Anne Carson's Red - Part One

Reading the Anne Carson Interview in Paris Review No. 171, Fall 2004 this last weekend, I was moved to wonder, as I had in the past, just why her work has received so much favorable attention, and why so many people who should know better have been praising her work, and lionizing her as the feminist's answer to John Ashbery.

Perhaps it is her grounding in classical Greek literature. Tradition-bound critics and poets invariably admire writing which bears the stamp of classical literary tropes, even if (or when) it may be so unlike its putative models that it's unrecognizable in that context as literature at all. Classical fall-back is always the salve for anxiety about the new, especially when the work is so resistant to comprehension or explanation that even its Author is at a loss to account for it. Leavened with liberal doses of straight "translation" doesn't hurt either, particularly when it's of Euripides, Aeschylus, or Sappho.

What is it about Canadians that makes them so bland--so vanilla and inert and obtuse? I've always liked Roderick Haig-Brown (though he was born in Great Britain), but I can't think of any other Canadians who do it for me. I tried to like Margaret Atwood's poetry. No luck. I don't think of Leonard Cohen as a poet, but a song-writer who strayed out of his metier. I once heard Michael Ondaatje read a couple of interesting poems. Wiki lists about 650 names, but I've only heard of about eight of them. This is going to irritate lots of people, but it's a fact that most American readers are completely unaware of the vast majority of Canadian poets. We seem separated by an invisible wall at the border. When I've traveled to Canada, I've sensed a strong undercurrent of distrust, even of contempt, for America and Americans. I would like to believe that that's a misapprehension based on bad publicity, our confused foreign policy, or what the world thinks of us based on the art we export abroad. But I think it's also a symptom of a huge inferiority complex, which is almost racial in its intensity. Canadians have a "clean" country, things have a superficial sense of order, there's a kind of cottage industry of presumptuous propriety which they do nothing to conceal. "We're superior," they seem to be saying, "and if you don't like it, that's tough." The evidence for this supposed superiority being their refusal to succumb to the chaotic tendencies and excesses of their big blustery neighbor to the south. Or perhaps it's a lingering vanity that having once been part of the British Commonwealth, they're a tad more sophisticated than us obstreperous Colonials.

Carson makes a case for herself as a maladjusted teen and young adult. She describes herself as a cold fish, sexually ambiguous--perhaps even a-sexual--who developed an obsession for the Greek language while still in middle school. Like many of her contemporary academics, she's spent much of her adult life teaching in America. And her American audience--the audience for her work--seems better suited to the kind of writing she's published in her life--than her native country-folk. She's in that sense more "American" than Canadian, though those aspects of her character which are revealed in her work, seem more deeply Canadian.

Occasionally, one encounters the work of a writer whose impulse to abstraction and discontinuity is so primordial that one is left without any kind of mooring or guidepost even to attempt to describe it. The first fact to comprehend about Carson's work is that nearly all of it is based on Greek models, or tropes. Her fascination with the Greek language has led her to a lifelong attempt to understand ancient Greek civilization--its ways of thinking, its imagery, its worldview and religious iconography. All of these she imagines for herself in an eccentric way, freely incorporating details (both real and imagined) from her life, as well as surrealistic events and imagery, in such a way as to produce hybrid prose cribs as of some larger formal structure. The inadequacy of these fragments and disorganized sequences is excused with the claim that she neither has the interest nor the skill to make them more organized than they are, and that this disorganization embodies a vision of a sort of archeological incunabula, as if we could read her as we read Sappho, with a full knowledge of her incompleteness and fragmentary status. In addition, her defensive position with respect to feminist projections of history and meaning leads her into many peculiar gendered thematic dilemmas.

Adopting classical models is a very traditional choice. Writers have been translating and "adapting" Greek dramatic works and poems for centuries. Robinson Jeffers spent a good deal of his career either re-writing Greek drama, or trying to write new kinds of poetic-dramatic works based on vaguely contemporary subject-matter. Countless writers try their hand at adapting Homer--Christopher Logue comes to mind. Pope did the whole of the Iliad, and a major part of the Odyssey. But Carson, in her own work, is quite at odds with any literal use of Greek literature. In her own work, Greek literature is like a fantasy world, which bears aresemblance to accepted historical research and surmise, but which exists primarily to furnish her with a context and a pretext for the presentation of very abstract and difficult speculative meta-fictions. Again, none of this is new territory. John Gardner, for instance, used classical literary prototypes in his fictions. But Carson's employment of it is different in that she feels no obligation to historical accuracy or to artistic truth: Her post-modern license permits her to excuse any kind of excess, as if the difficulty and confusion her work projects were self-evidently finished and perfect. This notion of disjunct artifice has become tiresomely familiar to readers of post-Modern verse--as if the casual failure to make sense were somehow a victory over power and fate. It certainly may be a victory over common sense, when critics who should know better praise work which they can't interpret, either because its referents are so obscure that the work becomes opaque, or because they simply can't figure it out. Put up a persiflage of disconnected event, obscure reference, and clever disorganization, and you have the makings of a post-Modernist blockbuster.

