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Designing eye

August 26, 2026
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Garry Winogrand once said, “I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.” What? It looks like reality, surely. Isn’t that the whole point of taking pictures — to capture reality? 

But most photographs, historically, and including Winogrand’s are in black and white. The world is not. And even if you used Kodachrome or a digital camera, the colors are exaggerated, more saturated than the colors your eyes see. And then, a photo of your house, for instance, is maybe 8 inches by 10 inches, while the house is immense. The photo is two-dimensional and the world is 3-D. And most of all, your photo has an edge, a frame around a portion of what you see in front of you. It is not reality at all, but a convention of how we picture the world. 

This is one of the hardest lessons for the beginner, or the ordinary person to learn. Seeing photographically is imagining how an image will perform shrunk and separated from context. To see photographically is to see shapes, lines, colors, textures and not to see houses or people. Yes, they may be in there, but you have first to recognize the shapes, lines colors and all that. And be aware of them. 

If you just see a subject, say, Aunt Trish, you may ignore the tree behind her looking like it’s growing out of her head, or you may take a picture of your car and not notice that half of it is blacked in shadow. You’re seeing a car, and not the patches of lights and darks that make the actual shapes your camera records. 

Most people think in words, and so, they name what they see. That’s a horse; that’s a tree; that’s my Grandma Edna. The camera doesn’t understand words or names. It sees shapes, lines, patterns, textures. As artist Robert Irwin put it, “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.” 

It takes some practice, some eye exercises, to train yourself to see. One online videomaker has suggested that whenever you have a spare moment, say, just sitting in your living room, to look around and see what may make a pattern, to spot contrasts of shape or color, to see abstract designs. You needn’t actually make a picture, but imagine things around you as if they were photographs. Make an imaginary frame. 

I do this regularly. I take my point-and-shoot Canon and take as many photos as I can in a period of time, say an hour, and see how many of them, simple details rather than nameable items, and turn them into visual offerings. 

Another photographer, Lee Friedlander, calls this “pecking,” and uses his camera to find possible images. Out of a roll of film (in the pre-digital days), he might wind up with only a few pictures worth showing the public, but the exercise keeps his eyes awake and noting the possibilities. 

When I was teaching photography in the 1980s, I had an assignment I gave my students. I asked them to photograph something so that I couldn’t tell what it was. I warned them, I was really good at deciphering bits and pieces. They were not to simply make bad photos, out-of-focus or blurred images, but to see the shapes and lines extracted from context to hide their identities. (I can brag that only once in six years of teaching was I stumped. Usually, I spotted immediately the bits of clothesline, or the bottom of a teacup, or the stitching of a sole onto a shoe. To quote Captain Reynaud, “It is a game we play.”)

The world is made up of details. We assemble them into an experience we recognize — the neighborhood street, our children, the Grand Tetons, flowers in a vase — but each of these is constructed of details. Seeing the details vivifies the whole. 

I have played with this exercise before, and even posted some of the images on this blog, when I spent an afternoon photographing all the circles I found. (link here)

I posted another on the patterns I found visiting my brother-in-law and “pecked” at the things in his house and yard. (link here). 

And I did it again yesterday in the back yard and in the house. I’m sure you can guess the identity of the things in the pictures, but it is the abstract patterns I was seeing, ways to use shapes, lines, textures, colors to form an esthetic whole out of parts. I made 50 photographs in the space of about 40 minutes. 

I don’t usually call these images art, although I don’t know what else to call them. They are ocular calisthenics, eye exercises, to help me focus on the seeing behind the naming. 

Back when I was a teacher, and therefore knew nothing, so was able to pass on my knowledge to unsuspecting students, I had to teach a word I now only mention with contempt: composition. We all taught things like the “rule of thirds” and “focal point,” and where to place horizons or how much of a person to include in a portrait. We taught awareness of negative space, and keeping it interesting. 

But long ago, it hit me that all these precepts had nothing to do with taking good photos. The word, “composition” implies a kind of blueprint or set of construction instructions. But I instead used the term “design.” And the secret to good design was never rules. It was awareness. “Design is your awareness of everything in the frame.” Want to chop someone’s head off at the top of the frame? Do it on purpose and it will work. Want to cut your landscape in half with a horizon? If you are aware of what you are doing, go ahead. Make that point. 

Most people, making photographs, or drawings or paintings, focus on their subject, and don’t pay much attention to the backgrounds, or the framing, or the patterns of light and dark. They focus on what is named. 

But if you look at all the great art of the past, and the famous photographs in your books, you see that the upper left corner, or the bit halfway in from the side, still has interest. It has not been ignored. Even a 17th century painting of a Dutch burger with a blank background has the precise color of that emptiness calculated and thought about. What a delicious blue-gray it is. Block out the rest of the picture and you will still get pleasure from the background. 

Awareness is the secret to any art. Paying attention. The more you are aware of, the better your result will be. 

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Eye am a camera

August 16, 2026
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I made my living as a writer, spending my career primarily as an art critic and travel writer with The Arizona Republic in Phoenix. But it didn’t start out that way. Originally, I planned to be a photographer. I spent years working with my cameras and hoping to become the next Ansel Adams. 

Yosemite Falls

I got my first camera when I was about 12, a Brownie Hawkeye, which I took on family vacations. I got my first SLR in 1965 — a rather primitive Praktica, which I took to Europe with me. Only a few pictures remain from those early efforts, including this image of Kristiansand in Norway. I was 17. 

Kristiansand, Norway

College came next and I took very few photographs, but after graduation, I began a very serious addiction to acquiring ever newer and greater cameras, marching up through Nikons and Leicas, hoping for a Hasselblad, and eventually getting a 4X5 field camera with a Super Angulon lens (don’t worry if these names are Greek to you; they don’t mean anything anyway. They are hardly more than shibboleths for photo geeks.)

I got job in a camera store, and for the next several years, acquired a full darkroom setup, used my employee discounts to experiment with various films, chemicals and printing papers, until I became an accomplished darkroom technician. I got deep blacks and whites that never blanked out. 

Then, in the ’70s, I was hired as a photographer for the Carolina Peacemaker, a Black weekly newspaper in Greensboro, N.C. But when the editor quit, I got his job, and became factotum, writing editorials, a food column and I became “Dear Carol,” the advice columnist, along with taking photos. It did seem, at the time, a bit peculiar for a white guy to be the editor, but then, the other reporter was also white. (At the time, talented Black writers were being head-hunted for the previously all-white daily paper, bypassing the usual route to the African-American press). 

The writing came by default, but I still considered myself a photographer. And not a jobbing photojournalist, but one with my aim being art galleries and photo books. And all my personal work tended to be in traditional genres: portraits, landscapes, still lifes, nudes, architecture. For some reason, street photography never much interested me. 

In the mid-1980s, my wife and I moved to Virginia, where I spent six years teaching photography at a two-year college. Back then, we taught black-and-white photography. Color was left to jobbing professionals, and digital photography was unheard of. (It’s odd to remember, but back then color photography was not widely accepted as art. It was looked down on as fit only for glossy magazines, advertising, and Sunday lifestyle sections in newspapers. The medium was thought to lack permanence — dyes faded — and most museums didn’t collect color). The school built a darkroom with a dozen enlargers and all the sinks and equipment needed, and I had all the students I could handle. 

I loved teaching — or perhaps I just loved having an audience. But I continued with my own work, again, in all the usual genres. 

Because we were both teachers, we had summers free to travel, which gave me a chance to visit all 48 contiguous states, and most many times. I vacuumed up landscapes and have a collection of what must number into the tens of thousands of landscape photos. 

Judy Crawford; Hank Hackett; Pam Henry

I had always photographed friends and colleagues, and taught a yearly course in portrait photography. My models were formal rather than candid. I loved the work of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, and it shows, I’m afraid. 

My method went against the trend. Most photographers preferred a longer lens for portraits, like and 85mm or 105mm lens. I felt that such a lens kept the photographer too far away from his subject. I wanted to insist on a kind of intimacy, that the subject should be kept a bit on edge and alert. So I taught using a wide-angle lens for portraits, and getting up close. 

Carole Steele

I also insisted that the subject look directly into the lens, giving the pictures both a confrontational aspect, and also a peek into the “window of the soul.” 

I have made a trove of nudes, too, both studio and outdoors. Over the years I have had a series of models. Only one person I asked declined the request. I believe I have avoided anything too exploitive and always, I hope, looked for the human being wearing the skin. 

Still lifes are often pictures of flowers in vases, and I confess to having taken a barge-load of such pictures. But the percentage of blossoms has dwindled over the years, and other things have taken the focus. 

And I tried many experiments, with chemicals and printing papers, seeing ways to make something like abstract art. 

Yet, even while teaching photography, I wrote out instructional sheets for my students, and tried to be at least a bit amusing in them. My four main rules for better photography were: “Get close; make sure your lens cap is off; hold the camera steady; get closer.” Just these rules will improve the beginner’s pictures by a proven 800 percent. 

All this takes me to the late 1980s, and a major change. My department head at the school saw the handouts I had written for my students, and decided I had some talent for putting words together. She knew the Norfolk newspaper was looking for a freelance art critic, and suggested I write some sample art reviews of local shows. I wrote one about a new Edward Hopper painting bought by the Chrysler Museum and The Virginian-Pilot printed it and signed me up. For a year or so, I wrote a review for each Sunday edition. The extra income helped. 

