La Recherche des Chaussettes Perdues

The other evening, skimming through a drawer in my son's old room, I came across an infant sock.  In a Proustian moment, I was sucked into one of those emotional 'rivers' of the past. The tiny sock was decorated with charming colorful train cars, but like something one no longer sees. I could recall with some clarity how this was the first article of clothing that seemed to engage my baby boy at three or four months.  He'd stare at his feet particularly in this pair of socks... wave them around and coo.  No other pair-- no matter what color, pattern, picture-- had this effect, like a magic lantern-- they sparked him, gave him a kind of obvious joy.

But one day, as babies do, he must have over-enthusiastically kicked or pulled or randomly peeled during one of our marathon walks through the city... and a sock was gone-- missing. I retraced our steps, frantic... with that new-mother passion, but no success.  There is some statistic somewhere, surely metaphorically speaking, about how humans spend six months of our lives looking for lost socks. That day added significantly to my total.

Perhaps because he is my genetic offspring, he somehow processed the loss... and while I still put the single train-sock on him, and it evoked the same cooing and chirping sounds of obvious happiness, I had to pair it with a blank. He looked at me; he gestured and seemed to even speak in baby gibberish. There is something not quite right, Mom, he wanted to express... something is missing!

One of my all-time favorite photographic essays is Nicholas Nixon's ongoing visual chronicle of the Brown sisters.  Featured in the New York Times several years ago, these are a series of group portraits of four sisters-- taken annually and chronologically-- through their lives. We see them as girls, then as young women, then slowly aging-- shifting positions subtly. We read on their faces their increasing maturity, their deepening texture and complexity, and their tiny sorrows and difficulties.  Maybe because the elder sisters are around my age, I see myself in their composite. Of course in this era of AI, one can digitally age a face in seconds. But nearing fifty analogue years of 'chronicle', the project grows more and more compelling to those of my generation.  

Having weathered both the standard griefs of a normal life as well as the unexpected losses of recent years, I can't help a sense of dread that one year a sister will be gone-- and like a gap tooth in a formerly joyful smile, it will be all about the one who is 'missing'.  This is the reverse poetry of later life-- like the negative space of a photograph or the shadow which replaces its source, it is the absence that concerns me.  And I can't help imposing my emotional prejudices and narratives-- reading in their faces a break-up or abandonment-- of pain or suffering-- current and future illness.  There must be a dark one afflicted with some inherent unhappiness, a conflict or secret issue.

But they all seem so healthy... and so blessed in their sisterhood, their loving and tiny brushes against one another-- the gestures and casual affectionate touching.  Both posed and unposed, bravely facing the camera in a sort of womanly and familial solidarity... despite the passage of time, the disappearance of youth, one cannot help but envy.  Even the oldest, who is first to display the facial ravages of natural aging-- well, we know she is the fulcrum... especially loved by the photographer, her husband, whose compositional embrace is the 'extra'-- the 'other'-- less visible subject. 

What we don't see, what we supply-- the loves, the children-- the careers and informational details of these women who we implicitly trust-- and maybe one more than the others.  For me I am compelled by the eldest-- her womanly soul, her maternal-ness.  She is slightly ahead of me in years, has outwardly changed herself the least (even her hair is quite the same)-- she who in her graceful aging is deeply long-loved by her husband, to the extent that the gestalt of the sisters became part of their intimacy.  

A near-fifty-year marriage is like a sort of sea.  The extremes-- the shifts, the rhythms and constant motion-- the storms and dramas, thrashings, drownings, and then the future goes on with or without.  I never managed to log enough in either of mine to complete a journey; they were rather like crossings or explorations.  A little landlocked and seasick, I disembarked before they fully revealed. Contemplating the Brown sisters, the rich chronology of lives, I feel a bit remiss.  It's not exactly regret, but like my baby son sensing the lost sock in his underdeveloped intellect, you are not exactly sure but something seems to be missing.  

More than anything, ironically, it is the unseen which I 'see'-- the omnipresent photographer who understood the joys and the tiny sorrows, through all the ages he had known.  And for knowing-- for recognizing love, for somehow creating a future out of the present, and documenting a past which touches us all.  God protect the Brown sisters, I say to myself almost selfishly.  It is something to believe in-- something solid and real, bright and fading, old and new.  

I doubt my son would remember the tiny sock, if I showed it to him... nor would he have the sentimental response, if I tried to impart the narrative, or the patience to listen.  Sometimes I think he has taken a practical reverse life-lesson from me who has spent an inordinate amount of time searching for lost things, for sensing the missing even before it disappears. But maybe that is a clue to our lives-- that we must love what we have, here in the present-- even the small things, before they are washed away by the seas of life which will have their way with us all, in the end.

