CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION
Stan Chilson is elusive as, I imagine, all interesting and creative people are. His way is a bit odd. He puts stuff on cellophane, on movie film, and stretches a screen so he and his village mates can see. These last estimable hearties laugh and guffaw over how they look onto the screen before them. Now Stan is nowhere to be found on the screen. He stays the invisible creator, like the Lord, our God.
That is cruel, I guess. Stan is just quiet, not omnipotent in his quest for doing art. But when you think about it, he is, a bit, playing the director's role. That is to say, he, like I imagine God, moves people about to amuse himself and pass the time. For you see, God and Stan must get a bit bored with their lives, humdrum as they must be, like ours.
I am gearing up to say something. It is 6 on a quiet summer Sunday. I have been rehearsing this story in my head for a bit now, when I was going to work on the highway. And it goes a bit like this. Stan is important to me. He interests me. Less his work actually, than his motivation. My speciality is trying to understand where good work comes from. Not great work, like Grandma Moses or N.C. Wyeth, but good work that is somehow sharp and odd and special. That is how I see Chilson, as special and good.
Here is what I came up with. The phrase, "I must to survive." It applies to illegal Salvadorans I see north of Boston. Dignified, lovely people with wives named Daisy and terrific children who live with the fear of being sent back to die in a tough, tough land. I must to survive myself. The body I carry is getting harder and harder to lug around. I am deep-tired in my heart of how hard life is. Now this applies to Stan. He survives .... how? In his work. And that is me too. In my work. He puts on shadow plays to stay alive and vital.
He takes care of his mother and father. He takes his nephew, Buck, on his rounds of police stations and fire stations. For those of you who don't yet know Stan, he is an official fire and police photographer, as well as a good artist, who does photos for pleasure and movies just to stage little village dramas. He asks little. Creates his own devices for making the picture process more efficient. His own flash gun system. Has a little printing press for making the legends that introduce his village scenes. He play acts, using the villagers as the actors. They are happy and he is happy.
Why he does this, I do not know. I would not do that. He goes from his imagination to the screen with delightful views of parades, summer festivals, weddings, and people sawing wood or tearing down an old building. Or he goes on the street and catches a uniform, a policeman who is walking around looking good. He shows the people kidding and serious, in all their moods. And he gets a kick out of it. You can tell, because his work has a clean aspect to it, a holiness, a cleanliness. He is clean, his work is clean. Stan is a clean person whose work has an innocence that makes it feel like a story out of the canon of children's book fables.
He celebrates community in the self-same village of his youth. In the face of awful change that will obliterate same. His view is saccharine, a fiction. Like all work is fiction. It comes of his head, his will to recreate and freeze a world he needs in order to survive, to keep living. Without that world there is no life. For him, for me, for innumerable old people who now live in Wrentham, Franklin and Dover. He is immediate, trenchant, real, and vital in all his otherworldliness, in his fiction. He veers off the path to go to the road of imagination and takes us with him who do not understand or like the world of internet and Japanese car and the frog on the tv who eats the Budweiser truck. I should say I don't really mind the new things that much. They amuse me but do not sustain me like the world that Chilson describes, loves and portrays. He's in the village and so am I. I prefer it there and he serves it up on my plate. The americans are weird to me, the child of an immigrant, but at least they are villagers and I can make the adjustment and change the American village into a Greek one and the people into Zorba figures.
Stan imagines and I follow. His humility is what grabs me. And his certitude that what he is doing is the right thing to do. Just as I do vids for some reason, he does movies and never questions the reason. 'Cause he knows I will come along and reinterpret his work to a new generation and someone will come along and take my work of the village of Chilson and reinterpret it to some other generation. I used to feel funny thinking I could compare what I do to a terrific artist like Chilson, but I am beyond care at this point and feel my work is as good as anyone else's if you judge it by its attempt at honesty and don't worry over how "good" it is by some standard or other. I feel close to Stan and he is beyond me in his heaven and can't do much to object.
