The Contemplative Eye

Mary and I went to Boston the other day on business—her business, actually—visiting a client for two days of meetings.

We stayed in a big, steaming Blade Runner-ish ziggurat of a hotel on the Charles River that was okay if you like rootless International Postmodern design (I do) and paying $17 for a poached egg.

I came along as Mary’s chauffeur, bodyguard, lover, companion, assistant, amanuensis, sous chef, tour guide, personal shopper, best friend, entertainment, accomplice, sounding board, factotum, in-house enthusiast, hanger-on, playmate, bed warmer, wardrobe consultant, pilot fish, ally, alarm clock, kindred spirit, main man, dinner companion, homeboy, well-wisher, sidekick, acolyte, posse, senior manager, flunky, hairdresser, aide-de-camp and grateful husband of 32 years.

It was 105° F. in the streets—I kid you not—and I wandered around for hours at a time, swilling down Nantucket Nectars in exotic flavors unheard of in Maine and taking pictures. Here are seven:

In Cambridge (see below), I shot a cinder-block wall, a sidewalk bench, a stack of dollies in a mover’s truck (with an amused driver who admitted he’s a photographer, too), a wheelbarrow on a construction site, and a copper downspout.

In Roxbury’s Mission Hill neighborhood (see below), I shot a moonscape-y playground and the interior of the huge, gorgeous Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Known as the Mission Church, it was built from—and on—a puddingstone quarry in 1878 by the Redemptorist Fathers and Brothers. The Redemptorists are a missionary order that venerates the Virgin Mary. Puddingstone is a distinctive purplish conglomerate rock that is found specifically in Roxbury, is known around the world, and was used in at least four other buildings I spotted along the way.

And then: On the drive home, the temperature fell 35 degrees. Amen for pudding.

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let’s buy it.

Daylight, full of small dancing particles
and the one great turning, our souls
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?

All day and night, music,
a quiet, bright
reedsong. If it
fades, we fade.

(From The Essential Rumi, translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne, 1995. The photo shows a detail from an ancient mobile crane in blazing sunshine at the Navy Yard in Charlestown, Massachusetts.)

My friend Dave is an intriguing photographer (see flickr.com/photos/adstankowicz) who lives on Peak’s Island in Casco Bay, just off Portland, Maine.

Not long ago, Dave told me, “George, stop shooting waterfronts. No more! You’re repeating yourself!”

He was right—even though I live on the Maine coast and have to take active steps to avoid water, docks, ships, beaches, harbors and beautiful old maritime junk.

And so, herewith, a final handful (for now) of photos from the sea. Above: Along the wharves in the Navy Yard at Charlestown, Massachusetts. Below: The ferries that prowl Casco Bay (and convey Dave on his daily commute—which he spends, no doubt, not shooting the waterfront). Bottom: Famous Dave falling off the no-waterfront wagon, under a lighthouse in South Portland, Maine.

I don’t suppose the docs who put up this billboard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had any idea it was funny. The dears. On the other hand, how could proctologists not have a sense of humor? Maybe the joke’s on me….

It caught my eye across a parking lot, at 40 yards.

A splash of light blue on a big, blue wall. The wall was part of a Jiffy Lube, or something like it, in golden late-afternoon sunshine along the commercial strip in South Portland, Maine.

I was, as usual, out cruising for photos. So I hiked across the lot, framed up a couple of shots, and was just finishing when a blue door I hadn’t noticed before swung open in the self-same wall.

Two young fellows in T.J. Maxx ties poked their heads out, in conversation on another topic but also, I thought, watching me quietly. They kept talking.

(As a photographer who occasionally trespasses—and, according to my esteemed wife, dresses like a vagrant—I’ve learned that the words “Can I help you?” are a bad sign.)

I paused a moment and said, “Hi.”

They said, “Hey, what’s up?”

“Nice wall,” I said. “I know it sounds nuts, because you guys just work here. But to a photographer, it’s beautiful.”

“Great,” one of them said, falling back into his earlier conversation. The other one said, “We oughta splash acid on all our walls.”

I had three grandmothers.

One was my father’s mother. I never met her, because she died about 1921, a generation and a half before I was born.

The second was my mother’s mother. Born in 1899 in Potsdam, near Berlin, she was a fairy-tale grandmother in every way, and I adored her (not least because she and I were allied against my mom).

The third was Lucy Taylor Hammer, my next-door neighbor in the 1960s and ’70s. I met Lucy when I was 11—and she wasn’t much like a grandmother at all.

Lucy was born in 1903, a gracious, birdlike woman from an old Virginia family. She was the wife of the town’s leading industrialist. Brisk, intelligent, elegant, and mordantly witty—yet large-minded and unconventional. A Smith graduate.

Lucy served as a Connecticut state senator decades before women were in politics, and never lost a race. She was said to be “pound for pound, worth three times her weight of any male senator.” In later life, she was a co-founder of the first Hospice in America (in Branford, Connecticut) and, with her husband, donated large tracts of land to the town.

