We all suffer our own daily deaths - our spiritual stagnation, when our sense of wonders fail: when we are no longer in awe of the Creation. The world is like the sea coming into the fine ports of our senses. God knows what kind of cargo to expect - but too often we erect barriers, we blockade these ports. We send the strange, mysterious ships away. We are wary of encountering the unknown. We become walled in by fixed convictions...blinkered beliefs...arrogant assumptions. I think it is vital for our own well-being to keep opening new doors onto life. Miseosler Holeb, a poet from Prague, urges us to take that forbidding step, to set forth and discover:
Go and open the door:
Even if there's only
The darkness, ticking;
Even if there's only
The hollow wind;
Even if nothing is there
Go and open the door.
A poem like this with it keen vision of renewal, its refreshing lift of enthusiasm, encourages all of us to develop a sense of awareness - a sense of reading, an openess to experience. Poetry/painting/photography of this kind is about seeing. Seeing what others have forgotten to see. In this respect Jan Voster is a see-r. A photograph may only take a split second of execution but it represents, as Susan Santag said, ' a lifetime of preparation' A lifetime of walking around with ones eyes opened. Jan Voster has eyes sharp as tin openers. Art of any kind is like a balloon. It takes you up into the air. It gives you and overview of things, but it also has to function as a parachute to take you down safely to earth again.
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