Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Go Through the Door, and Find (Bring) Your Magic

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[Image: untitled landscape by Ma Yuan (c. 1160-1225); spotted it here This is almost certainly not the painting referred to in the Alan Watts passage below; on the other hand, his “reference,” as though to a specific painting, was only glancing/ambiguous. So we can choose, right?]

From whiskey river:

I live in a world that is completely seamless between the two. Fantasy is the real story. The world in which we live is structured from notions that are completely fabricated; your clothes, your wallet, that we all agree that pieces of paper are worth something. Geography is a complete fabrication. Where does Mexico start and America end? From space, nowhere. We agree to kill each other, to tax each other, to shame each other from notions that are complete fabrications. To me, those are harmful fantasies. Whereas my fantasies are liberating.

(Guillermo Del Toro [source: nothing canonical])

…and:

The Farm When I Was Five

The most magic thing
was the pump in the backyard.
And a dipper to drink from.
For a long time the pump
was as tall as I was
and I used to make it do its magic
even when I wasn’t thirsty.

The sound of the water
coming up from a dark somewhere
was a hollow roaring noise
that broke suddenly loose
and splashed a crystalline miracle
on the darkening cement.

Grandma always said,
“Stop wasting the water!”

I didn’t waste it, Grandma.
There is this poem.

(Grace Butcher [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Where the Poems Come From Now That I Ride a Motorcycle

They don’t come from the sun
so much anymore—
or not from the sun alone
but from he glint of sun on chrome.

And not so much
from the dark roads
as from the unrolling
of the roads with a sound
like wind.

And sometimes now from
the way the quiet stars
blow back behind me
and I have no thought at all
till later.

I notice how everything is changing:
nothing comes from where it used to.
I make decisions at crossroads
I have never seen before.
So does the wind.

The directions we are heading
have not yet even been named.

(Grace Butcher [source])

…and:

We feel, from a Western standpoint, that haiku are unfinished. They are simply titles; first lines of something that could go on to elaborate and express everything. But in this kind of artistry, one leaves the best part unsaid, because the work of the poet is not to impress everybody with how clever he is, and leave them speechless, but to evoke something in the listener. In exactly the same way, the art of the painter–in the tradition of Sung Chinese painting–is to leave something to the beholder’s imagination; hence, there is what is called “one-corner painting.”

A painter like Mahiwon [i.e., Ma Yuan]–or Byon, as he is known in Japanese–is a master of one-corner painting. He indicates a line of hills somewhere near the top, and down at the bottom there is a single drifting boat and a fisherman. This is all there is. The path, as it were, comes to an end in the parsley. To understand this, you have to go back to childhood. Remember how as a child you loved to explore paths and get right down among the stalks of grasses and weeds, to see where it all goes? One of the eternal children’s stories is that you were one day walking along a little lane and discovered a door in a wall that you had never seen before. You opened it, and it led into a magical garden where all the bushes were covered in jewels, and there were marvelous birds and fantastic songs. And you came out because you had to get home in time for dinner, and the next day you looked for that door again but you couldn’t find it anywhere. You knew it was there–it was just between this fence and that fence. But today it isn’t there. And yet somehow it is always there.

So, for every child there is always a kind of funny place that leads to somewhere else, and you don’t figure out exactly where it leads because that would spoil it. You mustn’t know. And all this haiku poetry, and this kind of painting that the Sung artists so marvelously mastered, seeks to evoke that sense of what I would call possibility or potentiality, without actually filling in any details. And that is real magic.

(Alan Watts [source])

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Regarding Incongruity — Baffled, Maybe, But with Eyes Wide Open

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[Image: “Now Hiring Parts,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) For some rumination about the photo, in the context of incongruities, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

Dear Friend
(excerpt)

I become each day more reckless,
too impatient for summer, the unbearable heat,
the calm that comes with it. There are no hills here,
not one, and I’m bored with the stillness

of the yellow field outside my window. And you,
who cannot keep still, who can never
look back, where will you go next?
How will I find you?

