Next, my advance reading about Sicily had prepared me to see some of the most complete Greek ruins still in existence – right there, not in Athens, but in Sicily. The Island had been a Greek possession during much of the classical Greek period. Plato had walked the streets of Syracuse where we toured, teaching in the forum there, possibly trudging across the very stones I was walking on. Dionysus I, a tyrant ruler of Syracuse, had prevailed upon Plato to come to Syracuse. Dionysus hoped Plato could teach his nephew and brother-in-law to be “philosopher-kings,” like the ones Plato had written about in The Republic. Plato was very doubtful that these young men could be taught wisdom. But he came to Syracuse and tried nonetheless. However, he soon had a falling out with Dionysus, was imprisoned, and was almost sold into slavery. Only his followers’ incessant pleadings on his behalf eventually won his release. He came back to Syracuse a second time to teach for Dionysus II – but fell out with this ruler in turn, over freedom-of-speech issues. This time he was only put under house arrest for a while. But all-in-all, Plato did spend a fair amount of time in what is now Italy, something that surprises even people who are familiar with Plato’s works.
The Greek amphitheaters were mostly carved right out of the Island’s substrate of rock. Sicily is one big, rocky, volcanic island. So it wasn’t necessary to haul big slaps into place to make the circular tiers of seating and the stage. The raw material was already there.
Some of the most notable Greek ruins are in Syracuse itself. But it was hard for members of our group to focus on the ancient ruins. The big draw in Syracuse is the wild pussycats. They are everywhere, poised on every vendor’s canopy, sunning on the forum steps, prowling where their larger relatives, the lions, were once led out to attack and do battle. The population’s willingness to communally feed and care for the wild cats may go back to the time of Plato himself. As I looked at the cats and their kittens reclining everywhere, it seemed as if they might have had more wisdom passed down to them than those numbskull human relatives of the Dionysus dynasty.
Then the Romans ousted the Greeks on Sicily and the “glory that was Greece” was replaced by the “grandeur that was Rome.” Our guide pointed out how, in Syracuse for example, a Roman arena would be built less than half a block away from a Greek amphitheater. The two kinds of structures looked essentially the same to me. Both were circular tiers of seating surrounding a performance ring. But our guide said if you looked more closely, you could see that the two structures reflected two entirely different worldviews and cultures.
The Greek amphitheater was built for the intellect and for enrichment. It was the site of plays and choruses and lectures. However the adjacent Roman arena was built “just for cruelty.” Our guide pointed to the runways that winged the Roman theater – where the lions would be prodded out from their pens in the excavated basement under the arena. It seems the lions had even less of a chance of survival than the gladiators or Christians. The lions were brought over from Africa and starved in wretched conditions until the moment they were released for the crowd’s entertainment. Hardly any survived more than one very short bout in the arena.
But the Romans were great builders. Their plumbing achievements are especially famous. Many of their water ducts remain in use to this day, although since the pipes were made of lead, it’s doubtful that one would want to drink too much of the water that passes through these pipes.
But one of our tours took us through the “Frigidarium” – the old Roman bath in Catania. A cathedral has been built on top of it, but the essential plumbing remains in the sub-basements of the church. The pipes down there were designed to carry cool water from local aquifers and feed a reservoir, which now serves to keep the cathedral cool through the hot summer months. It was a little eerie, going down the dim fire escape stairways to this old spa, inching along the catwalks overlooking the pool. I could almost see the Roman wealthy, languoring there, 2,000 years ago.
The city of Catania was itself an interesting contrast with the rest of Sicily. A lot of Sicily’s towns are similar mazes of ancient, stone-paved alleyways. But a lot of Catania is much more modern. That’s because Catania is right underneath Mt. Etna, the most active volcano in Europe. Our guide said the residents of Catania are kept busy sweeping ashes off of every surface, the spumings from Mt. Etna. However, I didn’t notice any particular residues about the place the day I was there. But several times in the 20th century, a large part of Catania was buried under ash and lava. And the residents had to rebuild their city. In Sicily, when you want to call someone “pigheaded, stubborn,” you call him “Catanian.” That’s because through the ages, the place has been destroyed so often – and yet the survivors always rebuild on the same spot.
Now big swathes of the city are glitteringly new. The main street is a broad boulevard lined with gleaming plate glass. But always looming behind is the outline of ancient Mt. Etna.
