2018.04.15 Images of Mystery

IMAGES IN WORDS AND PICTURES ARE WHAT WE HAVE OF MYSTERY

Through each of these images I see the Wholeness of all living things.

ORCHIDS—with—sunlight from windows, a mural of the Holy City Jerusalem, a broken-winged angel on the left, a half-burned oil candle on the right, a dancing flame lamp unlit center front. 

RULE OF THE ORDER OF THE HOLY CROSS, Episcopal male monastics:

LOVE MUST ACT
   AS LIGHT MUST SHINE
       AND FIRE MUST BURN



THE FORGOTTEN TREE

In the famous biblical myth of the Garden of Eden with all its wisdom about the human condition, we most often focus on the one tree whose fruit God, in all wisdom, advises against eating. It is called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good AND Evil. Its fruit, not an apple btw, is forbidden because it will bring shame and a strong temptation to doubt the goodness of in God, self and neighbors as we are. This fruit will bring shame and fear. It's the lush fruit that tastes delicious and can bear bad spiritual fruit. That simple. And we always grab for it, no? It is normal so to do. I would. I have. I will again.

BUT, there is another tree in this famous Garden of Eden. It is the Tree of Life from the beginning so placed by the Creator. It is full and rich and ample, and plenty. Its presence is almost always forgotten. We choose the other tree. It seems quite human to do so. Thank goodness we have a God who does not punish but does keep on reminding us in myriad ways, that the other tree is still there with its own fruit for us to choose—anyhow.

MEDITATION in Eastertide by Sister Stan, Gardening the Soul. Soothing Seasonal Thoughts for Jaded Modern Souls

"As we move into the third millennium, we need a symbol of hope, an image that is capable of encompassing the great traditions of the past, the energy of the present and hopes for the future.
   Could a woman with child be the symbol for the third millennium? For contained within her womb is all the richness of ancestral heritage, the unique, creative moment of conception and the infinite potential of the future. "

A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth.      Revelation 12:1-2


EMPTY TOMBS

I sought for an image of the sun-woman pregnant with life and writhing in pain. All I found were images of a virginal Mary, all white, or some Russian icons, stiff of face and form. 

Tiring of the hype of glory and knowing it to be only part of the promise, I thought of laboring women, pregnant with life, who then face the unfathomable sorrow when a child is born still, leaving an empty womb still vibrating with spasms of longing—and the woman alone, bedraggled, sunless, starless. 

Is that the truest image for women? The empty womb? For all of us who hope sightlessly? Is the truest image of Easter the empty tomb? A resurrection without a body? 

Aidan Owen, a brother at Holy Cross Monastery highlighted some words, taken in part from a poem by Christine Lore Webber, in his 2018 Easter Vigil sermon in the monastery church in the night.

"And some of us God hollows out with new life. Hollows us to be a tomb in which to lay the polar bear and the maple. Hollows us to be a bell tolling in witness to the lives of children killed while they study. Hollows us to be a throat calling out for justice, wailing in lamentation, and singing songs of hope and resistance, a throat proclaiming the great and unending alleluia of God, of life flowing from the heart of death, like the waters of Eden."

Are we not all called to be hollowed out like the tomb, even as we simultaneously long to be hallowed? 

2015.08.30 Photography: The Bias of the Camera's Eye

I think of technology as neutral, existing to help us live life in simpler, more efficient ways—and beautiful, too. Well, that’s naive, but at least a camera must record what it sees as it sees it, even if the photographer slants the content in certain directions— racist, sexist, or whatever. The camera never lies, does it?



An early professional daguerreotype photographer remarked on people's reaction to their portraits: "People were afraid at first to look for any length of time at the pictures Mr. Daguerre in 1829 produced with all his 'miraculous' technology. They were embarrassed by the clarity of these figures and believed that the little, tiny faces of the people in the pictures could see out at them, so amazing did the unaccustomed detail and the unaccustomed truth to nature of the first daguerreotypes appear to everyone."

Teja Cole, writer in residence at Bard College and the photography critic for the New York Times Magazine, offered a perspective that startled me in his February 18, 2015 article, "A True Picture of Black Skin". Cole called photography poetic, even though its art is dependent on the best technology in the hands of the artist. But, there's a but............

It’s difficult to photograph black faces. This difficulty became pronounced during the time of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s—ironically, when the very presence of black people was under question.

Cole wrote: “All technology arises out of specific social circumstances. In our time, as in previous generations, cameras and the mechanical tools of photography have rarely made it easy to photograph black skin. The dynamic range of film emulsions for example, were generally calibrated for white skin and had limited sensitivity to brown, red or yellow skin tones. Light meters have similar limitations, with a tendency to underexpose dark skin. And for many years, beginning in the mid-1940s, the smaller film-developing units manufactured by Kodak came with Shirley cards, so-named after the white model who was featured on them and whose whiteness was marked on the cards as 'normal.'

"Some of these instruments improved with time. In the age of digital photography, for instance, Shirley cards are hardly used anymore. But even now, there are reminders that photographic technology is neither value-free nor ethnically neutral. (Italics mine.) In 2009, the face-recognition technology on HP webcams had difficulty recognizing black faces, suggesting, again, that the process of calibration had favored lighter skin..  ....An artist tries to elicit from unfriendly tools the best they can manage”

(HP is a brand name. Our printer is HP. A webcam is a video camera that inputs to a computer connected to the Internet, so that its images can be viewed by Internet users. No techie here, I had to look this one up.)

The camera can, in fact, lie. Prejudice can be compensated for by adjustments of light meters and the like, but bias is there right in the technology. Of course we know that technology is the product of human endeavor, but still........

Thank god, there are sensitive artists who work hard to free their art from racist images, images people have no idea are biased. Artists, of all kinds, want to give their work soul, to rise above any technological handicaps.
 
One such artist was the late Roy DeCarava, an American photographer, who grew up in Harlem, N.Y.C. DeCarava, the son of a single mother, photographed ordinary people. He died at 89.

Cole noted that the power of  DeCarava’s  pictures is in the loveliness of the dark areas. Rather than compensate and lighten, DeCarava insisted on finding a way into the inner life of his scenes. He made technical choices accordingly. Instead of trying to brighten blackness he went against expectation and darkened it further. “What is dark is neither blank nor empty. It is in fact full of wise light which, with patient seeing, can open out into glories.” Now that's soul!

Black skin has nuance unknown to whites, it seems. Toni Morrison wrote a story called “Sweetness” (2/9/15 New Yorker) in which a young mother gives birth to a baby who is blue-black. She spends time trying to teach the child how to cover up for the shame of not being brown. Morrison’s book, God Help The Child, tells more of the story from many perspectives. A beautiful book I recommend.

But when I really look around I don’t think white skin is uniformly white. There’s albino white, ruddy, freckle-speckled white, olive-toned white, and of course ivory. We tan and darken our skin, though, and blacks die laughing over this mimetic irony!

Cole concluded his piece in praise of the work of great stories, which, in photography are literal . . . visual stories of the “hard-won, worth-keeping reticence of black life itself. These pictures make a case for how indirect images guarantee our sense of the human. It is as if the world, in its careless way, had been saying, ‘You people are simply too dark,’ and these artists, intent on obliterating this absurd way of thinking, had quietly responded, ‘But you have no idea how dark we yet may be, nor what that darkness may contain.’”  

 
                                      DeCarava's, Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, D.C.

How little we know, and how much is exposed, day after day, if we but look. Revelation never ends.