"Deep Thoughts": February 2009 Archives

Watching wolves leap through snow is so soothing when one has had a very bad day. They look to me a bit like this scarf; a lot of pale sunlight filtering through a white landscape. Not the same thing, obviously, since this was shot in interior light, but there's something about the color and pattern of this scarf that really does it for me. Evocative.

Some days I wish I could suddenly be riding in wilderness instead of on these streets. The jarring, rutted streets.

I cycled by a howling bloodhound standing at a corner yesterday, waiting (with its person) for the light to change so they could cross. I smiled and smiled at the pooch, and said hello to it, and the owner smiled back as I passed them. His voice was so plaintive and sweet. So out of place.

I had a fight today, with a stranger. I had an argument instead of a planned lovely encounter. I had a big fast ride that I hadn't planned on (but which I enjoyed). It was sunny, and still it was a terrible day.

I had enough to eat. I had water with me, and plenty of warm clothing, so it's not like those more desperate bases weren't covered. But you know, an emotionally bad day can still suck the beejezus out of you.

Kitwich is watching the howling wolves with focused attention.

"I just want to testify what your love has done for me." - Parliament

On the other hand, enh, who cares? I have a date.

When the going gets tough, the tough make a date with a cowboy and dye their hair black. Oh wait, it was already black. Well, you get the picture.

In short, while I am disappointed that the boy does not love me, I love me, and that is enough.

Also, I am knitting these mittens. A trifle bulky for fingerless but I love the colors so much I don't care. Plus, maybe fingerless will be good for bulky mittens - a little built-in air conditioning. A safety valve.

Did you know that 95.4% of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy, neither of which have ever been measured, observed, or perceived? In other words, the entire universe is constructed as 95.4% mystery. Makes life make a lot more sense, doesn't it? The fact that we can never quite tell what is going on around us - not for certain - is simply in keeping with the design of the universe.

Either that or humans are really thick.

Sometimes I am so happy with the simple things. I'm almost surprised to find myself saying this, but at the moment, I feel very content.

Making myself a giant vat of soup (lentil-tomato, because it's what I've been wanting all winter long), got a bunch of beautiful yarn I'd ordered in the mail today, and the colours are so lovely, all of them. Made some important phone calls that I'd been putting off for weeks. I don't know why I was able, suddenly, to get things done; I just woke up willing.

Could be that the smell of soup is inherently soothing. Or the process of mixing and cutting and sprinkling. I've written about how I like that before. Though tonight I was in a hurry with it, because I was hungry, so it's not like it was a leisurely thing.

Maybe it's because I think I know what I want to do about that situation that I'm not telling you about. And maybe it's because the thing I want to do is so simple and direct, so honest.

Neither kind nor unkind. Well, actually I think it is kind because I think people deserve to hear when they've hurt you, so that they can understand and maybe do better the next time. I think it's kind to give someone the benefit of the doubt, to assume that they aren't trying to hurt you, but also not to let them go on thinking that they've done nothing wrong, either.

So I think I will just tell him. I will give him a chance to be my friend, rather than chilling him out, or pretending it didn't matter to me, or any of those more drama-laden postures that seem more appropriate to middle school than to adulthood. They don't lead to understanding, and they never really make me feel any better, either.

Anyway, that's my idea. We'll see how it goes.

I'm a sucker for colour (and it simply must be spelled with a "u"). I like intense colours. I like delicate colours. I like unusual juxtapositions of colour.

I've bought so many things just because (or primarily because) I was mad for their colours. I've often thought that I'd like to make my living working with colour in some way, but never quite figured out what that way might be.

When I am bored, or upset, I find myself looking through here, purely to gaze at the marvelous interplay and variety of colours. And of course, I occasionally break down and buy things. Purely because I can't resist those colours any longer.

Some of my favorites, singly and in combination:

orange and purple (together and separately)
cerulean blue (that's a tealish blue)
pale lavender or periwinkle (bluish lavender)
pale green
indigo and turquoise (together, as seen in many saris)
plum
deep violet blue
deep blue-green
chocolate in combination with teal, or orange, or pink

I was walking along and looking at shadows tonight, and noticed how soft the edges of a gate shadow looked; how its decorative curls looked like they'd been drawn in charcoal. And I thought, as I often have before, that one of the reasons I am here on earth is to look, and look, and look, and perhaps to have those thoughts. Charcoal lines, fat moon rising like a peach, just those few stars winking through the city layer.

PS. Note about the title: Voir means (in French) both to see and to imagine...

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe....All those moments will be lost, like tears in rain." - Roy Batty, in Blade Runner

Okay, here's the thing. My prime directive is and always has been to grab after the ineffable, the difficult-to-express but perhaps universal and therefore important to share, and to chase with language, with art, or with poetry. The idea being to make it physical and therefore transmissible in some inexact but evocative format.

Or, in much, much simpler language: I have to create things, in order to say the unsayable. Or just to transmit something I think is worth sharing.

So, my question on New Year's Day, while I was walking home, hands half-frozen in fingerless mittens, camera weighing heavy on my hurt back, was: What happens to all the photographs I don't take?

There was a man, you see - a man struggling to take off his blue jacket in front of a brick wall the exact same blue. And it was lit by car wash lights, and the fading sun, and that heavy blue-grey cloud overhead, and it was remarkable, and worth trying to capture, to show you and anyone else who might see my photographs.

But my hands were cold, and I wanted to go home. So I didn't take my mittens off. I looked and looked, and drank it in, and then kept walking.

I wonder intermittently about the dead portfolio, too. What happens when I die, and some poor sad member of my small family is sitting at my computer going through things, and seeing all the pictures I've taken that no one ever saw. Will anyone find and read the hundreds of poems, raggedy but beautiful, scribbled at 4am on the pages of small Staples notebooks?

But that is a side note. Related, of course.

What I wondered on New Year's Day was: is it worth anything for just one person to see the beauty? I mean, if I myself am ravished by something I see, is that enough? Even in a tiny way? I'd dearly love to think of there being a conservation of beauty, or insight, in the universe. That any great thought or image that anyone has or perceives gets saved someplace, like the conservation of matter - or more appropriately energy.

I suspect it isn't the case, and that it is indeed important for me to take off my mittens whenever possible and take the shot, so you can see the blue man, who is no longer there and exists only in my head now.

Though I will say this - on another walk, on a different day, I saw the same man in the same jacket. He was not struggling to take it off this time. He was standing against the same blue wall, but it was not nearly the same view. Maybe the different light, the different posture of him, something....took the art out of it.

Which makes me think that it's moments that are the most crucial thing about being alive. Not years, not even the whole - not some kind of sum of your life or whatever you've done while you were here.

Maybe we're simply here to be ravished by beauty, or sadness, or love, and those things occur in moments. Little glittering pieces of time.