|
|
|
A Distant Shore The Spiritual Traveler
|
I
blew into Durham, North Carolina on a fine spring day, having driven
all the way from Michigan, parked my car near a bicycle shop adjacent
to the Duke University campus, got out, and stretched my
legs. The school term was obviously over; there were few
students in sight. The first thing I noticed was a Kinko’s
Copy Center, where I was pretty sure I could access my
e-mail. I went inside and spoke to an
attendant. He showed me how to log into Telnet, and then
access my e-mail account. I had a couple of messages,
answered them, left the shop, and strolled down the
street. I passed a bookstore, and immediately noticed a
small handwritten note pasted on the door advertising of a psychic who
would be there the next day. Feeling at loose ends, I went
in, and asked the manager about the service.
“I’ve got her on the phone right now,” he said. “Do you want
to talk to her?”
I
took the phone from him and said hello to the psychic. “What
I’m interested in,” I told her, “are answers to some specific
questions. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” she replied simply.
“OK. I’ll do it. Tomorrow at what time?”
“Any time after 12:00.”
I arranged to come in right away, at noon, and handed the phone back to
the manager. He asked me to write down my name, the time of
my appointment, and my telephone number.
“I don’t have a telephone number,” I said.
“Well, we just need it in case…”
“I mean, I really don’t have one. I’m just passing
through. I’m camping out. I have no phone.”
“That must be nice,” he said.
“It is and it isn’t,” I replied, inscrutably, as I left the
shop. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
At the end of the street I spotted a photo studio. I
remembered that I needed some studio photos to send to my publisher for
publicity purposes. I went into the shop, and was greeted by
the photographer, an elderly man with curly hair dyed blond and a South
American accent.
“I
need an eight by ten, black and white, glossy photo,” I
said. “But I don’t want a nice, smiley kind of photograph
that are taken for families or passports. I want a more
artistic kind of photograph. I want to look
serious. I don’t want to smile. Whenever I smile
in a photograph, it turns out bad. And I need it by
tomorrow.”
“That’s
no problem,” he replied. “I can shoot five different shots,
you can see them right away, choose the one you like, and I can have it
developed the next day. Whether you smile or not, it doesn’t
matter. It only depends on how you feel about yourself.”
I grunted skeptically.
“How DO you feel?” he asked.
I glanced in a mirror near the entrance. I saw lines etched
in my face that seemed as deep as valleys on Mars. “I feel
tremendously old,” I said, worriedly. “But I guess I’m more
interested in a photograph that brings out my character than one that
simply looks good. I’ve got an idea of what I
want. Something cropped really close, no
shoulders. I want it to zero in right on my face, and I want
the expression to be a little aggressive, the eyes squinting a little,
my chin jutting out, and my head cocked to one side.”
“There are two ways of looking in a picture in which you don’t smile,”
he commented. “Either you look sad or you look mad.”
“I don’t want to look sad, and I don’t want to look mad. I
want to look suspicious,” I said, almost with a snarl.
“Well, you’re doing a good job of that.”
I smiled sardonically at his remark. He took me into his
studio, had me sit in a sofa, and tried various camera
angles. Finally, he took a picture, developed it, and
brought it back to me.
“It’s not bad,” I said. “If it were the only choice, I’d be
satisfied with it. But let’s try some different angles.”
He had me sit backwards on a chair, with my arms on top of the back of
it. I made various expressions for him, one smiling, another
scowling deeply, and yet another in the midst of
speaking. He seemed to be enjoying my
performance. “Did you ever notice how people, in their
interaction with you, comment on your appearance?” he
asked. “If you’re in an argument with them, they’ll say ‘You
look angry’. It’s a way of gauging you, and at the same time
influencing you.”
I
was remembering a recent violent argument I’d had, in the midst of
which my verbal assailant had commented on how my hand was
shaking. It had been his crude attempt at gaining control of
the situation. I had simply thrown the comment back at him,
but it had been effective, nonetheless.
At the same time, I remembered how frequently people remarked that they
were puzzled by my expression. “I know what you mean,” I
said. “People are always asking me what I mean by the face
I’m making. And I’m not aware that I’m making any kind of
face at all.”
“Exactly,” the photographer said. “It’s because we pay too
much attention to ourselves.”
