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BOOKS — A Glimpse of Death from the Vantage Point of Love (128 pages, 94 full-color images, and 4 essays in a 8.5 x 8.5” format)

Please follow this LINK to order your copy of directly from the publisher. LULU will ship your order to wherever you find yourself in this crazy world.

The price is US $40.00

If you live in or near Trumansburg, you may be able to get your copy directly from me. CONTACT

“Paradoxically, a primordial function of thought (both secular and religious) is to protect the individual psyche from direct and independent contact with the mystery of life and death and its enigmatic presence within. Regardless of significant differences among them, all ideologies carry out this feckless protection by ignoring, cleverly obfuscating, or outright denying the natural, healthily democratic, and ever-present reality of death. This multiple misrepresentation of reality has an across-the-board political function. The cohesiveness of any given society rests assured when its adherents draw security and a sense of distinction from a particular—that is, exclusive—interpretation of life/death coupled with a promise of worldly or otherworldly continuity and self-realization.

Contradictory secular and religious ideologies do not seem to care that by making certainty and the pursuit of worldly and post-mortem happiness essential ends in people’s lives, they are also justifying means that are, like themselves, divisive and an endless source of injustice, conflict, and suffering. The many competing interpretations of the inevitable final ruin of the organism created over millennia to assuage our chronic dread of it have created myriad social and mental afflictions suffered by every individual member of our species. This personal and social calamity endures, in significant part, because a complete and accurate perception of it implies seriously questioning, contravening, and, ultimately, abandoning said interpretations. In other words, an independent and, therefore, possibly precise insight into the actual nature and significance of life/death implies a radical transgression of the established markers, norms, and boundaries of tribal and personal identity.

The mental pivot away from pre-programmed, self-centered thought and towards the actual truth of life/death that is so urgently necessary cannot possibly occur without a profound and perhaps painful exposure to and consequent rejection of the falseness, divisiveness, and general toxicity of ideology in all its forms. To facilitate this pivot is the central aim of the collection of photographs and four essays that constitute this book.”

The images in this book were selected from a large body of photographic work made in a relatively small section of Taughannock creek, mostly upstream from the famous waterfall bearing the same name, located near Trumansburg, New York. Most of these images are composites made from three to nine different exposures capturing different sections of a single scene subsequently reassembled using an image-editing program.