blue wheelbarrow: Interpreting the landscape

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Interpreting the landscape

William Henry Jackson's "Phantom Curve" (late 1800's) and Robert Adams' "Clear Creek Canyon, near Idaho Springs" (ca. 1970). If you click on the Jackson photograph to enlarge it you will be able to see the man standing at the base of (what's left of) the rock formation to the right of the tracks.

from "The Names"

When Pohd-lohk told a story he began by being quiet. Then he said Ah-keah-de, "They were camping," and he said it every time. I have tried to write in the same way, in the same spirit. Imagine: They were camping.

In my earliest years I traveled a number of times from Oklahoma to the Navajo reservation in New Mexico and Arizona and back again. The two landscapes are fixed in my mind. They are separate realities, but they are sometimes confused in my memory. I place my feet in the plain, but my prints are made on the mountain.

N. Scott Momaday

from "The Lives of a Cell"

from "The Fork River Space Project"

I have just discovered I can magnify objects by a slight pressure on the lids of my eyes. My head lies on the pillow, a fold of the bedspread touches my nose. The weave is coarse. If I press lightly on the lids of my eyelids the material of the spread looks like a fishnet. If I lid my eyes and turn to face the light, I see a color glowing like heated metal. Across it motes flick, like water insects. The color changes to a smog-filtered sunset. If I give myself over to this impression, I am free-falling in space (that is my sensation), and only by an effort do I recover my bearings. I owe this to Harry Lorbeer. He started me thinking--or should I say seeing? On the mind's eye, or on the balls of the eyes, or wherever it is we see what we imagine, or imagine what we see.

Wright Morris

blue wheelbarrow

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Interpreting the landscape

from "The Names"

Invocation to the muse from "Ceremony"

from "The Lives of a Cell"

from "The Inner Reaches of Outer Space"

from "On Photography"

from "In the American Grain"

from "Anecdote of the Jar"

the best prayer I know

from "The Fork River Space Project"

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