THE WORLD THROUGH THE LENS

Sociologists say we now only see the world through the lens...

Skippers became part of my world when I bought a camera with a slightly better zoom, under the US$200 limit I thought reasonable in our world, for a camera.

I may have seen them before, they may have landed, but I was not ever sure they existed.

I just registered their flickering shadows at the edges of my vision, imagining moths, perhaps moths taken by flame.

Now I stand here, at the edge of the woods, inside the fields, wishing mosquitoes and ticks away, so that my hand and the camera may not move.

Wishing time stand still... hoping to be their witness.

I want to capture them, as a photographer would.

No longer believing, like my mother did in the old days, that trays decorated with butterfly wings are cool.

I want to name them, define them.

Clearly establish my knowledge.

 

I know

now they are

the manifest

tiny I seek.

As if these creatures could save me,

grant me grace

in this ephemeral infinity.

". . . why name them [rock formations]? . . . Vanity, vanity, nothing but vanity: the itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things. Let them and leave them alone--they'll survive for a few more thousand years, more or less, without any glorification from us. . . . Through naming comes knowing . . . . And thus through language create a whole world, corresponding to the other world out there. Or we trust that it corresponds. Or perhaps, like a German poet, we cease to care, becoming more concerned with the naming than with the things named; the former becomes more real than the latter. And so in the end the world is lost again. No, the world remains . . . and it is we who are lost."  Edward Abbey in “Desert Solitaire”.





Sachem or Atalopedes campestris, the first one I photographed and named, with the help of the great folks at Butterfly and Moths of North America