by Mary Jo Bang
PORTRAIT AS SELF-PORTRAIT
Avoidance of boredom drives the body forward. I sleep. I eat. I enter a lightless room. Existence there is limited to the self and whatever image the eye feeds it. The film canister acts like a bank. The emulsion acts like a layer that lies between what I once saw and what I now think. At the moment, the eye feeds my mind this man. His face floats in a frame. His hand refuses the camera. The wiring that makes him behave is invisible. I light him that way. He is connected to nothing and thus without context: no ring rests on the dresser, no shoes on the shelf, no long coat on a hanger. I keep him alive. I place him in a cage.
LAST NAME FIRST FIRST NAME LAST
[Last name], [first name]. Born [father’s surname] in [place], lived there until [date]; moved to [place] in [date]; studied [three subjects] at [school name] in [place]; worked at [occupation] in [city] from [date] to [date], and in [city] from [date] to [date]. Married [name] on [date]; divorced on [date]; worked as [occupation] in [place] from [dates] and in [place] from [dates]; created [what] with [name] in [city] in [date]; established [what] in [city] in [date]; subsequently specialized in [occupation] in [city], [country], [date]. Was [something] in [date]; was [other] in [date]; member of [society], [date].
First name, last name, studied subject, subject, and also subject. Was employed as something by various. Was married to and with him went somewhere when. When the something moved to somewhere in date, she began to do something. In due course she did something, as well as something. Collaboration with him was very close, particularly in the fields of something and something, as well as something. Cf. [book title plus date of publication].
THE PHOTOGRAPHER, BERLIN
Monday was fluid, so no longer matters. There was food and that is not nothing. An alarm. A doorbell. I’m limiting my thoughts to facts. This may be what the near-dead feel as they enter their special sleep. Tuesday, up at five, dinner at eight. Then I don’t know what until Wednesday when I woke. Dinner and the desire for knowledge, which we have come to realize is impossible. As much as I know I know it is nothing other than what I assume. Thursday is over. I am toward and away and each type is a tedium. I am afraid I will board the wrong train. I exit the station I find myself on the street, pure evidence, so the eye says. I’m met by a stream of quotidian detail. This morning was and now day is a train with a window and above it, concrete. Where am I? The weather changes. Warmer. Less gray. Less wet. I’m already here. Is this what it means to accomplish? Thursday was sudden. I walk and I walk. I now wonder what I was thinking.
THE NEW OBJECTIVITY
The orbit begins but won’t meet its end. Will I ever arrive at a future? An ocean of place names rolls by like a cart on an incline and nothing to stop it. Can it rest? I continue to be against hunger and terror. My own and that of all others. What is constant? One, a bed, or two, the ticking beside it. Buy a ticket, catch a train, cross a border. Take with you only what you can carry. The eyes of the other are on you. The indicative finger is telling you to come away from the window. It indicates that a room is for looking into, not out of. The sway of terror like a dance band, ratcheting up the drum beat.
THE ICON IN THE HANDS OF THE ENEMY
To disappear, but not this way, not with the body intact but slowly eroding until it’s been hollowed out. A diminishing rain followed by a panicked dash to a border where tanks are backed up. We were busy living in a house and about to step out. Who could have known that the same kiss we were having had just been with death? I watched while a man was taken away. I held onto the view of the closing door and when I turned back to the room, there was the small map of the tea-set table, quotidian, benign, symbol of time. The numbers on the wall clock morphed into dots. We are this now I said to myself inside the terror. The indifference of nature added its weight. After that, I no longer thought of time as a transcript but as an ongoing address to emptiness.
