wishes left on lips
the mark of their wings – regrets …
fly kites in your eyes
Wishes left on your lips
The mark of their wings
Regrets fly kites in your eyes
Wistful by Carl Sandburg as published Good Morning America in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950).
the running water
home of living fish and
silver of the sun
The mountains stand up around the main street m Harper’s Ferry
Shadows stand around the town, and mist creeps up the flanks of tall
rocks
A terrible push of waters sometime made a cloven way for their flood
here
On the main street the houses huddle, the walls crouch for cover
And yet— up at Hilltop House, or up on Jefferson’s Rock, there are
lookouts.
There are the long curves of the meeting of the Potomac and the
Shenandoah,
There is the running water home of living fish and silver of the sun
The lazy flat rocks spread out browns for green and blue silver to run
over
Mascots of silver circles move around Harper’s Ferry
No wonder John Brown came here to fight and be hanged
No wonder Thomas Jefferson came here to sit with his proud red head
writing notes on the great State of Virginia
Borders hem the town, borders of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland,
Be absent minded a minute or two and you guess at what state you
are in
Harper’s Ferry is a meeting place of winds and waters, rocks and ranges
Landscapes Including States of the Union by Carl Sandburg as publishing Good Morning America in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950).
Yes I went for the one line, There is the running water home of living fish and silver of the sun, to go with my photograph of Horse Creek on Hilton Head Island.
It is not Harper’s Ferry.
This is Harper’s Ferry with me on Jefferson’s Rock and my brother Eddie standing in front of me.
As Mr. Sandburg writes:
or up on Jefferson’s Rock, there are
lookouts.
No wonder Thomas Jefferson came here to sit with his proud red head
writing notes on the great State of Virginia.
I have to point out that visitiors are no longer allowed to sit of stand on Jefferson’s rock.
Today there are guard rails to protect the rock.
In Jefferson’s day there were no were upright stone post to keep the rock in place.
BUT I DIGRESS.
My photo is of the sun over Horse Creek in the center of Hilton Head Island.
Miles from anywhere and miles from anywhere.
Be absent minded a minute or two and you guess at what state you
are in.
little time we live
learn painfully to practice
for eternity
The oaks, how subtle and marine!
Bearded, and all the layered light
Above them swims; and thus the scene,
Recessed, awaits the positive night.
So, waiting, we in the grass now lie
Beneath the languorous tread of light;
The grassed, kelp-like, satisfy
The nameless motions of the air.
Upon the floor of light, and time,
Unmurmuring, of polyp made,
We rest; we are, as light withdraws,
Twin atolls on a shelf of shade.
Ages to our construction went,
Dim architecture, hour by hour;
And violence, forgot now, lent
The present stillness all its power.
The storm of noon above us rolled,
Of light the fury, furious gold,
The long drag troubling us, the depth:
Unrocked is dark, unrippling, still.
Passion and slaughter, ruth, decay
Descended, whispered grain by grain,
Silted down swaying streams, to lay
Foundation for our voicelessness.
All our debate is voiceless here,
As all our rage is rage of stone;
If hopeless hope, fearless is fear,
And history is thus undone.
(Our feet once wrought the hollow street
With echo when the lamps were dead
All windows; once our headlight glare
Disturbed the doe that, leaping fled.)
The caged hearts make iron stroke,
I do not love you now the less,
Or less that all that light once gave
The graduate dark should now revoke
So little time we live in Time,
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour’s term
To practice for Eternity.
Bearded Oaks by Robert Penn Warren as published in The collected poems of Robert Penn Warren by Robert Penn Warren (Louisiana State University Press: Baton Rouge, 1998).
The oaks, how subtle and marine!
Bearded, and all the layered light
Above them swims; and thus the scene,
Recessed, awaits the positive night.
The south is different.
It has a lot less snow.
It has a lot less cold.
It has a lot more sun.
It has lot more good smells.
It had lot more bad smells.
And it has live oaks.
Ages to our construction went,
Dim architecture, hour by hour;
And violence, forgot now, lent
The present stillness all its power.
Here before we were born.
Here after we will die.
The present stillness all its power.
So little time we live in Time,
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour’s term
To practice for Eternity.
According to Wikipedia, Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 – September 15, 1989) was an American poet, novelist, literary critic and professor at Yale University. He was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King’s Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry. Yale awarded Warren an honorary Doctor of Letters degree in 1973.
rapidly changing …
no way to anticipate
these occurrences
Weather, however spectacular to the eye, may present difficult conditions and compositions, especially when working with large cameras.
