Commonplace Book, pg. 2

Robert Adams, photographer:

I am asked with surprising frequency, “How do you know where to make pictures?” To the extent there is a rule, the answer is that it is usually where you stop long enough.

My father trained as a painter. He said his instructors spent half their time in class teaching him how to see like a painter. Decades later, we would attend museum or gallery shows and I would watch him. He’d glance at a picture, move on, glance at a picture, glance at a picture, then stop. This is when I would walk up and say, “Okay. Tell me what you see.” These were lessons in composition and color theory and the artist’s eye. My first lessons in how to see.

The best photographers learn to stop and look first without the mediating technology of a camera. They look without words. That is, they don’t analyze, they don’t mentally crop an image, they don't map dominant shapes and leading lines and gauge the quality of light. Not yet. They just gaze. The visual cortex kicks in and neurons fire and connect and when they sense, still before words, that something has sparked an emotional response in them, only then do they begin to think about what the picture might be and how best to make it. Sometimes all this happens in mere seconds, sometimes only after much longer, but it has to happen to produce a good picture.

They pay attention to the scene. They pay attention to themselves. They stop long enough.

E.O. Wilson, biologist:

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.

By problematic paleolithic emotions, I assume E.O. Wilson meant fear and suspicion and anger and the impulse to violence. Paleo Home sapiens was a vulnerable creature in a hazardous world of short lifespans. Our forebears survived because families figured out that by banding together and looking out for each other while enforcing conformity to the tribe’s way, they could live long enough to shepherd more children into adulthood. They also began to collaborate, stockpiling the knowledge and experience that led to culture.

As more people lived longer and learned more, their tribes burgeoned. They began to rub up against each other and compete for resources and, being human, compete for status. That friction needed to be dissipated, but paleolithic emotions worked against that, and we know what happened next.

We are long past the need for tribalism, but not our paleo tribal behavior. We still allow the worst among us to play on ancient fears and sustain systems that impose harsh penalties for disobedience, even to the dumbest ideas. My oh my, have we paid a price for that.

As for medieval institutions—that’s a sketchier argument, perhaps, but I do think that beneath the principles, good and bad, that undergird contemporary governance, global economics, organized faith, and higher education, is institutional thinking that would not be unfamiliar to someone from the Middle Ages.

The godlike technology? I am still alive because of it, and, I bet, so are many of you. It can do wondrous things. But the heavy price is how it enables the vilest among us to play on our paleolithic kernel, and through our medieval institutions command loyalty to bad thinking, bad ideas, and bad impulses.

Anarchists and libertarians are fools. Refusal to obey anything is juvenile and can wreck a society. But at its heart, the obedience essential to civil society does not arise from a surrender to authority. It arises from good will. When I drove to a friend’s book signing the other night, I didn’t die in a crash because everyone else on the road voluntarily obeyed the traffic laws and drove responsibly. Buildings and bridges do not collapse thanks to architects and engineers and contractors who do not cheat on safety codes. Restaurants don’t poison us because there is good will in the kitchen. Republican Party propaganda notwithstanding, in the States we have fair elections because tens of thousands of poll workers and election officials bring good will to their jobs. And on and on. We don’t do these things only out of pressure to conform and obey. We do them because one of our few saving graces is the battered but resilient impulse to cooperate and do the right thing and extend a hand.

Consider a serenity prayer for our times:

God grant me the serenity that comes from good will, the wisdom to know who deserves my obedience and who does not, and the courage, when appropriate, to stand up and say, “Fuck off.”

Edward R. Murrow, journalist:

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.

Gather ’round, children, and let me tell you about the early days of the internet. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, on bulletin boards and Usenet (I see the old-timers nodding: they remember what many in those days optimistically called The Information Superhighway), technology evangelists hailed the forthcoming democratization of...of...of everything! Universal empowerment to become a critic, a pundit, a pamphleteer, a citizen journalist, an analyst, a public intellectual! An influencer, though we didn’t call it that back then. They declared independence. We huddled masses yearning to be free would shove aside all those lame, out-of-touch gatekeepers who had unfairly rejected all of our crappy fiction and think pieces and book reviews and cultural commentary! You didn’t own a printing press? You didn’t need one now! Did you want to unleash your raw truth and score victories for the vox populi? Fire up that dodgy modem and glory in a new age of unbridled creativity and free thought! My god, the juices were flowing! We were about to experience a Renaissance that would dwarf that old one, the one in Italy or whatever.

Not far into this golden age, it became apparent that affording the populi a vox did not give them anything to say or any ability to say it. Turns out, writing journalism and literary criticism and food reviews and social commentary and all the rest was harder than it looked. So was making photographs and films and websites.

This would be funnier had the great democratization, the new Renaissance, not firebombed our politics and civil society. The witless gasbag at the other end of the bar now has 200,000 followers who appear not to have noticed that he is still a witless gasbag. The marketplace of ideas has become a toxic waste site.

But hey, puppy videos! Who doesn’t like puppy videos?