musings

Grace and my father at the Louvre.  All the selfie-takers were focused on the more famous art, and this room was deserted.

“The stick is the sword in the selfie army,” my 10 year old son observed as we walked underneath the Eiffel Tower, last month in Paris. I looked at him, laughed, and dodged another group of tourists gathering together to take a photo of themselves with the soaring steel gridwork of Paris’s most famous landmark in the background.

We were in Paris for a week. We saw the Mona Lisa, the Eiffel Tower, Napoleon’s tomb, more pieces of art and history than I can remember. We also saw dozens and dozens and dozens of people taking selfies. At the Louvre we couldn’t see the more famous works of art. We couldn’t see through the thick throng of phones, held overhead.

The people had their backs to the art. They were looking at them through the camera lens, and with their own smiling face in the foreground. Maybe I’m old. Well, actually, yes, I’m definitely old. But still, I found it shocking.

I was shocked because people weren’t looking at Paris. They were looking in the lenses of their phones. This once-in-a-lifetime experience was mediated through the lens of a phone camera. I’ve observed this before, particularly at school concerts and plays. I have been guilty of this, myself, of missing whole swaths of an experience or a performance because I was so focused on getting a good photo of it. All around me, in the lower school gym, there are glowing screens and parents videotaping a concert. Their witnessing of the experience is secondary to their recording of it. In the last few years, though, I’ve tried harder to put my phone down and to simply be here now – be here now, what my someday-maybe-dream tattoo will say, on my wrist – and trust that the memories I make are richer and more colorful than any photo would have been.

What I saw in Paris was different than what I’ve seen in the lower school gym, though. Yes, the parents and the tourists were both mediating their experience through a camera lens. But the tourists were experiencing Paris backwards, in order to make sure they themselves were in the photos.   They weren’t looking at the city; they had their back to it.

The truth is, this question felt uncomfortably close, because I’m often anxious about the solipsism inherent in writing personal essay. Is it the same thing as what I observed in the Louvre, people inserting themselves into every photo? It strikes me that it’s not. I write what I see, and my gaze is turned out, onto the world. The essays I write – and, perhaps more importantly, the ones I am drawn to reading– are insistently outwardly focused. They are about subjectivity only in so far as that is the filter through which the world is viewed.  This makes me think of the Aikra Kurosawa quote: “An artist is one who does not avert her gaze.”  When I read that passage, I think of writers and artists whose work I admire: their gaze is outward. 

What I witnessed in Paris, which made me sad, is the insistent viewing of oneself in every frame. The lens is literally turned. The photo, or the essay – and the experience – is self-reflexive. It’s about the subject primarily, rather than secondarily.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the young adults whose back was to Paris. Yes, it made me sad to see this, but what’s really going on? IS that generation insecure about their place in the world? What underlies their aggressive need to assert that they are there? Or has the culture become so self-centered that all that matters is our own experience of something, of documenting that we were there?

I’m not sure. But I do know that there’s something sad about turning your back to Paris, even if you get a great shot of your face with the blurry Mona Lisa in the background.

I wrote this piece after our March trip to Paris. 

Saturday night after-dinner walk with ice cream.  The Bermuda flag is flying because the race to Bermuda just left from our town.

Yesterday was the summer solstice.  This is second to the winter solstice for me as a holy day, but it is an important one nevertheless.  The winter solstice occurs in the darkest week of the year, during the beginning of Boston’s cold, snowy months.  And yet it is somehow a more hopeful day for me than the summer solstice, which takes place at the height of light, the frenzied pitch of spring and summer’s fecundity, when the world positively bursts with potential.  I can’t help sensing, somewhere deep inside of me, that we’re now shifting back towards the darkness, towards shorter days, and from here on for the next six months we will be losing light.

That sounds pretty depressing, I know.  Particularly because I write these words while sitting in the living room of my parents’ house on the water, surrounded by books and half models of sailboats and with the ticking of the beautiful grandfather clock that lives in the corner of the room.  The clock features in my childhood memories of my paternal grandparents’ house in Long Island, and when I look up at it I sense them near.  Later in the day, I cut two peonies from a bush that my mother transplanted from her father’s garden and put them on our dinner table.  It only struck me on Sunday, Father’s Day, that it was likely not an accident that I felt both of my grandfathers so nearby all weekend.

There was some gloom on Saturday, despite it being so beautiful.  Part of that was the tangible presence of my grandfathers, who were vividly present.  Another part of it was both Grace and Whit were crabby, and more than once we tangled, tempers flared, and a few tears were shed.  It was far from a perfect Saturday.  There were raised voices, crossed arms, and hurt feelings.

Despite these shadows, the world is also awash in light.  On Friday night the four of us went to see Jurassic World, the very first time we’ve gone to a movie as a family of four, though I have taken the children to many, many movies by myself.  It was entertaining and full of messages that we discussed as we drove home.  Both children noted that nature seemed to do better when you didn’t mess with it (the movie focuses on a genetically-modified dinosaur). When we left the movie theater, around 9:15, light was still visible in the sky.  A sliver moon was rising on the horizon, and I tried to take a picture, overcome, as I so often am, by the beauty of the world.  These are the most heightened, light-filled days, and yet deep within me I’m aware of something shifting, below the reach of words or logic.

Hilary sent me a poem late last week that she thought I would like.  She was right.  I love the way this poet, who is new to me, touches on life’s ordinariness and beauty, the way she evokes the long view, the ancient vista, that essential sense of the eternal, age-old universe that throbs under my daily life and to which I feel closer at the solstice than at any other time of year.  We spin on.  The earth under our feet, the great green ball on which we live, this tiny speck in a universe whose enormity we cannot fathom.

My earthly time is sweetening from all of this, memories and ghosts and tears and crankiness as much as joy and ice cream and laughter and sunsets, I know that to be true.  It’s all a part of my life, shadow and light intertwined, even on the longest days of the year.

Solstice

Tess Taylor

How again today our patron star
whose ancient vista is the long view

turns its wide brightness now and here:
Below, we loll outdoors, sing & make fire.

We build no henge
but after our swim, linger

by the pond. Dapples flicker
pine trunks by the water.

Buzz & hum & wing & song combine.
Light builds a monument to its passing.

Frogs content themselves in bullish chirps,
hoopskirt blossoms

on thimbleberries fall, peeper toads
hop, lazy—

Apex. The throaty world sings ripen.
Our grove slips past the sun’s long kiss.

We dress.
We head home in other starlight.

Our earthly time is sweetening from this.