Running After My Hat

Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so

Real-Life Dialogue: Meta-Dialogue Edition

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[The setting: a Monday evening in a small apartment in North Florida, USA, in March 2021. Dinner is being prepared, mostly by Her. They are just coming off the feverish roller-coaster of symptoms common after Round 2 of the COVID-19 vaccine; they are both a little light-headed, even giddy, with relief — and with the start of their first cocktail hour in a couple of days. As usual, whatever the nominal topic, beneath the repartee is an undercurrent of adversarial good feeling: She says “[A],” for example, and he counters with “But, well, [A-Prime]…”; she replies “But [B]!,” and he ripostes with “Yes, but [B-Prime]!” They both withhold any sign of amusement, but with difficulty. Suddenly, she turns at the counter and signals for silence.]

She: You make talking about everything so difficult…!

He: And yet, you seem to have made it your primary mission in life to get me to talk more about everything—

She: (interrupting) I know! You’d think, after thirty %&*!@?! years — you’d think I’d know better by now!

[Scene dissolves in laughter.]

___________

(Note: for further reference, please visit the Wardrobe Culling Edition of this series, from 2011, and also the more recent Men Are from Illinois, Women Are from Manhattan entry, from 2016. Or, come to think of it, pretty much any of the posts in the series.)

From Arriving to Having Arrived — and Then What?

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[Image: “Stay Put,” by photographer Akiva Shapero. Found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license (thank you!). In their different ways, the couple in this photo struck me as iconically impatient and dissatisfied with their setting: looking elsewhere, apparently trembling with a desire to get moving — elsewhere, anywhere — and, in any case, physically there but psychically adrift.]

From whiskey river:

Whence all this hurry to arrive at a state? Are you not already face-to-face with the eternal mystery? Take it easy for a while; just watch the snow falling or the kettle boiling, and not so much hurry.

(Alan Watts [source])

…and:

Watchful Waiting
(excerpt)

It’s where you are in your imagination
That’s important, for the life of simply staying where you are
Is a shadow’s life, that leaves you by yourself, alone and scared.
Why can’t we just move on? The light up ahead is soft
And seems to beckon us, glowing with a promise of beginning
Once again, as if there were still time.

(John Koethe [source])

…and:

Blinding, the White Horse in Front of Me
(excerpt)

…I’m the one into whose
arms you fall when you fall through all of space. The one
who tells you infinity is another hoax. I’m the being
who has no manners, or mannerisms. I have no style.
I settle on nothing; I decide nothing. This is not
a final place. There is no such place. I am the being
who whistles to you and distracts you from self-absorption.
I am the mosquito in your ear, an iridescent fly, a lightning bug.
This clearing is full of false lights, flickers that stop
when you look. I’m the being that’s tricky because you
try to make me conform to your senses. You
have no senses here. You have nothing.

(Alice Notley [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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In the Uncomfortable Embrace of Past and Future

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[Video: actress/comedian Leigh French made a series of regular appearances on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour TV series in the 1960s. Her specialty: playing long-straight-haired “hippie chicks” who often made much more sense (in retrospect) than they seemed to at the time. In an interview last summer, she said of this particular skit: “…if I did it today and just changed a little of the slang and the dates, it would be as significant today as it was decades ago.”]

From whiskey river:

When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I’ve been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That’s a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans themselves are literate, able to get the information, we’re in an entirely new relationship to the Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.

(R. Buckminster Fuller [source])

…and:

Living in a dream of the future is considered a character flaw. Living in the past, bathed in nostalgia, is also considered a character flaw. Living in the present moment is hailed as spiritually admirable, but truly ignoring the lessons of history or failing to plan for tomorrow are considered character flaws.

(Sarah Manguso [source])

…and (except for first two paragraphs):

The scientists and humanists were saying one thing, but the artists and poets were saying something else…

Someone was wrong.

In the very age when communication theory and technique reached its peak, poets and artists were saying that men were in fact isolated and no longer communicated with each other.

In the very age when the largest number of people lived together in the cities, poets and artists were saying there was no longer a community.

In the very age when men lived longest and were most secure in their lives, poets and artists were saying that men were most afraid.

In the very age when crowds were largest and people flocked closest together, poets and artists were saying that men were lonely.

Why were poets and artists saying these things?

Was it because they were out of tune with the spirit of the modern age and so were complaining because the denizens of the age paid no attention to them?

Or was it that they were uttering the true feelings of the age, feelings however which could not be understood by the spirit of the age?

Nobody wants to hear about his unspeakable feelings. It is only when the feelings become speakable, that is, understandable by a new anthropology, that people can bear hearing about them.

(Walker Percy [source])

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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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Dancing Nimbly in a Tangle of Overlaps and Abutments

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[Image: “Manhattan Cocktail,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) This was #682 (2019-08-09) in my series of one thousand “#everydaybandw” posts on Instagram. As you can see, they weren’t always 100% “B&W”; I told myself I was honoring the spirit of the label rather than the letter. (Or maybe I was just making vague, hand-waving excuses of the sorta-kinda-close-enough variety.)]

From whiskey river:

“Monster” is derived from the Latin noun monstrum, “divine portent,” itself formed on the root of the verb monere, “to warn.” It came to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous creatures like the sphinx who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts, because the ancients considered the appearance of such beings to be a sign of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, “Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening.”

(Susan Stryker [source])

…and:

When you observe that today’s controversies often reveal not relevance but the clash of the untaught with the wrongly taught, and when you can endure this knowledge without cynicism, as a lover of humankind, greater compensations will be open to you than a sense of your own importance or satisfaction in thinking about the unreliability of others.

