I Shall Try to Think of It in This New Way

The following florid prelude written in a style meant to do affectionate (if given the impossibility of reproducing it, inevitably ironic) homage to the late manner of Henry James — with which you may understandably not decide to put up for long — and in which I usually employ a liberal use (although not here, it’s only used once at the end) of the distanced and distancing pronoun "one" and the occasional interspersed gratuitous phrase française, all to throw up a wall of steam (the pretense of subtlety, nonetheless subtle) over a topic which in fact I find intrinsically threatening in some way I can’t explain -- introduces a visual tutorial I believe will make self-evident what I have only this moment found I must claim as certainty: that it is impossible to photograph close-ups of packed shiny black plastic garbage bags day or night, rain or shine, and not have each reveal itself as mesmerizingly inimitably beautiful. Their sculpted surfaces and implied landscapes (mountainous ravines, many of them!) may even edge out Sycamore trees as Existence’s most dependable source of beauty. 

How many other categories of potential esthetic wonder are ignored because we find their function too ubiquitously common (ergo boring) and/or uninspiring/distasteful to think of as anything but ‘there’? Look at these glories - qu’il me semble mes frères, mes semblables! - and consider the question.

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I’m thinking of investigating asphalt up-close next, bringing to bear on the phenomenon of its startling diamond-cut black-jeweled tiny edged surfaces Quentin Crisp’s near dictum of implied suggestion which may profitably govern our approach to the experience of any aversion or reflex dismissal based on what amounts to bias: ‘I shall try to think of it in this new way.’ If you learn of my demise through the news that I’ve been run over by a New Jersey-plated car on a Manhattan street, this will probably be why. (Which I should count as a fine way to die.)

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With regard to which (not my demise, but Quentin Crisp’s implied invitation “to think of it in this new way”): of the gratifying number of viewers who have kindly indicated their approval on Facebook (via the ever-serviceable LIKE & even a few red heart LOVEs) of another category of esthetic wonder I have recently not infrequently mined for what seem to me to be among the more striking kaleidograms Instagram’s layout function creates by robotic accident --

-- I’m curious what these kind viewers individually believe constitute the myriad small kaleidogrammed components they are looking at. I’ve inserted a quartet of these symmetrical baroque arrangements of pale gold translucence just above – samples of which you'll already have seen hovering over the beginning of this text, in geometric concert with the garbage bags’ dramatically shadowed shiny black beauties, and I invite you to guess the pale gold translucent components’ identity. 

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One shan’t reveal if your surmise is right or wrong, however.

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Oh, and I looked down into the texture of the asphalt surface of First Avenue as I walked upon it just now and was drawn to photograph a little square of it wet from crushed slush which I then kaleidogrammed thrice. Here are the parent (upper left quadrant) and its three children affixed to one another in a quartet. 

There’s no pretense in these subtleties.

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