Category Archives: The Seawall

Recent interactions on a family basis have caused me to reflect. I thought I knew that person and I thought I knew me and what I have realized, if that is the word, is that neither that person nor I really know one another. I am not surprised at all. We go along, I go along, in our human dufflebags thinking that we are coherent, purposeful and with intention and we proceed in our daily affairs on gross assumptions and gross suppositions that we understand, that we are understood and that we have a handle on who we are and who that other person is until we are told something that rattles the cobwebs we have spun. In this way I experienced an insight into the Other which I sensed all along but kept on a subliminal basis — and  that someone else was close kin. Teiresias had a rough time with Oedipus. I am a little sad if not depressed by what I heard. Disappointed is the better word. Clarence Darrow said that the first half of our lives is soured by our parents and that the second half is soured by our children. So true.

Here I am on the downward spiral toward extinction and I must work on myself and work on the other if I can ever get across my disappointment. We are so blind to one another. In part this only serves to fuel my feelings about the species which is a world-wide dementia; we alzheimer one another — missed responses to missed questions, emptiness to substance and substance bouncing off voids. I laugh at media-clowns like Dyer and Dr. Phil and Deepak Chopra who argue, in part, that we are in “control” of our lives which is horseshit, plain and simple. I am lucky if I can get through the idea doing simple things like buying a newspaper. Anything more complex is thorny, is it not, reader?

Questions like these are rarely asked: why do you do that when I am talking about me? why do you bring everything back to you when I talk about my losses? why is it that you act as a non-participant observer in our relationship, like a German in the fields watching trains rolling by with Jews on the way to Auschwitz? Why are you so unwilling to stand by me? How close do I have to be as a father or mother to get your commitment to me as a child? why are you so oblivious to yourself, for this makes you oblivious to me? and why do I pull my punches with you, fearful that if I tell you of my pain you will go away in a huff? I thought we were connected and I guess I deluded myself, once more, that we were. We are in effect disconnected. Is it solely my job to inform you that the tracks have broken off? you cannot see while I see. This is the conundrum. How do you help the “blind” to see especially if you are the aggrieved one? It apparently is double-duty, is it not, my close one?

I believe in my case only that I write to create solace for myself, to mend my wounds with the cobwebs of paragraphs and well-wrought sentences and completed stories and novels. I take my soul’s paw and remove the thorns and apply poultice to the inflamed sore. I do that because ultimately self-sufficiency rescues who I am although I’d rather have the other tend to me compassionately. I write to self-succor myself and that is nowhere as vital and alive as having the other apply tenderness, care and love. The cards have been dealt in my life and I play my hand as it is. And I will fold ultimately.

“Hell is other people,” Sartre wrote in No Exit. So true. What greater hell can there be than to be alienated not only from one self but others. Early on in my young adulthood I read the Existentialists. I found it appealing, brave, courageous and stoical. I liked the idea that we define outselves. Fads come and go but I believe Existentialism had it right about our very existence. It is cold out there, cosmically cold; it is lonely out there, very lonely; and we only have choices to make, often tragic ones. The story goes that in a Latin American banana republic a dissident was arrested and brought to the top of a mopuntain to be executed. Binding his hands behind him, the scaffold erected, the Commandante was not done with his prisoner. He brought his teen-age daughter and wife before him and as he began to disrobe and rape them before the man’s eyes, the prisoner turned around and leaped to his death. In this instance suicide was an act of courage as Camus has explained so well. He took power from the Commandante; he chose to die rather than to see such horrors. I wish I had that kind of courage, but since I have not been tested in such a manner, I try to be courageous incrementally, for the goal is an admirable one in my eyes. I choose. I must choose. I cannot leave that in the other’s hands. It is I who must stand firm, to confront, to take on, to point out. Not easy at all. I will do it.

It was a Kodak Bantam camera with a lens that folded out on a rail, very charming and dainty, with little metal knobs to set the f-stops and one to set the shutter. You could put it into the palm of your hand like some inlaid treasure of inestimable value. Because it was so miniature in consequence, I honored it so much more. I did not treasure things for their material worth; I treasured them for their personal meaning to me, the decorations of my life as a young boy. The camera used 828 film which is no longer available –again, we are given immediate obsolescence, such as digital cameras having taken over from film. A recent read through camera magazines informed me that I was “obsolete.” I will always be a film man.

The tiny Kodak was a pleasure to hold in my hand as I was growing up. Many snapshots were taken of my sister and I with it. The snaps were 3 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches I believe, as memory fails me. The edges were scalloped as was the fashion then, and I never saw a color snap made with that camera nor a slide. It was encased in a leather case and by the time I gave it over to my son the case had fallen into such decay it was of no consequence.  Jordan has it now as he has my Nikon FE as a personal gift to him. It had replaced a Pentax K1000, great little camera to learn about depth of field and f-stops. I bought the Nikon in 1979 and for about two decades I photographed and registered our family lives together. I made sure that I was in the shots for too often fathers record and leave themselves out. Several years back, 1999, in fact, Rochelle died and I purchased an expensive non-digital camera for my son at B&H in New York City, the place for camera buffs. It was a grand and well worth it; he was aching with the loss of his mother and so was I. It was a mutual gesture, to make “merry” to alleviate the sadness. I was in such agony, and so was he. Unmentioned agony is so heavy to bear. I had to make my way into relating to him in a whole new way. I was no longer the father within a context, I was the father in a photo whose other half had been torn away — Rochelle, she who always photographed so well.

Somewhere in his house in Chicago two cameras rest, one has the history of my childhood molecularly integrated into its dark bellow and interior case, and the other has Jordan’s history as a baby, toddler, adolescent within its more modern and intricate recesses. I fantasize late at night  that both cameras chat about the places they have been, the scenes set forth before their eyes, the care by which they were handled and the value given to them by their owners. I hope they exchange photos and comment about skylight and polarizer filters, camera errors as well as camera tips that the owners should have been aware of. And I hope in solemn pleasure they mourn the loss of the faces of those who have gone on. And I am sure that the little Kodak will mention to the very sophisticaded Nikon that the greatest picture of all was taken in 1969, a picture of Rochelle sitting in the passenger seat, window down, and resting her arms on the 65 Mustang — top down — convertible and looking at me with all the love she could give, she of the Hedy Lamarr face, European, Mediterranean and Hebraic.

I am thinking of what photo that the FE might crow about — I have no idea. I do know that Rochelle would choose those pictures in which she is sitting in Amish country with Jordan and Brett as small children, to the right and left of her, on her lap, her arms embracing them. Oh, mothers, how often so cannily wise about what is important and what is not.

After Rochelle had died I went for a new camera as well, a point and shoot compact, Ricoh GR1s. I give its nomenclature because I give it respect. Do not chuckle — do you step over a worm during a rainy day or do you thug it to death with your shoe? The camera is terrific but not reliable in terms of mechanicals. Recently I had it repaired for I was not going to go digital. I love retro, I love that which does not expedite me. New is not necessarily better — growing old has taught me that; it is only the press of culture to advance speedily, quickly, to nowhere. Digital is Iraq.

When it is my moment, I hope Jordan retrieves my Ricoh and places it with the other two, for in the grand sweep of time he too will be remembered. Do not shy away from the inevitable, reader, for in its dramatic and sad-tinged feeling, we can carve out a presence of meaning, whether for ourselves, or for those dear to us. In a way I die every and each day, but I note that, I feel it deeply, I taste the loss and in some casual or remarkable way, it makes tomorrow more to be cherished and this very moment most important — and endearing. All is in loss. Despair is for those unaware and unawakened.