The Contemplative Eye

For some time now, Mary and I’ve been planning a two-week excursion for January 2008 to Mexico’s San Miguel de Allende.

San Miguel is a well-known art colony, a city of 60,000 (including 12,000 foreign residents, most of them American expatriates) located more than 6,000 feet above sea level in the mountains 150 miles north of Mexico City.

Mary’s friend the artist Lou Lipkin and her husband established a six-months-of-the-year beachhead in San Miguel over the past few seasons and invited Mary down for an intensive art retreat this winter. I’d tacked myself onto the proceedings as a tolerably welcome stowaway photographer—until our well-water pump died the other day.

The repairs, consisting of the installation of a Goulds submersible pump, cost $1,500. And this changed everything. Suddenly the fact that my going to San Miguel would triple the cost—by doubling the airline tickets and obliging us to board the cat, park at the airport for weeks, rent a casita (apartment) rather than stay at Lou’s, etc.—was starting to leave a bad mouth-feel, at least for me.

So I changed my mind and announced I’d stay home.

It was like taking a knock-out drop. I’m completely relaxed! Now I’ll enjoy my house and my cat, and launch an art retreat of my own—a rich vacation of photography, painting, writing, you name it. With plenty of meditation, loud music and long walks by the sea. Meanwhile, I’ve saved the entire cost of the pump.

San Miguel’s been around since the 16th century. It’ll still be there next year. Also, I’ve got the pity factor on my side and can cook up a coconut-oil-slathered tropical beach holiday for March.

(But I sure will miss my Mary.)

I was roaming around Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, early one Sunday morning a couple of years ago when I was surprised to find an unlocked door into a glass walkway connecting two buildings—and strolled right in, camera in hand.

The hangers were hanging there, glinting in the sun. All was hushed; the tennis-sneaker-floral fragrance of an institution was in the air. And I’ve enjoyed bumping into this photo occasionally in my computer archive ever since.

There’s something odd (for me, at least) in trying to shoot in locales like Bowdoin. Most of what you see there is so carefully manicured—i.e., under such high-intensity human control—that I can’t seem to get a toe hold or hand hold, the little sliver of an edge I need, the borderline or balance-point between order and chaos where, in my experience, the good photos are hiding, like Chinese sages in misty mountains. Because there isn’t enough chaos.

It’s kind of like rock climbing. A perfect rock would be unclimbable. It’s the cracks, gaps and other imperfections that give climbers a way “in” and up.

I’ve had the same problem in Freeport, Maine, a village that, as you might know, has been transformed over the past 30 years by the gradual substitution of large, national commercial “outlet” enterprises for most of the small, local Main Street spots—the hardware store, the barber shop, the library, etc. The result for me? Nothin’ to shoot. Too “pretty.”

I’m fairly sure the same thing would happen on a cruise ship, in a Club Med resort, in a mall, any place else that’s been human-engineered to smithereens. That’s why Spirographs are pretty and fractals are beautiful.

Geronimo!

Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903-1987) was a French philosopher, political economist, and futurist.

His father divorced his mother in 1912 to become the second husband of French writer Colette. In 1919, when Bertrand was a mere 16, he began an affair with his famous stepmother, who was then in her late 40s. The affair ended Colette’s marriage and caused a scandal.

The thing about sheep, as my photo (above) suggests, is that you can’t always see them easily.

Temperamentally, I’m pretty independent. I left corporate New York in 1989 and moved north with Mary to live, write and do art in a Maine farmhouse by the sea. But when I read about the composer Percy Grainger, for example, then, well—heck!—I feel as conventional as a sheep.

Intellectually, I’m pretty bright. I went to Yale and read philosophy and physics for pleasure. But when I try to read the details of physicist Garrett Lisi’s new Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything, I feel as dumb as a sheep.

Politically, I’m pretty far to the left. I’ve liked Dennis Kucinich for years. But when I perceive that I wouldn’t dream of voting for him (because I want to help elect someone who can win—even if he or she’s less interesting to me), I feel as timid as a sheep.