Ah, time's ravages!

Here are two recent Carson poems from The New Yorker, of all places.

Tag

this

Insatiable April, trees in place,

in their scraped-out place,

their standing.

Standing way.

Their red branch areas,

green shoot areas (shock),

river, that one.

I surprised a goose and she hissed.

I walk and walk with cold hands.

Back at the house it is filled with longing,

nothing to carry longing away.

I look back over my life.

I try to find analogies.

There are none.

I have longed for people before, I have loved people before.

Not like this.

It was not this.

Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

your

("unalterable")

Actually not. Feigned leap into--

river glimpsed through bare

[waiting]

[some noun] for how thought breaks up around you not here

your clothes not wet in this deep mirror--

what Holderlin calls die tageszeichen, signs scored into the soul by the god of each day

your answer scars, I still don't know--

years from now, these

notations in the address book, this frantic hand.

Alembic: The presentation of a series of notations which are the notes towards a possible poem, in its half-finished state, dull repetitions, unspecified emotional dilemmas, with incomplete gaps where words or phrases would later be supplied--these are cute tricks which do nothing either to demonstrate the wit or thought of the writer, or to move her beyond curiosity. The lacunae and brief parsings do nothing to further our appreciation of the emotion.

Ode to the Sublime by Monica Vitti

I want everything

Everything is a naked thought that strikes.

A foghorn sounding through fog makes the fog seem to

be everything.

Quail eggs eaten from the hand in fog make everything

aphrodisiac.

My husband shrugs when I say so, my husband shrugs at

everything.

The lakes where his factory has poisoned everything are as

beautiful as Bruegel.

I keep my shop, in order that I may sell everything there, empty

but I leave the light on.

Everything might spill.

Do you know that in the deepest part of the sea everything goes

transparent? asks my husband's friend

Corrado and I say Do you know how afraid I am?

Everything requires attention, I never relax my neck even when

kissing Corrado.

Kant says "everything" exists only in our mind, attended by a

motion of pleasure and

pain that throws itself back and forth in me when I lay on

Corrado's bed fighting with

everything with Corrado watching from across the room then he

came to the bed and

mounted me and this made no different except now I had to

fight everything through Corrado, which I did

"undaunted" (so Kant) on his freezing bed in its midnight glare.

What will you take? I ask Corrado who is leaving for Patagonia

and when he says 2 or 3

valises I say if I had to go away I would take with me everything

I see.

To this Corrado says nothing which is not I think the opposite of

everything.

Doesn't seem right is what my husband would say, he says this

about everything--

especially since I came out of the clinic, a clinic for people who

want everything, everything I see

everything I taste everything I touch everyday even the

ashtrays and at

the clinic I had only one question What shall I do with my eyes?

The first thing to remark is the complete lack of a formal control over materials. The progression of lines is completely lacking in rhetorical tension. The poem's structure is that of a soliloquy begun with a non-sequitur, and then sustained without rests. There is no music in the phrasing, and no suggestion of a relationship between the ostensible speaker, the poet, and the possible implications the dramatic situation proposes. Though the lines are centered, there seems no urgent purpose to its having been set this way, except perhaps to de-emphasize the lack of a formal setting.

Ostensibly, it's an adaptation of the film Red Desert [1964, which Michelangelo Atonioni wrote and directed], a classic art-house film from the heyday of the Italian New Wave. Carson's appropriation of the quasi-feminist content of the woman's mental instability, sexual vulnerability and blank animation is completely typical and opportunistic. In other words, there is nothing she brings to an interpretation of the film's bare outline that is not already in it. Adapting situations from other works is a routine technique. Traditional historical tropes pervade Western literature over the last 2000 years. The point has never been the mere evocation of the familiar emotion or situation of the model, but to capture it in something like a heightened state of dramatic intensity, or to offer new points of view about them. Carson writes her poem as if the recapitulation of the plot constituted an amazing feat, the whole business of the poem.

