on the act of seeing and perceiving: of my eyes make the world vibrate . . . With each flutter of my eyelashes a curtain lowers and rises, though I do not think for an instant of imputing this eclipse to the things themselves; with each movement of my eyes that sweep the space before me the things suffer a brief torsion, which I also ascribe to myself; and when I walk in the street with my eyes fixed on the horizon of the houses, the whole of the setting near at hand quivers with each footfall on the asphalt, then settles down in its place. (To make my point I take two photographs that aren't part of Paradise Road, but can be glimpsed along the verge.) We revelatory experiences in certain places, like the photographers in Sweeney's photo of the crowd in the Louvre snapping at the Mona Lisa. as we have seen, he embraces speed to the point of stillness. But this frantic horde of photographers, desperate to catch their own fragment of the revelation La Gioconda represents, appear to miss entirely the elusive figure against her backdrop of nature. finds revelation not only in the places that have been preordained, as in the quiet and timelessness of the landscape (although there as well), but also in the blur and contemporaneity of the city--as in a billboard of Penelope Cruz gazing Mona Lisa-like at us as the world goes wonderfully, blindly about its business. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: Harcourt Inc., 1957, p. 12. 2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature; Addresses and Lectures, www.emersoncentral.com/nature1.htm. 3 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Divinity School Address, www.emersoncentral.com/divaddr.htm. 4 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, Op. cit., p. 203. 6 Ibid., p. 118. 7 Jacqueline Taylor Basker, "The Cloud as Symbol: Destruction or Dialogue," Crosscurrents, spring 2006, p. 113. 8 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature; Addresses and Lectures, Op. cit. 9 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanstown: Northwestern University Press, 1968, p. 6. was born in New Zealand in 1958. He lives in New York City and Raumati South, New Zealand. He has a degree in Political Science and works in business. go to www.paradiseroad.com is a playwright and filmmaker. He has degrees in Creative Writing and Contemporary Religion and writes about the visual arts in New Zealand and internationally. |