Yet, poetry may be the more precise language we have for talking about the world. Poets who give language to states where the soul meets the world; the inner and outer intersect are charged and changed by the energy at the edge. In the introduction to her Collected Poems Kathleen Raine writes: ‘No one can suppose that the English language is any longer in its prime; words are worn thin with trivial use, emptied of meanings unknown in our materialist society. We are beset through press and media with a daily flood of words put to mean uses. Yet the soul still needs a roof over her head other than the breeze-blocks and acrylic pain of the world deemed real by media in the service of consumerism … My mother, as she peeled the potatoes, inhabited her world of Border Ballads, Shelley’s skies, Milton’s hells. The material commonplace, currently celebrated as the ‘real’ reality, has never been so for poetry, unless illuminated by the soul’s inner light.’
from Changing Light, J. Ruth Gendler
As I keep seeking the God who is in the everyday details in front of my eyes and beneath my feet, poetry trains me to look more intently for the ‘illuminated commonplaces’ and ‘the secret of light’ that might come through the view finder of my camera. If I need to reintroduce my battered senses to the mystery of God, photography’s ‘blue hour’ (the hour before the sun rises or after the sun sets) is always a good place to start. For pilgrims setting out to journey into the unknown, or on those days I travel when I do not, cannot, know for whom I seek, beginning that journey in twilight might enhance my ‘pilgrim glasses’ (to use Lacy Clark Ellman’s phrase) to be alert for the Sacred.
‘Blue hour’ photography is always an act of faith for me: the loss of the what I can no longer see still affects what I see and how I see.
I keep seeing until I say I can see ‘nothing’, then I know my eyes might just be beginning to be attuned to the secrets Emmanuel longs to unfold before me in the dark.
What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names--
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don't remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.
‘What we want’
Linda Pastan
moving from sun to star. Canon 7D. F9. 1/60. ISO 100.
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