Amateur Barbarians

by Robert Cohen

  “Now the task of the artist, if I’m reading Auden right, is to engage in dialogue with earthly forms. To keep our perceptions fresh. Be alert to what Cartier-Bresson calls ‘the scars of the world.’” She took a sip from her paper cup. “But fresh perception is no easy task. We’re bombarded with images every day. Think of it—every one of you has the technology at your disposal to make a movie, record a CD, post a blog, and take a picture of yourself with your cell phone and send it to the ends of the earth. Surely this is a good thing. But if everything’s so accessible, what then has value? If images are just more cheap goods to produce and consume, why bother to perfect them? Why learn how to use a thirty-five-millimeter camera? Why master the rudiments of the darkroom? Why squirrel yourself away all night, breathing toxic chemicals and fussing over composition? What purpose does it serve? These are questions I hope we’ll be addressing together in the weeks ahead. Now, if you’ll all turn to the syllabus for a moment…”

  But nobody had a syllabus, so the class came to another screeching halt while she passed copies around. The document ran to three pages, none of which were stapled to the others. Students were taking out their cell phones and staring frankly at the screens, as if willing some message of deliverance to appear.

  “As you’ll see, I’ve included the usual suspects. Warren’s Concise Guide, Stahl’s What Is Photography? Berger of course. Baudrillard. But I’d like to begin with a little volume by Rimbaud, Illuminations. Perhaps some of you have read it? Rimbaud was of course a highly visual poet from the first. But even after he grew bored with poetry and moved to Africa, he did not abandon art altogether. He worked hard at his photography. He had his mother send him the latest film and equipment from Paris, though eventually he grew bored with that too. Not the most emotionally stable person, our Monsieur Rimbaud. But then highly creative people are easily bored, aren’t they?”

  The fellow in the second row, the one who’d just got back from Peru, was an easily bored creative person himself—you could tell by the extravagant way he now leaned back and yawned. A girl beside him tittered. Meta McVay glanced up from her notes in distress, her long throat mottled, her eyes filmy behind her glasses. My God, Teddy thought, she’s never taught before. The stuttering, overemphatic gestures, the extraneous digressions about this guy Rimbaud, the way she kept looking down at her note cards like a game-show host, shuffling them in search of an answer—he’d seen all these signs and symptoms before: the novice pedagogue in over her head. The father in him wanted to sling his big, protective arm around her white shoulders and sit her down. The lover in him, that rough beast, wanted to rise, shake out his woolly coat, saunter forward, and lie her down. And of course the school administrator in him, that cold clerk with his rolled-up sleeves, wanted to have her canned immediately. A teacher as poor as M. McVay wouldn’t last a week at the Carthage Union Middle School. So naturally it followed that she’d been hired at Carthage College. That was the private-education racket for you: the more paid, the less received.

  He stuck his hand in the air and waved it like a flag.

  “Yes?” M. McVay groaned, truly apprehensive now.

  “This is probably just me,” Teddy said, “but I’m a total beginner here. I feel like it would help me to maybe get some of the basics first? Like what sort of equipment we need, and how we’ll be evaluated, and all that?”

  “Yes, I was going to come to that, once I laid out the, uh, groundwork as it were. But perhaps it would be better to start with the basics.” She put down her notes. “Shall we just go ahead and start with the basics? Would that be okay for everyone?”

  A few people nodded grudgingly. Already you could feel it, the change in pressure, the new beginning. Nobody appreciated how hard it was, Teddy thought, the teaching business. You couldn’t just start in the air: you had to get purchase. Build a concrete foundation, then ascend from there.

  He watched her now, crisply ticking off the requirements. The books to be bought, the craft areas to be addressed. Filters and lenses. Dodging and burning. Light and shadow. At one point she paused, glancing up at Teddy with what might have been gratitude or deference or puzzlement, but he didn’t linger on the implications. There wasn’t time. He opened his Nomad binder, freed a clean white page from the steel-toothed clasps, and copied down the basics like everyone else.

  The first assignment was the most basic one imaginable. The Visual Diary. A kind of meet and greet. “Get to know the camera,” Meta McVay had said. “Carry it with you around the house. Just take pictures. You’ll find that anything becomes interesting when you look at it long enough.”

