The Turtle Man, Ishmael Samad

Samad was a trim, bespectacled man in his mid-fifties. He had a high forehead, grey hair, a moustache, and a tuft of grey hair below his lips. He spoke with a soft, slightly quavering voice and possessed a remarkable facility for lengthy, orderly monologue that had been developed, I imagined, from years of ideological argument. But he wasn’t, I was relieved to discover, a haranguer. Samad practised a kind of fluent openness, an out-loud musing that disclosed concerns ranging from his sadness about the massacres in Central Africa to his trouble with the Virgin Birth to the joy that filled his heart when he saw a grape-like mass of clouds tinted pink by the sun. He was thoughtful, emotional, receptive, dogged, religious and obsessive. Things delighted and amazed him.

That’s from an essay, The Ascent of Man  by Joseph O’Neill in Granta 72. It’s a lawyer’s story primarily about the death penalty in Trinidad and Tobago, but it begins, ends, and is interwoven throughout with the story of Ishmael Samad. It’s a wonderfully written piece that I hope you’ll read. [ link ]

Another story about executions that I read recently is Master of Guillotine  by Sarah Richards in the May 2006 issue of The Walrus. I recommend that you not  read this one. I mention it only because it is also about capital punishment, and because I found the idea that a man could cut off the heads of 200 people and then retire to live on his real estate investments in France to be truly bizarre. Here is just enough to give you the flavor of the story:

For fourteen years, Meyssonnier operated a guillotine in Algeria while the country was a French colony. Working alongside his father, he executed two hundred people, all but two of them Algerian. Few people better personify” —or are more proud of—the civilizing mission undertaken by France around the world than Meyssonnier.

Meyssonnier has been living with his Tahitian common-law wife, Simone, in southern France since the early 1990s. They live in Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, a small town near Avignon that is famous for its resurgent springs and the towering brick archways of the nineteenth-century Aqueduc de Galas.

Meyssonnier says everyone in town knows his past as an executioner, and that any poor relations are due more to jealousy over his successful real estate investments.

We live in a strange world.

The full story includes detailed descriptions of the process of guillotining — and I do not recommend that you read it.

(If you have time to read something, go read the lead story about Ishmael Samad.)

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Efforts at Articulation

Below is from an Interview   with writer Richard Ford in Granta 99:

Do you think stories are created or discovered?

That’s easy. Stories are created. It isn’t as if they’re ‘out there’ waiting in some Platonic hyper-space like unread emails. They aren’t. Writers make stories up. It might be that when stories turn out to be good they then achieve a quality of inevitability, of there seeming to have been a previously existing and important space that they perfectly fill. But that isn’t what’s true. I’m sure of it. A story makes its own space and then fills it. Writers don’t ‘find’ stories — although some writers might say so. This to me just means they have a vocabulary that’s inadequate at depicting what they actually do. They’re like Hemingway — always fleeing complexity as if it were a barn fire.

Has faith or church-going ever had any appeal to you?

Not church-going. But faith, well… There’s the famous line in Hebrews 11: ‘Faith is the evidence of things unseen’. I’ve always been attracted to that line. But for specifically ir-religious reasons. I deem that line to be a line about the imagination. I could almost say that, ‘the imagination is the evidence of things unseen’. But again specifically I’d say that my ‘faith’ lies in the imagination and in the imagination’s power to bring into existence essential experience that heretofore wasn’t known to exist.

All right; you’ve also said that you consciously want your writing to be ‘affirmative’ of the possibility of love, closeness in a life, what makes you hold to that?

Not to keep on quoting famous men, but somewhere in Wallace Stevens there’s a little fragment that says, ‘we gulp down evil, choke at good’. That’s always meant to me that it’s more appetizing to decry, and less appetizing, maybe less simple, to find a vocabulary for affirmation. And also ‘closeness in a life’ and (if you will) ‘love’ seem immensely sustaining to me, and worthy of efforts at articulation.

The rest of the interview is mildly interesting. [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

What They’re Like

Here, we are going to tell you how to write about, and photograph … them.

