Art & Photography

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

August 21, 2020 by John 3 Comments

[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

August 14, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[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

July 31, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[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

July 25, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[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

July 17, 2020 by John 3 Comments

[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

July 10, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[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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It Is Important to Let Sense Quiver

July 3, 2020 by John 2 Comments

[Image: “Sacudiéndome::Shaking::Tremblement,” by Oiluj Samall Zeid; found it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons License (thank you!). The photographer affixed a small GoPro camera to the harness of his dog, named Fray, and took him for a walk around the streets of León, in north central Spain. This shot was taken just as he and Fray were at a crosswalk; the dog stopped for a moment, in mid-shot, to shake his head and body.]

From whiskey river (second stanza):

Steady, Steady
I believe you can build a boat.
I believe you can get to water.
I do not believe you can get the boat on water.
How do other people bear
what you are still afraid of? The answer
is that when big things happen
you do go through the looking glass,
but it is still you who goes through,
the inner text is all still right to left,
so you just keep reading.
Because there is no boat and there is no water.
I stare at my tiny baby’s face
but he so wriggles he can’t quite be seen.
He grows steadier, more the blur
is gone; joins us in the myth of the stable.
Of the quakiness of infancy and old age
we shimmer and shimmy into being
and out again. In the mean-
time, we’re horses in the stable of the myth.
A quick check of the ocean, or any fire,
is a reminder of how things seem;
I can’t seem to see them.
You’re on the beach and you find out the secretary
of defense thinks calico cats are agents of the devil.
Your friend asks if they get 10 percent.
She was funny, your friend.
The water in this metaphor
is unreal because of the way time passes,
so you can’t quite get the boat on water,
but you can build the boat,
and a boat is good for a lot of things
not just on water.
Will we, without the boat on water,
always feel that we are missing
something basic to the picture?
No. That is what I’m trying to say.
It is important to let sense quiver;
even in this stable of the myth of stable,
even living aboard a boat mired
in mud in view of the sea.
Who wants yet another world?
It’s enough already.

(Jennifer Michael Hecht [source])

…and:

With the passage of days in this godly isolation, my heart grew calm. It seemed to fill with answers. I did not ask questions any more; I was certain. Everything—where we came from, where we are going, what our purpose is on earth—struck me as extremely sure and simple in this God-trodden isolation. Little by little my blood took on the godly rhythm. Matins, Divine Liturgy, vespers, psalmodies, the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening, the constellations suspended like chandeliers each night over the monastery: all came and went, came and went in obedience to eternal laws, and drew the blood of man into the same placid rhythm. I saw the world as a tree, a gigantic poplar, and myself as a green leaf clinging to a branch with my slender stalk. When God’s wind blew, I hopped and danced, together with the entire tree.

(Nikos Kazantzakis [source])

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Large, Containing Multitudes

June 26, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “DCI Mooreland,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) To see the microfiction behind its title, refer to the original in my SmugMug “#jesstorypix” gallery; just click on the title at the bottom of the photo, and the story will appear at the left or bottom (depending on your screen’s orientation).]

From whiskey river:

“Shoot, I can’t remember her name. What is her name? Darn, here she comes. What is it… Sally… Sue? She just told me yesterday. What’s the matter with me? This is going to be embarrassing.”
In case you haven’t noticed, you have a mental dialogue going on inside your head that never stops. It just keeps going and going. Have you ever wondered why it talks in there? How does it decide what to say and when to say it? How much of what it says turns out to be true? How much of what it says is even important? And if right now you are hearing, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have any voice inside my head!”—that’s the voice we’re talking about.

(Michael A. Singer [source])

…and:

Once upon a time, there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered, and everything was possible. A stick could be a sword. A pebble could be a diamond. A tree a castle.
Once upon a time, there was a boy who lived in a house across the field, from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was Queen and he was King. In the autumn light her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls. When the sky grew dark, they parted with leaves in their hair.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

…and:

Or maybe a person is just made up of a lot of people… Maybe we’re accumulating these new selves all the time. Hauling them in as we make choices, good and bad, as we screw up, step up, lose our minds, find our minds, fall apart, fall in love, as we grieve, grow, retreat from the world, dive into the world, as we make things, as we break things.

