The Contemplative Eye

My friend Dave Stankowicz and I betook ourselves north to Lewiston-Auburn today, cameras in hand, to see what we could see in the twin cities.

Dave lives on an island in Casco Bay, off Portland, Maine, and his mainland car was out of service. So I drove west 32 miles from Harpswell to round him up, 40 miles north to our destination, and then back again, saying, “You’re worth it. Sort of.” He paid for tolls and a lovely Italian lunch (where I annoyed the waitress and caused amusement by, in Germanic fashion, pining for a tuna sandwich and a glass of milk).

We roamed far and wide in the cities, which are socioeconomically poor but rich in old mills, other irreplaceable urban architecture, ancient French-Canadian culture, and a recent influx of Somalis.

I strolled into a tiny African market at one point, Dave lagging suddenly, had a polite exchange with the four careful young men behind the counter, and marveled at the pea flour, spice blends, big ghee jars, and Nestle food tins with Arabic lettering.

Dave remarked on my intrepidity afterward (but I think he was kindly warning me a little, too, about giving inadvertent offense). I told him about my grandfather, an earlier George Simonson, who was a journalist. And my great-grandfather, another George Simonson, who, according to his diary, took the Fall River steamer out of New York City and clambered below decks to quiz the engine-room crew on marine engineering. We’re a curious lot, it seems. But sometimes curiosity kills the cat.

Later, in a very poor neighborhood with a strangely electric mood in the air (possibly because of us), Dave—who is a high school teacher with street smarts—suddenly remarked in a quiet voice that it would be good if we left the area promptly. And so we did.

Toward the end of the day, we wandered around the town green (which has the best skateboarding park I’ve ever seen) onto a side street with a shop selling “Simone’s World Famous Hot Dogs.” A young Somali in Western clothes approached us—the first Somali with whom I’ve been able to exchange words or even real looks—and said, “We call this Mogadishu Street!” He insisted we must be professional photographers working on something interesting. If only.

My wife Mary saw our pictures, including the two Dave and I took of each other, and exclaimed, “Hey, you look completely relaxed”—unlike typical photos of me, where I’m stiff and phony—”and so does Dave. You guys sure do like each other!”

How right she is.

[Above: Dave in a dead end, where we shot graffiti on someone's big corrugated-tin shed for a while before we spotted two workmen at their déjeuner, watching us. Fortunately they didn't seem to mind our trespassing. Below: Me, near a railroad bridge overlooking the big waterfall on the Androscoggin River where the twin cities were founded. Nobody fell in, despite much harebrained rock scrambling.]

Mary and I are thinking about a bigger trip next year and are teetering back and forth between, or rather among, I guess, Belgium (shown above), Finland and Mexico.

We like Belgium because of the chocolates (which Belgians buy and eat the way Americans used to go to bakeries for their daily bread), out-of-this-world beers (which mean a lot to your faithful scribe, a half-German), and a lively mix of architecture (which you can enjoy even in the off-season, when tourism and costs are lower).

We like Finland because it was home to Sibelius, one of our favorite composers, and looks so much like Maine, where we live. Go figure. We sit on the couch in our tiny TV room, crank up the stereo, and blow the roof off with Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. Sibelius called the grand, swaying horn motif his “swan hymn” and recorded it in his diary next to a description of swans flying in formation over his home. He wrote (as quoted in The New Yorker):

One of my greatest experiences! Lord God, that beauty! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a gleaming, silver ribbon. . . . That this should have happened to me, who have so long been the outsider.

The swans are always in my thoughts and give splendor to [my] life. [It’s] strange to learn that nothing in the whole world affects me—nothing in art, literature, or music—in the same way as do these swans and cranes and wild geese. Their voices and being.

And we like the Mexican city of San Miguel de Allende, a famous art colony where one of Mary’s best artist friends has a winter beachhead. And is looking for company. But not for husbands. I could lurk at a b-and-b, I suppose, and take photos around town. But we’ll have to see.

People say you should travel to see something different. I say, screw ’em. Finns are plenty different. Finnish for “travel”? Matkustaa.

QED and Gesundheit.

Mainers are plenty different, too, for that matter. It’s five countries in one:

We live on the classic lobster-y coast and go to Castine, a far Down East seaport, to enjoy majestic elms unglimpsed in lower New England, thanks to the elm blight, since I was a little boy.

We go to the western lakes and mountains to paddle a canoe in golden autumn sunshine and commune with moose and other large, dangerous wild animals.

We go north into the darkness of the forest primeval (or at least we drive through it, being Starbucks-drinking non-campers), the largest tract of wilderness in northeastern America.

We go north and east to the big sky and high, rolling patchwork farms of potato country, where potatoes actually taste good—just as mangoes taste better in, say, India.

