A new blog in a new year: sparks and mirrors

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“Go into yourself and see
how deep the place is from which your life flows.”

~ Rainer Maria Rilke 

Some of you found me, with Lorenzo (of The Alchemist's Pillow blog), at our year-long blog where we posted readings from the book A Year with Rilke in 2011. It feels impossible to summarize the year there, much as it did after I finished RUMI DAYS, another such blog of soul and spirit the year before. I know that I have been changed as a result of those daily readings, and the interactive commentary from readers. It was deep and wondrous, opening doors and windows onto light I had not imagined existed. Sometimes I think we created light, together, following Rilke on his path. And now, I can't recall what or who I was before these transformations.

In a letter to Witold Hulewicz Rilke wrote:

All the worlds of the universe plunge into the Invisible as into a yet deeper reality. Certain stars increase in intensity and extinguish themselves in the angels' endless awareness. Others move toward transformation slowly and with great effort, and their next self-realization occurs in fear and terror.

We are the transformers of Earth. Our whole being, and the flights and falls of our love, enable us to undertake this task.

Because of that power of transformation, and the joy of community Lorenzo and I found with our friends at AYWR, we have launched another such blog called sparks and mirrors. We didn't want it to end, that daily dive into waters of discovery, truth and beauty. We want the practice to continue. We will post at our new blog every few days, mostly passages from authors who have themselves opened windows onto the universe within and without, with a few words about how and why they have inspired us. We would love for you to dive in with us there, with a hearty and warmly welcoming splash. (Swimsuits optional.)

I will, of course, continue here with poems, photos, art, music, and whatever else wants to be shared. I am so very grateful that you are in my life, and how we learn from one another.

May the year ahead be awake and alive for you!

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Mind walks

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The Norwegian Jøtul wood stove in the family room (where we spend most of our home awake time -- where I write, read, work on photographs, blog, paint and watch movies) radiates heat into much of the house, and the forced air propane furnace rarely kicks on. We feed the wood stove dead, seasoned wood from the fallen trees that stripe the back acre of the farm. Ash borers have defeated many tall, straight ash trees, and thanks to that tiny, mighty pest, we have some of the densest, longest burning firewood there is, for a long time to come.

On Saturdays, just after sunrise, while snow falls and floats like ash outside the glass deck door, and chickadees, juncos, mourning doves, cardinals and blue jays rise and fall from the ground to the spruce and back again for scattered bird seed on the ground, I put our biggest pot on the radiant Jøtul. Into olive oil I drop chopped onions and celery that quickly begin to sizzle. Then what’s left of vegetables in the fridge, rough chopped, and scraps I’ve saved in the freezer, get added and filled almost to the brim with water. (My gourmand ex-brother-in-law Larry scolded me once for not saving every dear peel, rind, stem and shaving from vegetables in a freezer bag for a Saturday broth-fest; within the scraps are contained the same elements of vegetable goodness. I changed my ways.) For a few hours I cook this potful that’s almost as big as the cast iron heat-box itself, creating tasty veggie stock that I’ll use in cooking for the next week. Cabbage becomes fragrant (!), and the low winter sun shines on the spruce where at least a dozen red cardinals are tucked in the branches, looking like soft, exotic fruits.

Like birds picking up seeds, I have been flitting from pillar to post gathering ideas and thoughts. I feel as if I'm back in college classes, pushing myself to do close readings of the writers I read. They join in the pot of my head like scraps from the fridge. But what soup is being cooked up there? I read passages from Rilke and Rumi at the daily blogs. Synchronously they link arms and walk like twins separated only by centuries. See the parallel lines from the readings posted a couple of days ago:

Rumi: I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.  (~ from "The Price of Kissing")

Rilke: I would perish in the power of his being.
For beauty is but the beginning of terror. (~ from "If I Cried Out")

Each day friends come into the comment boxes and reflect on the passages posted in those blog salons, filtering them through their own separate experiences and patterns of thought. Paths emerge, merge, and sometimes lead into dense thickets where I have to focus hard, keep up and try not to get lost. I love mind walks, even when I'm in danger of losing my way. (Have you seen the wonderful 1990 film "Mind Walk" with Liv Ullman, Sam Waterston and John Heard? Nothing but stimulating conversation, while walking around Mont-St Michel . . . ahhhh.) I collect thoughts and words that smell good, and throw them into my pot-head ☺. Does this make me wishy-washy? Maybe. Like water, shaped by the vessel it's in. And what's inside the pot? Fragments of this and that . . . these, and all.
                                                                       
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Steam rises from the pot, walking a ribboning path . . . . .

