The Saint of the Suburbs.

I met P. for the first time when he was sixteen or seventeen. He was looking over my shoulder, at art school, when I tried to draw a stuffed animal. Two years younger than myself he had the nerve to criticize my drawing. Then I looked up to the most radiant smile I ever saw from a man. Tall, handsome, a young man to win the hearts of all the girls, he stood behind me, and we began to talk. That was the beginning of a deep friendship for some of the most important years of our lives. Together we discovered whatever would move our hearts in literature, in philosophy, in music, in long walks through the woods. An ex-student of the Steiner school he told me about Anthroposophy. I shared my first readings about Buddhism with him.

Some years passed, we both got married, he soon went away to live in Sydney, and to work there as an architect. That distance in space became a distance in the first true friendship of two young men.

Almost thirty years later he called me on the phone. He was back again, to visit his old friends in Switzerland. We met. He had a sad story to tell: He had cancer, a bad form of it, and had just survived a major surgery. How can you tie up again the thread of those long talks between friends from the youth, under these conditions? We tried. Our hearts were full, but our time together was limited. He left with a sad hug at the airport, and with a shadow of his radiant smile from so many years ago. He came back, a few years later, after another treatment of his cancer in the United States. The irradiation had left terrible traces on his face. But still, he took me for a long hike over the mountains. What would have killed most of us, had woken up an unbelievable strength in P. Thin, aged for more years than had passed since his last visit, he still was full of projects, full of life. – Then, with another sad hug at the airport he went back to Sydney. I thought I would never see him again. I was too terrified to ever call him on the phone after he had left. I didn’t want to hear that my old friend was deadly ill, or even dead. Nobody can understand this, I know.

A few months ago it was him who called me again. He had difficulties to speak, after another big surgery, on his brain this time. He urged me to come to Sydney. He offered to pay for my ticket. He wanted me to come, and I took a plane, a few weeks later, to Sydney. How would I find my old friend, what would be his condition of life after those 20 years of sufferance?

He picked me up at the airport. Even thinner this time. Much older than his age. One side of his face practically dead from the irradiations, his skull deformed from the brain surgery. But still with a hint of his beautiful smile, for the occasion. He drove me to the city first, to show me the harbor, and then to his home. P. had designed his own house himself, as the talented architect he is. That house, a symmetric cubicle in steel and glass, suspended high above the bush on twelve steel pillars, this house got my home for the next two weeks. And, finally, the two of us had time for each other again. He took me on little hikes through his beloved bush. He explained each little plant to me. He brought me to the rock where he used to sit in meditation. He is a Buddhist now, had even founded a Buddhist community in the suburbs.

And then he told me about his brain surgery: Six doctors had refused to do it. They told him to give in to his fate. He refused. Then one doctor accepted to try, but told him that his chances were to wake up blind, or deaf, or paralyzed, or all together, if at all. P. didn’t want to die as a mental cripple, if there was the slightest chance to avoid it. Our reason to live, if not life itself, dwells in our mind. P. braced himself, for the huge challenge of an almost hopeless treatment, in meditation. Sitting for hours on his rock in the bush he tried to get One with nature. With this beauty around him, with Rico, the dog, leaning on his back, with the twittering and the songs of the birds, in the middle of this living universe of plants and animals, with all of this in his mind, and with nothing else, no emotion, no thought: that’s how he wanted to fall asleep for the surgery. And that’s how he wanted to wake up after. He insisted that there would be no preoperative injection. He wanted to pass the door to the oblivion of the anesthesia in full conscience. And that he did, despite the warnings of the doctors.

The first one to see him after the surgery was his wife. He greeted her with a faint smile when he woke up. He just came, he told me, from his meditation in the bush, as he had wanted it to be. The doctor couldn’t believe the fact that P. welcomed him with an absolutely clear mind. Weak, yes, but totally clear. And yes: blind and deaf on one side. But still able to stand up after a while, to go for his walks in the bush, to go back to his meditation rock. And to live a life much closer to normality than anybody would have expected, above all the doctors.

Amongst his friends and neighbors P. got to be something like a Saint. A Saint with a difficult character, because he is extremely demanding, not only to himself. But, as the wife of the owner of the post office told me, when we passed to send off a parcel: “P. is just wonderful. We all admire him so much. And he listens to everybody’s worries, despite his own. And he has an encouragement for everybody”.

The Window.

