What is the point of a picture like this? I don't know. Can't even say why, but everytime I come across it, I pause a minute. Shadows and light, I guess, and the lure of the greenery. And it is a safe picture, the only kind. that doesn't get you in trouble any more. As much trouble.
That show "Serengeti" is getting to me. The show anthropomorphizes all the animals. I think. It seems that the animals DO have complex emotional lives. Maybe they aren't anthropomorphized at all. If we showed them drinking beer and eating Doritos, maybe that would be it. But nature sure doesn't give a shit about the individual. It is awful. Maybe the kids should watch it. Maybe they shouldn't. I don't know. Maybe only old people should be banned from viewing the ravages of the natural world. It is terrible.
I am an old bull. The young bulls want to run me out of the herd. That f'ing show tells me it is inevitable. No matter how tough you think you are. . . .
Maybe I'll just become a photographer of buildings. It is akin to nature photography. You know, the close up, big bokeh pictures of flowers or the telephoto shots of lions. People like the sort of thing. I'll anthropomorphize buildings. They have faces already. I'll give them a soul. And like everything else, they will be destroyed, eventually, by man or by time. There is a tragic sadness to it all that will have its own appeal. Apparently we like that sort of thing.
I should quit watching "Serengeti," but I probably won't.
ReplyDeleteI like both photos. They are poetic - in the way of - yes - shadows and light - which is really just the yin and yang right?
i have been writing draft poem using my photos and times from trips to Tanzania as inspo. I have written in so very long - so they are so rough but I'll share this one.
Elephant
“Elephant, beyond the fact that their size and conformation are aesthetically more suited to the treading of this earth than our angular informity, have an average intelligence comparable to our own. Of course they are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves -- nature having developed their bodies in one direction and their brains in another, while human beings, on the other hand, drew from Mr. Darwin's lottery of evolution both the winning ticket and the stub to match it. This, I suppose, is why we are so wonderful and can make movies and electric razors and wireless sets -- and guns with which to shoot the elephant, the hare, clay pigeons, and each other.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night
At the bottom
of Ngorongoro crater
the male Elders
float
big gray solitary ships
on the faraway grasses
having become
mostly useless to their herd
George says “This is the elephant graveyard
where the Bulls come to die.”
We sit with them
in the caldera – quiet
understanding things between us
things we never imagined we could know.
I know the epigram is long - but it's just so perfect. Bless that Beryl.
Are you watching "Serengeti"?
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