We go to the far north to the villages and waterways of the Canadian border, where life is slower-paced and English is damn scarce. Vraiment!

Or we just stay home and think about how delightfully odd it is right here.

Wouldn’t it be nice to just curb your tongue?

I was at a Buddhist event over the past two days and sat next to a dear friend who, when we were chanting, wandered slowly from pitch to pitch like a buzz saw and clearly didn’t, or couldn’t, hear the pitch(es) the rest of us had settled on.

And that’s fine. Nobody cares, and it’s not important. (I’m unaware myself, of course, in many ways—and no doubt everybody else is, too.)

During a break, I overheard her and another friend talking about her chanting quality, and I—in a habitual fit of know-it-all older-brotherishness—unthinkingly chimed in to the effect that “Yeah, you’re pretty tone-deaf.”

She looked so horrified that I got scared and said more, making it worse. Yikes. After three hours of secret wretchedness on my meditation cushion, I caught her at the next break and apologized.

My beloved sister-in-law Jenny—who’s one of my heroes on this topic—reports that she tells herself “You shut up now” every day. She writes:

I think I have this wacked-out sense of trying to be helpful so that I will get approval, even from strangers, or my secret pleasure in being a know-it-all. Pathetic to have my self-esteem dependent on ‘I know where the Woolite is and you don’t!’ I only burble something now if someone is truly in need of help, like they can’t find the pickles in the paper-towel aisle and they are over 80. If you are 79, you’re on your own! Find your own damn pickles.

Bless you, Jenny.

My chanting friend listened kindly to my apology and said she’d been working on the same issue, believe it or not—how to shut up and “stay in the center”—and was even thinking of writing her doctoral thesis on boundaries!

So there’s hope for boobs like me.

[Above: A curb-like cellar-window well at St. John's Catholic grammar school in downtown Brunswick, Maine. Killed any habits lately? "Bring out your dead!" ]

I love the picture you see here, not only because it looks like a mad, beautiful abstract canvas of some kind but because I remember what it really was—the ruined pressboard top of an ancient metal folding table.

The table was in a rubbish heap nine days ago in the back parking lot of St. John’s, a big Catholic church on the west side of Brunswick, Maine. I remember the day I was there, the weather, my peregrinations around the neighborhood, camera in hand, and, above all, the many things I photographed.

Which is important, because I shoot a lot of oddly cropped images and close-ups. If I can’t remember what they were, there’s often no other way to figure it out.

So I’ve been lucky—because even years later I tend to be perfectly clear on my pictures and what to say about them, if I need to.

But not always. Sometimes I draw a blank.

And then I’m stuck with photos like the ones below. They’re not so great anyway, I guess, and it doesn’t really matter. But it’s an odd feeling to be stumped—stumped by your own mind. Especially because I shot all five of them on the same day as the tabletop!

I think you’re looking (below) at a gripping device of some kind in the rear of a utility truck, the deck of a portable train platform on wheels at Brunswick’s temporary train station, a latch on a utility-equipment fence gate, a galvanized latch among the utility equipment, and the yellow base of a nearby post or pole.

Maybe.

When the dear lady who served as my American grandmother grew old, her true grandchildren composed a piece of birthday doggerel for her beginning with “When I turned 85″ that recounted the comical things one loses at that age and ended with the refrain “But how I miss my mind.” The next year, they composed a new verse, beginning with “When I turned 86,” then “87,” and so forth.

So: It looks as if we’re going to have to start composing mine a little earlier.

I roamed Lewiston-Auburn last Sunday afternoon to take photos—but all I got was a glimpse of my own mind.

Lewiston and Auburn are small, old twin mill cities (hence the long-time joint “Lewiston-Auburn” monicker) on either side of the Androscoggin River about 20 miles inland in southwestern Maine. Lewiston is the state’s second largest city, after Portland, and the home of beautiful Bates College. Auburn originated the factory system of shoe manufacture, in 1835.

When I got there, I discovered that the annual Great Falls Balloon Festival was up and running in Lewiston, though the hot-air balloons themselves were still on the ground because of wind. All I saw was a bale of fabric and a big basket go by on a truck bed. An older gent, an ultralight-flying fan, explained to me that this was normal, as balloons (and ultralights) tend to fly at about 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., when winds are at their calmest.

I ate a slab of fried dough, having chosen to live large; listened to a Peruvian on two sets of panpipes accompanying, and selling, a CD that poured mournfully from his loudspeakers; watched Air Force recruiters ply the uneducated young with sexy T-shirts (and wondered at our indecency to each other); and hiked east a few blocks to admire a street carnival.

