My Ideograph of My Feelings

Self-Portrait:

I know a photographer who took a photograph of the bed he slept in every morning just after he got up. He then would compare the way the pillows creased and the blankets got tossed and he would also comment on the books by the bedtable and the way the light filled the room.

It seems as if there is a separate self that we leave in our sleep who lives out his nights in dreams, and the remains of this person is what we see in the way the bed has been slept in.

You can tell if it was a fitful sleep or a peaceful sleep just by how the covers are laying or the pillows are clumped.

In this image, I can see the outline of where I slept and how my head positioned between the pillows. The tones are grayish, bluish, and in the early dawn, the light seems misty, diaphanous, and the bed seems cool because of the tones.

I like the textures of the sheets and the way they seem to ripple like water and the way the pillows seem like smooth boulders in a riverbed. Darkness is the water of sleep, and our dreams are like fish. Waking is like bursting into the light in the air above the surface.

For many years, I suffered from sleep paralysis, a condition that feels like suffocation, like there is someone pressing down on me while I am half-awake. The sleep scientists have come up with an explanation of the condition and say that it is being caught between two stages of consciousness, waking consciousness and dreaming consciousness, or R.E. M. sleep when the mind is totally engaged in dreaming.

In this nether world of being stuck between states of sleep consciousness, deep sleep and light sleep, the sleeper feels trapped, hence the panic, but the feeling of being frozen and the terrible feeling of being unable to move or get up or even scream.

I haven’t had that for many years. But it is the reason that I prefer to sleep alone. I am a violent sleeper and I have had waking nightmares that I could not wake from. I used to write down all the dreams I remembered having as soon as I woke and I kept a dream journal.

I still have a file folder where I keep all these recorded dreams and it is interesting to read and to see patterns that add up to psychic disturbances, recurring images, and motifs. We are what we dream on some level.

This is a photograph of my father and my first cousin, Diane, in front of my aunt's house in Lodi, New Jersey, circa 1950, three years before I was born. My father crouches down to get into the picture and he smiles his warm smile while gripping a pipe between his teeth. He wears a leather jacket and a pork pie hat popular at the time. I can see the front end of his car in the driveway in front of my aunt and uncle's little brick house. The house had to be fairly new because the bushes in front are small and I remember them taller than the house.

The world before I was born is the same world as the world after I die. I don't exist in either of these worlds and I am very curious about both. I was always mesmerized by the line by Theodore Roethke: "The dead love the unborn." It sends a chill up my spine. In the photograph my father is newly married to my mother and they are living a block away in a house of their own. I would never get to know that house because they moved soon after I was born to another house in the suburbs. My mother hated Lodi because she thought that the schools were rowdy and low class and all her life she dreamed of an upper-class life. My father worked his whole life for one company, Western Electric in Kearny right after World War II, and then in the modern, black-glass, 20-floor office, in downtown Newark on Broad Street until he retired in 1986--45 years!

That pipe in his mouth, plus all the cigars, and other bad habits he acquired over a lifetime, would end up giving him cancer of the esophagus just after he turned 80. He made it to 81, but that last year was a year of suffering. No one should have to suffer the way he did. It broke my heart. My cousin, Diane, asked me for a copy of this photograph recently because she loved my dad so much and because he was so good to his nieces and nephews--they all loved him and he was fun, did crazy things with them and they always had a good time.

They are all gone now, all the uncles, all the aunts, all the mothers and the fathers, and it is just us cousins now who have moved into the green room for the river Styx, to wait for the boatman Charon, to row us to the other side.

Self-portrait (Vanitas) Who Am I

Describe the image:

Asbury Park, New Jersey, the Palace Amusements, with rides for kids and "Tillie's" face painted and peeling off the wall and fading next to a go-go bar. The building is fenced off and closed. I can make out the ends of some words and there is a clash of bright colors, red, yellow, aquamarine. There are patches of strong sun light on the side near the roof. And there's an arrow pointing to the door below, and dark slits for windows. The telephone wires crisscross in front of Tillie's face.

