Float
Thanksgiving day of '97. Here I am again and confused as ever. How come I haven't been able to get anyone to see Chilson's a great photographer? I wish to say here his gift is that he can make people float. They go upn'down stairs in a float. Anevokatevenoun; they climb and descend in Greek. It is one word and that is the key. Who goes up, comes down. The figures head in one direction, to church, to vote or to school. They enter, then leave. The motion is two-faced. Toward and away. A mundane business. Obvious to any observer, but in the recording,0 a funny thing happens. The people we catch leaving a place, an indoor spot, seem to rejoice in the leaving of the indoors and the reentry into the light. Something happened in the darkened church, corridor, office, room, that makes them flee to the light.
The action is akin to how Chilson may feel in his brain. He takes the dark and creates light with his kindly images of the folks he knows the best. Not the Italian persons on the other side of the tracks in Franklin, but the ones he encounters daily on his own main street. Likely the ones who enter his father's butcher shop for a chunk of meat to use for the supper. His world in known to him in a particular way and he records to forget the deaths he records also as fire, crime and accident reporter in his own town of Franklin as well as the other adjoining towns he covers as an official photographic expert. He has all the technical aspects down pat. His nephew, Buck Buchanan, has explained to me how competent the fellow was in doing his calling. Serious and competent, as he and Buck make the rounds of police and fire stations recording events in an official capacity. He knows everyone, has no enemies. You just can't dislike him. He is so nice.
He leaves the site of grim dealings, the police station, fire scene or side of the road where the accident occurred and comes on home. Stan takes pictures of the mundane movings of his mates. Of them all, in his sphere. Men, women and child. He needs to do this for some end and it somehow works as he captures them coming down stairs into the natural and kind light of day and god.
He is the only one who sees Wrentham or Franklin. No-one will follow him in his time who can see what he sees and cares to record it for you and me too. They wrote books in those far days and had shows on the radio, printed and read newspapers, painted pictures. Wrentham had a fair share of indigenous artists who did up canvases in pretty fashion. But there was only one Chilson. That is the fact and one can wonder how he could do it with no-one to understand or care. Then or now, for who gives a damn about Chilson today in a time of grand movies and blockbusting novels? We are so removed from Chilson and his time, he could be a Martian or Peruvian come down the mountain for yearly provisions. He is a wierd. A strange person to be doing what he does in his movies. The local channel in Franklin has run the footage as it stands and some folks watch it. It is the only way to do Chilson. As a whole. To think about analyzing it, is to give it importance and I have not found another human I can get to see how important Stan is.
And so I do these vague essays to convince myself of the fact that he is priceless and so valuable for us to appreciate life in the forties and fifies and thirties, in Franklin and Norfolk and my beloved Wrentham. By association, I imagine those images might also fit for the same period of time in my town, Dover and the adjoining place; call it Medfield. A life that disappeared with the dreadful suburbanization we have since witnessed and which goes on now apace. Huge homes, toxic green lawns fed by bursts and gusts of water from mysterious little holes in the ground. Drizzles that cover the whole lawn somehow so the growth takes on the aspect of astroturf as seen in the domes of the stadiums in Dallas and Detroit. The whole damn world as a irrigation-fed toxic green lawn. I just hate it. And go back to the forties to forget what we became.
I love the disorganized look of their clothing. The fact they have time to laugh and peer at Chilson photographing them. I attend the summer festival, the parade, the flagraising and think of the people as just floating in their pond with enough time for them to enjoy life and remember they are the curious thing we can call the American. Their way of life is in tact and so secure nothing could ever endanger it. Not the Nazi, or the Japanese war machine. Not the depression they are passing through, nor disease, blight, tornado or hurricane.
And they are just cooked. They don't even know it, but I do, in hindsight. In a Marxian twist, they were destroyed from within as the philosopher said would be the sad fate of capitalism. He was right about this and wrong about the promise of communism and even its weak cousin, socialism. Did Chilson know he was witnessing all alone the demise of a whole way of life of a culture? I do not know. I wish I did but I have not heard lately from Buck, his nephew and don't wish to bother him with more letters. I would say to Buck if I could, do you think uncle knew he was photographing a dynasoar that would never more grace our world in person? These lovelies he films left us, extinct as the flapper of the twenties. As gone as Frank Capra movies and the innocence of our lovely advertisements of the day. Gone, gone, to be replaced with the suburban and the new way of living and more importantly a new way of thinking.
I can only politicize Chilson, whether he consciously or unconsciously knew what he was doing. It doesn't really matter if I put words in his mouth. It cannot diminish his art and that ultimately is all that matters. Further he is the teacher ever and always and can instruct us on how to find community and family again. And when I put him in this context, I am not sullying his contribution , his art. His most grand art.
