by Mary Jo Bang
PHOTOGRAPH PRINTED WITH HATCH-MARKS OR LINES ACROSS THE PORTRAIT
Some photographs invent a method of fiction, an illogical trying to think differently history. The true aim of archives is:
a complex, relating, narrating voice and rare versions of what happened, actuality of actuality. This requires a plastic mind. Archives of photographs create a direct category linked to the culture of written history, along with the premise of what may have happened, spread over the course of images that exist in two different temporal dimensions, i.e. when the photo was made and when we see it.
These opposed logics disfigure the true act—the incidental fact that this did exist—morphing the two times into one simultaneous reality where temporality remains to say this: what did exist may still exist. I think the living know this or else will come to know it when they look at this photograph.
SELF-PORTRAIT IN THE BATHROOM MIRROR
Some days, everything is a machine, by which I mean remove any outer covering, and you will most likely find component parts: cogs and wheels that whirr just like an artificial heart, a girl in a red cap redacting the sky, fish that look like blimps and fish-like blimps, an indifferent lighthouse that sweeps the horizon. I wasn’t a child for long and after I wasn’t, I was something else. I was this. And that. A blast furnace, a steel maze inside, the low-level engine room of an ocean liner. My eye repeats horizontally what I by this time already know: there is no turning back to be someone I might have been. Now there will only ever be multiples of me.
IN THE GARDEN BEHIND THE MASTER’S HOUSE
Does the erotic exist outside architecture? The shepherd asleep, the shepherd awake—his staff in his hand. Sweet are the fields of. Exiled from home am. A sandwich of tendered lamb. Overhead, stars marvel in a heaven of now. As soon as we have a building, we have a mash-up of the dystopic present and the future that will not sit still. A is for agitation. B is for building a house. What does it mean to be a master? To have mastery. One woman, one man. Who is whom. Self-interest as an imperative is unlike any other. Where does one live? It’s early in the history of coupling. No one is more alone.
IN THIS PHOTOGRAPH I AM UNTITLED
And seen through. The way a wine glass placed on a table transparently suggests wine will be served. I don’t mean to say that is all that I am but it is a fact that even in the dark, angles often conduct the eye into a lighted interior. There, someone sees and says to herself, I wasn’t always this way. One sometimes becomes.
THE DOLL SONG
A stage set, curtain, window, wall, the shape in a shadow drawing the eye into the dark. In time you see she’s a she who has moved from the edge to the desk to elsewhere. Simply said, the absence at the desk edge equals her presence stage left. Both ghosts. This is more than a question of dimension.
When a well-lit bamboo lattice expands, it can morph into Madame Butterfly. On an enlargement of the still, you see a lake shape on the upper right, the realm of nature. You’ve seen this opera before. There’s a ship on the lake, a god in the house. A man is going away. The woman is here to stay. We all want her to be more than just a lovable glass-eyed facsimile, a robot going through the motions.
One act is loosely based on a love of diamonds. In that act the woman is almost headless and completely naked, a line drawing of her would place her next to nothing.
The fur isn’t fake, nor is the lost look. She looks back over her shoulder but keeps the eye bright. A veil should hint at what’s under it. The lips are a bow, the present a present. With a spool of thread, she’s Ariadne in charge of a labyrinth. On a bivalve shell, she’s a goddess. Now a blurred bride on a bed. She is what you want her to be.
STAIRWAY, SEASIDE
A process. A performance. A figural stage. A glass dance where the glass alternates between mirror and see-through. Followed by suspense-filled love affairs with others. Actors alive in your own time. The dead too. Why not? They’re easy enough to find. You only have to open a book. In this way the animated pregnant beginning gets reanimated over and over. One day you say to yourself, I am light-dark, warm-cold, up-down. After saying it the first time, you repeat it whenever a wave washes over you. What’s ideology compared to that? To the held breath and the heart race up two flights of stairs. At the top, you look down as one does on the edge. Of course, not everyday is gray. On a good day you go to the beach.
THE GAME OF ROLES
In any narrative, facts are present or not. One might assume the more facts, the better the constructed history, since facts are meant to reflect what can’t be computed by storytelling alone, which is said to be subjective and therefore inaccurate. In many cases, the story is filled with complex details, which only one person knows. You sit at a table and turn a page on which marks make letters that suggest a timeline. It’s clear that you believe nothing will ever outrank your cold and unforgiving erudition, however, everything you think is based, even at the most basic neuronal level, on the way you connect a long line of dots. Refined interpretation requires that you know that someone once said the offspring of reality and illusion is only a staggering confusion. Keep in mind that your mind is a twice-shattered light bulb and on the other side of detachment is the fact that someone is busy living while you are translating the fact that she’s dead. Also remember that behind your glass mask is only your mind.
