But from Smith’s costumes and party scenes, our costume sex bloomed, with Maggie flowering and coming in many-colored scarves. Fantastic also, the approach of another kind of invisibility. “Invisible” to me—though it was there, I couldn’t “see” it. Call it the epicene. No lucidity, and it couldn’t be seen through. Some art presents itself uniquely, not rationally, and beyond reason, or based upon other logics, not mine or yours. Maybe against and unavailable to interpretation (“Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph.” —Susan Sontag).
Obstacles grow up to be people, created ignorantly by people.
We can stand in each other’s way. Maggie once accused me of that, then said she was sorry.
If I couldn’t totally get Jack Smith’s film, then I couldn’t depend upon my understanding my own culture that much better than the “others” I was studying. See where I’m heading? Significantly, I could shape myself into an ethnographer without a knowing attitude, and could learn as much about my own as “the other,” or discover the other inside. That grabbed me most, the other within.
The next rebellion launched itself against earlier rebellions, but this time I raged under the radar. I was chill, driving on cruise control, though in overdrive, and seeking out family albums, talking to the families and writing field notes, annotating the photos, applying ethnographic theory and photo theory to what I found, basically making it up as I went along. It had to be made up.
I was in a discipline, or disciplines, inside an institution where I had to fit, but that in some way urged me not to, also, and I was and also wasn’t making my own life. I was adjusting, and maybe I wanted to but couldn’t know that yet, but wanted to be choosing why I was bending this way or that.
Maggie’s in her office writing her ethnographic novel—I wasn’t sure what it would be, but I’d been an influence, she said. She didn’t say Good or Bad. Kidding. When Maggie had her mind set, nothing ever stood or stands in her way, and she’d thrown herself into this book, and that let me throw myself into mine.
We worked in silence.
John Cage scored with it. (Haha.) A unique American postwar artist. We studied him together. She loved what he thought, how he wrote it. I felt I’d grown up knowing it without knowing it. Everyone has their illusions, right.
“There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound. No one can have an idea once he starts really listening.”
Silence performs.
Cage’s 4′33″: a composition of those eponymous minutes.
He didn’t want to compose music, what happened was music, sound was music. Mother told me that Ezra Pound wrote, “I tried to write Paradise. Let the wind speak. That is paradise.” I wanted paradise on earth, and had it with Maggie.
I’d never known this kind of love before, there was only Maisie, and crushes and high school sex, flickers of adolescent love, young lust. Never loved before Maggie—this is an article of faith—I saw the light. She hit me, whoosh, the sound of a concussive tackle, bang. Kidding. See, everything I want to say about love is known, humans know this feeling, mostly they do. And also know it always as a unique experience. You feel me?
Nothing felt the same, feels the same, would ever be the same. Should I make a list? No, but I want to, because I can’t stop myself, that’s how love is. Love is a Memory of Love. First times for tears, consolation, sitting near her. An ordinary room shifted into paradise, the aroma of her killed me. I liked watching her breathe.
My new life: impassioned, passionate. Passion sounds like an emotion from the nineteenth century. That intensity, the Romantics. My gen is cool, over it, supposedly. It consoles me that the ancients felt the same. In the grip of love madness, you stand in a long line of humanity. Think about it.
Sex, with Maggie: I got it, finally, apprehended, and it wasn’t an act. I didn’t give her an orgasm, she took it when she wanted it. She did take me in every way, and I took her, and she let me have her, we had each other, totally. I would give her anything, everything. I’d see her and need to touch her, her skin, the flesh on her hips, ass. The fascinating way her breasts moved when she moved, the colors of her labia, heat of her cunt. I realized why Renoir went all garish painting women’s bodies, why their flesh had purple and yellow tints, because he saw God in their bodies. Maggie and I—gods together, perfect lovers, soul-to-soul mates, perfect beings being together. If I didn’t compare my love for Maggie with a summer’s day or a rose, but with playing tennis, I debase romantic love, unless you feel tennis the way I do. So, Maggie was my best partner.
Maggie, always and forever.
Mother says: “You can’t ever know about forever, Zeke.”
