Illumination
Abbot Sugar's ambition was nothing less than to build the kingdom of God on earth, and in some measure he succeeded. Working in stone and glass with the best craftsmen of his day, Sugar undertook the restoration of the Abbey of Saint-Denis outside Paris, which became the prototype of the great gothic cathedrals of the 12th and 13th centuries. Through the use of heavy stone buttresses on the building's exterior, the interior walls could be raised on slender columns to unprecedented heights. To enter such a space was to feel simultaneously dwarfed and enlarged by a sense of God's grandeur. But it was not scale alone that Sugar was striving to achieve. Because the weight of the structure was borne by buttresses rather than by exterior walls, he was able to install large stained-glass windows between the support columns to illuminate the sacred space within. The abbot was influenced by the writings of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, a fifth-century monk and neo-Platonist who believed that God manifested himself through light. For Sugar, the stained-glass windows in his church "kindle in us the desire to ascend from a world of mere shadows and images to the contemplation of the Divine Light itself." Mystics have long favored light as a metaphor for God, and many have described experiences in which the world suddenly appears as translucent as Abbott Sugar's stained-glass windows. Perhaps the archetypal experience of this kind was the gospel account of the transfiguration, in which Jesus and three of his disciples ascended a tall mountain where "he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as light." The Greek word for "transfigured" normally refers to alterations in form as well as in appearance, which suggests that the change was more than skin deep. Mystics are drawn to light as a metaphor because it is both tangible and immaterial. The distinguishing feature of a stained-glass window is not glass and lead, after all, but the light that shines through it. And yet without these materials, the light would be invisible. As it is, the illuminated world that mystics describe remains glass and lead to those who see only by the light of the sun. Or they assume there must be another world more brightly lit than this one. Mystical experiences tend to be fleeting and solitary, which is why they transform individuals more readily than history. It is not really the world that is illuminated by God's light but the sacred space within oneself.
Homegrown 2
The "Homegrown" juried competition at the Midwest Center for Photography in Wichita, KS has been extended through August and moved to its regular gallery space. The exhibit was originally online only due to the cornoavirus pandemic. With the move, two of my entries were added to the original selections: "Amber Waves," above left, and "To Wither into the Truth," above right. My original entry was highlighted in my previous blog post. Homegrown
For several years now I have been photographing flowers closeup under an intense beam of white light. Occasionally, I have also shot fruits and vegetables. This one is called "Illuminated Corn," which has been selected for a juried competition called "Homegrown" at the Midwest Center for Photography in Wichita, KS. The exhibit runs from May 6, 2020 through May 31, 2020. Technically, this specimen is store-bought rather than homegrown. Call it artistic license. Small Miracles
"Conflagration" by Eric Rennie In a sermon preached at St. Jude on the Hill Church in London in 1942, the Christian fabulist C.S. Lewis made a point about miracles that is usually lost sight of by believers and skeptics alike. He said, "Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.” Did Jesus actually walk on water? Did Moses really part the Red Sea? Is not the real miracle water itself, the stuff that covers more the 70% of the earth’s surface and makes up some 60% of the human body, without which life itself would be impossible? We take it for granted, and yet we have no explanation for its existence, any more than we can explain any other phenomena in nature. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger put it: “Why is there anything rather than nothing at all?” Miracles are usually understood as phenomena that appear to violate the laws of nature or otherwise defy rational explanation. There are, of course, plenty of phenomena for which there are as yet no explanations. Nevertheless, science proceeds on the assumption that all material phenomena are governed by natural law and will eventually be understood in those terms. Accordingly, as far as the scientific community is concerned, there are no stories written in letters too large — or too small — to see. There is only objective reality. The problem — or “the hard problem,” as philosopher David Chalmers calls it — is that we don’t see the world objectively, as if from the outside looking in. We see the world subjectively, from the inside looking out. We think of ourselves as being small creatures scurrying about with other small creatures in an immensely large space we call the universe. That’s how it might theoretically look from the outside, but from the inside we discover that the universe and everything in it are contained within an immensely large space called the mind. As the poet Emily Dickinson noted long ago, “The brain is wider than the sky.” We may think there is an explanation for everything in the heavens and the earth, but the fact remains that they come with a frame around them, and we have no explanation for whatever it is that lies outside the frame of human consciousness. Descartes never figured out how the mind fit into the grand scheme of things and concluded it occupied a separate realm altogether from the material world. Many cognitive scientists believe consciousness is a byproduct of physical processes that are as yet unknown. Others, like philosopher and neuroscientist Daniel Dennett, insist that it is an illusion. If so, it would call into question our most basic perceptions of the world, including those we now categorize as scientific, since all are filtered through the framework of consciousness, illusory or not. As a fine arts photographer, I cannot speak to the scientific underpinnings of consciousness. But I know a thing or two about putting frames around things, since that is what photographers do. A photographer points his camera at something that is plainly visible to everyone and hopes by putting a frame around it to make people see. He hopes to still the mind’s ceaseless wandering by directing the viewer’s attention to a particular subject seen in a particular light at a particular time and place. His business is retelling in small letters the same story written in large letters across the world. And if he succeeds, he will have extracted from the large miracle of our existence some small miracle that cannot then be ignored. Walkabout
My photograph, "Nooks Hill Road at First Light," is one of 40 images selected for a juried competition entitled "Walkabout" at the Midwest Center for Photography in Wichita, KS. The exhibition runs from May 1-31, 2020. The show's theme dovetails with a long-term project of mine to photograph a variety of subjects within walking distance of my house in a small river town in Connecticut. This picture was previously in a show at the Black Box Gallery in Portland, OR in 2019. You can click on this link to see the other images in this series that I submitted for the Wichita exhibition. |
