Visioning

I
What do you see in this picture?

 

And in this one?

A shadow and little stream in the first; a beautiful damselfly in the second.

I suspect you did not see this Great Spreadwing in the upper left of the first photo, but I did when I stood there this afternoon. I saw it because of my previous experiences and practiced vision.

II
I recently watched an episode of Morse with a scene in a stately home's picture gallery. On entering, the detective Morse said, "The pictures. Aren't they beautiful?" The gentleman in the room looked around at the paintings, turned, and replied, "Are they? I live here, so I know they're valuable. But I don't know their beauty. I can't see it." "Pity," Morse responded.

III
Keith Woods' refined and moving personal essay reminded me again of the different ways we see and feel depending on unique perspectives. The writer comes to new understanding about his father's complex relationship (and his own) to his "flawed homeland," not always visible to others. 

IV
Even the essay's meaning and beauty were not visible to other commenters to the Facebook post of the essay.

I agree with Morse. Pity.

V 
Aired on and published by NPR, the essay is well worth reading and hearing.

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.

I Am Not Really Writing About What I Could Write About

which would be the horrifying images of families stuck between borders, late in the fall, moving into winter, sleeping on the ground, in tatters, because I thought of them when I saw this Common Buckeye, warming himself after a cold night and a long season.

Instead, I'll write about my double vision in general. 

Sometimes, I see something and think of another thing (see above), and sometimes I see something and think I am seeing it in a way that wasn't possible before Photoshop. Like the trees along the path where the Autumn Meadowhawks mate in droves and their reflection in Lake Cheston. 

I played with the photo, processing the top and bottom in different ways and adjusted the color and contrast separately until it looks like what I saw, but what I saw is not what it looked like to someone else.

Nothing looks the same to anyone.

Witness, photograph number 1.

Witness, the current xenophobia in this country.

Ways of Seeing

Until today, I didn't really see.

Today, I put on a new pair of glasses over my eyes with new lenses and everything snapped into focus.

I stood atop the Lake Cheston dam, looked down some fifteen feet to the water's edge, and saw two bluets chasing one another.  Mind you, a bluet is about 28 millimeters long.  Then I noticed the single Rambur's Forktail (about 34 millimeters long).  Far to my left, I picked out a wheeled pair of Autumn Meadowhawks (about 35 millimeters long) looking for just the right leaf. 

This is amazing!  This is 20/20 vision!

Filled with fall fever, I headed over to the campus late this afternoon to watch light move across stones and down trees.  I saw three boys playing soccer at All Saints', ginko leaves yellowing, and a little lime-green plane (which my friend Bill identified as an Aircam, "designed to fly low and slow with extreme visibility and the security of two engines") buzzing us all.

Those two flyers surely had an amazing view.  But so did I.

Correction: so do I!

Modern Medicine

When my father had cataract surgery, he had to stay in bed in a dark room for days.  He wasn't allowed to bend his head down or lift heavy things.  When it was all over, he could see better -- but he still wore tri-focals.

Unhappily, I inherited my father's bad eyes.

I've had to use both distance and reading glasses for years (never together because I couldn't handle bifocals), and I even required middle distance glasses for a period of time.  My vision deteriorated so badly when I was in my twenties that my ophthalmaologist had me tested for diabetes.  When I came to his office after he received the report, he said, "I have good news and bad news.  The good news is that you don't have diabetes.  The bad news is that your eyes are fifty years older than your body."

Happily, unlike my father, cataract surgery is no longer a big deal.  Yesterday morning, I had a second cataract surgery (my right eye was corrected a year and a half ago), came home with a patch, removed it 4, started eye drops, and resumed normal activites today. 

"Normal," though, already has a whole new meaning.  Because I opted to have both new lenses focused at the same point, I can see the computer screen clearly for the first time in my life.  And I am not even wearing glasses!

In a month, when I can get new prescription distance glasses, I expect to see a whole new world of wonders. 

Unlucky in eyes, lucky in modern medicine: that's me.

The Weight of a Small Thing

It's a small thing I do every day -- walk and look with my camera.  It's a small thing to write a blog post that would go unread were it not for a former student who religiously reads each post.  (Yes, you know who you are, W.)  It's a small thing to snap photos, throw most away, tinker with a few others, and upload one each day to a gallery. 

But there's nothing small about the effects. I see the world as if new every day.  I feel more fully myself in those moments when I walk and snap. I am more grateful than I have ever been for the small things -- legs that walk, eyes that see, ears that hear.  I have learned to love Sewanee for its smallness and the beings that live in it. 

I wear a kind of light weight now, like the bee burying its head in a zinnia: for a moment, it is mine -- all of it -- and then I fly away.

Wondering Why

Yesterday, a friend asked, "How did you come to be such a wonderful dragonfly photographer?  Were you always interested in them?"

I answered her, easily and quickly: "Two years' interest.  I'm trying to identify all the species here on the Domain.  They're really hard to photograph, so it's fun to try to snap them."

This is true, but I don't think it's the whole truth or the deepest truth.  Why, I have been wondering all day, do I spend so much time each day looking at and photographing dragonflies? 

If I don't hunt and snap, I am unhappy, grow physically restless, feel my energy sap and zap.  There is something about being outside, alone, looking at creatures that I used not to see, finding them everywhere.  Sunday, I drove with a friend almost an hour away to an orchard.  Three times or four, I exclaimed as we started to leave a spot, "Look!  There's a dragonfly!"  They are always with me.

So much surrounds us every day, outside of ourselves and in.  Choosing what to attend to is what I do.  Creative focus itself alleviates loneliness, disappointment, anxiety, listlessness, . . . .  You name the ailment and I respond, Look!  There!

I hope you will see what I think I have found.

Looking at Art

Years ago, I took my first art history course: a first semester survey of Western art with Barbara Rose at Barnard College. (Years later, I discovered that she was famous in art history circles.)

She taught us how to look. Required to visit the Metroplitan Museum of Art often, I remember studying the El Greco's for hours, struggling to select one about which to write a critical essay. I finally settled on The Opening of the Fifth Seal ("The Vision of St. John"). I returned many times to the museum to look and make notes, look and make notes. I loved that painting -- its energy and movement, play of light and shadow, upward-moving composition of repeated elongated shapes and bold brush strokes. I don't remember how I did on the paper, but I remember the looking and the beauty and the joy of writing about what I saw, and that, of course, was the point.

Today's New York Times offers an article titled "At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus" about a phenomenon I've noticed in museums since I started going to them: the streams of "viewers" who read the labels and move on or who take photographs and move on, as if collecting bits of "experience" they can tick off a mental list. Years after my El Greco experience, also at MMA, I was happily spending time with Grant Wood when a young couple breezed in the room and asked the guard, "Where's the famous painting? That's the one we came to see." The guard and I unobtrusively glanced at each other before he answered.

In his article, Michael Kimmelman says that he and his son take sketchbooks to museums, not because they are fine artists, but because the act of sketching forces them to slow down and look. I did the same thing one summer when I spent almost a month in Oxford, England. In the Ashmolean for most of an afternoon, I recorded an overheard conversation as well as an impression of a few objects.

Yesterday, I blogged about a way of looking aided by the camera, but I snap in the natural world of flux, not in a museum. The object there before me does not change, though I do in the looking. I love both ways of seeing for the same reason: the pleasures of "slow looking" (Kimmelman's phrase).