Robert Root

 

One of my weekly habits is to sit down with the new issue of The New Yorker the afternoon I fetch it from our mailbox, deliberately ignore the table of contents, and then read every cartoon in order, page after page. If my wife is nearby and I come upon a cartoon that seems pertinent to her, maybe reminiscent of something she mentioned or a conversation we've had, I'll show her the image and let her read the caption. Sometimes a thematic undercurrent seems to run through the cartoons, as if they were in tune with issues of the day or the psychology of the cartoon editor, and sometimes they seem entirely randomly selected, unrelated to one another. Sometimes, as often happens with whatever we encounter in our daily activities, a cartoon will set a chain of memories and reflections in motion.

 

That happened with the December 30, 2019 issue, entirely devoted to cartoons and to humorous prose. On page 39, a comic drawing by Paul Noth showed two female figures—or possibly three. The young woman on the left seemed etched from a late nineteenth-early twentieth century magazine illustration. The figure on the right was a perfect replica of a classic 1915 optical illusion by William Ely Hill, "My Wife and My Mother-in-Law." It contains both women at once—the "wife" turning to look behind her (in Noth's drawing she faces the woman on the left) and the "mother-in-law" seen in profile. It's a famous ambiguous illusion, like Rubin's Vase, an image from the same year that is simultaneously a white vase in a black background and the black profiles of two men facing one another against a white background. Noth's interpretation of Hill's illusion has one woman telling the other, "I'm turning into my mother." It's essentially an homage to the earlier illusion but it adds a different psychological dimension. For Hill the ambiguous figure is simultaneously his wife and his mother-in-law, as if the illustrator as husband is aware of the resemblances that age heightens; for Noth the speaker is the daughter acknowledging changes in herself, adding another level of ambiguity, since the changes may not be only physical—notice how dour that older woman seems, compared to the fashionable adornment of the daughter.

 

As it turns out, the Noth cartoon didn't simply remind me of those ambiguous illustrations of the past; it took me back at least seven years to a time when I downloaded the Hill and Rubin images to add to a slideshow I planned to run in a summer residency writing class. The images were really background, establishing the tradition of optical illusion art before projecting images from a video of eight young women dancing onstage to a German polka-rock recording titled "Tanz" by the group Hiss. The women are dressed in alternating outfits with one white side and one black side, the white of one linked to the white of someone next to her and her black side linked to someone on the other side. They have to coordinate their movements even coming on stage since they have their arms behind one another and their costumes are all connected at the hips. When the music starts the dancers have to move their legs, all white legs together, then all black legs together, but since different dancers have those colors on different legs, some left, some right, their movements create an optical illusion. The audience cracks up all through the number. Since then I've discovered a number of other performances like this from different groups, some male, some female, some mixed-gender, and I get the feeling that this is a popular amateur chorus line act.

 

When I put the talk together, I'd been focusing on the idea of ekphrasis, the art of writing about images. I would start with famous poems like Keat's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," William Carlos Williams' "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," W. H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts," and Patricia Hampl's "Woman Before an Aquarium." I would also show music videos to reinforce the possibility of ekphrasis extending into other forms, such as visualizing a poem or a song lyric. I located the German lyrics to "Tanz" and found a translation, and it inspired me to try writing my own poem about the "Strumpfhosentanz" video. Google Translate tells me "Strumpfhosentanz" in English would be "Pantyhose Dance." I think I'll stick with the German title. This is my ekphrastic poem:

 

Strumpfhosentanz: An Ekphrasis

 

Strumpfhosentanz,
schwarz und weiss.

How elusive the illusion
when made so vital—
and by now viral—
as if strobe lights
had come to life,
become Rockettes
for polka-rock.

 

Was ist gut für den Korper,
für die Seele, für den Geist?
the singer asks.

Der Tanz! The dance!

Shifting focus without
the blink of an eye,
repeatedly startled
by what I comprehend
that is at the same time
what cannot happen—
and happens,

as if, in Hill's cartoon,
the old woman suddenly
smiles while the young woman
turns ever so slightly,
as if Rubin's vase becoming
the faces becoming the vase again
were somehow animated.

 

My allusions elude me,
my optical ekphrasis
mere delusion.

Strumpfhosen auf schwarz und Weiss—
tops and bottoms don't align
within the chorus line.
"Hebe deine Beine"
and their legs lift
and what cannot happen
happens.

