ON THE PASSING OF SEBASTIÃO SALGADO AND ALASDAIR MACINTYRE

I think those whose loss we most deeply feel says something about the culture of a people. After the brilliant poet (and sometimes essayist) Seamus Heaney died, I showed my students a picture from one of the Irish newspapers of the memorial service for Heaney, and there were Bono and other members of U-2 among those gathered to honor Heaney. It is a society that more deeply appreciates gifted storytelling and puts the past over making money from bulldozing it. I thought of that reverence again when Irish poet Paul Durcan passed away this past week.

I have felt very somber and thoughtful at news of the passing yesterday of the photographer-ethicist Sebastião Salgado, though knew he had been suffering from a leukemia, which apparently had developed from malaria contracted years earlier in his travels. He is probably the living photographer I most admired. I was very saddened, too, to hear of the passing the day before of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. While waiting for car work Friday afternoon, I was reading articles on the contributions of MacIntyre to public ethics. Places honoring him ranged from traditionalist Catholic journals to the Jacobin, whose author doesn’t quite get why MacIntyre moved on from being a Marxist and Trotskyist to being a Thomist thinker but saw some connections and very much praised MacIntyre’s concern for public virtue, particularly in a society that seeks to commodify and monetize whatever it can. I think it speaks well for someone when people of different views can recognize the good in you.

In fact, that, to me, is what was common with both Salgado and MacIntyre. Both believed in a public virtue, not just philosophically but each sought to live out a public virtue, using one’s resources and talents for a teleological end: what is the best use I can make of my knowledge and talents? People are probably less familiar with Salgado. The short version: he began as an economist, having studied in Paris, finding himself for a long time in exile from his native Brazil because of its right wing dictator. After picking up a camera his wife, Lélia, had bought, he saw that he could make more of an impact with his photography and photo-text exhibitions and books. (I’ve probably oversimplified.) Several of his books are about migratory patterns of people. He believed that, other than war and natural disasters that lead to famine and people’s being forcibly uprooted, people have been forced to migrate as capital moves. For anyone not familiar with Salgado, there is a deeply moving 2014 documentary, “Salt of the Earth,” put together by filmmaker Wim Wenders and Salgado’s son Juliano.

Salgado was eventually able to return to Brazil and used some of the proceeds from his photography work to rebuild deforested areas. (His father himself had sold off some timber land to pay for his children's educations.) The connection to the reforestation work, Instituto Terra, was spotty yesterday, perhaps a lot of traffic, but you can find it if interested.

I never had the opportunity to meet Salgado. Years ago, I heard he would be speaking at the International Center of Photography in NYC, on occasion of his traveling exhibit “Genesis” appearing there. I figured I could maybe afford the plane fare but couldn’t afford a hotel. I called up the bookstore at the ICP (having visited and purchased from them before) and asked whether I could pay them for a copy of Salgado’s book Genesis and whether they could ask Mr. Salgado to sign it along with the other books he would be signing.) They were happy to oblige, as was Mr. Salgado. So at least I was able to reach out to be one of many to express our thanks for his work.

When it came out, I saw “Salt of the Earth” locally at the Magnolia theater. Only two others were in the theater that evening, a young French couple. We all sat in quiet reverence. It is available in DVD/Blue Ray and streaming on several platforms. You can see the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgd3ZDtx8lg

WAFFLE CONES AND TRIPODS

In college, my housemate Joe and I would have fun with James Burke’s BBC production “Connections,” airing here on PBS. It was actually an interesting series, showing the connections between seemingly unrelated inventions or events in history, and we would catch it when we could. Sitting in a booth at Waffle House, after a night of studying, one of us would hold up a salt shaker or ketchup bottle or something and try to come up with a long, elaborate story of connected inventions. I was thinking of that this weekend as I looked through my tripods for one short enough for easy carrying but heavy enough to keep a larger camera steady for some light landscape photography. I compromised on an old Star D tripod, passed down to me by my photographer uncle (who helped begin my path in photography years ago). And here is my James Burke moment. The Star D tripod was patterned after the Tiltall tripod, a very classic design, still available today. Here’s the quick story. (You have to wait a moment for the tripod part.) In the early twentieth century, Italian immigrant Italo Marchioni, looking for a way for his customers to carry off their ice cream in cones, without their cones becoming too soggy, came up with the crispy waffle cone, taking out a patent in 1904. Making and selling ice cream was the family business, but, some time later, Italo’s son Caesar, an avid photographer, wanted a tripod head that would allow him to easily tilt his camera. So he and his brother Mark, in their free time away from the family ice cream business, developed a head that could be tilted in different directions to go on top of a tripod. So next time you’re eating a waffle cone, you can have your James Burke moment. (Or, better yet, when eating your ice cream cone while preparing to set up your tripod.) I actually don’t know of any physical lineage to trace between the waffle cone and a tilting tripod head (James Burke, still alive and active, perhaps could), but the boys had learned from their father how to see a problem at hand and think of how to create something to solve that problem.

