For a few minutes each week, I’m reminded of how caring and artful radio can be.
John Rosenthal’s weekly commentary on WUNC-FM, the public radio station in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is an anomaly in a largely impersonal medium. His observations about art and photography and children and lost love are intelligent and candid; he’s a man who can talk about beauty, about “the gift of sunlight on an unmade bed,” and still acknowledge the darkness and confusion inside him.
It’s too bad a show like this doesn’t have a wider audience. Instead of the vapid hucksterism of commercial radio and the stultifying boredom of much educational broadcasting, we could use more human voices.
We’re thankful to WUNC (91.5 FM) for permission to print these commentaries. Rosenthal, a writer and photographer whose work has appeared in The Sun, lives in Chapel Hill.
— Ed.
Sometimes people ask me a question to which, over the years, I’ve given a lot of thought. They ask me: how come, if you’re a photographer, you don’t carry a camera around with you? Of course, what they mean is how come you don’t carry a camera around when you go to see the Bulls play in Durham, or when you walk around Chapel Hill on a Sunday afternoon, or when you go to a party and lots of your friends are there? How come you don’t bring your camera to concerts where people are already dressed up as if begging to have their picture taken? They’ll ask me: what happens if you’re walking down a street without a camera and something incredible happens, say, a beautiful woman in a blue dress starts singing in the middle of traffic, or a tiger escapes from someone’s back yard and finds himself trapped by the fire department on top of an abandoned gas station? Don’t you wish you had a camera with you at these times? Well, the answer is: probably. It would also be nice if I had color film in my camera so I could at least catch the blue of the singing woman’s dress, or if I didn’t have color film at least have a yellow or orange filter, so the tiger pacing up and down on the roof of the gas station could be seen against the illusion of a blue sky, since if you use black and white film in a camera without an orange or yellow filter a blue sky turns out pure white. I’d have to have a few lenses, too, to cover emergencies. What if the fireman wouldn’t let me get close to the tiger and all I had was a wide-angle lens? Later it would look as if I’d taken a picture of a gas station, period. It gets complicated after a while carrying a camera around, constantly making decisions about what kind of photographs you’re going to take of the world.
Well, I don’t carry a camera around much, and here’s the reason, which is a personal one. Thirteen years ago, when my child was born, I had decided to be present at the birth, to help my wife in her labor as well as I could. There were techniques for proper breathing which I could help with, encouragement, conversation to pass the time in between contractions. I also had my camera by my side, primed with Tri-X film and a suitable 50mm lens. Now, as far as births go, it went pretty well, but needless to say, when the time came for the actual birth, I felt pretty tense. At such a moment, even in the world of modern medicine, questions of life and death are not beside the point. Since my role in the birth had been taken over by the delivery room crew, it was time to reach for my camera. To be truthful, I had almost forgotten it in my anxiety.
I found myself a proper angle of vision, checked out all my readings, and started to compose the photograph which I should take at the moment of birth. Behind the lens, I noticed something interesting: my anxiety was miraculously dropping away. I was thinking about how I was going to get a good picture. In other words, I had left the world in which I was an emotionally involved participant, and had become instead a spectator, one who was making art out of a moment of travail, out of a moment in which I found myself at such a distance from everything in front of me that you could say I wasn’t even there. And when the doctor finally held a gasping infant in the air, I took a picture. Was it a good picture? Well, all newborns look pretty much alike, don’t they? The question that remains, however, is this: is the photograph we get always worth the distance we put between ourselves and the world? I answer: sometimes; sometimes not.
A few years ago I found myself walking down a street on my way to visit a friend who was staying with her grandmother. I had no reason for feeling jubilant that day, but the minute I got out of my car, that’s precisely how I felt. It suddenly seemed as if my eyes couldn’t get enough of the day. I was on a small narrow street of tall two-story houses where only a small driveway separated the parlor of one house from the bedroom of the next. This was in a part of New York City called Forest Hills, and Queens Boulevard with its loud commercial traffic was two blocks away, but here there were only the sweet sounds of an ordinary day. Birds were calling back and forth to each other, the shrill cry of children on their bikes could be heard along with the sound of a car driving by. For some reason, it seemed like paradise to me. I felt momentarily as if my eyes had never looked upon a more beautiful world; they were cataclysmic with joy at what they beheld. And what did they behold? Well, nothing beyond the ordinary: leaves falling in the small yards of narrow-gabled old homes, uneven sidewalks broken in places by the roots of the oak trees which lined the simple street. And a few hours later, when I told my mother where I’d been, she told me that I had spent the first four years of my life less than three blocks away from the street on which my friend was staying.
I never understood this experience, nor even realized that I had had an experience, until last week when I looked at Gregory Conniffs new book of photographs, Common Ground, and read his amazingly eloquent prefatory essay, “Why a Camera.” In this essay, Conniff describes how, as very young children, we undergo an immense experience with our eyes, which is nothing more or less than seeing the world before language has dictated to us the meaning of that world. Now if that doesn’t sound like much, that’s only because ever since childhood we’ve allowed words, our own words and other people’s words, to define what we’re feeling and thinking and hearing and smelling and tasting — words, without which we can hardly imagine a human culture, but which paradoxically, by their very dominance over our senses, have greatly inhibited the possibilities of human experience. What do I mean by that? Simply that we grant words permission to represent things they only stand for, as when we see a landscape pulsating with color and energy, and we say, “Isn’t it beautiful,” even though at that moment we are experiencing no beauty, which is a kind of wild harmony of the senses. Words bind us to other men and women by permitting us to agree about the identity of things we have in common, which later we will argue or sing about. But in the very act of creating shareable meanings we commit a kind of crime against ourselves, by letting words stand for such things. The world may benefit by such an exchange, but we, actual human creatures, pay a heavy price. The specificity of our life on earth is exchanged for abstraction — color, line, shape, stink and blossom. All become words, and as we grow up we put away our laughter and our silliness and our childish noises, the great sensory hilariousness of our young lives. We pick up a few notions about proper behavior, like what books to read and how to go about getting married and buying a home and being polite and having cocktail parties, even knowing how to act at them, and the next thing you know, the little child — who was also an enormously alive sensory apparatus — is just another boring adult going to work in a seersucker suit with a briefcase. Now this may be the way the world is able to continue, but I have my own suspicion that every time a grown-up picks up a paintbrush, or sits down at a keyboard, or feels the desire to take a photograph of something, that it’s really a protest against this conversion of real experience into mere words, a protest not against growing up, but of growing up without our senses.
Now, do you see why I felt jubilant on that day I walked down an ordinary street in Forest Hills? My eyes, usually dulled by habit, were stunned by seeing for the first time in years the world on which they first looked. They were surprised to find themselves looking at the one spot of earth where they first became aware that they were eyes — aware of color, of movement, of the space between things, and the things themselves. We all have our spot on this earth where our senses came into their own — it could be the city, the country, the suburbs — but wherever it is, we’ve probably lost track of it. And, I suppose, most of us never find it again, spending our lives in the world of words and in the world of notions which words create. But if someday you feel yourself unaccountably happy, then open your eyes and look at what’s in front of you, because what it probably is, is yourself.
When I was a little kid, I had one advantage over all other little kids: my father was Joe DiMaggio’s lawyer. I can’t think of any fact in my life which was so important and as basic to my existence as the air I breathed. Around the age of eight or nine, when you would belligerently exchange facts with your friends about your father — how much weight he could lift or how fast he could drive — in 1950 the fact that my father was Joe DiMaggio’s lawyer was so big a fact that my friends wouldn’t even believe it. Whenever these friends would come over to my house to play they would ask my father, “Mr. Rosenthal, are you really Joe DiMaggio’s lawyer?” And when my father would answer that he was, they would look at him for an extra second or two, actually see him for a moment through that vague blur that all adults are to children. Of course to us kids coming into baseball awareness right at the end of DiMaggio’s career, even Joe was a kind of blur, a legendary name like Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth; it was only as we got older and realized how difficult it is to be really good at anything that we got to know something about DiMaggio. He was not only good at something, but great and wonderful. His 1941 hitting streak of fifty-six games was ended in front of a crowd of 57,000 at Cleveland when Ken Keltner made two spectacular catches of DiMaggio line drives. But the hitting streak ended only for the record books; Joe went on to hit safely in the next twenty games — a feat beyond talent, for it describes character, rock-hard character. And it is just this fact of character which makes his record in today’s game, a game played by high-rolling multi-millionaires, the one record in baseball that will never be toppled.
