Choice & Distance
by Leif Einarson and friends
Last updated a long time ago
Choice & Distance: A Literary Focus On Photography
Sight is a curious sense. We live in an age of the eye, in a visual and textual culture that is different from the oral cultures of the past. This website is just one example: it is full of engaging photos, intricate networks of links and articles that our eyes absorb completely, without any sounds, touches, or tastes. Sight grants us so many choices about how we perceive the world around us. William Blake entranced my imagination several years ago with the idea that we do not simply receive the world as it is through our senses - each of us actively shapes it in our own ways and creates it in our own ways by looking at it, listening to it, feeling it. Blake's challenge to us is this:
"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."
It is by such choices of the imagination that we create the depths and meanings of the world we live in. Technology is an extension of our imagination. The camera, for instance, grants us a lot of choices about how we shape the world around us: the camera lets you hold infinite focal points in your hand, and it can make an entire world out of a single grain of sand. The challenge is in the choice.
The camera, however, also grants us a lot of distance. In fact, the camera does not just grant distance: it demands it. Both the sense of sight and the camera only work with distance: you cannot read this text if your nose is touching the screen. Likewise, a camera needs distance to its subject: some light, however little, needs to be able to travel a certain distance, however small. Unlike hearing, touch, and taste, it is sight that actually needs a certain amount of distance to function. Photography is, in a way, the art of manufacturing that distance.
The camera, however, also grants us a lot of distance. In fact, the camera does not just grant distance: it demands it. Both the sense of sight and the camera only work with distance: you cannot read this text if your nose is touching the screen. Likewise, a camera needs distance to its subject: some light, however little, needs to be able to travel a certain distance, however small. Unlike hearing, touch, and taste, it is sight that actually needs a certain amount of distance to function. Photography is, in a way, the art of manufacturing that distance.
Pentax DA18-55mm @55mm; f/5.6; 1/10sec.; ISO400
Choice and distance: these are two very interesting frameworks with which to shape the world. There are infinite spaces and lives in this world, and I enjoy having a camera with me on my explorations. I enjoy it because of the choices it gives me, and because of the distances it constantly reminds me of.
Last year I spent the summer studying in Iceland & traveling throughout Scandinavia. I study Icelandic, particularly Old Icelandic and Old English, and the fantastic mythological narratives and legendary sagas we have access to only through these languages. I love the sounds of the languages, and you may even notice I have a tendency towards alliterative structure in my prose, a feature I seem to have picked up from prolonged exposure to Old English alliterative poetry. But as much as I love the sounds of the languages, I readily admit that most of my love for the languages and the narratives is actually for the places and cultures that are evoked by them. Iceland, Scandinavia, and the British Isles are at once beautiful and stark places. And the places seem much more real and magically rich to me because of the historical distance that the medieval languages and narratives create.
Studying Medieval Literature and Culture presents many challenges. Just one of these is the distance we constantly face in trying to understand extinct languages and ancient cultures. The societies and belief structures that I read about on a daily basis are only alive to us today through partial remnants over great distances of time. Yet arts and crafts and technologies (like a poem, a photograph or a camera, for instance) are always key features of cultures that can allow them to speak beyond their time and place. Listening actively to those few remaining features is much like photography - a practice of selective focus and long exposure.
Last year I spent the summer studying in Iceland & traveling throughout Scandinavia. I study Icelandic, particularly Old Icelandic and Old English, and the fantastic mythological narratives and legendary sagas we have access to only through these languages. I love the sounds of the languages, and you may even notice I have a tendency towards alliterative structure in my prose, a feature I seem to have picked up from prolonged exposure to Old English alliterative poetry. But as much as I love the sounds of the languages, I readily admit that most of my love for the languages and the narratives is actually for the places and cultures that are evoked by them. Iceland, Scandinavia, and the British Isles are at once beautiful and stark places. And the places seem much more real and magically rich to me because of the historical distance that the medieval languages and narratives create.
Studying Medieval Literature and Culture presents many challenges. Just one of these is the distance we constantly face in trying to understand extinct languages and ancient cultures. The societies and belief structures that I read about on a daily basis are only alive to us today through partial remnants over great distances of time. Yet arts and crafts and technologies (like a poem, a photograph or a camera, for instance) are always key features of cultures that can allow them to speak beyond their time and place. Listening actively to those few remaining features is much like photography - a practice of selective focus and long exposure.