I have a tripod ready now, and thinking of its heritage brought back good memories of past times with my late friend. And speaking of James Burke, this clip is considered one of the best segways in television (before CGI and AI, mind you, when we were smarter and had longer attention spans). Be patient. Wait for the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCJh5D0FCZk

Pausing to reflect and seeking to understand

In the little spare time I have, I’ve been reading a collection from a few years ago of Best American Essays for that year, as well as Hungarian writer László Földényi’s book Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts Into Tears. What they have in common is a fondness for “ekphrasis.” It’s a Greek word, “ek” meaning “out of” and “phrasis” meaning, of course, “phrase” but also something like “description.” So it is rhetoric in which a feeling or meaning comes from a detailed description of something, as if someone was pausing to reflect or meditate on a painting or other scene. Something like that. Which put me to thinking why “ekphrasis” is favored so much in a lot of contemporary essays and short fiction. In centuries past, it was used in essays because there wasn’t an easy way to convey a visual image (pre-television and all that, and even engravings costly), so words would be needed. Sometimes it was metaphorical, as showing an unfolding allegory. Some of the chapters in Melville’s Moby-Dick are good examples of this. Dickens developed his fondness for description and caricature in part from starting out as a legal reporter (as well as studying Addison and Steele and others who had come before him). Part of the increased use of “ekphrasis” in recent decades seems to be a desire for feelings of transcendence in an increasingly soulless society. The writer is saying, hey, stop for a moment, consider this. It’s not a bad thing to slow down and consider the scenes around us, and the folks around us, too.

Mr. Berry's clear, moral voice

For some comfort amidst the morally tortured presidential campaign, I've been rereading and reading Wendell Berry, including his most-recent essay, published in October in Christian Century. Mr. Berry, now 90, writes on our growing numbing to the killing of children in schools and our growing numbing to the killing of children elsewhere. Not so comforting a subject. What I find comforting is Mr. Berry's clear, moral voice. He is not distracted by financial profit or polls as the evidence of something's being worthwhile or any other moral compromise. Here is from the first paragraph.

"Since the Vietnam years, I have opposed our wars of national adventure, and I have opposed the extractive industrialism that passes with us for a national economy. I have opposed the dominant attitudes and technologies by which we are destroying, and have too nearly destroyed, the economic landscapes of our country, our country itself, our land. The different manifestations of our destructiveness are all parts of one thing: a global corporate economy concentrated upon the effort to turn to profit everything that can be subdued to its methods. Whatever cannot be made directly profitable—the lives and needs of children, let us say—it ignores and thus draws into the vortex of its destruction."

As an educator, I would add that, because we do not find profit in the lives and needs of children, we've also sacrificed the quality of their education and healthcare, but that is another topic.

His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice

Yesterday I was privileged to hear (and afterwards talk with) Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, who wrote His Name Is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice. The book won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in 2023, the authors presenting George Floyd as the complex person he was, making mistakes but always trying to do better the next time. The authors do not focus so much on George Floyd’s death as his life and the history of his family. The family were representative of what happened to a lot of black families, just one example being a great-great grandfather able to amass 500 acres of farmland, only to have it stripped away following Reconstruction. The book is exhaustively researched and beautifully honed in a literary journalism style. In fact, I would strongly consider using this book in a journalism or writing class if I were back teaching in the university.

The authors, speaking at Texas Theater in south Dallas, were here as part of the Hay Festival Forum Dallas; they were in conversation with Dallas Morning News Executive Editor Katrice Hardy. It would be well worth your time to make the next Hay Festival Forum here.

People who have appreciated the unknowable ...

