Tag Archives: black and white

Contemplation

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Dallas Museum of Art
Dallas, Texas

Dallas Museum of Art

Dallas Museum of Art

“Muddy water, let stand, becomes clear.”
― Lao Tzu

Symmetry

Posted on by Bill Chance

University of Texas at Dallas
Richardson, Texas

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.
—-Camille Paglia

The Control of Nature

Posted on by Bill Chance

“The industries were there because of the river. They had come for its navigational convenience and its fresh water. They would not, and could not, linger beside a tidal creek. For nature to take its course was simply unthinkable. The Sixth World War would do less damage to southern Louisiana. Nature, in this place, had become an enemy of the state.”
—-The Control of Nature, Atchafalaya, John McPhee

Levee strengthening, New Orleans, Louisiana

Levee strengthening, New Orleans, Louisiana

“The Unites States Congress, in its deliberations, decided that ‘the distribution of flow and sediment in the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers is now in desirable proportions and should be so maintained.’ The Corps was thereby ordered to preserve 1950. In perpetuity, at Old River, thirty per cent of the latitude flow was to pass to the Atchafalaya.”
—-The Control of Nature, Atchafalaya, John McPhee

New Orelans, Louisiana

New Orelans, Louisiana

Cloud Explodes

Posted on by Bill Chance

“What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

After riding around the city I sat on the platform at the Union Station DART train stop, waiting for the Red train to take me back to Richardson. It was late in the day (I had not brought my lights and had to get home before dark) and the sun was low in the sky. A late afternoon thunderstorm began to explode upward, the rising hot air spreading skyward, fanning out in a semi-circle that covered the sun. Still, the light filtered through, glowing like a fireball over the reflective ridge of the Hyatt Regency Hotel.

Rising cloud over the Hyatt, downtown Dallas, Texas

Rising cloud over the Hyatt, downtown Dallas, Texas

It was a brief image, an ephemeral phenomenon – the water vapor boiling away as I watched. And then my train arrived.

“To make myself understood and to diminish the distance between us, I called out: “I am an evening cloud too.” They stopped still, evidently taking a good look at me. Then they stretched towards me their fine, transparent, rosy wings. That is how evening clouds greet each other. They had recognized me.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Stories of God: A New Translation

Lonely Bird

Posted on by Bill Chance

Trinity River Audubon Center
Dallas, Texas

Trinity River Audubon Center, Dallas, Texas

Trinity River Audubon Center, Dallas, Texas

I’m not a nature photographer – I don’t have the knowledge, patience, or equipment to do well at that. Still, here’s a little bird in the middle of a drying wetland pond on a hot Texas day, looking for a bit of lunch. He looks a little lonely, don’t you think?

Stand Up Paddleboarders in the Big Easy

Posted on by Bill Chance

Stand Up Paddleboards
Bayou St. John
New Orleans, Louisiana

Bayou St. John New Orleans, La (click to enlarge)

Bayou St. John
New Orleans, La
(click to enlarge)

Under the Bridge

Posted on by Bill Chance
People walking from the yoga event with their mats under their arms. All Out Trinity Festival - Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, Dallas, Texas (click to enlarge)

People walking from the yoga event with their mats under their arms.
All Out Trinity Festival – Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)

From above, the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge – the Dallas Calatrava-designed cable-stay signature bridge finally reaching across the Trinity River from Downtown to long-neglected, oft-reviled West Dallas – is an architectural marvel of geometry, steel, and curves.

Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, Dallas, Texas

Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, Dallas, Texas

It has a dirty little secret, though. It isn’t really a bridge over much of anything. It’s more of a causeway with a huge, expensive, and dramatic sculpture tacked on overhead.

This is obvious when you venture into the vast stretches of the river bottoms. You can see the forest of columns holding up the span.

But still, even there, it is a thing of beauty. A different beauty – a more muscular, less soaring beauty – but beauty nonetheless.

I like it. If nothing else it offers up a vast strip of welcome cool shade.

Underneath the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. (click to enlarge)

Underneath the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge.
(click to enlarge)

Underneath the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge. (click to enlarge)

Underneath the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge.
(click to enlarge)

Settings

Posted on by Bill Chance

Fountain, Flora Street, between the DMA, Nasher, and Crow – Arts District, Dallas, Texas

Sharp or Blurred?

fount1

fount2

Sometimes the truth is seen in clarity – sometimes in a blur.
—-From Hell’s Heart I Stab at Thee, Armando Vitalis

Everything Old Is New Again

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on.
I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

everything_old

Dead End

Posted on by Bill Chance

Frisco, Texas

“Quite possibly there’s nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardesty thought. That’s when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

“Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!”
-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

“The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her—her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever-seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that ‘It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,’ and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her—understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.”
― George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier