This is just to say …

March 20, 2025
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I don’t often write about politics in this blog. My own beliefs are rather mainstream and inoffensive, on the whole. I tend to like politics as the negotiation of competing interests through compromise. But sometimes, there is something that just needs saying.

It has slowly dawned on me that we have been mistaking Donald Trump for quite some time now. I don’t know how many articles I’ve read or videos I’ve seen coming up with explanations of what Trump is really trying to do. Is he intent on creating a dictatorship? Is it world domination? Is it some clever means of manipulating the market to make himself even more rich? There are a dozen explanations put forward. Even his MAGA people don’t have a single explanation, and choose a Trump that fits their wishes. 

But I have come to the conclusion that seems to be the only one truly possible: Donald Trump is clinically insane. 

I know, we have all been saying he’s crazy for at least the past 10 years, but when we said that we didn’t really mean it. We were using a metaphor to explain the counterintuitive and counterproductive policy decisions he’s made, and the vomitation of lies that spew from his tongue. But I now mean that I think Trump is actually a madman. Spitgargling, foaming at the mouth crazy. The kind of crazy that would normally require a straitjacket  and padded room. That to attempt to understand why he does this or that is a fruitless task. There is nothing to understand. There is no secret meaning behind his policies. He is just insane, like Col Bat Guano in Dr. Strangelove. Stark, raving out of his mind. 

The scariest part of it all is the Republican congressmen and senators who line up behind him for their own craven reasons, often racist, or more often thinking they need to back up the crazy man in order to be re-elected. They repeat Trump’s crazy talk and attempt to explain “what he really means,” or, more often, just run away from town-hall meetings to avoid reasonable questions. 

It really hit me when I remembered Fritz Lang’s 1933 German film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, in which the famous master criminal, Dr. Mabuse (he’d been the subject of two earlier silent films by Lang) had been caught and declared insane and put in an asylum, where he wrote compulsively these scribbled nonsense notes that were smuggled out to his followers, who then used them to commit robberies, arsons, sabotage, etc. The images of Mabuse in his cell scribbling away with hysterical focus seem so much like Trump and his tweets. Both their utterances make little coherent sense. 

At one point, the police captain in the film talks about “Mabuse the criminal,” his ardent follower shoots back, “No, Mabuse the genius!” and describes admiringly how the “crimes” of the “brilliant” Mabuse will destroy a corrupt world. 

The film was banned by Joseph Goebbels, who proclaimed that The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was a menace to public health and safety and “showed that an extremely dedicated group of people are perfectly capable of overthrowing any state with violence.” Which, of course, is exactly what his boss, Herr Hitler, had already done.

Lang himself explained, “The film was made as an allegory to show Hitler’s processes of terrorism. Slogans and doctrines of the Third Reich have been put into the mouths of criminals in the film. Thus I hoped to expose the masked Nazi theory of the necessity to deliberately destroy everything which is precious to a people. … Then, when everything collapsed and they were thrown into utter despair, they would try to find help in the ‘New order’.”

Sound familiar? 

And so, I am now of the mind that Trump has no grand scheme, cryptic plan, overall policy design, but rather is a lunatic spouting inanities and non-sequiturs and a portion of the electorate suffering what they see as grievance follow him, hoping for relief, and far worse, a cadre of lawmakers who use the ravings to further their own careers. 

I hope by posting this, and having others make similar observations, we may finally reach a tipping point where the obvious insanity no longer goes normalized, and the tide shifts.

Still, it all makes me even more depressed about what is to come. 

Joisey

March 15, 2025
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I was born in the upper right corner of New Jersey, just to the west of the Hudson River and a few miles south of the New York state line and the Rockland State Hospital, an asylum famous for once housing Allen Ginsberg and Carl Solomon.

That corner of the map is Bergen County, the most populous county in the state and where I spent the first 17 years of my life, before I managed to escape. It is unrelentingly suburban and, to my young sensibility, numbingly banal. In my senescence, six decades later, I have moderated my disdain and now recognize it as my hatchery — and a part of my psyche that I cannot ever fully extirpate. Like Quentin Compson speaking about his native Mississippi, I can say of my own native state, “I don’t hate it. I don’t. I don’t hate it.” 

The Hackensack River

Bergen County is split by two rivers, the Hackensack and the Passaic. The later forms part of the western border of the county and the Hackensack ran through the town where I was raised and drained, finally, into Newark Bay to the south, between Newark and Jersey City, two old cities that show their age. 

To the east of the Hackensack, the land rises abruptly until it reaches an edge high above the Hudson River, called the Palisades, a 20-mile long series of basalt cliffs that rise to 500 feet above the water. This bit of America, from Paterson to Manhattan is the landscape of my Umwelt — etched into my psyche. 

Since I grew up there and knew no better, I assumed that all rivers must be as wide as the Hudson, and when I first came South to go to college, was less than impressed with what passes for a river there. The Deep River, near my Guilford College, I could have jumped across. That’s not a river, that’s a brook (or, in Southern parlance, a creek). 

 

But the Hudson was noble, wide and impressive. Historically, it ran through the home land of the Lenape Indians and the county is filled with towns and rivers given versions of their Indian names, including my home town, Old Tappan, which was named for the Tappan tribe of Lenape people, which may mean “cold water.” All of New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania, Delaware and New York were originally Lenape lands. 

Other Bergen County Native American names, however twisted by the ears of the early colonists, include: Hackensack; Ho-Ho-Kus; Mahwah Moonachie; Paramus; Teaneck; and Wyckoff. 

Names can get quite twisted. In central Jersey the name of Cheesequake was originally the Lenape name Chiskhakink, which meant “cleared land.” Other New Jersey names, some harder to pronounce than others, at least for non-native Jerseyites, include Hoboken, Hopatcong, Manahawkin, Mantoloking, Metuchen, Neshanic, Netcong, Pahaquarry, Parsippany, Pequannock, Piscataway, Ramapo, Secaucus, Squankum, Succasunna, Weehawken, Wickatunk. And that doesn’t count the lakes, rivers and creeks: Absecon; Assunpink; Assiscunk; Hakihokake; Hockhockson; Kittatinny; Luppatatong; Machesautauxen; Metedeconk; Muksukemuk; Musconetcong; Picatinny; Pohandusing; Rancocas; Shabakunk; Waackaack; Wawayanda; Wickecheoke — and that’s about 10 percent of the list. I believe I’ve heard my cat say “Waackaack” at times. 

If you’re from there, these names roll easily off the tongue, if not, well — I once heard a newscaster pronounce Parsippany as “par-suh-PAN-ee.” 

Then, there’s Kinderkamack Road, which sounds like it should be among the many Dutch names in the area, but is really a version of the Lenape for “Place of the Ceremonial Dance.” But you would be forgiven for mistaking it. After the Native Americans came the Dutch, with their own names for things, such as Kill van Kull, Polifly, Paulus Hook, Schraalenburgh, and Tenafly. 

There’s a lot of history in New Jersey, although most Jerseyites pay little attention to it. Not only Native American and Dutch history, but New Jersey was once a slave state. My county, Bergen, was the largest holder of enslaved people in New Jersey, with 20 percent of its population in bondage in 1800. New Jersey was the last of the Northern states to outlaw slavery. At the end of the Civil War, there were about a dozen slaves still owned in the state, eventually freed by the 13th Amendment. By the way, the state voted against Abraham Lincoln both in 1860 and in 1864. 

When my father was clearing land in our back yard in Old Tappan, he dug up an old brick foundation that a local historian identified as the remains of an 18th century slave quarters. 

The stony ground of the state has seen a lot of history. One of the most famous and consequential battles of the Revolutionary War was fought in Jersey, as George Washington crossed the Delaware River in the winter of 1776 and surprised British forces at Trenton. He did it again a year later. 

During the Gilded Age, New Jersey was a comfortable home for corporate monopolies. Before being broken up by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1911, Standard Oil of New Jersey had controlled nearly 90 percent of refined oil in the United States. 

Oh, New Jersey. Wikipedia lists more than 50 New Jersey politicians convicted of crimes and corruption, most famously in recent years, Sen. Bob Menendez, who was found guilty of taking bribes after investigators found Menendez had illegally received a Mercedes-Benz car, 13 gold bars, and $486,461 in cash.

The Chin

In my own home town of Old Tappan, Mafia boss Vincent “The Chin” Gigante had a house a little more than a hundred yards from where I grew up. I didn’t know that at the time, but imagine my surprise when, at college in 1970, I turned on the radio one morning and heard the NPR announcer say that the entire police force of Old Tappan had been arrested for taking cash from Gigante’s wife, Olympia. 

Other high points in New Jersey history: 

It was the home, in Menlo Park, to Thomas Edison’s research laboratory, later moved to West Orange. 

New Jersey was the first state to ratify Prohibition.

In 1927, the Holland Tunnel connected NJ to Manhattan, followed by the George Washington Bridge in 1931 and the Lincoln Tunnel in 1937. 

In 1932, the baby of Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow was kidnapped from their home in Hopewell, NJ., and later found dead. A nation-wide manhunt eventually led to the arrest two years later of Bruno  Hauptmann, who was convicted of and executed for the crime. 

The dirigible airship Hindenburg, a German Zeppelin, exploded in flames upon landing at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in 1937, killing 13 passengers and 22 crewmen. “Oh, the humanity!” 

In the infamous Mercury Theatre War of the Worlds radio broadcast of 1938, Orson Welles claimed that Martians had landed in Grovers Mill, NJ. 

And on Sept. 23, 1949, Bruce Springsteen was born, in Long Branch, on the Jersey shore.

The state tends to get divided into three parts, Northern Jersey, Central and South Jerseys. The north is all suburbs of New York City; the south is oriented to Philadelphia and Central Jersey is orphaned between.

 But really, there is another way of splitting up the map that is more reflective of the cultural realities. There is suburban and industrial New Jersey, which is a ribbon running from the northeastern part of the state and cuts diagonally across to the southwest, near Philly. This includes not only my Bergen County, but also Newark, Trenton, Camden, and the Oranges — pronounced locally as Onch, East Onch, South Onch, and West Onch. There is no Nawt Onch. 

The second part might be considered Appalachian New Jersey and is in the northwest, largely rural and wooded, with the Kittatinny Mountains and the Delaware Water Gap. My summer Boy Scout camp was there, where I was first camper and later camp counselor. 

The third part of the state might be called Confederate New Jersey, technically below the Mason-Dixon Line and composed of farm land, swamps and the infamous Pine Barrens, supposed home to the Jersey Devil, a legendary flying demon, said to have been born in 1735 as the 13th child of local woman Deborah Leeds. The child, though born normally. immediately grew wings, tail, and claws and flew out to the Pine Barrens, where, like Big Foot, it is occasionally claimed to have been spotted. 

South Jerseyites can even speak with a drawl, separating them culturally from those farther north. The familiar Joisey accent has a pronounced rising “dawg” while in the south, they are closer to a descending “doag.” (The North Jersey accent is quite distinct. We once had a plumber come to fix our “terlet.”)

There is a fourth important component to the state. Some consider it part of South Jersey, but it is distinct enough — and famous enough — to warrant its own regional name. It runs down the eastern margin of the state, from Sandy Hook to Cape May and it is the Jersey Shore. It is not like any other section of the state and has gained notoriety for the empty-brained drunkenness and pointlessness of the MTV “reality” television program. The less said, the better. 

The broad stripe that runs diagonally down the center of the state is the heart of what people think of as being New Jersey. Bergen, Hudson, Essex, Union, Middlesex, Mercer, Burlington, Camden and Gloucester counties and parts of others, are both the suburban and industrial centers of the state, and the source of most of the enduring cliches. 

But it is the center filet that has all the housing developments, mcmansions, oil refineries and chemical plants — to say nothing of the Pulaski Skyway and the single most trenchant metaphor for the state: The NJ Turnpike. (“Where do you live?” “Exit Four.”)

   When I left New Jersey as a teenager headed off to college in North Carolina, I shook the dust off my sandals and said good riddance. I despised the bourgeois banality of it all and couldn’t wait to get to the “real” stuff that higher education would show me: art and poetry and music, and — well, beer and sex. But over the years I came to realize both that New Jersey was not exceptional in its inanity — that was everywhere — and also more importantly, I had to accept that New Jersey had built my insides.

The pace, the smells, the population density, the architectural styles, the speech, the ethnic and religious diversity I had known had all become the universal norms by which I judged the world. 

It came as a shock, for instance, that there were so many churches and so few synagogues in the South. In Old Tappan, there was one Protestant church and one Catholic church and the nearest synagogue was in Closter. Here in my neighborhood in Asheville, there are three churches all in walking distance. Oy. 

The Trinity Reformed Church in Old Tappan was presided over by the soft-spoken Louis Springsteen whose basic message to the congregation was that good is better than evil because it’s nicer. No brimstone, no hellfire. My Catholic friends went to St. Pius X at the other end of Cripplebush Road. Some of them went to parochial school and were taught by nuns. It was all just normal, and built that normal into me. Religion made no more difference to me or my friends than hair color or freckles. 

I remember my father, raised in Cliffside Park, NJ, telling us that when he was drafted at the beginning of World War II and shipped off to Camp Wheeler in Georgia, he was shocked to find out the camp was segregated. The idea had never occurred to him. 