By the time I was done, I realized I hadn’t taken a single photo—except the river views you see here, shot in silence from a bridge linking the two cities. I think I was drawn into the noise, color and immediacy of the day’s events and lost my contemplative “distance,” my ability to stand back a little and photograph things according simply to how they look, as (more or less) pure perceptions, instead of falling into my habitual conceptual beliefs about, and relationships with, them.

So: That’s a mouthful. But maybe you see what I mean.

[Above: Water grasses waving in the shallows of the Androscoggin. Below: River stones in the late afternoon sun, water grasses near the river bank, and a nice aerial shot of the balloon festival taken by the Lewiston Sun Journal.]

Mary and I have a sweet, beautiful marriage that depends in part on telling each other what we want.

So it came as no surprise when she cropped up on my cell phone just now as I was tramping around with my camera on the outskirts of a shopping mall in Topsham, Maine, to ask shyly if I’d bring home a small, romantic gift for her, such as “a flower or two,” to celebrate our summer’s day together.

A great idea—lovely woman!—except it was 6 p.m. and almost everything was closed. No boutiques for little gift-y items. No drugstores for girlie stuff. (The supermarket sells flowers, of course. But as a husband of 32 years, a romantic, and a prudent fellow who knows the benefits of showing initiative, I didn’t want to get exactly what she’d asked for.)

Imagine my pleasure, then, in discovering a day spa with the lights on and countless lotions and potions in the windows. I surged in and found four young saleswomen draped around the front desk, staring sideways into the distance like magazine models, with identical pumpkin tans and shiny eyebrows.

“Have you got bubble bath?” I asked them.

The ringleader looked at me as if I were something odd from a fish net and flagged down the manager.

The manager, who was 20 years older, assured me she remembered bubble bath but said people don’t use it much anymore.

“Really?” I gasped. “No more lounging about in a nice tubful of soap bubbles? This will come as a surprise to my wife.”

“Women want something more nourishing today,” she explained, “with organic herbs, natural toners, healing emollients, floral essences, and aromatherapeutic surfactants.” (Or something like that.)

“A bubble bath is plenty nourishing if you’ve got a martini,” I pointed out and bought the small bottle of implausible tangerine-lemongrass body lotion you see here. It smells like jelly beans.

But that’s okay.

Fortunately I had the sense, too, to go to a liquor store and buy the heroic 25-ounce Belgian-style ale you see next to it—a gift that’s always (almost) as good as a bubble bath. At least in this marriage!

I talk and write for a living.

Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like if I opened my mouth in a meeting and the capacity to form sentences on the fly stalled—and nothing came out. Right there in front of people. System crash! Even if only for a moment. Weird, huhn?

If you think about it, talking is a habit, really, built on long experience. And recently I’ve been looking closely at my habits. Really closely. The scrutiny of a lifetime. Because I don’t have an endless lifetime ahead of me anymore.

What are these things anyway, these routines, these semiautomatic robot behaviors that I spin through year after year, over and over? It’s like a protective cocoon, isn’t it? The same old spit.

And who’s inside the cocoon? Anyone I know?

So instead, I’m trying to teach myself to do and say conscious things one by one, slowly, one moment after the next, like beach pebbles laid on a windowsill, rather than continuing to fall wholesale into the habitual gravel banks of “me,” and somehow to let go and live with abandon as “the real George,” whoever that is.

One of the gifts of my childhood: Close attention. I can tell, usually, if people understand me when I’m talking, and I know what to say to help them understand.

But this gift has a down-side, too. When I was small, my mom—through no fault of her own—was so big and overwhelming, I think, that I developed an exaggerated, self-protective sensitivity to her, and to people in general; and this has dogged me my whole life. I call it being a “courtier.” It’s one of the big veins of habit I’m trying to see and drop, or at least put to more conscious use. We’ll see.

That is why I love photography, because it’s a simple, moment-by-moment chance to make a fresh start. Real seeing. Fewer habits.

The secret of beginning a life of deep awareness and sensitivity lies in our willingness to pay attention. Our growth as conscious, awake human beings is marked not so much by grand gestures and visible renunciations as by extending loving attention to the minutest particulars of our lives. Every relationship, every thought, every gesture is blessed with meaning through the wholehearted attention we bring to it. …[W]ithout attention we live only on the surface of existence. It is just simple attention that allows us truly to listen to the song of a bird, to see deeply the glory of an autumn leaf, to touch the heart of another and be touched. We need to be fully present in order to love a single thing wholeheartedly.
—Christina Feldman and Jack Kornfeld, Stories of the Spirit, Stories of the Heart

[Above: A fresh look at a gaggle of summer deck chairs for sale recently at a stove shop in Topsham, Maine.]

Copies of this advertising poster floated around our dorm rooms in my college days.

I somehow took it as perfectly natural that the young woman—said to be, ahem, an opera singer—would be quite so saucy and voluptuous in an image then already 75 years old and that she was advertising what appeared to be French beer of all things.