Strumpfhozentanz auf
Schwarz und Weiss.

How elusive the illusion;
my ekphrasis applauds delusion.

 

This is something I've only done once, to this song and this video. I think this is the way ekphrasis works—something in what you see sets off something within you and you give voice to it somehow, in a poem, a song, an essay. If you watch the video linked to the image and listen to the song, I hope you'll sense the way they inspired my response. They may even inspire a response from you.

 

 

One recent morning another one of those coincidences I tend to notice occurred at breakfast time. In the May 18, 2020 issue of The New Yorker Peter Schjeldahl reviewed an exhibit of Dorothea Lange's photos on the Museum of Modern Art's website, one of those virtual tours our pandemic times encourage. Over twenty years ago I'd read about Lange in Robert Coles' splendid Doing Documentary Work, then examined online holdings of her photos at the Library of Congress and began using some of her images, including the "Migrant Mother" photo Schjeldahl discusses, in writing courses I was teaching. He devotes a paragraph to Lange's pictures of Japanese Americans sent to internment camps during World War II, "work that was commissioned and then suppressed by the federal government."

 

"One of the best known is a shot of children, Japanese-Americans and others, with hands on hearts, apparently reciting the Pledge of Allegiance," Schjeldahl tells us. "Lange's images show the detained as regular people who had to cope with an outrageously unjust confinement—and who, in doing so, were buoyed by being together, at least." He claims that "Lange was a poet of the ordinary but imperious human need, under any conditions, for mutual contact." When I closed the issue, I saw again the cover display of a dozen separate images of young people in graduation dress all wearing face masks—"Class of 2020" by Anita Kunz. It made for a timely juxtaposition.

 

Ordinarily, such a review would simply send me to view Lange's photos online, but I'd also been reading sections of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, edited by Simmons Buntin, Elizabeth Dodd, and Derek Sheffield, a collection of "letters to America" published since 2016 at Terrain.org. After breakfast I happened to open the anthology to "Aperture: A Photoless Photo Essay" by Traci Brimhall. Her essay consists of a series of eight short segments each composed of two paragraphs, the first subtitled Image and the second subtitled Caption. The Image paragraph describes a photo and the Caption paragraph explains and reacts to the picture. No photos are attached to the essay. Her third segment at first startled and then engrossed me—it centered on two of Dorothea Lange's photos of the WWII Japanese internment project.

 

Brimhall introduces the first image as "Rows of barracks and a dust storm moving through them" and then starts the next four sentence fragments the same way: "Dust through . . ."—floorboards, broken windows, "the unfurled American flag straining at the pole," "the clothes of the two Japanese Americans running through the dust roads between the barracks." She describes the second image this way: "A father posed with his family. A tag looped through his coat buttonhole, the child next to him, tagged. The child in front of him, tagged. And the other child. And the other child. Each one staring unsmiling except the smallest child who watches someone the camera cannot see. Their bags labeled with their surname and a symbol to reunite them someday." In the Caption section Brimhall explains how the War Relocation Authority, which recruited Lange to take the photos, impounded them after they were submitted and stored them in the National Archives. Brimhall surmises, "When they realized the photos were sympathetic portrayals of Americans moved into horse stalls, standing in line for hours for food, weaving camouflage nets to help the war effort, the WRA realized the images must remain unseen." They only resurfaced in 2006. Brimhall asks, "Dear Unlooking America, it embarrasses me, but when a mirror teaches us who we are, do we ever believe it?"

 

Other segments in the essay treat images from the Manzanar Concentration Camp in California and the Gila River Concentration Camp in Arizona, built on a reservation—she calls it "A prison on a prison." Fort Sill in Oklahoma, she tells us, has been a relocation camp for Native Americans, a concentration camp for Japanese Americans, and, recently, a detention center for migrant children. In one more contemporary segment, the image paragraph details drawings by children released by the Border Patrol from a detention center and asked to draw their experiences before being transferred into a "respite center." "The Smithsonian expresses interest in acquiring their drawings as artifacts." Brimhall claims to be "disturbed that we need images to make us pay better attention," which partly explains why this is a "photoless photo essay."

 

And yet the words Peter Schjeldahl and Traci Brimhall find to describe the images they've scanned closely don't simply recreate them but interpret them in ways that reveal how the images affected them. Consequently, their accounts of those images impact their readers by making them visualize what these writers were viewing. If we were to view those images after reading their accounts, we would likely see them in much the same way. The question is, if we had seen them without those descriptions, how would we have understood them?