And when I was at college a group of us decided to crash a Ku Klux Klan meeting in Liberty, NC, where the main speaker was the sheriff of Forsyth County, and I was surprised to find out that among the enemies they despised were not just Black folk, but Catholics and Methodists as well. Huh? Humanity never seemed such a narrow concept where I came from. 

My Boy Scout troop was presided over by Paul Weinstein and his two assistants, Vern Riportella and Arch Curry. Basically, one of each. 

It all, good and bad, became the unexamined bedrock of my personality. I remain somehow in New Jersey, even though I haven’t lived there in 60 years. 

The highways I knew in Paramus seemed the normal highways; the shopping malls the size of Delaware were the norms; the traffic was normal; the oil refineries burning off their excess in the night sky was normal; the bus service, the delicatessens, the pizza, were all the baselines I took elsewhere with me. 

I mean, come on — you call that a pastrami sandwich? 

And New Jersey set the inner tick-tock of my sense of time, a quicker pace. As I’ve aged, the clock has slowed a bit, and living in the South for the majority of my life has moderated the tempo, but it still moves too fast for some. My Anne complains that I talk too fast, according to her North Carolina metronome. 

Perhaps it is because my New Jersey innards prompts me more to favor efficiency than courtliness. 

And while I grew up thinking of my home state as intellectually stultified, I have to grant that there are random points of light. I hesitate to include James Fenimore Cooper among them, after reading Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” — “Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.” — but New Jersey was also the adopted home of Walt Whitman and the very subject and marrow of the poems of William Carlos Williams. There were also Stephen Crane, John Ciardi, Joyce Kilmer, Philip Roth, Amira Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones), George R.R. Martin, to say nothing of the Ginsbergs, père et fils. The Jersey Shore town of Long Branch alone has given us Springsteen, Norman Mailer, Robert Pinsky, and Dorothy Parker. 

Springsteen, Pinsky, Mailer, Parker

New Jersey gave birth to, or was home to George Antheil, Gerard Schwarz, Astrid Varnay, Eileen Farrell, Dorothy Kirsten, Jerome Hines, Sherrill Milnes, Michael Tree, Stephen Paulus, Judith LeClair, and one-third of the Beaux Arts Trio. And that’s not even counting Count Basie or Frank Sinatra. 

And visual artists: Charles Addams, John Held Jr., George Platt Lynes, Robert Smithson, Reginald Marsh, George Segal, Tony Smith, Irving Penn, Marion Post Walcott, Cindy Sherman, George Tice, and, most famously, Alfred Stieglitz.   

So, there is a serious element in the state, past the saltwater taffy, Miss America contests and Giants football in the Meadowlands. I’ve read work by all the authors, listened to music by all the singers and instrumentalists, either live or on recordings, and seen and often written about the visual artists. I hope that has also seeped in to the brainbox. 

After all, maybe I don’t despise New Jersey like I used to, and perhaps I am not alone in having ambivalent feelings about the places that gave us birth and nurtured us. After all, Henry Thoreau complained about the torpor of Concord farmers and townspeople at a time when that village was also home to Emerson, Hawthorne and the Alcotts. Hmm. Might make for a good sonata.

Cats

February 16, 2025
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I am a cat person. I’m not sure how that happened. I didn’t grow up with cats — or dogs — for that matter. My father hated cats. He wasn’t fond of dogs either, but that was more like indifference; he actively disliked cats. Somehow, I grew up differently. Through most of my adult life, there have been cats in my household, sometimes a full clowder. 

People seem to be divided between dog people and cat people. I’ve written about this before. Dogs are simple. You can count on them, yes, but they seldom surprise you. Cats live in an infinitely more rich and complex world. They have an inner life, which is inscrutable. Dog people like dogs because they are trustworthy and dependable. Cat people find this rather boring. We like to be surprised by what our feline overlords are up to. 

My first cat came to me in the early 1970s because I was friends with three women who lived on Cedar Street, in Greensboro, N.C. They had a cat named Trevose, who was boss of the neighborhood. He sired a kitten on a semi-feral cat named Mama Kitty and I inherited the progeny. 

The three women, known collectively back then as “The Girls,” had been on a backpacking trip through Great Britain and had camped in Cornwall at a place called Trevose Head, hence the name of the sire. His son, then become my cat, was given the name Head, which would have been his name on his driver license, if cats could drive. But we soon nicknamed him Widgie. And that’s the name that stuck. 

Widgie grew to be a great bruiser of a cat, with a face as broad as Clark Gable’s. He became the neighborhood “capo,” the cat to whom others came for favors. He survived many fights, winning them all and grew tougher and brawnier with each.

He showed all the usual feline behavior that we laugh at and love cats for: chasing phantoms from room to room, staring at blank spots on the wall as if watching the most fascinating theater, slurping himself through a handful of catnip and looking at me all droop-eyed with a sliver of tongue in the cleft of his upper lip.

It was not unusual for him to scratch at the back door to be let in, and when I came, he might carry the dead body of a vole or sparrow to drop at my feet as if it were a present, or perhaps his kitty version of the rent he owed.

And he had the usual vocabulary of odd catspeak. I rarely heard the classical “meow,” but often heard the “ack-ack” when he spotted a bird out the window, or the “gmorph” when he looked up at me as if to say, “Ain’t life peculiar.”

I often mimicked his talk back at him, but once made the mistake of saying, “Brrrrrttt” to him, which means god-knows-what in cat language, but sent him into the air with his claw swiping at my nose as if I had insulted his mother.

Another time, playing with him, I chased him around the house. If he got away, he returned to find me again so I would renew the chase. I finally got him cornered on the second floor — literally cornered so that he had nowhere to go. He looked both ways to find an alternative, then, when none appeared, sprang up in the air at least double his length with his arms held wide as a crucifix, with his claws stretched open and a scream in his mouth. But he attacked straight up, not at me. It so startled me that I first backed off, then fell backwards laughing. I had never seen him so fierce.

Then, there was cat bowling. When we lived in Virginia Beach, our apartment had a long hallway with smooth wooden floors and I would toss Widgie down the length of it, watching him try to get traction on the wood with his claws. He would slide all the way to the end and then race back to me to do it all over again. He loved it. 

I mention these things because I want to talk about how he became a member of the family. It isn’t that I didn’t know he was an animal. I did, but that simply didn’t matter: He was the animal member of the family.

I know it is the same way for many, perhaps most pets. But the point I want to make is that there is something that transcends the sentimental attachment we have for “Little Puss,” or Rover. There are people who go all soft and goofy over animals; they are not, in fact, treating them as a member of the family, but as some idealized object of a rather sappy affection. People don’t treat real family members that way.

But this particular cat was more like an uncle or brother. I came to know his habits, both good and bad, and accepted them all; he in turn, forgave me some of my faults.

Nutlets

The second cat that entered the family was a patchwork piece, more normal sized than the big boy. His official name was Undifferentiated Matrix, but one morning my girlfriend and I woke up to find him mushling us, facing our feet and she said, spontaneously, “Ooh, look at his little nutlets.” And that became his name. Nutlets. 

The naming of cats is important, as Old Possum told us. The name we give them initially often doesn’t hold up, and usage stamps them with a new one. So, Undifferentiated Matrix became Nutlets. We added a furry, completely gray kitten once. He was named Brahms, but called Fuzzbox. 

My sister-in-law, Deborah, had a stray she named Chicago Transit Authority, although he became just Chicago. My favorite was a cat owned by a pair of friends in Greensboro, who they named Samuel Maybe Gompers.

Pachebo

There are traditional names for kitties, but even then, there might be some feline irony involved. 

“At the farm, we had a white cat we called Snow,” says Deborah, about a time in the 1980s. “Being sophisticates, you will know our name did not refer to the weather.”

Genevieve, my friend Stuart’s wife, once had two cats. A black one, named Snowball, and a white one named Midnight. 

Deborah still has two, a ginger named Saffron and a tabby named Emily. 

Emily

The champ, though, must be our friends in Maine, Alex and Mary Lou, who over the years have had loads of cats in their care, among them: Pachebo and Redburn. “Let’s see … Hecate, Thunderpaws, Tycho, Chicory, Machimos, Serenity, Justin, Vesta, Quiffen, Q.2, Oscar, Minkey and Fred — I think that’s all.”

 

Minkey 

Thunderpaws was special. I lived with Alexander and Mary Lou when they had a great old house in Summerfield, N.C. — a house with no central heating, just a wood stove in the kitchen. 

Thunderpaws was an orange giant who had a talent for losing body parts. He had only the stump of a tail when I first knew him. Later his ear got mangled and he lost an eye, like a pirate cat. Or maybe Popeye. He was called Thunderpaws because, unlike most of his species, he clomped rather heavily when he walked. Thud-thud-thud. He was also more like a dog than a cat in temperament. He was a cuddly little monster and loved to be loved. His purr vibrated his whole body.

Saffron

A house will not usually put up with two alpha male toms, and my Widgie was the big boy, but Thunderpaws was also top cat. We had to keep them separate. When Widgie was loose in the house, Thunderpaws was relegated to the basement or outside. When T-paws was feeding in the kitchen, Widgie was locked in my bedroom. But the inevitable happened.

There was a battle royal, which my friends still talk about once in a while over dinner. One day, Thunderwunder managed to sneak into my room while I wasn’t there. The two cats fought like the Act 2 climax of a Verdi opera, a sort of feline Achilles and Hektor. Alex heard the squall and pounding thuds and by the time he got to the room and opened the door, he told me, the air in the room was snowing cat fur and on the floor staring innocently at him, he saw the two of them, an orange cat with a gray mustache and a tabby with an orange mustache. It may have looked like a standoff, but subsequently, Thunderpaws always “defurred” to my Widgie.

By the time Widgie was a very old cat, I had to care for him like an aging parent, performing those humiliating services — humiliating certainly for a prideful cat and humiliating to me to have to see — such as cleaning up after him and changing bandages.

He eventually died in the house while I was away at work. When I came home in the evening, my wife met me at the door and broke it to me gently.

I cried over the death of that cat as I have cried few times in my life. He had been with me for 15 years and had been my most constant companion. He saw me through two and a half marriages and residences in several states. 

Saffron

Now, I said I am not a sentimental man. I don’t believe in creating sham emotions when they don’t exist, or glorifying trivial ones. Yet, I know that that cat and I shared something.

We buried the cat in the marshy woods of Mackay Island National Wildlife Refuge on Knotts Island in his home state of North Carolina. My wife, Carole, insisted we leave him with a paring knife so you would have a tool in the next life. I came back to the site about a year later and found his tiny, wasted skeleton under the brush where we left him. I collected his skull, put it in a box and to this day keep it on a shelf in my library.

I also have his photograph — his great, broad Clark Gable face — as a screen saver on my Macintosh. 

Ultimately, though, what I think I mean when I say he was a family member is that I learned from him. It is one of the prime functions of family: We model behavior on our parents, learn to be better men when we marry, learn patience and a sense of the future with our children. It is an emotional and almost mythical relationship we have with family, unlike that we have with those we meet in business or career.

Emily 

And from my cat, I learned a number of things. I learned how to concentrate on a task as though I were defusing a bomb. I learned how to face experience with a certainty I didn’t really possess. I certainly learned the trick of relaxing; I am now a master of it. And I learned, even through his death, how life is a certainty of loss. And all those we love will die and we cannot love them any the less because of it.

The cold reality of language

January 28, 2025
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“It was six degrees last night,” I said. I was on the phone with Stuart. “A huge mass of cold has dropped down from the north. Tonight, it’s predicted to hit 5 degrees.”

“Sounds nasty,” Stuart said, although I know he was being diplomatic — He and Genevieve live in Portland, Maine. I’m pretty sure he’s seen his share of six-degree days. 

“But,” he went on, “I’m not sure cold actually exists.” I settled in for a Stuart session. He has these bouts of brain flurries. 

“It’s something I’ve been thinking about recently,” he said. “Cold is a judgment, not a thing. I mean, there’s no such entity as cold; it’s really just the absence of heat. Heat is real — the commotion of molecules. Cold is our perception of the lack of heat.” 

I don’t think he was being deliberately sophistical; it’s just that sometimes the gears in his brain spin rather fast. 

“We think of things being hot or cold,” he said. “But they are a single thing, which is an amount of heat. Sunspots, for instance, are ‘cold spots’ on the sun’s surface, even though they can measure 7000 degrees Fahrenheit, and frozen nitrogen can melt when heated above 346 degrees below zero.”

He knows this is a hobby-horse of my own: the gap between language and reality. I’ve written many times about how what we call opposites are usually just points on a single scale. A thermometer measures heat and we express it with words like “hot” and “cold.” We usually take words as reality, when they are merely a separate, parallel thing, with its own rules and forms. 

“There are things that we take for granted that only make sense in the language we use to describe them, but don’t really exist in any real way,” he said. “Real life isn’t so black-and-white.” 

Stuart went on: “Take black and white, for instance. You’ve heard it said that white is the combination of all the colors added together, cancelling each other out. That was what Newton demonstrated with his prism. But that’s if you are talking about light. If you are painting, the combination of all the colors is black. So which is it really? Well, we aren’t talking about color so much as about hue. There are millions of colors and we give them names, like ‘teal’ or ‘pink.’ They are the combination of hue, shade and tint. Hue is a specific spot on the spectrum, a basic ingredient, like an atom. From them we build molecules — specific colors. A blue can be light or dark and still be the same hue, although the colors are sky blue or ultramarine. 

