A Woodland Valentine

7:19AM February 14, 2026

“Where else but in nature do we learn to overcome nature and thereby become our humanity—our finite, open-ended transcendence?” Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, p. 231.

     The heart songs offered in forests and woodlands come freely every day. Their blessings enter the window above my desk as well as all windows around our home and perhaps even better when walking amid the oaks and maples. Harrison’s book enriches these experiences with his elaboration on the words and representations articulated by historians, story tellers, poets, and visual artists who have ventured into forests across many lands and ages. One, of course, is Henry David Thoreau. Harrison notes: “The woods do not contain the knowledge that Thoreau seeks by going there; they do, however, uncover the habitual hiding places of the self, leaving it exposed to the facts of life,” p. 222.

February 14 2026

Exploring woodlands through the lens of John Constable’s paintings, particularly Study of a Trunk of an Elm Tree, Harrison furthers an understanding of logos:

… the trunk of the elm tree…stands there as the embodiment of something that has come to appearance, that has emerged from the earth that somehow gives itself over to representation. The tree and its encircling forest, the patch of open sky and its sphere of illumination on the floor of the clearing, appear in Constable’s study in what one might call their pregivenness. The phenomenon is always pregiven, the human presence is that to which it is given. Expressed otherwise, the phenomenon takes its stand within a fundamental relation, or correlation, that binds together the human essence and the self-disclosure of the phenomenon. This relation is logos. Logos is the ‘word’ that keeps silent in the artwork by disappearing into the presence of the phenomenon.

We must go further and say that this fundamental correlation underlies the correspondence between soul and landscape which Constable’s paintings strive to evoke. Constable’s devotion to the light, tone, and atmosphere that pervade a landscape and imbue it with a mood that is like a fusion between human feeling and nature’s appearance—this devotion to the emotional modalities of the chiaroscuro indicate the extent to which, for Constable, human presence in the world belongs most intimately to nature’s manner of being. ‘Painting is but another word for feeling,’ he declared, and feeling is but another word for the relational bond—the logos—through which nature comes to presence in the phenomenon. (p. 208)

This commentary contributes to my sense of the possibilities of photography involving these woods.

     Harrison also meditates on the abundant giving from the woodlands through several poets, especially A.R. Ammons, John Clare, and Andrea Zanzotto. Poignant are the revelations from seasonal expressions shown by forests in relation to longing and loss. Profound are the gifts that flow from fallen leaves covered in snow.

Disfiguring

 

Jan 5, 2026, 9:03PM

Ah-Ha! Just when I think I’ve figured it out…Not.

 

                                   yesterday's sunrise, taken with the camera’s “default” setting

Maybe moving into my 80th year I’m finally learning to look through, maybe to revalue the quick take or the disappointment, perhaps to imagine a conception possibly drawn from the other world. The “figured-out” more likely marks the activity of presumption and delusion, but rather than throwing it out, consider it as an opportunity to “disfigure.” The really important things like beauty, truth, love and the other 96 Names for God all surpass human containment. Claiming to grasp them descends into all manner of trouble; yet when problems are recognized and this brings a humbling recognition of human limitation--then  comes the chance of surrender to the beyond. And, by Grace, the Divine just might allow a whiff of the ecstatic.

same image edited to remember and imagine possibility of spring, etc

This venture beyond the bounds of cognition invites the play of imagination, and opens a free space where interpretations guess and dance with uncertainty. The figures that have ruled as unquestioned reality, as absolute right, get unmasked in  “disfiguring.” This term finds provocative elaboration in Mark C. Taylor’s Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion. Taylor explores and richly illustrates with contemporary artists, also connecting with philosophy and theology, as he develops the process of finding sacred ground by breaking idols that block access to creativity and compassion. How can we engage the modern condition without sinking into despair and alienation?

same image edited for black and white setting

“Modernism’s perfection is always a ‘violated perfection’; its purity is impure from the beginning, indeed, before the beginning. Modernity is infected by an other it both refuses and cannot refuse.

One of the figures of this irrefutable other is figuration. Modernism’s disfiguring is not only an aesthetic strategy; it is, as we have seen, a moral crusade. The struggle between figuring and disfiguring is the strife between madness and civilization. Inasmuch as it re-presents sensuousness and irrationality, figuration represents the primitive, infantile, feminine, and mad that modern civilization is constructed to refuse. The refused, however, never goes away. Constituting itself in and through acts of refusal, modernity needs what it nonetheless cannot bear. The refused eternally returns to disrupt and dislocate the structures constructed to control it. 

At its height, modernism’s search for purity is violated by the eruption of surrealism. . . 

The goal of surrealism is to reclaim the rights of the imagination by releasing the strange forces that inhabit the mind. These uncanny powers constitute madness in the midst of civilization and folly at the heart of reason. By soliciting the return of the refused, surrealism attempts to subvert modernism’s repressive puritan ethic. . .

Against modernism’s preoccupation with purity, order, rules, reason, clarity, and function, surrealists set impurity, disorder, transgression, irrationality, and uselessness. Such concerns are hardly reasonable; indeed they are folly—‘les folies les plus vives.’ Forever incomprehensible in any system—be it philosophical, religious, or economic—the folly of surrealism is the ‘non-knowledge’ that Bataille associates with the ecstasy of ‘inner experience.’ If the proposition (non-knowledge lays bare) possesses a sense—appearing, then disappearing immediately thereafter—this is because it has the meaning NON-KNOWLEDGE COMMUNICATES ECSTASY.’ 

(pp. 232-233, 235 in Taylor, quoting Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 52; emphasis in original).

Perhaps reading Taylor has encouraged my play with photo editing and its application to other stuck places in views of life past, present, and future. The snapshot offers a limited perspective dependent on the camera’s default setting and the photographer’s point of view, focus, zoom…so much like the mind’s view that has its own default settings, often unexamined, that control and limit understanding, action, and love for others as well as for self. So let's figure, dis-figure, re-fuse, play on...