FIB: Ferragosto
Hip Hooray! It’s a holiday! Friday was Ferragosto and by sticking within the bounds of good Italian tradition, Friday in Bracciano can only be posted now. Walking out on the street that day I thought, Ferragosto is more important than Christmas, than Pasqua; what reverence for the Holy Virgin Mary’s ascension into the sky! Personally, I have to prefer the antiquated purpose of the holiday, the pagan version is nearer my grounds: fertility, the bounty, the abundance of summer almost finished.
That day was a blustery day in Bracciano with large grey bottomed clouds passing overhead. On that day I knew summer was ending and that it has been short. Maybe the extensive vacations on and around Ferragosto act as some kind of memorial, catching up for a whole summer with a week or two of sun and sand, family and friends. Like an acknowledgement of necessity in the passing of the season. That’s what the pagans must have thought as they wearied from the collection of their bounties. The hard labour of summer; the harder and more expansive is the fun.
We’re not pagans anymore and we’re a long way from it. Reading Shikasta by Doris Lessing rubs off in its distant views of the Earth, what she calls, our “Degenerative Disease.” When we begin to account for ourselves and our individual advancement above the human kind, then we suffer, it eats at our guts from the insides out. Ferragosto in Italy is awash with the do’s and don’ts’ of Bella Figura, like much else in our nonsensical world. So much of what we do is dictated by the social laws of making an outward “impression.” But, I think way back, in the origins of our times, we were bound together by tighter ropes. The closed signs in shop windows have meaning deeper and beyond what we outwardly admit.
Celebrate the passing of summer, the passing bounty; share it for a day or for weeks on end.
FIB is Fridays in Bracciano. Check out an old FIB with new controversy!
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Reality
“Few people have the imagination for reality.”
— J.W.v Goethe
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More Important
You are more important than Jesus. You are more important than Muhammad. You are more important than Buddha. You are more important than an actor or a singer or a president or a company or a guru of any sort.
You are all you have.
This is your trip in the universe. You will never be duplicated. So why not live now?
Thanks to Duane Michals.1
1 Warning: Damned Flash Website where you can’t link to a direct page. Click on ‘Duane Michals’ to watch the short interview.
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Looking, Listening, Doing
While editing1 photographs today this thought occurred: Looking at pictures is as important as taking pictures. Listening to music is as important as playing music. Doing something is more important than speaking about it.
Doing leads to thinking, which encourages studying, which fosters works of art.
Is the best way to learn something not to do it rather than talk about it?
1 I use the term ‘editing’ in the sense of choosing, condensing, and preparing.
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FIB: Colossal
“If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.
No nation on earth can possibly give birth to a new order of life until a world view is established. We have learned through bitter mistakes that all the peoples of the earth are vitally connected, but we have not made use of that knowledge in an intelligent way. . . There will be no hope of peace until the old order is shattered. The world must become small again as the old Greek world was—small enough to include everybody. Until the very last man is included there will be no real human society. My intelligence tells me that such a condition of life will be a long time in coming, but my intelligence also tells me that nothing short of that will ever satisfy man. Until he has become fully human, until he learns to conduct himself as a member of the earth, he will continue to create gods who will destroy him.”
— The Colossus of Maroussi , Henry Miller
Today in Bracciano I’m thinking of Henry Miller’s words of men being as gods because the sky is blue and hot. Because when I think about his words I am filled with an expansive desire to reach out beyond any limits and to become who I know myself to be. Because Henry Miller’s words come loaded with a hard knowledge that strips life to its barest and most lean truths; life in its most abundant is often an objective to be worked towards on a path unique to each person. Henry Miller helps me to better envision my own multifarious forkings; he brings me nearer to the heart beat of universal life.
I know now that any influence I may have upon the world will be a result of the example I set and not because of my words.
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Instinct
“Loosening up” is often encouraged by David Alan Harvey and other great photographers. Taking the picture without thinking too much. Being not only the bow, but also the arrow and the target itself.
Being instinctual.
There is a delay between seeing something and pressing the shutter button. The signal from your eyes to your brain to your hand takes time to be transmitted and processed. I remember someone saying that Cartier-Bresson could see the future a split second before, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to catch the moments he did with such precision. I think this is true, but plain hard work and taking lots and lots of pictures (including, and mostly, bad ones!) was part of it as well I am sure, as was hard work in editing and good luck!
Capturing a fleeting moment of human expression in a photograph is living now, is being in the present time and acting with the present time. Acting instinctually is living now, and this includes hard work at doing what you want to do instead of always postponing for later, instead of making excuses.
Rather than thinking too much, is it not better to just do it?
Oh, and before I forget, I have a new favorite photographer: John Vink.
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An Open Letter to Prince William
Royalty holds an unusual rank nowadays. I mean, to be born into Royalty, it sounds so strange. Just as strange as thinking that Britney Spears may have been a child once. Royalty, it just sounds so pompous, so overachieving.
