Elizabeth Adams's Blog, page 38

At a Safe Distance

Beneath a photograph of the refugee camp at Calais, France, known as "the Jungle", in yesterday's New York Times, this caption appeared:

"The squalid camp, growing and festering for over a year, has become a symbol of Europe’s faltering efforts to handle its migration crisis."

The sentence was a quote from the article itself. This morning, the first thing I saw when I checked my Instagram feed, were the photograph and caption, posted by Teju Cole, with the following comment (quoted here with his permission:)

Sometimes it's not the photo, it's the caption. Sometimes it's not the caption, it's a single word. What work is the word "festering" doing here? The caption is an excerpt from the article, which you can find yourself. "Squalid" is permissible in context but imperfect, but there are at least two problems with the framing of Calais as a "symbol of Europe's faltering efforts to handle its migration crisis." The first is that this is a crisis for those who must leave home, not for those who receive or refuse them. Europe does not have a migration crisis. The second problem is that Europe is not a country. There's a reason there's no "Jungle" in Germany, and there's an opposite reason there isn't one in Switzerland. Whatever is happening in Calais is about French policy and British policy. Italy is another thing. Hungary is a different thing. But that's all about the framing.
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What I keep coming back to is that word "festering." I've heard it before. What festers? What instinctual response do we have to that which festers? I think I know the kind of work the word is supposed to be doing. That work is all about mislocating the crisis. And when the crisis is mislocated, when it is about those who must witness the crisis rather than those who must undergo it, then other actions, otherwise unimaginable, become compulsory. After all, what is one to do with people or places that are "festering"?

[Later this morning, I note that the caption has been changed to read "The squalid camp has become a symbol of Europe’s faltering efforts to handle its migration crisis." The text remains the same in the article itself; the New York Times does follow TC (one of their own critics and authors) on Instagram.]

What, then, is actually "festering?" In my opinion, it is our hatred and fear of "the other" who will somehow take away or undermine what we feel is rightly "ours" -- our jobs, our health, our security, our resources, our prosperity...and, if we dig deeper, our very whiteness and privilege: god forbid, one of them might intermarry with one of our children.

Well, you know what? That's exactly what I did. 35 years ago I married the son of a Syrian immigrant and a refugee from the Armenian genocide. And that changed forever my ability to be indifferent to or distant from those who are not white, Anglo-Saxon, American, Protestant, English-speaking, Euro-centric...you can fill in the adjectives yourself. I was already a young person leaning in the direction of difference; I was curious and open. But I had not yet been broken open. And if we carefully defend ourselves forever, if we hide behind words and never take action, our hearts will never be broken and we will never truly understand or help the other out of that brokenness. We will simply sit at a safe distance, maybe spouting outrage and sadness at the world's ills, but our empathy will be temporary and we will not have to change, grow, or give anything that is an actual sacrifice of self. Outrage is, frankly, cheap. My question to you is, what are you willing to do?

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Language does matter: I agree. We have seen it at work in this deplorable election season, both for good and for ill. We are not, in general, careful with it, but taking great care with words is supposed to be the job of journalists, as well as speechwriters.

I would like to recommend another article, "What Does it Mean to Help One Family?", about the Canadian response to the plight of the refugees, which shows the complexities of both immigrating and helping. We will be welcoming a refugee family through the cathedral sometime in the coming year; at the present time they are still mired in paperwork in Beirut. This will not be the first time I've tried to help people making a new life in a new country, nor will it be the last, and every single time I know that I am not doing enough. I feel compelled because of my parents in-law, who had been helped by others and who never forgot that. Their story changed me: for their sake, as well as my own conscience, I cannot turn away. And then I became an immigrant too -- an immigrant with money, relative security, and language skills, to be sure -- but I found out firsthand what it means to leave your past behind, with all its practical and emotional connections and knowledge, and have to begin again to build a new life in a new place.

We all need to be more careful with the language we use. We cheapen our empathy by spouting  platitudes, we speak when we ought to be listening, we use words for effect and shock value that linger and cause great harm, and in this word-intensive internet environment, we invest a stream of empty words with weight as if they represent acts of actual sacrifice or self-emptying.

Words matter; they descend from our heads to our hearts and continue to live there, as a sort of compost for our emotions and actions. In the heart, certain things fester, and others flower; which way it goes is ultimately up to us.

