I know what it is—some kind of flowering plant. But I can’t stop seeing it as something else: a young owl, her small feet outstretched, laser-eyed, wings catching the air before touch-down.
Is seeing ever more than a seeing-as? Is knowledge ever more than an act of imagination?
No question about these flying creatures—crows.
But there is something equally mysterious in their blue hour gatherings: they fly together but not in echelon; something brilliant shines in each one.
Tara, who normally dreads such an unflattering upward angle, but who here is inspired and courageous.
“…looking at certain photographs, I wanted to be a primitive, without culture.” - Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes
Not long ago, this downtown playground and the apartment towers around it were parking lots and warehouses. The city is complex, changeable; it serves purposes I will never grasp. I cannot say what it is all for.
But this—a man and his son swinging gently on a spring afternoon—if it is all for this, then I can understand.
My favourite contemporary painter is Martin Wittfooth. There is something holy about his creatures—an elephant with industrial plumes rising from in his forehead; a fox wandering a degraded forest, spine arched in a doomed ecstasy; a humpback whale gliding like an unmanned Zeppelin over a pre-dawn city.
So that here I see an old boar meditating upon something I lack the wisdom to perceive, his long exhale alive with tiny things that belong to the narrow margin between light and dark.
When I crouch down to point the camera at her she normally approaches me—ears flat, spine long—too quickly for me to focus. But here a gap in the rocks kept her at the right distance for a wide-angle portrait; her album cover, says Tara.
I was amazed by the nest of stamens and the spotless ladybug. Did she weave them somehow? For what purpose?
But later in the park I see many more of these stamen tangles; they are dried out, ugly—they always do that once the petals fall. I only noticed this one because it was fresh and because the beetle suggested a different story; the point of light on its glossy carapace—is it not a mark of truth?
“O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count
myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I
have bad dreams.”
“Life can be interesting and beautiful”—a therapist offered this when I asked him why one bothers living.
Yes, it is interesting to see the world through mathematics, to see a Fibonacci number in the five petals of a flower. But I am no longer interested in mathematics if it asks me to turn away from the world.
Yes, there is beauty in the colours of nature, in the pink petals that draw my eye and lens. But I don’t want beauty that presents itself as an appearance. (Dishonesty—not being what you are—is death.)
I want, somehow, to take interest in the world as it is, to see the beauty in its ordinary being—in what is the hardest to see because it is the closest to me and is always in view.
She is far too small—I had no time to change the lens—but the moment would not wait. A beautiful child, a girl, winding up to leap. Into what? From my position in the dark foliage, I wonder at her brilliance.
“Sing, if you know how. Sing./ Nothing is more real than beauty.”
- from Seven Last Songs, Jan Zwicky
Yes, a bee is an automaton programmed to find nourishment, a useful mechanism for transferring pollen. But I, too, fly automatically from flower to flower.
I thought it was Schopenhauer who said that "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” In fact—I don’t know whether or not to be embarrassed—it was someone named Walter Pater.
In any case, the architect Arthur Erickson sought in this building to obliterate—as music does, for Pater—the distinction between matter and form, to let concrete take up a form native to its substance, not the form of something else. He wanted his building to bypass—as music does, for Schopenhauer—the representational part of the mind, the part that can be wrong, so that the music of the world could be heard as human music.
And in this building I do hear music: metrical, patient, unabashed music.
But is the difference between this building and less musical buildings a difference in the degree to which they unite matter and form?
As Wittgenstein wrote, “Substance is what subsists independently of what is the case. It is form and content.” Which is to say that to be concrete is not to be part of the structure of a building but to be something for which it is possible to be part of the structure of a building. The concrete in Erickson’s building, as substance, subsists independently of its being part of the state of affairs that is the structure of Erickson’s building. If form means what Wittgenstein calls structure, “the determinate way in which objects are connected in a state of affairs”, then form and matter have nothing to do with each other, even in Erickson’s geological ruin of a building. If form means, as Wittgenstein says it means, “the possibility of structure”, then the form of concrete contains the possibility of all buildings; the form of concrete is in the concrete, not in the building; form and matter are inseparable.
If the “distinction between form and matter,” then, is just another artifice of the representing mind, is any work of art—any building, any piece of music, any photograph—more guilty of sundering form and content than any other? If not the uniting of matter and form, what, then, does art aspire towards? Towards the quieting of the mind? Does a building aspire towards its eventual ruin? But here stands a building; and here I stand.
Is a tree really material stuff—carbon and so on—temporarily taking the form of a tree? Or is it, somehow, tree right through? It doesn’t matter. When a tree is this grand, it becomes wise, not massive.
A man listens to the mechanical whir of the self-timer and waits for the click of the shutter.
Behind him are photos from the past two years of learning photography. To his left are a few books found in a thrift store, books which he will not read. His t-shirt is from a 10k race the previous autumn.
A man finds himself in the middle of his life.