The Lake
Ponds & Rivers
Part 5 of the WATER project
WATER Photographs : The Complete Project Titles
Introduction
This fifth part of the WATER project will survey four earlier projects which explore three water forms: the Lake, the Pond and the River. Here are the title-links (in chronological order) for the online versions of the projects I'll be introducing to you, briefly, below:
1981-82 The Lake Series
1988-89 River Songs
2008 The Two Meadow Ponds
2010 The Hudson River Valley
Each project can speak for itself, however please keep in mind that conceptually and philosophically the four projects represent earlier stages of my unfolding Creative Process in photography. In particular, I want to point out that all these projects were made prior to 2011 when I experienced an epiphany in Turkey which initiated the growing collection of recent projects I have identified as The Sacred Art Photography Projects.
Gaston Bachelard
I have provided brief introductions below to the four projects, and in each I have quoted Gaston Bachelard from his book Water and Dreams - An Essay On the Imagination of Matter. I felt that since I have quoted him extensively in the four previous parts of the WATER project, invoking Bachelard's ideas in relation to the Lake, the River and Pond water-forms would provide some sense of continuity between the five WATER projects thus far completed.
Bachelard has made it his task in Water and Dreams to prove that certain substances (especially water, and water in its various forms) bring us to their "oneiric power," a kind of of "poetic substantiality" that he says "gives unity" and "depth" to true poetry. As a photographer I feel, similarly, that an image which merely describes the visible world will usually not succeed at functioning as "poetry." Imaginative and transcendent (poetic) transformation occurs within a viewer of a photograph when the image has been elevated by grace to the status of what I call a true, living Symbol. All of the Lake, River and Pond images I will be presenting here function for me as symbols.
There is a theme-and-variation aspect to the Lake Series, the River Songs series, and the Meadow-Ponds series. Each of these collections of images was built over a substantial period of time that ranged from one to two years of continuous engagement. I would return over and over again with regular frequency to Lake Michigan, the Milwaukee River, and two Ponds (which are in the Meadow just beyond our back yard) in order to see and picture them in varying seasons, light, atmospheres, points of view, etc. These differences constitute a kind poetic-documentation of the ongoing transformation which the Lake, the River and the Ponds experienced. It seems to me, as a contemplator of the work, that I too experience a series of transformations when I study the collection of images in each of the projects. Every change in the project's primary subject provides me with new insight to the truth that everything in this life--including my own self--is experiencing a continuous process of transformation.
"The world wants to be seen"
In Bachelard's "Introduction" to the Water and Dreams book he argues that "the world wants to see itself, and it wants to be seen." This statement reminds me of a famous hadith (a saying of the Prophet) that states: "I was a Hidden Treasure; I desired to be recognized; hence I created the world so that I would be known."
Bachelard makes it quite clear that he wants you and me to see the world as well, and tries his best to help us see water in all its depth and with great (poetic) clarity of understanding. He proclaims that water functions for us as a pure mirror; through our reflections on water we can see ourselves all the better. And he proclaims that water has something to tell us. The various sounds of water, for example, "give voice" to all kinds of ideas and meanings which transcend human language. And water can awaken us to our own poetic vision, for he writes: "water offers a kind of intimacy unlike any other substance in this world."
Welcome to the Lake, Ponds & Rivers, part 5 of the WATER project.
The Lake is a large and tranquil eye
With a poet's pure conviction, Bachelard writes: "The Lake is a large and tranquil eye." Thus: "water helps us see in depth."
"Is not the eye itself luminous beauty? It must be beautiful in order to behold beauty." Here again, it seems to me that Bachelard may be echoing another hadith: "God is Beautiful, and God loves Beauty."
Dreams and Pools of liquid light
"In our eyes it is water that dreams" . . .
"Are our eyes not that unexplored pool of liquid light which God put in the depths of our being?"
"The lake takes all of light and makes a world out of it."
