An interview by Rod MacIver

Frederick Franck has authored twenty-eight books on being human, on Zen Buddhism, on the human mind, on the art of seeing and on Albert Schweitzer. Frederick spent three years as an oral surgeon working with Schweitzer in the African jungle. He has degrees in medicine, dentistry and fine arts. His art is in the permanent collections of a score of museums in America and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, the Fogg Museum and the Tokyo National Museum.

Pacem in Terris, the peace gardens Frederick and his wife Claske have created, are located in a leafy-green village about an hour and a half from New York City. The Francks live in a hundred-year-old house they’ve renovated. It was once known as McCann’s Hotel & Tavern, an establishment offering liquid refreshments and primitive sleeping quarters to peddlers and itinerant laborers. I arrived late and after dinner found myself alone on the ground floor with some of Frederick’s paintings and books. I spent an hour or so quietly absorbing his works. Frederick’s art, in particular his recent large ink paintings, captured my imagination. They possess that profoundness that is only found in extreme simplicity. The colors are subtle. They are depictions of life stripped to its essence—powerful, mysterious, searching. All weekend I kept going back to examine them again. I dreamt about one while I was there — a person walking through the fog on a beach at sunrise or sunset.

Frederick and Claske have created a life on their own terms — built around their art, writing, music and their imagination. Their time is divided between creative works and the need for rest and quiet. Their home sits on a site — partly art, partly spiritual, partly cultural, (Frederick and Claske would object to all of those labels) that is open to the public and receives many, many visitors every year. Frederick is 89 years old, his wife is 80.

In contrast to Frederick’s contemplative presence is Claske, who seems to be continually moving from detail to detail — handling sales of his works, organizing concerts, dealing with visitors, overseeing the gardens of Pacem in Terris, typing Frederick’s manuscripts, and making sure that pesky interviewers don’t overtire her husband. The gardens consist of two or three acres of paths intersected by a road, a river and a railroad. Throughout the property are Frederick’s steel icons (he prefers “icons” to “sculptures”) — including a memorial to Hiroshima “The Unkillable Human”. In the little visitors’ book Frederick wrote about Pacem in Terris, the gardens are described as “a sacred place that speaks to the sacred space at the core of the human heart.” Also in the booklet is this quote: Art is not a luxury! Art arises from one’s depths or it is not art but kitsch! Art, for me, is and was my digging tool for Meaning, for Truth…my own truth that may speak to your truth. Art then becomes a “religious”, a spiritual act, not in any sectarian sense but as a witness to a “religious” attitude to sheer being, to existence as such, being Supremely Meaningful.

At Pacem in Terris, Frederick and Claske host, several times a summer, chamber music recitals in the old mill ruin they have restored — a building with particularly fine acoustics. Musicians, who otherwise can be heard in venues such as Lincoln Center, perform there for a modest stipend. Attendance is by donation — suggested at $5. The music the evening I was there was worth the numbness rendered by the mill’s hard wooden benches. The concert was performed by violinist Krista Bennion Feeney and her Loma Mar String Quartet. It ended in a truly magnificent piece — the string quartet in G major by Franz Schubert. Afterwards I had a beer with Art Meyer, who works with Frederick creating his icons and maintaining Pacem in Terris. One of the subjects that came up was the necessity of being frugal if you are to pursue your art. “When Frederick and Claske go to New York, they brown bag it,” he said. “That’s how they’ve avoided working for the Man…” At another point, he described how hard they work — how he often sees the light on in their office at 11 pm.

Looking through his books, I came across these passages:

I was serving on the medical staff of Albert Schweitzer at his legendary jungle hospital in Lambarene when the Grand Docteur was well into his eighties. Only while at Schweitzer’s did my professional skills give me real satisfaction. I treated people in dire need who came paddling down the Ogowe in dug-out canoes, and the unfortunates from the leprosarium which Schweitzer built with his Nobel Prize money. But I did more. I drew and drew, and so I came to terms with the African earth, with African faces. I penetrated and was penetrated by African ways of being human, for to draw is to become what you draw.

Once, returning from New York, I carried thirty letters for Schweitzer in my briefcase. They had been written at the behest of a sixth-grade teacher at a public school in the South Bronx. I had gone there to speak about Schweitzer on an invitation I hesitated to accept until my wife, Claske, said: “If it had been the Sierra Club, you would have jumped at it.” And so I talked to these thirty slum kids of whom not two seemed to be of the same genetic mixture and very few who grew up with both their parents. “You don’t have to read all these,” I said to the old doctor, “but may I drop them a line of thanks on your behalf?”

