interpretation
of reality like others
all is subjective

This shading of different realities is only the start.

It gets more fascinating – and much weirder. It’s one thing to allow that there might be an alternative perspective on colour, but quite another to accept that colour doesn’t actually exist outside our brains.

Not only is there no colour, but there’s also no sound or taste or smell.

What we perceive as red, for example, is just radiating energy with a wavelength of around 650 nanometres.

There’s nothing intrinsically red about it; the redness is in our heads.

What we think of as sound is just pressure waves, while taste and smell are no more than different conformations of molecules.

Although our sense organs do a splendid job of detecting each of these, it’s the brain that construes them, converting them into a framework for us to understand that world.

Valuable though this framework is, it’s an interpretation of reality and, like all interpretations, it’s subjective.

From It takes all 53 of our senses to bring the drab external world to life by  Ashley Ward in the Guardian on Feb. 26.

Ms. Ward writes:

Underlying all of this is the brain’s frantic efforts to build its internal model, even though the sensory information it needs to construct that model has been cut off.

The results are odd, though to some they can feel disturbingly real.

But what is reality, and, more generally, what does it mean to be alive?

I repeat, what is reality, and, more generally, what does it mean to be alive?

I am reminded of Mr. Sandburg and his poem happiness.

I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell
me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of
thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though
I was trying to fool with them
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along
the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with
their women and children and a keg of beer and an
accordion.

To paraphrase Big Bill, Methinks we think too much.

on the other side
of the small space, that small place
on the other side

I enjoyed the writing in the article As Rams imploded, Sean McVay faded away: How they found their way back to each other by Jourdan Rodrigue, very much even with the number of split infinitives in the text.

Split infinitives are my bête noire of grammar checking even though I was told that no one cares anymore about that.

I persist because it is one of the few forms of bad grammar I can identify and it makes me sound smarter or at least smarter than my phone which persists in telling me to turn left out of my parking lot when I need to turn right to get to work.

It was one short combination of words of Ms. Rodrigue’s that caught me eye and said, do something with these words.

That combination of words was “On the other side of the small space.”

It is in the sentence, “Afterward, half of the locker room sat in stunned silence. One offensive lineman wept, covering his face with his hands. On the other side of the small space, star cornerback and team captain Jalen Ramsey vented to reporters about the offense’s inability to close out the game as other defensive players quietly vented to each other.”

On the other side of the small space.

Ken Dryden’s description of the dressing room of the Montreal Canadian’s, in Dryden’s The Game, came to mind.

It has the look and feel of a child’s bedroom. Shin pads, shoulder pads, socks, jocks, gloves, skates, and sweaters lie in twenty little heaps on the floor. Players in various stages of dress move easily about, laughing and shouting in equal measure. It is too big to be intimate, about the size of a large living room, too antiseptic and bright to be cozy. In early morning or late after¬ noon, it appears quite ordinary — fluorescent lights, chrome equipment racks, a red indoor-outdoor carpet, concrete block walls painted white with red and blue trim, a wide gray bench that runs around its borders. Functional, attractive in an institutional sort of way, it is a room that needs people. Only higher, above the chrome racks and near the ceiling, is it clear that this is a dressing room unique to one team.

This was the dressing room in the old Montreal Forum.

When it was torn down, the locker was saved somehow and reconstructed in the National Hockey League Hall of Fame in Toronto.

On the other side of the small space.

It also came to mind that of these small spaces in sports, Football and Basketball use locker rooms.

Hockey has the dressing room.

And Baseball has the clubhouse.

Not wanting to descend in Mr. George Carlin’s Football/Baseball routine but there it is.

Of the clubhouse, in The Boys of Summer, Roger Kahn wrote, “So summer came, tempting and hot, but of all the new scenes what compelled me most strongly was the crowded and drab clubhouse under the right-field grand- stands in Ebbets Field. It was not air-conditioned as clubhouses are today; ventilation came from narrow windows ten feet above the ground. The clubhouse was a long rectangle, with a trainers’ room and a corridor to Dressen’s office opening on the west. Old metal lockers ran around the walls. Reese, as captain, was assigned the first locker along the outside wall. This came with a battered metal door, a rough symbol of eminence since no other locker had a door of any kind. A small electric heater stood nearby. Reese reclined in an old swivel chair someone had found for him once. The other ball players sat on three-legged milkmaid’s stools.

On the other side of the small space.

I like that combination of words.

Maybe that is where the sidewalk ends.

unconquerable
unreposed untired unfaded
unmarred unburlesqued

Based on the poem, The Sea Ocean, by Robert Pollok (c. 1798–1827) From The Course of Time Book I.