It’s not just one fumarole. Etna is actually a chain of several hundred craters. The volcano was especially active while we were there, more active than it has been in decades. A new crater was opening up, spilling lava down one of its steep sides. The molten lava pouring from this crater was added to the lava pouring from three adjacent craters. We would all angle to get good views of the Mountain at night. These four orange-glowing rivers would shift and re-channel, looking as if they were trying to form different letters of the alphabet there on the mountainside. For a minute, the lava streams looked as if they were forming a big letter “M.” Then the next moment, they converged to look like an enormous “R.” It was as if the mountain were trying to spell out a message for us. Everyone took photos of the spectacle, but I don’t think any of these night shots came out.
(By the way, when the tour was over, our group departed from the Catania airport. When I got home, I read that the very next day after our departure, that airport had been temporarily closed due to the heavy amounts of smoke and ash coming from Mt. Etna. It would have been too dangerous for the planes to attempt any take-off in the ceiling-zero conditions.)
But as I say, while I was there, I didn’t notice anything particularly noxious about Etna. (The only respiratory distress I suffered was when we were touring the ruin of a Greek temple in Agrigento. A man was cleaning the stones of the temple that day, using a scrub brush and buckets of benzene! Maybe he needed to scrub away spray paint graffiti?)
Our group was bused out to Etna one day, and invited to climb a little way up the mountain - on a facet away from where the molten lava was spilling. We were also told we could collect as many granite rocks as we wanted as souvenirs. The mountain just keeps tossing out more and more. Some of the ones we found were still warm, a sign of their recent escape from the nether regions. These were all spongy-looking, nondescript rocks though. It seems Mt. Etna doesn’t form any obsidian – the lovely black-glass rocks I was hoping to see.
“Obsidian my midnight gleams…”
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Sicily I - Our Trip Starts
As for my big adventure of the year – my trip to Sicily – there were a lot of surprises there. I learned a lot. I didn’t prepare much for the trip. I decided to just make it a spontaneous junket without boning up a lot on Sicily in advance. I don’t know if that was wise. I sort of wish I had learned more before going, so I would have known what to look at, what questions to ask. And I certainly wish I had boned up on the language more. Every shred of Italian I ever knew totally escaped me when I was there on the ground. The one time I tried to communicate with a native in full Italian sentences was at the Post Office, and I ended up getting ten postcard stamps for twenty Euros – over twice what I should have paid. So something went wrong there. They saw me coming!
I did read a few books before launching off though, including one written by Lawrence Durrell (who also wrote the Alexandria Quartet and other become-PBS-Masterpiece-Theater-productions). In the 60’s-70’s he wrote this journal account of a bus tour he took around Sicily called Sicilian Circus. He made almost exactly the same circuit I was scheduled to make.
Durrell’s observations were generally out of my league, and well, to be frank, a little precious. He was very versed in classic mythology and found frequent likenesses between phenomena such as a lowering cloud formation and “the brow of Zeus as he was chastising Hera for her inconstancy.” Like that. Also, much of his book wasn’t about Sicily at all. It was a reminiscence of his bygone and again slightly too refined-for-my-tastes friendship/love affair with a beautiful, highly cultured woman – recently deceased when he wrote the book. She had lived in Sicily and frequently urged him to visit her there. But he never had, instead buying palazzos in Greece, and particularly on the Island of Corfu. Now, too late, he was heeding her call and visiting her beloved Sicily. As his little tour bus with its motley set of passengers made its way around the Island, Durrell recalled conversations he’d had with his friend.
He recalled how they had sipped wine under the stars of Corfu and exchanged anecdotes about Aristophanes. It all made me wonder – are there really people who converse like that? Could there really have been a man and woman, lovers, whose pillow talk consisted of reveries about what the ancient Gods meant to the Greeks? “Where the women come and go, speaking of Michelangelo.” That sort of relationship seems to exist on another planet, no - in another universe altogether from the one I’m inhabiting.
But getting back to Durrell’s Sicily – he did alert me to the long, multinational history of Sicily. The ancient Egyptians were there, although they didn’t leave any pyramids, as far as I know. But I did get to see some of their steles of hieroglyphics in the Palermo History Museum. And even at that, the ancient Egyptians weren’t the first to leave an imprint of their culture around Sicily. That Museum also had representations of some of the Paleolithic cave paintings to be found around the island – some almost as spectacular as the famous Lascaux paintings.
