Nature – Page 9 – The Inner Frame

Unintended

I thought I’ve done all of it: Forgot the camera, leave the battery uncharged, overwrote the memory card. And not just once. So I have become pretty good at double checking my equipment.

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I did check everything before I went today to take some shots of my beloved Pate Hollow trail in snow.

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What I forgot was that I had set the camera to take double exposures when I took photos for Wenckheim X. Back then, I had try to compose the double exposures carefully.

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Not so here. They are completely unintended. Of course most of the pictures are just trash.

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Some, however, came out nicely, when the subconscious effort to capture the atmosphere of the place superposes its actual appearance.

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I see this as a unique opportunity. There is no way to make the same mistake unintentionally a second time.

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Ridges (Mogan Ridge East Trail)

We continue on to the Eastern loop of the Mogan Ridge trail, another 6 miles or so. It follows indeed mostly a ridge, with ups and downs.

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Ridges are an interesting design pattern, they can serve as watersheds between light and dark, for instance.

They are — isn’t it in the word? — rigid borders, immutable, and encourage compartmentalization.

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Walking a ridge means having a constant choice: Shall we go left and hide in the woods, or do we confront the alien who is beckoning strangely?

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What better place for us than this lake, protected between two ridges? Don’t we want peace?

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Someone has decided to stay.

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The true ridge walker will avoid either choice and stay on the ridge, letting all possibilities pass.

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And on we go. Stone faces are looking at us again with disdain. They didn’t have a choice.

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Do we have regrets? No, we’ve made our choice.

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Life and Death (Mogan Ridge West Trail)

A few minutes down the road from the Two Lakes Trail trailhead is another long hike, the Mogan Ridge trail. It can be done as two separate loops as a single 20 mile loop. Today I show pictures from the western portion.

Fire has devastated part of the woods. It’s a sad view, full of pain and beauty.

Death in nature is usually a slow and silent disappearance, but here the sudden death has created a togetherness of life and death with a staggering complexity.

These are sculptures — for whom, by whom?

It’s not a place to stay, but a place that will follow me.

Winter Walk

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Trail #2 in Cifty Falls State Park is one of the most rugged trails in Indiana, suitable for a harsh winter experience even without snow. It begins with a steep descent into the canyon.

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There we follow the creek, switching sides when needed. Occasional obstacles can easily be overcome.

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The canyon walls make it clear that we have little choice otherwise.

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What is a path anyway? Isn’t it just our choice of walking?

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Frozen time passes, too, and makes us hasten forward.

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Increasingly, the path becomes an illusion.

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Well, it said very rugged in the park brochure. We have been warned.

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While there might be no path, still there is a way.

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What more could we have wished for?

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

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Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Land of Winter (Svalbard I)

Let’s begin this year with a journey in time and space.

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The year is 1976, the day lasts 24 hours, and the season says summer but does not feel like it at all.

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It is a dark and barren place, where the few residents live by mining the mountains.

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My father and I both took photos back then, it’s impossible to tell who took which. Memory can fade.

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The impossible darkness alternates with equally impossible brightness, just like our past.

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And then: The end of the world — — —

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Golden blüht der Baum …

Color in winter is a difficult affair. I don’t know how they do it, but the Washington Park Arboretum in Seattle has a special winter section where the trees show off the most wondrous color palettes.

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Above, the leafless small tree with mossy branches seems to partition the colorful background.

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Or here, the delicately branched marvels beam in some shade of green, bushes provide a foreground with contrasting colors, while larger trees stay in the back.

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High point in complexity of the composition was this Japanese inspired garden where two rust colored trees touch upon a pond. The saturation is surprisingly well balanced by the yellow bush.

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What keeps baffling me is the intricate play between structure and color. It feels like the color is the soil in which the abstract shapes can grow.

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Then there are the solo performers, single trees effortlessly covering the ground with leaves while still decently wearing their costume.

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Some leaves just seem to be perpetually falling.

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Infinite Difficulties (Wenckheim VII)

The Professor, international expert on mosses, is back at Thornbush, and busy with thought-immunization exercises.

… not a single moment can be left to the brain to find some pretext in order to escape from the questioning gaze, namely, the brain is looking at itself, and this looking must be comprised of sheer mistrust …

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Facing deathly revenge from the bikers, he acquires an insane amount of gasoline and stages his own death in the flames, re-creating a Burning Thornbush. We are led to expect that he will escape.

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While busy with preparations, the Professor ponders the meaning of life and death in a long monologue (speaking to his dog Little Mutt), beginning with questioning the infinite, and accusing the mathematician Georg Cantor for thinking the infinite is real, which the professor refutes, based on the lack of empirical evidence:

…namely, no one has ever wished genuinely to confront the deeply problematic nature of empirical verification as such, because whoever did this went mad…

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The denial of the infinite leads the Professor further — thinking itself becomes suspect:

…the mere appearance of a thought hauntingly reminds us that the way a person thinks is but one concept of infinity,…

Existence beyond being extant in time and space is questioned:

…there’s only that which takes place…

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The denial of the infinite and with it anything transcendent however causes a problem: our universal fear of being finite, that is, our fear of death:

… what we must deal with here is, namely, Cantor and his god — because if we’re dealing with this, then at least we’re dealing with something, namely we’re dealing with fear, and we have to deal with that if Cantor and his god are interesting — and they are interesting — and that’s why, at this point, we must refocus our attention on this, as fear is what defines human existence, …

The Professor’s monologue culminates in what I would call his theology of fear:

… fear, if we regard it as a creationary force, a general power center, from where the gods evaporate, and finally God emerges, and yes, the God of Cantor too, because the fear of the cessation of existence is a force field which we can’t even measure, …

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Strikingly, the Professor comes to the realization that fearing death and loving to live are identical:

… the fear that is within us and the joy of life that is within us, well, these two things are one and the same, two sides of one fact, because we are a web of events that seeks to sustain one thing and one thing only, namely continuity, …

So he can, simultaneously, affirm life as a process that aims to constitute infinity, and deny the existence of anything infinite, including God.

The simplest infinite set in mathematics, the set of natural numbers, is postulated to have the property that for every number there is a successor. Within mathematics, it is not stated what it means that such a set exists — but most of mathematics is based on the firm belief that there always is a number that’s by one bigger than the previous one, that there always is one more step, just as in life.

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Has the poor Professor not understood yet that if you have lived you don’t fear death?

Thank You, Dear Trail

It’s time to thank my trusted companion, the Pate Hollows Trail, which has kept me mentally and physically healthy this remarkable year.

Today, on Christmas day, we had a bit of powdery snow, providing just the right amount of contrast to what makes the trail, the ground.

Thanks for the leaves, the ferns, the moss and the mushrooms.

Thanks also for the water and the roots.

A loop trail like this has no other purpose than to be walked.

Which teaches us an important lesson, maybe the only one: There always is one more step to take.

Browning Mountain

Today I climbed Browning Mountain, with staggering 283 meters the 53rd highest mountain of Indiana according to Wikpedia, while on Peakery’s list it’s at position 57.

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First, one has to find the trailhead, which is located along Combs Road near Elkinsville, whose inhabitants were displaced in 1964 in order to create Lake Monroe Reservoir. It turned out later that due to a miscalculation of the elevation the town would not flood after all, but too late, alas.

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