(Jandy Nelson [source])

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Grasping Sanctuary

June 19, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “Three Worlds” (1955), by M.C. Escher. As you can read in this essay at the website of the Escher in Het Palais museum, this was actually Escher’s third attempt to capture the effect, starting in 1950. The print served as the front-cover illustration for Beaver & Krause‘s influential electronica album, In a Wild Sanctuary (1970).]

From whiskey river:

The American Sublime
How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?
When General Jackson
Posed for his statue
He knew how one feels.
Shall a man go barefoot
Blinking and blank?
But how does one feel?
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?

(Wallace Stevens [source])

…and:

A normal existence—what could be more irrational? It’s fantastic the number of things you’re forced not to think about in order to go from one end of the day to the other without jumping the track! And the number of memories that have to be driven from your mind, the truths that have to be evaded!

(Simone de Beauvoir [source])

…and (last stanza):

There is a dream going on while I am awake.
Because I must pay attention to what
is happening around me, I am unconscious
of the dream. When I sleep, the daylight
things fade out and the perpetual dream
surfaces fully and is memorable.
When I die, the dream is the only
thing left. It balloons and fills the world.
As a writer, I coax partly into action
that internally coherent, silent story.
I let my conscious life yield a little,
and a little more, and occasionally a great way,
to my best needs and hopes: whatever
I mean by my best, whatever I mean
by my judgments on the happenings around me,
that center and guide is invited to have its way.
For intervals, then, throughout our lives
we savor a concurrence, the great blending
of our chance selves with what sustains
all chance. We ride the wave and are
the wave. And with renewed belief
inner and outer we find our talk
turned to prayer, our prayer into truth:
for an interval, early, we become at home in the world.

(William Stafford [source])

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Backing Away from #everyday

June 13, 2020 by John 1 Comment

[Photo: “Newscoop,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I like several things about this photo, which I won’t detail here other than the one more or less insignificant detail I briefly mention in the post.]

In the last several weeks, I’ve been nibbling away at the fringes of the fast-food meal of what passes for my writing aspirations. In the meantime, a hungry little insect has been nibbling away at the me who’s been nibbling away at the fringes of etc. To wit: photography.

The specific trigger here, or rather now, is the daily Instagram series (black-and-white, with occasional splashes of color) I’ve been running since October 2017 — specifically, the approach of Day #1000 in the series.

My Instagram account is here; the hashtag I’ve used for the series is #everydaybandw… which, alas, is also in use by a other photographers. That’s “alas” because Instagram has never supplied a means to search/filter by both the account and a hashtag. So the only practical way of seeing #everydaybandw photos specifically by me is to view my account page, and tap on individual pictures in the grid. (Note: some of those in that series are tinted black-and-white — e.g. this one — or contain “color splash” effects, like this one.) You can also see a selection of my favorites from the series over at SmugMug, with the caveat that it’s updated only occasionally. (If you want to see all #everydaybandw photos, by anyone, try this. Most of those right now are mine, but not all of them.)

Now, there’s nothing inherently special about reaching Magic Number 1000 (or any other — even Magic Number 1). But I’m at a point now where I think I’ve got about all the satisfaction I can out of a series of “one black and white photo a day, of everyday scenes/objects/moments, which have been shot, post-processed, and posted with minimal effort.” At the time the series began, I desperately needed to spend some time “outside my head,” as it were:

The Pooch had died just a few weeks before.
I was still working a full week, every week, with no paid leave of any kind…
…which was taking place — largely by my choice — in a small, enclosed, windowless office I shared with no one at all.

I also had pretty much ignored the whole digital-photography thing, and — although I’d loved photography in general since the 1960s — had not even picked up my film camera gear in probably 15 years.

So the daily photo mission forced me to do something — however glancingly “creative” — not on a specific schedule, but every, single, day.

…and then of course, recently, I’ve had all this opportunity, suddenly, to structure my time anew somehow. Over the last three months, I’ve started to run out of gas on the #everydaybandw journey for a couple of reasons.

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