Sunny day

These geometric shadows tell the story more clearly than I can. The spring sun has arrived in Keene, and Main Street is bustling with people strolling, sitting, and otherwise soaking up the light and warmth we’ve craved all winter. Sunny days are here again, and it’s all but impossible to stay inside.

 

Made in the shade

Noticing is addictive. Once you see one tree silhouetted against a building, you start seeing shade trees–the upright ghosts of living trees outlined as shadows on nearby vertical surfaces–everywhere you go.

I’ve talked before about color-collecting, the practice of choosing a particular color (say, red), and then taking a walk in which you try to notice every instance of said color (a stop sign, a passing jogger’s hat, a parked car, a cast-off Coke can). The first time I talked here about color-collecting, I reasoned “If we’re going to travel the territory of our mundane lives, we might as well notice the neighbors.” Now nearly four years later, I find myself nodding emphatically to my own argument. What better way to make yourself at home in your environs than by getting to know your neighbors, both the actual trees you meet and the ghostly shades they cast?

I took today’s photos last weekend, and over the intervening days, I’ve been seeing tree shadows everywhere: on buildings, on cars, on fences, on other trees. The natural place for any shadow to lie is on the ground, shade gravitating like water to low places. But in a forest of trees or a suburb of houses, there are many available objects to catch any given shadow. Presumably any of these shades would prefer to lie lazily on snow-blanketed ground, but instead, they’ve been snagged on verticality. Can you imagine the courage of an east-facing facade that stands unmoving even while knowing the weight of a shade tree will fall upon it every sunny morning?

In the summer time, these shade trees are shapeless and amorphous: dark blobs that bespeak the leaves of others. In a snowy season, shade trees are stripped skeletal, the shadows they cast tracing their inner anatomy. In summer, we see superficially, lulled by the loveliness of leaves; in winter, all that gets cast away like so many veils, and we see (truly) what lies beneath.

Some say shadows are unreal, the lingering after-affect of light and enlightenment. But why should we privilege the cause over the effect? Once a tree has grown, we have no use for its now-split seed; once we’ve reached our own adulthood, we’re discouraged from behaving as babies. Leaves are arboreal flesh, branches arboreal bones, and tree shades arboreal spirit. If over-arching trees add value to shady suburban homes, why wouldn’t the winter shadows these same tree cast be likewise prized?

Click here for the complete photo-set of shade trees. And while you’re collecting all things arboreal, click over to the March 2008 Festival of Trees, currently hosted on Orchards Forever. Enjoy!

 

Eclipsed

Yesterday morning’s dog-walk was sunny, with the kind of low-angled light that makes for good shadows. When you walk the same streets nearly every day, you become a connoisseur of local light, someone who notices when the light is shining this way rather than that. Yesterday’s dog-walk was sunny, and Reggie and I walked early, so the rising sun was glinting through the east-facing window of storefront in downtown Keene that’s in the process of being gutted. In low-angled morning light, the dirty window that had shrouded this process the afternoon before suddenly became transparent, and I could see the previous day’s demolition illuminated as if on stage.

I don’t go looking for local light shows; they just happen to happen when I’m out and about. If you walk the same old streets enough times in enough weathers, you’ll grow accustomed to the same old sights, and that makes it easy to see something Different and Unusual when that sort of thing decides to happen. I’m sure that there have been alien eyes my entire life and then some, but I started to notice them only upon moving to Keene with an antsy dog. Several weeks ago while walking with friends in a new-to-me-neighborhood, I found myself interrupting the usual conversation to point out an afternoon specimen.  “See? There. The same old light reflected and refracted in an unusual way. Now that you’ve seen it, you’ll start seeing it everywhere.”

But truth be told, I’m not sure my friends or anyone will start seeing alien eyes everywhere: my predilection for noticing light and shadow seems to be an acquired thing, an obsession that few others share. Yes, there are the likes of Shadow Steve walking the streets of New York, but elsewhere and among other folks, you have to point to something a bit more exciting than reflected light on a wall to make headlines. What’s the big deal behind another bit of reflected light?