This past weekend I processed some rolls of film and wrote maybe ten pages longhand, but I haven’t been sleeping well, and I also managed to read about a third of the way through Kevin Kileen’s The Unknowable in Early Modern Thought: Natural Philosophy and the Poetics of the Ineffable. In this 2023 book, Killeen looks at thinkers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who reacted to the growth of empirical thought as part of the so-called Scientific Revolution. Jacob Boehme, Thomas Browne, and John Milton are some of the writers Kileen examined. This is a very rough summary, but basically they did not believe that science alone could describe all of reality. At the same time, as part of the Reformation, they were wary of revelations claimed outside scriptures. There had been a history of misuse, for example, with relics claimed to be bones of apostles or people deemed saints placed in churches to encourage people to come to venerate. But how in their writing to talk about meaning beyond the scientific, how to describe that part of experience that seemed unknowable? It’s thoughtful reading.

For the past few weeks, I’ve also been reading some in the Anglican priest Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations (from the seventeenth century but not published until 1908), which sort of pairs well with Kileen's study. Here is a short excerpt from one of Traherne's meditations: “He thought it a vain thing to see glorious principles lie buried in books, unless he did remove them for his understanding, and a vain thing to remove them unless he did revive them, and raise them up by continual exercise.” I can see in this meditation about being somewhere between two worlds a hint of the later Romantic poets or even Gabriel García Márquez.

The cold could be worse ....

My sleep patterns have been dodgy in part because of temperatures below freezing and being in an old house, and I'm trying to get back on a better schedule. Today I happen to be reading through letters of Charles Dickens, and I shouldn't complain. Here from a letter to a friend, the letter dated 1 February 1861.

"You have read in the papers of our heavy English frost. At Gad's Hill it was so intensely cold, that in our warm dining-room on Christmas Day we could hardly sit at the table. In my study on that morning, long after a great fire of coal and wood had been lighted, the thermometer was I don't know where below freezing. The bath froze, and all the pipes froze, and remained in a stony state for five or six weeks. The water in the bedroom-jugs froze, and blew up the crockery. The snow on the top of the house froze, and was imperfectly removed with axes. My beard froze as I walked about, and I couldn't detach my cravat and coat from it until I was thawed at the fire."

Ten years ago ...

Ten years ago today, I sat in Westminster Abbey, quiet and drawing all in. About a thousand people from around the world had gathered for a dedication of a marker in Poets Corner for the writer C. S. Lewis. It was all very moving. The abbey choir sang a beautiful anthem composed by Paul Mealor and specially commissioned for the service using Lewis’s own poem “Love as Warm as Tears.” Douglas Gresham, younger stepson to Lewis (and who has tried in recent years to preserve the integrity of the Narnia stories as they have been filmed), also spoke at the service.

The "sermon" was delivered by former Archbishop Rowan Williams, an eloquent speaker and gentle scholar in his own rights. After Archbishop Williams’s remarks, the marker stone was unveiled where it had been placed in the abbey floor, and Walter Hooper, then 82, knelt down to lay the remembrance bouquet on the memorial stone. During parts of the service, I wept for this belated recognition by the English academic and religious bodies, not for any personal recognition to Lewis but that we might better understood his wanting us not to see the world as what our egos can construct but to learn to see and care about one another as spiritual beings.

You can find his full talk in online searches, but here is some of what Rowan Williams said. He had been talking about Lewis’s book Perelandra:

“But this wonderful and eloquent satirical scene is very typical of one aspect of Lewis’s apologetic that we sometimes overlook: his profound, sophisticated, and witty sense of the terrible things we do to language. You might even say that, for Lewis, the abuse of language is one of the things which would tell you immediately that you couldn’t trust someone, that the person you were listening to didn’t understand what it was to be human.

“Lewis is interested in de-mystifying the myths that we tell ourselves – the myths about the intrinsic nobility of the human race, entitled to exploit not only its own planet but every other one in the universe; the myths we tell ourselves about how our will and our imagination can somehow make us more than human. And in spelling that out, he shows us how the aspiration to become more than human leaves us profoundly less than human....

“Only the Word, the Word incarnate with the most capital of Ws, can save us, not only from nonsense, but from the self-consuming boredom of endless inhumanity, Unmanhood. And when we allow the Word to speak in us and to us, that is when – he says in a paper of the 1940s – that is when we learn how ‘to lay our ears closer to the murmur of life as it actually flows through us at every moment and to discover there all that quivering and wonder and (in a sense) infinity which the literature that we call realistic omits.’”

This year I've been helping others with their photography, too.

