Wednesday 24 June 2015

the encounter






Sundog Rising!
Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog




Light, Ecstasy and the Encounter


Photograph by Renee Beaubien


The light was very strange in Winnipeg yesterday.

For reasons I haven’t determined yet, although forest fires are the likeliest culprits, the city was covered by a haze of smoke all day. This gave a very curious reddish tinge to the sunlight trying to slip through. This far into June, there’s a lot of sunlight in Winnipeg any given day. The sun’s rising around 5 a.m. and not going down until after 10 p.m.

As I walked to the grocery store and generally just took in the light streaming through the windows of the house, I kept thinking I gotta get a picture of this!

Around 3 in the afternoon the light came in the kitchen window and shone on the hardwood floor in a square I found too utterly fascinating colour-wise not to try to record. Forgetting to take the flash off, I destroyed the first two pictures but finally managed to get the best I could manage with my particular camera, an ancient-by-today’s-terms point and shoot. Didn’t really do the moment justice. No ecstasy there. Didn’t get the image sharp enough to match my already fading memory of it.


Photograph by John Baillie


Still it was an exciting encounter. Thinking I could get a photo of that strange light made me regard the beautiful effects it had on my environment much more consciously than I might have just walking by them with my mind occupied with the usual wasteland. So to me, among all art forms, the idea of the encounter is what photography is most clearly about.


Photograph by Renee Beaubien


As I mentioned last week, I recently read Rollo May’s The Courage to Create, which is where I’m primarily picking up on these concepts of ecstasy and encounter as facets of the aesthetic and creative experience.

May talks about both concepts extensively in his book. Two of the more succinct statements he makes regarding them are:

[A] heightened consciousness, which we [identify] as characteristic of the encounter, the state in which the dichotomy between subjective experience and objective reality is overcome and symbols which reveal new meaning are born, is historically termed ecstasy. … Ecstasy is a temporary transcending of the subject-object dichotomy. (p. 105)

The Encounter — a quality of commitment, which may be present in little experiences — such as a brief glance out the window at a tree — that do not necessarily involve any great quantity of emotion. But these temporally brief experiences may have a considerable significance for the sensitive person, here viewed as the person with a capacity for passion. (p. 100)


Photograph by Renee Beaubien


May’s argument is that creativity is a necessary aspect of our psychological make-up enabling us to interact proactively with our world, through a series of encounters that produce an ecstasy in our perception concerning that which surrounds us. Which mostly sounds like writing poetry to me. But as I’ve mentioned before, I think poetry and photography have a lot in common. And putting things in terms of photography, I think May’s conception of the encounter would resonate more strongly than poetry even with people who may not consider themselves terribly creative.

Why do we take pictures? My wife recently mentioned to me that she’d read that a high percentage of people consider their photographs to be their most prized possessions. These are people who are hardly all out there trying to capture the most aesthetically satisfying blends of light and form in a digitally accurate format.


Photograph by Renee Beaubien


No, these are the people who believe they’re capturing tangible evidence of their own memories in an image that will last eternally — or at least until the hard drive crashes without a backup. EVERYONE! Always remember! Back up your photographs externally today! Or you may live to regret it.

I like May’s idea of the encounter. Especially as applied to photography. People who take endless snaps of their relatives at family events or record each exciting moment of a foreign holiday aren’t necessarily thinking they’re being terribly creative. But those moments are too important not to try to save. Human memory is very fickle — generally useless beyond a few moments to any degree of accuracy. Two people can argue about what they recall about any given event endlessly, but a photograph tells the facts. There is the real memory, made concrete.


Selfie by John Baillie


That’s not necessarily true of course — photos can be faked by the devilishly creative. But you get my point.

The fact is that the idea of the encounter rings true for any photograph taken for whatever reason. All the family is together on this day, looking this much older — we’re all encountering each other at this moment, so snap! That’s how we all were on that occasion. There’s a beautiful sunset happening over the lake tonight on this long-awaited holiday. I don’t want to forget this encounter, so — snap!


Photograph by Renee Beaubien


With the facility of the digital camera and its capacity for endless images, more encounters are being recorded each day than ever before. I won’t even mention nude selfies on the top of Malaysian mountains causing avalanches. Some encounters can be a lot more dangerous than others.

However, if this practice was as random as I’m making it sound here, merely having a endless series of digitally stored photographic encounters wouldn’t be important enough to make their My Pictures folders such a high percentage of people’s most prized possessions. The fact is, most people get something out of looking at the photos — and remembering — well beyond the mere fact of having them. And that’s where the touch of ecstasy steps in.


Photograph by Renee Beaubien


Even for the self proclaimed non-imaginative, having these photos to look at, no matter how many times your mother cut the top of your heads off in most family shots and managed to completely eliminate your ex-brother-in-law and what kind of a loss is that anyway? in that one particularly hilarious group picture, still produces a good feeling. Maybe not the full temporary transcendence of the subject-object dichotomy Rollo May talks about, but we’re getting into the right territory.

And for those who actually use photography as an intentional means of creative expression!


Photo montage by Renee Beaubien


Well, the sky’s the limit. So go out, snap snap, encounter encounter, discover and rejoice in your world! A little bit of necessary creativity never hurt anyone.


For more photography by Renee Beaubien,
go to Beyond the Prism on Flickr, at:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/128997372@N08/



*****

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

Everyone’s got complaints during "Judgement in Space" for Episode Fourteen, posting Monday, June 22nd. While The Electric Detective explores the geography at Barometer’s Rising on Friday, June 26th. Reality Fiction Three: The Interrupted Edition continues at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

Three Episodes to go! Two Ishes and three Electric Detectives! We’ll tie it all up at the end of July.

Episodes to Date:

Episode One: Dante-Ish — Mak’s Inferno
Episode Two: Chaucer-Ish — The Hermit’s Tale
Episode Three: Malory-Ish — Le Morte de Mak
Episode Four: Doyle-Ish — Mak the Kipper
Episode Five: Carroll-Ish — Madelyn in Wonderland
Episode Six: Stoker-Ish — The Down For The Count Shimmy
Episode Seven: Tolstoy-Ish — Anna Makerena
Episode Eight: Lem-Ish — So there is …
Episode Nine: Hoffman-Ish — Dr. Hoffman’s Happy Gene Machine
Episode Ten: Shakespeare-Ish — Hamlet the Barbarian
Episode Eleven: Poe-Ish — The Usher Motel
Episode Twelve: Kafka-Ish — Metamorphos-Ish
Episode Thirteen: Finney-Ish — The Invasion of the Hotel Detectives
Episode Fourteen: Miller-Ish — Tempering the Cauldron

All with illustrations by the author. The complete roster of 34 Contestants have now appeared, so we move on to the supporting cast, the Judges, and the Guest Judges.



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