InfraRed Scenes

Last week I wrote about my afternoon adventure taking photos in infrared. I got the preliminary scans back today. They are the cheapest scans, and sloppy in some ways, so I'll have to wait until the negatives arrive to scan them better myself. In the meantime I was happy with a lot of what I saw already.

Springvilla

Springvilla, with a lot of lens flare. The lens I used is almost 70 years old, though, and I was shooting into the sun. Note how ghostly the American flag looks.

This is what I look like in infrared. Taken at Chewacla.

Creek at Chewacla

A familiar scene in Chewacla, a large projecting rock. Here it appears dark among bright foliage. In visible light it is bright among dark green foliage.

Another Chewacla scene.

Chewacla again.

This is Wauxamaka Creek, near my uncle's barn. Taken the next morning.

Wauxamaka Creek.

This is the end of Wauxamaka Creek, where it flows into the Euphabee Creek.

All photos were taken on Ilford SFX 200 film with a Hoya R72 infrared filter.

GAF

I need a Latin translator. Can anyone help me? I need to know how to say “Give a Fuck” in Latin. I need to know in the impossible event that I’m ever elected pope. It would be my motto. 

I’ll call it GAF for short. Sometimes it seems like nobody Gs AF about anyone or anything anymore. We adopt this jaded, ironic, cowardly emotional distance from people and things. Who can blame us? We’re bombarded with information, decisions, communications, stimuli. Every new thing produced by journalism has to appeal to our shock factor more than the last piece. Over time, we become numbed to it all. 

I noticed it yesterday. When I started my car, the Bluetooth from my phone immediately started playing the daily Mass readings from a podcast. Without thinking, I turned it off immediately. Being honest with myself, I realized that, in that moment, I could not GAF about the Word of God. How many people died to uphold the faith held in those words, and here I was tossing it away like garbage. It was just too much. 

Recently I did GAF. When I was in church on Sunday, I thought about my Uncle Patrick who died after trying to kill himself, which was more than ten years ago, and suddenly I began to cry. What was that feeling in my chest? What was that moisture in my eye? Could it be that I was giving a fuck? Yes, I was. I was sad. I was angry. “I have to say, Uncle Pat, I give a fuck about you. It makes me angry to think about what happened to you or that no one cares. It makes me angry that no one talks about you anymore. No one seems to think about you or miss you. No one seems to care that you ever existed. I give a fuck about you, man. And I don’t know what to do about my giving a fuck, but right now I’ll just kneel in this pew and cry.”

It was a strange, hard feeling. Giving a fuck is hard work.

So please, Lord, be patient with me as my hard heart softens and relearns how to GAF.

Divine Mercy Sunday

One of my favorite stories from Antiquity is the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, as told by Ovid. It is a story of forbidden love between two young lovers, who find a way to communicate through a crack in the wall that separates their two houses. They decide to meet at a mulberry tree, against the command of their parents, but due to a misunderstanding similar to that in Romeo and Juliet, the story ends in a double suicide. 

One thing I love about this story is how Ovid explains how they found the crack in the wall. In the translation I have, “Love is a finder, always.” I think in other translations it is something like “Love finds a way” or “Love will find a way.”

Pyramus and Thisbe found a way, and nothing could stop them from being together, not even the fear of death. 

I like to relate this also to the mystery of the Incarnation and the death of Christ. Love will find a way: but its opposite is also true. Where there is no way, there is no love. It is easy to imagine that there is no way that we could possibly be saved. God is perfect. We are sinners. There is a vast chasm between us and God, as was always told to me in Sunday school growing up. 

According to justice, or at least the human misunderstanding of justice, there could be no salvation, because there could be no way that God’s necessary grace might be due to us. 

For God, who is so great, to fall for us, who are so unworthy, would be the ultimate in forbidden love.

And yet, if God did not find a way, a crack in the wall that might let his voice through to us, calling us to meet him at the tree, where he would die for love of us, die of grief in seeing our death in sin, then we might justly wonder if God really is Love, or if he really loved us as he said he did. Because Love will find a way, and without a way, there is no love. 

And Love did find a way. Love became a young lover, and made himself capable of death, so that he might fear it, and overcoming fear of death, bore the wrath of the Father and died for love of us to make a way. 

Love is a finder, always. 

Blessings of Civic Presence

A few weeks ago, a friend was telling me how, at the old Catholic church in Auburn, after Mass, as people were gathered outside, cars would sometimes drive by and the people inside would yell insults at the church attendees. That was the old church, which was on one of the major streets downtown, with constant traffic at close distance, and the church opened directly out on the street. 

I was thinking about this as I was walking in downtown Opelika this morning, and noted how much of a civic presence the First Baptist Church has there. There is the Lee County Courthouse on one side of the main square, with its tall steeple, and on the south side of the square is the Baptist church, a huge white neoclassical complex with its own rival steeple. The church is not merely an institution of private worship; it is almost a public civic monument. The grounds of this church even enshrine the city’s Confederate memorial, a stone obelisk topped with a Confederate soldier toting a rifle. 