Peak: A Fall Trek up Noonmark

We had intended to climb Noonmark Mountain, in the Adirondacks, on our anniversary (August 1), following our tradition of going out somewhere in nature for an adventure on that day. But circumstances got in the way and we ended up putting it off...until yesterday. And what a glorious day it was to be in the mountains: the autumn foliage at its peak, the air cool but not freezing, the sky absolutely blue. (The only problem was that my camera battery was dead, so I had to forget about taking photos -- all these pictures are by Jonathan.)

 

We hadn't bargained on quite such a challenging climb. Noonmark is not one of the highest peaks in the Adirondack Park, but it has one of the best 360-degree views from its bare summit. Still, it's 3,556 feet (1,084 metres) high, and the Stimson Trail to the summit, which we took, is steep, especially in the last couple hundred metres, and includes high rock steps and sections of exposed, bare rock.

We were glad we'd brought trekking poles and had worn hiking boots with good ankle support. Although we shed progressive layers of clothing, there was frost in shadowed places on the ground as we approached the summit, and ice in the little pools on the rock.

On the way up, we met another couple about our age coming down, who said they had stopped short of the summit and decided to just enjoy the views from there. "You know, it gets pretty dicey -- a couple of ladders, and a lot of scrambling over bare rock," the man said, shaking his head. "Yes - these are pretty old knees!" said the woman, with a sweet, resigned smile. I'm pretty stubborn, and I'm afraid this exchange just stiffened my determination to make it all the way up. As we climbed, the trail did get steeper and harder, but it was also beautiful and well-maintained: narrow ridgelines along rock walls, bare rock ledged without handholds that required some thought to scale, decisions between going straight up the difficult rocky steps or the edges filled with branches and roots, and enticing lookouts on Giant Mountain to the east, and the high peaks to the northwest that gave a hint of what we'd see from the summit. Meanwhile we observed the progression from a climax northern forest of beech-hemlock-maple to hemlocks and cedars, with more tundra vegetation like lichens, and finally krummholz, the stunted,wind-pruned pines of high altitude.

After climbing over some tall boulders, we emerged from the trees onto bare rock: we had made it!

We'd brought a lunch, and sat to eat it on the sun-warmed, worn, pinkish granite, sparkling with mica chips and adorned with round green and white lichens.

When we arrived, a high school group from Ontario was also on the top, talking excitedly, but soon their teacher sent them to each find a spot by themselves, and they sat for fifteen or twenty minutes in complete silence, so we did too, looking out over the high peaks of the Adirondack range and the vivid array of trees below us.

 

In spite of growing up in central New York State, my family never came up to the mountains in the north, and then I spent my adulthood in the broad valley between the Green Mountains of Vermont and the Whites of New Hampshire, visiting both often. I've only started to get to know the Adirondacks, mountains of quite different character, in the past few years. Since I stopped downhill skiing, due to a knee injury twenty years ago, I've deeply missed being on the tops of mountains, especially in the winter: the solitude; the raw beauty; that particular, crystalline quality of air.

Jonathan attended the North Country School in Lake Placid for several years, and he had climbed a number of these peaks as a child, ridden through them on horseback, gone apple-picking and hauled sap out of the woods for maple sugaring. At his request, I photographed him with Cascade Mountain and its dramatic rock slides behind him: a favorite of those early days. He told me that when you hit the rock on the top of Cascade, it sounds hollow.

The father of a close friend (who we visited in the previous post) was the author of the Time-Life book on the Adirondack Park; reading it a couple years ago reminded J. of his early love for these mountains, and piqued my interest in exploring more. A while ago, we met our close friends Dave, Rachel and Lucy near Lake Placid, and went for a much less demanding but beautiful hike across the valley from Noonmark. With our other friends we had done easier hikes, and swum in the ice-cold Cascade Lakes, but this was the first time Jonathan and I had climbed one of the big peaks together.

Soon the school group departed and for an hour we had the summit to ourselves.

