THE OLD MAN THAT DIDN'T KILL SPIDERS

tony smith

Listening to friends who hunt talk of their adventures with a bow, a rifle and a one-shot musket, the kind you pack the powder and the ball down the barrel and hope it works. I don't take an interest in guns, nor do I have an interest in killing a conscious being who has the same right to live as I hold for myself. I like to listen to my friends tell about getting a "ten-pointer" or a "twelve-pointer" with a rack so wide, measured by hands like the length of a fish, "they was this wide!" I like to listen to hunters talk about their different kills. Justin told me one day that hunting is better than sex. Hunting is different every time; sex is the same every time. He is the kind of hunter who will not take a shot unless he is certain he can hit it so the deer will drop straight down. He doesn't like them to suffer. Nor does he like to track their blood trail with a flashlight in the dark and drag the dead weight up the side of a mountain to a place where he can get his truck. His aim is that they don't feel anything; suddenly fall asleep, knees give out. I appreciate that in Justin, as well as in other hunters I know. It's hard for me to listen to the accounts, yet I enjoy hearing them. I am one who sees the deer of a level of consciousness about the same as the donkeys. From knowing other four-leggeds, I can project, I feel fairly accurately, that the deer fall in love, have partners, love their young, and probably live closer to love than we humans do. My impulse is to want to know the deer the way I know the donkeys, a dog, a cat. I want to know the individual personality, aware they are as individually unique as Jack and Jenny. 

tony smith

Deer run for their lives, literally, when they see a human. It's like they believe we can kill them just by seeing them. I only see deer by chance, as I never go looking for them, and when I see one or more I feel a longing to know who the individual is, same as I do when I see a crow walking in the donkey meadow. The Australian Aborigines and American Indians called them people. They are. I've learned like they did, from knowing some and paying attention. I don't attempt to tame any of the the deer by putting food out for them and earning their trust. I'd love to have a deer feeding station close to the house and get to know some. I remember in my first years in the mountains the news one week of someone who had raised a deer from a fawn found in the woods, brought it home and raised it a pet. The young deer was tethered in the back yard when somebody drove by, saw it, stopped, picked up his rifle, shot it, and drove on. Something such as this is inevitable. I'm recalling in my first weeks on the farm, I was introduced to some Park rangers to give me some tips on growing Christmas trees. The one talking was telling me about hunting. He justified it with Bible, "It says in Genesis God give us dominion over the beasts," which he interpreted the right to kill. I had to double-take. It shocked me. I was thinking it a tyrant's interpretation. For me, it means the responsibility to take care of them. If I ever had a lifetime long ago as a king, I hope I was one who treated his people with care, not a tyrant. I could have been either, according to the belief system one grows up in, the culture, the place, the time, the context.  

tony smith

Though I automatically recoiled within hearing the man talk so casually of killing gentle, harmless beings to eat them and display their horns on the wall, I reminded self that I'm here to learn the culture, know the people, have a Blue Ridge experience. I was here for the culture. The culture was not here waiting for me to shape it according to my whim. It is my role to allow the people around me to live as they live, believe as they believe, be as they are, not to judge them, but to support them. Learning the culture through the people, I have learned to appreciate the mountain people on their own terms, not the terms of an outsider. All Justin's life he has known that I don't like to kill anything, but that's only for me. It has nothing to do with him or anyone else. It is mine for myself. I don't like to presume my rights more important than another's. We talk in terms of people, but I include raccoon, possum, crows, every sentient being, including spiders. Justin's girl, Cheyanne, found a common window spider in a plastic grocery store bag I'd brought something in. She showed it to me squeamishly, like, Eeu. I carried the bag outside to the deck and turned it over above a flowering bush next to the railing. Cheyanne watched. I turned around and she said, "Why didn't you kill it?" I took it she had never seen anyone let a spider live. I said, "I don't have to kill something just because it's living." She got it. It was a brand new concept in her six year old mind. Every adult in her life killed spiders. Many years after I'm gone, I'd like to be remembered by Cheyanne as the old man that didn't kill spiders. 