Can you feel the world pull
apart, the seams loosen?
What, tell me, will keep it whole,

if not you? if not me?
Send a postcard, picture, tell me
how you’ve been.

(Blas Falconer [source])

…and:

Now, as far as I was concerned, there are two ways of living, and because we’re on a ball in space these were more or less exactly poles apart. The first, accept the world as it is. The world is concrete and considerable, with beauties and flaws both, and both immense, profound and perplexing, and if you can take it as it is and for what it is you’ll all but guarantee an easier path, because it’s a given that acceptance is one of the keys to any kind of contentment. The second, that acceptance is surrender, that there’s a place for it, but that place is somewhere just before your last breath where you say All right then, I have tried and accept that you have lived and loved as best you could, have pushed against every wall, stood up after every disappointment, and until that last moment, you shouldn’t accept anything, you should make things better.

(Niall Williams [source])

—

Not from whiskey river:

Although nobody planned it that way, most of us wind up emerging from adolescence with a deeply nuanced sense of what is real, with shades of gray all over the place. (However, I have known, and probably you have too, reader, a few adults for whom every issue that strikes me as subtle seems to them to be totally black-and-white — no messy shades of gray at all to deal with. That must make life easy!) Actually, to suggest that for most of us life is filled with “shades of gray” is far too simple, because that phrase conjures up the image of a straightforward one-dimensional continuum with many degrees of grayness running between white and black, while in fact the story is much more multidimensional than that.

All of this is disturbing, because the word “real”, like so many words, seems to imply a sharp, clear-cut dichotomy. Surely it ought to be the case that some things simply are real while other things simply are not real. Surely there should be nothing that is partly real — that wouldn’t make sense! And yet, though we try very hard to force the world to match this ideal black-and-white dichotomy, things unfortunately get terribly blurry.

(Douglas R. Hofstadter [source])

…and:

The Festival of Almost Getting There

At the festival of almost getting there
Zeno pokes his head out halfway, asks

directions, half-heartedly, to the train,
admits he’s been riding on the tortoise,

been running after arrows to watch them
stand still. He understands course, path,

way, even relative position (dichotomize,
divide) but motion’s still a figment:

distance halved and halved (split infinity,
twin trajectory) the long, long way, and all

that longing (two-fold, doubled) (moments,
instants, continuous or discrete) for some

unfamiliar end—such unforgiving progress,
portioned, yes, bisected. A half-assed effort?

No, he’s as good as got it. So much struggle
and amends. Sure, we’re goddamned tired of

this much waiting, but look! He’s halfway there.

(Renée Ashley [source])

__________________________

About the photo: The caption to this entry in my #jesstorypix collection on Instagram: “In retrospect, the HR manager at the heavy-equipment retailer decided, the Spring 2021 recruitment campaign had been quite misguided. If only he’d known the psychiatrist residing next door was THE ‘Hannibal Lecter’…”

Most often, I think of puns as “verbal coincidences”: two meanings just happen to collide at an intersection shaped like a single unit of sound. But “getting” a pun also relies on choosing fun over common sense: not doing the possibly difficult work of choosing “rightly” or “wrongly,” but just lazily recognizing the existence of a choice at all: a choice between the superficial “meaning” of an arbitrary passage (word, phrase, sentence) and the, other, generally more interesting and, well, profound and true meaning. Asserting “I don’t get puns” means, in effect, “I recognize the alternatives, but why should I skip between them when I can simply walk?” But taking just such a sprightly and incongruous leap — from word to word, from concept to concept — is the whole point… not just of puns but of any jokes. No?

[Aside: as clever visitors will have noticed, the very first word in this post’s title is a bit of a pun (albeit not an especially sprightly one): (a) “regarding,” in jargon-speak for “concerning the matter of…”? or (b) “regarding,” literally looking at and taking the measure of?]

