Defaced

"I sat in the gradually chilling room,

thinking of my whole past the way

a drowning man is supposed to,

and it seemed part of the present

part of the gray cold and 

the beggar woman without a face ..."

-- M.F.K. Fisher, 

The Art of Eating: 50th Anniversary Edition

Ceramic statue 12-31-13

"Th-th-th-that's all folks!"

-- Porky Pig

Number one suspect

Proctor:      Woman. I'll not have your suspicion any more.

Elizabeth:   I have no --

Proctor:     I'll not have it!

Elizabeth:   Then let you not earn it.

Proctor:     Now look you --

Elizabeth:    I see what I see, John.

-- Arthur Miller, The Crucible

Cemetery statue 9-27-13

"'Yesterday, some hooligans knocked over a dustbin in Shafsbry.' 

Wooooo ... The hooligans are loose! The hooligans are loose! 

What if they become roughians? 

I would hate to be a dustbin in Shafsbry tonight."

-- Bill Hicks

Yesterday I drove my motorcycle to explore a new cemetery in search of faces.

There was just one statue in this particular graveyard. This sort of melancholy girl with her hand on her cheek.

She was pretty, except a caterpillar had made its cocoon right the hollow of her eye socket, right in the tear duct, (or where the tear duct would be if a cement statue actually had tear ducts.) It was gross, and I didn't want it in my pictures.

I looked around on the ground for a stick or something to scrape it out with. I found a broken hickory nut shell, and, camera in hand, I climbed up on the statue's base to remove the nasty eye goober. 

That's when I heard the unmistakable sound of gravel crunching and popping under car tires. 

I looked over my shoulder at a fat police cruiser sitting on the lane right behind me where my motorcycle was parked.

Moving slowly, acting naturally, I sat my camera on a headstone, then walked over to my bike and politely moved it to the side of the path, out of the cruiser's way. Then I picked my camera back up and started snapping pictures. I let the nice officers see that even though I was dressed in leather and rode in on a motorcycle, I wasn't dangerous. I was no hooligan. I was just a girl with a camera. I wasn't there to desecrate, or vandalize, or steal, but to appreciate, memorialize and create.

What I didn't know at the time, however, was that there'd been a recent string of cemetery thefts and vandalism in the area, in some of the very cemeteries that I like to explore. Someone had been stealing statues, urns and other items from cemeteries across northern Ohio and southern Michigan. 

I'd love to say the cop told me to drop the hickory nut shell and put my hands up where he could see 'em. Or that he threw me up against the car, cuffed me, read me my rights, then told me to watch my head as he pressed me into the back seat and carted me off to the big house. Because at first glance, it certainly might have looked like I was inflicting some harm on that statue. I mean, I was all up in her face scraping away with my little nut shell. If that doesn't arouse suspicion, what does?

But he didn't do any of that.

He clearly saw that I was simply a non-threatening, passionate artist at work, and without a word, he left me to it and drove slowly away.

It turns out police had already nabbed the real cemetery vandal anyway. He is sitting in the county jail on  $20,000 bond, charged with felonious theft, breaking and entering, and vandalism. They found dozens of stolen cemetery items, which he was planning to re-sell, at his house.

I looked the story up online. I personally loved what the guy who manages my favorite Sandusky cemetery said about why stealing from a cemetery is wrong:

"Nobody can defend themselves."

As I exited the cemetery and headed home, I passed the same cruiser twice more. He was tailing me, keeping his eye on me until I rode out of his town on the horse I rode in on. Well, on the motorcycle I rode in on. Anyway. I did feel a little thrill knowing I was a prime suspect for just a second.

Honest, officer. I didn't steal anything.

You can check my pockets. You can search my backpack. 

Just don't look inside my camera, because it's full of all the pictures I took.

Like a rock

"Life is mostly froth and bubble, 

Two things stand like stone -- 

Kindness in another's trouble, 

Courage in your own."

-- Adam Lindsay Gordon, "Ye Wearie Wayfarer"

Cemetery statue with flower garland 9-17-13

"Cold as winter, strong as stone;

She faced the darkness all alone."

-- Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, Shattered Mirror

"The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands,

its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves,

was like a theater after the performance --

all strewn with crumpled playbills."

-- Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

 

Taken for granite

"Everyone breaks a little sometimes." 

-- J. Kenner, Release Me 

 

Broken angel  9-1-13

"... the wounds of the past and the scars of the present 

don't disfigure me in your eyes ..."

-- John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

"He jests at scars that never felt a wound."

-- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

I went to the cemetery yesterday, searching for faces.

I was looking for new material, but I also wanted to revisit a couple of familiar faces that I've photographed in the past.

One of my favorites is an enormous monument bearing the stone image of a larger-than-life angel. I photographed her several years ago, and wanted to do so again for this year's 365 days project.