The story of the anxiety and disorientation of a fragile woman protagonist allows the film-maker (and Carson) the freedom to conceive of her as a victim, a personification which has reached the stage of cliché in our present cultural dialogue. It is well beyond cliché--it is a dumb idea. But writers like Carson have to get their ducks lined up. You could pick Joan of Arc, or Susan B. Anthony, or Florence Nightingale, but the important thing is the persecution of women. There have been, and there will be more, works based on the persecution of women, in literature. One looks forward to them. But the choice to adapt themes like this, without the merest effort to process the model beyond a simple report, or crib, is completely typical of Carson. One is left with the feeling of waiting for another shoe to drop. "Ode to the Sublime"?"I want everything." Well, what an astonishing idea. Do run-on sentences really qualify as an example of the elevation of style which Longinus posits as one of the sources of sublimity in language?

Carson may have arrived too late on the scene to benefit from the excesses of the Language School's approach to literary form. One might theorize that her work is an unconscious example of the decay of rhetoric arising from the corruption of spirit. But claiming territory by fiat isn't enough. Are these the daydreams of a translator who literally thinks in cribs? Nabokov constructed a "novel" out of the translation of a narrative poem and appended exegetical appurtenances [Pale Fire, 1962]. Lately we've been treated to the hybrid fiction as a cross-bred historical-academic fairy tale; there was French Lieutenant's Woman [1969], and then A.S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance [1990]--each balancing past and present linked dramatic situations played off against each other. These are each a carefully constructed fictions, in which reality and fantasy, dancing animatedly side by side, are kept separate and distinct. But Carson's post-Modern objects are not lenses placed between us and another time, clarifying our sense of our own reality, or making more vivid our knowledge of a distant situation. Hers are deliberate distortions (arising from obscure or fragmentary sources), designed to celebrate the failure of comprehension, and glorying in the ability to twist accounts into jealously selfish and fake preferred versions, the better to suit her unique set of prejudices and PC views. One possible exercise of this tendency would be to re-imagine primitive mythical prototypes, but that would throw the burden (and the responsibility) for interest and authenticity squarely on the author's shoulders, which Carson would be unlikely to want; established myths lend an air of genuine license to her animadversions, despite the fact that she pays them not the least duty of respect. For her, ancient Greek myths are a means to an end, an intention which is appropriated for the expedience of fake authority.

Scholars mourn the loss of ancient texts, and speculate about the meaning and purpose of surviving fragments. Our interest in such residual evidence does not, however, suggest that the resulting dilemma constitutes an aesthetic principle in itself. Carson's texts often rely on mysterious, fragmentary content, and broken-off assertions and incomplete situations, perhaps believing that these might be seen as metaphorical revisions, or as metaphors for a mental state of disarray. This is like trying to justify a crime by insisting on a lack of responsibility or awareness on the part of the perpetrator. We may understand that the failure of a writer to accomplish more than a fragmentary hodge-podge of statements could in itself be evidence of an inability to do better, but any writer's attempt to convince us that this failure is interesting and valuable because of its shortcomings, is simply a pathetic pleading. The notion of implying an abnormal psychological component to the voice of a poem or story is among the most tired, discredited ideas in Modernist and post-Modernist literature, since it is wholly gratuitous to the case.

[The text here breaks off in favor of an interview, which is continued in the next day's blog entry.]

The Leathern Cloak

Purple

The orchid

unfurls

itself

in a

paroxysm

of ecstatic

self-immolation

Its

excruciating

slow

dance of

becoming

a putrid

exfoliating

Decadence

Satin Sheen - Irresistable Concoction

Satin is one of the sexiest of fabrics--has been since like forever. The stuff has been around since the Middle Ages, when it was originally made out of silk. Something to do with how the threads are woven--I don't have a clue about textiles. One of its most familiar adaptations is ballet shoes. Great flexibility, style, sophistication, chic. Gotta' love'em.

Cocktail dresses comprise a whole segment of the dress-making industry. Women supposedly wear them out to formal evening occasions, though most women wouldn't be caught dead trying to wear them. Either you're a candidate or you're not. Beauty is the least forgiving of qualities. Which is not to say our idea of it doesn't change. Bustles, anyone?

