Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

To Craft (Pretty Much) Anything from (More or Less) Nothing

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[Image: “Circuit Breaker,” by Daniel Friedman. (Found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) This is the second of Friedman’s creations I’ve used here at RAMH; the first was just this past April. It doesn’t really depict a circuit breaker — it just (apparently, and not implausibly) suggested one to Friedman. Among the quotations he chose to caption the drawing is this, from Montaigne: “Quintessence is no other than a quality which we cannot by our reason find out the cause.”]

From whiskey river:

Mirror Image

Tonight I saw myself in the dark window as
the image of my father, whose life
was spent like this,
thinking of death, to the exclusion
of other sensual matters,
so in the end that life
was easy to give up, since
it contained nothing: even
my mother’s voice couldn’t make him
change or turn back
as he believed
that once you can’t love another human being
you have no place in the world.

(Louise Glück [source])

…and:

History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in his making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare. Or, to put it another way, it consists in transforming the nightmare into vision; in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality — if only for an instant — by means of creation.

(Octavio Paz [source])

…and:

I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity. The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain.

(Pico Iyer [source])

…and, from whiskey river’s commonplace book:

We are born with nothing outside ourselves, and so we leave the world as we proceed to the unknown, yet dimly remembered, realms that lie ahead of us. As we have conducted ourselves here, so will the realm be that awaits us and the souls with whom we can communicate most easily. While we are alive on the earth, we have to encounter much darkness as part of the greater unfolding of our personality, but the end of all this suffering is our identification with the inner lives of our fellow creatures. Our experience of the polarities of darkness and light, of evil and good, is a part of the pageant of universal growth. If there were no temptation of evil, there would be no awareness of goodness. In a society where hatred was not countenanced there would be little love (of the type that will sacrifice itself), but only a safe, detached benevolence that effected no relationship with anything. Out of the terrible events of our tortured century much potential good has emerged.

(Martin Israel [source])

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The Paradox: Waiting to Be Caught Off-Guard

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[Image: “The Ties That Bind,” by user “wetsun” (found at Flickr, of course, and used here under a Creative Commons license: thank you!). When I first saw this photo, I liked the look of it — composition, lighting and contrast, that sort of thing. I had to look at it two or three times more before the surprise set in.]

From whiskey river:

When we are lost in the woods the sight of a signpost is a great matter. He who first sees it cries, ‘Look!’ The whole party gathers round and stares. But when we have found the road and are passing signposts every few miles, we shall not stop and stare. They will encourage us and we shall be grateful to the authority that set them up. But we shall not stop and stare, or not much; not on this road, though their pillars are of silver and their lettering of gold.

(C. S. Lewis [source])

…and:

I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of. Everything passes into it now. I don’t know what happens there.

(Rainer Maria Rilke [source])

…and:

Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective. We have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that cannot bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armor, we might say.

(José Saramago [source])

…and:

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
in September or October, when the wind
and the light are working off each other
so that the ocean on one side is wild
with foam and glitter, and inland among stones
the surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
by the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
more thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
a hurry through which known and strange things pass
as big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
and catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

(Seamus Heaney [source])

…and:

Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.

(Jeanette Winterson [source])

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To Recognize the Rarest Part of You

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[Image: “L’Empire des lumières” (commonly translated as “The Empire of Light,” although I’ve also seen it as “The Dominion of Light” — which I myself rather prefer), by René Magritte. This is one of somewhere between a dozen and sixteen works by Magritte bearing the same title, all on the same general theme: a quiet street scene at night, illuminated here and there by individual lamps… while overhead, the sky is a daytime sky. All the paintings in the series were painted over the last couple decades of Magritte’s life. As for how I got to this painting for today’s post, let’s just say I blame Elizabeth Spires’s “Pome,” below.]

