BAT

This is an appreciation of the American photographer, David Plowden. His book, "Small Town America," is my reference text. In it are several remarkable photographs and some pages of his thoughts. It is in the folio section of the Wellesley Free Library. Folio refers to the oversized nature of the book. The call number is 973. When I look at, or on his work, I sense the thing I look for always. Sheer beauty. It is a theoretical journey, one that is not real, but is more the real just because it is not real. It is a voyage toward something, and as Kavafi always reminds, it is the journey, and not the end spot that counts most.

For some reason I look at fotos for meaning and beauty. By way of warming up on this stormy Tuesday in July, I turn to the book, "Picturing Us," a visual study of the African American culture. It is edited by Deborah Willis . A photo I see in a book can thoroughly overwhelm me. It has depth to it, is all. Multiple meanings that beckon. A woman in a white dress, youngish, is posing in a formal setting of a studio. The author of the piece that goes with the photo says his mother died of toil and of disease, but in the picture she is young and very beautiful. She cleaned peoples' houses or clerked or some such dull and tiring thing, and then she just died, not filling the dreams her eyes spoke of. He muses on the tragic life and he comments on the deep beauty she emits in the photo.

Sheer beauty is a tree, a sunrise with crisp light, a meal when you are hungry. It is a sliding kind of thing. The most common aspect of it, is that it is accompanied by the feeling that something unbelievable and wonderful is happening at the moment. One feels overcome. I go and get off that way, as a kind of ecstatic. I adore beauty. What is beauty? In a film, on tv, in music, in a book? It is authenticity or what passes for a benign reality. One that is lit by a direct light that is satisfying in some way. That is how I see beauty. Philosophers may not agree.

Most of us who think things go into a secret place to dream and talk to ourselves. It is the room of art. It is the bed in my head. A place removed from the hard world of survival. It is a soft world of flowers, art, music, poems, and more flowers. I ask me,"where would you like to live?" and the answer is easy.

I may be tired and hot and beat and broke, but I put on my poetry mantle and forget my physical sense of self, as I enter the room of art. It is a lone place. I am afraid it has to be, to allow for something of a lasting sort to get created. I find my writing can only work when I close myself in that space and dream. Usually about my ancestors and what they thought and felt, but sometimes about other things. My family, the trees outside, my friends, the cows at Briggsy's farm, the things I see at the flea market. I dream ; then tell what I see. What I feel.

Plowden is a magician. He is in the long line of great American photographers who take pictures, so we do not forget. There is Walker Evans and his large, grand body of pictures of America in the thirties. There is too, the photographic work of Richard Nickel who documented the architecture of Louis Sullivan before it got torn down. So much more too, but I wish to speak in this piece of Plowden. I enter his world through the image, the foto. It is not the thing itself, but a reproduction. One that resembles the thing. The image for me is intriguing, more interesting than the thing itself. A tree, a building, a person. A picture of one of these. The item is frozen for a second or millisecond. It responds someway to someone taking its picture. We don't know how it responds, but it does. Then the object goes on with its everyday existence of being a tree, person or building.

The image is a freeze that stops a moving or changing thing. The tree wags its branches, when the wind helps it. The person is ambulatory. The joints of the building expand and contract with the weather, especially so, in fickle places like our own, where the weather changes so often. Its paint needs replacing; its stairs need to be realigned etc. What happens is the foto holds up all the action the object is doing. By stopping it, the viewer can quietly contemplate the life in the foto at his or her own leisure.

An image lets us look. We do the object no harm. We observe some sheer beauty. It enters us. Enriches us somewhere deep.

That said, Plowden is one smitten. He not only takes pictures but has a point of view. It is, that history here in America is constantly being erased, without a thought. Old buildings are torn down daily, with nary a thought. We are so busy doing 1995 life we forget what it means to be deeply human. To be human is to know one's past and look after it. Anyone who is deeply human knows to preserve what is special in daily life.