In any event, a cocktail can suggest different kinds of moods, various ambiences. A black tie affair might dictate a flamin' red mini, like that one above. Few men have the opportunity to accompany someone who looks that good. But in the event, it might be well to consider the following concoction. It's a smooth runway to a cool aura. The sheen on satin rustling in the mirrored spots, undulating reflections. Drag her kicking and screaming to the changing rooms.

As usual, by proportion--

3 parts Boodles gin

1 part St. Germain liqueur

1 part limoncello

1 part cherry brandy

2 parts freshly squeezed ocktail grapefruit

--swirled round and served up in a chilled cocktail glass.

You won't be sorry.

The French Country Cocktail

This concoction doesn't have much recognizably French in it (unless you include the Violette), so it must be that what inspires me to call it French Country has something to do with the spirit of its flavor.

On an aesthetic level, the spirit of France has been a cultural inspiration throughout the world for at least four centuries. French was once the lingua franca--the chosen language of communication and diplomacy--as English has now become--and as Chinese may someday become.

In England and America, French culture has been held in such esteem partly as a result of its Mediterranean aspect--its taste in food, its liberality of indulgence--but also because it shares with the Anglo nations a tradition of revolutionary freedom and refined intellectualism. In the 19th and 20th Centuries, French art led the way, though that torch was passed to America after World War II.

Above all, the spirit of France is the spirit of light--Paris is often called the City of Light. A spectrum is a panoply of the colors of the spectrum, illuminated by the white light of day. We think of our insights and discoveries and inventions as illuminations, exposing dark areas to our view, revealing truth to the curious mind. The various flavors of this cocktail inspire a sense of lucid translucency.

Ingredients by proportion--

2 parts Tanqueray # 10 Gin

1/2 part cocktail grapefruit

1/2 part fresh lemon juice

1/2 part cinnamon liqueur

1/2 part maraschino liqueur

1/2 Créme de Violette liqueur

Shaken lightly and served up.

So, in the spirit of illumination, a toast to enlightenment!

Earthquakes & the Mirage of "Preparedness"

Scientists are as vain as other people, they just tend to hide their vanity inside empirical corroborations and pompous notions of authority. Geologists are among the proudest researchers and theorists in all of science. They can point with confidence and pride to the advances made in their field, beginning with the discoveries and confirmations which begin in the 19th Century, and continue all the way down to our own moment, the era of plate tectonics. We all like plate tectonics, because it explains much of the seismic and volcanic activity which mankind has been experiencing since . . . well, the Beginning.

For those of you who don't know it, the earth is a very hot ball of matter. The interior of our planet is very hot. The crust, the part inhabited by living organic matter, is extremely thin. And it's comparatively fluid. That may seem counter-intuitive. Rocks, after all, we think of as brittle, hard. But the truth is the surface of the earth is more like jelly than granite. And it rests not on "bedrock" but on a bed of very hot stuff which is inherently unstable. Planets are made of star-matter, they're fragments of something very much larger which exploded. These were very hot, very energetic events. The fragments of the Big Bang are still smoldering. That fire, that energy, is comparatively long-lived, in human time. In fact, when we're considering what is referred to as "geologic time" we're generally speaking in terms of tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions, or tens of millions, or hundreds of millions of years. Segments of time of that extent tend to dwarf human time: for instance, the life of a single individual, or the length of a century, or of a millennium. In human terms 1000 years seems like a very long time, many generations. Most people lose track of their ancestors within a generation or two--those cultural memories gets lost in the distractions of the immediate present.

Geologists now know that geological events cause enormous changes on the earth's surface, and sudden, violent events (like large volcanic eruptions, or larger earthquakes) quickly get people's attention. But the intensity and effect of such events tends to be exaggerated in the public imagination. As man has acquired more control over his environment, we've become habituated to the notion that we can mitigate against such occurrences. We can use our fear and apprehension to motivate ourselves to make more concerted efforts to control our environment, or, failing that, to prepare for the predictable consequences of regularly occurring geologic events. It seems sensible to make reasonable mitigations that could save society from needless harm and destruction. But having said that, there are other considerations that complicate and undercut the optimistic slant that scientists put on the value of our knowledge of geology.

For one thing, geological events are so large, so powerful, that it's unreasonable to assume that mankind will ever command the energy and leverage required to have any significant effect upon, or control over, their progress. You can't "stop" a volcano, any more than you can influence the orbit of the moon. You can't hold back an earthquake fault. These are phenomena completely beyond our control. Man stands in awe of such natural forces. They are like gods. They rule our existence, albeit fitfully and unpredictably.