Is it true that as a Prince, Prince William, you can do anything you want to do? I find it striking that you are taking a career in the military; but that must be tradition dictating; for what is Royalty but a really old tradition. One we obviously can’t let go of very easily. Let there Kings and Queens and Princes and Princesses! All the better that they don’t rule! Let them satisfy the fantasy of the people! Let them dress in regalia and long gowns and crowns! Let them buy letter after letter of The Generous Alphabet Project!
So, Prince William, it’s come to my attention that you would benefit by a little boost; that it would suit you to engage in an activity of slightly more daring. Why not buy a ‘C’ for Commonwealth or a ‘W’ for Wales or for William or an old-fashioned ‘P’ for Prince? How about those for ideas! Just let us know when you’re ready to hitch a ride on our crazy idea! It would be just the spice for your immanent Kingly career.
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FIB: Isola del Giglio
When one thinks of “island” I think one envisions the sway of palm trees as lazily they sway in a sultry salt-studded breeze. When one thinks of a Tuscan island, well, I don’t know? what do you think? I think of water with texture like silk with depths of a blue somewhere between sky and death; with water like a set gem of aquamarine whose ripples are prisms dancing on shallow yellow sands, light pure white, in discontented circles they dance. When my flesh strikes through yellow-blue, white-turquoise to suspend above lavender curved rocks or mounded sands, I dance my suspension dance and pretend I’ve been flipped into the hazy hot sky.
On the island of Isola del Giglio there are some palm trees, some ochre Mediterranean rocks and lots of Italians on vacation, some meduse, some seafood and late-night drinks, but all in all, there’s not much. The sound of water lapping the shore: that’s an island, not much.
Many go to islands to “get away from it all,” some fall in with the great Italian tradition, to get a sun tan, abbronzatura, still others party, but most relax. Relaxation was in the Creator’s mind when he grumbled, “Let there be land floating off of the land!” He must have thought, “I foretell stress and islands will relieve it.” Life slows. Water of an angelic tint, it laps upon the shore, vacation goers in bathing suits, my how funny we all look! lazily bobbing and listlessly lying prone! Up on the hills stand the trees still lush from spring’s heavy rains. Out there the Mar Tirreno —where the sun slips into its own golden glove— flows always becoming and being, to seas to oceans. It must be a waterfall out there! or water-full, maybe. . .
So, if you’re ever somewhere near the Tuscan coast, go check it out: Isola del Giglio.
FIB is the usually regular series: Fridays in Bracciano.
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Response to Misty Tracks
Please click here before reading on. I know it’s not usually me who devotes space here to photos, but I can’t pass Ryan’s photo by.
Mist: a concentration of water droplets hanging in the air. Obscurity, uncertainty, an opaque “whiteness” (or lack of color) through which the vision is limited to the immediate or expanded to a transformative view of a more mysterious beyond. As one moves through mist, a sense of what is immediate moves with one.
It was on of those peculiar afternoons that arrive in late October or early November in this district and are entirely dominated by one natural phenomenon alone—the phenomenon of mist. Wavering and fluctuating in its advances and retreats and only tangible to the sensitive skin by a faint impact of wetness and chilliness the mist rises, it would appear, by its own volition, or by the will of the divine water, straight out of the river and, unaffected by wind or sun, assumes, weak creature as it is, the dominant and mastering control of a whole unreturning day. This rape of the day by the weakest of her children was more significant of that spot than any other of Nature’s methods.
— Porius by John Cowper Powys
I am enamored by mist.
Tracks: the path upon which a train travels. Trains and tracks strike me much stronger than mist. I think that every writer must have some symbol that exceeds above others; train is the symbol upon which I throw my best and most fertile seeds.
The pulse of the great train resonates through her. She feels like the insides of a great bell; she is the omnipotent throbbing. Sometimes, when Valerie’s head falls back against the sticky brown upholstery, when her eyelids fall, and when her eyelids fall there is such an alliance fused between herself and the whole works that you would not believe. Valerie gets confused: Valerie thinks she is the train, that she is the one director of movement, that the vibrations coalescing, originate within her and that the train is mere assistant to discovery.
— Draft #3/4 of The Body’s Long Madness by me, Amber Ruth Paulen
I am doubly-enamored by tracks.
The combination of Mist and Tracks, well, it’s enough to spring me off my easy-chair. Bravo! Bravissimo!
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Question of Power
“Light of the morning star pushes away the darkness of night from the horizon. The mountain top is blessed with the warm glow of light which creates a new day.
The new day begins, quite often before dawn for many of us. An alarm clock sounds. The flip of a switch creates instant light in our lives. Aromas of fresh brewing coffee fill the air. Engaging a small button brings life to a computer for a quick check of E-mail. The cell phone is removed from its overnight charger ready for another day of important calls.
Our new day begins with a surge of electricity.
Quickly, easily, we replay this process day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
But where is this electricity coming from…and what is the real cost?
Thanks to David Alan Harvey.
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