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



 

 

TRANSPARENCIES, POSITIONS AND SPILLS

Transparencies, positions and color spills

 

"Why name them? Vanity, vanity, nothing but vanity: the itch for naming things is almost as bad as the itch for possessing things.”

Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire

http://ag.arizona.edu/OALS/ALN/aln35/Abbey.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Through naming comes knowing; we grasp an object, mentally, by giving it a name - hension, prehension, apprehension. 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 - those unique, particular, incorrigibly individual junipers and sandstone monoliths - and it is we who are lost. Again. Round and round, through the endless labyrinth of thought - the maze." Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

   

 

Transparências, posições e transbordares de cor

“Porque dar nome? Vaidade, vaidade, nada senão vaidade: o impeto de dar nome as coisas é tão ruim quanto o impeto de ter coisas.”

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire.

Benediction of Edward Abbey

“Benção:

Que teus caminhos sejam tortuosos, ambíguos, solitários, perigosos e te levem as paisagens mais surpreendentes. Que tuas montanhas se ergam até e além das nuvens.  Que teus rios fluam sem fim, circulando pelos vales pastorais ao som de sinos, pelos templos e castelos e as torres de poetas até a floresta primária onde os tigres gritam e os macacos berram, através de pântanos miasmáticos e misteriosos, ao deserto de rocha vermelha, aos planaltos azuis, montes e cumes e grutas de rocha infindos, e mais uma vez ao vasto abismo desconhecido e ancestral onde fachos de luz se incendeiam na face do precipício, onde os veados caminham nas praias de areia branca, onde as tempestades vão e voltam com os raios explodindo pelas frestas do alto, onde algo estranho e mais maravilhoso e lindo, maior que o teu sonho mais profundo te espera – ali na próxima virada da esquina das paredes do penhasco.”  Edward Abbey

 

 

 

 

“Benedicto:

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you -- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.”

Edward Abbey