Geologists of course, would like to believe that science can eventually explain everything. That's what drives scientific inquiry. We've gone to the moon. We've figured out natural selection and the DNA code. We can measure the speed of light. We know about Black Holes. We've figured out relativity, partly. We should be able to study plate tectonics, to map the earth's crust, and to deduce from our measurements the frequency and likely times of geological events like eruptions and fault slips. And there's been considerable progress in our increasing knowledge of why earthquakes happen, and what their frequency seems to be, just by collating empirical observations made over time.

It's become fashionable over the last quarter century, for the media to encourage people to "get serious" about our awareness of the impacts of large geologic events. Every few months, they'll have a fear-mongering exposé, filled with dire warnings about the terrific dangers to society of earthquakes. Geology has provided us with reliable maps of all of the earth's fault lines, the margins of the plates which make up the shifting pieces of the earth's crust. We know where the faults lie, and we've begun to make time-lines of the rates of occurrence of slippage along the ones that are the most active. But here is where the contrast between geologic event times, and human event horizons, run parallel.

In human time, whole civilizations can be born, expand into great cultures, thrive and decay, within a couple or three hundred years. Cities can be built, the land brought under cultivation, and the population explode by millions upon millions. This happened in North America after the first European colonizations along the Eastern seaboard. Thirty generations of human time. Buildings and roads and reservoirs. Harbors and canals and power grids.

Volcanic eruptions and big earthquakes are frightening things. Not only because they happen unexpectedly, but because of their evident force. They upset people, and they can be destructive. Earthquakes can cause buildings to collapse, roadways to buckle, and can cause fires, and interruptions in vital services such as water, power, sewage. In developed areas, the amount of damage they cause can be staggering, especially where construction practices, and service systems are rudimentary and fragile. And humankind has shown little regard for the advisability of building in areas known to be at risk for such events.

But the larger question still arises: In what ways do geologic events challenge our ability to work around probable occurrences? Are there practical steps that can and should be taken to minimize or mitigate the dangers and damages associated with them? If, for instance, it is reckoned that a certain earthquake fault is known to slip or slide once every 100-250 years, does it behoove society to go to any lengths to prepare for the "next big one"? The popular view these days, is that we should be getting about preparing for earthquakes.

The comparative study of different kinds of risk is called risk management. There's a whole discipline devoted to calibrating the amount of distress that certain kinds of dangers pose to people or structures. On a scale of intensity, natural disasters--such as hailstorms, tornadoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, mudslides, floods, fires, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions--all are empirically gauged on a curve of known effects. The more frequent such occurrences, the greater the likelihood that someone living in a high risk area will be affected. Degrees of severity also play a part. A small hailstorm in Nebraska may break a few automobile windshields, and penetrate a few cheap roof structures, but by and large it's more frightening, more curious, than devastating. A big hurricane, on the other hand, depending on its intensity, and where it reaches land, will always cause a lot of harm.

Nations and states and counties and towns all have to consider what the best policy should be, to protect their respective citizens from unnecessary risk. But how much preparation is practical, and how much merely speculative? Society tends to become preoccupied, at any given moment, with the death rates from disease, or from wars, or from terrorist acts, or from driving on the highway, or jumping from bridges or high buildings. The events of 9/11, for instance, were probably more destructive, in terms of human life, and in terms of structures, and in terms of ordinary peace of mind, than most earthquakes ever are--certainly in the U.S. Could 9/11 have been prevented? Could it have been mitigated by planning and emergency preparedness?

We're told over and over by "the authorities" these days, that all our building structures, our elevated freeways, our bridges, must be "retrofitted" to make them more stable, more secure against probable shaking in earthquakes. The costs involved in such "retrofits" is considerable. To retrofit a house, or an apartment building. or a city skyscraper--to make it more rigid and stable, to withstand greater degrees of eccentric movement--is very difficult.

Are such retrofits cost effective? In other words, is it in society's interest to expend large amounts of public and private money to prepare for an event that may be as far away from happening as a century or more?

As the world population continues to explode, the value of human life goes down. This may sound cold-bloodedly insane, but as a fact of life it's undeniable. Man's ability to over-run his environment has gotten completely out of hand. We hear of thousands and thousands dying of hunger and disease and civil unrest across the globe, and we hardly blink an eyelid. And as populations expand, more and more people are put "at risk" by inhabiting areas where the conditions exist for large events to claim the lives and work of millions. Global warming threatens to eliminate many of the largest port cities on the planet, as a result of rising sea-levels. And yet the nations of the earth are doing virtually nothing about this.