Besides working (successfully) on two long-term photography / writing projects, I’ve been busy this past year with a return to teaching full time, hence the absence from posting much. Long story short, but my undergraduate and graduate studies were a mixture of English, journalism, media studies, philosophy, and theology. This year I’m teaching a combination of English and photography classes in a secondary school. I was demonstrating to my photography students how to submit to competitions of the Association of Texas Photography Instructors. To show them the process of choosing images entering (putting in all the proper metadata), I used one of my own photos taken during the academic year as an example, a photograph of the Big Boy Locomotive 4014, on a promotional tour for Union Pacific.

The day the Big Boy had come through town, I took with me a square format film camera. Large crowds pushed down to the tracks to get a look at the giant steam locomotive, understandable, and I was glad that parents had an opportunity to show their children this part of our past, but blocking me from a good photo. I waited until the engineer began blowing out steam as the locomotive prepared to head out to its next stop. As people retreated back from the steam and soot, I moved forward into the hot cloud. With one eye on the viewfinder, I kept the other eye open to look about for the moment when the smoke would build up (for a kind of informal balance or “negative space” to the cab, the main area interest) and when there were lines of direction for the two men in the cab. I explained all this for my students, to help them in previsualizing their own photos.

To my surprise, the image I had prepared as an example for students took Best of Show in the Faculty Division of the ATPI competition. As well, some of my students, in what is the first year for this photography program, took home recognition in different student categories. A good example in another way for students, to put oneself out there, something not necessarily instinctive to us.

The photos not made

Over the years there have been many photos I’ve not made. Sometimes there was no good to be had from taking a photo. I’ve volunteered at a homeless shelter, where under the trees nearby are tents set up by some of those without a place to stay. (The shelter opens when days are too cold or too scorching for human safety.) I’ve seen the sun setting behind the rows of tents tucked back among the trees and thought what a striking photo that would be. But to what good? Would my striking photo change the hearts of people in the community to find solutions? This past year, I’ve been regularly making a long drive back and forth to East Texas to take someone I know, facing a court date for some criminal charges, to check in with authorities there. My friend’s story is a compelling one, with drama and pathos and, to boot, good visuals; but, in this case, my friendship means more than any magazine piece for me. Recently, while I waited for my friend to do the obligatory check-in, to calm my nerves I wandered about the hallways of the 108-year-old courthouse and came across a worn metal stand that must have in a previous existence held gospel tracts, when such was more tolerated. This was a photo I was willing to make. Truth, believe it.

John August Swanson

The visual artist John August Swanson has passed on, September 23, at the age of 83. I never met Mr. Swanson, who lived and worked out in Los Angeles, though I told myself I would try to visit him should I ever be out that way. The closest to any conversation was passing on some messages through his studio assistant. From everything I read or heard about him, he was a lovely, kind, humble person. I loved the iconographic images he created. I also deeply admired how he saw his art as possibly holding in his hands something humble and spiritual, at once convicting to the unrighteous and uplifting to those seeking a just path. I have a few of his works on the walls to encourage me to think along those lines, too (on the best of days), including a signed print of his adaptation of Psalm 85, the scripture embedded in the work:

"Justice and Peace shall kiss, Truth shall spring out of the earth. Kindness and Truth shall meet, Justice shall look down from the heavens."

 
 

Anne

My friend Anne Coulter passed away earlier this month. “Not the other Ann Coulter,” she would declare the first time she met you, wanting to make sure you didn’t think her politics or disposition were like those of the abrasive pundit. At one time, she lived down the street from me. If after a few days I didn't see her out, I would walk down to check on her. As others noted about Anne, she was a lovely, spirited person. An encounter with her left you cheered up for the good (and open to the spontaneous) in the world. Under “People” (and also below) is a photo I took of her some eight years ago. I liked how the late afternoon light of the summer day especially showed her eyes. When I asked her whether I could use her photo, I told her I would put it on my website alongside Rosa Parks and another Anne, Anne Braden. She appreciated that company.

 
 

A Habitat house in Louisville

Where I live, the application process for a Habitat home is underway. It is a great program. A few years back, I was walking around a “transitional” neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky, when I saw a woman out watering plants and adjusting the lawn decor in front of her house. I stopped to admire her work. She had decorated the house and yard to claim it as hers, and I complimented her on what she had done. She told me it was a Habitat house, and she proudly rejoined that she only had two years to go in paying for the house. I stopped to think today that it must now be all hers, and I am happy for her. She was shy to have herself in any photo and moved inside the glass front door while I took a half roll of film on my medium format camera.