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RAMH@13: Scrambling After the Damned Hat

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[Image: “Ballcap Tanoura,” by John E. Simpson. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

I’m preparing to head out of town (actually, out of state) for a week, which feels quite momentous. Yes, The Missus and I took a much needed weeklong break in October. But this one feels riskier — more exposed, y’know? — because that trip was a driving trip, just the two of us, to a destination where we’d be around no one at all for all but a few hours, total. For this trip, I’ll be flying to the Northeast US, to visit with several family members. Still no large crowds, except in the three airports I’ll go through… but, well, you get the idea. The main point now: at this early moment in its composition, this is shaping up as an uncharacteristically brief annual meditation on the state of RAMH.

The very first of those annual meditations offered some basic statistics:

  • 365 days; 310 published posts; 1,295 (published) comments…
  • …or a little less than one post a day, and a little over four comments per post.

Let’s see the standings as of now:

  • 4,758 days; 1,610 published posts; 7,084 comments (of which I myself apparently posted over 2,600)…
  • …i.e., about one post every three days, and — still — a little over four comments per post.

It’ can be entertaining, remotely and intellectually, to consider what these statistics might “mean”: for instance, What’s the state of blogging in general, or of this blog’s “popularity” in particular? Why do I blog, and has that reason changed over time, and what does that say about my audience, such as it is? But after 13 years of so much radical change in the context — society and culture, technology, the pandemic — I’m afraid what such statistics “mean” boils down, for me, to approximately, well, nothing at all.

I sometimes get notices from one company or another, alerting me to how I can “leverage” my “platform” by paying more careful attention to SEO, or search-engine optimization. this would basically require me to really sit down and analyze things like how long did visitors remain at the site, what did they look at while here, where did they come here from, and where’d they go next. Or, of course, these companies would be happy to do the analysis for me, and make recommendations for how to improve it all. For a fee. DUH.

Here’s what I’m pretty sure I’ll think of RAMH as of the moment I click the Publish button for this post: First, I know it provides a much-needed rhythm to my week — especially now that I’m free of the metaphorical time clock of a day job, and especially since the COVID-19 (etc.) mess has continued to grind on. That I don’t blog on anywhere near a daily basis is a blessing in this regard: the habit helps me remember which day of the week I’ve awoken to (heh).

For my Friday posts, I’ve settled into a rhythm of three mornings’ activities: (1) reviewing and selecting from the past week’s whiskey river posts, and kind of grope around for a common “theme” among them; (2) locating — from among my own recent reading, or just by looking online for — whatever seems to “go with” the whiskey river theme; and (3) finding an image (usually), a video, or some other media item to head the whole post. Write the image’s caption. I do a bunch of related tasks (proofreading, assigning categories and tags, editing for length if necessary, maybe writing a brief “maxim for nostalgists,” etc. Finalize the title. Click “Publish.” Confirm the post’s automated sharing, as needed/desired, to other social media.

…and that’s all I put into RAMH, every week, for an average total of six to seven hours. Oh, some bits and bobs of blogging creep in — updating WordPress plugins, moderating occasional comments, that sort of thing. But I generally require a real “something in mind” to blog otherwise… usually, something which I’ve been thinking about for a while.

Which leads me to the two other ways I use RAMH — hence what it “means” to me — right now. Neither will surprise you if you’ve been a regular visitor.

  • Writing: I don’t write much here anymore, it’s true. But I also don’t write much of anything at all — nothing “writerly,” essays or fiction or what-not — outside of RAMH these days. I do think about it quite a bit, and in particular I keep thinking I should not (haha) close the book on the novel I once called Grail and, later, Seems to Fit. I have entered (as you may know) a handful of short-fiction writing contests, to no great ongoing effect. But I tend to think of writing successfully, outside of RAMH anyhow, as something I once craved but have lost almost all ambition for. The occasional book review or other one-off post here does keep my hand in.
  • Photography: well, again, you probably know about this. (If not, check out the posts in the “My Photography” category; many of these are only peripherally related — a post might simply include one of my photos, for example — but a reasonable number of them now address specifically one or another photographic technique/project in words (imagine that!).