And yet it was Juvenel, when not disporting himself with Colette, war correspondent Martha Gellhorn or others, who said, “A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.”

[Above: Sheep in a pen at the Cumberland County Fair this past September in the town of Cumberland Center, Maine.]

Unlike most people, as far as I can tell, I actually like wastelands.

At least well enough to photograph them for their own sake, without implied eyebrow-raising. Or tired art-commentary about the unfortunateness of the way we live.

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land went on at length in the latter vein (back when the thesis was new-ish), pitching literary allusions in such numbers as to arouse suspicion there was no pitcher in the middle. Maybe that was the point. The sort-of-Buddhist point.

In Arthurian legend, the Fisher King—a key thread in Eliot’s poem—was a keeper of the holy grail who had a groin wound that wouldn’t heal. His kingdom, sympathetically reflecting the wound, became a wasteland. Barren and dry. Yes?

As I remember the story, the virtue of the knight who finally healed the king (and the kingdom) and attained the grail consisted simply of seeing the king as a human being and treating him kindly (by inquiring “What ails you?”). In other words, he saw the king for what he actually was, right there under your nose. No allusions. And not just as a means to an end.

Still, I enjoy a good allusion just as much as the next poor scribbler. And besides, many of us have a wasteland story of our own to discover, and tell, in however allusive a manner. Me, I was lucky—a recipient of the sweet rain of my loved ones’ kindness. You, too, I hope.

Shantih, friend.

[Above: The backside of Portland, Maine.]

I painted this a couple of years ago in an ecstatic fit, I seem to recall, as a type of unconscious homage to, or echo of, a Hudson River School painting at the Metropolitan Museum in New York that I’ve loved for decades but have only seen in person about five times—Gifford’s Gorge in the Mountains (Kauterskill Clove) of 1862 (see below).

It’s kind of painful to put the two works side by side, his and mine, because Gifford obviously knew what he was doing. Wow! (Maybe that’s why I only posted his as a thumbnail!) Still, times have changed, and by now the ornate naturalistic details around the edges of his painting seem to ground it a little too much, for my taste at least. (Of course, I like to listen to Philip Glass, Indian ragas, Constance Demby, and other music where nothing much happens, in the old Western sense, for days at a time.)

I learned this afternoon that our friend Eddie St. Pierre had died. He must’ve been about 84. Eddie was for 15 years our beloved, all-purpose handyman—a little fireplug of a guy in a green jumpsuit who could fix anything and always had a sly, French-Canadian twinkle in his eye. In particular, there was probably no one else left on earth who knew how to fix our kerosene-fired wood stove, a Rube Goldberg contraption from the first half of the previous century. Eddie used to say he had nothing but V-8 juice with pepper (”for vigor”) for breakfast, then nothing else all day till dinner.

Our water pump failed after lunch, and I called Eddie as usual, getting his wife on the line as usual, and explained our problem as usual. “I wish I could help you,” she said after a pause, enunciating clearly, “but Eddie’s passed away—last May 17, in fact.”

I used to “help” Eddie as he worked his way around our house, cellar, and yard, at least to the extent of milling about on the periphery and holding spare nuts and bolts. Then, gradually, Eddie drew me into the operation, saying, “I’m gonna teach you how to work!”

Strauss’s Four Last Songs are playing just now, I’m wearing a crazy old-fashioned Filson mackinaw cap I bought the other day out of love for old-timers like Eddie (now that I’m becoming one, too, it appears), and it’s time to go to bed.

Eddie liked Mary and me—probably because we liked him so much—and hardly charged us anything for his visits. Maybe $20 at a time, even for hours of hard work. The last time, he rubbed his cheek and said, “Five dollars,” and I gave him twenty, saying, “Take your wife out for ice cream.”

“Death is not extinguishing the light,” Tagore wrote. “It is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.” He’s probably right.

So long, Eddie.

[Above: Over Kaaterskill Clove: Vast Mind by George Simonson, acrylic pastepaint over oil pastels on paper, 30 x 22 in. Below: A Gorge in the Mountains (Kauterskill Clove), 1862, by Sanford Robinson Gifford (American, 1823–1880), oil on canvas, 48 x 39 7/8 in.]

