PHOTOS and SEEING

Does taking pictures keep me from seeing? 

When I thought of this before, I had in mind those hords of tourists snapping their cameras at whatever the tour guide is pointing at.

I also was thinking about pointing a camera and clicking the shutter in contrast to the process of looking, drawing, looking more carefully, drawing, looking again, drawing.

And finally, I thought about the contrast between me with my little camera set on automatic for snapshots (the OED says that "shot" has an early form of "scott") and the real photographers I know with their technical expertise, their ability to see and frame and light and choose focus and speed and then to develop or work digitally with the photo until they have a work of art.

Last night, however, sitting on the deck with a good book and a hoppy local IPA, I saw the light change out of the corner of my eye and turned to see this:

and then, this close-up view of the light in the sage

and then this to the east

and then the light in the rabbitbrush to the north

and then the light in the drying penstemons

with the maples red on the mountain

And finally, I thought I had been thinking the question of seeing and photography badly.

A real photographer could tell me how to make each of my photos better, no question about it.

But with the camera in my hand, I went from wonder to wonder, looking at the light, clicking the shutter, looking at the light, clicking, looking, clicking. 

I wasn't trying to be a photographer. I wasn't a tourist. I was trying to see. Trying to see the sage and the rabbitbrush. Trying to see the light. Trying to see the thing itself, not the photographic representation of the thing.

Of course, the photos remain after the seeing and then can be posted here to remind me of what I saw. But they are secondary. Last night I saw the light in and on and around the sage. It was thrilling.

Wildflowers #5 + taxonomy

glacier lilies and wasatch bluebells

Taraxacum officinale + Artemesia tridentata

18 March 1999, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos

            A velvety, blue-spotted mourning cloak flits across our path. I chased these as a child at my grandparents’ farm in Windsor, Colorado. Some childhood experiences never leave us.

            When I decided to move from Tennessee to Utah, the Dean of Vanderbilt’s School of Arts and Sciences asked if BYU, where I had been an undergraduate, was offering me more money. “No,” I said, “I miss the smell of sage.” In my case, at that point, for complex reasons, visceral memory trumped academic prestige.

Another insect flashes past, a brilliant scarlet-orange patch under its wings.

            “Box elder bug,” Sam says, “Boisea trivittata.” Named by Thomas Say, an American entomologist who was part of an expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1819 and 1820. He was the first to classify and name the coyote and the lazuli bunting.

            Up the trail, a panzered lady bug splits its orange shell to reveal black wings. Small spiders dodge our tires. And when I think I have found the first tender green leaf on the still barren oakbrush, it turns out to be a lime-green stinkbug.

            At the top of the hill, Sam points to a tiny low plant with small red leaves: “Some plants use this red coloring to protect themselves from the bright sunlight that bleaches out their chlorophyl. It’s called anthocyanin, the same substance that, along with tannin, may make red wine good for the heart and that causes the red coloring in leaves in the fall.”

            “Thanks for the lecture,” I tell Sam, “Glad to be out with a botanist. Let me ask the expert a question. Last night I looked up death camus in both of my field guides to wildflowers. The one lists only meadow death camus, Zigadenus venenosus, and doesn’t mention any other variants. The other book describes mountain death-camus, Zigadenus elegans, and notes the existence and characteristics of Zigadenus gramineus, Zigadenus venenosus, and Zigadenus paniculatus. What’s the deal?”

            “You’re on to something interesting here,” Sam says. “You’ve discovered the war between the lumpers and the splitters. Your second guide was written by splitters and your first by lumpers. Lumpers see splitters as scientists who proliferate species designations endlessly on the basis of insubstantial differences. Splitters see lumpers as scientists who are too lazy to pay attention to detail.

            “Dandelions, for example, are a great source of tension between splitters and lumpers. They grow from Alaska to Patagonia and lumpers call all of them Taraxacum officinale. Because dandelions are self-fertilizing, mutations tend to stick and splitters distinguish hundreds of species. Check your guides and see what you find.”

            At home I open Carl Schreier’s A Field Guide to Wildflowers of the Rocky Mountains. The common dandelion, Taraxacum officinale, is listed as a single species. Craighead/Craighead/Davis’s Rocky Mountain Wildflowers, however, lists the names of three dandelions that occur in the Rockies, and then states that “close to 1000 species of Taraxacum have been described, but conservative botanists now recognize around 50.” Schreier is a lumper, Craighead and friends splitters. It’s that simple. Once Sam points it out.

            I bought these guides expecting scientific facts. Instead, I get judgments, assessments, interpretations built on biases. “Truth,” Nietzsche wrote, “is a mobile army of metaphors.” I’m fifty years old and have known this for decades. Now I know it again.

winter light

BREAKFAST BEFORE SUNUP

sage breakfast  (douglas fir for dessert)

frosty backs on these young ones

still bedded down

Old Friends, Old Profession, Old Home, Old Religion -- New Insight

Fuhrman Hall

Vanderbilt University was my academic home for most of the 1980's. It was a wonderful place for a new Ph.D. in German, an intellectual environment that stimulated and challenged and supported.

