Magical memories and magical thinking
Mourning the documentarian of apartheid, what Elon doesn't get, and reflections from a hospital window.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Remembering Peter
IN 1995, I INVITED Peter Magubane, the great South African photographer, to the Bay Area, where he stayed with my wife and me. He came to judge the entries to that year’s Mother Jones International Documentary Fund awards, which I had created with photographers Ken Light and Michelle Vignes. Two years later, we again invited him to the U.S. to receive the fund’s Leica Lifetime Achievement Award in New York, where he shared a dinner table with Leonard Nimoy and Gene Wilder.
There have recently been tributes to Peter, who died last Monday, including a lengthy one in the New York Times. My story today concerns a different side of the man who endured beatings, internal exile, and solitary confinements to photograph the horrors of apartheid and the struggle against it.
After his friend Nelson Mandela was elected president in 1994, Peter undertook a project to document life in the more rural provinces of South Africa. He told us he had traveled with a white journalist and on one occasion they had stopped at the home of an Afrikaner farmer. Peter stuck out his hand, but the farmer refused to shake it. The journalist chatted with the farmer for a few more minutes and, as they were leaving, Peter handed the farmer his business card. “He put my card in his pocket—next to his heart,” Peter told us and laughed.
We enjoyed dinners and parties with Peter during the week he stayed with us and we heard many more stories, some harrowing and others hilarious. On the day he was to leave, I called a cab to take him to the airport and when it came, we embraced at the door. I handed him my business card, smiled, and said, “I hope you will put this card next to your heart.”
“Oh, no,” said Peter, “I think I will put it in my back pocket.”
Rest in peace, my friend.
EXHIBITS
DON’T MISS Linda Okazaki’s retrospective, Into the Light, at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. Showing through February 25. I wrote the introduction for the book accompanying the exhibit.
ON SATURDAY, I delivered my photograph, Red-tailed Tropicbird, to the Collective Visions Gallery, where will it be on view as part of an annual juried exhibition of Washington state artists. The show opens next Saturday, January 13, at the CVS gallery, 331 Pacific Avenue, Bremerton, Washington, and runs through February 23.
WHAT’S BARBARA THINKING?
My lack of a Fermi paradox
PHYSICISTS AND SCI-FI aficionados are puzzled by the question: If the pre-conditions for life are so ubiquitous in our universe, where’s ET? While living beings likely exist in other parts of our universe, we have no convincing direct evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. In 1950, Enrico Fermi posed this question as an offhand remark. During a lunchtime conversation about life on other planets, he reportedly asked “Where are they?” This strikes me as a perfectly reasonable question that poses no paradox. Where are they, indeed? Find out and then tell me all about them! I stand with Enrico.
A paradox only arises for people who add a conceited second question: Since humans are so cool, who wouldn’t want to hang out with us? Uncovering this hidden assumption resolves the paradox. If intelligent beings are intelligent enough travel around the universe, then they’re smart enough to avoid the likes of us.
I intend no disrespect. Apart from a few invasive species such as Homo sapiens, Earth holds fantastic life forms. But is Earth truly a desirable enough destination for extraterrestrial tourists? As the James Webb telescope has shown us, there are way cooler places in this universe. Even if our galaxy were attractive to the alien cognoscenti, it’s doubtful they’d stop by our immediate neighborhood. People from all over the world travel to New York City, but essentially zero of them are headed for your Aunt Esther’s house in Queens.
My second objection involves interstellar travel. Despite Elon Musk’s confidence in his Martian ventures, no one on earth knows how travel between galaxies can be achieved. Beyond the engineering problems, there’s our pitifully short attention spans. Earlier cultures produced massive, seemingly impossible technological works. Pyramids of Egypt, anyone? How about the walls of Sacsayhuaman? And then they stopped. They were conquered or the climate changed or they started believing in different gods. Humans have trouble focusing for more than ninety minutes at a time and most cultural groups haven’t ever maintained a massive public works project for more than a few centuries. Intergalactic travel might well require a focus of 100,000 years. Just as we now laugh at the alchemists’ conviction that they could transmute lead into gold, humans may well one day laugh at the idea that intergalactic travel is achievable by any intelligent life form in our universe. Possible doesn’t equal inevitable. You know Star Trek? Turns out it was all made up.
My last objection concerns the subset of paradoxers who formulate the question as a time problem. Since many stars with habitable planets are more than a billion years older than the sun, some alien life forms may have a billion-year jump start on us. That’s plenty of time to perfect intergalactic space travel, they say. But what if a billion-year head start produces more Buddhas and fewer Elons? More life forms fascinated with contemplating time and space and fewer with conquering it? It’s rank hubris to imagine that our species’ insatiable drive to explore and exploit must be an inherent feature of intelligence. Genghis Khan was a really smart guy, but he was only human. –Barbara Ramsey
PERSONAL JOURNAL
Through the glass
THE VIEW FROM her sixth-floor room at the University of Washington Medical Center was dominated by the football stadium. Beyond were the trees and houses of Bellevue, where eight years ago the art museum had displayed a quilted outfit she’d sewn and worn while attending medical school. We’ve now lived here long enough that places in the city hold memories like that: The restaurant where a niece told us she was gay. The pier where we heard Booker T. play on a sweaty summer evening. The park where we kissed and she gave me a fragile Ukrainian egg she’d dyed.
For the past month, a health emergency involving her heart has taken over our lives. On the last Friday of the year she was admitted to the hospital. As I stared out the window of her room in a mild daze, waiting for a report from the cardiologist that would decide our fate, I looked down on the Montlake Cut, which connects Lake Union to the much larger Lake Washington on the east side. I recognized the channel and remembered a bird I’d photographed there earlier in the year: a Great Blue Heron, with stealth and method, fishing in the shallow water near the shore.
On New Year’s Eve, the cardiologist came to the room to deliver the news. The problem wasn’t what they initially thought it to be. They think she will be okay. She will need medication but probably not major surgery. We could go home.
That room is now committed to memory. The soft light from the window. The timbre of the doctor’s voice. And the recollection of a blue heron precariously holding a tiny fish by its fin.
Coming up:
Barbara’s all-time best nonfiction list, photographer Viktor Kolar on the town that communism left behind, and the wonders of Wood River Delta.
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Barbara.
So nice to discover what a good writer and thinker you are! Really enjoyed your intergalactic musings