And then it was mid-afternoon, and time to start our descent. Going up, you have the challenge of climbing and all its aerobic demands, but in the other direction, you have the slowness of picking your way down steep ledges and stone steps, and rocky, rooty ground that's covered with fallen leaves, but the worst is the ever-increasing pain in your knees. Poles help, but this descent was steep and long, and by halfway my skiing-damaged knees were really yelling at me; meanwhile there was less and less light on the trail so we needed to keep moving. We were glad when we finally came out of the woods and reached the parking area. Soon the full moon rose over the Ausable River, and kept us company all the way back to Montreal.

This morning, I was less stiff than I thought I'd be, with minor blisters on both big toes, and the knee, which hadn't swollen, had stopped complaining. Maybe we're not too old for this sort of craziness, after all.

All photographs (c) 2016 Jonathan Sa'adah

Lyre, Lake

When I was a young girl, my grandfather, who had a real estate and auction business and was also a skilled woodworker, gave me a pair of antique Hitchcock chairs. They were small, with low, caned seats suitable for a child, and traditional stenciled decoration, but instead of fruit or flowers, my chairs had a lyre in the center: I was the musical child. For almost sixty years, those chairs have been with me, too small and delicate to be practical, but impossible to part with because they were such an early affirmation from someone who didn't need words to tell me he loved and knew me. The cane seats have been replaced once, but the stencils are in remarkably good condition. I ate my lunch today, as I usually do, seated on one of those chairs, with its golden lyre pressed against my back.

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We slept in that bedstead with the carved lyre last week, while visiting friends on Lake Champlain, in a small old town that used to be the summer home of affluent families from New York City, as well as longtime local families. The town has the mansions and summer hotel one might expect, but the storefronts along the one main street are mostly empty now, the hotels and inns turned into rental apartments, or even torn down. So, the town and the lakeshore were quiet except for migrating flocks of Canada geese and smaller groups of ducks, or the occasional hawk or vulture or heron overhead, and the lake itself was calm, with long ripples instead of waves that caught the light and slowly progressed from the opposite shore towards us, as if a long knife had sliced the water at an angle from below.

Our hosts took us for a short but steep climb up a nearby mountain, to a rock outcrop that gave a panoramic view of the high peaks, the lake, and Vermont's Green Mountains beyond it; we lounged on the warm rock, eating apples and almonds, while their basset hound crunched acorns with his strong teeth. My knees were grateful for collapsible hiking poles, especially on the descent, but we were happy to find we were in pretty good shape for hiking.

 

Later, we sat on the porch in sweaters, drinking vodka and eating homemade gravlax, watching the lake until the sun set, and then ate dinner at the kitchen table, and talked into the night.

Camel's Hump, in Vermont, seen from the New York side of the lake.

In the morning, a long breakfast of eggs and Montreal bagels with labneh and grilled peppers, another walk, and then a slow drive back to the city, along the lake for a while. We stopped at a farmstand where workers -- there to dig potatoes? pick cabbages? apples? -- were sleeping in the grass under the trees, and again for lunch at a diner in a deserted village, bought some apples at an orchard, and made it back to Montreal in time for choir rehearsal, feeling like we had been away far longer than we actually had.

 

Petite histoire

The young man stood in the narrow entrance to the studio parking lot, and as I approached on my bike I could hear him talking excitedly to a handful of others standing near the building's doorway. He wore a dark coat and had long unkept hair, and seemed like he might back up into my path at any moment, so I carefully made a wide circle around him and continued on to the bike rack in the corner.

I was removing the key from my lock and gathering my things when I looked up to see him walking toward me. In one hand he carried a long wooden staff, and around his neck was a polished amulet that seemed to be the front tooth of a large animal. His coat flapped around his ankles as he came closer, and he met my gaze with a wide smile.

"Madame," he began, in heavily-accented English, "you see, this is the bizarre part of the movie." He held out his hand. The fingers were clutching a small spray of crushed purple flowers, which he laid carefully on the rack of a bicycle near mine, close enough for me to reach. He swept his empty hand back in a knightly gesture, and smiled again. "If you have nothing to talk about with your colleagues today, you can tell them that someone gave you some flowers."

"Thank you," I said, smiling back at him and bending toward the flowers, but by the time I touched them he had already turned and was walking away, a crow-like apparition about to take flight.

In the studio, I laid the flowers on my desk, and noticed that a long dark hair, definitely not mine, was entangled with them. The flowers looked sad, but it felt wrong to throw them away, so I put them in a tiny vase of water, and now, this afternoon, they've completely revived.

