Men and Apparitions

by Lynne Tillman

  I ask myself that every day.

  loving a praying mantis: on the road

  to ethnography

  I was a morbid kid, but also kind of happy, nothing stood in my way, except Bro Hart and Father. Kidding, not.

  I saw us through Mr. Petey’s eyes. We/they were fools in clumsy shoes, ugly aprons, eating burned hot dogs, complaining about bugs, while getting loaded and uploading shit on others, people were just stupid. Mr. Petey watched, hunkered down on a leaf, invisible to dull adult eyes.

  PMs are carnivorous, so the smell of burgers wasn’t disgusting to him. They eat their prey alive, but paralyze them first.

  PMs’ ability to turn their heads 180 degrees allows them great visibility, also their eyes are sensitive to the slightest movement up to sixty feet away (two-thirds to first base). They have powerful jaws for devouring their prey and ultrasound ears on their meta-thoraxes. They are so aware of their environment, built that way, like some humans who are called overly sensitive.

  PMs blend into a plant’s leaves and only their movement gives them away, so they fool other insects and us. They can’t be fooled because their brains aren’t stymied by the problems ours handle, which are bigger than our big brains can actually manage. If a brain is small, dedicated to fewer problems, and those get handled exquisitely, that organism isn’t less smart than a human.

  His species required no improvement, think about it: he didn’t need to evolve, like our imperfect species—heavy skulls sit on top of spindly, multi-parted spines, the body’s primary support structure.

  Women have narrow pelvises, to winnow out fatheads.

  Shoulders are needed for too many functions, too many directions in which they must turn. The knee, by comparison, is more simple, the hip a simpleton.

  Mr. Petey was small, efficiently built, and effective.

  He cogitated, my thinker-insect. Thought = action.

  Go ahead, go play on your own, Mother used to say. I loved that.

  So what if I didn’t have a “good personality.” Mother claimed my personality showed at birth, but my character emerged later. Go figure. My family has strong opinions—principled, stubborn, righteous, judgmental; they’re reasonable, smart, assholes, bigots, or nut jobs, depending upon your POV and linguistic code. My father told me I was a brat; Mother might call me sly or rambunctious. Maybe I wasn’t cool enough or too cool for school, and so what if Hart beat me up or sat on me and tried to suffocate me or tickle me to death, or Little Sister sometimes ignored me; so what if I wet my bed until I was five or sucked my big toe, not even my thumb like normal kids, or had three cavities at age four because Mother feared government control by fluoride. She was otherwise a pretty rational person.

  native, naïve not

  The so-called native informant—a native can be anyone, a member of the Zuni tribe, or an upstate New York gang member, or a DJ—is not an innocent informant. No one’s innocent. How should an anthropologist behave with informants? “It entails trust between the ethnographer and subject” (more later). The ethnographer can’t trust that he or she knows their subjects’ motivations for cooperation. The ethnographer can’t entirely know his or her own motives for talking with or choosing subjects. The most obvious stuff wasn’t sixty or seventy years ago, and new-style obvious-ness hides in blatant plain sight. Many humanists and social scientists are totally incensed, everyone appears to be incensed about the loss of objectivity and Truth with a cap T. It’s not the end of Western Civ. Or it is. Does it matter?

  I started with “naïve” images, or I was naïve, the images weren’t.

  I remember thinking, what’s happening inside everyone. I wanted the illusion—a picture talks to me.

  I haven’t entirely progressed from the vernacular, in all ways. Haha.

  See, the naïf or amateur has no cred in our digitized world. There are no amateurs. Does it mean there is no love in what people do? No, it can mean that those who do it professionally are not as valued, or even themselves value it less, oddly. Or, that everyone feels able to take good photos, and they are—good enough. Yet what is a good photo, and by whose definition?

  Some people get paid to take pictures: the professional class, experts, artists, specialists. Often they talk only to each other, a small circle of other picture people. The majority take spontaneous, unplanned pix, especially of family and friends, in which there are what I call “display stances,” image-ready attitudes, position-motifs showing status, etc. In the picture-taking and -making age, each generation matures with technologies that “show” them to themselves and others, so everyone can assert self as an image; we are all in image-apprenticeship, and it is through pictures we see ourselves and learn to shape ourselves, to present ourselves.