Truck stop in Texas

In the mid-’80s, my wife got a job offer in Arizona and we piled everything we owned into a Ryder truck and crossed the country, towing our car and keeping a cat in the cab the whole way. I applied for a job at The Arizona Republic, based on my experience with the Norfolk paper. To my great surprise, they hired me. I became a writer.

For the next 25 years, I functioned as an art critic, a travel writer, an editor, and, eventually a critic writing about classical music, ballet, architecture, theater, and movies. For many of the pieces I wrote, especially interviewing artists, I took my own pictures.

Artist Fritz Scholder and novelist Diana Gabaldon

The Republic was generous in sending me off on travel for stories, including a trip to South Africa, and I used my vacations as source for many of my other travel pieces. 

Paris

Such photographs were journalism (not that there’s anything wrong with that). But I never stopped making my own work. But there was a growing difference. The formality of my past work had loosened up. I was no longer concerned with the silly strictures that had been so important to the art photography movement from the ’50s through the ’80s, when cropping was thought a sin, the Zone System was the magic elixir, and documentary fidelity was a jealous god. It all began to seem quite beside the point. 

Curtis Beckman and Isabel Fierros; Mel Steele

My portraits became warmer, more human. 

Landscapes tended to shrink down into details. In fact, the whole change in my approach was less a concern with art and all its concern with composition and metaphor, and more a means of focusing my attention. Paying attention to the world became the aim. The image was merely the by-product. I mean, how many greens are there? Pointing a camera can make you notice such things. They are important. 

And so, I found myself “pecking,” in the word that Lee Friedlander uses. I would see some detail and try to make it work as a design. They were often random things in the house or car. 

The natural world was infinitely various, and seeing the bits that made up the whole drew my attention. 

There was texture, rhythm and physical presence in these minor, normally unnoticed micro-worlds. 

I also found the images worked better in groups, and so I began making sequences, mean to be seen almost as a visual story. Individual images became less the point, and relationships from one to the next took over. 

Jardin des Plantes, Paris; Judy’s garden, New Orleans

With my interest in natural details and vegetative profusion, I started a series of garden sequences, each group containing from 10 to 20 related images. I made series in friends’ back yards, public gardens, anywhere plants defined space. 

Doug’s garden, Seattle

I love gardens, but I love weeds, too, and trees. There just seems such a rich variety in nature. But, again, I wasn’t no longer thinking of the work as art, although I don’t know what else you could call it.

Title sign and opening at Tidewater Community College, Portsmouth, Va. 

At one point, I gathered about a hundred images, organized in 12 “books” and was invited to mount a show at my old Virginia school. 

To make these series more palpable, I began making a series of bound books, using the Blurb app, and have now assembled 14 volumes. They look good on my bookshelf, and I’ve given away many copies, but they are, after all, just vanity projects. But, boy, they do look good. 

When I was younger, I tried to make art; now, I don’t care about that: I concern myself with looking, paying attention, becoming immersed in the world I inhabit. Photography is just the means I have to focus my awareness. Being more aware is being more human. 

This freeing up of my intention also let me play around more. I bought a $1.98 Diana camera and took it to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. 

I made a series of flower prints by scanning them on a flatbed scanner instead of using a camera.

Anne Iott

Playing with the options of Photoshop, I made a faux watercolor from a photo of my college department head. 

I woke up one day and noticed that sunlit trees outside my windows looked rather like images on a Japanese shoji screen. 

I used multiple images of crossed tree branches, overprinted them to make an abstract image, looking rather like a Jackson Pollock.

I found abstractions everywhere, including these micro-scratches in the silver paint of our old Buick, and looking rather like something from a Wilson cloud chamber, or perhaps a Cy Twombly. 

Snow melt on front stoop

The more I looked, the more I found, turned into patterns rather than things you might name. 

When I was a young man, I desired an audience. Having gallery shows or publishing books seemed to have a point. Now, I find I make images simply for myself. It has turned out true for my writing, as well. 

For a quarter of a century, I wrote for my reading audience. If no one read what I wrote, I wouldn’t have been paid for it. And it was gratifying, I admit, to be recognized in the supermarket, or to have Richard Avedon write to me after having read one of my reviews. But it has now been 14 years since I retired, and have written almost as much on this blog as I did then, and for no pay. I just cannot stop writing. And it is still pleasant to get comments from readers, but I write for myself, to clarify my thoughts, to express my feelings. Anything beyond is gravy. 

Rest stop on I-40, east of Asheville, N.C.

And it is the same with my camera. It is my response to the world. I make these images to interact with that world, to force my gaze, to pay attention. 

The most important lesson I ever got from college was from the professor who forced me to “engage with the text.” That simply re-uttering what he had said in class was not enough. I had to find my own way in the subject, bring something to it, rather than just memorize. Engage. Pay attention. It’s real, not just some hoop to jump through to get a degree. There is genuine reward, intellectually and emotionally, for involving your best self with what the cosmos has to offer. You will be more alive. 

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Becoming Southern

July 31, 2026
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Am I Southern? I have lived in the American South for most of my life. I am comfortable with most of the culture and folkways of the region. Both my marriages have been to Southern women and this is the place I choose to live. But I was not born here. Worse, I came from New Jersey. 

If there is anything more un-Southern than Bergen County, just off the George Washington Bridge, I would be hard pressed to name it. Even the wilds of Afghanistan has more in common with life in the South than I had growing up. That sense of tribal identity — of living in the hardscrabble land, of having kinship with the soil, the bona fides of regional identity — that is more Southern than life along the Turnpike. I don’t remember anyone I grew up with pounding their chests with pride saying “I’m from New Jersey.” No one cared. My family didn’t go back five generations there.  

It is true that the South has changed, become more cosmopolitan. Not everyone’s a farmer growing tobacco or sorghum. Interstate migration has diluted the percentage of homegrown folk, and cities such as Atlanta or Houston have radically altered the demographics. Even the accent and vocabulary have begun evening out. 

Yet, there is still that sense of Southernness. It may be less clannish than it used to be, but it is still layered in to the psyche of anyone who grew up here. 

I first arrived in 1966, entering college in central North Carolina. There was then still a strong backlash — even a mainstream backlash — against the Civil Rights movement. Jesse Helms spewed his racist venom on the radio waves, and was soon elected to the U.S. Senate. His campaign, against Democrat Nick Galifianakis, preyed on bigotry and that suspicious foreign-sounding name: “Vote for Jesse; he’s one of us.” The Klan was still in business. If schools were legally desegregated, most communities still had a Black side of town. 

No one now takes a second notice of a Black family sitting at the Red Lobster. I’m not claiming racism is over; it is not. But the norms have shifted. Black newscasters on TV or a Black state trooper are hardly noted. 

One thing I noticed as soon as I got here: There is and was a countervailing sense of manners that didn’t play out in the same way back in New Jersey. Some of it struck me as odd, initially, and even worse, some seemed absolutely hypocritical. I didn’t understand. 

I remember a perfect example of how this works in the South, and why I have come to understand the brilliance of it. Many years ago, my wife’s teenage cousins (“cousin” is a loosely-defined concept in the South) had bought some new tires for their car. When one of the tires had a blow-out, their father, a Yankee transplant from Massachusetts, drove to the tire-store and screamed at the man there, “You goddamn kid killer! Someone coulda died! — why’d you sell those rotten tires?” He demanded an apology and satisfaction. All he accomplished was to raise the hackles of the tire salesman. Ineffective strategy. Made sense in Boston, but not in North Carolina. Luckily, cooler heads intervened. 

Their Southern-born mom intervened and had a long conversation with the salesman, after first apologizing for her husband. “You have some really nice tires here.” “Thank you ma’am. We try.” “I know. But sometimes something slips through, and I know you would never, ever want to let that happen.” “Well, no, ma’am.” “I’m afraid, I don’t know why, but one of the new tires my daughter bought had a little blow-out. Brand-new, you understand.” “I’m very sorry to hear that.” “Well, I’d hate to inconvenience you, but I know you would want to make things right.” “Of course, ma’am.” I believe there was also a bit of discussion about the salesman’s son, who went to the same high school as the girls, and probably a bit, too, about whose aunt had known whose aunt and a recipe for a good coconut cake. Things resolved amicably and no one was further accused of anything nefarious. 

This is a culture, after all, where the gravest insult comes in the form of “Bless your heart.” 

  I know full well that since I wasn’t born here, I can never truly be Southern. And I also have been reminded constantly by my wives that I’m a Yankee. Even if they haven’t held it against me, the fact is always there. I grew up with bagels and saurkraut, not with biscuits and slaw. 

My ex-wife asks if it even matters if I’m Southern or not. Why should I care? “There’s no court you have to prove it to,” she says. “Yes there is,” I say. “There’s in-laws.”

As the years slid by, I have become increasingly acculturated, so that I now lift four fingers off the steering wheel in salute of drivers headed the other way. I talk slower than I used to (part of that, I admit, is age). I am no longer surprised by ham hocks in my beans (which, of course, I now call “pintos”), and I find myself saying “sir” and “ma’am” in a way that would have made my New Jersey relatives look at me like I was an alien. Up there, it was closer to “Hey, Mack…” 

I would say the transformation is roughly 80 percent complete. I still love pickled herring in sour cream, bagels with a schmear, and cannot yet bring myself to accept the local pizza. I have been ruined by the New Jersey version, perfection in every aspect. 

And when I open a tin of King Oscar kippers for a sandwich, Anne will call from the other room, “What is that stink?” And I cannot get used to sweet tea. Curls my tongue. I take mine unsweetened. 