Setting up the camera takes several minutes during which the first promising aspects of light and cloud may disappear.
I would sometimes wait hopefully for the scene that I could visualize as an exciting image.
It was occasionally realized, but I have always been mindful of Edward Weston’s remark, “If I wait for something here I may lose something better over there.”
I have found that keeping on the move is generally more rewarding. However, it is important to say that I photographed from this particular viewpoint in Yosemite many times over many years, with widely varying results.
Clearing Winter Storm came about on an early December day.
The storm was first of heavy rain, which turned to snow and began to clear about noon.
I drove to the place known as New Inspiration Point, which commands a marvelous vista of Yosemite Valley.
I set up my 8×10 camera with my i2’/4-inch Cooke Series XV lens and made the essential side and bottom compositional decisions.
I first related the trees to the background mountains as well as to the possible camera positions allowed, and I waited for the clouds to form within the top areas of the image.
Rapidly changing situations such as this one can create decision problems for the photographer.
A moment of beauty is revealed and photographed; clouds, snow, or rain then obscure the scene, only to clear in a different way with another inviting prospect.
There is no way to anticipate these occurrences.
From Examples: The making of 40 photographs by Ansel Adams (Boston: Little, Brown Collection, 1983).
I used to be into photography and cameras and film and a darkroom that my Dad bankrolled for reasons I cannot understand today but maybe that I spent hours down in the basement away from everyone else had something to do with it.
Today I use my iPhone.
I use my iPhone and I think about the work of Ansel Adams.
Maybe it is a bit much for me to think about my camera work and Ansel Adams in the same sentence but I am the guy that edits Langston Hughes and Carl Sandburg into 17 syllables so there you are.
It is evident and important to remember that from his writings and commentary, Ansel Adams saw not just a scene, but the photograph he could make of that scene in his mind before he ever got out a camera.
He was such the master of the tools of his day that he knew just what camera, what lense, what filter, what settings, what film, what developer and what photographic paper he would use to make the final print before he snapped the shutter.
His work was getting all of these things to produce what he saw in his mind in the final print.
I think he would have loved an iPhone.
I think he would have embraced Adobe Photoshop and digital imagery as he worked to interpret what he had on his iPhone to match what he had in his mind when he envisioned a photo.
I think he would have spat on artificially generated images while at the same time, the final prints of his photos may have had a lot more to see that what his camera picked up.
This morning I biked over to Horse Creek Landing Pier on Hilton Head Island.
My guess is that most folks could have been coming to Hilton Head for 40 years and never heard of the place.
I walked out on a narrow fishing/crabbing pier and looked into the heart of the island.
The tide was going out.
A storm front with gale force wind warnings attached to it was coming in.
The sun shone through the clouds.
Rapidly changing situations such as this one can create decision problems for the photographer.
A moment of beauty was revealed and photographed; clouds, sun, or rain then obscure the scene, only to clear in a different way with another inviting prospect.
There is no way to anticipate these occurrences.
yes, you’re going to
die, but, you know, we all die
eventually
Based the opening paragraph in the article, Do we really need eight hours sleep a night – and what happens if we don’t get it? by a Mr. Joel Snape where Mr. Snape writes:
‘Once, after I did a presentation, someone came up to me and said, ‘I don’t get eight hours of sleep a night. Am I going to die?’” says Prof Russell Foster, head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford. “And I said, ‘Well, yes, you’re going to die. But, you know, we all die eventually.’”
Which brought to mind Big Bill and the speech of Hamlet which I paraphrase here:
To die, to sleep, no more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to.
To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there’s the respect that makes calamity of so long life but that the dread of something after death, makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all ...
I must be getting old though a recent location chnage has dropped me on an island where the median age is 62 I am middle aged again.
On that theme of getting older, let me talk about the best part of my day of late.
My after-supper nap.
I ask, why don’t I feel as refreshed as I do after my after-supper nap as when I wake up in the morning?
I read all these articles about sleeping.
We all have to sleep.
We all are going to die.
All I want is to feel refreshed, like I do when I nap, when I sleep all night.
Mr. Snape writes:
… the best advice is to prioritise sleep: recognise that it’s important, make sure you’re setting enough time aside to get as much as you need to feel well rested, and make the most adjustments you can to your current sleep environment.
“If I only did one thing, it would be invest in proper blackout curtains,” says Leschziner.
“And if you live in a noisy environment, then consider comfortable earplugs that are designed for sleeping in.”
So I ask, what do I do about the neighbors?