When I was ten and my brother was fifteen, a year after DiMaggio retired, my father took us to the stadium for a game, and just before it started he whisked us into a room and there was the man himself, the Yankee Clipper. Then I shook his hand, and let me tell you something, awesome is the only word to describe it, not the awesome kids use today to describe the way a car looks, but the awesome that was once reserved for things like Mount Everest. To this day I remember that immense hand of DiMaggio’s, the size of a baseball glove. And then about five or six years ago, when I was visiting my family down in Atlanta after my father had mostly retired, he turned to my brother and me and said, “By the way, DiMaggio’s staying down at the Hilton for the Old-timers’ Game, and I’ve got to go down there this morning and talk some business with him. Would you like to come down there in a couple of hours and meet Joe? Would you still get a kick out of that?” My brother and I looked at each other as if to say, can you believe this man? So a couple of hours later, there we were, outside DiMaggio’s room at the Hilton and an imperious voice inside asked, “Who is it?” We announced ourselves awkwardly, and then the door opened and there was Joe DiMaggio again, the Bronx Bomber, a tall graying man, tense and unwelcoming, whose handshake now seemed like any other handshake and whose hand now seemed no larger than any other hand. Well, it must have been a bad day, for Joe was unhappy; he was physically hurting, and underpaid for the Old-timers’ Game, and maybe he wouldn’t do it anymore — he was too old for these things — and then there was some dissatisfaction with the Mr. Coffee contract. Finally I said, “Hey, Joe, who was the best pitcher you ever came up against?” and he didn’t take a second to say, “Carl Hubbel,” and I said, “What did you think of Mantle when he came up?” and he said, “Mickey Mantle, well, he was a very nice, strong kid,” and I realized I was going to have to be content with that. Then Joe went back to grousing about this or that and a little while later we all excused ourselves and left Joe looking anxiously out the window down into the parking lot.
Now you might be saying to yourself, I know what he’s going to say now: how sad it is that our childhood heroes grow old and lose their heroic qualities — Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away, that sort of thing. But then you’d have to think there was something fair about my brother and me, two boys bouncing into middle-age, sitting there in that room with the Yankee Clipper, all of our childhood expectations still intact. Well, there was nothing fair about it. Fair? What’s fair about having to conclude one of the greatest careers in baseball history after only thirteen years because of injuries? Do you think Mr. Coffee compensates for that? For that matter, what can compensate any of us for lost love, but particularly DiMaggio who lost it forever? No, you won’t find me saying anything about the Bronx Bomber but this: when you play ball like he did as a young man, you aren’t playing it just for yourself, you’re playing it for everybody. And why for everybody? Well, for the simple reason that the day arrives for all of us when we have to have something to remember, something to call us back to ourselves, something that is not likely to be better than the young DiMaggio, No. 5, moving gracefully through the solitary spaces of centerfield or standing at the plate, a bat in his hand, opposed forever in his youthful perfection to all the powers of mediocrity.
I was thinking about how I was going to get a good picture. In other words, I had left the world in which I was an emotionally involved participant, and had become instead a spectator, one who was making art out of a moment of travail. . . .