"In nature it is once again water that sees and water that dreams . . ." All quotes are by Bachelard
Looking at the Beyond
Bachelard writes: The lake which "stops us near its bank" says to our will: "you shall go no further; you should go back to looking at distant things, at the beyond. . . ."
This last statement, about "looking beyond" . . . "at distant things" is quite haunting to me personally, for it relates directly to one of the primary ideas that fascinated me when I was working on the Lake Series. That is, many of the Lake photographs are for me "about" the horizon line, that ineffable in-between space that exists beyond the surface of the water; indeed it exists in an unknowable space between the sky and the water, and perhaps even more accurately, more poetically, it exists in that space where the two (sky and water) Imaginally merge into each other.
In other words, the horizon line is an image of Unitary Reality, that inexplicable place where "above and the below" become One. And the horizon line is the infinite space of the Imaginal world, the "place" between the inner and outer worlds where the physical becomes spiritual, and where the spiritual becomes physical. The Imaginal world is the place of origin of true living symbols.
Part Two of the Lake series, the Collage Lake Photographs, have multiple horizon lines, some of which have been manifested by the physical interface of the collage pieces themselves. (I have included only one example of the Collages here, but many can be seen in the online version of this project.)
The Pure, Solitary Vision of Reflecting Waters
Water is a "pure mirror," writes Bachelard. "In so pure a mirror the world is my vision. Little by little, I feel myself the author of all I see while alone, all I see from my point of view. . . Pure vision, solitary vision, this is the double gift of reflecting waters."
Those water photographs which function for us as symbols need our full attention and our deepest reflection.
I invite you to read my extended written commentary on a Lake photograph--"Fisherman standing in the Lake beneath the Rising Sun"--that I published in my earlier project: The Rising Sun - Prelude To An Exhibition. See especially the commentary section numbered XII, subtitled: "The Midnight Sun." The section XV, subtitled "The Space Between" is relevant as well.
1981-82 The Lake Series
1988-89 River Songs
2008 The Two Meadow Ponds
2010 The Hudson River Valley
Each project can speak for itself, however please keep in mind that conceptually and philosophically the four projects represent earlier stages of my unfolding Creative Process in photography. In particular, I want to point out that all these projects were made prior to 2011 when I experienced an epiphany in Turkey which initiated the growing collection of recent projects I have identified as The Sacred Art Photography Projects.
Gaston Bachelard
I have provided brief introductions below to the four projects, and in each I have quoted Gaston Bachelard from his book Water and Dreams - An Essay On the Imagination of Matter. I felt that since I have quoted him extensively in the four previous parts of the WATER project, invoking Bachelard's ideas in relation to the Lake, the River and Pond water-forms would provide some sense of continuity between the five WATER projects thus far completed.
Bachelard has made it his task in Water and Dreams to prove that certain substances (especially water, and water in its various forms) bring us to their "oneiric power," a kind of of "poetic substantiality" that he says "gives unity" and "depth" to true poetry. As a photographer I feel, similarly, that an image which merely describes the visible world will usually not succeed at functioning as "poetry." Imaginative and transcendent (poetic) transformation occurs within a viewer of a photograph when the image has been elevated by grace to the status of what I call a true, living Symbol. All of the Lake, River and Pond images I will be presenting here function for me as symbols.
There is a theme-and-variation aspect to the Lake Series, the River Songs series, and the Meadow-Ponds series. Each of these collections of images was built over a substantial period of time that ranged from one to two years of continuous engagement. I would return over and over again with regular frequency to Lake Michigan, the Milwaukee River, and two Ponds (which are in the Meadow just beyond our back yard) in order to see and picture them in varying seasons, light, atmospheres, points of view, etc. These differences constitute a kind poetic-documentation of the ongoing transformation which the Lake, the River and the Ponds experienced. It seems to me, as a contemplator of the work, that I too experience a series of transformations when I study the collection of images in each of the projects. Every change in the project's primary subject provides me with new insight to the truth that everything in this life--including my own self--is experiencing a continuous process of transformation.