First, how to write about them. From How to Write About Africa  by Binyavanga Wainaina in Granta 92; winter 2005:

… Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates.

… Describe, in detail, naked breasts (young, old, conservative, recently raped, big, small) or mutilated genitals, or enhanced genitals. Or any kind of genitals. And dead bodies. Or, better, naked dead bodies. And especially rotting naked dead bodies. Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the ‘real Africa’, and you want that on your dust jacket. Do not feel queasy about this: you are trying to help them to get aid from the West. The biggest taboo in writing about Africa is to describe or show dead or suffering white people.

[So far, I'm enjoying Wainaina's satire. He must of heard me, because, near the end of the essay, he rounds on my part of the audience and goes on:]

… Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as well rounded, complex characters. They speak (or grunt while tossing their manes proudly) and have names, ambitions and desires. They also have family values: see how lions teach their children?  Elephants are caring, and are good feminists or dignified patriarchs. So are gorillas. Never, ever say anything negative about an elephant or a gorilla. Elephants may attack people’s property, destroy their crops, and even kill them. Always take the side of the elephant. Big cats have public-school accents. Hyenas are fair game and have vaguely Middle Eastern accents. Any short Africans who live in the jungle or desert may be portrayed with good humour (unless they are in conflict with an elephant or chimpanzee or gorilla, in which case they are pure evil).

After celebrity activists and aid workers, conservationists are Africa’s most important people. Do not offend them. You need them to invite you to their 30,000-acre game ranch or ‘conservation area’, and this is the only way you will get to interview the celebrity activist. Often a book cover with a heroic-looking conservationist on it works magic for sales. Anybody white, tanned and wearing khaki who once had a pet antelope or a farm is a conservationist, one who is preserving Africa’s rich heritage. When interviewing him or her, do not ask how much funding they have; do not ask how much money they make off their game. Never ask how much they pay their employees.

[I'm still smiling, but he's getting closer to home.]

Read the full essay. There’s much more. [ link ]

Now that you know how to write about them, here is how to get good photographs. This is from Human Safari   by Lucy Eyre in Granta 100; winter 2007:

Human diversity is the new wildlife, apparently. Every second honeymooner has glimpsed a lion or stalked a buffalo, but people—ebony-skinned, half-naked, scarred, painted people—are the new wildebeest. Going to photograph and stare at people untouched by the modern world (ignorant of the life and work of David Beckham) is state-of-the-art adventure tourism.

… We were lucky enough to see the spectacle of a Hamar ritual—a privilege, as it turned out, offered every day to tourists during the season. One worry about tourism is that it undermines traditional cultures; but does it, paradoxically, conserve them as a show for the tourists? This ceremony involves whipping the women, a practice which inevitably makes a modern Western liberal nervous. We worried that, as spectators, we were implicated in such brutality. This initiation festival would have happened without us, but the family sometimes needs to wait until sufficient money is saved up to brew beer and kill goats for the participants. There must have been at least forty ferengis  (white people) watching the ritual; if everyone paid the same price as us, then the tribe or the family would have received well over £200. (The standard wage for a construction worker in Adis Abeba is just fifty pence a day.) The ceremony is a genuine tradition, and the Hamar, naturally enough, make the most of its appeal to the tourists, whom they never courted. But should we help to preserve it? Ought we to refuse to watch? And who is exploiting whom, after all, when one is clearly paying a (relative) fortune for a ring-side seat? How would we feel if our luxury wedding could pay for itself by letting a few strangers from a very different culture wander through the proceedings, pointing and taking photographs? Would we all sell our wedding party to OK magazine if they asked us?

… You pay a fee to watch the ritual and then you have full access and permission to take unlimited photos. Visiting a village or market is somewhat different. You pay to enter the village (though not for the market), then you must negotiate separately for each photograph. There’s not really much to see in a Hamar village: four round huts, perhaps, a large goat-pen built out of thorny shrubs and, amazingly, almost no Western artefacts beyond some plastic jerrycans and cigarette lighters or digital watch straps worn on necklaces. And us, of course, looking ridiculous with our designed-and-tested walking boots, insect repellent, suncream and cars full of essential equipment—camping stoves, tents, sleeping bags, extra clothes, toothbrushes, tins, tin-openers. (Actually, we forgot the tin-opener.) When we got changed in the campsite, local children would ask for our T-shirts. The assumption, naturally enough, was that you clearly didn’t need it if you had taken it off and swapped it for another one. We look at the Hamar; the Hamar look at us. ‘But you’re here!’ both groups are thinking, with somewhat different emphasis. It’s a two-way zoo.

