Seeing the Self in Others' Writing

Two essays, read today, both personal -- but both about some interior part of me that I have recognized at isolated moments throughout my life.

In "David's Ankles: How Imperfections Could Bring Down the World's Most Famous Statue," Sam Anderson writes about the first time he saw the David in person:

"I stood there in my filthy Birkenstocks feeling a sense of religious transcendental soaring: the promise that my true self was not bound by the constraints of my childhood — by freeway exits, office parks, after-school programs, coin-operated laundry rooms at dingy apartment complexes, vineyards plowed under and converted into Walmarts, instability, change, dead dogs, divorce. No. The David suggested that my true self existed most fully in some interstellar superhistorical realm in which all the ideal things of the universe commingled in a perpetual ecstasy of harmonizing trumpet blasts. If such perfection could exist in the world, I felt, then so many other things were suddenly possible: to live a perfect life creating perfect things, to find an ideal way to be. What was the point of anything less?"

I know about that "interstellar superhistorical realm." In Italy, I felt it, not from standing before the David but from standing in the Cornaro Chapel before Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa and in the Galleria Borghese before his Apollo and Daphne, The Rape of Proserpine, and David (see here and here and here). For me, it's the same heightened experience I feel at times (not every time) that I walk with a camera, especially in nature.

Writer Katherine Towler says this in her essay "Why Do Writers Love Birding So Much?":

"With birds I have found another way of being in the world. The time devoted to watching birds is about nothing but what is right there in front of me. I am released from myself instead of sent deeper within. I am immersed in the senses, and freed of turning that experience into a narrative. Until I went out looking for birds, I did not understand how much I hungered to leave the self-consciousness of the writer behind."

I am not a writer or a birder, but if I remove those specific references, I recognize my own leaving "self-consciousness" behind in the fugue state of looking at what I have never before truly noticed. At essay's close, she writes,

"On a summer day, the song sparrow in my back yard gives his sweet, loopy song over and over in a repetition that is insistent. Listen to me, he says. Look out the window. Feel the sun on your face. I lived in my house for more than ten years before I noticed and identified the song sparrow. It seems inconceivable that he was calling to me all that time and I did not hear him, but I’m listening now."

Substitute seeing for listening and that's me. That's why I walk with my camera. That's why I lose all sense of time in an art museum or beside a pond. That's the state of suspended of deep knowing I am lucky enough to experience from time to time, the flow that relieves the mundanity of otherwise ordinary living.

The Challenge of Walking Home

A visit to the garage, where I left my car in the capable hands of my mechanic and his youngest daughter, whom he is training. (He's a feminist! Who knew!)

Then a walk up the trail, ten minutes at most, but extended to 45. Not by intention, but because I was distracted by

• the Shenanigans window's carnival mirror reflection of Woody's Bicycles
• a male Diana butterfly, still considered rare but certainly present here in wooded areas, nectaring
• a large sulphur butterfly darting down the creekbed
• acrobatics of a Tiger Swallowtail balanced on the tip of a long weedy branch
• the Red-spotted Purple puddling in gravel at my feet
• prismatic argiope webs, one after another, catching a little light in heavy shade
• two hawking Black Saddlebagsin front of the Chapel of the Apostles, darting from lamp to steeple, high above my head and low below my knees
• glow of the newly restored dorm, all golden against azure sky

Good thing the car won't be ready till tomorrow. My eyes are sore.

Good News, Bad News

Good
I finally found an unbelievably helpful blog post explaining how to use my camera's 4K features. Why the manufacturers don't hire people like Heather to write their instructions and make their instructional videos I'll never know. Nothing in my 400-odd-page manual actually explains anything clearly.
Bad
Heavy tree canopy and a cloudy sky made it impossible for me to practice what I learned.

Good
One Arrowhead Spiketail passed me four times along the now mostly dry creek/runoff bed on the Village Trail. 
Bad
Without sun or water, the Spiketail never slowed down or perched.

Good
On my way up to the elementary school, I just happened to see an amusing green caterpillar resting on the bridge handrail. My first ever Eastern Tiger Swallowtail caterpillar!

Bad
Heavy tree canopy and intermittent sun in all the wrong places make for a lot of awful photographs.

Always Good
I am easily entertained by photowalking.

A Break in the Weather

Sun again, and photowalking. 

Both make me feel human. 

I stretch my legs and mind, wander, look, listen, stop, stoop. 

Big and small alike delight me, and I am made new again.

In the Here and Now

In today's New York Times, Perry Garfinkel describes opening a writing workshop with this direction:

At the top of a page, write the words ‘Here and now I am’ followed by an ellipsis. In the next five minutes write as many sentences as you can, each sentence beginning with ‘Here and now I am.’ The rules: no questions, no stopping, no thinking, no worries about logic or syntax and no cheating off your neighbor.

If you go blank, draw from your senses — what you see, smell, taste, hear, feel.

Here goes:

Here and now I am writing my 2,120th post for My Daily Snap, a ritual that lifts me like a swing, higher and higher, head back, laughing. 

Here and now I remember swinging as a child, and I love blogging like that, an infectious addiction, even though my feet hurt. 

Here and now, my feet hurt as they have since morning when, over my head a green heron ack-ack-acking across the pond, I slid part-way into the black loam, water soaking my socks, my camera aimed at another new species -- the Southern Spreadwing. 

Here and now, I smile, knowing that a famous person, Dennis Paulson, author of a major field guide to Odonates in America, verified my photo on Facebook. 

Here and now, I heard the heron's acking as applause, but it's the rush of wings, the gust of air brushing my cheek as a Slaty Skimmer races by, that makes my skin pucker. 

Here and now I feel dehydrated, not literally, but metaphorically: spent, I suppose. 

Here and now, still tired from looking for bugs, in wet shoes and socks, two cameras slung across my chest and back, I know I'll do it again tomorrow. 

Here and now, when I write have nothing to say of consequence other than noting the way the Southern Spreadwing turned a moment toward me as I reached in for a photograph or the way the second lizard, the one on the Lake Dimmick sign, waited and waited and waited as I approached, as if it knew I am no predator. 

Here and now, I have nothing to write, I think, but then when I sit at the computer and place my fingers on the keyboard, something happens and text appears. 

In the here and now of photowalking and writing I am part of the elements, and I feel whole.