What Is It I Am Seeing?

"The question is not what you look at, but what you see."
Henry David Thoreau

This is not a blog post as I used to write them Or perhaps it is.

Thank you everyone - for all the lovely comments I have received through this site. In general. And on this last posting - about summer. About afternoons. About time. About images. About blogging. About life.

And to you erin, for your asking about my whereabouts....

I am wondering myself.

I have thought about this blog. I have loved loved loved writing it. And loved loved loved the communication.  And visiting all of you in your special web homes.

But the blog itself changed me. (ehhhmmmm..... was that not the very idea of it?)

Blogging made me realize my love for photography. (You might have guessed, as I started filling this site with more and more images....) So I joined this photo site - just for the summer. Just to live that outdoor life. The 3-D life I urged for.

So. A photo blog. Just for the summer. Or so I thought.

It has taken me completely by surprise. How I love my camera (a new/old one. Not the compact - but a Single Lens Reflex). How I love looking at other peoples photos. How images are so important to me.

The photo blog does something to me. For me. A photo a day cannot NOT change you.

I go around with my eyes completely open all the time.

As for this blog, and all the lovely lovely people I have met here - please be patient with me.

Time. Time. Time. The eternal dilemma. A gift. And a frustration.

I need more of it. Don’t we all.....Or perhaps life is just as it should be.......

Right now, I need to be out there with my lens. I need to get back to my first love. Which was images. (I am an art historian after all :-)

And this is my quest at the moment - "The question is not what you look at, but what you see."

I need to know what it is I am seeing.


If you enjoy photography as well as poems, you are welcome to visit here.

Summer, Sun, Son, GrandSon, Swimming, Sailing, Strawberries, Screens.....and Time....

...............................Live  
a three-dimensioned life;  
stay away from screens.
- Wendell Berry

Yes, I know. I repeat.
But how can I not with that sentence of gold?

How can I not, with the Nordic summer being so short, the sun so yellow, the grass so green, the sky so blue? How can I sit in front of screens with the sea sparkling as the iris of an eye and the wild strawberries insist, pick me, pick me and pearl me on a straw?

How can I be indoors with daylight lasting and lasting, with dusk igniting the smallest object enlarging it with colors that burn?

How can I live in two dimensions with my cute, cuddly, curios grandson crawling by my feet, laughing as he grabs a buttercup, the lid of a jam jar or my naked big toe? 

For in a blink it is over. The summer is gone. The strawberries are memory. And my grandson a grown up man............  


Quote from How to Be a Poet by Wendell Berry
Text and Photos © Grete S. Kempton

Angel Visits

Shun electric wire.  
Communicate slowly. Live  
a three-dimensioned life;  
stay away from screens.
- Wendell Berry

Last week I lived the poem, literally.
I stayed away from screens, 
and instead....

....walked barefoot in the grass with my grandson (As for the angel’s feet, please be patient, I’ll explain later.....)

....went sailing with my son and husband. (As for the angel, please be patient, I’ll explain.....)

.....made lots and lots of food, inviting family and friends for a birthday party (yes, mine :-) (As for the angel please.....well, you know....)

.....who in turn honored me with their presence. And presents ....:-) (As for the angel, need I say any more?)

I went to the exhibition opening of an artist friend, the Very Painter of Northern Norway. As you can see, a master of the sea.... (As for the....no need to repeat....)

In the café I was served the cutest tea bag.
As for the angels, let me explain with a quote:

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone. 
~George Elliot

This week I looked for angels. I found them in the ordinary. And in the extraordinary.


Quote from How to Be a Poet by Wendell Berry
Text and Photos © Grete S. Kempton
Painting © Karl Erik Harr

Accept What Comes

Accept what comes from silence.  
Make the best you can of it.

- Wendell Berry 

We moved in silence, my bicycle and I. We accepted what came.

He zigzagged the field with a football. Single handed he kept the game going by scoring as well as guarding the goal. I approached him as I would a deer grazing. Then -
“Did you watch the game between England and USA?
He nodded.
“Exciting?”
He nodded.
“Which team?” I said, “the US?”
He shook his head. “Wayne Rooney!”
“Me too,” I said. And nodded.

In the Castle grounds I walked among foreign voices. I wanted to be the traveller with new eyes. To see outside of the ordinary.

“Ghee, I can’t stand those cobbled stones!”
A lady with chunky thighs and tiny shoes wobbled through the courtyard.
“Me neither!” Her friend’s face was red and puffy.

“I told you it was this way!”
His voice was high, his body short. He wore a powder blue hat. It made him look just those millimeter taller. Even so, his wife still had to look down at him.

Then, as a dark force, a lanky man with a red scarf and a red umbrella. He rushed past, his overcoat dancing from side to side. I turned just in time to catch him leave into the light of the archway. 

I listened to the sounds of the city. I let the world enter me. The more I opened my eyes, the more the noise disappeared into the silence.

Quote from How to Be a Poet by Wendell Berry
Text and Photos © Grete S. Kempton

Hungry for Silence

Make a place to sit down.  
Sit down. Be quiet.  
- Wendell Berry

I was hungry for silence. 