… The traveller may feel superior to those who have stayed at home. This is why the photographs are required: to display as proof of adventurousness. But also, in at least some cases, superiority to the Hamar, the Mursi and their neighbours. These people don’t read; their lives haven’t changed for generations; we can visit them but they can’t visit us; they walk for miles, we drive past in powerful cars. We’d hate to be them, though we love to see them. It is, for the Hamar, astonishing that ferengis  will travel so far simply to watch them doing what they always do. But if the visitors insist on gawping (and they—we—do), then the Hamar know their price.

Even with these long quotes, I’ve only given you a small bit of the Human Safari essay. It’s good. Read it all if you have time. [ link ]

(Please note that the way that I have used ”they” and “them” in this post is satirical.)

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Generations of Stars

Wow! Just …. wow!

 

 

– Spitzer telescope reveals stellar ‘family tree’

Generations of stars can be seen in this new infrared portrait from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. In this wispy star-forming region, called W5, the oldest stars can be seen as blue dots in the centers of the two hollow cavities (other blue dots are background and foreground stars not associated with the region). Younger stars line the rims of the cavities, and some can be seen as pink dots at the tips of the elephant-trunk-like pillars. The white knotty areas are where the youngest stars are forming. Red shows heated dust that pervades the region’s cavities, while green highlights dense clouds.

W5 spans an area of sky equivalent to four full moons and is about 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. The Spitzer picture was taken over a period of 24 hours.

Like other massive star-forming regions, such as Orion and Carina, W5 contains large cavities that were carved out by radiation and winds from the region’s most massive stars. According to the theory of triggered star-formation, the carving out of these cavities pushes gas together, causing it to ignite into successive generations of new stars.

This image contains some of the best evidence yet for the triggered star-formation theory. Scientists analyzing the photo have been able to show that the ages of the stars become progressively and systematically younger with distance from the center of the cavities.

This is a three-color composite showing infrared observations from two Spitzer instruments. Blue represents 3.6-micron light and green shows light of 8 microns, both captured by Spitzer’s infrared array camera. Red is 24-micron light detected by Spitzer’s multiband imaging photometer.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA

– from NASA [ link ]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Peeling the Onion

A hoax is a contrivance that requires at least two levels of knowingness; those who are being “hoaxed” and those who have concocted the hoax.

Every reader of this magazine is likely to have heard of the “Sokal hoax,” the most celebrated academic escapade of our time. Everyone is also likely to know the story in outline: how in 1996 the radical “postmodernist” journal Social Text published an article submitted by Alan Sokal, a mathematical physicist at New York University, with the mouthwatering title “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Sokal then revealed the article to be a spoof, a tissue of nonsense that he had painstakingly assembled in order to parody the portentous rubbish that flew under the colors of postmodernism. By publishing Sokal’s submission, the emperors of that tendency revealed themselves to be as naked as the rest of academia had always suspected, and with this one coup Sokal himself became the toast of the town, a celebrity, a hero of the resistance.

– above is from a review by Simion Blackburn of the book, Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Cultureby Alan Sokal

… the Ern Malley hoax made international headlines when it was sprung in June 1944—not a slow news period. Two Sydney-based poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, had whiled away a weekend in 1943 by creating the complete life work of a nonexistent poet to whom they gave an identity, replete with birth and death dates and a surviving sister credited with having discovered the poet’s manuscript.

Lieutenant James McAuley and Corporal Harold Stewart hated modernist poetry in general and despised the Adelaide wunderkind Max Harris in particular. Harris, at age twenty-two, edited a self-styled avant-garde literary magazine with a goofy moniker, Angry Penguins. It was to him that McAuley and Stewart submitted all sixteen of Malley’s extant poems.

