Know shuns are dones

News thoughts on the way down

Searching boxes in my garage, I came across some of my old clippings from newspaper. How sad this one .from September 1985—Japanese dancer Yoshiyuki Takada falling to his death during a performance . He fell five or six stories depending on the reporting, What was consistent in reporting was that he held this position the whole way down.
This would have been the last photograph of him alive.

For me this image immediately came to mind:

“Along about springtime (1963), the monks began to hint that they were going to pull off something spectacular by way of protest ...“
The monks were telephoning the foreign correspondents in Saigon to warn them that something big was going to happen. Most of the correspondents were kind of bored with that threat after a while and tended to ignore it. I felt that they were certainly going to do something, that they were not just bluffing, so it came to be that I was really the only Western correspondent that covered the fatal day.””

If anything this image is a reminder that sometimes just showing up is enough.

photo by Malcolm Browne Vietnam 1963 Malcom Browne/AP

Elizabeth Cotton 01/05 /1893 – 06-29 871987)
lI the 1960s, finger picking “freight Train” as she created it was common for hopeful folk guitar players, She was a living legend. I experienced her in Newport Folk Festival, 1984 or 1985, both on stage and in a workshop.“

She learned music as a young child, but did not begin her professional career until in her 60s—to the fortune of folk music and the bewnefit of the US in general—when she was employed in the musical family of the Seeger household where the children called her “Libba.”

Sometime in the mid 1980s, a rock concert, what is the point of these images?—Do you think this guy is a model hired by the reporter or a “real kid gamester? Every photograph represent some side of being human. This young man is , or was, some mother’s son, maybe someone’s brother, and maybe someone’s killer— Perhaps he was all three things at one time.

Alameda Creek

All of the photographs on Earth, are each a frozen moment of time permanently connecting the past to a future.

We see the printed photographic image because our “eyes can see” the light reflected off the image of the print (the medium). It gives us meaning because our mind finds meaning in the image. On l seeing a photograph, unconsciously the mind will ask “What is it?” and unconsciously seek an answer.

Daibai asked Baso, “What is the Buddha?”
Baso answered, “The mind is the Buddha.”
Mumonkan Case XXX Blyth translation

The photograph is made possible because the light reflects off material things, such as a rock, a tree, a person and carries the reflected image to the eye where we “see it” AND the camera capture the same image, a latent image which can be printed at will anytime, and it looks the same. The camera records the light, on a range of “on or off” to many shades and colors and a print can made on a medium, such as paper or a computer screen, a print on which most people agree about the contends. We can all see it and agree that is what it looks like, *its really that thing.*

Imagine a photographic print on a wall where light comes in the window, reflects off the photographmaking a latent image, and is redirected back out a window down the tree lined street, out of the atmosphere to maybe travel across the universe unhindered for millions of light years. Will it find another “eye” to communicate its message ?

Perhaps there are light images all around us, we just need the “right medium” to translate the experience compatible with our human senses. We do that already with different kinds of light such as x-ray and infra-red. And, the images of stars and galaxies from space are us providing a medium—which humans can see— to capture these images as they go by carrying themselves beyond us to who knows where.

Imagine gadzillions of exposed but not-printed-to-a-medium images traveling around the universe at the speed of light . . .

Maybe its more like a video than a photograph , as long as there was light reflecting off something there will be a latent image traveling around. and our photograph of a far away star is just as snatching a frame of the video as it travels by at the speed of light.

What happens when the traveling light image meets another traveling light image ?Does it mix with it ? or bounce off it? Does it add to the original image, do they combine until it gets too dark see detail ?

Once the photograph has been printed on the paper light can bounce off the paper to be sensed by the eye . A computer screen is different. The image is the light itself, may be it makes on image on the screen, then the light keeps on going , some to my eyes and other parts of it go right out the window, down the street, up into the sky and on the way to the stars.

Can you really destroy a photograph just by ripping it up into small pieces or burning it up? Once the latent image is embedded in the light its just keeps traveling around —what happens when it reaches the end of t3he Universe?

A dress or a blanket? Each has their own purpose, which is better for making a photograph, which is better for sleeping rough?

EndPapers

The last tram in Tokyo, the Sakura Line runs through old neighborhoods, mostly carrying locals and tourists who can get a day pass to get on and off when and where ever they desire.

You also get to see a lot of those train-pedestrian crossings like you see in Japanese tv shows and movies.

It runs right through people’s backyards.

Little shops .it seems like a lot of work everyday getting produce, putting it out, sitting down, an at the end of the day putting it all away at night.