We, as Americans, have made an enormous error, a serious mistake. He offers; "we suffer from a pathological inability to read what is happening to America."

We lose buildings and types of places and don't even give it a thought. If we had a picture, at least then, we might rebuild the same thing someday, to remind us how life was and how good life was.

Plowden's heroic persons are all pre-modern. They had the "cherished individuality and ingeniousness " he so values and now misses. Plowden breaks your heart. Here are some of his lines toward the end of his long essay in "Small Town America." He cites agribusiness, malls, Walmarts, tv and movies, interstate highways, big government and other sundry forces . These are the causes of the demise of small places and the small, circumscribed lives lived there.

Joining the big world of American culture, post war, meant we "brought a scourge of problems from the world beyond to the doorsteps of a culture almost totally unprepared to deal with it."

Tv came with " a seductive , new, unreal reality into America's living rooms."

And along came too, "all the psychoses that come with our upwardly mobile society."

It is no longer manageable.

"The pace at which change is taking place has outdistanced our emotional ability to keep up with it."

In some way we must reintroduce the old in the new.

I can see reproducing Bat Nelson's barbershop, up at the mall. Of course, there is no Bat to run it. But maybe we can train people someday to be fine like he is. Bat's sitting in his chair, hands, huge fingers, folded. Legs crossed, waiting to cut your hair. He's on page 68 of Plowden's book in a picture taken in 1991. In Alta Vista, Kansas. For me he is one of the stars in Plowden's book. He has the qualities. He is competent, loyal, friendly, durable, kind, smart, all that. I mean, he's everything a human could ask to be . Born, September 3, 1900.

Here's a bit of Bat. "I've been barbering for seventy-five years. First head of hair I ever cut was Lee Massey's in sixth grade. I was eleven years old."

Married sixty-five years, his wife is now in a rest home, having suffered a fall recently. He , too, injured himself and now just visits the shop to sit. He doesn't cut hair anymore. He got his name from Battling Nelson, a prize fighter, who was popular when he was but a feisty kid. It got shortened to Bat and Bat he stayed.

For all those seventy years odd years in his shop, he stayed the same. If you read around page 28 of the text, you will see he remembers everything. The shops, there used to be on the main street; most of the people he barbered among. Using a straight razor on his customers, as he hit his nineties. An old man with a weapon in his hand, used to stroke and beautify his clientele. Never to nick and hurt. Anyone.

I guess Bat is special because he is so tough, so down-to-earth, so wonderfully American to me. He is, for me, a great representation of our culture. And I have Plowden to thank for knowing him. He is somekinda wonderful, Bat is. Somekinda grande. I feel I know him. And if we spoke, we'd have fun and I'd have a good haircut.

Plowden comes to remind us of what was once commonplace and is now gone, probably forever. He says, "the pace of small town life was played out on an intensely human scale, in terms comprehensible to most of us." That was a major underlying strength of the old way, that it had a rock-solid solidity to it. The society made sense, with its scale and concern for human life.

I suppose one mustn't dream. Yet Plowden invites us to visit. Look in on page 91. Lafayette County Court House. Darlington, Wisconsin, 1992. You walk the corridor he offers in the picture. Can see around the corner where you will find a government office, a clerk who will say, "good morning," a bulletin board with stuff on it, etc. Yes, his foto is of 1992. He locates it amid fotos of the 1960's and 1970's in his book of pictures. This illustrates how the old among us still stares us in the face, if we will look. Should we care to look. His lesson is apt. Some old views are still with us, are as fetching as what was here in 1960 or 1970 or 1950. These views are just as fragile and valuable as the ones of the previous decades. What we see in the '90's is gonna get lost soon enough, so we better enjoy it now and photograph it now, 'cause some damn genius is gonna come along and tear it down for a new-type building. Buildings are razed, storefronts demonized, offices modernized, proprietors and owners dead and buried, mostly forgotten.

