It was a cold and still morning, bright, then overcast. The Broadmoor Sanctuary was nearly empty, and very quiet. The small marsh beyond the boardwalk had already iced over; I thought of the turtles I'd seen there last summer, and imagined them hibernating in the mud below. The paths were covered with leaves and a thin coating of snow; the branches of the trees and bushes were mostly bare. My eye was drawn to small, hard, precise things like these pods opening in sections,
and to red things -- like these Rilkean ripening barberries.
There's lots of red, in fact. The woods are stippled, punctuated in red.
Red berries, red buds -- the color of heat transposed into a cold landscape.
It is, I suppose, a reminder that a small flame still burns, be it in the cells of the hibernating turtles, or in the deep sap of the branches and in the seeds scattered over the ground. This may look like a landscape of death, there may indeed be death here, but death's not the whole story.
Advent begins here, among the decaying leaves and stripped branches, in the lengthening dark and the increasing cold. It begins here, as it always does, among the unspeakable horrors of the world.
God is off somewhere, distracted, bright and distant as the winter sun. Some days he barely makes it above the horizon. Nonetheless, things happen in His name. Holy ostracisms. Sacred violence. Scripture is invoked. God Himself is invoked.
Does He notice ? He strolls the autumn woods, admiring the subtle pastels of the decaying buttonbush fruit. He hears hymns pour from the small mouths of the seeds, and hums along. His voice sounds like the north wind pouring through oak leaves, something between a hiss and a rattle.
It's the season of thorn and tendril -- of rejection and of embrace. We are stripped, and poor and death-bound, horrified, petrified. But something moves among us, between us, thin as a filament, and secret, subtle, weaves us one to another.
We seek each other out for warmth if nothing else.
If only we could read the signs. Look closely --
there are mangers and cradles everywhere.
They are empty, to be sure --
-- but that simply means they're waiting to be filled. As we are.
Or maybe it's the emptiness we're meant to notice, maybe that's the point: nothing's there already, nothing's been there all along --
no-thing that will be made apparant, that will be spoken, drenched in ink, bound and codified as there and then and Who.
The days grow shorter and shorter. The wind cuts through me as if I were latticework. As night falls, dread arises. I dial up the thermostat, put supper on. If only there were a muddy marsh floor in which to hibernate. Time: dread, expectation, hope. The clock ticks, like seeds blown against glass.
This is Advent, the time before. This is the waiting room. The story unfolds in time: prediction, event, aftermath. Sowing, fruition, harvest. We must be patient. We mustn't thumb forward to the last page to see how it will all turn out. We already know. Nonetheless, in the deepening dark and cold, by the light of whatever fire we can manage, in the company of whomever we can find, we ask --
-- what is this coming thing, then, this no-thing, this word, this silence, this seed ?
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Thursday, November 24, 2005
It Was Thanksgiving
You could tell because there were turkeys.
Even on the birthday cake.
And there was pie. Nice pie. Lemon meringue pie.
Sherry retired to her chamber.
Steve said the cricket had been there all week.
As we drove home I amused myself with tree sillhouettes.
What's that sound ?
BrrrrRRRRR...ping...ping...CLANGCLANGCLANG !!!
There was room at the inn. In Woburn. Woe Burn !
I have my mobile phone, I said. Mobile phone ? he asked.
There were cakes in a bubble.
And a triple A case number.
There was even some flora
a frond
and some leaves.
There was entertainment.
There was art.
Soon help arrived. (I wish you'd stop doing that.)
It was Ramsey Winch, from Tulsa. (Do you have to keep doing that ?)
The tow cab smelled nice. (Will you please stop doing that !)
It had a view out the back.
I bet you're just gonna put those in your blog.
Even on the birthday cake.
And there was pie. Nice pie. Lemon meringue pie.
Sherry retired to her chamber.
Steve said the cricket had been there all week.
As we drove home I amused myself with tree sillhouettes.
What's that sound ?
BrrrrRRRRR...ping...ping...CLANGCLANGCLANG !!!
There was room at the inn. In Woburn. Woe Burn !
I have my mobile phone, I said. Mobile phone ? he asked.
There were cakes in a bubble.
And a triple A case number.
There was even some flora
a frond
and some leaves.
There was entertainment.
There was art.
Soon help arrived. (I wish you'd stop doing that.)
It was Ramsey Winch, from Tulsa. (Do you have to keep doing that ?)
The tow cab smelled nice. (Will you please stop doing that !)