I hadn’t realized – Sicily is only 100 miles across the Mediterranean from Africa. I never really bothered to understand before why Patton and our other Generals were fighting in Tunisia during WWII. But Africa is only a rowboat away from Italy. So no wonder. This was brought home to me during what was perhaps my most memorable day in Sicily. Our group was touring Ortygia, an Island off an Island. It’s a southern projection off the Sicilian city of Syracuse. Some of us stopped there for lunch at an off-the-beaten-path restaurant. It was a hole-in-the-wall place with barely room for our party and the one other party there in an alcove. We glanced over at this other group, a panel of three distinguished-looking men who had little flags placed on their table. We didn’t think much of it at the time. We ordered, and gazed around the place, at the wine barrels and red-checkered tablecloths.
It was very homey. But there was near disaster waiting in the coziness. Two men on our tour were celebrating their 5th anniversary by making a present of this trip to themselves and to an accompanying pastor friend. One of this interesting couple was rather tall, and when he came back from the bathroom – he bashed his head into a low stone archway. He fell, briefly unconscious, bleeding. It was quite dramatic. Cold compresses were rushed to him and he was quickly revived. He was soon back in his seat, eating spaghetti. But he continued to seep blood onto his compress, and in his gusto over his food, he continued to drool a little rivulet of spaghetti sauce from his mouth. He was twin rivers run red.
The meal was delicious – prepared to order for each of us by the daughters of the restaurant’s Tunisian owner. After we finished, the daughter who had waited on us came up and shook hands and embraced each of us in turn. She had a mist of tears in her eyes as, in her halting English, she wished us all a good trip. We looked at each other sadly, realizing we’d probably never see each other again. This was the one moment when I experienced a really different way of being in the world from anything I typically find in the U.S. Here was someone putting human contact ahead of business. It was a truly touching moment.
When we got outside, our tour leader asked if we had recognized that other party behind us had been. What? No. She said the man in the middle of the group, the one who had nodded over at us and graciously said “B’giorno” – was none other than the Prime Minister of Tunisia – Mohammed Ghannouchi. It seems the restaurant owner was head of the Tunisian ethnic minority in Sicily, and so Tunisian potentates dined there often. But we’d really hit the jackpot of VIP’s that day.
We all shopped some more until night fell on Ortygia. It got a little chilly, at least chilly by the standards of long-time Sicilian residents. It was slightly comical, the way the tour leader would rush up to me worriedly and say, “Oh Rosalie, button your sweater. You’ll catch cold!” whenever the temperature dipped even a notch below 65 degrees.
Especially on such cool evenings, chestnut vendors came out in force along the lanes and in the town squares. Their metal cylinders sighed gusts of aromatic smoke up towards the starry skies. Our tour leader bought a big bag of chestnuts, and we all stood around munching, our sweaters buttoned, while we waited for our tour bus to pick us up and bring us back to our hotel in Syracuse.
While that may have been my favorite day in Sicily, there were many good days.
(To be continued...)
I did read a few books before launching off though, including one written by Lawrence Durrell (who also wrote the Alexandria Quartet and other become-PBS-Masterpiece-Theater-productions). In the 60’s-70’s he wrote this journal account of a bus tour he took around Sicily called Sicilian Circus. He made almost exactly the same circuit I was scheduled to make.
Durrell’s observations were generally out of my league, and well, to be frank, a little precious. He was very versed in classic mythology and found frequent likenesses between phenomena such as a lowering cloud formation and “the brow of Zeus as he was chastising Hera for her inconstancy.” Like that. Also, much of his book wasn’t about Sicily at all. It was a reminiscence of his bygone and again slightly too refined-for-my-tastes friendship/love affair with a beautiful, highly cultured woman – recently deceased when he wrote the book. She had lived in Sicily and frequently urged him to visit her there. But he never had, instead buying palazzos in Greece, and particularly on the Island of Corfu. Now, too late, he was heeding her call and visiting her beloved Sicily. As his little tour bus with its motley set of passengers made its way around the Island, Durrell recalled conversations he’d had with his friend.
