The Art of Re-Working Reality

 

No book – more precisely, no series of books – has embedded itself more deeply into my life than Lawrence Durrell’s  The Alexandria Quartet. The four companion volumes, Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea, are remarkable on several counts. Their portrayal of the story’s protagonist, the city of Alexandria herself, is vibrant and evocative. Against the background of her corniche, brothels and souks, the author sets himself the unusual and difficult task of examining the complexity of human relationships, emotions and events in the context of the space/time continuum.  To the degree that he succeeds in reaching that goal, he succeeds as well in making the Quartet a bit of a structural tour de force.

Durrell’s dialogue occasionally creaks and groans like a recalcitrant ox-cart, but his descriptive powers are unrivaled. Whether tracing the outlines of Alexandrian society, plumbing the depths of traditional Egyptian culture or capturing the incomparable beauties of Mediterranean sea and sky, his language is variously lush, languid and spare.  As Justine opens with the insistent force of a natural process, the narrator is living on an island with a companion we know only as “the child”.  Her identity, suggested, is not confirmed. What is clear is the setting, an exquisite  prologue to what will come:

In the great quietness of these winter evenings there is one clock: the sea. Its dim momentum in the mind is the fugue upon which this writing is made. Empty cadences of seawater, licking its own wounds, sulking along the mouths of the delta, boiling upon those deserted beaches – empty, forever empty under the gulls: white scribble on the grey, munched by clouds.  If ever there are sails here they die before the land shadows them.  Wreckage washed up on the pediments of islands, the last crust, eroded by the weather, stuck in the blue maw of water…gone!

Beyond the elegant structure of Durrell’s story and the  extravagant beauty of his language, there is another reason for artists of every sort to plumb the depths of his narrative.  Few writers provide more clues to their own artistic process or their personal convictions about the nature of art than does Durrell. Painter or poet, novelist, sculptor or photographer – all can find guidance for their craft and the beginnings of wisdom for their art in words which have become as well-known as their author:

I spoke of the uselessness of art, but added nothing truthful about its consolations.  The solace of such work as I do with brain and heart lies with this ~  that only there, in the silence of the painter or writer can reality be re-ordered, re-worked and made to show its significant side.

Sitting in silence at my desk , I often enjoy little more than a hunch, a suspicion, a tentative sense of direction in which to travel with my words.  Still, I  understand the process by which words can be “re-ordered and re-worked”  to reveal that deeper significance Durrell so rightly prizes, and no one seems inclined to argue the appropriateness of such re-working.

However, as I’ve become more appreciative of  the possibilities offered by photography, I’ve been intrigued and puzzled by arguments between those I privately think of as “purists” and “innovators” – that is, between those who insist photographs never should be retouched in any way, and those who assume tweeks and tricks of every sort will be a natural part of the creative process. 

In simplest terms, the argument seems to boil down to “pure perception is good, manipulation is bad.”  Manipulation most often seems to mean “messing about with a computer”.  But “manipulation” of an image doesn’t begin when someone opens Photoshop or Picnik. It begins at the beginning, when the photographer makes a first decision about what will, or won’t, be in the viewfinder.

 Michael Smith,  member of the North American Nature Photographers and former member of the National Press Photographers Association, ponders these issues in a recent discussion on his fine blog, Dissent Decree.

As he says,  “…I have heard most of the arguments about how far photographic “truth” may be stretched. What it comes down to is context and intent. A photojournalist with ethics will not alter, stage or otherwise contrive a photograph. However, that same photographer must and will decide what to photograph, from what vantage point, and (at which) exact moment.”

“Likewise, he or she will decide what focal length lens to use, what to focus upon, what to frame in the viewfinder (“in-camera cropping”) and what aperture setting and ISO to use. All of these decisions shape and shade the final image – (which becomes) in some degree… editorializing and self-expression as much as reporting. Photojournalism, in spite of what the purists may argue, is in part a form of Art.”

As a writer, I understand the need for constant choice. I spend hours choosing between this word or that, reordering paragraphs, eliminating sentences or adding the necessary phrase.  Photography, it seems, is no less a process of continual decision making. Should I photograph this flower, or that? Would the building be better shot in morning light or evening? Shall I focus here, or there? Will I choose black and white, or color? It intrigues me that some consider these decisions inherently artistic, even as they describe what happens at the computer as undesirable manipulation.

