James Hillman has said that we are living in times which are "absolutely encrusted in rationality" - in a kind of veneer-deep literalism which I call, "what you see is what you get," so that what you see is all there is to it. The physicists have come to call this "material realism." It's like the overeager kid in the front of the classroom. Bouncing in his seat and always the first one to have his hand raised, this child so easily becomes the teacher's pet - to the exclusion of the other 25 voices in the room: voices which speak from slightly different attitudes and perspectives. I think we have come to a point where intellectually many of us would agree that this iceberg we are floating on lies 4/5ths below the surface -that this part of our existence that we can see and agree on and argue over constitutes only the visible 1/5th. But our actions indicate that we have come to take it as all there is. The map has become the territory. If I were asked to give a definition of creativity, one thing I would include prominently would be a person's ability to be confronted with that sense, "How do I get there from here?" To be able to embrace what we know in our hearts needs to be done, or perhaps more importantly, to cease doing what we know in our hearts should not be done. I have come to think of my photographs as being incidental, as the residue of a process or as the evidence which is simply left behind. Really, the photographs are the easy part. It is altogether too easy for me to forget Castenada's assertion, that we are nothing but a feeling....that this entire life of ours is nothing but a feeling. I mean this in the same sense that dreams are nothing but a feeling: certain events which transpire (which we may or may not recall for any length of time) which leave us with a residue feeling long after the particulars have passed away. Likewise, certain seminal events in our lives are remembered first and foremost for the feeling which played center stage inside those events: feelings which, if followed, lead us out of our own private little dramas and connect us to a larger humanity. It is with this attitude that I try to approach photography, viewing an image (or an event) from the standpoint of a witness. The same sort of witness that I am in the drama and activities of my dreams - a drama that is of me and by me, but also through me. I try to pick up the tone and atmosphere of the scene, to enter it as a tourist might arrive in a foreign land, as Thomas Moore would say. To put aside my own agenda and just see what is being presented. It is in this sense that the photographs here on the wall are a travelogue. And it is in this sense that I am speaking to you about aesthetics, though perhaps the use of the word in this way is not so familiar to you. It is a word which is used quite alot today, and seems to have become sort of the "Chardonnay" of the art world. Aesthetics, as Frederick Sommer pointed out, is Greek for "sense perception." But I have come to a more complete sense of what this word is about through the writings of James Hillman: "Aesthetics is not some John Locke empiricist sort of sensation....The...Greek sense perception cannot be understood without taking into account the Greek goddess of the senses or the organ of Greek sensation, (which is) the heart, and (also) the root in the word - that sniffing, gasping and breathing in of the world..." Another thing which Frederick Sommer has said that I like very much is that the world is not a world of cleavages, but a world of bonds - that circulation of the blood is always circumnavigation of the globe. Now, some ideas you don't so much understand as simply get used to, and this is one of those ideas for me. But really, isn't this another way of saying that it is not "a me inside here, and a world outside there"? I will grant you that this is all pretty heady stuff, and I think for many of us that is exactly where this will all stay: in the head - while we continue to live out our life "from the neck up," as Sandra Whittier would say. It is easy to get swept up in a feeling of lucidity only to come face to face with the facts of our existence. Just another form of escapism really. But there is one pivotal thing which we can use to help keep perspective....Let's consider this image for a moment: It is a hot day and we decide to take a swim in the ocean.... MARE....MER...mother, ocean.We are floating around in this "mother ocean"...with something like 4/5ths of us below the surface, right? And what part of us is the 1/5th above? It's the head isn't it? Safe, dry, out in the full light of day...above it all...only just able to see the rest of us below the surface... And the 4/5ths that is below the surface...this is where the heart resides. That part of us which tends toward the depths, that lives in diffuse, refracted and indirect light...moist, cool, dark. Able to live in the absence of air, almost as a guest; a guest with a most critical function - a function without which we would die in a moment, slipping beneath the surface completely, to bask in the light of day no more.... But WHEN?

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