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My 5th blog anniversary, a winner, and salons

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Thank you for celebrating five years with me this week. It has been beautiful to contemplate the rewards of blogging, and of knowing you, my friends.

My gift of gratitude

With the help of List Randomizer, I tossed all your pretty avatars from the previous post comments into the bag and came up with a very pretty blogger avatar indeed! Margaret Bednar, I will be painting you a bluebird on a piece of wood (see previous post).This may be a little like sending coals to Newcastle, since you are an artist! Margaret lives in North Carolina, has six gorgeous children, and still has time to create art, write poetry and maintain two art blogs: Art Happens (Painting & Sketching) and Art Happens 365 (photography & poetry)! Margaret, thank you for making this little salon sparkle with your presence.

Speaking of salon. I’d like to ‘splain, since I use the term salon in my comment box. The word sounds either hoi polloi, or hoity toity in the U.S, where the only rooms we call salons are for hair stylists and nails, but we vaguely know about the European salons. To call my blog a salon either sounds like I’m about to give you a virtual shampoo-massage, or that I delude myself by thinking I am a European sophisticate like Mme. Geoffrin on rue St. Honoré. (See Lemonnier's painting of her salon at the right/above, and read a wonderful essay about the history of the European salon at the Oxford University Press site here.)

But the word salon is quite special to me, actually. Until we moved to Istanbul, I hadn’t heard the word used much, except in books located in Europe when friends gathered in them, or as in the art and literary salons in France and other places where artists like Rodin submitted their work (and were sometimes rejected, yes even Rodin). So when we moved to Istanbul in 1985, we learned that the “living room” was called the salon. We bought salon furniture and satin drapes with tulle sheers, in the rather elaborate fashion of Turks, for whom hospitality, and the attitude of welcome at the very least, is one of the most important values. The salon was the room where guests were entertained, and believe me, in Turkey guests are still entertained, or at least they were twenty-five years ago. Whether accompanied by çay and börek in the afternoon with the ladies of the apartment building crocheting and gossiping, or çay, dolma and pastries in the evening with couples or families, it was the center of conversation. We kept track of each other's lives. If we had been better at the language, it might have been something like the salons you read about in Henry James or Edith Wharton novels (well maybe not so fancy) where friends came in from the cold to engage in stimulating discourse. If someone had a particularly skillful touch with delicacies from the kitchen, combined with an ease of hospitality and a gift for encouraging people to talk, and if the çay kept pouring into those little glasses with saucers, then their salon was rarely empty any given week. Friends would travel through the heaviest downpours or ignore wedding invitations to sit and visit in such a salon. (See Michael Naples' beautiful painting, above, of the Turkish çay glass and saucer -- ours were just like that; the tea doesn't have a chance to get cold in those small glasses; when I found his image on Google, I thought it was a photograph; do explore his Daily Paintings.)

I have nothing in my life like a drawing room, parlor, living room, or front porch where guests come regularly to sit and visit together . . . except this salon where my blog friends come. We can cozy up by the wood stove here on the farm and chat, never stiff or formal like Mme. Geoffrin's, I hope (though like her, I receive an education by listening to my guests!), and some days I kinda want it to be more like a saloon! (Yes, same word, anglicized . . . or americanized.)

Western Saloon, by Lee Dubin

Or I'd like to invite you to a warm, festive supper, like this:

Julaftonen (Christmas Eve), by Carl Larsson

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However we drink our beverages here, coffee, tea, Christmas punch, or draft beer from the bar, I love having you come! Or in Turkish: Hoş geldiniz! ("We welcome you with pleasure!" Hoş is pronounced "hosh" -- long "o") Now you say: Hoş bulduk! ("We're happy to be here!")

Now, drink your tea. It'll get cold.

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"The blog thing" at 5 years

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My first blog post

Five years ago this week was my first blog post. You can see it above, though the template was different. My sister Ginnie ("Bootsie" to me) was my first and only commenter for some time and the first person I knew who had a blog (the wonderful In Soul). Three months later, my "brother" rauf introduced himself from India, and much more of the world opened to me via his posts at Daylight Again. And so the wonder began. Let me wander as I wonder at the full hand of these years.

