Getting to It

The Easter Lily cactus opened this morning in my front garden. It's late this year, holding back as the unseasonable cool air blows through the valley. Birds are mating late, or so it seems and I think of the little babies that will welter in the summer heat when it comes. It always comes.

This is as large a view of the world that I can deal with lately. Just a few petals, not even a whole bloom. I even drop the f-stop low to blur the background and focus only on the flower. My lens gets dusted with pollen from stuffing it in like a hungry bee.

Scale is relative. Minutia always seems immense to me, overwhelming even. I prefer details over master plans, one great sentence over an epic novel.

Too much stimuli nauseates me.

Taking Pictures

I'm officially stumped, hitting a wall. Vacation is over and I'm back to work and time just seems to evaporate. So this will probably be short, what with the dogs barking and the freezer repairman clanking in the kitchen not ten feet from my desk. Going back to work always puts me in a different mind-frame, as if my thoughts have to relate to my job. Writing should be work-related writing, about scholarly things that other people, scholarly people, would deem worthy. It's a real kill joy.

On my own, I can stop thinking about what other people would think about my thoughts. They're just there and I can enjoy them, or move on to other thoughts. So, I'm trying to figure out how to have an independent thought during the semester and how to make time to write them down.

As an ease into this awkward transition, I chose to write about photography, so I can mostly use pictures and let the words take a siesta.

Lately, I take pictures of plants up close. Its a way to see the familiar in a new way, like the poppies in my garden. Everything I know about plants changes when I move in close. When I first met the camera, it was just a tool for capturing memories or documenting work. No art, everything at a human scale, like the eye sees.

I admired the work of Ansel Adams, because he could get so much of the landscape into one image. He captured the immensity of the American West and I loved that.

Then I found Dorothea Lange. She seemed to do for human tragedy what Adams had done for the beauty of the Western landscape, but not by grabbing a big image, rather by moving in to reveal the immensity of the human soul. She also seemed less encumbered by the photographic equipment, compared to Adams who always lugged a large format camera into the mountains.

She used a medium format camera or a 35 mm. Sometimes using a camera with a lens that could capture images 90 degrees from straight, so she could appear to be photographing something other than her true subject. Her photographs convey her unobtrusive nature as a photographer. I also tend to move quietly and can often go unnoticed in the world. Sometimes it feels that there are the people who live life and those who watch the film. I'm a watcher. It's not that I'm a lazy couch potato. It's that I feel as though there is a script to life that no one bothered to give me, so try as I might I always feel outside the action. So I watch. . . and take pictures.

My early impressions of Helen Keller, filtered through my sister, stayed with me like a good childhood memory, as if Helen had been a playmate joining in on our afternoons of make-believe. She stayed a child to me even though she had died an old woman the same year we moved to Berkeley and my sister started haunting the library at the School for the Deaf and Blind up the hill from our house. And of course she looked more like Patti Duke in my mind than the real woman. Despite my flawed sense of the true Helen, the core of her heroism remained with me. She managed to find her way in the world and seemed joyful to be alive. If she could do that without eyes and ears able to help her, I should do fine. All my parts seemed to work fine. And her passion for discovery comforted me.

Heroes both inspire and shame us. With Helen, her joy in sensing things, the color of a flower by the feel of its petals, reminded me to cherish small things, cherish the fact that I can feel them, smell them, hear them, see them, taste them, watch them change through time. Inspiration. Yet to also know I do so much less with so much more than she had. Shame. While she devoured every scrap of life, I give considerable effort to blocking out sensory input. I can't handle it. It overwhelms me. This seems a waste of perfectly good eyes, ears, and nose.

When I feel closest to understanding how Helen might have perceived the world, especially after reading her tiny autobiography The Story of My Life, is when I'm in the garden. She had an intense love of nature, of learning about life--"The loveliness of things taught me all their use."--especially at an intimate scale:

"Sometimes I rose at dawn and stole into the garden while the
heavy dew lay on the grass and flowers. Few know what joy it is
to feel the roses pressing softly into the hand, or the beautiful
motion of the lilies as they sway in the morning breeze.
Sometimes I caught an insect in the flower I was plucking, and I
felt the faint noise of a pair of wings rubbed together in a
sudden terror, as the little creature became aware of a pressure
from without."

I feel that kind of intimacy when I take photographs with my macro lense, leaning in so close a flower or bug are revealed as if for the first time, like this flower shot I took last spring. The world opens up anew (and yes, how my heroes write can spill into my own writing if I think about them too much or have just reread their words, so I'm going with anew)