In love we’re amateurs. By definition. We do it for love, live for love. In love, I didn’t, don’t care what anyone thinks.
family values
Father showed signs of trouble to come, on a distant horizon, but I’m not sure how much that mattered to me; he was slowing down, that’s all, drinking more, coughing more. Before I met Maggie, I basically lived at home, home every weekend, because there were meals, did my laundry. That’s when Little Sister and I started to know each other; or, from her POV, I’d stopped being her loud-mouthed older bro.
The closer I came to her world, the closer I came to me, now.
She was making photographs, camera obscuras, a perfect form for her: the image develops very slowly, and she prefers dark rooms. She gave herself a secret professional name, and indicated she might show work someday. Might not. She never seemed to care about what happened outside her sphere, except that humans were decimating the environment, she had no fear of missing out, no FOMO for her. I hope that acronym stays around. She felt some communication with our ancestors, influenced by Clarissa, because Clarissa took up space in us. Maybe not Bro Hart.
Bro Hart says, “Matilda sees dead people. Yuck.” He doesn’t know shit. He’s selfish, like Father, with a first son complex. So, he sees disease in others, thinks his sibs are lacking, and totally dismisses the baby of the family and her “fruitless endeavors.” Right, cutting up dead people is fruitful.
I tell him, “When a pickpocket meets a saint, all he sees are his pockets.”
“Up yours, Zeke,” he says.
Mother says one day we’ll be friends.
Oh, man, no way.
Little Sister: an outsider-insider or vice-versa. Emily Dickinson, Mother says of her; our twenty-first-century Clover, Clarissa says, because Little Sister takes pictures now. (So did Clover Hooper Adams in the nineteenth.) But Matilda … Matilda? Can’t call Little Sister that.
Aunt Clarissa came around loads to visit Mother and Little Sister. When I was home on weekends and summers, it went OK, within limits—I limited her, gave her less scope, testing my own limits and hers.
Clarissa turned gray, then her hair went white, and she was kookier, maybe a more passive whack job. In the past we’d had some trouble, I mean, she caused me trouble, but later for that. Not in the mood.
Clarissa expands her cocoon, nurses her sicknesses, believing in their truths. She wouldn’t want to change, espouses that people should accept their tics, as she calls them. “Embrace your disease.” All of her heroes suffered illnesses that helped them be brilliant and more sensitive. And, she unfailingly expects people to come to her—the oracle of Delphi, an hour outside of Boston. Her narcissism swings like that. Many friends have given her up, most anyway can’t oblige, even her grammar school friends. But she always has Mother. Little Sister shows her favor, because Little Sister is one of the kindest people I have ever known. I sometimes associate her earlier silences with plain, simple kindness. She didn’t want to say hurtful things, but had to be honest, so kept quiet. That’s what I suspect happened.
No one prepares a child to be an adult who has to buy toilet paper, a pillow, sheets, towels. You feel me? Malingering was my rebellion against the future unfolding “normally.” Things come together. Things fall apart.
se
ems like moving on
With Maggie, I learned to structure my days, keep on the paper track, attend classes. Later, Maggie moved with me to grad school; by then she was doing an M.F.A. in writing, working on stories and a novel. I turned compulsive about living up to her estimation of me, because she believed in me, my mind. We scheduled quiet times, and crazy fuck times. I photographed clouds at certain times of day each week, not just loving them the way I did as a kid. I used my love. Which may have been the start of the perniciousness of scholarship. Of becoming an “expert,” not just a lover.
Assimilated to Little Sister, her unique discretions, I learned to love Maggie also, as she was, and I liked our quiet, its comforts, and depended on what I believed were Maggie’s discretions.
“Maggie, marry me?” It burst out, emotion in those words. Marry me, crazy stuff, but I had to marry her. Impulsive, right, but I trusted all my impulses then. We were young, still in grad school, but hell. Her parents, her mother especially, didn’t like me—oh man they were against it: too young, their only child, jewel in the crown, I got that. But how would it change anything, we were already living together.