– Lost & Found: Ern Malley, the Genuine Fake   by David Lehman in issue #19 of Tin House

In both examples, above, if you envision layers of knowingness, the hoaxers are outside of or above their victims. However, if you, the reader or observer, then step back or up one further layer so that you are outside of the frame in which the hoaxers live, you find that both hoaxes are turned into truths (or at least non-hoaxes). The Sokal affair is now a useful demonstration of post-modern gullibility, and the Ern Malley poetry has more or less absorbed its hoax-iness to become interesting and meaningful because it is a hoax. 

As Lehman goes on, in his Tin House story:

… The hoaxers wanted to expose Harris to ridicule. If Angry Penguins went for their hoax poet, it would show that the editor and his cohorts couldn’t tell the real from the fake. After all, in crafting the Malley poems, they had gone out of their way to produce bogus verse. They lifted lines haphazardly from books opened at random, made nonsensical sentences, wove together misquotations and false allusions. They made certain the poems offered no coherence, no message, “only confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning held out as a bait to the reader.” Max Harris fell for the bait hook, line, and sinker. He published, the hoaxers pounced, and to make matters even worse for the Angry Penguins crowd, the South Australian police seized the issue and filed obscenity charges. The trial, especially the testimony of police detective Vogelsang, is a masterpiece of unwitting self-parody. Vogelsang declared the poems to be indecent, and for proof pointed at the word “incestuous” in one of them. On cross examination he admitted he didn’t know the meaning of the word.The poetry of Ern Malley initially succeeded on the terms that MacAuley and Stewart dictated. What they had written was parody, caricature. But it has lasted as poetry, and the continuing appeal of the work confirms that not the hoaxers but the hoaxed—especially Max Harris, who never modified his admiration of Malley’s verse—have prevailed. It is not quite in spite of McAuley and Stewart that this happened; it is rather in the very nature of a successful hoax that it makes some predictions fulfill themselves. There are passages where the hoaxers succeed precisely in aping the thing they detest — but aping it so well that the result transcends their conscious aims.

…In May 1976, the faculty of the Brooklyn College M.F.A. poetry program consisted of John Ashbery, Jill Hoffman, and me. Each of us contrived an examination question that the students had to answer satisfactorily, in the form of a short essay, in order to receive the degree. For his question, Ashbery quoted two poems in their entirety, and wrote, “One of the two poems below is by a highly respected contemporary poet; the other is a hoax originally published to spoof the obscurity of much modern poetry. Which do you think is which?” There then followed the poems, unidentified by author or title:

So much for the elves’ wergild, the true governance
of England, the gaunt warrior-gospel armoured in
engraved stone. I wormed my way heavenward for
ages amid barbaric ivy, scrollwork of fern.

Exile or pilgrim set me once more upon that ground:
my rich and desolate childhood. Dreamy, smug-faced,
sick on outings – I who was taken to be a king of
some kind, a prodigy, a maimed one.

_____________________________________________________

I have avoided your wide English eyes:
But now I am whirled in their vortex.
My blood becomes a Damaged Man
Most like your Albion;
And I must go with stone feet
Down the staircase of flesh
To where in a shuddering embrace
My toppling opposites commit
The obscene, the unforgivable rape.

One moment of daylight let me have
Like a white arm thrust
Out of the dark and self-denying wave
And in the one moment I
Shall irremediably attest
How (though with sobs, and torn cries bleeding)
My white swan of quietness lies
Sanctified on my black swan’s breast.

Ashbery never revealed that one of the two poems was from the esteemed poet Geoffrey Hill’s “Mercian Hymns”; the other was Ern Malley’s “Sweet William.” But you, dear reader, can surely tell the real from the fake. Can’t you?

Obviously not. I expect Google could. However, it puzzles me that fiction (poetry is fiction, is it not?) is capable of being hoaxed. The intent was to mock the a particular style, but I can’t think why, if readers like it, the backstory of the writers matters, even in its original intent of fooling the Angry Penguins editor.

