It has been a long time since I last posted a collection of photographs to my blog. It is not that I have discontinued my forays into nature armed with a camera, a couple of lenses, and sometimes a flash, but that I have been so busy finishing the publication of my books that I did not have any time left to do the work required for processing images and getting them ready for uploading.
Almost all of these images were made during a single shoot on the fourth of October in and around Taughannock Creek and one of its tributaries.
There are two galleries. Please click on the first thumbnail to see the image in full and then follow the arrows to see the others. Get in touch with me HERE if you are interested in purchasing a print of any of these pictures.
To give this post greater depth, I am transcribing between the two galleries a remarkable text about the ever-unprecedented quality of perception that appears in The Book of Disquiet by the great Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa.
At the very end, I’m also placing a brief text of mine about the nature and enormous significance of the same mental quality: perception.
GALLERY - I
249 (18/5/1930) “To live is to be other. Even feeling is impossible if one feels today what one felt yesterday, for that is not to feel, it is only to remember today what one felt yesterday, to be the living corpse of yesterday’s lost life.
To wipe everything off the slate from one day to the next, to be new with each new dawn, in a state of perpetually restored virginity of emotion —that and only that is worth being or having, if we are to be or to have what we imperfectly are.
This dawn is the first the world has seen….Never before have this hour, this light, my being existed. What comes tomorrow will be different, and what I see will be seen through different eyes, full of a new vision.”
(For curious and hardy souls, I cannot recommend enough reading Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. Look for the complete edition excellently translated into English from the Portuguese original by Margaret Jull Acosta and published by The Serpent’s Tail)
GALLERY - II
We, human beings, long ago opted to live in a world almost entirely constructed on the basis of contradictory forms of secular and religious ideology and their projections. Every child that has ever been born has been rather brutally socialized (shaped) by exclusive forms of symbolic representation that are an integral part of this dominant and utterly fragmented mindset. What each of us calls “me” is a verbal and image/inary recounting and advancing of a story, a particular record of biographic events, that is merely a particular instance of the general phenomenon of mental conditioning by ideology.
Our fundamental problem is that the mental/social phenomenon of exclusive identity—” you and I,” “us and them”— is hardly related to the totality of existence, which is the true source of the human presence in the cosmos. Far more than relatively different cultural and psychological entities, we are common manifestations of a material/energetic reality that, being indivisible, whole, is beyond the reach of whatever knowledge and manner of thinking we each adopt to serve the claim of having been, presently being, and having the “right” to eventually posses and become whatever we want.
To put it simply, we are profoundly and tragically alienated from the fathomless depth and dynamism of our common vital and sustaining force. The persistent outcome of this mental alienation is the tribalism and egocentrism afflicting the entire species. Life fragmented by thought and experienced in separation is tragic because it is full of conflict and the futile striving deemed necessary to overcome the loneliness, fear, and sorrow intrinsic to isolation. Whatever instances of love and joy we may muster are always exclusive and, therefore, either insufficient or all too ephemeral.
Whether acknowledged or not, this constant experience of painful alienation makes the mind insensitive and dull, which in turn prevents the independent, holistic, and accurate perception of this overriding mental conditioning, which is the only factor that can end it.
You are undoubtedly wondering by now what all this has to do with a bunch of pictures of a little New York stream revealing the beautifying ravages of Fall. After all, these images are too symbolic representations of a minute aspect of life; an absurdly small and insufficient map of an utterly irreducible territory. Yes, that is right. However, the deeper intent of posting these images is to show, with the invaluable help of Fernando Pessoa’s quote, the necessity of awareness at every moment. A mental keenness that can only arise when perception is no longer obscured, if not altogether denied, by a false sense of unique identity and separate existence. While photographing these scenes, often in the middle of the stream, I was hardly there as a separate observer. It was as though this massive death/life event were witnessing itself.
What do you think would happen if a critical number of us could look at ourselves and the world free of all previously acquired mental habits and tribal dogmas? -Would we continue to be indifferent to the suffering of others or, worse yet, to us being the direct cause of it? Would we allow our absurd ambitions and foolish sense of tribal exceptionalism to continue sleepwalking the entire species into an ecological catastrophe, if not prior self-extermination, by thermonuclear or other equally destructive means? Would we not truly love our children, their children, and all future generations? The time to see and assume total responsibility is now.