 

An aperture is an opening in a lens that lets light pass through. The images are apertures that let our history appear and, like any image, what we see depends on the setting of the aperture. It changes when we no longer see the image in isolation but view it among others, perhaps across time, in an album. Or even in a photoless photo essay.

 

Note: Dorothea Lange's Dust Storm image is viewable here.

 

One nice thing about being addicted to reading as a writer is finding yourself inspired or provoked to start writing about memories or ideas that your reading has somehow triggered. Over a period of a few days I happened to read a posting on Facebook by Leslie Carol Roberts, a writer whose work I like, author of The Entire Earth and Sky and Here Is Where I Walk. She asked her readers, "Tell me about the first book you wrote" and mentioned writing and illustrating a book at age 8. I responded at once with a story I've written about a couple times before. Here's what I told her:

 

I haven't been able to find any copies of my earliest writing—a good deal of it was destroyed by mold in our basement—but I have vivid memories of coming home from a matinee showing of Superman and the Mole Men with my neighborhood friend Bobby Hall. We both were excited about the movie—it later was shown in two parts on The Adventures of Superman television series—and when we got to my house we pried open my mother's typewriter and sat down on the living room floor to write adventure stories. At the time, in addition to reading superhero comics and faithfully following adventure series in the Sunday newspapers, I was also a big fan of the old Flash Gordon serial being shown daily on local television. All that influence came together that day in my creation of several one-paragraph action stories about Tiger Boy. He had superpowers and lived on the Tiger Planet, modeled on Flash Gordon's planet Mongo and ruled by an evil emperor like Mongo's Ming the Merciless. The various civilizations in peril were all part human, part tiger, like Tiger Boy, whose secret identity I've forgotten. Bobby and I had a good time—his stories were more sports related, I think—and when my mother read my typed tales, she eventually got me a toy typewriter of my own so I wouldn't break into hers again. I've been a writer ever since.

 

Around the same time I responded to Leslie's post, I read an essay titled "Dear Me" by Ann Napolitano in the New York Times Book Review. Starting at age 14 she'd been writing letters to her future self to be opened ten years later, her most recent one at age 44. I've blogged about that essay before, but along with admitting that, at my advanced age, I might not be around to open such a letter ten years from now, the convergence of Leslie's post and Napolitano's essay set off something else in me.

 

Revisiting that Tiger Boy story again I realized a couple of things about it that I hadn't thought before. One is the way the story might have shifted its emphasis. It's an autobiographical narrative about something that happened to me that I remember fondly. It is also a personal anecdote about the influences of popular culture on a young boy (I think I was eight years old) and it could lead in a couple of directions, towards the idea of private creativity arising from public creativity or towards an argument about the nature of contemporary culture influencing the creation of further popular culture or towards a memoir of a young writer's interactions with his family (my mother wasn't always supportive, as I mentioned in my memoir Happenstance). It's also a tale about learning how to use a typewriter.

 

But, possibly because I've been thinking about writing with images more often lately and have done a certain amount of such writing, I realized that every time I've told about Bobby and me typing our one-paragraph stories, I have re-entered that "first living room" (as we called it), the room at the entrance to our house, and seen the two of us on the floor not far from the coat rack and the front door and the front wall mirror opposite my mother's piano and the staircase leading to our bedrooms and the hallway to the kitchen at the back of the house and the open archway into the "second living room," the one where we watched television and listened to records and read. I could go on. Just mentioning any one of those features sets off memories of many more of them.

 

Mostly when I think or talk about writing from images, I think about the ways we can find an old photo and imaginatively, psychologically, enter it, walk around, check out the nature of the place and the personalities of the people in it, re-acclimate ourselves to having occupied that space at one time or, more challengingly, assess how the living presences in that space interacted even if we weren't there at the time. But I also think that it's possible to reverse that process—to re-enter a scene through memory and by writing about it re-inhabit it fully. In my writing classes I sometimes ask students to imagine themselves as a time-traveling drone that can approach their home from the exterior and look through a window into a family room—perhaps the living room or the kitchen or the bathroom or their own bedroom—in order to first of all describe what that drone would see and only later interpret what the things being viewed might reveal about the occupants. If you could take a photo of that room from one angle, what would be in the picture? What would a casual viewer realize about the people who used that room? What does examining that picture do for you?