Respond to the image:

Asbury Park is where my father on a July night in 1948 proposed to my mother on the boardwalk, a block from Palace Amusements. As a kid, this is where my family went for summer on the beach, and me and my brother would spend hours inside Palace Amusements on the skooter ride and in the fun house. Later, this is where I would take my first girl friend when I was sixteen. We kissed standing outside Palace Amusements with the smiling Tillie looking goofily down at us. I always loved that silly grin because I associated that time with being in love and being sixteen. I can still smell the cotton candy when I see this image and I can still hear the screams from inside as the girls got blasted by a geyser of cold air pumped from the wood floor that raised the girls' skirts up over their heads (girls wore skirts back then). And we would laugh. When I shot this photograph, the entire boardwalk was closed and deserted and this was a July 4th week when the shore is crowded. I felt like a nuclear post-holocaust survivor walking the deserted boardwalk.



Describe the image:

Bendix Diner on a January Sunday afternoon and the diner is empty. There are a row of booths to the left and a row of counter stools in the center and to the right there is the short-order grill and I see dozens of eggs piled up and other things like cups and utensils and napkin dispensers, sugar containers, ketchup bottles, salt and pepper shakers on the Linoleum countertop. The menu is on the wall over the grill and there is an old photograph of the diner tacked onto the wall menu. The diner is old and the everything looks old, the tile floor, the chrome and Naugahyde stools, the Linoleum table tops and counter. There are stains on the ceiling and the windows are fogged. At the far end, there is an exit door, and there is a roadway out there outside and some houses and some trees and an office building of some kind.

Respond to the image:

I gravitate to diners and all my life I have been eating in diners and because I grew up in New Jersey, I am fortunate to be in the "Diner State" in my opinion. I am drawn to them because they reflect some of my wanting to be alone with my thoughts yet out among people, a paradox I know, and because I am a paradox, a contradiction. I want to be around people, yet I desire to be anonymous at times, separate, by myself, in contemplation. I used to smoke in diners and I used to write in diners. I still write in diners. I like the maternal feeling of being waited on by waitresses. And I like coffee, good coffee, and if the coffee is good I am in heaven. I also like good food and good diner food is hard to find. This diner doesn't have good food and the coffee is average so it is not my favorite diner, but I love the classic look and feel of this art deco diner from the 1940s because it connects me to my past, to my parents and to a time that has gone. My mother used to work at Bendix and on her lunch break she would come to this diner to pick up orders and grab lunch for herself. That was in the 1940s before I was born and before she met my father. It is that maternal feeling again. The diner is like a womb. I feel comforted there. It is a temporary refuge for me, a place to gather my thoughts, contemplate, and write without being disturbed, especially when it is empty and I have the diner all to myself.

Describe the image:

This is me in my old office at the college in downtown Paterson a couple of years ago, sitting at my desk with my back turned to my desktop computer monitors. On the monitor screen is a "Vanitas" self-portrait of a famous photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, who is holding a "human skull" walking stick or staff, and who is dressed all in black to accentuate his face and his hand so that the viewer almost sees the head floating and the hand floating as if he were disembodied. There is a pen holder next to the monitor on the desk and there is a sheet of paper with some writing on it in front of the keyboard. I am clean-shaven in this image and I stare at the camera lens without smiling. I am wearing a dark shirt in imitation of Mapplethorpe. I see that my expression resembles his somewhat.

Respond to the image:

As a photographer, I take self-portraits in many different forms. In this image, I wanted to convey a sense of mortality which is what the vanitas tradition is about in art, that everything vanishes, disappears, dies and that our lives are temporary, fleeting. The tradition goes back in still life painting to the seventeenth century and a human skull is always present. It was intended to create a higher order of thought in the spectator, and remind the viewer of the vanity of human existence. Other objects like hourglasses are sometimes present as a reminder of time, or flowers that will fade, that beauty fades, is short-lived, and darkness is present in the background. By pulling up the famous Mapplethorpe self-portrait on the computer screen, I was alluding to this tradition and it was a clever way to include a skull as well as a dark background and it incorporates an image within an image or a photograph of a photograph. But I get away from the feeling it invokes in me to look at an image of myself. What was going through my mind at the time I shot this is hard to say at this point. I was probably sad about something since I fight depression when it comes and I brood a lot. My father had recently passed away and death was on my mind. I can see some of that in this image. I think that I look lonely in this photograph, looking at it now and thinking about my life then. I probably wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere but in an office where I sometimes feel trapped.