tony smith

I think our bond has something to do with me as perhaps the only adult in her life who takes her seriously as an individual instead of a mindless kid who needs to be told what to do. She lives with her mother and sees Justin every other weekend. I am an adult in her life who doesn't judge her or threaten her, doesn't want to control her, always open to listen to her. And she listens to me. We communicate. This is how I am with kids I know. It's so easy. I was this same role for Justin from the time he was the age Vada is now, 3, I was the adult in his life who affirmed him, listened to him talk like he knew what he was saying, and he did. I paid attention to him as a consciousness in a human body like everybody else around me. The same with his sister Sheena I've known since birth. Now that they're grown up, Justin past 30, Sheena approaching 30, they're the closest friends of my life. Justin said to me a few months ago that I have known him through all the phases and experiences of his life and he has only known me with white hair. I've had white hair the whole time he's been living. I've never given him advice. I don't do that, because I don't know. We talk things over and look for practical solutions. When he's troubled, he comes to "the calm down place," and tells it all, sometimes stressed so much he's red faced. I let him tell it until there's nothing left to tell. I know that in the telling, he heard it too. In looking for what to do, I let him figure it out; he's a lot closer to it than I am, knows it from the inside. My goal in his childhood was to pass to him self-awareness, somehow. I believed he could make it through the gauntlet of his childhood with self-awareness. I don't know how it happened, unless it was the listening and letting him search for his solution in the context only he knows. His self-awareness helped him grow into the ethical man he now is.  

  

tony smith himself

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A DAY IN MY WORLD

beverly pepper

I need to consult somebody about what the planets are doing. Mars has something to do with the mix. I can see and feel Mars manifestations everywhere all day long. There is something going on that feels like a planet arrangement. The nice part is the planets are in motion and will move out of this arrangement in time. I'm going into the third week of nuttiness. Dropped in at the grocery store for catfood and carrots, primarily, and found traffic flow in the store was all out of sorts. Four times I came to the end of an aisle into a bottleneck of buggies, and one time in the middle of an aisle. Making the turn to go to the register, it looked like the gates opened at a horse race. I stepped into a herd of buggies mounded up high like they were racing to the register. I found a way around a bottleneck of four buggies that were then stalled by another bottleneck. I avoided both bottlenecks by slipping through an opening before it closed behind me, clean air into the open area in front of the registers. I found the aisle with one of my favorite checkout women, nobody ahead of me. A very strange feeling coming out of a major traffic jam of buggies going three different directions, into the open area, only one buggy each at three registers and one free. And I was gone before the bottleneck of mounded buggies I detoured arrived at the registers. I went for the opening, like Brad Keselowski, and won the race, thanks to a pile-up. I've had moments in the grocery store every once in awhile when a bottleneck occurs at the end of an aisle, but not very often. Four times in one brief grocery store run is a noteworthy record. Reading events in a day like a dream, it was a great grocery store dream. It was so odd it had a dream quality to it.

beverly pepper

A woman from a Fellini film was in there. Approaching the tuna section, she was slowly walking in front of me, very slowly walking. Predictably, she stopped in front of the tuna. She didn't look at the cans. She gazed around the aisle like her mind was gone and she was looking for something familiar, a clue to where she was. I thought, no problem, she'll figure something out in a little bit. She turned and looked at me. Seeing she was not standing there for the tuna, just a place to stop, I said, gently as possible, seeing she was adrift on painkillers or something, "You're standing where I want to be." It sounded really stupid hearing myself say it, not knowing what to say. It sounded spoiled by privilege. And I didn't mean anything like that. I saw she was a benign soul, old with hair dyed black, out of the house, on the verge of losing the ability to leave the house alone. I did not want to push her nor disturb her reverie. She generously moved ahead enough to let me reach the tuna cans. I moved on and she moved on. Old women were in there today, people I've never seen in the grocery store. Perhaps it was the shut-ins day out. The experience was an odd sensation from one end to the other in the grocery store, something like stepping into a Fellini film. And I saw the old Chinese woman from the Chinese restaurant bent over her buggy, red sweater, hair dyed black, a wall of bread loaves behind her like a big Warhol silkscreen titled, Bread. The whole experience in the grocery store was so dream-like I'm inclined to call it interpretation of what I saw. I remember, then, that these images are outside my mind. These are individual people in the grocery store pushing buggies at the same time, and I'm one of them. I am the camera. As was each of the others. It was so out of the ordinary, it felt like I walked into a movie scene in progress.