He recalled how they had sipped wine under the stars of Corfu and exchanged anecdotes about Aristophanes. It all made me wonder – are there really people who converse like that? Could there really have been a man and woman, lovers, whose pillow talk consisted of reveries about what the ancient Gods meant to the Greeks? “Where the women come and go, speaking of Michelangelo.” That sort of relationship seems to exist on another planet, no - in another universe altogether from the one I’m inhabiting.
But getting back to Durrell’s Sicily – he did alert me to the long, multinational history of Sicily. The ancient Egyptians were there, although they didn’t leave any pyramids, as far as I know. But I did get to see some of their steles of hieroglyphics in the Palermo History Museum. And even at that, the ancient Egyptians weren’t the first to leave an imprint of their culture around Sicily. That Museum also had representations of some of the Paleolithic cave paintings to be found around the island – some almost as spectacular as the famous Lascaux paintings.
I hadn’t realized – Sicily is only 100 miles across the Mediterranean from Africa. I never really bothered to understand before why Patton and our other Generals were fighting in Tunisia during WWII. But Africa is only a rowboat away from Italy. So no wonder. This was brought home to me during what was perhaps my most memorable day in Sicily. Our group was touring Ortygia, an Island off an Island. It’s a southern projection off the Sicilian city of Syracuse. Some of us stopped there for lunch at an off-the-beaten-path restaurant. It was a hole-in-the-wall place with barely room for our party and the one other party there in an alcove. We glanced over at this other group, a panel of three distinguished-looking men who had little flags placed on their table. We didn’t think much of it at the time. We ordered, and gazed around the place, at the wine barrels and red-checkered tablecloths.
It was very homey. But there was near disaster waiting in the coziness. Two men on our tour were celebrating their 5th anniversary by making a present of this trip to themselves and to an accompanying pastor friend. One of this interesting couple was rather tall, and when he came back from the bathroom – he bashed his head into a low stone archway. He fell, briefly unconscious, bleeding. It was quite dramatic. Cold compresses were rushed to him and he was quickly revived. He was soon back in his seat, eating spaghetti. But he continued to seep blood onto his compress, and in his gusto over his food, he continued to drool a little rivulet of spaghetti sauce from his mouth. He was twin rivers run red.
The meal was delicious – prepared to order for each of us by the daughters of the restaurant’s Tunisian owner. After we finished, the daughter who had waited on us came up and shook hands and embraced each of us in turn. She had a mist of tears in her eyes as, in her halting English, she wished us all a good trip. We looked at each other sadly, realizing we’d probably never see each other again. This was the one moment when I experienced a really different way of being in the world from anything I typically find in the U.S. Here was someone putting human contact ahead of business. It was a truly touching moment.
When we got outside, our tour leader asked if we had recognized that other party behind us had been. What? No. She said the man in the middle of the group, the one who had nodded over at us and graciously said “B’giorno” – was none other than the Prime Minister of Tunisia – Mohammed Ghannouchi. It seems the restaurant owner was head of the Tunisian ethnic minority in Sicily, and so Tunisian potentates dined there often. But we’d really hit the jackpot of VIP’s that day.
We all shopped some more until night fell on Ortygia. It got a little chilly, at least chilly by the standards of long-time Sicilian residents. It was slightly comical, the way the tour leader would rush up to me worriedly and say, “Oh Rosalie, button your sweater. You’ll catch cold!” whenever the temperature dipped even a notch below 65 degrees.
Especially on such cool evenings, chestnut vendors came out in force along the lanes and in the town squares. Their metal cylinders sighed gusts of aromatic smoke up towards the starry skies. Our tour leader bought a big bag of chestnuts, and we all stood around munching, our sweaters buttoned, while we waited for our tour bus to pick us up and bring us back to our hotel in Syracuse.
While that may have been my favorite day in Sicily, there were many good days.
(To be continued...)
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Stop Or I'll Shoot!
Packing for a trip is always a delicate balancing act between too much and too little. But even prior to all those weighty decisions for me – is the decision about whether or not to take a camera.
For most people, a camera is a foregone conclusion when they travel. But I come to that crossroads with the extra poundage of my parents’ prejudices in my backpack. My mother especially was given to issuing carefree, Auntie Mame waivers – about living in the moment. “Don’t record life. Live it! Don’t take pictures to look back on. Look at what’s around you now!” For her, taking pictures was like taking copious notes in class. You miss so much while you’re scribbling. You miss the fleeting grimace on the teacher’s face. You miss his joy in making a point. You miss the nuance in favor of the facts.