In the Sokal spoof, he was mocking their claims to “truth”. As book-reviewer Blackburn notes at the end of his review, when dealing with science (non-fiction):

… The word “faith” raises its annoying head at this point. Is the human reliance on uniformities just as much a matter of faith as the creationist’s reliance on whatever message tells him that the earth is six thousand years old? A lot of modern writing in the theory of knowledge more or less throws in the towel and supposes that it is. Wittgenstein summed it up in his last book, On Certainty, arguing that what we would like are rock-solid foundations for our beliefs, but what we find are things that simply “stand fast” for us — and this raises the disturbing possibility of others for whom different and in our eyes deplorable things equally stand fast.

This is really only a rediscovery of Hume’s own results. But “faith” is the wrong word here, if it implies cousinship with arbitrary stabs of confidence in things for which there is no evidence. Those can, and must, be avoided, because a modest confidence in the wonderful stabilities of the world goes with our capacity to think at all.

Without getting into a discussion of the possiblity of knowing truth; if we just stick with knowing “wonderful stabilities”, and you think of knowing as dependent on framing, ones ability to know becomes like an onion. The Ern Malley hoaxers fooled the Angry Penguins editor. However, for all we know, Lehman may be fooling us — if he stands on a layer above us. Or, I could be fooling you. Perhaps there is no Lehman, no Ern Mally hoax, no Angry Penguins editor. Layers, outside layers, outside more layers.

When I look at photographs, I assume that, in the onion of knowingness, I am below the layer of the photographer. I assume that I am seeing less than what he or she saw or knows — if not an outright hoax. I’m not sure if this is because I am a photographer, or if it is how everybody looks at photographs.

When looking at art photographs, I willingly submit to being hoaxed. When looking at his pictures, I don’t want to think about Edward Weston sweating under his cover cloth with his monstrous 8 x 10 camera as he makes his photographs of green peppers. Any more than I, while reading a good novel, want to be aware that the writer spent many months or years sitting in his or her kitchen in a bathrobe writing it.

But when I look at news or documentary photos, the layering of knowledge is always subliminally on my mind. In a recent post in this blog, Eye to I, I commented:

I have to confess that I paid attention to the African story, not because it was about starving children, but because it was a first person narrative by a woman photographer. And because she cleverly (or naturally) stepped back to show the bizarre juxtaposition of all those well-fed technologically advanced news people swarming over that one starving child.

That photojournalist brought me “up” to where she was (and still is) partly by framing her pictures wide enough to show more context, but mainly by her verbal description and ongoing verbal posts in her linked personal blog. Unlike written journalism, or fictional writing such as poetry, or any of the from-scratch visual arts (which work on the same level as their makers), unmanipulated photographs always remain one layer below their maker  — and the perspective of the viewer of those photographs will therefore always be less than that of the photographer. A photograph is always, to some degree, a hoax.

For me, photographs are never of the outer layer of the onion. Like the Sokal affair, and the Ern Malley spoof, we can back up and find their context and with that,  convert them to useful knowledge, but the picture on its own always resides somewhere below me in knowingness.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Infiltrator

RM: Yet another of your recent projects involves walking from airports to major cities around the world. What brought this about, what cities have you visited so far, and how has the experience instructed you?

WS: Um, I may have overstated this! So far I’ve managed only four airport walks—all in the UK. But I hope to walk from JFK to Manhattan the next time I come to the States, and from LAX to the Chateau Marmont. In part the airport walks are a form of derive—or “drift” as the French Situationists styled it—a way of subverting how contemporary society imprisons us in an ordered, economically controlled environment. By walking where everyone else drives, or is otherwise mechanically conveyed, you begin to explore the environment in a new way. When I walked from central London to Heathrow Airport I felt that I might, quite possibly, have been the first person ever to do this journey in this way—certainly in the postindustrial era—and that I was more profoundly in virgin territory that I would’ve been had I found myself paddling up some distant tributary of the Amazon. When I reached the traffic tunnel under the runways that leads to the terminals, I found a sign saying: “No Pedestrian Access: Go Back to the Renaissance.” The Renaissance is in fact a hotel on the peripheral road where they run a shuttle-bus service to the terminals—but nevertheless I felt overseen by the society of the spectacle. In general, I love walking—it puts a brake on a society crazed by its own ability to travel at high speed. It stops me thinking, and it allows me to reach places— often ones near to hand—which others don’t bother with, because they’re leaping over them on their way to Seoul and soullessness. Needless to say, I abhor tourism. I’ve been doing a series of radial walks, whereby I walk a hundred miles from where I live in London along the cardinal points of the compass. Even here, in one of the most populous countries in the world, you can walk for hours—days even—barely encountering a soul. People say they live in the country—but they don’t. They live in their Mitsubishi Inuits, driving their children to pony club. Or else they sit in their houses and gardens. Walking long-distance through southeast England I often feel like a Vietcong infiltrator, creeping along a green tunnel into the heart of the West.