The next year, RAMH-wise, will be very different from those before it, and I can’t tell you what to expect here at the blog because I don’t know. I’ll have more to say about this over the next couple months, as plans get finalized. For now, though, we will probably be leaving Florida, quite possibly for good, and road-tripping around the US for at least several months. “Homeless,” after a fashion: we’re thinking we can mix short-term rentals and family visits for a few days at a time. During such pauses in movement, sure, I’ll look forward to blogging (and the hope of writing, and photography).

But on a schedule? Beats me!

In any case, thank you for dropping in — and perhaps sticking around — during the (so-far) 13-year-old road trip around my head that Running After My Hat represents.

And thanks especially to The Missus, for her patience with my habit! (Well, I think of it as my routine, but let’s not quibble over word choice.)

_________________________

About the image: You may or may not remember the photo series I did last summer, called “Hat Dance” — mostly just an experiment in lighting a “still”-life subject which also happened to be in motion. (I posted about it, including the five shots I actually used, in July.)

I was so pleased with the results of that test that I tried again, a week or two later, using four or five baseball caps instead of just the two felt Indiana-Jones-style fedoras. The results: less pleasing. (The problems were many, and my time on the day of the shoot was limited.) Still, I found one shot I could do something with…

As for the title, I wanted to continue the “dance” theme of the earlier series. It just refers to the Egyptian Sufi folk dance called the tanoura. Dancers, traditionally male, wear brightly colored skirts with weights sewn into the hems, so that as they spin, the skirts flair out almost into two-dimensional disc-like shapes. (Of course, any patterns inherent in the skirt’s weave then blur and become unrecognizable while it’s in motion.)

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Hunting for Clues in (of) the Interior

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[Image: “She Got a Lot Out of Those Physics and Shop Classes,” by Alan Levine; located this clue to someone’s interior at Flickr, naturally, and share it here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!) Posted there about 10 years ago, the image seems to have been one of a daily series — all telling (one enigmatic story? several enigmatic stories?) of a woman named Lori. The story itself seems to be in rough-draft form — typos, ever so slightly “off” phrasing, and so on — and I’m guessing it went straight from Levine’s keyboard, to the Flicker post, without an intervening spell-check and so on. But it was an interesting story nonetheless, and, most importantly, I do like this still life… especially as metaphor.]

From whiskey river (highlighted stanzas):

Wildly Constant
(excerpt)

The first thing I saw
the first morning I went out for a walk in Stykkishólmur
was a crow

as big as a chair.
What’s that chair doing on top of that house? I thought
then it flapped away.

A crow that big is called a raven.
Corvus corax in Linnaeus’s binomial system.
Each one makes a sound

like a whole townful of ravens
in the country I come from.
Three adjectives that recur

in the literature on ravens are
omnivorous.
Pernicious.

Monogamous.
I’m interested in monogamous.
I got married last May

and had my honeymoon in Stykkishólmur.
This year I returned to Stykkishólmur
to live with my husband

for three months in one small room.
This extreme monogamy
proved almost too much for us.

Rather than murder each other
we rented a second place
(Greta’s house)

near the pool.
Now we are happily
duogamous.

There are ravens on the roof
of both places.
Perhaps they are the same ravens.

…

I should learn more about signs.
I came to Stykkishólmur
to live in a library.

The library contains not books
but glaciers.
The glaciers are upright.

Silent.
As perfectly ordered as books would be.
But they are melted.

What would it be like
to live in a library
of melted books.

With sentences streaming over the floor
and all the punctuation
settled to the bottom as a residue.

It would be confusing.
Unforgivable.
A great adventure.