Contrast this with the new Catholic church in Auburn, which was built on cleared forest a mile north of downtown. This church doesn’t open onto the street; it opens into an interior hall. Few people stand outdoors after Mass, much less the conspicuously-vested clergy, and even if they did, there would be a vast expanse of parking lot between the doors of the church and the nearest street. And even if the church opened onto this street, it is a street where the cars drive so fast that they wouldn’t have much time to take notice of anything. And even if there were pedestrians, they may only be the occasional jogger on the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street.

There will never be anyone to drive by and yell anti-Catholic slurs at Auburn’s Catholics after Mass. We have retreated out of the civic sphere into the suburbs, into a private oasis separated from fast-moving disengaged motorists by an expanse of trees and lawn and ditch and asphalt.

Losing that 60s-era cupcake spaceship downtown was no loss, but the presence there was. At least they are building a Catholic student chapel closer to downtown. Hopefully it will be designed so that the students and clergy are blessed with the inconvenience of standing by the street after Mass so that they might be persecuted. 

Outdoor Adventures

Yesterday, I got off early to run errands in Opelika. Afterward, the sky cleared up, and I loaded Ilford SFX 200 film in my Hasselblad. This is a black and white film with sensitivity extended into the infrared. So, I used my infrared filter and took some photos out at Springvilla.

Infrared photography is still a bit mysterious to me. I have no idea how the photos will turn out. All I kept in mind was that blue skies and reflections of blue skies will look black, and green foliage or reflections of green foliage will appear white. That, and it's not easy to bring invisible light into focus, so I shot at the smallest aperture possible (about f/32).

After Springvilla, I went to Chewacla, and hiked and took photos there until sunset. I was surprised how few people were there on such a fine day. I saw a guy fishing, and another guy sitting pensively at a picnic table overlooking a valley. That was about it.

This morning before work, I waded through Wauxamaka Creek all the way from my uncle's barn until the creek runs into Euphabee Creek. The Euphabee Creek is actually the same creek as Chewacla Creek, only thirty or so miles downstream. I finished my roll of infrared film and sent it off today to be developed.

Here are some (visible light) photos I took at Chewacla recently. All were taken on the same day with Kodak Ektar 100 film.

For this one, I placed the camera on a rock in the middle of the creek, and set the aperture at f/32, allowing for the longer exposure.

I like the Hasselblad, but sometimes I'm not sure how to compose things in square format. I think landscapes lend themselves more to wider formats.

'Thalia', 'Diamond Ring', 'Trevithian'

The daffodils are almost out of season. Only 'Goose Green', 'Aspasia', 'Elvira', and 'Twin Sisters' remain, and I'm not even sure the last two will bloom at all. 'Aspasia' is already in bloom, with photos to follow, and I suspect 'Goose Green' will begin flowering in the next few days.

Here are other recent daffodils:

'Diamond Ring', a hoop-petticoat daffodil

'Diamond Ring'

'Diamond Ring'

'Thalia'

'Thalia'

'Trevithian'

I didn't grow it, but I found it in Tuskegee National Forest. It's Iris verna.

Masculinity and Beauty

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine said that he didn't think men were drawn to beauty as much as women. This surprised me, with him especially, because I always thought of him as someone with a longing for beauty. Maybe what he meant is that women desire to be beautiful more than men, and to this I would agree. But that's not the same thing.

Whenever I've interacted with women in my life (especially my mom and sister growing up), I've thought that women don't understand beauty like men do. It's almost as if, when they use the word, they mean something totally different than men do. The fact that so many women can't empathize with men's tendency to have wandering eyes makes me wonder that these women possibly have never recognized beauty in anything they saw, because once you have an encounter with beauty, you look for it everywhere and at all times, and it takes real discipline and self-control to practice custody of the eyes. It can be a real struggle for men seeking virtue and purity of heart.

I think that beauty is attracted to masculinity and masculinity is attracted to beauty. The more masculine a man is, the more he desires to possess what is beautiful, and the more beautiful something is, the more it yearns to be possessed by a masculine man. I think it's interesting that heaven itself is called the Beatific Vision, as if God, who is Beauty itself, desires to make Himself beheld in the end. Men long to see the face of God, and God longs to have his face seen by men, so much that he became man and died to make it possible.

I think that the neglect of beauty in Catholic art and liturgy is a direct result of the increased feminine influence in the Church's leadership (or the absence of masculine leadership).

I know I might be wrong about this. I think it would be interesting to read what a woman thinks about beauty: i.e. what she finds beautiful and how she knows it's beautiful and why she is drawn to it.

Or, if women aren't drawn to beauty like men are, what might they have a keener sense for than men? Perhaps goodness. (I don't know; I'm not a woman).

I was thinking of these things today, because I was making a list of what I want in life, and what I would need to do to achieve it, and beauty kept coming to my mind. What must I do in order to be worthy to behold beauty with purity of heart? Whom should I become? And the answer - a man in the fullest sense.