“So, realistically, both black and white are the absence not of color, but of hue. In reality black and white are the same thing, just different shades of it, with all the grays in between. If you realize that black and white are simply variations of the same thing, then you realize that darkness, like cold, doesn’t exist: It is merely the absence of light.” 

OK, I thought. But does that really shed much light on our day-to-day lives? 

“We take these confusions of language as something real, when they are not,” he said. “When I hear terms like ‘left wing’ and ‘right wing,’ or ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ bandied about, as if they actually mean something, I develop a kind of psychic acid reflux. Beliefs shift with time and what was once considered conservative, is suddenly dangerously leftie. And vice versa. Is it conservative to believe in a strong central government or in a small government? Is it conservative to try to minimize change and keep things in place that have been there for ages? Or to radically transform government and shake things up? It changes over time, making the terms we use basically useless. Republicans call themselves conservative, but have complained for decades about an ‘imperial president,’ and yet have happily elected just that.”

It seems to me, this has immediate relevance to our lives today. Language matters. 

“You know, scientists have decided fish don’t exist,” I said. “Turns out a salmon is more closely related to a camel than it is to a hagfish. Just because it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck doesn’t mean it’s a duck. Just because something has fins and gills and swims in the water, doesn’t mean it’s in a common group called ‘fish.’ In the 17th century, a whale was a fish, too. And in earlier times, squids and mussels were also counted as fish. Jonah, after all, was swallowed by ‘a great fish,’ which tradition has it, was a whale.”

Once, these were all fish

“I have been thinking that language is really myth,” he said. “I don’t mean it doesn’t exist — that’s not the kind of myth I mean. 

“The world is itself. It was before there were humans to perceive it. We see it, however, through language. Take a car. We all know what a car is. That car is in a terrible crash and smashed up. Is it still a car? It gets taken to a junk yard and disassembled for parts. Are the parts still a car? Grind them up into bits of metal and ask the same question. Melt down the metal into a molten form. The same atoms every time, but at what point did it stop being a car? The thing was the thing; the word was just the word.”

“The ship of Theseus,” I said, “that Plutarch wrote about, that had each of its parts replaced as they rotted, leaving the identical ship but completely new. Is it the same ship?” 

“Our brains are hard-wired to see the world as things and those things have names,” Stuart said. “And we take the names seriously. It’s quite silly to worry if it’s the same ship: The question is entirely linguistic. All that piffle that Plato went on about, it’s all really just about language.

“It is our Umwelt,” he continued. “Which, as I’m using it, is a model of the world built into our psyches not only by experience, but by evolution, and through which we tend to filter our perception of the world, narrowing it down to what seem to be comprehensible limits. A pattern we impose on experience. In our Umwelt, the sky is up, the ground is down. Without thinking, we assume that north is up and south is down, although in a round world in a chaotic cosmos, up and down are meaningless terms. If we hang our world map on the world with Antarctica at the top, it looks wrong. Just wrong. It shouldn’t. 

“It’s why quantum physics is so hard to accept. Our Umwelt is built from human-size experience and the quantum theory makes no sense. In a world of things, we understand atoms as tiny pellets. How could they be vibrating strings? We attribute human emotions to animals, we assume other beasts see the same colors we see, we take anything larger than ourselves as big and anything smaller as little — but why should human size be the standard? 

“Weeks.” Stuart was on a roll. “We take weeks for granted, but they don’t exist except as a custom. We’d be rather upset if we didn’t have weekends punctuating our worktime. The metric system the world uses and believes is derived from nature, is all nowadays built on a measured second, which is an utterly arbitrary duration — no natural fraction of experience, but one counted by an arbitrary number of cesium vibrations. We think of the earth as flat, although we know it isn’t. I mean, we know the earth is a globe, but if I separate out North Carolina in my mind, spread out, it is as flat as a map. It’s how it feels. That we orbit around the sun, when in fact sun, earth, all the planets and moons spiral around in complex motions as the whole shebang skitters through space. 

“If we don’t simplify and schematize the world, we could never navigate it. That is what I mean when I claim that language is myth. It  explains what cannot be explained. It actually functions as myth, explaining the world to us. And so, we can personify nameless things by naming them.” 

“We think of myth as being, like Zeus and Theseus, but if Ancient Greeks thought of Zeus as a deity, he becomes a folk story when no one worships him anymore. But myths are also ways of explaining the world when science has no good answer — or rather, when the reality exceeds our tiny brain’s ability to grasp it all. Like when we were children and when we were scared of thunder, our parents might tell us not to worry, the noise was just angels bowling in the sky. It was a story that made sense to our infantile brains. 

“Language is angel bowling for grown-ups. We use words to box up ideas, tidying them so our feeble brains can swallow them. We cannot begin to understand where the cosmos came from, so we use Genesis to explain it, or, nowadays, we use the Big Bang. Existence is something so far more complex and chaotic than our tiny minds can begin to understand. So, we make language, a 2-D version of a 3-D world.”  

“Like death,” I said. “Death is a skeleton with a scythe in myth, or on a pale horse, or death hovers bedside over the terminally ill. But death doesn’t exist. Dying exists, but death is a myth. Death doesn’t take over our bodies, but the metabolism of our bodies ceases manufacturing life. The machine breaks down.”

“Yes,” Stuart said. “I remember someone pointing out that ‘life’ is not the opposite of ‘death,’ but that ‘birth’ is the opposite. They are verbs, not nouns.”

“I saw this with gut-tightening immediacy when Carole died,” I said. We watched her last inhalations, and then they stopped. She ceased being Carole. There were no 21 grams floating away, she just ceased manufacturing her own life. The light bulb burned out. Light didn’t go anywhere, it just stopped being generated. Almost instantly, her flesh began feeling like clay, cooling off. I’m sure it might soften the loss for those who believe in religion that her soul went somewhere else, but I just saw a factory close down, leaving an empty building.”

“Nice metaphor,” Stuart said. “All language is ultimately metaphor, and metaphor and myth are essentially the same thing. A way of talking about the unsayable.”

This was the moment I heard the faint voice of Stuart’s partner, Genevieve, somewhere in the other room say, simply, “Sophomore dorm room!” and we moved on. And I remembered that women know the real world a lot more than men. 

Abandon all hope, ye who enter

January 19, 2025
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No matter where one lives in this country, there is little that instills a deep, thriving fear in a person than a visit to the Division of Motor Vehicles. There is a reason that Selma and Patty represent the general tenor of things. 

But it has been 12 years since I had to come face to face with the horror of dealing with the DMV here in North Carolina. And I learned just why it has the miserable reputation it has earned. My license was set to expire on my birthday, and I needed to renew it. 

Nightmare: The Prelude

The DMV sent me an e-mail more than three months ago, reminding me that my license would expire, and they offered to make it easy for me to renew online and gave me a link. “Great,” I thought. That sounds easy. Hold on there, pardner — when I went to the clunky website and rattled around in its web-maze, it said that you had to be under the age of 70 to renew it online, so I would have to show up in person to the DMV office. Frustration No. 1. 

Then, Hurricane Helene hit and Asheville closed down completely for a good two months (it is still not up and running completely). Roads were closed, offices shut down. No water, no electricity and fallen trees blocking streets. The pictures and videos online give only a hint of the devastation. It was actually worse. 

After a few weeks stuck in the house, we managed to evacuate and drive down to the flatlands to stay with my brother- and sister-in-law, who were tremendously generous to us. 

Yet, even when we got back to Asheville, so many streets were closed and the town so discombobulated, that I put off going to the DMV office. 

There was a sub-office a couple of miles from the house, but when I went there, a few days before my birthday, there was yellow police tape across the entrance and a sign that said “Closed indefinitely” and said that it would reopen soon. I checked online and it said repairs were being made for a leaky roof. Frustration No. 2. 

I knew I would have to deal with the main office, on the far side of town in the section of the city full of mattress stores and bail-bond offices. So, a couple of days after my birthday, I went to the main DMV office in West Asheville, a drive of about 12 miles, negotiating various detours along the way. When I got there, the joint was crowded and a sign posted just inside the main entrance, “No more walk-ins today.” They said I should go online and make an appointment. Frustration No. 3

I drove all the way home, around several more detours and traffic jams, and went online to create an appointment, via a website that was horribly designed and confusing, only to find, when I finally found the right webpage, that the site said “No new appointments available.” No explanation of when appointments might be had or how to find out. Frustration No. 4.

(The website is a mess, poorly designed and engineered, making any useful information obscure, difficult to find and even more difficult to understand. If anyone needs to find out how not to design a website, they could not do better than to check out NCDMV.) 

And so, a few days ago, I decided to get up early and get to the DMV office before they filled up. I went past the East Asheville DMV office to check if it was still closed (it was), so I got on the Interstate and drove all the way to the West Asheville office and when I got through the entrance, there was a sign saying “No walk-ins till noon.” Frustration No. 5. 

It was then 9:30 a.m. I got on a line for the info desk and when I made it up to the front, they told me that they only take walk-ins in the afternoon. I told them my sad story, and they were very nice but unyielding. I could wait in the parking lot for two and a half hours till they allowed walk-ins, or I could come back the next day after noon. 

When I asked them about making an appointment and how the internet told me there were no appointments available, they explained that appointments were booked up 90 days in advance. And so, piled on, a Catch-22: Have to make an appointment; no appointments to be had. Frustration No. 6. 

I thanked providence for my cool Norwegian blood and I didn’t explode at the poor clerks. They were only doing their job. The policy wasn’t their fault, and at least they weren’t going full Selma and Patty and blowing cigarette smoke in my face. They sympathized, yet, there was nothing they could do. “Come back tomorrow,” they said. “The line for walk-ins usually begins about 11:30 a.m., so I should make sure I get there early enough not to get so far back in the line I get closed out once again. I smiled the kind of smile you do when the only other option is thrusting a knife into their throats, and turned and walked back to the car and drove home. 

Nightmare: Part 2

OK, so the next day I planned to go the the DMV a half-hour before they were supposed to allow walk-ins to enter the building, hoping I could finally renew my license. I drove around the detours over the 12 miles to the office and got there at 11:30 a.m., to find a line already formed, with about 25 people in it, standing in the cold outside the building. I got on the end of the line. The temperature was in the low 40s, but the sun was shining. The line got longer behind me as we waited. At exactly noon, exactly nothing happened. The doors didn’t open. We all stood in the numbing cold for the next hour and a half. 

Then, a guy from inside told the first 8 people to go inside, and we all moved up in the line and at the head of the line there were chairs with their backs up against the front window of the building, and I got the last seat. After standing in the cold for hours, my knees were stiff and the seat was quite welcome. Unfortunately, the chairs were under the canopy and so we sat in the shade. The breeze picked up and it got colder. Much colder. Nothing moved for the next 90 minutes or so and I sat shivering — literally — and getting colder and colder. It was torture Guantanamo level, and I was ready to confess. “I am willing to name names,” I thought. “I’ll tell you anything. I thought the Geneva Conventions outlawed this kind of torture.” I half-expected them to come out and spray us with cold water, just to amplify the misery. 

Several times I thought to give up and leave. But, it is the torturer’s trick to let to expect relief will arrive soon, so you keep waiting. I kept putting off the leaving and sat in the progressing hypothermia like a frozen lump. Face turning blue, fingers now numb. At least it wasn’t raining and they didn’t bring out hoses. 

Eventually the same guy came out with a clipboard and began taking our names. We signed in and explained what service we were there for, and then he went back inside and we heard no more from him. Several of the people ahead of me, sitting in the cold shade got up and walked back out to the parking lot to stand in the sunlight for the illusion of heat. I was afraid of losing my place, but also afraid that my knees, already throbbing from all that standing, would give way if I tried to stand up again. 

The guy eventually let three more people in and we shifted chairs to move closer to the door. A rebellion was brewing: The woman seated next to me got up a few minutes later and said, “I don’t care what they say, I’m going in where it’s warm and stand,” and she went in. Another followed, then I did too. Inside the door was another queue, in front of the admission desk. The man there chased us all back outside, but we had seen the promised land, and had seen a half-dozen empty waiting-area chairs and decided they were doing it on purpose. We went back outside and sat down again. Then the guy with the clipboard came out and started calling off names from the clipboard and my name was the last one he called. We all trundled finally in to the warmth, where we formed another line to get registered and be given a number. I was E473. 

The DMV is has all the architectural grace of an old supermarket, with the back area walled off and a set of 11 numbered desks ringing the waiting area. Four — only four — of them had examiners working them. I sat in the waiting area, still shivering involuntarily, with my core temperature dropped somewhere into the orange sherbet range. There were probably 60 people in the waiting area waiting for their number to be called. 

It was now after 3 p.m. and I watched the call board ring out numbers. A1, then A2. Where does E473 fit in, I wondered. I dreaded. Turns out the letter in front of the number signified what the person who held it needed from the DMV — a new license, a chauffeur’s license, etc. “C123 now being served at Window 3” came the announcement. Number after number came up. Finally some E numbers “E465 is now being served at Window 7.” 

Waited and waited. At 4:30 p.m., the guy with the clipboard stood up and told the waiting masses that anyone who needed a driving test would have to go home and try again another day. They stopped giving driving tests for the day. A handful of people got up and left the building, looking grumpy but as played out and exhausted as a late-round boxer. I had no watch, and there were no public clocks, but I could feel we were getting close to 5 p.m. closing time and maybe I would have to go home empty-handed and try again another day — I had already resolved to give up and drive without a license and hope just not to get caught. A fine would be preferable to suffering another day at the DMV. 

