Day: October 3, 2013

I’ve been spoofing the shutdown, but today, talking to some old people who fear losing their medical coverage, and some people who have lost their paychecks and are worrying about their mortgage, and hearing about people whose vacations have been ruined, and children who can’t get their meals, and I decided to write a poem instead. It isn’t funny today.

 

Shutdown. An ugly thing, it peeks around corners,

comes through phones, lives in the

worried eyes of old people, waiting for their checks.

Shutdown offers the Gift Of True Elegance,

for those who can grasp it.

It is never easy to stop thinking ill of others.

You must fall in love with someone who has

accomplished that wonderful feat herself,

or make friends with someone who has done it

many times.

Shutdown. I sit on the streets with the homeless,

and hide behind the sofas of the abandoned people,

waiting for the bank to call,

at the locked gates of the parks,

I am a shadow on the wall of the

schools that do not open,

the food that doesn’t come.

The voices of the angry men are ringing in my ears,

soiling my sweet and beautiful dreams.

I know this, separation from love,

is the hardest work in this world.

What do the angry people have in common?,

they talk about God all the time but all they worship is the past.

Maybe stop being so religious.

Like that.

Blessed are you who are hungry, for you will be filled.

God told the prophets to lie

with the poor, not the powerful,

and give them cause for hope.

Or the Cherubim will come,

and sting their cheeks.

You can use my soft words as a pillow,

as a cushion for your weary head,

let me bring you some sweet honey

to put on your bread.

Shutdown.

I offer you the Gift Of True Elegance,

in the face of worry and despair,

the secret.

It is this thing: pity them, for they are lost.

The angry men are defenseless

against True Elegance,

they will shrivel and disappear,

they will starve themselves to death,

their souls and voices swept away

by the wind. You only hear them,

if you listen.

Blame keeps the anger game going,

it steals all of our wealth.

I will share with you the Gift Of True Elegance.

Be better than them. Every day. Take that vow.

Our hearts should do this more.

The Round House Cafe has become the heartbeat of my small town, Cambridge, N.Y., the sunlight streams through the open windows of the old bank building on Main Street, there is usually someone young in the corner reading one of the books, studying, browsing an open Apple laptop, texting a friend. I love the idea of a cafe culture, I spent so much time in cafes when I lived in Greenwich Village in the 70’s.  I can’t do that anymore, too many people know me and want to talk, but I envied this young man, I thought he was sitting in his own painting.

George is a humble man and he doesn’t like to tell other people what to do. Plus, he mumbles a lot. To learn from him, you have to sit near  him and listen as he runs through the settings and angles and mechanics he is employing to take a photo, in this case with a homemade 200 mm macro lens he build out of glass and metal scraps – he had to take it apart yesterday because it had a spiderweb in it. He got some parts on E-bay and built a converter so he could use it on the Canon Digital Camera I bartered with him in exchange for one of his classic photos.

George does things with exposure that nobody can do, even with a digital camera, but he can’t really explain how he does it, you just have to listen to the stream of consciousness that emerges from when he starts thinking about a photo, he holds the camera up and down about a dozen times, trying different settings until he gets the one he likes. You can look at his wonderful work here.

We never did get the glint of light off of the crystal that we wanted, we came close though and we had fun.

I can’t imagine a better photo instructor than George Forss who came to the farm yesterday to give me my second photo lesson, this one on composition. George has a busted ankle, which is healing nicely, so I picked him up at his gallery and brought him to the farm and deposited him in a chair near the headless statue.

George became obsessed with a crystal Maria found in the woods, we both had the same idea, we wanted to photograph it and catch the sunlight sparkling off of the prism. I put the crystal in an apple that just fell off of the tree and placed the apple on top of the headless statue in the back  yard. We circled the apple for nearly an hour, adjusting the lenses (George’s are mostly home-made built out of glass and metal from garbage cans, he has studied optics for years).

I brought two chairs out and I mostly photographed George, I want a photographic record of this wonderful artists, the photos are precious to me. It was a warm day with a gentle breeze. Lenore and Red sat out with us, though George is not really an animal person. He stretched his cast straight out and started taking photos and so did I. Maria said I looked very happy. I was.

George is an intutive teacher, I mostly learn by watching him, he is a photographic genius, a master not only of composition but especially of settings and light, of exposure, shutter speed and aperture settings. He is constantly fiddling with the camera, putting it to his eye, adjusting the light, the ISO, watching the sun, the background. George can sometimes appear to be in  his own world, and his own world is filled with aliens, mystical visions and memories,  but when he has a camera to the eye, he is in a trance and he is clear and focused and laser-like.

