Anchoritism

Ramblings

June 3, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Jame Joyce thought that ‘Thought is the thought of thought’ or so he wrote in Ulysses which he started in 1914, at the beginning of The Great War, when people forgot to think and petty jealousies among Imperial cousins killed millions.

Rabindranath Tagore, while on a US tour in 1916, wrote that ‘You who live under the delusion that you are free, are every day sacrificing your freedom and humanity to this fetish of nationalism, living in the dense poisonous atmosphere of world-wide suspicion and greed and panic.’

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Colour Lives

June 1, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Brown and green are shades rather than hues. You know this because you don’t see them in rainbows. Look, here’s a selection of some of my rainbows to remind you.

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Thursday Smiled

May 28, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

I mentioned ‘the decisive moment’ in yesterday’s post. The Decisive Moment (1952) was where Henri Cartier-Bresson formalised his idea of capturing an event that is ephemeral and spontaneous such that the image represents the essence of the event itself.

The mere memory of the concept had me thinking of capturing a decisive moment of my own. I wondered if a walk along Dun Laoghaire pier might be the place to search out some moment among the boats, birds and the folk taking their constitutionals. I thought to take 4000 steps to find documentary shots with a personal expression of the things I saw.

And Thursday smiled on me. I found myself on the pier chatting to another photographer who chose coincidentally to also bring a Sigma 150-600mm lens, just like I did. I noticed a few simple juxtapositions that almost qualify as decisive, two relying on the distance flattening of extreme magnification. The gannet enters the water. A rod flexes in the cast of a fishing line a kilometre from my camera (the red Poolbeg Lighthouse is more than five kilometres distant). Perspective misleads as two identical ships pass near the mouth of Dublin port.

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Tuesday’s Muse

May 26, 2020 by Simon Robinson 1 Comment

A quote from Laozi, the author of the Tao Te Ching:
‘If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.’

Myself and my walking buddy might have had good reason to have broken from our walk towards Rome and gone to Marseille last weekend. Day 52 of the trek would have found us in Lentilles. I’m still not sure how we’d have made the 700 km diversion from the Aube which is poorly served by trains. Nonetheless, we both had high hopes that Leinster Rugby would have made it to another European Rugby Cup Final and made good on the failure to win a fifth title in Newcastle last year.

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Ruby Sunday

May 24, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

‘Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone’
or
‘Catch your dreams before they slip away’

The lyrics of Ruby Tuesday never made sense to me but what a melodic and catchy song it is. Perhaps it’s not anthemic enough to feature in a global top 50 of the best songs of all times if only because The Rolling Stones probably have a dozen other contenders. It’s one of my favourites and another is Angie.

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Truth Changes

May 22, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

When George Bernard Shaw wrote that ‘all great truths begin as blasphemies’ (Annajanska), he wasn’t concerned with innovations. Yet there may be a parallel that enables hindsight to adopt this phrase to another purpose.

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Anchoritism

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