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Darkness and light…

By on April 30, 2016 in beauty, Greece, John D.C. Masters, John Masters, Paroikia, Paros, spiritual journey, spring in the Aegean, Uncategorized

It is Easter here.  The symbolic nature of the the life/death/life cycle are not lost on me.  My grief over the death of both my parents last year will continue to shake my psyche for some time.  This week I have been particularly sad.   My father and I had a troubled and difficult relationship.  Still, I miss his little emails about what he would be making for dinner, what he was reading…My mother?  Ah, yes…mama…

She was my center.   She was stability and gentleness, support and unconditional love.  Regardless of my age or maturity, she was there.  I would come home and she would greet me at the door with a hug.  If I had telephoned beforehand, she would have always asked, “What do you want for dinner?”  There was always food, hugs, warmth, encouragement.  Roast chicken. Pot roast.

Panagia

Amidst this crushing grief,  my family and I are all but forced to sell her house, the house where I grew up and, for 47 years of my life, the only home I have ever known.  It is a matter of practicality since none of us can afford to live there and pay the taxes–and for this I am ashamed.  I can only speak for myself.  I have had to reduce a source of protection, nurturing and golden memory into a commodity, something to be passed on to strangers.   May they find the same hub of stability there that I have known forever.

I decided 3 years ago to move to Paros full time, to make my home here, to try to sink roots in this rocky land.  The deaths of my parents has rendered my old compass obsolete and my maps out of date.   Previous points of reference have faded and mean too much or nothing at all.   My new compass is a thing of beauty–bronze, marble, sunlight and the wine-dark sea.  My new maps are crisp and unmarked.

So darkness and light, death and life…we grasp for handholds on our respective islands.  We find ourselves in treacherous waters, between rocks and the hardest of places.  Tonight at midnight the lights will go out and from behind the curtain the magic appears…a single trembling flame–hope for the hopeless, a light in the darkness.

Kalo Pascha!

–JDCM

Deep in the Ancient City…

By on April 19, 2016 in Athens Greece, beauty, darkroom work, Greece, John D.C. Masters, John Masters, silver darkroom, skill and craft, spiritual journey, Uncategorized, working

Below my hotel balcony the city breathes deeply.  Tribal drums motivate interpretive dance, guitars reverb surf music through metro tunnels, amplified bouzoukis in Syntagma stir a metallic thrum, mingling the aromatic sounds into a heady stew.  And the smells!  Food, concrete, diesel, piss and old, old stone.  Athens is alive!  In the distance I hear a saxophone, I imagine the player–sunglasses at night, hat on the sidewalk at his feet, the slow crooned blue woodwind wail runs through the ancient marble veins.  Voice carry up from the street–all the languages I have ever heard and many from central Asia, east Asia, Eurasia…The Cosmopolis…the world as a city.  It is here. I am here.  It is my home.  I am blessed.  I wear the sign of the anointed.  If you have to ask, you’ll never know.

I was in taxi and the driver and I were talking.  He told me had two jobs and was raising his three children by himself.  “You have three jobs then, ” I said.  He laughed in agreement.  “I think this is the beginning of something”, he said.  “There is only one choice now for us and it is that things will improve.  There is no other alternative.”  It must be the truth.

This is the beginning of something.  It is all happening here.  The Pope came to town.  There are rumbles of possibilities and energy flows, rich static arcing through the crowds in Monastiraki, Psirri, Exarchia, Sygrou Fix, Thissio, Keramikos…We wait for the great popular firework display, crescendos of chrysanthemums and showers of sparking lights heralding a New Age.  The Emperor will emerge, naked. The applause will be deafening, the laughter unending.  The party is always starting…

I have worked for the past few days deep in a secret archive in the city, a vault of imagination and celluloid.  We are alchemists turning crystals into precious metal.  Magicians.  The dancer moves across the page, fading into view.  Her body leaves atomic molecules, drifting bits of herself, richly perfumed droplets of life.  She bursts from her black background, glowing, free and transcendent.   This is what it is all about.  We plant our collective flags and cry “This is me, this is who I am!” We glow, shine and dance through the traffic, gathering stars in our arms, passing them out like leaflets to the big show.  Entasi!

