What we see is almost always a matter of expectation. No doubt we have evolved to observe the unexpected, to jump to conclusions and then notice departures from those conclusions. How quickly we resolve something to fit what we expect! How outraged we are when what we observe (or are forced to conclude) departs from expectations. It is the well-spring of righteous indignation, a path at the end of which is the au·to–da–fé, heretics burned at the stake, and innumerable lesser acts of violence.

As a little exercise in observing the unexpected - where are the trees in this picture?

I'm off back to Seattle. A flying picture. How much can you discard and still have a picture? I love this image as it comes close to pretty much everything. The bird is still there, the impression is unmistakable. It's even unmistakably a Floridian bird (for the non-Floridians amongst you, the Floridian birds have a quite distinctive morphology - long necks, legs and skinny bodies, generally white).

See you later alligators...

Amongst my favorite things (not whiskers, kittens, geese or mittens) are found objects, especially found poetry. Perhaps there's no such thing but I fancy I do encounter it occasionally, actually I'm sure it's going on around me all the time and it's just that occasionally I happen to notice it, usually over an extended period of time. I particularly liked this one; dropping off a rental car at John Wayne Airport, Orange County, finding my gate, waiting around, getting on the airplane...

Attention all drivers, has anyone seen

A sixty-nine year old woman with red hair and a denim jacket.

She has been missing since six o'clock this morning

Missing a green velvet bag with an angel inside it.

Please can I go through? 

There's no one there, I'll miss my flight.

If I go missing from my post, I'll lose my job.

 This photograph has something of the same quality for me.

It is a sequence of images, not just one. It has a quiet drama to it that I find grips me every time I look at it. Oh, and the pelican pole is just off to the left.

Fireworks for Quinn, a brand new grand nephew. Happy birthday Quinn.  Many joyous returns of the day.

Structure in the ambient world has always fascinated me. A common human trait I suppose. As a child I spent many happy hours wandering the African bush collecting rocks and anything I could find that had a sense of purpose or pattern to it (thinking about it, no biology - I wonder why). This image is typical of the kind of thing that catches my eye. Morning dew on the paintwork of a car.

What combination of temperature, humidity, residues on the surface of the car, gave rise to this particular pattern? I don't believe I have ever seen it before and I am quite sure I will never see it again.

A funny story: In and amongst, I collected quite a few old artifacts from the rocky hills around where I lived and donated a few to the local museum. On one occasion, David Attenborough came to visit and I was invited to meet him as a consequence of the donations. I actually have no memory whatsoever of the occasion but, in retrospect, I can imagine Mr. Attenborough thinking to himself, "How in the world are we going to stop this kid from trashing any more archaeological sites." Entropy rules, OK - anyway, makes me laugh.

Building in the sand. Even more ephemeral than building out of sand. In this case, the building is beside the point, what matters is the light, the way the water glows with color but the sand is flat grey. I am sure there is a view somewhere in which the light is more enduring than any concrete structure.

The pole by the way is the pelican pole (for those of us that like to connect up the dots...).

There is a church a couple of blocks away from the apartment in Celebration. It has what is, on the face of it, a rather unprepossessing spire. Stand in the street and look at it and it blends in well with the the surrounding condominiums and town homes; it fits the general Disney-chic ambiance of the place (think Donald Duck in a tux).

Then you see it from a distance, the building under it no longer visible, and suddenly it's a spire. A true spiritual artifact. a monument to the living God. Donald Duck nowhere in sight.

Light and shade on a grey background. You can guess at the origin of the patterns but there's something nicely deceptive about the way the lines meet, the fact that the various parallelograms touch at their corners, but not quite, the light grey parallelograms almost line up with the dark ones, but not quite. It's odd to think that (crystal structures apart) this type of image is entirely artificial, it just doesn't exist in the natural world.

This is a different view of the same thing - different light, different angle.

Just love those balloons. Fire in the sky. One of these days, I'll have to take a ride in one. Makes me think of Gershwin's wonderful "Summer Time":

One of these mornings

You're going to rise up singing

Then you'll spread your wings

And you'll take to the sky

Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon. Do you want to hear what ears have never heard? Listen to the bird's cry. Do you want to touch what hands have never touched? Touch the earth. Verily I say that God is about to create the world.
-- "The Theologians" Jorge Luis Borges

Merritt Island before sunrise.

To the Bushmen the morning star is the "Foot of the Day". He hunts through the night, the stars are his dogs. If you stand out in the bush at night and listen you can hear him crying "Tsa!  Tsa!" to the dogs as they chase across the sky. You should never give a dog a name with a strong 's' sound in it as they remember the morning star's cry and will look to see what they should chase every time they hear it.