“Do you remember the apartment I had when I came back from Brazil?”
“The one with the big window?”
Indeed I would never forget that window. It took the whole length of one of the walls of what my daughter used as her living room and study combined. Not at all the kind and size of window one would have expected in that sort of an elderly building. Standing in the room you felt totally exposed to the eyes of everybody living across the street. And there were no curtains in the beginning, because there was no contraption to hang them up.
“Yes” she said, “Do you know what happened there?”

Chatting with my daughters from time to time like this I always wonder about how many stories they have to tell about the times when they first lived on their own, and sometimes I am glad I didn’t know then. This story seemed to belong to that kind when she continued:
“There was this man in his apartment across the street. Often, when I looked out through that window I saw him sitting there on his sofa, just sitting and staring at me.”
Not very nice for a young woman used to walk around freely in her place and not always fully clothed, and with no curtains.
“Of course I was upset. But he didn’t react to my angrily staring back. He stared as if it would be the most natural thing to do.”
“What a nasty kind of a voyeur.”

This was hard to hear for me from my daughter even though it was from years back. I am a rather protective kind of a father and not always up to the fact that my daughters are adult enough to handle that sort of intrusions from the nastier part of my own gender in their life as women.

“One day when I left the house I saw him stepping out from the door on the other side of the street.”
“And you went and told him off?”
”I was about to.”
“And you didn’t?”
“He locked the door behind himself and then turned around in my direction. I just wanted to go over to him. But then I saw him hesitating and fumbling around with something in his hands, a kind of a stick.”
“That could barely have hindered you from telling the man what you thought about his behavior, or did it?”
“Now listen: The stick was a telescopic contraption that he extended to its full length as a walking stick. Then he hesitated again, staring now in my direction.”

She gave me an amused smile when she continued:
“He tapped his stick on the pavement twice and then, slowly, walked away, tapping along with his blind man’s stick.”

From the Dark to the Light.

“Because you're working from the dark to the light”, he explained.

I had asked him why the illustrations he used to send out as his New Years greeting cards were so dominantly black.
“It’s called the scrape board technique. You work on a cardboard that's covered with a thin layer of black ink over a ground of white chalk. You “draw” on this black surface with pen knives and needles, scraping away the black to bring out the white underneath.”

We had not seen each other for quite some time, and I never had had a chance so far to ask him about the picture. he had sent me at the end of 2001: the one with the broken bridge. It had shocked me when I first found it in the mail. That man in the picture, struggling to cross the gap in the bridge on a narrow board, high above what seemed to be a threatening abyss: What a strange picture to go along with the wishes for a happy new year. In fact I should have asked him why he had chosen such a somber motive for the occasion.

“Was it because of 9/11 of that year?”
“Not really. Even though I had used this as an excuse sometimes, when people asked me.” He referred to his answer to my first question when he continued:
“In fact the answer is the same here: I am working from the black to the light, when I create a picture. I sit, and I see nothing at first, sometimes for hours.”
Probably most of us who don't draw or paint professionally have sometimes wondered, where the pictures came from, in an artists mind.
“So you “sat”, as you say, and that bridge came to your mind?”
He might have suspected that I had some difficulties to understand what he wanted to say.
“Like something unveiling itself from the darkness, yes. Call it the darkness of the unconscious, if you want.”

Well, I thought, you do have some dark sides of your own, my friend. I was not alone to have wondered those past years about the dramatic changes in his life and attitudes. There was this second divorce in the background, we all guessed. It began around that time, when he drew that picture. In fact I had expected this as an explanation for it’s motive.

“It’s strange, even to myself, but it happened with quite a few of my pictures”, he continued after a long pause.
“I “find” them at a certain moment in time, not yet knowing what they mean.”
Another hesitation, like seeing something in a new light.
“And then, when I look at them again, and sometimes years later, I see the truth in them.” He was struggling now, to find the right words.
"Yes: they reveal a truth that was already there, when I created them, but still unknown to myself.”

“That man on the board, crossing the gap in the bridge, that was myself. I didn’t know it then, when I drew him. Like I didn’t know the true meaning of those waving hands in that other picture: That those good byes would go on for ever. I had seen them as something in the past, when I scratched them out of the scrape board.”

It was me now, who hesitated. Should I ask him about the picture with the little girls and the balls? – As if guessing my thoughts he said:
“It was the same, when I drew the girl playing with a ball and that other girl standing on that second ball on which another girl…”
He smiled, for the first time in our conversation. I remembered what he had told me about the meaning of this picture: A somehow fatalistic view of our lives being like a game in somebody else’s hands.
“The things I had told you about this picture and the events in my life that might have to do with it: I had no idea about them, when I scraped those lines in the board that brought the picture out to the light.”
"They revealed themselfs from the unconscious by the act of drawing?"
"From the Dark to the Light, yes."