That all sounded so Bohemian and right. And other people’s pictures generally supported her argument. If anyone ever had the time to look back through them at all, they would generally find posed shots of “Say cheese” groups standing in front of – the Taj Mahal - the Eiffel Tower - the Leaning Tower of Pisa. And there were so many indiscriminate shots of these clumps of conscripted smilers.
Now technology has made it possible to be even more indiscriminate. Weddings aren’t usually about creating close, personal family ties anymore. They aren’t about the intimate hopefulness in the vows made between two people in love. Weddings are now usually mass staged events, like coronation ceremonies. The point is in the spectacle of the thing. The point is all in how the thing is visually arranged for the ubiquitous cameras. And a bride feels her life is ruined if the photographer somehow fails to get a shot of her throwing the bouquet.
In earlier decades, people usually only captured one or two choice pictures of themselves around the time of their weddings. My mother had one formal picture made in 1928. It is a sepia close-up of her husband-to-be smiling down wistfully, indulgently at her - and her looking up at him, a little tentatively, perhaps just a shade unconvinced that she wanted to launch on this adventure. She might have been prescient because that marriage did end in divorce about six years later. It ended amiably enough, amid, what was for the times, a relatively mild scuffle of Depression-era troubles. Yet at the moment the photographer snapped the picture, they were a strikingly handsome jazz-age couple - an early, untroubled F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda - except for just that slight shadow of doubt that might have revealed itself to someone pondering the picture closely enough. The photographer kept them on display in his window for years – a close-up example of his skill.
That picture is all my mother had or cared to have of the rites surrounding her first marriage. Then she didn’t even think to have any pictures at all taken when she married my father twenty years later in a civil ceremony. She was content to let all the unphotographed moments shed their skin and assume newer, livelier forms in the minds of the people who were there. Presumably she lived in the moment, and that was enough.
Now it seems necessary that everything about a wedding be captured on film. Now we must record every one of Uncle Johnny’s jarring elbow thrusts as he attempts to do the Macarena at the wedding reception. Now we must record Cousin Otis precariously threading his way across the dance floor, holding a sloppy, sliding piece of wedding cake on his little paper plate. These details can be of telling interest. But somehow, they usually end up being neither telling nor interesting. They just trap Cousin Otis in a podgy limbo somewhere between the self-conscious and the candid, whereas before he could have flown free into history. In the same way, our traveling companions of a previous era could have remained more truly themselves, rather than being cut to the constant Procrustean Bed of a picture frame.
Yes, my mother was right about all that. But then I got a digital camera. And I started taking pictures.
I still choose my shots carefully, although when I have the camera along, I feel pressure to take the obligatory shot of the landmark. But in general, I try to limit myself to things that have a personal, unpredictable interest.
And lo and behold! I see things on these pictures I would never have seen if I had just “lived in the moment.” For example, I recently took a series of photographs of the large Cooper’s Hawks that have miraculously been visiting my garden in a populous Chicago neighborhood. Looking over the pictures, I was amazed to find one that captured the instant when the hawk’s second eyelids, its nictitating membranes, were pulled down - eerie, iridescent shades over its eyes. Although the bird was indeed a hawk and not a raven, that captured slice reminded me of Poe’s final-stanza description of his harbinger bird – “And its eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming…”
That and a thousand other details are revealed in a photograph – details that would have been forever lost in the rush of impressions that constitute life in the moment. I suppose this value in taking pictures should have been obvious to me all along, if the enterprise hadn’t been clouded by my mother’s injunctions – and even more, by the generally rather dull and trivializing output of most shutterbugs.
But then, also perhaps obviously, I have discovered value not only in the picture, but in the process of taking pictures. Having a camera in my hand wakens me to my surroundings. I go forth with an artist’s eye, in the footsteps of Steichen and Stieglitz, more keenly aware - scouring the landscape for unique features, for odd juxtapositions that might be a commentary on the human condition, without necessarily involving any actual humans.
I still feel a reluctance to take pictures of people. That might in part be due to an instinct operating in me similar to the instinct operating among tribal peoples and people in closer-knit communities like the Amish. It’s a feeling that to take a picture of a person is to literally “capture” and encase the essence of that person in too-earthly a mold. And again going back to all the sorry and depreciatingly specific remembrances we have of the Uncle Johnnies of the world – that instinct has wisdom in it.