And so you may or may not be surprised to hear that my own viewing of last night’s total lunar eclipse was only partial. Around 9:00, I checked the skies from inside my warm apartment to see whether it was clear, and yes, I could see the celestial bangles of Orion’s belt. At 9:30, I pulled boots and coat over my pajamas–yes, by that time of night, my own moon is surely settling toward the horizon called sleep–and went outside to see a half-slivered, half-silvered sphere hovering above my backyard. By 10:00 pm and beyond, I was nestled inside, imagining the half-slivered moon as completely shade-stained as I remembered past eclipses and the way something as simple as a shadow turns the usual flat white disk into a smoky orange popping from the sky with three-dimensional intensity.  In other words, my desire to see last night’s total eclipse was itself eclipsed by other desires, the warmth of my own apartment and its awaiting bed exerting a gravitational pull I couldn’t resist. Nestled in for the night, I knew someone like Dave would take and share pictures better than any I could. A lunar eclipse, after all, is something everyone stops to take note of, giving someone like me the night off from noticing.

This morning, though, was something else entirely. Walking Reggie before sunrise, we both were greeted by the same old non-eclipsing moon shining its flatly white, entirely ordinary face over the the center of the street as we set out in the frigid chill. Did this morning’s moon look a bit sheepish as it shone with the usual monthly fullness, embarrassed at the unaccustomed attention it garnered last night? Shadows are an everyday occurrence, but eclipses are rare: this isn’t the fault of the moon but of our imperfect and obstructed view, purely a matter of perspective. This morning, the only other folks out were drivers headed toward the morning shift at the local factory, and I doubt they’d stop for something as simple as shadows on the moon.

 

Misty

In my mind, the above is a misty scene. I remember taking this photo on a warmish winter night several years ago; a quick check of my blog and photo archives tells me I snapped the shot on February 3, 2006 and blogged it the day after. I don’t remember it being February, only foggy, and the above picture doesn’t capture any of the mist my mind so clearly remembers. Instead, there’s only damp pavement, a lone car, and the supernal glow of my local laundromat still open on a midwinter’s night.

This is the picture that captures the misty mystery of that February fog almost exactly two years ago:

This second picture captures the atmosphere of that two-years-ago February night more truly: it was the kind of night where you could see snow ghosts swirling above the streets, their presence blurring the normally piercing beams of traffic- and street-lights. But it’s that first picture of some lone soul doing Friday night laundry that resonated most deeply with me, perhaps because on most Friday nights two years ago I would have been sitting at home, a pile of papers being my version of a lonely late-night chore.

It’s strange how our memories are ultimately more misty than even the warmest mid-winter night. Now that I have photo and blog archives to refer to, I can nail down dates, times, and places in a way I previously couldn’t; if put on the witness stand with my laptop and an Internet connection, in most cases I could tell you where I was, what I photographed, and what I thought about on any given day. Without the record of my blog’s literary and photographic hatch-marks, however, everything would ultimately be subsumed in the mists of forgetfulness: was it two years ago or three that I went to that art opening, and was it in February or December? Left to my own devices, I’ll forget it all. With a blog and photo archives, at least, there’s some sort of definitive chronicle: oh, yes, of course. It was then, and I was there!

I’m not convinced that bolstering one’s own memory is the best reason to keep a blog, but it certainly is a convenient side-effect. This weekend, Leslee considered her not-very-Groundhog’s-Day-like existence, concluding that this year, unlike previous ones, “Everything is different now.” I don’t know if for me everything is different now compared to two foggy Februaries ago–I still teach the same classes at the same colleges, I still live down the street from the same laundromat, and I still spend too many weekend hours grading papers. But still, I no longer spend Friday nights alone in Keene, and these days I’m attending more sports events than art openings. Over time, given enough Februaries and the words and pictures that chronicle them, some things do change, and if we don’t record it all day-by-day, most of it will be lost to the fog of time, our memories being the most misty mystery of them all.

This is my belated contribution to this past week’s Photo Friday theme, Misty.

