what you see and what you don't see. this is a terribly complicated photograph. i laugh at myself for thinking this. isn't it the most uncomplicated and evident thing anywhere and yet, what you see and what you don't see, the stems never finished inside the frame, always a direction and a journey, never succinct, being in march remembering september. i am quite startled by every known and unknown element in this photograph.
i was thinking to post this quote on the Bridge at some point, but now i feel the urge to share it here:
The contact with light, the act of opening one's eyes, the lighting up of bare sensation, are apparently outside any relationship, and do not take form like answers to questions. Light illuminates and is naturally understood; it is comprehension itself. But within this natural correlation between us and the world, in a sort of doubling back, a question arises, a being surprised by this illumination. The wonder which Plato put at the origin of philosophy is an astonishment before the natural and the intelligible. It is the very intelligibility of light that is astonishing; light is doubled up with a night. The astonishment does not arise out of comparison with some order more natural than nature, but simply before intelligibility itself. Its strangeness is, we might say, due to its very reality, to the very fact there is existence.
Roxana: thank you very much for this quoatation. Levinas says what i have been thinking about photography, but more precisely and elegantly than i ever could :-)
it is this astonishment that the world is -- i am never finished with this (and neither are you, i know :-)
exactly.
ReplyDeletedeb: thank you
ReplyDeletewhat you see and what you don't see. this is a terribly complicated photograph. i laugh at myself for thinking this. isn't it the most uncomplicated and evident thing anywhere and yet, what you see and what you don't see, the stems never finished inside the frame, always a direction and a journey, never succinct, being in march remembering september. i am quite startled by every known and unknown element in this photograph.
ReplyDeletexo
erin
erin: perhaps being startled is the only honest response to the world ... doesn't any one, tiny leaf dash to bits what we thought we knew??
ReplyDeletei was thinking to post this quote on the Bridge at some point, but now i feel the urge to share it here:
ReplyDeleteThe contact with light, the act of opening one's eyes, the lighting up of bare sensation, are apparently outside any relationship, and do not take form like answers to questions. Light illuminates and is naturally understood; it is comprehension itself. But within this natural correlation between us and the world, in a sort of doubling back, a question arises, a being surprised by this illumination. The wonder which Plato put at the origin of philosophy is an astonishment before the natural and the intelligible. It is the very intelligibility of light that is astonishing; light is doubled up with a night. The astonishment does not arise out of comparison with some order more natural than nature, but simply before intelligibility itself. Its strangeness is, we might say, due to its very reality, to the very fact there is existence.
Emmanuel Levinas
Roxana: thank you very much for this quoatation. Levinas says what i have been thinking about photography, but more precisely and elegantly than i ever could :-)
ReplyDeleteit is this astonishment that the world is -- i am never finished with this (and neither are you, i know :-)