Bacchantes Autumnales

JOHN KEATS: "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter..."

Bacchantes Liberati

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: While walking in a wooded valley in Sharon, Connecticut last week I met these bacchants - sylvan apparitions orbiting human imagination.

Beside the Housatonic River, Autumn, 2010, No. 2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: As silos to dairy farms, so chimneys and towers to industrial mills. They make the horizontal world vertical; they offer the photographer opportunities and dilemmas. This tower, which is topped by a rusting tank, probably stored water pumped from the river for use in the mills.

Given certain conditions, it is clear that the inanimate, dead world strives with amazing determination and dexterity toward perception and differentiation. The most primitive cells say "I am," seek sentience to turn toward the light, and strive to distinguish between that which they can eat and that which will eat them. As hawks search for their prey, rivers seek the ocean, the sun holds the planets aloft, and yellowing vines cling to an ancient scaffold to reach the sun. Are they all animated by the same current? Where is its source, or is such a question paradoxical? Are the forms perceived its finite, corporeal shape, and are they intuited through sensing and perceiving organs that are also of its making? At least that's been my contemplation from here in the cave of my Cartesian heritage.

The old factory is quiet, the water tower above the river, empty. Here the leaves flare before the coming chill. This weekend the oaks, last holdouts, dropped their leaves, and now the chill is off the ocean blowing from the east and north, and on Monday everything was covered with ice.

Reverie

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Is the drowsy half sleep of becoming a premonition of the drowsy decay of going? Is that why these rising, spring lily pads look so like their decaying selves now settling back to pond bottom? On one side we celebrate the star-shaped, gleaming lily flowers and on the other, dread the star-like, mute infinitude.

Heat

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:


Transmogrification

Once they've felt the force,
the turning and grinding,
the hum
they say
stays in the castings,
reverberating through
shafts and pullies
down to the
last
punch.

Joker Ball

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL, "Station Break": On Sunday I traveled with a friend to NYC where we met two other friends for the annual Greenwich Village, Halloween Parade, and so the processing of Halloween images must now compete with the processing of autumn images which has been competing for the past weeks with the taking of autumn images. As always, this means the images posted to TODAY'S are not the most current. I like to post in sets and try to place images in a somewhat ordered context, but the set of Maine images were interrupted when the factory images began, and the factory images soon became staggered as I inserted fall images which seemed to comment on them, and now all has halted as I try to make the most of autumn shooting.

In any case, this image was not taken at the celebrations in Greenwich Village but in the same antique store in Maine where I found the Sea Captain's Wife. The posting of Halloween parade images will most likely appear in the context of New Year's Eve or maybe May Day.

Images from the 2008 Halloween Parade can be found by scrolling back to November of 2008.