We are deeply into winter now. Sister Molly is up in Pennsylvania to spend time with Dad and Fred, who is recovering from a hip injury, as well as with brother Will and his wife Sarah. It has been a rough season for the northeast, lots of snow and ice and frigid temps. (More snow predicted for Pennsylvania today, and tomorrow the low will be nine degrees.) Here in Florida, we’ve had more record cold spells than ever. Tonight its in the 30’s and tomorrow night it will get down near freezing—not a big deal for you Yankee winter professionals, but for us here it means wrapping the pinwheel jasmines in the garden and hoping the stray cats we feed will manage to say warm.
An indoors, inwarding vigil, dark and cold and endlessly winter. Yet there are comforts. I write on this laptop skewed to the right arm of this recliner with cat Belle curled on the main of my lap, sleeping, warming us both. I have the steady hearth-fire of my morning reading, which these days include Walter Jackson Bates’ masterful biography of John Keats, considered by most to be the greatest English poet next to Shakespeare.
Yesterday I read something which so reminded me of Timm that I share it here.
Timm took this on a jaunt to Crater Lake National Park in southern Oregon in July 2007.In the summer of 1818, John Keats set out on a walking tour of Scotland with his friend Charles Brown. He was 23 years old, and in the next year would write his greatest Odes. He would be die of tuberculosis in February 1821.
Keats was excited to enter a wilderness he had long associated with William Wordsworth, his greatest contemporary, the only poet of their day who seemed to find the energy and inspiration to enter a territory not already fully explored by the great Elizabethan poets—the human heart, a mansion of many, many rooms which only the individual can explore, each in their own way.
Remember Timm’s mantra? Follow your heart, wherever it takes you. Healing through its bad history, as I have said many times before, I believe that Timm in his maturity was becoming an adventurer and eventual resident of that plurally-vaulted mansion of a heart.
Like Keats, Timm would die short of the mark he dreamed, but he left us with images of astonishing faith in that wilderness.
Another photo from Crater Lake National Park by Timm in July 2007.As Keats and Brown entered the village of Bowness, Keats saw, as he related in a letter to his brother Tom that night,
... The Lake and Mountains of Winander—I cannot describe them—they surpass any expectation—beautiful water-shores and islands green to the marge—mountains all round up to the clouds … The two views we have had of it are of the most noble tenderness-they can never fade away—they make one forget the divisions of life; age, youth, poverty and riches; and refine one’s sensual vision into a sort of north star which can never cease to be open lidded and steadfast over the wonders of the great Power.
Who can wonder at Timm’s own fascination with that wilderness, outside and within? More than any of us kids, Timm became the great outdoor’s native son; he was most natural in it (human company for him was ever compromised by the past), he saw it with the same naked wonder that Keats did, and he would attempt to sharpen his “sensual vision” in a medium which was unknown in Keats’ day, his photography.
After spending the night at the White Lion Inn in Bowness, Keats and Brown head out the next morning for Ambleside, where Keats encountered his first great waterfall.
There is something magical and profound in this moment for him; something about the sight of motion within form (or, perhaps, the sight of form existing only in motion) which pulled something deep in his sensibilities. Before, he had expressed delight in the sight of an “inward sea” of grain blowing in the wind; he had jumped on a stile and cried “the tide!”
Water in land, motion in form, heaven on earth: the sight of the waterfall at Ambleside which clarifies something essential about the poetry that has yet to leap from his imagination and heart and pour from his pen. That night, in a continuation of his letter to Tom, he writes about the “tone and intellect” of seeing that waterfall, of taking in such a wonderful new moment:
Seeing is believing; yet as a poet, Keats believes that he can write such a waterfall, become such a magnitude. He goes on to tell Tom,
What astonishes me than any thing is the tone, the coloring, the slate, the stone, the moss, the rock-weed; or, if I may say so, the intellect, the countenance of such places. The space, the magnitude of mountains and waterfalls are well imagined before one sees them; but this countenance or intellectual tone must surpass every imagination and defy any remembrance.
I shall learn poetry here and henceforth write more than ever, for the abstract endeavor of being able to add a mite to that beauty which is harvested from the grand materials, by the finest spirits, and put into ethereal existence fro the relish of one’s fellows. I cannot think with Hazlitt that these scenes make man appear little. I never forgot my stature so completely—I live in the eye; and my imagination, surpassed, is at rest.
Yes, to live in the eye: that was Timm’s accomplishment and gift to us, and waterfalls were his master-pieces, the images of greatest beauty and magnitude and healing. As we saw in the recent photos sent by his friend Darwin, Timm was drawn to waterfalls early in his development as a photographer, and tried to catch the harmony of motion and form in the stillness of a single frame. One of the master touches he developed was to slow the shutter down so that falling water developed a silky, gossamer blur to it, the impact of all that water registered as an embrace, a welcome.
Here – in Timm’s waterfalls – we feel at the end of all falling, and feel the serenity of homecoming. We are at rest in Timm’s greatest vision.
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