The old is with us, but going fast. That is the message Plowden offers. That since the Second World War, they have been tearing down our Main Streets and South Streets and putting in chain stores. With this change comes the professional manager, the dour clerk, who are no match for the ones who trod the floors of stores in an earlier time. These last were entrepreneurs; vital, lively, colorful, idiosyncratic, creative, crotchety, feisty, great people, whom you could not replace. They and their stores and their times just went. They are no more.

It is the process of inevitable change Plowden cannot accept. We do, and go on to do the next thing in our life; make money, make supper, watch tv. Plowden just can't do that. I don't imagine his publishing will make him rich, ever. I don't think he is that type, any more than I am. It's just a compulsion with him, to save what is getting squandered so fast.

His greatness as an artist comes out of his stubbornness, his refusal to be reasonable. He says his work is a repetition of a common theme. How many costumes can you put on death, on demise of real places, on the loss of memory and loved ones? He puts it this way;"I have been saying the same thing many times over in different ways. I look at my photographs as portraits of our ancestors."

Artists, you see, really make little sense. That is what they are for. To make little sense. To guide us common folk down paths that , at first, seem silly.

Then, a reader, or viewer like me, says, "oh," and the light goes on. I say, "I get it." I react to fotos, essays, movies, videos, painting, illustrations, magazine ads, tv ads. To sculpture.

The thing reaches me at a level below, beneath my level of conscious understanding. Plowden deeply upsets me, because of his truth. A way I can say it, is that the matter gets under my skin.

I apprehend, suck up, feel, my way, when I view an image; one that I call a piece of art. It may be a painting, or a foto, and it is art. Some fotos and paintings are just that,and

I can call them art. Others I cannot put in that category and I go past them quietly. They do not move me, do not strike me as something I cannot live without.

If I like it in a deep way, I call it art, is all. A lot of Plowden's fotos of small town life are art. Very deep, heavy art. In his writings he explains to me about what it means to come from a tiny town, village, or from a self-enclosed larger place, a big town. In this way he tells how he feels about the pictures, too. When a foto takes on serious meaning to me and has an element of beauty to it, I call it art. Plowden just can't seem to do bad fotos. His chosen work , the fotos, he reproduces in his book, are just stunning. It calls from beneath the surface of the picture.

Maybe art to me is whatever is beneath a surface. When I scratch beneath the surface and find meaning, I just call it art. A poem I like is art. Some critics and sages believe that fotos cannot be called art. To me, Eliot Porter, Edward Weston, Walker Evans, and , of course, David Plowden, are artist-photographers. In this category I would also place Richard Nickel, whose photos of Louis Sullivan's structures, mesmerize and charm.

Photos of old things and places we find in our local historical associations, the commissions and societies, reflect a life that has largely passed. Oh yes, we have some old-timey buildings like the court house I show above, but the old way of life is long-gone.

So much of value is long gone. Older folks, many remembering old times, are not only sad at the passing, but nervous amid the modern times. They don't like the new days they inhabit. The new life is not one of pleasure. They dislike it , rather. The culture they are in. Dislike it rather actively. Protect themselves from it.

May I give you Plowden? To him, the good life has certain characteristics; parameters, so to say. I shall list some. I shall do it in the present tense. To Plowden, the life gone is in the middle of his head. He lies in the bed in his head and thinks. Present tense. So here is how I visualize Plowden , thinking. Of course, his fotos give him away. He is a sucker for the slow n' easy life.

The good life is slow. There is time... to talk, to fix things, to dream, to think, to be nice, to remember.

There is time, period.

Life is predictable, stable, related to the time that preceded that time. Looking back is possible. What passed, is not that different from what is. Society is one, unified and whole thing.

What I am getting at, is one of his main points. Post-world war 2, the time that followed the war, is a sudden jump. A vast destruction of the life that was pre-world war 2. This total break from a past is new. The nation set sail on a new course. I mean, change used to be manageable, but it wasn't in the world war 2 period. The America after the war became something so different as to be downright frightening to those that lived through the time. The society one lived in became a strange and alien locale. Living here got to be uncomfortable for those who were adults at the time of the war.

