To Mystery

-

-

To Mystery ~

Cloud all this knowledge from my head.

Shade my eyes, the sun is strong.

Come in here, through the back way.

Leave the front door for strangers to knock on.

You are the unknown in the known,

the forgotten shirt I found

pressed against the back of the closet

and put on, something in its soft pocket

left there sometime.

~ Ruth

-

-

photo shame

-

-

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.

-

-

I♥NY & The Most Interesting Man in the World

-

-

I am a second-rate wife. I went to NYC without Don, visited our daughter and her husband, lived large, and all I brought home to The Most Interesting Man in the World was this t-shirt from the Laguardia airport gift shop for losers like me who didn't purchase a more $ignificant gift on 5th Avenue. Don really is very interesting (ok, stupid understatement, there is nothing the man has not attempted to do in his lifetime), but calling him The Most Interesting Man in the World is what our son started, because Don resembles the man from the Dos Equis XX beer ads. If you go to that link in the last sentence, you can watch videos of the ads. I ♥ them. The narrator makes statements about The Most Interesting man, such as,

XX His charm is so contagious, vaccines have been created for it.

XX He is the only man to ever ace the Rorschach test.

XX Alien abductors have asked him to probe them.

XX Even his enemies list him as their emergency contact number.

To illustrate the resemblance, Don is here in the top photo, below, at Lesley & Brian's wedding last summer, and the other World's Most Interesting Man below him. (The actor is Jonathan Goldsmith, but he looks a little like another interesting man, Maximilian Schell, don't you think?)

The police often question him, just because they find him interesting.

"Stay thirsty, my friends."

Maximilian Schell: "It's your most endearing quality." - Topkapi

But the real point of this post was supposed to be an even more successful ad campaign.

I ♥ N Y

Maybe I am not such a big loser for buying Don this t-shirt, because after I got back from NY I started following the Sartorialist blog, which is chic and cool, and he posted a pic of a trendy guy in a I♥NY t-shirt in his May 21 post on Moscow Men. Basically I don't think this tourism promo logo has gone out of style ever since it was created by Milton Glaser for the failing, flailing state of NY in 1977. I started wondering if I♥NY was the start of the whole "I ♥" thing. It was. Thanks to Google I found other stuff:

♥ This logo is a rebus. A rebus is a word puzzle using pictures to represent words, or parts of words. It was gr8 to find that out.
♥ The type face is a slab serif called American Typewriter. Is that the same as courier?
♥ Milton Glaser also designed the famous psychedelic Bob Dylan poster for CBS records in 1966.
♥ Milton Glaser co-founded New York Magazine with Clay Felker in 1968.
♥ The Director of the New York Department of Commerce, William S. Doyle hired ad agency Wells Rich Greene to help rejuvenate New York's damaged image in 1977. But then, Doyle got the great designer Milton Glaser to design the logo, which he didn't think was any big deal, and he did it for free. We're talking about maybe the most successful and imitated logo in the history of advertising.
♥ The state of New York is currently in such a crisis financially that they are begging ad agencies for free 30-second ads to rekindle the I LOVE NEW YORK campaign.
♥ Milton Glaser modified the logo after 9/11, like this:

Question: When you see I ♥ N Y do you say "I love NY" ? Or do you say "I heart NY"? I say "I love NY".

The Most Interesting Man in the World does not love NY, or heart NY. He might feel relatively neutral about NY. In fact, it's probably more like -





Info found at:
Wiki
Gotham Gazette
ragnewyork
ezinearticles.com

the oak book case

-

-

If a person could be represented by an inanimate object, my father would be this oak book case. These stacked barristers that encase sets of Hemingway, George MacDonald, the Brontës, Miss Austen, Alcott, Dostoyevsky, Dickens and British mysteries, among others, in the corner of our family room, once held Bible concordances the size of shoe boxes and theology books on every Christian theme known to the Church, in my father's upstairs library: Gray & Adams' commentaries, Encyclopedias of Religious Knowledge and missionary histories, as well as his impressive hymnbook collection. The house was long and narrow, the upstairs hall reaching from front to back. Besides four ceiling-high stacks of barristers in two studies that book-ended the long hall, one in the front end's huge bay window where one of his two roll-top desks (without the roll-tops) window-faced Lincoln Street, and the other in the small bedroom at the back end of the long hall with a tiny balcony escape adjacent to the other desk without its roll-top, he had also built neat shelves lining one wall of the entire hallway floor to ceiling. Every hair's breadth of space on these shelves was perfectly fitted with books by theme, in various states of wear, each spine religiously aligned with the shelf's edge.