Someday,
when I have searched my life
and the world is older,
I will see these lights and shadows
are like a dream
and think of you.

How lovely—
my foolish heart and mind
forever, ever changed!
There’ll be nothing for me
but to let my breathless answers go
and rest with you (and every thing) arranged
in vastness,
just the way it is tonight.

—George Simonson, 3 April 2006

The song “The Way You Look Tonight” was featured in the film Swing Time, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It was written by Jerome Kern with lyrics by Dorothy Fields and won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1936. Fields later remarked, “The first time Jerry played that melody for me I had to leave the room because I started to cry…. I couldn’t stop, it was so beautiful.”

Good times.

My poem (above) echoes the lyrics and unpacks them, aiming to create a larger song—a love song for the world, and for our moment in it. Yes? No?

Rabindranath Tagore:

Let all the strains of joy mingle in my last song—the joy that makes the earth flow over in the riotous excess of the grass, the joy that sets the twin brothers, life and death, dancing over the wide world, the joy that sweeps in with the tempest, shaking and waking all life with laughter, the joy that sits still with its tears on the open red lotus of pain, and the joy that throws everything it has upon the dust, and knows not a word.

[Above: An annoyingly Zen-like photo taken almost entirely by accident as I was fooling around with a new telephoto lens last year, depicting Middle Bay late in the day, off Harpswell, Maine.]

Mary and I wandered the other day, by accident, into the grand opening of the new hunting and fishing wing of the L.L. Bean store in Freeport, Maine.

No, they didn’t give us balloons or dollars-off coupons. Or even a dead deer. Still, Mary found me a preposterously old-fashioned hat, called a mackinaw cap (shown below), that I promptly fell in love with, bought for $28, and later discovered was even pricier online.

The hat reminds me of Eddie St. Pierre, our multi-talented French-Canadian handyman—stumpy and taciturn, with an utterly dry, one-syllable sense of humor—who’s now in his mid-eighties. His house is for sale, we noted recently, and we fear that the era of old gentlemen who know a thing or two about furnaces, well pumps, clothes dryers, toilet gaskets, and horse-hair plaster is coming to a close.

I’ve had the good fortune to work for L.L. Bean almost continuously since 1991. At first, I was the company’s copy chief, in charge of what the catalogs said. My counterpart, a senior art director, was in charge of what they showed. She and I fought like cats and dogs. (Not really. But it was fun to say.)

When I left the company, in 1995, they invented a companywide “Best Team Player” award and surprised me with it at a huge company event involving humorous T-shirts, videos, and speeches. The funny thing, of course, is that I’m an almost hopelessly bad team player, except as a learned business courtesy (and method of pain reduction).

In those days, Eddie came to our house often. Before we moved in, it had been sealed up for three years after the former owner was removed to a retirement home in his nineties, and it held numerous secrets and puzzles. Eddie and our neighbor Les, another shrewd old engineer in his seventies, rediscovered our lost well head buried in the lawn by triangulating like pirates and hauled up 250 feet of heavy, paired rubber hoses to extricate a peppercorn-size piece of gravel from the clogged jet nozzle at the bottom. Les grew faint from the exertion, took a nitroglycerin pill, and kept right on working.

In later years, I worked for L.L. Bean as a marketing consultant, writing things for the International, Advertising, Public Relations, Research, Creative, and other departments. I wrote the company’s first new-product press kits, large parts of its first website, and countless first-time-ever cover wraps, newsletters, and special offers for its rapidly expanding business in Japan. God, we had fun!

Les had a beautiful collection of grafted apple-tree varieties in his backyard orchard, across the street from us. One night around Halloween, he let Mary and me make apple cider with him on the old press in his garage. Few things have tasted as good! His wife was a fierce old tyrannosaur, and all three of us were afraid of her. Les died one day around 1998 while sitting on his tractor.

