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- Breathing Light - Issue #35-on the wisdom of a falling leaf and singing the colour of trees
Breathing Light - Issue #35-on the wisdom of a falling leaf and singing the colour of trees
In this issue
My Artwork of the Week
Frontispiece
Waiata mo te Ata-poem for the morning-Autumn's memoirs
Singing the colour of trees
Herman Hesse on trees
Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)
Endpapers
My Artwork of the Week
“If you want to teach the light something, you need to know the places where the light has never reached, for the other places are already well known to the light!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan
How do you sing the last shimmers of autumn?
How do you bottle the incredible light just before winter comes to drain the golden bowl of autumn?
How do you write a hymn to the warm comfort of being in the presence of trees growing in sunlight?
For a long time, I've wanted to make autumn's likeness, to use light to express light.
I was born and raised in the whispering presence of trees. My father's career in silviculture (production forestry) led us around the country as he climbed the professional ladder of forestry. My first memories were of trees sighing and swaying in the night as they caught the messages blown by the winds that came to pin stories of the world to their leaves. The small boy learned to go to sleep listening to these stories from other places.
When we followed his career into the city, the background rumble of traffic and the noise of human existence made it hard to hear them. For decades I missed them.
My father had a good friend, Gordon Roberts, one of New Zealand's leading wildlife photographers. Gordon's speciality was deer and the introduced species that roamed the forest and mountains. Initially employed by the New Zealand Forest Service as a deer culler, Gordon changed his career and became a forest ranger.
Later in life, Gordon swapped his rifle for a camera and stalked deer with the same skill and passion he had employed as a hunter. He was the person who introduced me to photography and infected me with the photography virus. After a university summer as one of his bushman employees following him around the native forests of Canterbury, I got used to watching him abruptly stop to make a photograph.
As time passed, he and I became close friends and, whenever he was in town-he was a travelling man-we would get together and talk photography. I think he was pretty proud that the boy he had introduced to photography was becoming a photographer in his own right.
One day he called by for a cup of tea, and he looked at my early photographs of trees. He nodded approvingly.
"You know," he said, "you really should do a book on trees. I think Gene (my father) would like that. Yes, he really would."
And maybe I will.
Maybe I should.
To honour his and my father's memory.
And express my gratitude for the wonder of growing up with the wise counsel of trees.
Frontispiece
"Trust in Allah but tie your camel at night."
-Arab hadith (proverb).
Atamaarie e te whaanau:
Good morning everybody:
Analytics, damned analytics
Well, something to share.
Two hundred and ninety-five of you get Breathing Light delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning. That's 150 more than when I first started writing it. Five more, and we will be at 300. So the next marker I am aiming for is a thousand.
How do I know this?
Revue, which Twitter (now the plaything of Elon Musk) owns, supplies me with data (a.k.a. analytics) on Monday morning, showing me the response to my weekly musings.
Things I've learned:
Some of you are waiting for it and open it almost immediately. By Sunday evening, approximately 60% of you have had a look.
About 25% of you follow one or more of my Fevered Mind Links section links.
Some of you have established weekly rituals around the newsletter. For example, one of you (at least) saves it for Monday when you have your morning coffee before starting work for the day.
Others have told me that you dip in and binge as time permits.
At least one of you is collecting the quotes I supply, copying and storing them for future exploration.
All of this is rather wonderful.
And it makes this worth doing.
It's a grim world, with the Four Horsemen riding freely around. And how does somebody like me, with a passion for dancing with words and pictures, act as a lighthouse of sorts, as a way (however minor) of holding back the darkness?
My way is to try and weave the two together to produce something beautiful, uplifting, and inspiring to perhaps breathe a little hope and peace.
As Carl Jung puts it:
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being."
Thank you all for sharing the journey with me.
Waiata mo te Ata-poem for the morning-Autumn's memoirs
"I will love you forever; whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I'll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again...
I'll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one'll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you...We'll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pin trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams...And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won't just be able to take one, they'll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we'll be joined so tight..."
― Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
Autumn’s memoirs
Autumn has been writing its luminous memoirs
on thin-skin translucent vellum,
in wind-teased haste to get them done and down,
before winter comes
to crush them under its frigid jackboot
into the blue cooling ground.
It has dipped the rosegold pen of the slowing season
in glowing sunlight,
and inscribed them in russet ink and faintveined delicacy
on delicate parched parchment leaves
clinging beyond reason
to bluemossed skeletal branches,
which are withdrawing their waning support.
And,
ever the perfectionist,
it reviews and rejects and discards,
stripping its fervent attempts from the withering papyruspad of the year,
to to breathe them softly down the echoing air,
to lay them as crêpe paper litter
in withering and diminishing crinoline layers
around the brittle, broadening base of the bare-armed canopy.
Singing the colour of trees
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
― Herman Hesse, Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte
From time to time, one of my students will pose the question:
"What is the best thing I can do to improve my photography?"
My answer inevitably is:
"You should study Art History. Then, you will never see your work in the same light again. Why? Because then you will be travelling with true friends on a road without end."
Of all the art movements I have studied, possibly the two that have had the most significant influence on the way I make work are Russian Symbolism and the Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Knight) movement of German Expressionism.
Der Blaue Reiter was formed in 1911 in Munich as a loose association of painters led by Vasily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. They shared an interest in abstracted forms and prismatic colours, which, they felt, had spiritual values that could counteract the corruption and materialism of their age.
Franz Marc taught me to free myself from the necessity to represent things according to accepted norms but rather trust in my seeing and express them according to what I feel.
Kandinsky introduced me to synaesthesia, a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to experiences in the second sensory or cognitive pathway. A synaesthete might, for example, perceive letters or numbers as being inherently coloured.
