Old Canadian Machine
India and Turkey are two countries that I’ve travelled in where you can see a lot of tractors made by the Canadian company Massey-Ferguson. At least they used to be Canadian; they might not be today. Anyway, I always look for them. During one visit about two weeks ago, to a place in Moodbidri, India (see post on Jain temple and statue below) called Soans Farm, I saw a very old MF tractor that must have been from the 1950s. It was still going strong. I did a photographic study of its parts and liked this picture. The steel had a kind of rich patina to it and I liked the simplicity of its mechanical parts, its sturdy levers. It seemed so well cared for that you would think it could run forever. One of my favorite memories of living on Cyprus was the day I ventured to find a remote ruin of a Byzantine church that nobody I knew had ever seen. Moreover there were only the sketchiest of indications of its whereabouts. It appeared on no map. I went to a village, hoping for the best. I showed a man a line drawing of the church done a century before. He nodded, and took me to his tractor (a Massey-Ferguson, of course) and drove me for twenty minutes to his fields. There, in the middle of his fields, was the church. Makes me think… I think I took a picture. Stay tuned to this channel.
Shore Crab, Galle
The tidal pools and shorelines near Galle, Sri Lanka, were filled with life. My friend Rich found a small Moray eel in one pool, and everywhere were urchins and very shy crabs, who seemed to know that many people and birds liked to eat them. I took lots of pictures, chasing after them. This was the best portrait I got of my crustacean friends. Later, in the Maldives, there were lots of hermit crabs and another type of crab, light green in colour–Ghost crabs–that ran sideways so fast it was hard to believe.
Another Galle Fisherman
At one beach near Galle, Sri Lanka, rows of men were lined up pulling by hand on a giant seine net that had been set out in the bay. Dozens of them were needed to haul it, and it extended so far out that men had to support the net at its sagging points to keep it from dragging too much in the surf. I took a picture of a man doing just that, pausing in his hard work for a moment to look out at the slowly gathering net, hoping that it held a lot of fish. There wasn’t much colour in the shot to begin with, and I liked mostly the weary man’s pose and the play of the curve of the net and waves, so I went with black and white.
Galle Fishermen
The famous images of fishermen at Galle, in Sri Lanka, are of the fellows that sit up on poles in the surf, but that practice has long ago become something the locals only do for tourists. It was nice instead to see real fishermen working on shores of Galle. There are two images (this one, and above) that I liked. This one shows two fishermen walking along the beach with its warm coloured sand. They clearly were friends and I watched them talk and laugh as they walked away. I liked as well the shanty shacks in a tattered jumble along the beach. Prime real estate in other parts of the world, but here the mere sheds of fishermen and their families.
Nice Smelling Feet
While we’re on the subject of the Jain religion (previous post), here is a picture of some hibiscus flowers that have been left at the feet of a giant statue of a Jain saint, Gomateshwara, at Karkala, India. It dates from the same time as the aforementioned ‘Thousand Pillar Temple’, 1432 CE. The statue itself is 42 feet in height and made of granite. The story goes that Gomateshwara meditated for so long in a standing position that vines began to grow around his body. These are depicted on the statue itself. The drama of the site is also that this statue stands atop a high rock outcrop of a hill. A perfect place for a monumental cult statue. Every 12 years a great scaffolding is built behind the statue so that milk and ghee can be poured over the statue in veneration, along with myriad other votive powders and liquids. There’s an even taller statue of this same saint at a place called Shravanabelagola. At 57 feet it’s the tallest of all Jain saint statues. It too undergoes veneration at the 12 year cycle.
Thousand Pillar Temple
Near Mangalore, India, in the town of Moodabidri, is a Jain temple known as ‘The Temple of a Thousand Pillars’. There aren’t that many pillars, but many little pillars are depicted on the main pillars themselves. I suspect the place has disappointed some visitors with its promising name. But likely they were happy to see it anyway, because it’s a beautiful temple. It was built in the early 15th century and houses a cult statue of the Tirthankara Chandraprabha, a Jain saint. Jainism was an offshoot of Hinduism some time in the 5th or 6th century B.C.E. Here, the cult statue, about 8 feet high, is visible in the temple’s inner sanctum. This lamp and offering bowl marked the outer limit that non-Jains could go, barely half way into the temple structure proper. A surly fellow in his white Jain garb was guarding the door. I liked the warm colours in this picture, the flame and the brass of the lamp. The visage of Mahatma Gandhi stares up from a ten-rupee note in the offering bowl, filled with Sindoor or red Sandalwood powder.
Cashew Kindergarten
A week ago in Mangalore, India, we visited a cashew processing facility. It seemed only women worked there; the hours were long and the work noisy and hard. One thing was sure: after you visited you’d never eat a cashew again without thinking of those women’s labours. The facility had a kindergarten for the workers’ preschool children. A few of them warmed to having visitors and rushed to the gate, but none of them was as precocious as this little girl, who posed beautifully and burst into laughter when anyone showed her the picture on their camera screens. She was moving about all the time, a bundle of energy, so it was hard to get her in focus, but I was happy with this one with her lovely smile and the frames of her hands.