  Teddy was eager to get started. He’d already ordered his equipment by Express Mail: a 35 mm Leica M6 range finder with a 50 mm lens. A Vivitar flash. Fifty rolls of Fuji Acros and Kodak Tri-X film. Enlarging paper, dodging wand, burning board. When they arrived, he carried the boxes down to the basement and set them on the ping-pong table he’d insisted on buying the girls for Christmas ten years ago, thinking they might enjoy the game as much as Philip and he had in their youth. But they hadn’t. Now the net was down, the surface gouged and scarred, and the table’s sole function was to provide storage and exhibit space for the Hastings Museum of Bygone Technologies—all the old printers, slide projectors, tape recorders, boom boxes, and VCRs bought over the years and then discarded in favor of the new. Well, maybe this one would break the string. Maybe this one would last.

  Just tearing open the cardboard gave him pleasure. The cheerful snap of the bubbled plastic. The squeal of goods being extracted from their Styrofoam harnesses. The dehumidifier hummed and cackled, urging him on. Carefully he inspected each piece of equipment, admired its heft and shine. Then he reached for the operating manuals. Teddy had contempt for people who didn’t read their operating manuals, people who, by choosing not to read manuals, were passively electing to be dependent upon people like him, people who did read manuals, to map out the circuitry of their lives. And he was surrounded by such people. Hence he was the one who’d set up Danielle’s laptop, who’d programmed Mimi’s MP3 player, who’d installed Gail’s tax software on her hard drive. It was the price he paid for having that sort of mind. God help him, he liked taking things apart and then rebuilding from scratch. But at last there comes a time to put the manuals away, to stop reading and start doing. So he pushed all that crumpled packaging aside, picked up the camera—it was heavier than it looked—and tromped out into the startling daylight.

  One nice thing about living in the country: all these picturesque landscapes were just lying around, waiting to be noticed. The yard, the garden, the woods, the snaking brook and muscular mountains and golden fields—it all came flooding through the lens, rushing and indiscriminate; he had only to stand there and catch it with the Leica like a bucket. He tried to do it as Meta McVay directed. Tried to see things as if for the first time, whatever that meant. Tried to defamiliarize the environment, whatever that meant, and to decontextualize it, whatever that meant. Tried to reassemble it as a series of progressive visual relationships using memory and personal narrative, whatever that meant. Above all, he tried not to be overly self-conscious about being overly self-consciousness, whatever that meant.

  At moments, it was true, facility seemed within reach, the instrument in his hands felt light and responsive, and every click of the shutter was soft as a kiss. But there were other moments too, and a great many more of them, when nothing held still, when the light was all wrong, the Leica jerked in his hands, when every shutter speed was too fast or too slow, every detail gone smeary or marginal. At such times he felt like a drunk fumbling in the dark with his keys. He could not coax the doors open. Could not work his way past his own security system and step inside. He kept plugging away at his nature shots—the bloody sunsets, the spindly deer posed stoic in the fields, the frivolous finches lighting up the weigela bush like Christmas ornaments—with a sinking heart. He could no longer conceal, even from himself, his boredom with the whole nature-shot enterprise. What he
prized about nature was its impersonality, its indifference to human will, human designs. Now he began to loathe it for the same reasons. He trudged back to the house, set down the Leica, unslung his brand-new $40 camera bag, and left it on a chair, bulging with chargers and adapters, and the long hard barrel of the telephoto, and ten film canisters all in a row, like the gun belt of a sleeping sheriff.

  Then he took a hot, punishing shower and, wrapped in his terry-cloth robe, settled into the recliner, a king reclaiming his throne. The robe was still musty from his long convalescence. It was as if he’d never been away. As if it had all been one long sleep.

  He woke to find the Leica entangled in its own straps, staring at him through its dark, unblinking eye. He could see his own reflection floating upside down in the lens, like an embryo, like an astronaut in a space capsule. Beside him, curled on the floor, Bruno snored and shuddered in a pool of light. His scraggly flanks were dotted with flies.