…I
stand amid glaciers.
Listen to the wind outside

falling towards me from the outer edges of night and space.I have no theory
of why we are here

or what any of us is a sign of.
But a room of melted glaciers
rocking in the nightwind of Stykkishólmur

is a good place to ponder it.
Each glacier is lit from underneath
as memory is.

Proust says memory is of two kinds.
There is the daily struggle to recall
where we put our reading glasses

and there is a deeper gust of longing
that comes up from the bottom
of the heart

involuntarily.
At sudden times.
For surprise reasons.

Here is an excerpt from a letter Proust wrote
in 1913:
We think we no longer love our dead

but that is because we do not remember them:
suddenly
we catch sight of an old glove

and burst into tears.

(Anne Carson [source — do consider reading the entire long poem!])

…and:

Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.

(Fernando Pessoa [source])

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Startled by a Glimpse of the Invisible

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[Image: “Family Portraits IX,” one of a series by the photographic team known as Inka & Niclas (Inka and Niclas Lindergård). The series comprises what might be otherwise conventional natural-landscape/family-portrait photos (sometimes with their children, as here). The difference: the human subjects were dressed in full-body reflective garb, and illuminated with strobe lights in such a way as to minimize the effect of the lighting on their surroundings. Some, like this one, were taken in dark settings; others, in broad daylight. Overall, the photos simultaneously haunt and disquiet — bleached-out cousins of the human figures graven, in 1945, on the walls at Hiroshima.]

From whiskey river:

Funeral Music
(excerpt)

8.

Not as we are but as we must appear,
Contractual ghosts of pity; not as we
Desire life but as they would have us live,
Set apart in timeless colloquy.
So it is required; so we bear witness,
Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us,
Each distant sphere of harmony forever
Poised, unanswerable. If it is without
Consequence when we vaunt and suffer, or
If it is not, all echoes are the same
In such eternity. Then tell me, love,
How that should comfort us — or anyone
Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place,
Crying to the end ‘I have not finished’.

(Geoffrey Hill [source])

…and:

At a certain point we need to grow up; we need to look inside ourselves for our inner guidance. There are things most human beings know; they just don’t want to know them. They know deep down that certain things in their lives are working or aren’t working, that certain parts of their lives are functional and others are dysfunctional. But sometimes, as human beings, we don’t want to know what’s not convenient. So we pretend not to know.

(Adyashanti [source])

…and, from whiskey river‘s commonplace book:

What’s Not Here

I start out on this road, call it
love or emptiness. I only know what’s

not here: resentment seeds, back-
scratching greed, worrying about out-

come, fear of people. When a bird gets
free, it doesn’t go back for remnants

left on the bottom of the cage! Close
by, I’m rain. Far off, a cloud of fire.

I seem restless, but I am deeply at ease.
Branches tremble; the roots are still.

I am a universe in a handful of dirt,
whole when totally demolished. Talk

about choices does not apply to me.
While intelligence considers options,

I am somewhere lost in the wind.

(Jelaluddin Rumi [source])

…and (in slightly different words):

The easiest way of illuminating this term [“grades of significance”] is by means of a classic example of the diverse responses and grade of significance that an object may elicit. For example, an animal may see an oddly shaped black and white object, a tribal person a rectangular flexible object with curious markings. To a Western child it is a book, while to an adult it may be a particular type of book, namely a book that makes incomprehensible, even ridiculous claims about reality. Finally, to a physicist, it may be a profound text on quantum physics…

What this example so nicely demonstrates is that when we cannot comprehend higher levels of significance, we can blithely believe that we have fully understood something whose true significance we have completely missed. As Schumacher pointed out:

…All levels of significance up to the adequate level, i.e., up to the level of meaning in the example of the book, are equally factual, equally logical, equally objective, but not equally real… When the level of the knower is not adequate to the level (or the grade of significance) of the object of knowledge, the result is not factual error but something much more serious: an inadequate and impoverished view of reality.

