The Narrative Image

Back a few weeks when snow paralyzed a significant portion of Portland, a spare contingent of Portland Art Museum staff managed to open the facility’s doors on time and kept it running until reinforcements managed to straggle in. Their heroic efforts afforded me an opportunity to take in the WILD BEAUTY photo exhibition in relative solitude. http://www.northwestphotography.org/WildBeauty.htm I’d been working at establishing a relationship with the gorge over the past couple of years… oh screw it. …maybe it would be more accurate to say that, like some shallow, materialistic paparazzi, I’d been stalking the gorge with my camera, hoping to capture an intimate or private moment (say maybe a nipple slip) so it was an unexpected bonanza to find myself peeking into the equivalent of a childhood photo album. The thing is, the pictures were really beautiful, and seemed to become more beautiful as it became evident how difficult the early art of photography was to practice, but the unspoke...

The other day at work, a colleague described me as a pessimist (I remember thinking, “No good can come from this!) Turns out, there’s some people who see the glass as half full, some who see it as half empty, and then evidently there’s my case where not only is the glass completely empty…the faucet isn’t working either. But my immediate response was to deny it. I tried to argue that I’m among the first to look for the humor in particular situations. It was then I learned that gallows humor, “…finding irony or comedy in serious matters such as death,” is kind of an acquired taste. But – but – I stuttered, what about my constant search for and appreciation of creation’s beauty as documented in these blog entries? Doesn’t that reflect some small measure of optimism? Even as I said it, I completely expected that it wouldn’t save me from a futile life as a cynical pathetic wallflower. So I thought I’d take another stab at inspirational, perhaps even optimistic ‘free verse’ to exerci...