(Idries Shah [source])

…and:

Is there
any way we can purely touch the world again, the way
a salamander does, breathing through its skin? Can we
become the strands of this shrine we weave ourselves into
hoping to emerge into a world where — where what?
There is no end to desire, which means no end to regret,
no end to our need for an ending, so that even the sky refuses
our touch, that sky which, at its bluest, is the most empty.

(Richard Jackson [source, apparently (unconfirmed); the last several lines of a poem called “Benediction”])

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How to Make the Trip from Unsatisfactory Here, to Vaguely-OK There, While Living with All the Godawful Stuff en Route

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[Image: “Dry Summer (Until It Wasn’t,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) This photo is among those in the “#oneoffs#” album at my SmugMug site.]

From whiskey river (all but the last sentence):

I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.The temptation towards resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems to me a terrible trap. Why not be more honest with the moment? The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning. That’s genius. Somebody told me once that fugue means to flee, so that Bach’s melody lines are like he’s running away.

(Sam Shepard [source])

…and:

You go on by doing the best you can. You go on by being generous. You go on by being true. You go on by offering comfort to others who can’t go on. You go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days. You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.

(Cheryl Strayed [source (#24)])

…and:

The narrator is well aware of how regrettable is his inability to record at this point something of a really spectacular order—some heroic feat, or memorable deed like those that thrill us in the chronicles of the past. The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence and by reason of their very duration. Great misfortunes are monotonous. In the memories of those who lived through them, the grim days of plague do not stand out like vivid flames, ravenous and inextinguishable, beaconing a troubled sky, but rather like the slow, deliberate progress of some monstrous thing crushing out all upon its path.

(Albert Camus [source])

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Perfect Moments: My Mathematical Breakthrough (Age 16)

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[Image: blurry version of the Borromean-ring logo of the International Mathematics Union (IMU). For the non-blurry version, just click the blurry one. And no, I had nothing at all to do with the creation of this logo, or with the sciences of either mathematics or physics, really. My “breakthrough” was much smaller and more personal.]

I sort of straddled peer groups at my fairly small high school: sort of an academic/bookish nerd (hello, Latin honors student!), sort of an arty writer/photographer-wannabe (remind me to tell you about my James Thurber ripoffs), and sort of a pilotfish attached to the flank of the social center (it helps to develop crushes on school yearbook and newspaper editors). I even dabbled very superficially in athletics, and acquired a varsity letter in tennis to prove it. All of which pretty much set me on course for the life which followed: not quite one thing, not quite another, and really not very much of something else, but a mishmash of them all.

My personal Venn diagram might look something like the Borromean rings shown above: indistinct and formless enough that at any one time, I’m not quite sure what domain I’m occupying… assuming it is indeed just one domain at the moment. The so-called “credential” which I use most often when answering questions on Quora is: Not an expert in much; probably interested in it anyhow.

I took three year-long classes with one teacher, Mr. Hanlon: trigonometry, physics, and calculus. (Aside: all nominally in the nerd category. But because Mr. Hanlon also introduced me to photography, via the Camera Club, his influence also fed the wannabe artiste in me.)

Like many students in those three classes, I often had to grapple with what we (and maybe everyone) called “word problems.” These dressed up pure-math theory in the garb of applied math, so you might be asked something like, “If you’re in a train heading east at 30 miles per hour, and there’s a train 15 miles away, heading west at 45 miles per hour, how long do you have until the head-on collision?” Solving such problems, for me, often involved two steps: (a) untangling the language so I understood more or less exactly what the premise was, and (b) sketching out the specifics, often on graph paper, if (as here) the specifics lent themselves to being sketched.

But there was a specific subset of word problems quite different, in that while it involved words, and of course numbers, “solving” a given problem required no particular knowledge or manipulation of either. Instead, the solution — for me — simply consisted of… well, for lack of a better way of expressing it, simply consisted of flipping a switch. These were problems — and/or solutions — of unit conversion.

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All Aboard the Train to Utter Stillness

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[Image: “Vogel duikbank,” by a Flickr user who goes by the name (?) Ebelien. Found it there, of course, and — likewise — use it here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!)]

From whiskey river:

More than ever, I’ve come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity and ability to cope with change. Is it any wonder that the world seems full of strange and implacable forces to someone who doesn’t know how to look up a Zip Code, use a computerized card catalog, or even make a long-distance phone call? When my husband tended bar in Lemmon, he was often asked to place calls for people flustered by a pay phone. The night he telephoned a research library at a university in California to settle a barroom dispute about the planets is now part of local legend. He might as well have been a shaman.

(Kathleen Norris [source])

…and:

Directions

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world.
— Hamlet

Take a plane to London.
From King’s Cross take the direct train to York.
Rent a car and drive across the vale to Ripon,
then into the dales toward the valley of the Nidd,
a narrow road with high stone walls on each side,
and soon you’ll be on the moors. There’s a pub,
The Drovers, where it’s warm inside, a tiny room,
you can stand at the counter and drink a pint of Old Peculier.
For a moment everything will be all right. You’re back
at a beginning. Soon you’ll walk into Yorkshire country,
into dells, farms, into blackberry and cloud country.
You’ll walk for hours. You’ll walk the freshness
back into your life. This is true. You can do this.
Even now, sitting at your desk, worrying, troubled,
you can gaze across Middlesmoor to Ramsgill,
the copses, the abbeys of slanting light, the fells,
you can look down on that figure walking toward Scar House,
cheeks flushed, curlews rising in front of him, walking,
making his way, working his life, step by step, into grace.

(Joseph Stroud [source])

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