- Technology and Wordsworth – Seeing through the dark

If you calibrate a Mac display using the faculty of your eye, you begin with a screen shot, in System Preferences, which invites you to set the brightness at the point where, in true Goldilocks style, the oval centre within a black square is neither too light nor too dark. It is both a question of judgment and a leap of faith that the display has the technology to deliver what is assumed to be the correct level of brightness. I wonder what Vermeer might have made of this, for whom the dark shadowy areas from a distance appear to merge but close up they maintain their variegated differences. I have never seen anything approaching a good repro of Vermeer for this reason. The photographer always seems to expose with too much deference to the shadows thus rendering the overall feel too light, muddy, lacking mood and contrast. I am thinking of paintings such as The Letter, The Geographer, Lady with a Maid where there is a heavy use of dark shadow particularly on the edge or the side in a way that frames the subject.

Pursuing the Bahiya advice from the Lord Buddha (which turned to Insight for him on hearing it) if we move from ‘in the seen only the seen’ and ponder what do we actually see – a good and fruitful enough exercise at most times – then Wordsworth segues most powerfully from the recalled visual experience to the imagined in the episode from childhood recalled in The Prelude involving what is often referred to as ‘the stolen boat’. (I prefer ‘borrowed’ to ‘stolen’ because he was always going to return it. What else could he have done with it?)

At first he rows out into the dark lake as light is falling, gradually he becomes aware of a great mass which seems to pursue him. This ‘grim shape’

Towered up between me and the stars, and still,

For so it seemed, with purpose of its own

And measured motion like a living thing,

Strode after me.

He hurriedly replaces the boat to its original mooring and is left to ponder on the nature of this experience of something else beyond him, leading him to a sense of the transcendental and a ‘dim and undetermined sense of unknown modes of being’ where

There hung a darkness, call it solitude

Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes

Remained, no pleasant images of trees,

Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;

But huge and mighty forms, that do not live

Like living men moved slowly through the mind

By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

I certainly don’t access this gateway through from the visual to the imaginal when I am calibrating my Mac display, but it does make me stop and ponder where else there might be portals. At the moment, such an illumined space, where brightness may be found in the dark, lies somewhere between what was gleaned on a recent retreat on the Sutra of Golden Light, led by Vedanya and Padmavajra, when we were all given a bunch of keys with which to open particular doorways into the sutra, and the excellent book by Nagapriya called Visions of Mahayana Buddhism which is full of maps and signposts of understanding.

© www.roypeters.co.uk

- In the Scene only the Seen

"An impeccably formed quarter of a tomato, cut out of the fruit by a gadget with such perfect symmetry. The peripheral flesh, homogenous and tight, in a beautiful chemical red, is of a consistent thickness between a strip of shiny skin and the bit where the pips are displayed: yellow, with a regular consistency, held in place by a thin layer of greenish jelly along the bulge where the heart is. The latter being of a gently attenuated granular pink, begins from a recess on the underside via a membrane of white veins from whence one extends out towards the pips – albeit in a slightly hesitant way. At the very top, a scarcely visible accident has occurred: one corner of skin, come unstuck from the flesh by one or two millimetres, imperceptibly juts out."

In Alain Robbe-Grillet’s 1953 novel, Les Gommes, at one point he describes in wonderful detail, the segment of a tomato. It is so precise and exact yet it comes to stand generically as such for a quadrant of tomato. In the photographic equivalent or attempt at replicating the written into visual discourse, the representation remains singular and precise – even though we can’t eat either depiction and experience the experience of eating a tomato. I don’t know what surface R-G’s tomato wedge finds itself on but mine is clearly on a white plate. The photo is clearly a mise en scène – as no doubt is R-G’s description at that point in the novel. No matter how simple the shot is by shutting out whole battalions of signifiers, whole regiments are nonetheless there even in the so called neutral choice of background, as well as with whatever distortions and propensities the lens, ISO setting and aperture bring to it.

By attempting to limit and shut out certain other signifiers it’s as if we are trying to lead the viewer down an avenue of apparent simplicity where what is seen is just a tomato, a wedge, a quadrant of tomato. Yet in order to do that, at a fundamental level, we have presented not so much what is seen as what we (photographers) want to be seen as the seen. Clearly we do this all the time with more complex images. Take my picture of the rupa on my shrine. It is simple enough notwithstanding what it is of and what it represents with the addition of the two items I have added to it, a symbol of blue to remind me of Akshobya and a book at the Buddha’s feet to represent the Dharma. There is a plain background which I manufactured so as to further isolate the figure. Actually what I saw with my eyes is closer to what is apparent in the other shot – you may just make out my shrine in the top third of the picture, about a third in from the left. (Unconscious use of classic thirds maybe?)

I am not sure I want to start taking all my pictures in this way, somehow trying to replicate a seemingly haphazard way in the human eye scans and absorbs the visual environment, but it is somehow an encouragement to be simpler in approach and to try less yet at the same time to deepen our understanding of what is going on and what we bring to a picture. These are not neutral choices and they may be made through instinct and ignorance. As photographers we always bring certain elements to a visual situation and overlay it with choices and pre-conceptions. We rarely - if ever - just take things as they are. Even the simplest of pictures is highly pre-constructed.

The same could be said of mind. How often do we really see ‘things as they really are’? How often do we just see what our eyes show us, hear what our ears deliver, use our imagination not for mere fantasy but for access into the nature of reality instead of seeing what we hope, want, dread and fear to see, and hearing the unsaid and imposing so many narratives onto our experience like some over-worked Bollywood metteur en scène? © www.roypeters.co.uk