I am not a scenery and outdoors photographer.
Perhaps I do not have the patience to find the right angle and wait for that
split second when the light is just right. Yet, I cannot go anywhere without a
camera hanging from my neck.
During a memorable hike in the Cedar Breaks National
Park in Utah, I could not resist taking a few photos of the half-mile deep
geologic amphitheater. I used a 1970s Vivitar Series One 70-210 mm variable
zoom to reach down the amphitheater. And then a 1948 Rolleiflex TLR for a few
photos of subalpine forest trees surrounding the mouth of the amphitheater.
I was looking at these photos and wondering why I
took them. The few pine trees gathered in the otherwise barren amphitheater
were a striking contrast to the lush forest half a mile above. And, in a
strange turn of things, these two photos made me think about lines of poetry
from various poets.
First, the bristlecone pine tree in the forefront of
aspen trees reminded me of a line from Rumi:
“May be you are searching among the
branches, for what only appears in the roots.”
Was I? Was it why I could not figure out why I took
that photo?
Hiking such grand and open spaces often makes me
feel part of the space while at the same time very alone. Not lonely though, as
I feel like the countless others who have taken that hike before me have given
that space a name. It is a welcoming name – in fact I think of it as a room. A
vast room with no walls and no ceiling.
And that made me recall lines from the Swedish poet Tomas
Tranströmer who suggested in his “The Half-Finished Heaven” that:
“Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.”
So, was I a half-open door during that
hike? What was behind the half-closed door in me? Would I have opened my doors
wide if I knew they were half-open?
… Feeling alone makes me look around me.
Perhaps to check if I was really alone. But that impulse allows me to see more
than perhaps others notice. And what I notice stays in me, sometimes dormant
for a while. And then seemingly unrelated events or moments, such as looking at
photos I took and not understanding why I took them, make these dormant
impressions manifest themselves.
And that is when my favorite lines from
Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun made me
understand why I took these photos.
“Alone,
alone.
Glug glug
glug I drink gulps of light
and I
brush.
So I shower
and put myself back, alone.”
That was it – I was trying to put myself
back, alone.
June 21, 2016
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2016
