We are living through unprecedented times of collective suffering; this is a line in the sand where events after the crease will have little resemblance to those before. The streets outside are in turmoil from old human follies and new viral adversaries. Trying to explain these soul-stirring days to myself has been excruciatingly hard. Harder has it been to explain them to my ten-year-old –– and here I was, comically worried about the big sex-ed talk I would need to have with him someday! The world is boiling like the primitive cosmos where the darkness remains unpunctuated; it appears as if there are no beacons in sight.
So, where does one find solace during such malevolent turbulence? Gretel Ehrlich says (in her renowned book), one could find it in open spaces. Well, if one knows where to look, there are plenty of open spaces in a park near us – Yosemite. As you may know, Yosemite is a mental health asylum of some world-class repute. Since obscure times, it has cured numerous suffering souls, including a few luminaries who were primarily lunatics: Charles Weed, John Muir, Ansel Adams, and Fred Olmsted to name a few. It is located geographically in California's heart and spiritually in hearts of million other human beings who could be taxonomized as naturalists, activists, artists, environmentalists, visionaries, or, plain ordinary people, like, yours truly. When I am in Yosemite – or, find Yosemite in me – I perceive peace. You could say, Yosemite's wilderness is my totem of solitude, solace and hope.
To most, Yosemite’s totem is Half Dome – a giant granite monolith that stands in congruent humility with its surrounding rocks and clouds. It is unique among all Yosemite domes in having a sheer cliff and a steep vertical face (northwest side), which actually displays a human face in blockprint (a story for another day). Glaciers, time, and light have ebbed and flowed over the humpbacked dome for millions of years, but ‘Tis-sa-ack’ stands proud in deft defiance. The oft-pictured image of Half Dome – the one with the helmet curve, as Ansel put it – is from the West (Glacier point area). From our vantage point the other day, the iconic steward of the park displayed its unglamorous hind side, which features a prominent hump, the eastern sub-dome. In his National Geographic article, William Least Heat-Moon described this view of Half Dome as, “… watching a Shakespearean play from backstage, where old and familiar lines seem different, strange, new”.
Our contemporary times are somewhat similar... old and familiar ways of life now appear ‘different, strange, new’. In his letter to Ansel Adams in 1953, art historian Beaumont Newhall wrote, “In the face of all the present turmoil and unrest and unhappiness… what can a photographer, a writer, a curator do? …To make people aware of the eternal things, or show the relationship of man to nature… is a task that no one should consider insignificant… These are days when eloquent statements are needed”.
Eloquence is not my thing, but here above, you have my statement against everything that attempts to stir darkness in our societies, lives, minds, and hearts.
PS: The title is borrowed from Sylvia Plath’s sonnet Ennui, which was written in 1950s and published in 2006:
“The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,
compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;
and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,
while bored arena crowds for once look eager,
hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizes
shall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.”
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