Hosta 'Pocketful of Sunshine' 11 July 2021

Today Sunday, July 11, 2021 I will be having a few reasons to feel a tad cheerful.  I am invited for dinner at my daughter Hilary’s in Burnaby. After dinner we will be watching Nomadland.

Since my Rosemary died on December 9^th I have not wanted to see films, certainly not Netflix. On Saturday evenings we used to watch Noir Alley on TCM. I have not had the heart to see it alone. In short there are few things I want to do alone. One is to feed myself and the cats, read the NY Times, watch (not always now) Rachel Maddow at 6 and to water the garden and deadhead the spent rose blooms.

But increasingly I have come to understand that what keeps me stable is to write my daily blog. For a while, months back my grief resulted in a terrible blog writing block. Now it is something I look forward to doing. 

Hosta 'Hirao Majesty'

Many of my blogs, including this one include my other obsessive pastime which is to scan the plants and flowers of my garden. What began in 2001 as a scientific/botanic attempt to record my roses accurately (with the day’s date) has blossomed into a pastime that I equate to playing golf. I don’t play golf but those who do might find it entertaining (soothing? - perhaps not!). I simply enjoy doing it. Because I see well with my bifocals I am able to use my Photoshop to remove dust spots and play with shadow detail. Hours pass and only the constant appearance of the two cats for attention in my oficina make me get up to pick them up, pet them and feed them.

As for the scans of the two hostas here I would like to explain a little obsession involving the all green Hosta ‘Hirao Majesty’. For me it is a brilliant name for a hosta (in a pot at the front entrance of my house) that is supremely elegant in the sheen of its leaves and for a flower on a scape (hosta lingo for stalk) that is strikingly graceful in its simplicity.

The other hosta, Hosta ‘Pocketful of Sunshine’ is smallish and it has deeply cupped leaves. When I look at it, I smile. It is delightful!

Those who have gotten this far might notice that my scans now are not just done for           accuracy. I find myself in looking for different ways to display the flowers, sometimes alone and sometimes accompanied by a leaf. 

Rosa 'Escimo' 9 July 2021

Clothes pins have been part of my life since I can remember. In my 1950 Buenos Aires I remember having siestas and seeing the flickers on my shuttered window of Mercedes, our live-in housekeeper, outside hanging clothes to dry.

As soon as I started processing film in my darkroom I used clothespins to hang my negatives to dry. Because sometimes the springs were not that tight, the negatives would fall and I had to re-wash them.

I don’t quite remember if by the mid-70s in Mexico or once we arrived in Vancouver in 1975 when it was that I started using stainless steel clothes pins.

Not a day now goes by when I invariably notice a string with clothes pins that Rosemary liked to spread across our fern dell to dry our clothes in the sun. It is a melancholy sight made worse by the fact that her posthumous rose gift to me Rosa ‘Escima’ is blooming right below.

Beyond the Grave - A Posthumous Gift

Wooden clothes pins with very tight springs have been one of the reasons for my success with over 2000 scans of our garden plants since 2001. As you can see in the photo here it is the only way I can get white roses (or other white flowers) to be very close to the scanner bed without touching the glass. When they do touch they overexpose and it is almost impossible to correct the image with my Photoshop. The use of the mylar over the setup eliminates the complete black background and adds a little blue which I am warming up to.

Rosa 'Buttercup' & Platycodon 'Sentimental Blue' 16 July 2021

In my years as a card-carrying member of the American Hosta Society I learned that you put blue hostas next to yellow ones. In this way the blue ones looked bluer and the yellows yellower.

What you see here are two plants that Rosemary adored. She loved the English Rose, Rosa ‘Buttercup’ for its dainty smallness. And while this balloon flower, Platycodon 'Sentimental Blue') is blue, Rosemary liked them also when they were white.

No platycodons (a perennial) emerged in our garden this year so I when I spotted Sentimental Blue at Southlands I was compelled to buy it.

Generally blue is considered a colour that we humans call cool (as opposed to hot reds and oranges) and of course in jazz blue is cool.

Another Rosemary blue & yellow

But for me  when I feast my eyes on Sentimental Blue (particularly next to Buttercup) in this scan, I feel Rosemary’s warmth and I know that had she been around when I brought two pots of it she would have beamed a smile at me that would have made me feel important and loved.

Those who notice details might note that the date of the scan, 16 July, 2021 does not coincide with the date of the blog. I am trying to fill the holes I left in my daily blog because of my melancholic blogger writing block.

