Shadows of the Season

Photo taken 11/20/20 while walking the dog near the Merrimack in Concord

Shadows of the Season
On a cold November afternoon

Looking out at this backwater channel to the Merrimack

The last leaves of autumn are casting their muted colors on the still water

While the grasses, bleached almost white, anticipate the starkness of what is to come.

A lone gray birch tree, scraggly and bent from the rigors of living on the edge

Hovers over the fading landscape like a mother hen, wings spread,

Attempting to shelter her brood from the inevitable:

Death's looming dark shadow.

Are we becoming a shell of our former selves?

Photo of deserted amusement park, Old Orchard Beach,  11/13/10

Thoughts about our country:  if we don’t want to end up a desolate shell like this amusement park, we need to start leaning on something more substantial than consumerism.

Nature's Hieroglyphics: The Origin of All Human Language

Leaves reflected on beech tree trunk
Photo taken in my woods, 10/26/10

Breath a soul into the newly formed...

Sunrise over Jenness Pond 10/27/10

“Be pleased yet once again to come

 down and breathe a soul into 

the newly formed, fragile film

 of matter with which this day 

is to be freshly clothed.” 

(Quote by French paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin)

Photograph taken at Cape Cod summer of 2010

The Hidden Hand of the Marketplace

The Hidden Hand of the Marketplace

Fishermen in the beginning of time

Sacrificed a symbol of themselves to The Great Spirit

Praying for the welfare of the fish

Who sustained them and gave their life meaning

Within The Great Web of Life.

Fishermen at the end of time

Sacrifice all the fish to the great god of Moolah

Praying to get paid back enough bucks

To keep afloat and survive another month

Without being washed up on the beach with the fish–

Yet another victim of the Hidden Hand of the Marketplace.

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This photomontage consists of three photographs, two of which I took this summer: The first is of a blue fisherman glove that washed up on the beach at Fort Foster in Kittery. The second is a wild ocean shot I took on Cape Cod. I got permission to use the third photo, the image of the fish skeleton, from Dreamstime.com.

I’m sorry about the gender bias.  It just didn’t fit the cadence to say fisher people or people who fish or people who live from the sea. And alternating fisherman and fisherwoman would have changed the meaning.

In the end, everything returns to the earth

This photomontage is my second attempt to tell a story about my connection to a certain sugar maple tree. The first attempt was my last blog entry. You can see it by scrolling down or by clicking here: photograph with accompanying essay.  While the first image is visually accurate, it does not connect to the complex array of memories and emotions that this tree brings to life in me. Hence, my second attempt: the collage that you see above, which merges 15 different photographs, some taken for this project and some from the past.

I took several photographs of different trunks which had fallen off the sugar maple tree and were strewn around in various degrees of decomposition. To me they represents various stages of life. One of the trunks (seen at the bottom left of the collage) is turning to compost, ready to support lady slippers and maple flowers producing new life, while the leaves (on the bottom right) represent the obvious, the autumn of life.  Likewise, the photo on the left of me as a young child present the spring of life while the current self portrait represents again, the autumn of life.

Along the top half of the collage I wanted to show the stages of the old maple's life. Not having old photos of this tree, I took photographs of other maple trees which, in my mind's eye, looked like my old maple, going back in time, at various times of the year.

Finally, I needed a way to make a transition from the forest floor to the towering maples above. I chose to use photographs taken of stonewalls from elsewhere on my property; they not only fit seamlessly into the scene but are appropriate since I used to build them.

I merged three photographs of stonewalls in various degrees of disarray to show a progression from the rigid order of civilization to the flowing entropy of Mother Nature. Or, to put it differently: to show in the end that everything returns to the earth.

My enduring friend

My Enduring Friend

When I was eight or nine, I helped my father clear a path to the top of the land across from our house, land I later inherited. The land had been clear cut, almost denuded, a few years before by the previous owner to extract all possible value before selling the land to my father.

Almost every large tree was cut.  That’s why, a huge, ancient sugar maple tree, sitting on the boundary line at the very top of our property, commandeered my attention.  The tree also stood out in my young mind because I found it gross: deformed, decayed...dying. The old sugar maple didn’t make much of an impression at the time. After all, it was just a useless, old tree, soon to be dead and gone.

But I was proven wrong. 

Since then, I have walked that path to the top of my land thousands of time, and slowly over time, that old tree has become my friend.  It is not the same tree I first saw, but yet, it still stands proudly alive: A monument both to the tenacity of life and to the foibles of the human imagination.

Imagination is not a simple thing.

Imagining a tree as a young child is not the same as imaging a tree entering old age. It is a qualitatively different kind of imagination. A French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, wrote about these two forms of imagination, calling one formal imagination and the other material imagination. He believed that these two kinds of imagination were at work both in nature and in the human mind.

According to Bachelard, formal imagination in nature creates fleeting beauty such as flowers while the material imagination produces that which is both primitive and eternal. “In the mind, the formal imagination is fond of novelty, picturesquenss, variety, and unexpectedness in events, while the material imagination is attracted by the elements of permanency present in things.”

So it is with my old friend.  No longer is she the body-beautiful goddess, lush and symmetrically rounded, stretching sensually toward the sky. No longer do nineteenth century farmers visit her early each spring to tap her vital fluids. Yet, while she may no longer appear beautiful and useful in the formal, convention sense of the imagination, she magnificently endures, “in being, both primitive and eternal.”

The older I get, the more I value my walks up the path cut so long ago by my father and I to visit my dear old friend, my teacher, my initiator into the mysteries of old age.

XXX

Jean Stimmell ©2010 (424 word draft)

Photograph of my old Sugar Maple taken 9/25/10