It wasn't only the books he loved with their millions of characters in thousands of pages that made up the tools of his trade communicating the word of God. He loved their shelves and book cases, too. He loved wood. He loved boards. My dad was gone before we moved to this farm, but we lived on another small farm for a short while twenty years ago, and my brother Bennett caught him on video walking into the soft filtered afternoon light of the tall barn as if into a sanctuary, then with his beautiful carpenter's hand (yes, like Jesus), stroking the 100-year-old boards as wide as the tree they were rough sawn from, a look of ecstasy on his face and a deep moan from his chest, while rays of light through the boards wrapped him in a celestial aura. Really. Just like that.

My mother came from fine mahogany stock, but Dad was of oak. Simple, steady, slow growing, common in those days (he told us he paid just $4 per oak barrister section in the 1940s), and strong. He lived an inner life with the windowed door closed six days a week, and on the 7th, the door opened, and he spoke. I remember him strolling the long hall on Saturday nights, rehearsing his Sunday sermon in quiet whispers, while I was downstairs watching a movie on television, occasionally hearing the floor creak under his pacing feet. He gathered inspiration from his forest of oak shelves and leaves of bookish testimony and carved an unaffected piece of clear prose.

At my family's cottage we have a large black and white etching Dad bought somewhere, some time of a teenage Jesus standing in his father Joseph's carpenter studio. There is light flooding in from the window, sawdust and pale curled shavings like fallen leaves on the floor, a plane, chisel and mallet covered in wood pollen, left hurriedly on the work table as if Joseph had just run to help his neighbor pry a sheep loose from stones. This young boyish Jesus contemplates the work of his earthly father, and the heavenly light from another Father pours in the window, melding in a marquetry of dark and light, air and wood, sun and earth. Infusion of the divine in the human and humble was my father's joy.

-

-

o reino das flores

o reino das flores

This wind break - the old chicken coop,
with windows done up like eyes
looking out as far as they can see
through sails of iris soft
and thin as garlic paper;
imperial cat S-weaving through the columbine,
her neat petal feet calibrated to the spaces between
those purple jester crowns
tipped in dew bells;
the kingdom of ants who circumnavigate
peony globes on streams of nectar;
and I ask, Who is the king of these?
Magellans on peaceful currents without ships
or an eye for stars and coasts,
with only endless curves
and tireless legs.

o reino das flores: the kingdom of flowers in Portuguese, Magellan's language

-

-

What is NY?

-

What is New York? It's big, that's what New York is. Which means this is a big apple big post. Believe me, I tried to keep it to a minimum. I spent three days in the City last week. Yum. Wow. Fun. (That's me using small words, trying to keep it short.)

So, what is New York? What can I say, I was a tourist. This is not a deep look into the heart of the City. Just a middle aged woman's snapshots.

New York is neighborhoods. Sixth Street in the Village, above, is inhabited by many Indians, and there are Indian restaurants up one side and down the other. I spent a lot of time in Midtown Manhattan, because that's where the museums are, but I would have liked to spend more time in residential areas like Lesley & Brian's Queens neighborhood. We did get out one day to the grocery store. I heard mostly Greek being spoken, and some Spanish. Below is one of several produce markets in Astoria. Look at that hot green tomata between the mangoes and papayas.

New York is museums, and art. This was my first time to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which I did in one day. I am a firm believer in the litest visit possible for large museums like the Louvre and the Met, focusing on a few exhibits in one trip. Besides what you see in the Met images below, I saw the American Woman costume exhibit. I wanted so badly to touch the crepe and beads of flapper dresses, or take close-up photographs of details of 1930s gowns. But the stern guards would have none of that.

At the MoMA, I limited my steps to the Cartier-Bresson exhibit on the 6th floor. Even with just that one area, I spent almost two hours, and I was exhausted at the end, emotionally and physically. You can only take so much in, you know? His portraits are enthralling, showing each celebrity in their own context and mannerisms, such as Jean-Paul Sartre with his pipe, below. His photos of street women are touching. And when I got to the images taken at the end of WWII (like the one in the lower left corner, below, of the woman in black about to strike the other woman, who had falsely accused her) and at the time of Gandhi's sudden death in India, with the crowds flocking to the train where his body swayed in a casket in the clacking train's rhythm, I could only weep. Such, my dears, is the power of photographs of people.

