The Filbert Steps

For years my old friend Pete has been trying to get me to move to California, if possible to San Francisco. (He lives in Philadelphia himself.) The other day he sent me a photo of the Filbert Steps, which to him are fraught with fond memories and nonesuch associations. I had to tell him that to me they looked pretty much like any other flight of wooden stairs. "It may well be my full memory of the place," he admitted, "bay view, weather, and cute, ancient little doll houses, that make this photograph special to me." My reply, lightly Bowdlerized, follows.

Yes. BTW, that raises an extremely important and basic esthetic issue: evocation. Art often works by evoking a response in the beholder. Some would say it always works that way. "Abstract" art and decorative design are efforts to make it work otherwise. The extreme case is the painting or photo of a big-eyed stray kitten with injured paw. Most would dismiss such images as crude attempts to evoke a response. Yet how do they differ, except in degree, from more respectable evocations? "For all the history of grief/ An empty doorway and a maple leaf." Hmmm. As I'm sure you've noticed, I generally try either to avoid obvious evocations or to use them paradoxically – the flyblown corpse of a cute li'l bunny displayed as elegantly as possible, etc. Irony, you dig.