Grades of Rice, Goa
Ten days ago I was exploring the old markets of Goa (Panjim) with its fish and exotic fruits and vegetables. I passed by a little office where a young woman was busy at filling out receipts. In front of her desk was a small table filled with tiny bags of rice, each with a label telling which variety it was. Each grain was a slightly different shape and colour. In Asia people have a fine sense of the varieties of rice and their attributes. This picture made me think of Asia’s ‘rice culture’ compared of our ‘wheat culture’. It’s too bad they didn’t have a tasting station, where a less-than-savvy Westerner could have tested each of them out.
Seeking the Past
I’m usually seeking the past in art and architecture, but the other day I went with some friends, who were also here in Italy, to a remote village called Seren del Grappa. They were there to find the cemetery and the graves of any people with the last name of my friend’s great grandmother who came from the village but had emigrated to America in 1905. We found many tombs with her family name and even some living people (we’d missed one by just two weeks; she died on November 11th), though they weren’t home when we buzzed them. On the way from the cemetery I took this picture of autumn leaves covered in frost, even though it was well past noon. In the sun all was warm, but in the shade it was frigid. To the north the rough heights of the Dolomites loomed with new snow upon them. Travel brings many pleasures, and many moments of beauty and contemplation. I always find that travel dramatically alters one’s sense of time, both short and long term. History is everywhere, time is everywhere. The seasons change. It was the first time I’d seen frost in years.
Bellini’s Drapery
I was at the Accademia Museum in Venice again today and took a picture of part of Giovanni Bellini’s San Giobbe altarpiece (1487), of the wingless angels in the lower middle of the painting who make up a striking musical trio. This time I was impressed by the draperies of their clothing; the sheen and crisp rhythm of the folds. When I was first studying art history you weren’t supposed to be impressed with such things; they distracted one from the social function of the work of art. ‘Formalism’ was a dirty word. No good Marxist worth their salt would think of noticing such a bourgeois detail. However, no longer being an academic, and since Marxism is now passé, I can now once again freely revel in it. I love the glance of the angel on the left, the one with the magnificent blue robes and impressive hair. What he’s looking at is hard to tell, the figure of Job, perhaps, who wears only a loin-cloth, though it seems to be of very costly iridescent shot silk. I guess if you’re only going to have one outfit, it should be a good one. Tarzan eat your heart out.
Revisiting: Heraklion, Crete
The recently reopened Archaeological Museum in Heraklion, Crete, is fantastic. I was lucky enough to visit this past September, just two short months ago. Many more artifacts are on display, and the displays themselves are wonderful. You get to see so many incredible things produced by the Minoan civilization. One of them is this vase with a band of decoration showing ibexes. The ones in the middle are posing heroically and symmetrically for their snapshots, proper fellows, while the one on the right has been distracted and is biting at an itchy spot– a bit of naturalistic, behavioral detail. The Minoans must have loved nature as plants and animals figure heavily in their representational art, still vibrant and compelling 3500 years later.
Revisiting: Agrigento
On slow days like today I find myself thinking back to things I saw these past months that I didn’t get to share on the blog. I was browsing through some pictures from the last few months and came across this one that I took in the Agrigento Archaeological Museum (Sicily). It’s a detail of a Greek vase from the 5th century BCE that shows Perseus, who has already slain the marine serpent who is about to devour the maiden Andromeda. He pauses for a moment, puts a foot up onto a rock, places his elbow on his knee and briefly regards the beautiful woman chained to a rock, as if mesmerized by her loveliness. The profile is so economically rendered, as are his robes. His hair falls in black ringlets. It’s strange to see the calmness of it, the moment of stillness and contemplation. Perseus, a real hero, makes it all seem easy; all in a day’s work. The orange bits are where the white paint of the vase has been chipped, revealing the terra cotta underneath.
Going to the Dogs
Look at the image in the previous post (see below). This picture is just below it, and you can see the overlap. But what interested me here in this second, lower picture of the group of Borso and his courtiers was the way they all used their hands, many of them gloved, to show their elegant and measured gestures; restraint and grace being the hallmarks of the movements of the nobility. The dogs are great too. I love the two that look like greyhounds, with their slim muzzles and wonderful ears. They peer down at a mongrel pooch who is a bit sorry looking (you can just see the top of his head), imitating exactly what is going on in the human world just above as Borso gives a coin to his servant, who may be the keeper of his hunting dogs. So even here the great hierarchy of being is reflected: the animal world reflects the human world just above that, and above the humans the stars and heavenly bodies, and above those the realms of the Olympian gods. There was only one other person there today, a beautiful Russian woman about 30 years of age. She was taking notes very seriously, as I did 25 years before at about her age. I talked to her a bit; she’d come from Moscow, where she studies art history, to see the frescoes. That’s some field trip. She just had a little point-and-shoot camera so I offered to send her some of my pictures if she needed them. I was trying to be chivalrous: a courtly ideal, though in the frescos of April and May, of spring, love is the theme. I dreamt of cold Russian nights… in bed with a fireplace flickering. As I left I tried to make a joke with the guard, who was doing crosswords, saying that it was ironic that she had such a boring job in a palazzo named Schifanoia. I’m not sure if she got it or not; she smiled weakly and just said, “arrivederci”.