He stretches a sheet in the backyard and the people come to show themselves on the screen and laugh and Chilson runs the camera projector and they go home happy and he goes home shaking his head that he is so lucky. To be able to use live actors and props to amuse himself. A kid in the attic on a rainy day moving about his soldiers or stick figures to tell little stories to pass the time. That is all Stan is doing. Sitting in his attic, safe from the prying eyes of whomever, telling the story of creation, the story of this or that village mate who lives, marries, dies, and has an elaborate funeral ceremony to commemorate his passing. Stan films it and we are struck by its grandeur, its beauty, its notion that life and death are one in the holy village in Stan's mind. The unity of life. The warp and woof of community. In tact as they were in the old days, the very old days when villages were the one and only. The day will come, he implies, when we will get back to sanity and make villages where people can live safe from drugs, bombs, deportations, death at cruel hands, poisonings, stupid advertising, nastiness and all the other stuff so foreign to Stan's makeup. His imaginary world he puts on the screen should scroll hour after hour at McDonald's in Franklin, on a tv set mounted above the french fries. Hour after hour of people coming down stairs to remind the munchers of today how wonderful Franklin used to be and how wonderful it might one day become if only we remember what it meant to be human. Stan knows and tells us, only we don't listen.
Buck,his nephew who hung with Stan, knows. I know, but who cares? No-one. That is life as they say and let's just get on with it and celebrate Stan's vision. It is a Chilson moment. Forget the Prozac, the thorazine, the crack, the Bud Light. Forget Roseanne, and the Mounty on "Due South." Forget the freeze-dried food at Supermarket-Damoulas. Forget Walmart. Please. Just stretch the sheet and go on Main Street for the show. It begins in fifteen minutes. The world may blow up. We may all get so fat the cholesterol will choke our veins and we will die, all at the same moment, before we may properly celebrate Stan. So say, "Stan, good job." Stan is asked to do a good job and that is all he does. He gets the aperture and the staging right and manages to tell a story and that is all he does. He tells a good story.
He asked nothing. Took nothing. You see, he had everything. And we have Buck to tell us his story, as he has told it to me. I imagine and actually know, Buck is Stan. I look on this man and see his uncle. Quiet, lovely, calm, unassuming, tall, warm, funny, always kind of quiet. I am always, it seems, the luckiest of men. I find what I am looking for. I looked to find this person who extolls the life of the village, the calm of a real Main Street and I find him. In Buck. In the photos of David Plowden, American photographer. In the water colors of the incomparable Charles Buchfield, my very own dandy-lion. This gentle person says in his journal he never saw anything as beautiful as a dandylion. How lucky I am. My kin come to this weird place, America and I find it just like my village, Mandraki, Nisiro, Dodecanisos, Aegean sea, Greece. I walk the village with the Americans and I am speechless with their company. I love them so. I love their villageness as I love my own. It is villageness, universal, and I can but rejoice. I am blessed.
The place where fun can be had. Where family is primary and secure. There is time for merriment. Stan is always bright and cheery. He is positive and buries the sad stuff and the tough times. My own Disney,Currier and Ives, Rockwell, Simpsons, as in Bart. He is of a world where people care. I care. Stan cares. It is a world I recognize. Today they don't care any more and always seek to just step over my corpse as they pass by me on the mean street. I am odd, stupid, crazy. They tell me so and step over my body as they go to make more money or feed their overfed body some more. O, a pox on modernity! I care only to stretch the sheet, lower the lights and watch people come down stairs once more. Stan is what is needed to counter the modern trend. Stan is all we need to see the world as it is meant to be, as it was, for three thousand years, until 1946, when the boys came home from war and moved to Leavittown and gave the world to the corporons to sell them crap they wanted but did not need.
Innocence is lost. Can we find it once more?
Stan is invisible. He stages his villagers for us to learn from. Do we learn? No.