I love Eastern North Carolina barbecue and hushpuppies. And I now understand that the dried-out Shake’n’Bake chicken I had growing up (more wood plank than comestible) has absolutely nothing to do with fried chicken. I grant your fried chicken balances my pizza. 

It has taken me longer to accept boiled greens, but I have gotten there. I had spinach growing up, but collards stewed with sidemeat until it turned to something akin to road tar — well, that took a little longer. And, to be fair, even most Southerners now let their turnip greens keep a resemblance to its original form as plant life. I now am able to add them to my plate sprinkled with some vinegar. 

One one side of the ledger, I’ve now fired rifles and pistols recreationally; I wait for pedestrians crossing the road in front of me (that was a hard one for me: where I came from efficiency was the rule — who could get out of the way faster, and it was usually the car); I automatically walk on the traffic side of the sidewalk when with my wife; I make small talk with the checkout staff at the grocery store (and I now call it a grocery store instead of a supermarket). 

On the other side of the ledger, I’m told I talk too fast; I have no interest in college football; I don’t listen to country music, and Anne tells me “you’re still unsound on black-eyed peas.” On my first trip to the barber, making small talk, he asked which church I attend. “I’m not a believer,” was the nicest way I could answer, and the subject changed. 

If there is something that draws a line I cannot cross, it is probably Robert E. Lee. My late wife, Carole, kept a portrait of Bobby Lee in the china cupboard. I was never allowed to say nary a  word ’gainst his sainthood, and in converse, she would bring the hammer of heaven down upon my head if I ever said anything temperate about Wm. Tecumseh Sherman. “Villain!!!” 

My vocabulary has shifted, too. Southern expressions fall out of my mouth without my even being aware of them. I say “Y’all” unconsciously, and even “all y’all.” I am fixin’ to do something. “Cattywampus” and “plumb” — as in “plumb outa Crisco” — I hardly note as I say them. “Reckon” is now in my regular speech, as is “poke,” as in where I lodge my vittles when I haul’em from the grocery store. I have been known to call my jeans “britches,” and my suspenders “galluses.” But that is more mountain talk than just Southern.

I asked Anne how I’ve changed over the years. “You’re not as obnoxious as you used to be,” she says. 

I have been well trained by a series of serious-minded women, among them wives, girlfriends and mothers-in-law. With an emphasis for the last on “law.” I know my place.

Naming names

July 15, 2026
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When Wolfgang Mozart was three, he was already picking out notes on a keyboard. His father recognized the potential earnings potential and trotted young Wolfie around as a prodigy, showing off to wealthy patrons for their gratuities. I’m no Mozart, and my talent was of an infinitely smaller order, but I remember when I was three and my father showed me off, too. 

At that tender age, I had learned to recognize all the cars that passed on the street in front of our house in Teaneck, N.J. I would sit on the front stoop and call out names as they drove by. That would have been in 1951, and the cars were quite distinct. There were Packards and DeSotos; there were Mercuries and Studebakers — each with their characteristic shapes, grills, ornaments and sizes. 

DeSoto

It was only a few years since the war ended, and many older cars remained on the road, like the LaSalles or the pre-war Fords. Our next door neighbor even had a car with a rumble seat. (They were comically called “mother-in-law seats,” although I can’t believe many could had clambered up to get in.)

1939 Plymouth with rumble seat

At three, I knew the Pontiac had three chrome stripes on its hood; the Buick had its portholes; the Ford had its bullet-grill; the Hudson seemed as broad as the river I thought it was named for. Many station wagons had wood paneling. I had them all down pat. 

1950 Ford station wagon

And on July 4 that year, when I was three-and-a-half years old, the family drove down the hill to watch the fireworks over the Hackensack River. There was a crowd gathered. The gravel parking lot was full, with people lining the banks of the river to catch the display. I sat on the hood of Dad’s black 1950 Chevrolet and not much liking the noise. Two of my uncles were there, too, with their families. And Dad decided to show me off. And so, with uncles in tow, and a few of their friends, too, we trooped up and down the lot with me announcing the names of every car we passed, all to the astonishment of the grown-ups. Hudsons, Studebakers, Packards, to say nothing of the Fords, Oldsmobiles, Buicks, and Nashes. I felt so proud showing off. I don’t know if Dad actually took wagers or not, but he clearly enjoyed bragging on his son. 

1950 Frazer

Through the 1960s, cars designs remained distinct, especially with the absurdly growing tail fins — or the Edsel, described as “a Ford sucking a lemon.” The also grew to be great barges of the road, rolling with wobbly suspensions (which you can’t help notice on old TV reruns when those leviathans turn corners). But cars have since been growing more generic. 

1950 Buick Special Deluxe Jumbo

Oddly, as I became a teenager, when most of my buddies were swooning over 400 horsepower behemoths and zero-to-sixty ratings, I had no real interest in car culture. I have always loved driving, but never much cared which car I was driving in. But something of that original car-naming from my preschool days survived. 

1950 Nash Airflyte

As I grew up and went to school, the habit of learning and naming classes of things continued. In the third grade, it was dinosaurs; in fourth grade, it was whales; fifth grade brought ships. On it went. Later, with birdwatching, or the naming of wildflowers. Most recently, I compiled a list of the names of British comedians I recognized on sight; it had 127 names on it. I guess you never get over it. It’s a form of acquisition, and all adds to the trove of knowledge and experience. A hunger for knowing. 

1950 Pontiac Chieftan

There is a streak that mainly boys seem have: learning and naming. I don’t remember schoolgirls having anything like the habit. Maybe they did and I just didn’t notice. To boys at that age, between the ages of maybe five and the advent of puberty, girls are, if not the enemy, at least utterly foreign. 

1949 Packard 23 Series club sedan

Many boys never outgrow this naming quirk. Often a concern with regalia properly sorted. When I was an art critic in Phoenix, the museum had an annual show of Cowboy Art, with lots of paintings of shoot-em-ups, horse wrangling; cow-punching and war parties. All kinds of Western movie tropes, but with the serious, almost solemn belief in “historical accuracy.” No one would picture a Montana cowboy riding the kind of saddle popular in Texas, or show a sheriff holding a gun in 1882 that wasn’t manufactured until 1893. They could be quite persnickety about such things. Women’s hair-dos, though, not so much care in that, but then, women didn’t much figure in their mythologies. When I wrote a review that made fun of such things, I wound up being hanged in effigy in a cartoon in Western Horseman magazine. 

1950 Ford Custom Club coupe

All this came back to me the other day as I sat at a red light and noticed the flood of cross traffic. I could see vehicle after vehicle pour across the intersection with monotonous sameness. There is no way I could tell anymore a Honda from a Kia.  

Three seemed to be only three kinds of vehicles, each sharing a sameness with others in its class: First, the SUVs, bigger than they need to be — the bullies of the highway; second, the small sedans — they used to be derided as “European jogging shoes” — that are faceless as store mannequins; and finally, the pickup trucks. This last may be more prominent in the South, where I live, but the cars crossing in front of me seemed about equally divided into these three. The only punctuation in this repetitive tune was the public transit bus. 

The only way to discover the difference was if you could see the logo on the trunk. What was once the personalities of their manufacturers have become mere brand names, no more different than yogurt brands or actual jogging shoes. 

1957 Nash Rambler Metropolitan

How different from when I was three or four and naming the cars (with a certain amount of joy in their esthetics, and pride in my ability to name them). They were very distinct designs. “We had faces then,” as Gloria Swanson says in Sunset Boulevard. (actually, I looked it up and misremembered. She actually said, “We didn’t need dialog; we had faces.” But same thing, right?) Car manufacturers used their special designs to sell the cars and create identity. Hence the broad Packard and the Studebaker, with its pooched “mouth.”  

1950 Studebaker Commander

I don’t know why there is such a paucity of interesting design among cars. When I was little, they really did have faces.

Around the block a few times

July 11, 2026
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I’m now 78 and I’ve done a few things in my life. Probably most people have. Things they can list that few others have managed. Places visited; people who have impacted their lives; adventures to recount to grandchildren. 

And so I think back to recount my own experiences, those particular to my own past. Maybe others have similar lists. This is mine. 

I’ve been charged by a bear, for instance. How many people can say that? I was hiking the Appalachian Trail in Smoky Mountain National Park with a few friends. By late afternoon, we reached a lean-to shelter and I walked out onto the path with my camera, when a black bear — maybe two or three years old — crossed the trail about 30 feet from me, spotted me, didn’t like what he saw and turned and charged at me. He was no more than five feet away when he veered off to my right and chugged off into the woods. I was stupid enough that while he came at me, instead of running back to the shelter, I took photos, so at least now, I have the evidence. If it’s a tad fuzzy, I’m sure you can understand. 

Certainly the bear makes my list. But I tried remembering other things that would make the list of things peculiar to my life, that few people are unlikely to have shared.

Almost no one now crosses the Atlantic on an ocean liner. I did, in 1966 aboard the MS Oslofjord from New York to Norway, when I accompanied my grandmother to the Old Country where she was born. I was a high-school student at the time, and I remember standing on the ship’s deck watching the Orkney Island lights at midnight, bright points on the black horizon as we sailed past. 

There’s a lot of travel in my past. I’ve crossed the U.S. twice by train. Once when I moved from North Carolina to Seattle, taking the Southern Crescent from Greensboro to New York, the Twentieth Century Limited from NY to Chicago and the Empire Builder from Chicago to Seattle. 