 

We carry a wealth of images around with us all the time and they offer us abundant entries into memory and imagination.

 

 

It's been a habit with me to take photographs in a sequence whenever I experience a new place—hike an unfamiliar trail, for example, or visit a forest I've never been in before. Since I often write about place, sequences of images have been a useful way to revive memories of where I've been. I take a photo at the trailhead, often with my wife in it if we're hiking together, and then record changes in the terrain or interesting features that crop up: certain trees or clusters of trees, certain rock formations, certain meadows or prairies, a bridge and a stream, a boardwalk. Later, particularly if I've decided to write about that experience, examining the photos in the order they were taken can revive my memories of being there. I not only recognize the location recorded in the photo but I can close my eyes and project an imaginary video of my progress between each pictured place. Sequencing the images lets me re-walk the walk in my imagination.

 

Not all projects work that way, of course. I once wrote short essays for radio, virtually composing scripts while doing whatever I was doing. I noticed the world around me as I experienced it, sometimes taking photos but mostly narrating—silently—whatever I was doing and whatever I was seeing as it happened. A nature-writer friend told me once that he needs to hike alone so that he can speak aloud as he walks and record whatever he reacts to as he notices it. His recordings also pick up background sounds of birds and breeze and the crunch of his bootsteps. It's the most immediate way to compose. My habit is to write a log or journal entry after the experience as soon as I can, just to get something in motion, on record. Writing extemporaneously—what we used to call "freewriting"—opens up your thinking in ways that impromptu speaking or formal composing can't quite achieve.

 

Everything I've been saying here suggests that tackling an experience in image and language is best done within a limited time frame. Nowadays, of course, I take my photos on my phone and can share the sequence with my wife as soon as I get home, but when I first began photographing scenes from a hike I had to wait until I'd taken the roll of film into my favorite developer and picked them up days later before I could react to the sequence I'd recorded. The more slowly—weeks, perhaps a month or more—I got around to getting film developed, the wider the gap between the experience and the examination of the images, the more challenging the comprehension of the sequencing became. Sometimes in the frantic pace of living my log entries were very slight and my opportunities to peruse a sequence were slim. With enough distance between experience and examination I sometimes couldn't remember what I was viewing or how I happened to record it. For a nonfictionist of place that's embarrassing as well as frustrating.

 

For example, nearly two decades ago I embarked on an ambitious project: to compare the Hudson and Rhine rivers in both literature and onsite journeying. It took a lot of time and a lot of travel to gather the written and visual materials for the book I hoped to write. But by the time I'd done that, the long-term press of other projects and the complications of relocation and re-employment distanced me from everything I'd collected. I never wrote that book. Lately, no longer immersed in those other (very rewarding) activities and wondering whether I could revive that project, I leafed through the material I'd accumulated. My notes and journals generally seemed insufficient and the photographs, though plentiful, seemed remote and vague.

 

And yet I found myself returning to one brief sequence of images. My wife and I had taken a cruise on the Rhine and predictably I'd photographed various sights along the shore and occasionally on the vessel itself. One photo showed the two of us against a shoreline background with a castle on the highest point. A picture centered on the castle itself came next and then one of a smiling man in a deck chair. The sequence brought certain moments back to memory. The castle was the Marksburg, an iconic fixture along the Rhine, and the photo of the two of us was taken by the man in the deck chair, whom we'd been talking to on the cruise. A German a few years older than me, he'd learned English from American soldiers at the end of World War II.

 

At first the pictures seemed to inspire simply a slight memory passage, little more than an anecdote, and my first draft was only about the image of the two of us and the solitary image of the castle. But I couldn't stop thinking about the personable German who'd taken our photo, his pleasant interaction with us two Americans, and his youthful experience with American soldiers, as my father-in-law had been at that time and in that place. The contrast between his life experiences and mine made me aware that he and I would never see the Rhine or the Marksburg in quite the same way. The sequence of images urged me to deepen my understanding of that moment in our travels, an understanding I might not have had when I was actually there but now couldn't avoid thinking about. And couldn't avoid writing about.

