The Contemplative Eye

My friend Dave and I went to the Cumberland County Fair the other day, a harvest festival, originally, of the kind that’s repeated from county to county across Maine in autumn and, for all I know, the rest of the country.

We saw a midway carnival, antique trucks and tractors, 4-H farm animals, and a windmill running a water pump to demonstrate old-time wind power.

In the horticulture hall, we were the only people in the audience as two grown women made flower arrangements, and we gradually got into conversation with them. Dave told a joke: Why do Mainers lock their car doors in September? To keep friends from putting zucchini in the back seat.

To my surprise, one of the women told an amusing but distinctly lewd joke in reply. It made me think: How times have changed since I was a kid and the merest jokes about bras were so torrid they had to be told in whispers (and never in mixed company).

Things, I think, are better now.

In the farm museum, we saw a big display wall of quart milk bottles from small, long-lost dairy farms all over Maine. Dozens of towns. Thousands of local people enjoying milk from local farmers and cows. What a human way to get good food and help keep one’s economy alive.

As it happens, I once tasted milk like that myself, 25 years ago, from a three-cow dairy run by a gentleman farmer near Appleton, Maine, and I never forgot it. It tasted like a meadow, a certain meadow down the road, and its stones and soil, and its angelica and wild onions and summer buttercups. The cream on top was the color of ivory and so thick my spoon literally stood up in it. It was like a first kiss.

Things, I think, were better then.

Above: Towering milk tanks at a large commercial dairy processor in downtown Portland, Maine. Note the video camera at top left. In case of milk terrorists?]

I hardly ever take pictures of people.

Some of my work has people in it. But only incidentally, like car fenders or pumpkins, as composition elements.

Indeed, I hardly ever take pictures of anything—i.e., of things in their usual conceptual guise as entities-named-by-Adam and all that—at least not for the purpose of showing them to you in their thinginess.

But what are you gonna do when girl field-hockey players sail past you magically like larks out of the blue? The poor dears were being flogged around a field in the hot sun by their coach, and they were kinda blotchy and mad.

I could see they didn’t like me watching them. So I didn’t. Especially in my unasked-for role as an old Bill-Shatner-ish stranger with a camera. (All I needed was a rag-top Buick and white shoes.)

Adding to my confusion, beyond the heat, was the fact that I was hiking around in an unlikely parallel universe, a wedge of Maine urban real estate I’d never seen before or even imagined though it’s within easy walking distance of downtown Portland. It was huge, with the highway thundering overhead behind me, a vast triangular sports field in front of me, a low-slung modernist brick school on the far side, and a row of cottages dotting the horizon.

I’m well aware, by the way, that some of the finest photos ever taken—or at least the photos I like best—are in fact photos of people. So why no people for me? Against all odds: I’m shy.

But I keep careful watch. As Roald Dahl said, “Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”

Anyway, I waited till the girls were well past and, suddenly recalling that my telephoto lens was in place, snapped, from about 30 paces, the shot you see here. Case closed.

Good-bye, ladies. I hope you grow up happy—and remember to believe in magic.

[Above: High school girls' field-hockey team on Saint James Street in Portland, Maine.]

I really, finally, totally filled my old computer. All 75 gigs of it. With photos. Then I switched to our new laptop—and began filling it, too.

But it couldn’t go on.

So Mary and I sat down yesterday afternoon and started pruning—hundreds and hundreds of files, some of them TIFFs, most of them RAWS, all of them huge. Lots of older photos that really don’t interest me anymore. And before long I’ll have a little breathing room again. For a while.

Some of my photos aren’t even mine. The picture shown above is of Baku, the capital, largest city, and chief port of Azerbaijan. Isn’t that something? A city of 1.8 million people that you never even heard of. In a country I’m pretty vague on, too.

Baku is on a hooked peninsula reaching 37 miles into the Caspian Sea. The peninsula has a name, too—Absheron. It’s an extension of the Caucusus Mountains and is known for its salt lakes, vineyards, mulberries, and figs. Who knew?

