The Music of the Cane

On Considering Repetition in Photography

He had the strongest inkling that back there, not ahead, lay the thread in the labyrinth he had lost. *

Most of us, at one time or another have returned to our high school campus years after graduation, only to notice how much smaller things seems to be.  As we linger, we remember events, people, situations, and feelings.  Although the stage in the gym is a fraction of its former self, we remember the play and our first speaking role.  The classroom looks more intimate, but peculiarly familiar, and we recollect the day we exceeded our (or the teacher’s) expectations.  The athletic field is less expansive, but the collision in PE still hurts, as does the lost opportunities with the special someone who failed to even notice.  When we remember, we recollect the story we tell ourselves.  Our memory is vital as it narrates our lives—the perceptions of who we are and where we are going.  To the photographer this act of repetition provides fertile ground for pre-visualization of future images.  To the poet it can be pure gold.

Memory and narrative

The infant’s brain has more neurons than the adult’s, but the adult’s has more interconnections between the neurons.  The wiring of this network is shaped by experience, by learning.  Simply stated, our experience shapes our neural network and new information interacts with our perceptually created view of self and the world.  Repetition and recollection then provides repeating, evolving, and different information to be processed and integrated against our important memories and our view of self.  The perceived difference between what was once and what is now allows the photographer to recover the past in hopes of seeing differently.  The resulting experience can lead to a deeper and more personal vision, a more profound understanding.

This repetition and recollection of memory experience is important to the human condition.  It helps resolve hurt, close loops, and reconcile internal conflict.  We return to sites, real and symbolic, important sites of injury and pain, birth and death, joy and profound experiences.  We attend our high school reunions, and visit the home of our youth, and we recreate a self-view, a personal narrative.   And these narratives, expressed verbally or visually, connect with other narratives into a human network of stories, experiences, memory, ideas, emotions, and understanding.  So, using images conceived through an authentic repetition may create a photographic narrative, which may be seen, perceived, and understood by (that is to say, connected to) others who understand the visual linguistics of the images.

Alienation and discovery

If the apparent need to recollect and reinterpret a narrative seems central to human authenticity, consider that many of us in our contemporary society spend a great deal of time in an aesthetic sphere of existence—seeing the world as a set of limited resources to be competed for, valuing the accumulation of material wealth and social position, reinforcing “doing” behaviors in the value system of consumerism, and so on.  Our Cartesian heritage has fractured our spirits.  Understanding and valuing an authentic existence is not required for our contemporary human experience.  Physician and novelist Walker Percy says contemporary man is “alienated” from himself and his surroundings by this fractured existence.

To say the least, he is bored; to say the most, he is pure anxiety; he is horrified at his surroundings—he might as well be passing through a lunar landscape and the signs he sees are absurd or at least ambiguous.

Repetition is one way to recover the authenticity of the human experience.  As Kierkegaard defines it, it is more than savoring past experiences.  It is a voyage into one’s past in search of one’s self.

The question what does it mean to stand before the house of one’s childhood? is thus received in two different ways—one as an occasion for the connoisseur sampling of a rare emotion, the other literally and seriously “what does it really mean?”

In this context, we may consider the camera as an instrument of discovery, asking the deeper question, “What does it really mean?”  Not “Oh, the house looks so much smaller now, so let’s take a picture” and record that observation, much like the tourist taking a photograph at a Kodak Picture Spot at Walt Disney World.  The photographer would be well advised to see and look deeper, discover more, listen more attentively to the music playing and respond with an authentic and sincere vision, a self-narrative—one that is free from current expectations and constraints our “art society” places on photographic images.  It only needs to make sense to the maker, the narrator.

The music of the cane

What is a repetition?  A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulterations of events that clog the time like peanuts in brittle.

For my part, I grew up spending summer days along the Bayou Teche in St. Martinville, Louisiana, which is centrally located in the sugarcane region of the state, and the historical locus of Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline.  As the story goes, Evangeline spent her days waiting for her betrothed Gabriel under the oak tree, following the expulsion from Nova Scotia under English rule.  This myth and the cane industry played an important role in forming memory of place, heritage, culture, and relationships.  It became my important opportunity for narrative images arising from a photographer’s repetition.  Many of these images are found in the quotidian.  Here is one such story:

••••••

I came back, you know, to see the cane.  The sweet smoke of the sugarcane harvest never left me.  The cane is cut, then laid across the rows and set afire to burn the leaves off.  Sweetest smoke I ever smelled.  It’s been a long time and the soft comfort of a world I knew consoles me.  The road to the Saint John mill is quiet in the cool air.  Clumps of dried mud mark the tire tracks of harvest entering the road on the way to the mill.

I have always found peace on this stretch of road, the live oaks echoing nobly against the flat open fields of cane.  The afternoon light attracts me and I think of my grandmother’s house up the road.  I have many recollections here – the camp trips to Catahoula, learning to drive on this road, the Way of the Cross nailed to the big roadside oaks.  These crowd my mind.  The contrast of the soulful piece of road, precious and deep within me, and the need to begin again, calculates each step I take.  A tractor with two full wagons of cane rumbles past on the way to the mill.  The customary nod appears through the muddy window, as if I lived up the road.  It feels good here.  Like the time an older stately woman passing on the Main Street sidewalk in front of the Teche theater, stopped me and said, “You’re Margaret Fournet’s boy, aren’t you?”  After 30 years, she recognized me after my mother’s maiden name.  They don’t forget here.

I left and chose conformity.  In making the grade, I lost something.

I have this peculiar sense, maybe more of a feeling, that it is good to be here, almost therapeutic and physically real.  All around me the cane rustled in the cool breeze.  It was a quietness I heard, as the muddy load of cane echoed off toward the mill.  What was it?  What called out in this heard silence?  The cane was playing a music I heard when I was a child, and until now I had forgotten.