He asks nothing, reveals nothing of himself, and in the process, reveals everything about himself. We do not know his age, his personal habits, is his dress neat or is he sloppy like me? Does he wear after shave? Does he like steak? His father owns a meatmarket. What kind of music did he play on the piano or the violin before he took up photography? We don't know. Buck knows some things, and he is open with me. He tells me things so I understand a little. But I never know why Stan felt compelled to do so many hours of movies to record many events in the life of the village. There is so much one feels submerged in its vast quantity. He could have done a little, but why did he do so much? Who knows? I don't.
All we really know is the work. He is to be found through the work. It doesn't matter how tall he was or whether he read Sinclair Lewis or Dreiser or how he liked his orange juice. All we need to understand the artist is the work and we have tons of it. If we need more to get to Stan all we need is Buck. Because he is Stan's standin for the time. Stan influenced his life tremendously as he did lives of others around him. As he influences mine. So I chat with Buck and feel things I know to be true of Stan.
All he is up to is to "celebrate Main Street." Ha! The artist of Main Street.
So what's the big deal? He has a secret. Here it is. The people on the screen are dancers. To a silent music in Stan's head. Don't try to put Glenn Miller to his films. It just doesn't work. His music may be Sibelius, as it was to that other cold weather artist from Buffalo, Charles Burchfield. Or Bach, or Brahms or Beethoven. Maybe Scott Joplin. Oh goodness. I don't know what music. But the secret Stan has it that he does an Isadora Duncan routine. He is a dance master, not a photographer. He choreographs the village and its people to pass a rainy day, to get over a dark feeling he might have as to his fate or that of his mother and father who are getting old. He chases the nasties with his little song and dance routines he stages so the villagers can ooh and ah over their appearance in his shadow plays. But maybe Stan has some other need he is satisfying as dancemaster and musical director of his life. It is innocent. He is not pulling the wool over anyone's eyes. He is just letting his soul out to tell a story and then his soul goes back to the bed in his head. Untill the next time when he trots it out to once more be a Grimms, or Dr. Seuss or Hans Christian Anderson and in this process creates memorable art. Who is to say he is as good as David Plowden, N.C. Wyeth or Rockwell. Sinclair Lewis or the person who wrote Peyton Place. I don't know, but I like his dance, his innocence, the way he makes the actors whirl and swirt across the stage. He coordinates all this and it makes me very, very happy. It is such a simple thing and that is what the holy village is about, the simple life in all its deep complexity.
My hero, Odyseas Elytis, the poet, said," When shall we, all of us, feel how deep, serious, charming life is?" Well, Stan teaches us how, if we will but pay attention. His eyes are serious, cheerful, wary, clever, and kind. They are serious. He is serious. He puts on a play and puts out a music to which his figures accompany us to our sleep. I dream of his villagers going through their permutations in Wrentham. I have viewed hours of film or Wrentham and the people go to sleep with me at night. They are my figures because Stan recorded them. They never hurt me or insult me. They just dance.
That is their beauty. They dance to some music or other that Stan has in his head. I don't know the music but it is music to my ears. His silent film has a music I provide. Only I can't hear it clear enough yet to make out a name for it. Sibelius or Bach. To be honest, I could not tell Sibelius from Bach. I have not sense of music. I love only the still photo. That is my life the still. I still Chilson's moving pictures because the movement confuses me and renders me unable to analyze the art before me. Chilson is not like me. He can handle movement and his figures for him are meant to move to some kind of music.
And therin lies his genius. His ability to make Main Street tinkle and trill. To make his actors real and lovely in their very own dance and play and musical production. Just as if he were in his room creating little plays with toy figures on the floor, aside his bed, looking out the window and dreaming.
The daily dance is on the screen. Only he sees it. The daily dance is his secret. He keeps it to himself not out of meanness but because he is private. Not out of selfishness but out of deep humility. He figures no-one else would care about his song, only he, so he just hums it to himself.
He has the idea that the ballet of Main Street in his head is his way of amusing himself as he merrily goes about documenting the world he sees. The pomp and the circumstance of daily life comes to be a large orchestrated opera, but all the people see is themselves and their kin on the screen, the boy scouts in parade or the American Legion in the parade.
