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December 5, 1999

A Sorcerer's Apprentice

I have decided that I want to learn how to make photographs look great on a web site. It seems deeply mysterious. The first thing I have decided to learn is how to create drop shadows for my image files. I did a web search and found lots of tutorials on how to do this with PhotoShop. I have tried many of them, with no success. I'm not sure what the problem is, perhaps the tutorials are written for older versions of PhotoShop? Another problem I am running into with online tutorials is that the web browser has to be open to read them and PhotoShop has to be open to try them. This means that I am constantly switching between the two programs to proceed with the tutorial; I can't see the instructions at the same time that I am trying to follow them. It is pretty slow going. It may be quite a while before I manage to work through this.

Life has offered me glimpses of many deep mysteries. When I was very young I was fascinated by the magic of the written word. My grandmother had been a schoolteacher and she filled her home with books; I cannot remember a time without them. An adult would open one of these seemingly ordinary objects, cast their eyes upon the scratches and speak wondrous stories and poems. There were continents and roads to the heart's desires mapped by those scratches on paper. Reading, the adults called it; I called it magic.

I remember first looking at the scratches with bewilderment, wondering how they spoke the stories that I loved to hear. Black on white in orderly rows, the words themselves had no color, they did not move, they made no sound. I wondered at the magic that could transform the little black marks into stories. How did they do it, the adults? How did they get the stories out of the little black marks? How could I learn to perform this magic?

My grandmother soon began to teach me the alphabet and phonics. It all came together for me one hot afternoon in the quiet upstairs bedroom at my grandmother's house. I remember it very clearly, reading my first book. It was a little book about two little Eskimo boys. I sat alone on the floor, my back leaning against my grandmother's bed. I struggled with the words on the pages until I had finally figured them all out. Then, the magic moment arrived; I started on the first page and read it, understanding the words, understanding what they meant as sentences. What a moment, the realization that this was it, this was how the adults found the stories in the books! No epiphany in my life would come close to this awakening.

But closely following the euphoria of discovery was disappointment. What had seemed to me magic was merely a clever system of rules, a system both simple and predictable. There was nothing mysterious about reading after all. I remember thinking, "Is that all there is to it!"

I haven't been impressed or intimidated by techno-babble since that time. There is no magic there. I know that anything that seems mysterious is probably just a clever system of rules that anyone could come to understand if they were interested enough to take the time to learn. Usually I'm not that interested. I have not found any other clever system that provides a window to the universe as does reading. All other clever systems pale by comparison. It seems like such a waste of energy to invest in learning other systems when they can only offer a fraction of the wealth to be found in reading.

And yet here I am trying to learn how to create drop shadows for images in PhotoShop. The little system of rules is time consuming to learn and highly specific to PhotoShop, one of thousands and thousands of software packages. All this to accomplish a little shadow for an image that no one may ever see.

Today has been a quiet and lazy Sunday. Attila and I took our walk after dark in the rain. We donned our hoods and struck out on our usual round. Quite a few homes have put out displays of Christmas lights this year. Last year a new type of Christmas light hit the market here, hanging "icicles" of small white lights. These lights are appearing everywhere this year in various new colors: blue, green and red. Soon there will even be a set hanging from our roofline.

My mind is closing in on itself like a nocturnal flower in early morning. I want to keep writing. I desperately want to think of something witty or interesting to write. But my mind is slowly winding its way down the hallway towards the nice warm bed, fluffing the pillow and folding back the eiderdown. I seem to be following my mind's lead...