Author on the south coast of Iceland
(photo credit: Laura Zabele)
(photo credit: Laura Zabele)
While touring through Scandinavia last year I got to see many of the original artifacts from the period from A.D. 500 through to A.D. 1000, a period closely associated with Beowulf and many fascinating Medieval Germanic cultures and narratives. The intricacy and artistry of these remnants are amazing - the interweaving of animals and bands that resembles some Celtic art and yet seems quite unique in its own right. There are also the amazing pattern-welded sword-blades that are so prominent in Beowulf and several Old Icelandic sagas: these blades have, in some cases, survived in such good condition that one can still see the intricate wave-like patterning on the sword, a sign of how strips of soft iron and hard steel were welded together with great care and greater skill, making a blade that is both flexible and amazingly sharp. Polished reproductions of these blades create an impression of distance and life inside a solid piece of metal. Like snakes of sunlight playing within the refractions of a shallow pool of water, the pattern-welded surface reveals the depth within the blade's construction and constitution. Just as today we live in a visual world, dominated by the textuality of websites and the images of cameras, so in Beowulf's day culture was much more oral and also highly focused on identifications, for example, between a warrior and his sword.
Above: inside the Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki, Finland)
Pentax DA18-55mm @35mm; f/5.6; 1/90sec.; ISO400
Pentax DA18-55mm @35mm; f/5.6; 1/90sec.; ISO400
Above: Myvatn, Northern Iceland
Pentax DA18-55mm @55mm; f/6.7; 1/125sec; ISO100
Pentax DA18-55mm @55mm; f/6.7; 1/125sec; ISO100
Like a photographer focused on the contrasts of light and darkness, so much of the poetry, art and craft of this period draws on contrasts between shadows and light, the dark and bright sides of life and death. Especially in the autumn of the year, as the leaves burn their life-force out into bright oranges, yellows and reds, I wonder at the various aesthetics and understandings of life and death. As we are well aware of today, there are fascinating choices and distances between different belief structures and understandings of life and death. Within the literature that I study there are details about traditional belief structures which we know very little about. There was the warrior ethos: a noble death in battle is a great way to die. And it was a great thing to be descended from a noble line of heroic warriors. But there was also the intense value of wisdom and old-age, and a strong sense of betrayal and almost random chance when one was selected by Odin and his Valkyries for death in battle. What was the meaning of life when it can seem to end randomly for anyone in any way? Where was the beauty in a battlefield frost-bitten and strewn with blood-smeared bodies being eaten by black ravens and grey wolves? With such a passion for honour and heroism, where did the individual's spirit or essence travel on its trajectory from warrior life and beyond violent death? These are questions that, in some ways, we still ask ourselves today.
At right: Leaves in a swimming pool (London, Ontario)
Pentax DA18-55mm @55mm; f/5.6; 1/20sec.; ISO400
Pentax DA18-55mm @55mm; f/5.6; 1/20sec.; ISO400
The choices and distances between belief structures and the aesthetics of life and death are fascinating. I took this photo (to the left here) of an autumn leaf on the pavement in downtown Helsinki: 1200 years ago Vikings were traveling across the Baltic to Finland, where their own mix of paganism and Christianity interacted with the Sami people, an indigenous culture with its own belief system. I wonder how a Viking and a Sami might have communicated, and how their understandings and appreciations of life and death might have interacted.
There is a famous Old English anecdote of an encounter between a traditional belief structure and Christianity. A wiseman sat in a hall with his fellow pagans, in council, considering the option presented by Christianity. The wiseman said that, as far as was known to them in their traditional knowledge, beyond life there is little but obscurity and turmoil: a sparrow, he said, enters one end of this hall, leaving the darkness and cold of the storm outside. For a brief moment that sparrow flies through the warmth of the fire-lit hall. Then it flies out again through the other end of the hall, back into the dark unknown abyss of the storm. As far as we know, the wiseman said, our life is like that sparrow's brief passage through the hall. The wiseman concluded that, if there is another tradition that tells us more of life beyond death and birth we should consider it. This is, no doubt, a captivating anecdote.
There is a famous Old English anecdote of an encounter between a traditional belief structure and Christianity. A wiseman sat in a hall with his fellow pagans, in council, considering the option presented by Christianity. The wiseman said that, as far as was known to them in their traditional knowledge, beyond life there is little but obscurity and turmoil: a sparrow, he said, enters one end of this hall, leaving the darkness and cold of the storm outside. For a brief moment that sparrow flies through the warmth of the fire-lit hall. Then it flies out again through the other end of the hall, back into the dark unknown abyss of the storm. As far as we know, the wiseman said, our life is like that sparrow's brief passage through the hall. The wiseman concluded that, if there is another tradition that tells us more of life beyond death and birth we should consider it. This is, no doubt, a captivating anecdote.
