Fashion Shoot Backside

In this Richard Avedon photo, we don't see backsides, not the elephants', not the model's. She's svelte, sylph-like. What was she thinking? Was she allowed to speak? These questions may sound trite to those who know more about fashion photography than I do--I don't know much. When I saw a fashion shoot on Ocean Drive I was shocked: the model was almost completely mute, though I heard her murmur a few words just before she and the crew changed location, crossing the street to the Versace house.

There, near the steps where the designer was murdered, the model relaxed a little, shifting her weight before the shoot continued. She was silent. The tag shows at the striped sweater's back neckline.

While the photographers conferred, she did not speak. Mid-day in hot Florida, dressed for fall in long sleeves, she waited, alone. Plump, scruffy, in short sleeves, clothes rumpled, the photographers worked to get the best shots.

She worked too, obeying, keeping her cool. I wondered about the final shots: would she look powerful and perfect? The goal is to sell a product. I'll take for free the backside tag, hair-shifting breeze, plump belly. Will I be open enough to let my subjects speak? Photographers whose work I admire often record their subjects' words. Others I also admire, shoot living subjects with such empathy that I don't miss the words. Empathy and also the shock of recognition: Arbus shows us herself in her subjects. Do you worry about such things? Do you let your subjects speak?

Playful South Beach

There are times when the passing scene is playful and language delightful: the two C's in Corn on the Cob, "Friendly John," "Bob's Barricades"--I didn't get a shot of those. Tell me what surprised and delighted you today.

Lawn jockey holding a lamp, cinder blocks, white impatiens, white curlicues: we humans are able and determined to create arrangements.

Seven small, post-like plaster lions stationed on this fence, two more life-size lions near the door.

South Point Park is sculpted, the carved/molded hill a backdrop for shadows in the late afternoon.

The lighthouse-lifeguard station appears through the planted 'wild' area.

Figures on the slant. I didn't tilt my camera. People gather here at sunset.

These three on the hill did not look up at the towering condo.

The Habana is miles from Cuba. Workers have filled the cracks in the facade so the crazed surface appears startling white. (Mostly I've seen crazed surfaces on glazed plates, miniature lines compared to these.) I hope they keep those bold colors. Buildings shift and settle on land that was once a mangrove swamp.

Mail Lady Chrystler

This morning in SoBe the "Mail Lady" car was parked in front of the 13th Street Post Office, which was built in 1937 during the Great Depression. Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the champion and key planner of Social Security was Secretary of the Treasury.

The U.S. MAIL sign on the dashboard signifies official business. I don't know the Mail Lady's official title. The sign may allow her free parking.

Morgenthau's name and Postmaster James Farley's are carved on a plaque at the front of the building, along with other names and the date, which I take pleasure in repeating--1937--and placing before our year: 2011. Styles change. It's a worn-out truism that appearances deceive. Yet we choose how to appear, how to present ourselves. The Mail Lady presents herself in a red Chrystler: "Mail Lady" in an auto drama starring the car and herself. She's made herself a character and given the character a name. (I don't know her other names.) What was she thinking, if she was thinking? Flaunt it? Look, I made it! Is that what she means? Tell me, what do you think? I was shocked, though I love red.

On the way home I saw this chalk drawing of a truck the rain will wash away.

Relentless Ants, Drifting Clouds

Hakuin (1685-1768)

This Zen master, I've recently learned, often painted the image of an ant circling a grindstone. Round and round the ant goes. Ants will relentlessly follow an ant track. Repeat, repeat. Relentless repetition: call it obsession; call it despair, call it slavery. Slave masters enforce unrelenting repeated motion. Why when the slave master is dead or no longer in power, do we repeat, repeat, exhausting ourselves? Even a wise person like Hakuin cannot give a pat answer. Instead he exhorts:

An ant goes round and round without rest

Like all beings in the six realms of existence,

Born here and dying there without release,

Now becoming a hungry ghost, then an animal.

If you are searching for freedom from this suffering

You must hear the sound of one hand.