 

A certain slat of light

I’ve given up photographing objects: these days, all I want to capture is the angular intersection of line and light.

I suppose some photographers venture out of their houses specifically looking for images; me, I let lines and light come to me. Like a cat curling into the warm spot created by an angled sunbeam, yesterday my attention was drawn to the glowing spots where light slanted through window blinds, the slats creating a geometrically interesting slant. Seeing the world sliced is novel enough; seeing the world not as object but as shape is even more novel, the mind skimming the surface outline of things rather than sinking to the level of name. This is no longer “house,” and that is no longer “tree”: now they each are an interesting, intertwined constellation of line and angle, a geometry problem arranged in two dimensions like a sketch. Haven’t you ever longed to leave the world of reality and enter the purely theoretical? The world of shape and line is super-real, a realm apart where even ugly objects allure with sensuous shapes and forms.

As a writer, I’ve always been transfixed by lines; as a photographer, I’ve come to fall in love with light. Have you considered the miracle that brings a nascent god into our midst every day? At Keene State, there is a stone monument honoring the scientists who study gravity, a force we seldom remember as being essential to our mundane lives…but where do we remember the miraculous power of light, the very fabric of our existence as seen and seeing creatures? Take nearly any object, shine some light on its matter, and you will behold an interesting and intriguing thing: even the dusty, well-worn floor in an aging house, its boards sliced thin by slatted sun, glows with unadorned wonder. What is this? How many times have I seen and passed by, unaware?

Carrying a digicam with me these past three years, I’ve become a connoisseur of light and line, relishing the varied ways each falls and lies. What is the world but a tangled, tender matrix of light and line, each splayed into varied vectors? If we were to strip objects to their constituent parts, we’d be left with the angles of light and line, a child’s drawing of sticks and circles. The sun is a circle surrounded by beaming sticks; we ourselves are sticks intersected and folded.

The lines and light in our lives typically go unheeded; we notice them as little as fish notice water. Instead, like children we are tempted by baubles, grasping and clinging to the objects of daily life with their discreet names and forms: window, wall, floor. But that which lies behind these objects, the Thing that fills and sustains them, is nothing more than Light and Line. A blind man can feel the warmth of light on his face; a blind woman can trace the outline of a window sill with her hand. How blind are we sighted ones, then, who forget both surface and shape because of our insipid search for the Deep Meaning of things?

If there were no meaning, we’d satisfy ourselves with the superficial surface of things, and presumably we’d be happy, wandering the world like the newly sighted, awed and aghast at the profusion of shapes that surround us. Instead, we look at the world and tell ourselves there must be More, refusing to embrace a sea of shape as All We’ve Got. On winter afternoons, though, a certain slat of light more than suffices, brimming and welling into the sunken surface of things, spilling into the space a poet reserves for joy.

 

Snow ghosts after dark

Today is Keene’s annual Ice and Snow Festival, so last night on downtown’s Railroad Plaza, city crews heaped piles of snow scooped from other sites. You know it’s been an unseasonably warm winter when there’s a dearth of raw material for the annual snow-sculpting contest: as a point of comparison, two years ago, it was negative 14 degrees Fahrenheit without wind-chill the day after the festival.

Yesterday was mild and rainy, a day when most of Keene’s remaining snow sublimed into snow ghosts. Last night was similarly mild–well above freezing–so as I walked to and from a friend’s downtown art opening, the usual sights along Main Street took on an eery, other-worldly cast. “It looks like London out there,” one waitress called to another as I ate a Friday night special at Timoleon’s diner right before closing. I’ve never walked the streets of London after dark, and it’s been a long time since I’ve walked the nocturnal streets of Keene. But with the air last night rich with moisture, even the usual street lamps, shop windows, and lit marquees gleamed with a fuzzy, supernal glow.