At an elementary level, synaesthesia is the mixing of different sense descriptors. Phrases like: "the apple-sweet smell of autumn" blends taste and smell. In Salomé (1891), Oscar Wilde wrote:
“Thy voice was a censer that scattered strange perfumes, and when I looked on thee, I heard a strange music.”
Kandinsky was particularly interested in the colour of music. Therefore, in approaching his abstract paintings, particularly those containing musical instruments, we are asked to share his musical experience of colour.
So what does this have to do with wandering in a local park at the end of the world among trees from foreign lands and attempting to make art?
Tucked away in a corner of the park are three or four lovely cedars. At least that's what the PlantNet app tells me they are. They are a gorgeous blue-black, with branches that drape and slide softly downwards, like a most exquisitely made ballgown fabric. However, they are over 30 m in height and possibly 10 to 20 m across the base. Short of using an ultrawide lens, which is too obvious, I wasn't sure how to make their likeness.
Then a falling leaf gave me the answer.
I had wandered over to shuffle through all the discarded footnotes littering the base of a nearby maple tree. As I was rummaging through the litter memories of the year, a single leaf detached itself from the branch and skated slowly down to join the pile at the base. I watched its passage downwards through the echoing autumn air as it zigged and zagged its way, going first one way and then the other until it softly settled.
There was my answer.
I went back to the cedars and looked at the fall of the branches, the way they zigged and zagged. I wandered around, studying the rhythm pattern of the branches and the way they tumbled, on the move and yet static.
Then, I heard Henryk Górecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs playing in my head.
After that, the composition was self-evident, and the postproduction fell into place.
I have included a second copy of the header image below, with the flow marked (crudely) for you in red.
I would love to know what you think. So please drop me an email if that feels right and you have the time.
Herman Hesse on trees
“When Summer lies upon the world, and in a noon of gold, Beneath the roof of sleeping leaves the dreams of trees unfold;
When woodland halls are green and cool, and wind is in the West, Come back to me! Come back to me, and say my land is best!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers
While researching for this newsletter, I came across a beautiful extended quote by the German writer Herman Hesse. It's simply too beautiful not to share with you.
“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)
One of the two pioneering movements of German Expressionism, Der Blaue Reiter began in Munich as an abstract counterpart to Die Brücke's distorted figurative style.
“I often find the terms Narrative, Story, Plot, and Structure to be used interchangeably (on blogs, in articles, tweeted, and talked about),” writes Ingrid Sundberg, “and personally, much confusion has ensued as a result.
In one scene in the 2020 Netflix blockbuster I’m Thinking of Ending Things, the main character, Lucy, pulls out her iPhone and scrolls through images of gauzy, moonlit landscape paintings, mottled just enough to teeter on the edge of abstraction. They’re moody, enveloping, and intimate.
“Little Prince” Author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on How a Simple Human Smile Saved His Life — www.brainpickings.org
Though researchers since Darwin may have spent considerable effort on the science of smiles, at the heart of that simple human expression remains a metaphysical art — one captured nowhere more beautifully and grippingly than in a short account by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (June 29, 1900–July 31,
Georgia O’Keeffe’s introduction to the art world wasn’t through her now-iconic paintings of flowers and desert landscapes—but through another artist’s photographs of her nude body.
Welcome to the first article in our four-part series, How to Make Comics. It’s no secret that we at MoMA love comics—be sure to check out the series Drawn to MoMA, for example.
It’s no coincidence that the current Guggenheim show Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle places a contemporary sound installation nearby to highlight the confluence of the two modalities of sound and sight. Kandinsky was synesthetic.
Richard Misrach. Dakini and friend. 1972
Just look at that. Isn’t it pretty? We eat with all our senses and a colourful dinner is a true delight, especially when the nights are closing in earlier. Don’t be put off by the length of the ingredients list.
Almost Nothing, yet Everything: A Stunning Japanese Illustrated Poem Celebrating Water and the Wonder of Life — www.themarginalian.org
There is more than poetic truth in her words — there is also a scientific fact about what makes our planet a world.
Endpapers
It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.
-Charles Dickens
As you might have guessed, I've been taking every opportunity to spend time up in the park, flesh out my brief encounter with trees and reflect upon what they mean to me and how they are part of my life journey. In doing so, I have managed to gather together a small body of work on the trees in the park. I may even print these as a monograph. I suspect I have only a few days left before winter drains the beautiful colours from the trees.
Then a new type of beauty will begin to emerge, one woven from the fabric of silence and peace. In about six weeks, the wild winds of autumn will fade away, and by mid-June, the land will have settled into its winter slumber, with a soft quilt of white coating the mountains.
We are now in Haratua, the twelfth month of the Maori year, based upon the maramataka, which is lunar. Soon it will be Matariki when the Pleiades star cluster rises above the horizon. You might think that Matariki is common to all Māori.
However, you would be wrong.
In certain parts of the country, notably the West, the New Year is heralded by Puanga, which is the arrival of Rigel. In other parts of the country, the New Year is celebrated by the appearance of Takarua (Sirius).
This time is likened to, and re-enacts, the creation period of Te Kore (the void/potential) and once the land has been treated, it will then go through a period of Te Pō (the night – or a time to plant). Then as the shoots of the food sprout above the soil, the plants transition into Te Ao Mārama (the world of light).
-nā Che Wilson (Ngāti Rangi ki Whanganui)
Whether your heart leans towards the Julian/solar calendar or towards the lunar calendar favoured by many indigenous peoples, it is worth remembering that we are all one people, inextricably intertwined and connected.
May the coming week bring you the four things we are permitted to ask for:
health, strength, wisdom and peace
Ngaa mihi arohaa nunui ki a koutou
Much love to you all.
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