Then “E471 is being served…” then “E472…” My hopes went up. The “C346 is being served…” and I lost all hope. It was DMV hell. Finally they called my number and I went to the desk, answered a few questions, had my picture taken and paid $38 and was given a printout temporary license and told the real one would come in the mail next week. The ordeal was over. The sun was setting and I drove home in the twilight. A day I will never get back. 

When I got home and ate dinner with numb hands, it was then almost 7 p.m. and I was still cold to the core. It would take some time to warm up again. This was a trial by ordeal. But at least the new license will carry me through 2030. 

Afterword

It took till nearly 10 p.m. sitting beside the gas-log fire wearing a sweater, with four lap blankets over me and drinking hot tea before I felt that my inner core was finally warmed back to normal, or nears enough. Getting cold on the outside is one thing, feeling the temperature on your skin, but it’s a whole other thing when the cold penetrates into the bones of your fingers, arms and into the core of your torso so you feel like you’re a refrigerated ham.  

For all the misery, I don’t hold it against the DMV staffers. They were each as calm and helpful as they could be. Even at the end of the day, after dealing with an exasperated public for eight hours, my examiner could still make pleasant conversation and help me get through the paperwork quickly. (Five minutes it took, after an icy, information-starved wait of more than five hours — a ratio that feels imbalanced, to put it diplomatically). 

I’ve known several public employees and they all wanted to do their jobs as well as possible. It is the system to blame — if you can call it a system at all. I hardly seems planned. The website is a mess. The process is incompetent. The office understaffed by at least half. Little information shared with the victims, and what there is is often incomprehensible.

No doubt, in the Pleistocene, when the protocols of license renewal were first established, an era, no doubt, of dial-up internet, and before the designated-hitter rule, the procedures may have been state of the art, but it seems as if nothing has been updated or rethought. What they are stuck with is not up to the task. 

We often make fun of government bureaucracy and its inefficiencies, and in the case of DMV, any shaming we give is truly deserved. I don’t know why we don’t all march on Raleigh with pitchforks and torches and demand action on the part of state government to make the DMV more humane.  

Various cogitations on Mozart

January 8, 2025
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Intro: What We Get Wrong

The 1984 movie, Amadeus, won eight Oscars and has been seen by millions of people. It was an excellent film, but it lied through its teeth. Mozart was not an arrested-development adolescent potty mouth. And Antonio Salieri never tried to kill him. 

Poor Mozart, he has had his life twisted over the centuries to illustrate cultural trends, and those trends have changed over those years. 

The 19th century first saw him as old fashioned, then he became a proto-Romantic, with his life deeply mythologized. The 20th century first saw him as a kind of porcelain doll, and after WWII, saw him as a polite precursor to Beethoven. In the 21st century, he has been the victim of countless historical-performance strictures that leave his music in a kind of inexpressive jog-trot strait-jacket. 

The man sometimes considered the greatest composer of all time has been so mauled over by his biographers, fans and later writers and filmmakers that the legend has taken over from the fact.

So, the plot of Amadeus is only one of a myriad of distortions, legends, myths and factifications. The truth, as usual, is more interesting.

What are some of the worst Mozart myths?

— Mozart began writing masterpieces before he turned 10.

* Yes, he wrote music beginning before he turned six. But some of that music was arrangements of other composers’ work, some may have been outlined by his father for the boy to complete, and none of them are masterpieces, or noteworthy, other than for them to have been jotted down by one so young. The early works are generic. They get played, when they are played at all, simply because they have Mozart’s name attached. 

— Mozart was buried in a pauper’s grave.

* Although it’s often said he died so poor he was buried in a pauper’s grave, the fact is Viennese law required anyone other than an aristocrat to be buried in a common grave, after a funeral service at the church. It was a reaction to recent outbreaks of plague in the country. And Mozart wasn’t poor. He lived quite well, although, working in what we would now call a “gig economy,” he had his income ups and down. 

But, over his last year, he earned 10,000 florins when an average laborer averaged 25 florins a year. It put him in the top 5 percent of the population of Vienna, according to H.C. Robbins Landon, author of 1791: Mozart’s Last Year. The man was no pauper, and his music was hugely popular, not only in Vienna, but across Europe. And when he died, he had a hit on his hands: The Magic Flute. He left his widow reasonably comfortable. 

— Mozart wrote his music spontaneously, without effort.

* Mozart’s facility with music was remarkable, but there are plenty of sketches and studies for his music. The pieces without such preliminary work most likely had them at one time, but they don’t survive. His widow, Constanze, burned most of the sketches, not thinking that fragments had any value. Mozart even writes to his father about doing such preliminary work. 

In 1787, he told the conductor of his opera, Don Giovanni, “It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I.”

— His middle name was Amadeus.

* He was baptized as Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart but his parents called him Wolfgang Gottlieb (Gottlieb being German for Theophilus). He usually signed his name Wolfgang Amadé. It was only after his death that people began regularly calling him Wolfgang Amadeus, which is a Latinized form of Gottlieb.

— His music is simple, direct, easy to listen to, easy to perform.

* And at the time of his death in 1791, at a mere 35 years old, his music was considered difficult to play and demanded careful listening. Mozart asked a lot. When the progressive Emperor Joseph II famously told Mozart his music had “too many notes, my dear Mozart. Too many notes.” he wasn’t being an ignoramus; he was reflecting the general taste of his times. To understand this, we need to place him in context. 

Some Context: The Classical Era

Something else we get wrong: It is usually said that Mozart and his contemporary Joseph Haydn wrote in the classical style, as if such a thing existed, and all they did was follow the rules. That’s got it completely backasswards. They didn’t write in the classical style; they invented the classical style. They were making it up as they went along.

Music history is taught as consisting of succeeding eras. The Renaissance gave way to the Baroque, which led to the Classical era and on to the Romantic, to Modernism and currently, Postmodernism. As if they were clearly defined and separate. And it is true that after about 1740 or so the heavily contrapuntal Baroque lost its hold on the ears of its listeners. They wanted something simpler, clearer, more charming and that wouldn’t be so serious. All those fugues and counterpoint of what was called “the learned style” gave way to homophony — that is, tuneful melodies and supporting harmonies. Something you could hum along with: Simpler and more direct. 

This is sometimes called the Style Galant; it followed the Baroque the way Rococo followed in the visual arts. Composers such as J.C. Bach, Johann Joachim Quantz, Johann Stamitz, or Domenico Alberti published torrents of light, catchy three-movement sinfonias and bright concertos, to say nothing of keyboard music to be played after dinner by the daughters of aspiring middle-class burghers. I’m grossly simplifying this, but the outlines are true. 

This is the kind of music both Mozart and his older contemporary Haydn produced in their younger days. Mozart wrote more than 20 symphonies in this popular style before the age of 17 and if they still get played it is because, again, they have Mozart’s name on them, and also, because they are full of great tunes. Mozart always wrote great tunes. 

Haydn had his own orchestra, paid for by his boss, Prince Nikolaus Esterhaza, a ridiculously wealthy Hungarian nobleman, who loved music. Hidden away at the prince’s countryside palace in Esterhazy for some 30 years, Haydn developed on his own, inventing new ways to delight and surprise an educated audience who learned and grew along with the composer. The palace was far from Vienna. Haydn said, “I was cut off from the world. There was no one to confuse or torment me, and I was forced to become original.” 

He basically invented the modern form of the symphony and the string quartet. 

Prince-Archbishop Colloredo

Mozart, however, was truly cosmopolitan and after freeing himself from the employment of Salzburg’s prince-archbishop Colloredo, earned his crust as a freelancer in what was becoming a “gig” economy, living from commission to commission, and from concert to concert and opera to opera. 

He learned a lot from Haydn, and joined him in making his music increasingly more complex than the usual run of gallantries. They added back counterpoint to their works, increased chromatic and harmonic subtleties. Mozart’s music, for instance, is always more complex than it sounds.

Mozart asked his musicians to do more than did other composers: to play higher, lower, more quickly; to play notes unfamiliar to their instruments or voices; to attempt unusual phrasings and colorations.

At the end of Act I in Don Giovanni, three bands play onstage at the same time, performing different music in three different rhythms, but entwining their harmonies so they mesh perfectly in a tour de force of compositional cleverness.

His music sounds simple and perfect and symmetrical, but you look at the phrase structure and it’s highly irregular. Normally, you expect 4- and 8-bar phrases, but you take a look at one of Mozart’s late scores and you see phrases of 4, 5, 3, 7, 8, 6 — but you would never guess it was so irregular just from hearing it. It always sounds smooth.

And although the surface of the music is always velvety and seductive, it’s frequently chromatic, introducing notes that shouldn’t belong. Even so graceful and simple a tune as the trio from the minuet in the popular Eine kleine nachtmusik manages to use 11 of the 12 notes in the chromatic scale. It verges on Schoenberg, though it sounds as simple as a nursery rhyme.

While Haydn’s metier was primarily instrumental music, Mozart shone in vocal music, and especially opera, where he brought psychological complexity to what is sung. 

Mozart as Shakespeare

Mozart was the Shakespeare of music. No composer ever displayed a wider sympathy for the human condition or a greater breadth of musical style. At the bottom of his music is a profound humanism, which is all the more obvious in his best operas — The Marriage of Figaro, Così fan tutte, The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni.

Of all the great composers, Mozart also is the easiest to love. Bach may be more sublime, Haydn wittier, Beethoven more in-your-face and Schubert one of the few who could write melody to equal Mozart, but Mozart remains the most accessible. He speaks directly to us, because he is the most humane.

That quality underlies all his major operas: His plots are filled with three-dimensional people, not the stock characters of most other operas. No hero is flawless, no villain unredeemable.

The miracle is that it isn’t just the libretti that convey this complexity, but the music itself. It gives us the subtle psychological undertow.

Mozart understood all of his characters well. None of them is tossed off as inconsequential. He imbues each character with definitive musical qualities.

So that Don Giovanni’s ebullient life force is expressed in his headlong “Champagne Aria,” with barely a moment to inhale. Or the Queen of Night’s rage in Magic Flute, when she launches into Baroque arabesques and arpeggios in her showpiece “The vengeance of hell boils in my heart.”

Even in Figaro: Has adolescent horniness ever been better expressed than the “amorous butterfly” take the hero sings about the love-struck Cherubino?

All these characterizations are built on the composer’s willingness to accept without judgment everything that is human. Perhaps that’s why nobody ever wrote forgiveness better than Mozart.

Each of his major operas has a scene of forgiveness in it, and it’s usually the turning point of the action, when a character recognizes the frailty of human nature. Such forgiveness is not bestowed from a feeling of superiority but from shared compassion.

It’s not that we believe the Count in Figaro will now be faithful to the wife who forgave him, but that we know she will always forgive him, because this is what it means to accept the human condition.

But the particular mood Mozart raises in such moments also is carried into his purely instrumental music: The slow movement of his Piano Concerto No. 18 is the echo of such a moment in Figaro. It sighs, and we sigh with it.

Such genius, whether Shakespeare or Mozart, can’t be explained. You just accept that it is.

Don Giovanni

Mozart’s Don Giovanni has been called the perfect opera. It ingeniously balances comedy and drama, music and theater, the aristocracy and the peasantry, the past and the future.

It was first performed in 1787 in Prague, where the composer was a musical superstar, and told the story of the seducer Don Juan (Don Giovanni in Italian).

The story is simple in outline: After he kills the outraged father of one of his amorous conquests, Don Giovanni is tracked down by his victims. When he hides in a cemetery, the statue of the dead father miraculously asks him to dinner and, later, when the don shows up, the statue drags him to his judgment in hell.

But Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, took what was a traditional story of sin and punishment and made it into a paean to the life force. Technically, Don Giovanni is still the villain, but Mozart and da Ponte made him such an engaging and vital presence that in the end, when he refuses to repent, despite the demons that surround him and the brimstone that burns, he actually rises to the heroic. Is he hero or villain? Or both.

This is where the Classic past meets the Romantic future: The cautionary moral tale of the past turns into the Byronic hero of the upcoming 19th century, and Mozart is in the avant-garde.

Digression I: Rake with a Quill Pen

Opera is a collaborative art. Mozart’s music is great, but so was the libretto written by Lorenzo da Ponte. Da Ponte was born a Jew in Venice in 1749, was ordained a priest and opened a brothel with his mistress, where he entertained the clients by playing violin in his priest’s vestments. He was the perfect choice to write the libretto for Mozart’s dramma giocosa, Il dissoluto punito o sia Il Don Giovanni (“The Rake Punished, or Don Giovanni”).

Da Ponte was a friend of the infamous seducer Casanova and was forced to flee Venice after a trial for sedition, settling in Vienna, where he wangled a position from Joseph II, the Holy Roman Emperor. When he was asked how many plays he had written, he answered, “None, sire,” to which the emperor replied, “Good, then we’ll have a virgin muse.”

He wrote libretti for dozens of lesser operas by lesser composers, such as Antonio Salieri, before landing a job writing — or rather rewriting — Beaumarchais’ popular play The Marriage of Figaro as a libretto for Mozart. He also wrote Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte before being shown out of the city by the police.