– from an Interview with Will Self  by Rick Moody in issue #28 of Tin House magazine

Because it made me laugh out loud.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Snaps

I think this is a hawk feather. It’s from a Really Big Bird. Probably not a chicken.

 

 

 

 

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Unmaking the Unworld

[Please note: the following is taken from a rather brutal critique of modern poetry. I am quoting it here to be thought about reference the visual arts (for which purpose it was not written). My use is in no way  meant to be an endorsement of the author's opinions reference poetry. ]

Finally they grasped some dark matter: and that was the idea of constituting poetry as that which was so jagged and broken and inefficacious at communicating a wide variety of thoughts and rhetorical effects, that which was so useless for any other kind of expression besides emotional portentousness, that it just had to be poetry.

That’s from a very long, four part (so far …) essay on modern poetry, Our Steps amid a Ruined Colonnade: Contemporary Poetry and the Academy  by James Matthew Wilson in Contemporary Poetry Review. In many ways, his views on poetry coincide with my feelings about much of contemporary art photography. On the other hand, I do not agree with his near total rejection of what is new. Thus I strongly agree with some of what he says (most of what I am going to quote below) and strongly disagree with many of his conclusions (not quoted below).

From the first part:

… It was one thing for Plato to criticize his imperfect world, because he believed in the real existence of an archetypal, ideal reality of which human society could become an expression. It is another for those wounded by and disaffected with their families, society and the Bush administration—for those, in fact, too wounded to believe in the reality of anything except physical matter subject to the amoral voluntarisms of power—to “critique” out of existence our few cultural achievements along with human nature and the human condition itself. The academy after Plato, as it were, has also expelled poetry and poets, because poetry means making, and academics will not settle for their own sterility. They would also un-make human experience and un-world the cosmos in which we live. They would, if only they could. Instead, they settle for disenchanting the literary and encouraging in their students an ignorance of literary and poetic form in favor of a paranoid sensitivity to the forms of political power.

… They are the vanguard of a race that discounts as oppressive the hypothesis that there should be any formal value or inherent meaning in a work or in the world, and they have the additional kinship of being, by some cruel fate, engaged in two of the few enterprises that should require, as a creed, a belief in just such value and meaning. Poets currently do not believe that their poems need to make any intelligible contribution to our understanding of reality, but merely insist that they float upon it, reality’s superfluous metaphors, like oil on water. Scholars, conversely, do not believe that a literary text can be anything more than an accidental expression of ideology; in consequence, literature qua literature has nothing (wise or valid) to say to its readers, but merely reveals historical conditions external to, yet inscribed unwillingly within, it. To put this another way, contemporary literary criticism generally acts as a crude psycho-analysis of a work’s author and its first readers, divulging their hateful complexes in order to condemn them.

 … Do I ask them to cease being conventional in order to become great poets? Not at all. All poetry is written within conventions, even when it is explicitly against them. I ask rather that they ask themselves why it is they write what they write. I have noticed that very few poets enjoy sitting and reading other poets’ work. This is not because “most of the poetry in any age is bad,” but because most poetry written and published today is produced within a body of conventions that guide poets in banal, opaque, even nonsensical directions—directions that no one save another poet looking for something to steal would willingly follow. It is the hack work of the incompetent yet ambitious.

