Time To Perambulate

No I haven't fallen off the edge of the world - although those ancient mariners may not have been too far off - the world has assumed a few straight edges it seems. And not for the better. Worlds need roundness - nature has few straight-edges; they tend to be inflexible. Back to point, my world has been consumed with a new project - Great Ape Diaries - which does and doesn't fit here. It certainly is full of perambulations - just not here.

Like most things in life I plunge in 100% or flop about on the edge like a fish on the shore. I'm at a point in life where flopping doesn't suit me physically or, most importantly, mentally. Meaning is the water in which this fish needs to swim.

I'm coming back here because Great Ape Diaries has thrust me back into the world - traveling and thinking - and all those impressions don't fit quietly into a GAD box. They are most at home perambulating on a blank slate of no pre-intentions.

On Our Better Nature...

"Sherwin Nuland, the clinical professor of surgery at Yale who wrote How We Die, writes in The Art of Aging, "Man is the only animal to have been granted the ability to continue developing during the later periods of life, and much of this depends on seeing oneself as the kind of person who can overcome the tendency to do otherwise." 

"I look at what I write so I can see what I think."

I read this article on writing and found much of myself in the paragraph from Jonathan Safran Foer:

"I begin with nothing and I unfortunately usually end with nothing, in terms of the day-to-day process," says Jonathan Safran Foer. "I’ve never had characters before I started writing.  I’ve never had a moral.  I’ve never had a story to tell.  I’ve never had some voice that I found and wanted to share.  Auden, the poet, said, 'I look at what I write so I can see what I think.'  And that’s been very true for me in my process.  I don’t have a thought that I then try to articulate.  It’s only through the act of writing that I try to find my own thoughts.  So, it can be quite scary because you know, it’s... there’s a kind of faith, I guess, that you have to have either in yourself or in the process that something good will come from filling blank pages." 

As Robert Capa, one of the founders of the agency Magnum Photos, once put it: Arnold's work "falls metaphorically between Marlene Dietrich's legs and the bitter lives of migratory potato pickers."

Photojournalist Eve Arnold Dies At 99