Keeping Watch (M.A. Reilly, April, 2012, Plymouth, England)
Z is for Zooming Past the End
I like to experiment and did so with this A to Z blogging challenge. I wanted to write about imagination and thought the constraint of the alphabet and the use of verbs would help me to think.Out of that work, the idea of being a verb emerged and I think it is a big idea and I'm glad I had time to explore it.
In other ways though, the constraint of writing about a single topic for a month, has been a drag. It has kept me from writing frequently about topics closer to my heart, and ones that emerge alongside living. So with this lesson in mind, I bid farewell to A to Z blogging and return to my regular blog.
Thanks for taking time to stop in and view and now it's back to living and writing and making art. To get myself started below is a slideshow of images I made,mostly with my iPhone while in England last week.
I live on Earth at present,
and I don't know what I am.
I know that I am not a category.
I am not a thing -- a noun.
I seem to be a verb,
an evolutionary process --
an integral function of the universe.
II. Find a new way to walk.
When my son was a toddler, I can remember we would play and replay this video any number of times and dance crazy around the house and often out the door. As we lived at that time on a main road I suspect we were quite the spectacle. It was liberating: the silliness, the dancing, the joy, the being verbs, not nouns.
“Never believe that smooth space will suffer to save us." D & G ATP.
Well this has been a week for interrogating intentions--getting beneath the surface so to speak and seeing what lurks there. At PELeCON 12, Simon Finch (@sinfin) presented a keynote and used the film below. Take a look.
So it has me wondering about how much I am willing to sell out myself--sell out what I deeply believe, sell out you and your children, or my own child--in order to secure or keep a job, or to be promoted? What's the price for economic security?
The world depicted in the video is one that maintains its power by ensuring that it has no free thinkers, just followers. It's a world I think we are coming to know--at least those of us who can still think, can still recall.
There can be no imagination inside a machine, be it a war machine or a school machine. The machine requires reproduction of an already established norm. It's at best, a track one follows--a track one must follow. To release the imagination requires agency, self will, desire. Allow yourself to be placed inside a box by being untrue to what you believe, and what you create will only be a simulacrum: a copy for which there is no original.
Kind of simple, really.
Get yourself out the door.
And walk.
Poem by Monika Hardy, Image by M.A. Reilly, 2012.
II. A Walk
Translated by Robert Bly
Rainer Maria Rilke
My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-
and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
III. Capturing the Everyday
While out walking, I make images of the people I see, meet. Ansel Adams writes:
These people live again in print as intensely as when
their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago... I am
walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and
workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to
be aware of me.
Here are a few images of people I have met along the way, almost all while out walking.
Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge,
with each day focusing on a letter. In order to bring some cohesion
to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.
Imagination can be (in)formed by viewing. In this manner we act a bit like voyeurs, peering into place; eavesdropping on other. So much to be learned, inspired by.
So what does it take to view?
A rear window?
A camera?
Voyeur (M.A. Reilly, 2009)
Hope you'll post what you view.
Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge,
with each day focusing on a letter. In order to bring some cohesion
to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.
"comes to act as an unquestioned cultural resource, to function as a dominating narrative that allows educators, policy-makers, parents and designers, without too much reflection, to make decisions and take action in the present" (Kindle Locations 240-242).
Roland Barthes (1957) tells us that myth is
"a type of speech...a system of communication...Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way it utters this message" (p. 107).
James Gee (1996) describes master myths as prevalent stories we have internalized as truths, as the way it is, as what is normal.
Such mythologies are influential in our lives. They shape what we think is possible and not; truthful or false, and normal and abnormal.
The imagination, oddly enough, may be limited by these mythologies that tells us how to behave, how to be. Last week I was in England and one of the things I wanted to do was to make images of people playing 'on the street'. I did not want to capture images of organized play (football, etc.). I spent a good portion of two days roaming about looking and I found just three accounts of public play:
three boys on skateboards
an elderly couple and their dog and a ball
a mom and two small children each with a scooter
One of the master myths we live with is that as we age and mature we become more respectable, less likely to be silly, playful or messy--especially in public. This myth makes me wonder how such a truth limits our imagination. For example, a friend tells me that she grew up in a home where making visual art was not done because it caused too much of a mess.
"I couldn't leave anything out. Everything had to be put away right after playing. Our house had to be presentable at all times in case someone dropped in."
