipped over to a section in whiskey river’s commonplace book, where the anonymous blogger records some of their favorite (and no, not necessarily the “most important”) quotations and clips among the ones they’ve posted. Like this one:

The process of practice is to see through, not to eliminate, anything to which we are attached. We could have great financial wealth and be unattached to it, or we might have nothing and be very attached to having nothing. Usually, if we have seen through the nature of attachment, we will tend to have fewer possessions, but not necessarily. Most practice gets caught in this area of fiddling with our environment or our minds. “My mind should be quiet.” Our mind doesn’t matter; what matters is nonattachment to the activities of the mind. And our emotions are harmless unless they dominate us (that is, if we are attached to them) – then they create disharmony for everyone. The first problem in practice is to see that we are attached. As we do consistent, patient zazen we begin to know that we are nothing but attachments: they rule our lives.
But we never lose an attachment by saying it has to go. Only as we gain awareness of its true nature does it quietly and imperceptibly wither away; like a sandcastle with waves rolling over, it just smooths out and finally—where is it? What was it?

(Charlotte Joko Beck [source])

“Huh,” I thought. Maybe the whole concept of interestingness masked an unhealthy attachment — a “this, not that” attachment not unlike Robert the monk’s fixation on one type of rice vs. another. And then I kept reading:

First Step
Beginnings
are sometimes foggy.
The path is not always clear.
The end of one begets another.
To begin, put one foot
in front of the other.
Your foot knows where to land,
the one that moves forward first.
Forget about the best foot.
Just put it out there.
Stop traffic if you have to.
Go home if that is where it leads you.
Go back to work
if that is where your foot falls.
You don’t have to
go anywhere
Just rest.
After you step,
take another.
Forget about the weather.
Step
Step again.

(Robin Heerens Lysne [source])

The first step: important, yes. Yet no more important than the step after, which in turn is neither more nor less important than the one preceding or the one following, and ultimately, no step more important than any other…

Our 2021 odyssey, such as it is, will include (I think) another five stops after we fly back to our car at the end of our current two-week break here in Florida. This will put us in Las Vegas in mid-December, as we’ve been hoping… None of those intervening stops were on our bucket list of “must-see” places — they’re just on a more or less straight line west from our car’s current location to Vegas. We expect each stop will, yes, differ from the others. But I’m going to resist assigning them relative importance (ha).

How to Set Aside the Unwanted: Foreground the Diversions

November 12, 2021 by John 3 Comments

[Photograph, more or less untitled, by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) These yellow rubberized mats are visible at many street corners and elsewhere on curbs around the United States, and make curbs less of an obstacle for, e.g., users of wheelchairs. Those little nubs or bumps protruding from the surface? They’re called truncated domes. That term, as well as the color (see below), suggests that the photo’s title should incorporate the words “aureolin,” or perhaps “gamboge,” and “truncation”… and, maybe the concept of, uh, domeness.]

I’ve been trying, with mixed success, to cultivate a frame of mind with which to face my diminishing allotment of years with something like equanimity. The phrase I keep returning to: “No regrets; no resentments.” I have to fight the urge to sample both of those bitter fruits of earlier years, and suspect I’m not alone (although many people seem to linger in the produce aisle over one or the other, squeezing them, sniffing them, and putting them back — over and over). One of the most useful tools for distracting me from these temptations is indulging in my curiosity. As whiskey river offered a few days ago:

I have a friend who speaks of knowledge as an island in a sea of mystery… We dredge up soil from the bed of mystery and build ourselves room to grow. And still the mystery surrounds us. It laps at our shores. It permeates the land. Scratch the surface of knowledge and mystery bubbles up like a spring.

(Chet Raymo [source])

Having caught this at one of the river‘s posts, I glanced at the next day’s, too — to whit:

The day, with all its pain ahead, is yours.
The ceaseless creasing of the morning sea,
the fluttering gamboge cedar leaves allegro,
the rods of the yawning branches trolling the breeze,
the rusted meadows, the wind-whitened grass,
the coos of the stone-colored ground doves on the road,
the echo of benediction on a house—
its rooms of pain, its verandah of remorse
when joy lanced through its open-hearted doors
like a hummingbird out to the garden and pool
in which the sky has fallen. These are all yours,
and pain has made them brighter as absence does
after a death, as the light heals the grass.
And the twig-brown lizard scuttles up its branch
like fingers on the struts of a guitar.

(Derek Walcott [source])

What the hell, I wondered, was “gamboge”? It looked like a typo. It wasn’t italicized — so, all things being equal, I guessed it to be a legitimate English-language word…

And so it is. Gamboge, Wikipedia tells me, is the name of a pigment — “partially transparent deep saffron to mustard yellow… It is the traditional colour used to dye Buddhist monks’ robes.” (The same source, on the word’s etymology: “[it] derives from Gambogia, the Latin word for Cambodia.” Color (haha) me skeptical, but I have a hard time imagining the Romans knew enough of that land to give it a name.) The hue (also called “cobalt yellow”) is popular among artists in either oil or watercolor paints. The problem with the substance traditionally used to produce this color is that it’s not particularly durable; it fades over time. (It’s also somewhat toxic.) So in more recent decades, artists instead turned to an artificial substitute, with a more melodious name: aureolin. Alas, it too is far from perfect — a “defective” paint.

…which led me to a whole string of books by the artist and author named Hilary Page, at whose site I encountered that defective-paint assertion — and further jargon like “PY175, a lemon Benzimidazolone,” and so on. See for example this “web update” of a page in one of her books, including the image shown at right. (Caption: “I had boards of these paint samples in every sunny window in my house to test each paint for lightfastness.”)

And having encountered Ms. Page’s particular expertise, I inadvertently found myself reading about the precursor of Lego building blocks. Some of these are of course a sort of golden color… and — at least in their Lego form, especially the so-called baseplates — also rather suggestive of truncated domes:

Funny how that all works out, eh?

Not really funny, but also worthy of comment: any regrets and resentments I might’ve been harboring when I woke up today are, well, gone.