  Sometimes, contemplating Bruno, a pressure would rise in Teddy’s chest, a flutter and swell of the heart, like an intoxication with being.

  Without thinking, he reached for the Leica.

  Just one picture. The dog and the flies.

  And that was how it started. Not an interesting portrait, not meaningful or suggestive, in no way well composed. Just bony old Bruno, dead to the world, and his hovering entourage of flies. A dumb thing to focus on, but so what? He’d already made up his mind to drop the course anyway. You had to learn such things when you were young, Teddy thought, the way you learned a foreign language. And he hadn’t. Now it was too late. He would never learn to take good pictures. He didn’t even want to take good pictures. So he forgot about taking good pictures and took bad ones instead, very bad pictures of nothing at all. No fields, no mountains, no sweeping vistas…just random, boring pictures of no interest to anyone. The meeting, say, in the depths of the fruit bowl, of kiwi and banana. Danielle’s closet with its toppled pyramid of shoes. Mimi’s frown in the mirror when she brushed out her hair. The webbed shadow of the hammock, arrested over the grass in late afternoon. He snapped away carelessly, wastefully, hopelessly. It didn’t matter that the pictures were bad. No one would ever see them, these bad pictures; he had no intention of developing the film.

  And here was the odd thing. Not until he’d given up taking good pictures entirely and begun to enjoy taking bad ones did the lens fill with life, and, if his instructor could be believed, some good pictures too.

  “It’s a start, perhaps,” she said, looking over the contact sheets the second week of class. “There’s the beginning of something honest in these last shots.”

  “You like the one with the dog?”

  “I’m not much into dogs, I’m afraid. But what does interest me, Mr. Hastings, is the latent content here. The beginnings of a narrative strategy. I think I see what you’re up to.”

  “You do?”

  “Of course you risk trafficking in some historical clichés here. The empty rooms, the lost connections. The symmetries are perhaps too neat.” She pivoted, holding the pictures up against the light. “But you give them your own spin, don’t you? These ghost traces—they make us feel something quite terrible has happened in this house. And yet there’s a sense of judgment being withheld. It’s rather haunting I think.”

  “Haunting is good, right?”

  “Here too. The way you pull back here to expose the clutter on the closet floor. Very nice. All those empty hangers. They’re reminders, aren’t they, of what isn’t there. The authority figure. The legitimizing presence. The unifying principle.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now here’s a case where you do go over the line, I think. The crumbs on the tablecloth say it all—there’s no need to hit us over the head with the melting butter and cracked plate too. And those dying flowers, they’re far too elegiac. You’re milking the pathos. Give the viewer some credit. We see what’s gone wrong in this family. It’s unmistakable.”

  He stared at her blankly. Nothing she was saying bore the remotest correspondence to his intentions, but then how could it? He’d had no intentions. The butter was melting because Mimi had forgotten as usual to put it back in the fridge. The plate was cracked because at this point in their communal life, most of their plates were cracked. And the flowers weren’t dying; he’d only picked them that morning. Though now that she mentioned it, they did look droopy.

  “I keep getting the light wrong,” he complained. “I can’t seem to adjust for shadow.”

  “You’ll learn. It takes time.”

  “Listen, I’m past fifty. I don’t have time.”

  “Then I’m afraid you’ll have to find some,” she said.

  Still, at least he was trying. Which was more than he could say for the women in his life.

  Mimi, grounded, had turned listless and silent, a renegade monk. All day she sat high in her lifeguard’s chair at the town pool, long nose swathed in zinc, gazing down at her noisy fellow Carthaginians with a fine and distilled contempt. Then she’d drive home, eat three bites of dinner, and go sack out in the hammock for hours, whether from depression, surreptitious drug intake, or lack of nourishment it wasn’t clear. When had they last shared an entire meal together? When had they last exchanged an entire sentence? As for Danielle, the fond firstborn, the academic all-star, she too, from the photos she’d e-mailed, was now an accomplished slacker, lying in a glassy stupor on some palm-studded beach in Thailand or Vietnam or someplace, in the arms of a dark, shirtless, rapacious-looking young man gone AWOL from the Israeli army, while the last deadlines for renewing her merit scholarship scattered in the wind like so much dandelion fluff.

