Figure 1 – Break in the clouds, Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2018.

Those dramatic and transient cloud moments call for you to stop the car, jump out, and take the photograph. I have found that the IPhone is wonderful for this, because of its marvelous wide angle of view. When my goal is black and white, I find it great to just switch the camera over to the “noir” filter and take the photograph as if I were using a deep red Wratten filter – shades of fifty years ago.

Figure 1 is such an image taken in Concord, MA a week ago. The subject is an old one. A dramatic ray pierces the clouds and seems to indicate an ascent to or descent from heaven. In any event there is the other worldly sense of the celestial spheres, the sense that we are confined to one shell, but here we are miraculously given a view to the level that lies beyond. What lies beyond the next level, we may ask. Is it enlightenment or merely a tease.

I have not thought of this view of the moment before. It reminds me of Franz Kafka’s Parable of the Law where a gate keeper refuses to give “the man from the country” entrance to the law. Levels upon levels upon levels. The explanation is given to “the man from the country” from the gate keeper.

“At the moment the gate to the law stands open, as always, and the gatekeeper walks to the side, so the man bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the gatekeeper notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly gatekeeper. But from room to room stand gatekeepers, each more powerful than the other. I can’t endure even one glimpse of the third.”