Maggie would never deny me what I wanted, if that’s what would make me happy, she said, Yes, of course. She didn’t need a license, but somehow I did. YES. Cool. We had a small wedding, the way we wanted. And life went on. I wore a ring now. New men like to wear rings. (See later, MEN IN QUOTES.)
family condition conditions
My father died a few years after I passed my exams with distinction, and my dissertation was close to written, because I’d totally rushed like a madman. I needed to split, get away from school, into our field of dreams, Maggie and I starting out. Our la dolce vita, our vita nuova.
Uncle Lionel had a one-time muscle-destroying heart attack. When his brother died, something died in my father, and it showed he could feel, and also showed that it’s not just married couples who can’t live without each other, happily or not. I saw that Father felt deeply. He wasn’t a great example of a man—just an example—a good provider, didn’t run around, I think—he never doubted his being anything but a red-blooded man, which has something going for it—certainty. He must’ve been impotent by forty because of the alcohol—he banked on Viagra, sure. Father worked himself up, occasionally, and showed me his way to be a man, but I didn’t take him seriously.
His death coincided, kind of, with the death of Polaroid. He’d witnessed the start of the digital revolution, was aware that Polaroid had sold off parts of itself, sputtering to its finish line, he knew it went into bankruptcy in 2002; but wasn’t around when it got sold in 2011, and no more Polaroid company. It might’ve killed him, if esophageal cancer hadn’t.
Slugging, cigar-smoking—not in the house, after the surgeon general’s report on secondhand smoke—could have irritated his GI tract enough to bring on, combined with his DNA, esophageal cancer. Or, his self-made body environment switched on the genetic marker for C—Bro Hart talks a lot about epigenetics. “It’s happening there, little bro,” he says, smugly.
Hart’s probing dead bodies maybe was fomented by Little Sister’s condition. Or, it’s a forensic approach to family-ancestor worship.
Through his breathing tube, my father spat out his last words for me. Nothing spiritual from this estate lawyer: “Get your money out of the market.”
You’re supposed to obey deathbed wishes, and this was doable, and, OK, I’m youngish, why not. I “obeyed” him, when the market was near 14,000. I took it all out. And then with the naughts’ crash, I almost forgave my father for being an asshole. Believe me, I’m as shallow as the next guy. Shallow as a grave. (I’m so running ahead of myself.)
Next came Kodachrome: born 1935, died 2010.
Long Live Kodachrome. Let’s all have a Kodak moment.
Goodbye, 1950s saturated colors.
grad school buddy (bmf)
I shared my intellectual life with Maggie, but also Curtis Woolf. Maybe squandered it. I met him in my first year of grad school, he discovered me, flattered me, telling me I was the smartest guy in our film seminar. Curtis, being English, carried the usual superiority to Americans typical of Europeans, but also was an avid fan of U.S. pop culture. Not unusual. Mother told me that, in the 1980s, people said, usually the Baudrillard crowd: “The French have the theory, Americans the practice.”
Curtis was Irish on his mother’s side, accounting for his pale skin and blue eyes, but with English guy cool—shaggy, tall, thin, fashion-conscious. English on his father’s side. He charmed Mother, extra-super-sweet to her, syrupy wit, and she liked him, though he was such a flatterer.
She insisted: their looks don’t last, when they’re older, they look very old. Potato sacks, or something like that. Her ancestors, remember, left England for religious freedom, only the gods know what else.
Curtis was really smart—clever, he’d be called in England—and pretended he never did any work. Maybe he didn’t. An indolent lad, casual in all things, seemingly, though fierce in debate, but don’t call him an intellectual, though he was: the English dislike intellectuals, worse than here in the States. It’s about class: Oxbridge = intellectuals. Curtis was from a modest background, as they say, but a teacher discovered this smart kid in his local grammar school, and guided him, then Curtis killed on his A levels, and off he jogged—he was a runner—to Oxbridge, and a life different from his parents’, a different class or at least he mixed with the upper classes. Took up tennis, seriously, oh man was he serious, and joined the drama club, less seriously. He didn’t have much contact with his parents when I met him; if he did, it was with his mother. An only child, he said. I envied him sometimes. He was going to be a writer, like Maggie.
