I Never Know What I'm Going To Write (Henri Cartier-Bresson & Rumi teach Zen Photography and Poetry)

Enlightenment Prompt #8

REPORTAGE HAIKU

I never know what
I’m going to write; eye fills
with light, mind shines back.

Arlo, my housemate in Notting Hill, London. Photo by Morgan Buchanan. Taken with an iPhone 5 camera.

I never know what I'm going to write. Drifting with the tides of the day I try to exist in a listening state: alert for inspiration but not actively hunting it, relaxed, but not asleep to the signs and signals moving about me. 

When something catches my attention, I try to capture the energy of the decisive moment with my camera phone or with words in the form of a haiku (I carry a small notebook and pencil for just this purpose). 

Rainfall and wind rock/my little house but my mind/sits warm, deep within. Outdoor Meditation Haiku, 31st October, 2021

Later, when I come to compose these daily enlightenment prompts, I ponder that decisive moment and write whatever comes to mind. 

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.
I don't plan it.
When I'm outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all. 
- Rumi

My process of haiku reportage was inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson. I first encountered his work when I was living in Rochester, New York. Rochester is “Kodak town”, the home base of one of the world's oldest camera companies. My astrophysicist wife had been hired by the Rochester Institute of Technology to unlock the secrets of the universe with the Spitzer space telescope. I’d shelter in the university library each day to write and take advantage of their heating (Rochester is too close to Canada for climate comfort). When I needed a break I’d browse their vast collection of photography books.

Portrait of Henri Cartier-Bresson © Ara Güler

Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French artist and humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment.

In an interview with The Washington Post in 1957 Cartier-Bresson said:

Photography is not like painting. There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

Here’s a short interview-article I gave in 2016 to the global photography site Lomography when they selected me as Newcomer of the Week. The photos featured there were taken with my 35mm Leica film camera.

A Hot Day in Washington Square Park, Manhattan by Morgan Buchanan

Cartier-Bresson’s approach struck me as something akin to the process of the Zen archer when he releases an arrow. Capturing, in an instant, an essential truth underlying the human condition. This kind of Zen photography can teach us to listen, become sensitive to the energy of change, and help us connect with a greater reality.

“Don't think of what you have to do, don't consider how to carry it out!" he exclaimed. "The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise.”
― Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery

Read on for practical tips on Zen photography (with the oldest, cheapest of camera phones) and how it can help us perceive the world behind the world…