Seeing and Knowing

One thing I love about winter is that when my husband Steve ends his landscaping season our conversations get more interesting. The winter is the time for the life of the mind and different types of creativity to emerge. Steve makes furniture, remodels rooms in the house, makes paintings, refinishes and reconstructs doors, and in the cold mornings between four a.m. and seven a.m., when he is usually organizing and loading machinery for a day’s work, he reads and writes.

This winter, we’ve been talking a lot about the meaning of the self and the meaning of time, started by the question, “Is there really such a thing as living in the present?”

This past year especially I’ve been being more conscious of my own memories. I’ll indulge in a surprising memory that floats through my head, sometimes telling Steve the story (poor guy), sometimes writing it down in as much detail as I can muster. I haven’t pushed on the memories the way I did when I regularly wrote poetry rooted in memory and association. It is more simple storytelling. It is like photography.

Twice in my life I’ve looked at a photograph and seen my own life. The first time was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where I saw a photo exhibit that included several by Dan Weiner. There in a frame in NYC was a photo of a “Party in the Tot Lot,” adults doing a sort of Virginia Reel in a small enclosure surrounded by brick townhouses that were unmistakably in my home town of Park Forest, Illinois. I’d lived there from a year old to six years old and it remains a magical place for me, where I experienced safety and a nurturing of my creativity and intelligence. I learned to read there. I explored the forest preserve with others and alone. I took long walks down sidewalks and through neighborhoods of identical houses, “the courts,” meeting people in my neighborhood, most of whom were kind and a few of whom were bullies. The world of the Park Forest Co-Ops was truly my oyster. In the gift shop, I bought as many of the post cards as I could get. Later I got a copy of America Worked, a collection of Weiner’s photos from the 1950s, the catalogue from a show at MOMA I had not seen, that had several photos from Park Forest in it. I framed the post cards, and recently framed a larger image of the Matteson, Illinois, train platform where I often caught the train. It was taken a decade before I was born, but captures the place and the identity of my home town and so, in some ways, of me.

Last week I bought the book The Universe Next Door, images by Abelardo Morell, from an exhibit of his photography at the Art Institute of Chicago. I bought it for the camera obscura images he has taken, including my favorite one, “Houses in Living Room, Quincy, Massachusetts, 1991.” That image wasn’t in that exhibit, but I was introduced to a lot of other gorgeous photographs, many of which make one think about nostalgia and childhood. And then one ordinary page, not my favorite image by far, stopped me short.

I wasn’t sure at first what I was looking at, in black and white, and in a way it resembled views of our prairie or garden at different times when hummocks of grass and dirt appear. So I read the title: “Shadows During Solar Eclipse, 1994.” Wait a minute. I was there. I saw that. And in fact I’ve been looking for it ever since.

I was in Chicago on May 10, 1994, when there was a good-sized solar eclipse across North America that lasted several hours. There was no totality, the sky did not go dark, but it was the kind of eclipse where you could punch a hole in a piece of white paper and see a perfect shadow of the moon crossing the sun on the ground. Punching a hole in a piece of paper to make an image is much like camera obscura, where you turn a room into a pinhole camera and create an image of what is across the street on the canvas of the room.

The thing about this solar eclipse, when I went out of the office where I was working to see the eerie light, to look through my poked piece of paper, was that all sorts of things became pinhole cameras for seeing the eclipsed sun. I heard on the radio that this was true, so not only did I look through my pinhole sheet of paper, which worked so much better than I remember a cardboard version working in grade school, but I also looked at the shadows on the ground cast by the leaves of a tree. It was incredible. The dappled sunlight took on the outline of the eclipse. There was a littering of eclipsed suns, of crescent suns, on the grass. Later a friend would tell me she and others were looking at the shadows cast through their hair, long and lifted up, with interstices for the pattern to sprinkle itself on the sidewalk.

That is what Abelardo Morell had captured in his photograph. I could see my memory of it, in green grass, on the sidewalk, in the dirt around the urban tree.

I don’t believe it is the goal of art to reflect one’s own life back to the viewer. In fact, what I love about Morell’s work is the way it makes me think about more complicated issues like childhood, language, place, and the stories we tell about place. Weiner’s images allow me to think about the complex story of America, particularly the suburbs and capitalism. But then on this day I saw an image from my own life, and for a moment I considered the complexity of all human life, and its constancy as we move forward, from past to future through the most fleeting of things, the present.