The Southern Crescent

I recall the dreamlike lights of Toledo factories as we passed after midnight; the 10-below zero air when I stretched my legs at the station in Minneapolis; the vast empty spaces between farmhouses in South Dakota; and the track-side elk watching the train pass by near Yakima, Wash. 

The second time was more luxurious: Working for the Phoenix newspaper, I was assigned to write a story about the then newly-launched Sunset Limited route from LA to Miami that passed through Phoenix, bringing the first rail service to the city in decades. 

The paper flew me to Los Angeles where I boarded, and flew me back from Miami when finished. In between, I had a sleeper compartment and ate my meals in the dining car, which Amtrak had fitted out initially with a first-class galley and real chefs. That didn’t last long after my trip, before cost-cutting turned steak into saran-wrapped bologna sandwiches. 

Mississippi at Cairo, Ill. 

One of my beats at the newspaper was as a travel writer and I got to choose many of my subjects. I have driven the length of the Mississippi River from its source at Lake Itasca in Minnesota to its end in the Gulf of Mexico. So, I’m one of the few people who have ever visited Cairo, Ill., which is a largely deserted town, at the tip of the state where the Ohio River pairs with the grandfather of all American waters. 

I have also driven the Pacific Coast Highway from Tijuana, Mexico to Vancouver, British Columbia. And as part of that trip, I got to stop off at Point Roberts, that tiny exclave of the U.S. that can only be reached overland by driving through parts of Canada. Virtually nobody visits there, because there is nothing to be seen or done, and the only reason to go there is to be able to say you had done so. 

Back before the wilder parts of the road were closed to traffic, I drove the length of Mulholland Drive and Highway, across the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains, from its beginning at the Hollywood Freeway over Cahuenga Pass, past all the film stars’ extravagant homes into the brushland wilderness, with its dirt roads, and finally down to the Pacific Coast Highway at Leo Carillo State Beach, some 55 miles later. 

I pitched a story to my editor about the Hundredth Meridian that traditionally divided the East of the country from the West — the line that separated the land that got more than 20 inches of rain per year, from that which got under that amount. I drove from Laredo, Texas to the Canadian border, writing stories the whole way. And when I got back, I conspired with a page designer to take over an entire Sunday travel section with my pieces — all without telling my editor. “If you had told me, I would never have permitted it,” she said. “But I’m glad you did it. I looks great.” Easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

Clearing storm, Mont St. Michel

I have been many places in my life. I’ve been to Mont Saint-Michel in France, that island abbey on the coast of Normandy, where the tides come in at such a speed that anyone walking on the mud flats at low tide is in danger of drowning. I’ve been to see the Bayeux Tapestry in its current home. I’ve listened to the organist at Notre Dame de Paris play a recital of Messiaen. 

Two views of gargoyle rainspout at Chartres Cathedral

I’ve climbed to the top of Chartres Cathedral, where I could look down at the gargoyle rainwater drains and see their channels and spouts. For that matter, I’ve visited most of the major gothic churches of northern France. 

I stood at night on the banks of the Rhine River in Dusseldorf, German, where the composer Robert Schumann had lived and written his deeply romantic Rhenish Symphony. The rushing current of the mile-wide river, catching moonlight in its waves, seemed the essence and power of  nature. 

Cape of Good Hope, South Africa

I had always had an interest in the remote and isolated places in the world, and I got to visit the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, which is as remote and isolated as you can pretty much get. While in that country, I also got to taste grilled mopane worms. Few Americans have managed that, or would care to. 

I’ve been to Hudson Bay in Canada, to Percé Rock on the Gaspe Peninsula, to Glacier Bay in Alaska, to the Yukon, and to the Cape Verde Islands (although that one hardly counts, since it was a layover on the flight to Africa; I didn’t get to see much; bragging rights only). 

I have been to all 48 contiguous states many times. I used to say “I’ve been everywhere, man, I’ve been everywhere.” And indeed, I can bore my wife when watching some film on TV and I recognize locations I’ve been. “I’ve been there,” I say. She gives me the side-eye. 

I’ve canoed with alligators in the Okefenokee Swamp. Driven through Death Valley in July in a car with no air-conditioning — nearly collapsed from dehydration and had to drink a full gallon of water to revive.  

Zabriskie Point, Death Valley, Calif. 

I have driven the length of the Blue Ridge Parkway I don’t know how many times, and the continuing Skyline Drive, also. There are notable roads, often over mountain peaks, such as the Going-to-the-Sun Road in Montana’s Glacier National Park, the Beartooth Highway from Montana into Wyoming (we drove in the summer, but it still snowed in flurries), the Tioga Road over the Sierra Nevada. Or the roads in the East like the Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire, the Natchez Trace from Mississippi to Tennessee, and the Colonial Parkway that runs from Jamestown to Yorktown in Virginia. Many more with no special names.

Richard Avedon

I took photographer Richard Avedon out to lunch at my favorite  Salvadoran restaurant in Phoenix. I interviewed Duke Ellington’s son, Mercer, when he brought the band to play in Phoenix. I talked to him only about his own music (sure that he was tired of repeating all the chestnuts about his old man), and at the concert, he dedicated a performance of his  Blue Serge to me, saying the band hadn’t played it in 20 years, but they brought it out and spiffied it up just for me. I knew Frederick Sommer, the reclusive Surrealist photographer who lived in Prescott, Ariz., and visited his home several times, where we talked about things that would have made no sense to anyone listening in. 

I’ve fired guns a few times over the years, once when I was training to be a security guard (a low point in my career), and several times at black-powder gatherings. My wife had a flintlock carbine that I had the pleasure of firing. A lot of smoke and a loud, brusque “whoosh” rather than a cracking “bang,” and a .50 caliber ball blew out the barrel at the target. 

Yes, that’s me, ca. 1981

I worked at the zoo in Seattle, and most days, when the place closed for the public, I would accompany the bear keeper to the back alleys behind the exhibits and feed leftover food-stand hot dogs to the grizzly bears. We were behind the enclosure, about 20 feet above the bears. They would stand up, open their maws and we would toss the franks down their gullets. No swallowing, just straight down the chute to the stomach. 

Behind them was the back entrance to the tiger cage, with a small barred door to get in when the keeper needed to clean up. When a tiger came to the door, I saw what felt like the most enormous thing I had ever seen, its giant head, bigger than my imagination could hold, and when he “purred” the ground shook. I would rank that the single most impressive thing I’ve ever encountered. 

That zookeeper was my friend, and he once commented to me about the crowds, “You see all those kids, don’tcha just want to run them all over?” 

There were many more zoo stories, but most are not suitable for family reading. But more animals: I once had a six-foot boa constrictor wrapped around my neck. I visited the grave of Hopalong Cassidy’s horse, Topper, at the Los Angeles Pet Memorial Park in Calabasas, where you can also find Rudolph Valentino’s dog, Kaber, Petey, the ring-eyed dog from the “Our Gang” comedies, and Tarzan’s chimp Cheetah (real name Jiggs). 

I might also mention driving to Maine in 1963 to see the total eclipse of the sun, or having crossed the equator twice, and in Africa, seeing the Southern Cross and the constellation Orion in the night sky standing on his head, with his sword pointing straight up. 

Which reminds me of the night camping in the Outer Banks of North Carolina with my friend Sandro, and discovering that someone had forgotten to close and lock the door to the Hatteras lighthouse, and so we snuck in, climbed to the top, heard the roar, and watched the black surf below us catch the light. 

Or the time I climbed Roden Crater in Arizona with artist James Turrell, who was reshaping the extinct volcano to make an earthwork piece of art from the mountain. We were standing at the top as the sun set. “People talk of nightfall,” he said to me. “But they should call it nightrise, like sunrise.” Because, he pointed out, the night doesn’t descend, but rises, as a mass of dark sky climbs from the horizon in the east up into the sky, eating away the dusk. You can actually see the borderline as it rises, until all is dissolved in the general night. It is a startling effect that we don’t notice, because our horizons are generally blocked by trees or buildings. The phenomenon is a stunning revelation. I have looked for it — and seen it — many times since then. We walked down the mountain in the gathering dark. 

Hybrid car

June 21, 2026
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I am a centaur. Well, not technically — but I know what it feels like to be one. Sorta. 

A centaur is a familiar mythological creature, half man, half horse — although more like one-third man with two arms, and two-thirds horse with four legs (although there is a second version that is half man, with two arms and two human legs in the front, and the rear half of a horse abutted  to the backside). In either case, with six appendages, the beast might well be classified as an insect. 

Mythology is well populated with the hybrid offspring of human and animal, from the Minotaur through the sphinxes and down to the half-man, half goat satyrs. They all seem to be metaphors for the animal side of human nature. 

Like most Greek myths, there are multiple versions of the story, but in the most common form, Ixion lusted after Hera (Zeus’s wife), so the Big Guy formed a false image of Hera from a cloud, named Nephele, and Ixion had his way with the cloud, which subsequently gave birth to a son, named Kentauros (Κένταυρος or Centaurus), who, in turn mated with the Magnesian mares of Thessaly, who then engendered the race of horse-men called Centauridae, or centaurs. In his anger at Ixion (remember Ixion?Several generations back?) Zeus struck him with a thunderbolt and bound him to a burning, spinning wheel that careened through the heavens forever. The wheel is central here. 

Hence, the centaurs are the grandchildren of wheel-bound Ixion, which brings us  back to me as a centaur. It is often thought that the idea of the centaur was evolved from first seeing men riding horses — who knew they could do that? The man and horse must be the same being. Merger of Homo and Equus into a single being, one mind, one corpus. 

