Departure and Return

Into (and out of, sans glasses) the cold and fast-running Stanislaus River near Ripon, Ca. on May 28, 2008

Booty!

 

Infinite Love

 

First photo:
Taken by American W. Eugene Smith in 1971, the black-and-white photo depicts a mother cradling her severely deformed, naked daughter in a traditional Japanese bathroom. The mother, Ryoko Uemura, agreed to deliberately pose the startlingly intimate photograph with Smith to illustrate the terrible effects of Minamata disease (a type of mercury poisoning) on the body and mind of her daughter Tomoko.  At the wishes of Tomoko Uemura's family, the photograph was withdrawn from further publication in 1997, 20 years after Tomoko's death and the copyright for the photograph was granted to the Uemura family.


Second photo:
"Gramps" details the final years of coal miner Frank Tugend’s life, which he spent in the care of his family. Tugend suffered from generalized arteriosclerosis in the years before his death and required assistance from his grandsons for virtually every task.
In the photo, Dan Jury is seen cradling his grandfather in the year 1974. “On February 11, 1974, Frank Tugend, aged eighty-one and of dubiously sound mind- but certainly of sound body – removed his false teeth and announced he was longer going to eat or drink. Three weeks later to the day, he died.”

Leaves and Loves

I've decided I don't want to speculate or ruminate on the relationship or affinities of these two photos. A whole lot of living has gone on in the 14 years between their creation. I just want to show them together.

Melina Wade Staal, taken November 15, 2017

Edna Milagros Staal-Robles, taken December 12, 2003

Beyond the Road's Edge

A little over 20 years ago I wrote a poem called "By Day, By Night" about humans believing they own the world, that anything they can see belongs to them. But, the world is more than our property, it is an entity that has not relinquished its claim to itself. It cannot be owned - that is only a fantasy that man entertains in his arrogance.

By Day, By Night

By day, the winding mountain road presents many vistas,

And all we see becomes our own.

By night, our headlights barely reach the shoulder.

And in darkness, the earth moves to take back its own.

Then, just a few years ago I ran across this poem by David Ignatow for the flip side. It seems he feels that suburbia is intimidating; I don't see the natural world as intimidating, more as powerful and benign. Still, reading these two poems feels to me like looking at the same scene from very different angles. Beyond that, I was struck by the commonality of the image of car headlights and the road. In Ignatow's poem, the light is constrained "timidly" to the center of the road; in mine the light is unable to penetrate the "primeval" darkness beyond the road's shoulder.

Suburbia

The silence of the suburb

its woods primeval dark.

Cars drive through,

their lights

timidly centered

straight down the road.

(David Ignatow)