Chilson floats and I note. Nobody else in the whole world could see as this man did. That be truth, and the magnificence of this figure reaches stars for me. I stick him up on the altar place with Atget of Paris and other unkown and solitary figures like the Peruvian thinker and playwright, Sebastian Salazar Bondy, as described by the writer, Llosa.. He says of the dear solitary, the following. He is a person who knows that the multitude in his society cannot read what he writes or understand what he puts on the stage. The ones who can read and could understand if they wished are the ones who don't care. So the artist named Bondy is alone in the Peru of the '60's. Llosa says words like this. "It means protecting oneself....setting up a spiritual enclave as a retreat, a separate world of one's own, jealously guarded, erecting a small cultural citadel within whose walls the solitary one can grow, live and work."
I don't mean to imply that Stan Chilson was a potential national hero like Bondy became on his death. No, just that the two, along with Atget, lived the same issues in their daily life. They had to go on with not any recognition from the mates they were trying to help to see reality and what it could do to and for them. Fact is Peru rocked on with revolutions and poverty and little love to go around. The fact is that Wrentham and Franklin just ceased to exist.
And Atget had this unsettling habit of taking pictures of an empty Paris, with no people in his pictures because he knew the people were expendable and only the buildings mattered as important. In the three cases above, the humans who occuppied space would be replaced by uncaring fit-ins, ignorant masses and self-absorbed middle classers who only lived for consumption and cared not for the preservation of the old.
Artists and photographers, the writers and the poets dare know differently; that the past only is what matters. That there can be no future unless we look at the culture and think on it seriously as past and as present. The Peruvian Bondy, the French photographer, Atget, and the American one, Chilson, know the culture needs help to survive as an extension of the past. All three fail really. Paris becomes a world city where the old alleys Atget photographs are knocked down. Gone. Cherished Main Street goes away in our small towns. And in Peru, the writer, Bondy is buried, and the poverty continues and the lone artist is still alone to try to survive. Always the same somehow. It is a bit discouraging.
Bondy tried to do everything for his countrymates, Llosa says. He calls him "a man-orchestra," which I love. He is, "This living demonstration that, despite everything, someone had lived up to his vocation." How well put for Llosa to recognize thus his colleague in art. He just follows the muse, the mythic lady who governs us who attempt the art thing in a serious and caring fashion. He is a diamond, a solitary, an Atget in Paris or a Chilson in Wrentham. Let us recognize the local as universal. What is said of the national hero, Bondy applies to Stan. Hear. "Above all, despite his terrible goodness, his unquenchable curiosity for every aspect of life,.....Sebastian was that intransigent egotist, the writer, and of all the struggles that he undertook the main one, that motivated all the others, was the one that maintained the solitary one as an ideal."
So it teaches us, the essay by the Peruvian intellectual, Llosa, that the solitary and the lone ideal is ever out there. He lauds countryman and predecessor, Bondy. See a review of a new book on Atget in the "New Yorker." April of '94. Where in, it says of him he saw all, that others ignored. "The arcana of the old city, its brothels and doorways and dirty fountains, the stages on which its daily drama was played out." I am looking at a photograph of Atget in the article and he has got on this look equally of "I done it," and another half of, "whether you like it or not, is no concern of mine." In reality he does it because he has to, and that is his work. He calls it documentary work, his photographs are but statements of fact. Not art. Any more than Stan would claim what he does is art.
The reviewer of the Atget book goes on to say, he "stopped to absorb the detail that others failed to notice." Paris is a " lost yet living place." An empty universe of a set of structures and streets with no humans. Hard lines, soft mists over the buildings. Ghosts and goblins galore forged by the ability he had with his old-timey photography to capture them as they stare out of a cafe or flit down a dirty street to an appointed, dirty deed. All that Atget did, was pure Atget. No-one else had his fingerprint, his style, his signature. Silent and steady he headed out each day with a hundred pounds of photographic baggage to catch the reality of the street. He wandered then on home, to rest, to go out and to do the same thing the next day. Why? Who could know? Wierd stuff, odd stuff. Very Atget and very strange.
Great artists create their own dream and go lie in it. I have that feeling about him and many painters and thinkers I have read about and whose work I have seen.
It just seems they like it there, like I like it, where I live in my vids and where Stan lives in Wrentham and his Franklin. The artists seem to live in the places where they want to, in their self-made worlds. Alone. Always secretly reveling in their odd posture. That may be the sign of a true artist, now that I think about it. It may be why I love David Hogarth as much as I do. He is an experimental artist of L.A. who came of England and his work is odd and beautiful and self-revealing all at once and he stays way out there so we are able to see better the worlds he creates.
