Surfaces & Souvenirs

SURFACES & Souvenirs

I Vol.

The experiences of a father, with his sons...

Textures of Togetherness

by Raju Peddada

Surfaces & Souvenirs: Textures of Togetherness, Volume I Copyright Š Raju Peddada, November 2014 Satyalu+Kristi Media, USA First U.S. Edition ISBN No.

Surfaces & Souvenirs

Textures of Togetherness Volume I

by Raju Peddada

Peddada Satyanarayana Murthy, 1932-2007 Our first adventurer and pathfinder, with love and eternal debt of gratitude

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

-- Marcel Proust “I can see why “Surfaces and Souvenirs” is dedicated to Peddada Satyanarayana Murthy. Some forty-six years ago, in the mid sixties, spread over a three year period, I had the pleasure of sharing almost a thousand hours of walking with him, through the not so urban jungle of New Delhi. He was a dear friend, who was a listener, who observed and contemplated the real world phenomena, with a fantastic sense of humor. These compilation of photographs that document the journey of Raju Peddada with his boys, show that there is no end to what one can learn, for themselves and their children, if one observes, listens and contemplates in the here and now. This is indeed, a fitting evocation, and tribute to his father.

The richness of such textural and tactile experiences the boys and their father enjoyed, transcend all the “life” one can have, or experience, in the virtual world of Social Media, in image sharing, texting, and tweets.

Bonding via learning, can take place in your own backyard, or the railway yard. Enjoy these subtleties of existence around, through the eyes of these three evocateurs! And, create and evoke your own, everyday!”

-- N. Rao Machiraju, CEO, reQall “I much appreciate Peddada’s bridging of photography with its literary scaffolds--”

-- Art Shay, Photojournalist

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The indefatigable Peacemaker, yearning to be the piece-maker: Kuchhkooti... and the irrepressible Icebreaker: Muttubooti -- who fuel my wonder and curiosity!

Can the act

of seeing, be construed as the act of creating? I think so -because, discovery and creation emanate from the act of seeing, what others did not or could not see. Is there a co-relation between seeing, discovery and creation, if so, what is the connection? Two prime examples come to mind. Seeing the apple fall, triggered the big ‘why’ in Isaac Newton -- which led to the discovery of gravity.

For Charles Darwin, seeing the finely nuanced differences in plants and animals on his voyages, precipitated his theory of evolution. Seeing leads to contemplation, which in turn leads to the creation of solutions and answers. Seeing, is the guiding predecessor to creation.

The mind’s eye grasps, then, we realize. With this attitude and approach, and for us to have that “aesthetic experience,” we step out, of the realm of suburban safety and banality, out of their didactic system of rules and regulations, to interact with nature, in our free spirits.

Peeling paint on railroad tie

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Eaten wood

Substance is Eternal

This terror, then, this darkness of mind, Not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light, Nor glittering arrows of morning can disperse, But only Nature’s aspect and her law, which, teaching us, hath this exordium: Nothing from nothing ever yet born.

-- Titus Lucretius Carus, 95-52BC,

from his “Of the nature of things.”

Nature is the

overwhelming artist, whose work we ignore for the most part. It crafts imposing and profound beauty in imperfection, and in the cycle of growth, decay and death. People go to the museums and galleries to see something expected -- they go with expectations, and enjoy the creations of an artist, or several of them, then head out and call it a day at the pizzeria. But, stop for a second! The gallery I am talking about is all around us, it’s everywhere, it is intimidating, yet inviting. No smooth floors, nor slick walls, but infinite in display. You need an awakening, of consciousness, it’s a deliberate effort to wake up from that urban somnolence, and see what appears to be ordinary is actually extraordinary, and what looks mundane is unequivocally magnificent. This gallery is full of surprises, and the unexpected! It nurtures many things in us, more than anything, it’s learning to see beyond the obvious..

Beaten wood

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This gallery of

nature requisitions not just our faculty of seeing, but watching to a great extent. It is watching nature create its magical works of art. It’s a process that involves time and materials, and a process that we can watch, for hours, days, months or even years. We watched a sheet of iron, turn from a factory gray to a speckled burnt sienna in various hues, in 5 years. A tree full of leaves, in the spring of 2003, to a hollow dead trunk by 2007, nevertheless, an alluring sentinel of memory, with orange and white lichens, and, gray mushrooms. Devastating, yet, divine, at the same spot.

Does this have an effect? The intricate and serene geometry of our surroundings afford us many possibilities -- one of the them is forgetting ourselves.

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Out in this gallery, we unconsciously get to experience “Fukinsei,” (asymmetry) one of the seven Zen principles, that teaches us that in nature, there is no rigid and formal symmetry, telegraphing any plastic perfection, which can be fatal to our imagination. In fact, it is asymmetry, that allows us freedom to be spontaneous -- more human.