Early in the century, the horse gave way to the trolley and then to the car. Even though this represented a series of revolutions in the time leading up to the big war, humans could handle it. Not so with the burgeoning of the suburbs after the war, the new media, the new values, the rootlessness. This was the big change we have never mastered and are now still paying the price for. We never mastered the changes the post-war period gave us. The post modern world we live in now is another universe from the bucolic, dusty, small-town existence that preceded the war.

To Plowden, that set of events marked the great fall from grace. We threw the old on a heap and rushed headlong into modern times; the cars, chain stores, material surfeit, total busyness. And all that led to crime, the non-family, the constant moving about, the lack of caring. Courting the new, achieved the proportion of a fetish. The worst thing you could say of a building or a thing, or an idea, was that it was old-fashioned. Too bad, says Plowden, but it's almost too late to do anything about it. We got to" look at history as something we have outgrown."

The old way. Life is kind, slow, stable. Life is a kind of miracle... a daily miracle. Life has a beginning, middle, end. In the same place, one place. The town or the village.

Life was once much better overall. That is my opinion. Despite epidemic disease, small-town pettyness, back-breaking labor, drunkedness, physical abuse. Life was slow, graceful, beautiful. "In small towns every person had a place , no matter how insignificant."

In the old way, people get to handle tools and objects in a loving way. They pick up toys with a kind of wonder and reverence. Things get their due respect. Things and the people live with one another in harmony and balance.

Animals are real animals, not chirping little dogs with curls.

Life is a bit dull, but having it predictable, cuts down on alienation, neurosis, and stress.

People care about one the other. More true then, than now. Of course, I see lots of caring in my daily life now, but I think caring deeply was more common then than it is now. And they had less means to care for one another then; materially, that is, which made the caring, more precious.

Having hung with old people most of my life, as a matter of personal preference, I should like to speak about the humor that I found in their company. It seems they had funny things to tell about. In hundreds of hours at kitchen tables, I have heard story after story that was humorous. About odd ducks who'd do the strangest things. I mean people we would call odd ducks. Like a friend who would ride about with his goat in the car. This worthy proceding to eat his way through most of the car's upholstery and fabric top. Or I think of Mrs. Amidon, on Page 23 of Plowden's book.

She invited Plowden, then young, and his family for tea, held in the front parlor. It was the winter and the room was not heated, but for some reason, he says, there they were to sit and drink. He and his sister got curious about a set of drapes that masked the bay window of the room.

Kids wonder what mystery is behind things and David asked. Mrs. Amidon replied with, " Hitler and Churchill," and drew the drapes to reveal " the carcasses of two huge pigs, hangin from hooks, in the ceiling of the bay

The bay was her cold storage;

Hitler and Churchill would soon be butchered and meanwhile this was the best place to keep them."

Plowden ends this wonderful view of Mrs.Amidon and his neighbors in Putney, Vermont, with the following words.

"Somehow this petite, little old lady made the idea of having two quite dead, four-hundred pound pigs hanging in one's parlor during a tea party seem perfectly logical." Page 23.

Funny stuff. Odd, interesting folks in all of the pages of Plowden's narrative. Wonderful to read and to savor. Please refer to the book for stories about so many of Plowden's friends and neighbors.

Perhaps it is nature that regulates behavior in the old system. Today heating and air-condition make all our space the same, no matter what is happening out of doors. Outside, as we say. We are become climate-controlled. The outside becomes alien, an evil force, that can only hurt us. The source of bugs, god save us. In the oldern days people didn't mind bugs. Picking ticks off dogs or oneself, was a minor sport. Taking the varmint in one's fingers and making it go poof; blood all over the place. Mud in the hall caused no distress to the housekeeper. Mud was a piece of the reality, not some germ-laden piece of nature, best kept outside. On and on, it seems we don't accept the outdoors as a friend any more. The sun causes disease. We put on lotions and blocks to keep safe from the sun. Raid keeps the bugs off us. What's wrong with bugs?

