The Contemplative Eye

Melody uninterrupted by the need for air—
sheer and brandy-sweet and distant as hunting horns
but unnatural, really, like the endlessness of bolts of fabric.

Here, in the last light, moss roses lie tangled on the stone wall
(shelves of battered slate sinking stately back into the lawn),
a tumbler of purple wine riding in the briars.

Soon it will be evening,
and the sounds of evening will fill the garden.
People will move among paper lanterns.
A college boy with perhaps Hawaiian-blue eyes will serve a Stilton,
dreaming, as so many do, of love uninterrupted
by the need for air or other things.
I will dream simply of being present to our guests (and to myself)
and in so doing will intermittently do, as so many do, nothing of the sort.

How do we touch one another and stop and go
like sections in a stalk of wild bamboo?
There is no other way in nature, really,
where we are,
where melody is interrupted by air and other things
that make it melody
and Stilton, even, is interrupted by the damp blue crevices
that make it Stilton.

My tumbler is empty now.
It is evening.
You move, silhouetted against the open doorway,
humming, intermittently, that aria from The Pearl Fishers.

—George Simonson, 16 January 1995

Sometimes, if you’re lucky, a photo comes out sort of interesting and moody even though, technically speaking, it isn’t any good.

I framed it up nicely enough. (The one you’re looking at, above.) Or at least I framed it up and got what I was aiming for. But it’s overexposed and underexposed, and you can’t figure out what it is. None of this, needless to say, crossed my mind ahead of time. I guess I was following…what’s-her-name. The muse.

Still, maybe it catches at your heart a little. Or not. (It does for me.) Some kind of intimate space. Old in some ways. With burly, old-fashioned engineering details. Splashed with light. I dunno.

It reminds me of—nothing exactly. Just a feeling. A feeling of quiet, and presence. The house where Mary and I live is an 1840s Maine farmhouse near the sea. We’ve often said we’re just stewards here. Passing through and trying to take good care of things. (Or at least reasonably good care. We’re not really house people, and the new roof and paint job had to wait, well, a certain number of years.)

And we’ve often said it feels like people lived many, many lives here before us. And indeed, of course, they did. Whole families, whole dynasties have come and gone. We know where they put their broken crockery, where the old people warmed themselves by the Boston Beauty wood stove, where the dead were laid out in the bay window.

The dead were smaller then, to judge from the bay. Sails were made of real canvas, to judge from the scraps in the attic. Women made braided rugs out of old clothes because they needed rugs. (The center of the floor of our front parlor is unpainted to this day, because rugs have lain here—to save paint—since long before the Civil War.)

Anyway, it’s the cab of a big, restored antique truck from the early 1930s on display at a county fair last month in Cumberland Center, Maine.

A haiku:

This tough old Mack truck,
six decades later, is now
lovingly cared for.

Buddhists say, “Death is real. It comes without warning.”

Fer sure.

About four years ago I hiked to the top of Morse Mountain in Phippsburg, Maine, and down the other side to the beautiful beach shown here.

The mountain and beach are part of a 574-acre conservation area donated to Bates College that preserves one of the few undeveloped barrier beaches on the Atlantic coast.

It’s a great place to swim in the cold, wild, open waters of Maine. If you dare. I was standing there once, chest deep in the swells, when I felt my feet—then my tiptoes—getting dragged out from under me by, I guess, an undertow. To my mounting horror, I began sailing straight out to sea, upright in the water and perpendicular to the rapidly receding shoreline.

As a lifelong Yankee living by the New England coast, many’s the time I’ve heard it said that if you’re being carried off in a current, don’t try to swim against it. It’s much too strong. Swim across it until you get out of the main stream. (I once spotted a couple trying to reach shore at Popham, the beach right next to Morse. They were paddling unknowingly, and with little success, right into the mouth of a river that empties there. So I gesticulated and shouted them sideways until they reached solid ground.)

Naturally, then, I’m ashamed to report that in my own crisis, I paid no attention to this proven counsel. O where, in the blink of an eye, does our mind go? There were dangerous barnacle-covered rocks to one side of me where I couldn’t imagine climbing out. And to the other side, the shore curved away so rapidly that I feared being swept even farther into open water.

Finally it occurred to me that the undertow was quite a bit below me, around the level of my feet. So I pulled them up and swam, breast-stroking and frog-kicking as shallowly as possible, along the surface and against the current, and soon made my way back to shore.

How swiftly it happens!

Five days ago, I climbed 3,070-foot East Royce Mountain, on the Maine-New Hampshire border in the White Mountains, on a warm autumn day under the most brilliant foliage imaginable. In 90 minutes of moderately tough climbing, I passed several parties heading downward, including, finally, a young couple who told me the summit was only 10 minutes farther along.