  And Gail? Instead of cutting back her summer hours as usual, she had at Mimi’s urging (the negotiations had been strictly closed-door) taken on the Chinese-refugee case pro bono. As a result of which her hours at the office had not halved, but doubled. Mostly she skipped dinner altogether, proceeded directly from work to yoga or the fitness center before falling into bed at midnight with a groan. Teddy would lie there listening to the slow intake of her breath, waiting for her to ask him how his day was. If only she would ask him how his day was, he thought, then he’d gladly go ahead and ask her how her day was. But she wouldn’t. Anyway he knew how her day was: tiring. But then so was his. When had their marriage turned into a competition, a race to exhaustion, a land rush to stake out the high ground of complaint? And why did he so seldom win?

  Case in point: VA 103. Though nominally encouraging about his enrollment, and though technically solicitous of his progress, Gail was not yet entirely on board, it seemed, with the demands of the course.

  “Are you still on that same assignment?” she asked one morning, her lips going tight as he raised the Leica. “I thought surely she’d have moved on by now.”

  “Sometimes moving on means staying put. Going, you know, deeper.”

  “Interesting. And you came by this idea how?”

  He didn’t answer. He was fixing her in the lens, adjusting the light meter for contrast.

  “It intrigues me to hear you talk this way. It’s like you’ve joined a cult.”

  “Just hold still.”

  Even when he did manage to bully or cajole her into posing, Gail would find a way to withhold herself, to elude the camera’s grasp. She’d blanch under the lens’s examination, or make tense, unflattering faces she claimed to be unaware of, or move abruptly at the last second, blurring the exposure. Mimi of course was even worse. She poked her head into the kitchen—her shoulders bare, her hair wet and dangly like a mop—saw the two of them sitting at the table like conspirators, noted the Leica in his hands, and swore. The next sound they heard was the bang of the screen.

  “You’re driving her crazy with that thing,” Gail said. “She’s at that awkward stage. She hates everything about the way she looks.”

  “I thought the last stage was that awkward stage. How many are there going to be?”

  “I don’t know. Every child’s different. In h
er case it looks like a lot.”

  “Listen,” he said, “this photo diary? It’s a class assignment. If I don’t finish it, I’m going to fail.”

  “I thought she didn’t give grades, this Meta-person. I thought she said it should be pass/fail.”

  “It should be, she said. But it’s not. Anyway I’m not doing this for grades.” He’d let her strange construction—this Meta-person—pass, recognizing it for the casual sliver of bitchery it was. “Besides, look at the kid. She’s never been more beautiful. All those hours at the pool, she’s brown as a berry. You could eat her up.”

  “It’s her thighs,” Gail said. “They’re too doughy, she says. She wants cosmetic surgery for her next birthday.”

  “First I’ve heard of it.”

  “Where have you been? She’s been talking about this for months. Her thighs and her ass, her thighs and her ass.”

  “Why doesn’t she exercise then? Why doesn’t she cut back on the Doritos? Why does everything have to be a shortcut?”

  “First of all, she happens to be built big, thanks to certain genetic indicators she gets from her father. Also, you really want to declare war on shortcuts? Keep in mind, toasters are shortcuts. Cars are shortcuts. Even cameras are shortcuts.”

  “I don’t see what’s so wrong with her ass,” he muttered. “It’s just like yours.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So then what’s the problem?”

  They regarded each other across the table, surprised. His question, for all its innocence, had struck a suggestive note. He reached a hand to her cheek, cupped it softly in his palm. Gail, dimpling prettily, hung her head. Her hair came down over her eyes. Her beaded necklace—black, putty-colored, ocher—uncoiled itself in increments like a slinky. “Ah,” she said. “Now he’s interested.”

  “I’m always interested. You know that.”

  She shook her handsome head. Her hair was still lushly dark, more black than white; her scalp shone like marble through the part. The lines on her face were barely perceptible. The age spots on her hands might have been freckles. Her breasts, just visible in outline, still formed their taut, shapely parabola.