Not the easiest thing

 

I find myself reading Jack Schaefer's
Shane (1949) this weekend, occasioned

by nothing more than a browse in Wil-

liam Allard's beautiful Leica photog-

raphy. I don't think there'd be much

chance of my reading a Western these

days, which only goes to show how ill

one can understand one's time. That's

not the easiest thing.

It was a shrewd choice on Schaefer's

part, to present this intensely sen-

timental story through the sustained

first-person voice of a young boy. It

allowed him to support a tone of leg-

itimate awe for the upper Plains of

the American West, to carry the some-

times fevered responses of his narra-

tion. (Noting this, director George

Stevens adopted the same perspective

in a film which so immortalized his

child star, as to illuminate every-

thing this actor did in adulthood,

opposite Paul Newman in Hud). Today,

readers who've been present for the

same years as Brandon de Wilde will

cut this story a wry slack. For all

its naïveté - not to say, cynicism - 

it touches faithfully upon what is

not the easiest thing.

                    He was there. He was there in

                    our place and in us. Whenever

                    I needed him, he was there. I

                    could close my eyes and he would

                    be with me and I would see him

                    plain and hear again that gentle

                    voice.

William Albert Allard

Vanishing Breed

Photographs of the Cowboy

  and the West

Little, Brown & Co, 1982©

Jack Schaefer

Shane

1949

The Library of America

Ron Hansen, editor

The Western

  Four Classic Novels ...

LOA, 2020©

My favourite clothespin ix

     So few days of Fall

     afford the meteoro-

     logical coincidence

     for wearing no more

     and no less than an

     escapade by bicycle

     wants in afternoon.

     It's the acute ang-

     le season, the ear-

     then pleats welcome

     some unbrittleness,

     darts array in play

     upon the aubergine.

     A fleeting pastoral

     ensign, unmistaken. 

     

Dominik Sadoch

Lukas Pukowiec

  photography

Elle Man Poland

October, 2016

Le Grand William 

  bicycle 

Hugo Boss

  vest and shirt

Ermenegildo Zegna

  trousers

Cowgill Forge

Blacksmith's Eye

October, 2016

Sampled fruit

The photographer who created
this unreasonably excellent
picture has presented it as
suggesting Sunday afternoon,
manner of Edward Hopper.

The dialogue between the mak-
ing and the depiction of vis-
ual art is present enough in
each of these artist's works,
to portray how familiarly we
associate with created image-
ry, as in this cottage space.

And his reference to another
artist is therefore clearly
one of consciousness as much
as of construction. In this
proposition, the photograph-
er raises the acts of poetry,
in which his dialogue with
the painter is consuming. 

We see it done in words more
often, as a scavenging assem-
blage of almost a parallel so-
ciety, implicit contributions
susceptible of such sampling. 

                         I have eaten

                         the plums

                         that were in

                         the icebox

                         and which

                         you were probably

                         saving 

                         for breakfast

                         Forgive me

                         they were delicious

                         so sweet

                         and so cold

William Carlos Williams
This is just to say
1962

Ivan Terestchenko
undated

Laurent
American veteran
October 5, 2010

Sorting the millennials

 In America, we read that our
 children of the '80s are un-
 moved by the dreary logic of
 preventing forest fires, as
 a means of democratic self-
 expression with their ballot.

 This makes perfect sense, in
 a system closed to combustion.
 There's a lady in North Car-
 olina, would you believe, who
 travels the world, photograph-
 ing dumpsters which have suf-
 fered the same calculation.

 Here's one from Seville, a
 place that knows a tyranny
 as the casino of the street.

Paul Fontanier

  for Pull & Bear, 2016

Caroline Cockrell

Dumpster, Seville

undated

Henri Cartier-Bresson

Wagerings, Madrid

1930s

Somewhere in Brittany, 1938

   It ain't dark yet

Bob Dylan
Henri Cartier-Bresson

A gathering of great powers

Edward Dimsdale

Kyoto

undated

"Pangs of death and pangs of birth"

Over an entrance to the quadrangle
of the Yale School of Law, one can
make out an inscription carved al-
most a century ago. The law is a
living growth, not a changeless
code. Still the most illuminating
guest lectures in the school's fa-
mous Storrs series under this ae-
gis, were given in the 1920s by a
Columbia Law School grad, working
in New York, Benjamin N. Cardozo,
a descendant of Portuguese Sephar-
dic Jews, and a self-effacing bach-
elor, all his life. Those lectures,
on the Judicial Process, were met
with such respect that when the
Republican Herbert Hoover nominated
Cardozo to the Supreme Court of the
United States, they were cited in
his support even more strenuously
than his brilliant career on the
New York State Court of Appeals.

