Archive for October 15th, 2010
Through a Smog Darkly
Sometimes, life is just like this. Here in Changzhou, China the air quality sometimes suffers. A low pressure system brings on clouds which hold the exhausts from hundreds of factories and thousands of cars. We are washed moment by moment with our own grayness, our own toxins. I chose this scene to present because this is also reality. Other than cropping the photo to fit this space better, no editing was done to this photo which I took from a classroom window in a primary school where I had gone to present an “English Corner” to grade five students. This morning as I write this post, dawn is just breaking and I can already see blue skies and know that this will be a day of sunshine.
Strange how the weather seems to have personality. Looking at the scene above I can reduce it all to simple terms that have no “emotional” connotations. Air is just air. But, my head looks beyond the conditions of air and finds life. That life isn’t always shadowy nor is it always sunny. What I see is myself as though in a mirror. Projections.
So what do I see in an “other,” in a woman with whom I have “fallen in love?”
“There is passive projection and there is active projection.. Passive projection is completely automatic and unintentional. Our eyes catch another’s across a crowded room and we are smitten, head over heels. We may know nothing about that person; in fact the less we know, the easier it is to project. We fill the void with ourselves.” (Sharp, Jungian Psychology Unplugged, p. 59-60)
Today’s post is short. In a few moments I leave on an early train to travel to Shanghai where I will spend the day with a camera wandering around the site of Expo 2010. I wonder what photos will present themselves to me and I wonder at the resonance and the words to follow.
