Winnowing reflections on this first day of September, wondering what’s wanting to be drawn from the seine, like the folks fishing watch as water flows from their nets…Why not stand beside them, wondering if Jesus has spoken? And the term “Ekstasis” flits up in the mind with an uncertain recollection of where I was reading about it. The book was probably giving the root of the term “ecstasy,” thus suggesting it has to do with positioned beside or outside oneself. I’m not finding the place where I was reading but it probably came from one of these:
Anyway, the point is that this magnetic attraction toward the ecstatic inclines us, sometimes with a more emphatic shove, toward realizing the divine alongside the everyday. Perhaps some of us need it, certainly I want the push toward increased awareness. How easy and how unfortunate it is to miss the sacred as it disappears due to unholy distraction. How often the visitation gone. The missing not even noticed.
The picture shown above came through the default editing of the camera shutter this way:
Re-editing the image
happens partly because I walk outside most morning, predawn, and imagine how the darkish horizon might be imagined if I just attend further into the shadows,
venturing through the invitation of foggy places, hoping with the early sunlight that bends over while mostly unseen, as if asking one to see through the veils. How might we move closer to the Presence?
Messages from the mystics often feature “attending,” “interpretation,” entering the dark and/or silence. To stand beside, to experience the ecstatic, especially in the more subtle vibrations, might require “slow art.” The opportunity is to extend looking, to intensify attention, to open imagination, to go further than the default experience given by “normal” “default” time and space.
The framing and focus on my horizon has been re-set-ing through readings as well as in picture-taking and editing. Arden Reed in Slow Art (pp 120-121) quotes historian Jonathan Crary (Suspensions of Perception) who quotes William James (Principles of Psychology):
In fact, Crary argues, attention and distraction came to define the modern self. For the psychologist William James (1842-1910) experience itself was not given but formed through acts of attention. He explained in painterly language: ‘Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses in ways which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to … Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground…Without it…consciousness…would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.’
For more of this excerpt from William James, Chapter XI, The Principles of Psychology, 1890, please see: https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin11.htm
From the closing pages of Beauty in Photography, Robert Adams asserts: “Nature photographers particularly need to widen their subject matter if they are to help us find again the affection for life that is the only sure motive for continuing the struggle toward a decent environment” (p. 103). I’m also being moved by reading Denise Levertov.
In addition to picture-taking and editing, my response led to this draft:
The point obscure.
Like ecstasy, likely obsessive.
Direction? Where the center,
illumination?
Maybe the draw
not to beauty nor truth.
Separate no one
from the ninety nine.
Just attend with a sixth
or further
sense toward the unknown,
the Unknowable.
Focus for the whispered
hint, the inaudible
“Good enough”—
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