FRAGMENT OF A BRIDE
Relative to status and state, one often finds the strategic depiction of an implicated myth: man v. god, fire, female, followed by a beeline drawn to the end of the garden. Outside, the concrete sky and a clamor that might be described as a deafening mechanical distraction, the basic rhythm of which has been set in advance to match a harsh song that goes like this: metalwork-always-outlives-fabric. That mess of a crumpled net dress at the bottom of a wardrobe might be a refusal to accept the notion that possibility is something one puts on to go out: a woman for example could still wear the dress but where would she go looking like that? It would be an error to describe her as someone who doesn’t know how she is supposed to act, when in actual fact she is acting. Her eyes are open and she is acting like someone looking into a box of scattered catastrophes, saying to the man next to her, “Look at these. Which one would you like?”
GESTURE DANCE DIAGRAM
In other words, a Caligari cabinet arranged like a stage, where an invisible hand sets the figures in motion. You’re free to add sound if you want some. Form, color, style isn’t added to but naturally is. What stage set isn’t jagged? One pale gray silhouette moves toward an exit that’s lit with a light Diderot called English red. It’s late so let’s all go to bed. We’re young and some of us won’t last. Although who can say what when is or where why? Please don’t tell me tomorrow is already over.
IN THE STREET
Here we are, on top of the utopian arc. The water is shallow. An oil spill shimmers on the surface like a lens catches light and folds it in front of a mirror. If someone stands next to you, they are there, even when outside the picture. Which makes total obscurity relative to luck and such. Unlike the law, architecture lasts. A façade, like an ideal, can be oppressive unless balanced by a balcony on which you can stand and call down to those in the street: Come over here and look up at us. Aren’t we exactly what you wanted to believe in?
THE HEAD OF A DANCER
The days when you lean your head forward, then pull your head back, to see the sun is only a chrysanthemum, the eye is a white lake with a black boat moored at a particle pier that says what you want back isn’t coming. The white speck says there is a light source that shines day and night far from a balcony on which an audience waits to see us open our doll eyes and close them again. I keep my face facing front to see every last thing that is coming. What is coming is this: a hat to be worn when taking a train, a compact in a pocket, a letter in a pocket, two hands, a waterfall pouring its contents into a well-worn shuddering mind. I’m as devoted to knowing as the dim fish swimming in an ever-widening circle. Today outraced the latest hour
of midnight, my hat tells you that. That and that I strangely resemble you: eyes, nose, lips that refuse to open, knowing the face is glass and that glass can make or break you. The dog in the street pauses just as a car comes. Where does it stop? And now this, someone says. The precise line draws the bone that holds the cheek in place. The cheek waits to be kissed by air as it was once kissed by the dark-haired boy in the boathouse whose late-night lesson was that the distance between what had been described and what was now happening was immeasurable. The morning after, the black shoes on the shelf were married to a new all-encompassing idea: the dress is no longer the thing the future is founded on. You put it on. You take it off.
THE TRANSFORMATION ANXIETY DREAM
You’ve three sets of hands but you still can’t catch the ball. If the distance were closer, you could fence it in. On a whim, add something thin, a giraffe or two. Have a small zoo. But your eyes won’t work. You clown face. Amphibian fingers. A shape moves and finds your forehead. A bare-bulb bright idea. A giraffe is too tall. An okapi perhaps. Your suit is too tight. You’re a melting iceberg. Don’t make that face. Hear no, see no, say no. Your tie is too tight. Your eyes are upside down. You tunnel under an avalanche. The snow doesn’t own you. What does? The stairs inside the tripling device can’t be decoded. The pane of glass flowers, becomes a cloud on its way to becoming amnesia.
THE BRACELET
It hardly matters but the metallic taste demands your attention. Like a pre-planned sleeve tattoo. Like the wrist wielding a titanium hammer. Like that sick all-day tension headache in the too-hot interrogation room. Like Cleopatra’s head lodged firmly in a brush that brushes the dust hour after hour. For a moment, a wedge takes a bite out of the sun and you wear that while you pretend the metal band means what you once wore for what felt like a second is now yours to keep. When the theft is eventually discovered, the trap door opens and drops you in.
A BALLET BASED ON THE NUMBER THREE
We are three: me, he, and she. I am a pocket, he is a needle, and she is the pinprick that resets the elements. A minor annoyance can come to mean more than a minor irritant if it gives rise to a shift in proportion or to a reduction of value. The record of motion is like a slow dance that ends with someone sitting it out. I’m outside now, having left eye, brain, grid, and graph behind in order to become an auto-self-selection machine that allows a whole person to disappear. I feel the law growing weaker (that’s father), and the she (that’s mother) no longer the rabbit hole into which one falls and falls and falls.
THE SHATTERED MARRIAGE
You perform the ritual and replay the ceremony but still Medusa’s head poses a problem. Will it explode? Pass from an ordered geometry into a state of decay? Opinions are sought, scientific and otherwise. The enterprise requires some license, the same as the absurd. Not disorder so much as a solidly soullessly matched set of batteries. Or a bored audience held captive by some terrible unforeseen on-stage disaster.
