Day: November 11, 2017

As I wrote earlier today, this is Jane Goodall day on our farm, Maria and I both seized on her as a wondrous role model in the sordid era of sexual harassment and revelation.

It seems the angry white men (and a few men of color) are making a last and smarmy stand in our time, fighting to stave off what looks more and more to me like the next chapter in a genuine revolution.

And there are many chapters in this revolution. The women’s movement is more than a century old now, and more and more, it reminds me of the trench battles in World War I, one bloody battle at a time, stretching out for many long years, now and into the future.

Maria was thrilled to go see “Jane”, Brett Morgan’s  new documentary which tells Goodall’s story mostly through newly discovered 16 mm footage taken by her late ex-husband Hugo van Lawick. She saw it is a badly needed inspiration in angry and disheartening times. And it was.

Goodall’s observations of chimpanzees in what is  now Tanzania were groundbreaking. They challenged conventional anthropological and medical wisdom about what was supposed to make humans exceptional and also superior to wild animals.

She is one of the most admired and remarkable woman in modern times. An untrained secretary, she came alone into the jungle to live with and observe chimpanzees, and 50 years later, she is still hard at this work, studying the chimps and fighting for the conservation of the world environment.

As women in America tell their horrifying stories of abuse and degradation, Goodall’s very life seems brighter and even more inspirational. She rejected almost all conventional ideas about how a woman was supposed to live and what choices she was supposed to make. “I don’t care what people think,” she said of her critics. And she never has.

People seeking clues to her strength and purpose could understand some of it from the scenes in the movie of her mother, who rather than fuss about the danger,  urged her to go and came to the jungle with her and opened a health clinic while she was there.

She told Jane all of her life that she could do and be anything she wished to do and be.

Mothers like that seem to produce remarkable daughters.

The film is so gorgeous and absorbing that I didn’t stop and think until it was over about how much of the imagery was captured.

For one thing, this Goodall is beautiful, her blond hair clean and shiny.

She crawls through bugs and snakes and foot-long insects and the mud in the jungle, and climbs up steep and vine-infested cliffs and trees without sweating, getting a spot of mud on her khaki shorts or face or  legs or converse sneakers. She never had a single hair fall out-of-place.

This in one of the hottest, most humid and dense jungles on the earth.

There is barely a scene of Goodall in her early years in Gombe when she was not sitting among the chimps or watching them. I got no sense of her life there beyond her research, or some brief shots of her raising  her son Grub.

In shot after shot, Goodall is almost always sitting in a cover pose, staring meaningfully and lovingly from the tops of trees and from thick  brush through cameras and binoculars.  She most often looked beatific. This looked a lot like staging, and for me it demeaned what must have been years of dirty, dangerous, painstaking and frightening work.

It is not clear why the chimpanzees  stayed so calm as all of the film equipment that must have been necessary came crashing through the jungle alongside of her. It makes some sense when I read that almost all of the film in the movie came from 100 hours of newly found National Geographic film archives from van Lawick.They were thought to be lost.

The original film had no sound track so all of the jungle and chimpanzee sounds were added later, the natural chronology of the film altered to fit the new narrative story line. This makes the movie, produced by National Geographic,  seem disconnected at times by what can only be generously called “documentary music.”

The movie is beautiful and compelling despite all of the polishing and re-arranging. The archive footage gave Morgen the chance to construct what seems like a complete narrative. You often feel as if you are seeing a beautiful travelogue about the jungle, but are not really in it.  For a documentary, that’s a problem.

Morgen’s editing shows the hard and tedious and loving work of Goodall working to win the trust of the chimpanzees and making her groundbreaking studies of their habits, emotions and brutality. The movie also draws from her letters and copious notes and charts.

Jane Goodall does add fresh interviews with Morgen and looks candidly back on her life as a researcher, mother and wife and at her work and life in the Gombe forest.

At 83, she remains a powerful charismatic presence.

It’s a tribute to Goodall’s work and life and to the quality of the film that you don’t think much about how it was put together

You are pulled along by the fascinating and sometimes heartbreaking story of this remarkable woman. Goodall discovered the chimp’s capacity for tool-making, nurturing, and stunning cruelty.