From whiskey river:

Most people believe it is only by constraint they can get any good out of themselves, and so they live in a state of psychological distortion. It is his own self that each of them is most afraid of resembling. Each of them sets up a pattern and imitates it; he doesn’t even choose the pattern he imitates: he accepts a pattern that has been chosen for him. And yet I verily believe there are other things to be read in man. But people don’t dare to — they don’t dare to turn the page. Laws of imitation! Laws of fear, I call them. The fear of finding oneself alone — that is what they suffer from — and so they don’t find themselves at all. I detest such moral agoraphobia — the most odious cowardice I call it. Why, one always has to be alone to invent anything — but they don’t want to invent anything. The part in each of us that we feel is different from other people is just the part that is rare, the part that makes our special value — and that is the very thing people try to suppress. They go on imitating. And yet they think they love life.

(André Gide [source (in a slightly different translation)])

…and:

It is in this darkness, when there is nothing left in us that can please or comfort our own minds, when we seem to be useless and worthy of all contempt, when we seem to have failed, when we seem to be destroyed and devoured, it is then that the deep and secret selfishness that is too close for us to identify is stripped away from our souls. It is in this darkness that we find true liberty. It is in this abandonment that we are made strong. This is the night which empties us and makes us pure.

Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created for spiritual JOY. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and spiritual joy you have not yet begun to live.

(Thomas Merton [source])

…and (from whiskey river’s commonplace book):

Mindful

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for—
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world—
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant—
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these—
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

(Mary Oliver [source])

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What to Believe In (When Belief Seems Distant)

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[Image: “Hard Lesson (Detail),” by Lewis Minor; found it on Flickr, and use it here of course under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). Minor is one of numerous photo-artists on Flickr who assemble found photos into collages of often eerily photorealistic quality. (Some are more successful than others, of course — just as is true of the component images.) In this example, captioned “Messin with Banksy and Bouguereau,” he’s combined portions of each of those artists’ work with some Pop-art-style scraps from here and there. This is a detail which he selected from the full image, here. Really, I could’ve used any of a dozen or more choices from Minor’s photostream.]

From whiskey river:

The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of today) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also.

(G. K. Chesterton [source])

…and:

If we look at this conflict as a straight eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between Empire and those of us who are resisting it, it might seem that we are losing.

But there is another way of looking at it. We, all of us gathered here, have, each in our own way, laid siege to Empire.

We may not have stopped it in its tracks—yet—but we have stripped it down. We have made it drop its mask. We have forced it into the open. It now stands before us on the world’s stage in all its brutish, iniquitous nakedness.

…Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness—and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling—their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

(Arundhati Roy [source])

…and (italicized portion):

The time has come, the Walrus said. Perhaps things will get worse and then better. Perhaps there’s a small god up in heaven readying herself for us. Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

(Roy, ibid.)

…and:

Happiness

A state you must dare not enter
   with hopes of staying,
quicksand in the marshes, and all

the roads leading to a castle
   that doesn’t exist.
But there it is, as promised,

with its perfect bridge above
   the crocodiles,
and its doors forever open.

(Stephen Dunn [source])

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Too Much… But Listen to It, Ringing Soft and Low

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[Image: “Black Walnuts, by the Thousand,” by John E. Simpson; a sample from my gallery called #plantsthatlookgood. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) This photo, taken in early 2018, doesn’t do justice to the enormous quantity of the things beneath the tree from which they’d fallen. Nevertheless, in my mind, for some reason I’ve always associated it with the notion of “profusion.”]

From whiskey river:

The History of Too Much

There is too much here, the sapphire, the thistle,
the oregano blooms in June, everything extravagant —
the rich peat of what decays, the ruins that don’t decay,
these especially are too much, the temples and statues
in their stark marble glow, that simplicity which is not simple at all.
This sheen of time, the wear of wars, the famine years
of Occupation, lucent as the columns standing stoic, Doric —
their weight has whittled the people: the weight of that antiquity,
of those stones, the grandeur and pride — too much
in this moment, this present crushed by the evidence,
the result of living with beheaded gods, and maimed still
beautiful torsos, the muscled limbs in chipped robes.
They plague our dreams, what was once achieved is now
incomplete, these pieces of the golden age aging
in the midst of traffic, too much, the yelling and honking,
the protests in the middle of everything — people are impatient;
how can anyone be patient, overwhelmed as they are.
Even the oregano’s thick perfume, the sapphire sea, remind people
of extravagant loves and sacrifice, while here, now,
ghosts live on as gods and their impossibility.