Well for me Stan does that too. He makes art of his surroundings. Out there on a branch of his own. He is a Grandma Moses. Like Atget, he symbolically lives on crusts. Of Atget, "he dined on milk, bread, and sugar lumps for twenty years." When you look at his photograph in the New Yorker magazine, the first time I have ever seen him in person, after having spent hours at the Regis library looking at his photographs, the feeling you have is he is charmed. A pixie. A fairy who just popped in for a minute to say a good hello and thank you but he must leave because there is a picture out there that he has to record, that has to put aright.
Atget or Chilson or Bondy of Peru come to us at this table on Thanksgiving day of 1997, to say to have hope and faith in our worlds, the ones we so lovingly live in and describe. It may be an American novelist, a Chinese filmmaker, or the Greek poet, Seferi. The thing is all the same. You just need to do what you do with no intermediation from the outer world, in the way of praise or criticism. Money or free lunch? No. No distraction. Just reach and touch the muse. The story or the canvas will emerge. It will yield, as it does for Stan's does, every time. He never agonizes over what is before his camera. He just knows to film it and not call it art or fancy, just a picture. Of his mates. Just like Atget communicates with the silence that is Paris with no people in it to complicate things. I know Stan does people and Atget buildings and alleys, but to me it is the same process. The artist telling his story, unwinding a tale, spinning a yarn on how he or she feels about what is before him or her, as an observer of the life at hand.
The story goes on. You may recognize a few shops Atget photographed in Paris now. You can travel to Wrentham or Franklin and see what Chilson used as backdrop for his folks coming down the stairs. The thread of history is still there, but where is the style of life, the ambience of the time? Gone. Gone and it will not return, unless we recreate it and make it live again which is not only unlikely, but nigh impossible. The only hope is for a movie or a painting or poem, that evokes what we lost and sorely need to be able to keep going. A look at the forties and thirties of small American towns will reveal a wholeness that is totally wonderful. A fairyland that today's 128 and 495 frantics can not even imagine. We need to reclaim the young who flail about in those modern cars on the highway and stop them long enough to say, "hey, there was this Chilson fellow and he can tell you how to live and raise your young. He can tell you what to do with your life so you won't throw it away like you're doing just now." Oh Stan, they don't seem to listen or to care. What am I to do? So I go back and sight the photograph of Monsieur Atget and think that I have not yet seen a photo of Stan as a grownup and would like to and I will say what it is I see in Atget's face. Hold on while I turn the page here to reveal his face. His look says, to just go on no matter what. What Seferi is always saying to me. I have leaves to rake. It is forty miles an hour out doors. No fooling, it is like a train rumbling out of my window. The arthritis is crippling me up and I am forgetful when I think things, where I didn't used to be. My appetite stinks, my mind muddled. I can't figure out my dreams of last night. Only they left me tired when I got up this morning. I am a mess as usual. In short, says Atget, who cares? Just do what you do and it will turn out fine. You will make enough to get by, and be able to write or paint or photograph like always, just knowing it is the fun and the right thing to do. Atget has things under control. He has taken off his glasses, in the picture, to make his point. He welcomes you and anyone else into his world, his fraternity, with a nod of his head and a flick of his finger, eaten by the chemicals he uses for his pictures. He says what Elyty, the Greek poet says, to just celebrate life with lights, music and horses. He echoes Sullivan whose skyscrapers I love. Who counsels with the line, "bring it alive, man."
He is wise like the playwright and thinker, David Mamet, who says to forget method acting and just be a vessel for the needs of the work at hand. We're but instruments, he says, we who practice art, and our voices but echoes of times and persons who have come before.
Stan Chilson lived before me. I lived while he did and never knew him. Only through his work and the two meetings with his nephew in Medfield. I cannot ever get him out of my mind. I think it is mostly I admire him, but also that he teaches me how to live better. How to love my wife more, how to be kind to my daughter, to support her endeavors. To respect the privacy of my neighbors and village mates. He comes with me daily to Revere, as I muse on the parking lot. He is on my finger when I look through the lens of my still camera. I go to Wrentham and look to see him. Of course, I don't, but I feel better being there, knowing he was once at the spots I am in now.
It is an aweful lonely world today. With all the art and the great movies and the excellent newspapers, magazines and tv shows, I still seem to need Stan, Walker Evans and Florine Stettheimer. Evans is an American photographer and Stettheimer an American colorist and painter. I love my movies I get from Blockbuster, two a week. I feel as though I am in the middle of a miracle. The America I inhabit is this miracle. I love its vitality. Yet I need Stan's vision to clue me in on another world; one that doesn't have today's day's razzle-dazzle, the speed.
Stan's world has a different thing, called peace and calm.a daily loveliness.
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