Fires in France

   I saw the beautiful picture below a couple of days ago in the New York Times, accompanying an article about the wildfires that were burning in Southern France. It shows people taking refuge on a beach as the fires burned in the distance.
   As I look at the image more closely, I'm finding it difficult not to see the people in it as being at leisure, even though I am fully aware that they have been displaced against their wills. The quality of light in the foreground reminds me of the hour just before dusk, though the picture may have been taken in the middle of a sunny day darkened by smoke. Dusk often brings with it a lovely, calming light, and it is my favorite time of day at the beach.
   I am currently recalling the hot and humid summer days of my childhood, remembering when early evening would sometimes lessen the oppressiveness of the day's weather. And even though the image illustrates what I believe must be a tragedy, it is hard to convince myself that there is not something of a relief to the scene, summer weather being on my mind as it is.
   I began the second paragraph in this short blog piece stating that I looked at the picture more closely, because the first and last thing that I notice in it are the beautiful warm grey, grey-pink, and orange tones of the smoke which dominate it. Still, as I look at it for perhaps the fifteenth time, I find it difficult not to dwell on those beautiful colors.
   I have always found it remarkable how stunning destruction can sometimes be when photographed.
   I think of the color pictures on newsprint from the New York Times, the day after the September 11th attacks, and the small, beautiful bursts of fire from the plane fuel igniting. I saved those pictures for a long time.
   Similarly, the concentration of orange color in the picture below serves as a focal point, and here functions as the catalyst for all of those wonderful grey hues. And although I don't believe I can see anything without context, I think that sometimes seeing can be a great pleasure all on its' own.

Flooded

    The picture below is of the Marysville Cemetery in Marysville, California. The cemetery flooded when the nearby Feather River overflowed its banks from the heavy rains we've experienced in the state this winter.
   When I first saw the photograph, I thought that it might be a film still: it looked so strange and otherworldly, like it could exist only for entertainment purposes.
    After looking at it a while longer, I became sad, thinking about those bodies and decomposed remnants under those grave markers, helpless to alter their situations. It struck me that they were so humiliated and suffocated by all of that water.
   It occurred to me that the river cared for nothing but itself.

Seam

   As I came near the end of my morning walk a few days ago, I passed by an area where the grass seemed to be disturbed. Not unusual for the park, I didn't pay too much attention, but as I walked on a bit further, it dawned on me that there was something a bit different about this particular disturbance.
   Doubling back, I realized that it was not the usual divot that I was looking at, rather, the earth was actually pulled back. Perhaps that description points to more intent than was at play here (I don't imagine that someone or thing set out to lift the earth), but the appearance of it anyway filled me with some nice thoughts.
   When I think about something being pulled back or up, I imagine that it is to reveal something under or behind, and when a thing is perhaps only partially revealed, like the soil is in the picture below, I start to imagine what more there is. My thoughts become filled with possibilities.
   For me, all of what is unknown is filed with possibility. And although there are things that I find frightening in this idea (for example my lack of control over it), I do tend to see beauty, especially in the natural world, in what has yet to be determined.
   When things are finished, their completion does not allow me to enter emotionally, nor my mind to wander free.

What's under there? No, don't tell me!

Aura

Although it cannot be seen in the poor quality image seen below, there was a visible glowing ring around the moon when I arrived in the park when I took this picture. Looking up as I stretched out my legs before walking (yes, I am that old), the light formed a circle around the moon perhaps twenty times its' size, emanting out in all directions. I wouldn't sat that it illuminated the nearby stars (because light near stars tends to make them harder for me to see), but rather created a buffer of blue-black before the stars reappeared to frame the round glow.
   As I looked up at that light, I kept thinking of a dull light bulb, even though what I was looking at was nearly otherwordly.
   Sometimes, the ways that I have been so thoroughly socialized saddens me.

 

There's an aura there, I swear!

Feather out of place

   I took this picture because I found the way the feather stuck out from the body of this Muscovy duck beautiful. I felt an immediate warmth towards it.
   Even though I already had sympathetic feeling towards these animals (having seen them and watched their interactions with one another regularly during my daily walks around Stow Lake), there was something so endearing, so real to me about this particular one.
   As I thought about writing the word 'real' above, I felt badly about the choice, like there was another word, or something else that I was really trying to say but could not find a better way to say it.
   I almost wanted to write human.
   What I was trying to convey was that the errant feather, figuring so prominently, acts for me as a kind of invitation to enter the animal's world. Where there is visible imperfection, I also see a door that I can exit my own experiences to a degree that I can better perceive others'.
   Where the unfinished business of living is most obvious, the presumptions I have about living things have the best chance of becoming obsolete, at least temporarily.

Is my humanity is sticking out?

Red, black and white

   I saw the picture below about a week ago in the online edition of The New York Times, and was at immediately struck by it visually.  

   After looking at it a bit further, then and now, it appears to me that the composition seems to be of greater vitality than the scene depicted. In addition, the blocks of color present more descriptively as shapes than as representative of figures, either foreground or background. Even though I can see clearly that there are two figures in the picture, viewed from above, their humanness is trumped by their visuality.

   Far from having much interest in the formalisitic in general, what holds me here is the strange way that I am unable to move past the pictorial. I cannot manage to convince myself to believe what I know, and there is something in that which I find both unsettling and beautiful.

Can you see past what you see?

Lagoon city

   I saw the photograph below in a news magazine that I subscribe to called The Economist. I didn't understand just what it was about it that fascinated me then, but am trying to understand it a little better as I put some words together. For me, writing is in many ways a process of discovering what it is I am trying to write about.

   Perhaps what is most beautiful about the picture is that it does not look to me like what it actually is. To me, it resembles more an illustration than photograph, and this interruption of definition helps me to feel a bit freer, although grudgingly so. I question the limiting judgments that I place on the people and world I live in, because I realize that things, like the image, may not be as I seem them to be.

   Adding to the akwardness of the photographic representaion here (and I mean that in the liberating sense described above), the buildings and freeways depicted in it seem to rest inexplicably on top of what looks like a lake. The magazine calls the metropolis shown, Lagos, Nigeria, a "sprawling lagoon city", and although there must be some solid engineering there that I really just don't understand, I can't fathom how those structures stay afloat like that. 

   It seems like they couldn't possibly do that, and in that I find a world of possibilty. It's a kind of science fiction in one of the few ways I can imagine liking that genre.

   

Definitely swampy