∞ I picked the name synchronizing after seeing my hand held device "synchronizing" with my computer when I linked them at the end of a work day. I liked the idea of bringing things together in some kind of unity. I changed it to synch-ro-ni-zing, adding the hyphens, to sort of help people understand that "synchronizing" is different from "synchronicity."  This blog isn't necessarily about meaningful coincidence (synchronicity), but more about the intentional pairing of things.

∞ My blog is just as eclectic today as it was five years ago. You might find Paris paired with Bishop the barncat, memories of my mom with a walk in the meadow, or raptures over a sublime salad during a long, beautiful winter. I just tell you what's going on inside. This past year I've done that more in poems, because I've been writing more poems, a direct result of being freshly and deeply inspired by blog friends. You know who you are.

∞ Speaking of blog friends, I have met some of the most wonderful people of my life, here, in these five years at synch. There is more talent, imagination, insight, knowledge, wisdom, humor, experience, story-telling skill, beauty, strength and love here than anyone who doesn't blog might understand.

∞ As a result of these friends and conversations, I have changed. I have grown more confident, better at writing, better at photography, better at life, better at me! It has been like a non-stop class in the arts and humanities, critical thinking, communication, and the soul's journey. The world has shrunk, and so have I. I am less, and I am more.

∞ Blogger has gotten better and easier to use. I pay $3.95 a year for this space, since I overflowed my space limit sometime in the last year or two. I'd say it's a pretty darn good bargain. Compare it to, say, a Burger King Whopper ($3.29).

∞ Two years ago today I received the honor of Blogger's Blog of Note, eleven days after my friend Barry of An Explorer's View of Life received the same honor. I was fortunate to find him through that award, instantly enthralled by his story-telling sweetness. Of course we didn't know we would lose him the next year to cancer. I rejoice, and gasp, whenever I see his comments in old posts around the blogosphere. He is still with us, but I miss him.

∞ Vastly more important than Blog of Note, immeasurably more, is the reward of being together with you, in this heartland. Hear what Walt Whitman meant in his poem "Song of Myself," for yes, this blog is a song of myself! always about myself, because it is from my heart. Yet for me and for you and your blog, our songs are like his song. The song of "myself" is not just about me, but contains much more . . .

“ . . . in all people I see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less
and the good or bad I say of myself I say of them . . .”

“I am large, I contain multitudes.”

“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

And this from his Song can be our guiding light, because while we read each other's words (and lots and lots of books), as Rumi says in a similar vein, "Let the beauty we love be what we do. / There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."

"Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of
all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions
of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through
the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self."

A little gift of gratefulness

In the list of traditional gifts for [wedding] anniversaries, five years is celebrated with gifts of wood. It feels appropriate seeing the spruce bough in my first post, in light of this. And also in this light, I would like to celebrate my full hand of joy and gratitude by sending one of you a [humble] hand painted wooden ornament of a special bird here on the farm: a bluebird. It will look something like the one I painted for Peter's girlfriend for Christmas, below. (I just started tole painting, cultivating my dormant Swedish roots from Grandma Olive.) After wandering through the bag of friends who leave a comment at this post, I'll announce the person I randomly choose (with List Randomizer, so cool) on the anniversary of my blog on Friday, January 21. Then I will paint a bluebird, with you in mind specifically, whoever you are, and with the bluebird in mind in his round russet breast and shy, quiet presence. And I will paint meditating on the rest of you too, and the connections we hold so dearly in our hearts. This gift is a way to be reminded that we are physical beings, who touch and feel material things. The blog thing is real.

But even though our blogs are tangible -- seeming somehow indelible on the Internet -- and our blog friends are true friends, we and our blogs will fade one day like leaves of grass, like wood dust. But oh, my friends, we are also stardust.

 Though I incorporated the crack in this slice of ash wood

into Andrea's painting, the disk I paint for one of you will have no crack,

I pray! Don found beautiful seasoned oak

and has already cut the piece.

This could be your piece of wood :)

-- about 6" diameter, with a bluebird from the farm.

I'll gladly mail it anywhere in the world. 