dancer 1

 

–JDCM

Another year…

By on February 18, 2016 in beauty, biking, darkroom work, Greece, John D.C. Masters, John Masters, mountain biking in Greece, Paros, Polly Jo Masters, quiet islands, silver darkroom, skill and craft, spiritual journey, spring in the Aegean, Uncategorized, working

I am 51 and a day today.  This past year has been one that is still hitting me in waves, endless ripples from countless stones tossed in my emotional pool.  I contemplate making a phone call and suddenly realize there is will be no one on the other end of the line.  I imagine a voice and the softness of a cheek…and they are gone.  My mother will no longer look up from the New York Times Sunday crossword, over her glasses, and announce, “Well, that’s done!”  My father will no longer smack his lips after taking a sip of something tasty and raise his glass.  He was always one for toasts.  “Hear, hear,” she would chorus during better times.

Polly and Hilary in Provincetown, 1970. photo by Sara Ballard

Polly and Hilary in Provincetown, 1970.

I was thinking the other day that I have never been the “cool” guy.  Never hip, never dressed in the latest fashion…I was feeling down that day.  Then I realized I didn’t  care.  When I was younger, maybe, but then again I was envious of those around me who had better or more or newer or sexier (or so I believed)…not much weight there.  Pretty superficial stuff.  I hope they are happy in their respective lives.

So these days I do what I am wanting to do and this makes me happy.  I am not treading on the lives of others and I am moving forward and slightly uphill.  I am honouring my mother and my father in my life and activities.  I am finally getting around to reading a short biography of St. Augustine given to me by my sister a few years ago.  I am reading some Epicurus.  I am back to building fine scale WW 1 aircraft which give me great joy and satisfaction, not just in their execution but in the research involved.  I am in training for a very tough mountain bike race being held here March 6th.  I have a photo shoot coming up next week which I have been looking forward to for months.  It will be several hours of intense work, and then that stage will be done.  Then I develop the film.  Then I choose what to print, etc…intervals and stages, tension and release.  One day I am 50, and then the next day…

Biking here on Paros is a good metaphor for my life.  The stress of the uphill slogs are rewarded by not only the accomplishment but also the release of the inevitable downhill run, slaloming around rocks and through washed out sections of red dirt roads.  Then it is uphill again.

It all feels pretty cool to me.

–JDCM

Polly Jo Masters March 14, 1924 — December 4, 2015

By on December 6, 2015 in John D.C. Masters, John Masters, spiritual journey, Uncategorized

 

 

Polly Jo and JDCM, Provincetown 1967

Polly Jo and JDCM, Provincetown 1967

 

We mourn the passing of Polly Jo Masters of Ancramdale, NY who died peacefully at home on December 4, 2015 surrounded by her children, at the age of 91.  The family thanks the community of caregivers and friends who encircled her with love, companionship, laughter and music since 2008: Diane, Keavy, Joni, Elizabeth, Gaye, Peggy, Lolly, Anne, Julia, Jackie, Mandy, Mary, Carol, Brian, Becky, Harold, Gregg, David and Terry.

Born in Beckley, West Virginia on March 14, 1924, she was the daughter of Dr. John H. McCulloch and Effie Lajo Stalnaker.

After graduating from the University of Kentucky fate ushered her through the doors of Beckley’s WJLS radio station where, as “Side-Saddle Sue”, she hosted a weekly radio program.   She played banjo and ukulele, singing cowboy music, reading local news and engaging in easy humor.  A year or so later she departed for New York City, where she pursued a career in musical theater.  She sang cabaret, stage managed many productions including “Oh, Captain!” and was a principal in the summer traveling company of ‘Brigadoon.’  In 1951, she and a business partner, the director George Quick, renovated several old stables and barns on the Vanderbilt Estate in Hyde Park, NY, establishing the Hyde Park Playhouse.  While in Hyde Park she also assisted the late Eleanor Roosevelt with the NY State Literacy Project.  When theatrical success required a press agent, she and Quick hired a young writer, Hilary Masters.  Polly and Hilary fell in love, married and ran the Playhouse for the next 7 years.

