A Word of Pitiful Explanation

OK, gang, you’re probably wondering what’s with the posts in this blog of some of my thirty+ year old poetry, some of which reads like an existential epitaph.

Well, here’s the deal. If you’re curious, read on. It won’t take long…

After I was honorably discharged from the US Coast Guard Search and Rescue teams in 1973, I had developed a line of thought predicated on at least two premises.

First, this was a time when the Viet Nam war was still raging, and most every newscast was brimming with morbidity. Back then, the media delighted in reporting body counts on both sides of the line, for example – daily.

Having been drafted into the Army, I knew I had thirty days to enlist in another branch of service, so I enlisted in the USCG. As a result, over the ensuing four years, I was directly involved in saving over thirty souls.

Second, during that same time, however, I also witnessed not-infrequent failure. I took this very personally. I lamented my own inability to save every life threatened by the sea. As a result, my own mortality punched me squarely in the face. I also developed a chronic intolerance for failure of any sort.

Handling human corpses wasn’t a daily occurrence, but unhappily occurred often enough to instill in me a sense of horrible wonder. To this day, many of these tragic memories are still emblazoned in my mind, and my dreams, with vividly bizarre details, untoward events usually fueled by utter human stupidity, culminating in entirely avoidable tragedies in almost all cases.

Infant corpses were the worst. 

Once I lapsed back into being a civilian again, and a few years on a Liberal Arts campus, I often waxed philosophical in those days. In retrospect, these epitomes of largely existential babble were more therapeutical for me than truly philosophical, nonetheless amusing to me now.

And as we all know, writing of the fabric of the human condition can’t be just about happiness and feeling good. There is an inevitable duality in our condition – good, bad, happy, sad, love, hate, epochal, trivial… One side cannot exist without the other. One cannot truly be appreciated without carnal knowledge of both slices of life, in my humble opinion, a truism shared by philosophers and prophets throughout the ages.

As we all have experienced, the fabric of all life events obviously influences our thoughts, hopes and dreams, our aspirations, our outlook, our writing. And our photography.

As I re-read some of the quasi-poetry I wrote back then, I was enchanted by how differently I feel now, but feel compelled to share a few of those decades-old perspectives. Some of the interest for me is the robust range of the human condition–even my own–perhaps especially my own. Certainly not to be ignored.

I still love the bizarre constructs of poets like ee cummings. Not sure why. Unconventional, to be sure. Celebrates different. Probably the bleeding heart liberal facade that I sometimes paint for the amusement of others.

I hope that helps put these old mental meanderings into some sort of context for you. Not sure why I felt compelled to explain all of this, but there you have it. Maybe I still need a therapeutic pen in my mortal hand. Maybe that’s what writing is entirely about?

Then:

Now:

Gene

Commuter Morality Unhappily Remembered

Loneliness was always the most intense

Amidst the crowd so indelibly cold.

Distant at arm’s length, they took offense.

So often, it seemed your soul had sold

For a measure of cheap jealousy, always on sale.

No matter how you felt, you were seen as too bold.

Or perhaps you just thought you would certainly fail

When others were threatening you with what they were told

Of your shallow indifference to their empty inadequacy,

Or their perception of your periphery tightly rolled,

Into an understated cancerous indelicacy,

To pillage and burn your dubious affectations. So droll.

Is it fitting and appropriate that their ineffectual efficacy,

Who, in the midst of indefinitely infecting your shallow soul,

Were pretenders of honor and innocence as their prophecy,

Yet armored with their careless anonymity as a whole,

For the last time, every time, an equally careless mendacity

… At your onerous expense? A sentence without parole?

Gene Jurrens, December 20, 1980

Lava’s Slow Embrace

Among placid, molten merriment,

Viscous bubbles waltz.

A ponderous and befitting occasion.

Not bragging her boisterous belch,

The crater spits her fury.

A lady in waiting impatiently,

With knowledge of graceful millennia.

Tucked within her girth,

The hollows of pulsing bowels

Scream deeply from within her wavering breath

To exhale eternally and so hotly.

 

She withers my weakening frame,

She turns me to ivory gold,

Never missing a nerve,

Every instant unfolds

An icy trembling memory.

Entices, engulfs me tensely

To a slowing umbilical end.

