Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

<a href=”Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I first came across Edward S. Curtis’ photography in “Puchteca,” a Native American art gallery in Flagstaff, AZ, in 2010 and was hooked on his unique and monumental work, The North American Indian, a 20-volume set published in the early 1900s. Then I received a copy of Egan’s biography of Curtis for Christmas, 2012 and dove in headlong. What an amazing story of this one-of-a-kind, 6th-grade-educated man’s focused dedication, spirit of adventure and self-confidence as he set out and spent all of his adult life preserving images of the cultures of some 80 American Indian tribes. His work includes not only stunning photography, but music and lyrics of songs, alphabets and lexicons of their languages, descriptions and photographs of their daily lives and cherished rituals.

Egan’s story is much more than a chronicle, though. He adeptly captured the complex character of the man — not a perfect man, by any means — in all his confidence and bravado, his self-effacing dedication to his work in spite of all obstacles, his growing apprehension of the plight, and revulsion at mistreatment, of the Indians, and his obsession with the work. This is another of those historical pieces of literature that rises well above the norm and captures a riveting life.  I was even more captivated by the fact that Edward Curtis was a product of Seattle as it grew into adolescence in the late nineteenth-century Alaskan gold rush era, founded his photography studio in Seattle with brother Asahel Curtis, and started his family here.

I highly recommend Timothy Egan’s Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher and know you’ll enjoy the reading!

View all my reviews” title=”Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher”>Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

One Child’s Wisdom

Don’t look at me all bug-eyed, as though you disbelieve!  The Boogeyman has been around a long time, and everybody knows it, even adults.  Kids, especially little kids, can tell you all about him — what he looks like, where he lurks and lies in wait, what he does when he gets you.  Adults can’t, though — or won’t.  We’re too sophisticated to believe in childish stories.  A boogeyman?  Nah!  But you can research the topic on the Internet if you want; there’s been a movie or two about him, and surely hundreds of stories over the generations by the likes of Stephen King and a host of others.  The Grimm Brothers’ Children’s and Household Tales were often about this grim character of folklore, in one form and name or another.  Not only has he survived, but he has thrived at the unwitting hand of humankind’s nurture.  Like you (I’ll bet) and millions of others, I remember being afraid to enter a dark room, get out of bed at night, or go outside in the dark because “the Boogeyman” might get me.  That was common knowledge.  All my school friends could, wide-eyed and gulping, confirm his existence based on independent experience, even if not an eyewitness report.

As I was growing up and battling the fear of such a specter, I was sure that he had many forms, that he was an omnipresent, evanescent creature with chameleon powers so that he avoided detection by his victims until it was too late and he had you.  He clearly had “the upper hand” — ALL the hands!  Enough to snare you, stifle your cries for help, smother you near to death, and use you for his nefarious purposes, purposes never apprehended by his young prey.  To be sure, we didn’t think then in fifty-cent words like “omnipresent” or “evanescent” or even “chameleon.”  But the unmitigated truth of the Boogeyman’s existence was without doubt.

Then Yann Martel came along and spoke in the profoundly simple-yet-vivid voice of a young, bewildered, shipwrecked Indian boy, Piscine Molitor Patel (“Pi”), to address — no, to call out! — the Boogeyman.  It’s an ancient story reborn.  But the Boogeyman doesn’t really exist!  Or does he?

Here’s how Pi puts it:

I must say a word about fear.  It is life’s only true opponent.  Only fear can defeat life.  It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know.  It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy.  It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease.  It begins in your mind, always.  One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy.  Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy.  Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out.  But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier.  Doubt does away with it with little trouble.  You become anxious.  Reason comes to do battle for you.  You are reassured.  Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology.  But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low.  You feel yourself weakening, wavering.  Your anxiety becomes dread.

Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on.  Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake.  Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot.  Your ears go deaf.  Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing.  Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much.  And so with the rest of your body.  Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart.  Only your eyes work well.  They always pay proper attention to fear.

Quickly you make rash decisions.  You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust.  There, you’ve defeated yourself.  Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

The matter is difficult to put into words.  For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene; it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it.  So you must fight hard to express it.  You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it.  Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.

~ Y. Martel, Life of Pi, Harcourt, Inc., 2001, p. 161-62 (underlining and bold emphasis added).

I believe Pi  — or Martel — nailed it, spot-on.  Does his description sound familiar to you?  And have not many sages, masters, prophets, teachers and divines down through the ages left a wealth of recorded wisdom on this very topic, spoken in other words and many languages?  Where else might we find that wisdom, those thoughts and principles verified so eloquently by the poor, shipwrecked Pi as he faced his Bengal tiger?

Carpe diem.  Vita brevis.

© April 30, 2011, by Michael E. Stubblefield.  All rights reserved.

Forty-two and Counting

The book ends thusly:

When he thought of her, it rather amazed him that he had let that girl with her violin go.  Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant.  All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.  Love and patience – if only he had had them both at once – would surely have seen them both through.  And then …. This is how the entire course of a life can be changed – by doing nothing. On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back. Instead, he stood in cold and righteous silence in the summer’s dusk, watching her hurry along the shore, the sound of her difficult progress lost to the breaking of small waves, until she was a blurred, receding point against the immense straight road of shingle gleaming in the pallid light.

Excerpt from On Chesil Beach, pgs. 201-203, by Ian McEwan (“Atonement,” “Saturday,” et al.) Nan A. Talese, New York, 2007.

McEwan’s thesis in the novel, which is by turns titillating, slow-paced, and surprising, is common enough – the ending of a marriage – yet his insight as to its preventive is another matter, perhaps too uncommon to gain much thoughtful attention in our move-on world.  He boiled it down to its essence as I reflected on my own marriage, a marriage which has, for all its twists and turns and sometimes-tortured dances, moved ahead and endured those difficult roads.  Along the way, we’ve learned to talk honestly with each other through the fight-or-flight times, wading through a slough of typical challenges and distractions to get here. It’s not easy, and the path ahead is likely not a golden road without hazards.  But it is paved with mutual love, trust, and gratitude in our relationship’s security.

No one wants for theories as to why marriages fail or succeed; such theories abound in the psychological, sociological, theological, and philosophical worlds. In my opinion, McEwan’s analysis above, presented from the advantaged viewpoint of one of his two primary characters, forty years removed from the subject marriage, is on target as it identifies a thoughtful communication that was let go without exercise at the needful time.  Or put another way, a thoughtful communication that was overpowered and overshadowed by a thoughtless communication.  Edward and Florence, newlyweds on their wedding day, struggled to express their love for each other, yet ended up in an argument over an unfortunate but relatively petty occurrence that was anything but petty in its consequences.  True to form among the young and prideful (are not we all prideful at some point or other?), the newlyweds could not see through the fog of emotions and identify, much less vocalize, their true feelings of love and care for each other.  They raged (in understated British style) and stormed at each other, then stormed away without reaching resolution.  A marriage destroyed by default; destroyed for lack of courage to say what really mattered – that they loved each other and despite what seemed a drastic momentary outcome, they were committed to go on with each other.

“All she had needed …” could have been stated “all he had needed …” with equal effect and truth.  Both Florence and Edward needed certainty of each other’s love and “reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.” Could either of them find the courage to offer those simple statements?  In the heat of marital battle, can you find that courage?

Pride carried the day, but lost the life together.

Carpe diem. Vita brevis!

© October 13, 2010, by Michael E. Stubblefield.  All rights reserved.