In 1960 they sold the Playhouse and moved to their new home on Woods Drive in Ancramdale, New York.  From the mid-1960s she was very active in her community.  She volunteered for the American Cancer Society, worked with the local PTA and was a friendly and welcoming face at the polls during election time.  In 1968 she ran successfully for President of the Pine Plains Board of Education, becoming the first woman in local history to hold that honour.  She held that post until 1975 and was, among many other things, instrumental in the conception and building of the Stissing Mountain Junior-Senior High School, also the first of its kind in the region.  From 1979 until the mid-1990s she contributed a regular column for a local newspaper, the Roe-Jan Independent, under the heading “One Side to Everything”.  She wrote about politics, local and national education, television, rural homeownership, the origins of linguistic memory and the diminutive interior dimensions of the original Ancramdale Post Office.

She is pre-deceased by her brother, John H. McCulloch Jr., her parents and her former husband, Hilary Masters, whom she divorced in 1985.  She is survived by her sister-in-law, Carolyn McCulloch of Beckley, W. Va., as well as her three children, Joellen Masters of Lexington, Massachusetts, Catherine Masters of Deer Isle, Maine, John D.C. Masters of Paros, Greece and a grand-child, Kaolin R.E. Pitcher of Portland, Maine.  She was a mother, a grandmother, a prescient community leader, a lover of Broadway musicals, English mysteries, a fount of knowledge and a source of no-nonsense unending love and support to all.  She covered the ground she walked on.

–JDCM

Just an update…

By on October 29, 2015 in 35 mm photography, autumn, beauty, biking, craft, darkroom work, Greece, John D.C. Masters, John Masters, mountain biking in Greece, Paroikia, Paros, quiet islands, silver darkroom, skill and craft, Uncategorized, working

I have always loved the change of seasons.  Whether in the Hudson Valley where I grew up or the small island in the Aegean Sea where I now live.  I welcome each new season with joy and relief, only to say good riddance three months later after weariness sets in.  This autumn is no different and there are many changes to go along with the weather.  Clocks have been set back.  Tea time seems more meaningful as darkness falls.

I have been living in an apartment full of boxes for the past two months.  All of my books, shelving, camera gear, odds and ends…have been packed up and ready to be moved.  At first it was an exciting feeling, to come home to this pyramid of brown cardboard.  It has grown stale as the day approaches when I can finally begin to move from one side of town to the other.  As one friend remarked last night, moving house is inspiring and makes one reevaluate routines.  Like the change of seasons, this move will give me a new perspective.  I need it.

My small photo show was, on many levels, a superb success.  Many people came to the opening and I was struck by the wide variety of people I know here on Paros: people involved in the arts, those I know through the local biking community, others I have come to know over the years, students from a local art school…people who would ordinarily not mix.  They crammed into the space provided by a small Italian restaurant and had a good time.  I guess that was the point, really, to have a small gathering on a night in mid-October when there was ordinarily little to do.  Many compliments, many questions…alas, not a single sale so I am stuck with 22 framed and matted photos.  So I will choose one to put up in my new apartment.  There is a part of me that wants to just burn the rest.  But what to do with the frames and glass?  Eventually I will get around to scanning the photos so people can see them online, which suddenly feels like cheating.  Now I don’t want to do that.  If you missed the show, you missed it.  Is that so selfish?

I wasn’t asking a huge amount for these photos.  They were priced inexpensively.  If I had sold five I would have broken even on the costs.  I think many people have no idea of the work that goes into a single image.  Even had these been digital images, the work would have been substantial.  They are not, of course, so we are talking days of labor to get the picture right and that is before matting, framing, the overall cost for the exhibit opening…I guess I am taking page from Robert Fripp’s advice to artists–work for free–an expensive venture.

My list for today is as long as my arm and I must get it all done.

–JDCM

 

 

Asleep, then waking…

By on August 30, 2015 in Athens Greece, beauty, Greece, John D.C. Masters, John Masters, Paroikia, Paros, spiritual journey, Uncategorized

The streets of Athens feel empty at 04:00.  This ancient city is sleeping.