Da Ponte’s post-Mozart life is hardly less interesting. After marrying (quite a trick for a priest), he moved to the United States, where he failed as a grocer, became friends with Clement Moore (reputed author of ’Twas the Night Before Christmas), who helped him gain a faculty post at Columbia College (now Columbia University), where he was the first faculty member to have been born a Jew.

In 1828, he became an American citizen, died 10 years later, had a grand funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

The Pop Star

Mozart’s time was the late 18th century. He was born in Salzburg, Austria, in 1756 and was one of the great child prodigies of all time, picking up the violin when he was four and composing by the time he was five. His first opera was written when he was 12.

He was trooped across Europe by his father, playing for the amazed aristocracy and gathering gifts of money and jewels.

He outgrew his boyhood cuteness but grew to be one of the most prodigious composers of all time: He wrote 22 operas, 50 or so symphonies, 27 piano concertos, 23 string quartets, 17 settings of the Roman Catholic Mass. His complete works take up 170 CDs in one current set.

And he became enormously popular.

Mozart was the pop artist of the time. People wanted to play and hear that music so much, they transcribed the music for all kinds of ensembles. Every town had a wind band and they played arrangements. Every little village in Belgium or Bavaria could play arias from the latest Mozart opera, the way halftime marching bands now play show tunes.

Mozart makes fun of this phenomenon in the finale of Don Giovanni, when the don has a dinner in his castle, with a band playing the latest hits from operas, including “amorous butterfly” from Figaro.

He dismisses it: “I’ve heard this piece too much, he says. We laugh because it shows Mozart could take a joke. And that only makes him more human.

Digression II: Mozart and Haydn

The era from about 1770 to 1810 is called “Classical.” It’s the age of music defined by two names: Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Mozart.

They were the twin colossuses of the time: one witty and bright, the other deeper and more melodious.

But the two men were very different. Haydn brighter and more brittle sounding, with an emphasis on what the 18th century valued as wit, making in-jokes in his symphonies and working simple themes into complex textural patterns that his audience recognized with pleasure — they got the joke.

Mozart’s music is darker, more chromatic, with a more blended sound, and he focused his attention on grace and style.

If Haydn is the brain of 18th-century music, Mozart is the heart.

They valued each other above anyone else and recognized each other’s genius. Mozart learned more from Haydn than from any other source. Haydn said Mozart was the greatest composer alive.

To many, Haydn and Mozart sound alike. They are very different but shared a musical language. So, how do you tell them apart?

One wise old professor explained his simple test: “If you can remember the tune after it is over, it was Mozart.”

Reason and order

The 18th Century is called “The Age of Reason,” although sometimes I think it may be said ironically, since, after all, it was also the age of Rousseau, the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. But the overall tenor of the era was one of rationality and balance, of a just God in his heaven keeping proportionality in everything human and cosmic. 

In German-speaking lands, it was the Aufklärung, the “clearing up,” and prompted enlightened rulers, such as Joseph II in Vienna, to downplay religious fervor, mindful of the chaos of the Thirty-Years War, and promote scientific enquiry and philosophy. Coffeehouses rose filled with debate and Freemasonry became fashionable. Mozart became a Freemason, and his final opera, The Magic Flute, was a Masonic allegory, of sorts. 

There were certainly many points of view, but the general sense was one of moderation in all things. Don’t go overboard. Keep an even keel. Music followed suit: nothing too extreme, but nothing too simple-minded, either. It was a perfect walk between opposites.

And the major musical innovation of the era was the rise of the Sonata-Allegro form. It was the primary organizing principle for Haydn and Mozart and held sway in various permutations for the next century and a half. It is usually taught in a technical way: first theme in the home key, second theme in the dominant, followed by a development section and rounded off with a recapitulation of the two primary themes, but now both in the home key. But that is not why the form became so dominant. That is like describing an angel as having wings and white robes, without ever noting it is a messenger from God. 

The point of the sonata form was to establish an order, in terms of recognizable melodies, to then disrupt the order by breaking up the tunes into bits, rearranging them, and playing those pieces in a hodge-podge of shifting key-centers, leaving the listener with no firm ground to stand upon, and then reasserting clear order once again, so the universe is set right. Order – disorder – order reaffirmed. 

Once you understand the metaphor of the sonata form, you will never again be hoodwinked by the academic palaver. The music is about the primacy of providential order. 

This is a metaphor that has provided the foundation of much of art. Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies are all about disturbed natural order that has to be set right. Opera plots are almost all about illegitimate threats to the way things are supposed to be. It is the mega “A-B-A” of countless poems and novels. 

The form made such satisfying intellectual and emotional sense that it ruled western instrumental music almost until now. Those composers who didn’t write sonata form wrote in protest to it. Take a side. It was that influential.

L’Envoi

It is nearly impossible to write words about music. One tends to write impressionistically and metaphorically about what one hears, but such language become like trying to describe color to a blind person. 

The result is that when most people talk about their favorite popular music, they talk about the lyrics. The music is barely mentioned. In fact, most popular music contains scant little actual music at all: just a few familiar chord changes under a meandering set of melodic intervals. You may mention the beat, but that, too, tends to drone on monotonously through the song. 

You could, if you wanted to, talk about the music, but it would take specialist vocabulary that would convey almost nothing to the lay reader: “The composer used the Neapolitan relationship to modulate from B-minor to A-flat major while dividing the treble from the bass line in hemiola.” There, does that mean anything to you? Two against three? 

One reads scores rather than text to understand what is going on, but even that does not really tell you what you are hearing, only how it was done. 

And so, when writing about Mozart, almost everyone falls immediately into biography. We can tell you fascinating things about his family, his sister, he relationship with his patrons or the order in which his symphonies were composed. 

But the ear can hear how, in sonata form, we hit the comfort of the home key as the recapitulation calms down the churn of the development. It is something instantly felt through the ear — if you are paying attention. But how to write about that in the Jupiter Symphony or the K. 545 piano sonata comes a cropper. Just listen. It’s obvious. 

One can say that Mozart blends his wind instruments while Haydn tends to keep his winds distinct. It is true, but you have to hear it to understand. Mozart’s recapitulations are usually a return to order, while Beethoven uses his recaps (in his mature work) to take the music to a new place, a “new normal” that means we have moved through the development from Point A to Point B. Mozart’s melodies tend to be step-wise, as a human voice might sing, while Haydn often jumps around because fingers on a keyboard can do so. 

These are swooping generalities, and there are plenty of exceptions, but they are attempts to write about the music rather than the historiography. 

The only recommendation is to listen to more music, lots of it, and absorb what you can, so you can distinguish the difference between a sonata form and a rondo, between an English horn and a bassoon in its upper register. Hear it and pile it into your trove of experience. It is the sounds that are made that is the music. Words get in the way. 

And pay attention. Music isn’t a warm bath you slide comfortably into, but a conversation the composer is having with you.

La vie de Bohème

December 31, 2024
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When I see photographs of myself in my 20s, I am deeply embarrassed. I seemed to be play-acting in some fictional version of the life I believed I was living, or wanted desperately to be living. I clearly thought I was ripe for la vie de Bohème. 

I am probably not alone in this. From the onset of adolescence, most of us, I believe, are trying to figure out who we are, and believe — quite wrongly as it turns out — that we have some choice in this. 

For me, as for quite a few in my generation, coming of age in the Eisenhower years, the banal middle-class life was something we wanted to escape. The world of art and artists — or poetry and poets — seemed so much more vital, so much more real. 

It was in the air. Breathless, with Jean-Paul Belmondo, came out in 1960, when I was 12 years old. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was released in 1957. In the same year, Alan Watts produced his Way of Zen. All of these things presented a way of life that seemed to this unformed New Jersey boy so much more real — so much more important — than buying annual new school clothes at the Paramus mall. 

“What are you rebelling against?” “Whatya got?” Maynard G. Krebs. 

My parents were reasonably intelligent, but they were not college educated and they were not readers. I thought at the time they were intolerably boring. I read everything I could get my fingers on, including books that were way above my puny ability at that age to comprehend. I thought bourgeois respectability was the enemy, and in a fit of juvenile delinquency, I would stuff paperbacks from the book rack in the local drug store into my pocket and make off with them. I thought I was so daring, so rebellious. By real-life standards, it was pathetic; the real thugs in my town were Mafia kids and all the books I took were literary: 

John Updike’s The Centaur; Malcolm by James Purdy; John Knowles’ A Separate Peace; The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth; A Death in the Family by James Agee — you get the picture. As I look back on it now, I’m pretty sure that Everett, the pharmacist, knew what I was doing, but recognized that they were likely books that would never sell anyway in suburban New Jersey and that I would benefit from reading those books more than he would from keeping them dusty on his book rack.

I bought a subscription to Evergreen Review and another to Paul Krassner’s The Realist. And just to go the extra length of high-school pretentiousness, I also got a subscription to Les Temps Moderne, although I knew no French. But, it was Jean-Paul Sartre’s magazine and I knew he was important. I was desperate to join the grown-up world of truly important things — not like the pep rallies and gym classes of high school. 

The attraction of the bohemian life were all too apparent to me then, and all through my college years and into my 20s. It was a fantasy enriched by exposure to literature; actual bohemians were sparse on the ground in Bergen County. The tradition of poor scholars, thumbing their noses at conformity is long, and goes back at least to the Roman poet Catullus. I found a used copy of Francois Villon’s Testament and then, there was Goethe’s Faust and Puccini’s opera, La Bohème. 

As I headed off to college, I imagined myself as one of those louche students, full of sex and alcohol, but also drunk on great books and music and art. Of course, there were others there who shared that vision and we became friends, like Rodolfo, Marcello, Shaunard, Colline, Mimi and Musetta. 

Or so we imagined ourselves. I was filled with an exaggerated sense of art and literature, but lagged in classwork. I’m sure I read more than my curriculum required, but rather less of those texts assigned in class. After all, textbooks were dull and Dostoevsky was not. 

We knew we were “special,” and that we would become, if not famous, at least important. My best friend and I self-published a slim volume of our poetry and titled the thing 1798, after the year Wordsworth and Coleridge published their Lyrical Ballads. Their poetry changed the climate for literature for the next hundred years; we expected ours would do the same. Being important was important to our yet unformed selves. 

Rae, Aime and Alex

After graduation, with a first wife, I lived that sort of poverty, in a cheap rental apartment on the second floor of an old house, entered from stairs rising up the outside, and heated with a single kerosene stove in the living room and we ate from a book titled Dinner for Two on a Dollar a Day. I had a job paying minimum wage as a clerk in a camera store, and I found living on no money intoxicating. My first wife found it less so. A punctuation mark in the bio. Full stop. 

Sandro and Mu; me and S; Cap’n Billy and Tiggy

Later, and with the succeeding unofficial wife, we lived in a duplex. I still worked in the camera store, and she was a cashier in a supermarket. We managed to save enough money to buy gear to hike the Appalachian Trail. We quit our jobs and took off for the woods. When we discovered that goal-oriented hiking (making the required miles per day to reach the next lean-to) was less glamorous than we thought, we gave up in northern Virginia and returned to Greensboro. 

After that came some time on unemployment benefits and meeting up with fellow bohos in local bars, betting quarters on air hockey. Being poor was never a problem: It was exotic. We were still sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and having friends over for feasts, and at least once a year, with friends, renting a venue and holding a masked ball where we waltzed into the wee hours of the next day. 

Ursus, Colin, and Spider in Seattle

But then, she left to get married and I was pole-axed. I hadn’t known. I gave up everything (well, except my books), and moved from North Carolina to Seattle, where I lived with my old chum, Ursus, who was then a bicycle messenger in the city. I was offered a spot in the coal bin in the basement, and lived more vie bohème on a mattress on the concrete floor. Being jobless gave me time for a lot of reading. 

I eventually got a job at the zoo, and became crazy about a zookeeper I fell for, but depression wore me down. 

And so, I moved back to the South and lived with my 1798 co-author and his wife. They gave me a room in their old farmhouse, with its only heat being a wood stove in the kitchen. I did the cooking and maintenance work while they went to work. A few daylong pick-up jobs and I earned a total of $900 for the entire year. It seemed sufficient. This was truly la vie de bohème. 

My second official wife invited me to visit in the Blue Ridge and eventually, I moved in with her and her teenage daughter. Still no job, still poor as a midge and happy as a clam. But I was now over 30 years old and never had a real job. It was beginning to wear thin. 

I mention all of this because I recently watched a 1992 film by Finnish moviemaker Aki Kaurismäki called La Vie de Bohème and based on the 1851 novel Scènes de la vie de bohème by French author Henri Murger, which, in turn, was the source for Puccini’s opera. 

Henri Murger by Nadar, 1857

It is in many ways a brutal and heartbreaking film, mainly because, unlike the opera with its young heroes, flush with romantic enthusiasms, the movie shows us a more realistic vision of bohemians, now in their 40s, and looking pretty sad. It’s fine for 20-somethings to live their fantasies; but given greying hair, paunches and ratty clothes, at 40 living such a life seems like utter failure. Not only in career, but more important, as persons. They have not found who they really are, but have worn holes in the soles of who they try to be. 

These are people who had grand ambitions when young. They were going to be writers, thinkers, painters. And they each now do piecework on commission for a few dollars and do their best to avoid creditors and landlords. When our writer falls in love with a worn-looking 43-year-old Mimi, he finds himself deported to his native Albania. When he sneaks back much later, he finds Mimi is dying. It’s all much as in the opera, only everyone is at least 20 years older. 