We loved word games. One day when I was 13, Lucy set out Scrabble tiles for the word “tit” and, shooting me a look over her eyeglasses, declared, “The tit is a perfectly respectable little bird!”

Lucy was not warm and fuzzy. Still, when I hand-calligraphed a nonsense sign that said, “Eat not the flotsam,” she inexplicably posted it on her office wall, where it remained for 15 for years.

Lucy didn’t start to cook until she was in her seventies, when maids finally faded from the scene. She gathered a small collection of nice recipes (some of which my wife and I still use). I can see her now, squinting at a recipe card and following it meticulously. “Dot with butter,” she’d say, and we’d have to put tiny pieces of butter all over the casserole. But the truth is that Lucy didn’t like to cook. “I don’t understand those people!” she said. “What could they possibly have been thinking when they called that book The Joy of Cooking?”

Once, I was clearing dishes after a big Christmas dinner and Lucy came up to me, looking a little exasperated. “Now George,” she said, “what are you doing?” I said, “I’m clearing the dishes, Lucy.” And she said, “But you’re doing Operation Ant.” I said, “What’s Operation Ant, Lucy?” And she said, “For some reason, men like to move things one piece at a time, like ants!”—and pressed a tray into my hands. She was right.

Lucy and her husband, Thorvald “Tote” Hammer, a Yale man from the class of 1918S (“S” stood for Yale’s former Sheffield Scientific School), were great benefactors of my family. Among many other things, they encouraged me to attend Yale—where I had the good fortune to meet my wife-to-be, Mary Katherine Brennan, and to embark on a long, happy life together with her. To this day, when Mary and I prepare a dish, we say, “Dot with butter!” just before putting it in the oven.

Mary liked visiting Lucy because, she said, “The style was gracious, the plates were warmed, and men were brought to heel.”

In her old age, Lucy gave us her collector’s porcelain teacups. We were horrified because it was such an extravagant gift (and we knew she was dying). But Lucy said, “Oh, no—don’t worry. I’m giving you the ones I don’t like!” A rude way to give a present? Not at all—it was exactly the right thing to say, because it made us comfortable and happy about the cups. Yet I have no doubt she was telling the truth about them, too. We even went through them together again, with Lucy saying once or twice, “No, I think I’ll keep that one after all!”

Thanks, Lucy!

[Above: Lucy Taylor Hammer, photographed in 1951 by long-time Branford photographer Earl Coulter. I went to school with Earl’s boys and was delighted to find him still in business about four years ago, the last time I went home.]

Somewhere, clever things have no doubt been said about why certain photos of random decrepitude strike us as pretty. But I don’t know where. So we’ll have to make do with me.

What you see above is not an Abstract Expressionist painting but a four-foot section of concrete wall in a parking lot in Portland, Maine.

I saw a slideshow in Boston the other day of abstract photos like this one, and the audience oohed and aahed over the same photos (and was quiet over the rest). How did they know?

In college, I trained to be a composer. The mid-1970s were the last gasp of Modernism, when people secretly thought Western art was better than the traditional arts because “we” were making progress toward something. Oh, Jesus.

I took a dim view of jazz in those days, not just because the sound of it didn’t interest me but because—and this was saying the same thing—jazz musicians seemed to me to work in tiny, habitual ways inside tiny, habitual harmonic spaces. (Also, of course, they made composers superfluous.)

Later, I saw that composers are usually just as habitual—think of the endless self-similarity of Vivaldi or Copland, for example—and that cutting-edge wonderfulness in either field (and all fields) springs up when and wheresoever it will, bless its heart. The rest is cannoli filling. (Which is pretty good, too, if you can relax and enjoy what is instead of being hung up on ideas about wonderfulness.)

Meanwhile, I didn’t fit in anyway, because I wrote nice melodies at a time when this was massively verboten and when serious composers were “performance artists” who darted into audiences and cut off people’s ties. Also, I was profoundly struck by the fact that Bach was out of fashion and forgotten when he died, in 1750: progress had passed him by. Yet today we listen to him with pleasure. Surely this means something.

Since then, of course, no sensible person has been quite sure what to make of progress. Composers are long since writing melodies again and, I might add, stealing wholesale from the traditional arts. Just like Mother Nature. A bouillabaisse. And it has become pretty clear, I submit, that the Abstract Expressionists were painting the color, light and energy that we in fact see—and feel—around us all day long but fail to notice.

This, to my way of thinking, explains “good” abstract photos—because photographers are after all noticers. The rest of us, too, live immersed in the sea of life’s beauty, sorrow, ugliness and joy. We’re just too busy daydreaming about lunch.

In 1962, I thought ventriloquism was pretty cool.

In those days, ventriloquists still showed up on TV—riding the momentum of their centuries on stage—because, I think, it hadn’t dawned on folks that this intimate art form doesn’t work in mass media. (Edgar Bergen, the top U.S. ventriloquist, had a radio show for 20 years, for god’s sake, even though you couldn’t see his lips or dummies.)