I longed to listen where there were no words.

I wanted poetry in a quiet language.  

I went to the Botanical Garden.

I waited for words contained
in rhythm, in composition, repetition,
contrast, form. That moved along lines. 

Eventually I found them.

Or they found me.

(And then, again, I am curious. For where do you go to find silence?)
(I have hit the edit button, for I need to correct the above question. My asking steers more in the direction of  - What is contained within silence? Why seek it out?)

Quote from How to Be a Poet by Wendell Berry

Text and Photos © Grete S. Kempton

What My Imagination Told Me

When it's over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.
- Mary Oliver

I was not present when my father died. Yet I had so wanted to be there.

I struggled in the weeks and months to follow. Not least because circumstances had denied me the opportunity to be there when he departed.

So the loss was double. 

In the midst of my mourning a friend appeared. She floated into my life as a message in a bottle. I didn’t know her from before. I don’t know her now. She was one of those brief acquaintances that comes. And then leaves again.

We talked about this, about the other. Then I told her about my dad. How I grieved not just his death, but also missing that last farewell.

“If you had the choice, how would you have liked it to be?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Just imagine what could have happened. And then tell me about it.”

“What could have happened?” I said, and wondered what my preferences had to do with it. My dad was gone. I had not seen him off. Facts were facts.

“ Just play around with it,” she said, “just make it up.”

Reluctantly I let images appear. Of how I had wanted it to be. If there was a choice, that is.  
“I’m sitting in a chair,” I said, “next to his bed. I lay my hand on his forehead.”

There was a pause.

“And?”

I stretched my neck. Tried to sit more upright in the chair. Was this serious? Did she really want me to produce some make-belief story?

She spotted my bewilderment and tried to ease the situation. “You’re sitting in a chair,” she repeated. “You lay a hand on his forehead.”

“I’m not sure it was my hands,” I said. I could see a pair of hands, but I was confused as to who they belonged to. I looked down at my own fingers. As I spoke I felt the warmth of my dad’s skin against my palms. “Perhaps I’m holding his hand,” I said. “And then there is something else on his forehead.”

I tried to grasp what my imagination told me.

Gradually an image of a bird appeared.  A feathered creature perched on my dad’s forehead. A quiet little thing, patiently waiting. 

Then I could see the hands again, but were they my hands? No. They were not hands at all, they were wings. Then a pair of hands appeared, waving. My dad’s hands and the wings. The wings and his hands. The two images were one. The waving and the flapping, the flapping and the waving. I couldn’t discern which was which. But this I knew for sure. Here was my dad. Waving.

In the New York Times article “Write Till You Drop” Annie Dillard writes “You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”

“Strange seizures beset us,” she says, “ Frank Conroy loves his yo-yo tricks, Emily Dickinson her slant of light; Richard Selzer loves the glistening peritoneum, Faulkner the muddy bottom of a little girl's drawers visible when she's up a pear tree.”

Whenever I read this article I learn something about my astonishment. I stop and go back. What appears to amaze me again and again invariably involves the imagination. The strength of it. The intensity. For better or worse I may add, for I have also knowledge of the latter. I have experienced that reality is relative. And that facts come in many forms.

My father’s departure is no longer a trauma. Whenever I think of this moment, I see the hands and the wings. As the bird lifts, there is the flapping. And the waving.

And I realize my imagination is sacred, for it has far more knowledge than I will ever have.

(And then, of course, I am curious. For what is your astonishment?)

Mary Oliver, When Death Comes, from New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press).
 
Photos © Grete S. Kempton

The Choreographer of Life

“............The doctor said,
“There are things we can do which might give you time,
but we cannot cure you.” My father said,  
“Thank you.” And he sat, motionless, alone,  
with the dignity of a foreign leader.”
- Sharon Olds

When my father received the final message, this was what he had left to fight for - dignity.

I have shipped the oars, he said.

It was we who were not prepared to let him go.

Erin of “the tiny leaf” had me wondering. Do we own our bodies? Do we own our lives? Why are we so afraid of dying?

I have no answer but asking new questions. How can we not fear the unknown? It is only natural, like the naturalness of dying. Which is not natural at all. When my father died, I was angry. At life. At death. At him. At myself. But life is generous, it grants a multitude of perspectives. Little by little I grew into a new one like a dandelion forcing its way through tarmac.

Do we own our bodies, do we own our lives?

He will not leave till we give him the permission, I said. It was only hours before he died. He held on, held on, till the time had come. And we said, you may go now.

Or perhaps it wasn’t like that at all.

I was not present when my father left. Yet I had so wanted to be there.

As life, imagination is generous, It offered me a chance to go back.

There was a bird, there were wings flapping. They lifted off from my father´s head. As they did, the wings transformed into a pair of hands, waiving. The flapping and the waiving, the flapping and the waiving, I couldn’t see which was which. But as I bid farewell to a pair of wings, of hands waiving, I noticed the silence. The flapping of the wings. And the silence.

Do we own our bodies? Do we own our lives?

I have no idea. All I hear is a pair of wings flapping.
And then there is silence.

Sharon Olds, “His Stillness” from Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002. 

Photos © Grete S. Kempton