“You’re right. That’s a big problem. I spend a
lot of time alone with myself. When I’m alone, I feel I’m
always making the same expression, and not a very happy
one. It’s a set, rigid expression. But whenever
I’m with people, I feel my face comes alive. In fact, the
more I’m alone, the more my face comes alive with other people, because
it’s such a release from the prison routine that my face is used to.”
The photographer brought out four other prints and set them next to the
first. I was somewhat shocked at the wide divergence of
expressions. One was too happy, another too glum, and a
third simply too wild. “I think the first one is really the
best,” I said. “Unless maybe this one.” I pointed
to one that was rather dark and aggressive-looking. “What do
you think?”
“I like the second one,” he said.
“Why?”
“The first one is too wishy-washy. You look like you’re
going along with something, but not because you want to—just because
you have to. The other one is stronger. You look
like you’re saying ‘I’m not going to take any crap from anyone’.”
“You’re right. Let’s go with the second one,” I agreed.
“How do you feel when you wake up in the morning?” the photographer
asked, playing amateur psychologist.
“Not very good, lately,” I admitted.
“What about when you’re in the shower, do you sing to yourself?”
“I sing to myself a lot when I’m on the road. But mostly I
sing the blues, so I don’t know if that’s all that good.”
“I fancy myself a little bit of a philosopher,” he
confided. “And I would say that there’s no
escape. We’re all looking for a solution to something in our
lives, and we don’t know where we’re standing. But sometimes
the body, or maybe the instinct for survival, makes us
smile. And that’s something.”
“Yes, that’s something,” I agreed, smiling again. “Spoken
like a true philosopher.”
I paid for the pictures, and made arrangements to pick up the finished
prints the next day at 1:00. He gave me the initial prints
of the four pictures I had rejected, and told me that since I was from
out-of-state, he would give me all of the negatives.
After leaving the photographer, I made my way to the East Campus,
parked my car in the first lot inside the gate, and went looking for a
place where I could get a campus map. I flagged down a
campus policeman.
“I’m looking for a visitor’s center, where I can get a map and
information. And I want to know about visitor’s
parking. I think I’m parked in a tow-away zone.”
The officer handed me a map. “You’re OK parked where you
are,” he said. We stop inspecting the parking spots at
4:30. That’s in a half an hour. It’s not likely
that anyone will ticket you any more today.”
I
thanked him, went back to my car, got out my laptop computer, and
looked for a library. There was a small one, called Lilly
Library, nearby. I went in, found a seat, and started
scrutinizing the pictures the photographer had given me
again. I looked at the ‘happy’ one, which I had found the
most disturbing when I first saw it. As I stared at it, it
seemed to come to life. I had done this with photographs of
people before—stared at them until they started changing. If
I stared hard enough and long enough images of entirely different
personalities would appear. I fancied, in a superstitious
way, that the more ‘active’ the picture, the more it spoke for the
individual.
In this case, I found that the effect was much stronger with the
‘happy’ picture than with the others. This result
immediately threw me back upon myself. It was strange how
vehement I had been with the photographer only a ‘serious’ picture of
me. The ‘staring’ exercise seemed to be telling me that I
had made the wrong choice of which photograph to
enlarge.
In the evening, I drove out of town and camped in the Falls Lake
region, and the next morning I drove back into Durham, got to the
bookstore by 12:00, and was greeted by the psychic a few moments
later.
“Oh, a reporter, I see,” she said. She was a youngish woman
of medium build, dark hair, and unremarkable features, who wore a
short-sleeved sweater that was a soft indigo in color.
“A reporter?” I asked.
“Yes. I can sense you’re a reporter.”
“Well, not exactly,” I replied, taking a seat in a back room, while she
sat down at a desk directly in front of me.
“Have you ever done any kind of reporting?” she asked.
I thought for a
minute. “I’ve had a few brief experiences or nudges in that
direction,” I replied. “Last year I wrote some very brief
articles for a local newspaper in Royal Oak, Michigan. I
knew someone who worked there, and she got me in to see the
editor. I agreed to give it a try.”
“What happened?”
“I asked to do articles on
people, rather than events. So they gave me an assignment to
go around to various schools in the Birmingham School District and
interview some retiring teachers. I did three interviews,
wrote them up, and did a decent job.”