(I have also created several other blogs. Oh dear. Yes I would create one a month just to design it if I had time to maintain them all. Currently: daily posts at RUMI DAYS and A Year with Rilke (the latter with Lorenzo of The Alchemist's Pillow) -- see sidebar for regular updates. These daily readings are nourishment for my soul.) 

The Interior Castle: Chagall, Rilke & a new Rilke Blog

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Segment 1 of "America Windows" by Marc Chagall, Art Institute of Chicago

In this late afternoon blue winter light, as the window of one year is being shuttered and a new one about to be opened with the flare of a candle, thoughts about an artist and a poet are synchronizing in me.

Segment 2 of "America Windows" by Marc Chagall, Art Institute of Chicago

Wednesday I had the mighty joy of standing in the radiance of Marc Chagall’s stained glass "America Windows" at the Art Institute of Chicago, which he created expressly for the museum out of appreciation. Newly cleaned and returned to the Art Institute in its new modern wing, Chagall’s blues, reds, yellows and pink are as resplendent as they must have been when he completed them in 1977. (If you are interested in learning more about the windows and how Chagall created them out of gratitude for the Art Institute's dedication of a gallery to him, go here; if you ever make it to the Midwest, I feel a trip to the Art Institute is worthwhile for these windows alone.)

Segment 3 of "America Windows" by Marc Chagall, Art Institute of Chicago

"America Windows" by Marc Chagall, Art Institute of Chicago 

(this photo from The History Blog)

As you may have noticed I have been posting a lot of poems by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke these last few months. His focus on the inner landscape is right up my alley, and with every new poem I read, my heart expands a bit more.

What came together for me as Don and I walked the streets of Chicago were the parallels between Marc Chagall and Rainer Maria Rilke. For both men, Russia is incredibly important. Chagall was born there (in Vitebsk, Belarus, in 1887 – he died in 1985), and Rilke (born in Prague in 1875, and died December 29 in 1926 in Switzerland) spent many months there with his dear friend Lou Andreas-Salomé. For Chagall, though he left Vitebsk for Paris and other parts of the world for good when he was 36, Russia remained his soul’s home throughout his 97 years of life. For Rilke, after just a few months in Russia, he claimed it as his heartland and felt that no people understood spirituality more than the Russians. Both men lived through World War I and struggled to make sense of a world in which such a war could happen. Both men migrated to Paris and found intense inspiration from artists there. For both of them, angels populate their work. Chagall’s windows and paintings are sprinkled with angels flying in the skies. For ten years Rilke wrote the Duino Elegies, of which angels are a central theme.

What most impresses me in connecting Chagall and Rilke is how they carried the world consciously in their souls. Chagall left his hometown of Vitebsk, but it was so dear to him that he kept painting it in signs and symbols in many of his paintings, often with his beloved wife Bella as a personal representation of Russia, his soul’s home. Rilke too transformed the stuff of life – things -- into inner material that could remain with him always. And always he was trying to reconcile the true and even dark facts of the world into a harmony of the soul. You can see what I mean in the poem of his I’m posting, below.

In the mind-boggling and cumbersome intensity of the world’s problems bending the corner with us into the new year, I am inspired by these two who continually processed and transformed the facts of the world into the truth of the soul, where our response to the world is what matters. Through creative expressions, we can love this place of ours.

Out of the deep admiration that my friend Lorenzo of The Alchemist’s Pillow and I feel for Rilke’s poetry, and because there is a new volume of daily readings titled A Year with Rilke (translated and edited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows), we are launching a new blog containing these daily passages, much like my blog RUMI DAYS, which shares readings from another HarperOne publication, A Year With Rumi. Our blog A Year With Rilke will offer passages of letters, prose and poems of Rainer Maria Rilke exactly as published in that book, except that we will add images to the readings. The blog is live, and daily postings will begin January 1. The following poem will be featured at the blog March 18 and expresses what I have shared today.




The Interior Castle

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Nowhere, Beloved, will the world exist, but within us.

Our lives are constant transformations. The external

grows ever smaller. Where a solid house once stood,

now a mental image takes its place,

almost as if it were all in the imagination.

Our era has created vast reservoirs of power,

as formless as the currents of energy they transmit.

Temples are no longer known. In our hearts

these can be secretly saved. Where one survives—

a Thing once prayed to, worshipped, knelt before—

its true nature seems already to have passed

into the Invisible. Many no longer take it for real,

and do not seize the chance to build it

inwardly, and yet more vividly, with all its pillars and statues.