"The world wants to be seen"
In Bachelard's "Introduction" to the Water and Dreams book he argues that "the world wants to see itself, and it wants to be seen." This statement reminds me of a famous hadith (a saying of the Prophet) that states: "I was a Hidden Treasure; I desired to be recognized; hence I created the world so that I would be known."
Bachelard makes it quite clear that he wants you and me to see the world as well, and tries his best to help us see water in all its depth and with great (poetic) clarity of understanding. He proclaims that water functions for us as a pure mirror; through our reflections on water we can see ourselves all the better. And he proclaims that water has something to tell us. The various sounds of water, for example, "give voice" to all kinds of ideas and meanings which transcend human language. And water can awaken us to our own poetic vision, for he writes: "water offers a kind of intimacy unlike any other substance in this world."
Welcome to the Lake, Ponds & Rivers, part 5 of the WATER project.
___________________________________________________
The Lake Series
1981-82
The Lake Series
1981-82
Straight Photographs
& Photo Collages
10.5 x 10.5” gelatin silver prints, dry mounted on 16x20" board
The Lake is a large and tranquil eye
With a poet's pure conviction, Bachelard writes: "The Lake is a large and tranquil eye." Thus: "water helps us see in depth."
"Is not the eye itself luminous beauty? It must be beautiful in order to behold beauty." Here again, it seems to me that Bachelard may be echoing another hadith: "God is Beautiful, and God loves Beauty."
Dreams and Pools of liquid light
"In our eyes it is water that dreams" . . .
"Are our eyes not that unexplored pool of liquid light which God put in the depths of our being?"
"The lake takes all of light and makes a world out of it."
"In nature it is once again water that sees and water that dreams . . ." All quotes are by Bachelard
Looking at the Beyond
Bachelard writes: The lake which "stops us near its bank" says to our will: "you shall go no further; you should go back to looking at distant things, at the beyond. . . ."
This last statement, about "looking beyond" . . . "at distant things" is quite haunting to me personally, for it relates directly to one of the primary ideas that fascinated me when I was working on the Lake Series. That is, many of the Lake photographs are for me "about" the horizon line, that ineffable in-between space that exists beyond the surface of the water; indeed it exists in an unknowable space between the sky and the water, and perhaps even more accurately, more poetically, it exists in that space where the two (sky and water) Imaginally merge into each other.
In other words, the horizon line is an image of Unitary Reality, that inexplicable place where "above and the below" become One. And the horizon line is the infinite space of the Imaginal world, the "place" between the inner and outer worlds where the physical becomes spiritual, and where the spiritual becomes physical. The Imaginal world is the place of origin of true living symbols.
Part Two of the Lake series, the Collage Lake Photographs, have multiple horizon lines, some of which have been manifested by the physical interface of the collage pieces themselves. (I have included only one example of the Collages here, but many can be seen in the online version of this project.)
The Pure, Solitary Vision of Reflecting Waters
Water is a "pure mirror," writes Bachelard. "In so pure a mirror the world is my vision. Little by little, I feel myself the author of all I see while alone, all I see from my point of view. . . Pure vision, solitary vision, this is the double gift of reflecting waters."
Those water photographs which function for us as symbols need our full attention and our deepest reflection.
I invite you to read my extended written commentary on a Lake photograph--"Fisherman standing in the Lake beneath the Rising Sun"--that I published in my earlier project: The Rising Sun - Prelude To An Exhibition. See especially the commentary section numbered XII, subtitled: "The Midnight Sun." The section XV, subtitled "The Space Between" is relevant as well.
