You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
It is the opposite to staring into the Sun–where an infinite amount of light obliterates; but similar in that the obliteration (flares, bleeds, and streaks through the image) reshapes how we see and how we relate to the finite, the material, and even incompleteness(?).
spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf.sky[shade, leaves] and branches.
Nature (the natural!) is the setting for our humanity. Being attentive to one’s presence near the natural generates joy.
Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,”
There is something infinitely healing in these repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.
Rachel Carson.
“The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendour of life, yields a new thought with every petal, […] The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live.” – Richard Jefferies
via Popova
The natural world can offer us more than the means to survive, on the one hand, or mortal risks to be avoided, on the other: it can offer us joy.
[…]
There can be occasions when we suddenly and involuntarily find ourselves loving the natural world with a startling intensity, in a burst of emotion which we may not fully understand, and the only word that seems to me to be appropriate for this feeling is joy.
[…]
we need constantly reminding that we have been operators of computers for a single generation and workers in neon-lit offices for three or four, but we were farmers for five hundred generations, and before that hunter-gatherers for perhaps fifty thousand or more
[…]
It is time for a different, formal defence of nature. We should offer up not just the notion of being sensible and responsible about it, which is sustainable development, nor the notion of its mammoth utilitarian and financial value, which is ecosystem services, but a third way, something different entirely: we should offer up what it means to our spirits; the love of it. We should offer up its joy.
The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy, Michael McCarthy
Untitled (The croton brightens and dignifies; here we will be)
back at it.
Un-related —
Dot-Band Class, Attic, active 520 – 500 BCE Black-Figure Vessel (Amphora) Depicting the Struggle between Apollo and Herakles for the Delphic Tripod and African Attendant with Horse, late 6th century BCE Archaic Period Greece, Attica region, possibly Athens Terracotta 8 3/8 × 6 × 5 3/8 in. (21.3 × 15.2 × 13.7 cm) 3-D Object/Sculpture 1983-035 DJ Photo: Paul Hester, via Menil.org
“Some soldiers with nuns behind them served as an example to explain what the punctum was to me… but when Bruce Gilden photographs a nun and some drag queens (New Orleans, 1973), the deliberate contrast produces no effect on me, except perhaps one of irritation. Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly, intentional, and probably must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful… it does not necessarily attest to the photographer’s art; it says only that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he could not not photograph the partial object at the same time as the total object.”
Fried quoting Barthes’s Camera Lucida, framing his argument linking punctum and anti-theatricality.
“That is it; that is all Barthes has to say with respect to the punctum, about the point of view, the activity, of the photographer as distinct from the response of the viewer… it is enough to situate Camera Lucida in relation to the central current or tradition of anti-theatrical critical thought and pictorial practice that I have tried to show… Understood in this context, Barthes’s observation… that the detail that strikes him as a punctum could not do so had it been intended as such by the photographer is an anti-theatrical claim in that it implies a fundamental distinction, which goes back to Diderot, between ‘seeing’ and ‘being shown’.”
Fried argues.
“The concept of human uniqueness is only a problem when we deny the beauty and necessity both of our animal lives and the lives of other animals.” – aeon.co
Benefits to think like a detective. “Practise: your brain needs training like any other muscle. Embrace doubt, start digging, stay humble, and continue educating yourself.”