#frederick franck

“Astonishing. Getting older and older, I still stand here at this window, watching as if never having watched anything like it before – the wrens, juncos, and purple finches picking the seeds strewn on the pile of frozen snow. Through my breath condensing into fog on cold window pane, I still see bare branches chasing their shadows in the icy wind, black threads of water crinkling through fissures in the frozen river. I am aware that what I am seeing is no more, no less than the great Mystery, that of being here at all, that of seeing it – as if from the other side of a mirror – snow, birds, my breath still condensing, that breath that started so long ago as my first cry.”

I was five years old. My mother and a friend I was expected to address as “Aunt” had taken us children to a modest little tea garden with swings and seesaws on the edge of our small town on the Dutch-Belgian border. It sported the elegant French name of “Les Champs Elysees”: the Elysian Fields — Celestial Fields of Bliss … I can still see and hear the trio that was playing on the rickety bandstand: the thin, sorrowful violinist in his patent leather shoes, the bald, rotund pianist, the bosomy lady in white tulle, a moaning cello clamped between her short, plump thighs.

The other children were still swinging and seesawing when I got bored, and as mother and the pseudo-aunt, with her long nose, were absorbed in the music — which did not prevent them from chattering rapturously in whispers — I saw my chance to escape across a narrow stream, and found myself in a sun-drenched meadow. I lay down in the fragrant, swaying grass, tall enough to make me unfindable, and listened to the trio far away. Then, suddenly there was a loud zooming close to my ear and I was terrified: a velvety bee circled around my head, almost touching it.

But ignoring me, it sat down on a hairy purple flower that was so close to my head that it looked huge and vague, and started to suck … At that moment something happened: all my fear evaporated, but so did bee and sun and grass . .. and I.

For at that instant sunlight and sky, grasses, bee and I merged, fused, became one, and still: remained sun and sky and grass and bee and I. It lasted for a heartbeat, an hour, a year … Then, as abruptly, I was I again, but filled with an indescribable bliss — were they not Elysian Fields?

The trio was still playing the tune that I remember to this day, and I can whistle it for you anytime you wish … I had probably  come as close to reality as I ever was to come in this life.

—Frederick Franck, excerpted from The Awakened Eye ( a companion volume to The Zen of Seeing), published by Alfred A. Knopf in September, 1979. Copyright© 1979 by Frederick Franck. By permission of Joan Daves.

Reprinted in Parabola Volume 4, No. 3, “The Child,” Fall 1979. This issue is available to purchase here. If you have enjoyed this piece, consider subscribing.

Is there anyone who reads this who does not recall being coldly looked-at, that is, pigeonholed as a “this” or a “that,” dismissed as too ugly, too thin, too coarse, too fat, too knock-kneed, or too white, black, or yellow, who did not cry out deep inside: “Please, don’t stand there looking at me! Can’t you see me?”

To see is that specifically human capacity that opens one up to empathy, to compassion with all that lives and dies."

What that central concern is…I can only surmise that it springs from an existential necessity, a compulsion to know in my very bones what this being human is about, and hence to give it form; to concretize in pencil, in stone, in steel and wood, in written words, what others may 'think' about.

The real choice, then, was not between drawing or painting or writing: brush, pencil chisel, welding torch are simply the tools of the dialogue with one's life. The answer to the question 'Who am I?' matters perhaps less than the finding out of who I am definitely not, but have only pretended to myself and others to be."