“No,” he said, “read them to me! These are the things in life that are really important.” Then, bent over his table, I saw his arthritic hand start to write a long, warm letter to Bella, the teacher in the Bronx: “I know how hard a job yours is. I come from a family of teachers …” Puttering in his drawer he found a photo of himself with his pet pelican and another with Peter, his baby gorilla, resting on his arm. “Send these,” he said. I thought that by this time I knew a thing or two about Schweitzer, but as I saw the old Nobel laureate laboring over that letter to the Bronx I realized as never before that this man, who had pushed each of his extraordinary potentials as a doctor, a philosopher, a theologian, a musician, to their utter limits, was a human being of awesome authenticity. Since 1913 he had been a pioneer: of foreign aid — without any political strings attached; of missionary action without the obsession of converting people; of a practical ecumenism that excluded no one; and, at eighty-seven, he once more pioneered: he was the first man of such prominence to protest loudly against atom bomb testing. He had solved the primal question: he had lived his own human truth.
  – Frederick Franck, The Courage To Grow Old, edited and with an introduction by Phillip L. Berman

I also found this quote about the work of Paul D. MacLean, MD, Chief of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution at the National Institutes of Health:

(MacLean) described our contemporary human brain as consisting of that ‘trinity of brains’ he calls the Triune Brain. The most archaic component of this trinity is the reptilian brain, which, with all its skills of foraging, fighting, and mating intact, survives in us after its 250 million year history, and is still as active in our skulls as ever.

This reptilian brain is enveloped in the course of evolution by, respectively, the Old Mammalian and the New Mammalian brain. The later develops into two hemispheres, which form that remarkable intra-cranial computer which enables us to verbalize, calculate and think logically.

The intra-cranial computer is rigidly logical. It is, however, almost devoid of intuition and feeling, so that we would still be less-than-human were it not for the most recent outcropping of the brain, the pre-frontal cortex.

MacLean was able to locate in the pre-frontal cortex capabilities until then unsuspected: the capacity for “insight,” namely for introspection into one’s own life-process, that awareness of having been born and having to die — which no other animal ever had. It is this awareness that makes it possible to identify with the life process in other living beings. The first stirrings of empathy have a chance to arise! From empathy to compassion is but a step…

Frederick Franck, Fingers Pointing Toward the Sacred

In our interview he elaborated: “With the beginnings of the pre-frontal cortex came the beginning of imagination. When you can imagine the other being, you can identify with that being. Perhaps “Reverence for Life”, Schweitzer’s life motto, is born right there, or at least the potential for Reverence for Life. I found that fascinating.”I interviewed Frederick where he writes — a roughly 12′ by 15′ cabin simply furnished with bamboo mats, writing desk and bookcases. It has no telephone or radio. Frederick works on a Japanese bench-style seat with no backrest. We talked about modern American “culture”, about Pacem in Terris and about life.

I asked Frederick what the word creativity means to him. He responded:

“Creativity is a pretentious word. Creativity, like so many other words, has been de-valued — ‘I am more creative than thou.’ ‘My aunt is so creative. ‘My mother is an artist too!’ There are a few words that immediately make my hair stand on end. The little hair that I have left. I do what I am doing because I can’t do otherwise. If that results in books or drawings or sculptures, it is because I simply follow my nature. I can’t help it. If you want to call it creative, OK, but that is meaningless. I simply am a compulsive image maker. I have to draw, paint whatever. Do I call myself an “artist”? No. I leave that up to the beholder. Artist is to me an honorific. “Ah, Rodin, what an artist! Rembrandt? An arch-artist!” But to be an “artist” is not to smear paint on a canvas, trace lines on a paper, have exhibitions, gain an honorable mention, sell. It is something quite different from being an “artist”. The only authentic artist is the artist-within.

“Nothing I make is “designed”. It comes up or it doesn’t. It doesn’t intend either to impress, to charm, to please or to shock. It hopes to communicate something. Walking through art galleries I can’t help distinguishing art from Kitsch. What is calculated to please, to sell, however technically admirable, is Kitsch to me. For art arises from the deepest recesses of one’s being. It may be quite unacceptable. Van Gogh’s was unacceptable to his contemporaries. He sold one painting in his life – for twenty-five guilders – but one look at a Van Gogh and you know it is authentic. You know it came from his core. If I listen to a Bach Cantata there is no doubt where it came from. It is not “Mr. Bach expressing himself’, being “creative”. It is the great Mystery of Being that expresses itself.