ONE PHOTOGRAPH OF A ROOFTOP
Dawn rains bombs on the rooftop while a legend scrolls under a series: one escaped to Siberia, another, to somewhere else. A silver crystal ball reflects what it catches the way a fish-eye lens does—both bend the edges and flatten the foreground. How can one plan? You have an intention, then the right comes out of hiding and becomes the wrong thing. The wrong time. The worst thing. We had hoped means “then nothing.” We admired the architecture, sat in the courtyard and marveled at the look of surprise attached to our faces. Two children bounced a ball back and forth behind a wall. We remained committed to finishing dinner and avoiding death. How is the present now? As difficult? Like a murder trial where one is asked to decide if the defendant is guilty or only appears to have killed someone? Would he be guilty? It must go without saying that there is more than one way to look at a situation. What can you do with a building’s collection of angles? We lived among facts. What does order cure? If not cure, at least calms while you look at the roof. Or at a stone boat sinking slowly. Winter etches the glass deck. Is it always possible to find an example of what you didn’t do well enough? Don’t you think?
A handful of small-scale hours unobserved, the sight of cities razed. The ever-active disaster machine pauses to fix itself. You can never answer the question of whether a single death matters. All those sorrows. Radio signals run through rain. Glass hours lie on their sides. A sand bed dead to the world.
MASTERS’ HOUSES
Architectural is one way of being. A background against which the black trees are more belonging than the white walls and made beds of boredom behind them. Inside, a plate is waiting to be emptied, a rose is giving in. I never wanted to be anything but an eye that was open, city to city to city. Master is craftsman but also a brutal building of history. Bleached femurs in slave chains and trains to where. Razor wire master as monster, the memory of. We began where you began, with the thought that the world was about to be. And it was. And still is.
TOMB IN THREE PARTS
I remove my heart from its marble casing and grind that shell into glass dust and force the dust and the occupational core into a box barely big enough to hold them and watch while the self-sealing lid sets itself. I then take the contraption to a place to which I doubt I will ever find my way back, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. I have zero desire for what has been buried after having been done with like that one that was once. With such rigor and exactitude does the end come and more than once, which is a way of making a statement about the infinite duplicity of a suffocating blanket.
THE EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS
Darwin dreams of orchids while I dream of Darwin saying mutability isn’t always elegant, not like the cult objects we once loved. The now-past post-utopian scene is so frayed that the residual sounds like a disintegration tape. What is missing is what we were when we were the gorgeous beginning. Silence can be the gray painted edge of a ship where the water’s nothing takes the shape of the mind forestalling deciding what to do next. Going downstairs and out again onto the patio, the movie of your mind returns you to the dodo, a bird now only believed in. We believed and that brought us to the drowning of the ticking clock and to air filling a well-defined building and years.
MASK PHOTO
I.
Life as a dressed doll. A graveled path no wider than a balance beam. You come to yourself in a dream where a woman’s face is imported from the ancient era. Myth always works like this: all goddesses get dressed out in qualities and roped into whatever arena you choose to believe in. Red Riding Hood is an ingénue; Daphne is featureless, a chaste head inside an oval at the distant end of a tarnished tea strainer, her shining beauty left behind. You sail away to the mountains at midnight with the owl and girl-friend his cat. You pick a self and make it last. Waiting fate takes the form of Ariadne who has secrets. Day and night she whispers at the mouth of the maze. You wish you could kill her, but don’t. Her understudy is standing by.
II.
The terrible act of the photograph made more so by the fact that the scene is only volatile dyes bonded in a
n unstable coupling that becomes a red shoe warped by wearing. There is also the red flowered dress one could wear but instead it becomes the moment of someone staring at a radical departure from the limited real. Perfection, you know, is a matrix best imagined as a picture behind glass. The room’s circus performed on the surface makes a viewer want to enter its mimetic mouth and melt. Above you, a sugar cube suspended like a lifelong doubt: you doubt that you can ever love what truly is in front of you. You are left wondering what is behind. When you turn around to see, you only see what you want.