I have returned home from my father’s memorial service in Provincetown.  It was a lovely and moving weekend laughter and tears.  On Sunday we scattered his ashes in the bay.  We boarded the rented schooner and set sail on a foggy and grey afternoon, light winds from the south.  As the skipper cut the motor and the crew raised sail, I was struck by how calm and peaceful the air had become, silent but for the waves lapping at the hull.  Light mist settled upon us with caring hands. As we came about my sisters and I stood against the gunwale and poured him into the briny blue-green, the water turning momentarily milky as the ash melted into the deep.  And he was gone.  Afterwards we gathered with friends and told tales of the man.  We watched a moving short film prepared by his widow, and ate some food.  We all agreed he would have enjoyed  it.  He would have also exclaimed, at one point, “Enough already!”, his modesty finally outweighing his pride.  So long, weary traveler!  Kalo taxidhi!

I have been musing on happiness–again.  I have heard that it is an ‘inside job.’ If so then what are the external expressions?  I know that I am happy yet my world, to some, may look messy, chaotic, perhaps unsystematic.  There is nothing neat and orderly about it.  It is not sanitary or perfectly aligned.  Maybe a need for external neatness, a desk of neatly sharpened pencils and carefully arranged in/out boxes is actually a cry for help?  I know my father’s office, even when he was young and dementia had not taken its toll, was what would have been thought of as messy and disorganized. In fact, everything was exactly where it needed to be.  His internal life, his ethos, was ship-shape and trim.  His morality and sense of self were in alignment and he was happy.  And he left a desk of unfinished work–a sign of a life well-lived.

I celebrate the dust and disorder of the external and understand how it feeds my imagination.  It is a zen geometry, creating an oblique stack of books, random pieces of folded paper, a crumbling temple on a rock overlooking the noise and chaos–all precarious. It allows me to get lost, discovering the jewel in the mud that others will never discover.  I have permission to get muddy.  To find joy and laughter in the lack of right-angles, the subtle aspects of color and shades of grey…That is fun.  That is happiness.  Creation is messy work, full of uncertainty and risk.

Macmillan-Wharf-view-2015

–JDCM

A bit of dark backstory…

By on July 27, 2015 in John D.C. Masters, John Masters, spiritual journey, Uncategorized

I have recently been examining some of the bits and bobs that make up my past.  Some are quite old–worn gears that skip teeth, and clank around rustily bent.  If I listen too close, I can hear them late at night.  They can keep me awake.  Most of the time I pay them little heed, but they are still there.  Here are a couple…

In 1975 my father began his first teaching position as Writer-in-Residence at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.  A year later he convinced my mother to move with me to be with him for a year.  We packed up the family car and moved from the idyllic, bucolic, verdant village of Ancramdale, NY to the suburbs of Des Moines.  There were few trees then, many plastic houses, minuscule back yards.  I was 11 years old.  I was pulled from the familiar and dumped into what I felt was a terrifying experience.  I was very unhappy.  my very cool bicycle was stolen from school and the school did nothing to help even thought they knew who had stolen it. I was beaten up outside my homeroom and the teachers did nothing then as well.   I acted out in all the ways that children do when they have been traumatised–I lied, stole, lied some more, failed at school, snuck around at night dressed in black.  But being the 1970s, I fell through the cracks. Our shitty suburban rental seethed with anger, fighting and disappointed expectations.  My parents were in the painful middle stages of a separation that 9 years later ended in divorce.  I became a latchkey kid.  I learned to be a ghost and disappeared into the background.  We left Iowa in the spring of 1977 and moved back home.  Thank God.

That summer my parents sent me to summer camp.  They needed some time alone, I think.  For me it was more terror, yet I was resigned to my fate.  Camp Berkshire was a horror.  The counselor who oversaw our little cabin was a drunk and when I alerted the head counselor that this guy had been drinking a lot while driving us all around, he was fired.  One night I was shaken awake by this guy.  He smelled of booze.  He whispered that he knew it was me that had snitched.  He held a knife to my throat and told me that if I ever did that again he would kill me.  So I kept my trap shut.  A few weeks later my parents came to visit me.  My father took this picture.  I have only recently seen this photograph.  It says a lot, I think.  Even back then I was white-knuckling it.