It seems obvious we can’t have it both ways. If deciding to include a cloud or exclude a tree in a photograph is an “artistic decision”, then cropping, framing and applying effects can be artistic decisions, too.  On the other hand, if choosing to transform an image with the special effects available through computer programs is “manipulation”, then choosing a subject, a vantage point, a condition of light is just as surely a manipulation of what viewers will see in the final image.

In fact, whether a photographer chooses to rely on camera settings alone or prefers to crop, tint or otherwise modify an image after its upload to a computer, the goal is the same: to choose a subject and then to “rework” that reality, to frame this bit of landscape or that bit of life in such a way that its emotional depth and temporal significance become accessible.  Like a painter selecting a favorite brush or a writer uncoiling great loops of words, the photographer softens and tints, focuses and frames in such a way that  quite ordinary bits of daily life  become transformed, evoking a sense of unutterable mystery and delight.  Inexplicably, they become living moments, available to serve artists of every sort in a way Durrell understood to his depth:

These are moments which possess the writer, not the lover, and which live on perpetually. One can return to them time and time again in memory, or use them as a fund upon which to build the part of one’s life that is writing. One can debauch them with words, but one can never spoil them. In this context too, I recover another such moment, lying beside a sleeping woman in a cheap room near the mosque.  In that early spring dawn, with its dense dew, sketched upon the silence which engulfs a whole city before the birds awaken it, I caught the sweet voice of the blind muezzin from the mosque reciting the ebed – a voice hanging like a hair in the palm cooled airs of Alexandria…

The great prayer wound its way into my sleepy consciousness like a serpent, coil after shining coil of words, the voice of muezzin sinking from register to register of gravity ~ until the whole world seemed dense with its marvelous healing powers, the intimations of a grace undeserved and unexpected, impregnating that shabby room where Melissa lay, breathing lightly as  a gull, rocked upon the oceanic splendors of a language she would never know.

 

 

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The Bluebird of Perception

 

Each of us has our favorites in life.  Unlike the casual “favorites” overflowing our browsers, personal favorites often are life-affirming and life-changing preferences embedded  into our hearts by a process as subtle as it is mysterious.  Asked to reflect on a best-loved moment or reveal which cherished bit of beauty we’ve pulled from the world’s storeroom to decorate our lives, we may pretend to ponder, to anguish just a bit, but in truth we know the answers.  We’re just trying to ignore the world’s judgement on their merits.   

Perhaps because these favorites are so personal, so idiosyncratic, we seem to find them fascinating.  Yet another version of the old ”choices” game was sent to me recently, a sign of that fascination.  Designed to invite self-revelation, this one banished us to the proverbial deserted island, allowing only one book, one song, one memory and one vision to sustain us in our solitude.  Responding wasn’t hard, as two of my choices have been fixed for years.  Lawrence Durrell gets the nod for his exquisite, four-volume  Alexandria Quartet, a palimpsest of the heart.  Enya’s Orinoco Flow may be as much memory as song, but years ago its melody and rhythms carried me across the Pacific, repetitive and comforting as the sea.  Hearing it today, I feel again the rise and falling of the deck. Leaning back against the insistent pull of imaginary sails I suffer the illusion, common after long passages, of once more being underway as earth herself begins to pitch and yaw like a green and verdant vessel.    

Books and music are easy choices, but choosing one special memory is harder.  There are as many memories as moments in life, but my final choice transports me to a room on Madrid’s Plaza Major, stretching out across the rough cotton spread and listening to the curtains breathe in the late afternoon silence.  Time contracts, then expands with the rising heat, reverberating with the great bells of the city.  I peel an orange, and watch a single bee hover near its sun-warmed skin.  Blown forward in time, the curtains billow into my vision from Andrew Wyeth’s Wind from the Sea. The painting carries salt and substance as lightly as a breeze, and if the vision recalls Anne Morrow Lindberg’s Gift from the Sea, if it somehow bends the rules by giving me yet another book and many more memories than the game allows, then I have chosen well. 

Andrew Wyeth ~ Wind From the Sea

Eventually, one of these little games will stipulate an island with a broadband connection and ask for a favorite blog.  How I would choose then, I can’t say. In the midst of the verbal clutter we call the blogosphere, there are writers serving up words that drip with the intensity and flavor of sun-ripened fruit.  Some blogs breathe as softly as a faltering Spanish breeze while others, layered and impenetrable as Cavafy’s City, trace the labyrinthine longings of the human heart with passion and persistence.