So much for me.

As it happens, I’ve been thinking and writing about Belgium over the past week and discovered entirely by accident—after all these decades (ignorant fellow)—that the Meuse is the principal river of the Low Countries. Known as the Mosa in Roman times, it rises in northeasternmost France and flows 575 miles through Belgium and the Netherlands (as the Maas) before merging with the Rhine and emptying into the North Sea.

The poster was created in 1899 by the Czech Art Nouveau painter and decorative artist Alphonse Maria Mucha (1860-1930). It was made for a Belgian—not a French—brewery that sponsored big opera productions of the day. And Belgians of course speak French (plus Flemish, a group of dialects of Dutch) and make spectacular beer.

Note that the singer—ah!—who has also been described as a “jovial beer drinker,” has long, artfully meandering tresses adorned with beer-making ingredients, including barley stalks and green hops, and large field poppies of a type native to northeastern France. The poster is surely the loveliest ever conceived on behalf of a malt beverage.

Holland America Line has owned five ships called the Maasdam since the company was founded, in 1873. They’re named for a dam along the Maas. As a kid in 1958, I sailed the fourth of these, a stylish old ocean liner of the sort one associates with steamer-trunk decals and Hercule Poirot.

And then, upon reflection, it turns out I’m a Low Country guy all around:

My father’s family traces back to the 1720s in America. Before that, they’re said to have been Dutch Huguenots.

My mother’s family traces back to the 1380s in Germany, with probable origins in Charneux, Belgium. The name—de Warlimont (or variants de Walrimont and de Warrimont)—is believed to mean “from the hill of Walram.” Walram was a 13th-century count and the forebear of the Grand Dukes of Luxembourg. (Don’t look at me; the Grand Dukes got all the good silver and stuff.)

[Above: Mucha's poster. Below: The Meuse (or Maas) at Maastricht, the Netherlands' oldest city. Its name comes from the Latin for "Mosa-crossing," meaning the bridge built here by the Romans in the days of Augustus Caesar.]

I went to my first town-planning meeting a number of weeks ago—and went home mystified.

We were in a school gym. The meeting facilitator divided us into working groups of nine or 10 each at big metal folding tables. We were handed town maps and asked to pinpoint resources—historical, cultural and environmental—that we thought were most worth working to preserve in the years ahead.

A fine idea.

But the main thing I saw was that people (including me) couldn’t read the maps. They were computer-generated and looked satellite-y, with complex false colors representing elevations, bodies of water, land-trust property, and other features familiar and strange.

The result was that it was weirdly difficult to get oriented. Person after person beside me muttered that they couldn’t spot their own house, their piece of waterfront, or even the country store. Everything looked odd “from up here.”

I’ve lived in Harpswell for 15 years and soon declared—aloud—that I couldn’t believe the number of ponds, back roads, and remote parcels of land I’d never seen before. How, I asked, under these circumstances, was I supposed to “vote” for features worth saving?

The next day, I drove south on a side road I’d spotted on the maps but never noticed in real life before. It went on for miles, passing the town’s largest pond—entirely new to me—a demolished farmhouse and the ancient wooden working boat you see here.

This boat plied the seas off Harpswell once, I imagine, and did its job, carrying men and boys safely, one hopes, home again. And now it lay in the woods, knee-deep in rough scrub, and was forgotten, except for the moment, and was being carried slowly home itself, home into the earth once more.

I photographed it—and moved on, mystified all over again.

I went to the farmers’ market just now, to the bread stall, to get a big levain loaf with currants, when a couple of ladies my age came fluttering by to admire the dark, compact little rye loaves.

“They’re yummy,” I said confidentially. “You slice it real thin and eat it with something savory, like liverwurst.”

“Oh, you mean meat!” one of them exclaimed.

I recalled half-consciously that farmers’ markets sometimes harbor über-vegetarians, but my mouth was already in gear: “Yes,” I said, “it really makes you feel German.”

“Oh,” she said to her friend, “by the time I look German, I’ll know I’m in trouble….”

“Hey, I’m German,” I said pleasantly into space but felt a nervous pang.

“You’re not German,” she remarked. “You’re not short.”

The bread baker and I looked at each.

Tee hee. I should’ve listened to my sister-in-law. When she feels the habitual urge to overflow into other people’s conversations and realities, she whispers to herself, “You just shut up now.”

Time for levain bread for breakfast.

[Above: Who were those people? Who was I? In the summer of 1965, when I was 12, neighborhood kids threw stones at me and called me a Nazi. The stones missed, but it stung anyway. And even at the time, I understood it was really their parents talking. Ever since then, I think often what it must feel like to be in a visible minority. Shown here, a mannequin at a secondhand store in Brunswick, Maine.]