 

JDCM at Camp Berkshire, 1977.

JDCM at Camp Berkshire, 1977.

–JDCM

Happiness…

By on July 21, 2015 in beauty, craft, Greece, spiritual journey, Uncategorized, working

Gouna is a traditional Greek fish dish–sundried mackerel, seasoned and grilled.  Fasolakia are a type of green bean, like haricot vert, but much longer.  They make an excellent salad.  Together they make an excellent dinner with friends, family and loved ones.  Especially overlooking the bay of Paroikia at sunset.

Gouna, fasolakia and Paros at sunset...

Gouna, fasolakia and Paros at sunset…(photo  by Angelique Tsantanis)

 

 

I have so much on my mind…so many things to say that seem extremely important to pass along.  When I feel this way I become verbose and sophomoric.  Best to say nothing.  I will say, however,  that the inevitability of change has been on my mind for the past month or so.  I can let it go.

The close-up...

The close-up. (photo by Angelique Tsantanis)

One choice I have to is to try to stay ahead of the curve.  Although I have never surfed, I feel an apt metaphor lies in that activity.  I can either ride the wave or let the wave ride me.  I have let many waves ride me over the years.  Time to shoot the curl.

–JDCM

 

In Memorium, Hilary Thomas Masters (February 3, 1928-June 14, 2015)

By on June 17, 2015 in beauty, John D.C. Masters, John Masters, Paros, quiet islands, skill and craft, spiritual journey, Uncategorized, working

It goes something like this…

Let me tell you a story of a man who went down to the sea in ships, of an imaginary knight who took to the sky, of the struggles and joys of a man possessed by love and all things worth living for…

I knew my father.  I knew him as only his son and friend can.  As father and son we attempted to fly, to join up.  But it was as comrades and friends that we finally earned our wings.  As an only child in what would today be called a “dysfunctional family” he came to us with whatever he had learned from his grandfather, an old 19th century cavalry soldier: deep morality, sense of duty and a set of standards to which perhaps even he could never rise.  Hard work was forever its own reward.  This was sometimes bitter and angry when mixed with his love for us, yet that never stopped us from loving each other, as only great and deep friendships can attest.  He was, after all, my father.

He was a sailor, a skier, a swimmer, a writer, a newspaper man, an historian, a photographer.  He learned how to build with wood, cement, paper, plastic, paint.  He drove his Morgan Plus-4 with joy and calm excitement.  His love of history and adventure drew him to the stories of the great aces of the First World War, an age of modern chivalry when derring-do flew hand-in-hand with honor and comradery.  He became Dilly O’Dally, the Irish ace of the skies over the Western Front in 1917.  He was, after all, my father and I knew him for 50 years.

Writing was his real work, although he taught for many years to pay the bills.  “One must always work,” he would say to me.   This ethos kept him laboring, pushing, grinding away at his desk every day, word by word, sentence by sentence.  I do this now, but in a different medium, as do my sisters.  He was, after all, my father and I knew him for 50 years as he taught me of these things.

When I saw him just a month or so ago, he said to me, “Tell your mother that I love her…”  Despite a painful and long separation and divorce, he asked about my mother often.  Maybe some regret plagued him, a guilt that only he could really ever know.  Or perhaps not.  I think it was just love bubbling up from below, or a memory of love, a memory of green trees in the Hudson Valley or a beach on Cape Cod, of three children and a home, a family unlike the family he had known as a child.  He was, after all, our father for well over 50 years and we loved him in the only way we had ever been taught.

Like Greek drama, there is no surprise finish.  At the end of the story the great ace of the skies, the sailor, the man who loved life ends the struggle and, running low on fuel and mortally wounded by the betrayals of age, banks his delicate spruce and canvas craft and heads west.  He was, after all, my father and I loved him and knew him for 50 years.

HTM, 2006

HTM, 2006

–JDCM