Master craftsman and aesthete from Japan, Soetsu Yanagi, in his insightful book,”The Unknown Craftsman: Japanese Insight into Beauty,” gives us some guidelines to seeing: do not judge, acquire the habit of just looking; use your senses to study and treat an object, not your intellect; and void your mind of all intellectualization -- clear it like a mirror that can only reflect better. I must confess, that I and the boys do not consciously practice Zen out there. We simply enjoy looking, suspended in a state of mindlessness, without analysis and rationalization,that affords us a mystifying oneness, with our surroundings.

Weathered concrete

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Weathered wall

I brought my 8

older son, Butch, to the train tracks, when he was barely two. Now, I am dragged almost everyday to the tracks by both my sons, who find everything there fascinating.

From the stones, for target practicing, to the tracks themselves, putting their ears to it to listen, like the native Indians did a century ago. They also discover discarded and inexplicable objects, in various textures, that had fallen off the trains, or somehow got there mysteriously. Also, no less fascinating are the flora and the fauna, with the Bumble and the honey bees in commerce over the wild flowers. I just stand there and close my eyes, and take in the fragrance from the wild blooms, and ignore the industrial clanks and beeps in the background. Then suddenly, “look daddy -- the signal is green and red, train’s coming!� We await the train anxiously.

There is this 7.30pm train that blurs by from the south-west: the mechanical majesty of the Norfolk-Southern engines drill down by us at almost sixty miles an hour, pulling the white Triple-Crown containers.Woosh-whut-woosh-whut-woosh, they disappear in less than five minutes, leaving us breathless, and in awe. There can be no apt metaphor for life, than a train... it comes and vanishes before we realize what has happened.

Mani and class-mate

My younger son

, Mani, who I often address by gritting my teeth in love: Muttubooti, is a train fiend. This is not some passing fancy that dissipates, as the years dissolve, rather, with him, this fascination has gathered steam, with intense interest for the metal caterpillars. We live near Chicago, which is the freight transportation hub for the entire country. The busiest airport in the world, O’Hare, is a stone’s throw away. Warehouses in the area belong to the biggest trucking lines, and speaking of the lines, the train tracks that crisscross the region like a spider’s web, are owned by the Union Pacific, with almost 50 trains that thunder by everyday, a couple of hundred yards away from us. It was only natural for us to gravitate to them, and find them ever so intriguing. Our fascination transcended the mechanical majesty of the engines, to seeing beauty in decaying structures and things: the sublime beauty in the dissolution of materials, in various stages of decay, by the tracks.

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It was only a matter of time, before we found every texture by the tracks inducing questions: where from? Why here? How long? And, every answer only multiplied their irrepressible, and indefatigable curiosity. We found many textures on surfaces, either of peeling or chipping paints, mildew or oxidization, on pieces of plastic, metals, foam, wood, paper and other materials. They were being transformed, into new characters, as if changing masks in a theatrical setting.

Dirt on paper with rain drops

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Peeling paint on weathered plastic

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1. Piss or Powerade? 2. Punched sheet of rusted iron. 3. Fried circuit 4. Loose cotton and rags

Saturday, 23 July 2011, all morning after 9:00 am.

Butch: Hey daddy... what’s the difference between garbage and junk?

Mani: Junk doesn’t smell.

Riiight baba... very good, junk is garbage too, it perishes very slowly... junk can be recycled...

Mani: what’s pirrishable?

Butch: Perishable is something that can get rotten and starts to smell...

Yes... decomposition... a smelly process of breaking up that has maggots or microbes turning the garbage back to earth... a natural recycling process. Butch, you had asked me once “what are the agents of change?” well, the maggots are agents of change, just like people...

Mani: People can change to junk too... do people get rotten slowly?

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We’re made of flesh, so we rot away quickly... look at this boys... this was a shiny metal piece once, look at it... it has red-brown dots... isn’t it beautiful?

Butch: It’s got a pattern... looks like drops of spreading red color.

Mani: uh huh... are the maggots smelly?

Butch: Of course they are... they look smelly!

Dry twigs in underbrush

We’re smelly too, without showers... aren’t we? Hey look... here’s that particle board again, it’s turned beautiful... the staples have turned rusty... rust is bleeding onto the board... look at the mildew pattern brown and green... isn’t this great?

Look at the whole board... the staples on the top right holding the chart head, the white paint chipped off with the mildew growing... the whole board looks great now!

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Lichens on tree trunk

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Driftwood or spaceship?

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Driftwood of Elephant man?

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Hand...