Not only did the house have to be presentable, but I imagine the inhabitants, especially girls and women needed to be presentable, neat, pretty at all times.
Take a look at the mythologies in this older advertisement aimed at girls. What is suggested as 'normal'? How is cleanliness and beauty aligned?
Or take a look at this more recent commercial:
Why is being clean situated as critical, essential?
So today I am wondering about what myths I need to unlearn? I'm wondering which ones get in the way of creating? Imagining? Being?
Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge,
with each day focusing on a letter. In order to bring some cohesion
to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.
be a masterpiece you
have
to
have enough time to talk
when you have nothing to say.
Talking About Malcolm X, I (M.A. Reilly, 2008)
I think about Cage's words as I think about the two men who are featured in these images. Both men were kind enough to allow me to photograph them while they talked. Originally from Brooklyn both were at that time living in Florida. They each lived in Crown Heights, but neither knew the other while there. They met each morning at the ocean to talk, often about politics and the old neighborhood. One of those mornings I photographed them while they talked. On that day the topic was Malcolm X, Barack Obama, and how America might come to better understand itself by studying both men. At the time Obama had not yet secured the Democratic nomination for president.
Cage is right. Sometimes you just need enough time to talk, to see what surfaces, to come to say what you did not know you could produce. There are all kinds of ways to talk, yes?
Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge,
with each day focusing on a letter. In order to bring some cohesion
to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.
In James Joyce's Dubliners, there's that lovely line in "Eveline" when the narrator speaking of Eveline tells us: "All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart." For me the sea has a powerful allure. I cannot recall a time when I have not wanted to visit the sea, to linger there, to dwell. It draws me to it. A few years ago I visited where I was born, having no memory of the place, the land. Stamullen, about 40 kilometers north of Dublin is a stone's throw from the Irish Sea.
At the very beginning of Moby Dick Melville describes people who all year are trapped in
their desks, who can’t move in their desk, and how on Sundays they run to see the water,
they run to see the ocean. It’s a way of breaking free. And a way, again, of somehow
being liberated by a loop of the imagination, but by realizing there is another way of
being. There is another way of being in the world.
Here's Melville, at the opening of Moby Dick. Best to have someone read this to you and to listen, let your mind wander, much like rivers do to the sea:
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?- Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster- tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?
But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling And there they stand- miles of them- leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets avenues- north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?
Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries- stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies- what is the one charm wanting?- Water- there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
And here is how Melville closes the same text:
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
Seeing the sea allows me to feel the ungraspable, and understand it as ancient.
Literature offers lines of flight.
We need only grasp and ride.
Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter. In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.
Composite of images I have made. Top Row (L to R): Virginia Woolf, Henry David Thoreau, William Carlos Williams. Middle Row (L to R): Seamus Heaney, Osiop Mandelstam, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Bottom Row (L to R): Edgar Allan Poe, Zora Neale Hurston, Emily Dickinson.
R is for Read
Read voraciously.
Be hungry for literature and essays.
Such texts fuel the mind, fire the imagination.
Perhaps you might leave below a few titles of works that inspire you to see what is not present.
Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter. In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.
Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter. In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.
Yesterday on my way to Plymouth, I was in London at a bus station and met two women who were on their way to a Shaman's collective. You should know they were joining others from around the world to pray for peace--world peace. I felt better for it.
Play. It is always more fun when you do it with others.
Listen to how people come together across the world to blend their voices. To play for change.
Perhaps you will want to join in.
Imagine and Dream.
Care and Connect.
Be the Change You Want To See in the World.
Look at all we can accomplish by being together, playing together.
Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter. In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.
Even when I don't want to, I am always noticing: people, light, movement, scents, geometry, space, emotion, trees, territories, sound, shadows, surfaces, moonlight, architecture, umbrellas, breath, and more. Years of practice as an artist has made it difficult to turn this off. I distracted by what is around me until that pull, that exchange of energy happens and I fall out of time and focus intensely on the exchange.
One of the pleasures, and perhaps a responsibilities, of being a photographer and an artist is observing others, locations, settings. It is inherently being in the middle of things, most often without any destination.
This is a brief slideshow I made inspired by Nick Drake's, From the Morning. I made the images (photograph, collage, painting, remix) during the last few years. Hope you'll take a look and afterwards, do some observing as well.
Observing leads to imagining.
Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter. In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.