1. Lake Series, Straight Photograph
2. Lake Series, Straight Photograph
3. Lake Series, Straight Photograph
4. Lake Series, Straight Photograph
5. Lake Series, Collage
See the complete online version of The Lake Series
_______________________________________________________
The Two Ponds
Photographs from "The Meadow Series"
2010 to the present . . . (and continuing)
Photographs from "The Meadow Series"
2010 to the present . . . (and continuing)
Is not a pond an enlarged puddle? . . . a miniature Lake? The two ponds in the meadow beyond our back yard in Canandaigua, NY are not large, but they acquire a sense of vastness when they reflect the sky above. One pond is south-west of our house, the other is north-west of us. The two ponds are like liquid eyes which are always looking at me. They also seem to be aware of everything that is happening to it and around it.
When we moved from Milwaukee to Canandaigua in 2008 I started photographing The Meadow and its ponds, and I have continued the project to this day (December, 2018). I enjoy watching the changes of light upon the meadow and the waters, the seasonal changes of colors, the changes of atmosphere and plant growth that occur throughout every minute of each day. The two "eyes" are almost always seem full of light. And even at night, there are sounds that--though I do not know what they are--nonetheless seem to come from within the ponds themselves. Especially in the evenings of springtime an entire "orchestra" can be heard playing what seems to me to be a profoundly mysterious, "cosmic" kind of music that I have fondly named the "music of the universe."
"Night" Bachelard writes, "seems to be a universal phenomenon that may easily be taken for an immense being asserting its power over all of nature, but without touching material substances in any way. If Night is personified, it is as a goddess whom nothing resists, who envelopes everything, who hides everything; she is the goddess of the Veil."
Bachelard also asserts that night is a substance: "Sometimes the penetration is so deep, so intimated, that for the imagination the pond in the middle of the day still retains a little of this nocturnal matter."
More recently I have been taking many photographs of the meadow and its two ponds at twilight--that time of day which exists between day and night, when everything begins to merge into each other, when in just one additional next moment - the entire world dissolves into the darkness of night. The twilight photographs may seem to be more about the sky than the ponds, but I love the way the ponds echo the vast and luminous space of the sky within its darkening waters.
My most recent addition to the Meadow-Ponds series was made while I was working on this project, in December, 2018. We had a brief put intensely cold and snowy period of weather that froze the South pond. As it was freezing several rings formed inside the pond. I had never seen that before in the ten years I have lived with and photographed the ponds. Perhaps it was a little miracle, a gift of grace offered specifically for inclusion in this project.
6. The Two Meadow Ponds (Dusk, after a storm, NorthWest pond)
7. The Two Meadow Ponds (SouthWest)
8. The Two Meadow Ponds (Snow-covered NorthWest pond)
9. The Two Meadow Ponds (SouthWest)
10. The SouthWest Pond, "Frozen Circles" December, 2018
See the complete online version of The Meadow Series
_____________________________________________
River Songs
Photographs of the Milwaukee River
1988-89
Water is a "type of destiny," . . . an "essential destiny" writes Gaston Bachelard. "One cannot bath twice in the same river because already, in his inmost recesses, the human being shares the destiny of flowing water . . . A being dedicated to water is a being in flux. He dies every minute; something of his substance is always falling away."
*
My dad died in 1959, just weeks before my tenth birthday. One of the most cherished memories I have of my dad is of our adventure of fishing on a river one early summer morning. However, the adventure began in our back yard, at night, searching for night-crawlers with a flashlight.
We had watered the lawn plentifully at dusk to bring the worms up to the earth's surface at night. I was both terrified and fascinated when I saw their long, silent mysterious forms glistening in the light of my flashlight under the dark shadows of blades of grass. If we were successful at grabbing hold of one of those poor worms, it was placed in a can full of other worms and a little bit of moist earth. They would be traveling with us to the river early the next morning, destined to be placed on a hook and thrown into the river. Our goal was to catch some carp.
