Ain't No Grave

I'd love it if you went back and read The Fall of the House of Cooper, my post about May, buying a house, and death. But it's long, so let me give you the pertinent quotes:

1. "Today is my birthday. Every year in late May I have a freakin life crisis."

2. "On the day after we signed the contract, someone very close to me was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The cursor has been blinking at the end of that sentence for a good five minutes. What follows? What can you write after that? It says nothing. It says everything."

3. "Upon further consideration, there is plenty to fear. Photographs make you look at things as they are, rather than as you’d like them to be. That’s a scary turn of events."

Alright. Here we go.

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It is 9:13 PM on 25May11. My dad is in the Solace Center, dying of pancreatic cancer. We were told on Sunday that he had "days to a week." The cancer has occluded his stomach, and he cannot eat or drink.

We are so blessed. He is in no pain at this time, and the nausea is kept under control by drugs. You may not believe that these are blessings. You may say that they are only mitigations of an awful curse. You'd be wrong.

I don't know why I'm writing this post. I suppose one reason is that I can, because I know he'll never read it. I've never wanted to write about him, because this blog is an exercise in ego and self-promotion, and I was horrified that he might think I was using his illness to gain attention. Oddly enough, I don't care if I ever gain attention again.

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I called Madame Rex last night from the floor. I was drunk. Rex said these things we do, dance and art and vision, will matter in the end. I said they won't. But how ashamed I would be if he heard me say it. More importantly, where would I be if, all his long life, he had agreed?

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My wife is the most amazing woman in the world. Which is pretty strange, because my mom is also the most amazing woman in the world. I don't know how they manage that.

It is so horrible to die. When this started I told Jes that I knew how I wanted to go: Shot by a rifle at a great distance, just after she dies of old age. Quick, with no foreshadowing. Not this slow march. Not these moments, these last times. The last time you eat, the last time you see your dog, the last time you hear birds in the morning.

But Jes walks in with waffle fries. Dad has asked for them. I can't ask for her: She is more than I could ask for, if I had a thousand lifetimes to phrase the question. You just have to take it, and be amazed by it, and be thankful for it. Like waffle fries. Dad eats them, and savors them, when he hasn't eaten anything in weeks. It's a miracle. I can't believe we're crying over someone eating some fries.

To live is to die. Is it horrible to live?

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God has built the world this way. In His beautiful plan we all die. People file in, talk about comfort. We thank them. People from work want to help, to make us food. We thank them, too. Everyone says, "If there's anything we can do . . ." And I thank them, and I know what they mean, but the semantics of the question make me sad. What can you do? Cure death?

The Bard visits. I can remember once in the middle of the night, my dad yelling down at us from through bedroom window because we'd just blown something up in the yard. We must have been 17. And now Dad looks up at him from the bed.

Later, Bard and I sit outside in the rockers. Old people orbit around us, some walking, some in wheelchairs with catheter bags full of bloody urine. We reaffirm our commitment to dying before we get old. But just a few weeks ago, we were sitting in the rockers on my porch, and we said that most of what's wrong in our lives is because we never planned on making it to 30.

I turn 30 in four days. A few weeks ago, I wished I could tell my 17-year-old self to finish school quicker, save more money, make better choices. But the plan to die young sure led to some hellacious living. So when the chaplain and the visitors ask what they can do, I say nothing. We are meant to die. To die is to live.


[photo by Sharon Cooper]

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Stephen Hawking is one of my heroes. Diagnosed with ALS at 21, he's lived 44 more years to become the Einstein of his generation. I've written him letters about how much he inspired me. Fan mail for physicists.

Hawking recently reasserted his position that there is nothing beyond the physical realm. "Heaven," he said, "is a fairy tale for those who are scared of the dark." He didn't read my letters, and he'll never read this blog, but still:

I know something about the dark. I can render its likeness and take its measure. I can tell you how starlight behaves in a lens. I can tell you what the wind sounds like just after your flashlight dies. And I can tell you, Dr. Hawking, that you should be afraid of the dark.

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Dad has given me his Leica. The cursor has been blinking at the end of that sentence for a good five minutes. What follows? What can you write after that? It says nothing. It says everything.

I don't want it. I want him to have it. But he can't have it. So it's mine now, the finest camera I've ever owned.



We look through a photo album. From the early 80s. My birthdays. I can pick out the photos that were taken with the Leica. Or maybe just the photos taken by my dad, the ones that were well seen and well shot.

I found a picture of my dad in his robe, standing in the apse of the church he served in 1985. Without knowing of the old one, I took another photo of him in the same room, in the same robe, last fall. It makes me feel better about the Leica. There's a quarter century between the two moments. Life moves on. Somebody better take some pictures.

