by Brian Dillon
I am touched by the notion that my mother is not like the others: that this photograph shows me a singularity which is in fact detachable from the scenography of milieu (provincial), of education (predictably religious: a photograph taken on the same day from a slightly different angle shows the group surrounding a beaming nun) or of history. This idea seems to come from a particular attitude towards the camera, as much as from the simple observation (a fact I remark upon with some pride) that my mother is darkly glamorous compared to her sun-blinded companions. She has, I tell myself, a particular aura about her in which doubtless one can already see the modest ambition that will take her away from this place within a few years, a move without which my own existence would be impossible.
¶ The bridge
There is a single photograph that connects my mother’s move to the city with my own existence: the first I possess of my parents together. It was the only photograph of my parents that I had ever displayed where others could see it; for several years I had pinned it to the walls of a succession of bedrooms. It was a tiny reminder, I imagined, of their continued presence in my life, but also allowed me to see my parents as somehow detached from my recollection of them, cast in the roles of young lovers from another age. Later, a larger, framed version hovered on the wall above my bed, just out of my field of vision, as I slid the original from the pile in front of me. I realized that I had in fact never properly considered the content or significance of this photograph. It had functioned as a compensatory talisman, as a way of not addressing the collection as a whole, but of extracting from it a fetishized and venerated memento, in the process defusing its true mnemonic charge. As I held its edges now, careful not to mark its fragile sheen, it began, slowly, to undo the whole skein of recollection I had woven around the earliest images of my parents.
It is one of only two photographs I own of my parents together, unaccompanied by family or friends. The photograph was taken on O’Connell Bridge in Dublin. It shows my parents crossing the bridge at night. It is not difficult to work out that they are heading north: behind them are the faint outlines of two telephone boxes I remember clearly. Above them, out of the darkness, a neon sign announces ‘Shannon Travel Ltd, Westmoreland St’. The same faces have already looked at me from other photographs, pictures I had buried in a kind of prehistory and regarded as if part of a photographic archaeology. These earlier scenes had yielded up their significance – the glimpse of a gaze with which I could connect – precisely, I now realized, because of their distance. The uniqueness of those faces had been surrounded by so much abstractedly archaic detail. It was the contrast between their expressions and what surrounded them that had allowed me to acknowledge my parents.
This nocturnal scene presented a different genre of photographic drama. My initial confusion was a matter of pure chronology: they looked so young. I had always thought that my parents must have met sometime in the early 1960s. They had married in 1968. But I could not connect that knowledge with what I saw here. There seemed such a vast distance between the couple in the picture and the earliest photographs of their married life, of which, in the chronological advance of the collection, I would soon become a part. Maybe, I reasoned, my unease arose from a simple absence in my own knowledge of those years. I had (and still have) no idea when my parents met.
What I encountered here was – in an odd way, for the very first time – the image of my parents as a couple. The darkness which separates them starts as a gap in the balustrade of the bridge and extends downwards through the centre of the image. It keeps them apart but it is not empty. My father’s arm extends behind my mother’s back. Does his hand touch her lightly as they cross the bridge in front of the photographer who will shortly offer this image of an intimacy which only he has noticed? It is a warm night; my father has taken off his coat and carries it loosely over his arm. A breeze has caught my mother’s skirt so that it moves ahead of her out of the frame towards the brightness of O’Connell Street, towards which her smile advances too.
The photograph intrigues and appals me for this reason: it may be that I would never have existed but for this night, but, perhaps, for this very moment. Could it be that my parents do not yet know each other well? Is this not only the first photographic evidence I have of their relationship but – and the thought sends me back to the image, plunged now in a sort of vertigo, stranded on the bridge between actuality and a past without me – the very first photograph of them together? If so, it may be that the moment they were accosted by the photographer (I imagine my father gallantly, awkwardly amused, giving his name and address) was the very moment they began to consider themselves a couple. In the flash which isolates them, happily illumined against the black ground, the photographer fails to record that I am waiting in the darkness. The photo is part of me, though I can’t recall it. My memory depends on this black hole in time, an unknowable moment at which the collection comes together, becomes the record of another sort of memory: that of my family. This moment on the bridge is in fact the transition from one experience of my photographic collection to another. It captures the coming together of the two strands of images with which I cannot connect myself and can only, by the most strenuous act of concentration, catch brief glimpses of the tender actuality of these two people. Here, however, they loom into view with an insistence which says: we are your past. This is not merely a moment in time captured, or frozen into monochrome. It is also a bridge between a distant past and my own.
¶ Time before time
St Augustine was the first writer to look back on his childhood and experience this sense of vertigo while trying to reconstitute a lost self. In his Confessions, Augustine essayed the first proper autobiography in the history of Western literature. Others had recounted the stories of their own lives from a first-person perspective, but Augustine deserves the title of inaugural autobiographer because, for him, the very notion of a self presents so many problems for the author who wishes to trace the development of his adult personality. Augustine knows that a book about himself must also be a book about time: a book in which time is not a current flowing in a single direction, but a dizzy confusion of eddies and undertows. The Confessions stage the author’s dramatic struggle to make the mad flux of time settle into serene channels, to navigate between past and present in order to reach the shores of future redemption.
