An eclectic reflection about life in the present. Photography. Brief writings.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Drifting
("Postcards from Nowhere")
What madness, these lives we call ours? They are never ours, ours alone. One day it comes to us. We do not own them. Perhaps, we think, they own us. We struggle to dredge up meaning from the past, to put things into context, to make it all seem a solid, coherent entity. But we know only one thing. We drift toward some inevitable, certain future, unmistakable, unavoidable. In a cold panic, we try to stake our claim. Drifting, drifting, drifting.
drifting isnt all that bad:) I seem to be in a drift mode most of my life, maybe that's way I'm still a poor southern boy chasing dreams, my angel and fish :)
I definitely agree that our lives are not our own. I think they belong to the universe...and the only control we have is how we react to what the universe throws at us...more backpaddling than drifting sometimes.
"The only thing that ever stood between me and success was me."
Woody Allen
Arrested Development
"You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development."
- Chapter 6, The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
Tiziano Terzani
"The truth is, at fifty-five one has a strong urge to give one's life a touch of poetry, to take a fresh look at the world, reread the classics, rediscover that the sun rises, that there is a moon in the sky and that there is more to time than the clock's tick can tell us."
Wild At Heart
"This whole world's wild at heart and weird on top"
Barry Gifford, Wild at Heart
Secret About A Secret
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
Diane Arbus
I am, I am
Blind moil in the earth's nap cast up in an eyeblink between becoming and done. I am, I am. An artifact of prior races.
Cormac McCarthy
Suttree
Transformation
The photograph isn't what was photographed, it's something else. It's about transformation. . . . There is a transformation, you see, when you just put four edges around it. That changes it. A new world is created.
Gary Winnogrand
LIfe Is Short
Life is short, But by God's Grace, The Night is Long
Joe Henry
Safe Passage
Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?
Peter Matthiessen
A Generation of Swine
"What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death?. . . [T]here is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation."
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
Orson Welles
"If you try to probe, I'll lie to you. Seventy-five percent of what I say in interviews is false. I'm like a hen protecting her eggs. I cannot talk. I must protect my work. Introspection is bad for me. I'm a medium, not an orator. Like certain oriental and Christian mystics, I think the 'self' is a kind of enemy. My work is what enables me to come out of myself. I like what I do, not what I am. . . . Do you know the best service anyone could render in art? Destroy all biographies. Only art can explain the life of a man--and not the contrary."
Orson Welles, 1962
Late Work
“ ‘Late work.’ It’s just another way of saying feeble work. I hate it. Monet’s messy last waterlilies, for instance — though I suppose his eyesight was shot. ‘The Tempest’ only has about 12 good lines in it. Think about it. ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood.’ Hardly ‘Great Expectations,’ is it? Or Matisse’s paper cutouts, like something from the craft room at St. B’s. Donne’s sermons. Picasso’s ceramics. Give me strength.”
"Engleby" Sebastian Faulks.
The Sun Also Rises
It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing."
Ernest Hemingway
What's Remembered
"The only things that are important in life are the things you remember."
Jean Renoir
Winesburg, Ohio
"One shudders at the thought of the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant. . . one love life so intensely that tears come into the eyes."
Sherwood Anderson
Perception
“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
Henri Bergson
Joyce's Lament
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
drifting isnt all that bad:)
ReplyDeleteI seem to be in a drift mode most of my life, maybe that's way I'm still a poor southern boy chasing dreams, my angel and fish :)
cool pictures, keep working bro, you got talent!
drift on,
Danny
I definitely agree that our lives are not our own. I think they belong to the universe...and the only control we have is how we react to what the universe throws at us...more backpaddling than drifting sometimes.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is, we all know where we are heading.
ReplyDelete