Then too, I feel that taking a picture of a person is just generally too intrusive an act. It seems it should certainly entail my approaching the person and asking their permission first. But if I do that, I will almost always destroy the spontaneity that made me want to take the picture in the first place. So how is that whole exchange supposed to be negotiated? I’m never sure. The classes I’ve taken in photography haven’t covered that topic. Any tips that teachers could give in this regard would probably have to boil down to legality and sensitivity – and after that, how to take pictures covertly.
I know I would certainly be made to feel ill at ease if I spotted someone photographing me, even if I was sure it wasn’t part of a lawyer’s investigation, but only because I was “picturesque.” Perhaps I’d be even more put-off by implications of picturesqueness, because that usually means being somehow typical of a place and time, being somehow representative. And above all, it usually means being old. And I assume other people feel the same aversion I do to being typecast that way.
But again, I might be wrong in many cases. On my recent trip to Sicily, I was rather taken aback to see a member of our tour group ask permission, then stand directly in front of a weathered native (an old-man-and-the-sea archetype) – ready to snap him head-on from only a foot away. I cringed at the audacity. But then something amazing! As our tour member lined up her shot, a huge grin radiated across the man’s face. Pride at being found picture-worthy boosted him, suddenly reversing the years’ inevitable sapping of youth and vigor. In the gaze of this media attention, he flowered into his prime, a second wind filling his sails. It was apparent our tour member had brought immense joy to someone by soliciting such bold exposure. And I felt a little ashamed of my global reticence. Because of it, I might have missed many opportunities to similarly bring joy to people.
Going back to the original dilemma that prompted all this reflection - I decided not to bring my camera along on the Sicily trip at all. It was practical reasons rather than philosophy that made the decision for me in the end. I had heard so much about drive-by camera-snatchings all over the world. And my camera had a big zoom lens. It couldn’t be tucked in a pocket. It would be an albatross around my neck, something that would brand me as a tourist from a mile away. Or more affectionately, it would be like traveling with an infant. I would have to be constantly conscious of it, protective of it – swaddling it away from harm.
I wasn’t even sure how to get such a thing on board an airplane in the first place. Not being much of a traveler, I didn’t know the post 9/11 protocol regarding cameras. You don’t really pack such an expensive, delicate item in your checked luggage, do you? But on the other hand, isn’t a camera a suspicious thing to carry dangling as you go through inspection? Wouldn’t the security guards want to disassemble it to make sure it wasn’t a bomb? Then even if I got it intact onto the plane, I’d be left with a big wattle weighing me for 3,000 miles across the Atlantic.
I am always so flummoxed by these little questions in life. While other people are grappling with wars and famine and family crises – I am left in the dust, immobilized by whether or not to tote a camera.
In the end I left the camera behind. In the end, I regretted it. Everyone else on the tour through Sicily routinely brought cameras along, seemingly without have spent a moment agonizing over what – how – who. So I will have to depend on the kindness of these strangers to share their pictures with me if I want to look back at where I’ve been.
But I probably won’t make a big point of asking to look back through their portfolios of pictures. I now see how my mother was partially wrong. But I still appreciate how she was partially right about the shallowness of taking pictures. A lot of things are better left to the imagination. Although I have developed a sort of keenness for taking the occasional photo, my primary medium always was, and probably will continue to be – the printed word. So I will still likely keep most of my memories of trips through life in the form of letters I write or in just random jottings like this.
Taking pictures is more like watching TV. Writing is more like listening to the radio. When I take pictures, I’m pretty much limited to capturing a scene as it is. Yes, I have choices – a choice of subject matter, of angle, of lighting, etc. But these are all choices among off-the-rack options already out there. Writing seems to leave me more room to insert myself into the scene. When I write up an experience, I can weave myself into the very fabric of the narrative.
So I will write my trip to Sicily. In some follow-up postings, I will tell what I saw in Sicily – or, more accurately, I will tell what a picture Sicily and I made together.