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and foot

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Dried algae on mysterious surface

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Staples in plywood

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Staples on sawdust board

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Rumbling boyhood... Kuchhkooti and Muttubooti

Butch: Daddy, you’re totally weird... you say beautiful to every piece of junk.

Mani: Yeaah... he’s a weird dude.

Look boys... I didn’t say I like all junk, but, there is beauty in decay, in aging -- it’s a way of appreciating the textures of nature. Let me show you -- come here! Is this tree trunk interesting, or this young trunk?

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Butch and Mani: This one.

Explain to me why.

Mani and Butch: This trunk has cracks, and looks like an alligator... it looks designy, interesting... also, it looks like a tree; this one looks like a large plant... kinda boring.

Well, gentlemen, you are on the way to appreciating age and good taste... that particle board I showed you guys...has been there since 2004... Mani, you weren’t even born...I used to bring Butch here when he was two. This particle board was here all this time, and I had ignored it, but today... after six years, it looks great... all worn out... doesn’t it?

Butch: That’s cool -- if it’s beautiful, why is it left here?

Crushed metal

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Welding residue by the tracks

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Corroded sheet metal

Mani: Daddy... all this junk was here before you were born?

Maybe some pieces, baba... like this rusted piece with no definite edge... nobody moves them, they just stay in one place and wait for guys like us to discover them. Look... do you like this flat metal sheet, or this crushed one with holes, and with the rust spreading around them...whoa!... a hornet’s nest... let’s set it down slowly!?

Butch and Mani: Even the hornets like it!...

I love it too!... me too... man, the home of hornets!

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Great... now, can you dudes show me why things look cool... and if you can show me the difference in things, and why one looks better than the other... you get to be weird like me... is that a deal?

Laughter ensues.

Weathered foam

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Clump of unused hardened cement

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While walking by

the tracks and industrial parks, we constantly inquire, expanding our intelligence on materials, even metaphors. We witness both decay and death in materials, and, death and decomposition of organic matter. We engage in debates, on the inevitable versus immortality. The inevitable being death, for every chemical composition, whether organic or inorganic matter -- and, fossilization as the only immortality that is afforded to organic life -- unless, intelligent organic life can create something that lasts forever. Like creations, on or of indestructible materials, even those have an expiry date, in the distant future.

Weathered plastic

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Dried up wood

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Mani, in a steam engine cab

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A mildewd wall of faces

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Hornets: No Trespassing!

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Camouflaged Twitter bird eggs

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Decapitated Oppossum

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“Mani: Why do the trains blow their horns at 2 in the morning?”

“Think, baba! Why do they? Can it be that they are trying to shoo away some animal off the tracks that is hanging out on the rails? Don’t you think that the train engineer would rather wake us up, than run over the poor animal that is cooling off on the rails? Well, now you know why!”

Unknown skull

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Orbiting around an exoplanet?

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Asteroid approaching?

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Found souvenirs

“Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the anals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things out and selects judiciously: he collects like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of industry. This description is one extended metaphor for the poetic method, as Baudelaire practiced it. Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse.”

-- Walter Benjamin 39

Found souvenirs

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Faded Colors

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Crushed can

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Skateboard art

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Skateboard art

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Skateboard art

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Skateboard art

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Skateboard art

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Discarded skateboard

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Skateboard art

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Discarded skateboard

I had many

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an unpredictable and asymmetrical expedition as a boy. Thanks to my father, he broke every rule in the book, when it came to pushing the frontiers in such experiences. He literally drove us through this vast and mesmerizing gallery: India, that still linger, after almost five decades. His shoes are too large for me... nevertheless, I too, avoid the “standard” experience for my boys. Every outing should incite wonder. Every excursion should grab their attention, and sharpen their sensibilities.

Every experience must attend to their inclinations and spur development of their interests. Every outing, that reveals a multitude of materials, textures and interactions, nurtures their capacity to think laterally, which would lead them to the appropriate solutions for problems they may encounter.

Unusual and asymmetrical experiences in places like the junk and the train yards, listening to sounds, watching textures evolve, visiting construction sites, exploring forests for edible plants, looking into factories, abandoned buildings and grain elevators, visiting Airports to see them function, the message of great architecture, old and new, not only expands their understanding of the functions, but the systems that govern such functions as well. These kinds of exposures refine, not only their curiosity and instincts, but intellectual development, channeling their energies to a more focused creative and academic involvement, both, at home and school. This is the retardant, the antidote, against the “instant gratification culture” of our contemporary lifestyles.

Dessicated Brain?

Trampled

SURFACES & Souvenirs

Textures of Togetherness

by Raju Peddada

I Vol.

In the end, we all will transform, to surfaces and souvenirs