Photos by the lake

Today, my son and I made our monthly trip to the lake to take pictures. It was our twentieth trip, and we haven’t missed a month. There’s something very comforting about the routine, not only of making the trip every month, but also of parking, making our way along the path past the blackberry bushes, wandering down toward the pier, walking out to the end of the pier, coming back and choosing one of the trails, and finally returning to the car. We are both people who find great comfort in routine, and yet there is sufficient change, gentle change, that it is always stimulating. Of course, the peacefulness of the setting, the lack of obligation, the opportunity to experience the exquisite and sad beauty of nature, these are certainly as important as the routine — for me, at least. I feel completely unskilled with the camera, like a small child awkwardly clutching a pencil. I see things a want to capture, but I really don’t have the ability to realize my ideas. Yet although I am inevitably disappointed by the results, the camera helps me focus my visual sense so that I am more aware of what I see, on the different scales and in the changing light. In the end, it doesn’t really matter if I capture it in a permanent way. The totality of our experiences is so ephemeral. We can’t possibly save it. Like strawberries, it has to be savoured fresh, in the moment, and in the end, even the most beautiful photograph (or memory) bears only a superficial resemblance to the original experience. So for me, the camera is more an aid to heighten my appreciation of one aspect of that experience.

The opportunity of spending time together is of course an enormous part of this routine. It’s a time when the lack of obligation and goals that must be reached tends to level out our relationship. We are companions, sharing an experience, and although our points of view certainly do overlap because of our similar termperaments, they are very different in many respects, too. We share the delight at seeing something rare or beautiful, the frustration of only catching a glimpse of something or not managing to capture it with our cameras.

Even though our trips are weeks apart, there’s a soothingness about the gradual ebb and flow of the seasons. It’s like watching trees blow in the wind — we have the illusion of being able to see the seasons. In our response to nature, there seems to be no clear line between the exquisite and the ugly. The corpse of a duckling lying next to the water, the gaudy flash of a blackbird’s wings, the patterns created by the ice on the edge of the lake, an iridescent fly cleaning itself on a dog’s turd… there is some kind of beauty in every experience, and also some kind of grotesqueness. I suppose the ideas of beauty and grotesqueness are somehow dependent on the meanings we read into these things. Do we see beauty in dead leaves because we feel that they are part of a cycle of death and renewal? And yet I have the impression that I have some kind of aesthetic sense that is very far removed from meaning. Is there meaning in a particular shape or colour or tone or melody? There doesn’t seem to be, but perhaps this is an illusion.