Cosmos and Anemones

And for those who found the previous post too cranky, here's something less so. We're getting to the end of flowers in the community gardens now, when all that's in bloom are various late-season yellow daisies, asters, and the last of the annuals. These cosmos and anemones are still looking good, but we've been close to a frost this week, although it's still a bit early for that. This morning was downright nippy as I rode my bike to the studio, but it warmed up mid-day. Montrealers will keep the summer going as long as they possibly can, though I've already seen some recent immigrants bundled in parkas, and I feel for them!

 

The New Empires, and We Their Subjects

"We enjoy the bounty of their empire. Free services, easy communication. The ever-expanding convenience of commerce. We leave it to the media companies to worry about the empire’s tribute for this bounty..."

Please read these two recent articles about Facebook and Google. I have never liked FB, but maintain a presence because some of my family and friends only communicate there, and because social media have been necessary for my publishing business. But I am going to be minimizing my FB use even further in the future, and taking further steps to own and control my own presence on the web. Disentangling from Google is much harder, because a lot of what Google does is fantastically useful. However, I'm using a lot of third-party, open-source apps for my phone instead, and will be reviewing all my communications to try to use alternative methods. Do you check the permissions that are requested when you install a new app on your phone? Believe me, you should.

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From today's Guardian, by Ellen P. Goodman and Julia Powles:

Facebook and Google: most powerful and secretive empires we've ever known

and from The Intercept, by Glenn Greenwald:

Facebook is collaborating with the Israeli government to determine what should be censored

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I'd also like to recommend this recent essay from New York Magazine by longtime blogger Andrew Sullivan:

I Used to Be a Human Being
Sullivan writes: "An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me. It might break you, too."

I did notice that Sullivan live-blogged the recent presidential debate, so he's back at it, at least to some extent. But the point I want to make is that we really need to think about how we use the internet and how it is using us.

Thank you for reading this far, and now I'll get off my soap-box. (Wonder how many readers know where that expression came from?)

Recent Drawings and Watercolors

Well, I certainly haven't been writing here much, but I've been busy with book projects, the start of choir season, preparing for a wedding of dear young friends in Vermont this coming weekend, having guests and seeing friends as summer winds down into fall. Our weather has been pretty much gorgeous here in Montreal, still warm enough for t-shirts and sandals, so it doesn't really feel like fall yet except, of course, it is. The evidence is in the hint of color in the trees, a few fallen leaves, the markets overflowing with cabbages and cauliflower, apples and late berries, the last of the sweet corn, colored squashes, baskets of tomatoes, armfuls of basil. In the evenings I've been drawing, and as usual some sort of flowers or plants tend to make their way onto the page. In my community garden there's not much left in bloom except some beautiful Japanese wind anemones, which look so pretty with the magenta flowers of cosmos.

I just haven't had the kind of quiet time lately that's necessary for writing, and I'm not sure when it will open up, or what form it needs to take, but I feel an increasing need for that to happen. I'm considering what I want to do with Phoenicia in 2017, and with my own projects that have been on the back burner for too long. A recent birthday has also figured in this equation, reminding me that time does not hold still. I need to reassess priorities and make more room for the things I really want to do.

But what exactly are they? Why, I wonder, is it sometimes so hard to figure out what we really want, even when we have the freedom to make those choices? Why is it so difficult to balance our own needs with those of others, and with the many responsibilities and genuine joys in our lives that often compete with each other for attention? 

 

I've always loved to cook, for instance, but I've noticed that when I stay at the studio until 5 or 6 and then go home to prepare a meal in a short amount of time, I don't enjoy it nearly as much and even resent it, because I haven't had any time to unwind or rest before starting yet another task. When I go home earlier, with some time perhaps to stop at the markets for special provisions, or sit down with a recipe book and try something new, it's a pleasure and I enjoy it. But, of course, that takes time away from the studio. And so it goes...There's no right answer, but when I feel that tightness that signals resentment and too-muchness, or I feel a longing because I've been away from something I love for too long, it's time to pay attention and make some changes.