We don’t much ride horses anymore, at least not on city streets. We drive cars. And it is possible to merge with the machine just as it was thought to merge with beast. When I drive, the car and I become a single being. I am not just a person getting into a car, strapping on a seatbelt, plugging in an ignition key and revving up the engine. I become one with my automobile. It has been this way for me since I first got my driver license. 

As a sidenote, I have tried riding a horse. Did not go well. It was a docile animal, but it turns out that the round belly of the horse and the desire of my knees to remain straight conflicted painfully. Knees bend front to back, horses pull them sideways. The wrenching pain was somatic dissonance. I got back in my car. 

I’ve been a car person ever since I was two or three years old. We had a black 1950 Chevrolet, and in those years before children’s car seats, I rode in the back, standing on the seat so I could look out the window. I loved riding and watching the New Jersey scenery go by. 

My younger brother, on the other hand, has always had a different response to car travel. I rode with my nose pressed to the glass so I wouldn’t miss anything. He said that car travel, for him, was much like an elevator ride. You got in, waited till you got to your destination, and the door opened and you got out. Basically, it was lost time. 

From my earliest years, I was hooked on driving and riding in cars, but I never transferred that interest to the cars, themselves. 

When I became a teenager, cars were important to all the boys I knew. They swore by Motor Trend magazine, and looked forward each fall to the unveiling of the latest model cars, with their tail fins and chrome trim. Which new car could go from zero to sixty the fastest. In contrast, I didn’t much worry about racing through city streets. Zero to sixty was a meaningless metric. For me, they were a means of going. 

My first car was a powder-blue 1960 Ford Falcon station wagon, which had a mattress in the back and loosey-goosey steering, which led to my first car wreck. The second car was a red Chevy, twice the size of the Ford. For some reason, we kept a bunch of plastic grapes hanging in the rear side-window, and so we named the vehicle, Vanessa Redgrape. (The naming of cars, at a certain age, seems important. They all had names. My friend, Hank, had a green VW beetle he called Gigi, or “G.G.” for “Green Gonad.”)

I also owned a succession of Veedubs, which I loved, in part because I could always repair them with just a hammer and a screwdriver. They were simple. Cars have gotten so much more sophisticated technically, so that now, mechanics generally effect engine repair not by fixing, but by replacing. It was the age, back then, of hippies and Whole Earth Catalogs, and I pined to own a VW Minibus, and eventually I found one I could afford, and it promptly broke down on the way home from the car lot. I couldn’t afford to fix it. 

Many of us have had dogs we treasured, but they eventually die on us, and we sometimes find a replacement, but usually keep in our hearts the ones we loved most. Like the Navy blue Ford Falcon passed on to me when I was down on my luck by my friends Alexander and Mary Lou. It was falling apart, with no heater, no windshield wipers, and a rusted hole in the floor under the brake pedal that let me watch the asphalt pass by below my feet. It was the car I drove up the Blue Ridge to meet the woman who became my wife. It was snowing that day, and I had to drive with my window rolled down and my head stuck out like a locomotive engineer (or a happy dog) because I couldn’t see anything out the windshield. I loved that sorry car. 

Mostly, since then, I have had modest cars with generic names, various Datsuns, Hondas, or Toyotas. Although one very particular exception was the Chevy Citation that came into the family when I married Carole. Citations had a reputation as a break-down special. They were badly designed. But for some glitch in the universe, her car was the opposite of a lemon. Never had a whisper of a problem with it and drove it past 200,000 miles, then gave it to my brother, who continued with it for some time. 

In that car, Carole and I began our many peregrinating years. She was a teacher, and I was also, and so, we had our summers free. In 1981, we put 10,000 miles on the Citation as we drove across the U.S., up and down and back and forth. 

Each year after that, we chose a region and explored it in depth; by the third summer we had visited all 48 contiguous states, and most multiple times. 

When we lived in Phoenix, I’d drive a hundred miles south to watch an opera in Tucson and drive home the same night. I could not tote up the number of miles I’ve sat behind the wheel over my life, but I’m sure I could have gotten to the moon and back, if there had been motels along the way. 

And even now, when I am old and falling apart at the seems, so that even walking is a chore, with knees that need a serious relining, I have no trouble getting in the car and driving. I am most comfortable behind the wheel.

And it is because I have become a centaur. In a car, I am the ghost in the machine. We merge to become one single entity — a car-centaur. I extend my sense of self from bumper to bumper. Proprioception is the sense we have of our bodies and their shape and location in the world. I can feel where my feet end, where the top of my head is. I can twiddle my thumbs with my eyes closed. I have a clear sense of where my body extends. 

In the driver’s seat, that sense expands to encompass a larger whole: The car is as much a part of me as my knees or my fingertips. We have  become mechano-organic. My foot on the clutch and my hand on the gearshift is like breathing, natural and fluid. 

Byzantine gold cup; Indian Kinnara; Russian Polkan

Each culture and every epoch has its hybrid mythiforms, and there are horse-men from the Hindu Kinnara written about in the Mahabharata to the Russian Polkan and the troubadour centaurs of the Byzantine Middle Ages. It seems natural that we should adopt the modern in-car-nation. 

Different differences

May 29, 2026
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I have lived in four quarters of the continental United States. Born in New Jersey; left for college in North Carolina; moved to Seattle; returned to tidewater Virginia; spent 25 years in the desert Southwest; retiring in the mountains of N.C. In that time, I came across the fact of regional cultural differences. 

Over my seven decades, though, I have seen those differences thin out. The Southern accent I heard in 1966 can still be found, but not so thickly, nor so prevalent as the one greeting me when I went to North Carolina for college. 

Moving to the South when I was 17 years old was a shock. It was a completely different culture. In fact, the first thing I saw arriving at Guilford College was a huge homemade sign hanging from my dorm that read, “FORGET? HELL!” The Civil War was something in history books for Yankee me; in the South, it was in the soil. 

The first time I was blindsided by these cultural differences was when my family took a summer vacation trip to Washington D.C., and on the way, in Maryland, we stopped for lunch and when I ordered a hamburger, my 8-year-old self was shocked, even horrified, that it came with mustard. At that age, you are pretty certain that what is familiar to you is what is normal, and that what is normal is “right.” Mustard did not belong on a burger. Ketchup did. Mustard was for hot dogs.

Food is a major part of the differences, especially the ones that persist. No one ate pickled herring in the South, and I couldn’t find a decent kaiser roll, to say nothing of pastrami or a real pizza. Cabbage was turned from a hot vegetable into slaw; instead of spinach, there were collards. (I later became quite fond of Eastern Carolina barbecue, hush puppies, and fried okra. In New Jersey, okra, if it ever appeared, was boiled and slimy. I now order me some “fried okree” whenever it’s on the menu.)

The regional differences have been sanded smooth over the years, as national chains supplant local businesses, nationally watched TV has blanded out the accents, and population migration has averaged out some of the distinctions. But vestiges of the flavor remains. 

While the shock of easing from the North to the South is likely the greatest between regions, each section of the country had its idiosyncrasies. 

When I moved to Seattle, there were salmon and giant geoduck clams (say, “gooey-duck.”) The design influence of Northwest coast Indians was common. And over the city, seen on a rare clear day, was a looming Mt. Rainier, somehow indistinguishable from the clouds. There were Rainier Beer commercials on TV. The populace was divided between Rainier drinkers and Olympia drinkers (locally known as “Oly.”)

In Arizona, there was great Mexican food everywhere, food so good that I miss it now, when eating at the ubiquitous Mexican restaurants outside the Southwest, the same way I miss New Jersey pizza. Yes, it’s still good, but nothing like the real thing. What they call “too hot” in North Carolina doesn’t even register on the tongue trained in Arizona. I’ve never had a green corn tamal anywhere that came close to those at the El Bravo restaurant in Phoenix. 

But it isn’t just food that I wanted to write about. When I first came South in 1967, in my innocence, it hadn’t occurred to me that along with the change in accent from “dese” and “doze” to “y’all,” I would also confront a very different set of courtesies, different gender expectations, along with a different diet. 

The most obvious was the awareness of race. In New Jersey, skin color wasn’t of much concern. By eighth grade, I habitually took the bus from the street in front of my house to Manhattan, where I spent many happy hours in the museums and book stores. The city was a vast mixture of ethnicities and the ferment was heady. It was also “normal.” 

When I got to college, I learned that such a mixture was not considered normal. It wasn’t so much hatred, as it was a completely different attitude toward race. Everyone seemed aware of it at every turn. The east side of Lee Street in Greensboro, was where the “coloreds” lived. The barber near the college refused to cut the hair of our Sikh history professor because, he said, “We aren’t trained to cut black hair,” despite the fact that Dr. Suri, being Indian, was not black and the hair under his turban was notably straight. His skin was dusky. 

There was obvious antagonism in some quarters. When the future NBA star M.L. Carr played on our college team (I went to a Quaker school, where segregation was not practiced, at least not overtly) and went to the local hash house with his white teammates, someone taking exception cut the brake line on their car while they were inside, causing them to crash on their way back to school.

And it could be downright ignorant and ugly. In 1968, a group of us liberal-minded Guilford students decided to visit a Ku Klux Klan rally in Liberty, N.C., to see what it was like. It was as vile as we had feared, including a cross burning and a main speaker who was also county sheriff. The smell of alcohol was in the air, along with the kerosene used to douse the rag-clad cross. I found out that they hated Catholics almost as much as they hated Jews and … you get the picture. 