But the love between Mimi and her man is so much more real and touching, because it is adults who need each other rather than youths living out some romantic fantasy, and Mimi’s death, in the hospital, is an actual death rather than a dramatic set-piece. Life has stomped on the youthful delusion. 

 For me, it was my second marriage, which lasted 35 years, until my wife’s death, that turned me into who I was rather than who I played at being. It can be a long process to something approaching reality.

I don’t know if any of us can ever know who we really are, but we all know who we think we are. Most of us, as we get older, grow closer and closer to who we truly are; when we are young and full of ourselves, we live a mythologized sense of ourselves. A much more important sense of ourselves. We are going to change the world. In truth we are ordinary. 

As one grows older, the graph plotting the importance of one’s internal sense of self, the mythology of autobiography begins to tail off, dropping down the chart, while the realization of who we truly are begins to climb, and there comes a point — for me, it was in my mid-30s — when the two lines cross. For some it marks the “mid-like crisis” and one can choose to attempt to grasp after the myth and buy a sportscar, or one recognizes that the actuality is more solid, more real, and more meaningful than the fantasy. 

The young sense of self is a choice — a mask you wear or a role you play — and maybe you try to live up to it, but it is always a pose. The longer you hold on to it, the more you feel like an imposter. Who you are is not a choice: It is a given, and it can slowly reveal itself over time as you give up the pose. Maybe you give up the pose out of exhaustion, maybe out of a seeking of self-knowledge. Either way, it is why older people often feel so much more comfortable with themselves, so much less worried over what “others think.” 

And for me, I have given up rebelling against the bourgeoisie. I have never joined in. I have too many books. But let them be who they are and let me be me. 

Old master

December 22, 2024
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Artist Mel Steele turned 85 recently. I have known Mel for nearly five decades, through the motorcycle years, the goat-herding years, the gun collecting years, the opera years. He is my brother-in-law and a friend. And I love his recent paintings as much as I’ve loved any art I’ve seen in person. So, I thought I might write a little something about his work.  

I made my living as an art critic, and during my time as a journalist, I made it a practice never to write about the art of any of my friends, both because I feared insulting them through misunderstanding, but mostly because I wanted to avoid the charge of favoritism. (There were artists I wrote about who later became friends, but that was different.) 

But I have been retired now for a dozen years, and I would not write anything about Mel’s paintings that I have not said to him face-to-face. 

Mel Steele was born two years before America joined World War II, and was raised in Madison, N.C., about 30 miles north of Greensboro, and I doubt there was any question about what he would be when he grew up. From childhood, he had a brilliant talent for draftsmanship. I remember seeing a small painting of a rooster head he made when a schoolboy and it was as fully finished as any professional illustrator could have managed — almost photographic in its detail. 

He has always drawn and painted animals.

But what do you become when you are an enormously talented child? There is not a lot of expectation for a rural North Carolina boy to become a famous painter. He could have grown up to become a plumber, like his father, and perhaps doodled on his customer’s bills. 

 He wound up  going to the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) at age 20 and became a commercial artist, graduating from talented amateur to knowing professional. Commercial art seemed like the only meaningful way to use his gifts. Selling paintings in art galleries is an iffy prospect; a paid job is more dependable. As fashion-photographer great Richard Avedon once said about his own choice, “You can’t really make a living photographing trees.” 

Yet, at school, Mel was introduced to the larger world of contemporary art. It was 1959, and New York had become the world center for art, with the buzz of abstract painting at the center. 

Mel entered school wanting to paint like Norman Rockwell, but, as he says, “Most of the leading guys weren’t teaching just the standard way;  they were teaching what was going on right now.” And that meant Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg. Mel loved the new work. 

“Asheville” Willem de Kooning, 1948

But there was still that need to make a living, and when he graduated, he worked in advertising, employed initially for Belk department stores. Later, he opened up his own agency in Charlotte, N.C. He was good at what he was doing, enough so that he could pick and choose his clients. And move out of the city to a farmhouse in Rockingham County, N.C., where he and his wife, Deborah Ballington, took up raising goats and chickens. 

This is when I first came to know Mel and Deborah, when my wife —  Mel’s sister, Carole —and I would visit and get fed goat meat (absolutely fabulous) and perhaps do a bit of target shooting in the yard. (I was introduced to the .45 caliber Browning semi-automatic pistol, which had the kick of an angry horse and could knock a tree stump off its feet.) 

And by then, Mel had begun selling what are euphemistically called “limited edition prints” of rural scenes. These were essentially “posters” made from painted originals, printed up in volume and given evocative titles, like Down East or Wentworth Winter. 

Most regions of the U.S. have some populist art tradition that sells well commercially. In Maryland, it is pictures of skipjacks on Chesapeake Bay; in Maine, it is lobstering; in Arizona, it is cactus or Indians; in Texas, cowboys. In North Carolina, it was barns. Mel painted barns and farming scenes and became known statewide for his paintings and the prints made from them. 

He did well with these, enough he could buy some land in the woods outside of Reidsville, N.C., and design and build a new house and studio. And his prints were popular enough, he could begin selling not just the prints, but the original paintings. 

Mel would sometimes cynically denigrate the art he was making, thinking of it as hack work. But it put food on his table and motorcycles in his garage. In retrospect, these images were better than they needed to be. They often had some edge to them, such as the print of a fox skulking near a barn, titled Thief, and presumably looking for chickens to grab.

Thief

Or, more graphically, a dead rabbit, run over in the road.

Highway 704

I say these prints were made better than they needed to be, and compared with many of the regional prints from around the country, they were. The most famous in North Carolina is Bob Timberlake, who has turned his talent into a marketing juggernaut, selling prints and furniture from his gallery in Lexington, N.C. But compared with Mel’s paintings, Timberlake’s are simplified and verge on the cartoonish. And they traffic in a greeting-card sort of nostalgia. 

“Boyd’s Creek” Bob Timberlake

There is a long tradition of such sentimental fluff. People have always longed for a past they remember as better than it was. Victorian genre painting is full of such stuff. And artists, such as Paul Detlefsen, made a career out of sentimental Americana, painted for calendars and nowadays reproduced on jigsaw puzzles. Happy ragamuffin farmboys with fishin’ poles, covered bridges, horse-drawn wagons. 

By Paul Detlefsen

The point is, the artists who make these images never actually lived such lives — Detlefsen was born in Denmark. It is a fictional history they proffer, a mythologized lie. 

“Old School On the Hill” P. Buckley Moss

I don’t know if P. Buckley Moss had any real talent — she didn’t really need it for the kind of work she did, cartoonish prints of Mennonite farmers in northern Virginia — but Mel put some solid effort into his prints. 

Of course such prints all play on a kind of sentimental nostalgia, but the nostalgia in Mel’s prints is earned: He and his sister did live for a while in a log cabin growing up. They did know the houses and barns that show up in his prints. And rather than knock off simplified versions, he worked hard on detail and finish.

“The Thicket’s Edge” Mel Steele

Not that there wasn’t some tacky marketing involved. Mel knew his audience and often played to them. When he thought he could sell three prints instead of a single one, he tried making “trilogies,” such as the “Quilt Trilogy” — three prints featuring old-timey quilts in them. 

Or, discovering that he could charge more if his prints were “remarqued” — that is, a small detail from the image could be repainted in miniature on the border in actual paint — he began doing just that. You got a tiny bit of genuine painting along with your photomechanical print of the main picture. There should be no forgetting this was a commercial endeavor. 

Timberlake had published a coffee-table book to market his prints and Mel did the same, in a 1993 book called Weathered Wood & Rust. The text is godawful and smarmy — they hired a writer to come up with some cliché-filled pabulum — but the images were beautifully made. 

Marketing was an essential part of the limited-edition print business. But such things could get out of hand. I remember visiting the Moss studio in Virginia and seeing a framed print for sale with added “value” for having three signatures. First, on the original painting, which was then photographed and printed in large-number editions, with each prints given a second signature. And third, after the prints was framed, the glass was given an extra John Hancock, with gold ink. I don’t remember Mel ever going that far. 

I’ve spent a long time on this part of Mel’s career. I believe he often felt sheepish about courting popular fandom when what he was really interested in was more serious art. I have been telling him for years that he has nothing to be ashamed of for those populist prints. They really were often so much better than they needed to be. 

I’ve pointed out that his subjects, while they may have had an aura of nostalgia about them, were nevertheless genuine to his life and upbringing. I believe he felt genuine emotion toward them — even if he might have expressed a knowing disdain for what might have been taken as “cornball.” His professional training led him in one direction; his life experience informed another. 

I want to discuss two prints in particular. The first is Mitchell’s Mercantile, a gouache from 1980, that is just an old chair on a store’s front porch. 

Mitchell’s Mercantile

One of the things you notice in Bob Timberlake’s prints is their general lack of shadow. They are “cartoonish” in the sense that their subjects are simplified and usually portrayed in an overall wash of light. In Mel’s pictures, real objects tend to throw real shadows. Also, in the popular prints of other artists, objects — buildings, people, animals — are generalized, sketchy and not particular. But this chair on this porch is not just a chair, it is this chair. It is almost photographic; Mel has spent time and effort to look and to pay attention to the world. This is not some generalized metal chair. 

Paying attention is the unacknowledged secret of fine art. That is true of abstract art as well as naturalistic art. Nothing is glossed over or ignored. And so, the very exact angle that the chair’s seat leans back is paid attention to. The quotidian is afforded dignity. It is the idea behind the German expression “Ding an Sich.” The Thing in Itself. 

One does not need to get all academic over it. But look at the chair, the wood floor, the rusted Coke sign and the light that plays out over it all, from a distinct direction and shaping the images and recognize that Mel Steele has looked with care and internalized each millimeter of his picture. 

The other print is my favorite of all of them, and that is for entirely personal reasons. When Carole and I moved in together in the early 1980s, we lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, along the New River in Ashe County and many of the hills were cleared for cattle, and other hills were natural “balds.” 

West Jefferson

Mel made a painting of this bare and unprepossessing landscape. It resonated strongly for me. I know this landscape and no one I know has better caught its sense of isolation and innigkeit — of being alone in an expansive space. I am convinced Mel made this picture because he felt something genuine in it. Surely it could never have been one of his more popular sellers. (In fact, Deborah tells me it was never made for sale, but as a Christmas gift for several valued regular collectors of his work.) 

So, there are two directions I sense Mel has always been pulled in. On one hand, as a professional and commercial artist, he knows his public and is able to aim his work at that market. But on the other hand, he truly wants to make something worth more than mere dollars, and so even making commercial work, puts an extra effort into it — and something personal — that lifts it above its mere purpose. 

I shouldn’t overstate my case here. Mel has made his share of purely pandering images, and often they are not as well crafted, and maybe a little more quickly tossed off. The buying public is looking for rural nostalgia and Mel could give it to them. But in his best prints, he has invested himself and his life experience. 

 His success in the print world meant that he could also sell original paintings in art galleries, and accept commissions. And he made quite a few paintings for himself. Landscapes, 

still lifes, 

portraits 

— even the motorcycles he loved and collected (he had been a big motocross fan as a young man

Which showed up in a series of motorcycle paintings

He experimented with a series of paintings made from little squares with letters, numbers of text in them, such as the red pepper. A detail shows how the picture is made up of tiny glyphs. 

He made another series of copies of famous paintings, usually in oil crayon, but always he made little “improvements” in them (as he called them), like this copy of Edward Hopper’s Chop Suey.

Mel could take on any style of art. His popular prints were photorealistic. But he could also do impressionistic

Or primitive

Or design work

Or even sculpture

Mel can tackle pretty much any style or genre. Yet, what he really wanted to do, since his early days at art school, was the abstract painting he discovered there. 

It sometimes needs to be pointed out that abstract painting isn’t necessarily easier or faster than detailed realism. In fact, quality in any variety of art depends on careful attention to color, line, design, mass, balance, and a sense of depth (or lack of, when that is the point). A successful photo-realist scene will only work as art if all its parts work in harmony. A good abstract painting is the same as a good realistic painting, except without a subject matter you can name — like a barn or owl.

Believe me, as an art critic (often asked to judge local art shows and give out blue ribbons), I saw a deplorable boatload of bad abstract painting, and almost always, the problem was that the artist really just threw some colors on the canvas in a haphazard fashion. Bad abstract art is a dime-a-dozen. 

Bad, indifferent, tossed haphazardly

It isn’t just the public, but too often the artists themselves, that think an abstract is made by energetically slathering paint on the canvas, and that the energy of its creation will be conveyed to the appreciative viewer. Das ist schlamperei. Sloppy; lazy; careless. 

Sometimes a painting can give the appearance of spontaneity, but such doesn’t happen through accident. One may look at an abstract painting by Mel’s hero, Willem de Kooning, and believe he tosses them off in a fit of athletic frenzy, but there is film of the artist painting and mostly he stands back from his easel by about 10 feet and looks at the canvas for two or three minutes and then approaches with his brush and adds a few strokes and steps back again to look. It is a slow accumulation of careful decisions made through a lot of just looking and thinking. 

I have watched paintings by Mel in the process of being “builded.” He likes to work alone, but I have snuck into his studio in off hours and seen paintings change slowly over days until he gets the final version he is happy with. Whole quarters of the canvas may be covered over and repainted; new details added or others scrubbed out. 