Pens and Pics ~ A Cautionary Tale

The six words came first, like a little roadmap found crinkled under the seat of a car, or the sight of a curious, six-legged creature fleeing over the horizon.   Even the right word takes effort, I thought, the words so clear, so absolute and certain I looked around to see who might have spoken.  Seeing no one, yet possessed by a sudden, compulsive urge  to hold the words captive, to prevent their escape into the thicket of a mind overgrown with phrases like “don’t forget the milk” and “be sure to mail that check”, I looked around for tools to help me construct a cage.

The tools needed, of course, were paper and pencil, or pen.  Ubiquitous in human homes and offices, they can be hard to come by on isolated docks where language means the chatter and chirr of gulls.  Digging around beneath the birds’ inquisitive stares, I finally found a pen under the spare tire in my car’s trunk, laughing that I’d found one at all.  The pen, a white ballpoint imprinted with the LaQuinta logo, looked as though it had knocked around the car for some time, but it worked. Paper was less of a problem.   Junk mail envelopes in the car’s trash were abundant, as were the backs of  business cards , but there on the dock was all the paper I needed.   Pieces of used sandpaper five inches  square and smooth on the back were just big enough for those six words and the title which eventually presented itself: The Task at Hand.  Over the course of several days, words and phrases were added and removed, arranged and stacked and rearranged until at last I brought my little pile of sandpaper home and transcribed the words which gave this blog an identity and purpose.

The fact that I’d written my first poem on sandpaper didn’t seem in the least odd until I began attending a local writers’ group. A few members appeared at meetings with spiral-bound notebooks  and ball point pens straight off the drugstore shelf.   Far more had lovely, leather-bound journals or exquisite notebooks with covers of hand-made paper.   Filled with thick, creamy pages that absorbed ink in an instant or leaves of tissue so delicate they made the very act of writing seem an assault, they were perfect companions for pens far more elegant than my lowly trunk-dweller.  I hadn’t used a real pen in years, but here they were in abundance, their gold nibs, tiny enameled bodies, silver and gold engravings and perfect proportions luscious and appealing.

Before and after the meetings, there was as much talk of pens and paper as about words.  Writers talked about their trips to the stationers like explorers eagerly cataloguing acquisitions of rare butterflies.  Papyrus, vellum, marbeled or mulberry, the papers were rumored to imbue the most pedestrian words with weight and substance.  As for the pens,  it seemed one never was enough.  One writer used only a gold Cross pen for prose,  a Monteverde with purple ink for poetry and a nice rollerball for editing.  Montblanc was a favoite, Conklin esteemed, Montegrappa coveted.  My LaQuinta freebie hid in my purse, embarassed and chagrined.

Certainly there is legitimate pleasure to be taken in artfully produced journals, a paper smooth and heavy to the touch and the flow of ink, a sensuous pleasure that only increases when combined with good coffee, a little time for thought, a window from which to gaze.   When that pleasure slides toward obsession, as it can, it suggests something more – an unspoken conviction that if only one could find the right paper, the perfect pen, the perfectly bound notebook, writing itself would become easier, more fluid, more richly textured and memorable. 

The longing of some writers for these perfect tools is very much akin to the hunger for a perfect setting in which to write.   “I can’t write at home,” says one. “I see the chores needing to be done and become distracted.”    Another fusses, “I only can write in complete solitude.” Some can’t write at night, or in the morning, or in public or facing south.  Some need windows, or beaches or mountain cabins. Others prefer a cafe setting, or a certain, comfortable couch.  I once heard a fellow say, “When I retire, I’m going to have a teak desk, with a beautiful sheen, and a room in muted colors with natural fabrics, and no telephone.  Then, I’ll be able to write.”

I hope he can.  And yet, I remember Annie Dillard’s words on the subject in her marvelous On Writing.  She says, ”Appealing work places are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.  When I furnished this study seven years ago, I pushed the long desk against a blank wall, so I could not see from either window…  Once, fifteen years ago, I wrote in a cinder block cell over  a parking lot. It overlooked a tar and gravel roof.  This pine shed under trees is not quite so good as the cinder block study was, but it will do.”

While Ms. Dillard’s thoughts might be taken as the strange rantings of a mystical poet, William Zinsser is all prose, and his opinion hardly differs. In his introduction to the 2006 edition of the classic On Writing Well, Zinsser mentions a photograph of E.B. White which hung in his office.  Taken by Jill Krementz, it’s described by Zinsser in this way: 

 ”A white-haired man is sitting on a plain wooden bench at a plain wooden table – three boards nailed to four legs – in a small boathouse. The window is open to a view across the water.  White is typing on a manual typewriter, and the only other objects are an ashtray and a nail keg.  The keg, I don’t have to be told, is his wastebasket.“   Zinsser goes on to add, “White has everything he needs: a writing implement, a piece of paper, and a receptacle for all the sentences that didn’t come out the way he wanted them to.” 