THE ANTI-BARBIE

On the first day of second grade I was sort of the new girl, having skipped a year and moved up into a faster group.  I sat in front of a blond-haired boy who shared his lunch with me on the playground. He was 7 and destined to become a high-school girl-chaser and an incurable romantic, but he'd singled me out (I was all of 6 years old) right there as his primary 'mate'.  

On the first Friday of that term, a stack of comic books was left on the front stoop outside my house.  A blond boy with a bicycle had delivered this, my neighbor announced.  There must have been fifty or sixty-- the pile was quite as high as the milkbox.  Some Nancy, some Richie Rich-- but mostly Superman, and various other galactic beings and heroes.  As an early reader, I devoured books... took my wagon back and forth to the library where I loaded and unloaded. But comics? I'd never tried these, besides the Sunday strips which never interested me much.

It's sort of a love thing, my mother suggested... and being the youngest and smallest in my class, having a handsome attaché gave me status.  So I delved into Superman-- Bizarro world, kryptonite, Mr Mxyzptlk-- Lois, Jimmy and Clark. Besides Elvis on the car-radio it was my first real foray into pop culture.  It was also my first experience of peer-culture affecting my personal entertainment choices.  And while I spent long afternoons playing at the blond boy's house with his dog and his siblings, he never really seemed that into comics.  He could draw and paint, though, and we made things-- built things, played in the yard.  We were sort of inseparable for years... until I hooked up in the 6th grade with his twin brother. By Middle School, we barely spoke.  And besides occasional childhood Superman episodes and the 1978 movie, I had significantly more interest in rock and roll, folk music and anti-heroes. The only cartoons I indulged in were Robert Crumb-- Edward Gorey-- Beardsley... etc.

So it baffles me that the Marvel Universe has usurped a disproportionate sector of our entertainment bandwidth. Movies, Broadway-- as though the cult of the juvenile has infiltrated.  I guess I can relate to science fiction-- horror, although I'm much more drawn to psychological thrillers and historical bio-pics.  But all this costumery and the characters... with super-powers and fantastic abilities... it's fun to consider, but it's a multi-trillion dollar industry. Yes for children wearing capes on Halloween, even the dolls and figurines... but as grown-up film material?  I'm missing something here.

Sometime in the early 90's I was looking for a new apartment and happened on a loft space filled with massive Lego projects.  This was the home of a sophisticated architect and the structures and ideas were compelling; the sheer volume of tiny blocks was staggering.  But now-- the cult of Lego has exploded.  Movies-- theme parks... and of course one must appeal to parents who accompany their kids and buy the toys that engage the whole family.  Well, it's educational-- the building part-- the geometry, the planning, the engineering factor. But the endless contests... in light of our overwhelming world issues... it seems way too much brain-time is occupied with play.  

While we were all sleeping, or building Lego, watching Spiderman-- galactic fantasy and space wars... our own world is more than a little terrifying and overwhelmed. Was this the point?  Instead of worrying about the new NATO and the Ukrainian cluster bombs, it seems we are all watching Barbie.  We pay to have our brains distracted.  More people will see this movie than vote in the primaries, sadly.  

Apparently sixty-one percent of America does not believe in evolution.  While the scientists were debating this week about the designation of an Anthropocene era, the majority ignores the math. Are these the same people who watch the Marvel films?  Jurassic Park? Are the lines deliberately blurred between reality and fiction? While Hollywood was making all those techno-laced fantasy films,  AI was slipping into our entertainment DNA and only this week the actors have decided it was terrifying enough to shut it all down?

Today I saw a news piece about a new cruise-ship that looked like it was manufactured in Candyland.  The toy-culture rules the seas; five intelligent men boarded an expensive toy (directed by a Playstation controller!) and self-destructed on their way to a sort of deep-sea fantasy-fulfillment.  I also saw a 75 year old woman wearing a pink tulle skirt and a Barbie handbag.  Grown men in suits ride scooters around the city.  They wear T-shirts and uniform replicas just like their own children.  When did this begin? 

The NYPL is commemorating HipHop with new cards to attract users. I got mine this morning... and I already miss the old one.  I wanted to become part of this culture... and yes, I embraced Hip Hop... but now I feel a bit duped, like I traded in an old vintage Renault for a Lego car.  Here I am, an incongruous specimen of mid-century obsolescence-- with my books and my records and my technological illiteracy. 

Text me, my son says... and it sounds as though he is asking me to transform him into verbiage.  There's a kind of poetry in my failure to adjust to the mainstream.  I am not just gig-less but gigabyte-less. To me AI is and always will be the first name of the great artist Ai Weiwei.  Irony?  He seems to understand things.  His Lego version of the Monet Waterlilies was spectacular.  But I digress... a symptom of natural intelligence-- one of the flaws and distractions of not just curiosity but the aging me.  God willing I will not descend into some intellectual childhood and betray my adult values.  Victim or villain, persecuted or culturally excommunicated as I am occasionally by the consequences of my analogue stubbornness, I was surely born this way.