The World in a Jug

Japanese haiku masters, who grasp in passing a shimmer in its impermanence and consider the frailest things to have the greatest value and the most power, are not mystics. You could not imagine calling them 'ardent', or even that they climbed mountain peaks. They remind me more of those servants, in André Dhôtel's The Man of the Lumber Mill, who suddenly see the pure gleam of a garden reflected in the silverware or crystal glasses that they are cleaning.

Philippe Jaccottet (translated by John Taylor), "Notes from the Ravine", in "And, Nonetheless: Selected Prose and Poetry, 1990-2009" (Chelsea Editions 2011), p. 303.

I found this quotation transcribed in one of my notebooks, probably from someone else's blog or website, but despite the thorough sourcing of the quote itself I seem to have omitted to note the secondary source, not that it matters.

French literature has always been a blind spot in my Euro-culture, so I had some looking up to do: Jaccottet? Dhôtel? Are those even real names? Apparently so. It turns out the work by Dhôtel is L'homme de la scierie, which I see our university library holds, as well as the Jaccottet (Notes du ravin), so if I wanted to find the original French of either text in order to verify the accuracy of the translation then I could. But, again, it hardly matters. What had caught my attention was the linking of haiku with that last sentence: servants "who suddenly see the pure gleam of a garden reflected in the silverware or crystal glasses that they are cleaning".

Why? Because that is an excellent description of a sort of photography that I enjoy. This is not a description to be taken literally, obviously – there's not a genre of photographs of scenes reflected in tableware – but in spirit: to be taken by surprise, often while doing something completely different and routine, by some oblique, ephemeral marvel that demands to be noticed and, if you are a photographer, recorded. These mini-epiphanies are never the result of a carefully planned expedition, the laying out and lighting of a still life, or the posing of a portrait, but a momentary glimpse of something perfectly ordinary transformed by light and circumstance, perhaps but not necessarily distorted and given that "pure gleam" polish by optical means: a mirror, a shiny surface, a window, or indeed a camera lens.

Inevitably, I suppose, its main proponents are Japanese: I think of the work of Rinko Kawauchi, or Masao Yamamoto. But it's something that anyone does who, in Gary Winogrand's words, photographs to see what things look like when photographed. Especially now phone cameras have added a whole new dimension of spontaneity to that enterprise.

Kitchen top, Bristol

Kitchen wall, Southampton

Of course, you can create similar surprises for yourself deliberately. Earlier in the summer I was in the kitchen, putting away the washing up, when I wondered what would happen if I took a picture through the bottom of a coffee jug. My phone gave a polite cough... Your wish is my command, master... Behold:

Hmm. So I then started taking pictures through the bottom of any transparent article that came readily to hand from the drying rack.

Interesting. A Pyrex jug or a jam jar are not things you'd want to lug around on a "just in case" basis, but might a light plastic food tray be worth slipping in a bag as a sort of filter? Probably not. Besides, for those of us unafraid to combine spontaneity with outright fakery in the pursuit of picture-making, there is always a simpler way...

All of which inevitably reminds me of this poem, an anthology favourite:

Anecdote of the Jar, by Wallace Stevens (1919)

I placed a jar in Tennessee,   

And round it was, upon a hill.   

It made the slovenly wilderness   

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.   

The jar was round upon the ground   

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.   

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,   

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Incidentally, I have only just learned, after all these years (from Wikipedia, naturally), that Dominion was a popular brand of glass jar in the USA for the preservation of fruit (not to mention the infusing of home-distilled alcohol), most notably the Wide Mouth Special, made in the, ah, Dominion of Canada.