But he had second thoughts on his
Storrs Lectures; so he gave a sec-
ond series, which are bedrock tes-
taments in the life of the mind.


              I have become reconciled to uncertainty,
              because I have grown to see it as inev-
              itable. I have grown to see that the pro-
              cess [of jurisprudence] in its highest
              reaches is not discovery, but creation;
              and that the doubts and misgivings, the
              hopes and fears, are part of the travail
              of mind, the pangs of death and the pangs
              of birth, in which principles that have
              served their day expire, and new princip-
              les are born.

Justice Anthony Kennedy's candid
confession of trepidation, in yes-
terday's oral arguments at the Sup-
reme Court, in rendering a decision
he would perceive as at odds with
"millennia," called to mind the pangs
Cardozo not only felt, but explained
to him, and to all people within the
purview of our hybrid legal system.

Benjamin Cardozo is gentle, but he
is unfailingly not vague. Here, in
fraternal advice to Justice Kennedy,
he is saying there are times when
incremental redistributions of em-
pathy can no longer defend the af-
front of decrepit, incongruous rule.
The duty to act is not paradoxical,
it is preservative. 

I turned to his voice last evening,
and rested not on bedrock, but on
polishings of its grain.


              We may say that in the everyday trans-
              actions of life the average man is gov-
              erned, not by statute, but by common
              law, or at most by statute built upon
              a substratum of common law, modifying,
              in details only, the common law founda-
              tion. Failure to appreciate this truth
              has bred a distrust of a creative activ-
              ity which would otherwise have been seen
              to be appropriate and normal. A rule
              which in its origin was the creation of
              the courts themselves, and was supposed
              in the making to express the mores of
              the day, may be abrogated by courts when
              the mores have so changed that perpetua-
              tion of the rule would do violence to the
              social conscience .. If abrogation is per-
              missible in cases of extremity, still more
              plainly permissible at all times is con-
              tinuing adaptation to varying conditions.
              This is not usurpation. It is not even
              innovation. It is the reservation for our-
              selves of the same power of creation that
              built up the common law through its exer-
              cise by the judges of the past.


Who could make a secret of the
call to justice in one's time?

Benjamin N. Cardozo
The Growth of the Law
Yale University Press, 1924©

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Arrival of displaced persons
  New York
1946

Portrait of a household under siege

  Anticipate photogenesis,
  but gather up the read-
  ing lamps and cachepots
  for the excursions of a
  newborn English dog.

  Two years ago,
  his plane ar-
  rived from Cal-
  ifornia and he
  became Virgini-
  an.

  He's better at
  it, right down
  to his accent.

   I requested an
   ornithologist,
   they sent me a
   cavalier. When
   there are wood-
   cock, his ora-
   tions stir the
   County. And be-
   tween these ep-
   isodes, we are
   plotting their
   return, polish-
   ing our marrow
   spoon, quietly
   inconspicuous.
   

   His genius for
   the victimless
   pounce has not
   yet gained the
   panache of his
   rising. Yet we
   accept this in
   such répartée,
   as heralds all
   to play.
   

















Winchimes Cypress Point

Expose for the highlights

 not real sure
 how long I can stay

iv  Herbert List
     Liguria, 1936

v   Vivian Maier
     New York, 1961

Le Baron, Chouzy

Through the years, Cartier-Bresson's
famous post-war portrait of a vigner-
on at home in the Loire Valley has ac-
cumulated, for anyone who's revisited
it over time, a gathering context of
associations, relevant and extraneous
in equal parts, so that it is pleas-
ing to try to see it as for the first
time, although at one's present age,
and in one's present culture and soci-
ety. One of the first things to strike
one is the angle of view, higher than
if one were at the table and lower than at the mantle; but this is not a Rollei photograph, which could account for an abdominal perspective. This is a Leica image, from the nose. The vis-itor bowed.

    Nothing in this
    space is a clat-
    ter. Everything
    thuds; which is
    to say, illumin-
    ation weighs ev-
    erything in aud-
    ible coherency.

    It's a declara-
    tion of genius,
    yet whose, I'm
    not sure.

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Le Baron, Chouzy-sur-Cissé
1945

Martin Conte 
work shirt
2014