It had a view out the back.
I bet you're just gonna put those in your blog.
Monday, November 21, 2005
Through The Looking Glass
I have a new lens, an ultra-wide angle lens. It's a used lens, actually, a 14mm f/3.5 Sigma, and it's battle scarred: the printing's worn, and there's a long crack in the window of the focus scale. It's heavy, a beast of a lens, and the front glass is bug- eyed and bulbous, practically exophthalmic. I bet it's seen a lot in its day. If only it could speak.
I came into the weekend peevish and tired. Work's been rough, and I've been on call more than usual. As of 8 am Saturday I was finally off call, but multiple obligations would preclude long stretches at the river. Nonetheless, come 8:30, I rushed out to squeeze in a walk before the dentist at 12. I hated being on a timetable, hated wearing my watch, hated having to keep track of time. I was, as I said, peevish. I brought, of course, the camera. I was anxious to try out the Beast.
It was cold and bright, and there was some frost on the grass. I scanned the familiar terrain through the viewfinder. It was, to say the least, disorienting. The world receeded, stretched, bowed away. Distances increased. The greedy, hyperthyroid eye was drinking in everything. This was not the closer-and-closer-up photographic world I was used to. I was vertiginous, in freefall. I squatted and squinted ino the camera, trying to coax a delicate weed into the foreground. The beast would have none of that. The whole background screamed for attention. My neck began to hurt. I felt, for lack of a better word, nervous.
I remembered an experiment I'd heard about in medical school. Volunteers were given glasses to wear, special prisms that would invert the world. Initially they were completely disoriented, and staggered about trying to adjust to feeling upside down. Eventually they adapted, and were able to negotiate the world effortlessly again. Finally, when the glasses were removed and they were returned to their usual visual relationship to the world, they were disoriented afresh.
This would not do. I was risking brain damage here. So I detached the Beast, and replaced it with My Favorite Lens, my Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro lens. I felt better immediately.
The Tamron is a splendid lens. My copy is an older, used version, handsome and better preserved than The Beast. At 90mm it's a short telephoto as well as a macro lens so it's versatile, usable, as they say, as a portrait lens. I suppose I do take portraits. Weed portraits. Like of this pathside helleborine I've observed since last summer when it was covered with beautiful orchid-like flowers. It's still beautiful, regal and dignified as an ancient grande dame.
The lens lives up to its reputation of having beautiful bokeh. What's bokeh ? I thought you'd never ask. Bokeh (I learned recently) is the blurred background behind a photographic subject.
And with a macro lens set to a wide aperture, the depth of field, or the area in focus, is small -- sometimes vanishingly small -- so there's plenty of opportunity for bokeh.
The nebulous buff and blue and green background complements the cascading greens and purples and browns of the aged helleborine leaves.
I look. I see form; I see color. I know the trajectory: colors run, blend to a uniform, murky brown. The striped, billowing skirt-like leaves decay to a dull, brown paste. Everything tends to sludge and slime, to a dull pap that feeds the ground's hidden seeds.
The slime is where my hungry eye averts. It so prefers form, however bedraggled, and colors, however subtle. Slime is just not visually interesting. It is, however, metaphysically fascinating. And -- I admit -- horrifying.
Today, back at work, I was buried by an onslaught of tasks and demands. Late afternoon, sitting at my desk and writing, I suddenly came to. There I was, sitting there, looking at my hands as they wrote. What were they ? Who was I ? It was one of those awful, disorienting moments of Sartrean nausea, keener than usual. I felt poised and teetering on an abyss; a small panic fluttered inside. The Big Lens -- the wild, wide, all-seeing, goitrous eye of the Beast -- had turned inward. "I" dwindled to a grassblade in an enormous, ravening meadow. The world, viewed through the backside of the Beast, loomed large, extra large.
My pulse quickened. Bold, fascinated, I tried to follow the feeling where it was leading, to sustain it and investigate it. This was the crack though which I could slip into and out of the world. This could the Mobius path to enlightenment. This was my golden opportunity !
Or, I thought, I could become insane.
That would not do. I had progress notes to write. Email to send. And, furthermore, back at home, there was laundry to fold and put away and the dishwasher to unload.
I wrenched the Beast out of its socket and looked across the room. There was my pile of charts. There was my nurse on the phone. Things were neither too bright nor too dark. What was near was near, what was far was far. I pushed my glasses back up my sweaty nose. There. That was better.
Things were, for the moment, back to 50mm. Back to normal.
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