All of this is amazing to me. By area, the Caspian is the world’s largest enclosed body of water. (It’s the one that looks like Abraham Lincoln.) The Volga, Europe’s longest river, flows into it. And nothing flows out. Countless people spend their days on these quiet shores, fishing, living, making love, eating figs—a miniature world, as it were, on a vast, inward-facing sea.

Bazardüzü, a mountain in Azerbaijan that you never heard of either, is taller than anything in the Rockies. Some of the oldest clay pottery in the world comes from the region, according to archaeologists. And its prehistoric language is sometimes held to be the mother of Indo-European, the colossal language group that stretches, to this day, from Spain 5,000 miles east to India.

My poor computers! It’s a good thing this blog, at least, lives elsewhere, on a server in California. And now I can prune out the Baku photo. Maybe I should switch to shorter texts, too:

Bronze Age pottery,
beautiful, ancient, wild-glazed.
Remnants of dry wine.

[Above: A view of the old Inner City of Baku, Azerbaijan, on the western shores of the Caspian Sea.]

I was trespassing not long ago, camera in hand, on the high back lawn of a retirement home in Portland, Maine, trying to get a shot across the inner harbor, when I tumbled out of the shrubbery into a side parking lot and discovered the view you see here of St. Louis Parish, the only Polish church in the state.

Officially, Maine is 98% white. But Mainers, like all human beings, are secretly far more diverse (and frictive) than seems plausible, and many of us who are persons of pink color are in fact just hiding out, like purloined letters, in the welter of other such persons.

Maine has about 865,000 “Yankees,” including 275,000 English and 193,000 Irish, in addition to 300,000 French and French-Canadians, 9,400 Latinos, 9,000 Asians, 7,100 American Indians, and 6,800 blacks.

And it’s quite a chowder.

The Maine seaport town of Kennebunkport, for example, is home to 7,763 people, most of them white. Yet their ancestries are reported to be, in descending order, English, French, French-Canadian, Irish, German, Italian, Scottish, Welsh, other Canadian, Polish, Swedish, Dutch, British, Greek, Swiss, Russian, Norwegian, Ukrainian, Danish, Slovak, Lithuanian, Finnish, Czech, Portuguese, Austrian, Hungarian, and Latvian. And Armenian.

Yowck! Do they dare turn their backs on each other?

There’s a Lithuanian church in Kennebunkport and a Lithuanian community hall in the inland city of Lewiston, bespeaking Lithuanians on the ground somewhere, one supposes, although I haven’t actually seen any that I know of. Except one. My wife Mary is half Lithuanian. But she’s from Pittsburgh.

There’s a German restaurant and deli north of Waldoboro better than any in Boston, and two German restaurants within 12 miles of the tiny fishing village where I live. One has spectacular beers on tap (served, however, alas, in boorish boot-shaped glass mugs) and dinner platters so big that the owner had a quadruple bypass. Mary won’t go to the other one because they use too much roasted-pumpkin-seed oil for her digestive comfort. (Crazy tree worshipers….)

There’s a madly fragrant Polish restaurant and deli on the far side of Portland, selling what are probably the only Polish spice cookies for 200 miles around.

I am half German—which is to say half Polish, in a sense. It shows in my cheeks. My mother’s family is Prussian, from Königsberg, in a corner of old Germany so far to the northeast that, for long stretches of the history of modern nations, it was in Polish hands. Yet today, the city—once home of the Ur-German philosopher Kant—is called Kaliningrad and is part of Russia, believe it or not (an isolated sliver, or “exclave,” known as the Kaliningrad Oblast).

My oldest male friend in the world is a Pole named Stanley. We met in kindergarten in 1958. Three generations of his family lived together in one house, including a grandmother in black who sat beside the stove, glaring at me and peeling potatoes. I went to her wake; she was the first dead person I ever saw. In high school, I introduced Stanley to a beautiful young friend of mine who later became his wife. We’ve lost track of each other over the years. But I know they lived for a time in Westport, Massachusetts, a village I discovered independently whose charms helped me pry Mary out of Manhattan. The last time I saw his mother, in 2002, we embraced for a full minute and wept with joy.