The willingness to imbue simple tools with mysterious powers and to confuse the process of creating art with the ability of its product to intrique, inspire and initiate dialogue is not limited to the writers among us.  A delightful parable of technology, vision, and imagination  comes from painter and photographer Michael Maurer Smith, who tells the story of Snapper’s Disappointment in his blog, Dissent Decree.  As Michael tells it,

Snapper figured if he bought the best he’d be the best. So he made the call and ordered himself one of the finest digital single lens reflex cameras money could buy. This puppy came with 24.5 megapixel full-frame capability, a magnesium body shell, a carbon fiber composite shutter, a 922,000 pixel LCD monitor, and it could shoot 7 frames per second.

Snapper took some time to familiarize himself with his new treasure, with all of its menus and buttons, but found himself increasingly anxious as he realized he hadn’t a clue where to begin taking actual photographs, or why he might choose one subject over another.  Eventually, Michael tells us, as Snapper searched for answers he stumbled upon Henri Cartier-Bresson and the amazements of a different sort of photography.

“Bresson had made his pictures using a completely manual camera—something called a Leica. It had no auto focus, auto exposure or zoom lens. The label also said Bresson rarely used flash. Snapper was dumbfounded. ‘How could Bresson make such stunning photographs using such simple technology?’…

…Snapper was disappointed. The advertising had promised him that the technology built into his new camera would assure great photographs with every click of the shutter. But after seeing Bresson’s work it sure seemed like there was a lot more to photography than just the camera.”

Indeed.  And in his own delightful way, Michael Maurer Smith not only shows us how Snapper resolves his issues, he uses the tale to drive home a point I’ve suspected all along.  The writer searching for a magic pen, the photographer waiting for the perfect technology, the painter constrained by the quality of light ~ all have forgotten a basic truth of the creative process.  It is grounded not in technology and technique, but in what Faulkner in his Nobel Prize speech called “the agony and sweat of the human spirit.”  It is pursued “not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.”

As the logician would say, the tools of any art are necessary but not sufficient for beauty and meaning to emerge.  And however well we succeed, no matter how far short of our goal we may fall, the words of this slightly amended proverb hold true: it is a poor artist who blames the tools. 

You just have to live, and then life will give you photographs.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson

 

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And Many Thanks to oh! of WordPress and Sandiquiz of WeatherUnderground and Flickr, both of whom used the proverb “It is a poor workman who blames his tools” within a week of each other and thus started me down this road.  Welcome to Team Muse, and many thanks for your posts and comments!

An Almost Silent Spring

Every gardener in Houston knows the significance of February 14th.   Never mind Valentine’s Day,  it’s the traditional time to trim back rose bushes.  The actual pruning may take place on the 18th, or the 26th, or even March 1st for the lazy or preoccupied, but the ritual pruning of the roses means only one thing.  Spring is on the way.

I don’t have roses, but I have three large pots filled with  Cape Honeysuckle.  A beautiful shrub native to South Africa, its  red-orange blossoms resemble tiny versions of the trumpet vine flower and attract butterflies and hummingbirds galore.  Shortly after the 14th, I gave all three a serious pruning, and settled back to watch them fill out.  As February gave way to March and March  began to draw ever more closely toward April,  the plants sprouted new growth with a vengeance while I vacillated between restlessness and a strange lethargy.  Even as the honeysuckle climbed toward the sun,  I declined into a sense of anxiety and unease.   The days grew longer and the temperatures  warmed,  but the world seemed monochromatic and dull.  Looking around, I experienced no seasonal anticipation, no delight in the world’s renewal.  It hardly felt like Spring.

In the midst of my decline, friends in Dallas and Oklahoma began to post photos of their own harbingers of Spring. I grew curious and more than a little confused. Why were pear and plum trees blooming  in Dallas, two hundred miles to the north, when my neighborhood redbuds hadn’t begun to flower?  When folks in Kansas and the Carolinas began to brag on their  narcissus, crocus and daffodils, I still hadn’t seen a dandelion. 