Over the years, Eddie let me work at his side and showed me by example how he looked at mechanical problems, rummaged around and thought about them, and solved them. I loved working shoulder to shoulder, sweating and laughing, with the old guy. (My father fell ill when I was a little boy and was taken permanently to a V.A. hospital when I was 12. Still, I have visceral memories of being with him and watching him sharpen pencils with a jackknife, hold screws dangling from his lip as he retightened something, and lay out a tape measure. To this day, I jam a pencil behind my ear like he did when I’m starting a project around the house. The funny thing, of course, is that I’m almost hopelessly nonmechanical—and I suspect he was, too.)

Over the past couple of years, the last of my old pals at L.L. Bean have pretty much moved on, and my work there has dried up. They’re on to new things and new people, as is the wont of Mother Nature.

And the last time I saw Eddie, he said he’d suddenly grown weak the previous winter, and he made me heave the washing machine around by myself.

[Above: Me, gazing about under a peculiar plastic dome that lets you crawl "inside" a huge aquarium of river fish at the L.L. Bean store in Freeport, Maine. Below: My deliciously un-handsome mackinaw cap in 100% virgin wool by Filson, a design seemingly unchanged since the dawn of television. Retro is as retro does.]

Iapetus is the third-largest moon of Saturn.

Shown here: A false-color satellite image of an apparent island in a liquid-filled crater or lake on Iapetus’s surface near the terminator (the line separating light from darkness at sunrise and sunset). The contents of the lake are unknown but might be liquid ethane. Iapetus is gravitationally locked in synchronous rotation around Saturn; its day and year are both 79 Earth-days long.

Well, no.

Actually, it’s a Photoshopped image of a crazy little apple from a tree in our backyard. We have four apple trees, and they’ve been troubled for years by the illness of bees, recent cool summers, and homeowners too neglectful to get professional pruning.

But this year we had a bumper crop:

• The apple above is from our main tree, next to the barn, which produces yummy red apples with extremely crisp, white flesh, of a variety unknown to us. They’re great for eating, apple sauce, and apple butter, and they routinely fall on my head while I’m mowing the lawn.

• The tree farthest to the south, along our stone wall, produces fruit that appears, to us, to be Delicious apples. I don’t like Delicious much.

• The oldest, most gnarled tree, next to our shed, on the western border, produces what we believe to be Lodi apples, an old-fashioned variety that’s soft, sweet, juicy, yellow, ripens in early August, and keeps only briefly. They’re good to eat; the Arbor Day people call them a “summer apple” and claim they’re good for sauces, pies, and freezing, too, though, as for me, I haven’t tried.

• Last but not least, there’s a small tree hidden in shrubs to the north that never before produced an apple in the 15 years we’ve lived here. This year it suddenly yielded a wealth of small, green rust-speckled fruit of a variety unknown to us that taste remarkably like an apple crossed with a pear.

As Newton said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

(Below: This stunning close-up shows mountainous terrain reaching six miles high along the unique equatorial ridge of Iapetus. The view was acquired during a “close” Cassini flyby of the two-toned Saturn moon—at a distance of approximately 2,400 miles. Image scale is 75 feet per pixel. Courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Now that’s a lens!)

I don’t think of myself as someone whose photography relies on eccentric cropping.

But it’s also true that photography captures what might be called “slices” of the world on film (or on digital-sensor thingies) and that this is not, at bottom, un-akin to cropping. Which means it could be argued that photographers—all of ’em, including me—are essentially croppers after all, eccentric or otherwise.

Many years ago, when I was young and first being introduced to my fiancée’s family, her Houston sister and brother-in-law (a pair of clinical psychologists) took her aside and said, “Is he all right?”

Mary said, “What on earth do you mean?”—and they said, “He free-associates rather freely.”

Always happy to undermine my theses, I draw your attention to the photo shown here, a composition of semi-unrelated photons that caught my eye, God knows why, including a black triangle, the panels around a carnival ride, and the ceiling of the tent overhead.

But I like it. And—bingo!—my pal the photographer Dave was kind enough to say he wished he’d seen what I saw and taken the picture himself. But, then, he free-associates, too.

How much do I owe you this week?

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