Sunday Post: Definition
Words are important to me. I have been looking for the right ones to define what I am trying to do here.
I am a secular monastic neo-transcendentalist.
“Language reveals the man. Speak that I might see thee.” – Ben Johnson
Model, Nicolette Di’Bendetto
Image, Reverend Bobby Anger
Model, Nicolette Di’Bendetto
Image, Reverend Bobby Anger
Sunday Post: Fact
I sometimes feel that the boundaries are blurred between what is real and what I have imagined.
I once read that a mark of sanity is the ability to distinguish between thought and reality. Perhaps this is true. I would add to it though that a mark of originality is the ability to have a thought and make from it a reality.
“All this is fact. Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.”
— Marilynne Robinson
Image, Reverend Bobby Anger
Sunday Post: Where It Comes From
We start with imitation. That is the easiest of all. Though there is nothing noble or original about only seeing beauty where others have taught you to look.
Next, we reflect on the world of knowledge. We interpret. As Goethe once wrote, he who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.
Finally, we experience. There are things we can know only in this way. They are the richest and often the most bitter. We think them when our mind is void of thought. We see them when our eyes are closed. They are seeded in us where their roots gain purchase.
There is no procedure by which it can be achieved, no rule by which it can be measured.
There is a voice inside. It says yes and no.
Model, Hex Hypoxia
Image, Reverend Bobby Anger
Model, Hex Hypoxia
Image, Reverend Bobby Anger
Sunday Post: What We Are Left With
I knew a good man. He passed away.
I visited his widow to comfort her.
I asked about the experiences they had had together, their memories. They seemed to her distant and unclear.
We sat in a dark room and drank tea at an unsteady table from cups that were chipped and did not match.
She said her whole life was now lived and all she had left were these things.
I didn’t know how to respond.
There was no disappointment in her voice.
What will become of you and me (This is the school in which we learn…)
Besides the photo and the memory? (…that time is the fire in which we burn.)
— Delmore Schwartz
Model, LauraUnbound
Image, Reverend Bobby Anger
Sunday Post: Remember
We lay sleepless in our rooms in the dark hours and think our dark thoughts. The world becomes an abstraction.
You must remember that in the day you walked through the fields. You felt the breeze gently stir and stopped to watch the light fall through the trees.
This is all we have against the darkness.
You can always return. The field is still there and the wind still blows.
And I am waiting.
Image, Reverend Bobby Anger
Sunday Post: The Weight of our Decisions
A decision is not an independent thing. Each decision we make is an accumulation of all the decisions we have made in our lives.
There is a point that we reach where we can be nothing more than a projection forward of our past. Our character is written and the story nearly told.
These things we have chosen against though, the other side of the coin, they have a life of their own. They are there in us, living dormant like a stone in the sweet flesh of a plum.
Model, Teresa
Image, Reverend Bobby Anger
Sunday Post: Prophesy
I was reading Homer some time ago. A character made a reference to the prophesy of birds. It made me curious on the topic.
I was shooting in an abandoned structure in an abandoned town recently. I noticed small skulls in all the rooms. They were the skulls of mice. Why were the mice all coming here to die? In another room, I saw the pellets and the answer was clear. Owls now inhabited this building.
The American Indians had a belief concerning the owl. They believed that if one encountered an owl, it was a sign that one’s fate would soon change. Generally, this change was a change for the worse. Sometimes though, it was a change for the better.
The image I made that day, just a few weeks later, appeared here.
http://sfmoma.tumblr.com/post/20176785637/submission-everything-looks-permanent-until-its
It was the first time ever my work had received such recognition.
Below, the mice.