Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
There’s a small collection I like to keep beside the bed, things to dip into when the news of the world depresses me. One of the items is My Life as a Foreign Country: A Memoir (2014); a depressing yet brave collection. These are stories about a soldier from a family of soldiering trying to hold onto his humanity. Brian Turner has written a lot about his PTSD without really addressing it directly. I’m very pleased that we have his signature on the copy beside me.
This night four years ago found us in a very special place, a retreat more accustomed to housing guests of the nation than folk like us. We took full advantage and went for a crepuscular walk once we were locked into the estate. We had the freedom of an entire domain until dawn.
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.’
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.
I decided to conduct a thought experiment today. I had looked over the wall of books that defends my desk and decided to chose one title to seed some thoughts.
So now I can tell you with a fair degree of certainty what I was doing on the 7th of November 2010 at the time of 19:03:53. I was buying a book in Dublin airport. Indeed, yes, a sales receipt fell out of the book I chose. I have the book in hand though no memory of purchasing it.
13 Things That Don’t Make Sense is an interesting insight into some of the modern mysteries and challenges in science. A thought provoking study by Michael Brooks from 2009. Think placebo effect, free will or the missing universe. And if you want to know more, I recommend a read.
[Read more…] about Saturday ThinkingI 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.
[Read more…] about Thursday Smiled