I've Been to Sea Before (M.A. Reilly, from The Linen Series, 2011)
Authors understand this--this need, compelling really to notice deeply. Later I will be traveling across the sea and so I guess the sea is on my mind. Here are a few examples of authors noticing the details of the edges of sea deeply and a few images I've made of the sea. I hope to make more images of the sea while in England.
Nothing fuels the imagination like noticing.
HESTER bade little Pearl run down to the margin of the water, and play with the shells and tangled sea-weed, until she should have talked awhile with yonder gatherer of herbs. So the child flew away like a bird, and, making bare her small white feet, went pattering along the moist margin of the sea. Here and there, she came to a full stop, and peeped curiously into a pool, left by the retiring tide as a mirror for Pearl to see her face in. Forth peeped at her, out of the pool, with dark, glistening curls around her head, and an elf-smile in her eyes, the image of a little maid, whom Pearl, having no other playmate, invited to take her hand and run a race with her. But the visionary little maid, on her part, beckoned likewise, as if to say,—“This is a better place! Come thou into the pool!” And Pearl, stepping in, mid-leg deep, beheld her own white feet at the bottom; while, out of a still lower depth, came the gleam of a kind of fragmentary smile, floating to and fro in the agitated water. - Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Chapter XIV
Sea Impression, I (M.A. Reilly. from The Linen Series, 2011)
The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth. - Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 1.
Sea Impression, IV (M.A. Reilly. from The Linen Series, 2011)
When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great South Sea; were it not for other things I could have greeted my dear Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my youth was answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand leagues of blue.
There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seems to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness. - Herman Melville, Chapter 111, Moby Dick
Storm and Sea (M.A. Reilly, 2010)
His throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds. This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar. An instant of wild flight had delivered him and the cry of triumph which his lips withheld cleft his brain.
– Stephaneforos!
What were they now but cerements shaken from the body of death – the fear he had walked in night and day, the incertitude that had ringed him round, the shame that had abased him within and without – cerements, the linens of the grave?
His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave-clothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.
He started up nervously from the stone-block for he could no longer quench the flame in his blood. He felt his cheeks aflame and his throat throbbing with song. There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?
He looked northward towards Howth. The sea had fallen below the line0of seawrack on the shallow side of the breakwater and already the tide was running out fast along the foreshore. Already one long oval bank of sand lay warm and dry amid the wavelets. Here and there warm isles of sand gleamed above the shallow tide and about the isles and around the long bank and amid the shallow currents of the beach were lightclad figures, wading and delving.
Inca few moments he was barefoot, his stockings folded in his pockets and his canvas shoes dangling by their knotted laces over his shoulders and, picking a pointed salt-eaten stick out of the jetsam among the rocks, he clambered down the slope of the breakwater.
There was a long rivulet in the strand and, as he waded slowly up its course, he wondered at the endless drift of seaweed. Emerald and black and russet and olive, it moved beneath the current, swaying and turning. The water of the rivulet was dark with endless drift and mirrored the high-drifting clouds. The clouds were drifting above him silently and silently the seatangle was drifting below him and the grey warm air was still and a new wild life was singing in his veins.
Where was his boyhood now? Where was the soul that had hung back from her destiny, to brood alone upon the shame of her wounds and in her house of squalor and subterfuge to queen it in faded cerements and in wreaths that withered at the touch? Or where was he?
He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the sea-harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air.
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.
She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.
-- Heavenly God! cried Stephen's soul, in an outburst of profane joy.
He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him.
Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!
He halted suddenly and heard his heart in the silence. How far had he walked? What hour was it?
There was no human figure near him nor any sound borne to him over the air. But the tide was near the turn and already the day was on the wane. He turned landward and ran towards the shore and, running up the sloping beach, reckless of the sharp shingle, found a sandy nook amid a ring of tufted sandknolls and lay down there that the peace and silence of the evening might still the riot of his blood.
He felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the calm processes of the heavenly bodies; and the earth beneath him, the earth that had borne him, had taken him to her breast.
He closed his eyes in the languor of sleep. His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth and her watchers, trembled as if they felt the strange light of some new world. His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer or a flower?
Glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than the other.
Evening had fallen when he woke and the sand and arid grasses of his bed glowed no longer. He rose slowly and, recalling the rapture of his sleep, sighed at its joy.
