{"id":283,"date":"2005-01-30T16:35:24","date_gmt":"2005-01-31T00:35:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/wordpress\/?p=283"},"modified":"2005-01-30T16:35:24","modified_gmt":"2005-01-31T00:35:24","slug":"near-the-guadalupe-reservoir-equivalents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2005\/01\/30\/near-the-guadalupe-reservoir-equivalents\/","title":{"rendered":"Near the Guadalupe Reservoir, Equivalents"},"content":{"rendered":"

I went for a Sunday walk in the Almaden Quicksilver Park<\/a> today. I like to leave the car by the Guadalupe Reservoir on Hicks road and walk in across the dam.<\/p>\n

I come to this park about twice a year, usually alone, and I always have this sense of giving myself a special treat when I’m here. Getting away from the friggin’ computer and touching Gaia.<\/p>\n

I remember last year I came here when I was thinking about retiring, for instance, and again right after I retired.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I’m always amazed how Nature keeps on doing her thing unaided. All the fractal layers of life, I just want to zoom in on it forever. But can’t actually zoom that far, so need to stop and savor the four or five levels I get.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Around 1930 Alfred Stieglitz took a lot of pictures of the sky and gave them all the title “Equivalent,” which he said meant that each of the sky images captured a pattern that was equivalent to some mental or emotional state. In this picture, I was thinking the cloud and the wood grain were equivalent patterns, so that’s another kind of equivalent.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I have a weakness for pictures of the sky, as readers of this blog will have noticed by now, and I admire Stieglitz for figuring out a rap for making them sound like more than “isn’t this pretty?” (Be it said, his pictures of the sky are amazing.)<\/p>\n

I couldn’t find a good link for a page with a bunch of Stieglitz equivalents<\/a>, you can get a kind of fake page of them with a Google image search<\/a>, and there’s a good page at the George Eastman House<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The thing about calling a picture of a sky an “equivalent,” is that if it’s just a picture of a cloud, people are like, so what, but if you tell them that it’s really<\/i> a picture of your inner turmoil or passing serenity, then it seems more interesting, gossipy monkeys that we are.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I went for a Sunday walk in the Almaden Quicksilver Park today. I like to leave the car by the Guadalupe Reservoir on Hicks road and walk in across the dam. I come to this park about twice a year, usually alone, and I always have this sense of giving myself a special treat when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}