I studied old, fragrant library books on the subject, practiced for months, got a not-bad dummy for Christmas and can still “ventriloquize” to this day, if called upon while feeling festive. The secret of not moving your lips, by the way, is to substitute inside-the-mouth letters (such as “d” or “g”) for letters that make lip trouble (such as “b”)—and, remarkably, no one notices. (See brownielocks.com/ventriloquism.html.)

Ventriloquism hooked me in part, I fear, because it relied on misdirection. I was a kid stage magician, too. Same idea. Later I worked in advertising and PR. Even the moral mistakes I’ve made as a human being, alas, involved trying to point people—including myself—away from what was really going on.

Giggles under a snowdrift? I never learned to throw my voice, because I couldn’t understand the instructions. (Try it yourself, online, at Ventriloquism in a Month by the Edwardian scrivener and enthusiast Cecil Bullivant, who informs us it calls for “retching noises” produced on the inhale.)

These days, I find, I don’t wish to “present” anymore, or entertain, or misdirect. Or even direct. I’d rather talk with people one at a time, in whispers, leaning close if I can get away with it, as intimate as two tugboats at dawn. No groups, please. You can’t be intimate and honest—and loud. At least I can’t, at the moment.

But happily there’s still room, from time to time, to try to misdirect my nieces and nephews—by pulling quarters out of their ear, removing the first joint of my thumb, and making thimbles vanish.

There. I’d detter qoo’it hoo’ile I’n ahead.

Remember when TV ran velvety old black-and-white movies?

I couldn’t stand it as a kid. But nowadays they’re gone—banished to cable stations I don’t get—and once in a while (after a restful 35-year interlude) I miss ’em.

So we rented Dancing Lady last Sunday night, a shimmering, unhinged parfait from 1933 that set off fireworks of lost memory, delight and anxiety.

It’s all here: Huge, rotating Art Deco sets in mirrored chrome. An inane plot. Goose-stepping chorus girls filmed from above. Top hats. And feverish big-orchestra “jazz” recorded in a rain barrel.

There was Joan Crawford, young but already baleful. She plays a burlesque dancer who makes good on Broadway. Horsey and not really a dancer but—according to my in-house Terpsichore—holding her own.

Clark Gable plays her director. He was only 32 at the time yet already making his fourth of seven films with Joan. In a gym scene, he has the body of a boy.

Franchot Tone is Joan’s suitor (and real-life husband). May Robson is his grandmother. (May was an old lady who played old ladies in movies in those days and was born, breathtakingly long ago, in 1858.)

Fred Astaire glides in briefly, in his first film appearance, playing himself as a dance coach. Robert Benchley’s about (for no evident reason pertaining to his gifts). And even the Three Stooges, still led by Ted Healey of their vaudeville days, ricochet around as stagehands, their rigamarole undimmed by youth.

(The term “slapstick” comes from burlesque, by the way, a descendant of commedia del’arte, in which players carried a “burle,” a stick used to slap other players for comic effect.)

We also spotted Eve Arden as the faux-Southern dancer; a brilliantined Nelson Eddy as the crooner; and Sterling Holloway, a stripling at the time, as the playwright.

Ah, and the chorus girls, shown in quick close-ups, had crooked smiles and noses, and sweet old-fashioned faces from all over the country—just like real people. No cosmetic surgery here.

All of them, things you remember as clear as a bell—and find touching—but have no idea you remember.

When May Robson was born, America was only 82 years old. As late as the 1960s, Jackie Gleason and Ed Sullivan were still showing dancing girls filmed from above, silent-era vaudeville acts, and Renaissance slapstick. Even today, we who know these things and continue to be alive and well (or at least well enough), scribbling blogs in 21st-century wi-fi coffeehouses, seem to be the bearers of mysterious, tender flotsam from the ever-receding past as we make our journey toward the ever-receding future.

And here we see my mother, fixing a watchful eye on the camera. And me, fixing a watchful eye on her.

She was 84, hale and alert, when this picture was taken last June. Today she’s traveling on her own in Germany, visiting family and friends who date back, in some instances, to the years just after World War I.

After World War II, she worked as a German-English simultaneous translator in the Stuttgart offices of an American government economist. She subsequently married him, and he became my father.

These days, she marches around Boston, terrorizing shop girls and docents at the Museum of Fine Arts.

The people in the frame are her ancestors, the children of an eye doctor, photographed about 1905: a great-uncle Joachim I never knew (he died of an ear infection or diphtheria in 1926, at age 14); my grandmother Brigitte, who was angelically beautiful and took the view that if ice cream was 50% off, you should buy two cartons; and two great-aunts, Anne-Marie and Agnes. I met Agnes once when I was five, I’m told, and, announcing that she was cute (”niedlich“), asked if I could kiss her.

Mary and I are going to a wedding in Chicago in July, when it will be staggeringly hot, and I plan to slip out of my shirt and tie to dance in the Hawaiian shirt you see above. The only problem now is to find the shirt, stored for the winter somewhere in our barn.