~ from the Seventh Duino Elegy 

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Who left the gate open?

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This is the first time in four and a half years of blogging that I woke up this morning without a post drafted, ready to publish. I post something every three days or so, and in all this time, often I have had two or three topics ready to fly. So, what of this presentation of emptiness? I dunno.

Give me a couple of minutes, I’ll come up with something. Either a topic to write about, or a reason I am without a topic.

Wait for it.

You could very legitimately ask, If I have nothing to say, why post anything?

OK there is something I’ve been wondering about lately.

Many of my favorite bloggers have enabled comment moderation. I wonder why? There was a short time I was getting spammed like crazy, so I added the word verification feature. That seemed to take care of it. No more spam.

When I publish a comment at a friend’s blog who has enabled comment moderation, off my words fly like a butterfly, never to be caught again. Sometimes when I really like something I wrote, I copy and paste it into a Word document first so I can look at it again while I wait for my friend to publish the comment to their blog. This is a good safety net, since I have written a long comment many times, only to have it gobbled by Internet interference. I might have spent fifteen minutes writing that comment, and pfft! Waiting for my comment to get published after blog author approval can take an hour, a few hours, a day, and sometimes a couple of days, depending on the blogger. I tell you one thing, it’s a way to get me to go back to that post, something I don’t always have time to do after posting a comment. A lot of the people who have this feature enabled also respond to comments, so that is a nice reward for the waiting and checking on my part.

Maybe requiring blog author approval of comments is one last ditch effort to have control over something. There isn’t much left in that category.

So enough maundering. Isn’t that a great word? That’s my new favorite word. It means to talk in a random, foolish, or meaningless way. I have a friend who taught me that word who is anything but random, foolish or meaningless.

All this gets me thinking about authorship, and authority.

In my English department there is an awful lot of plagiarism by students. Would you be surprised to hear that some reports show that up to 70% of college students admitted to plagiarizing at some point in their college career? And did you know that it’s considered plagiarism even if a student does it unknowingly?

OK, here’s my last wandering, lumbering, untethered donkey thought on this open-the-gate-and-let-the-animals-graze-freely blog post kind of day.

What is authority? After growing up in a home where parents ruled and kids weren’t consulted much, I am happy to report that at age 54, after much tugging and tucking, I am the author, and the authority, of my life.

It’s dark outside. A truck just drove by, I heard the sigh. It’s the 9th of November, 12:25AM. In a few hours I’ll get up and drink coffee, eat oatmeal, and get ready for work. I can’t stop the clock ticking, but I can decide what to wear, maybe a skirt and tights before it gets cold outside. The sun will rise, no matter what I do. I can’t find the picture I really want to load with this post. I must sort and file my photos. They’re out of control.

I'm not used to this free donkey wandering, but this felt kind of good. Now I'll wander over to the comment box and see if anything wild, random or unruly happens. Eee-haw!

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The Willow Ball!

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Tomorrow night, this farm chick will giddily galavant to a ball! Our favorite blog sophisticate, Willow of Life at Willow Manor, is throwing a sparkling and extravagant party, the third Willow Ball, and this is the first time I am going. It is a blog event so massive that everyone is invited. To participate, all you have to do is "shop" for your attire, your escort, and any other accourtrements you please on the Internet (or from your own archives, if you are so fortunate), and post them as images at your blog, like I'm doing today. (We hope the original sites for what we borrow won't mind. I'm giving credit for my sources at the bottom of this post.)

I'm asking Willow, Fred and Ginger to bend their ball rules the way they bend their bodies dancing. Here at my place I am morphing the event into a Regency Willow Ball, because, well, I can, and because I have sat waiting to dance at a Jane Austen ball long enough. There are never enough partners . . . or balls for that matter!

I shopped and shopped until my fingers dropped, and I found just what I wanted to wear, how I want to get there, and who will escort me.

If you didn't find out in time to post this event on your blog, you can still party all night long at Willow's Manor and at all the other Willow Ball blogs that are linked there (Willow will have a Mr. Linky widget with participating blogs starting at midnight tonight). Just hop in the coach and click, tap and waltz your way around the floors of the world. Ahh, music, ahh, candlelight, ahh, romance.

Before departing the farm tomorrow,
here is what I'll be wearing.