He climbed to the crest of the sandhill and gazed about him. Evening had fallen. A rim of the young moon cleft the pale waste of skyline, the rim of a silver hoop embedded in grey sand; and the tide was flowing in fast to the land with a low whisper of her waves, islanding a few last figures in distant pools.
- James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chapter 4.
Sea Impression, II (M.A. Reilly. from The Linen Series, 2011)
Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter. In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.
I am forever messing around.
Here are some images I played with. None of the images began the way they ended.
That's the fun in messing around.
Here are some examples I found on line.
Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter. In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.
Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter. In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.
One morning in the space of four minutes, two friends tweeted the following:
Releasing the imagination is often a matter of following a tweet and seeing where it leads. In both cases, the tweet ended in inspiration--in helping me to see what I had not considered. Jabiz, located in Jakarta and Scott, located in New Jersey each pointed via a link to a way of seeing that underscored how the imagination is fueled by approximation, risk, and uncertainty.
The juxtaposition of the two opened for me a space that helped me to consider the importance of experimentation on varying scales.
Be open to what you can't imagine by knitting together ideas that just happen to arrive alongside each other.
Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter. In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.
Juxtapose two or more dissimilar things. Doing so will open the imagination.
Consider this example: bicycle and paper.
So What will you juxtapose today?
Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter. In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.
Look at something common, something you see each day and ask: How might I transform this old thing into something new? The image above was made the evening Barack Obama was sworn in as President. I was in a diner and there was a large flat screen TV. It was set to a news channel and I snapped a picture of the screen that showed the President speaking. I built the rest of the image around that central image of the President with the text superimposed. The images of the faces are of former students. I was thinking about how President Obama's presidency might represent a hope, especially for young people.
How we join things together--imagine new possibilities--read the landscape--listen to the city noises/country sounds/suburban drawl--remix ideas, images, sounds, and words: all of these actions trigger our imaginations.
Below is a 1-minute video in which point of view alters how we see the ordinary. Enjoy.
Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter. In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.
Sometimes clearing away in order to experience what has been in front of you or alongside you, but nonetheless remained hidden, requires a bit of hacking. A bit of clearing. Oddly, clearing can also be achieved by being in a place that is full. It is inside a fullness that clarity is achieved.
There is a story Jonah Lehrer tells in Imagine about David Byrne and it reminded me of John Cage's understanding about traffic, music, and silence and how being full can lead to insight, inspiration. I think it has something to do with triggering the right hemisphere. Anyway, here's Lehrer writing about David Byrne:
While Byrne celebrates the pleasures of biking—“ The wind in your face, the exercise, the relaxation”— he bikes mostly for another reason: it lets him listen to the city. He describes cycling as a form of urban eavesdropping, a way to overhear the hum of the streets. “When you’re stuck in a car, it’s like you’re in a bubble,” Byrne says. “You can’t hear anything that’s happening outside. But when you’re on a bike, you can tap into the atmosphere. You can feel people doing their thing. It’s a kind of connection.” When I met Byrne outside his office loft in SoHo, on a cobblestone street filled with fancy clothing boutiques, he was carrying a muffin and a helmet; his shock of white hair was perfectly vertical. He led me inside, up three flights of stairs, and down a grim, industrial hallway. (The building used to be a sweatshop.) It was a warm day, and the windows of his studio were wide open— the sound of the street seeped in. “I like it a little noisy,” Byrne says. “It reminds me where I am.”
Lehrer, Jonah (2012-03-19). Imagine: How Creativity Works (Kindle Locations 2431-2434). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter. In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.
Wood and Brown (2005) write: "...lines of flight are discontinuities, disruptions, splits or fractures that intercede in and break through the tedium of lives and the uniformity of things, changing the nature and significance of familiar histories and given situations as they interact along the way (Deleuze 1993)" (p. 13).
Lines of flight offer us ways to become otherwise, to recast the familiar.
Lately I have been making images with my iPhone. This is relatively new to me. For the most part, I have made images using a Nikon with an 18 to 200 mm lens. The iPhone requires me to see differently. It is more intimate, requiring me to be closer in proximity with the subject.
Juxtaposing the way I see with each of these allows lines of flight to occur: the space that is revealed between each signals a space where something new might be created.
Work cited:
Working paper
Wood, M. and Brown, S. (2009) Lines of Flight: Everyday Resistance along England’s Backbone. Working Paper 46. University of York, The York Management School. http://www.york.ac.uk/management/research/workingPapers.htm
Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter. In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.