But most of the time, it wasn’t that obvious, just that the city bus through the upscale Starmount development left the main road to carry Black housemaids in the morning to their jobs, and in the afternoons back home. The infrastructure was designed to advantage racial expectations. 

So, it wasn’t just race. Where I grew up in northern New Jersey, the populace was heavily Roman Catholic. My Boy Scout leader was Mr. Weinstein. Half the school spelled their surnames with a vowel at the end. I was best buds with Aurelio Orlandini. Some of my friends went to parochial school and had tales of nuns with rulers. Protestants went to church, Catholics went to Mass, and Jews went to temple. Just variant religious beliefs. Again, the mix seemed natural and we hardly gave a thought to it. At the Klan rally, however, even Methodists were suspect. 

It was also manners. When I later married a Southern woman, she scolded me if I didn’t walk on the traffic side of the sidewalk. I wasn’t being discourteous; I had never been trained. Calling women “ma’am” or men “sir” wasn’t a thing, either. I had a lot to learn. I was used to, “Hey, Bud…”

In Jersey, the only marker of driving from one town to the next was a roadsign that said, “Entering Bogota” or “Entering New Milford.” The population was spread evenly over Bergen County, with no breaks between towns. When I got to the South, there was farmland or woods between settlements. How quaint, I thought. 

People talked slower, moved slower, and while I grew up prioritizing efficiency, I learned that efficiency was considered merely rude below the Mason-Dixon line. Wait for that old lady on the corner to cross the street, even if the car can get out of her way much faster than she could get out of my way. I have lived in the South, now, longer than anywhere else, and I am now slower, too, and not just because I am old. Just yesterday, in the grocery store parking lot, I stopped the car to let a man pass in front of me. It hit me then that I have become acculturated. And it made me think again about all of this. 

The plunge into the South as a callow youth may have been the biggest cultural shock, but each major move in my life gave me new surprises.

I knew snow in New Jersey, and humidity in North Carolina, but in Seattle, I learned that a constant drizzle wasn’t even considered rain. It took a downpour for anyone to consider an umbrella. Grey skies was the norm, and a sunny day was a news event. In Seattle, everything was on a hill, and a the Cascade Mountains walled the east and the Olympic Mountains dominated the west, across Puget Sound. 

When my wife and I moved to Phoenix, where we lived for 25 years in the desert, instead of rain, we had endless days of sunlight, and eight months of unbearable heat. It may have been a dry heat, but when it hits 122 degrees, and the airport shuts down because of it, you aren’t much aware of the humidity index. And the so-called dry heat turns quite soggy in July and August with the advent of the monsoons, dragging humid air up from the Sea of Cortez. In most months, after taking a shower, you don’t need a towel; by the time you begin dressing, you are already dry. During monsoons, you stay indoors with AC or change shirts several times a day.

We thought nothing of driving an hour and a half to Tucson to watch an opera and then drive back when the curtain fell. Distance was felt differently from when I grew up, and the trip from Teaneck to Cliffside Park, where my grandparents lived, seemed expeditionary, although it was probably more like 7 miles. But then, I was a little kid back then and the world seemed immense to my novice brain. 

I came to love the desert, although I never warmed up to Phoenix, which I used to call “Cleveland in the Desert.” Phoenix offers little charm, but lots of traffic. Still, on weekends we could drive out of the city to beautiful desert, mountains, and canyons. I got to travel almost everywhere in the state, writing for my newspaper. I wrote hundreds of travel stories. 

But, I was, for the bulk of my career, an art critic. I grew up going to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim, the Met, the Whitney. The city was attuned to international art. Other regions tended to feature regional myths and tastes, so, in the South, there were lots of paintings of tobacco barns and farmhouses. In Seattle, ravens and killer whales in the style of Northwest Coast Indians. Phoenix was awash in cactus and cowboy art. Of course, when I have traveled elsewhere in the U.S., those regional themes show up, too. 

But after decades of increasing cultural uniformity, I see the country breaking up again, region from region. Not only red states from blue states, but rural from urban, Anglo from Hispanic. Not just the former Confederacy rebuilding the Lost Cause mythology, aiming its ire at the formerly industrial North, which spends very little time thinking about them. The working-class Northerners deriding the college-educated expertise. Everyone eyeing everyone else with suspicion. 

I have come to think of the United States as comprising seven distinct regions, each with its own internal differences (i.e. barbecue vs. gumbo), but increasingly tribal allegiances. There’s the Northeast; the South; the Midwest north; the Plains states; Texas (yes, Texas is its own self-regarding region); the Southwest; and the Pacific states. 

(My map has state lines as the borders of regionalism, but in reality, northern Virginia perhaps belongs now with the Northeast, and perhaps western Pennsylvania aligns better with the Midwest. My map is only a broad suggestion.) 

Each has its distinct culture and folkways. Each, like me when I was eight years old, believing its own way is normal, and therefore right. Perhaps this alternating increase and watering down of cultural self-alienation is just a normal pattern of history, like the longterm shift leftward and the retrenchment shift rightward, and then back again, the breathing rhythm of culture, but the current re-stamping of regional passports seems to be making us increasingly insular. Although I’ve always enjoyed the flavor of regional difference, the regions I grew up with were  largely unconcerned with other regions. The new regionalism seems to believe the others are somehow out to get them. I worry.

Pilgrimage

April 1, 2026
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When that Aprille with its sweet showers has vanquished the roaring lion of March, then “longen folkes to goon on pilgrimages” — or at least on spring break. The ice has broken on the rivers and the trees are budding. You want to get out of the house again. Go somewhere. 

I’ve been on many pilgrimages, although I had never really thought to call them that. The line between what constitutes pilgrimage and what can be called merely travel is impossible to draw in black ink. Each of us must decide where one endeavor shades into the other. There are many who walk to Santiago de Compostela merely for the adventure of it, while, on the other hand, there are those who may vacation in some spot that has developed, for them, the quality of a shrine.

Utah

I am not religious and subscribe to no doctrine, but there is still something deeply satisfying about going somewhere, away from life’s everyday concerns, to discover something bigger, more important and more meaningful. That is how I define for myself the nature of a pilgrimage.

Some call this meaning “spiritual,” but the word, for me, has too much incense around it. I leave it to the New Age conjurors and the church-goers. But it hits something more than merely day-to-day in our consciousness. 

Oregon

In some sense, nearly all travel I have taken has functioned as pilgrimage. I go to see something, or I go to learn something, or just to be near something that has meaning. And there’s a crux. “Meaning” is a squishy term, difficult to define. It is not an equation: “This means that,” as if we were translating something, like “amigo” means “friend.” In the sense I use it here, meaning cannot be translated; you can’t always say what something “means;” it cannot be paraphrased, but it inheres in an experience. You feel that it has meaning or significance. Like a dream you cannot parse, but won’t leave you; you know it is meaningful. Meaning is not understood; it is recognized. 

Maine

You will have your own meaningful travel; consider why some places seem important, perhaps because of something that happened earlier in your life; perhaps because of something you read and admired; perhaps because of religious belief. You want to visit the house where you grew up, or the farm your ancestors worked. Perhaps, even, because it matches some undefined longing deep in your chest.

It was such a longing, or empty space in my experience, that led me to Chartres cathedral. It was certainly more pilgrimage than tourism that led me to it first time. It overwhelmed me. 

Northern France

It prompted, a few years later, a more traditional pilgrimage: an intentional voyage from shrine to shrine, as I traveled west to east across northern France seeing many of the notable churches and cathedrals: Rouen; Amiens; Beauvais; Laon; Reims; Noyon. 

I’ve been back to Chartres several times; in Paris, to Notre Dame too many times to count. But also to Sainte-Chapelle, Saint Denis, and several smaller churches, such as Saint Séverin, Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, Saint Eustache. Each fed a hunger to experience that unexplainable sense of space and time. 

And despite my utter lack of religious faith, there was no denying the power of this architecture and the meaningfulness of its vast interior space as metaphor for both the infinite exterior and our psychic interior — dome of heaven and dome of skull — both of them larger and more important than our puny day-to-day lives.

Giverny

I’ve also made the pilgrimage three times to Monet’s garden at Giverny — which is one of my holy-of-holies — first in the spring and then twice in the fall. My life is infinitely more alive for my having spent time there.

One important thing about pilgrimage is that there is a layer beyond the quotidian. There are many other gardens I have visited, from Butchart Gardens in British Columbia to Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina, and however beautiful they are, they don’t have the added psychological punch of being conjoined with the historical, artistic or biographical significance of its founder. 

Texas

Giverny has been memorialized in the paintings of Claude Monet, and are a monument to a moment and a movement in art history — and what is more, one that I particularly resonate to. And so, visiting Giverny has the significance of pilgrimage for me. The more deeply you become emotionally engaged with the things and places of the world, the more likely a site may become such a destination. 

Hatteras Island, N.C.

Cape Hatteras has become such for me. In college, my friend and I visited several times. We camped in the dunes directly under the lighthouse and at night the surf misted the air with a salty haze. The nighttime sky with the roar of the ocean was another mirror turned simultaneously inward and outward. I return periodically, although when I first went, much of the barrier islands were empty; now, except for the protected National Seashore, it has become a Manhattan of the coast, with three- and four-story condos lining the single road that runs south along the island. Its magic is mainly now in the memory. 

