The dry pleasures of the book shelves and the red-blooded pursuit of photography have always been worlds apart in my solar system.
But sometimes they show themselves as reflecting the same light from a common sun. Or coupled in darkness within the same airless void. The difference between sun and void being one's cosmic weather at the moment.
I caught a sunbeam recently when I encountered the words of an admired dead, white European again while browsing through a monograph of the legendary Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo.
"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is." - T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets (Burnt Norton).
These lines have been with me for the longest time, not connecting with any gut experience, like the rest of Mr. Eliot's wonderful stew of the temporal and metaphysical so deceptively flavorless in its title. I've stored it up like a pretty but pointless trinket, more enthralled by the language and imagery rather than any worldview it might represent.
Then someone attempted to explain Bravo's work and I saw how deep the hook of this poem, those lines, have truly snared my photographic vitals, the parts that come alive the most when the world renders up its overt and hidden codes in images. Conversely, I'm usually inclined to pay back Eliot and other secret sharers like him by impregnating each frame I record with the seed of a revelation.
While words are never adequate, it's always nice to find the closest English to one's experience. When you click that shutter, how to describe that silent shout amidst the vastness of it all? Eliot's rhapsody about stillness and dance coming together isn't such a bad start.