Thoreau wasn’t much for urban nightlife, and neither am I…but Thoreau loved to walk by night, filling his 1851 journal with accounts of his monthly full-moon walks. Although I can’t speak for moon-walking, I can assure you that last night’s fog-walk showed a side of Keene that I’m not accustomed to, a softened, blurry side through which even a hint of warmth–like that emanating from a crowded coffeeshop, or the light from a packed theatre–burns through your consciousness like a beacon. On any Friday night, people mix and mingle…but on a foggy Friday, I think they draw closer than at other times, huddling around the communal fire of human companionship while solitary walkers like me watch (and snap photos) from outside, amazed by their glow.

On a foggy, lamp-lit street, you can almost touch the ghosts around you; these streets aren’t empty but full of the spirits of those who walk and have walked here. Snow isn’t the only phenomenon that leaves a heavy cloud when it passes; so do the souls of street-walkers, their silent footsteps echoing for a hearkened ear.

Before hitting the fog-shrouded streets to stroll home, I chatted with a local glass artisan who crafts multi-faceted tinted lamps–crafted star-light–and backwards-ticking glass clock faces. In a jewelry store filled with paintings, sand- and yarn-works, batik prints, and other earthly delights, there shone the prismatic sheen of hand-helped color. Even in a warm winter, February is a lonely month, so the beauty of last night’s art was almost equal to the beauty of co-mingled souls: other locals who ventured into the fog to gather around the spark of art, kindled from the embers of creativity and vision.

At one point while I was admiring those gleaming glass lamps, a woman asked me if I were an artist, and humbled by the abundance around me, I stammered. “Uh, no. I mean, I take pictures…but I can’t produce anything without the technology of a camera…I can’t make anything tactile.” On a night when even air had a velvet touch, the ephemeral ether of typed word and pixelated image seemed as insubstantial as a dissolving cloud. What seemed real instead were the hard matter of human contact and the palpable textures of painted canvas, blade-cut aluminum tape, and wrought iron.

On the walk home, at my usual crossing spot in front of St. Bernard’s Parish on Main Street, the almost empty streets were filled with ghosts, the beams of head- and traffic-lights diffusing into moist air. Thoreau loved his moon-walks because they made his usual haunts seem foreign and alluring; Thoreau recognized the inefficacy of intoxicants in a world where darkness and the very air itself is hallucinogenic.

On a foggy Friday night, the true nature of everyday objects is laid bare, a local funeral home looking as ghostly as befits its business. Some would say these scenes look different in fog, that an atmospheric anomaly masked they way they “really” are, but I’d beg to differ. Perhaps daytime, not night, is the time of illusion. Maybe the palpable presences we so applaud by day are mere chimera, their spiritual auras appearing only when fog confounds the eyes of sense.

If I were an artist, I’d make clocks that did something more audacious than move backward. If I were an artist, I’d manipulate matter itself to make time stand still, capturing for eternity the blurred and gleaming spot in time when a solitary soul shone from a drizzle-dampened parking lot, a foggy Friday at the laundromat transformed into the ghost-haunted stuff of dreams.

My friend Sage Camille doesn’t have a website, but the other artist featured at last night’s opening, Segun Olorunfemi, does. And you can view Hans Schepker’s glass geometry, including his prismatic lamps, on his online collection of mathematically correct lighting and sculpture.

 

Divine

Today’s Photo Friday theme is Divine. I posted this pencam shot of a stained glass window panel from Boston’s Gargoyles Grotesques & Chimeras (aka “the Gargoyle Shop”) on my birthday back in January. No, I’m not egomaniacal enough to compare myself with Christ on my birthday; it just happens that I was born on the Christian feast of the epiphany, which I considered good enough reason to post a picture I particularly liked.

As much as I like to admire religious iconography (and yes, I find myself wandering churches whenever I travel even though I don’t frequent one at home), I seldom take photos inside of churches. Back when I was a graduate student at Boston College and used to spend an occasional moment meditating in the chapel in Saint Mary’s Hall, I remember a particularly obnoxious pair of tourists once coming in, talking loudly, and taking lots of photos of the place even though I was obviously sitting there “using” it. Ever since, I’ve been particularly hesitant to disturb the interior quiet of a church even if there aren’t worshippers around; somehow, simply imbibing the spiritual essence of an intentionally sacred place is enough, and taking photos seems excessive. Whether or not this self-imposed photo abstinence in churches makes sense, I had no qualms shooting a stained glass window inside an art and architectural shop.