Vermont

One can make pilgrimage not only to claim something new, but to pay homage to what has become sacred. Every time I visit Maine, I go to Schoodic Point where the waves crash over rocks and wash back into the sea in torrents. It is pilgrimage in so far as each visit reassures me that the world I know survives — both the interior and the exterior. I reabsorb what it gives me and I am remade.

Road to Walden Pond

When I was a young man, I read through the writings of Henry Thoreau and made the pilgrimage to Walden Pond in Concord, Mass. I can not accurately recall the number of times I have made it to Walden Pond; they all blur together. I’ve been there in spring and in fall; I have had the place all to myself, and I have had visits I had to share with busloads of tourists; there were moments when I felt I was communing with the eternity that Thoreau found there, and moments that were bound by the clock — I had elsewhere to get to before dark.

Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina

With my second unofficial wife, I hiked a good portion of the Appalachian Trail in the mid-1970s, in a more traditional pilgrimage on foot. We never finished that one, giving up because we discovered that unlike what we had imagined — leisurely enjoying the beauty of nature —  the reality was driving ourselves to the next lean-to by nightfall and not losing track of the paint blazes that marked the trail. A trudge rather than a Thoreauvian saunter. Nevertheless, even incomplete the hike has informed who I have become in profound ways.

Pacific Coast Highway, California

Other pilgrimages I have made include driving the the length of the Mississippi River from its source at Lake Itasca to its mouth on the Gulf of Mexico. I have also traveled the length of the Appalachian mountain cordillera, from Alabama to Percé Rock at the tip of the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec; and have driven from Mexico to Canada up the fold in the middle of the map of the 48 states — along the 100th Meridian.

Each of these, and several others, have been journeys of intent, that is, trips made with an end in mind, as opposed to a vacation trip, whose whole point it to avoid the work involved in achieving a goal.

Rainbow, Delmarva Peninsula

Perhaps the most salient difference is the goal: For a pilgrim intends to change or be changed, while the vacationer usually purposes only to recharge the batteries and come home feeling more himself. But leaving home and passing through the unfamiliar will always change who you are.

The sea and the sublime

March 27, 2026
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Many years ago, when I was still teaching photography in Virginia, I visited an art show that bothered me. In the gallery were a series of large black-and-white seascape photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto. Each was about 3-feet square and each was divided exactly in half by the horizon line. 

Sugimoto, who is exactly my age, is a Japanese architect and artist who created a project of making pictures of various seas, oceans and great lakes, at different times of year and different times of day and different weathers. But every one was the same size and with the top and bottom divided in half, sky and water. 

What bothered me, initially, was the featurelessness of the images. The seas were generally calm and the skies usually cloudless. 

At the time, in my class, I was trying to get ordinary students to make better pictures. Most of the students had no ambition to show in galleries, but rather had wanted to be able to make better family snapshots, or to improve as hobbyists and learn darkroom techniques. And so, I taught such normal things as making sure their images had a center of interest — a person or a dog, placed foreground against a background. If they wanted to make a landscape, to include some center of attention and not just make a dull grab-all of the scene. 

These were not “rules,” but ways to get beginners to improve. First steps, as it were.

And I taught the ubiquitous “rule of thirds,” in which you help the design of a photograph by placing things a third of the way from the bottom or top, or a third of the way in from the sides of the picture. Or, also, to place your horizon line a third of the way from the bottom or two-thirds up from the bottom. And never, ever, put your horizon through the center of the image. The center is the most boring and static place in the frame. 

(Of course, no accomplished photographer pays any attention to these notions, but I was helping beginners up their games and making their pictures marginally more interesting.) 

But here were Sugimoto’s seascapes, centered and otherwise featureless. It bothered me for a long time — enough so that decades later, I can remember that show, burned in my memory, when so many others that I went to in so many galleries, have faded into time and oblivion. 

I was aware that if the images stuck in my craw and couldn’t be dislodged, there must have been something to what Sugimoto was doing. I have thought long and hard on the subject. And I came to the conclusion that their very inexplicability, tied with the elemental themes of nature and the vast oceans, gave them their power. That, in fact, they were a projection of the sublime. 

The sublime is a subset of esthetics, a particular experience of the beautiful, set in distinction to what is attractive and pleasing, by showing what is immense, often frightening, and which gives the viewer a palpable sense of his own unimportance in a vast and radiant universe. 

“Among the Sierra Nevadas” Albert Bierstadt 1868

It was a popular theme in 19th century art, with landscapes of the mountains of the American wilderness, or, in England, of vast biblical scenes, or or battles or storms. You have Jacob Mallord William Turner painting disasters at sea, John Martin showing the apocalypse in giant canvases, Gustave Dore engraving images of Dante’s hell and Satan’s flight through chaos.

“Snow Storm at Sea” JMW Turner 1842

You have poets describing limitless scenes of the Alps or the Arctic. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ends in such a scene, with a ship stranded in the Arctic ice and the monster choosing white oblivion over life. The ship’s captain writes in his log: “We are still surrounded by mountains of ice, still in imminent danger of being crushed in their conflict. The cold is excessive, and many of my unfortunate comrades have already found a grave amidst this scene of desolation.”

Nature could be pretty. It could be daffodils. But it could be overpowering, desolate, dangerous. As in Percy Shelley’s Mont Blanc: “In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,/ Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,/ Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river/ Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.”

“Chamonix: Mont Blanc and the Arve Valley from the Path to the Montenvers” JMW Turner 1802

Hardly a better example could be found than Sam Coleridge’s Kublai Khan: “But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted/ Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!/ A savage place! as holy and enchanted/ As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted/ By woman wailing for her demon-lover!”

In Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean — roll!”

It’s all over the place in English Romantic poetry — “Tyger Tyger, burning bright,/ In the forests of the night” or later, in the works of Americans such as Walt Whitman (“Out of the cradle endlessly rocking”) or Emily Dickenson. 

British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge describes the sublime in his 1818 lecture on “European Literature” by recalling: “My whole being expands into the infinite; earth and air, nature and art, all swell up into eternity, and the only sensible expression left is, ‘that I am nothing!’ which concludes that his ultimate realization of the sublime was of his own human insignificance.” 

“Cotopaxi” Frederic Edwin Church 1862

Giving in to the infinite — or the emotional experience of it — can hit you whenever you are open to it. Not necessarily seeking it, but nevertheless open to it. Most often, we spend our lives closed, trying to make sense of the everyday things that take up most of our time. But there are moments when it all breaks in. These moments tend to stick in our psyches, to be brought back in memory to refresh our lives. 

In music, the sublime is found in Haydn’s depiction of Chaos at the beginning of his oratorio, The Creation. Or in the ecstatic chorus of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the trumpets of apocalypse in Berlioz’s Requiem or the vastness of Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand.

“Manfred on the Jungfrau” John Martin 1837

The problem with the Romantic vision of the sublime is that it can too easily devolve into kitsch. The sense of cosmic overload shrinks into a kind of religious sentimentality and you wind up with Charlton Heston and Cecil B. DeMille. Where you draw the line, personally, depends very much on your willingness to accept the underlying metaphor of the vastness and impenetrability of the universe. 

Any theme, including the sublime, can peter out in too-familiar tropes and cliches. And so, in the 20th century, artists and poets have needed to find new ways to explore the idea, without the hurling boulders and cataclysmic storms of the 19th century. The old ideas still persist, of course, in such things as the photographs of Ansel Adams. It came to a banal end in 1968 when Adams let his photos grace the cans of Hills Bros. coffee. 

But, for the most part, the sublime has quieted down for the past hundred years or so, with priority given to social and political themes, from Brecht to Basquiat. We have a suspicion of grandiosity. Two world wars made us modest. 

Nevertheless, that cosmic power is still out there, seducing and threatening us. The night sky, the city-flattening hurricane, the ever-retreating horizon, the glimpse over the edge of the Grand Canyon precipice. And, always, our awareness of the inevitable extinction of our personal consciousness. 

“Blue Poles” Jackson Pollock 1952

And some artists attempted to address this, but without the baggage of 19th century Romanticism. People like Barnett Newman with his huge blank colors, Jackson Pollock with his impenetrable scribbles, and Mark Rothko with his inscrutable floating squares. 

In fact, it was Rothko that first unlocked the Sugimoto seascapes for me. 

Rothko was another artist whose work initially I didn’t understand. Having only seen reproductions in books, I thought of his paintings as simply boxes of pleasing colors splashed on the canvas. 

“Blue and Gray” 1962” and “Ochre and Red on Red” 1954 Mark Rothko

All that changed when I got to see the actual work, hanging on museum walls, and I realized those colors actually floated — visually — above the canvas. The colors of ink in a book illustration couldn’t do that the way actual pigment on canvas did. The difference between seeing a picture of an airplane and the actual flying at 30,000 feet. 

And so, it hit me, Rothko’s quiet illuminations were the 20th century version of the sublime. I couldn’t explain the emotions they roused in me, but they were the sense of seeing the primordial meanings of life, something no words could convey. 

It was this same thing that nagged at me in Sugimoto’s photographs. The sky and sea were yin and yang, something primeval and immutable. 

“When you look up at outer space there’s the Moon and the Stars,” Sugimoto said. “But on the surface of the Earth, the farthest place people can see is an ocean horizon.”

Sugimoto also said that seascapes are pivotal in that they are a  scenery that we, in our modern world, still share with the ancients. Cities all look modern; even rural landscapes are crossed by interstates and power lines. But the ocean looks today the same as it did for Homer. 