One must have the proper undergarments, mustn't one?

Don't you think the hairstyle I've asked André

to coif is dressy, without being stiff? No hairspray pour moi.

When you see my dress, you'll understand why my favorite gems, garnets, are the necklace I must wear. Besides, they match my copy of P & P.

I decided against heels, since I'll be dancing through the night,
although maybe uncomfortable shoes would help me stay awake.
Not that these toes look comfortable,
but they're the fashion, what can I do?

I must have a fan to yawn behind,
and I need a handkerchief after certain, ahem, wild dances
when I'll be sweating glowing.
This warm glow will bring out the subtle
scent of lavender oil I've dabbed on my neck, temples and wrists.
(Chanel No. 5 hasn't been blended yet.)
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Here is my silk gown. I'm going to hold it just like this, 

while I twirl and swirl and stub my tiny pointed toes
(and bruise and puncture my poor dance partners). 

I trust my neck will not look as thick as hers,
although it would be harder to break.

Since Willow lives just one state away from me, 

my escort and I really could ride in this cozy coach the whole way.
So romantic, all enclosed, and someone else
to pay attention to the road.

As for my escort, sadly, my husband Don made a commitment for this night (cleaning the chicken coop and his nails afterward). I did get some enchanting offers from dear friends (who had better not forget their promises to dance the night away with me if my escort will permit me to leave his side - forget what I said about punctures and bruises) but they were after my dear, dear friend Elizabeth Bennet-Darcy had already pitied me and charitably offered her husband. Hmph! said I in my head. Second-hand goods, and not directly from the man himself! I considered her offer long and hard over tea and crumpets. I ate a whole package of crumpets! Finally, I sent a note with my carrier chicken to Eliza's dearest Fitzwilliam, sidestepping my dear friend, because I don't want any of those horrid misunderstandings that our friend Emma Woodhouse got into as a result of second-hand news. As I say, I sent this note to Fitzwilliam:  

Colin Firth, as Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy in BBC's Pride & Prejudice,

giving Elizabeth The Look

Update: Fitzwilliam Darcy has agreed to my terms, 

and his note also said that we won't be riding in any 

puny little one horse buggy. 

He'll be coming 'round with his coach and four.
Willow, don't worry about the horse puckey!
Fitzwilliam's man will take care of it.

I look forward to seeing you, my dear blog friends, here, at Willow's and all around the world as we turn, spin and swoosh, and drink toasts to each other and our splendid hostess all night long. I have several of you penciled in on my ballspenden and can hardly wait to dance with you. There's still room on it, so don't be shy, gentlemen. And ladies, Mr. Darcy assured me that Eliza has rid him of his infernal pride, and he will dance with as many of you who desire it. Will the night be long enough? Cheers!

Image sources:

The ball

The garnet necklace

The Regency undergarments

The hair

The shoes

The fan
The handkerchief 
The perfume bottle

The ball gown

The little coach

The look

The big coach

The wallpaper designs

An Interview

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My friend Bonnie at Original Art Studio is an artist, thinker, questioner and writer. Out of her generous spirit, she is unveiling a series of interviews of a few of her blog friends, and I'm the first! I'm so excited. Please visit Bonnie's blog, not just to see how I answered her interesting questions (I really felt like I was on the stage of Inside the Actors Studio), but also to browse her beautiful images and be challenged by her thought-provoking posts, examining how we live. Her aesthetics and sensitivities are really very lovely.

And she even creates word puzzles, like this one:

Bonnie will be interviewing other bloggers in this series, some of whom I already know well, some I know a little, and others I don't know at all. I look forward to getting to know my friends better, and to make new friends.

Thank you so much, Bonnie!

Travel well, Barry

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My dear friend Barry left us Tuesday, yesterday, at noon, after a hard fought struggle with esophageal cancer. Special thanks and love to Barry's beautiful wife, Linda.

On February 18 I joined bloggers around the world and rang the bell for Barry's health, when he finished a round of chemotherapy. I shared something of what his exploration of life meant to me in that post.

Just five days ago, on July 16 Barry posted: Where Am I? Today I flew. Look for him now, resting on a wind current. Good-bye, kind, tender, smart, funny, brave story telling man. Thank you for sharing your life, right up to the end.  I will miss you, and I know your dog Lindsay will too.