Whew!

But as soon as they’d gone, the trail ahead of me grew spindly—so tiny and aimless that I could only barely credit the belief that all was still well. I thrashed my way out to a ledge to admire the gauzy blue vista and wonder if I hadn’t made a wrong turn somehow. But where? The way up, heretofore, had seemed pretty obvious: Go upward.

Then, naturally, when I turned around, even the spindly trail was…gone. And I realized that, against all odds, like one of those people you hear about on the evening news, I was in fact lost.

Lost!

A strange, churning feeling. Night in the mountains, anyone? (Or worse.)

After a few minutes of tense, pop-eyed creeping around in the underbrush, I found the trail again, fortunately, and retraced my steps to a familiar spot. It was then that I perceived I no longer had the slightest wish to see gauzy blue vistas. I wished to be not lost. So I manfully gave up on the summit, barely eight minutes ahead, staggered down the mountain, and drove gratefully home!

Now I’m driving to the Portland airport to round up Mary after 10 days in California. And I wonder: What sudden adventure might the night hold for us?

Reminds me of the story of the traveler passing through Radun (a town in what is now Belarus) who took advantage of the opportunity to visit the famous rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan. He was astounded by the lack of furniture in the rabbi’s home. Unable to contain himself, he asked, “Where is your furniture?” The rabbi responded by asking, “Where’s your furniture?” The man, a bit surprised, explained that he was only passing through. The rabbi smiled and said that in this world he, too, was only passing through.

So just in case: Good-bye.

I like photos that look like outer space.

Maybe it’s because I remember sitting in a Halloween costume in 1966, postponing our trick-or-treating to watch Star Trek when it was new. (Believe it or not, Bill Shatner used to be young, earnest and shiny. Just like me.)

Our screen image was wildly grainy because the TV set was in Connecticut and the NBC affiliate was in Manhattan. This was before cable. (And just a year after the famous Northeast Blackout, when we three kids played poker with our dad by candlelight. Happy as clams.)

Or maybe I like photos like these because you can’t tell what they are. They defy our habitual pigeonholing and “stop the mind.” With the result that just for a moment we’re simply here, having a direct experience of unmediated perception. Or something.

That’s the pseudo-Buddhist-contemplative-arty explanation. The real explanation might just be that I like outer space.

Remember the android Roy’s final words in Bladerunner?: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the darkness at Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.”

Boy-stuff, Rutger. But I see them, too!

[Above: A fragment of a shattered planetoid in the Oort cloud, or a large beach rock in Harpswell, Maine, in harsh sunlight. Below: The boiling surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, or an overripe Anjou pear in a Portland, Maine, advertising agency. An alien artifact over 40 kilometers long found near the ecliptic in Arcturus, or a streetlamp post in a Brunswick, Maine, parking lot. And two galaxies colliding in deep space—really.]

I love this photo. So there.

Nobody else does. It’s a stone bench, seen from above, in a little park in Portland, Maine. I like the fact that it’s crooked, that the lower strip looks pasted on, that the soft shadows contrast with the harsh line of the bench edge, that you can’t tell what it is, that the shadows on the bench continue under it, and so on. I love the day I took it. I love how it spoke to me—the tenderness of the shadows—at the time, catching my attention somehow, so that I looked down, under me, and found it.

All kinds of things to say. Though of course they don’t explain, really, why I like it. I just do. Why do I like kidneys? They’re scary—even to me. (As food.) Why do I like Sibelius and Ravel? I remember the first time I heard Ravel’s Pavane. I was a freshman in college and a sentimental boob, as ever, and it pierced me to the heart. It still does. I borrowed the phonograph recording from a guy down the hall for so long that, at the end of the year, he simply gave it to me. Thank you, Bill. I’ve got probably 15 recordings of it now, in various stages of mawkishness.

I love quince jam, the color periwinkle, small islands with houses on them, and the poets Rumi, Whitman and Mary Oliver. And Tagore, naturally.

I love Indian head pennies, wheat pennies, buffalo nickels, Mercury dimes, and standing Liberty quarters—all of which you could still find in loose change when I was a kid. (Main Street merchants used to let me paw through their cash registers!)

I love the Buddhist dedication of merit; it makes me cry. It’s a generosity practice, a snippet of poetry you say aloud to give away, or “dedicate,” to others the merit you’re believed to have gained upon doing something virtuous:

By this merit, may all attain omniscience.
May it defeat the enemy, wrongdoing.
Through the stormy waves of birth, old age, sickness and death,
From the ocean of samsara, may I free all beings.

