LAWRENCE RUSS: Soul, Art, and Society
One of the Most Important Things to Be Said – but Which Almost No One Says – about Our Photography
If what we really want from our photography is popularity, or praise from supposedly-important members of the “industry,” or a lot of money, or if we don’t think of ourselves as making art, then we won’t care about this. But our not-caring won’t change the crucial truth: If our goals are shallow, our photographs will be shallow. If we mainly want to make our photographs bright and brilliantly-colored, in order to catch people’s momentary attention on a screen, then that’s what they’ll be. If our principal aim in life is superficial, centered on worldly success or values, then our photographs will be superficial, no matter whether or not they’re shown in a prestigious gallery or praised by the writers for prominent publications.
No, No, “Arcane” Doesn’t Mean Anything Like “Archaic”!
I’ve already written and published on this blog, on October 19, 2014, a post about the portfolio that includes this image — shortly after I self-published a book of the photos in that series: . . . What is kinda funny to me is that after naming that book with what was then the name of the series, “The Arcane Machine,” I felt forced to change the portfolio’s name, because I could tell from people’s responses that many of them mistakenly thought that “arcane” meant something like “archaic.”
A Christmas Surprise (and My Antagonism towards Categories)
Recently, I was out walking with my camera, as I often do, like the bear in the nursery rhyme who went over the mountain “to see what he could see.” Passing through the local railroad station, I saw a handwritten paper note taped to one of the train passenger shelters. . . .
In the Name of All That’s Holy. . . .
This is not about politics or ideology, not about endorsement of any political argument or group or leader. It is about an instance of the horrible violation of our common humanity, of the divine life in each of us.
Romancing the Stone (and the Sun and the River and. . . .)
. . . Zen classics say that the world after satori is, in some ways, just the same as the world before satori — and yet, everything’s different. My connection to the Devon Bridge is positive and intimate, but people, including artists, aren’t taught to recognize that relationship, or what to call it. It goes beyond common education and beyond the terms and habits of photographic society.
Visionary “Correspondences”
. . . That is what opens up, in immersive fashion, in mystical experience: a sense that one is experiencing not some kind of glorious hyper-illusion, but rather the universe as it really is, when the doors of our perception are opened. And it’s that manner of vision that the greatest artists to try to evoke or manifest by their art, in works such as “Pepper No. 30” or Wynn Bullock’s “galactic” “Tidepool, Point Lobos” or Olivier Messiaen’s Lightning over the Beyond or Shakespeare’s The Tempest. And it’s central to what I pursue in my own art, in photos like “The Window Is at Your Feet,” “Ritual,” “Grass of the Midnight Sea,” “The Tree of Unsleeping Surveillance,” “Uprooted,” the “Marion” images, most of the works throughout my portfolios.
The Word “Spirit” Means Wind or Breath, as in Respiration, or Inspiration
Intellect by itself (not that it ever really is a function by itself) is not the only way, and not the best way, that we navigate reality, that we determine what is valuable or decide what action is best. Within what I’ve called the higher function, there is a capacity to sense non-conceptual, experienced resemblances, affinities, correspondences, a capacity like what we call intuition, but more than intuition. I’ve already written a bit about this in earlier posts (in July through October of 2011 – you’ll find a timeline in the column to the right of this post). But now I don’t want to try to discuss it, but rather to give you a related line of illustrations from my life.
It Isn’t Intellect That Sees through the Matrix That Intellect Builds
The faculty that we call intellect is good for figuring out how to transport water uphill from the river to our hut. It can do astonishing things. It’s pretty useless, however, in disclosing the satisfactions of tasting that water, swimming in it, watching its ever-changing motions and reflections, hearing it as rain on a roof or waves on a beach. . . .
Blessings and Bridges for New Year’s Transport
As many of us know too well, New Year’s can bring us dejection as we review, unkindly, all that we have and haven’t done to date. Having been hard on myself lately almost to the point of cruelty, the passages from Rumi below, which I wrote out for myself just yesterday, seemed blessings. And, of course, Rumi intended them to be blessings for me – and for you, and for anyone else who might come to read them at any point on the space-time continuum.