At a snail’s pace

December 29th, 2013 by Charles Cameron

[ by Charles Cameron — leap frog in very slow motion, and leap razor too ]

.

As a poet, I don’t much like that old saw about a picture being worth a thousand words — but there’s a density of information in each of the images below that’s worth considering:

**

Two very striking images, in parallel, juxtaposed. What can we read into them, or out of them?

  • That a snail’s pace is always the same, no matter what obstacles it encounters?

  • That slow and steady wins the race?

  • That you can take the easy way, or you can take the hard way?

  • That you [Chinese Buddhists] can go for gradual or sudden enlightenment?

  • That the snail in the upper panel (in an artwork by Nancy Fouts) is enacting and or paying hommage to Colonel Kurtz‘s celebrated line from Apocalypse Now?

    • I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That’s my dream; that’s my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor… and surviving.

  • What else? What do you see?

    • There’s power in images, and even more in juxtapositions.

    **

    Daffodils

    If one picture is worth

    a thousand words,

    what’s a bunch of Wordsworth?

    **

    Here the actor Jeremy Irons gives a refreshingly fresh reading of Wordsworth‘s poem:

    Posted in Charles Cameron, Doublequotes, nature, photography, poetry, Specs, time, Uncategorized | Comments Off on At a snail’s pace

    Previous post:
    Next post: