So, Mother’s ancestors were constitutive of her self-image. She inclines toward them, as in anaclisis, or choice of a love or erotic object “on the basis of a resemblance to early childhood protective and parental figures,” which might lead you to suspect my mother favored her actual parents, but no. Mother chose her image or constructed it, and “loved” on the basis of dead people. I don’t know how Father fit as a love object. Maybe as a disinclination, or recidivist throwback.
My father’s genealogy was sketchy, his people wandering to America from different parts of Europe: his mother, English, Scotch; father, Russian-Jewish, Spanish; his grandparents had scattered among nations and religions: Catholics, Protestants, converts from Judaism, arriving in the mid to late 1800s.
Weekdays, my father returned home from Boston, where he performed his corporate lawyering, poured himself a shot of Johnny Walker Black, no rocks, took the newspaper off the coffee table (Noguchi, right), and would walk to one of the plate-glass picture windows.
Did the big view enlarge our sense of the world or just our sense of ourselves?
If nice out, he’d continue to the patio, the adult sector of the backyard, and sit or lie down, start at the lead column, drink, and read every page but the women’s page. Bad weather, too cold or hot, he’d lie down indoors, overwhelming the Corbusier lounge chair. You couldn’t bother him, so I’d watch his head moving up and down, side to side, then it’d wobble. Slug, wobble, slug. He pretty much held his liquor, pretty much, but when he read, his cheeks flamed and darkened, and sometimes he fell asleep. I could look at him then, stare. He looked dead, and it made me
feel peaceful.
Mother thinks she is America. Her family was distantly related to those who arrived on the Mayflower. With the criminals, religious crackpots, I say. You know, Mother, we inherited their problems. Wow, she gets pissed. We were poets, she says. Feminists, abolitionists, politicians, she says. Her people knew or met the Henry James crowd, etc. When she came of age, Mother let family privilege go, which was part of her privilege. The way I’d put it, she practiced a type of ancestor worship, and it’s as if, from birth, she knew herself as an image; her relatives’ images suffused her own. Her family’s house was decorated with ancestral portraits by respectable English and American painters and, later on, nineteenth-century photographers.
Mother was constant, with her bad days, sure, but mostly solid like a pet rock (kidding), plus, she was the Stark family photographer until I weighed in, sort of. She gave me a cool little camera for my eighth birthday. In 1982, Kodak launched disc photography, the easy to use, “decision-free” cameras built around a rotating disc of film. She bought me one from that line. It was unfussy, she said. Primitive now but I loved my little guy. I was more interested in bugs and rockets then. Mother owned a Zeiss Ikon, and my father, when he was young, bought himself one of the first Polaroid 100 series cameras. Don’t you forget it.
Most of the family portraits hung on the walls at Aunt Clarissa’s house—we had fewer walls—and they got fixed in my mind. The ancestors were sometimes mentioned as though hanging out with us. One looked down, when we ate, Henry Adams shot by his wife, Clover, a reproduction of one of her prints. Even Clarissa didn’t have any originals by Clover.
Mother’s reverence for the dead was manifested in their faces on our walls. These characters couldn’t be known, but they were our familiars, their images sacred. So they became models, idols, icons.
The dead have a real presence in my life.
I could say, and will, I was driven INTO pictures. Bro Hart got steered into cutting up dead people, looking for diseased tissue.
Father had inherited few family photographs, so he suffered from major “image-envy.” There is a compelling one, though, of his father, my grandfather, Edward (never met him). He married late; in his forties had Father. Grandfather Stark is pictured with an unknown woman. He’s not smiling at but challenging the photographer; his stance rakish, an arm around the woman as if she were a possession. He’s claiming ownership. His other hand rests on his hip, which juts out, and suggests arrogance, cockiness, or indifference. Maybe impatience. The woman, whoever she is, looks pleased.
This is my father’s father.
I admit: my curiosity about others must be partly protective. Sometimes even paranoid. If I know your habits and turn of mind, let’s say, I know what to expect, and what might happen, to me. If I can recognize myself in others, I can believe I am safe; if I don’t see myself in them, I have less predictive capability, less power, and more vulnerability.
I filter my narrative, along with and through others. I know when to talk the talk, and not. Our species is adaptable.
Mostly, I know when I’m blowing smoke. Some, like me, use self-denigration as a way to rise up. But when your story goes passive, I mean, when it’s changed ON you, that’s a whole different condition: then you’re not the agent of your story. You may be enslaved to another, and, definitely, not in control.
But if you change your bio, you invent another character. Cool. Then you have to remember what’s been added or deleted. Keep those changes in mind all the time, including the consequences—new dates and years for every incident in life—that occur from the switches. (Never do this if you’re bad at simple math.) There’s a reason great liars are sociopaths, they believe their lies, lie smoothly, lies and truths don’t have borders.
You have to be rational about your irrational choices, have second sight, which pertains also to photography.
Call the frustrating effort to document, or “just the facts,” “de-fictionalizing.”
the realness/unrealness of images
What you see is what you believe, and what you see may not in actuality be there.
“The aim of anthropology is the enlargement of the universe of human discourse.” —Clifford Geertz
Geertz distinguishes between falsehood and fiction: Fiction is NOT falsehood. An image is always fiction, just as a report from an anthropologist in the field—a hut or a bar—always entails fiction, NOT making it up. This is creative interpretation. Interpretation is theoretical explanation, it is MADE UP, it explains, responds to what a person thinks, perceives, these are also artifacts of the human imagination, because thinking requires imagination. Unless a thought is entirely received and a thoughtless conventional wisecrack, it requires creativity. Thinking IS creativity, it is active, and shows, if their heart rate didn’t, that human beings are vitally aware of their environments.
Einstein, asked what a child should read, said, “fairy tales,” and, after those, more fairy tales.
Any photograph is a fiction, an artifact, and a social fact, part of and existing IN society.
repetition: prints are replicants
Photographs render worlds.
The original was assaulted by multiples, prints, and by Fordism, and theoretically, seminally, by Walter Benjamin, since to him photography’s principal distinguishing, radical element was reproducibility. Uniqueness didn’t reside in its one-of-a-kind-ness, but instead its capacity to be reproduced for the many, a collectivity, aligning a theory about art with other theorists in his time like Mikhail Bahktin who emphasized a novel’s heterogeneity as compared with a poet’s singular voice. Which makes sense when acknowledging a novel’s “origins” in Gutenberg’s printing press, and reproducibility.
Origins: the ur-moment is not so important in the age of the Picture People. But I happen to like thinking about when humans rose up, stood on two legs, to find they could walk upright, that’s cool. Many sit now. An object at rest stays at rest. The restless like me can’t rest, even in sleep, where I’m forced to run. In dreams, no one can’t escape origins.
Or, origins, such as: The Donner Party and its recourse to cannibalism inflames the fantasies of present-day Americans. The species showed its primal nature, which haunts the contemporary version. I’d never, never do that. But who knows.
Last night, I dreamed I was a fly on the wall. Not in a good way,
because I couldn’t move or hear anything.
Few want to give up on originality, especially actual origins and their meanings.
Booming ancestry biz. Roots r u.
If it’s not one kind of memorializing, it’s another. Why do people forget so much, and remember selectively? What does memory do for humans as a species equipped with that capacity. Besides, how hardwired is memory when some have a little, some a lot, and each gen might have to relearn what they should, supposedly, remember.
Various artists make visuals that insist on second sight. Now the viewer sees it again, because of a new context, because it’s been lifted, and this move shifts ideas about originality. The original, originality, was a dominant factor in an artwork’s value—one of a kind. (Though even God had a son.) Appropriation disrupts the importance of “origin” itself, with consequences far beyond art-making and value. Darwin and artists did it first, I think, questioning origins.
family values a play called home on tv
mother: Please turn off the TV. [War footage; violent crimes; weird sex scenes.]
father: Zeke needs to see the real world, Ellen.
mother: Yours or mine?
On TV 24/7: In 1996, “child beauty queen” JonBenét Ramsey was murdered. She was six years old when she “disappeared from her house” in Boulder, CO, but her parents didn’t call the cops until she’d been missing twenty-four hours. The day after Christmas, she was found dead, strangled, in the family basement. No sign of forced entry, a handwritten blackmail note. Everyone was a suspect, especially her mother, which really upset my mother. In the photos of JonBenét at beauty pageants, she was dressed like a tiny, perfect princess, costumed and in makeup—a glam, sexy, mini-woman. Mother told Little Sister to leave the room when her face, her mother’s, her father’s appeared. But for months they did all the time, no escaping this creepy story.
I dreamed I found JonBenét alive, and kept the killer away, until I couldn’t anymore, couldn’t save her from death, but somehow, before, after, or both, we kissed, I kissed her, undressed her, did something with her, and woke up. Eros wets my bed, because I have sex with a dead girl. When more dreams came, oh man, the shame, I was bad, and, if I’d known the word, I’d have called myself a pervert.
Children can’t be protected from much of anything, def not their curiosity; not mine. Youth wants to know.
TV mattered, didn’t, wasn’t “serious,” my parents thought, just seriously detrimental. TV prepared me for life, and I claim membership in the second totally televisual gen: content meaningful/meaningless fused seamlessly. Real-fantasy infused me like Mother’s maternal ancestors, who fueled her psyche. I am a TV devotee, a slave to its radiating charms; and, it was all about representation. A weaving and warping made me “myself,” and later also, it was any foundation in a storm. TV, definitely, was foundational.
In the 1970s, a TV documentary about the Loud family entranced Americans with its psychological honesty—son Lance came out. There were brazen displays of discord, the parents fought. Divorce was “screened”: The Louds fell apart on TV.
After Ellen DeGeneres came out on TV, on her series, Ellen, after those shock waves leveled, female hetero/gay men became the new romance, so-called white marriages that could last, or new forms of family. What keeps “family” vital now? The emergence of new ones. Homosexuals, once “banned” from society, defining as gay and/or queer, have built them. First, divorce became common, then single families, led primarily by women/mothers; then an accepted gay community showed its desire for the nuclear family, too. The two-father, two-mother dyad has led the way toward mixed, blended, dyed-in-the-wool—kidding—structures.
Compared with the Louds, reality TV trivializes whatever reality a viewer is invested in, switching all “realities” into sameness, since the programs’ form is the same no matter what the reality’s content. The form is a blender whose ingredients contain angry slurs, sometimes physical violence, and heavy doses of betrayal. These TV exhibitionists contest with or deform their own credulity, even sanity; and humiliate and shame themselves and others. Exploited and exploiters.
The Eighties, my childhood decade, wallowed in Alice Miller’s Drama of the Gifted Child. Everyone was “gifted.” Miller’s parameters were like a fortune-teller’s reading, one size fits all. Children were Gifted or Abused—family life under Reagan.
On TV, the McMartin trial in California, a long-running play from 1987 to 1990, and the Little Rascals Day Care Center in North Carolina, with abuse alleged in 1989. The accused were tried individually beginning in 1991, the airwaves filled with lurid accusations of satanic rituals—
hysteria and “moral panic,” that was the term. The extent of the sexual abuse, number of abusers, was totally incredible, the abusers must have been as fast as NASCAR racers.
The Parents whispered behind our backs, Hart’s and mine, then turned off the TV because we were too young. I swallowed big whiffs of sordid disorder and bad words. Later, I caught the documentary, Innocence Lost, about the Little Rascals Day Care Center, when, already hooked into cultural studies and anthro, I was totally struck by how a conversation and gestures, and a flawed interpretation of behavior, caused the first accuser to think “something was wrong.” It was in a small town, where one mother decided that another, Betsy Kelly, who ran the center and was her good friend, wasn’t “really sorry” about the bad behavior at the day care center. The accuser alleged that Robert Kelly had slapped her son. Betsy Kelly apologized to her friend, the boy’s mother. It wasn’t good enough for the mother. She decided there was “more to it.”
