"Witches Cauldron" by Eric Rennie

“A flower blossoms for its own joy,” Oscar Wilde once wrote. This remark came in a letter in which Wilde argued that art exists for its own sake and for no other purpose. “A work of art is useless as a flower is useless.” In suggesting that flowers blossom for the sheer joy of it, Wilde might fairly be accused on falling prey to the “pathetic fallacy,” that is, ascribing human emotions to plants, animals or inanimate objects. It is, of course, humans who find joy in the blossoming of a flower — not the least photographers like me who try to capture their beauty in useless works of art meant to bring some small measure of joy to others. 

My image, "Witches Cauldron," is appearing in two juried exhibitions this month. The first opens today at the Annmarie Sculpture Garden and Arts Center, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, located on the eastern shore of Maryland. Entitled "Shine: Catching the Light," the show runs until August 9. The second show is called "Bloom" and opens June 25 at the Midwest Center for Photography in Wichita, KS.

"Pas de Deux" by Eric Rennie

The Buddha, like Socrates and Jesus of Nazareth, left behind no writings of his own, which made him susceptible to having others put words into his mouth.  A case in point is the saying attributed to the Buddha that can be found on more than a few gauzy internet memes:  "Those who are awake live in a state of constant amazement.” The only problem is that the Buddha never said it — of if he did, there is no record of it.  The saying may be found in Buddha’s Little Instruction Book by Jack Kornfield, published in 1994.   Similar words were put into the mouth of Meg Ryan’s character in the film Joe Versus the Volcano,which was released in 1990.  She tells Tom Hanks, “My father says almost the whole world is asleep….He says that only a few people are awake and they live in a state of constant total amazement.”  

Whether the words were put into the Buddha’s mouth or Meg Ryan’s, it’s the thought that counts. There is a reason why these words wind up as gauzy internet memes.  Awakening is a common metaphor for what Buddhists call enlightenment, and spiritual seekers who are trying to wake up are certain that whatever it is, it will be amazing.  Who wouldn’t want to live in a state of constant amazement?  

These days I come at the subject from a more mundane direction informed by my practice as a fine arts photographer.  Apart from some technical considerations, photography really boils down to paying attention.  Something catches your eye, and you snap the picture.  The issue is not so much what you see as how you see it. What you see may be perfectly ordinary, as such things are normally reckoned. How you see it is a matter of learning to behold the world as if for the first time.  As W.B. Yeats once put it, “The world is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”       

The late poet Mary Oliver — no stranger to internet memes herself — captured this approach in her poem, “Sometimes”:

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

What jumps out at me is the exhortation to “be astonished.”  You might think that you can’t be astonished on cue.  And yet, if you are really paying attention, the astonishment is never far behind.  You might even say that to pay attention isto be astonished. 

What is perhaps most astonishing is that the world is always like this,full of magical things,and most of the time we don’t see it.  We are lost in thought,which always seems to be directed elsewhere, toward some neverland —  somewhere that once was or ever shall be but is not what is happening right now.  Virginia Woolf wrote that the whole world is a work of art, yet there were long stretches of what she called “non-being,” when we slog through the dull humdrum of everyday life without noticing. “Every day includes much more non‐being than being,” Woolf said.  “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.” Most of us spend little time bookbinding or writing orders to the maid, but you get her point. 

There is a third part to Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life: to tell about it.  You might been shaken from the dull revery of everyday life.  Say you are Moses tending to your father-in-law’s flock on the slopes of Mt. Horeb, and you are riveted by the sight of a bush that burns but is not consumed.  You turn aside to see and on that turning turns the whole history of western religion.  You tell everyone you know about this curious sight, and then you go and tell the pharaoh to release your people from bondage in Egypt.

For most of us, of course, that turning aside to see will be much less consequential.  For a photographer, it may be nothing more momentous than a look on someone’s face, a fold in a curtain, a certain slant of light. Something catches your eye, and you snap the picture.  Then you load your pictures onto a computer, and if the image still astonishes you, you share it with the world.  That is your way of telling about it, just as this is my way of telling you.     
 