And yet, cities and counties and states are warned that if they don't retrofit all structures and services against the next big quake, armageddon will sweep thousands away, and wipe whole cities off the face of the map. What if all the money that we spend preparing for the next geologic event were spent instead on more immediate needs and purposes, based on the human time scale, instead of the geologic one? What is the price we're willing to pay for the fear we feel about imponderable geologic events such as earthquakes? Certainly there are sensible things we can do to "get ready" for probable dangers. Houses and buildings can be constructed with lateral bracing and lockdowns. Elevated passages can be built that will not fall down when shaken. Children can be taught to dive under desks. And you can put a jug of water, a few cans of pork and beans, and a good flashlight in the kitchen pantry. But in a practical human time sense, wasting society's resources to prepare for an event they may well not occur within our lifetime, or even that of our grandchildren, seems like a boondoggle for the contracting industry.

Let those geologists prognosticate and wave their hands in the air, presaging doom and gloom and the end of civilization as we know it. Great catastrophes which happen once or twice a century are interesting to contemplate, but common sense tells us that organizing our lives around such unlikely and infrequent events is silly. Some people aren't satisfied unless they've built a moat around themselves, and have a stock of weapons and emergency supplies handy at all times. They imagine a post-apocalyptic world where everyone or every family is on their own, living in a jungle of threat and competition. But this view is a fantasy. If society's history of response to crisis is any guide, disasters tend to bring out the best in people, and civilizations rebuild after great devastations. And what we do to each other in wars and disputes and neglect, far outweighs the harm done by nature. The pain and death and destruction we wrought on Iraq, for instance, is many times greater than any combination of natural disasters that could ever have happened there.

Framing as Meaning

I made the above image in 1988, along the Oregon Coast. It's an 8x10 contact print, taken with a "normal" focal length lens (for this format). It's a shot taken at about early to mid-afternoon, facing West toward the ocean, and this little tide-pool is formed from the run-off rivulet of fresh water flowing from higher ground across the beach.

This is in my view a typical kind of tide-pool study. The attractions of such subject matter are obvious, in that it's easy to set up, and easy to conceptualize a number of different possible versions, no one of which is the correct one, no one of which can be considered final or comprehensive. When photographing in nature, there's always this riddle, of having to rely on some principle exterior to the phenomenon, since nature has no aesthetic boundaries; you have to decide for yourself what they should be, and your choice, though unpredictable, will be derived either from your previous experience or training, or upon some more unique personal view of things.

In terms of my own aesthetic, I see this as a study in circles, impingements, gratuitous structural expression, elaborate material states. Rock, sand, water; light, movement, reflection. What does such an image mean? To a scientist, it may be an expression of natural forces. Gravity, balance, inertia, stasis. Our relation to it is typical and opportunistic. Any slight movement to the left, the right, forward or back will alter the inherent arrangement of light, shadow, and the tensions set up between the contiguous parts. The frame is initially rectangular, but it could as well be circular, oval, or atypically trapezoidal or irregular. We ordinarily regard such departures from traditional framing as being a little gimmicky; though there's nothing visually inevitable about rectangular framing. The fact that it's a cliché actually releases our attention, allowing us to see into the image without being preoccupied with something as methodical as the shape of the frame.

If we can get beyond the initial rectangular frame, and examine the composition as an exercise in framing--a sort of interior framing--we can begin to think about its arrangements as a set of choices which all contribute to its overall effect(s). When discussing such choices, one must admit the limitations. In order to have put the sun's direct reflection on the surface of the water, in a position, say, more towards the center of the composition, would have been practically impossible, since it would have involved having the camera view at a point backwards and up and slightly to the right of the view--requiring having a platform allowing me and the camera to be something like 8 feet up in the air--obviously an impossibility under the circumstances. But would I have wanted the reflection to be in the middle of the pool? Probably not.

What initially attracted me to this was the neat curving edge of sand, the fact that it had not been disturbed by footprints (or paw-prints!), and its pristine purity, the delicacy of the ruffled edges of the sand, the hard dark edge of exposed igneous rock, and its aspect in relation to the sun's angle which lit up the wet margin. Again, in a practical sense, I had to take care not to let the tripod points get too close to the foreground of the picture, since the wet sand would show this as a disturbance--clearly, I wanted no evidence of human agency to impinge on the scene. It had to be natural--that is, it had to seem to have occurred as a consequence of purely physical forces, without any human (or other organic) interference.

