Ions

So I was watching this documentary on Edward Hopper, and he apparently once said that all he wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a building.

I came home in light rain today after waiting out a massive thunderstorm, and by the time I sat down at my desk it had turned suddenly strongly sunny out, complete with chirping birds.

Something about the way the light was slanting in made me want to pull out the camera, and it also made me think that Hopper had a point.

I am usually a big fan of color, and my life without strong colors in it would be so empty that I don't even like to contemplate it, but now and then I am struck by the important beauty of black and white.

And even more so, by how beautiful light itself can be - what it looks like playing on a surface, the ripples it makes in reflections, the contrast with a sharp shadow. Positive and negative space.

Positive and negative space has counterparts in life, too, I think. And not just in the obvious idea that life has good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant, virtue and evil. I have been feeling my way around in the nebulous area where the values of things are suspended and one simply experiences them.

{I can hear Boywich in my head clamoring about relativism, but I am not talking about that - not really.}

I guess I am talking about opening oneself to experiencing something before deciding whether one likes it or not, before calling it a good or bad thing in one's life, before making any decisions about it whatsoever.

And no, I'm not quite (or not merely) talking about boys, or sex, or any of that, though those things can certainly be considered this way.

It's more about feeling the shape of something. Things have positive or negative space - they can feel bright or dark, or have aspects of both. Again, I am thinking of bright and dark as merely descriptive rather than assigning a value judgment to them. It's a bit like yin/yang, perhaps.

Sometimes I feel that I can detect positive and negative space, bright and dark, solid and airy, manifest and mysterious aspects in interactions with people, and in the people themselves. We all have things that we present easily to others, that we're comfortable showing, and things that we reserve for ourselves for various reasons, and things that move us in a way that's hidden even from us, things which may in fact be gigantic turbine forces arranging our lives and propelling us in ways we aren't aware of.

There is a certain amount of yin and yang in most people, I imagine.