  The pictures don’t need to be reflexive. Portraits of selves reside inside or beside portraits of desirable or desired others, too. The other’s desired life is a fashion or style, there is no inner to the outer-wear. Fashion and style rule because the shopper assumes the style of the designer and imagines it’s his or her own. When in fact he or she is merely branded. (See Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.)

  Pictures don’t tell stories; they match—align with—stories we tell ourselves. In the early 1980s, artists Louise Lawler and Sherrie Levine posted this on a movie theater’s marquee: “A picture is not worth a 1,000 words.” It isn’t, but if it doesn’t tell a story, what, if anything, does it tell? Do our lives lean heavily on nothing?

  HBO’s Six Feet Under (2001–2005), a droll series, showed Claire, one of its protagonists, in art school studying photography. In its finale, before leaving her house and home for the unknown, Claire shoots it and her family. Suddenly, Claire’s dead brother, Nate, a ghost, looks on, and whispers to her, “That’s already gone.”

  But Claire takes the pictures, because she’s alive, and present to remember.

  tellings

  Uncle Lionel liked to recite this ditty:

  Yesterday upon the stair

  I saw a man who wasn’t there

  He wasn’t there again today.

  Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

  I wished upon the first star that winked at me in a black sky: preserve me, keep me safe, oh little angels in heaven. (No religion practiced at home; angels appeared in museum paintings.) During the Reformation, I might have volunteered to be a castrato and resisted maturation. I heard a recording of the last-known castrato, made in 1904—an eerie boy voice.

  I wonder if his face stayed boyish. I wanted to stay a boy. “I’m not going to grow up like you, I won’t become an adult.” Typical for Americans.

  My secret world, once upon a child, included my photo library, definitely a formative, building-block experience, with a system only I knew, because I conceived of it. I hid it. I stored and preserved (thought I did) what I wanted. At age nine, I classified pix, and really did my best to preserve them. Martin Scorsese says preservation is filmmaking. Think about how much of existence goes into preserving what could instantly disappear, and maybe should, like taking a photo at a wedding. Good or bad? Which is important, the moment or the preservation?

  I named my analogue catalogue Zekabet, coding by colors and numbers and symbols I liked—naturally, the praying mantis was significant. It was a kind of me and not-me formulation. My color was dark green, like Mr. Petey’s; any home video or Super 8 I appeared in was marked with a dark green Crayola; if I shot it, it was marked with lime green, and any green was number 1. Bro Hart was shit brown. Little Sister violet, Mother gray-blue, Father real red; these accorded with their temperaments. (Mother once wore a mood ring, made an impact.) The code never left my pocket. My biggest conceptual issue was how to show the passage of time, not by dates like the year, say, 1980. Too easily decoded. So, I created a calendar that related to weather, that is, when weather first was recorded in 1870, or Year 1. Simple, but cloud formations and movements were also factored in, because I was entranced by clouds and why they took the shapes they did,
that they had volume but were made of air, of space. That killed me.

  In the Zekabet, Mr. Petey ranked over all creatures; Little Sister was a special human-creature; also ranking high: outer space, robots, D&D, clouds, rocks, family photos. Kid-time felt eternal, off the charts, and what I felt then was limitless, or more prosaically, if there was time, it was like the waves I watched breaking far from shore, without end or thought, one after the other. No concern for anything.

  An endangered species and I were friends.

  Am I an endangered species?

  Time stood still when I picked up a smooth gray-blue stone, flat, nothing exotic, but it was in the backyard.

  A rock with a crevice, maybe it encased a fossil. Looking, I was outside of time, and as I said, never bored.

  Perpetual stillness: still photographs do it for me, not movies, videos. Stopped time is an illusion, OK, is there life without illusion? Delusions, that’s different, I know from experience, though experience is a relentless, wicked trickster. Oh wickedness! Yet an ethnographer is encouraged to trust it. See, here’s the fault line, there’s trouble in paradise.

