Memory

It’s been a weekend full of art.

I came across a bagpipes rehearsal near my office after the solar eclipse this week, maybe for someone’s homecoming parade. Some family visited this weekend and went with me to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art up in Bentonville yesterday. Today, we went to Eureka Springs, a small town to the northeast that’s home to hundreds of artists and shops.

And tonight, I went to see “The Book of Life,” a beautifully animated romance and adventure story based around the Mexican holiday called el Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. The observance, which is coming up this weekend, is a celebration of loved ones who have died, a way to remember them while enjoying food and color and light and taking away the sting and dread of death.

In the movie, the dead inhabit two realms: Those who have living descendants to remember them dwell in the boisterously colorful and fun Land of the Remembered, while those who have no such legacy wither away in the cold, gray Land of the Forgotten.

It’s a family film, but like the holiday it celebrates, it dives into some of my deepest, most fearful questions: What happens when I die, and will I be remembered? I don’t think I’m alone with these thoughts.

Art, I think, is at least partly an attempt to answer those questions: to make something to remember, and to reach past the boundaries of a lifetime.

We have sculptures and buildings and paintings and books, but a lot of humanity’s art is temporary, like a group’s playing of the bagpipes for a crowd or an interaction on a sidewalk. Other art doesn’t come from us at all, like a sunset or solar eclipse. I like to think of photography as a way to record this art, to say, yes, you existed, and you did or made or were something worth seeing.

I hope my photography also qualifies as art, because I’m trying to make something to remember, too. We all want to keep the party going in the Land of the Remembered.

So when I say thanks for looking, I mean it. I hope you have a good week.

Dan

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Eclipse

Today I saw my first solar eclipse. It’s tough to convey how exciting it was for me; I was thoroughly geeking out. Just look at that crescent and remind yourself that it’s an unfathomably huge, seething sphere of gas and energy that’s being obscured by a much smaller, but no less beautiful, sphere of rock and cold. How cool is that?

You can also barely see a massive sunspot moving across the Sun’s “southern” surface. It’s about the size of Jupiter. Sunspots are regions of particularly intense magnetic activity, and they only look dark compared to the rest of the Sun; they’re still plenty bright.

I always like to think of eclipses from the perspective of people 2,000 or 10,000 or 50,000 years ago. What would you think if you saw the light of the sky dimming, or going out as during a total eclipse? I’d think the world was ending. I wonder how terrifying it was. Or maybe ancient people were more relaxed than I suspect. Either way, I wonder.

It was a really lovely evening here. I spent most of the day nervous that the clouds wouldn’t get out of the way in time. They broke just enough to let me see the Sun through their filter — perfect. A few other creatures joined me to see it.

Beautiful all around. I’m looking forward to the total eclipse coming in 2017.

Thanks for looking,

Dan

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The Stage

This sunset came Friday — a perfect birthday gift. It was a tough week here. On Thursday, a solitary locomotive a few miles south of Fayetteville collided with a small, stationary passenger train it had been sent to help. No one was killed, but most of the 50 or so people on the two trains were jostled around pretty well, and a few were seriously injured. The AP and the Wall Street Journal had picked up the news by the time I left work.

It was a lot for us at the newspaper to deal with, but obviously the ordeal was far more agonizing for many people on the trains, including the driver of the aiding locomotive, who officials said was among the most severely wounded. I hope everyone recovers as well as they can.

Within half an hour of the accident, several dozen emergency responders in ambulances, fire trucks and deputy cars swarmed Highway 71 near the tracks, including a lot of volunteer firefighters I recognized. At least half a dozen agencies were involved coordinated their efforts. Even Benton County to the north sent ambulances southward to make sure all of this county remained covered.

Whatever’s going on with us humans, the seasons keep moving on.

As the sun neared the horizon Saturday, giants made of papier-mache and cloth gathered in Fayetteville’s Wilson Park to put on a play: It was time for the eighth annual Puppets in the Park. At least a hundred people, mostly families, sat and stood in a semicircle to watch a story about good and evil told only with music, gestures and caricatured masks.

Here, the Coyote leads the small Mud People to a better home, watched over by gods of the Sun and water. The goats helped. It was a simple, archetypal story, and the crowd gamely supplied enthusiastic cheers for the Mud People and boos for the grotesque villains along the way.

I’d never seen anything like it in person, but I loved it. The play felt old somehow, as if it were the re-enactment of a religious tradition kept for hundreds of years somewhere else in the world. The Art Experience of Fayetteville, which organized the event, also gave the story a political edge, setting it in the context of the tens of thousands of unaccompanied children who came to the U.S.’s southern border earlier this year.

The show ended with dancing.

My birthday weekend drew to a close today, but this evening I finally got what I wanted most after a tough week: a hike.

Thanks for looking, and take care of yourself.

Dan

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On the Side

I’m sorry for the delayed post — I visited family over the weekend, and election and budget season has my brain at least half-fried at all times. I’ve also been toying with the idea of selling prints of my photos.

There are lots of reasons this might not work out. I’ve never done it before, my photos might not be all that great, and I’m sure it’s a crowded market. But it’s fun to think about and look for possibilities within seven years’ worth of photos. Any selling would be a small operation, maybe at the local farmers market or a site like Redbubble.

Anyway, none of you have to worry about any of this, so I decided just to post a sample of the 60 or so images I came up with and hope they’re at least interesting to look at. Many of these haven’t been posted before, and hey, there’s a chance they’ve never been taken before, either. There’s my pitch. Above is the St. Louis Gateway Arch in 2011.

Washington D.C., 2010