Forget, relive, and die

To all reality save one…

To caress her anguish is to know

That all answers are all eternal.

Gene Jurrens, December 30, 1980

Labor’s Love

Ambition breeds

a joy in fatigue,

so long as one’s balance

one does not exceed.

Work of a want

lends peace in rest,

knowing doing is done

at one’s willful best.

Gene Jurrens, July 27, 1974

Porthole

Though the sun seems to cry

Through that foggy pane,

The washed out flashes blind

My happy eye,

Though waxy tarpaulins flail

As a kite beating at the wind,

I must only watch and sigh

As such a day glances by.

 

Amidst the tunnel of my sight,

An ancient gray duffer strolls

With ancient gray friend on arm.

Hair and soul glisten bright white

From labored ages harshly laundered.

Steam lazily lolls from a breezy stack

To haphazardly challenge, for a moment,

Meandering beams of the conqueror of night.

 

Gulls are surely braying

As I turn on ragged heel to re-enter

A world of catacombs.

Seems even darker, heavier, ringing.

Is the light in my thoughts,

Or in the quiet black about me?

May I bargain for a memory

To keep that window near my mind’s eye?

…Gene Jurrens, April, 1974

My New Photo Site

Well, I’ve started collecting my portfolio of photos and paintings on a web site that might actually help me achieve an item on my bucket list – to sell at least one of my photos or paintings.

Yeah, they’re still pretty amateurish, but with time, and my obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, who knows?

And with our upcoming sailing trip around some of the islands off the coast of Greece, I hope to collect plenty of hopefully interesting source material.

If interested, check out my photostream at www.flickr.com/photos/genoflicks. Don’t be shy about commenting on any of the images you find there.

And if you’re not interested, well, who could blame you? After all, this is just another one of my obsessions, not yours.

Check out this panorama that took no small effort (and I’d like to think, creative skill) to put together (21 high-def images comprising 200MB of total data stitched and tone-mapped together). I like it. Hope you do too…

Also, don’t be shy about checking out my other blogs at:

• www.oursojourn.wordpress.com (boats ‘n stuff)
• www.ourhealthyretirement.wordpress.com (our attempt to live longer)
• www.k0gkj.wordpress.com (this radio boy’s haven for some geek stuff)

 Later, ‘gators…

Latest Images – High Dynamic Range & Time Elapse Photography

Well, I’m still learning the art of photography, and still trying to transform beautiful natural scenes into more exotic and evocative images. After all, who is to say what our mind’s eye conjures and presents to us before our über-rational optic nerve filters images into preconceived notions of reality?

The following photo combines a bunch of new stuff I’m learning more about.

First, HDR photography combines several images that are identical except for exposure time. By using some pretty high-tech software (Dynamic Photo HDR) to combine them, and use both global and local tone mapping (don’t ask!), a wider visible range of light and shadow is possible. This is achieved by including the best of each image into the final converged picture.

Next, I employed relatively long exposure times, in order to create twilight from a dusky night, and to paint with headlights. So, instead of a sub-second momentary click of the shutter, the image below was created from a composite of five images with shutter speeds varying from five to thirty seconds. Obviously, the camera was on a tripod to ensure clear and steady images.

Third, I employed a very cool color mapping methodology to coax some wonderful colors from an otherwise rather bland sunset over a Minnesota highway and Wisconsin bluffs.

And finally, we’ve seen hundreds, perhaps thousands of lightening strikes over this very lakeshore scene over the last few days of severe summer weather, so I thought it only appropriate to overlay a bit of that action on a sky that is this night miraculously clear… memories of a Minnesota summer.

I hope you enjoy viewing this project as much as I enjoyed creating it. I think it represents a wonderful juxtaposition between a tranquil water scene with a busy highway, even late at night, combined with a sense of electric movement above.

I’ve repeatedly drawn pleasant inspiration from this marvelous view.

For example, below is a sunny afternoon watercolor captured from this same vista while relaxing on the lanai of our rental condo in Lake City, Minnesota… 

When Kay’s friend, Diane, visited us, I took a picture of them overlooking the same body of water – Lake Pepin. From that photo, I created this oil painting…

And here’s a watercolor of our friend and dinner guest of the other evening, Captain Harry:

 

Later, kids…

Cheers!