I kept adjusting my exposure until I was able to catch the finest details of the crystal. George and I connect on a level I don’t always understand, I don’t talk easily to a lot of people, I’ve never been close to many friends or members of my family, but I feel totally at ease with this man, we just seem to speak the same language, we get each other.

George rarely talks about his early life, but he did yesterday, he talked about being taken away from his mother in the Bronx by city authorities who placed him in an orphanage until he was 17, and when he got out he was an agoraphobic for nearly seven years, his world was small and confined. One night, he went out and started taking photos in Central Park and slept by the wall one night and then woke up to  a woman bearing messages from alien beings, and the messages changed his life, awakened his creativity, gave him faith.

George is visibly upset by my taking insulin objections, he urged me to not think of myself as a diabetic, to have faith that I could heal myself, to turn a way from injections and medications. Talk to yourself, he said, tell yourself you don’t have diabetes. George, I said, I did that for several years, but the diabetes didn’t agree, it just kept getting worse.  He told me his beloved mother Norma, also a brilliant photographer, died of a diabetic coma. When George is upset, he tends to go to the alien world, he feels safe there and understood. I was touched that he was concerned for me, as I often am for him, he is a gentle and generous soul, as well as one of the few authentic genius creatives that I have known.

George fell and broke his ankle in two places, he was expecting to have surgery but the doctors say he won’t need it, another example of his healing himself, I have seen him do it before. George’s faith is inspiring, it is very real, I wish I had it.

We sat and talked in the sun for hours, taking scores of photos of this and that, exchanging settings and I learned so much from him, his two lessons have completely changed the way I take pictures. He thinks I am an emotional photographer, taking photos of things that touch my emotions, he is more technical, studying the composition carefully, setting up shots with great care as to light and aperture. At first George refused to take any money for the lesson, he said he didn’t do anything, but he certainly did, and I told him it was quite a bargain to have one of the most accomplished photographers in the world teach me how to use a camera for $30. I had to stuff the check into his pocket.

He said if I gave him a photo of myself when I was five years old, he would frame it and it would help cure me of the diabetes. I tried to reassure him that it was making me healthier, but he said the injections made him nervous. I don’t think I have a photograph of myself when I was five.

When it was time to go, we packed up our gear, his crutches and camera bag,  and I drove him home, it was one of the sweetest afternoons I can remember, I had great fun, learned so much. How curious that George and I, aliens each in our own right, should end up in this small town, such good and close friends, such soulmates. Life is endlessly wonderful and mysterious, crisis and mystery always around the corner. We are doing another lesson next week.

 

I’ve long felt that one of the most important – and difficult – things to teach a dog is how to do nothing, how to relax. We make our dogs crazy by over-stimulating, over-exercising, over-loving,  over-playing and arousing them. Dogs know how to do almost anything but nothing, and nothing is a critical thing for them to learn, it is the gateway to obedience, health and living mindfully and peacefully with us. I see Lab after Lab turned into ball-chasing addicts and one border collie after another so cranked they can barely think straight.

In my e-book “Listening To Dogs,” I devote a whole chapter to this idea and it is especially important with a dog like Red, obsessed with work, possessing tremendous energy, with sheep out the back door, therapy work regularly and all kinds of people hugging him, pushing treats at him, loving him.

Red knows how to herd sheep, he does not know how to relax, so I am teaching him something all border collies and most dogs really need to learn: how to be calm, be still, do nothing. This is not something obedience classes teach or that dogs learn in the play group or chasing frisbees. It is a long and painstaking process, in Red’s case, daily sessions of calming training, calm, quiet obedience drills, weekly acupuncture treatments and introducing him to activities where he can be still. Yesterday, I took a two-hour photo lesson with George Forss, the brilliant urban landscape photographer, and I brought Red out. He sat by the gate to the pasture in case we had sheep work to do, but then began to relax. I praised him when he was still and eventually he went to sleep and lay still for nearly an hour.

This would not have been possible for him even a few months ago.We are getting there, he is internalizing the idea of being  quiet and still. This is very good and healthy for him. I think we are loving our dogs so much we are making a lot of them crazy, which is why hundreds of thousands of dogs are now on Prozac for various anxiety disorders. I owe it to a dog like Red to help him live peacefully in an alien world.

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Good news. My book “Izzy & Lenore,” the story of my hospice work with the border collie Izzy, was offered as an e-book by Random House last month, the price is $1.99 and the book just hit the New York Times Bestseller List for October 13. Thanks. Also, the paperback copy of “Dancing Dogs,”  my first short story collection, is now out, signed and personalized copies available at Battenkill Books. You can also pre-order “Second Chance Dog: A Love Story” from Battenkill Books (518 677 2515) and Maria and I will both personalize and sign it. A book for $1.99 is a remarkable thing to get my head around, the new world of publishing.