I’d like to do that. I haven’t yet, obviously. I haven’t even freed myself. But at least I’m learning to love my life and home and marriage in the right way. A good enough place to make a start.

Oh, and I love my Hawaiian shirt!

Funny, isn’t it, how the eye knows things whereof the mind knows not? (Or something like that.) Or maybe it’s the other way around.

I shot the building above, on Fore Street in Portland, Maine, not long ago because the scene spoke to me. Something caught my attention as I was wandering along, I liked the old building reflected in the new one with a third one showing through it, I framed it up tight for a nice dense picture, and I let go.

It wasn’t until I got home, downloaded the “film roll,” and actually looked at it in any detail days later in Photoshop that I noticed the glass truck parked out front. More glass! I’ll be damned.

So: Who took the picture?

(Incidentally, it was Blaise Pascal who said, “The heart has its reasons whereof reason knows not”—as well as “I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter,” a roundly useful quotation that I have attributed for many years, wrongly, to Mark Twain.)

Three more by him for your delectation:

The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.

The more I see of men, the better I like my dog.

I went to a Maine county fair with my pal Dave last September and saw the beautiful, creamy black and white animal you see here; I photographed her with just a dash of udder so you’d know what’s what. I especially liked the gray “overlap” meandering along between the two main colors.

God forbid someone shot me this close up and hoped to see anything so pretty!

The Büyük Menderes is a river in Turkey known for millennia for its convoluted course. The ancient Greeks called it the Maeander, which evolved into our word for a river bend. Meanders form over time when a river flows slowly through a flat plain. If the meanders get cut off, as they often do, they’re called oxbow lakes.

And suddenly we’re back to cows. Or least oxen. A pair of them chanced to rumble past us on the fairground, under an actual oxbow, as it happened, and despite being a school teacher who knows perfectly well that oxen are castrated bulls, Dave wondered aloud if there was such as thing as a female ox.

Lordy, I thought, his lithium’s wearing off.

Imagine my surprise, then, to learn that he’s right. The Wikipedia observes that the word “cattle” is one of the few collective nouns in English without a singular noun form—i.e., there’s no such thing as “one cattle”—and then claims that, “[s]trictly speaking, the singular noun for the domestic bovine was ox: a bull is a male ox and a cow is a female ox.” Oxen are heavy-set cattle of either sex trained as draft animals; they’re usually castrated males only because males tend to be stronger. Untrained castrated males are called steers.

So there, Mr. Smarty-Pants Camera-Guy.

But, then, happily, the Wikipedia also avers that “[m]any…large animal species, including whales, hippos, elk, and elephants, use the term ‘bull’ and ‘cow’ to denote male and female.” Do they now? One fears they’re talking behind our backs….

Anyway: Rock on, Dave. But don’t take any wooden buffalo nickels.

[Below: A close-up of my tattered old face, possibly, or a satellite photo of the Songhua River in China, showing its meanders and an oxbow lake or two.]

I realized not long ago that a photographer like me is going to have perennial trouble getting together a coherent set of pictures—a “body of work”—to show gallery owners when angling for a photo exhibition. This is because I don’t take pictures of things in the usual sense, with the result that my stuff can’t be grouped by topic—”Old Barns of Maine,” “Desolate Crazy Street People,” “Still Lifes with Cheese,” etc.

(Even if I scrounged up a series that showed similar objects—I like to shoot waterfronts, for example—the similarity would be irrelevant to the reasons I took the pictures and would pretty much kill off the experience of fresh perception I’m trying to offer.)

I was turned down last month for an exhibition of “spiritual art” at Maine’s best gallery. This might’ve been because I’m not a very good photographer (which is possible) and haven’t worked my way dutifully up the system (which is true). But I also think it’s because I wasn’t able to convince the curator what “spiritual art” really means, or should mean—being cheerfully under the illusion that I know a thing or two about such matters—and because she might already have been equipped with immovable ideas of her own on the subject. (So who’s immovable now?)

Mary says I should go look at the show when it opens. But even apart from being a resentful cuss, I wince at the possibility it’ll consist of true-believer religious art or, worse yet, snide conceptual pieces by true non-believers about the impossibility of spiritual life.

It’s too late in history for this kind of dumbness. As long ago as 1888, Nietzsche proclaimed his famous “nausea” in the face of conventional religion:

If we have even the smallest claim to integrity, we must know today that a theologian, a priest, a pope, not merely is wrong in every sentence he speaks, but lies—that he is no longer at liberty to lie from “innocence” or “ignorance.” The priest too knows as well as anybody else that there is no longer any “God,” any “sinner,” any “Redeemer”—that “free will” and “moral world order” are lies: seriousness, the profound self-overcoming of the spirit, no longer permits anybody not to know about this.