At this time of year the Florida waters turn cold and the manatees gather round the springs that come up from the aquifers that underly the Florida landscape. I wonder, what do they hear? What language do they speak? How do we listen to what they have to say?

Saw this out my window one morning. Wasn't sure if I was awake or asleep.

Some possibly germane advice from Robert Graves

Poet, never chase the dream.

Laugh yourself and turn away.

Mask your hunger, let it seem

Small matter if he come or stay;

But when he nestles in your hand at last,

Close up your fingers tight and hold him fast.

from A Pinch of Salt in Country Sentiments

Possibly Americans (to be precise, citizens of the United States of America) don't suffer from a loss of the sense of direction in visiting the southern states. I am not talking about geographical direction so much as historical and aesthetic direction. I find confederate flags confusing, southern hospitality endearing but inexplicable (why southern as opposed to mid-western, or Cascadian or whatever). It is nicely summarized for me in Winston Churchill's essay "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg".

Looking at the photographs I took over the weekend in Savannah, Georgia, I find this one speaks most clearly to me. Tales of Savannah's preoccupation with its ghosts and graveyards, shades of Aubrey Beardsley, or perhaps Peake and Gormenghast. The tree has a curious, ghoulish elegance to it, rather like Savannah itself.

A window on a winter landscape. Looking in or looking out are equally bleak. Something tells me I will never see it in the spring. But don't we always feel the same in the middle of winter?

I console myself with a bit of humorous doggerel, "Spring is sprung, the grass is riz, I wonder where the birdies iz? The boid is on the wing, but that's absoid, the wing is on the boid." Which presumably is a response to:

Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring

The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:

The Bird of Time has but a little way

To fly -- and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.

Omar Khayyam (or Edward Fitzgerald anyway) offers us a serious face, but he'll never live down that image of the "bird on the wing". Flinging garments of repentance is rather good too.

Popped up to Atlanta this weekend. Lovely city. Very civilized , despite lots of churches, perhaps because of.... Here it is, a duck's eye view.

Did you know (I certainly didn't) that between 1714 and 1774, over 600,000 Scots came to America, mostly to the south. The Revolutionary War wasn't America versus the English, it was a rehash of the Scottish rebellion, only this time the Scots won. If you don't believe that, consider this. 9 out of Washington's 10 generals were Scots Presbyterian ministers. So maybe civilized Atlanta is a Scots phenomenon, then again maybe not, especially if they all came from Glasgow. Oops, did I just type that? Nothing wrong with the Scots, I love Robbie Burns (then again he didn't come from Glasgow).

A rose for valentine's day

So much has been said on the subject, that I can resort to lines almost at random

"You'll never know if you don't know now..."
"You do something to me..."
"A nightingale sang...
"Auf Wiederseh'n..."


Obviously I could go on almost indefinitely, and that's just what I was listening to in the car on the way up to Atlanta. Happy Lover's day.

This lovely fellow was lying by a path in a more or less suburban park near Orlando. People, dogs, kids wandering past apparently unconcerned by his presence.

The lovely fellow's African cousin, the crocodile, is not to be taken so lightly. Though I remember at least one funny story from my younger days when a friend of ours managed to sit on one, thinking it was a log. Crocodiles kill people regularly. This was brought home, almost literally, a while ago when a neighbor of ours (a doctor) went to work in Botswana for a while. He went canoeing on the Limpopo and never came back. He was snatched out of the boat by a crocodile.

Merritt Island sunrise. A different kind of figure and ground. I was fascinated by the fact that there seems to be a bright blue sky behind the clouds, so there is the low, huge, almost menacing cloud, behind that the even larger blue sky and beyond them both the immanent glory of the rising sun.

The scene is distinctly Florida; flat, wet and characterized by clouds (no doubt there was the odd alligator floating around in there as well).

The giants in the hills were almost entirely a matter of light, both the time of year and the time of day. I have flown over that same bit of countryside dozens of times and never seen the same sight again.Here's another case of figure and ground in which the shadow is just as important a part of the picture as the light.

There 's something very appealing about the rhythm of the gaps between the leaves. For my view, I find my mind switches from one emphasis to another, the leaves, then the gap between the leaves. Though I'm tempted by the idea that the gap matters the most, it is both that count. In really good piano performance, the gaps between the notes matter just as much as the notes themselves. No silence, no music; no shadow, no light.

"They told me also of the Wood and dark Mountains, of the Hill Difficulty, of the Lions, and also of the three Giants, Bloody-man, Maul and Slay-good." Pilgrim's Progress

This is an image of the hills just west of the Columbia river. Criss-crossing the country, so casually by air, I often wonder at the determination and courage it must have taken to do it on foot or with a horse-drawn wagon. These hills seem to me  like a monument to the terrible struggles those people went through.