New York is eating out. Twice Lesley and I ate out alone together. The first was at the vegan Caravan of Dreams on 6th Street in Greenwich Village after she got out of work Thursday. (Next visit maybe we'll try one of those Indian places on 6th St.) The "live" (new term for "raw") salad was one of the most delicious I've tasted. It is a Zagat reviewed restaurant, and I give it four stars, vegan or no vegan. The other food spot she and I shared alone was for brunch Saturday at Park, under the High Line park, our delayed Mother's Day together-celebration. That is her dipping a bite of fried chicken steak in maple syrup below. Yep.

Saturday evening Lesley & Brian treated me to a dinner at the Tao that was so good I almost didn't realize I was devouring my tempura soft shell crab until it was gone. Apparently the restaurant name is pronounced with the "T" sound, not the "D" sound for the religion. And I helped myself to the lonely shrimp at the bottom of Lesley's bowl too. All that walking had me ravenous apparently. Tao was not a very religious place, but it was packed and hopping and overflowing with Euro-pop music around the big candle-lit Buddha. I loved hearing Brian tell family stories, since I am still getting to know my son-in-law less than one year after they married here on the farm. I sometimes regretted his witty humor though, because it hurt to laugh since earlier that day I fell hard on the concrete sidewalk near Union Square, bruising my ribs on my Nikon D40 sandwiched between the concrete and me. You'll be happy to know that neither the camera, nor my ribs, broke. But it frightened poor Lesley, and a nice man who waited to see if I was all right.

New York is fashion. I sweated a little before the trip, wondering what I would wear. Wanna be comfortable, but stylish enough to fit in. It's a blast to watch people in NY, of course, but all those gorgeous women on 5th Avenue, now they are really something, my daughter among them.

New York is transportation. Ever present is the question of how you will get around. How many trains does it take to get there? Should we just take a taxi? Lesley & Brian live not far from Laguardia Airport, in Astoria, Queens, so I took one of the black taxi-limos to their apartment. Well almost. The guy got confused and dropped me on the other side of Broadway (not the Manhattan one), and when I crossed I nearly got hit by a speeding turning car, me and my purse, camera, backpack with Apple Blossom and the wheeled carry-on. And there on the corner were Lesley & Brian gasping at my near demise, fresh from the subway after work, having just arrived on separate trains. It was perfect timing, at which point I was glad for the 1.5 hours sitting and waiting on the tarmac in Detroit.

C'est moi, below, waiting for the train.

New York is parks. Thank goodness for Central Park, and other parks around the City. But even with them, Lesley is getting antsy for a back yard. They don't have even a balcony at their beautiful apartment. It is easy for me to take the farm for granted, where I can walk out into Nature whenever I please.

I have been intrigued by the High Line park since it opened a year ago, and I posted about it at my Huffing-Puffing blog. The 10 blocks of elevated train tracks had been out of use for decades. They have turned it into an oasis where wildflowers and grasses grow just as they do along the train tracks of rural Michigan.

The white building below was designed by Frank Gehry. The photo below that shows the Empire State building in the distance. Polka dot lady has a Coke can handbag below that.

New York is shopping. But not for me. I think Lesley wishes I liked shopping, but she was a very good sport. Just about every woman who knew I was going to New York said something about shopping. I really, really, really don't like shopping. Especially in New York, where all the spaces are confined, and carrying bags around just takes up more space. The one thing I did shop for, and do wherever I go, was postcards in the museum shops. Besides sending them to people now and then, I use them as bookmarks. Remember me? I'm the woman who reads a few pages in many books and rarely finishes them. So, I need a lot of bookmarks.

New York is people. I was sad the first morning, acutely aware that I was not in the Midwest where strangers smile at me, and I smile back. Or vice versa. I felt lonely, in a sea of living, human waves. I adjusted by that first afternoon, but I could feel my psyche overwhelmed. I did enjoy watching people. Except when I didn't want to watch them any more. Then I just looked down at the sidewalk, like almost everyone else.

Besides Lesley & Brian, I even know a few other people in New York. It was a special treat to meet my visiting brother's freshest grandchild at his son's apartment by Central Park. This sleepy little big city farmgirl (she's in gingham, right?) is Eva. That's Papa (my brother Jim) holding her, her dad (Nathan) with her brother (Riley), and Lesley & Brian. Mom (Nancy) and Mimi (Jim's wife Wilma) are not in the photo.