(Adrianne Kalfopoulou [source; also see here])

…and:

I had this sudden awareness […] of how the moments of our lives go out of existence before we’re conscious of having lived them. It’s only a relatively few moments that we get to keep and carry with us for the rest of our lives. Those moments are our lives. Or maybe it’s more like those moments are the dots in what we call our lives, or the lines we draw between them, connecting them into imaginary pictures of ourselves. You know, like those mythical pictures of constellations traced between stars.

(Stuart Dybek [source])

…and:

Singing Bowl

Begin the song exactly where you are.
Remain within the world of which you’re made.
Call nothing common in the earth or air.

Accept it all and let it be for good.
Start with the very breath you breathe in now,
This moment’s pulse, this rhythm in your blood

And listen to it, ringing soft and low.
Stay with the music, words will come in time.
Slow down your breathing. Keep it deep and slow.

Become an open singing bowl, whose chime
Is richness out of emptiness,
And timelessness resounding into time.

And when the heart is full of quietness
Begin the Song exactly where you are.

(Malcolm Guite [source — and don’t miss the video of Guite voicing the poem himself])

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Only the Heart of the Matter Genuinely Matters

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[Image: “Enigma with Key, Ocean Falls, BC,” by user “adavey” (Alan Davey) on Flickr. (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) From the photographer’s caption there: “Someone must have a quirky sense of humor and enough spare time to do something with it. The key behind the glass is attached to a door. Farther down the door, and not shown here, is a hasp with a padlock. What we don’t know is whether the key opens the padlock. In some places, this installation would be considered art. I’ve seen worse stuff at the Whitney Biennial. Here in the real world, it doesn’t really matter, because at the moment the padlock isn’t locked.”]

From whiskey river:

Nocturne II

August arrives in the dark

we are not even asleep and it is here
with a gust of rain rustling before it
how can it be so late all at once
somewhere the Perseids are falling
toward us already at a speed that would
burn us alive if we could believe it
but in the stillness after the rain ends
nothing is to be heard but the drops falling
one at a time from the tips of the leaves
into the night and I lie in the dark
listening to what I remember
while the night flies on with us into itself

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and:

What matters is that you allow your heart—not your ego—to rule your life. Then very little matters because you will be a humble person and you’ll take most of life as it comes. If it rains, you get wet; if they don’t show up on time, you wait; if they don’t pay you, you eat less; if they don’t love you, so what, you didn’t come to please them anyway; if they don’t think you’re special, that’s marvelous, it frees you from having to thank them for their compliments. If life doesn’t go the way you want, accept the way it does go, use it as your teacher.

(Stuart Wilde [source])

…and:

The less we cling to one side of reality—betting on either or or, arguing for for or against—the more we can be aware of the exquisite counterpoint of things. Everything matters: how we vote, how we tie our shoelaces, how we respond to the faintest whisper of a thought. And nothing matters, because (look!) it’s already gone. When we understand this, we’re home free.

(Stephen Mitchell [source])

…and:

There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you’d forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularly life with other people, possible.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

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In a Certain Thrall

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[Image: one of several in what I’ve been calling “The Odd Glove Project.” (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) Back in March or April, I started photographing a new category of roadside litter: single, unpaired surgical gloves. That I’d find any surgical gloves was, of course, not so surprising under the circumstances; the surprise came from their… well, their very unpairedness. I found enough such photographs, in just a few weeks, that I dumped them into a new Instagram account of their own. I don’t add new samples to the portfolio very often, but oh yes: they’re still accumulating.]