 

Note: My essay titled "The Marksburg Photo" was published online in the November 2019 issue of Ascent at https://readthebestwriting.com/the-marksburg-photo-robert-root/

 

April 30, 2020. This morning, looking out my study window to appreciate how green the grass across the street has become and to watch the swaying of the trees that tower beyond the condos opposite ours in insistent gusts of wind, I caught a movement in front of a neighbor's garage. I noticed robins bouncing around the driveways, suspected goldfinches and purple finches and mourning doves and chickadees might be visiting our feeders, out of sight from my window, but knew at once the movement I'd seen was not a bird. I leaned closer to the window and saw a rabbit scurry past white garage doors and condo entrances and small bushes and then beyond more garages and bushes and parked cars until it disappeared into a well-manicured hedgerow at the end of the buildings. I look out at six two-story condos in a row and the rabbit scampered past them all.

 

A few minutes later the rabbit made a second run past the condos, as if it had circled others behind them to complete the circuit. This time I watched it closely, trying to see if it was nibbling anything in the flowers below the shrubs and trees, but it moved on quickly and slipped in between the bushes in front of the final condo again. Almost before I could remember what I was doing on the computer the rabbit returned to run in the opposite direction and veer off toward the back near where it had first appeared. And then it was back a fourth time, partly retracing its last run but suddenly turning onto the blacktop driveway, crossing lawn and sidewalk and curb and bouncing across the street toward our complex, only a few doors down from me. I hurried into our bedroom for a closer view but by the time I opened the blinds it had vanished. I wondered if it had run through my neighbor's flowers and herbs or past our patio and garage. For the rest of the morning I kept flicking my gaze up from my laptop screen to scan the scene before me but saw no sign of the rabbit again.

 

Ours is a pretty suburban neighborhood, our condo complex sprawling across two sides of our street, pretentiously labeling itself as Townhomes of River Place. The Fox River runs through wetlands beyond the condos behind ours and a bike path lets us walk near it and through a forest. From time to time deer emerge from the woods to venture into the neighborhood, Sandhill cranes stalk parkland close by, a blue heron wades in a pond near the bike path, and foxes have been seen near the Fox River, so the rabbit wasn't entirely a surprise visitor. But it especially activated my attention this morning because of the images my cousin had posted on Facebook that were taken from her bedroom window in Arizona.

 

She lives in a retirement community and often displays the lively activities of her friends and neighbors, though of late the need for social distancing has limited the interaction she's been reporting. This morning, however, the photos and videos she posted were all of javelinas (collared peccaries) strolling through her patio at sunrise. She counted twelve, including at least three babies, and sure enough her videos show them wandering through cacti and ferns and wicker chairs and small endtables, munching on acorns that have fallen across stones and patio flooring. In one photo a javelina close to her bedroom window looks in at her.

 

My cousin's southwestern wildlife is more exotic that my midwestern ones but the coincidence of us both noticing unfamiliar animal activity the same morning put me in mind of images I've been seeing lately on internet posts from far-flung acquaintances. All of them seem to suggest that, during these days of lockdown and human isolation, wildlife have felt freer to roam suburban and urban areas. It's not entirely unusual to hear of cougars wandering in Boulder but this year their wandering has been a little more wide-ranging—at least one image showed a cougar passing a department store. Coyotes have been more visible in San Francisco; a kangaroo was filmed hopping down an empty thoroughfare in Adelaide, Australia; herds of deer, sheep, and goats have been grazing more readily on suburban lawns in Britain, Japan, and North America. Given how empty the streets of my neighborhood have tended to be over the past several weeks, I shouldn't be surprised if local wildlife didn't range more freely around here, especially with the grass so green and lush. My wife and I have noticed birds in the street uncertain about how to behave in regard to oncoming cars.

 

But then, now that the traffic is so light, my attention has more often been drawn to the birds and the squirrels and that rabbit, delighted to see the heron, hoping the cranes will show up soon. I look at those swaying trees a few blocks east and am aware of how seldom I attend to them. On cloudless days I remember images people have posted of smogless skies above LA, clear skylines in the distance in Chicago and Detroit, free-ranging animals having Rocky Mountain National Park or Yellowstone all to themselves. All those creatures going about their lives as if they barely know we're here.

 

Or maybe it is that we barely notice they are here and have been and will be. Given our own losses and our isolation in this pandemic, our awareness of sharing something simultaneously intimate and universal, our altered sense of our existence, gives us the chance to remind ourselves that this world is not ours alone. In the weeks or months to come, the other creatures we share it with will likely keep reminding us. We ought to pay attention.