ME, A CHRONICLE
Shapes that begin as just one solution to a common problem can go on to become an inflexible method. Take for example houses. Once a certain way of arranging walls takes hold, it’s difficult to imagine any other. Another example might be locomotion, the method and circular means of moving from one place to another. I was drawn early to the idea of other modes of seeing, especially to photography. Looking back, I see myself entering the living room. I see my father crossing the room to open or close a window. My mother’s zigzag pattern of static. My sister, the new century’s picture-perfect child. My brother, the new century’s self-possessed man. At one point, the idea of rebellion became a unified belief. I left. Can you imagine the impact? Who hasn’t felt that in order to breathe, she has to splinter the first self and leave it behind? I constructed a second self. I photographed myself as if I were a building.
THE POSSESSIVE FORM
In [year], the ______s [plural form of husband’s last name] moved to somewhere; it was there she did something. From [year] to [three years later], she was also made [title] at [school name] in [place]. In [year] she left [one country] via [one country] for [one country], and as a [occupation] soon made a name for herself, being compared by some critics to [woman’s name]. She also lectured to students at [school name] and [school name], both in [city name], the emphasis being on the [specialized subject within the subject].
THE ILLUSION OF PHYSICALITY
A body is a mystery of identity and death. Shrewd, you might say. Also spare. The right arm has something of a pared-down style—brusque, forthright, useful except when it’s not.
Take tennis: its sophisticated simplicity. Is the ball over the line? The truth is measurable to within a millimeter. Everyone is hoping. This goes on for years. The beauty of certainty is evident. The succinct repetition becomes rhythmic, the figure a form.
Daylight veils darkness in the depths of the mind. You sometimes catch sight of yourself whenever your body, that blood-filled shadow, collides with the wall behind you.
Inside the apartment is a half-eaten insect. Its proportions match both those of the building and those of my body: small and damaged, a delinquent in this prison I think of as a world that can’t ever be contained.
THE SCURRYING WHITE MICE DISAPPEAR
Where have they gone? The cage door unlocked is left open but that answers nothing. The snow outside will hide them if they are successful in crafting flattened versions of themselves and leave through the space where the high wall ends. This is only the nothing that is. Not a horror, or no more so than any other effacing trace, a novel of one hundred chapters that meanders until it arrives at the end where on the last page the reader sees, strange coincidence, his or her name. Spelled with different letters but still the same name. Closing the cover unmasks the guillotine and kills the mice. This is a well-known structuralist principle.
THINGS TO COME
Night’s metal wheel spins under the blackout of war, which says no to a world of want. Friday is through until Saturday’s alarm at seven. Work is the only redemption. Not the willful insanity of religion where the light-headed with hunger get down on their knees and beg for a crumb from the ceiling crack. Was sick today. Something eaten. Late last night I dreamed of a building that perfectly matched my adolescent longing. I have been breathing a fine layer of dust until this sudden rain eroded the window and remade the entire material world—watch as the ordinary melts into meaninglessness. The film ticks backward each time I replay the death I failed to forestall. This never blurs.
YOU HAVE TO BE UNCOMPROMISING AS YOU PASS THROUGH
Although it sometimes seems random, the gawking on the street is not imagined. I see the barriers. They are there by design. Every image of a woman speaks of a theatrical body performing a script, the connector that shoulders when there’s a war, and embroiders when there isn’t. I can see that they, meaning we, are meant to be objects: small scale, fragile, unassuming. Many men see themselves as having obvious affinities with other famous men. Not only from the same period, that would be banal, but from every period since time began, even Adam, even Eve. They see themselves as being more fascinating lying on a bed than the body lying beside them. She is an everyday animal of ubiquitous fabric sewn together with blue and red thread. A certain system that can act as a cushion at night when things are hard. Make no mistake, she is also, when things work well, an almost fully realized artwork repaying the viewer with attention.
SHE HE AT THE FLOWER BASKET
A circular mirror of the social order is something like a master with an exclusive club membership until a woman comes through the revolving door. He sees her as an angel of mercy with a braid down her back while she sees herself in the mirror and says I’m on the outside looking in. When she says that, his mouth covers hers and they both sound alike but what she is saying and what he is saying is not the same in and not the same as. The moon can be mistaken for a rabbit from the back when it’s both a rabbit and a cat.
LONG-EXPOSURE PHOTOGRAPH OF A MAN
One man is many. I never said he left me but he left what he thought I was. Yes, and I too had thoughts that went on over time. Duration extends into the future, wraps around the past. Can anyone avoid saying, I once was? Of course now you have those test-tube babies. Your nuclear transfer animals. My brother was at one point making a film that moved forward while we stood still. Looking isn’t always gawking. That requires a degree of stumbling open-mouth wonder. What’s wrong with that? If you had seen what I had seen. My brother is reading Kafka. My brother Franz. An incidental doubling. I told you before that I spoke English. Or did I? You know it now. You also should know that I communicate through showing how an object acts on me. I’m either in it or I’m behind it. One or two or more. Will you some day really bring everything back from the brink?