His problems begin almost at once. In his opening chapter, Augustine attempts to recall his earliest memories, to imagine himself back into the self he had once been. It is, he quickly discovers, an excruciating task. At what point, he wonders, can he truly be said to have become himself? Not, he complains, at his conception, for he has no memory of the time he spent in his mother’s womb. At his birth, then? Not quite. He certainly existed, he writes, but how can he connect his adult self with the infant whose consciousness is lost to time? ‘Thus, Lord,’ he writes,
I do not remember living this age of my infancy; I must take the word of others about it and can only conjecture how I spent it – even if with a fair amount of certainty – from watching others now in the same stage. I am loth, indeed, to count it as part of the life I live in this world. For it is buried in the darkness of the forgotten as completely as the period earlier still that I spent in my mother’s womb.
Augustine imagines a time before language, and therefore, he says, a time before himself. In a terrifying confusion which turns out to be the philosophical heart of Augustine’s doubt (about the possibility of his redemption in and by God), birth and death appear to coincide: they are both moments on which the continuum of a life depends, but both are entirely mysterious, twin voids at either end of existence, supporting between them a time which ceases to have meaning if we concede their meaninglessness. Their mirrored terror resides in the fact that there has existed (and will exist again) a time in which ‘I’ do not exist. But the first mystery is somehow even more unsettling than the second. Death, of course, we can do nothing about; but our origins are subject to the most pain
ful entreaties. We peer back into the darkness of the past, convinced that there must be some evidence there of our own future being. And we find, according to Augustine’s doleful reflections, nothing. We seem to have stumbled on to the stage of our own lives before the curtain has come up.
The advent of photography has at least illuminated for us that uncertain realm of infancy. But it has had the effect too of making the ghosts that we once were persist in a way that might previously have been dispersed in the intricacies and uncertainties of storytelling. Augustine is partly comforted by the stories told of his own infancy; he knows that he gradually emerged from this mute, apparently unthinking state to speak and act in ways that he can remember. Photographs of ourselves as infants thrust us back into an Augustinian unease: here we are faced with the evidence of the being we most certainly once were, but can never recall.
In the opening pages of his autobiographical Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov imagines two apparently contrasting moments: one of them filmed, the other, though unrecorded, an image which has all the mnemonic potential of a photograph, but which has left no evidence other than the author’s exquisite reconstruction of it. Speak, Memory, claims the book’s subtitle, is ‘an autobiography revisited’: as if the act of recalling the past were always a matter of recapitulating a reality already remembered elsewhere, at other times. It may be – although Nabokov doesn’t admit it – that he is disguising his own fearful reading of a family relic when he writes:
I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged – the same house, the same people – and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.
The image provides plentiful evidence of his future existence – the house, his mother, the baby carriage – but the object (himself) which ought to mark its centre is entirely absent. This horrifically vacant tableau is contrasted, for Nabokov, with the founding image in his own memorial archive. He recalls a moment – unphotographed but very like the perfect family portrait – at which he claims to have become aware, for the first time, of his own place in the temporal scheme of things. He pictures himself, aged four, strolling happily between his mother and father:
I felt myself plunged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was nothing other than the pure element of time. One shared it – just as excited bathers share shining seawater – with creatures that were not oneself but that were joined to one by time’s common flow, an environment quite different from the spatial world, which not only man but apes and butterflies can perceive. At that instant, I became acutely aware that the twenty-seven-year-old being, in soft white and pink, holding my left hand, was my mother, and that the thirty-three-year-old being, in hard white and gold, holding my right hand, was my father. Between them, as they evenly progressed, I strutted, and trotted, and strutted again, from sun fleck to sun fleck, which I easily identify today with an alley of ornamental oaklings in the park of our country estate, Vyra, in the former Province of St Petersburg, Russia.
The child feels himself suddenly to have succeeded in parsing an equation whose terms are the relative ages of himself and his parents, and whose logic is assured by their moving together along the path. He finds himself to be the overlapping, shaded-in space between several sets of temporal elements: his mother’s gauzy beauty, his father’s military career (long past: he is wearing the gilt trappings of his former regiment ‘as a festive joke’), the slow time of the estate where they are walking (soon to be accelerated, then curtailed, by revolution: the young Vladimir will never see those oaklings become mature trees). The scene is idyllic, but its details begin to hint at their own passing; the instant of the author’s ‘birth of sentient life’ is also the moment when he becomes fretfully aware of chronology and decay: ‘for several years afterward I remained keenly interested in the age of my parents and kept myself informed about it, like a nervous passenger asking the time in order to check a new watch’. In a way, he is as absent from this formative image of his family as the young man who is unsettled by the filmed evidence of his own paradoxically prenatal after-life. The family ‘photograph’ which this second passage describes is equally, despite the cheerful four-year-old at its centre, a rather melancholy picture of a world evacuated of meaning.