AN ANATOMICAL STUDY
Now I’m an archivist. Indexer of everywhere I have ever been. Of every moment I stood there and there. Of where I was when I was getting and spending. Coming and going. My seeing is now different from what it once was. White burns my eyes. Orange glares back like a crass plastic pumpkin bright in the last null of night. This must be the way any newborn sees a face facing its face. Color catches and brings two wide eyes into view. The archive is a disguise and disguise is a form of experiment, a mask every bit as radical as an overblown detail or some new extreme perspective. Here I am not myself but still me: hectic tulle and self-timer instead of identity. I’m an interceding nameless other and transforming even as we speak: face, make-up, lace, and cliché overlay. Eyes open, I’m someone else. Eyes closed, I’m a face-shape falling asleep.
THE MISSING NEGATIVES
In science, design, and architecture, there are no answers for what is entirely positive or negative. There is that ships-parts paradox based on the principle of asking what is anatomy and what is a nerve impulse and how does a doll act as a bioengineered replica of a body. How does an empty interior echo? No, Plutarch, no, under no circumstances is a ship rebuilt from the same wood the same ship. Apply the same principle (then is not now) to anything physical and multiply times two. Those two items will never touch again. Proof of that is the fact that the pout-faced neighbor doesn’t speak. He stands for some essential silence that is more than merely decorative. He takes multiple forms, first an elephant, benign but crushing, then a bird as the essence of what it is to be betrayed. The tedium of a pink drink, of closed lips, closed mind, without so much as a dimple of kindness to brighten the day.
IN NOVEMBER WE INCHED CLOSER
In November we inched closer to the ledge over which one only falls once. No traveler returns—or if, then borders will have been withdrawn. There will undoubtedly be a film made later and seen documenting the train as it passes through Germany. The soundtrack will have to include the clatter of knives and twice broken glass. Those on board felt a mystifying sense of time blurring more than the usual. To a person they said it felt like a flash. The train slowed, came to a stop, we got on. The hall was narrow, which made some sense—what hall is wide but the kind that cuts through Versailles? Cabins on either side of an hour: a bed, a curtain, a half-cup of water no more. There’s no one to ask where we are or whether we’ll ever arrive. No timetable. No dining. No dome car, no well-dressed people legs crossed at the ankles casually pointing at the sight of an avalanche or snow on a mountain. I didn’t know where I was going. There was dark at night and day never lasted. Each tunnel was a sightless blind and no soothing singsong birdsong. I no longer hear being German spoken. Those who are left are alive. I am among them quietly holding my breath and hoping time will go back to being. The last I saw of the sky, the moon was a man with moronic orange hair dressed up in a frock coat and collar swearing to serve no one but himself to the duped on his way to his tower.
HAVING BOTH THE PRESENT AND FUTURE IN MIND
The split image, a glass box that can be divided in two like a warm-water aquarium with angelfish, some with tails lashing one way, others another. The high-rise windows all masquerading as insect eyes. Inside, a house for a room in which an apple is bitten almost in half. A chair one gets up from. Time can move from the general to the visual particular one piece at a time until you reach the infinitesimal where everything is airborne. Place a grid over that and what you have is a tall building that’s been imploded. The roof ripped off, the fixtures removed as scrap for melting. Even copper wire can be stripped of its red rubber cover. What’s left will look as if it could be reconstructed, become electric again, but no longer dangerous. Although never again would there be that woman who stood up, walked over to a table, then turned to say, “I was just about to say,” to a man in the midst of dissolving. The building like a maze, the individual pieces falling, some forward, some backward, the woman and man collapsing, each becoming a sacrifice to the fact of having been. I’m not saying you can change a shape without forever altering the inside. I’m saying the opposite. I’m saying that in some cases the inside persists until long after it doesn’t.
Lucia Moholy, British (born Prague), 1894 – 1989
Untitled (Walter and Ilse Gropius’s Dressing Room), 1926
Silver gelatin print
4½ × 6 in.