“When I start a drawing I am scared. Drawing from life, which I do at least once a week, I have to prove I can still do it. I did a drawing yesterday on the beach. There are thirty figures in that drawing. I scribbled them down in a kind of ecstasy mixed with despair. I could never do it again. Drawing is a strange process, for even where it succeeds you never do justice to what you see. If you draw well today, you can’t assume that tomorrow you can continue on that level, you have to start all over again, from scratch. No guarantee of success, unless you are a hack who uses a routine.

“In 1972, on a kitchen table in Melbourne, for a poster about a play we were doing there, “The Life and Death of EveryOne”, I drew that face of EveryOne, Everyman. It became the Face of faces mentioned by the 14th Century mystic, Nicholas of Cusa, the Face of Christ he perceived as being visible in every human face “veiled as in a riddle.” This Face of faces, this epiphany of the human face, was called “the Original Face you have before even your parents were born” by the 7th Century Zen sage Hui Neng. I have the feeling it was this face that came spontaneously in no-time on that kitchen table. It still is the logo of Pacem in Terris.

“My kind of drawing has to be absolutely on target or is discarded. My writing is exactly the opposite. I have to re-write a page sometimes twenty or thirty times. Why? Because words are misleading. The thesaurus in my head chooses a word and then the next morning realizes that that was not exactly what I wanted to say. Drawing has to hit the target at once. In writing I have to struggle with a text until it is true. The processes are totally different. The impulse is the same — the impulse is to be as truthful to your perceptions as can be.

“I am now writing a very simple book — actually an elaboration on the little booklet on Pacem in Terris. I have re-written it five times…”

Claske interjected: “I have re-typed it seven times…”

Frederick: “…but it is still not where I want it. Each time I read it, I think that what is in the middle should come first. Then I have to reconstruct it again. It is a constant struggle…”

Frederick also talked about American culture:

“I used to have a very critical attitude towards American culture. I still think that the “official culture” of media, TV, advertising, does not merit the epithet “culture”. It is an anti-culture. But Pacem in Terris has taught us that its grip on human beings is not total. People that come here are often partly victims of this anti-culture, older women, heavily made up, in yellow shorts and complex hairdos reveal themselves in notes on the pad, in letters we receive constantly, that they caught the spirit of Pacem in Terris. Groups of youngsters who at first look a little threatening with rings in their lips, write on the pad: “We love this place. It is cool !“ More and more we begin to understand the why and wherefore we built this unlabeled sacred space. Pacem has shown us to rediscover what is human in humans. To protect the inner life, our own, and by doing so, that of others. Quite instinctively I avoided “labeling” the icons: “windows on the sacred” that are not dogmatized, defined, so that somehow they offer a focus for free association, for confrontation with the Self. That may be is why it works.

“It is only recently that we have come to understand why we created Pacem in Terris. I was to protect the inner life — our own, and by doing so, that of other people. And without dogmatizing. The icons are a window on the sacred. Since they are not labelled — dogmaticized — people of various religions or no religion can relate to them. They somehow offer a focus for free association. That is maybe why it has worked.”

I asked Frederick about the spiritual path. “Do you yourself feel that you live according to your own truth?” He was quiet for a moment. Then he said:

“No. I wish it were true. But I am always aware of it when I fall short. I am awake to it — to the existence of my truth. Our own truth is our true selves. It can’t be discovered, but perhaps it can be intuited. You can get in tune with its potentiality. And then you are out of tune again. It is not a true path at all….

“One’s truth is of course bottomless. When (Daisetz T.) Suzuki was ninety years old, which is very old, and am almost as old now myself, he wrote what was perhaps his most profound essay. It was entitled: “The Unattainable Self’”. I think that is a very good way of saying it. So one cannot say one has discovered it.”

Frederick’s latest book, just recently published, What Does It Mean To Be Human?, contains responses by 108 people including The Dalai Lama, Elie Wiesel, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Yehudi Menuhin, Charlie Musselwhite, Thomas Berry, Vaclav Havel, Ram Dass, Donella Meadows, Willis Harman and a tire dealer in Warwick, New York. Two excerpts from sections written by Frederick:

I was drawing Schweitzer, he was 86 then, when he sat writing at his desk, his face almost touching the paper, his bristling moustache at times sweeping it as the old hand wrote on, slowly, painstakingly. Once in a while his head would straighten to turn towards the screen window that looked out over the river. Turning back, for an instant aware of me, he mumbled a few words and went on writing. It was getting dark. The file of his pet ants marching across the paper went out of focus in the falling dusk. He stopped his writing, got up stiffly, put on his faded crumpled felt hat and said, “Let’s sit outside.”

