I was explaining something to him from a documentary that Sonia had shown Raf and me. It was years ago when we saw it, so I was a bit unclear.
But it was about failure, and how almost inevitable it is biologically.
An example?
Well, today I walked under a palm tree, and saw the ground beneath it completely obscured with pea-sized seeds.
How many of them will become a palm?
(Could make the same analogy of semen, but this is not that sort of blog….)
Well, I remembered all that last night, after I had called my doctor—a terrific woman—to ask her to review Iguanas. She’s bright, funny, an excellent practitioner. Only one problem!
Her specialty is geriatrics….
Stop that sniggering!
Well, well—she said sure, as I thought she would, and then I returned to the problem. For a book is at least potentially a seed. How to get it to grow? How to ensure that it won’t be, like the seeds this morning, one more book among the millions of others that people walk by, unheeding?
Well, I’m ruminative these days, and continued thinking of the old. And also of the documentary. And then, of course, it hit me.
She was in the documentary all those years ago, and I was fascinated by her story. She was born on 22 April 1909 into a prominent Jewish family. Had a wonderful childhood and then, in her teens, defied her father: she went to med school. World War II erupted, and she fled to Belgium. She returned to Turin, and lived in hiding.
Didn’t stop working, though! She somehow got hold of eggs and continued her investigation of “limb extirpation of chick embryos.” (Don’t ask, I don’t know….) Then the war ended, and an Italian colleague living in St. Louis invited her for a semester to work at Washington University.
Stayed thirty years!
Then picked up, and went back home to Italy. Then, in the 80’s she won the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology.
She had discovered, or helped discover, nerve growth hormone.
Well, that’s an achievement! That puts Iguanas to shame! And that’s not all—she’s a senator for life in the Italian Senate.
Great story, hunh? And she is now, by the way, still going strong. Maybe because she puts drops of nerve growth hormone each morning into her eyes. Take a look at her—what a charmer!
Well, well—back to thinking of the old. And then I began to wonder about Imogen Cunningham, and her book After Ninety.
Cunningham was a photographer—one of the greats. And she got around—photographing Martha Graham, Darius Milhaud, a whole cluster of greats. Then she got into photographing old people. And that’s where I saw the face that prepared me. Here it is.
She was a
distinguished radiologist who asked me to photograph her. I wasn’t taking on commissions anymore,
but I did it because she didn’t care if she looked old, and she didn’t hate her
face.
That’s what
the caption says. But no…
She wasn’t
a distinguished radiologist. At least not to me. She was the face I knew one
day I would see.
Maybe it
was just being the youngest that explained the bond between my mother and me.
But I think it was more. I sat often and stared at the photo and wondered when I would see the reality.
Well, I
lost the book but not the image. Then I lived the reality and created another one—a book I called Life, Death and Iguanas.
And now I
have the image again—peering at me, challenging me, accompanying me as I go
into my own third age….