  I was born in the USA, near Boston, MA, June 29, 1978, close to midnight, so I straddled night and day, the 30th, and those numbers mean a lot. To me. When I gamble, I go to them.

  “You’re emotionally immature,” Mother says. Little Sister smiles, faintly, pissing me off.

  I know I shouldn’t have children.

  Parental laws included: “Act like a grown-up.” An act. “Why act this way?” I yelled. “’Coz, then it’s all fake.” A “time out” would get called, I’d skulk to my room, where I calmed down with pictures and games. Everything came to seem fake. I saw that, as you grow up, your true self withers away, though the State doesn’t, and you find yourself accepting rules, because that’s how it’s done until one day you decide: I don’t want to walk that walk.

  Virtues of backyard = safe space.

  I could be alone there.

  I learned to embrace aloneness. Big plus for an ethnographer.

  Our garden led to the big forest, the unknown, and any stone was a solid thing I could hold in my hand for as long as I wanted that didn’t ask me to do anything or be anything, it wasn’t for or against anything, it wasn’t bad, good, it demanded nothing, like a potential true friend should demand nothing. I learned that true friends were rare, that mostly everyone demands something you can’t give them.

  When I started school (still being schooled by life, haha), my anxiety launched into outer space. First off, school wasn’t home, there were other kids, there was me; I had to be with them, but they could have been other kids, which Mother made a lot of. Was I with the best people, for me? Did I have the best teachers, for me? There was something about me that caused “parental concern,” a specific form of tribal concern. The word “gifted” popped up early on the school screen, and meant nothing to me except I was different or special, not the way I felt to myself but to others. Bro Hart wasn’t, and that was cool, I wanted to be different from him. Little Sister owned her difference, though it wasn’t a gift. To me it kind of was—I didn’t get that it was a problem, until later. I thought Little Sister liked her specialness, since it brought privileges. Hart wasn’t ever my parents’ problem, but the word “track” got thrown around. He was tracking right. I mean, what the hell. I didn’t know what was going on with Hart. Gifted kids don’t necessarily score high on tests or do equally well on all tasks and responses. My track got skewed. Or, I had a screw loose, depending on who dissed me.

  The “gifted” brand rests in a Pandora’s box, a grab-bag of mysterious stuff. I heard: How should Zeke be “handled”? Is he overly sensitive? That shit. Ultimately I took the label and ran with it; I sensed I could do with it what I wanted—“let the boy have his head,” my namesake Great Uncle Zeke once burbled. I followed my investigations; plunged into what I declared “research,” and poked my nose into the family image fog. (Prefigured my becoming a cultural anthropologist.) In high school and mostly in college, I avoided family history, maybe with vehemence. Now, people think it’s the subtext, or true undercurrent, of my life.

  First off: I hated school.

  (1)Didn’t understand when learning started or stopped.

  (2) Didn’t like other kids. Maybe one or two.

  (3) Wary of girls, if they talked to me; if they didn’t, I fell in love.

  (4) Was too aggressive OR not enough—for a boy.

  (5) Could boys wear nail polish, like rock guys, and why not? (Possible origins for my work-in-progress MEN IN QUOTES.)

  sacred photography

  I’ve worked, formally, with family photographs since grad school. People open their doors, let you in, they answer questions about intimate parts of their lives. What’s at stake for them is part of my investigation. (For one thing, people want to think their lives are worth talking about. That they mean something. That’s totally upfront.)

  Then: Why am I interested in this? What’s my stake in this?

  All “portraits” are also self-portraits.

  In the nineteenth century, Thomas Carlyle believed “all that a man does is physiognomical of him.” A face revealed a person’s character and disposition, if one was skilled in reading it, and physiognomists, natural scientists expert in the field, hoped, like curious people everywhere, to discern from it why human beings acted as they did and to predict what they may do in the future. Criminals especially—they felt certain they could determine them.

