Synonyms of Happiness
The beauty of owning many books means that sometimes you will remember a line or a thought and be able to pluck a particular volume from the shelf and flip through the dogeared pages until you find the part you were after. This happened to me lately when I was trying to remember what Joseph Brodsky said in Watermark about a feeling of “utter happiness.”
He arrives in Venice, which he visited every December, and says this about it:
“It was a windy night, and before my retina registered anything, I was smitten by a feeling of utter happiness: my nostrils were hit by what to me has always been its synonym, the smell of freezing seaweed. For some people, it’s freshly cut grass or hay; for others, Christmas scents of conifer needles and tangerines. For me, it’s freezing seaweed — partly because of onomatopoeic aspects of the very conjunction (in Russian, seaweed is a wonderful vodorosli), partly due to a slight incongruity and a hidden underwater drama in this notion. One recognizes oneself in certain elements; by the time I was taking this smell in on the steps of the stazione, hidden dramas and incongruities long since had become my forte.”
It doesn’t, of course, have to be a smell, though often it will be — your own personal synonym for utter happiness. But it’s good to have a feel for what it is, so that you might repeat it, or be closer to the possibility. Is it something you could cultivate now?
And maybe, too, it will change through time. Lately, for me, my synonym of utter happiness is just that feeling of absorption when trying to take a particular type of photograph. What do I even want this one photograph to be? I don’t know, and I don’t know if I’ve taken it yet, or if I ever will. But I think it has something to do with light, astonishment, redemption. I’m trying to renew my faith in this godawful time, in this city, in humans.
Probably my favourite shot of the outing was this one, a vertical.
Can light redeem every/anything? Since I have lost my faith in so many things of late, maybe irredeemably, it occurs to me that my latest photo excursion was in part about testing that idea. Can light still change us? Can beauty? Can a seagull perched on top of a TacoTime cactus after rummaging through the trash show me something that I need to know? Can all of this, this attempt, be a synonym for happiness, even if it is couched in despair and a loss of faith?
May 13, 2021