"Sky Hook" by Thomas Merton

Trappist monks follow a rule of silence when they enter the monastery, but there is nothing to stop them from taking pictures.  The Trappist monk Thomas Merton, author of the autobiographical Seven Storey Mountain and numerous works on contemplation, acquired a camera in the last decade of his life and learned to incorporate photography into his contemplative practice.  One of his photographs sticks out.  It shows a large metal hook hanging from a rope or cable in the foreground, with open countryside beyond it.  The picture is framed in such a way that it is not possible to tell what the hook is dangling from. The photo is entitled “Sky Hook,” and Merton called it “the only known photograph of God.”

Various commentators have attempted to understand what Merton meant by his comment.  Mostly they have nibbled around the edges of an interpretation.  His reputation as a contemplative is such that they assume he intended something profound.  However, Merton was attracted to photography precisely because “no explanations are necessary.”  He framed the shot so it appeared to be a big hook was hanging from the sky, labeling it “the only known photograph of God.”  He obviously knew how to tell a joke.  

Merton took up what he described as “zen photography” in the early 1960s, around the same time he began a serious inquiry into Eastern spirituality.  In a letter to John C. H. Wu, translator of the Tao Te Ching, he reported that he had grown uncomfortable with “mystical writings.”   Photography gave him a method to express himself directly, without the mediation of words.  “Instead of seeing things and facts as they are we see them as reflections and verifications of the sentences we have previously made up in our minds,” he wrote in Zen and the Birds of Appetite. “We quickly forget how to simply see things and substitute our words and our formulas for the things themselves, manipulating facts so that we see only what conveniently fits our prejudices.” 

Visio divina (Latin for “divine seeing”) is a contemplative practice far older than photography.  Originally it was used to meditate upon some visual object, such as an icon, painting or stained-glass window.  There is a formal process for contemplating an image that is designed to bypass the intellect and appeal directly to one’s inner sense of things.  The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, himself an avid photographer, summarized the method most succinctly when he said, “Don’t think, look.”  His comment was directed at his fellow philosophers rather than at contemplatives, but the same principal applies.  As he explained in his Philosophical Investigations, we must do battle against "the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”

As a photographer, I understand why a contemplative like Merton found the medium so alluring.  With a camera in my hand, the visual cortex takes precedence in my mind, and I am less prone to the bewitchment of the intellect that Wittgenstein warned against.  When seen through the viewfinder of a camera, the world becomes nothing but color, shape, texture, light and shadow.  It is a world without names, unframed by any thought.  Such thinking as I might do is purely mechanical: focus, exposure, composition and the like, much of it done almost reflexively.  I find myself on sacred ground.

St. Francis de Sales described contemplation as "a loving, simple and permanent attentiveness of the mind to divine things.”  When we hear the phrase “divine things,” we tend to think of angels and the Hallelujah Chorus.  But we are not in the realm of thinking here.  The writer John Howard Griffin, Merton’s friend and fellow photographer, remarked that Merton would often pass over “superlative” shots on his contact sheets and print seemingly ordinary ones, like the dangling hook.  In his letter to John C.H. Wu, Merton explained that “mysticism flourishes most purely right in the middle of the ordinary.  And such mysticism, in order to flourish, must be quite prompt to renounce all apparent claim to be mystical at all.”

Attentiveness to divine things is less about what you see than how you see it.  St. Paul talked about having “the eyes of our hearts enlightened.”  That sounds highfalutin, but it’s really very simple.  All you need to do is to pay attention.  Instead of thinking you’ve seen it all before, see things as if for the first time, as a newborn would.  If it helps, do as I do and pick up a camera.   I can’t promise you will find God, but you may just discover that you are seeing the world as if through God’s eyes.