Even the word “chowder” is quite a chowder. It sounds 100% New England but comes from the French chaudière, meaning a stew pot (from chaud, meaning hot), and is related to the word “cauldron”—all of which trace back to the Latin calidarium, meaning, again, a stew pot (and calidus, meaning, again, hot).

I’m happy to add—I am proud to add—that the St. Louis Parish church recently hosted a Sudan Day for members of Portland’s immigrant Sudanese community, who cannot hide like purloined letters and need our human kindness to each other at least as much as we do.

Na zdrowie, little Polish church.

[Above: The St. Louis Parish church on Danforth Street in Portland, Maine. Below: A New Year's Eve party at the church, from a website photo, in which the gentleman reveler bears a certain resemblance to, shall we say, me....]

I’m not normally interested in irony.

Indeed I’m averse to it. Irony seems to be the defining attitude—the easiest, cheapest pseudo-emotion—of today’s do-nothing young. Or old. Or even yesterday’s. “We’re still waiting on the world to change,” as the song says. Well, don’t hold your breath. It won’t change by itself.

There used to be another song, one that said, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.” I’d like to be able to tell you that I began with me, as Buddhist meditators for thousands of years have been taught to do. But so far it hasn’t worked out quite as I’d imagined, and you could say that I, too, might as well have been waiting. Waiting on myself to change. Ironic.

When I started high school, in 1967—a vastly different era (except for our endless, dunderheaded wars)—there was an older boy named Mark whom I now recognize as a forerunner of the irony-soaked coffeehouse slacker. His family ran an establishment backing on the town marina and fronting on the town beach; I’d seen him sitting there my whole life, wrapping thread on fishing rods and, as a teenager, growing snide and world-weary.

Still, he played Rhapsody in Blue on the piano, knocking back its complex rhythms, including passages of two-against-three that were completely new and electrifying to me as a beginning composer. In later years I taught myself to play five-against-three and even seven-against-four—and thought of Mark.

In my first serious job after college, I worked in New York City as the advertising production manager for a trade journal in the international sugar industry—which is where I learned that “dunder” is the final residue, or “lees,” left over after pressing cane juice from sugar cane. It’s used to make molasses and rum.

And so you can see what “dunderheaded” really means. (Dictionaries try to derive it from the Middle Dutch doner, meaning thunder. But I’m not too interested in that.)

Anyway, the ironic Barber Foods sign—”Real home-style goodness” in a sea of Bladerunner-ish factory plumbing—has amused me for years, and I finally got around to photographing it one hot day not long ago.

But the Barber folks are admired in Maine for their good works, if I understand correctly. And so, without further strains of irony, I’ll bid you adieu and guten Abend.

I rambled around Biddeford-Saco the other day, camera in hand.

Biddeford and Saco are another of Maine’s pairs of twin cities, located, in this case, on either side of the falls on the Saco River, about five miles inland from the sea, in southern Maine. They’re former mill towns that took advantage, in the old days, of water power to manufacture shoes and textiles.

Biddeford is the site of the earliest known permanent settlement in Maine (1616) and, today, the home of the University of New England and its college of osteopathic medicine. Saco boasts Maine’s only remaining wooden roller coaster.

Hiking hither and yon, I enjoyed myself and photographed a few of the cities’ (many) oddments—including a patch of Odilon-Redon-ish poison ivy beside a gas station (with its splash of brilliant blue trash on the side) and a fat, long-abandoned phone book still in its plastic bag on the stoop of a sun-baked tenement.

Lots to see. Lots to think about. Something about cycles repeating themselves.

We’re born somehow, wiggling like elvers, into the beauty and hardship of this world. Yet we don’t always, or even often, have the good fortune of seeing that we are, after all, free. Free to step onward and upward, and anyward.

Freedom of this kind (the mind’s freedom—a freedom of the imagination) is a natural resource, inexhaustible, like water power on a falls. A gift of the great cascading cause-and-effect of our circumstances and of the mind to itself, recognizing itself.

But for many of us, for now, this truth is practically a secret. And it’ll have to suffice, I guess, to say that we are mostly still just rambling around.

