Notes in November 10

Learning to See

Original Post: Monday, July 19, 2010

One always dies too soon or too late.

And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up.

You are nothing other than your life.

Jean-Paul Sartre

As a young humanities professor at Penn State University, I once described existentialism–and by extension a person’s life–by comparing it to a stone rolling down a rocky ravine. Its path is drawn by gravity to its ultimate stopping place. It rolls easily over smooth places, pebbles and smaller stones, is bounces off rough rocks, which alter its path and —if it is not stopped by something larger and stronger than itself—it eventually comes to rest among the rubble in the gully below.

Frank C. was one of my rocks and I tumbled quite a way in my life before I fully realized it. I was in high school when I met him—it must have been in the fall or winter of 1956. He was standing on the pedestrian sidewalk on the Minsi Trail Bridge, the ugliest of the three that join North and South Bethlehem. He was hunched over a camera and tripod, aiming west toward the smokestacks that lined the south bank of the Lehigh River.

I don’t know why I was walking in that area–it was at least a 20-block haul from where I lived on Goepp Street on the north side and I had never ventured there before. Whatever the reason, I can play still play the scene in my head, as if it were an eight-millimeter black & white movie clip. There were no other pedestrians on the bridge, except this man and his camera and me. A cold wind raised and lowered his light-colored overcoat like a flag. His collar was pulled up to cover his neck, but his crew cut head was bare. As I got closer, I could see a brick tied to the center of his tripod, for ballast, and that the camera was a twin lens reflex, a Rollei.

It was the first time I had seen one and probably the first time I had seen a real photographer at work. My camera was a Soligor, an inexpensive imitation of the coveted Rollei, and I was still at the stage of making contact prints and saving up to equip my little darkroom with an enlarger. It was like stumbling across Allah on the path to Mecca.

I remember the setting but I don’t remember the dialogue, but I’m sure it was the standard stuff. We had to have introduced ourselves. I learned that he was a college student and that the photos were for a class at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art. He liked photography, but his real passion was painting. When he was not at school, he lived with his family near Willow Park, a few miles from the bridge.

More important, he asked me what I saw when I looked through the viewfinder. I think I told him something that I would later elaborate into a short story, a vision that persisted with me for many years: that the grimy buildings of the Bethlehem Steel Company seemed like the decaying remains of some huge beast that stretched out and died along the riverbank.

He looked at me in a sort of breathless way, which might have been the cold, but later I noted was characteristic of him. In spite of his prominent nose, he breathed through his mouth. He shot me a small smile that verged on the ironic. When I knew him well, I learned that there was nothing ironic about him; the half-smile was part of his protective personality.

It wasn’t until I read his obituary more than half a century later that I was astounded to find out that he was 9 years older than me. In the three-year period that we were close friends—from the time we met on the bridge when I was 16 until I graduated from high school and went off to the Army when I was 18—I considered him practically a contemporary.

Reflecting on it, I think he may have been a bit “challenged,” as we say today. I don’t say this unkindly. If he had been a perfectly normal 25 year old I doubt that our meeting on the bridge would have been more than a “how-do-you-do, nice-to-meet-you, best-of-luck-with-your-photography, kid,” kind of thing.

I wish I had kept a journal. I was too self-centered to know that Frank was someone who would help me take fundamental changes in the direction of my life and I wish today I had a map of that journey. I can’t remember how our friendship grew: it just seems to me that it appeared whole as if it popped out of some Greek god’s head.

I have vignettes: visiting his family’s home, a large cozy farmhouse set off on an acre or so of land. Everyone in his family seemed unique, perhaps eccentric, especially compared with my pabulum parents. I always felt welcome, especially by his mother Frances, who accepted me as if it was the most natural thing for her son to have a teenager as his best (and I suspect only) friend. She was the only one who really conversed with me. One thing she said has stayed with me all my life: “Ronald, it is better to be a heathen than a hypocrite.”

Frank’s father (his florid name was Florimond) shot out an occasional quip but was mostly a shadowy presence somewhere off in the living room. Frank had two sisters, Francine and Faith, whom I occasionally saw, and a brother (whose name I don’t remember, but that also started with an “F”), a mysterious man who secluded himself in the attic. I don’t think I ever saw him more than once or twice, although I visited the home dozens of times.

Frank’s room was in one wing of the second floor and it was a magical place. He had his easels and paints, a day bed, a stereo and a large collection of LP records. These were not the kinds of things that came on little, big-holed 45s, that lasted a couple of minutes each, and to which I idiotically sang when I was with my girlfriend or my cousins. And they were not the sedate Beethoven, Brahms and Bach that came to me on my own 33-rpm records that I received each month at home.