And not surprisingly, she struggled to figure out how to balance her passion for her work with her life as a mother.

I highly recommend the film, although I doubt it will be shown in many mainstream theaters. I found it especially poignant that Goodall, like so many animal lovers, initially emotionalized the chimpanzees, seeing them as having a pure, almost perfect life in paradise.

I have found that people who love animals this much often tend to emotionalize them initially, and then come to terms with reality. To truly love them is to accept them for what they are, not for what we would like them to be. Animals are not, after all, like us. Except when they are.

Goodall concedes in the film that she learned what almost all of us learn about being human, there are many wonderful things about our species too, and we all yearn for paradise. Instead we learn the hard lessons of life. We will all eventually be sick and die, and many of us are capable of almost unimaginable cruelty and brutality.

Goodall learned many significant things about chimpanzees. No one had ever studied them in detail before.

She  forced the scientific world to reconsider it’s flawed and long-standing views of animals. But perhaps the most important thing she learned is that there is no perfect life, only life itself, and in that way, humans and chimpanzees are all too alike. The evolution of this wisdom is one of the real achievements of the film.

She never wavered in her determination to live her own life at a time when most women could not even consider such freedom and independence.

She married the National Geographic photographer – van Lawick – who came to record her work, and the couple had a son. When van Lawick, perhaps the most accomplished wildlife photographer ever –  insisted that she leave the Gombe Forest to  join him in his work photographing the Serengeti plans as his assistant – she refused and they amicably divorced.

And yes, she seems a wondrous role model for the still embattled women of today.

Goodall is a scientific hero, but also a feminist hero, and her strength and clarity are at the heart of the film..

The movie is uplifting and also sad, as life often is. This truth is gradually revealed in the movie, and Goodall has turned her focus more and more on saving the earth from the depredations of human people.

She spends most of her days now crisscrossing the world pleading on behalf of Mother Earth, and the dwindling environment left for the chimpanzees and the other animals. She knows first hand we are in danger of losing them.

Her years in the jungle may seem so much simpler to her than her newest adventure.

 

During the windstorm, a windowpane in the barn shattered. I thought we would take it to the hardware store, but Nature Woman said she would go out and fix it. She went into the basement, came up with some pins and panes, and in a minute or two the pane was replaced.

As usual, I was shocked and in awe of this, but when I went into the barn to look, it seemed there was no pane, I could see right through. I didn’t realize that the new pane was clean and the old ones covered in decades of grime and dust. It was a good photo, though.

Maria was out by herself putting storm windows on her studio yesterday, the wind was biting, it was nine degrees outside. I was in bed sick, and then thought of her outside struggling with these windows. I think of Maria as a kind of Superwoman in my life, she does so many thinks I could not do – repair broken barn windows, install storm windows, paint kitchens – and is also fiercely creative and gentle.

I got dressed and went outside, and I was shocked at the sight. She was standing in the yard with a giant window, holding the window in one hand, a wood shaver in the other, she looked absolutely furious, she was crying,  and cursing and shouting, “I’m so so fucking angry about what is happening to women…” She said it over and over again, sobbing and in a rage, shaving the window frame, which was too swollen to fit in her window.

I stopped, uncertain of how to respond. At first, I thought she might be angry at me, but I hadn’t even gotten up yet and I had never seen her that angry at me. I realized quickly what was happening – for days and weeks she had been listening to the wrenching testimonies of women who had been violated, abused, harassed, even raped and diminished in the most undignified and cruel of ways.

She had also been listening to the smarmy rationales and excuses and banalities of the abusers and their pals and defenders and enablers. i saw that this had taken a toll on her – she sometimes listens to the news in her studio while she works  – and she had finally exploded in rage and frustration out there in the freezing cold and wind.

I think she must have shaved off an inch of that window frame before she stopped cursing and crying. Maria wrote about her anger yesterday on her blog, a piercing shout from the heart, and she can speak for herself. Many people were moved by it, so was I.

