“There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again. And in later years a familiar scent brings it to mind.”
From a set of unprocessed March daffodil photos, I picked out a few that were backlit (or side-lit), posed and processed as I described last fall in Autumn Leaves / Autumn Light, the last five re-processed on black backgrounds. A little alien in a helmet swooped in and attached itself to the daffodil in the first two photos while I was shooting; aliens, apparently, like to hug daffodils. Who knew??
“Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience…. Wars are now also living room sights and sounds….
“Awareness of the suffering that accumulates in a select number of wars happening elsewhere is something constructed. Principally in the form that is registered by cameras, it flares up, is shared by many people, and fades from view. In contrast to a written account — which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership — a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.
“Nonstop imagery (television, streaming video, movies) is our surround, but when it comes to remembering, the photograph has the deeper bite. Memory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image. In an era of information overload, the photograph provides a quick way of apprehending something and a compact form for memorizing it. The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.
“Something becomes real… by being photographed. But a catastrophe that is experienced will often seem eerily like its representation.“
“To designate a hell is not to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others….
“Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing — may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget.“
“A civilized person is one who is able, at all times and in all places, to recognize the humanity of others fully. So two stages have to be crossed before anyone can become civilized: in the first stage, you discover that others live in a way different from you; in the second, you agree to see them as bearers of the same humanity as yourself. The moral demand comes with an intellectual dimension: getting those with whom you live to understand a foreign identity, whether individual or collective, is an act of civilization, since in this way you are enlarging the circle of humanity.
“Thinking that yours is the only properly human group, refusing to acknowledge anything outside your own existence, offering nothing to others, and deliberately remaining shut away within your original milieu is a sign of barbarism; recognizing the plurality of groups, of human societies and cultures, and putting yourself on an equal footing with others is part of civilization….
“Torture, humiliation and suffering inflicted on others are marks of barbarity. The same is true of murder, and even more of collective murder or genocide, whatever may be the criterion by which you define the group that you desire to eliminate: `race’ (or visible physical characteristics), ethnic group, religion, social class or political convictions. Genocides were not a twentieth-century invention, but it cannot be denied that they lasted throughout the century — witness the massacres of the Armenians in Turkey, the `kulaks’ and the `bourgeois’ in Soviet Russia, the Jews and Gypsies in Nazi Germany, the inhabitants of the towns and cities in Cambodia, and the Tutsis in Rwanda….
‘Waging war is more barbaric than settling conflicts by negotiation….”
The world is changing before our very eyes.
That might have been a statement I could have made about the season — the first weeks of spring with green starting to bust out all around me — but since my last post (over a month ago, which I find hard to believe until I look at a calendar) the future histories of nations are being rewritten. And the first drafts of that rewrite are playing out on our media day and night, the seeds of geopolitical realignments that will change global politics, economics, and possibly even country borders before the war in Ukraine comes to an end.
It’s weirdly interesting to me that we often call our engagement with media consumption — “consumption” having archaically described “wasting diseases” like tuberculosis — yet that’s certainly one of the things that’s happening as endless videos and photographs of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine fill our television screens and social networking feeds, as they have done for weeks. There’s a relentlessness to it that’s very nearly debilitating even when experienced as a remotely observed event, so that’s possibly why I found myself back in Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, rereading it for the logic it attempts to provide around our interactions with conflict imagery. It’s impossible to capture the nuances from the book in a few quotes or a blog post, so I selected segments above from the beginning — which describes our positions as war spectators — and from the ending, which explains why all these images matter, and why we cannot look away.
Regarding the Pain of Others was published in 2003, and so doesn’t necessarily encapsulate the shocking immediacy of what we’re seeing from embattled Ukrainian cities, photographs and videos produced nearly as quickly as events are occurring and widely disseminated within minutes of (or even during) each occurrence. “Nonstop imagery” — as Sontag described it back then — is an even more apparent element of technological acceleration than it was when she wrote the book, which makes the book as relevant now as it was then, perhaps even moreso. We may feel like we’re experiencing the war as it’s occurring — and in media, we are — yet we’re actually only experiencing a representation of that war, because unless we’re there, that’s all we’ve got. It’s our own sense of empathy that fills in the gap between the imagery and the experience — when we recognize that others, as Todorov says, are “bearers of the same humanity” as ourselves, tinged, perhaps, with a bit of suppressed relief that “there but for the grace of god, go I.”