The notion of the purity of nature sans any human manipulation is one of the great themes of 19th and 20th century landscape photography. Often an illusion, it nevertheless endures as a guiding principle of our concept of an unspoiled world, pre-human, pre-historical, pre-civilized, and pre-conceptual. But all art is conceptual, insofar as what we make of it involves, at least initially, a given frame. This little freshwater tide-pool is a part of the larger eco-system of which it's one minute element. In a whole (holistic) sense, it can't be considered apart from its surrounding context. And yet it is precisely the delineation of the whole that most often creates the sense of an aesthetic event, of a choosing and a making that derives from the aesthetically undelineated continuity of the natural world.

Photography takes in what comes through the lens. Once an image is saved, it may be manipulated in a number of ways. But initially, the data thus received, can't be refused. We can't prevent light from behaving in the way that it will. It's an adamant power of the universe, and follows laws we can't begin to fathom in their entirety. Working within the context of such a relationship one is apt to be subservient, since most of what we think we know about the world can't be altered.

For me, one of the driving motivations for making an image is a balance between the active and passive tendencies in one's own nature. You want to celebrate and share your vision, but you also want an image to speak for itself, as if it had a separate voice. And there is no question that nature can tell us, or confirm for us, all the things we come to deduce about it. Nature can be self-defining, in that its structure and flux and tactility and unpredictability occur with or without human permission and desire. Art is about making, is making. But in landscape photography, that will to form (or make) is limited first by what there is. A painter or a sculptor or an architect or a move-maker can manipulate their respective media, irrespective of such considerations. But their freedom implies a greater risk, too.

In terms of my act of framing in this photograph, I wanted the circular extent of the pool's edge to be "in" the picture. I could have used a wider lens to allow in more of the surrounding sand and rock and rivulet(s), but I had no desire to do so. I could have moved the camera around towards the right hand of the circle framed by the exigent "center" of the pool where the rock point lies in the water, but that would have put the sun's reflection at a point just above the water's surface--I wanted that white light near the top of the composition. There's the time element, too. If I had happened upon this scene at a point an hour earlier, or an hour later, I wouldn't have had the sun's reflection available to me at this vantage point. Circumstances can dictate what choices you have. Or I might not have had my camera with me--light and angle and shadow can change, from second to second, and the window of opportunity may be open for just a few minutes, or even a few seconds. People who think photography is easy don't always realize this.

This image has a quasi-spiritual quality for me. But I'm not a religious-minded person. Systems of ulterior belief generally bore me. But I am often moved emotionally, even on what is often called a "spiritual" level, by things I see in the world. I don't think, for instance, I've ever seen a designed landscape feature, anywhere in the world, which is as moving as this little pool. Nature wins hands down in contests like these. If you set out to create a pool as beautiful as this one is, by constructing one, it's doubtful the result would be as satisfying. The sense of satisfaction in nature's accidental arrangement is more moving that my sense of a "perfected" nature.

Oriental gardening is based on the proposition that nature in itself isn't perfect, that it requires the hand of man to make it "more perfect"--more, as it were, perfectly natural than nature itself. That, too, is a riddle. Human industry is no less natural than anything that occurs anywhere in the universe. But that's a philosophical fine point. There is a difference between naturally occurring phenomenon, and human design, and that difference is part of what makes taking photographs of nature intriguing. What's out there is itself first, not a second-hand stage-set meant to be seen just in a certain way. And that makes all the difference.

As in some kinds of oriental philosophy, the meaning of the universe can be implied by certain short-hand keys. Brief poems can do the trick. But any kind of art can serve. Photographs can be like koans, touchstones to the meaning of existence, or of the universe. They are everywhere, if you look hard enough. But just wanting to do it isn't enough. You have to let it happen, too. There must be a balance between wanting (desire), and waiting (passive awareness). Wanting and waiting. Dedication, and patience. Devotion, and intuition. Inspiration, and obedience. Determination, and chance.

End of the Iraq War - Permanent Devastation

As the War in Iraq winds down, after eight and a half years of conflict and occupation, it's an opportune moment to take stock of this military adventure, to ask why we undertook it, and to estimate its cost in lives, materiel, cash, reputation, and future strategic advantage.

