Halcyon Reflections

random thoughts, more or less

The Power of an Image

Visual acuity: the ability to see clearly, to distinguish with definition the details that are seen. It is but one part of vision. Important also are color definition, depth perception, and peripheral perception. These four however leave vision sadly incomplete, at least in my view. There is yet another aspect to vision that is more nuanced. It is the ability to see what lies between foreground and background. It is perception of the subtle layering within an image. It epitomizes the hazy relationship between beauty and the eye of the beholder. In this blog an image provides the embarkation of prose, teasing out that layered middle ground. I suggest the exposure of this mid-ground to be the catalyst of graphic prose.

The Beauty of Words

Long before I could understand the fundamental distinction between disciplines, much prior to parsing the nuances of grammar, I loved words. I loved words before I comprehended the way they danced together to make language. Once I learned to combine them, at first woodenly, vistas of new insight opened. With acquired skills, awkward sophomoric attempts were refined and became more fluid. These attempts became more evocative; certainly more aesthetically pleasing – to me, for one’s own efforts should please oneself first of all. Prose became a vehicle to explore the mid-ground of images. As knowledge of vocabulary deepened and enriched, the writing became florid. Images precipitated words, and words clustered to express insight.

Scholarly Pursuit

I remember the first time I began to understand the nature of scholarly pursuit. It wasn’t found in the effort to score well on standardized exams. It wasn’t in dogged preparations seeking to impress those who needed impressing. It was in the personal eureka regarding the classical Greek noun for ‘leisure’ from whence we get the term scholar. The tradesman toiled throughout the day with hammer and saw and plane; the farmer grubbed about with beasts of burden and plow; the cook sweated and produced at the ovens; the mother dandled an infant on her knee whilst she kept a weather eye on the brood. Leisure was a concept foreign to them. It was the man of leisure who had freedom of time for scholastic pursuits. It was a hallmark of leisure to sit, view, contemplate, find beauty, and commit it to expression. For me, it is in the moments of distraction from mundane and vocational tasks that the eye finds opportunity to see the mid-ground and reflectively add savor to what it beholds; what he dimly sees in that nether field between foreground and background. It is the fruit of this scholarly pursuit that follows here.