  The science is archaic, kind of silly, but I understand the belief, even the point: a face lives in the open, naked, except when, for example, women wear veils or are veiled on specific occasions, such as marriage ceremonies. Expressions of happiness and remorse, pleasure and pain etch a mutating portrait. A face changes, none stay the same, except for a girl kept in captivity by her parents from the age of three, and, when she was discovered at the age of sixteen, she appeared to be a child, her face unmarked by experience. She had only known her room, a stunted world. Her growth was also stunted.

  Cosmetic surgery manifests a wish for permanent disguises, “to fool” death, which makes life temporary and all acts conditional.

  What Carlyle believed isn’t far from what portrait photographers or artists do, since their art concerns readings, of faces, stances—e.g., Richard Avedon, Rineke Dijkstra, Roy DeCarava, Collier Schorr, Lyle Ashton Harris, Diane Arbus, Lorna Simpson. Their pictures reveal a tacit belief in physiognomy, that faces should be read and looked at closely, even though faces don’t reveal character.

  Whistler on his portrait of his mother: “To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?”

  The divine face. Divination and divining. The facial divide. Ha.

  In the field, we “make” pictures by assembling from and interpreting the images given us. Making sense makes/allows for interpretation.

  Are we ethnographers fooled or do we only fool ourselves? Margaret Mead’s Samoan girls told her what she wanted to hear, which is instructive, when we know it’s going on. Actually, it was a kind of gift to Mead, but I don’t do gifts—anthropologically, I mean.

  The world is wired. Remote has several meanings.

  The shift from analog to digital, for instance, has and will have so many unforeseen consequences. The hand disappears further; tangibility and physicality too. Unmanned drones are just part of the removal, the remoteness, future living has in store.

  You are here, you wander there, fear of the Conradian monster within, at home and away. Though “away” can be home.

  family images

  Hour-long dramas are sustained on TV, but totally losing ground, because of the Internet, which is displacing TV, and theaters; there are far more sitcoms on TV, because the half-hour = more advertising dollars. Thirty minutes is about twenty-two minutes; in that time, a lot must happen to advance the story and keep a viewer’s attention; much must be tantalizingly n
ot told, or withheld, secrets to compel viewers to watch next week. Reality TV uses the same narrative devices: who will be the biggest loser, winner, etc., is revealed over time, and time, its extension and duration, is what differentiates narrative from other art forms.

  Sitcoms, like families, depend upon consistency of their members/characters, but TV needs comedy in its dramatized horrors, the kind actual families don’t experience. Characters must be “themselves” but also develop (the way actual characters don’t). Development in TV narratives folds into plots: Modern Family’s gay male couple adopt a Vietnamese baby girl and later plan their wedding. Viewers watch their almost-believable, always exaggerated, and bizarre machinations around these events. Psychological changes get embedded, when they do, through the protagonists’ relationships to events, not the other way around. Occasionally, both are in sync. Protagonists who go wildly out of character are scripted for actors to leave the show, or their characters die. An audience demands of a TV sitcom or long-running story a commitment to continuity and fidelity, to reasonableness, and a consolatory ending—a contract ensues. Dallas blew off the lid of credibility, when one entire season was the dream or fantasy of one of its protagonists. The Sopranos’s ambiguous finale infuriated and frustrated some viewers. The show has, for some (me), never ended, just like other tragedies eternally resonate.

  The family’s contract, though, expected, implicit, or inherent, is to keep its secrets. In Breaking Bad, Walter White says his cooking meth and making millions is for the family; his wife, Skyler, hides his secret as long as she can, to protect their children and benefit from the drug money. Secrets are essential to the kinship bond and to husbands and wives, who don’t have to testify against each other in court, anyway. What happens in the family stays there: No Silence = No Protection.

  I use media to explain certain phenomena and enduring characteristics, as well as new adaptations, of the American family. For example, Mafia movies succeeded after the family was hammered during the sixties, by promoting oaths that, like marriage, were ’til death do us part, while guilt and criminality occurred only by disregarding the family, not the law. Hollywood and indie movies glorified thugs’ loyalty to the clan, but The Sopranos portrayed mob boss Tony Soprano’s sadism so graphically that, Sunday by Sunday, the viewer’s sympathy was shredded. Still, violence was enshrined, and, with it and its threat against disloyalty, families were meant to cohere.