From the third part:

I have always been perplexed by those persons, like my anonymous colleague, who seem to believe that the writing of poetry is primarily about self-expression. I apologize even for noting my perplexity, for I am aware that many others have made the same complaint. And yet any professor of creative writing who believes it is his job to help his students to express themselves ought to recognize immediately that he is less qualified than a trained art therapist to do so—presuming, of course, qualifications obtain in such a neologistic profession. And he ought to recognize in addition that art therapists do not have anything essentiallyto do with art. In wartime, one may use a mattress as a barricade rather than as a thing on which to sleep; similarly, in desperate circumstances, psychologists may deploy art as a means to alleviate the murderous or merely “mopy” tendencies of a psychopath. But no intelligent person would change the definition of “mattress” to “that which is used for sleeping and the stopping of bullets,” any more than one ought to change the definition of “poetry” to “that literary genre written in verse . . . and also used for the soothing of backward children” (St. Hilary,ora pro nobis).

From the fourth part:

… The difference between the pre-modern and the modern way of defining the nature of things is that the pre-modern consciously defines things in terms of their telos, the modern does so unconsciously, and refuses the definition as soon as talk of purpose, finality, destiny, or meaning arises. What made this great, infinitely iterated refusal possible?

… Metaphysics, which had traditionally been the first philosophy (because the first aspect one learns about a thing is its act of thingness, its existence), was reordered as a kind of ancillary subject modeled on mathematical theory. Etienne Gilson deprecated this development as “essentialism,” meaning indifference to what actually exists and exclusive concern with what might possibly be defined. (Contemporary specialists in cultural studies inadvertently echo Gilson when they decry the “essentialism” of Western thought. We might sardonically observe that to speak of “Western thought” as such an ahistorical abstraction is itself an act of essentialism.)

[To repeat my opening note: I am quoting these essays because they interest me reference photographic art. I am not agreeing with the author's assessment of current poetry -- I rather like free verse and nutty subject matter in poetry, but I'm no authority.]

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

And yet, And yet …

And yet, and yet. . . Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.
– from an essay : New Refutation of Time, by Jorge Luis Borges 1946.

I don’t particularly like Borges, but I enjoy the quote above, and those below, (also from him):

The history of the universe…is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a Demon.
– Autobiographical essay 1970

It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.
– Essay: The Fearful Sphere of Pascal

More, if you want them, from this page.

I’m still thinking about this one:

I found America the friendliest, most forgiving, and most generous nation I had ever visited. We South Americans tend to think of things in terms of convenience, whereas people in the United States approach things ethically. This — amateur Protestant that I am — I admired above all. It even helped me overlook skyscrapers, paper bags, television, plastics, and the unholy jungle of gadgets.
– Essay: The Fearful Sphere of Pascal

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Eye and I

Below are bits from three apparently unrelated articles. Try to think of them together.

On the ward’s veranda, there were many small, hungry, and very young children, most so malnourished they had the look of old men and women, loose skin piling up on their sides, features exaggerated by the paucity of flesh padding them.

… Out came the cameras and kit. Reuters, AFP, BBC, NTV and Ugandan broadcaster WBS, all focusing exclusively on one starving boy, a little older than the other children, too frail to stand. Realizing too many lenses were pointed his way for me to even attempt a photo, I left the scene and headed into the ward.

Some of the beds inside the ward were empty, but a few held small bodies that probably weighed less than my bulky camera. I started shooting. I was the lone journalist in the ward—the others were content to all film the same boy outside on the veranda, where his need was immediate and the light was better.
These pictures were doubtlessly moving in the way images of starving children shots always, so I sent a text to a photo editor in Nairobi. “Am at hospital 50 km from main town in Karamoja. Many children starving, malnutrition rampant. Have pix.” He replied back a little bit later, “Not interested for now thank you.” Apparently, they had just done a piece of starving children in Ethiopia, and there’s only so much room in the press for these small bodies.

I thought of the media spectacle outside the feeding ward, and the mothers beckoning me to their children, to take a photo, to take a minute, to care. But I already knew my photos wouldn’t be published on a major news wire. I knew that even if I cared, I wouldn’t be able to tell the story to an audience who could rally outrage into change.