Frank had wild music, such as Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird, Petruschka, and the Rite of Spring. He was slightly deaf, so the volume was always high—no one in the house seemed to care—and he would paint furiously as I sprawled out on the day bed overwhelmed by the immensity of the sounds I was hearing. I am not musical, which you may know, but once I was fully engrossed in the music I would compose reams of stories, poems and images. I remember creating a prose poem to the Rite of Spring that Frank insisted I declaim—it had to be very loud—as the music filled the room and the house.

Also dramatic was his Mercury recording of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra:  La Marseillaise intertwined with a cacophony of grand orchestra sounds that reached a crescendo of church bells and cannon fire—if I had dared play it at home, instead of celebrating a victory it would have provoked a battle. On one unforgettable and unforgivable occasion we took turns anesthetizing ourselves with artist’s ether while under the spell of the music.

Frank loved ballet and much of what we listened to was music created for it. In December of 1957 he took me to New York to the premiere of Stravinsky’s Agon, performed by the New York City Ballet at the City Center. He was unable to see at night—so I was his guide, as he was mine. I was confounded and excited by the language of dance and the spectacle of music, muscle and motion.

He was a subtle but brilliant teacher. As he painted he would ask me, “What do you think of this,” as he used his palette knife to slice in contrasting or complementary colors. He always made me think that I was the expert instead of him—the best way to show an egotistical adolescent how to refine his sense of sight. When I picked up my own drawing pad or began dabbing paint on canvas everything I did was brilliant, according to him.

I remember one day we were in the Poconos on our way to a lake that we claimed as our own—it was about an hour’s hike from the road. I was taking photos of a ghostly forest of trees that rose starkly from stagnant waters, probably drowned, and I asked him how he would paint it. He said that he would never paint it. He would leave the details of the dark to me, because I could see into it and he could not.

When we got to the lake and we both started to paint, I was overcome by his ability to capture such things as the shape of a leaf, the tall, elegant form of a weed that rose up golden against the greens and blues of the mountain and the sky. As always, he looked at my painting and told me how original it was and that I should never let anyone tell me how to paint. He taught by example and by compliment, and he gave me no prescriptions.

The painting he started that day became the centerpiece of his first major exhibition. He asked me to give it a title and I called it “Golden Concerto.” After the show he gave it to me and it has had a place of honor in every house I have lived in. I often pause to look at it and remember that day and I still marvel at how he could mold paint into object and convert a simple plant into a symbol of the idiosyncratic beauty of eternal nature.

He took me to visit his college. I have a dim vision of his tiny room and of a large studio where he joined a handful of students sketching a nude model—and a brilliant recollection of days spent at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, bounding from room to room, dumbfounded by masterpieces.

He introduced me to the French impressionists and whenever we could arrange it we were off to see another collection: the Museum of Modern Art in New York for the Monet Water Lilies, the National and Corcoran Galleries in Washington, the Baltimore Museum of Art which surprised us with its huge Matisse collection. We traveled by bus, by train and in borrowed cars. With Frank as my Virgil, I was also traveling beyond the gray streets of a steel town into a universe of colors and sounds.

Not all of our time together was spent on such an exalted plane. I dragged him along with me on rock hunting exhibitions. Once night we crawled along the rocky fence line of his family’s farm, poor Frank stumbling and standing dazed in his haze of night blindness and me towing a black light looking for phosphorescent minerals. All I found was a horde of bugs attracted by the light!

Frank photographed my family and took my picture for my high school yearbook, photos that I still have today. He disappeared in the intervals when I was at school or he was at college or later when he was at work as a graphic artist in Allentown. Long periods would pass when we wouldn’t see each other, because I was at play or chorus rehearsals, in performances, at work on one of my odd, odd jobs, or consumed by the demands of my girlfriend.

When I left for the Army my most prized possession was an ersatz edition of Life magazine with my photo on the cover, a mock up that Frank made for me, really a tribute to our time together. Years later when I started to paint again I did it because of the confidence that he gave me and the conviction that whatever I did was alright.

There is a famous quote that sticks in my mind, “He came and unlocked the gates of light.” I think Claude Oscar Monet said it about the great painter John Ruskin, but I’m not sure. I do know that Frank C. came into my life and unlocked the gates of light for me and tuned my ears to music that I might never have heard.

My wife reminded me recently that we visited Frank shortly after we were married because I wanted them to meet.  It was the last time I saw him, since we lived—and grew—a thousand miles apart. His night blindness had come to shadow his days and his vision was almost completely gone. I hope that he knew that his eyes helped me to learn how to see.