I try to tell myself that it's okay to be afraid of the dark. Really, it doesn't matter if it's okay or not, because I am terrified. If Dr. Hawking isn't, he's a braver man than I. But I'm learning that bravery will leave you there in the darkness. Reason and achievement will pass away.

What's left is something my dad taught me: Never doubt in the dark what God has shown you in the light.












































Edit, 29May11. Dad passed away from us last night. My gratitude eclipses my grief. A life well-lived, no more sickness, no more sorrow: Thanks be to God.

It was Henley--and yes, it is.

"I think it was Blake who said, 'I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.' Well, that's a bunch of bullshit."

-my dad

Operation Brightstar

Serious photographers will know what I'm talking about: You're at a shoot, maybe a wedding or something, and Uncle Herb spots you. You can see him from across the room, making his way through the crowd, with a tiny point and shoot suspended around his neck by a giant strap with big yellow NIKON letters on it. You try to evade, but he's locked on like a cruise missile.

"Hey, I'm Herb."

"Hey Herb, I'm a photographer."

"Yeah, me too. So . . ."

"And by that I mean I'm at work."

"Right. What do you think about . . ."

"Herb, are you back in the kitchen talking to the chef about his stove?"

"No, but . . ."

"So why do you think I can take my client's valuable time to talk about cameras?"

"Speaking of cameras, you're a Nikon shooter, eh?"

". . . Yes."

"Me too. The autofocus is so much faster than Canon."

"Yes, it is."

"Especially on my Coolpix 9,000,000 XL-TTYL-BBF-STFU point and shoot with face-recognition, red-eye reduction, vibration elimination and a super fast f5.6 lens. I've got more pixels than the national debt."

"I'm happy for you, Herb. Now, if you don't mind . . ."

"I took some great travel pictures on my vacation last summer. Still got em on the camera. Wanna see?"

And that, DarkTopo fans, that creeping cringe of a feeling you get when someone is trying to show you his vacation pictures, is what you should be feeling right now. I took some awesome photos on my vacation. Wanna see?









I have led a charmed life. Know how I can tell? Because there has been an astounding surplus of moments where I look around myself and think, "Hot damn, how did I get here?"

Shaking hands with presidents, laying beneath my tripod in the middle of a forest fire, dodging brass at the shooting range, crawling through abandoned buildings in the River District: None of it has been even half as surreal as stepping onto the deck of a Carnival cruise ship.

Suffice to say I had never planned on boarding a cruise ship, and it came as quite a surprise. There was not a lot of time to prepare. I traveled light: Only four cameras, four lenses, a tripod and a strobe.

And that was good, because there was much to capture. In fact, the first few hours were well nigh overwhelming. You might even say it was an assault.



The smartest thing to do when you're under assault is usually retreat. That we did. Upon boarding the ship we ran down the woozy corridors to our cabin and locked the door. After a few minutes, I gathered the nerve to look out the peephole.





You may not have noticed, but I am generally a minimalist. On the Carnival Fantasy, a minimalist is pretty much screwed. Everywhere you look, there is too much.

But a ship is similar to most enormous things in life: It moves forward, whether you want it to or not. And if you lock yourself in your room when you embark from Charleston, the next thing you know, the skyscrapers of Miami will be specks on the horizon:


(100% crop from my longest lens on the D70)

So the wise retreat. The foolish, and photographers, counter-attack.

Too Much

The ship is big. I'm sure you can look up the numbers somewhere, but what's important is that it held about 1,000 more people than the town I grew up in. As if that weren't enough, about 60% of the guests were spring breakers. Of those, it seemed 95% were female. And of those, it seemed that only about 5% had brought any clothes.

Now let me word this very carefully. I can neither confirm nor deny that a ship crammed full of drunk, bikini-clad women is a photographer's gold mine. But, and I say this in all honesty: It ain't my scene. I have no problem with partying, and I have no problem with ships, but if you put them together, people start having fun.

Lest you think I'm a prude, allow me to refer you to the epic Fight For Your Right series (Parts I, II, and III) and the Ozzfest essay. DarkTopo is populated by crazy drunk people with no clothes.

But the difference is that those people are partying almost out of desperation. There's a compulsive quality to it that fits right in among the rest of the work here, if only because I shoot most of these photos compulsively. The people aboard the ship with us were relaxing. It was almost as if they were on vacation.

So I was lost. But, to paraphrase the old photojournalism cliche about tragedy, the only thing worse than drunks is undocumented drunks. So:









The Application of Reason

All around us the most amazing work was being done. I have spent a lot of time photographing trains. Trains have nothing on this.





