"Illuminated Rope 2" By Eric Rennie

I was out for a walk recently when I came across a crumpled piece of rope lying in the road. It was just the sort of object that a small boy would instinctively try to grab before his mother pulled him roughly away with a lecture about not picking up things you find lying on the ground. As it happened, I had been on the lookout lately for wildflowers I could bring home to photograph close up. This was no wildflower, but the little boy in me picked it up and inspected it closely. It was a coiled length of hemp rope less than half an inch thick, no more than three feet long, frayed on both ends, with a loose knot in it. The mother in me duly noted the rope had grease stains on it, but no matter. This was found art. My eye became the lens of a camera exploring the rope’s marvelous weave as I happily anticipated shooting it close up under a cone of white light in a darkened room.

In Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf wrote, "Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art."  I know what Virginia Woolf meant when she said the whole world is a work of art. If you are paying the least bit of attention, as an artist must, you can’t help seeing it. When I was out walking the other morning along a perfectly ordinary stretch of road, flat and straight, with little in the way of obvious visual interest, I kept wishing I had my camera with me. I was just grateful I could bring back that poor bedraggled length of rope to photograph.

If you have ever read any of Virginia Woolf’s novels, such as Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse, you have no doubt been struck by the exquisite sensibility that sustains her writing. She was probably what psychologists call a highly sensitive person, someone whose senses are pitched at a much higher and deeper level than the rest of us. The poet Emily Dickinson was another likely candidate. Dickinson rarely left her bedroom for fear of sensory overload. Yet all the traits that made her unfit for a rough-and-tumble world enabled her to perceive what the rest of us often fail to notice and to capture it in her poetry.

As rarified an atmosphere as Woolf occupied as a member of the Bloomsbury Group, she did not spend her life shut away in her bedroom. Nor, despite the impression you might get from her writing, was she always transported by ecstatic thoughts and feelings, which she called her “moments of being.” There were also long stretches of “non-being,” when she slogged through the dull humdrum of everyday life like everyone else. “Every day includes much more non‐being than being,” Woolf wrote in her journal.

I have already forgotten what [husband] Leonard and I talked about at lunch; and at tea; although it was a good day the goodness was embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool. This is always so. A great part of every day is not lived consciously. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; writing orders to Mabel; washing; cooking dinner; bookbinding.

Woolf made clear there is little outwardly to distinguish the experience of being from non-being. She recalled a luminous moment that was one of her earliest memories, a night in the nursery at the house along the Cornish coast in St. Ives that her family rented in the summers. Writing more than half a century later, she could still vividly recall the blinds shaken by the wind, the light streaming through the window, the sound of the sea. But what set this singular moment apart from the nondescript cotton wool of ten thousand similar moments in her life?

Had hers been an overtly religious sensibility, Woolf might have subscribed to the poet Gerald Manly Hopkins’ statement that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Christians speak of the “sacramental imagination,” the ability to see everyday experience as a revelation of God’s grace. However, Woolf categorically rejected any belief in God, somehow embracing an ecstatic consciousness while rejecting all trappings of religion. The closest she came was to acknowledge there was a hidden pattern behind the cotton wool – not some deity, mind you, but a work of art. “Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world,” she wrote. “But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”

For “work of art,” we might say creation; however, that would suggest a creator. Likewise, a work of art normally requires an artist. Perhaps, as Woolf insists, there is no God, emphatically or otherwise. But a Hamlet without Shakespeare? A Beethoven quartet without Beethoven? One might sooner imagine a Mrs. Dalloway without Virginia Woolf.

"Earthrise" Taken by Apollo 8 Crew, Christmas Eve, 1968

Fifty years ago we got our first view of this planet from outer space as seen by the crew of Apollo 8. The poet Archibald MacLeish was moved to write, "To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold -- brothers who know now they are truly brothers." 

It's all too much for me to take

The love that's shining all around here

All the world is birthday cake

So take a piece but not too much
-- From George Harrison’s “It’s All Too Much”

The idea of a hierarchy of the senses has been floating around since Aristotle, with sight claiming pride of place, followed in order by hearing, smell, taste and touch.  It is unclear, however, how you determine which sense should top the charts, much less whether a hierarchy even exists.  If you consulted a photographer, a musician, a perfumer, a cook and a pickpocket, I suspect all would give you different answers, based on their own proclivities.  There’s no mystery why photographers would value seeing above the other senses.  Seeing is also associated with reason, which may explain why it appeals to philosophers like Aristotle.  But in truth, all the senses are subordinate to the mind and will flee into the shadows at the first sign of a thought.  We may apprehend reality through the senses, but in the end the world is whatever we think it is.

“All the world is birthday cake,” sang George Harrison in the Beatles animated film, Yellow Submarine.  The song came at the movie’s climax, amid a kind of psychedelic fireworks display meant to please all the acidheads who flocked to see the film on its debut in 1968.  Harrison later acknowledged the song tried to capture what it is like to take LSD.  As one of the acidheads who flocked to see Yellow Submarine a half century ago, I would say the experience is most succinctly captured in the song’s title and opening line, “It’s All Too Much.”

There are few literary antecedents for the psychedelic experience.  The English novelist Aldous Huxley wrote a book-length essay entitled The Doors of Perception (1954) chronicling an early experiment with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline.  We assume taking hallucinogens is like putting your brain on steroids, but Huxley arrived at the opposite conclusion.  He hypothesized that the brain normally functions as a “reducing valve” to filter out the otherwise overwhelming volume of sensory stimuli coming at us from very direction.  Brain-imaging experiments have since confirmed that hallucinogens bypass the brain’s sensory-inhibiting mechanisms, enabling us to experience reality in all its unfiltered glory.  Once freed from the mind’s straitjacket, the senses run riot, upending any hierarchy that might have existed.

I picked up a camera long after I stopped dabbling in mind-bending drugs, so I can’t say what it would be like to try to take pictures while high on acid.  I remember hearing a story long ago about a Zen master who took LSD and was asked how he found the experience.  “It gave me a headache,” he said dismissively.  Similarly, I expect LSD would do little to enhance my picture taking.  By a mysterious process I do not fully understand, I find that merely looking through the viewfinder of a camera helps my visual cortex to overcome the brain’s sensory-inhibiting mechanisms.  Perhaps it is just that I am paying close attention to what I am seeing.   

There is a reason why the brain comes equipped with sensory-inhibiting mechanisms.  In evolutionary terms, you have to keep your on eye the ball, whether it is spotting prey or spotting predators.  Clearly, you’ve got to eat – and avoid being eaten – in order to survive and propagate the species, which means you can’t be distracted by too much sensory stimulation.  Aesthetics would appear to have no role to play, except perhaps in selecting a mate.  And yet aesthetic appreciation is highly developed in our species, if not always highly compensated.  Every culture has artisans or artists whose function is to call attention to the beauty in creation.

Once you begin looking at the world through the viewfinder of a camera, you realize that beauty is not an incidental part of creation.  It’s everywhere you look.  I have exhibited photographs taken in my own home, in my yard, in the field behind my house and in my neighborhood.  One of my long-term projects is to take pictures of everything within walking distance of my house, and I realize I will never run out of subject matter.  Lately I have been photographing wildflowers found by the side of the road.  I bring them home and shoot them against a dark backdrop with no illumination other than a single high-intensity LED light.  All the world is birthday cake, as George Harrison said.  But you can’t be too greedy.  You’ve got to take it a piece at a time.