8/3/2019 paint palette world: a note on the pictures

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Emerson & Thoreau

LLST 3080

Nicholas Birns

Riley Kellogg

646-413-3749

rileybk@gmail.comExtramural Project

Part 3: A word about the pictures

No photograph can truly invoke in the viewer, at second hand, the experience invoked in the witness by

any actuality. And I am not attempting here an artistic photographic project, where the photos could stand

on their own, and make their own statement. But they can, I hope, convey some of the almost bewildering

richness that one can experience if one really uses one's eyes, along with an open mind, and looks around.1

Once I decided to accompany the poem with illustrative images, the question ofwhich images arose.

And this was not simple; which photo of the Red-Whiskered Bulbul would best show off thesense I had of

the bird? Perhaps an illustration from a field guide to identification would be better, intended to show not an

individual but a type? In the end, I chose to illustrate the species I mention in the poem with multiple

images. I felt that this better captured the experience ofindividuals of a type, rather than presenting only the

type, or the abstracted Platonic Form, if you will. The experience of perceiving the individual does evoke

the abstract type, and conversely, the apprehension of the type invokes the perception that there are myriad

concrete examples of the type. And thus the experience goes round in circles.

It is easier to be open to feeling this engulfing, consuming multiplicity of forms when in a foreign

place, where the crops, the birds, the roads, houses, animals, flowers, newspapers, stores, trees, clothes,

cars, people, look different from those at home. One tends to stop seeing that which one sees every day. But

one would do well to remember that the surprise, the felicitous composition of scene, the well-wrought

form, the play of light and shadow, the sudden piercing insight that can spontaneously spring to mind, all

are there in the quotidian experience as much as in the exotic, if we are open to seeing them, or to being

seized by them. I particularly think of Emerson's description of how dreary, cold, colorless, and generally

unpleasant a night it was when, walking across the Common, he was gripped by the Spirit via his

observation of his surroundings, and felt glad to the point of fear. One hopes when reading that passage

that he was using one instance for illustration merely; that this was a not-uncommon experience for him.

Buell notes, however, that Emerson's thirty published volumes of private journals, notebooks, and letters

report no more than two or three such events, and that Emerson mournfully laments that he had too few

such moments.2 But we need to be open to the possibility if we are ever to have any at all.

1A disclaimer: not all of the photos are mine; in fact, only a few are. I love to take photographs, but did not, alas, capture in images

(I almost said on film, betraying my age) all that I would have wished to. Birds, especially, are notoriously uncooperative with

the casual photographer. Thus, many of the photos in this presentation are the work of others, downloaded from the internet,

chosen to reflect that which I encountered on the ride and wrote about in the poem.2The American Transcendentalists, p. 158

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In this picture essay, or picture sidebar, or illustration, or whatever it ought to be called, I hope to

convey in some small part the sense I had on those roads in Thailand on an August afternoon, of heightened

awareness to my surroundings; of my immersion in them, as if swimming through a viscous pool of being in

which we always swim, but of which we are so often insensible.