Rand says that production is the application of reason to the problem of survival. I counted 500 containers on one of those ships, and another cruiser told me that they each weigh 14 tons. So it seems survival must be a troubling problem, indeed. And yet there we sat in a hot tub, guzzling alcohol, trying our best to do away with our reason. If there's any place less DarkTopo than a cruise ship, I haven't found it yet.

So what I need, reader, is an anchor. And I'll sit on a platform in Freeport harbor, photographing ships as they slide by in the night.

Sunsets

If you do a search for "sunsets" on DarkTopo, you'll find nothing but eye-rolls. Well, until now.

Aboard ship, life is punctuated by sunsets. If you're like me, and you've never lived with a flat western horizon, they are the most amazing, gut-wrenching sunsets you've ever seen.

Looking back, I don't think I've ever taken a picture of a sunset before. That's because I have trouble dealing with the limits of my medium. Back to that anchored platform in the harbor: You can't buy a tripod sturdy enough to get the shot. And there's not a camera, digital or otherwise, that can render a sunset with anything but mockery.

But still. You try.







The Slithery Dee

The best picture I took of the ocean is here. I include the quote from the Cancer Man because, of course, everyone knows that UFOs live under the ocean. And because I've made it four years on DarkTopo without quoting Nietzsche, so why start now?

The quote is also apt. There was a strange sense of timelessness to every moment aboard ship. The ocean looks like it did when Columbus sailed over it. Sometimes when we were in our cabin, I'd glance over at the window and feel like the sea was in the room with us. Some might say that's comforting; some might say it's horrifying. I say it's a starting point.













VacationTopo

Melvillian metaphors aside, the cruise was pretty awesome. Here are some photos from my vacation.









A Hard Rain

The next to last day of any vacation is when dread starts to creep in. We found ourselves in Key West. My parents very generously paid for us to fly in an open cockpit byplane over the island. So we covered land, sea, and air in one vacation.

Before the last flight, a supercell thunderstorm built up over the tip of Florida and started heading our way. The pilot's wife showed us the radar on her IPad, but it was obvious: A developing wall cloud coming down from the north, smooth and dark and sinister. The flight was canceled. By the time we left the airport, the rain was falling in giant cold drops.

It was one of the worst storms I've been through in years. I loved it. We got stuck in a parking garage, soaked and shivering. Later, other passengers would tell us they had seen water spouts out over the ocean.



Is it cynical to look for trouble in paradise? Maybe. Or maybe I was just comforted to know that here, too, they have dark moments. They run in from the beach. They watch the skies.

You might say I just don't know how to relax. Maybe you'd be right.

The last night we went to dinner. Have I mentioned dinner? Dinner was amazing. Just ridiculous. I think I ate filet mignon four out of the six nights. Anyway, half way through our dinner, a voice came over the ship-wide public address system and said: "Operation Brightstar, Operation Brightstar, Operation Brightstar. Empress 218."

The din of the dining room hushed only for a moment. Jes and I shared a glance. This was the first time we'd heard anything like it. Our waiter was an Indian guy named Sam, and we asked him what it meant.

"A medical emergency," he said. We were still 18 hours out from port.

I woke up in the night, motion sick. I could feel the ship rolling over the waves. I turned on the TV to the "Cruise Channel" and saw that we were traveling at the ship's maximum speed of 20 knots.

I woke up again around quarter to five in the morning, and we were in Charleston, three hours early. From our window I could see them drop the gangplank. I watched for a long time to see if they'd roll out a stretcher, and then I wondered just what the hell I thought I was doing, and went back to bed.

I don't know if there's a moral to this story. Maybe it's like that old philosopher guy said; when you look for trouble, trouble looks for you. Maybe everyone just wants to talk about their vacation.

In any event, I took some awesome photos.


[photo by Jessica Newton]

Larry White makes me nervous.

Another wedding with Larry White. The cool thing about working with real photographers, rather than the namby pamby flowers-and-sunsets bunch, is a certain expectation of fearlessness. You do what it takes to get the shot.

On the other hand, there is this. Everybody makes mistakes. Walking into a reception and seeing a swimming pool always makes me think of Chekov's gun. By the time the party is over, someone will be in that pool. My job is to make sure it isn't me.

And, frankly, that's why it's good to hire a photographer whose experience includes something other than weddings, little kids in cute outfits, and dandelions in the sun. A misstep into a pool will ruin the wedding. A misstep here will get you killed.

Or maybe that's an unnecessary dramatization. But it would make a nice slogan: When Max Cooper shoots your wedding, no one goes home in a body bag.

A couple more shots here.

Makes You Stronger.