Women, in particular, seem afflicted with this problem, as I've written here before, but I'm surprised that it persists so long in our lives. That means it's ingrained; I was taught by my mother that being selfish was just about the worst thing imaginable. Christian and Buddhist philosophies piled on top of that, and as a result no amount of feminism or rational intellectualism have ever managed to completely rid me of guilt when I choose myself over the needs of others. And I bet it's the same for many of you. Looking back from later adulthood, now, I do think that being kind is just about the most important thing, but not through sacrificing or suppressing one's own needs or happiness. I've been fortunate to have more freedom than most women to develop my own sense of self, and to have a partner who encouraged that, but the external and internal pressure to give away my time to others has always been enormous. On the other hand, there is a balance for me between solitary pursuits that may be personally rewarding, and being in relationship and community: I need other people, and I love other people, and genuinely want to be of use in the world. So the dance continues, and we adjust our steps...where do you find your own answers to these questions?

A Note to You, Dear Readers:

Thank you, always, for your comments. Usually I try to answer longer comments by email, but sometimes I don't manage to get to it, so please check back in the comment thread (such as on the previous post) as I almost always post my replies there. Some of you don't have working email addresses so it's hard for me to reply to you that way, too. Love to you all, and Happy September.

Skaftafell

Skaftafell. Pastel on paper, 23" x 18". (c) 2016 Elizabeth Adams

I've been missing Iceland, so I made a painting. Working on this pastel for the past four or five days has immersed me again in the autumn tundra vegetation and the breathtaking mountains near Vatnajokull, the largest glacier in Iceland (and also in Europe), where we were a little more than a year ago. As you can see in that previous post, the glacier is beyond these peaks, hidden by the clouds, but now and then they would part, and we could see it shining, so bright it almost hurt our eyes.

This view was from a hiking trail in the Skaftafell National Park, where we had climbed to see a famous waterfall, and then continued up onto the mountain above it to the west. I was a little reluctant to do this additional climb, and when I think of what I would have missed, it makes me cringe! We only encountered four or five other hikers on this leg of the trek, and we were alone at the top for nearly an hour. This is looking northeast; to the west the view looks down over a vast river-like glacier in the next valley; to the south is the huge black sand glacial outwash plain stretching for miles to the sea.

Here's the sketch that was the underlayer for the painting, which I like too.

I've been feeling word-less lately, so there haven't been many blog posts. But I've been busy in the studio; this is the second large-scale painting in two weeks, and I've been doing a lot of sewing this summer too, and working on two new books for Phoenicia. Lately I've had a little trouble with my back and it's been difficult to play the piano, but I can stand up and play the flute, so I've been practicing my old instrument a bit. And there is all that fabulous late summer produce to eat: we've had beautiful Ontario peaches, Quebec blueberries and strawberries, perfect corn-on-the-cob and tomatoes full of sunlight.

Sometimes it feels better to just make things and not talk too much.

It's still hot here, and I can hardly believe it's almost September. Have you had a good summer? Are you looking forward to fall?

At the Whitney

Looking northeast from the rooftop terrace of the Whitney.

The new home of the Whitney Museum of American Art stands in what's left of the meatpacking district, looking out over Greenwich Village, to the east, and the Hudson River, to the west. The grassy aerial greenway known as the High Line, built on an elevated former train track, begins here, three blocks south of 14th Street at Gansevoort, and runs north all the way to 34th. Last spring, we walked south on the High Line from that northern end, and noticed the new museum building in the distance, its rooftop terrace dotted with tiny people leaning out over the railings to look at the city: we wanted to be there too.

So, on an extremely hot day three months later, we took the subway from Brooklyn to 14th Street and walked toward this new urban landmark. We entered the cool air of the museum, bought our admission tickets, and immediately took the elevator to the top floor; there was just enough time to take some photographs before the rain began falling hard enough to drive us back inside.

We had come to see the new building and the views it affords, but also for a retrospective show of photographs by Danny Lyon, an early practitioner of street photography who has steadfastly maintained his 60s politics and counter-culture philosophies, right down to his refusal to use a digital camera.

At the entrance to the exhibition, J. and I drifted apart; we both like to see exhibitions at our own pace. My first impression was that this was a strangely-hung show, lightly-curated (always OK with me) and somewhat difficult to follow (rather less OK.) Gradually I understood the loosely-chronological groupings of work, and spent time with certain periods and photographs I liked the most, such as the portrait below.