Little Sister took to him, probably worshiped him, because he teased her gently, and most people didn’t dare. Some women distrust super good-looking men. I’ve been called “great looking,” am in good shape, solid features, OK, something to write home about, but Curtis—CW, and I’m Starkie to him—movie star looks. A reverse sexism, I told Maggie, is how some females suspected him, the way beautiful women are assumed to be dumb.
Tennis again, with CW. We played every chance we could and he worked hard to beat me, but he couldn’t. Ever. On the court, I killed. He could play with lesser players if winning was what he was after. On other courts, he beat me.
family values value
Dignified as ever, when Father died, Mother mourned, Little Sister had Mother’s back, and Clarissa hung around the house like a parasite nourished on mourning blood. Father left Mother in good shape, financially, anyway.
Little Sister lived at home, like loads of twentysomethings, and Mother returned to editing, and also found more “fulfilling work,” she says, as a hospice volunteer. Fulfillment? I can see it, in a way, given our family.
Friends ask, “Don’t you miss your father?” Nope, it’s hard to believe I had one.
When I watch our family videos, with my father at the head of the table, his contempt is evident, or maybe it should be read as discontent or plain drunkenness. I don’t miss him. Not a fun drunk, like Great Uncle Zeke and his bro Lionel, just a sullen one, on the brink—anger. He hadn’t achieved what he wanted, maybe to be an artist, he hadn’t had the courage to try, and he resented us for holding him down. Mother stayed with him anyway. The few photographs I shot of him he decided made him “look bad,” and he tore one up in front of me. That’s primal aggression.
OK, Maggie and I had our groove on. By the end of coursework at grad school, together six years, our life didn’t run on thrill, totally normal, and we were absorbed in our work and supported each other’s projects. Her parents supported her financially, and though we married, our bank accounts stayed separate. She had more than I, that way, but I had fellowships, and Mother helped me sometimes; after Father died, I inherited some money, which was held in a trust for when I turned thirty-five. Bro Hart, same deal. Most of it was left for Mother, and a big share for Little Sister. She was getting better, n
ot exactly in the real world, say, not employable yet. She talked more easily, but wasn’t destined to be wordy. Kidding. Went to art school for a bit, found friends.
We were cruising along, eating three solids, Maggie vegan for a time, drinking to chill at the end of the day. Writing, she turned more quiet, concentrating, and reminded me again of Little Sister, which was cool. I felt I really understood Maggie, and her need to be in her own head, the mental space inside her novel, her thesis. CW and she were both writing novels, and I listened to their writer issues, credibility was one, and the problem of working with or against coincidence. Cred is always a problem, in whatever field you’re in, right. How to gain it. When you lose it, and why. In life, I said, there are so many coincidences. Maggie said, But not in fiction, it’s very hard to make it work. Too bad, I thought, because it happens, my life’s full of them. But it confirmed: art is not like life, and life is not an art form, except for aesthetes. People can buy almost anything, including “taste.”
Sometimes I took pictures of her when she was absorbed, at her desk, a woman reading or writing, like the Vermeer I worshipped. Maggie wondered about my photographing her, maybe a little invasive, or showed my insecurity about her. Did I worry I’d lose her, that she’d disappear? Also, she felt self-conscious, she said. She hadn’t; then she did. Weird.
lost and found objects
Oh, man, it hit me: you’re way too concerned with photographs dutifully taken, saved, and treasured, “kept images.” Super-fixated maybe, because of my childhood, or on an hysterical mission, in the sense Freud wrote about hysteria. And, apart from everything else, like mental illnesses, my project didn’t feel ethnographically clean. Logically, my mind shifted to the other side, the rejectamenta. What isn’t kept and why not?
It was late for the morning, and I lay in bed like a drugged person, and that’s when the idea aced me. It flashed. It hit me, I’d look after the lost, care for the unwanted. Image detritus. I’d turn into a finder of the unwanted. Homeless photographs, the exilic.
Men and Apparitions Page 10