Blue / Fog

 

The Light Here

The light here

The light there

Captain, resting.


Lady, waiting patiently while I work:

Repose: Lady and Captain

I always feel a little more rested, a bit more at ease, when I watch my cats sleeping.  Or, as I should say, resting.  If you look closely, you can see that Lady's eyes are open and watching me take yet another picture, and Captain is resettling here atop my laptop, which I need to work . . . .

Light-Box

Lady and Light

Seeking, Sought

Navarro Beach:

February 15, 2016

Apotheosis

Kind sight for the weary or fraught swimmer below -- the waiting kayak --

Succor, or -- more colloquially -- Sofia:

Mendocino Morning

Looking out.

Looking back.

Cave-Time

Captain's Roost

Study time.

The Forest

I call this beauty.

Kelp forest beauty.

Vaporetto Visions

 

 

 

Early morning Venice.
On the way to the train station and Munich.

Edinburgh Light

Edinburgh was a bit of a puzzle for me, and it still is in terms of balancing or juggling what I like and don’t like about the city.  Edinburgh is a city and a wonderfully compact one, as anyone will tell you, and that’s appealing in the same way that San Francisco is so much more appealing than LA, say.  Or, perhaps, Seattle may be a better comparison, nowadays.  I’m not sure.

When I first saw Edinburgh, I was looking through a doubled pair of lens, Boswell’s and Ian Rankin’s, seeing both the 18th-century and Rebus’ cities intertwined.  And a third strand when I looked at the Castle and saw the winding streets and closes near the Castle was Dunnett’s strand, the Lymond of Crawford strand, for that one wasn’t as apparent as I had first hoped.  I had to look for the 16th and 17th century elements.   And, while I knew the Castle was on a volcanic outcropping and loomed over the New Town, say, I wasn’t quite prepared for the layering, the labyrinthian qualities, the sheer complex design and lack of design of a city that had grown over time on such an uneven surface.  I could understand Edinburgh metaphorically, suddenly, and that made both Dunnett and Rankin clearer to me.  A canny place.

I wanted to like Edinburgh, but I didn’t like the city at first.  Rain coming down didn’t help; anxiety about getting from airport to city centre to Dalkeith lodgings didn’t help either.  The height of the houses, of the buildings in general, surprised me and put me off.  The dirty gray and yellow and black stones of the houses also looked dingy, sooty, filthy in the cold, gray light too.  But then the sun flashed out through the clouds as the wind whipped about, and a brighter face shown through.  The sky in its brightness seemed higher than the sky at home, as if the sky were a ceiling however highly placed, but that’s exactly how the brightness of the light translated to me, illuminating the walls and the streets, catching the wetness of the past shower with a gleam, raising that ceiling as it were for a more expansive world.   

 I didn’t quite get all that, not in words, until I’d seen the brightness of the summer light in Northern England as well over York and Durham and Hadrian’s Wall.  And I don’t know if I am right about the light and the lifting up of the sky and of the spirit, but that’s how it felt and how it feels now in retrospect.

Agon: Truth vs. Error

"A central consideration is that a correct understanding of how, for instance, true factual beliefs are formed has no tendency to undermine them, while the opposite is typically true of ideological beliefs, for example. This is a truth--admittedly far from clear--at the heart of the Enlightenment enterprise."

--Bernard Williams, in a note to Shame and Necessity

McDuck Underwater and the Fields of Light

Sea-Caves: Mendocino

A Man and A Boat

Self-portrait #52.


An empty boat
will volunteer for anything.

--Harrison and Kooser