“And how did you feel about it?”
“I liked doing the
interviews. I especially liked visiting schools and not
being either a teacher or a student. It gave me a feeling of
freedom, of looking at something familiar from the
outside. I also enjoyed sitting down with these people,
getting them to talk about their lives and try to sum up what their
careers had meant to them.”
The psychic nodded. “What other experiences have you had like that?”
“Well, when I did my
dissertation, what I enjoyed most was also doing interviews with
writers. I liked the whole process—looking them up,
contacting them, arranging for a meeting place, and then trying to
elicit some comments from them about their work, their perspectives on
literature, and so forth. That was probably the most
enjoyable part of my research.”
“Anything else?”
“Not really. When
I was in Beirut, I interviewed for a job with the English-language
newspaper, The Daily Star. I met a young woman who worked as
an administrator with a relief agency in some of the refugee
camps. She offered to take me down to one and show me around
during a visit by some volunteer doctors. I thought about
doing an article about it to get me onto the Daily Star.”
“What happened?”
“I got sick. I was
so sick, I had to go straight back to Amman, and gave up the
project. More recently, though, I had the idea of doing some
sketches of people in the Ann Arbor area and building up a portfolio to
show to some local magazines. I made up a whole list of
people I had encountered in the Ann Arbor area who I thought would make
good interviews. There was this guitarist whom I heard play
at the Gypsy Café. I got in touch with him and asked to do
an interview with him, but we missed each other, and I never followed
up on it after that…”
“Well, it sounds as if you’ve
gotten several nudges in that direction. You just never
listened to them closely enough.”
There was something about her statement that rang true, but it was at
such variance from the current trend in my thinking that I needed some
time to process it.
“You’ve been blocked,” she added. “Something has prevented
you from discovering your true vocation. But you’re on the
right path. The one thing that I want to leave you with is
to do what you love to do. That is the most important thing
in life.”
I thanked
her, paid for the session. I felt lightheaded, as if I had
been in a boxing ring with the psychic, and she had landed a punch flat
against my head. I crossed the street and went into the
photographer’s shop to pick up my pictures. “The photographs
you took were great,” I said. “But I think we chose the
wrong one to enlarge. I think you were right…the one of me
smiling is the best.”
“Why do you say that?” he inquired. “I think we made a good
choice.” He showed me the final prints.
“They’re good,” I admitted. “I guess I just realized that I
came in with an attitude. I didn’t want a picture in which I
looked happy. That says something about my state of mind.”
The photographer laughed. “I work with a bunch of narcissists all the time,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Actors and actresses—they account for a large portion of my
business. They come in for publicity shots. They
have the biggest egos in the world. If you put them in
water, they would float!”
I looked at the photographer curiously.
“What I mean is, they don’t know themselves. They have to
borrow from the characters they play. They have no
personality of their own. They’re difficult to
photograph. But a few of the great actors, they know this
about themselves, and this is what makes them great. They’re
easy to photograph.”
“And what does this have to do with my attitude yesterday?”
“You were easy to photograph.
“What do you mean?”
“You have the qualities of a great actor, even if you’re not aware of
it. You have a personality. It started to come
through as soon as I started to shoot you. We play roles in
life in the same way that actors do in a movie. Sometimes we
get locked into our role. We take life too
seriously. But as long as we still have the ability to slip
out of our roles now and then, we are OK.”
I had taken out my notepad and was jotting down his
words. As I did so, I suddenly realized that I was
functioning exactly as the psychic said I could—as an observer, a
reporter. I noticed something else, as well. The
photographer and I had switched roles. The day before, it
was he who had been the observer, trying to bring out my personality in
a photograph. Now I was capturing the essence of the
photographer, not in an image, but in his words.
Another customer came in the shop. I thanked the
photographer, paid for the prints, and wandered out onto the street
with all sorts of ideas buzzing in my brain. I remembered a
quote from The Tiger’s Fang, by Paul
Twitchell: "We are all sailors of the cosmic seas, in our
little selves serving as boats, trying to sail toward that distant
shore."
Suddenly I felt that shore was a little closer. |
|
|
Date Submitted:
2001-06-18 00:00:00 |
Copyright Information:
Copyright © The Spiritual Traveler, 2001 |
|