Something Is Different Today
Some of you likely noticed I failed to publish my regular monthly post in March. Between concentrated work to finish the manuscript of my upcoming book and certain unforeseen personal challenges, I found myself with a bad case of writer’s block. As (dubious?) compensation, I give you today more than twice my usual article word count.
Alas, as some of the causes of my block remain unresolved and as my next projects are still taking shape, I decided to reach for my usual block-breaking technique: switch from essay form to stream-of-consciousness form. I hope you find my belabored train (wreck?) of thought below at least somewhat interesting.
But first, a couple of (unsolicited) credits and recommendations:
After several years of intensive writing, my friend Colleen Miniuk recently announced the upcoming publication of her turbulent memoir, So Said The River , in which I happen to be a character.I recommend taking some time to read through the recent writings of Alberto Rodriguez-Garcia. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Alberto on a photography workshop and was delighted to discover he is also an excellent writer. I found his posts thoughtful and honest, and relevant to anyone seeking meaning in photography (and in other pursuits).My thanks to my generous friend Jack Graham, who knows more about music than I ever will, for prompting my renewed interest in the works of composer Gustav Mahler, who I mention below.Until next time!
—Guy
~~~
But I smile, and not only with my mouth. I smile with my soul, with my eyes, with my whole skin, and I offer these countrysides, whose fragrances drift up to me, different senses than those I had before, more delicate, more silent, more finely honed, better practiced, and more grateful. Everything belongs to me more than ever before, it speaks to me more richly and with hundreds of nuances. My yearning no longer paints dreamy colors across the veiled distances, my eyes are satisfied with what exists, because they have learned to see. The world has become lovelier than before.
—Hermann Hesse
Something is different today. Spring has arrived. By this I don’t just mean that the calendar has advanced past the vernal equinox, or that temperatures have remained consistently above freezing for a few days in a row, or that the desert is greening up and starting to bloom. What I mean is that it finally feels like spring. Every cell in my body feels quickened and awakened in synchrony with the emerging life in the desert around me.
How odd that such a familiar and predictable feeling, experienced so many times in so many places for so many years in so many lives I have lived, still catches me by surprise each time it happens. Unlike so many other experiences, repetition does not seem to diminish this feeling, the richness and intensity of it, the novelty of it, the exaltedness of it.
After spending the last few days exploring, my body pleasantly sore from the long hikes, I’ve decided to rest and putter around my camp today. I have been alone in the desert for nearly a week now, mindful of the phenomena of the season unfolding around me—the subtle changes in light, temperature, colors, sounds, and scents. Some plants are already in bloom, birds are chattering all around me, lizards pause occasionally from their busy scurrying to stare at me. As I settled in my camp chair with my morning coffee, in the quiet blue hour before dawn, not quite fully awake, I sensed something feels different today. Something important, I can tell. Although I can’t say I what it is yet. For now, I will savor it.
This much I do know: something has come to an end. Something is starting. Imaginary pensive music is playing quietly in my mind. Every sense is heightened. Every smell, every sound, every view means something beyond what it seems, beyond what it felt like yesterday. Each nuanced difference hints of a grand secret about to be revealed. It’s not a good or a bad feeling but it is far from benign, rife with anticipation, trepidation, excitement, curiosity. The plot is about to twist. The protagonist is always the last to know.
~~~
Reflecting on his career after several decades during which he established himself as one of the greatest photographers in history, Edward Steichen confessed, “When I first became interested in photography, I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don’t give a hoot in hell about it. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself. And that is no mean function.”
When I first read Steichen’s words, perhaps two decades ago, I thought I understood what he meant to say. I didn’t quite agree with the idea that photography has any “mission.” Photography can serve so many purposes, practiced in so many ways, express so many things. Why would it need a mission? Why not many missions? Why would photography be expected to explain anything? Photography to me seemed as a means of expressing things I already knew and felt—things already obvious and visceral to me, needing no explanation.
In hindsight today I think I finally see that photography has in fact explained and clarified some things to me, about me. Steichen was right. Likewise, years ago, it would have seemed anathema to me to agree that photography is not “the whole cheese,” but now I, too, no longer “give a hoot in hell” about photography’s recognition as a fine art in any abstract, universal sense. I recognize my own work as art. I have shared in many writings what I mean by it. I strive to examine and to refine my views constantly as I gain new knowledge and experiences. Let others make up their own minds.
I have hinted in recent writings of changes, realizations, urges, epiphanies, questions, changing circumstance that are pointing me toward exploring new directions in the coming years. Doing “more of the same” when my work no longer feels novel and exciting has never appealed to me. “Boredom,” wrote Søren Kierkegaard, “is a root of all evil.” I agree. Boredom is wasted living.
