La Macchina Fotografica

In a scratchy dream I learn to fly. In effortless propulsion I glide through air and space. “Why haven’t I tried this before?” I ask myself. Somehow I reach an oasis of palms. Lanky and swaying, they acknowledge my arrival. They are rooted, yet free—something I make note of as I land on my feet and look up.

In my altered state I realize that these palms are familiar. They are the palms of Larkspur. I stay for awhile, something akin to a picnic. Then I propel myself off again into the pearly fog of my dream. I soon awaken in my bed, now firmly tethered by the gravity, space, and time. For a split second I wonder why I can no longer fly. Then my cat whacks me.

When one embraces a place in a dream, its reality changes. It becomes hyperreal, of a different dimension. Having forgotten the rules of dream-flying I place my feet on the floor and put on a fresh pair of socks. New socks in the morning are one of life’s great pleasures. The cat nudges me and prances off. In that moment I decide to visit the Larkspur palms, which are within walking distance, in the town next door.

I have admired the palms for years, mostly passing by in my truck. “I must photograph them someday,” I say. During my walk on this day I approach them from a different perspective, one of a freshly-minted dream. I look up and they sway at me just like they did the night before. I wonder, for a moment, if the dream is still on. My feet, feeling the somber weight of gravity, tell me otherwise.

No, the dream has surely left. But, it has given me a gift of insight and I see in a less-rigid way. My day to photograph the palms has arrived. I seize the moment and find a tiny smidgen of bliss…

The equinox has passed. As days lengthen into summer the light surrounds the house with its daily dance. Every room is a stage, each one having its hour of performance as the sun moves from spot to spot. No two days are ever alike. No two performances are the same. The only thing certain is the sun itself. It is impossible to escape the sun inside or out during its peak months. Why even try?

A nap is a respite from the summer glare—as long as there isn’t a heat wave. Waking up in sweltering heat imparts a dark mood that is hard to shake. I’d rather be around a crowd of sleep-deprived toddlers than one adult who’s awoken into sweltering heat after an afternoon snooze. Luckily, here in Northern California, the heat waves are rare and most often the shimmering light of an arriving fog bank is what we find upon awakening. Waking up to impending fog is the best feeling there is.

It is a moment of deliciousness to look at the ceiling and find the dancing shadows and sparkles of light. The kiss of the fog bank diffuses the light’s sharp angles, softening the amorphous shapes into a dream. The dream extends to the top of the room and then beyond. Eyes focus and then they don’t. The allure of hypnotic dance pulls me back into an altered state of awareness. A black cat sighs nearby. Industry can wait. The dream continues.

Every walk has moments of insight—fissures in the quotidian facade. One step, another step, a drone of steps. The crunch of earth under foot is like the shaman’s drum. The drum beats and magic swirls with the wind. Dreams give us clues. In dreams one lifts off the ground when walking. Walking becomes floating. Floating turns to soaring. Waking up after a soaring dream is ever a disappointment, as if being awake were actually the dream instead.

Back to our walk. On the trail, as we are rendered receptive, we start to truly see along the way. Each tree is a unique character in a forest tale, each bird an animated storyteller. Each and every thing becomes something unique and alive, yet all part of a sublime oneness. As we tire we yield ever more and that surrender brings a heady euphoria. Endorphins and oxygen. A walk might be as good as life gets.

With most every walk there are trees. Most trees are part of the giant gestalt, the hike’s backdrop—it is impossible to take in them all. Then, a startling and singular tree comes from nowhere. If you are lucky, it takes away your breath. It speaks to you, reminds you of some person in your life, or of a person who does not yet exist. If you have no schedule you might sit at the tree and sketch it. Or maybe talk to it. If you are a photographer, the tree is like the world’s most gorgeous fashion model. You circle it and photograph it from every angle. When it is time to move on, you and tree exchange something ineffable. Two living beings sharing an eternal moment.

I came across the tree in today’s photo during a hike at Pt. Reyes National Seashore. Among the thousands of trees I saw that day, it was this tree that spoke to me. I only had a brief moment with it. It was bent and gnarled. The imprint of the elements were built into its every twist. The tree’s bluff was exposed to the ubiquitous wind and fog of Pt. Reyes. The tree seemed yielding to these elements but unbroken. Bent but resolved. The tree is now a dream in my memory, forever moody and alive.

A few hours ago I’d woken from one of those long dreams that consumes the night like a glowing-hot fever. Before retiring for the evening, I’d put the finishing touches on today’s image. My work has been getting darker as of late, both literally and emotionally. While working on it, the image felt dreamlike, a journey into shadow. It must have activated something because the dream was very much as you see it in the photo.

The dream was a long hike in the dark, a path poorly illuminated and filled with animals of the wild. Meaty stuff. It makes me think of the artistic quest. That too has beasts in the dark, lurking in the shadow. Like the rambling dream, the artistic process has a life of its own and is stubborn to change. Things tend to recur until they are worked through to some kind of completion. The process peers into shadows and under trees, uprooting settled topsoil like a pig looking for truffles.

The artist is always looking for juiciness in the process, the moments when nerves are raw, senses are keen, and dreams are lucid. They are all too brief, as if the universe reveals itself and then folds the unconcealed over, back into the depth of the grand mystery. It is hardly summer but the following quote by Lysander from A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems apropos.

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say, — Behold!
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.

Dreams and photographs are of the same stuff. The surrealists knew this. To me, the act of photography is like dreamwalking. Tapping into the dream state while walking around with a camera isn’t as hard as it might sound. The creative process itself is part dream, part reality, part substance, part essence.

A photograph is a facsimile of a moment, something elusive whose tracings were caught. But, it is hardly real.
That’s the thing that snags people. The photo is so convincing, they think it’s reality. But, like the quantum physicist’s measuring device that changes the nature of the matter it’s testing, the camera changes the scene it is capturing. The camera changes reality and then turns it into a photochemical or photoelectric reaction. A tiny miracle.

There’s a lot of handwringing going on about the digital manipulations of photographs. And it is true that if one is passing off photographic manipulations as cold-hard fact, then there are ethical violations at hand. But, who ever said that photography were reality? It looks more like reality in a representational kind of way, but it still reminds me more of dreams than of the realtime world I encounter on this earthly plane.

There are these places in dreams that are larger than life. Shadow worlds of caricature. Today’s image reminds me of a singular moment in a dream where all stands still and we are left to wonder about where we are and of what we are. I love black & white for its romantic distillations. A fundamental question: do you dream in color or in black & white?