I took a walk on the morning of November 6th. After sitting with the heaviness of recent developments in American politics I decided that I needed to get out of the house, put some distance between myself and the insanity of men and find solace in the sanity of things. I grabbed the Leica with the 40 and a roll of Kentmere 100 and headed to a nearby park.
It was a cold morning, frost still glittered where the morning sun had not yet melted it. Where the sun shone on the melted frost it was as though everything was adorned in innumerable jewels. The light played beautifully through the autumn forest, and I was once again reminded of that certain magic and salvific power that we can find in these places. These places, these experiences are a kind of philosophico-spiritual gateway out of the hollowed, narcissistic and quasi solipsistic worldview that characterizes our modern attitude, what Micrea Eliade has called the desacralized cosmos.
An old friend of mine used to say that the only salvation for humanity was the fact that nothing it could do is eternal. Those words have always stuck with me. They speak, in so few words, to the place of humanity in the grand tapestry of the cosmos, to the deep beauty of creation that outshines our worst failures. For all the horrors we have and will continue to bring upon the planet there is this quiet, ineradicable sublimity pervading things.
Many have written about this experience, obviously. For example, the beautiful piece by the poet Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things. Personally, the writer who comes to mind most frequently for me is the American poet Robinson Jeffers, the poet laureate of the wild god of the world. Below is Jeffers’ poem Return, in which Jeffers urges our return to the earthly sphere beyond the cloudy and ethereal realm of abstract ideation. A return to the sanity of things and a turn from the insanity of the abstract machinations of the human mind.
“A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again.
I will go to the lovely Sur Rivers
And dip my arms in them up to the shoulders.
I will find my accounting where the alder leaf quivers
In the ocean wind over the river boulders.
I will touch things and things and no more thoughts,
That breed like mouthless May-flies darkening the sky,
The insect clouds that blind our passionate hawks
So that they cannot strike, hardly can fly.
Things are the hawk's food and noble is the mountain, Oh noble
Pico Blanco, steep sea-wave of marble.”
— Robinson Jeffers | Return
I have always found in Jeffers, and in the experiences that flow from his words, a kind of transcendent experience and a coinciding peace. In the unhinging of our perspectives from the narrow humanism of the enlightenment and the turning outward of ourselves we are opened up to the vast inhuman beauty of creation, of which we are still intimately a part. It is a reminder of that perspective which Thoreau alludes to in the closing paragraphs of Walden when he reminds us that the world is wider than our views of it.
The election has marked yet another development in the manifold crises that seem to be part and parcel of the slow unraveling of the world in which we find ourselves. The weariness and tedium of the election cycle had ended in one large step further in to fascist disintegration, with few if any silver linings. Let me be clear, I have no hope in salvation at the hands of political elites, puppets dutifully playing the roles of the right and left wing of capital in the service of a system which is, by all observations, a race to the bottom for humanity and the rest of the planet. A telos in which everything beautiful is to be sacrificed for the insane desires of a handful of unimaginably powerful individuals. The rot is systemic, fascism is capitalism in decay, goes the saying often misattributed to Lenin.
It is hard to find beauty in it, I admit. But it is there, quietly shining if we are strong enough to look, to paraphrase Plotinus. This experience, thematized, expressed and photographed in different ways over the years, has long been my muse in my photographic output. It was the experience which moved me deeply in long walks in the forest in dark times in my life, and became that which I desired to express and share in my work.
I have always hoped that if my work can bring anything to the world, it is that it might function as a glimmer in the dark, a reminder of that deeper beauty of creation in the midst of disintegration.