Leslie, Downtown Knoxville, 1967

Lyon is perhaps best known for his photographs of Hell's Angels bikers, and for the series of images he took of the Texas prison system, where he became friendly with several inmates and was able to make intimate pictures that eventually became collected into a book. He has never been an excellent printer, and the silver prints in this exhibition were of uneven quality; his focus is on the content and what he is trying to say. Some of the prints from his personal archive include borders on which he has written commentary in black and red ink, going all the way around the central image. I found myself reading all of these, because they gave me insight into his thoughts and emotions, his humor, and his sense of the absurd and tragic. Always documenting in order to preserve something he cares about - as in a series of images of a part of lower Manhattan that was demolished - or to show the humanity of his subjects, what came through most strongly in the show was Lyons' sympathy to the poor and disregarded, and unwavering commitment to his own values over a lifetime of work.

The image below was one that I found particularly arresting. The use of white against dark, and the repetitive postures reminded me of the work of Diego Rivera, though Rivera was trying to glorify the labor of the common worker, while Lyons was showing us the labor of Texas convicts. Next to this image was a photograph of an inmate unconscious in the back of a truck, a victim of heat stroke after hours spent picking cotton under the relentless, indifferent sun.

The Cotton Pickers, Ferguson Unit, Texas, 1968.

Jonathan and I found each other, talked, floated apart again. He was having a similar reaction to the exhibition, but for him it was more personal. Lyon was both an icon of a particular type of photography that they shared, and a rough contemporary. His was a different life, based on different choices, but there were similarities too. If we hadn't married, I mused, J. might have had a career much more like this; the raw edges and grit and obsessive dedication were what he gave up in order to build a life with me. He was a better technical photographer and printer than Lyon, and he had had a clear vision and style at a very young age; in fact one of his own best photographs had been taken close to here in his early twenties, on the abandoned West Side Drive after part of it had collapsed, the new World Trade Center towers in the background.

J.'s first invitation to me, almost forty years ago, had been to come up to his place and look at some photography. As we got to know each other, much of our conversation revolved around that subject. He showed me the work of contemporary photographers he admired - Gary Winogrand, Bruce Davidson, Emmet Gowin, Danny Lyon - as well as older masters like Cartier-Bresson, Edward Weston, Disfarmer, Dorothea Lange, Paul Strand, Josef Sudek, and taught me how to look at images. I talked to him about design and art; our eyes developed along with our relationship, and we became each other's most trusted critic. Over the years we have gone to many exhibitions together, and even though I was more of a talker and commenter, and he was more the quiet observer whose astute comments would usually emerge later, we developed a pattern of looking and discussing that suited us both, and fed us and our work together and as individuals. We built a communication and design business, and set our own artistic practices aside for a time, while other people -- like Lyon -- struggled to sell prints and make books.

I thought of all of this as I finished looking at the last group of pictures, and went to sit in a quiet white room overlooking the river. Jonathan came and found me there, and we walked together through the museum toward the roof, where the sun was again shining on an even steamier city.

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Photography has changed, and people too.

At one pole you have this older tradition of photography-as-high-art, in which photographers who have passed through certain critical filters are exhibited and collected; even those who were once on the fringes like Lyons are now the subject of museum retrospectives. At another pole, photographers are pushing the art forward on new platforms like Instagram, where we view hundreds of images each day, and where our eyes continue to develop into new ways of seeing. The photobook, once the province of specialized gate-keeper publishers, is now possible for anyone to create. Meanwhile, photography and the masses have become welded together in an often-narcissistic symbiosis, through digital technology that is available to nearly everyone.

"Shall we eat on the terrace, or what would you like to do?" he asked.

"No, too precious, and I'm really hungry," I said. "Let's go get something at one of the Arab food trucks in front."

The sleek elevator whooshed down to the ground floor, and we walked outside, where we ordered two hamburgers and a banana-mango smoothie, and stood on the sidewalk to wait for our food. I slipped my arm around J.'s waist. "Do you have regrets?" I asked, after a few minutes.

"No," he said. "It was more important to me to have what we've had."

"But we have some more time now."

"Yes." He smiled, and after we ate, we stopped at a cafe for a coffee, and then walked all the way to West 4th, taking pictures.