*Posts in a Blog are usually displayed "the wrong way", with the first one at the bottom. That's why you find the two other pictures from this story in the following posts, with the first one in time at the end.

Life, a Game?

Now I remember why I still had a copy of that picture with the “waving hands"*. He had sent it to me with his New Year’s wishes for 1994. He kept that habit of sending out these illustrations, drawn by himself for the occasion, for quite a few years after. I may not have collected them all. But there was another one, from a later year, that seemed to belong to the same category of milestones in my friends life, as the picture with the waving hands. He was living alone by now but, as I guessed, in a continuation of the relationship that had made his second wife to want the divorce.
This time the picture showed a little girl, playing with a ball. And on that ball, one could guess, there was probably another little girl, playing with a ball as well. Because the first girl already was standing on a ball, thrown in the air by still another little girl’s hands. And all of this, somewhere in the universe. A puzzling continuity.

“You know”, he told me, later, “if we think to be the players in our lifes, it’s not really true.”

He paused, because he saw that I couldn’t grab his thought. “Like the little girl, we play our life’s game. What else can we do?”

“And you think that we are part of the game of others, or from the outside?”

I tried not to sound too sceptical, but his image left little room for actively taking one’s life in our hands. Didn’t we have free will to form our lifes?

“I have been through some troubles, in the last few years.”

Of course, I thought: his divorce.

“You are not over it yet?”

He smiled.

“What if I wouldn’t have gone to that bar that night?”

He had told me that story before: Instead of cooking at home he had decided to eat a focaccia at “La luna llena” at the corner of his street. A woman came over to his table, asking whether she could sit down.

“I have to speak with you” she said, “I see you from my window, when you work at night.”

She turned out to be the woman who lived in the apartment across the street of his own, on the third floor like his’.

“And what, if I wouldn’t have accompanied her after, the few steps to her house?”

He had seen her before, yes, but had paid little attention to her. Now she was there, and she seemed to be interested in that artist who drew his pictures at night, across the street.

“Of course I was flattered”, he agreed. “And she was not unattractive.”

“Maybe attracted to you?”

"That’s what she told me, when I went up with her, for another drink."

“And that was it?”

Another cheap story, I thought.

“No. Nothing happened, really. But then I wrote this letter, and I put it in her mail box, the next morning.”

Of course: writing, his other passion, besides the drawing.

“And then another letter, when I heard nothing from her.”

It was him, now, who started to look over the street to see whether she was at home. She rarely was, till late at night.

“It was the passion of a game: Could I get another response from her?”

He wrote letters across the street, daily, and put them in her mail box.

“One day I had a little note in my own mail box, not even in an envelope, just scribbled on a piece of paper.”

She had invited him over for dinner the next day.

“Yes, that was it.”, he said.

The usual story?

I wasn’t sure anymore, considering his picture. Not sure about anything.

* The picture with the “waving hands” is right here in my former post.

An Endless Goodbye.

It began, he told me, with his first wife, the one he had two children with. They used to wave goodbye to each other whenever there was an occasion to do so. Somehow the habit got dear to him of standing there, waving, till they got out of sight of each other. But never, in twenty-five years, they had left each other for more than a few days. One day was enough to wave as if it would be for a much longer time. He began to wonder about this habit only when she was about to leave him forever. That was, when he thought that maybe it was his own habit mainly, and not so much hers. And that's when he created this picture, with the waving hands, on a train station called "Les adieux". He showed it to me.

He got married again. A complicated story, with a lot of passion involved and, in the end, with his giving in to the fact that this new woman would have had to leave the country, if they wouldn't get married. He wanted her to stay. And no more waving goodbye forever.

"It was difficult", he said, "for both of us, because each one was attached to a different culture." And then, he explained, a prior relationship brought her first to France, and then to the French-speaking part of Switzerland.

"I met her right then, when that relationship was at its end."

He was Swiss, but from the German part, and he wanted her to stay.

"So you continued your habit of waving good bye, when you where married with her?", I guessed.

"Yes", he said, "and there were a lot of good-byes. We only saw each other on the weekends. I worked in the German part of the country and had my little apartment there. Our common home was in the French part, her new cultural homeland. She didn't want to change cultures once more."
It turned out that this second marriage had not lasted till the day it was promised to, not "till death do us part".

"I fell in love with somebody else, in my lonely days between the weekends, or that's what I thought, and I confessed this to my wife. And that was it: She wanted to divorce."