Eventually, I realized anew that more than homes, businesses and boats had fallen victim to Hurricane Ike.  The suffering and loss endured by the natural world had been hidden by the dormancy of Winter.  With the  passage of the Spring equinox and the turning of the season, the full extent of the damage was becoming clear.  Massive live oaks stripped of their leaves by wind and innundated by salt water showed no sign of new growth.  Cypress, always bare through the winter, were refusing to leaf out.   Stopping at a pretty, anonymous tree I pass every day, I bent the end of a twig. It snapped off cleanly with the sharp, easy crack that says “dead”.  Reaching farther up the limb, I bent a larger twig, and found more dead wood.  I stopped and turned away, unwilling to explore further.

In the neighborhoods, confusion clearly reigned in the plant world.  Many redbuds never bloomed, and pears were putting on leaves before blossoms appeared.  The Indian hawthorne was late, the azaleas hardly noticeable. Crepe myrtles and palms seemed fine, but many shrubs were brittle and yellow.

Even worse than the damage and confusion was the complete absence of so much we’d taken for granted.  Ditches always filled with bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush were clogged with salted debris.  Once-rich beds of iris and amaryllis were reduced to a few sad blooms. Across whole neighborhoods, the little grace notes of life had fallen silent.  Gone were the brick walkways bordered with marigolds, the trellises, the tumbles of begonias and baskets of bougainvillea that could drench a day with showers of salmon and magenta reflections.   Where lantana and petunias once grew, chunks of concrete foundation piled higher as hibiscus, loquat and lilies struggled to survive.  Orange and lemon trees were bulldozed while planters once filled with geraniums and daisies were turned into ashtrays and trash bins.

In some neighborhoods,  garden after garden has been replaced by patches of empty, sand-covered dirt as homeowners wait for construction to begin.  The houses can be rebuilt in a year, but it will take more than a few years to replace the beauty and complexity of the gardens.  Whatever its style, a real garden requires time, commitment and care, and many of these gardeners never will live to see their dreams flower in quite the same way.  A garden is far more than a carload of plants from Home Depot or Lowes, and certainly more than the new flowers now planted at our intersections and in front of apartment complexes.  Those flower beds are neat and tidy, but they’re absolutely identical from one location to the next.  For all practical purposes they’re “rent-a-flowers”, and in three months they’ll be replaced by something else.  They add a bit of color to the landscape, but have nothing to do with gardens, or with all of the love, curiosity, surprise and delight that gardens bring.   

As one of my gardening friends put it after watching  a front-loader drive through her salvia and dusty miller beds, “This year we’re going to have to take what Mother Nature offers.”  Her off-handed remark was my salvation.  Instead of exhausting myself watching for signs of a normal spring, I began looking around to see what was happening despite the extraordinary circumstances.

This past, utterly gloomy and damp Tuesday, I was driving down a main street through town when I happened to glance across the esplanade and noticed a flash of gold in a vacant lot.  An impulsive u-turn later, I pulled into the lot and discovered a stand of gallardia-like flowers shining as though lit from within.  Looking around, I was astonished.  There were sunflowers  scattered here and there, and a bit of scraggly wisteria climbing the telephone pole. There was a mysterious white berry with flowers along a collapsed fence, and the tiniest but most vibrant little coral-colored  flowers I’d ever seen.  There were tall purple things and creeping purple things.  There was a remnant of a white geranium on what appeared to have been a trash heap, and yellow-green blossoms the size of a pinhead scattered throughout it all.  In that single vacant lot, I found at least a dozen varieties of wild flowers, all  passed by hundreds – if not thousands - of motorists a day, none of whom saw more than a glimpse of the taller flowers.

I was so astonished I made two more stops at vacant lots, one next to a boat chandlery and one in a neighborhood which itself had gone to seed since the storm.  There were fields of white and pink primroses, lantana of all sorts, more wisteria, and great sweeps of tall, graceful yellow and purple flowers I couldn’t identify.  It was truly astonishing.  In the midst of a world where human gardens had been swept away like so much scattered seed , Mother Nature had moved in and strewn her gifts with a generous hand.  It was not that the beauty of flowers was missing from the world.  They only had moved, taken on new forms, and were waiting to be discovered. They were, in fact, hiding in plain sight.

After finding the third flower-strewn lot, I called my friend and said, “Get your camera.  There’s something you need to see.”  For the next two hours, we stalked the urban wildflower, amazed at the variety and profusion we found.  Later, as I enjoyed and processed the photos, it was clear the temporary trowel-for-camera trade had been worthwhile. 

As with so many things in this post-hurricane world, things rarely are as they were.  But it surely is Spring, and  the grace notes are starting to sound ~ one  exquisite blossom at a time. 

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