Breaking for lunch today I watched last night's Charlie Rose program that included his interview of Ada Louise Huxtable, Pulitzer-Prize-winning architecture critic for the Wall Street Journal (formerly of the New York Times) regarding her book, On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change.
Publishers Weekly called her essays "learned analyses, fluent and exuberant." All three apply but it is exuberant that comes to my mind first of all. Watching her respond to Rose's questions and comments (his style, too, especially on this interview, shares the quality of exuberance) re-ignites the flames of artistic exuberance. Words are all too often inadequate to describe the inner experience (and what is not inner experience after all?), even when we take a double take, a triple take, a quadruple... The appreciation of something beautiful is one of our most powerful experiences. So amazing and powerful it surges against the skin and makes us want to share it, broadcast and immortalize it in as many memories as we can. At such a time consciousness is a tangible gift, precious, beyond valuation because amazement runs over the titter of thoughts that mark our little, insecure minds. We aspire to break our own skin and multiply and spread, and multiply and spread.
Listening to Huxtable comes on the heels of doing Chris Orwig's tutorial on Photoshop on Lynda.com earlier today. Orwig describes how a great photographer differs from the amateur. (I won't quibble and accept our present-day meaning of amateur although amateur in its truest sense is much more, a lover of the highest one can aspire to in art, trade or craft.) I can settle for becoming capable-that may be as far as I can go in photography-but there are shores beyond to aspire to. If we take the trouble to dream, let's dream to reach the impossible. Who knows but those shores could become reachable just swimming a stroke at a time, walking a feeble step at a time.
To talk about beauty sounds presumptuous but we all probably know the experience of encountering something of beauty, of hearing the sirens sing. They lure us not into death but into a land surprisingly not alien to us but that we often don't visit. We don't have the key to open the gates leading there. We know we are there when we are there and the rest is trying not to forget that we were there. No wonder that our sacred mythologies are replete with soaring descriptions of paradise.
Willis Barnstone in The New Covenant writes, "For the perceptive reader, spirit eludes name, dogma, and even word to reside in the silence of transcendence." Sometimes words do stumble out of our mouths and we hear the music behind them, the silence which is the quieting of our resistance to be transported beyond ourselves. Then melt away the objections to our divine right to beauty, justice, wisdom, to any of these extreme qualities that each of us has known and that in our heart of hearts we know exists in the midst of their absence.
This image is not great but it documents how the day was yesterday when I took the photo on 79th Street on my way home.
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