"Another long goodbye", he added, sadly.

And not the last one, it showed to be, when he continued.

"I still see her, from time to time, mostly for practical reasons."

It got obvious, from what else he told me, that "practical" meant "financial" as well, but not only. "Part of this is that we still have ugly fights, from time to time. It still hurts. That's why."

He looked sad when he added:

"And there is always a train to take, for one of us, when we part, and sometimes after these fights."
"And then I stand there, by the track with the leaving train, and I wave good-bye, and she waves back, with a smile. An endless goodbye."

The Orphan.

Would you want to be the little girl on the right in this picture? She happens to be my mother, an orphan at that time, somewheres between 1917 and 1920. The dark figures with her are the people she was living with after the death of her mother and her father, from a flu in the same year (1914), when she was only four years old. These people were her new family, before they found a place for her, with relatives*. They had dressed her nicely, for the occasion of posing for the photographer. And they must have been nice to her, I guess from what my mother had told me. But: What should I think about how she felt as the little girl in that somber company? - I had never asked my mother. But I wonder today, when I can't ask her anymore.

*Leo Allemann, from my recent post "Leo's Europe", and his wife Anna.

Too many Pictures.

I was looking at these two pictures again, from my recent posts. What had made them unique enough for me me, to chose them, and not others, to evoque a story worth to be told. Was it the physical fact that indeed they both happen to be the one and only print still existing of their negatives? And that both negatives are lost? Am I simply proud of their posession as the only trace of these lost originals? How would I see these photographs if they were not mine? Would they still touch me, at least a little? Even if nobody would tell me anything about the people they show or the stories they tell?

I do think so, yes! - Because I see in these pictures an inner quality of their being unique, even if thousands of copies would exist of them, and if I would just happen to see one of those prints, occasionally.

Recently my daughter gave me some pictures she and her husband had taken of their little son, Milan. He is 19 months old and as cute as a toddler can be. I got 183 photographs, from the last few months alone! All of them great pictures! - But is there one, at least, that I would call unique?

From my profession I have a habit of "scanning through" hundreds of pictures very quickly and of sorting out the best, whatever that means, for a purpose. I tried to sort out one of the pile of 183 for its being unique. Not easy, because I loved them all for showing my cute little grandson and the happiness and the pride of his parents.

Then I found one, on which I had not even recognised my darling at first sight. But, amongst the 183, this picture was unique. Not for it's empathy to me, as the grandfather of little Milan. As such, as I said, I loved them all. The one picture I had chosen shows eight babies, crowded close together in the green waters of a swimming pool, with their red floating tires. The picture inspires confidence and the feeling of being safe, in an unexpected situation. And, if you want, the bliss of that circumstance in a world where so many children suffer from the lack of this experience. Not enough, in my eyes, to make this picture unique.

But there is some irritation in this cozyness. It's like looking at a small portion of a wallpaper. As if, in stepping back a little, there would be thousands of babies in their red contraptions, each one paddling along in self-content. No more question of where is Milan, or Kevin, or Carol, or Ann. Just a never ending pattern of anonymous little paddlers. Like flowers on a wallpaper: All the same, with little variations, just not to bore the eye.

A certain irritation, something that makes us look twice. A message beyond of what is obvious on first sight. Something waiting there, to be discovered. A story to be imagined, to wonder or to muse about.

That's what I called "the inner quality of their being unique" when I spoke about the black and white pictures above. What you see first in one of them, are just two soldiers shaking hands. Then you look at their uniforms: A German and a French soldier. And you get aware of the fact that this picture had been taken in a time when Germany and France were bitter ennemies, probably just before World War One. The same two soldiers, had they met in war, would have been obliged to kill each other for the Glory of their Fatherlands.
It does not always take such a dramatic story to make a picture unique. The second picture shows a girl of around ten, apparently looking out of a window. But, looking twice, there is this side glance to the photographer, and the seriousness of her expression. A child, yes, but in a moment of communication to the adult world. A child with an almost adult self awareness, wearing that silk scarf as naturally as a young woman. Was the photographer her father? What were the questions in her glance? About what, and to whom? And what will the answers be, when she is growing up to be the woman she already looks to be in this moment, at ten.

Too many pictures, I stated in the title. And only a few, always, are unique, my statement in this text. Maybe this is worth to be kept in mind, when we fill the hard disks of our computers with thousands of digital photographs, just because "they eat no hay" as one says in German. They don't, but too many of them "don't feed the soul" either, I would say, if the reader allows me to overstretch the metaphor a little.