For most people, a camera is a foregone conclusion when they travel. But I come to that crossroads with the extra poundage of my parents’ prejudices in my backpack. My mother especially was given to issuing carefree, Auntie Mame waivers – about living in the moment. “Don’t record life. Live it! Don’t take pictures to look back on. Look at what’s around you now!” For her, taking pictures was like taking copious notes in class. You miss so much while you’re scribbling. You miss the fleeting grimace on the teacher’s face. You miss his joy in making a point. You miss the nuance in favor of the facts.
That all sounded so Bohemian and right. And other people’s pictures generally supported her argument. If anyone ever had the time to look back through them at all, they would generally find posed shots of “Say cheese” groups standing in front of – the Taj Mahal - the Eiffel Tower - the Leaning Tower of Pisa. And there were so many indiscriminate shots of these clumps of conscripted smilers.
Now technology has made it possible to be even more indiscriminate. Weddings aren’t usually about creating close, personal family ties anymore. They aren’t about the intimate hopefulness in the vows made between two people in love. Weddings are now usually mass staged events, like coronation ceremonies. The point is in the spectacle of the thing. The point is all in how the thing is visually arranged for the ubiquitous cameras. And a bride feels her life is ruined if the photographer somehow fails to get a shot of her throwing the bouquet.
In earlier decades, people usually only captured one or two choice pictures of themselves around the time of their weddings. My mother had one formal picture made in 1928. It is a sepia close-up of her husband-to-be smiling down wistfully, indulgently at her - and her looking up at him, a little tentatively, perhaps just a shade unconvinced that she wanted to launch on this adventure. She might have been prescient because that marriage did end in divorce about six years later. It ended amiably enough, amid, what was for the times, a relatively mild scuffle of Depression-era troubles. Yet at the moment the photographer snapped the picture, they were a strikingly handsome jazz-age couple - an early, untroubled F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda - except for just that slight shadow of doubt that might have revealed itself to someone pondering the picture closely enough. The photographer kept them on display in his window for years – a close-up example of his skill.
That picture is all my mother had or cared to have of the rites surrounding her first marriage. Then she didn’t even think to have any pictures at all taken when she married my father twenty years later in a civil ceremony. She was content to let all the unphotographed moments shed their skin and assume newer, livelier forms in the minds of the people who were there. Presumably she lived in the moment, and that was enough.
Now it seems necessary that everything about a wedding be captured on film. Now we must record every one of Uncle Johnny’s jarring elbow thrusts as he attempts to do the Macarena at the wedding reception. Now we must record Cousin Otis precariously threading his way across the dance floor, holding a sloppy, sliding piece of wedding cake on his little paper plate. These details can be of telling interest. But somehow, they usually end up being neither telling nor interesting. They just trap Cousin Otis in a podgy limbo somewhere between the self-conscious and the candid, whereas before he could have flown free into history. In the same way, our traveling companions of a previous era could have remained more truly themselves, rather than being cut to the constant Procrustean Bed of a picture frame.
Yes, my mother was right about all that. But then I got a digital camera. And I started taking pictures.
I still choose my shots carefully, although when I have the camera along, I feel pressure to take the obligatory shot of the landmark. But in general, I try to limit myself to things that have a personal, unpredictable interest.
And lo and behold! I see things on these pictures I would never have seen if I had just “lived in the moment.” For example, I recently took a series of photographs of the large Cooper’s Hawks that have miraculously been visiting my garden in a populous Chicago neighborhood. Looking over the pictures, I was amazed to find one that captured the instant when the hawk’s second eyelids, its nictitating membranes, were pulled down - eerie, iridescent shades over its eyes. Although the bird was indeed a hawk and not a raven, that captured slice reminded me of Poe’s final-stanza description of his harbinger bird – “And its eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming…”
That and a thousand other details are revealed in a photograph – details that would have been forever lost in the rush of impressions that constitute life in the moment. I suppose this value in taking pictures should have been obvious to me all along, if the enterprise hadn’t been clouded by my mother’s injunctions – and even more, by the generally rather dull and trivializing output of most shutterbugs.
But then, also perhaps obviously, I have discovered value not only in the picture, but in the process of taking pictures. Having a camera in my hand wakens me to my surroundings. I go forth with an artist’s eye, in the footsteps of Steichen and Stieglitz, more keenly aware - scouring the landscape for unique features, for odd juxtapositions that might be a commentary on the human condition, without necessarily involving any actual humans.