From whiskey river (italicized lines):

Mother Night

When you wake at three AM you don’t think
of your age or sex and rarely your name
or the plot of your life which has never
broken itself down into logical pieces.
At three AM you have the gift of incomprehension
wherein the galaxies make more sense
than your job or the government. Jesus at the well
with Mary Magdalene is much more vivid
than your car. You can clearly see the bear
climb to heaven on a golden rope in the children’s
story no one ever wrote. Your childhood horse
named June still stomps the ground for an apple.
What is morning and what if it doesn’t arrive?
One morning Mother dropped an egg and asked
me if God was the same species as we are?
Smear of light at five AM. Sound of Webber’s
sheep flock and sandhill cranes across the road,
burble of irrigation ditch beneath my window.
She said, “Only lunatics save newspapers
and magazines,” fried me two eggs, then said,
“If you want to understand mortality look at birds.”
Blue moon, two full moons this month,
which I conclude are two full moons. In what
direction do the dead fly off the earth?
Rising sun. A thousand blackbirds pronounce day.

(Jim Harrison [source])

…and:

The Poet Compares Human Nature to the Ocean from Which We Came

The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth,
it can lie down like silk breathing
or toss havoc shoreward; it can give

gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth
like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can
sweet-talk entirely. As I can too,

and so, no doubt, can you, and you.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Cold Wind

I like those old movies where tires and wheels run backwards on horse-drawn carriages pursued by indians, or Model As driven by thugs leaning out windows with tommy guns ablaze. Of late I feel a cold blue wind through my life and need to go backwards myself to the outback I once knew so well where there were too many mosquitoes, blackflies, curious bears, flowering berry trees of sugar plum and chokeberry, and where sodden and hot with salty sweat I’d slide into a cold river and drift along until I floated against a warm sandbar, thinking of driving again the gravel backroads of America at thirty-five miles per hour in order to see the ditches and gulleys, the birds in the fields, the mountains and rivers, the skies that hold our 10,000 generations of mothers in the clouds waiting for us to fall back into their arms again.

(Jim Harrison [source])

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“Working the Shot”: Photo Drafts

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Hat Dance #N-alt

[The five final images in my “Hat Dance” series, culled from hundreds of separate shots. Click on any image to enlarge it.]

Working in writing, I’ve long known the value of drafts: getting something at all — a prototype — on paper being the obvious priority, followed by some number of “stepwise refinements” (additions, deletions, amendments…), over and over, until you’ve got the finished work before you. (Or, sometimes, until you’re simply wrung out from the repetitious task. But if that “reason” for quitting comes too often, you might as well forget becoming a professional writer.)

But until recently, photography always seemed different to me: why, I wondered, would you take more than one or two photos of essentially the same subject? Sure, maybe something would obviously be wrong with the first, even maybe the second take… the sun ducks behind a cloud, say, or someone inadvertently walks in front of the camera as you click the shutter. Those, you had to re-shoot. But in recording a single moment, you’d have to accept that once gone, the moment couldn’t be recaptured, right?

As I’ve mentioned before, in the last few months I’ve been trying hard to take photography seriously — starting with the very most basic question: what do I mean by “seriously”? Roughly, what I mean includes these elements:

  • Really understanding — and practicing — all the “hard” stuff of photography: the interrelationships among shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and the effects that manipulating those interrelationships have on exposure, depth of field, and so on.
  • Learning more about what’s possible in post-processing — the latter-day digital counterparts, in software, of what used to require darkroom hijinks: dodging and burning, cropping, manipulating emulsions and the paper itself…
  • Controlling the product rather than simply accepting what’s right in front of me: not “settling.”

To this end, I’ve been taking advantage of my “free” time for two tasks:

First, I’ve been taking a series of refresher courses in photography basics, through the Great Courses Plus streaming channel. (So far: here and here.)