Great Ocean! strongest of creation’s sons,
Unconquerable, unreposed, untired,
That rolled the wild, profound, eternal bass
In nature’s anthem, and made music such
As pleased the ear of God! original,
Unmarred, unfaded work of Deity!
And unburlesqued by mortal’s puny skill;
From age to age enduring, and unchanged,
Majestical, inimitable, vast,
Loud uttering satire, day and night, on each
Succeeding race, and little pompous work
Of man; unfallen, religious, holy sea!
Thou bowedest thy glorious head to none, fearedst none,
Heardst none, to none didst honor, but to God
Thy Maker, only worthy to receive
Thy great obeisance.

Untowards utterance unlike usage untofor unknown!

while I am I, and
you are you, so long as the
world contains us both

Escape me?
Never —
Beloved!
While I am I, and you are you,
So long as the world contains us both,
Me the loving and you the loth,
While the one eludes, must the other pursue.
My life is a fault at last, I fear:
It seems too much like a fate, indeed!
Though I do my best I shall scarce succeed.
But what if I fail of my purpose here?
It is but to keep the nerves at strain,
To dry one’s eyes and laugh at a fall,
And, baffled, get up and begin again,
So the chase takes up one’s life, that’s all.
While, look but once from your farthest bound
At me so deep in the dust and dark,
No sooner the old hope goes to ground
Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark,
I shape me—
Ever
Removed!

Life in a Love by Robert Browning

neon abstractions
give the illusion we have
dispelled puzzlement

Edward Hopper’s New York, the sumptuous exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, gives us one more chance to retire — at least for a decent interval — those once glamorous words that have come to dominate, and increasingly suffocate, our experience of Hopper’s paintings: alienation, loneliness, voyeurism, the uncanny.

Such neon abstractions give us the illusion that we have dispelled the puzzlement we often feel in front of Hopper’s strange compositions.

What they actually do is give us license to stop looking at the pictures, causing us to miss crucial aspects of his achievement, such as his pervasive and peculiar sense of humor.

A painter who features an ad for Ex-Lax in a moody nocturne of a corner drugstore isn’t just concerned with alienation.

From Buildings Come to Life, by Christopher Benfey in the New York Review of Books.

everybody trapped
was a no-past no-future
state of existence

In a one page reminiscence, Mr. Zach Holland writes in the article, The Lost New Jersey Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, in the New Yorker, (2/13/2023) about photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and the effort made to follow and make documentary of the photographer as he tried to capture the essence of New Jersey with his camera.

This took place in 1975.

Why New Jersey?

“Because people make such a funny face when you mention New Jersey,” said Cartier-Bresson.

A man named Peter Cunningham was assigned to be Cartier-Bresson’s assistant and Mr. Cunningham recalled that New Jersey was “… was a no-past, no-future state of existence.“

Mr. Holland writes that, “To Cartier-Bresson, a master of formal composition, the confinement appealed. “Everybody is trapped by something,” he told Evans.

“For me, liberty is a strict frame of reference, and inside that frame of reference all the variations are possible.”

The project fell apart as the documentary was to be on television and the producer said they would have to crop photographs to fit the 4×3 aspect ratio of the TV.

Cartier-Bresson felt that once he snapped the picture, the image was complete and any alteration was a “degeneration.”

The documentary was never made and the photographs have sat on a shelf since 1975 and are just now being released.

It is an odd thing about photographs is that I have long argued that the camera eliminated the need for mastering a craft like sculpture or painting.

The camera, as far as tools went, leveled the playing field between artists and others.

That’s the concept.

Somehow though the artist still makes a difference.

Is it that because the artist has the title, we look at the pictures created by the artist with a different respect?

I don’t know.

I look at this image of the cars waiting to cross the George Washington Bridge.

At the same time its just a picture of a bunch of cars and it is also a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, the champion of the decisive moment.

I know what Henri Cartier-Bresson wanted to capture.

And I look at the photograph of the cars and I ask myself, what did Henri Cartier-Bresson see?

What makes this moment the decisive moment?

Here is expressed that liberty is a strict frame of reference, and inside that frame of reference all the variations are possible.

All these cars.

All these people in the cars.

Everyone trapped.

A no-past, no-future state of existence.

Its also a picture of a bunch of cars.

Maybe this is what is meant when they say and artist just holds up the mirror and you see what you bring in front of the mirror.

I count seven kids in the photo of the kids running across the street.

Seven kids.

Seven stories.

I want to know … what’s in the bag for lunch?

people who dream know
special happiness which world
of the day holds not

People who dream when they sleep at night, know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue.

They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom.

It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will.

The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control.

Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of.

Strangers appear and are friends or enemies, although the person who dreams has never done anything about them.

The ideas of flight and pursuit are recurrent in dreams and are equally enrapturing.

Excellent witty things are said by everybody.

It is true that if remembered in the day-time they will fade and lose their sense, because they belong to a different plane, but as soon as the one who dreams lies down at night, the current is again closed and he remembers their excellency.

All the time the feeling of immense freedom is surrounding him and running through him like air and light, an unearthly bliss.

From the book, Out of Africa (1937) by Karen Blixen (1885-1962).