A Time to Lament

One of my essays has been published, in The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, the literary journal at Johns Hopkins University. The title is “A Time to Lament,” speaking of a need to examine our lives and our responsibilities toward one another. A caveat: this has descriptions of racism and violence. Of course, I abhor the hatred and objectification of others, never mind violence against another person. Any is horrid. A piece of writing should ideally need no explanation, but in writing this I couldn’t help but be affected by all the terrible sadness foisted on us in this terribly heated, divisive time. In piecing this together from family history, I couldn’t help but be thinking, too, about casting off rhetoric of hate and seeking to advance to be better.

We allow the meanness.

I am so very bothered at all the meanness. I see on the local level some leadership and empathy. But a young person I’ve known (in his thirties) said a few weeks back to just let the virus spread, immunity would spread, and the fit would survive. He is Calvinist, is that part of his position? But I know other good people in that tradition. Argh.

Bottom line, folks in charge could not get away with callousness if there weren’t a sizable people who did not object, who didn’t show more self-interest than concern for others. I see that callousness in individuals, organizations, and even in some churches.

I am not talking about a particular political party. I don’t want others to use my words to start some back-and-forth bickering or attempts to score points.

No, I just want folks to stop and be kind. At every level. The Bible says we will be known by the way we treat the “widows and orphans,” in other words those without, whether today that is without shelter, a job, access to good health care, or a good immune system.

It is easy to try to please people who will help us get ahead, will help us earn a buck (or kickback), will help us get a job or promotion, are young and good looking, are fun to be around, or agree with us politically and theologically. But that is not how we will be judged in the end, to believe the scriptures.

Some Hungarian poetry

The Dallas Institute of Humanities & Culture is one of the places that keeps me sane. This past Monday evening you would have been able to hear some of the work from Hungarian poet Gyula Jenei, read by him, along with the flowing English translations from Diane Senechal. I did not understand any of the Hungarian except for the stray “loan word” from somewhere else, but found it beautifully lilting. It is an Ularic language, rather than a Romance language (as are Italian, Spanish, French, English, etc.). Words are often compounded with plenty of suffixes and occasional prefixes. All those poetic sound devices came through. Here is a link for one of Gyula Jenei's poems in the original along with Dr. Senechal’s translation, a poem I particularly appreciated.

Trying to measure for the good in the community

Here is what I did that was more uplifting this July. I was able to volunteer some at Monsignor King Outreach Center, a local shelter for homeless. (A lot of these folks are holding down jobs, folks, but can't afford rent. Put away any stereotypes.) I made a few trips out of Denton. A friend and I visited CitySquare in southern Dallas, perhaps the best model in this area for helping low-income folks with housing and work (though my being out in heat sent me to bed for the next two days). This weather plays havoc with my asthma. When the weather cools enough to lower the humidity and ozone, I want to follow up. I have only managed to do some photo work and have mostly just been developing film from earlier projects.

Mostly, besides doing some small repair projects inside, and visiting doctors, I wrote and read. For myself, I’ve been reading and rereading some of Simone Weil’s works. I especially recommend Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us and On the Abolition of All Political Parties. If you don’t know her work, she was a contemporary of the writers and artists connected with the French Resistance and French Existentialism. She attended the Sorbonne with Sartre and another Simone, Simone de Beauvoir. Camus called her his favorite philosopher. Etc.

I have also been rereading some of Wendell Berry’s works. Currently I am dipping into a collection of essays, What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth, and a novel, A Place on Earth. I also looked at an older work (1965), Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s The Lonely Man of Faith.

Besides those already mentioned, the most thought-provoking other books I read were Ragan Sutterfield’s recent Wendell Berry and the Given Life and an older book (2003), Robert Putnam’s Better Together: Restoring the American Community. Satterfield uses Berry’s writings as a taking off place to explore different virtues. Two chapter titles, for example, are “Home and Care in the Kingdom of God” and “Reclaiming Connection in a World of Division.”

I don’t allow my students to use this as a final source, but the Wikipedia entry on “Social Capital” has a fairly extensive and helpful introduction to the ideas of Putnam and related thinkers. For my more-conservative friends, this is not to be confused with socialism. The basic idea is that we should measure happiness or, say, the good of a proposed project, not just in the economic capital gained but in the good to the community in other ways, such as a sense of security, creating relationships, etc.

Weldon Burgoon

Weldon Burgoon, who kept alive the Western tradition and values, passed away yesterday. (There is a nice write-up in the local newspaper.) Before he closed shop in 2016, he kindly consented for me to attempt a portrait of him, and I later presented him with a copy. A good man.