Pause

It has been hard to try to write lately. I’ve pulled back from writing because I’ve been doing instead. As the readers of Krista’s blog already know, we got married a little over a week ago. We slipped away to Duluth for the weekend, and now we’re headed south for a week or so.

Thanks to QB, I have a flickr account that I’m trying to start using. I’ve actually started taking pictures for fun with the digital camera I got last spring. It’s been fun. An interesting parallel just occurred to me. When I was active as a photographer, I very seldom wrote (or even talked) much. It’s as if there are two different modes of thought involved entirely. But, all the same, my research for the last few years is directed at undermining that observation. I think words and pictures have much in common.

Perhaps its more like this: the activity of interpreting any symbolic activity (word, sound, or picture) seems to follow the same path. However, actively generating messages—in the sense of poesis— usually means concentrating on one mode to the exclusion of all others. But that’s kind of a cop out too. I’m not really taking serious pictures; in fact, I’d like to avoid taking serious pictures. I just want to have some sort of fun this summer!

Now that it’s almost over and all my teaching responsibilities are done for the moment, I might be able to relax. But probably not.