You know how I love the small. And so, that is what I will end this big post with. I had such a good time. Thank you for visiting with me.

-

-

song of thanks

-

-

Thank you, barn.
Thank you, dark.
Thank you, ragged edge of moon.

And silhouettes of trees,
   oh I thank you too.

Thank you, morning.

Thank you, light.

Thank you, arc and filament

     of bright.

Thank you, red.

Thank you, scrim.

Thank you, patina and skin.

Thank ceramicist and peristalsis.

Thank you, fingertips

    and mug.

Thank you, lips and metamorphosis.
Thank you, hand and earth and rug.
 

I am heading for NYC tomorrow. Thank you, vacation. Thank you, Don. Thank you, Lesley and Brian. And bon voyage, Peter. Thank you, motherhood.

- 

-

ordinary? or extraordinary?

-

-

Ordinary, or extraordinary?

We have become a people who look for extraordinary things every day. Remarkable accomplishments. Salacious news of extraordinary beauty and suffering for Angelina and Jennifer, or John Edwards, or Tiger. Or earthquake disasters that we only pay attention to if the casualties reach more than 1,000 in the first day. Extraordinary rescues after an extraordinarily successful company has had an extraordinarily disastrous accident. Have you noticed how many extraordinary accomplishments are by some gallant entity repairing the fallout from another entity's extraordinary [corporate] success?

Did the invention of the airplane make life better? How about the automobile? Lightbulb?

Of course on some level, they did. And so did accomplishments in things like civil rights - extremely important, like medical breakthroughs to ease suffering and improve health. I pray people will keep being inspired to make heaven on earth.

It's just that there is a rampant drive for improvement and change that becomes the end itself, and can have inhumane consequences. What is progress? [I know this is not a new question.]

People in our lives [me included] are blown away by my husband Don's farmy endeavors. Raising chickens for fresh eggs, cultivating a big garden, making jams and preserving fruit, tapping maple trees for sap. Isn't this what people have done, quite ordinarily, for thousands of years? Not to take anything from him, but does it not strike you as odd that we find it extraordinary?

And why do we feel unsatisfied if we don't feel something extraordinary every day? Remember that first kiss? How many first kisses do we need? Why do we have to type exclamation points? Have our words lost meaning? Just. Simple. Words?

Chesley Sullenberger flew airplanes for 40 years, and we didn't know who he was. He just did his job, very well, and became an airplane safety expert. Then he was called upon by the universe to do an extraordinary thing. He crash-landed a plane on the Hudson River, and everyone survived, thank you very much. Isn't it wonderful that someone who did their job day after day, faithfully, was ready for a moment's call to a feat of unfathomable grace and impact?

By far, the majority of the people in the world maintain an ordinary existence. They will never ride in an airplane. Never type on a laptop. Never turn on a water faucet inside their home. They will survive only by the strength in their arms, legs and determination to fight through the land and to the well another day. And by the mercy of the universe to survive remarkable, global, corporate success. And yet, by and large, many of them are happy.

I am in pursuit of the ordinary. I'm reclaiming it. And it's not easy. In this day, in this place, I'm finding it extraordinarily difficult.

-photo by rauf in India; he said, "Go ahead, Ruth, use any photo you want," or something like that.

-

Mother's Day

-

-

me and Mom on my wedding day, April 8, 1978

Mom with Peter in 1982

Mom and Lesley in 1981

Mom at around age 5

Lesley, with her cousins Lauren and Kelly, dressed up in my mother's old clothes; photo circa 1991

a list in the back of her devotional book

with some of the names of people she prayed for every day;

she also prayed for every world leader daily;

and of course she prayed for us kids every day too

When Don, the kids and I moved to Istanbul in 1986, she had put cards and gifts in Lesley's and Peter's backpacks to open at the start of each flight of the long journey:

1. Detroit to New York

2. New York to Frankfurt

3. Frankfurt to Istanbul

One of the cards had a music-playing chip inside that started playing Zippidy-doo-da when you opened it. The kids had that card in their toy box for at least two years, the cover eventually ripped off and just the inner white card with the tiny white button that would play when you pushed it. One day it suddenly played Happy Birthday instead of Zippidy-doo-da. I guess chips like that have more than one song in them.

-

--
-