Mary Oliver wrote, “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” I can say with pride I do not belong in this regretful demographic. Several times before, when the sirens called, I have left home and country, lucrative careers, comfort, security, and formerly held beliefs, to heed the call. All involved struggle and anxiety. All have proven in hindsight to have been among the best decisions I’ve ever made. “Anxiety,” wrote Kierkegaard, “is the dizziness of freedom.” Freedom is about choices. The greater and more consequential the choice, the greater the anxiety: the cost of freedom. I will pay it. I always have. It was always worthwhile.
After recently submitting to the publisher the complete manuscript of my next book, Be Extraordinary: Philosophical Advice for Photographic (and Other) Artists, I decided to take some time to disconnect and to contemplate, to let my mind drift and see where it may want go when set free from obligations and expectations. It drifted to thoughts about beauty, inspired by music.
~~~
Philosopher Roger Scruton opened his book, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction [ad], with these words: “Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend.” Later in the book, he wrote: “Our need for beauty is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people. It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition, as free individuals, seeking our place in a shared and public world. We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves. The experience of beauty guides us along this second path: it tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us.”
Would it surprise you to know that beauty, which every one of us understands intuitively, cannot be defined in absolute, objective, measurable terms? Beauty is a matter of subjective perception and preferences. No doubt, some of these perceptions and preferences are shared by many people, but there are no criteria and no measurable qualities to distinguish unequivocally something as beautiful. Beauty is a quality our minds intuitively associate, based on a variety of subjective factors, with things in the world—not just with aesthetic things like works of fine art, certain colors, or designs, but also with faces, personalities, emotions, ethics, relationships, deeds, sensory perceptions, knowledge, mystical beliefs, ideas, even mathematical expressions.
It struck me recently that my passions in life—my keen interests in art, philosophy, science, and in certain experiences—are in fact not random or eclectic. They have a common denominator: the desire to experience as much beauty, in as many forms, and as intensely as my brain would allow. This is the desire that drives me to seek awe before sublime landscapes, behold great art, create photographs and poems, immerse myself in music, contemplate the implications of various interpretations of quantum mechanics or of certain mathematical theorems.
What does that have to do with photography or art or my creative aspirations in the years ahead? Everything. With this clarity about my overarching desire to induce and to experience profound beauty—as much, as often, and as powerfully as I can—several trains of thought suddenly and unexpectedly arrived at the same destination… while standing on a small desert peak, listening to the music of Gustav Mahler.
~~~
I left my camp early in the morning with the general intent of hiking around, up, and over the lower slopes of a small range of desert mountains, to see… well, whatever there was to see there. I didn’t know what path I would take, how long it would take, what plants or animals I might encounter, what geological or archaeological treasures I might discover. (I rarely do when I go hiking.) But one thing I did know—the music that will accompany me on at least part of this walk: Mahler’s symphony no. 2, known as “Resurrection.”
I was going to listen to the whole thing, but I especially anticipated listening to the 5th and final movement, which is to say I knew the emotional freight train I set in motion by my choice. Mahler composed the symphony such that its earlier movements gradually prepare listeners, creating for them a world of beauty, gentleness, drama, ups and downs, slowly detaching them from their everyday preoccupations and immersing them in transcendent music (in fact, music continuing the story he began with his first symphony, which ended with the death of a hero) before unleashing the powerful final movement. He jokingly told a friend once that if people knew in advance what’s coming, they might be worried for their eardrums.
Not to belabor the day’s experiences, having already taken up so much of your time, and knowing there’s nothing I can write that could compete with the music, amplified still further by the beauty of the desert, I’ll share a journal note I wrote upon arriving at the summit of a steep hill in the early afternoon, sore and exhausted after several hours of walking and a strenuous scramble, breathing the fragrant early spring air, beholding a vast view of the colorful desert with ominous clouds above and the drama of a small storm beginning to brew:
The music touches on everything: life’s adventures, struggles, gentleness, victories, defeats, tragedies, doubts, reprisals, and, finally, the agonizing and seemingly final triumph of death. But death is not the end. When the struggle ends in defeat and all is reduced to near silence, there still remains the calm, quiet, peaceful, beautiful music of eternity. In eternity death is not final. Everything returns. The story continues. [The philosophically minded may recognize here the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche’s much-misunderstood idea of “eternal recurrence.”]
So, what comes after death? Well, it’s called “the resurrection” for a reason. That’s what comes next. Remember Bob Dylan’s cutesy track, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”? Not Mahler. Mahler doesn’t knock. With an army of hundreds of instruments, vocalists, and musicians admonished to give it everything they’ve got, he is going to blast open the gates of heaven for all existence to come pouring back out. And does he ever!
The final notes are overwhelming. The singers are belting out: “Sterben werd’ ich, um zu leben! (I shall die in order to live!)” And then it’s over… and I’m left with the silence of the desert and the growing roar of the wind. Good f’n grief! I can feel my heart pounding, and not just from the physical exertion. I’m tearing up and vaguely conscious that my lips are whispering expletives I never intended to utter out loud.