I was very sleepy that next morning, but since my dad usually worked the night shift at the electric plant I was happy to have some time with him alone beside the river. I remember watching him cast his line into the water, and placing his pole on a Y shaped tree branch that was stuck in the ground. I remember him showing me how to put a worm on my hook; and I remember the smell of "dough ball"--a sweet smelling mixture of corn meal and perhaps some vanilla--which my dad had made himself in the kitchen while I was eating breakfast.
My dad caught a large carp that day, and this made him very happy. I felt bad for the carp, though, and even more so after we got home and I became witness to my dad proudly scaling the large fish, then cutting it open, gutting it, and chopping it into pieces for cooking.
We had watered the lawn plentifully at dusk to bring the worms up to the earth's surface at night. I was both terrified and fascinated when I saw their long, silent mysterious forms glistening in the light of my flashlight under the dark shadows of blades of grass. If we were successful at grabbing hold of one of those poor worms, it was placed in a can full of other worms and a little bit of moist earth. They would be traveling with us to the river early the next morning, destined to be placed on a hook and thrown into the river. Our goal was to catch some carp.
I was very sleepy that next morning, but since my dad usually worked the night shift at the electric plant I was happy to have some time with him alone beside the river. I remember watching him cast his line into the water, and placing his pole on a Y shaped tree branch that was stuck in the ground. I remember him showing me how to put a worm on my hook; and I remember the smell of "dough ball"--a sweet smelling mixture of corn meal and perhaps some vanilla--which my dad had made himself in the kitchen while I was eating breakfast.
My dad caught a large carp that day, and this made him very happy. I felt bad for the carp, though, and even more so after we got home and I became witness to my dad proudly scaling the large fish, then cutting it open, gutting it, and chopping it into pieces for cooking.
*
I often thought of that experience--of fishing with my dad--as I photographed along the Milwaukee River, usually as the sun was rising. I would go to the River frequently in the mornings with my camera hoping to find nostalgic views that functioned for me as visual metaphors for the English Pastoral Music I had been listening to.
The Milwaukee River was just a few blocks from where I lived on the East side of Milwaukee near the University. Though the River ran right through the center of the city and finally into Lake Michigan, down by the River it was like entering into a magical, idealized world, perhaps a mythical place of another time.
As I photographed the River I would be imaginatively transported into this "more perfect" world very much in the same way that the Music that inspired the project transported me when I listened to it. Indeed, there were moments when a fusion of inner music and outer image occurred for me as I walked along the River looking for places and things to photograph. In these special moments differences dissolved between what I was seeing and what I was hearing within my mind as I photographed. Many of the River images are for me a visual reflection of my experience of the music, others are about celebrating an intimate, magical place I had experienced in the world.
The Milwaukee River was just a few blocks from where I lived on the East side of Milwaukee near the University. Though the River ran right through the center of the city and finally into Lake Michigan, down by the River it was like entering into a magical, idealized world, perhaps a mythical place of another time.
As I photographed the River I would be imaginatively transported into this "more perfect" world very much in the same way that the Music that inspired the project transported me when I listened to it. Indeed, there were moments when a fusion of inner music and outer image occurred for me as I walked along the River looking for places and things to photograph. In these special moments differences dissolved between what I was seeing and what I was hearing within my mind as I photographed. Many of the River images are for me a visual reflection of my experience of the music, others are about celebrating an intimate, magical place I had experienced in the world.
*
The summer of 1988 was unusually, extremely hot. My reaction to the heat manifested in my pictures though a reddish cast I gave them in the printing process.
There is a sense of longing in the River images. Perhaps to some extent it has to do with the ever present remembrance of fishing with my dad; surly it had something to do with the music I was listening to, for English Pastoral music is full of longing for an idealized, timeless mode of existence.
Five years earlier (1983-84) I had made another series of photographs entitled Images of Eden which is certainly related to the River Series. I was longing to create a visual world of Beauty, an Imaginal world of Unitary Reality that transcended the world of my ordinary existence, the world of duality, the world of "trials and tribulations." Both the River images and the Images of Eden photographs represent a Dreamer's world, a safe refuge from the difficulties with which life is continually challenging us.