The photograph which seems most precisely to register the condition of my own palpably present non-being (my not-yetness, the tardy shadow of my arrival in the world) is not actually the first snapshot in which I appear. There are other, earlier images in which I see myself as a black and white bundle in the arms of a few delighted and solicitous adults. We are all rather blurred: my parents, no doubt, are exhausted by the new arrival (by all accounts I was an exceptionally noisy baby, screaming my way through the first year, then promptly shutting up for the next eighteen). Here I am in the summer of 1969, held aloft by the youngest of my mother’s sisters. I’m not yet recognizable, but I seem to be able to identify with this tiny grey mass. As also with another photograph, taken perhaps a year later in the garden of my father’s parents’ house. Here, I’m held by both grandparents in an unconvincing imitation of an already walking infant.
These photographs fail to touch me like another, in which I am seated, a brown blob, on the weeds of our back garden. With one hand, I clutch at my father’s side as he half squats, half kneels with my brother Paul in his arms. Paul is a few months old; it is the summer of 1970. Behind us, the leaves of a flourishing lilac bush are edged with yellow, a few of them burnt brown (by late summer heat or the onset of autumn, it is impossible to say).
Perhaps the photograph looks like such an image of happiness because it has been taken by my mother. It dates from a time before she had begun to resent the camera’s materialization on a summer afternoon, before her own image of herself cracked and faded to the point where she could no longer bear to be photographed. She must have felt as if the camera itself were punishing her, the photograph repeating the process of hardening, the tightening of her skin, her slow shrinking into what she must have thought of as a desiccated version of herself, of the youthful person in the other photographs. And did she picture this unphotographable version of herself, without pain, without the visual markers of her decline? I imagine that if I were in her place I would be racked by images of myself as I might have been: whole, easy, free. And did she remember the feeling of being photographed knowing she had a body whole and ready to shine out in the image as itself, and not as this other version of herself? In a photo of my brother Paul’s confirmation, she edges out of the frame, and I can almost recall her entreaties to my father’s sister not to photograph her.
¶ ‘Widower with sons’
The years between this photograph and my father’s death nearly a decade later are, in terms of the family photo archive, almost totally invisible. Only a single photograph, taken a matter of weeks before my mother died, interrupts the void. I had always known that this gap sat at the heart of my collection. In fact, I think I had already felt the absence of visual record of my own life, and that of my family, as a strange, eccentric lack. I remember feeling that this disappearance of the camera from our lives was a vanishing I would look back on in later life; I was not sure if I would regret it. I certainly noticed it again after my mother’s death: I began to get used to the fact that my adolescence was entirely undocumented. In early adulthood, after my father’s death, I could even joke about this, counting myself lucky that no record existed of various disasters of dress and hairstyle, nor of the endless erupti
ons of my skin. But by the time I looked at these photographs again, weakened by depression, the sudden leap across years had come to seem especially significant.
I tried to imagine what photographs of that period in our lives might have looked like. How would we have faced the camera in the months before my mother died? Was it possible that we might have passed ourselves off as a normal family? How clearly would my mother’s symptoms have been represented there? How vividly would the strain on my father’s face have shown? How adequately might I have been able to mask the mixture of shame, fear and anger that I felt? I wondered, in other words, what we must have looked like from the outside. Might my father, my brothers and I, in the months and years after my mother’s death, have revealed in our appearance some aspect specific to a family bereft of a wife and mother? I could not picture those four figures, though I thought I might have discerned something of our awkward gathering around this absence in a photograph taken in 1914 by August Sander. The image is entitled ‘Widower with sons’. The squat widower is photographed in his parlour. He looks perhaps modestly prosperous, sombrely gazing away from the camera, his arms loosely around his two sons. The elder son looks at the camera openly, quizzically; the younger more tentatively, his gaze slightly blurred. Their heads are shaved, and they are dressed identically in faintly rumpled shirts with large round collars and shorts that come just below their knees. They are aged, maybe, fourteen and twelve, but it is difficult to tell: the first striking thing about their appearance is that they are too old for these clothes. Not only are their shirt sleeves too short, but their clothes seem ancient, too scuffed to be quite suitable for this curtailed family portrait, this stranded trio for whom the family snapshot can only bring to mind the absent mother. These details suggest a frail effort to hang on to the realm of familial appearance, the idea of a visual index that announces their togetherness in the face of bereavement. The Widower is defined only by his loss, a loss that spreads itself over the surface of a photograph which declares: there will be no more family portraits except as images of that loss. Had we been photographed, I thought, we might have looked like Sander’s dismal grouping: we would have been the iconic presentment of bereavement, but also of the failure of the bereft to find a way of addressing their loss.