Postscript: I just found this at the very bottom of Barry's blog, An Explorer's View of Life:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

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Why some people don't go to Paris

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Me? I'm ill equipped for it. French 101. That's it. Unless you count my mom sitting next to me on the couch, enlightening me on French pronunciation as a young person, starting with that vexatious phrase, qu'est-ce que c'est que ça. Really? KESS-KUH-SAY-KUH-SAH? When it comes to French, I am sandwiched between my mother who studied it through college and read Les Miserables in the original language (no doubt it's there in one of those floor-to-ceiling stacks in George Whitman's Paris bookstore at left), and my daughter who speaks it gracefully after six years of study. I learned Latin in high school, and I know some Turkish from living in Istanbul. On the ILR scale (Interagency Language Roundtable), I got to about a 2.5 out of 5 in Turkish (5 being that of a native speaker).  In French, I'd say I'm at around .2, maybe .3. How profoundly inadequate I was on my seven trips to Paris. Yet shamelessly, well almost shamelessly, I went anyway.

Many people take vacations in a variety of places where the language spoken is not their own. But I venture to guess that Paris is the one place where, first of all, the gap between the written word and its pronunciation is a wobbly bridge to cross, and second of all, it is spoken by people who are perceived [by some] to be mean and rude. So the image of waiting in line at a patisserie for pain aux raisins with French customers and having to fumble with Je voudrais une (or is it un?) pain aux raisins s'il vous plais and the correct francs, well now Euro coins, while also trying to find one's glasses to read said coins is just too frightening to contemplate. What scowls, what high scoffing eyebrows will fill that tiny space like arcs of raisins!

Yet I have found that when I have made the least effort to open a conversation with shop keepers, restaurant workers and taxi drivers with my limited (but I am certain very well pronounced, hawnh-hawnh) French, I have received gracious and helpful responses. When I haven't (I remember one particular taxi driver who I thought would break his transmission, he shifted so hard, and a certain crepes waiter in Montmartre who implied that I should order more than I did - What else was on the menu, s'il vous plais?), I have stood my ground and said in English something to show that I am not intimidated, and immediately there was respectful deference (at least in my presence).

One of the best moments in Paris was the spring Don and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary (2003, photo at right where we lived for a week). We were in a fromagerie the size of the postage stamp below, on Ile Saint Louis, picking up a Roquefort for supper. Don requested the cheese in French, and the seated French woman readied to slice with her big knife, adjusting it wider or narrower according to his hand instructions, cutting a wedge at last. She took his Euros and sweetly chirped with the song of a little sparrow, "Au revoir, Monsieur Foreigneur . . ." When we got outside the shop, in an incredulous tone, Don asked, "How did she know I wasn't French?"

I have a Paris blog called Paris Deconstructed, which is like Jacques Derrida's "literary revenge on philosophy" in that it is my revenge on the myth that Paris is the Eiffel Tower and rude people. I call it synchronicity that this post today happens to be exactly one year since my last post there, July 18, 2009, the second part of a story of meeting Mrs. Schott. And here's a post about that Shakespeare & Company Bookstore, and my encounters with the legendary Mr. George Whitman, which was my very first post at PD. I'll post there again when I get a round tuit. (Today that's pronounced to rhyme with Paris (the French way) and Ile Saint Louis: a round too-eee.)

This post is part of my participation in the Paris in July blog theme sponsored by Karen at BookBath and Tamara at Thyme for Tea, and told me by my dear friend DS at Third-Story Window. So, if like me, you can't afford a trip to Paris this summer, do start your reading tour de Paris at those and other participating blogs where the lingua franca is just, well, PARIS. Bon voyage!

Paris in July

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photo shame

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Migratory Cotton Picker, Arizona, by Dorothea Lange, 1949

When I visited the Met (Metropolitan Museum of Art) in NY earlier this month, I very briefly walked the long hall of the photography section looking for the stairs to the rooftop. I was conserving my limited museum endurance for specific galleries at the Met and the MoMA, and my #1 museum goal this trip was the Cartier-Bresson photography exhibit several blocks down 5th Avenue at the MoMA after lunch. It's good that I did protect my time and energy for Cartier-Bresson, because studying his photos on wall after wall was a powerful, and emotionally draining experience.