I’ve seen some articles on the internet that describe Russia’s attack on Ukraine as “the first social media war” — and while it’s not accurate to call it the first one, changes in technology (especially cell phones and their cameras, along with the explosive growth of social networks) have certainly infused this one with a visceral level of immediacy unlike conflict representations that any of us might have seen previously. Where words — especially superlatives — seem to fail, the photographs and videos coming out of Ukraine act as stand-ins for the words and for being there, except that being there means you can’t turn it off. Perhaps, like me, you’ve realized that you never really understood the obscene destructive power of weapons of war, of missiles flung across borders at a residential apartment buildings — until now.
It’s unnerving to realize that human beings are capable of such violence. It’s disturbing even as we’re surrounded by it, pummeled with its representations, or even when we’re just dimly aware of it. It’s almost inconceivable that these same creatures are capable creating anything worthwhile, and yet they are, and they do, as they have for millennia. I’m not sure why I always think about this (meaning, I’ve gotten used to it and have never tried to figure it out), but I always find myself simultaneously saddened and enraged not only by war’s loss of life but at the creative human potential that is destroyed by other humans. While I don’t expect it to make sense, I naively want it… to make sense….
Last week, Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy appeared in a speech to the U.S. Congress, in which he included a video of Ukrainian cities that started out like a travelogue then shifted to images of the damage being done to those same cities. As he did with a previous speech to the Canadian Parliament, Zelenskyy used words (and images) as a way to urge empathy: Imagine, if you will, that this is happening to you.
The full U.S. Congress speech is here; you can skip to the portion I’m referring to by clicking here. It is difficult to watch, but should be watched, and must be witnessed.
Setting the context and content aside for a moment (I know that’s not really possible), the video is powerful in its message, even moreso because of its juxtaposition of before-and-after scenes that drive its point home… accompanied by an intensely emotional melody that I had never heard before. It evoked some memories of music I was familiar with, possibly a somber Vivaldi larghetto (like this, for example), or maybe something dark from Rachmaninoff, or maybe the theme music from the movie Schindler’s List. It took me a few days to track it down, but the music in the video was written by Ukrainian composer Myroslav Skoryk, and the piece is simply and delightfully called… Melody.
There are quite a few performances of Melody on Youtube (see also here and here); but this is the one I liked the most, by Ukrainian violinist Anastasiya Petryshak:
It goes without saying, I suppose: but may the sounds of Ukrainian violins smother the haunting screams of air-raid sirens, as soon as is humanly possible.
“Prunus (Greek for “plum”) is a woody genus of around 430 species, found throughout the temperate zones of the northern hemisphere. Including some key sources of fruit and nuts — almonds, cherries, peaches, plums, apricots — the trees often combine beautiful flowers with productivity. Fossils of well-preserved Prunus flowers found in Washington State date back to the early Eocene (around 50 million years ago); the genus is thought to have evolved some 10 to 15 million years earlier, during the Paleocene….
“A very large number of other Prunus species are in cultivation, including ornamental varieties of species normally grown for fruit production…. Many of these are of eastern Asian origin and were introduced to the West during the late-19th- and early-20th-century period of intensive Asian plant hunting….”
“Floral preferences vary widely between countries, cultures, and different historical periods…. If we travel to Japan, we find floral arrangements incorporating moss pinks among European favorites such as tulips, roses, and lavender. Japanese parks showcase the traditional sakura cherry (Prunus serrulata)…. The Japanese enjoy their centuries-old pastime of flower viewing and picnicking (called hanami) under blooming cherry trees. Spring cherry blossoms are the most popular, but the people of Japan know that every season brings blossoms worthy of admiration.”
Hello!