Pentax DA18-55mm @40mm; f/5.6; 1/90sec.; ISO100
What is even more fascinating about this story is the fact that it is recounted in the early 8th century by a Benedictine Monk known as the Venerable Bede: this Christian author has obviously had a hand in how this anecdote is related. The focus has been shifted away from the traditional, pagan beliefs of life beyond death - certainly a wiseman of a traditional faith would have had beliefs in an afterlife in Valhalla or the like. Like a photograph that leaves the background blurred, adding sharpness to the fore-grounded object, so Bede's account focuses overwhelmingly on Christianity in relief against a background of traditional beliefs that lacks detail and accuracy.
Yet features of these traditional beliefs persisted: parts of England, as well as parts of mainland Scandinavia, switched back-and-forth several times between traditional faiths and the introduced Christian faith. In Iceland, however, the nation as a whole seems to have adopted Christianity in the year 1000 without further changes. This was not, however, at the expense of keeping details of the traditional beliefs alive: in the 13th century Icelander Snorri Sturluson compiled a wealth of information on Odin, Thor and Freyja. Three centuries after the nation converted as a whole to Christianity the traditional gods and beliefs were still alive in at least a literary way.
Speaking of interactions between groups with different belief structures, Iceland is a curious case. Iceland was initially occupied by a few Irish monks who had gone to the edge of the world to pursue ascetic lifestyles. In about 871, however, the land was rather suddenly inundated with pagan chieftains from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, as well as slaves and farmhands that they brought with them from the Orkneys and Hebrides. I think it is interesting that Iceland is often thought of as a fairly homogeneous society when, as 20th century scholarship has shown, it has been a rather heterogeneous combination of cultures and ethnicities. This original settlement population was a diverse lot, to be sure, but they seemed to get along well enough to form one of the oldest parliaments in the Western World. One wonders, however, what the Irish monks thought of their new neighbours, and vice versa...
Speaking of interactions between groups with different belief structures, Iceland is a curious case. Iceland was initially occupied by a few Irish monks who had gone to the edge of the world to pursue ascetic lifestyles. In about 871, however, the land was rather suddenly inundated with pagan chieftains from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, as well as slaves and farmhands that they brought with them from the Orkneys and Hebrides. I think it is interesting that Iceland is often thought of as a fairly homogeneous society when, as 20th century scholarship has shown, it has been a rather heterogeneous combination of cultures and ethnicities. This original settlement population was a diverse lot, to be sure, but they seemed to get along well enough to form one of the oldest parliaments in the Western World. One wonders, however, what the Irish monks thought of their new neighbours, and vice versa...
Left: Westminster Abbey (London, England)
Pentax DA18-55mm @ 55mm; f/5.6; 1/4 sec.; ISO400
Above: Arctic Terns at sunrise (south coast, Iceland)
Pentax DA18-55mm @18mm; f/4.5; 1/60sec; ISO100
Pentax DA18-55mm @ 55mm; f/5.6; 1/4 sec.; ISO400
Above: Arctic Terns at sunrise (south coast, Iceland)
Pentax DA18-55mm @18mm; f/4.5; 1/60sec; ISO100
Modern tourist brochures rarely seem to highlight Iceland's origins as a motley mixture of Irish monks, Orkneyans and Vikings. Iceland is most often touted as the land of "fire and ice," of stark geographical contrasts and dramatic oppositions. The black beaches of volcanic basalt sands certainly offer a striking contrast to white ocean breakers. From a distance the worlds of white water and black sand seem distinct, almost antithetical. But in this photo you can also see how the sand turns grey as it dries, and that it is actually in the wave-zone that the sand is at its blackest, as though it is painted black, paradoxically, by the white water. Up close, as the minute particles of moist sand squish beneath your bare foot, the sand seems far more diverse in tint, and you can see that within the water of the breaking waves there are buckets of swimming sand. My experience of Iceland is definitely one of stark contrasts, but moreso of remarkable subtleties and prolific inclusiveness: the landscape has everything densely packed into relatively small spaces - the greatest glaciers and volcanoes in Europe, the softest mosses and the sharpest rocks, the greenest fields, the bluest rivers and most colourful wildflowers, as well as the most monochromatic moonscapes. At a distance, it is perhaps the contrasts of a land or a culture that are most obvious: the choice of a closer look can reveal, however, that it is truly the diversity that is astonishing.
Above right: Beach (Vik, Southern Iceland)
Pentax FA28-200mm @200mm; f/6.7; 1/750sec; ISO100
Above left: Basalt sands (Vik, Southern Iceland)
Pentax DA18-55mm @55mm; f/6.7; 1/90sec.; ISO100
Pentax FA28-200mm @200mm; f/6.7; 1/750sec; ISO100
Above left: Basalt sands (Vik, Southern Iceland)
Pentax DA18-55mm @55mm; f/6.7; 1/90sec.; ISO100