Leaving Seattle behind for a while. Maybe this is an image to come back to. The tone and the color are just wonderful. It is the setting in which the image was taken that appeals to me most. Bridget and I were hunting around for a figure to go in the courtyard of her business premises. We looked at all kinds of things, went to all kinds of places. This was one of them. I'm not sure if it was an old garage or a house or some combination of the two, anyway some indeterminate building crammed full of statues, figures, fountains, nymphs, faeries, of every possible persuasion, Buddhist, pagan, Christian, it was all there. 

The manufacture of the sacred in (literally) concrete terms. Just wonderful.

Stairs, paths, roads, there is an assumption they lead somewhere, we might not know where they go, but they must go somewhere. We take comfort in a sense of direction and carry it over to a sense of purpose.

It's a hill I passed many times but
never climbed. I remember imagining
all kinds of people living there.
I can't imagine who lives there now

On the subject of what we do and don't see - this is something I didn't see.

I clearly remember taking the photograph and have looked at it many times since. There was always something that appealed to me about it, though I didn't give much consideration to what that might be. Just a week or so ago, when I was looking at photos I might include in the blog, I looked at it, thought I might include it and then realized there was a hand resting on the old dog's back. That look of quite satisfaction on his face, I'm sure is a response to the tangible affection he feels from the hand on his back. A lovely image, I didn't even understand why until recently.

Looking at something I am often prompted to wonder how other people see it. On old enigma, as Burns has it

O, wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion.

More than this it is tangled up with childhood and being driven from the garden. What was the fall other than the pursuit of that power?

There are different ways to approach the problem, one thing is to look at what people remark on, and the opposite of course, what they don't remark on. It always surprises me that this tree, right outside the Seattle opera house, doesn't get some attention. Thousands walk past it every day, but I have yet to see any remark on it other than this

People get excited about patterns left by sprinklers on office buildings, why not this really quite lovely image on a tree?

As a follow on to the topic of falling down, here's a picture of holding up. It's an Aikido picture (for Aikido, think judo, with a touch of Zen thrown in). Over the years I have taken literally thousands of Aikido pictures, this is one of my favorites. The hands above are doing a technique called yonkyo on the hand below. Very painful if done properly, the connection is undeniable, a jolt to the spirit, a touch to the heart.

A last look at Fremont (for now). The Solstice parade is a marvelously vibrant institution. There's that odd contradiction though, all that noise blowing out the bell of a tuba, but it is still an institution. Someone or something organizes it, says who can and can't be in it. Yet every Solstice it shows us this wild, apparently joyous face.

I took this photograph in the same place as the tuba photograph, there under the Aurora bridge. The bridge is very high at that point, a good hundred feet or more. On one occasion, some years ago, someone attacked a bus driver and the bus went off the bridge, crashing into the top of an apartment building, miraculously only the driver and the attacker were killed, though 33 people were injured. That particular spot, where I took the photographs, is a favorite for suicide jumpers. You might argue that gaiety has its price I suppose.

Still in Fremont. This is one of those photographs I know has been taken hundreds of times before, still the knowledge doesn't detract from the sheer pleasure of having seen it coming and managing to grab it as it went by. The picture was taken at the Fremont Solstice Parade just under the Aurora Bridge. You can see the bridge in the image along with various members of the marching band, the crowd come to see the fun and some parade participants, all billowing forth from the mouth of the tuba.

No naked cyclists I'm afraid, through they are a prominent feature (any adjective connected with "naked" is bound to be risky) of the parade. Why cyclists? I think it is because they are harder to catch, though the Seattle police have started turning a blind eye in recent years - they have also taken to riding bicycles, though perhaps fortunately, fully uniformed.

There are many things to see in Seattle, Bill's House on Lake Washington, the original Bill Building in Kirkland, the Bill sprawl in Redmond, the Bill give away in the Lake Union annex and of course V.I.Lenin (known to his friends as Vile) currently living in Fremont (a Bill free area - Adobe have an office there). Vile is indecorously decorated as local whim and the spirit of the season sees fit. Here he is all set up for Christmas.

The statue, by the way, according to the locals, is considered unique as it doesn't feature weapons (or perhaps it does - people in Fremont are easily confused). Also, it's for sale - or at least it was last time I checked. Though I'm sure Fremont would have a collective fit if you were to offer to buy it.

Also by the way, the great Bill Give Away (i.e. the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) has to be the greatest thing ever to come out of Seattle (Jimi Hendricks, Boeing, and the demolition of the King Dome not withstanding). Whatever you might think of Bill as a technologist, it's hard to criticize him as a philanthropist (so I keep reminiding myself, every time I have to restart Windows).