We sat on the steps of his cabin, mutely watching the dusk deepening on the Ogowe River. He looked worried. “One should have the skin of a hippo,” he suddenly grunted without explanation, “and the soul of an angel.” His little mongrel Tzu-Tzu sat between us. “Ah! Look at that tree,” he said after a while, pointing at a kapok in the distance, still gleaming in the setting sun. Then all of the sudden — it sounded at once hopeless and hopeful — “Do you think that the idea of Reverence for Life is really gaining ground?”

I was perplexed. I felt my eyes getting moist. I had just flown across half of a world that seemed to be getting ready to destroy itself in a spasm of violence. What could I say? “Who knows? I tried, “There is such terrible violence all over, isn’t there? Still, you sowed the seed. If anyone did, you did sow the seed.”

He sighed… “Ja, Ja” …and got up, for the dinner bell was ringing. This happened almost forty years ago and I am as old now as Schweitzer was then…

It became clear that what through the years had fascinated me in Shakespeare, touched me so deeply in Rilke’s Book of Hours, had moved me to tears in the Agnus Dei of Bach’s B Minor Mass, in the Adagio of Schubert’s Two-Cello Quintet in C Major, in Gregorian and Tibetan chant, was the celebration of life’s fullness and its transiency, its timelessness in time. It must be the ingredient that elevates art to the status of High Art as it is manifest in Egyptian, Assyrian and Medieval sculptures, in the sayings of Zen and Sufi masters, in Fra Angelico and Piero della Francesca, in Vermeer and in the smallest of Rembrandt’s landscape drawings, in Mucho’s “Persimmons” and Sesshu’s angularities. But it is far from confined to High Art, for it strikes the awakened eye wherever it turns — in the glance exchanged by an old couple, in the nurse’s face bent over me as I woke up from anesthesia, in the handshake of two men on a street corner, a child stroking its kitten — the Human.
What Does It Mean To Be Human? by Frederick Franck

Much of Frederick’s work relates in some way to seeing — being aware, connecting with the essence of something.

The glaring contrast between seeing and looking-at the world around us is immense; it is fateful. Everything in our society seems to conspire against our inborn human gift of seeing. We have become addicted to merely looking-at things and beings. The more we regress from seeing to looking-at the world —- through the ever-more-perfected machinery of viewfinders, TV tubes, VCRs, microscopes, spectroscopes, stereoscopes -— the less we see. The less we see, the more numbed we become to the joy and the pain of being alive, and the further estranged we become from ourselves and all others.

If we could still really see what day after day is shown on the six o’clock news, we would burst out in tears. We would pray, or kneel, or perhaps make the sign of the cross over that screen in an impotent gesture of exorcising such evil, such insanity. But there we sit, programmed as we are to look-at, to stare passively at those burning tanks, those animals choking in oil spills. We perfunctorily shake our heads, take another sip of our drink, and stare at the manic commercials until the thing switches back to smiling bigwigs reviewing honor guards, rows of corpses, and beauty queens preening.

No wonder that once the art of seeing is lost, Meaning is lost, and all life itself seems ever more meaningless: “They know not what they do, for they do not see what they look-at.”

“Not seeing what they look-at” may well be the root cause of the frightful suffering that we humans inflict on one another, on animals, on Earth herself.

How did I discover this seeing/drawing, in which the seeing and the drawing fuse into one undivided act, in which eye and hand, body and soul are no longer split?

It happened around 1960 — on the equator. I was serving as an oral surgeon on the staff of Albert Schweitzer’s legendary jungle hospital in Lambarene. Before leaving New York, I had vowed to use my time in Africa to get into as close a contact with Africa and Africans as possible. I had brought two good cameras.

Soon, however, clicking the shutter, even a thousand times, did not satisfy me. The machine separated my eye from the reality it perceived. People in the leprosy section of the hospital would hide their disfigured bodies and flee approaching camera-toters, but they sat for me as models, they felt that ‘the act of’ drawing reverenced, dignified them.

Multitudes of people paint, but few can draw, and far fewer still can see a drawing….The rare ones who do not look-at a drawing as a thing but see it for what it is, a process, a happening….True drawings are never mass communication, they are chamber music; no bullhorns, tubas, kettle drums. The lover of chamber music prefers a string quartet to a umpah band. The only pretext for exhibiting drawings is the reward of seeing one of these exceptional souls seeing them.

Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing by Frederick Franck.