When I was photographing the Milwaukee River (in the late 1980's) it's waters had become badly polluted from years of unregulated, untreated industrial waste that had been uncaringly dumped into it. My pictorial idealization of the "Place" through which the River ran was in a sense an attempt to "imagine" a time when the River was as pure as the "place" in my imagination inspired especially by English Pastoral Music and the Hudson River Painters.
When water flows through a community like the City of Milwaukee, it takes the will of that community--along with political will--to change the polluting and the toxic situation. The process of transforming a tainted River into a Paradise requires a long term commitment from everyone associated with the River.
After I completed the River Song photographs, I received an Artist's Award from the Milwaukee Foundation based on the River project, and a short time later Milwaukee's Urban Ecology Center initiated an intense community effort to clean up the River. Today its fair to say the River clean-up project has been tremendously successful, and it has expanded in many ways including the creation of several new City parks along the River.
The Milwaukee River continues to flow on . . . and so does the process of keeping it clean. However, we have entered an era when we have a president who discounts science, Climate Change and Global Warming, and instead wants to build walls; we are experiencing an era in which we are seeing unprecedented flooding, droughts, wildfires, unprecedented storms and a growing shortage and need for fresh and drinkable water--indeed, all over the world. We know that the entire Planet is struggling, and clearly it is up to us to awaken the politicians and rally together in support of the Planet's need. Indeed, it needs our respect and our care. If we do not succeed in this most critical moment, we face a destiny created by our own careless passiveness. Too soon we will pay an unimaginable price which will become a horrible burden not only upon our planet, but our children and grandchildren as well.
As I was trying to write about this tendency of mine to escape reality and take refuge in a more perfect Imaginal world through my photography, I came upon a published talk that my Siddha Yoga Meditation Master, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda had given in the late 1980's. The talk was on the theme of creativity and the desire to create a better world. I will present, here, just one key paragraph from a much longer transcript of her talk which was entitled "The Flashing Forth of the Supreme." At the conclusion of this project I will offer an additional quote from this same talk:
Even though you think you want to create a better world than the existing world, what you don't realize is that you have already got a lot of worlds going on. You have the waking world, the dream world, and the world of deep sleep. You never try to look into these, but you still want to create one more world. Yet you do not see the force behind the existing creation of God. The force behind this creation is also its origin. This universe is nothing but a flashing forth of supreme Consciousness. Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, from a talk published in Darshan Magazine, #39, "The Flashing Forth of the Supreme"
Five years earlier (1983-84) I had made another series of photographs entitled Images of Eden which is certainly related to the River Series. I was longing to create a visual world of Beauty, an Imaginal world of Unitary Reality that transcended the world of my ordinary existence, the world of duality, the world of "trials and tribulations." Both the River images and the Images of Eden photographs represent a Dreamer's world, a safe refuge from the difficulties with which life is continually challenging us.
"In nature it is once again water that sees
and water that dreams . . ."
Bachelard
When I was photographing the Milwaukee River (in the late 1980's) it's waters had become badly polluted from years of unregulated, untreated industrial waste that had been uncaringly dumped into it. My pictorial idealization of the "Place" through which the River ran was in a sense an attempt to "imagine" a time when the River was as pure as the "place" in my imagination inspired especially by English Pastoral Music and the Hudson River Painters.
When water flows through a community like the City of Milwaukee, it takes the will of that community--along with political will--to change the polluting and the toxic situation. The process of transforming a tainted River into a Paradise requires a long term commitment from everyone associated with the River.
After I completed the River Song photographs, I received an Artist's Award from the Milwaukee Foundation based on the River project, and a short time later Milwaukee's Urban Ecology Center initiated an intense community effort to clean up the River. Today its fair to say the River clean-up project has been tremendously successful, and it has expanded in many ways including the creation of several new City parks along the River.