On the basis of this conversation, allegations of satanic rituals spread fast, and soon most of the kids claimed to be victims of sexual abuse. They claimed, or the “experts” did, that it happened between September and December 1988. The therapists had entered the picture, big time, and the children revealed to them “repressed memories.” The so-called abusers were convicted, given long sentences. Finally, all of the convictions were overturned, and, by 1997, the prosecution dropped all charges. One hell of a shitty decade.
Those trials, pretty much forgotten, though not O.J.’s or Clarence Thomas’s (not yet), were Salem witchcraft redux. Not “the red diaper” scare: it was ANY diaper, all diapers could be suspect, any diaper outside the home was vulnerable, because rituals and rape and sodomy happened a lot in demonic nurseries, even though everyone conscious should know most child abuse is by a child’s familiars, not strangers.
Abuse goes on, kids damaged, though the eighties scare is over, but that was my little-boy time.
Riots of fear come and go—totally wack. But there’s no change in the insular family, and its secret keeping. Much blame.
coincidentals
During the days I was hanging with Mr. Petey, dwelling on Mother’s essence, everything felt simple—not her face, which I couldn’t read or find words for in a dictionary. Her wary, subdued glances were coded, and I couldn’t KNOW FOR SURE.
Mother wasn’t serene, not like Little Sister. Mother trotted from room to room, brain ON, tight-lipped, but her body wasn’t. As part of her boundlessness, she discussed issues with me as if I weren’t a kid. I liked that, even if I didn’t get it. I got the drift.
Adult stuff seemed sinister—that other world, a forbidden place. I knew I would be forced to go there, eventually.
Mother could play her cards close to her ample bust. It ran in her family, she told me, restraint, reticence, though sometimes she looked stormy. Yeah, and she called herself busty. Usually it was a facial expression that told me more than she said, a powerful image, even when illegible.
In the beginning, since everything was about ME 24/7, everything about her was about me too. I was the Sun, she circled round me. When she didn’t want ME to know stuff, it was my fault, my being too sensitive, say, or the opposite. My father teased Mother about her family, especially about Aunt Clarissa, and one afternoon he talked some shit about spinsters and kooks, and Mother went OFF—to her
office, locked the door, and didn’t come out until the next morning. Dad brought us pizza for dinner. Pizza still tastes bad to me, but along with gagging on it—a huge social limitation.
Mother and her clan: kooks, spinsters, how cool and weird was that, and how did being related to them affect me. It made me special, right.
face values too
Americans can’t shake their Puritan past. Everyone’s still hoping to confess their sins, with TV as the judge, visibility itself giving judgment.
Judge Judy appeals to characters who want public humiliation; those who watch wallow in a common human perversity, sure, insatiable curiosity but also schadenfreude. Also, some enjoy watching others being beaten, verbally. (See Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten.”)
Shame’s different now. If shame EVEN exists, it doesn’t last long—Pee-wee Herman, Martha Stewart, Richard Nixon, Alex Rodriguez, Tom Brady—they bounced back. Americans forget sinners’ flaws and misdeeds, especially if they cry on TV and show remorse. A sinner appears on Barbara wawa Walters, or Diane Sawyer—he/she MUST cry. No crying, no transformation. Without a credible sob-confession, there will be no sympathy for the devil.
the backyard (of the mind): american imaginary
The American frontier, the backyard: a shrunken mediated space for suburban kids before they hit the mall. Their next frontier.
Barbecue time: men/fathers scored and scarred meat, got sloppy drunk, while the women/mothers ran around, setting the table, bearing homemade potato salad, egg yellow in sturdy glass bowls, maybe Pyrex. Mother bought the fixings from the best shops to show she cared, even though she didn’t care enough to prepare food. She had a job, and was asserting her difference, like her heroes: she was not a domestic or domesticated female. Mother had once described herself as domiciled. I was little, and she was on the phone with a friend, and I figured she was saying she was in a kind of jail, which instigated this weird sense of her for me. I looked in pix for that unequivocally revealing THING about her.
Men and Apparitions Page 8