There was some indication recently that I had reason to fear for my health. I didn’t know at the time how serious the threat to my health actually was, but there’s no question that it seemed serious. There were tests to be run which took days. Once I requested some information about preliminary findings, which turned out not to be a good idea since they were ambiguously negative, whereas the final judgement was positive, or should I say, happy. Data was sent off to another state, to another institution, for an answer to a problem I might or might not have, and all that data was misplaced for ten days, and all the while I waited and wondered and grew somber and assumed that the confusion ultimately had its foundation in bad news. When you enter the land of the ill, you do what you can do. Perhaps everybody knows that. What you don’t know and what you’re likely to forget, once you know it, is how the world looks when your hold on it has become a little fragile, a little tenuous. With the thought that I might have a bout with ill health that could last for quite a while, I didn’t think to myself, “Oh no, I won’t be able to make photographs,” which is supposedly the thing I love to do most, at any rate the thing I’m best at. I thought instead, “No, I’m going to lose contact, for a while anyway, with the world, which is what I take photographs of.” I didn’t think how sad it was that I wasn’t going to get to take pictures of winter landscapes, whether they be in North Carolina or New York City; what I thought was, “I’m not going to have the winter, the winter itself; forget the photographs.” I wondered, “Am I going to be in a room somewhere, perhaps feeling badly, unaware of cold, bright, piercing afternoons when the sky is so blue that it hurts even to think about it, as blue over North Carolina this one time of year as it is over Texas?” Boy, do we take the world for granted, and isn’t it almost impossible to know that we’re doing it?
No, it wasn’t photographs or the world of art that I was going to miss; to tell you the truth, from the perspective of ill health, art seemed to me just a pleasant middle-class activity, and all my sensitivity to it just something that came with the territory of having been a lawyer’s son. As artists, we convert the world into a spectacle from which we are denied participation, by virtue of being outside of that world, observing it, structuring it. To me, it sometimes seems almost impossible to live authentically in the world while trying to convert it into art. Am I perhaps not doing that right now? All those hours spent in the darkroom perfecting a certain gray tone, all the discipline of timing, rhythm, and spontaneous calibration, and all of the hours used up in figuring out where one is going to point the camera, well, I guess this is the way I live my life and this is what I do. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could sometimes have the world more on its terms and less on mine? I’ve spent so many hours in the past few years thinking about photography that I can’t remember taking my wife dancing even once in the last year. With the thought that I might be ill for a while, that was what bothered me the most — that I hadn’t been dancing in a year. I mean, how did I ever get it in my head that being an artist was more important than dancing with my wife? Most of my life I’ve heard that art is the intensification of life itself, but I’ve had the suspicion (and I have it now more than ever) that the people who say that sort of thing have long ago stopped paying attention to the shape of an ordinary afternoon, or to the gift of sunlight on an unmade bed.
Well, the word is in now that I’m OK, and will probably enjoy good health over this Christmas holiday and into the New Year. And of course, being human, I’ll probably let my insight into the primary beauty of life itself grow vague and disappear from my consciousness. Maybe it’s not even a very good insight. Maybe we don’t get to have the world the way I want to have it right now unless we leave it, go into a seclusion without all the impingements of our confusing responsibilities, our families, our car payments . . . and simply celebrate the obvious things in front of us like rain or winter or the smell of earth. Maybe we have to become ill before we can do justice to the beneficence of good health. I don’t really know the answer to this question.
All my life I’ve heard the expression: a photograph doesn’t lie. But the real truth is that photographs do in fact lie about some things, and not about others. Is this what Diane Arbus meant when she wrote, “A photograph is a secret about a secret?” I loved a woman once who left me with very little warning. Had love blinded me or was I merely self-centered? For five weeks I felt a lover’s anguish. And then it was gone. I questioned myself closely: were feelings being hidden, disguised, outgrown?
Five years later, I looked over the contact sheets of photographs taken during the years of our romance. Her image appeared everywhere — from the beginning when everything was a sweet tempest, to the end when long silences occurred regularly. I thought to myself: these pictures will tell me something, at least something about myself. I have had five more years of sense and experience; surely I stand a good chance of finding out something about her that I didn’t know at the time?
With all those small images spread out before me, I began to look. There she was, as I photographed her, large-eyed and dramatic. I remembered when I took every picture — moments of mutual travail were recorded, moments of high-on-the-hog. In these photographs she was most presently there, a good image for any photographer to come upon.
But I began to notice something I had never seen before — and it is fair to say that it was the secret of these photographs, the one they concealed from me until I least needed to learn it. To put it simply, her image was there, but she wasn’t. What I beheld was a version of self which continually changed, and always for the benefit of the camera. For just a moment I felt a huge abyss had opened up at my feet.