beverly pepper

From there to the mechanic who takes good care of the car, Catfish, to change the oil. He keeps the Mt Airy radio station WPAQ online for best reception. I step into the garage and hear some old-time fiddle and banjo in the air playing Cacklin Hen. Some gospel music came on next, hillbilly gospel, the kind I love, and I just spoke out loud when This World Is Not My Home I'm Just a-Passin Thru was playing. "This is my song. The song of my life." The angels beckon me from heaven's open door and I can't feel at home in this world anymore. I saw Crystal and Sheena, watched them work peeling stencils from boards they are painting words onto. Crystal is the most inventive mind I know. She is self-taught and knows how to make things work, one step at a time. She's got drive like a drummer in a hard-core punk band. Sheena I've known since she was a baby. From there, in town I saw by chance my friend April, I've not seen in some time, more than a year. A refreshing visit. April is a beautiful soul. I'm always happy to see her. I went to the Subway for a sub to take home. A beautiful young woman the other side of the counter, big, round, Polynesian, beautiful milk-chocolate complexion, a tiny diamond in each earlobe. At home, a movie in the mailbox. I was ready to either take a nap or watch a movie. I'd rather see the movie. MONSTER'S BALL, with Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry. Powerful film. Half way into it, I was thinking if this were a South African I'd be calling it a great film. It's American and tells a particularly American story beautifully. Halle Berry showed me an actress as artist, subtle in her character. Billy Bob was Billy Bob making another classic character. Not many American films can jerk my tears, though at the end of this one my eyes were so wet the white credits on black were white blurs. 

beverly pepper

Two people who were bottoming out within came together in an unlikely mix, a white Southern prison guard racist and a black woman meet in a way that draws them immediately together. Her son had just been hit by a car and killed. Billy Bob drives by and stops, picks the kid up, puts him in the back seat and they take him to the hospital to find he's dead. She doesn't know it, and he doesn't know it, that he was involved in the execution of her husband just a day before. Both were reeling from the experience of the execution, how it got her without income, a kid to take care of, losing her job from the stress of the moment. They fell into each other's arms against their own will, and very much by way of their own will. It became complex. His dad, an old Mississippi retired prison guard racist, a shut-in using a walker. Billy Bob's was a story of a man who had only lived in hate, he and the old man hated each other, both were hateful people. After the execution, things changed inside Billy Bob. He was automatically drawn to help lift up this woman in her most vulnerable moment. When they were first discovering each other, he said, I want to help you. She said, I need help. They were drawn to each other, but their pasts kept them apart. I have to say hats-off to Halle Berry. She showed me a mature actress handling a major role well. She became the role immediately. It was Halle Berry, the artist, with Billy Bob Thornton, the artist, working together to make a beautiful film. I saw one yesterday, Stop-Loss, an Iraq war film that was good until it went totally cheezy at the end. Monster's Ball ended as well as a film can end. It let the viewer finish it in the mind.  

beverly pepper

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IN PRAISE OF ROB COPELAND'S PHOTOGRAPHY

 

 

 

 

Above is a photo made today of my friend Sheena. My new facebook friend Rob Copeland in NYC has been making some extraordinarily beautiful photographs of reflections in car glass, car hoods and tops that make a curved or distorted reverse image of a building or two or three that are also in the frame. Rob's pictures have a dimension that moves my heart when I see them. Gary Winogrand's images and Joel Meyerowitz's images excite my heart in the same way Rob Copeland's do. I say excite my heart because that's where I feel the sensation when I see a large percentage of his images. Some of them are breath-taking, literally. They cause an inspiration, an in-breath, an inhalation, the sudden intake of air when I feel awe. He puts pictures on facebook every day, a touch that makes my facebook pages all the more fun to look at. Rob has opened a new dimension for me. I see reflections everywhere now. They've always been there and I've always missed them, with some exceptions, the ones that jump in my face. I walk through parking lots looking at the sky and clouds on windshields, trees, signs, wires. In a world of mundane traffic, pavement, brick, cinderblock and glass, the occasional appearance of a reflection on the glass of a car passing in the other lane, the sky and clouds rolling across the glass. It is not exaggeration to say noticing reflections has added a new dimension to my world. I'm not taking a lot of pictures of them. I don't want to seem like I'm copying Rob. I send him a reflection photo I find from time to time calling them "hillbilly reflections," for the fun there is in it.  

