Para mi amigo Mac, quien, además de ser poeta y fotógrafo, ama la madre tierra. California is calling.
"One learns that the world, though made, is yet being made, that this is the morning of creation. That mountains long conceived are now being born, brought to light by the glaciers, channels traced for rivers, basins hollowed for lakes. When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. The whole wilderness in unity and interrelation is alive and familiar. The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly. Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike. This natural beauty hunger is made manifest in our magnificent national parks. Nature's sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world.
-John Muir (Cited in Ken Burns' documentary The National Parks: America's Best Idea)
2 comments:
Thanks for the 'grito' Ben. This clip both moves and sickens me. I feel a sort of kinship with the people who come out to photograph the phenomena and at the same time I don't know that I would want to be there with them. I think its because I feel that my relationship with the natural world is intimate and sharing experiences with strangers seems cheap or something. Photography, especially digital photography, feels like image consumerism to me sometimes and so I try to balance the consumerism feel with intimacy. Now I'm not making any sense, so I will just end by blah jones raffle box high steppin' garden's hose.
I know exactly what you mean. Almost every person there referred to themselves as a photographer. Seeing all those tri-pods set up next to each other so that hundreds of people could capture a singular event...
A problem I've had lately is that I've realized that I love reading poetry for myself. I don't want to share my experience of this or that poem with someone else. At the same time, that's what the poet does when they publish a poem, they share a singular moment with as many people as read the poem. But I want to feel some sort of exclusivity, I want my experience to somehow be more special or more profound than that of others. I think the reason for this is that the other side of the coin is a bit terrifying, that, though I am a singularity, I am also a repetition, my experience can and has been replicated. I think...I don't know. Now I'm not making sense.
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