This raises an arresting question: What higher levels of significance, what profound meanings and messages, does the world give us that we are overlooking?

(Helen Palmer [source])

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To Tell Your Life and Your Self

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[Image: “Parking Lot Meet-and-Greet, February 2021,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) Recently I learned a new phrase (although the concept was familiar): “vernacular photography.” I’ve always thought of such photos as just, y’know, snapshots… but a whole aesthetic, a mystique — and, probably, an academic discipline — has developed about them over the years. The gist is: not self-consciously “arty”; amateur(ish); casual/unposed; everyday/mundane; etc. During the time of COVID-19, I imagine, conscientious photographers — however “amateur” — have been composing their casual/unposed and everyday/mundane group portraits rather more carefully.]

From whiskey river:

To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well. It’s unwise, though, to think you know how it’s going to go, or how it’s going to end. That’s to be known only when it’s over.

And even when it’s over, even when it’s somebody else’s life, somebody who lived a hundred years ago, whose story I’ve heard told time and time again, while I’m hearing it I hope and fear as if I didn’t know how it would end; and so I live the story and it lives in me. That’s as good a way as I know to outwit death. Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to. He can’t understand that they end in him, but they don’t end with him.

Other people’s stories may become part of your own, the foundation of it, the ground it goes on.

(Ursula K. Le Guin [source])

…and:

List of Seemingly Unrelated Observations

Distance, like snow, melts.

Walking in deep yellow leaves
drowns out your voice.

Thinking, like a deep river,
eats canyons in your mind.

Everything blossoms that can.

Everything blossomed that could.

Stars move if they are airplanes;
wish fast.

You can live in as many places
at once as you need to.

For some places you don’t go anymore,
you still have a key.

A dream brings you into morning
one way or another.

(Grace Butcher [source: unknown])

…and:

Have an uncomfortable mind; be strange. Be disturbed: by what is happening on the planet, and to it; by the cruelty, and stupidity humanity is capable of; by the unbearable beauty of certain music, and the mysteries and failures of love, and the brief, confusing, exhilarating hour of your own life.

(Kim Addonizio [source])

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An Image in a Ball of Glass

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[Image: “Disembodied Legs,” by Miguel Tejada-Flores; spotted this on Flickr, of course, and use it here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). The photographer explains, “Disembodied legs protruding from an automobile transmission – advertising an automotive repair shop, in Central Point, Oregon.” He also includes an epigraph: “You don’t get to have legs and not use them. / Dance”; the quotation seems to have come from this book, by author Dianna Hardy.]

From whiskey river:

Playing and fun are not the same thing, though when we grow up we may forget that and find ourselves mixing up playing with happiness. There can be a kind of amnesia about the seriousness of playing, especially when we played by ourselves or looked like we were playing by ourselves.

I believe a kid who is playing is not alone. There is something brought alive during play, and this something, when played, seems to play back.

If playing isn’t happiness or fun, if it is something which may lead to those things or to something else entirely, not being able to play is misery.

No one stopped me from playing when I was alone, but there were times when I wasn’t able to, though I wanted to—

There were times when nothing played back. Writers call it ‘writer’s block’. For kids there are other names for that feeling, though kids don’t usually know them.

(Lynda Barry [source])

…and:

There is no hope anywhere but in this moment, in the karmic terms laid down by one’s own life. This very day is an aspect of nirvana, which is not different from samsara but, rather, a subtle alchemy, the manifestation of dark mud in the pure, white blossom of the lotus.

“Of course I enjoy this life! It’s wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!”

(Peter Matthiessen [source])

…and:

Run fast, stand still. This, the lesson from lizards. For all writers. Observe almost any survival creature, you see the same. Jump, run, freeze. In the ability to flick like an eyelash, crack like a whip, vanish like steam, here this instant, gone the next—life teems the earth. And when that life is not rushing to escape, it is playing statues to do the same. See the hummingbird, there, not there. As thought arises and blinks off, so this thing of summer vapor; the clearing of a cosmic throat, the fall of a leaf. And where it was—a whisper.

