watching Hells Kitchen
clouds and meaninglessness
I set off with a sigh. Above me the entire sky had opened. What a few hours earlier had been plain, dense cloud cover now took on landscape-like formations, a chasm with long flat stretches, steep walls, and sudden pinnacles, in some places white and substantial like snow, in others gray and as hard as rock, while the huge surfaces illuminated by the sunset did not shine or gleam or have a reddish glow, as they could, rather they seemed as if they had been dipped in some liquid. They hung over the town, muted red, dark-pink, surrounded by every conceivable nuance of gray. The setting was wild and beautiful. Actually everyone should be in the streets, I thought, cars should be stopping, doors should be opened and drivers and passengers emerging with heads raised and eyes sparkling with curiosity and a craving for beauty, for what was it that was going on above our heads?
However, a few glances at most were cast upward, perhaps followed by isolated comments about how beautiful the evening was, for sights like this were not exceptional, on the contrary, hardly a day passed without the sky being filled with fantastic cloud formations, each and every one illuminated in unique, never-to-be-repeated ways, and since what you see every day is what you never see, we lived our lives under the constantly changing sky without sparing it a glance or a thought. And why should we? If the various formations had had some meaning, if, for example, there had been concealed signs and messages for us which it was important we decode correctly, unceasing attention to what was happening would have been inescapable and understandable. But this was not the case of course, the various cloud shapes and hues meant nothing, what they looked like at any given juncture was based on chance, so if there was anything the clouds suggested it was meaninglessness in its purest form.
Knausgård, Karl Ove. My Struggle. Translated by Don Bartlett. 1st Archipelago books edition. Vol. 1. 6 vols. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2012.
The photos were made around the same time Karl Ove was living in Bergen: I was teaching at KHiB (now the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen). Probably no need to explain the resonance of this particular passage to other entries on this blog.
watching Hells Kitchen
watching Hells Kitchen
watching Hells Kitchen
watching Hells Kitchen
watching Hells Kitchen
watching Hells Kitchen
watching Hells Kitchen
[ED: The far horizon is a portion of Grand Mesa at over 10,000 ft, and the side of the mesa facing the viewer, an area characterized by numerous landslides, is called “Hells Kitchen.” This is the view from my kitchen.]
watching Hells Kitchen
[ED: If you could see the far horizon, it is comprised of a portion of Grand Mesa at over 10,000 ft, and the side of the mesa facing the viewer, an area characterized by numerous landslides, is called “Hells Kitchen.” This is the view from my kitchen. Another note, my property sits on a large alluvial fan (many tens of sq mi) descending from the Mesa and fueled by Surface Creek. The slope of the fan is minus 10-12 degrees from horizontal, as demonstrated from right to left in the photo.]
watching Hells Kitchen
[ED: The far horizon is a portion of Grand Mesa at over 10,000 ft, and the side of the mesa facing the viewer, an area characterized by numerous landslides, is called “Hells Kitchen.” This is the view from my kitchen.]
watching Hells Kitchen
[ED: The far horizon is a portion of Grand Mesa at over 10,000 ft, and the side of the mesa facing the viewer, an area characterized by numerous landslides, is called “Hells Kitchen.” This is the view from my kitchen. Another note, my property sits on a large alluvial fan (many tens of sq mi) descending from the Mesa and fueled by Surface Creek. The slope of the fan is minus 10-12 degrees from horizontal, as demonstrated from right to left in the photo.]
monsoon, Outer Loop
traversing Monument Valley
sky 09, hawk moon ridge
watching particular parts of the sky over time
Day 47 – sketch 1
yup
When the great earth, abandoning day, rolls up the deeps of the heavens and the universe, a new door opens for the human spirit, and there are few so clownish that some awareness of the mystery of being does not touch them as they gaze. For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars – pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time. Fugitive though the instant be, the spirit of man is, during it, ennobled by a genuine moment of emotional dignity, and poetry makes its own both the human spirit and experience.
. . .
Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, to-day’s civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.