We lived in Beaumont, Texas, my father working in the Petroleum Building there, but would spend summer days at my mother’s mother’s house.  We relished the long car trips in the blue Plymouth we had legitimized with a Jan’s Racing Pistons decal.  The St. Martinville home was set on four acres on the Bayou Teche, two blocks from Mr. André’s general store.  The land rolled once on the way to the bayou, and legend had it that the small valley was used for a tanning pit.  Stark contrast to the adventure land summers for young boys.  But the most amazing feature was a 300-year-old oak.  Branches so wide one could walk easily out on the limbs.  I am sure that the historians mistakenly identified the Evangeline Oak, choosing one a half-mile down the bayou.  On the warm summer evenings, the locusts would sing from the stately branches, interrupted only by the town’s 6 p.m. whistle from the volunteer fire department.  Their song, and the sweetness of the damp summer air, seemed to release the endorphins of the Sirens – a child’s comfort with the important reality, a sense of relationship with the world, a sense of belonging and hope.  It seemed that the rays of the evening sun through the oak and moss, played the strings of the cicadas.  The slow brown flow of the bayou formed the visual base notes.  This was a world I knew but forgot.

I turn and head down the road.  The mill hisses and sputters as the cane is crushed for its sweetness.  Great clouds of steam rise in the cool misty air.  The soot of the boiler fires settles on my car and the old plantation home nearby.  With my camera bag slung over my shoulder, I follow the dirt path to the mill office.  The rancid sent of the filter-pressed mud, the noisy clanking of the cane wagons, and the pressured roar of the plant, encloses the alien landscape.

At the office, the mill manager is not in, but his secretary, a plain young woman with stout legs directs me to the supply shed.  There I am issued the standard blue safety hat, which I crank tight to the top of my head.  Past the corer and the loader, I go directly into the plant yard.  Immediately, I am pulled into the building to the follow the path of the cane—as an entranced witness to the digestion process of a great magical beast.

The music of the cane becomes discordant.  Pipes carry hisses and heat.  Rolling mills grind as spray makes the pulp soggy.  Men watch and tend.  Great caldrons roar with hot bubbling syrup.  Intense noise.  Relays click.  The boilers blare and charge the air.  In the violent destruction, the precious crystals take shape and are whirled from the centrifuge onto the beltway.  Mr. Clemont, the sugar loader, guides the belt onto the waiting dump trucks.  The transformation is complete.  The mountains of sugar are quiet.

As the light begins to fade, I leave the mill and head back to the car.  Two cars full of cane workers pass seemingly in chase.  The broken tailpipe sputters oily smoke.  My car starts easily as I regret the quickness of the dusk.  The road is well paved but the car notices the mud and loose cane dropped from the wagons.  I will spend the night at Mommom’s house.  Turning into the gravel drive, the house stands under the oaks where it watched the events of the Civil War.  A southern woman, she greets me with unbridled enthusiasm.  She pulls me close and the sparse whiskers brushed my cheek as she kisses.  “The back bedroom is yours, and Josephine made pralines.”  I step into the house.  The comfort settles in.  I hear the music again.

••••••

The narrative portfolio

As noted in the artist notes in the quotidian, I have repeated this voyage with the camera many times, relying on the deeper sense of discovery, forming images that respond to a self-narrative.  True, the first feelings of the repetition are often of “rare emotion.”  These help the creative visualization begin.  Then the process often evolves to a knowledge perspective as the image making and subsequent editing takes place.  An image of the Teche Theater (p 64) is an ordinary one of an old building on Main Street.  It recalls feelings of the 25¢ movies my brothers and cousins would share.  On thoughtful recollection, one recalls that the door to the right was the “colored entrance.”  All families and their generations sought to vicariously escape the “everydayness” of that world through the motion pictures, much like Binx in Percy’s Moviegoer.  The image thus becomes multi-layered and more than two dimensions—a photograph of an historic structure in a small southern town, a memory narrative in the journey of self-discovery, and a potential sign of an escape from alienated lives.  True, the viewer does not know all of the personal meaning and understandings in each photograph, as with any conversation, the receiving perception will be shaped by the viewer’s memories and images of self and the world.  Therein lies the magic of the process.  Maybe at a certain moment of seeing the viewer will have a flash of a familiarity, a remarkable perception, a shared understanding, or even a instant of pleasure, at catching sight of something that resonates with his view, or brings him closer to a new experience.  The photographer-narrator connects with the viewer-reader’s search for authenticity.

Risk of discovery

Sure, the risk of sounding pedantic and pompous in this process is equal to the risk of developing a portfolio of vacation snapshots, but the risk of not repeating and searching is far greater.  The alienation of our viewing audience may suggest that these images are too personal, to intimate for comfort.  There may also be a bias to photograph scenes and artifacts only in a documentary approach.  Allowing the discovery process to unfold may broaden the visual repertoire and be inclusive of portraits, still life, landscapes, figure, and so on.  In addition, sequencing of the images, diptychs, and triptychs may play an important role in the creation of the narrative.  The what and the how, and especially the technology to accomplish the image, are not important.  Authenticity is.

Continuing the search

Responding to our visible world, photography has found multiple modes, meanings, and purposes.  In considering repetition in photography, we may realize that the medium may serve some as an ideal vehicle to share the search for self.  This process may seem contrived to some, to others, they way they have been making photographs their entire photographic career.  Nevertheless, the use of the camera as an instrument of discovery in the search for human authenticity maybe just the synergy needed to help pull us all out of our everydayness.

••••••

Gene Beyt

* Quote sources:

Walker Percy, Message in the Bottle, Farrar, Straus, and  Giroux, New York, 1993, pages 84 and 97

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer, Knopf, New York, 1961, page 80