For you see Chilson has assembled a vast cast as he creates his own opera, his sonata. A silent sonata. The town is his actors, and the stage for his little puppet show. He is not manipulating anything or anyone. He is just playacting and having some fun. Telling the stories a community puppeteer might tell. Only he uses live people to perform the daring dramas of village life.
My vids try to capture a sense of that whole business. As they walk and they talk. As they walk and talk...... and he, Stan, just loves it, and he goes, "wow!" And he goes, "wow!" Which will be the name of another vid I do on Stan. He is not different from Burchfield in upstate New York or Walker Evans with sharecroppers in Georgia.. They go "wow," and we sit up and take notice. Evans is as private as Chilson, really. He seldom explains over his whole lifetime what is special about his vision. His biographer says that. Burchfield is just as elusive, even though he wrote thousands of pages of notes about his art. He just never tells us the how and the real meaning of listening to his beloved Norwegian, Sibelius, and letting his hand go over the canvas as he turns out picture after picture of old houses on winter streets of upstate New York. He says this or that but not why his houses result from his reaction to the music he is listening to.
Well, Stan is listening to a music that causes him to stage his films. We don't need to find it. It is there, in its greatness, just like what Burchfield hears is there. It is not Sibelius that creates the masterpieces Burchfield creates. It is Burchfield who creates listening to Sibelius. It is Chilson who creates listening to what it is he hears. It is Chilson, not the music which we must pay attention to. So one does not need to know whether it is Gershwin or Bach that inspires Stan. Stan inspires himself and that is all we need to know.
The art's in him and he sure knows how to tell it. And we go "wow."
The theatricity of everyday life is what Stan does.... in the wholesome village. Like a little kid, he has his soldiers and clay figures and he moves them around in a delightful manner to show a nice side of the human equation. Not the gore, but the nice side of us and we, over time, ignore him and shove him in a corner. Throw his photos in an old corner as one fire chief did with Stan's work once.
We choose to emphasize something else. It seems. But that is life and we go to Mac Donald's to forget some more and get off on some new foolishness, the spider man or power ranger or latest Disney hit. The little kids get a piece of plastic that adorns the happy meal and the happy adults and kids go home to forget some more.
Stan gives us a soap of the thirties and the forties. His soap opera, as they say, shows us life as it can be, as it once was and someday will be. Only that day is not yet. That day is not yet.
How life can be miracle, Stan show. How much a miracle daily life is. How much life has been killing and suffering so we can live like human beings in Wrentham in the nineteen forties. How decency must get its chance. Decency deserves a chance. His people have a resolve and a certainty that today seems unusual. They took life as they found it and made it better. Against great odds.
And the implication from the "light work" of Chilson is we can do the same if we will. If we only take the light that Chilson favors us with in his films and will to make that light our light.
We need as rolemodels his actors and actresses of the forties. Until we got inundated with things in the late seventies we had a pretty good grasp of what life was and what it was for. Until we got inundated with things and things' messages, advertisements. We got fat and bloated. We are fat and bloated. We got soft. And Chilson foresaw all that and told us.
He keeps life simple and direct. So do his actors so we can lean on them and learn their music. Hum their tune. The drugs, the tv, the self-destructive people were in the future. The hatefulness gone haywire, the anonymous bombers, the killing for the fun of it. All around us. The genocide of all the good by the bad.
His message is the same as Walker Evans' or Charles Burchfield. The life of prewar was hard but fun. That of the nineteen forties and before. Preferable over the confusion that came of modernity and progress.
The old must serve as a model for the future. The community-minded persons, the churches, the village groupings and all that are an antidote for the run-a-muck corporatism we live in, the big government, the me-attitude.
We can no longer abandon the family and the tribe of human beings of whatever stripe or type. If we persist, we will continue to be miserable. That is why Chilson or Burchfield are so important. They have the power to show us how life could be then and how we can make it now.
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