I still feel a reluctance to take pictures of people. That might in part be due to an instinct operating in me similar to the instinct operating among tribal peoples and people in closer-knit communities like the Amish. It’s a feeling that to take a picture of a person is to literally “capture” and encase the essence of that person in too-earthly a mold. And again going back to all the sorry and depreciatingly specific remembrances we have of the Uncle Johnnies of the world – that instinct has wisdom in it.
Then too, I feel that taking a picture of a person is just generally too intrusive an act. It seems it should certainly entail my approaching the person and asking their permission first. But if I do that, I will almost always destroy the spontaneity that made me want to take the picture in the first place. So how is that whole exchange supposed to be negotiated? I’m never sure. The classes I’ve taken in photography haven’t covered that topic. Any tips that teachers could give in this regard would probably have to boil down to legality and sensitivity – and after that, how to take pictures covertly.
I know I would certainly be made to feel ill at ease if I spotted someone photographing me, even if I was sure it wasn’t part of a lawyer’s investigation, but only because I was “picturesque.” Perhaps I’d be even more put-off by implications of picturesqueness, because that usually means being somehow typical of a place and time, being somehow representative. And above all, it usually means being old. And I assume other people feel the same aversion I do to being typecast that way.
But again, I might be wrong in many cases. On my recent trip to Sicily, I was rather taken aback to see a member of our tour group ask permission, then stand directly in front of a weathered native (an old-man-and-the-sea archetype) – ready to snap him head-on from only a foot away. I cringed at the audacity. But then something amazing! As our tour member lined up her shot, a huge grin radiated across the man’s face. Pride at being found picture-worthy boosted him, suddenly reversing the years’ inevitable sapping of youth and vigor. In the gaze of this media attention, he flowered into his prime, a second wind filling his sails. It was apparent our tour member had brought immense joy to someone by soliciting such bold exposure. And I felt a little ashamed of my global reticence. Because of it, I might have missed many opportunities to similarly bring joy to people.
Going back to the original dilemma that prompted all this reflection - I decided not to bring my camera along on the Sicily trip at all. It was practical reasons rather than philosophy that made the decision for me in the end. I had heard so much about drive-by camera-snatchings all over the world. And my camera had a big zoom lens. It couldn’t be tucked in a pocket. It would be an albatross around my neck, something that would brand me as a tourist from a mile away. Or more affectionately, it would be like traveling with an infant. I would have to be constantly conscious of it, protective of it – swaddling it away from harm.
I wasn’t even sure how to get such a thing on board an airplane in the first place. Not being much of a traveler, I didn’t know the post 9/11 protocol regarding cameras. You don’t really pack such an expensive, delicate item in your checked luggage, do you? But on the other hand, isn’t a camera a suspicious thing to carry dangling as you go through inspection? Wouldn’t the security guards want to disassemble it to make sure it wasn’t a bomb? Then even if I got it intact onto the plane, I’d be left with a big wattle weighing me for 3,000 miles across the Atlantic.
I am always so flummoxed by these little questions in life. While other people are grappling with wars and famine and family crises – I am left in the dust, immobilized by whether or not to tote a camera.
In the end I left the camera behind. In the end, I regretted it. Everyone else on the tour through Sicily routinely brought cameras along, seemingly without have spent a moment agonizing over what – how – who. So I will have to depend on the kindness of these strangers to share their pictures with me if I want to look back at where I’ve been.
But I probably won’t make a big point of asking to look back through their portfolios of pictures. I now see how my mother was partially wrong. But I still appreciate how she was partially right about the shallowness of taking pictures. A lot of things are better left to the imagination. Although I have developed a sort of keenness for taking the occasional photo, my primary medium always was, and probably will continue to be – the printed word. So I will still likely keep most of my memories of trips through life in the form of letters I write or in just random jottings like this.
Taking pictures is more like watching TV. Writing is more like listening to the radio. When I take pictures, I’m pretty much limited to capturing a scene as it is. Yes, I have choices – a choice of subject matter, of angle, of lighting, etc. But these are all choices among off-the-rack options already out there. Writing seems to leave me more room to insert myself into the scene. When I write up an experience, I can weave myself into the very fabric of the narrative.
So I will write my trip to Sicily. In some follow-up postings, I will tell what I saw in Sicily – or, more accurately, I will tell what a picture Sicily and I made together.
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