Second, I’ve set up something vaguely like a “studio” out in our garage. I don’t have a lot of fancy equipment — primarily a moving blanket and a black sheet, used as backdrops, supplemented by a stepstool and various boxes used as “stands” for still-life work and for my off-camera strobe flash. (For the camera itself, I’ve got a couple of tripods.

So what’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned so far? That’s easy, and it brings me back to the first couple paragraphs above: there’s really no reason not to do many takes of the “same” subject, and several legitimate reasons to do so.

Note: One other big change removes pretty much any objection at all to taking many shots of the same subject. I’m referring of course to the cost: developing and possibly printing hundreds of hardcopy photos, vs. simply storing the images on a card.

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The Flip Side of Intuition

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[Image: “Wind Farm,” by Andrew Gustar. (From Flickr, of course, and used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) This is indeed a wind farm; the photo was taken from an airplane just off the Dutch coast.]

From whiskey river:

Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it’s asked for, but this doesn’t make our caring hollow…

This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.

(Leslie Jamison [source])

…and:

As I read the Book of Genesis, God didn’t give Adam and Eve a whole planet.

He gave them a manageable piece of property, for the sake of discussion let’s say 200 acres.

I suggest to you Adams and Eves that you set as your goals the putting of some small part of the planet into something like safe and sane and decent order.

There’s a lot of cleaning up to do.

There’s a lot of rebuilding to do, both spiritual and physical.

And, again, there’s going to be a lot of happiness. Don’t forget to notice!

What painters and sculptors and writers do, incidentally, is put very small properties indeed into good order, as best they can.
A painter thinks, “I can’t fix the whole planet, but I can at least make this square of canvas what it ought to be.” And a sculptor thinks the same about a lump of clay or marble. A writer thinks the same about a piece of paper, conventionally eleven inches long and eight and a half inches wide.

We’re talking about something less than 200 acres, aren’t we?

(Kurt Vonnegut Jr. [source])

…and:

Eagle Poem

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear,
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

(Joy Harjo [source])

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When You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Wave… and Walk On

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[Image: “Figure and Two Grounds,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) This was #994 in my series of 1,000 consecutive “everyday black-and-white” posts at Instagram. I blogged here about the series, as it approached its exhausted (ha!) conclusion.]

From whiskey river:

The Exhibit

My uncle in East Germany
points to the unicorn in the painting
and explains it is now extinct.
We correct him, say such a creature
never existed. He does not argue,
but we know he does not believe us.
He is certain power and gentleness
must have gone hand in hand
once. A prisoner of war
even after the war was over,
my uncle needs to believe in something
that could not be captured except by love,
whose single luminous horn
redeemed the murderous forest
and, dipped into foul water,
would turn it pure. This world,
this terrible world we live in,
is not the only possible one,
his eighty-year-old eyes insist,
dry wells that fill so easily now.

(Lisel Mueller [source])

…and:

Maybe learning how to be out in the big world isn’t the epic journey everyone thinks it is. Maybe that’s actually the easy part. The hard part is what’s right in front of you. The hard part is learning how to hold the title to your very existence, to own not only property, but also your life. The hard part is learning not just how to be but mastering the nearly impossible art of how to be at home.

(Meghan Daum [source])

…and:

The Lama of the Crystal Monastery appears to be a very happy man, and yet I wonder how he feels about his isolation in the silences of Tsakang, which he has not left in eight years now and, because of his legs, may never leave again. Since Jang-bu seems uncomfortable with the Lama or with himself or perhaps with us, I tell him not to inquire on this point if it seems to him impertinent, but after a moment Jang-bu does so. And this holy man of great directness and simplicity, big white teeth shining, laughs out loud in an infectious way at Jang-bu’s question. Indicating his twisted legs without a trace of self-pity or bitterness, as if they belonged to all of us, he casts his arms wide to the sky and the snow mountains, the high sun and dancing sheep, and cries, “Of course I am happy here! It’s wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!”

(Peter Matthiessen [source])

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