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.