It was (and is) also a supremely beautiful campus. Fuhrman Hall, picture to the left, was home to philosophy, Germanic and Slavic Languages, and other languages. My office, shared with colleague and friend Thom Heine, was stunning with its brick walls and high windows.

When I left there, just months after having been awarded tenure, I explained to the curious Dean of Arts and Sciences that I missed the scent of sage and that I was looking forward to the chance to teach at BYU, the university that educated my fellow Mormons.

Since then, there has been a lot of water under the bridge.

Last week I returned to Vanderbilt for the first time in over twenty years. The occasion was an international symposium on the work of Heinrich von Kleist, 200 years after his death. My paper, "Erection as Self-Assertion in Kleist's 'Die Marquise von O...'" will be a chapter in my book "On Standing" someday.

The paper went well. The conference featured about 40 Kleist scholars from Germany, Belgium, Spain, Japan, Canada, and from US universities from Berkeley to Princeton. There was, of course, tedium and pedantry and narcissism (we are German scholars, after all). And there was plenty of brilliance and good humor and insight (we are German scholars, after all).


Repeatedly I was asked why I left Vanderbilt. The only two people who really understood my answer were John Lyon, a Germanist at the University of Pittsburg, and James Rasmussen, a Comparatist out of Indiana. They're both Mormons and thus understood the BYU choice. The fact that I'm no longer a member of the LDS church, that I drank coffee by the bucketful (remember the tedium and pedantry?), that, in short, lots of water has gone under the bridge in the past 20 years, set up possible tensions but didn't seem to interfere, finally, with my conversations with John and James.

I'm still Mormon, for better and worse, even after leaving the faith.

I'm also a Germanist, for better and worse, even after having left the discipline for the most part to take the job in Integrated Studies at UVU.

Things change. Things stay the same.

The trajectory from that tight scholarly focus (which culminated with the publication of my book on Freemasonry and the German novel in 1991) to the travel writing with my friend Zarko Radakovic (the two books published in Belgrade) and to work with my friend Alex Caldiero and to my ongoing work on "Immortal For Quite Some Time" has been carefully chosen, as I explained to the PBS Ethics and Religion producer who pointed out that the moves from Princeton to Vanderbilt to BYU to UVU showed an academic career in precipitous decline.

David Lowe

Some of those choices were catalyzed by Thom Heine, a fellow Germanist out of the University of Virginia. Thom was and is a brilliant teacher of German. He's also a wonderful playwrite, full of good humor and profound insight. As he balanced his job with his creative work I too found myself broadening my fields of interest.


Returning to Nashville, the two persons I wanted to see were Thom and another friend, Evan Richards, a fine poet. Although I failed to find Evan, I did squeeze out an evening to see Thom and his wife Chris. Over good food and wine we settled effortlessly back into conversation. Unknown to us as we talked, our former colleague in Russian, David Lowe, was breathing his last breaths. For days and weeks and months on end, I sat with David in a room dedicated to 4 computers (before we all had computers of our own). David was translating what became four volumes of Dostoevsky's letters ("he's just run up another big gambling debt," David would exclaim, "and he's writing again to get some help") and I was finishing the Freemasonry book. David was also a lover of and expert on opera. And he was gay, the first openly gay person with whom I was well acquainted other than my brother John. David ate carrots by the handful, hour after hour, having heard that they strengthened the immune system.


I dedicated my Kleist paper to a third person I would have wanted to see, Hans Schulz, who died of cancer over a decade ago. As Hans died, we exchanged letters. This excerpt from one of his reveals a lot about us both:


"It’s been more than six weeks since I got your letter. I am only now coming out of the kind of hermetic self-referentiality which the news of my palpable finality engendered.. . . Your letter has a tone which expresses a lot about a flux of beliefs and the sense of loss that comes with it. Difficult for me to empathize because that is a whole field of beliefs I never entered and have always looked at as an indoor Hollywood landscape. But my own situation seems to subject a lot of things to revision too; in both cases, yours and mine, I think the results will be positive; in any case, staying in certain belief structures as if they were a nature-given exoskeleton has got to be boring in the long run."


That's it exactly. I left Vanderbilt because I had a clear sense (however subconscious it was) that staying in Nashville would be boring in the long run. The resultant years at BYU were never boring, composed of pleasure and aggravation in roughly equal parts; and the next decade at UVU hasn't been boring either -- with much less aggravation involved.


And then there was the sage.


Returning from Nashville to the mountains and valleys that shaped my childhood and that still thrill my soul, I realized that that scent and all it stood for, including the easing out into fields not exactly Germanic, was the scent of the life I wanted.