I guess I am just not comfortable with the "cleanlies." The dirt-busters and their products that spray out of these tall cylinders. I like my nature as is, with no frills. Like it always has been. The same with places . I like them small, so I can recognize them and handle them. Big cities, or big buildings, scare me. They are not natural. They repel me. I like a small, free-standing place, a town or a village. A place on its own. My village back in Greece, Mandraki, Nisiro. My village, Dover. The village, Wrentham. When I pass out the door, I find the nature I need. It is there to nourish and inform me. That is what I like. I expect it and there it is, in a bird's sound or the whirl of the wind or it is in the fifteen varieties of green I espy , in the heat and verdure of a New England summer.

I want my place small. I grew up in a first settlement-suburb, Jamaica Plain. First settlement means it came of the early expansion of the city to its outskirts. The trolley went out a ways from the center, from downtown, Park Street. It connected its commuters to the city. I came from the "monument." That is, my part of town was called the "monument," or the "pond," referring first to a monument that sat where you got the trolley to Boston, and second to the magnificent place , the Jamaica Pond, which was also near my house. I came of a neighborhood. On and about Orchard Street. Not really different from a small town in one sense. One belonged someplace. Even though it was not a self-contained unit, like a small town is. Anyway , I came from an ok place; one defined, one that was sensible. I found myself ready to ultimately belong someplace. I have been in Dover since 1958 and I like it. I like to be from a place that is discrete and sensible. I can say that I am from a place.

.But Plowden informs me of a way of life that was tighter and more more exciting than my own. The life of the small town. His Putney was able to leave him with profound memories and with a zeal to capture the essence of small town life in foto and sensitive print. This he has done admirably for us. I can only imagine what it was like to be able to wake and know the satisfaction of living in a womb, a place where all the elements of the society had a kind of fit.

Old ones, born in Dover and in Wrentham , the other town where I do videos, know what Plowden is talking about. It is gone now , but they sure remember the closeness, the niceness, the old time.

They know the old world. I don't. Too bad. They remember and talk about it a lot, when a few of them gather. I listen to them and enjoy myself.

I have Plowden with me on my journey back. I really don't know how I found him, but I am grateful. Thank goodness I have him.

I shall finish with a reading of his lament, his plaintive cry, his moan of loss. I don't know how real Americans express grief. My immigrant background gave me a more vocal, loud, emotional kind of reaction to loss. We scream and holler, when stuck or when we are in pain or grief. Plowden is not like that. He suffers more quietly, mourning over his ancestors and the memories they call forth in him. I read a few paragraphs, brief ones, of his text.

"There is nothing intrinsically bad about change; it has always been the yeast necessary for the development of civilization. Today, however, I believe there is a fundamental difference. The pace at which change is taking place has outdistanced our emotional ability to keep up with it. Not only has the speed with which things change increased geometrically, but change seems to have become an end in itself; almost a religion.

From the evidence it would appear that time, too, has taken on a new connotation. To 'take time' is no longer a virtue. It used to be that what we did was evaluated by its quality, rather than the time it took to do it. Now it is the time, or how little time, it takes to do something that is the gauge of merit. If saving time is the primary goal, then craft and workmanship can only be the losers.

And what of the simpler, more intimate, albeit mor circumscribed, world of our ancestors? As provincial and insular as it was, the pace of small town life was played out on an intensely human scale, in terms comprehensible to most of us. It may be that technology makes us forget that we are basically creatures of evolution, and in many ways the small town characterizes our evolutionary nature better than any place."

Plowden says the places he wrote and photographed in his '70s book, "Commonplace," are mostly gone and replaced by the now-style, by what he calls the banal.

He finishes his essay with these words that stand out for me. He feels the matter at a deep level. He says,

"I look at my photographs as portraits of our ancestors."