Private Collection
AFTERWORD
The electric brain echoes Open, and when it does, only then do you see how inside the cabinet a row of shoes suggests that life goes on and on. The unseen hand holding the camera is modern. The straight lines say so and maintain the illusion of us looking in from a distance. We are post-then but still attached. Perception alone can trace the lines between before and after that. The shoes in the photograph and their heirs will soon be buried under after and whatever falls from the window of broken glass that gives onto barbarity. Looking in from now, the future outside the print’s edges includes the unspeakable: I am what I made. Which also contains, I am out of that which I made.
A living magician on stage addresses the audience: I’m about to pull a rabbit out of an intangible hat. Out of death. Out of a row of shoes. Out of a cupboard with a door that swings open and shut. Out of a doll that is and isn’t actual. The doll’s avatar mouth—we are alike; we are not—can be made to say anything: I once lived in London. I once looked across a lake to where evil planned a “final solution” to the question of envy. I once tumbled from a balcony, got up and photographed my fall. I once wrote a book in which my face was inside a frame.
On the potential for error in the present: Stop me, the mouth says, as the dashboard-mind races toward disaster. This is like saying stop to water in a cup in the middle of a tilt toward an inevitable revision. A drip snakes its way down the forehead. That motion was invented to invert what we can’t claim to know about ourselves, much less about another. The negatives are arranged in a circle around us. Lives appear likable when standing on a balcony, bodies angled toward the emptiness below. Below us and them, time continually flips back and forth between utopian hope and what will be next. The breeze surrounding the bird-whispers sends indiscriminate messages to any who listen in on the scattershot hail against a window.
The sill is an unbroken line dividing without from within. That border acts like breath makes time mark the living as over. Imagine yourself inside that room. Can you see yourself? There is a mirror. You think now.
I once read that reading the phrase a green suede glove activates a part of the brain that processes texture. Does that mean reading makes it possible to know what it is to feel? What is certain, at least to me, is that patterned marks on paper are a reminder that humans sometimes speak.
In 2012, in a cube-shaped room I saw this—
a Dutch woven textile, hung verso, circa 1910–1930; Pablo Picasso’s Woman in a Red Hat, oil-on-canvas, 1934; Visions in the Night, oil-on-Masonite by Maybelle Stamper, circa 1938–39; a line drawing, Youth Dismounting, by the sculptor Marino Marini (a miracle of visual ambiguity: the man, the horse, the merger of two), 1949; a Plexiglas vitrine inside of which were three things: a medicine pot, a “power object,” and a figure of a man carved on a staff (Mali), all unattributed, dated circa 20th century; an untitled black and white photograph (Walter and Ilse Gropius’s Dressing Room) by Lucia Moholy, 1926.*
—and thought then about how the objects together brilliantly enacted
the democratizing collapse between craft and high art envisioned by Walter Gropius in 1919 and promoted by the vaunted Masters of the Bauhaus movement. The school survived until 1933, the year Hitler was made Chancellor. At that point, the forward-thinking ideas and sleek machine-age style—an elegant form-equals-function—were deemed degenerate by the Nazis. They idealized a past that had never existed except in the form of gingerbread trim. They misunderstood the word again. I watched the past unravel and worried about the future.
* Originally taken for a 1926 promotional brochure designed to publicize the Bauhaus buildings in Dessau, it was part of In the Still Epiphany, an exhibition curated by Gedi Sibony at the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis, Missouri, April 5 – October 27, 2012.
A NOTE ON LUCIA MOHOLY
She was born Lucia Schulz in Czechoslovakia to an upper-middle-class secular-Jewish family in 1894. The daughter of a lawyer, she studied art history at the University of Prague. She was fluent in four languages and experienced in darkroom photography. She was working at a bookstore in Hamburg when, on a visit to Berlin in 1920, she was introduced to László Moholy-Nagy. He was a Hungarian Constructivist painter who had also made a few sculptures and some works on paper. She introduced him to photography. When he began to teach at the Bauhaus in 1923, she joined him as a workshop participant in photography. She was asked by Walter Gropius to document the newly constructed buildings in Dessau and the workshop products. Gropius said he was unable to pay her but she would retain the rights to the images, as well as any fees for future reproductions.