look away at me

Eyeballs are interesting.

Admit it.

candle in the corner

on the wall

the razor-thin line of being

i took this shot thinking i saw something special in those lines. turned out to be a pretty ordinary photo. which i was tempted to say is a lot like life. because it is a lot like life, at least as seen from one perspective. the extraordinary in our imagination often deflates into the ordinary when actually experienced. few christmas mornings satisfy the yearnings of christmas eve.

but it also strikes me as ungrateful in the extreme to ever call life itself ordinary.

here's our story. billions of years behind us, nothing. then there you are. life. just somehow, improbably, there you are. a little blip. a translucently-thin slice of time. then nothing again (possibly) forever and ever.

so it seems like there's a whole lot of nothing goin' on in that story. billions of years behind us. eternity ahead of us. and yet that tiny little slice. a single sixteenth note of music in a long symphony of silence. and yet it's pretty special. pretty magical. definitely not ordinary.

and so, you know, not to be either too dramatic or melodramatic here, but life as seen from this perspective puts our neighbors in a special light. this tiny chance of existing. this tiny chance of existing together, you and i. sharing a special razor-thin slice of time together. fellow sojourners on the most statistically improbable journey of all, the journey of being.

definitely not ordinary.

the ball toss

communication at its simplest.

hands

My nephew Aaron's hands. Taken a couple of years ago at my sis-in-law's wedding rehearsal. Weddings always have a lot of waiting around, and Aaron was chatting with me from the the pew ahead of me (in this case a series of interlocking chairs). His hands were between the small gap the chairs, and I took this picture.

"There he goes again. Crazy Uncle Mike taking weird pictures of eyeballs and hands and bees again. " Or so he probably thought.

Crazy Uncle Mike. No joke. That's my name with my nephews and neice. Can you believe it?!?! I would understand it if they called me "Disarmingly Charming Uncle Mike." Now that would make sense. Or...."Profound and Witty Uncle Mike." That, too, is a natural. Or, "Our basketball hero Uncle Mike." Natch. Or why not Rabbi Michael?

But Crazy Uncle Mike....I tell you, it hurts.

Real bad.

But maybe if "you" were to call me Rabbi Mike, well, that could ease the pain a little. Because I have loads of wisdom to offer. Really really. And if you don't believe me, just ask me. (Brises, however, are out of the question. Fainting and circumcision are rarely a good combination.)

rainy sunset on the lake

walkway shadow

dixie

flinging dirt in the face of others

I don't know what it means that most of us don't have enemies. Because, gosh, it seems that you can't read two paragraphs of an ancient piece of literature (think David's Psalms or Homer's Iliad) without encountering the protagonist pretty much wishing death and suffering on an enemy.

Philosophers and moralists don't lack for reasons to explain our relative lack of personal enemies today. They might reach into their bag of ever-ready and infinitely malleable explanations for all things unpleasant and blame the easy-going relativity that comes along with liberal democracy. We don't hate, they'd say, because we don't care. We lack honor and a sense of pride that must be defended. We value niceness over principle. We have embraced decadent 1960's values at the expense of 1360's virtue, and who are we to judge other people's values any more than we should judge their taste in music? How can you have an enemy, they'd say, if you can't judge right from wrong, or good from bad.

And maybe they're right. Or at least have a point. This isn't the post to make a case one way or another.

But even if we don't have enemies most of us know rude or obnoxious or just plain hateful people who take pleasure in flinging dirt in the face of others. Through gossip. Through rudeness. Through backstabbing. Through the breaking of confidences. Through the delight they take in embarrassing others, of delighting in seeing them fall. Through speaking ill of others in the absence of any evidence for that judgment.

I teach my daughters that it's wrong to take delight in others failing in an innocent task. The world is much the better when others use their talents well, and we ought to be generous in recognizing the good traits in others. When actions are praiseworthy we ought to praise them, and when they're not we ought first to offer encouragement to do better. Envy is natural, of course, but it's a sin, especially when it becomes a regulating impulse for one's actions. The world is more interesting and delightful when lots and lots of people are doing lots of different things well, even when they're doing things we value and wish to do well ourselves.

The poor will be with us always, and I suppose we'll also have the hateful and petty with us right up until the end. But what a shame. Dang if they don't make life the worse for everyone else. And crazy modern liberal that I am, I can't help but think that as often as not it's fear and insecurity and not plain ol' evil that makes them that way.

off

I'm going to ruin this post, but i can't stop myself. I posted this a little bit ago and as I scrolled down the page just now (a couple of weeks after I originally posted it), I couldn't help but think of the board game, Clue: "It was Miss Scarlett in the parlor with the candlestick!!"

the partial girl

We're psychologically subterranean beings, and that's that. We're hidden, and that's what makes us interesting. Worth thinking about. Worth reading book after book about. Worth looking at a thousand paintings of persons. It's why we love faces. We want to know people, but we can't do it with certainty. So we study outward clues to glimpse below the surface.

Like many people, I once flattered myself that at least I'm not hidden from myself. I'm a keen observer of others, and I'm keenly aware of my inner life. Or so I once thought. Most everyone thinks that they understand themselves, that they enjoy perfect self-awareness.

To which I say, using the PG version language, that's...baloney.

Ironically, in some respects the parts we want most desperately to keep hidden from others are utterly transparent to others. Think about how we try to hide or minimize our physical imperfections, and yet how poorly we succeed in our task to fool others. It's not that different about our personalities and desires. And that's a tough realization to accept.

Though I dare not do it, my guess is that virtually all my blustery psychoanalyzing of others in this blog is little more than unconscious self-confession. I'm not going to reread any of my posts to affirm or deny this judgment, but i bet it's probably the case.

I show photos of parts because that's all I know. Of others. And of myself.

three reactions

challenge: provide a plausible caption for each of the three young women.

whee!! (being young is fun!!!)

Already I'm not as fond of amusement rides as I once was in my youth. When will I no longer like to swing? It's probably inevitable, but that will be a sad day.

fiction is truer than non-fiction

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,Than are dreamt of in your philosophy"--WS speaking through H.

Why the poets and not the damn philosophers have it right.

Hold your breath. It's coming. In a few days.

it's going to be okay

In The Rhetoric, Aristotle speaks briefly of the character of young people. He does so in service of equipping the reader with a better understanding of how to more effectively address that audience. I’ll spare you the specifics of his comments here except to say that for those folks who deny that there is a more-or-less stable human nature they best not read these passages. The timelessness of his account is genuinely extraordinary. I read the passage to my students without informing them of its author and ask them whether it accurately describes themselves and their peers. Inevitably they agree that it does.

I find this encouraging.

Attach what certainty one may to our future success as a nation, or as a civilization, or as a species of creatures, but I think we can say with confidence that it’s impossible to snuff out once and for all the desire and hope for more and for better that engines all human change and progress. I also believe that so long as nature asserts herself that it’s also impossible to permanently snuff out that fundamental force that expresses itself most effortlessly and unselfconsciously in the actions and faces of the young—namely that the going up makes the coming down all the worth the while.

Of course this photo is a kind of lie, as every photo is a lie. Every one of these kids is troubled, if not tortured, by his or her own phantom fears and anxieties. They have all suffered from broken hearts, or plain old loneliness, or fears about failing the expectations of their peers and friends and family. Some are coming to accept the fact that they're not all that and a bag of chips like they thought they were. Some are coming face-to-face for the first time with their own limitations. But despite it all, here they show that laughter and an abundance of being is still there for the taking.

And good on them, I say.

spirals

the last image was made by taking a chunck of the staircase and replicating it many times in decreasing size.

the river's edge

lace shadows

afternoon sun