ENIGMA
“Sometimes the best art isn’t immediately obvious. You might not get it or even like it the first time you experience it. But, if you take a moment and give it another try, it might reach you in a way you never thought possible. It’s a bold move to see again, read again, listen again.”
---Erin McKeown, Musician

This quote, “The Way I See It #115” was on my Starbucks coffee cup this morning. The older I get the more certain I am that it’s important not to dismiss an idea or an experience outright without giving it another chance. The first time I saw photographs by Diane Arbus, I wondered how or why they were considered important. They seemed so ordinary...in an extraordinary sort of way; and over the years since that first experience with her work, I have found that it is exactly her way of treating ordinary things that makes her photographs important. Some of her images are so compelling that I can’t erase them from my memory. I’m still trying to figure out why Christo’s and Jeanne-Claude’s wrapping of the Reichstag was important. As I walked through that building in Berlin earlier this year, I tried to picture it cocooned in Christo’s sheets, and I didn’t “feel” anything. I’ve looked at the pictures of the wrapped Reichstag, and I don’t get it. But I’m not giving up. There are people out there whose judgement I trust who do “get it,” so I’ll keep trying. I don’t think anytime soon I’ll be ordering a piece of Christo’s fabric from his new Arkansas River Project in Colorado (souvenir swatches of his other projects are available on his WEB site), but I’ll give him and his thousands of admirers the benefit of the doubt. Mahler’s symphonies took a while for me to like when I was young, but over the years I have come to like them so much that I am drawn to listening again and again. I’ve read Faulkner’s “Light in August” every August for the past thirty years, and it’s better every time. I'm in the middle of it now, and I find I can almost recite some of the paragraphs; and I like the feeling, like being able to recite some of hamlet's speeches and Frost's "Dust of Snow" from memory. What a blessing memory is. How sad that it can also be a curse.


This is a close-up photo of the trunk of the eucalyptus tree in my back yard. Almost all of last year's outer skin has wrinkled and fallen away and been replaced by fresh new bark. A small piece of the old bark seems reluctant to let go. The first image is the same photo solarized.