But it isn’t the job of news wires to care—it’s their job to spread news. And this wasn’t as bad as the famine in Ethiopia. It was just a few dozen starving children, somewhere, in some bush, that few people had ever heard of and even fewer people could find on a map and fewer still had visited. Some Africans dying in some bush is not news. It’s sad, but it’s not news.

– above is from If Some Africans Die in Some Bush, Does Anyone Care?; on The Walrus blog of Glenna Gordon, August 18, 2008 (her blog is This is Not a Safari!  and she is based in Kampala, Uganda)

“They’re comfortable in front of the camera,” says Wanda Daniels. In short order, the administrator of the embryonic Indian Residential School Museum of Canada has arranged an interview with two survivors for my documentary about the schools: her seventy-nine-year-old mother, Grace Daniels, and eighty-three-year-old uncle, Max Merrick. “When the last crew was here, they were the ones to speak.” Uh-oh — competition. “Who has been here already?” I ask. “Al Jazeera.”

Little more than a decade after the last one closed its doors, Canada’s Indian residential schools are widely regarded as one of colonialism’s worst excesses — great material for a channel that delights in tarring the West’s moral authority.

… Had you heard of Al Jazeera before they came here, I ask, turning to Grace. “No,” she says, “but they came a long way to see us.” What did they want to know? “The same things you’re asking about. What it was like in this school.”
… I try to imagine how this must have looked to the Al Jazeera crew, and to the network’s audience. “We showed them what we’re showing you,” says Grace.

– above is from A Proper Schooling  by Larry Krotz in the May 2008 issue of The Walrus

In late afternoon in a dim chamber beneath the eastern flank of the volcano, a circle of light the size of a dessert plate slowly traces a path across the wall. The beam is too diffuse to warm a hand. In a few minutes, the disk’s top and bottom melt away and it narrows to a pencil-like shape. Finally, with a strange, brief shudder, the sliver of light disappears.

From the chamber an 874-foot tunnel angles up through the volcano toward an opening to the sky. As it is approached, the portal grows, changes shape and gains color. From one point in the tunnel it resembles a giant, translucent robin’s egg, lit from within.

A bronze stairway rises steeply to the elliptical opening high above. The stairs taper narrowly near the top, with no railings. At the crest there is an explosion of light from the westering sun. To stumble, blinking in the white light, out into the crater’s bowl, pulse and respiration elevated, is to experience a vivid sensation, like rebirth.

“At times the only difference between hallucination and reality is consensus,” says Turrell. “How we respond to light and space, the feeling and sense of space, and how reality is put into question—these sorts of things, and the emotions attached to them, are not much talked about, but I think are worth exploring.”

– above is from an article, The Cosmic Art of James Turrell  by Michael Balchunas in PCM Online. It’s describing his Roden Crater Project.

What’s my point? Aside from the separate interest of each of the three pieces quoted, I see them as a nutshell outline of what one may wish or try to communicate with visual presentations.

First, we have immediate needs (hungry children).

Second we have consideration of who we are — what we look like to each other, evaluation of ourselves relative to one another.

Third we have exploration of our place in the universe.

========================================

Here’s more on Turrell’s Roden Crater Project:

Roden Crater will order basic human interactions with light and space and also with time. It will affect not only the intensity, but also the protensity the extension through time of perceptual experience. The modifications to the cinder cone will be informed by the works Turrell has been producing since the beginning of his career: the light inside the spaces will be like the Skyspaces, but they will be hewn from the natural materials of the volcano and surfaced with the sand stone of the surrounding desert.

Turrell’s Roden Crater Project is an interactive sculptural environment; its subject matter is light and space. At its most profound levels, the completed project will allow us to stand in the present and look into both the past and the future. Light, in one of its aspects, is time. The crater will focus our attention on infinite reaches that are both geologic and astronomical, both personal and psychological. The entire project with its myriad interior and exterior spaces functions in terms of the light in the sky. In these terms, the crater is designed to work closely with what is already available in the sky, but it goes beyond worldly givens into areas of autonomous, unbounded seeing.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/