Subtle differences in three states of the same work

When the famous Japanese Ikiyo-e artist, Hokusai, turned 80 he said, “I have drawn things since I was six. All that I made before the age of 65 is not worth counting. At 73, I began to understand the true construction of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes, and insects. At 90 I will enter into the secret of things. At 110, everything — every dot, every dash — will live.” 

Mediocre artists will find a “style” and stick with it. Better artists continue to grow their whole lives. You can follow the growing maturity of Mel’s abstract work from his early canvases to his most recent. 

His early abstracts suffer from the rigorous training he got at art school. His abstract paintings are notably careful, well-lined, almost as if he were making photorealist versions of abstract paintings. When architects attempt to make gallery art, they often make this sort of deracinated art — more design-y than resonant. It’s what I have always called “architect’s art.” 

Even in this early work, you can see some through-lines to the later. Unlike many abstract paintings, which may as well be wall-paper, Mel tends to situate shapes against a background. Often the background is a tiny sliver at the top of the canvas, sometimes the shapes occupy a spot at the center like a vase of flowers on a table. 

You see that in the early paintings and in more recent ones.

This gives Mel’s abstracts a solid sense of structure. Squiggles don’t just run off the edge of the frame. 

He also uses the size of shapes and their colors to create a sense of near-and-far, a sense of depth in the painting, so you can look at it as if you were gazing at a landscape. (I don’t want to get caught up here in an argument about Clement Greenberg, the influential mid-century critic who claimed that painting should be flat and that two-dimensionality was its essential fact and that to attempt the illusion of depth was somehow anti-art. That was always pure balderdash and if he had had eyes instead of theories, he would have seen that.) 

Some shapes cover up parts of other shapes. Cool colors and darker shades can recede while warmer colors and brighter ones can appear more forward. It isn’t all just a great bowl of oatmeal. There is visual structure available to those who take the time to immerse themselves in the art. Art takes time to look at and the longer you look, the more complex the painting, and the more intense the emotions that may be evoked. 

I mentioned that in his more commercial prints, at least in the best of them, Mel found ways to put his own life into them. Unlike some popular print artists, who present a nostalgic world that never actually existed, Mel’s barns and farm houses are part of the life he’s actually lived — at least in his childhood, and after a city life in Charlotte, once again in his life back in rural Rockingham County. 

When I have gone to visit Mel and Deborah in Reidsville, as I drive north from Winston-Salem on U.S. 158, I pass many tobacco barns like the ones in his prints. They are still there, and there is often a damaged barbed-wire fence around them. Nostalgia-mongers love white picket fences; there’s little quite so warm and fuzzy about barbed wire. Yet, it’s that detail that makes Mel’s print carry a weight greeting-card art never even attempts. 

Softer art likes flowers; Mel’s best paintings show weeds. 

And I think there is something similar in the abstract paintings. In most of them, there is a recurring detail of zebra stripes. A shape, either large or small, will be crossed with black-and-white stripes. I’ve asked Mel why and he doesn’t have a thought-out answer. “I just like it,” he says. But Mel grew up in a house in Madison, N.C., just across the street from a railroad grade crossing. I suspect that this detail has lodged in his consciousness and shows up as an emotional nexus in work that is otherwise non-figurative.

After all, the front door of his studio-home is striped also, and a spooky mask that sits on his wall. You can find these stripes all around his house, including on throw pillows on his sofa. 

 Like many creative people, Mel doesn’t seem to want to look too deeply into, or talk about the wellsprings of his work. Many artists I’ve talked to are afraid if they look too closely, their inspiration might dry up. 

One should always be wary of claiming to know what is going on in another person’s noggin. And I may have completely misunderstood Mel’s muse. If so, I’m sorry. It is only a guess, from watching from the outside. 

But over a very long work life, Mel has seemed to avoid talking about anything too deep in his art, while at the same time putting great effort into its making, even when less care would have been enough. 

For the past dozen years or so, Mel has painted landscapes on commission for certain collectors, mostly sold through his agent, and painted canvas after canvas working on his abstracts, using patches of color, on top or beneath each other, as if they were landscape paintings of imaginary shapes rather than trees and streams. 

You can see the layout of shapes running through the middle of these canvases, with a clear patch — almost a sky — above and another patch, almost like a meadow, below. The fact that the middle is made up of a bustle of shapes and colors might stand in for a forest — except that they don’t need to. It is sufficient that they are tangible shapes. 

It is the way some classical music has a “program” that tells you the story being depicted in the orchestra, but if you didn’t know the program, you would still be able to feel the movement of the music in a specific direction. 

It is in this sense that I say Mel’s abstracts can be seen as quasi landscapes. Not that they are meant to be literally so, but that they display a visual form that mimics the mental idea we have of a landscape. Take away anything in a scene that has a name and this is what is left. Color, shape, form, space, frame. 

I have included a passel of Mel’s artwork in the blog entry, but I have at least another 200 images I simply don’t have room for. Mel has been an extraordinarily prolific and various artist, using many styles and many media over the years — gouache, oil crayon, acrylic, pen-and-ink. There is almost no style, genre or medium he has not taken on over the past 60 years. 

He is better than he lets on. 

Click any image to enlarge

Required reading

November 28, 2024
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I have infinite respect for school teachers. My late wife was one. I was one myself, for six years earlier in my career. Teachers work harder and for less pay that pretty much anyone else I can think of. And more than anyone else, the best teachers I had made me what I became in life. 

But. 

There was something about the teachers I had in public schools — grade school and high school — that mystifies me to this day. It was “required reading.” Nothing against the idea of having students read, but the problem was the books they had us read. 

They were “great books,” unquestionably, and among the best of literature in the English language. But what, I ask, what can a 13 year old possibly make out of The Scarlet Letter? It is written in a rather formal  early 19th century style, about a culture long faded in America, and involving minute shades of thought and feeling, with, like an iceberg, more beneath the surface than above. I was required to read it in eighth grade and was bored silly by it, mostly because I could not possibly understand it. 

I remember one of the test questions on the book. “What is the significance of Hester naming her daughter ‘Pearl?’” Uh — I dunno. I was 13 years old and I had a hard time telling the difference between Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth. Perhaps I wasn’t paying close enough attention. Most likely the book was way over my head. Way over the head of any 13 year old. Which is my point. Why was it assigned? 

My teachers wanted to expose me to the best in literature, I’m sure. And Scarlet Letter is certainly a great novel. I’ve read it as an adult and was amazed at how different it was from the same book I read in eighth grade. Deep and true, and subtle. All of which was lost on a boy with not enough life experience to be able to absorb what I was reading. 

For most kids at that age, a novel was its plot. If I could keep the story clear in my head, that was what I took from the book. So, there were a few assigned books that I read and enjoyed. Oddly, one of them was Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, by Lew Wallace. It was assigned in seventh grade, and it was, at the time, the longest book I had ever read. 

It was no doubt assigned because of the 1959 movie, but I had not yet seen the film, and so I never had to compare the book with Charlton Heston. It was fresh to my eyes. 

But it was a story told without excessive subtlety. If I followed the plot, I got out of the book pretty much all that was put into it by its author. I was 12 and at the time, fascinated by history. Lots of that in Ben-Hur.

It should be pointed out that I had nothing against reading books. I read them all the time. I was an avid reader, but pretty much every book I picked up was non-fiction. (I once complained about novels, “Why would I want to read anything that wasn’t true?” Little did I understand.) I read tons of books about World War II. I was obsessed with the war my father had fought in. 

And so, Ben-Hur was right up my alley. A story clearly told and with little hidden between the lines.  

Another great choice for a young person was To Kill a Mockingbird. As a pubescent teen, I was deeply moved by the injustice and the countering righteousness of Atticus Finch. I read it at a time of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S., and it seemed instantly relevant to my life. The fact that it was told through the eyes of 8-year-old Scout, and the moral issues seemed so clear only made it easier to digest at my tender age. 

The novel is still taught in many schools, and is perhaps the perfect book for required reading, although at the age I was asked to read it, I had no clue as to the the fact that its author also addresses issues of class, courage, compassion, and gender roles in the Deep South.

All the subtleties and complexities in the book were irrelevant to my reading it at the perfect age to encounter it. But then, as Flannery O’Connor said, “It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book. Somebody ought to say what it is.”

In contrast, we also were assigned The Great Gatsby. On the surface, it is not difficult to understand. The language, unlike that in Scarlet Letter, was reasonably modern. But the book relies almost entirely on what is between the lines, which is exactly the part that a 14-year-old cannot perceive. When I first read it, in eighth grade, I thought it was a story about Nick Carroway. After all, he narrates it. This Gatsby guy seemed entirely peripheral and I couldn’t understand why the book had his name on it. And what the heck were those giant eyeglasses about? And that green light? No clue. 

Oh, I followed the plot well enough, I thought. But boy, I had not the first inkling of what the book was actually about. 

And how could I have. One has to have a decent fill of life’s vicissitudes, disappointments, misunderstandings, loves, longings, sex, ulterior motives — to say nothing of complex, multiple motives — before one can take in all that is going on in Fitzgerald’s book. 

Or any book written for grown-ups. We were assigned The Grapes of Wrath, and I enjoyed most of it, but on the test, we were asked why Chapter Three talks about a turtle crossing a highway. A chapter that fits what Steinbeck calls “hooptedoodle.” In Sweet Thursday, a character says, “Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. … Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

And so, Chapter Three seems to have nothing to do with the story. Or does it? At an age before hair began growing in unfamiliar places, I had no clue. 

Worse, the end of the book just seemed like a vaguely smutty joke to make a teen laugh like Beavis and Butthead. Now, as an adult, it makes me weep. 

There were other books assigned that my yet-vacant mind could not get around: Emma, The Return of the Native, Oliver Twist. Why were such books put into the hands of a boy who had not yet outgrown Cocoa Puffs? 

I could barely make it through Emma, and couldn’t for the life of me understand why such a self-involved cupcake should be worthy of my attention (I said to my utterly self-involved teen self). At that age, irony is an unfathomable concept. No one my age at the time should be forced to read Jane Austen. Way above my pay grade at the time. 

And worse, Thomas Hardy. I had no notion of what a reddleman might be, nor furze, nor a heath. Reading the prose was like chewing dry straw. Why, why, O why was this book handed to a pre-teen American boy, who never cut a wisp of furze in his life? 

Last year, I found a used copy of the paperback book I was given back then, so many decades ago, and I began reading it to see if it was as bad as I remembered it, and surprise: I found some of the most resonant, deeply felt writing I’ve ever read. As twilight settles, on the first page of the book: “Looking upwards, a furze-cutter would have been inclined to continue work; looking down, he would have decided to finish his faggot and go home.” That image rings so instantly true. I’ve been there. When I was a kid, not so much. 

There were other books assigned that memory has happily wiped from my mind. 

But worst of all, and for this I hold Miss Irene Scheider completely guilty, was my lifelong inability to read Charles Dickens. She was otherwise a fine teacher of my eighth grade class, but she decided she would assign each student his own book, chosen by her as the perfect match for his taste and personality. And for me, she chose Oliver Twist. 

I cannot tell you how much I hated, hated, hated that book. I found it turgid, boring, endlessly prolix, and completely unrelatable. I trudged through it dutifully, But I found it the absolute opposite  of anything my taste and personality would have fancied. “Please sir, I want less.” 

No blame should be ascribed to Dickens for this failure. I believe the enthusiasm so many intelligent readers feel for his books. But my experience with Oliver Twist in the eighth grade has ruined Dickens for me for the rest of my life. I cannot even pick up another of his books. My muscles twitch and my eye develops a tick. “Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!”

I understand the impulse of grade school teachers to introduce great lit-rich-your to young minds. But forcing a teenager to read works they are not equipped to comprehend can only deter them from ever wanting to read books they haven’t been assigned. 

I was lucky. I loved reading too much to be thrown off by boring books. I had my own direction. Before high school, most of what I read was non-fiction. I always had a book or two going. Some I read so avidly, I finished them in a day. You could not have stopped me from reading. But I only came to fiction and an appreciation for what it had to afford, after my brain had become fully formed, in my twenties. Then, I attacked all those classics I had dreaded when I was younger. Ulysses, yay! “Madame’s Ovaries,” whoopee! “Lady Loverly’s Chatter,” sign me up! 

I am pretty sure that if you want to instill a love of reading into young minds, you have to let them read what they choose for themselves. Don’t worry if it’s not great literature. Don’t worry even if it’s trash. Or even if it’s comic books. If they enjoy it, they will keep reading. And if they keep reading, they will grow out of the junk and seek the real deal. 

There are books that speak directly to eager minds. The Catcher in the Rye is only possible to read when you are young. Believe me, I tried to re-read it a few years ago and nearly upchucked. It’s not for adults. And there is a huge market for YAF (an acronym that makes me hiccup: Young Adult Fiction) that is surprisingly well written and tackles subject meaningful to their audience. Encourage that. Don’t, my god, hand them Brothers Karamazov. 

So, let them soak up Harry Potter if they want. It’s OK. Better than never being able to read Charles Dickens again. 

Canyon de Chelly

November 23, 2024
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The American Southwest is the landscape of John Ford Westerns, Roadrunner cartoons and, of course George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. It is a landscape I know very well, writing about it often for The Arizona Republic when wearing my hat as travel writer. And while I can’t say I miss big-city Phoenix, I do sometimes feel quite homesick for the desert and the canyons. There is a special sense of space there, of horizons bordered not by trees or homes, but by the curve of the earth. 

