Learning a new skill or embarking on a fresh line of enquiry is exciting. I am particularly fortunate to have grown up at a time when the current race for technological progress was probably just starting.
On my recent trip to Australia my brother and I visited a "heritage village" near Cairns that was made up of various old buildings and the artefacts associated with them. A part of the display inevitably focussed on agricultural equipment - much of it familiar to us from our childhood in the 1950's and 60's on a farm in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Gus observed that the reason we had farm equipment from the 1930's was most likely because that was the age that Dad most understood and had been trained to use and repair whilst a student at Seale Haine Agricultural College. The hay making equipment, for example, was made from a mixture of wooden planks bolted together and iron rods - a combination that worked well then, but which would be unthinkable today.
When I was at Springvale, my preparatory school, I learnt how to use a Brownie Box camera, how to develop my own black and white films and, once they were dry, to enlarge and print photographs from them. The heady smell of chemicals, the dull glow of a red light bulb under which we worked and close proximity of everything in the small dark room are abiding memories.
Watching a professional photographer at work and studying his work are excellent ways to re-engage with a childhood hobby. David A.Lee in Palm Springs is both a good friend and excellent photographer and a recent series of photographs that he put up on FaceBook have inspired me to take the plunge and study digital photography.
Great photographs of course do not just happen - they are made by events or the observations of a skilled photographer. Earlier this year David noticed a long line of geese flying through the skies above Palm Springs. True professional and artist that he is, he lifted his camera and made a photograph to share with the rest of us.
Consider then, this Haiku:
kari no kazu a number of geese
watarite sora ni migrating - in the sky
mio mo nashi not even a wake. MORI SUMIO (b.1919)
It is not just the coincidence of geese crossing the sky in a photograph and a haiku - but the use of the word "mio" in Japanese that intrigues. In his excellent analysis of the poem (see The Haiku Handbook), William Higginson points out that this unusual word literally means water-tail or wake. Sumio 'borrows' the word normally associated with water to good effect. In this conjunction of the photographic and literary arts, it is just as unlikely to see a wake caused by the passage of geese through the sky as across the desert sands surrounding Palm Springs.
Another great haiku writer, Matsuo Basho (whom I have blogged about before) did not have a camera on his many journies across Japan and during which he wrote the Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches (Penguin books). He used pen and ink to write his amazing verses and sketch his surroundings. I pause my thoughts to wonder what he have done with a camera here?
Amongst my current reading are two books - one on how to use my new Canon 1000D camera and the other on the practice of Zen. The former is by Ben Long and the latter a re-print of the seminal work, Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki. Although both are written by American authors I have no reason to believe they ever met or indeed knew each other. However in both they require their readers (and hopefully followers), to re-tune their mind to see the world through the eyes of a child. Suzuki urges us " to always be a beginner ... The beginner's mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate it is boundless." In his more recent book, Long observes that "because the world is a new place for them, they (children) notice every detail of the objects around them. They have to because they haven't yet learned to abbreviate the visual complexity of the world down to simple symbols ...". In short they retain their "beginner's mind" and he urges students such as I to set aside our adult eyes for those of a child.
Haiku and photography are both craft and art striving to represent a moment in an image that tells us a story or conveys a "truth". The spirit of Zen is found in both. There is much to be excited about as I try to bring my love of verse to re-discovering the craft of photography through the lens of a SLR camera. Friends and teachers be warned - there's a child in the room.
William Blake - Auguries of Innocence
To see a world in a grain of sand,And a heaven in a wild flower,Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,And eternity in an hour.
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