Then, the question bubbled up in my mind: can I hope to express or to elicit an experience such as I just had in photographs? The humbling answer seemed absurdly obvious. If I could snap my fingers and instantly replace my skills as a photographer for equivalent skills as a musical composer, would I do it? This answer, too, now seems obvious: absolutely. Except that this was not always the case. A couple of decades ago, my answer would have been “absolutely not.”
What changed? Most obviously, I have. It may be an uncomfortable truth to some, but if one aspires to be a self-expressive artist (which I do)—to have one’s art express authentic thoughts, feelings, knowledge, personal philosophy evolved in the course of one’s life—then it stands to reason that as life changes, the art that expresses it must change, too. When an artist’s work remains consistent for any significant period, one of two things must be true: either the artist has ceased to be expressive (i.e., has gotten too comfortable with tried-and-true habits), or the artist has not evolved as a person during this time. The latter case is, as far as I can tell, theoretical. It is the mark of a self-expressive artist to not be consistent, to have distinctive “periods,” even to change course completely. As Aldous Huxley put it, “The only completely consistent people are the dead.”
So, how have I changed? In some ways, I have changed in response to the trials of life. I have always been restless and resistant to long-term planning, which is another way of saying that consistency as an aspect of lifestyle has never appealed to me. Just as important, I have always actively sought to examine and refine my personal philosophy, among other things by studying the writings of great thinkers. This can be a dangerous endeavor. If you go about it too obsessively, inevitably, every so often, you’ll learn of a better way to think about something important than the way you previously thought was correct. As Albert Camus put it, “a man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.”
Wait, where was I? Oh yes, music. Oh, and now also philosophy.
~~~
Arthur Schopenhauer considered music as an embodiment of “things in themselves.” When music expresses beauty or sadness or exultation or any other feeling, it doesn’t refer to these qualities in relation to any one object or experience; it describes the very essence of beauty, sadness, exultation, regardless of where they may be found. Schopenhauer wrote, “That music acts directly upon the will, i.e., the feelings, passions, and emotions of the hearer, so that it quickly raises them or changes them, may be explained from the fact that, unlike all the other arts, it does not express the Ideas, or grades of the objectification of the will, but directly the will itself.”
[“The will” is Schopenhauer’s term for the force of endless, purposeless, constant striving that underlies all natural processes. Likewise, “Idea” is Schopenhauer’s term for reality as it presents itself to our minds and subjective perceptions. This, in turn, is a refinement of ideas originally expressed by his predecessor, Immanuel Kant, who distinguished between “noumena” (the true nature of reality, which is beyond our ability to know directly), and “phenomena” (reality as we perceive it, filtered through our human minds and senses).]
The effects of art—especially music—as Schopenhauer explained them relate to a key concept in the aesthetic philosophy of Kant. Kant claimed that to experience the highest form of beauty we are capable of, we must approach art with an attitude of “disinterestedness.” What he meant by that is that when we behold art, we must avoid considering any connection between the art and reality, and instead approach art purely as an aesthetic experience. That is, we must never think of visual art as “pictures of things in reality,” or of creative writings as “descriptions of events that occurred in reality,” and so on. Music holds a privileged position among the arts in the sense that it is purely expressed in form, without material contents, and therefore is completely detached from any specific object or event.
In Kant’s words: “The delight which we connect with the representation of the real existence, of an object is called interest . . . Now, where the question is whether something is beautiful, we do not want to know, whether we, or anyone else, are, or even could be, concerned in the real existence of the thing, but rather what estimate we form of it on mere contemplation.”
And what is photography (at least by design) if not the most “interested” artform there is? In terms of “interestedness,” we may even say that photography, which relies directly on objects in reality, is the polar opposite of music. This, in essence, is why photography can never “aspire to the condition of music” (an expression coined by famed art critic Walter Pater) as other arts do. It is why I believe no photograph can ever elicit the same emotional effects as music. (Admittedly, I am tempted to consider how, and why certain trained musicians, such as Ansel Adams, made the curious choice to switch from music to photography. But, seeing as I have already written 3,000 words, I will spare you… at least for now.)
~~~
With these realizations, a piece of the puzzle—what is different—fell into place for me. I have experienced what Pater described as, “the condition of music” in many forms: in music (of course), in poetry, in great writing, in cinema, in masterful paintings, in philosophical contemplation, in scientific knowledge, even in contemplating some mathematical works. In photography, I confess, I only experience this effect when revisiting some of my own most satisfying works, when they remind me of the intense emotional experiences of their making. Likely, this is one reason I find myself now considering other forms of artistic expression.
Something is different today. I think I’m starting to understand what it is. I will savor it.