Qué extraña escena describes y que extraños prisioneros, Son iguales a nosotros.

Platón, República, Libro VII

What a strange scene you describe and what strange prisoners, They are the same as we.

Plato, Republic Book VII

The last page of José Saramago’s 2000 novel The Cave ends:

En breve apertura al public de La Caverna de Platón, atracción exclusive, única en el mundo, compre ya su entrada.

Soon, open to the public Plato’s Cavern, an exclusive attraction, unique in the world, buy your ticket now.

Ever since I first heard of Plato’s Parable of the Cave from my philosophy instructor, Ramón Xirau in Mexico City in 1962 I have been fascinated by the story in which Socrates has a dialogue with Plato’s older brother Glaucon in Plato’s Republic. We do know that Socrates never wrote anything. What we know about the man is through his disciple Plato who championed his teacher’s views by perhaps “inventing” dialogues. 

A Rose and the Parable of the Cave 

Veronica Vex and the Parable of the Cave 

A Ballerina - an Essence  

A Violinist - an Essence

Kyuquot

Essence by a nose 

Gertrude Stein and the essence of a rose

In the Parable of the Cave, men inside the cave are chained to a stone bench. They face the wall. Behind them there is a flickering fire. Behind the fire there is a tunnel that leads to the world outside. When stuff happens outside the scene is broken down by the fire and reflections appear on the cave wall. Plato says that human reality is that. One day one of the men is able to escape and goes outside. At first he is blinded by the intense light. When he adjusts he is able to discern and figure out that the reality he and his companions saw on the cave wall was a sham of reality. When he tries to tell them about this they try to kill him.

Plato here puts forward his theory of a World of Forms and Ideas. These are perfect. We humans are only able to see them with our faulty senses.

This Platonic philosophy has obsessed me through the years. Once in 1967 at a Jefferson Airplane concert in San Francisco I observed a woman sitting at a corner looking closely at a little glass of crème the menthe. I guessed she might have been under the influence of LSD and that she was staring at the Perfect Green.

Early in my marriage to Rosemary in 1968 we would drive to my mother’s home in Veracruz. On the way as we were going down from the Mexico City altitude we would hit the city of Córdoba, Veracruz that was all tropical green. To me the green was greenness approaching a Platonic idea of a perfect green.

Only in the last few weeks have I finally connected the idea that a Platonic friendship is called that at it one that is imperfect and does not include sexual benefits. 

Throughout my photographic career I approached portraiture with the concept of somehow getting a bit of my subject’s intrinsic nature of being who they are and nobody else. For me a smile or a laugh somehow clouds my probing into my subject’s nature. Sometimes I achieved this by finding a common ground to share. Sometimes (rarely) I insulted.

All the above brings me to the purpose of this blog. I have photographed countless women, famous and not. I have photographed, in the hundreds, women undraped or with little on. I began this pursuit with my Rosemary whom I photographed with our first daughter in 1968/69 not wearing a stitch. 

Since my Rosemary died on December 9 I see her presence everywhere  in our house and garden. I see it in the eyes of our two cats. This presence, is it in my memory a hint of the perfect essence and nature of who she was?  

It was Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. who told our class in Austin, Texas in 1958/59 that all humans are born with an intrinsic quality he called human dignity. No matter what any of us ever did (for good or bad) he said we could not unload it. Could this have been Brother Edwin’s idea a Platonic perfection in all of us?

So invariably when I want to look at my extensive files of women I take out the one called Tarren. I have photographed (perhaps?) more beautiful women. I have had a few girlfriends with whom I shared intimacies. Tarren was always on the other side of my camera. Her body, as a whole, was as perfect as I have ever photographed.

What led me to photograph her from 1980 until about 2010? What kind of trust did she have to have posed for me so many times and so freely?

In trying to nail down some sort of answer I wonder if somehow Tarren’s nature of being a woman (a difficult topic to deal with in this 21^st century) had something to do with her womanness. I don’t think that word exists but I want to equate it with my idea that a live cat has in him a catness inherited from other cats. Roses of different colours somehow all have a perfection in my mind that I call roseness. 

 Tarren

Tarren - Style and Elegance 

Tarren and Mario Benedetti 

The Allure of Imperfection 

She almost killed me 

The Winner

The Bodyscape 

A cure for melancholy 

Sweet Spot at 50 

Is there such a quality that I would call Tarrenness? What would Plato say?