Tag: Watching the Detectives

The Artist’s Frame

I confess.

This little fellow’s been framed.

Not in the sense in which that characterization is made in my line of work, but in many other ways. Framed so he seems to pop out in bas-relief against a cloudless powder blue sky. His vivid, sharp-edged wintry colors seem to propel him towards the viewer as he bows away from a filmy floral bokeh. On closer inspection, one frond has broken clean through at its elbow: another hint of the season.

He’s frozen in time and space by a rectangle of sky so constrictive that he appears to be craning against and breaking free of its confines. Looking inquisitively down and out of the frame in which he was forever captured.

Only I can tell you who was on tip-toes on a Maine oceanside path on that long-ago morning. Chin tilted up to return this wee Flying Wallenda’s side-eyed glance as he balanced on a crimson frond.

My fingers were so cold they felt welded to my camera. My winter shots tend to be far sparer than the unending rectangular frames which entomb other seasons’ scenes.

In every season, each image’s framing allows viewers to fill in the blanks, based on contextual clues. These may be as concrete as deducing the months in which a given bloom is likely to erupt and flourish in New England. Or as abstract as interpreting a wavering pattern reflected in slightly rippled water on a cloudless day.

Strangely, I’ve written about absent lens artists’ frames more than once before:

Both within and outside the frames [my husband] Jim created each time he sparingly clicked his camera’s shutter, there was love. This was not anthropomorphism–although the scene as female frigates gathered around a scarlet-throated male echoed what I understand to be the premise of a reality show involving the distribution of a limited number of roses.

Inside each frame is something Jim loved and preserved about his window on this world: its brilliant colors and creatures, plants and geological formations, and the spectacular beauty of sights he had never seen before and never would again–at least from this earthly vantage point–on all that grows and erodes and decays and grows again around us.

On the other side of the lens was a man relishing everything about a trip he knew would be his last, with the family he loved and will forever love him. Each of his photos can transport us back to the warmth of that sun, the sounds of sea lions, the feeling of being able to reach out and touch his arm or the back of his shirt as he found himself among winged and earthbound creatures near the end of the visible world and his time in it.

The artist’s frame allows the viewer to recapture the world it holds. It also allows us to see the artist outside of each preserved moment, whether capturing something real or imagined, aspirational, or merely magical . . . .

Art travels in time, sometimes even more readily than we do.

The Company of Ghosts

My winter bird, like my husband’s winter dove and frigates in another hemisphere, surely is long gone in traditional corporeal (and photographable) form. Parca’s creaking scissors have been wielded mercilessly since then. Glorious flighted birds are now pining for the fjords. They’re off the twig, having joined “the bleedin’ choir invisible.”

But he’s also still framed here for you to see and imagine this once present soul, engaging with another being on an icy winter morning.

In the penultimate scene of a five-season show centered on a family mortuary (avert your eyes if you don’t want a spoiler), an artistic daughter takes a photo of older family members seeing her off as she leaves home for the opposite coast. She is a true photographer, and is deliberate in what she seeks to capture in each frame.

Her older brother appears at her side, from his side of the veil, and gently tells her: “You can’t take a picture of this. It’s already gone.”

And it is.

But it’s also still with her, and anyone who truly studies the way she filled her frame.

Here Today . . .

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It might seem like an ordinary spot.

Now, as then, one rock’s broad surface comfortably seats a man over six feet tall, allowing him to look up at the much slighter young woman facing him under a Long Nights Moon.

You faced the moon and I faced you. . . .

Technically I have been alone when revisiting the spot, in mind or body.  Even now, few couples would make the rocky climb on a December night. Its most perilous stretches had no guard rails then. Hemmed by poison ivy and washed by surf, scattered signs warned of the trek’s perils, beginning with the precipitous drop from unsteady earth to roiling sea. 

And we talked about the future we hoped to have and came to be. 

From the narrow, rutted path’s highest point, where the young man sits and she stands, an  overlook offers a panoramic view of the horizon, bracketed by ridged limestone shelves angled into the seabed, as glaciers had decreed.

img_6546 copyThe young man’s vision is razor-sharp, as it will remain all his life. Beyond his moonlit partner he sees a swath of inky, noisy ocean punctuated only by a rocky outcropping miles from shore. There, tiny Boon Island personifies the word “barren.” No less a luminary spirit than poet Celia Thaxter, of New Hampshire’s convivial close-knit Isles of Shoals and their blooming gardens, is said to have once described Boon Island as “the forlornest place that can be imagined.”   

Despite its size and solitude, its uneven granite has drawn in and grounded ships over the centuries. And more than one sturdy stone lighthouse there has been storm-toppled into the sea, rearranging itself into mazes on the ocean floor.

The distant toothpick of the most recently rebuilt lighthouse is in fact New England’s tallest. Standing at strict attention atop the granite pile where nothing grows, it laconically cycles its pure white light, lest another insufficiently attentive traveler come too close. 

Compared to its nearest neighbor, the gaudily scarlet-strobing, holiday-bedazzled and aggressively photographed Nubble Lighthouse, one would have to concentrate very carefully to commit this shy slender cousin to pixels or film. When one does, the tiny island itself often appears to be hovering above the water, as if it is present both as we know it to be and also its own ghost.

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At this spot my husband and I shared at the cliff’s edge, the only sound likely to be heard during any season gently floated upwards. Thousands of water-smoothed stones companionably clattered as waves cycled below. They mingle and chatter as each wave washes over them and recedes, resettling their companions only slightly as they all await the next incoming wave. The sound becomes less mellifluous only in the most ferocious storms–the rare, intense storms we sometimes do not sense are coming, and which might fell even the most dependable beacons.

It is no coincidence that this single quotidian patch of earth and rock snuck itself into  my subconscious memory, and in turn has played a role in both my  fiction and non-fiction.

My husband died almost twelve years ago, but I will always find him–and our younger selves and our future children–in this spot, at least as present as the rocky shore and surrounding sea, and the seagulls who pause to quietly survey the rising sun along with me.