[Bottom: The mills of Biddeford-Saco, from a photo of a ca. 1910 postcard.]

It was September 6, eight days ago, and drizzly, cold and gray. But I had a free afternoon and climbed into my car, camera on board, to take a closer look at Old Orchard Beach, about 50 miles south of here.

OOB, as they call it, is a resort town on the southernmost Maine coast, with a long sandy beach, a main drag just back from the water lined with ramshackle summer hotels, and a boardwalk carnival in the middle—and I hadn’t visited it in years.

I cruised the strip from one end to the other. There was no free parking in town, as far as I could see, the management having seen fit to hand the job over entirely to for-profit tourist parking lots. Annoyed by this, I finally whipped out my Handicap tag (a secret weapon Mary and I normally reserve for outings with her mother) and parked in a Handicap spot near the carnival.

The town was desolate. It had emptied out only days before, as summer visitors went home to put their kids back in school. But autumn was already sharp in the air, and I snugged my Polartec jacket close around me.

To my surprise, the carnival’s chain-link-fence gate was standing wide open. But there wasn’t a soul in sight. So I worked my way upstream through an arcade full of silent, shadowy boardwalk games, looking for someone in charge.

Finally, a young fellow pointed me to a slightly older fellow in the distance, who said the carnival was closed and I really shouldn’t be wandering around on the property. But he invited me to ask the owner directly for permission to photograph, if I wanted to.

The owner’s office suite was dark and shabby, with walls made of plywood. A line of tired-looking people was snaking toward his desk. I perceived that they were getting their paychecks.

I ran out of steam, then, seeing them one by one in the cold, waiting for money.

On my way out, I asked the slightly older fellow what he and his colleagues did all winter long, now that the tourists were gone. “We fix the rides,” he said. “It never ends.”

Just before I climbed back into my car and drove home, I stood outside the fence and shot the sad, rickety, beautiful old roller coaster you see above.

But that was it. To paraphrase Victor Hugo: Our minds being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.

[Above: The roller coaster at Old Orchard Beach, Maine.]

I was mucking around in my Lewiston-Auburn photos the other day and gradually noticed that the Lewiston skyline looks—to a remarkable extent—unchanged since, say, the 1880s. So I converted about 10 of the more portrait-y photos into black & whites, a little harshly, so as to get even more of an antique effect—and here are three of them.

I discovered the same thing, entirely by accident, about three years ago, when I was taking photos of the seacoast in Harpswell, Maine, during a blizzard. (I live in Harpswell.) The photos were in full color. But thanks to the weather, they turned out in such nearly pure, perfect blacks, whites and grays that they looked startlingly like vintage photos from the previous century. Well, the previous previous century.

It’s odd to realize that the haunting quality of Victorian photos is reproducible, in a sense, and doesn’t arise solely from their visual content. It’s not just that the places shown and the personages long dead are nostalgic (although they are); it’s also that the character of the medium itself was at a recognizable stage in its development. A stage now long ago and far away.

Anyway, an interesting effect—though I’m not sure what it’s good for except as a curiosity. (But hey, much the same could be said of me.)

[Above and below: Above the falls. Three views of the Lewiston, Maine, skyline from the Auburn side of the Androscoggin River.]

It’s round about midnight. (Actually, it’s round about 10—plenty late to get old buzzards like me in the mood.) And the velvety, dandelion-wine voice of Brazil’s Paula Toller is shimmering in the autumn air.

Me, I’m sitting at my desk, sipping Jaegermeister from a preposterous little German glass that tradition assigns to this role, and slowly sliding down my wheelie chair.

Paula is singing “1800 Colinas” at half speed, miraculously transforming the rowdy ’70s Carnival samba into a ballad—with a melody so dreamy, ornate, and spaciously far-leaping that I can only barely sing along with her. And I’m a not-bad singer. (I seem to recall something similar occurring in The Music Man, but I’m too lazy just now to look it up).

Paula’s even, slightly narcotized voice and the throaty zhush of Brazilian Portuguese are perfect for the job, contributing nicely—along with the CD’s sweet, heavy synthesizers—to the general sentimentality of having Jaegermeister in one’s neocortex.