But there was a time before that landscape and I became intimate, when my wife and I were teachers in Virginia and first planned a summer vacation trip to the half of the country on the other side of the Mississippi River. We were unprepared, back in 1981, for what we found, having been conditioned primarily by movies, television and the occasional Arizona Highways magazine Christmas edition. 

Driving west on I-40 across the Panhandle of Texas, through Amarillo, the earth was as flat as a billiard table, but at the exact border between Texas and New Mexico, the bottom dropped out of the land and the highway sloped down onto a landscape with buttes and mesas. This is the West, we thought. Finally here. 

On the border between Texas and New Mexico

Carole had always been interested in Indians, and one of the goals of the trip was to visit Canyon de Chelly in the Navajo Reservation. In our Eastern ignorance, we pictured the canyon as these steep walls of rock rising up from the land on either side of us. At least, that’s what the photographs looked like. 

Canyon de Chelly by Edward S. Curtis, 1904

But we had it backwards. Canyons are not cliffs rising up, but great holes dug below the surface. 

We were lucky, we approached Canyon de Chelly from the east. Most people arrive through the town of Chinle, to the immediate west of the canyon. Chinle is a tourist trap of motels and souvenirs. But coming to it, as we did, there was nothing but pine covered mountains and rocky wilderness. We drove in on an unpaved road — Navajo Route 7 through Sawmill — from New Mexico and coming up to an unmarked fork in the road, we saw a Navajo man sitting next to his pickup truck, which was piled with firewood. We asked him the way to the canyon. He said nothing but turned his head and lifted his chin to point the way. We continued down a wooded hill into a low scrub land, looking across the plain, and I noticed a darker spot in the sun-splashed land. When we pulled over and parked and walked to that spot, it was 400 feet straight down to the bottom of the canyon. It was somewhat like viewing a negative instead of a photograph: It was all backward. It was down, not up. It was Bat Canyon, one of the side shoots of Monument Canyon, one of the many side canyons to the main event. 

Of course, we slapped our foreheads (figuratively), because, of course, a canyon is an empty space, not a mountain range. Later as we continued on and found Chinle, and a motel for the night, we realized also how lucky we were to have found the canyon for ourselves, and not through the tourist muck. We had that side canyon all to ourselves. We sat alone on the rim looking down into the abyss for hours, listening to the breeze and the birds, before another car even drove by. 

Canyon de Chelly National Monument covers 131 square miles in northeastern Arizona on the Navajo Indian Reservation. Seen from the air or on a map, it is a chicken-foot shape of multiple canyon systems that runs for about 24 miles toward the east and the Chuska Mountains. 

Most tourists in Arizona head straight for the Grand Canyon, which is vastly larger and more immediately impressive. “Most famous places are always at least a little disappointing when you finally get there,” my brother once said, “but not the Grand Canyon. You just gawk at it, bigger than you had ever imagined.” 

But some of us love the human size of Canyon de Chelly even more than the Grand Canyon. Many days you can pick a corner and have it all to yourself. 

We went back many times, after we moved to Arizona, and Canyon de Chelly became a kind of talisman for us. One summer, probably 1998, we decided to hire a Native guide and ride horses into the canyon’s further reaches. We found Dave Wilson, who arranged for us to go up Canyon del Muerto on horses. His teen sons Delbert and Delmar came along, too. 

Canyon de Chelly National Monument is divided into two main forks, the southerly one is Canyon de Chelly itself, the more northern is Canyon del Muerto. The national monument’s name is a redundancy, like “Table Mesa” or “Glendale,” since its name derives from the Navajo word for “canyon” — Tsegi — turned by quasi-French transliteration into Chelly, pronounced “Shay.” (There is also a Tsegi Canyon on the Navajo Reservation, near Kayenta, further complicating matters).  

Mummy Cave

Canyon de Muerto, or “Canyon of the Dead” got its name in 1882, when topographical engineer James Stevenson discovered two prehistoric mummified bodies in a rock shelter ruin, now known as Mummy Cave, and then named the north branch of the place Canyon de los Muertos, now shortened to Canyon del Muerto. 

It could have been named for other reasons. Humans have lived in Canyon de Chelly for about 5,000 years. Long before the Navajo arrived, the prehistoric Anasazi peoples lived in the area and in Canyon de Chelly had built cliff dwellings to protect them from various warring groups. Those ruins are still to be seen in the canyons. And even after the Athabascan-speaking peoples, now called Navajo, arrived, sometime around 1700, the canyon continued to provide shelter from raids and wars with other tribes. It’s a long history of wars, battles and skirmishes, but two occasions stand out more recently. 

First, in 1805, Spanish forces, under Antonio Narbona trapped about 150 Navajo in a cave high on the walls of the canyon. In his report Narbona  stated “They entrenched themselves in an almost inaccessible spot, and fortified beforehand, we succeeded after having battled all day long with the greatest ardor and effort, in taking it the morning after and that our arms had the result of 90 dead warriors, 25 women and children and as prisoners three warriors, eight women and 22 boys and girls.” That cave is now called Massacre Cave. 

Massacre Cave 

Then, in 1863, the American Army began an attempt to bring the Navajo to a new reservation at Bosque Redondo in New Mexico, and Col. Christopher (“Kit”) Carson was tasked with rounding the Indians up to march them 300 miles to their new home. He had been given orders to destroy their crops and livestock, and the famous peach orchards of Canyon de Chelly. By March of 1864, some 2,400 Navajo had been collected and marched to New Mexico in the “Long Walk.” Thousands followed in later roundups. 

And so, there has been plenty of muerto in Canyon del Muertos. 

It might be a good place here to discuss Navajo superstitions and taboos. The canyon is filled with Anasazi ruins — good sturdy brick homes that just need a bit of sprucing up and new roofs. But taboos keep the Navajo from using them, or even entering them. Death is a principle taboo. A person’s name who has died should not be uttered. If someone dies in a hogan, traditionally, you move out and no one ever lives in it again. 

There are many more — a list of them could make a book. One online posting names more than 200 such superstitions. Do not look at lightning in a mirror or it will strike your hogan. Do not watch clouds moving in the sky or you will become a slow runner. If you see a shooting star, you have to blow at it or you will receive bad luck. Do not put salt on a piñon nut or it will snow. Do not kill grasshoppers or it will give you a nosebleed. 

We already encountered one, when the Navajo man with the pickup indicated the road to take by pointing with his chin and pooched lips. Pointing with a finger is considered aggressive. 

In 1993, I went to visit famous Navajo painter Jimmy Toddy in his home in Wide Ruins, on the Reservation. Unlike the hogans he had grown up in, or the ranch houses that pass for government housing on the Reservation, in 1947, he built a two-story frame house with a stone foundation. I parked in the dust of his front yard and entered through a front door that was off its hinges. “I never fixed it,” he told me. “There are bees that made a hive there and it would bring bad luck if I didn’t let them fly anywhere inside or outside.” 

At the newspaper where I worked, I became friends with Betty Reid, a Navajo reporter. She asked me to help her copy edit a proposal for a book she was planning. 

“Yuhzhee is my Navajo name,” she said. “It means ‘short,’ or ‘small’ in English.” She spoke only Navajo until she was seven and her family, who raised sheep, lived near the edge of the Grand Canyon at a place called  Bii Daa. “I’m a middle-age journalist who walked away from a traditional life to write for newspapers,” she said. “The two worlds are very different.”

I once asked her about the superstitions. “Yes, we are very superstitious.” “Do you believe in them still?” I asked. “Oh, no. Very few younger Navajos still hold on to such things. They make no sense.”

She paused a beat. “I still do them, though.” 

But back to 1998. My wife, Carole, had been fascinated by Indians and Indian culture since she was a little girl and collected arrowheads turned up by North Carolina farmers plowing their fields. She had always wanted to ride horses with Indians, and now she was getting her chance with Dave Wilson. 

We drove to his home, on a bluff just above the entrance to the canyons. His wife invited us in as Dave got the horses ready. It seemed like a very ordinary ranch house with modest furnishings, except that it had a dirt floor and just by the front door was a TV console with its tube removed, letting it serve as a home for a few chickens. 

I had never ridden a horse before, if you don’t count a pony ride at the state fair when I was a little boy. Dave assured us his horses were used to beginners and it would be easy. Just follow him.

We mounted the horses and followed Dave and his two sons, each on his own horse. He didn’t lead us down a road, but straight down the side of the hill, at a precipitous angle. I had to lean back so far in the saddle, my head rested on my horse’s rump. Luckily, the horse knew what he was doing. I certainly didn’t. Their hooves slid and kicked up gravel the whole way down. 

At the bottom of the hill, it flattened out and we rode into the canyon mouth, turning left into Canyon del Muerto. My horse was balking. It lagged behind the rest and they had to stop so I could catch up. At one point the horse, apparently impatient, began to trot after the others and I feared I would fall off. New Jersey boys make poor cowboys. 

What can I say? Not only was I a poor equestrian, but my body was not built for the saddle. One sees bow-legged cowpokes in the movies, who have long acclimatized to the barrel-shaped body of a horse, but my straight legs were agonizingly twisted to the stirrups, feeling like my knee cartilage was being torn sideways from my leg bones. It was a form of Medieval torture. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. 

Carole, on the other hand, was in horse heaven. I tried to last through the first few miles, but eventually, I had to get off and let my legs assume their normal lines. I limped around my sturdy mount, trying to regain the use of my knee joints. 

Dave had, no doubt, come across such greenhorns before and kindly offered to continue our tour of the canyon by car, and sent one of his sons back out of the canyon to bring back his station wagon. About 20 minutes later, it arrived and we all got in and began the tour again. The older son led the horses back home. 

But then, the car got a flat tire. Neither Dave, nor his remaining son, Delbert, cussed or fumed, but acted as if this were just a normal course of events. We got out and waited. Dave took out the spare, but it was flat, too. He never expressed any emotion about it all. It’s just normal. 

Carole on horseback; Delbert Wilson drawing; me, standing

Other tour cars passed us, other horse tours. But Dave never said a word to any of them, never asked for help. We sat in the sand for perhaps two hours. Delbert began drawing in the wet sand with a stick, to the delight of Carole, who was an art teacher. The sun went behind the canyon walls and it began to darken. 

It must have been about 7 p.m. when another car arrived, driven by Dave’s wife. We all got in and drove back out the canyon and up to Dave’s house (taking the road this time), where they apologized for the cock-up. They offered to feed us supper, but Carole wanted to get back to our motel. Dave’s wife gave Carole a gift of a small necklace and we all smiled and thanked one another. 

The impassivity that Dave showed with the problems we faced, we came to know as one of the cultural characteristics of the Navajo — which we learned over time with the many other Navajos we came to know and become friends with. I don’t know what Dave was feeling inside, but outwardly, it was all the same to him. 

When we got back to Phoenix, we mailed a box of presents up to the Wilsons. 

Canyon de Chelly National Monument is situated on land owned by the Navajo nation, and travel in the park is open only to tribal members or those accompanied by authorized Navajo guides, such as Dave Wilson. The only exception to that is a public trail from the cliff edge down to the White House Ruins, about five miles up from the canyon mouth. You walk down a steep path, 600 feet down through switchbacks and tunnels to the canyon floor. The trail is about 2.5 miles long and leaves you at the foot of White House Ruins, an Anasazi cliff dwelling, first built around A.D. 1060. 

The pueblo originally had an estimated 80 rooms, on two levels, with some featuring a light plaster, which led to the Navajo name for the site, Kinii’ ni gai — which means “White House.” 

White House ruins by O’Sullivan, Gilpin, Adams, and me

The cliffs above the ruins are streaked with desert varnish, a mix of iron and manganese oxide, that makes a visual scene that is absolute catnip to photographers. The first photo of the ruins and the varnish was made in 1873 by Timothy O’Sullivan, but a parade of others have followed, including Laura Gilpin in 1930, Ansel Adams in 1950 (having made an almost identical photo in 1942), and me in 1981. Gilpin visited and studied the Navajos and the land they occupy and published, in 1968, the classic book, The Enduring Navajo. It is still in print. 

The scene absolutely frames itself, which means that hosts of images are basically repeats. 

Photos by Tad Nichols, 1931; Jerry Jacka, 1976; Don Whitebread, 2009;  Patrick McBride, 2012; Richard Boutwell, 2017

It’s a highly tempting subject and I’m sure that many other tourists have made the same picture, now with their iPhones. 

Without getting down into the canyon, you can drive along its rim, both along the south branch and the north, with overlooks at such famous vistas as Spider Rock and Massacre Cave. 

You stand at the rim of Canyon de Chelly on the Navajo Reservation and look down to the braided stream at the bottom that scoured this great hole out of the sandstone and wonder how long it must have taken. Then you see the tiny Anasazi relics built into the walls of the rock and realize how long people have been living here, and then you see the sandstone itself an think about how much longer ago — exponentially longer — that ancient river deltas deposited the silt that later became that stone.

We visited Canyon de Chelly many times, and at one point, Carole applied for a teaching job on the Reservation. We drove up for an interview, but the terms of the employment contract would have made it difficult to ever afford to live there — the 10-month contract came with a 10-month lease on a home, meaning we would have to leave with all our belongings during the summer months. It was clear they would rather have a Navajo teacher than a bilagáana. We couldn’t begrudge them that. 

Click on any image to enlarge