the redemption of time

Aim, the black sun is in your range. Steady, now. Nerves. Fire! Ah, what a good shot the Queen is.

Bruno Ganz - Lied vom kindsein


warf es einen Stock als Lanze gegen den Baum,
und sie zittert da heute noch.

It is time to kill. And I shall do it with my silence, she said.

Roger Fenton is immediately known for his Crimean photographs, for the way in which he conjures up a private world, rendering it familiar and warm, so that one almost forgets the harshness of war itself. But I like best his attempt to capture and freeze time itself, in some of his landscape photos.

In some we see people caught in the light of a doorway, or small children climbing a fence, oblivious of the gazing world. All that transitoriness is played out against the solid bulwark of the masonry of Churches, abbeys. It is as if a meditation on the most fragile could only be possible against the backdrop of what is most permanent: time-worn stones and faith. Against this relief it appears that life is always slipping away, always in danger of falling back into the inorganic, of disappearing around the corner, retreating to the shadows-like so many of the subjects of the pictures themselves. Out of sight, out of mind. Even the huge, solid edifice of history and memory that we erect around us may not be enough to hold back time. Perhaps Fenton is saying that given this inevitability there is nothing else to do but portray something of our ineradicable ephemeral nature.

Even the stone sculptures are composed with their shadows in close attendance-their alter egos. The dark knives that cut into our being are really just death-masks that carry our imprint with them. The wilderness photographs. Always a solitary individual surrounded by the emptiness of nature. The foreground-a river, a stream-is slowed down by the exposure of the camera revealing a stillness and an elemental simplicity that doesn’t seem to be out of place or artificial. On the contrary, it appears that this is the essence of its real nature; that at the heart of all this rushing and striving for definition there is a contemplative nullity that embraces everything in its totality.

In a few it is the sky that is slowed down in this way. Reduced to a white, blank canvas so that the landscape below is a fundamental land, a primordial place, once again. The land in these photographs is barely anything more than a contour, a cold unredeemed place. We are back to the Old Testament, to the heath that is only briefly lit up by starlight. This is the world of pure potentiality, the pre-formed garden before Adam has named anything. One can imagine how alluring such a picture would be to a world-weary generation, one that was questioning the infinite advance into the future, the sunlight.

Perhaps there were other truths to stumble on, other realities that had to be erased before the earth would be forced to yield her secrets to science and technology.

We have lost our sense of what the earth means; to turn, and turn, and spin-in the heart, and not just the body-this, and this only, is time...and the redemption of time.

Then gaze upon the world; how strange! how new !
The earth and heaven are one,
The horizon-line is gone,
The sky how green ! the land how fair and blue !
Perplexing items fade from my large view,
And thought which vexed me with its false and true
Is swallowed up in Intuition ; this,
This is the sole true mode
Of reaching God,
And gaining the universal synthesis
Which makes All—One ; while fools with peering eyes
Dissect, divide, and vainly analyse.
So round, and round, and round again !...

No stay, no stop,
Like any top
Whirling with swiftest speed, I sleep.
O ye devout ones round me coming,
Listen! I think that I am humming ;
No utterance of the servile mind
With poor chop-logic rules agreeing
Here shall ye find,
But inarticulate burr of man’s unsundered being.
Ah, could we but devise some plan,
Some patent jack by which a man
Might hold himself ever in harmony
With the great whole, and spin perpetually,
As all things spin
Without, within,
As Time spins off into Eternity,
And Space into the inane Immensity,
And the Finite into God’s Infinity,
Spin, spin, spin, spin.
----Dowden

Turn Turn Turn (To Everything There Is A Season) - The Byrds