Each time I put my pen to a blank page, it exhilarates and terrifies me. I never quite know what’s going to tumble out of the tip of my pen, but I always begin with a desire to express something and a rigid structure of the style, feelings and moods I want to evoke in my writing. I wonder if that holds me back, because it feeds into an obsessive perfectionism that is hardly healthy.
I can’t really imagine what it’d be like to not have that barking voice in the back of my head dictating everything I write. And yet the worst that could happen, is just a bunch of mediocre writing comes out of my pen and I just may not ever use it. As Margaret Atwood said, “The wastepaper basket is your friend.” I cannot expect myself to churn out gold every single time I write. Perhaps the truly gifted writers could do that, but then again you’d wind up ridiculously unaware of yourself, and even more plumped up with arrogance than a writer normally is.
The wastepaper basket is your friend.– Margaret Atwood
I’ve been trying to approach both writing and photography as an art, and it’s been slightly confusing, sufficiently exhausting, and extremely wonderful all at once. There are so many things to consider in the intentionality of writing or taking photos, and though they share some commonalities, they differ in other parts. I’ve always thought of both crafts as inherently spiritual exercises, but meeting like-minded people who challenge you, your creative process, your output, and your limiting beliefs is another kettle of fish altogether.
At times, I’m struck by my own indolence, in waiting for a poignant scene to appear in front of me before I can capture a scene, be it in imagery or words. I never really realised that about myself until recently—I either sit or walk around until a particular pathos unfolds itself before me, or until an otherwise spectacularly mundane sight unveils its hidden poetry to me, like a whispered confession in my ear. Otherwise, my pen remains untouched, and my shutter remains unclicked.
Writers have filled entire journals with everyday observations, descriptions, musings, and lamentations that occur to them any time of day. Photographers have entire libraries of unprocessed photographs of the world they observe about them, regardless of whether they’re simply taking a walk through the neighbourhood or jetting to a different country on assignment. For someone who professes to be a writer, I don’t engage my senses thoroughly enough to observe the world immediately around me, and for a person who claims to have an interest in photography, I’m too comfortably snug staying in my own bubble of passive observation to engage directly with the subjects of my photos.
It’s always luck. It’s luck that matters. You have to be receptive, that’s all. Like the relationship between things, it’s a matter of chance. If you want it, you get nothing.– Henri Cartier-Bresson
There is a deliberate self-lowering involved in the act of searching for something beautiful to photograph or put into words, but I know that to embark on this search is to partake in an intricate dance between seeking and receiving. It is a lesson I have not yet really learnt: she who seeks a thing inevitably comes to expect a particular outcome, yet expectation often blinds one to reality as it is. I confess, though, that this is something I only really thought about when I started taking photographs.
Whether I was meandering through Marrakech’s many souqs or strolling down the pristine cobblestoned avenues of Old Kyoto, I found that attempting to photograph my surroundings in a way that does them some justice is an effort that is both premeditated and coincidental.
To capture a feeling, a scene, a particular atmosphere, or a certain inexplicable beauty, in a photograph, one needs to be aware of what needs to be captured in the first place; beauty cannot be conveyed if it has not first enraptured the one attempting to convey it. In that sense, to take a good photograph, write a timeless story, paint an ethereal landscape, or essentially create a work of art, one must open oneself up to the world in full, so as to experience its beauty in full. But this search for beauty inevitably starts off with a notion, however vague, of the particular form that that beauty might take, where one might find it, or who might possess it. The irony is that this is almost sacrilegious to the quest for beauty, and perhaps to the very idea of beauty itself—is beauty so easily defined, so readily apparent, so simplistically limited by human understanding in that sense? Surely not. And yet, I find myself, my own writing, my own photographs, still limited by my own conception of what is and is not beautiful in the world around me.
It begs the question: how does one define what is beautiful? If beauty is subjective, how does one judge the beauty of a work of art (or lack thereof?) A piece of writing is, after all, more difficult to judge than a photograph. The latter tends to engender an immediate reaction on account of its being a visual medium, whereas the former necessitates some cognitive effort in the exercising of one’s imagination.
That brings me to the subject of technical mastery. One cannot hope to produce works that have any real value without first being sufficiently grounded in the nuts and bolts of that given profession. After all, according to Shaykh Hamza Yusuf and Professor Scott Crider of the Renovatio Podcast, “the stage of transcendence can only be achieved by initial technical mastery.” But that’s a subject for another time, or in this case, another post.