Paula informs us:

Subi mais de 1800 colinas
Não vi nem a sombra de quem
eu desejo encontrar.
Oh Deus, eu preciso encontrar meu amor
Prá matar a saudade que quer me matar.
Oh Deus, eu preciso encontrar meu amor
Prá matar a saudade.

Eu que queria dar sossego ao meu coração
Mas fui infeliz no amor
Fui gostar de quem não gosta de ninguém
E hoje só me resta a dor.
E hoje só me resta.

The auto-translation of these lyrics is pretty fritzy (see below). But the gist of it, plainly, was that the protagonist climbed 1,800 hills looking for his or her lover, and did not find her or him. Ah.

Why 1,800? Alas, I cannot say.

“Colinas” comes from the Latin collis, meaning hill, and is related to the English colliculus, a term from anatomy meaning a small protuberance.

I spotted Paula recently on YouTube in a Brazilian music video that can only be described as torpid. The poor dear was robbed—devoid of energy and charisma (though very pretty), and having trouble with her eyelids. She was in a black-light lunar landscape that featured fly-girls wearing their birthday suits and a tuxedoed chap who looked like Kermit the Frog in a fright wig. The tune was so unremarkable that I can’t remember it long enough to remark on it; I fear she wrote it.

Paula was born in 1962 and raised by her grandparents in the Copacabana section of Rio, in a house filled with classical music, dance, and English. Her grandfather was a retired surgeon and author. But eventually, of course, she heard James Brown. In 1982 she joined Kid Abelha (”Kid Bee”), which emerged as one of Brazil’s top bands and has continued to be a pop hit-maker ever since. She also sings German Lieder.

In my first job in Manhattan, in 1978, I worked for a trade journal in the international sugar industry. We published a monthly in English and Spanish, the chief languages of the sugar-growing world, and a quarterly in Portuguese, for Brazil. Ever since, like many people who’ve had even the slightest contact with Brazil, I’ve longed—and longed—to go there. I was sorry to hear recently that the streets really aren’t safe for visitors these days.

The trouble with these tiny glasses is that you have to keep refilling them.

[Above: The hills of Rio de Janeiro, from an image by rioholiday.com. Below: Another, more familiar view, from an image by tropicalisland.de.]

1800 hills went up more than
Not vi nor the shade of who
I desire to find
Oh God, I need to find my love
Prá to kill the homesickness that wants to kill me
I that I wanted to give calmness to my heart
But I was unhappy in the love
I was to like who does not like nobody
E today only remains me pain

Ever see an electron-micrograph of a pillow tick? It looks like a silver-plated Godzilla towering over the skyline!

Likewise, I’ve discovered, you can squint in real close to a fine old car (or practically anything, for that matter), and the resulting image looks effusively surreal. And big.

Mary and I were rambling around Bath, Maine, late one afternoon last weekend, she to the dress shops and I to take photos, when I espied the 1957 Chevy Bel Air you see here, in these slightly anxiety-provoking close-ups.

Except for the schmutz on the turn signal, it reminds me of the dress Audrey Hepburn wore to the Ascot opening day in My Fair Lady.

Bath is a river city of about 9,000 souls. The first ocean-going ship built in the New World by English shipwrights was built near here. Since then, some 5,000 vessels have been launched in the area, including hundreds of wooden and steel U.S. Navy war ships.

The owners of the Bel Air, a cheery couple in their late 60s, came bobbling out of a seafood joint and welcomed me to take more pictures as they drove off into the sunset. But I declined, unobtrusively, being no portraitist.

Mary spotted me across a parking lot and later exclaimed how odd and interesting it was to see me, for the first time, at work with my camera, hunched over an innocent object, darting, weaving, and floating in space like an astronaut.

When we got together again, I learned she hadn’t bought herself a new dress after all. But that’s okay. Audrey’s dress was hard to beat.

[Above: Front grille detail of a 1957 Chevy Bel Air. Below: "Spear" detail on the Bel Air's hood. A red ’57 Bel Air in its entirety, courtesy of Serious Wheels.]