(Only recently, I discovered that the Pace Gallery in London had mounted a joint exhibit of Rothko and Sugimoto in 2012, and had even published a book about it.)

When I lived in Virginia, all those decades ago, it was on the ocean and I would almost daily have the opportunity to look out over the waves and into the horizon. I saw the seascape in sun and under the wind-blown scud of a nor’easter. It changed every day, even hourly. There were times when the sky color and sea color were so matched that the actual horizon line vanished and what I saw was a great blankness. A void. An infinity of sameness without edge. That blankness was a key to the modern sublime. 

Currituck Sound, N.C.

Usually what I saw was just “the beach,” with its swimsuits and sunscreen. The everyday tends to crowd out — needs to crowd out — the eternal. After all, we have lives to live, jobs to get to, families to care for, and we cannot function if our adrenaline is always at the boil. But there were also times that I could look out at the water and air and realize that I was seeing the fundamental sense of existence. The quotidian keeps us functioning in society, but the sublime absorbs us into the universe. 

There is such a thing as an intense blankness. It is both frightening and beautiful. 

Alaska

And without consciously realizing it, those Sugimoto photos had buried their way into my psyche, and without consciously imitating his work, I had begun making my own photographs of that phantom horizon. I did so all around the world, like this one of the Indian Ocean from South Africa:

Or these from Alaska:

Or this coup de soleil on Puget Sound: 

Although I was not aware, when making these images, that Sugimoto was buried in them, I was aware that they were informed by the sublime, and specifically, from a 20th- and now 21st-century version of the concept. 

Finally, if I needed any confirmation that Sugimoto was striving for the sublime, I found it in this photo of the artist, posed to mimic the painter who was perhaps the poster-boy for 19th-century Romantic sublime, Caspar David Friedrich. 

Drawing a line

March 9, 2026
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Fifty-seven years ago, while on the Apollo 9 mission orbiting Earth, astronaut Rusty Scheickart was floating outside the capsule in his space suit and had a moment to look out through his “fishbowl” helmet at the planet under him. 

“And you look down there,” he said, “and you can’t imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross, again and again and again [as you orbit the Earth every 90 minutes]. And you don’t even see them.” 

It’s a common refrain from those who have gone to space. Moon astronaut Buzz Aldrin said, “From space there were no observable borders between nations, no observable reasons for the wars we were leaving behind.”

Senator Bill Nelson, who flew on the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1986, said, “In space, you don’t see boundaries or borders. We are all citizens of Earth.”

The blue marble

We draw lines where there aren’t any. National borders are just one case. We draw distinct lines between species in biological taxonomy, we name historical eras, invent racial exclusions — we talk about these arbitrary lines as if they build fences between property lines. But they are legal fictions, and continually malleable. Political borders shift; taxonomy rejumbles categories; Red politicians vs blue politicians? Really they are all just grey men in blue suits. Their squabbles are parochial at best. 

The issue is that we understand the world in discrete chunks, but nature comes in indistinct swathes. In order to discuss or argue, we pretend there are clear lines. Perhaps we have to; everything all together at once is confusing. 

Robert Rauschenberg “Lucky Dream”

Nature, however draws few lines. It spreads and includes. It changes constantly; it is never static. “Everything flows,” as Heraclitus put it. Seed into sprout into flower and into seed into … 

I’m not saying there are no differences at all, but rather that the lines we draw tend to be arbitrary or at least, blurry. Are the red people for smaller government or a more powerful presidency? Such issues shift over time and it’s impossible to pin them down. 

Take the past, for instance. Historians like to take big chunks of time and give them names: Classical, Postclassical, Late Medieval, Romantic, and so on. Then they argue over it all, because any good academic historian knows that the names we give big chunks of time are misleading. But, as they say, whatcha gonna do? We seem to be stuck with them. 

The Middle Ages, for instance. Middle of what? Homo sapiens developed something like — in a common low-end estimate — 300,000 years ago, putting the start of the Middle Ages somewhere approximately in the last 15/3000ths of human history. Not exactly the middle.

And the dates we give the Middle Ages vary widely. Where do you draw the line? It came after the Roman Empire. But when did the Roman Empire fall? Well, you can say that the final collapse came in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople. For some people, that is already the Renaissance, squeezing out the Middle Ages entirely. And no one really believes the Byzantine Empire was genuinely Roman. They spoke Greek, for god’s sake. They were Christian.

Usually, when we talk of the fall of Rome, we mean the Western Roman Empire and the sad reign of Romulus Augustulus, which came to an end in AD 476. But really, the Western Roman empire at the time consisted only of most of Italy, a tiny bit of France, and Dalmatia (later aka Yugoslavia, later still — well, you know).

And you could easily argue that Rome ceased to be Roman after Constantine converted to Christianity and legalized it in AD 313. After that, the slow slide from Roman imperialism into Medieval feudalism began its ambiguous transubstantiation.

It is the great paradox of scholarship: The more you read, the more your ignorance grows: The more you learn about something, the more you discover how little you know. 

We think of our current era as modern. But when did that begin? It is a slippery question. I am reminded of the time, some 50 years ago, when I first drove west from North Carolina. I had never seen the great American West and eagerly anticipated finding it. It must be so different, I thought, so distinct.

We were living in Boone, N.C., named for Daniel, who trod those mountains in the 1700s, when anything beyond the Blue Ridge was the West. When George Washington surveyed the Northwest Territory in the late 1740s, he was measuring out what became Ohio.

Blue Ridge

So, when I was driving, I knew I had already pushed my own frontier past such things, and knew in my heart that the West began on the other side of the Mississippi River. But, when I crossed the river into Arkansas, it hardly seemed Western. It didn’t look much different from Tennessee, in my rear view mirror. Yet, Arkansas was home to the “Hanging Judge” Isaac Parker and where Jesse James robbed trains.

But surely Texas was the West, but driving through flat, bland Amarillo on I-40 was as exciting as oatmeal. The first time we felt as if we had hit the West was at the New Mexico line, when we first saw a landscape of buttes and mesas. Surely this was the West.

Maybe, but we hadn’t yet crossed the Continental Divide. All the waters of all the rivers we crossed emptied into the Atlantic Ocean. Finally, crossing the Divide near Thoreau, N.M., we felt we had finally made it.

Yet, even when we got to Arizona, we knew that for most of the pioneers who crossed this country a century and a half ago, the desert was just one more obstacle on the way to California. In some sense it still wasn’t the West.

When we got as far as we could in a Chevy, and stared out at the Pacific Ocean, we knew that there was still something farther: Hawaii, Japan, China, India, Africa — and eventually across the Atlantic to Cape Hatteras and back to North Carolina.

So, the West wasn’t a place you could ever really reach, but a destination beyond the horizon: Every point on the planet is the West to somewhere else.

When we look to find the beginnings of Modernity, the horizon recedes from us the same way. Perhaps it began with World War I, when we entered a non-heroic world and faced a more sober reality.

Modern Art began before that, however, perhaps with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913, perhaps with Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun in 1894. Some begin with the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874.

Politically, maybe it begins with Bismarck and the establishment of a new order of nations and the rise of the “balance of power.”

You can make a case that Modernism begins with the Enlightenment in the 18th century, when a rising Middle Class began to fill concert halls and Mozart became an entrepreneur instead of an employee of the aristocracy.

Or before that, in 1648, with the Treaty of Westphalia, and the first recognition of national boundaries as something more than real estate owned by the crown.

You can set your marker down with Luther, with Gutenberg, with Thomas Browne, Montaigne, Caravaggio — or Giotto.

For many, Modernism began with the Renaissance, but when did the Renaissance begin? 15th century? The Trecento? Or did it begin further north with the Gothic around AD 1150, which is really the first sparking of a modern way of thinking. 

Perhaps, though, it is the Roman republic that divides modern political organization from more tribal eras before. Or you could vote for the democracy and philosophy of ancient Greece. Surely the time before that and the the time after are distinctly different. We recognize the near side of each of these divides as more familiar than the distant side.

You might as well put the starting line with the discovery of agriculture in the steppes of Anatolia and the river plains of Iraq. An argument can be made for any of these points on the timeline — and arguments could be made for many I haven’t room to mention.

Which leaves us the ultimate question: Is Modernism now over? Done with? Have we moved on, or is what we deem Postmodernism really just the next manifestation of the Modern? Perhaps AI is the new line drawn in history. 

Perhaps the horizon should be recognized for what it is: an ever-moving phantasm. For those peasants digging in the manorial dirt in the Ninth Century, the times they were living in were modern. The first person recorded to use the term “modern” for his own age was the Roman writer Cassiodorus in the 6th Century. Each moment is the new modern.

Scholars know all this very well, and make their arguments in books and treatises, almost always with the caveat about drawing lines hard and fast. But the convenience of giving names is too seductive, and leaves the popular imagination with images like Monty Python’s “Bring out yer dead” or Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra. Can we talk about the past without the labels we give it? 

We need to understand the world is not binary, but a borderless spectrum of experience. Hawaii is now part of North America and Iceland is part of Europe. Electrons are particles and waves. Poland grew immense and shrunk, disappeared completely and reappeared and picked up its skirts and moved 200 miles to the west. And so, I wince every time I hear a red politician tell us with misbegotten certainty what gender roles should be, or that “male” and “female” are hard, definable categories with no subtleties. Or that “Left” and “Right” are hard-and-fast places where we must construct our redouts. 

I admit we need words, categories, borders, and definitions to be able to communicate. We need to cut up our steak in order to eat it. But I would wish we could be more humble about their actual reality.