It is now well-established that Iraq was not a breeding-ground for Muslim terrorists. Even if it had been, it's doubtful that any direct military action would have resulted in its eradication, since Islamic terrorism knows no borders, and, as has become abundantly clear, Al Quaeda was not territorial--it was an ideological franchise, free-floating and transportable. Arguments made at the time by the Bush Administration that Iraq was linked to the 9/11 bombings were erroneous.

It is now well-established that Iraq did not possess nuclear weapons, and also that it was not secretly conducting research or attempting to construct nuclear devices or delivery systems for them. This was made abundantly clear by the failure to locate any such devices or substances, or other evidence of their existence, after the country had been military subdued and occupied. Arguments made at the time by the Bush Administration that Iraq was threatening to drop a nuclear device in America ("a mushroom cloud" as Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice put it) were proved to be erroneous.

It is now well-established that the Bush Administration had no clear idea about what a post-war Iraq would look like, or how it might go about creating a context in which a so-called Western style democratic government (friendly to the West) might take root there. Once the country had been subdued, and the Saddam government dismantled, the American military was suddenly in the position of attempting to figure out what it was supposed to be doing there, as it became clear that a protracted guerrilla war would develop in the succeeding years, which shows little signs, even now, of simply dying away.

Estimates of the true costs of the Iraq War to the United States are now $845 billions of dollars, with the total cost to the American economy of three trillion dollars, and given the future medical and support costs to wounded soldiers and their families, that figure will undoubtedly rise.

Though accounts differ, a reliable estimate of the number of Iraqi civilian deaths is put at or near 130,000, with an additional 500,000 collateral casualties. Coalition forces deaths 4800.

American money was thrown around with abandon. In one report, neat bundles of six billions in American hundred dollar bills were airlifted into Baghdad in C-130 cargo planes by the Bush Administration; all of the 12 billions of such infusions of "mad money" are now unaccounted for, amounting to what some have called "the largest theft of funds in our national history."

The nation of Iraq is now in a state of flux. Our puppet government, headed by Nouri al-Maliki, seems weak and vacillating in the face of widespread unrest and threats of ethnic, religious and regional factional conflict. Like our departure from South Vietnam, there are expectations of a general collapse of authority once the American military is no longer present to prop up our opportunistic fair-weather friends. There are those who believe the new Iraqi regime's days are strictly numbered. Privately, my own guess is that the nation will descend into general civil war within a matter of weeks, resulting in the reestablishment of a new military ruler (as Saddam had been), or a theocratic establishment, headed by an "Ayatollah" or ruling Muslim priest-class. The Iraqi populace has little or no loyalty to the ideals of America, or its interests in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, our relations with neighboring countries, including Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the Emirates, and Kuwait are all seriously compromised. Military invasions and occupations are messy affairs. Despite all the best efforts of our soldiers and aids-people, we will be remembered as invaders by the Iraqis.

From a purely selfish point of view, the price of oil has quadrupled since 2003. The interruption of Iraqi oil production caused a world wide crisis in supply, which continues to some extent right through to the present. Much of the oil which was once earmarked for the West, will now be routed East to China and India.

Saddam Hussein had been America's ally during the years of Iraq's war with Iran. It suited our purpose to entertain his dictatorial regime when Iran was our enemy. But the Bush Administration had been planning an Iraq invasion even before 9/11; in fact, it was reported that Bush and his cronies met in Texas while his first (fraudulent) election was being decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, to firm up plans to mount a campaign for the invasion of Iraq, to "finish the job" his father had left undone in the Kuwait War.

The tidal wave of lies and false justifications perpetrated upon the American Congress and the American people to build support for the invasion was not without precedent in American history. But our preemptive military incursion, on this scale, amounted to a new level of corrupt exploitation of public opinion, and an unimaginable squandering of resource and man-power.

Bush II inherited a booming economy, and in six short years, turned our nation into a sad shadow of its former greatness. The Iraq war wasn't the only cause of this, but it was the centerpiece of Bush's presidency. He made Americans ashamed to be Americans.

President Obama has been doing the usual patriotic thing, welcoming our returning soldiers, and giving speeches about America's honorable service, our departure "with honor" from the distant Middle East battlefields. I remember the same speeches we heard by the Nixon Administration during the disengagement from Vietnam. They have a familiar ring.

The Iraq War was a totally unjustified adventure, expensive beyond measure, with catastrophic consequences which will continue for decades. It was fought in vain, and all of the sacrifices and casualties suffered for it will have been for nothing. Iraq will not become a democracy, and its people will not be better off. I was against the Iraq War from the beginning, and I have seen no reason to change that opinion at any point since.