After my last e-mail “blast,” Anita Buzzy-Prentiss, a photographer friend that I haven’t seen in years, responded with an e-mail. We corresponded, and the conversation went far and wide: big families; the inner need to keep moving; Pilates and yoga; heat, and cold, and in-between (Anita, it turns out, doesn’t like the extremes); the ephemeral character of photography and the desire for permanence.
Writing Anita got me thinking about art — thanks, Anita! — and what we seek to accomplish with it. It strikes me that the artist (and the photographer) seek to capture beauty, to make it one’s own, and in so doing, to make it somehow timeless. As I wrote her, “I don’t like the thought that hundreds of thousands of images will disappear when I die, so I’m posting many on my website for peoples’ quick glances.”
“But even if no one sees them, I still like the capture. [Photographers speak of taking a picture as a “digital capture.”] It’s a kind of eros, which Socrates defined as the desire to hold the other in one’s arms. I sometimes wish my eyes were cameras, because I see things when I don’t have a camera, or don’t have it up to my eye, things that just cry out to be caught. ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever,’ said Keats [in his poem “Endymion,” published in 1818]. A photograph freezes that moment of delight.” A piece of art, or a photograph, can point to what does not pass away.
I went on to observe that video, in contrast, does not capture a moment. Instead, it reminds you that everything changes; one moment, one frame, is not as beautiful as the last, or perhaps as the next. The beautiful appears, yes, but then is gone. Beauty is fleeting. This is why I much prefer photography.
There is more to this idea of permanence. I wondered if my quotation of Socrates had over-simplified him from something I had read, so I read some more: an article about Socrates and love. It’s quite involved (and my summary of Socrates on eros, above, is laughably reductive) but I liked this observation in the article’s conclusion: “The best kind of life, a life that comes as close as possible to the divine – [is] one in which we achieve happiness by having good things be ours forever.” (Not bad, for a pre-Christian philosopher.)
At one point I was a pastor of a very dysfunctional, evangelical Protestant church. Sometime after leaving the pastorate, I rode my bike through the Rocky Mountains in Canada for about 24 days. It was a great long-distance cycling trip.
Many times, I stood in awe of the mountains. It struck me that, while people change, are unreliable, and sometimes fail you (and you fail them), the mountains are just there. You can hate them, you can love them – but they are indifferent; they don’t change. While they are not, of course, eternal, they transcend us; they are a symbol of permanence, or unchangeableness.
People sometimes say about someone in a crisis situation, “He (or she) was a rock.” It is no surprise that, for the people of Israel, God is even greater than a rock: “There is none holy like the Lord, there is none besides thee; there is no rock like our God” (1 Samuel 2:2). The Psalmist uses the same term: “The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer, my God” (Psalm 18:2). The analogy is frequent in the Bible, as you can find from any Bible search engine.
I love photographing two things in particular: pretty women (it’s hard to find anything prettier :-), and mountains. My wife and I are planning a trip to Switzerland and Paris this summer. I am taking my camera to shoot every mountain I can find in the Jungfrau area of Switzerland, from every angle possible. I have already planned to hike to Bachalpsee, which is not far from Wengen, where we will be staying, God willing.
Something came to me about Bachalpsee in the middle of last night. After the cycling trip I mentioned above, I created several stained glass panels of mountain scenes, using other peoples’ photographs, and sold them. The first two below are the same, a piece based on a photo from British Columbia, titled “BC Blue.” (It was impossible to get the lighting and color right; these are scanned images of photos, as I recall.) The next was a piece titled “Alberta Peak.” The last is “BC Olympus.” (The woman who bought the last piece had the designer of the home she was building make the window it would go in the same size as the piece. Neat!)
One of the pieces in this series, below, was entitled “Bachalpsee,” which I had thought then was a mountain in Germany.
I had forgotten entirely about this Bachalpsee panel when we planned our trip. So now I will see in person the mountain that I had rendered in stained glass. And I will capture it!
One of the reasons I am back to creating stained glass panels is that they likely will last. Most of my photos will not be seen by anyone besides me. Some will be seen once, by a few — the brief glance — and then be gone. The glass panels, however, are likely to be passed on, and delight some people for some time, I hope, long after I am gone from this world. (I am filled with self-doubt: Is my work really beautiful? Does it make an impression on anyone, or are my friends just being kind? And so on. I understand that this malady is common. One can only press on, and create.)
As I said, beautiful things can point to what is enduring. Their beauty is only a pointer, but that doesn’t diminish them. St. Paul wrote to the Christians in Philippi, “Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” The things of this life can be good in themselves, and point to the Author of beauty. He also wrote, “For now we see in a mirror [or, as one translation puts it, “in a glass”] dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”