What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth dead falling or tiger-trapping.

In between the scurries and flights, what? Be a chameleon, ink-blend, chromosome change with the landscape. Be a pet rock, lie with the dust, rest in the rainwater in the filled barrel by the drainspot outside your grandparents’ window long ago.

(Ray Bradbury [source)

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The Mercy Hidden in a Circular Clockface

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[Product photography: “Volta Coffee, Tea, & Chocolate: Iron Goddess of Mercy,” by Anthony Rue; found it on Flickr. (Used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) See this Wikipedia article for the remarkably apropos story of the “Iron Goddess of Mercy” tea. While the Volta Coffee dot-com website seems defunct, the eponymous Gainesville FL café itself lives on, on Facebook, Instagram, and other social-media sites. We could find a certain grand balance even in that simple online history.]

From whiskey river:

At the end of an age, the denizens of the age still profess to believe that they can understand themselves by the theory of the age, yet they behave as if they did not believe it. The surest sign that an age is coming to an end is the paradoxical movement of the most sensitive souls of the age, the artists and writers first, then the youth, in a direction exactly opposite to the direction laid down by the theory of the age.

(Walker Percy [source])

…and (shared at whiskey river in the more commonly quoted, shorter form; below is the full passage):

Now, there’s a wonderful work of Schopenhauer’s; he says, “When you reach a certain age,” and he wrote this when he was in his 60s or so, “and look back over your life, it seems to have had an order. It seems to have had been composed by someone. And those events that when they occurred seemed merely accidental and occasional and just something that happened, turn out to be the main elements in a consistent plot.” So he says, “Who composed this plot?” And he said, “And just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself, of which your consciousness is unaware, so your whole life has been composed by the will within you.” Then he says, “Just as those people whom you met by chance became effective agents in the structuring of your life, so you have been an agent in the structuring of other lives, and the whole thing gears together like one big symphony,” he says, “everything influencing and structuring everything else.” And he said, “It’s as though our lives were the dream of a single dreamer, in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, and so everything links to everything else, moved out of the will in nature.”

That’s a beautiful idea. It’s an idea that occurs in India, in the image of what’s called the “Nee of Indra” or the net of gems. Where it’s a net of gems where every gem reflects all the other ones. And they also have the idea of a spontaneous and simultaneous arising. Everything arises in relation to everything else, and so you can’t blame anybody for anything; it’s all working around. It’s a marvelous idea. It’s as though there were an intention behind it, and yet it all is by chance. None of us has lived the life that he intended.

(Joseph Campbell [source])

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“Worth the Faff!”

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  • Establishing shot (color)
  • Establishing shot (B&W)

[The title of this post comes from a comment by a UK-based photographer I know on Instagram, after I’d posted this mini-slideshow there. The caption on that IG post focused on various practical annoyances I’d encountered during setup — not least, all the blessed lint present on the black backdrop, which I didn’t notice until I viewed the photos I’d taken on a large computer monitor.]

Like many people during the pandemic, at least in the so-called “developed world,” photographers have been turning to their hobby to keep their minds occupied, not wanting constantly to sit around watching TV, scrolling through social media, and the like. Idle pursuits, y’know, in idle times.

Not to suggest that such photographers are even remotely the ones suffering the most. In fact, the years 2020-21 may well be remembered as a period of creative-photographic explosion in response to various lockdowns and restrictions. Why? Because all the familiar subjects are out of reach. Public buildings and even outdoor common spaces shuttered. Travel restricted. Social distancing, masking, and other reasonable limits on spending much time with anyone other than the handful of people you’d already chosen to spend time with (only not, perhaps, quite so… exclusively.) But a recurring theme behind much Instagram posting over the last several months, at least among those who seem to take photography “seriously” (whatever that means), everyday if possible, has been — well, to put it simply: What the hell do I have left to take pictures of? And even if I find a new subject, how the hell do I shoot it so I’m not just repeating myself?