Some of the earliest spring — or pre-spring! — color in my neighborhood (aside from daffodil yellow; see February Daffodils and Plum Blossoms) appears on various fruit trees that show off their flashy shades of pink from mid- to late-February and continue through March and early April. While it can be a challenge to identify these trees by name, most of the early bloomers are in the Prunus genus, which includes cherry, plum, and almond trees, among others. I think the tree featured in the photos below is a Japanese cherry tree, and it’s pretty much true that wherever I look, I see these clumps of pink mixed among with the gray branches of other trees that won’t leaf-out for a few more weeks.
On a clear day, the pink looks nice against sky blue… but it also looks good if I remove the backgrounds and paint them black (as I did in the last gallery). Either way, it’s fun to stand at the base of these trees and aim a zoom lens up to get a closer look, while some of the tiniest bee pollinators zip from bloom to bloom, as little bits of pink fall to the ground and the tree seems to change its size, shape, and color even as you stand there.
“There are daffodils in February, or even in January on rare occasions when the little early trumpet or ‘February Gold’ show a flower or two; the various kinds bloom on until the middle of April or later.”
“In China, favorite garden flowers are treasured for their symbolic meanings in art, literature, and society…. Flowering plums represent happiness and friendships.”
Hello!
Below are some photos of a small batch of late winter, early spring, mid-February daffodils (most found in the sun but shielded from cold breezes by nearby tree trunks), and some flowers on a blossoming plum tree.
“[The] shadows of late afternoon are very different from those of early morning; the mood, the mode of awareness, the qualities imparted are richly different…. The silence is deeper, fuller…. The trunks and the cliffs are darkening, the needles losing their distinctness…. The myriad flows between insects and grass, between soil and stone, hawk and water and cliff, seem to be dissipating — the reciprocities and negotiations between neighbors all gradually subsiding….
“We participate in this encompassing awareness with the whole of our body, as other animals participate in it with theirs, the snow leopard with its tensed muscles and the hawk with its splayed wing feathers. Every creature here inhabits and moves through the same field of mountains and melting ice, imbibing the same air, the same boulder-strewn awareness. Yet each animal filters this awareness with its particular senses, its access to the whole limited by the arrangement of its limbs and the specific style of its pleasures, by the way it obtains nourishment and the way it avoids becoming food for others. Each creature — two-leggeds included — has only a restricted access to the mystery of the real….“
“If hawks are circling around us, does that mean they think one of us might be good to hunt?”
Just before the sun went down a couple of days ago, I had let my dog in the house from his afternoon squirrel-chasing session when I saw my second hawk this winter. The first one — see Dog in Ivy, Hawk in Tree — was at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, high up in an oak tree — but this time was different. While it won’t be apparent from the photos below, the branch on which this red-tailed hawk perched is only about five feet from the ground. I took the photos from various distances with a zoom lens; by the time I got the closest, the hawk stayed put while I continued shooting from about ten feet away.
I puzzled for a while about why it stayed so still and so close to the ground, then heard a lot of rustling from the tops of the tall pine trees that border the northwest side of my back yard. Fluttering atop the pines I saw an enormous owl, flying from branch to branch, eyeing the hawk. I never could get a clear shot of the owl, yet my wandering around the yard to try didn’t concern the hawk — who apparently concluded (correctly!) that I was less of a threat than the owl; plus, I don’t have wings. The owl — owls hunt hawks, but opportunistically, perhaps somewhat lazily — gave up after about thirty minutes, yet still the hawk didn’t move, only turning its head occasionally to see what I was doing. Cautious about its predator, this hawk.
Encounters with wildlife are fascinating: I kept wondering what it was thinking, how close it would let me get, and what it might do when it decided I was invading its personal hawk-space. Check the look in its eyes in the last two images: when I realized I might be pushing my luck, I backed off a little lest I ended out with talons in my scalp. Still it stayed for a long time — until the sun had set — after the owl had gone, while I put down the camera and just strolled nearby and watched.
I could have kept watching until darkness fell fully, but thought it was time to end our encounter and keep the hawk and my dog from crossing paths… so I pretended to be a fox… and it (laughed hysterically and) flew away.