But en route to the Met rooftop, this photograph by Dorothea Lange caught my eye, so I stopped and spent some time with it. I took photos with the Nikon, and with my cell phone. I nabbed the image above from artnet. Here is the Nikon photo I took, at a wrong angle (the pic was too high to get it straight on) and with pink glare artifacts:

And here is the cell phone pic, unprocessed:

No matter how many times this migratory cotton picker in Arizona puts his hand up in NO we just keep taking his picture. By the time you get to my cell phone pic, he looks angry, or like the life has been sucked out of his eyes.

Here is the original image again, where his eyes look suddenly gentle after my cell phone version, even though his strong hand still acts as a barrier. I wonder if maybe he was only about to wipe perspiration from his upper lip. No, I think his fingers would have been relaxed in an arc if that were the case. We don't wipe our face with a flattened, stiff hand.

Below him is what is probably Lange's most famous photograph, Migrant Mother.

Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange, February 1936

Photographs such as these, and those of Cartier-Bresson of people, are to be felt, not just seen.

Although Florence Owens Thompson, the woman in the photo that has come to represent the Depression, also has her hand to her face, she is not shielding her identity and shame from Lange's lens and our curiosity. But the children are. According to Wiki, her daughter Katherine, there on the left, said in a 2008 interview that the family felt shame at the fame of this photo.

Fame and shame. Nowadays (what an old fashioned word that is, no? nowadays - not befitting this digital age), with so many cameras in people's hands, photographing people in public is a topic of heated debate. In the days of this photo, Dorothea Lange had been hired by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to document the desperate need, and to support with what some called propaganda, the effort to rehabilitate rural America. According to Wiki, Lange misreported the details of Thompson and her family, saying they had sold tires to get money to buy food. But one of the family said her story was wrong, because they didn't have any tires to sell. Maybe Lange got her stories mixed up with another family. But Lange also told the Thompsons the six photographs she took for ten minutes of them at a pea-pickers' camp where they had stopped for the night would not be published.

". . . but Lange sent them to the San Francisco News as well as to the Resettlement Administration in Washington, D.C. The News ran the pictures almost immediately, with an assertion that 2,500 to 3,500 migrant workers were starving in Nipomo. Within days, the pea-picker camp received 20,000 pounds of food from the federal government. However, Thompson and her family had moved on by the time the food arrived and were working near Watsonville."

Florence Owens Thompson was found by a reporter in 1978 (not that she was lost), forty years later, and this is what she had to say:

"I wish she [Lange] hadn't taken my picture. I can't get a penny out of it. She didn't ask my name. She said she wouldn't sell the pictures. She said she'd send me a copy. She never did."

Was the aid sent to the pea-picker camp worth the shame felt by the Thompsons, still, decades later? Wiki goes on to say that Lange never got royalties from the photo, since it was funded by the federal government and was public domain. But it did help her career as one of the greatest documentary photos ever.

A couple of years ago, at my photoblog I posted photos of two young men in orange prison jumpsuits at the county fair. They had to spend the day keeping the fairgrounds clean. A photo of one handsome boy's angry face with the Ferris Wheel behind him on the horizon was especially good, and I was proud of it. I saw myself as not just an ordinary middle aged woman for a minute, but as an important documentarian. The photo, however, got an angry reaction from one of my photoblog friends whom I admire. She asked, "What if he were your son? Would you want his photo there like that?" Other highly regarded photographer friends said, "Leave it, it's important." I searched my soul, and I recognized that I would not want my son's picture there, like that. And I also recognized that the anger in his face may have been from sensing my camera. I confess that I was trying to be as inconspicuous and secretive as I could. A juvenile delinquent can land in jail over a stupid, petty mistake, which can shape his life. Did I want to freeze him in that mistake forever? Oh dear, I don't know if I could ever be a photo journalist.

Here in the U.S. it is legal to take photos of people in public places, as long as you don't publish for commercial purposes without their permission. My own rule is that I won't take a photo of a person who is in public without much choice or power, such as the prisoners, or homeless people. If I had their permission, I would, but I doubt I would ever ask.

I realize this is a huge topic, with many avenues and contingencies, such as children in public, using photos of others without permission (such as that I nabbed above), and on and on. But my main point here is, Is it important to document the suffering of some in order to garner the support and help of others, even if it causes the subject shame?

Photograph of Lange on the jeep is by Rondal Partridge, FSA photographer.

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