The Milwaukee River continues to flow on . . . and so does the process of keeping it clean. However, we have entered an era when we have a president who discounts science, Climate Change and Global Warming, and instead wants to build walls; we are experiencing an era in which we are seeing unprecedented flooding, droughts, wildfires, unprecedented storms and a growing shortage and need for fresh and drinkable water--indeed, all over the world. We know that the entire Planet is struggling, and clearly it is up to us to awaken the politicians and rally together in support of the Planet's need. Indeed, it needs our respect and our care. If we do not succeed in this most critical moment, we face a destiny created by our own careless passiveness. Too soon we will pay an unimaginable price which will become a horrible burden not only upon our planet, but our children and grandchildren as well.
*
As I was trying to write about this tendency of mine to escape reality and take refuge in a more perfect Imaginal world through my photography, I came upon a published talk that my Siddha Yoga Meditation Master, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda had given in the late 1980's. The talk was on the theme of creativity and the desire to create a better world. I will present, here, just one key paragraph from a much longer transcript of her talk which was entitled "The Flashing Forth of the Supreme." At the conclusion of this project I will offer an additional quote from this same talk:
Even though you think you want to create a better world than the existing world, what you don't realize is that you have already got a lot of worlds going on. You have the waking world, the dream world, and the world of deep sleep. You never try to look into these, but you still want to create one more world. Yet you do not see the force behind the existing creation of God. The force behind this creation is also its origin. This universe is nothing but a flashing forth of supreme Consciousness. Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, from a talk published in Darshan Magazine, #39, "The Flashing Forth of the Supreme"
12. River Songs 1988-89 "Eating the Sun"
14. River Songs 1988-89 Reflections
__________________________________________________________________
The Hudson River Valley
New York, September, 2010
I had been living in New York State for two years--after moving to Canandaigua from Milwaukee in 2008--when I finally got up the courage to travel to the Hudson River Valley and make photographs of that awesome River. I had always been in love with the work of the Hudson River School Painters, but it was a long hour drive to that Sublime and Mythic place I had always wanted to visit and photograph, and I was a little worried that "the place" no longer existed. (Perhaps it was only a dream.) And, if it did exist, I was (probably unconsciously) terrified of its largeness of scale and its complex historical reputation. In September, 2010 I traveled, alone, to the Hudson River with the intention of making photographs that would pay homage to the Great River and the work of the Hudson River School Painters. The four day journey was essentially a pilgrimage to an Imaginal land generated by a collection of key paintings and ideas that had served as an inspiration to me over the years.
If the journey was something of a fantasy, I soon was awakened to the rude fact that it was very difficult to find good places to stand and make photographs. Points of view of the River typical of those I had grown to appreciate in the paintings I had come to love so much were few and very difficult to find. Every view that at first seemed promising would then become blocked or ruined by an overgrowth of trees, some newly built homes, factory buildings and oil storage tanks.
It was with shear will power that I worked feverishly from dawn to dark to discover how and where I could photograph this overwhelmingly huge and complicated thing and place--a place I had never before visited. I had two half-days and two full days in which I could photograph, and I was determined to see and make some beautiful and perhaps sublime images that honored not only the Great River but its Great Art Tradition as well.
*
This project is of course related to the River Songs and Images of Eden projects, particularly in terms of my longing to enter a nostalgic and Imaginal world that I knew existed only in the philosophy and paintings of artists of an earlier era. On the other hand, these projects are also pervaded by something else. Though it is difficult to say what exactly the feeling is, in general I would say that it has to do with not only longing, but also with death.
Bachelard writes often about death when he writes about water, and especially when he writes about rivers. For example he wrote:
All rivers join the River of the Dead because Death is a journey and a journey is a Death. To die, he said, is truly to leave and no one leaves well, courageously, cleanly, except by following the current, the flow of the wide river.
