Character(less)

What do you do when you begin posing questions to yourself that you just can't answer?  Big questions, not the "what do you want for dinner" type.  And not the really big ones like "what is the meaning of all this" either.  Just the real existential questions about what you are doing and why.  Uncomfortable questions that make you wonder who you are and ask you to measure your character by what you do.  

Sure. . . have a drink.  But I can't.  I mean, I could be a quitter, but I still have twenty days, at least, to go.  Given my situation, this has been the hardest Dry January I've experienced.  Every night. . . oh dear god. . . my soul for a little respite.  And I could.  Nobody would know.  But it would be another blight on the record, another thing I couldn't do, couldn't complete.  I'm certain it is good for me.  Positive.  At least in some ways.  Physically, sure.  And mentally. . . you know. . . discipline.  But spiritually, I'm not so certain.  Somehow, it seems, my "character" suffers.  Not the one who sits alone and drinks half a bottle of scotch at night after a sundown cocktail and half a bottle of wine with dinner.  No.  That one needs vanquishing.  Rather, the one who just wants to pop in for a beer and boiled peanuts on a Saturday afternoon.  The one who accepts the offered drink when he stops by to see friends.  That one.  

I'll soldier on.  I don't mind drinking tea at night.  I enjoy it.  I have a really good one that was gifted me by T and his wife for my birthday, and I have been buying tins of it since.  It is an aromatic jasmine tea, the tea leaves rolled into little pearls.  I've learned how many pearls to put into the tea ball to make the perfect cup.  Three minutes of steeping.  The tea's fragrance fills the room.  Two cups from the tea ball always.  It is calming.  It is good.  

And I love to drink scalded milk before bedtime.  I like Golden Milk, and I like milk with cocoa, too, but just milk is lovely.  I'm one of evolution's milk drinkers, one, who like my northern European ancestors, never developed a lactose intolerance.  Reportedly, a cup before bed helps me sleep.  

So, yea. . . breaking the going to bed with a "belly full of rum" habit is good, especially since I spend my evenings alone.  

But I would love to go for a Sunday mimosa later today.  Such a thing may be a "character accoutrement."  

The aged need all the help they can get.  

Back to the questions, though, the "what are you doing and why?"  

Well, I'm taking care of my mother.  Why?  It's just what one should do.  See?  Easy answers.  

But other than that, what am I doing?  I mean, I feel like a pretender, by and large.  

I saw JP's photos yesterday.  They looked like catalog photos.  He knows what he is doing.  I was standing in T's kitchen with he and his wife.  They were saying they preferred mine, but I was having a hard time believing that.  We were framing the photos he has taken from me, and his wife said she wants a print of one of the photos I took of T, a large one that she will frame.  Still, I wasn't convinced.  I thought JP had outdone me.  O.K., I told myself, I mainly stayed out of the way, didn't take nearly as many photos as he did, yada yada yada.  But really, was it a competition?  If you know me, you know the answer to that.  Everything is a competition, even when I haven't a chance of winning.  It is not that I mind "losing," but I couch it in those terms, regardless.  

And so I walk the streets with a camera. . . and lose.  Oh, I like some of them, but. . . . 

I spent part of the day perusing Garry Winogrand's photos on the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Arts website.  Winogrand had hundreds of thousands of images, most of them never even developed.  They are trying to archive all of that.  So I perused.  You know what?  He didn't have hundreds of thousands of good photos.  He had hundreds of thousands of bad ones.  That's how it goes.  But he was recognized for his good ones in his lifetime.  

Saul Leiter, on the other hand, just made photos for himself after a brief stint at shooting for fashion mags like Vogue and having been included in a show at MoMA.  Then, just before he died, he was "discovered."  He was amused by it, or so it seems.  Brought up by a rabbi and having attended rabbinical college, he decided, in the manner of James Joyce, I like to think, to become an artistic rabbi (or, in Joyce's case, "priest").  

Leiter achieved fame in his eighties, having been discovered, or rediscovered, by the art historian Martin Harrison and then the Howard Greenberg Gallery.  He'd been photographing in obscurity for decades, then. . . BOOM!  He became one of the most influential photographers of his time, a time that had, but for the photographs, disappeared.  

Now. . . my favorite Saul Leiter quote. . . because it resonates deep inside my heart and bones.  In an interview for the 2013 documentary, Saul Leiter: In No Great Hurry – 13 Lessons in Life, he said, 

In order to build a career and to be successful, one has to be determined. One has to be ambitious. I much prefer to drink coffee, listen to music and to paint when I feel like it."

In searching for that quote, I found this: 

His friend Henry Wolf once joked that Leiter had a "talent for avoiding opportunities" because he would rather go home, drink coffee, and look out the window than network for his career.

Fuck yea!  The only place you can now see the Leiter documentary is on Apple T.V.  You can rent it without buying a subscription, I think. . . but about that I am unsure.  I saw it when it came out what is now much to my surprise so very long ago.  For a bit, I used to write to ask questions of the curator of the Saul Leiter Foundation, Margrit Erb.  There was something very particular I wanted to know about, but I was never able to unravel the mystery.  Maybe one day.  

Like Winnogrand, Leiter has thousands of unseen photographs, but unlike the U. of Arizona, the Leiter Foundation has not put up a website where they can be viewed.  I'd feel better if I could see evidence that Leiter took thousands and thousands of bad photographs, too.  

Of course, there was Vivian Maier who I helped discover.  Ho!  I'd like to think so.  But when the first photos appeared online before that all blew up, I was corresponding with John Maloof with tremendous excitement emphasizing how great what he had was.  He knew nothing about photography and was looking for help cataloging and scanning it all.  I, of course, couldn't help being here and he being there and me working a job at the factory, and so the emails petered out.  

My point?  That I could be famous one day!

No.  Kidding.  I'm just thinking that you don't have to pursue a career making money being a "professional photographer" to make good things.  

Still. . . I liked JP's photos and wondered how the competition truly came out.  

Self-doubt, of course, is one of my most obvious attributes, and now, minus the evening's "cup of courage," it seems to dominate my waking and sleeping hours.  I am living in the gaping yaw of an incessant void, or, at least, looking over the rim into it.  

I fear playing Falstaff to the King.  

But that's enough of that.  For now.  Let there be light and happiness.  Let there be music.  

Unfortunately, I am not listening to and finding new music here at my mother's house.  Other than in the car, I'm living in a music desert.  Just another of the things now missing from my characterless life.