I have a large framed photo of this angel on my bedroom wall. I shot the photo in 2004 and it is one of my all-time favorites. I love it because of the way it captures the combined sense of strength and sadness, power and helplessness, spirituality and humanity. I was eager to see her again.

After meandering around the winding roads cris-crossing the cemetery and successfully finding a handful of interesting new faces, I made my way over to where she stands.

My heart went cold. I felt sickened by the sight.

She'd been damaged.

Broken.

Her nose was completely gone, along with most of her upper lip. In their place, dead-center on her lovely angel face, a disfiguring, jagged, gaping granite wound.

I have no idea how it happened.

Natural disaster?

It's an old cemetery with lots of trees. Perhaps a branch fell during a storm.

Cemetery vandals?

God, I hope not.

Despite the damage, I photographed her anyway.

I was deeply moved by the beauty of the images I was seeing.

It wasn't the perfect beauty of the past, but beauty of a grittier sort. Even though her face was badly scarred, this angel somehow still conveyed that same combined sense of strength and sadness, power and helplessness, spirituality and humanity.

Maybe even more so.

The way she looks now ... it's like she gets it, she understands, she knows something about pain and damage, about scars and wounds, because she's been there. You get the impression that she can sympathize with the sadness and loss and tragedy that surrounds her, because she's seen it up close.

You know she knows how it feels.

You know she's felt the hard impact.

You can see it all over her beautiful face.

Petrified

"Does not the stone rebuke me

for being more stone than it."

-- William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

Self portrait 8-27-13

"I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention.

To not be like your parents.

To not be like your friends.

To be yourself.

To cut yourself out of stone."

-- Henry Rollins

petrify [pe-truh-fahy]

verb

1. To convert into stone or a stony substance.

2. To benumb or paralyze with astonishment, horror, or other strong emotion.

3. to make rigid or inert; harden; deaden: The tragedy in his life petrified his emotions.

I am petrified.

I thought the word "petrified" simply meant being afraid, that it was just a synonym for being really really scared, really really frightened.

But the word has a finer, more complex meaning that that. 

While the word does have something to do with fear, it is also tied up intricately with the process of hardening, or turning to stone. It's about fear that paralyzes.

In fairy tales, characters who fail a quest may be turned into stone until they are rescued.

God knows my life is no fairy tale, but my "quest" right now is my battle against insomnia.

And I feel like I am failing miserably.

I am getting help, and I thought the help was helping. But lately I seem to be back at square one.

Some long sleepless nights are kicking my ass again. I am disappointed and discouraged.

And it scares the shit out of me.

It is a fear that paralyzes.

And I feel like the longer I wage this battle, the more hardened I am becoming. Sometimes I feel like I'm about to break, but other times I feel like I'm turning to stone. Like out of self-protection I am hardening emotionally, retreating into a stony, isolated little enclave deep inside myself.

I feel trapped inside the anxiety of "what if?" 

What if this is it?

What if I never get fixed? 

What if I never get rescued?

What if instead of getting easier, it just keeps getting harder?

Love in the time of Cholera

"He was still too young to know 

that the heart's memory eliminates the bad 

and magnifies the good,

and that thanks to this artifice 

we manage to endure 

the burden of the past."

-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Cemetery statue 8-23-13

Cemetery statue (2) 8-23-13

One of my favorite places to look for faces is in cemeteries. Often, among the headstones, obelisks, monuments and memorials, there are statues standing sentinel over the lost lives beneath their feet.

This statue towers over the grave of the Wilber family in a cemetery near Vermilion, Ohio.

According to the engravings, the Wilber's lost four children in a span of  seven days, between January13th and 19th, 1893. Their names were Jess, May, Roy and Ruby. Jess was 11, May was 9, and the twins, Ruby and Roy, just three months shy of their 3rd birthday.

At the feet of the statue is a separate plot with the four children's individual headstones, under an arch that says "Our Darlings."

I don't know what claimed the lives of these children, but I'd guess they were victims of the Cholera pandemic of 1881-1896.

This face really got to me.
I love how the way time, the weather and the elements have eroded the lines through the surface so that it looks, even on a bright sunny day, as if this woman, this mother, is weeping eternally for her lost "darlings." The tear tracks are etching away at the stone, rivulets carving ever deeper, slowly, pooling over her heart before running away.

She is holding, barely, a little book that simply says "Memory." The letters aren't engraved, but raised. To me it looks as though this woman is intentionally tipping the book to let the letters tumble to the earth as if she might rid herself of the terrible memories. Of course, she can't, because the words are trapped forever in stone. That breaks my heart.

I see strength and serenity in this face, the face of grief holding on, barely, to a thin volume of what was, and what was lost.