Like many women who have spent a great deal of time in front of mirrors, she had become precisely aware of herself from the outside; in fact, she had come to dwell in that outside image of self. The version of self which I recorded in my photographs was only the one she deemed appropriate for that occasion. It was, in other words, what was allowed me. When it was time to be sad, she was sad like an actress is sad; when I dared the camera to find an image equal to our joy, there she was, as if looking at an angel for approval.
Am I suggesting that she wasn’t as alive as I was? There is plenty of proof to the contrary. Nor would it be fair to say that, wearing so many masks, she was a creature of artifice, less real, say, than myself. Her tears, after all, tasted of salt and left a trail down the sweet dust of her face.
But if I may be permitted a metaphor to say something which is otherwise almost inexpressible, I would say this: her inner landscape was determined by conditions which didn’t really exist for me. Knowing how to react to almost everything, her skies had a finished look to them, a blue which promised not to cloud over just as the guests were arriving. She was not adverse, it seems, to being perfect. This was the secret of my photographs which came to me five years too late. But too late for what? The fact is that in my inner landscape it rains a great deal — and often at the wrong time: on days when a trip to the beach is planned, when the picnic is packed, when love has made a bed for itself in the garden. How often it rains at the wrong time. But oh, how I love it when rain pours out of the sky, ruining everything, all plans and projects and schemes and expectations, leaving me sitting in a dark house having amazing conversations with myself.
I thought I saw Beth the other day. I could have sworn it was she — a tall, young woman in a full skirt, wearing tall leather boots, her hair long and rippled like the sand after high tide, her long sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She even walked the same way, taking big, long strides, as if the only thing she ever wanted to do was walk — not those huge strides which suggest defiance, but more a merry walk that borders on self-admiration.
What reminded me of Beth also had something to do with where I saw her walking. It was one of those places where you might see Beth, but where you would never expect your other friends to be. Years ago, you might suddenly see Beth crossing the interstate miles from Chapel Hill, coming out of some nondescript patch of woods, some stray dog rambling in front of her. Or you might be driving down a small road in Chatham county, somewhere around Silk Hope, and there she’d be, bending down to pick up a piece of quartz or mica that had caught her eye. The woman I saw the other day was walking by herself, with no other pedestrian in sight, beside a detour around a highway construction near Duke Hospital.
Similarly, you would never be able to anticipate when Beth might show up in your life. Once, when I was living in the country outside of Chapel Hill, renting a huge house by a pond for seventy-five dollars a month, Beth showed up during a snowstorm asking for a place to stay, announcing with tears in her eyes that she’d just had her heart broken. One summer, I was staying with a friend in Boston in a little apartment he was renting on Beacon Hill, spending the summer there in the hopes of writing one or two poems that might be termed acceptable according to the ludicrous standards I was then setting for myself. I received a phone call from Beth, who told me that she was waitressing out on the Cape in Hyannisport, and that I had to take her camping that very weekend on the dunes by North Truro.
That weekend, high on the dunes above the unfamiliar sound of the ocean, on a night of a full moon, I woke around three o’clock and saw Beth, hundreds of feet below me, walking along the edge of the bright water.
Looking back now, it seems that while the rest of us were protesting the war and going after degrees and developing those abilities which in later years would enable society to define us, Beth was insisting on her right not to take herself too seriously; to make, as it were, a small art out of wandering around, house-sitting and putting together odd collections of found objects. She should have been an artist; in fact, she should have been a photographer, what with all that perambulation and unorthodox appreciation for the everyday. But as you already may have gathered, Beth believed that truth — at least when she would think about it — was to be found only in the heart of spontaneity, and that all the learning of technique which any art requires would eventually put a cramp in her soul. And furthermore, she liked to sleep very late into the morning, and after she woke up there just wasn’t that much time to get into the intricacies of self and self-expression.
No, it wasn’t Beth I saw the other day, striding along the road, her hair flying, ruffled in all directions, her sleeves rolled up to the elbow. It was a young woman who reminded me of her, that’s all. Beth’s forty years old or thereabouts, married to some fellow in microchips, and living presently outside San Francisco. Someone who saw her a couple of years ago told me that her hair was about two inches long. And as for her blessed spontaneity — I don’t know. She hasn’t dropped in lately, though of course she knows my door is always open.