Maria understands what it is like to be voiceless and diminished and abused and harassed. She relieves it all of the time in the brave and disturbing accounts of other victims. I am learning that almost everyone woman has experienced this in one way or another, and that few men yet grasp the dimensions of it, including me. I think these rationalizers and enablers are in for a great shock, this is the Year Of The Women, I believe something important is happening, I think they are rising up, I sense they have had enough.

We’ll know soon enough.

___

Every Saturday, we wake up and scroll local movie websites for a movie we want to see. Maria shouted “Jane” and nearly jumped up out of the bed for joy. The much acclaimed National Geographic documentary “Jane,” the story of Jane Goodall, the primatologist, anthropologist the world’s foremost authority on chimpanzees was playing at a theater not to far from us.

I can’t imagine a better movie for Maria to see today, it was something of manna dropped from heaven. Her rage yesterday was deep and painful, the very thought of Goodall seemed to life the veil.

Maria was radiant, excited, we watched the trailer and heard Goodall talked about her fearlessness, commitment and devotion to her work. Nobody is ever going to stick their tongue in her mouth, I admit to thinking, unless she invited them to. She had created her own island, her owns special kingdom on the earth, and it was clear that no force on the planet would dislodge or bully or diminish her.

Sometimes we believe in fate in our lives, it was as if Goodall had appeared as an antidote to all the pain and suffering women have endured and are enduring, she was a symbol of strength and empowerment, just the person to appear out of nowhere and life Maria’s heart and give her some empowerment and inspiration.

Watching the news, it is a disheartening time to be a woman, or a good man, for that matter. Maria was overjoyed at just the thought of going to see Goodall, we scrambled out plans immediately, went out to an early breakfast and then to the dump, and then out to the barn to fix a broken window and then to the pasture to repair a broken gate.

We declared this a Jane Goodall day, an antidote to the daily stories of harassment and worse that feels like wallowing in manure. We’re going to see the first showing of the movie and then go out to dinner. We are going to celebrate the life and times of Jane Goodall, her incredible work with chimpanzees and her unstoppable commitment to her work and to the chimps.

In the documentary trailer, she says early on “I don’t care what anyone things,” she would spend her life in  Tanzania, walking into the hills every day to live with the chimpanzees, and to continue her 55-year study of the social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees in Tanzania.

I will review the movie when we get back tonight.

 

Mickey had a schizophrenic breakdown in New York City decades ago. He was said to be an extraordinarily bright student.

His stepbrother George Forss, the famed landscape photographer who moved to our town in the 1970’s, brought Mickey to live with him.  Mickey has vanished into New York streets for years until one day George ran into him in a coffee shop.

George too him in, and Mickey is cared for, he has a a room of his own, food and assistance.

During the day, in all kinds of weather, Mickey can be found walking up and down Main Street. At night, he goes to his apartment in George’s house to watch television and eat dinner.

I have been photographing Mickey for a couple of years now, he is the only portrait subject I pay – $3 to $5 a shoot.

In that time, I have noticed what is to me a remarkable and touching demonstration of community. Many people in the town watch out for Mickey and help take care of him. Teenagers on bikes pull over and give him coffee and sometimes, a cigarette or two.

People regularly stop by at George’s Gallery and drop off clothes, sweaters, shoes and parkas. Mickey is well dressed. At the Round House Cafe, Scott has told Mickey he is welcome to come in anytime an have a cup of coffee. Sometimes, Mickey sits down at the table.

Almost every time he does, another diner in the care will come over and ask him if he wants something to eat. He usually says chile, and the person – all ages, farmers and artists, young and old – will go to the register and pay for his meal, which Mickey eats hurriedly. If it is warm, he takes it outside, if not he eats a table.

He rarely speaks to people, and never joins in on other people’s conversation. He will speak if spoken too, and is gentle and courteous. He is also shy.

Like so many rural communities, my town of Cambridge has lost a lot –  young people, good jobs, small businesses. But it has never lost the sense of community that is so pervasive a characteristic of rural America. Here, somebody is always taking care of Mickey when it would be so easy to ignore him.

We don’t always love one another here, but we know each other and we help each other if we can.

I appreciate Mickey’s giving me permission to take his pictures. His face is so full of character and emotion.