Bachelard's reference to "the wide river" resonates for me as a metaphor not only for the Hudson River, but for my own destined life as well. My first meeting with Gurumayi Chivilasananda and Siddha Yoga in 1987 initiated a radical transformation of my life that was something akin to a "death" of my old self, and the "birth" of a new Self. (See my project Photography and Yoga.) And little did I know, in September, 2010 when I was photographing the Hudson River, that in less than a year afterword I would be traveling in Turkey where I experienced a series of mysterious epiphanies that would initiate an entirely new series of photography projects I have come to identify as The Sacred Art Photography Projects. I can see in the Sacred Art work a connection to the same longing that drew me to Gurumayi and so many of my WATER projects.
I intend to dedicate a future WATER project to the theme of death, but Bachelard also tells us that dreams continue to give "happiness and a taste for infinity." He says: "It is near water and on water that we learn to sail on clouds, to swim in the sky . . . Water invites us on an imaginary journey . . . [in which] 'eyes wandering over the luminous immensity of the waters [becomes] mingled with the luminous immensity of the sky" . . . such that we no longer know "where the water ends and the sky begins."
15. The Hudson River Valley Project
18. The Hudson River Valley Project
19. The Hudson River Valley Project
See the complete online Hudson River Valley Project
Afterword
______________________________________
_______________________________________________
The following quote by Gurumayi is taken from the
talk I had quoted from earlier, above entitled
"The Flashing Forth of the Supreme."
_______________________________________________
The following quote by Gurumayi is taken from the
talk I had quoted from earlier, above entitled
"The Flashing Forth of the Supreme."
It is destiny that universal Consciousness has already contracted itself, and here we are are sitting in this room, bound. But we've made the choice: to be in that state where all powers exist but no power is infatuated with itself. In that state of Consciousness, the power of seeing is free, and it has no limitations of any sort, no walls or barriers . . . In that state of Consciousness, everything is knowledge, everything is known, and everything is the knower. There is no difference between subject and object, seer and seen. Everything is Consciousness; everything is pulsating. This entire universe is a flash. The power of universal Consciousness is an inner creative flash.
When you know your destiny, you are not carried away by any one of these flashes. They are nothing but a play of Consciousness. You watch; you become the Witness, just as time is the eternal Witness.
Our destiny is also fuel for this universal Consciousness. Therefore, a man of knowledge won't tamper with his destiny. A man of ignorance wants to change his destiny. He wants to be somebody else. But a man of knowledge won't tamper with his destiny, because he knows it is fuel for universal Consciousness. His destiny is continually being fed to the fire of Consciousness, and when this act is completed, he becomes like Shiva, like the Lord. When his body falls away, reunion takes place, and he become one with Shiva. He becomes the Lord Himself. In the meantime his destiny is fuel for universal Consciousness.
When you remain ignorant, you get caught in the web of destiny and you experience its creations . . . But when you're not caught in the web of destiny, you're free from its creations, even though they are there. As they say in the yogic scriptures, drops of water roll off the petals of a lotus. In the same way, destiny just rolls off you. Because of destiny, you have a body. Because of destiny, you are in this world. But it's not because of destiny that you feel miserable. You have a choice. Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, from a talk published in Darshan Magazine, #39, "The Flashing Forth of the Supreme"
This project page was announced on
my blog's Welcome Page on January 4, 2019
WATER Photographs : The Complete Project Titles
To see the full online version of the four projects introduced above, click on the following links:
1981-82 The Lake Series
1988-89 River Songs
2008 The Meadow and the Two Ponds
2010 The Hudson River Valley
1988-89 River Songs
2008 The Meadow and the Two Ponds
2010 The Hudson River Valley
Other Related Projects and Links
Images of Eden
Symmetrical Meadow Photographs
Symmetrical River Songs Photographs
Symbol and the Symbolic Photograph
Other Music Inspired Photography Projects
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