I’ll be leaving later this morning to make a weekend trip to Ohio, so I’ll be out of the blog loop until Monday night. Until then, I hope your weekend is simply divine.

 

Afternoon shadows

As I’ve already illustrated, I am a collector of shadows. After spending most of yesterday in bed waiting for my inexplicably queasy stomach to settle, by afternoon I could deny the dog no longer: we’d go for a short walk.

Yesterday was sunny and mild, with afternoon temperatures in the almost tropical 60s. Mothers and children were out riding bikes on the Industrial Heritage Trail, a stretch of railroad-track-turned-bikepath that runs behind several local factories. I like to walk the dog along this segment of trail because it heads away rather than toward downtown Keene: in other words, it’s lonely enough that I can let Reggie run off-leash within city limits.

It was, as I mentioned, afternoon by the time Reg and I went walking; since I was still feeling sickly, I didn’t plan to take any photos. But I never leave the house without my camera, and the afternoon shadows were irresistible with their delightfully geometric lines and angles.

When Reggie and returned from walking, it was too mild and glorious to go inside even though my body wanted rest. So the dog and I did something we haven’t done since last fall, sitting outside on the screened back porch just like I did this time last year. So much has changed in my life since last year, but afternoon shadows remain the same, as regular as clockwork.

 

Miracle on Church Street

Sometimes one picture makes an entire day worthwhile.

That isn’t to say, of course, that Thanksgiving, 2004 wasn’t “worthwhile” in its own merits before I got dressed (finally) and walked the dog around the Square around lunchtime. After all, every day is intrinsically worthwhile, and some would argue that red-letter holidays are by nature more “worthy” than so-called Ordinary Time.

All I know is that it’s been rainy and overcast these past few days — yesterday I didn’t walk the dog (a rarity for me) and only left the house to do three loads of laundry at the laundromat down the street. So today when I took the dog on our usual jaunt into and around downtown Keene, I was somewhat desperate for blog-worthy photos. Would Happenstance happen: would the Remarkable spontaneously shine through?

Initially, things didn’t look good. Although I had thought yesterday’s perpetual rain had stopped, when the dog and I left the house this morning, it was drizzly and windy, exactly the type of weather that makes walking with an umbrella impossible. As soon as you put up your umbrella, the wind blows it inside out. As soon as you give into the wind and take your umbrella down, the drizzle turns to downpour. Needless to say, this makes for less-than-ideal photographic conditions: not only did I have to worry about my digicam getting wet, on today’s walk I fought a perpetual battle against a windblown umbrella on one hand and an antsy, tugging dog on the other.

So I wasn’t expecting Serendipity to show up as I turned the corner onto Church Street; in fact, the only thing I was looking for as the dog and I turned the corner was a trash can in which to deposit a fresh baggie of “business” that Reggie had done while I stood, again, playing tug-of-war with the wind and my umbrella.

New England in general and New Hamsphire in particular is known for its fickle weather, and today was not atypical. As I hurried the dog down Church Street toward the trash receptacle I knew was at the corner of Church and Main, I saw something unexpected. Sudden sunlight. It shone over the roof of Hannah Grimes Marketplace and onto the building across the street, bisecting that facade and the line of trees before it neatly in two, a perfect line between light and dark trailing off into the vanishing point. Geometrically, it was perfect, full of the lines and angles I love. Visually, it was stunning, a glimpse of light in an otherwise overcast scene. And temporally, it was fleeting: as fumbled with the umbrella, leash, doggie-doo bag and camera, I knew that in a snap second the clouds would shift and that sudden sunlight would be gone. Act now — supplies are limited.