 

 

 

 

 

This is Sheena's man, Gail, with his pickup. I was looking for a way to get his reflection in the glass, but couldn't find it for the mirror, which worked good second best. I started sending Rob what I thought comic reflections, like trash on a dashboard reflected inside the windshield on the highway. Then this picture of Sheena happened. I wasn't thinking it a Sheena portrait at the moment. I saw the reflection and thought of Rob, Sheena walked into the V-slot to put something in the back seat. That she happened to be there when I saw the reflection in the glass made it a million times better. I'd not yet made a photo of Sheena that I think of as a nice portrait of her, how she looks as I know her. I think this is my Sheena portrait. She is seen through the hinged-side opening of the open back door, her brother Justin's four-door pickup. Reflected in the glass is the rigging above the back of the pickup for hauling ladders. It is one of my favorite photographs of all I've made. It was a moment in the new dimension Rob has opened for me. Standing in the same place I snapped the Sheena picture, to the right Gail was talking with his brother on the cell phone. I don't have any pictures of Gail. He was standing beside the truck's glass reflections at a moment I was focused on reflections to send to Rob. I'm happy with this one as my Gail portrait. Gail is my definition of a good man, all the way around. Good hunter, good archer, good people. The same can be said for his brother Ronnie. I'm grateful to God for the good care Gail gives Sheena.

 

 

 

 

 

This was the scene on Gail's pickup's back glass. It's a decal of a multi-pointer buck in the middle of the glass. It's another hillbilly reflection I made for Rob's amusement. From cityscape to landscape. The cityscape makes some exquisite reflection photographs. This new dimension I've stepped into has brought in moments of found art that are specific to place, time and point of view. Every time I see a reflection now, it's like a spontaneous piece of art. I'm thinking of reflections I see as, themselves, art. Once noticed, incredibly beautiful art. Since Rob has brought reflections to my visual awareness, I look for them in movies. When I notice a reflection, I also see that the director and the photographer, both, missed a moment of visual opportunity. A moment of just seeing the reflection is a surprise moment of art, and they go as unnoticed as unwanted children. Every time I see a movie, now, I see reflections that could have added a great deal to the visual moment and nobody saw it. Reflections I see in the course of a day give my mundane world of traffic and town some visual surprises. Glass is everywhere in town. I'd never paid attention to the scenes on the windows. I've seen them, but had not appreciated them. Now they are like gems that pop up here and there. They give a bit of zing to my everyday world like anchovies in pizza.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is the windshield of Sheena's car parked under a tree. It was the reflection that initially caught my eye. We were on the way to the softball game down the mountain at Austin off of Traphill Road. Justin and Gail were playing. They promised on the way there that they'd scorch the other team, and they did. Justin went in the house, I sat on the tailgate of the truck with camera looking at the clouds and the tops of the trees in relation to each other. I've noticed that the outlines of trees are similar to the outlines of clouds. Both are created by water flow. I was looking for something interesting in the trees in relation to the clouds. Got a couple of pictures that were neither here nor there. Just looking around, seeing what I could see, mostly focused on clouds. It was a beautiful day for clouds. Big floating cotton balls pulled into every kind of configuration. It was a clear day sky with clouds floating across the blue. The trees and clouds were nice, but only for one picture. I sat looking at beautiful fields of goldenrod with late afternoon sun on them. I looked over at Sheena's car under the tree and saw the windshield. I hopped to the ground and made a few pics of the glass. Also got one of the side glass with two contrails in the sky making a white V on blue. By the time you figure out what the white lines are, it's too late. It's a joke that took too long in the telling. By the time you figure it out, it wasn't worth the effort.

 

 

 

 

It was after seeing the glass on Sheena's car that I went back to where the two pickups were parked. The back door was open on Justin's truck, I saw the image of the ladder rack in the glass, stepped up to get a look at it and Sheena appeared. It was a magic moment. It was the tree on the car windshield that set me off. I was thinking a hillbilly reflection for Rob, a tree on the glass. That was the inspiration. I saw it comic, fun, a kind of in-joke. Then the moment happened with Sheena and it felt like I'd been touched by the Divine fingertip. I thanked Rob in spirit for a fantastic moment, my portrait of Sheena. We all packed into the truck with as big a back seat as a big car, Seth, 7, going with us. At the ball game, Seth had his exercise running to find a foul ball that went over the fence on either side. The homeruns that went over the fence into the woods were hopeless to try to find that late in the day. This is Justin in the picture below, the split-second after he dropped the bat to run for first. It was a base hit. That's Gail heading out from first for second. They truly scorched the other team. 21-6. Sheena and I sat on the aluminum bleacher and talked through the course of the game. Every once in awhile, one of us would ask, Who's ahead? I valued having the time with Sheena, just us, talking about whatever. We've known each other all her life. Both Justin and Gail hit home runs over the fence. We kept an eye on Seth who spent the whole time running. He'll make a good soccer player.

 

To check out some of Rob's photographs:

 http://robcopelandphotography.blogspot.com 

 

 just a click away

 

 

 

all photos by tj worthington

 

 

 

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