Month: April 2005

The Picture that Never Was

Here’s a picture of one of my favorite hikes taken in The Enchantments about ten years ago:

Here’s another picture taken on the same hike, a picture that was never taken, though the hike was definitely taken, and everyone was really there. Of course, I wasn’t in the picture because I was behind the camera, as I often, perhaps too often, am.

Which raises the question, is this picture a fake or is the picture without me a “fake?” Which is the better record of history?

I have two rolls of film from this hike but I’m only in one of the pictures, and it wasn’t this one, though I’m in it now and I belong in it because it’s a more accurate picture than the one that this one replaced, the one where I stood behind the camera and took this picture. Surely anyone who takes a picture is a participant in that picture.

Luckily, in this case Bill took the camera right afterwards and took another picture of me, Dawn and Rich standing together, so it was relatively easy to splice myself into the picture without having to replace shadows, highlights, etc.

Learning to manipulate pictures as I’ve been doing lately has been an interesting experience, one that has raised questions about “history,” photographs, and memories I’ve never really thought too much about before, as well as a few I have thought about.

For instance, despite the fact that I have many fond memories of cars I’ve owned, I didn’t have a single picture of any of them. In the series I ran here I had to go online find a picture of a car like the one that I owned, then manipulate the picture to make the car look like the one I owned, and place it into a picture that I had taken when I owned the car. Some of them were quite convincing, others less so, but all of them captured a certain “truth” although they were all lies, lies of the memory. So, were all those pictures “lies,” mere distortions of reality, or were they more accurate memories of the past than my collection of photographs?

Some of the questions I’m beginning to ask myself are probably more important to an old man sitting in front of his computer looking back at his life than to anyone else, but in a society that increasingly relies on new forms of media it is perhaps a question all of us should be asking ourselves.

North’s “A Few Facts About Me”

I’ll have to admit that I’m having a hard time working my way through Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry, as you might have guessed since I keep writing about something else or working in Photoshop. I suspect that I should have read this book in a college class I’d paid to attend and then I’d feel more obligated to keep up with classroom assignments, or at least keep up enough that I wouldn’t sound like a total idiot in classroom discussions.

Reading this book and trying to make sense of each and every poem has proven to be extremely hard work for me, and I haven’t consistently lived up to that goal. If I weren’t determined to gain a better understanding and appreciation of postmodern poetry, I would have long since given up trying to finish this nearly 700 page work and moved on to poetry books sitting on my shelf I know I’d love to read.

Unfortunately, I still find myself clinging to long-held ideas of what poetry is or should be. So, invariably, I seem to find myself drawn to the poems that are closest to those that I’ve loved in the past. Hopefully, at least I am more open to different forms of poetry than I was before I began reading this work.

With that caveat in mind, I’ll just say that this poem by Charles North is my favorite in the last hundred pages I’ve read:

A FEW FACTS ABOUT ME

I am moved often, and easily
without knowing why or finding it appropriate
to be a consequence of somebody else’s unfathomable will.

I can be taken in by the suggestion of emotion in others
even if their actions are as foreign to human psychology
as the emotions of European children in American textbooks

or American textbooks in American life. Deciding what my life
will be has always been the decision as to what it has been,
and before I met you I knew what it would be like, and planned
to be in the path

of whatever could change it, whether or not it prevented me
from being the sole translator of your natural eloquence.
As the captain of my fate and steerer of my star

I don’t find any single decision irrevocable,
feeling inadequate to life’s daily immensities, a condition
of the unwillingness to act, for of the things that are human

the best is to be unavoidable, which doesn’t make it any better
but doesn’t make it worse–like that sunset I’m always refusing
to look behind
or away from as if to be dull were the reverse of not shining

and living selfishly when that too is exhaustible.

Most of all, I think that I like the self-deprecating humor of this poem. That’s not to say that I don’t find more truth here than I’d like to admit. Of course, it reminds me a little of that old adage, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans,” but at my age looking back that seems more like truth than merely a cliche’.

I’ll have to confess that I’m often moved by poems or odd movies that seem to have little or no effect on others, and I would have a hard time explaining why I found them moving. While I would like to think that I was the captain of my own destiny there’s not doubt looking back that much of my life was changed by forces I neither affirmed or understood.

But neither have I found “any single decision irrevocable,” and hope that at the very least I have learned something from the errors of my ways, particularly when I have lived “selfishly.”

Herman Creek

Although the long climb from the Columbia River to the top of the Gorge is often hot and dusty, the next seven miles of the Herman Creek hike more than justifies the initial effort.

Once you’ve reached the first plateau at 800 feet, the nature of the trail changes as it flattens out. Waterfalls stream from surrounding cliffs, cooling the air and producing outbursts of golden-green foliage.

Moss-covered creeks undisturbed a thousand years fill the air with the sounds of rushing water, broken only by long periods of silence and the occasional tweets and chirps of birds drawn by the water in this arid countryside.

None of this, though, is quite as awe-inspiring as the Cedar Swamps where most day-hikers turn around. Here the visitor is greeted by fallen, and standing, Giants.

Camping here overnight on a solo hike, I was struck by the eerie silence, almost as if I had been suspended in time and something stood watching over me.

It’s hard to imagine how long these giants have stood watch over this land. One can only hope that they will continue to stand watch now that this has been declared a Wilderness area.