I took two pictures of the sudden sunlight on Church Street: the first is the image you see at the top of this entry, and the other is one I deleted. In the span of time between my first and second shutter-snaps, the sun had vanished and a suddenly sunlit brick facade became ordinary again. Now you see it, now you don’t.

I firmly believe that grace is like serendipitous sunlight, sneaking in when you least suspect it to catch you unaware. Today for the first time in my life, I’m spending Thanksgiving alone, turning down a last minute dinner invitation to spend instead the day in stretch pants eating comfort food and lounging with the dog. I don’t think I’d want to spend every Thanksgiving alone, but this year, it feels just right: a chance to contemplate this past year with its monumental comings and goings — first a PhD earned, then a 13-year marriage ended — in a spot of intentional solitude. When I stop to consider what I have to be thankful for this year, I don’t know where to start or stop: although I have regrets about things I have done or left undone, I can’t think of a single thing in my life itself that I would change.

Last week on the drive home from meeting with Tim over tea in the afternoon and my friend “A” (not her real initial) over beer and burritos in the evening, I saw a shooting star drop toward the western horizon. Given the chance to wish upon a star, I didn’t know what to ask for since these days I feel I have everything I could want or need. Although it’s bad luck, they say, to speak your wishes before they’re granted, I’ll share with you my shooting-star wish: trusting the Universe knows exactly what I need, I asked for another year of serendipitous surprise.

 

How my light is spent

Yesterday and today have been bright and sunny here in Keene. Yesterday I taught all day; today I’m stuck at my computer commenting on online drafts. On days like today when I’d rather be outside walking, I grow oddly aware of my own mortality, the opening lines of Milton’s Sonnet XIX ringing in my head:

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg’d with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”

In Milton’s case, he laments the gradual onset of blindness: how can he effectively use his God-given gift of poetic vision while that same God deprives him of physical sight? Would God be so cruel, Milton wonders, as to judge the productivity of a “day-labourer” crippled by an affliction beyond his control?

Although I’m not plagued with gradual blindness, I’ve always resonated with Milton’s Sonnet XIX. It seems to me to describe the human condition: blessed with so much promise, our time and light are nevertheless limited. We want to serve God, perhaps–we look for ways to express our humble talents–but we feel incapable or misguided, not knowing what to do or where to start. And in the meantime, time passes without ceasing, the seconds on our mortal shot-clock ticking down, down, down while we consider whether to shoot or to pass.

Yesterday afternoon while walking the dog, I took the usual assortment of random photos: a fire-alarm, a dusty windowsill framed with red brick, the angular lines of dingy and decrepit siding on an old factory. Why take photos of ordinary, unlovely things? Well, to me they are strangely lovely: there’s something about the shine of light on brick, wood, and even old alumnimun that is precious and even heart-stopping. Someday when I’m old with failing sight, will I remember these random sights and wish I could see them one last time? Do the makers of these aging, overlooked objects, themselves long dead, long for the days when they and their handiwork were young and new?

My favorite scene in the film American Beauty shows a bit of footage shot by Ricky Fitts, the protagonist’s drug-dealing, video-obsessed teenage neighbor. The tape shows what Ricky describes as being the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen: a plastic grocery bag blowing in the wind. “Video’s a poor excuse,” Ricky explains, “But it helps me remember…Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it, like my heart’s going to cave in.” That sentiment is precisely why I take random photos of brick walls and windowsills: our mortal lives feel very much like random trash tossed by an unseen hand, but there’s a sense of beauty in the breeze if we surrender ourselves to it. “And that’s the day I knew there was this entire life behind things,” Ricky said of the day he watched that random bag dance, “this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever.”

Time is fleeting; our days are short and our light even shorter. Bandied about like a bag in the wind, it’s difficult to find our way, and easy to think that we should have one. But we aren’t the masters of our destiny: we install fire alarms and paint windowsills and put up sensible siding, but ultimately we don’t control our fates. An invisible wind, an unseen light, transmutes the fabric of our days, filling them to overflowing with beauty but not with time. Considering how my light is spent, I dare not waste it, for once it’s gone, our mortal dance will be relegated to the dustheap of Time.