(Not "one hand clapping," the way the line has been translated.)

I wonder whether Hakuin drank tea. I did this morning--some green. Not bad!

Yesterday I shot a picture of an empty decaying house in South Beach. The ants and termites are taking it down. Eating it, undermining it. Are you smiling with me? Are you ant-like today? Are you free? Are you both? I can't do it alone. Ants of the World, Unite. We'll wear away the world together. And unlike ants, watch the clouds drift. They're massing southward, cumulus; low, stratus. Mixed: there's even mackerel-mottled. I grew up, a noodle-eating city girl who seldom looked at the sky. Books and mud-pie pleasures. Years later, the window of my Boston room had a view to the sky. With J. I saw the sky over the Allagash--other skies too. The same sky here in South Beach seems endless--more endless, if there is such a thing--endlessissimo. Venus low and bright at 4: AM. My Crocs squeak on the tile floor. Dust blows in. The little metal table rusts. From the trash shoot on our floor, my lithe neighbor runs barefoot, bare-chested back to his apartment, empty handed.

Dandy, Focus, Joy

"Banish the will to be dreary," said the designer Dorothy Draper, when she wrote about giving parties. Draper was a dandy. The dandy chooses high style--bella figura. Cut a beautiful figure. In the end, nature triumphs but until it overcomes us completely, twirl, dress up, decorate. Yet let me tell you, I'm not decorating much--a few strings of bright lights--but I'm enjoying gazing at my neighbors' lights, and avoiding what some have called "a false sense of urgency," by staying away from my computer except to check e-mail and work on poems. There's been enough real urgency. You can imagine--the same things that cause urgency in your lives.

I've seen a few friends in the flesh and gazed at their faces and listened to their stories. I watched artist Melissa Shook's video, Kemper and Me, in which she and Kemper, to whom she was once married, talk about theirs lives with remarkable candor. They are honest without being hurtful, a remarkable feat, especially to someone like me who is quick on the trigger. (I mostly show that side of myself to J.--poor J.) I turned off the flash on my camera and set it for long exposures to pick up night light and motion.

Long exposures on modern cameras are short but take in a lot. So do our eyes and so do we if we focus. I can't force joy. It comes when it will. But let me focus! Tell me: what do you wish for?

Nobility and Self Oblivion

The word "noble" is out of style. "Noble" meaning "honorable." "Noble" meaning "superiority of mind or character." Roland Barthes gives these attributes to his mother and to literature: "Since maman's death, no desire to 'construct' anything--except in writing. Why? Literature = the only region of Nobility (as maman was noble)." I believe him!

Mourning Diary is a record of his mourning for his mother. But this morning I'm also interested in his surprising, idealistic view of literature as the only "region of Nobility." A tremendous claim in these relativistic times. Reading Barthes I feel I return to the idealism of my youth when my teachers, friends and I recoiled from materialism. To Barthes' equation I would add another: Literature = Freedom.

A few weeks ago my friend N. and I were looking at one of her paintings. "The paint takes over," N. said. When paint takes over, the artist is freed from herself. When language takes over, the writer is freed from herself. When artists express the seemingly impossible to express, there is freedom in the work. So today I won't beat a poem to death trying to get it right. Or scrub a pot to an inch of its hard-metal life.

Bumble

Writing is harder than breaking stones, Yeats wrote. Not first drafts but revising. I've been away, revising. Now it's bliss to walk to the pond and bumble around rocks. The dog pack thinned out. I didn't have to avoid the larger dog gang, people with their dogs, sometimes more than a dozen, chattering, beside themselves with cozy fellow feeling. J. calls them smug, entitled, while I say these suburbanites seem to know little about animals. They like to see dogs frolic in packs on play dates. They call it freedom.

Between rocks and dog gangs, I choose rocks--these from Ice Age glaciers.

In the woods a single chocolate lab ran at me hard, eager to play. I liked him, spoke to him, then went on bumbling toward the sun.