The power of acknowledgement & questions for deep, time-released understanding.
Sitting outside at a small red cafe table on Laguardia Place in New York City, Jim Smith looked me dead in the eye and said, “You know things. How do you know things?”
He was careful to draw out the word know, and I smiled and said, “I just do.” I was 22.
I don’t think I’d say the same thing quite that way today. But the smile would be the same.
Jim rubbed the front of his head with his palm and said, “most people just believe things,” and that was pretty much the end of the conversation.
Art Break
There’s a reason the Mona Lisa is iconic, and I believe it has as much to do with this woman over time, as Leonardo. No doubt, the painting is gorgeous, mysterious, and includes the hand of the master in the product, but what about the story of how this painting got made? And this woman’s story as she herself would portray it at different stages in her life?
You know, what about the doings in the studio? That I would love to know.
This commissioned portrait was apparently not paid for, so never delivered to Lisa del Giocondo’s husband. It remained in da Vinci’s estate then went on to become one of the most famous paintings in the world due to some theft, some proper provenance, and many powerful hands that touched it over time.
The Isleworth Mona Lisa (another painting by Leonardo’s studio), was similar, and represented a younger version of Lisa del Giocondo.
So why multiples of this woman at different ages? Wouldn’t only one commission be made? Perhaps Lisa a denizen of studio life as an object of gaze. I believe Leonardo considered her an equal in the partnership that produced this work?
Or are we only eyeballing one man’s (studio’s) vision of a woman? You know, the one who gets the glory (but she gets the views)?
After all, Leonardo kept the painting. And the keeping meant the painting gained value too.
While it is common for an artist’s studio to do many versions of a work, this particular woman’s arranged posture, background, and smile are so intriguing that powerful collectors have spent hundreds of years moving it around.
It could have just been he had nothing else to do with the painting too. You know, storage.
But you can’t sell a work representing a person you respect to some non-associated buyer either.
It wouldn’t feel right, and selling is just not how you treat a real lady. Read more about the history and controversies around these depictions here, and here.
Captain on Deck
Jim Smith was a 6’5″ man of many systems. Reading his obituary1 just now, I see he worked in counter-intelligence in the Korean War and studied business at Harvard. He never told us that. Instead he asked us to say as “Captain’s on Deck” when he entered the building. He was also a Star Trek fan.
Jim was very good to us. Like a goofy, protective grandpa who loved to help us make money. He had us collect a complex matrix of data on every paper guest check, including nuances as to where the guests were geographically from- interpretations of what constituted “neighborhood.” Then his wife’s office would tabulate this data into spreadsheets for him to analyze. The servers did all the math on the fly without calculators, made all customer’s change out of our aprons, and we did not accept credit cards either.
With the phone company, Jim claimed the name “New York’s Corner of Walk and Don’t Walk2” for a jazz club that anchored one end of Bleecker Street. He had met his wife, world-renown economist M. Kathryn Eickhoff-Smith3 via Ayn Rand, and these two well-into-their-forties-New-Yorkers-with-no-kids married.
They were a good team. They ate Shepherds Pie together and listened to Jazz occasionally. The bubbling beef and potato pie was a “special,” so was served on an actual plate, not Styrofoam.
Kathryn ran her world-renown econ office upstairs, Jim ran the experiment of a bar downstairs. They owned the building, and it was huge. Spectra Photo had a space inside it too. Spectra sold some of the jewelry I made on the side, which made no sense, but they did this because of Jim. Thank you Jim.
I believe Jim tried to “launch” me in some crazy way into my artist life, and I confused him, but more on that later.
Jim ran the bar partly like a spaceship, and partly like an efficiency experiment, perhaps hopes to outdo Henry Ford. And in our oddball training process was as much about philosophy, as bar work, and he taught us all some important stuff.
Mostly, how to run circles under systems with our sisters to a Jazz soundtrack.
I’ll tell you all the little stories sometime. How we were to make whipped cream, how we were to make coffee, how we were to communicate with each other. Each procedure was very specific, and the team broke the rules all the time. It’s what we did. We were creative, laughing ladies in mini-skirts, having fun and running the funky side of Bleecker. We liked Jim, a lot, and we got to know music via a few down low geniuses who played there.
Just for a quick teaser about the perils of efficiency: we were taught to order Becks beer from the bartender with a combination of counted fingers and a heil gesture to save time. This would never go down today: wild waitresses filling grey trays of foamy drought beer while signaling Hitler, but there you go. No comment.
I guess what I’m noticing here today, and trying to share with all of you, is that we all know people who helped us see things differently, and maybe who helped us understand ourselves better. They are often “ordinary” people: ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
And these people helped us by acknowledging us, then asking meaningful questions. This is a mechanic of learning.
And, that kind of learning is mutual. Just the timing may not be immediate, and the relationships may have changed. I know that I continue to realize what I learned from Jim. And another of his passions was music. I’m getting that more and more each year I go: Jazz. It’s mastery, then, improvisation.
Even though I’m now 30+ years from that time when I said “I just know things,” and now I’m less certain of that, I notice how that one respectful question by a man 50 years my senior laid some of the road of inquiry that’s led me here.
What would you like to know? Perhaps how to do something? How to understand the world better? Understand yourself better?
Perhaps it’s good to acknowledge someone you like and respect, then ask4. Then both folks understand what’s happening, and everyone walks away with something – maybe even a great question that enlightens you both over time.
FOOTNOTES & SUB-SUBTEXT 😉
Read more about the history and controversies around The Mona Lisa and the source material for many of my understandings here, and here. I also saw an amazing documentary about da Vinci, which I need to re-find to cite properly. If you know it, let me know. It was a British guy absolutely over the moon analyzing da Vinci’s work. Impassioned and scientific.