Ah, yes. That.

Nietzsche had problems, of course. Not least of which was that he saw organized religion is crap but then lost his way in thin air like Wylie Coyote. And I think he was wrong about God (at least as a means of feeling our way toward something important), free will, and spirit. But he was right about true believers; and true non-believers are the same thing turned upside down.

Still, I could be wrong myself. Maybe it’ll be a lovely show. I’ll be there with a pleasant little smile on.

Anyway, my idea for a body of work was to shoot—all in one place—whatever catches my eye as a contemplative photographer and then to name it for the place. The photo you see here, for example, is from a series I shot along Fore Street in downtown Portland, Maine. None of the Fore Street pictures has anything much to do with Fore. They were just shot there. Which gives the appearance of making sense. And it sounds like a concept despite being in fact irrelevant. Which suits my disdain for conceptual art. Arid and gutless! (So who’s conceptual now?)

Other than that, I’m just a kindly ol’ gentleman who likes to hum “Eres Tú.”

[Above: A side alley off Fore Street in Portland, Maine, in the morning sunshine.]

Mary and I saw The Maltese Falcon (1941) again last night for the first time since college.

A strange movie, based on the Dashiell Hammett novel of the same name, with lots of style and much, much talk. But also a jumbled worldview, I think, and plot line—kind of like the photo you see here.

Our culture jumbled it further when Humphrey Bogart played the film’s detective Sam Spade and detective Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1946)—even though Spade was pretty much morally unmoored and Marlowe wasn’t. Sort of. Plus the fact that The Big Sleep has an even more hopelessly tangled plot.

Still, jumbles have their place, and people enjoy rooting around in them. I went to the Cumberland County Fair a couple of weeks ago and rooted around for hours among the people, carnival rides, pigs, antique vehicles, ducks, caramel apples, geese, old farm equipment, chickens, and country music. But no falcons.

My first boss after college was Sol Chain, a big, gruff old guy who ran a weekly newspaper in New Haven, Connecticut. I set type for him (on one of the earliest electronic machines to supersede Linotypes), laid out ads, edited press releases, and wrote godawful theater reviews.

As a young fellow in World War II, Sol had worked for a U.S. Army newspaper on the Aleutian Islands under the editorship of—you guessed it—Sergeant Dashiell Hammett. The stew thickens.

At the fair, meanwhile, a giant pumpkin grown by a man from Harpswell, Maine, tipped the scales at 1,023 pounds to win the annual pumpkin contest. He won it in 2006, too.

I live in Harpswell. Jambalaya!

[Above: A carnival ride loading up, at the Cumberland County Fair in Cumberland Center, Maine. The fair was founded in 1870.]

The city of Portland, Maine, is built along a ridge overlooking a splendid harbor.

If you find the right place to stand (and a telephoto lens), the buildings rising along the back side of the ridge can pile up in interesting visual jumbles like the one shown here.

My friend Dave takes a dim view of telephoto lenses, saying they make everything look the same—viz., piled up. Like my buildings. And he’s probably right. But it seems to me that the sameness of the lens’s effect puts an intriguing premium on the image’s composition—and I like composition above all else.

To me, good composition can lift a scene’s elements out of their usual pigeonholes as things-with-names (such as “building,” “dog,” “glass of milk,” etc.) and transform them into—or, more profoundly, remind us of their true nature as—nameless elements of a larger experience, i.e., the experience of the scene (and ultimately of our life) as an unbroken whole.

My aim as a photographer, then, is to point beyond the subjects being photographed. To point, to the extent I’m able, at the experience of simple, thoughtless, wakeful being.

Susan Sontag, in On Photography, complained repeatedly about the fact that things in photographs look beautiful—sharecroppers, urban ghettos, assorted mayhem, you name it. Susan was an earnest-minded talker and took these tragedies and problems seriously. She believed them to be real, and felt they needed to be worked on, not just looked at.

Susan was of course right about our human struggles; they deserve our help and heart. But she was wrong about photography. The key thing about good photography is precisely that it can point beyond its subjects (and our habitual ideas about happiness and sadness) to the naked, nameless fact of their existence. To their “suchness,” as Buddhists say. To the barely camouflaged fact that everything that is, is beautiful—a realization that makes us larger and more human. Because, as Albert Einstein said, our problems can’t be solved when we’re still standing at the same level of consciousness that created them.

Is the picture above beautiful? Dunno. You decide.

Now if only I could find a place in the harbor, somewhere on the water, I guess—ha!—to stand and get a good picture of the front of the Portland ridge.

[Above: City skyline, looking southeast from the Marginal Way in Portland, Maine.]