I’m lucky: I have experience with taking pictures going back far enough, without much in the way of training — or, to be honest, of practice! — that I feel somewhat renewed by all the time at my disposal. I can also, for now, set aside my guilt and/or embarrassment about photographing human subjects, especially candidly. I’m used to taking photos of the inanimate. (Let’s not speculate too much about what might say regarding my own, er, inanimation.)

Nonetheless, back in the fall I did pick up a sourcebook of ideas for photos and photo projects. It’s called The Photographer’s Playbook, and was edited by two professional photographers: Jason Fulford and Gregory Halpern. Over about 380 pages, they offer ideas — mini-projects, cloud seedings so to speak — from just that many of their colleagues in photography and other arts. Each idea is simply printed, verbatim, from the responses they gathered (one per page).

I’d almost forgotten I even had the book until a couple of weeks ago, when I found myself spinning my wheels — twiddling my thumbs — about what to do next. So I opened the book at random and directed my attention to the first page I saw. There on page 72, I decided, I found my assignment, “Object Lesson,” contributed by Sarah Cwynar. It says (in abridged form):

Look for five to ten objects that are somehow related—it could be by color, type of object, quality of surface, even a theme like “tropical,” or from the same place, like, “stuff from Mom’s basement”… See what your chosen objects look like photographically and how they related when they are placed together in one image. Narratives will develop between the objects.

Shoot a roll of film of your objects placed in different arrangements. Take some out, put new ones in, move them around…

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When Does a Photographer Know an Image Is “Done”?

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  • (1) Original…
  • (2) as shot (i.e., cropped by camera)…
  • (3) as manually cropped and edited…
  • …and (4) as converted to B&W

[Slideshow: partial screen captures from the Adobe Lightroom program, showing four basic phases in the editing of a photo I eventually posted on Instagram. The first two really required little if any “manipulation” on my part; they happened in the camera itself. My involvement didn’t even click in until step (3). For some technical details, see this separate page (opens in new tab/window).]

Instagram is typically counted among the social media, but it doesn’t in fact quite “fit” among Facebook, Twitter, etc. After all, it focuses (ha) not on the social — not on human interaction — but simply on visual representations of the world: pictures. The general nature and purpose of a given picture depends on the person or institution who posts it: it might be self- or product-promotional, or artistic, or more — or less — clever, or topical, or whatever. Within each of those general categories are various more precise ones: landscape vs. portrait, for example, or pure photography vs. photography-of-other-media (paintings, calligraphy, video, and so on).

Still, after you’ve been on Instagram for a while, it’s hard not to find yourself interacting, via comments and replies, mostly with a consistent group of people — maybe people you know from elsewhere online, or those whom you first found on IG (as it’s sometimes called) and gravitated to based on a common interest — subjects, genres, media, whatever.

One of the folks whose daily posts and commentary about photography I always look forward to seeing recently posted this photo:

[Image used by permission of Chris Sutcliff (Instagram: oldmansutty77). Thanks, Chris!]

…accompanied by this caption:

I’m interested in how you guys edit your work – do you wing it or do you know what you’re doing? Do you use presets or, like me, hurl yourself at edits with no plan or talent? I feel like I’m winging it with occasional flashes of actual insight. I don’t want to tell you how long I spent on this tree (and the alternate shot before it which ended up in the bin under a hail of verbal abuse). I went to the extreme edges and back again, and I suppose I must have learned a lot along the way; lessons like never ever photograph a backlit tree. Everything about this shot was a total bastard, and I have hated every second of editing it. I’m glad it’s dead. It can’t be just me that experiences this level of frustration. Please share your own tales of woe, join me in ineptitude. Thanks.

As it happens, I thought the photo of the tree was just fine as posted — no post-processing recriminations “necessary.” But I also recognized the misery — boy howdy, did I ever!

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