Beston, H., 1976. The outermost house: a year of life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, Harmondsworth, NY: Penguin.
more (night) skies from Hawk Moon Ridge
A raging thunder and lightning storm builds to the far west late in the evening. Then, well after dark, it comes on inexorably, way driven through constant growing grumbling rumble, and a bright sky from Light deep within low dense cloud. Some long exposures, hand-held, in almost complete darkness (though this was rare in the instance of the almost constant lightning!) With a tinged glow from the east — Grand Junction’s quite shameful Light pollution. I wish they could follow the lead of Flagstaff’s dark skies initiative.
back in the wilderness, watching the sky
watching the sky
watching the sky
monsoon clouds
monsoon clouds
Regent & High Street
Out the bedroom window, but just didn’t have the mojo to make any decent timelapse works in Oz. The equipment available at the Uni was just too cumbersome to carry around. To be sure, there were some absolutely fantastic skies, I often watched them with great pleasure: stopping any forward motion so as not to come to some physical catastrophe like stepping in front of a car, or falling into the creek.
48-Stunden Neukoellen 2010 : flickering wastelands IV
Echo Park, watching
Sand Canyon transect
Try a couple more timelapse shots, but they are unsatisfactory with all the technical drawbacks. Stability, resolution, quality, etc. Nothing to be done about it without a $10K investment, or more.
Instead, after the driving rain all night, start a fire in the morning, in the rain, but gradually it tapers off, though still very cloudy. The guy who came in late yesterday in a Ford Explorer with a Rocket Box on top left at some point in the morning. Gah. No place to go! He’ll surely end up in a ditch somewhere.
more “Sand Canyon transect”
Pool Creek Canyon, watching
CLUI: Day Twenty-Eight — more changes
CLUI: Day Twenty-Eight — more changes
CLUI: Day Twenty-Three — sky changes
CLUI: Day Twenty-Two — sky changes
CLUI: Day Nineteen — SWAT
Today, upon waking, there are two buses parked to the west of the hangar, a bit later, numerous SUV’s begin to pull up along with several official SWAT command vehicles and their teams from Winnemucca, Elko, and Wendover. It’s SWAT play. How to deal with a bus-load of terrorists/hostages or so. Several squads are lectured and engage in practice drills for the morning. I had originally been told by the airport management folks that there were going to be live-fire exercises at South Base, so we were surprised when this began to unfold in the back yard.
There is the fascination of playing Army, recalled from early days in the Maryland woods beyond the pond, beyond the corn fields, into unknown territories of abandoned farmhouses and hunting camps. Learning to make the sound of a gun and of explosions. And here, older boys, men, with very fancy toys, playing for their lives and the lives of their charges. Learning to stay alive, to save life. Learning to kill, or be killed. Learning to protect the innocent and kill the profane.
CLUI: Day Eleven — sky changes
CLUI: Day Ten — transit
A forced migration to the Holy City of Moroni. Tire issues—the damaged rear cycle rim from the red clay mishap in southern Utah and the front-end alignment of the truck. Locate appropriate places to effect the repairs before coming over. A monstrous wind from the south dogs the transit across the flats of the Great Salt Lake Desert on I-80 and whips up a blinding dust storm in the middle and at the eastern fringe at the Kennecott Copper mine’s massive tailings dump.
Salt Lake City is quiet, wide empty streets, pedestrians are frequently toting suitcases-on-wheels. There are bicycle lanes and mid-block pedestrian crosswalks with baskets at either terminus with fluorescent flags for folks to carry when crossing.
Retreat when the work is done and after lousy lunch Reuben at The Bakery. Retreat looks like this (yes, cars and trucks in my lane do retreat forwards, I am, it seems, the slowest car on the road):
solstice II
sketches from the winter
solstice I
fragments
simplistic sketches within the deep darkness of the Icelandic winter; evidence of some hand-wringing angst; and then watching a blustering and dour day of brief blue December twiLight go by all too rapidly.
wind of glass (v2)
Looking to the future:
out to sea
a wind of glass
unseen
drives moving waters. salt spray raised. Here in a place of
frozen days. A slow flash, solid sense: obsidian. And I
take what. I am able. Out of hearing air. Sea sounds swollen low. Frenzied finger palm tree invites.
And hair cuts
the wind of glass. Solid smoothness. conchoidal bluster, ruffled.
Featured in stolen eyesight: reflected clouds.
out to sea
a wind of glass
unseen
drives moving waters. salt spray raised. Here in a place of
frozen days. A slow flash, solid sense: obsidian. And I
take what. I am able. Out of hearing air. Sea sounds swollen low. Frenzied finger palm tree invites.
And hair cuts
the wind of glass. Solid smoothness. conchoidal bluster, ruffled.
Featured in stolen eyesight: reflected clouds.