She said Little Sister had linked souls with souls of the past. Clarissa believed human spirit, energy, was transmitted from the dead to us, also that spirit settled in us to send on to the next generation; spirit communicated, good and bad. (See “trans-communication.”) Photography was about spirit catching, for good and bad. Nonsensically, our vice was carried on in the open, everywhere.
Clarissa reveres Joan of Arc, Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Gertrude Stein, the last two lapsed Jews; Father’s eclectic ethnic and religious ancestry made him a quarter Jewish or an eighth—a macaroon, he’d wag at Clarissa. Ask her, she’ll tell you Gertrude invented the twentieth century. Hey, I rag, Stein was no feminist. Better not tease Aunt Clarissa, she’s beyond earnest. Almost humorless. Worst kind of person, in my book.
Straight up, Aunt Clarissa’s in love with—not admires or cherishes—she is in love with Stein, and her famous and obscure ancestors. She’s in love with their images, she has no idea what they’re like, so Auntie is my model for an “image-lover.” Everything I knew about images, in a way, derived from her, first; I mean, Clarissa set me off, set me up, inflamed my imagination, even though I wasn’t aware of it. So, of course, it’s powerful, and I was powerless, when these attitudes, loves, entered into me. Boundless, what you’re not aware of, boundless in effects.
for the love of images
Addicts’ brain pathways narrow and deepen, pathways or furrows polluted, their brain chemistry transformed to light up pleasure-neurons, like Times Square LEDs. (Neon troughs.) The Picture People are addicted to images, in all their varieties.
We fall in love with an image, images; a notional picture of an ideal, the loved one, instills itself in the psyche. Quickly, people feel disappointed in actual living love objects: actuality doesn’t jibe with ideal images. But an image can be forever (like mind-perfume).
Love is a superimposition—no, love is layers of transference and projections that thicken, and thicken, obscuring the ground; love’s too gooey to have a discernible bottom or top. Passion and lust are untaught feelings, always unschooled, and have been, since humans appeared as homo erectus, or before them, feelings detonated the species, and, with ravishing energy, caused upheavals in behavior with unexpected, uncontrollable consequences.
Once upon a time, the Western concept of romantic love was started with a grammar for lovers, or a kind of map to the heart. No one follows Andreas Capellanus’s The Art of Courtly Love anymore, supplanted by advice columns, talk shows, astrology, apps.
It’s not what women/men want, it’s what DON’T they fucking want. Human insatiability. Capitalism fits it, not the other way around. That desire-machine ain’t all that bad, right; but maybe that mountain shouldn’t have been climbed. Maybe “civilizations” shouldn’t have expanded. Look at the loss.
In sixth grade, I danced with a girl I liked and had my first public boner. The girl moved as far from me as she could, without actually dancing on the other side of the room, and everyone with half a brain knew. My penis humiliated me, desire overran me, my mind couldn’t shut it down. My penis did it, not me. Did I tell her that? I don’t know.
love faces love
One-dimensional love, and thinking, compares with simple mental pictures and their simple-minded makers. People seek resemblances, most don’t think pictorially in an exciting way. Face it, most people don’t have interesting thoughts. Flat thoughts from flat-lining flat-footed flat-heads. The world is flat.
The Roundheads took their name from the Puritans’ unadorned haircuts; they were not Cavalier.
Sex before romantic love, before passion had a name, what did early humans imagine hit them? Lust like a need for food. Gimme gimme. Temporary coupling, the female was pregnant, the male didn’t know who did it. When did he figure it out, or was it she? Matriarchies depended on males not knowing. Did the female know how she got pregnant but keep it to herself and that way maintain power? But when the males went out hunting, the females might have stirred up trouble sitting in circles, laughing at the males, and also creating language. Females never had to be silent to do their work.
Poet and critic Eric Mottram theorized that monasteries were the first factories. No women there.
The need for workers turned families into factories.
Royalty required heirs with a provenance, so aristocratic ladies hid errant pregnancies from husbands by racing off to Italy to bear children. Their ladies-in-waiting returned, carrying infants in their arms, raised them as their own. Royal bastards.
Romantic image-love is a transference so complete it competes with so-called “real life,” more real to the image-lover than an actual object. Nothing interferes with this purer love. I told Mother, during a crisis—she was urging me to examine my new love—“I know what I’m doing, some of it. Anyway, I chose it.” “You didn’t choose it,” she said. Can’t argue with that. I tell her a crisis can be a moment for opportunity. She shoots me her look.
family matters: the matter
Mother probably knows if Clarissa has or ever had sexual feelings. She registers as several gender identities. But I can’t imagine her lusting after anyone. My imagination is limited.
She has always lived near her adored baby sister, and also is close to Little Sister. Clarissa doesn’t disdain Bro Hart, because he, though male, became a medical doctor. A hypochondriac tolerates doctors while despising their expertise.
After You’re a Picture, You’re Not a Picture was pubbed, Bro Hart turned uglier, more brutal in his attempts at one-upmanship. “Hot shot academic,” he sneered—I mean, like Snidely Whiplash. Totally ridiculous, Hart, a constitutionally weak sadist, no cojones.
The story goes: Hart was four, I was a newborn, he entered Mother’s bedroom, she was breastfeeding me, and the little boy, like a storm, raged, leaped at me, and I needed defense from his tiny fists. He has hated me since. That’s the skinny. Those primitive furies: instincts or good judgment? It could be a real high messing up Hart’s pictorial face. A borderline personality could do it. But why bother.
I used to believe, really believe: Clarissa represented a dying breed, spinster who stayed home, close to kin; I don’t think that now. Her kind just morphed: no more spinsters but another type of female. She prefers to live alone, not to be encumbered by a mate, male or female. Doesn’t want it, that, domesticity, wants love, sometimes, but doesn’t want someone else around.
Blood tells, as a fact. Aunt Clarissa carries many of her line’s recessive traits. She’s a trickster, or she’s her own person, either way.
the glut of images, boring
To generalize, and I do, and why not—I grew up surrounded by images. But I also grew up not believing in the reality of images. That is, they were first established as “only pictures.” Meaningless. That’s totally wrong. But it’s how they were culturally embedded. They do have a reality, in spite of their “illusory nature”—just an image, two-dimensional, a window, so-called, into the world. Dependent on illusion, and insubstantial space, but that’s not how it really looked, or how I look; or a picture only intimates the past, as Sontag and Barthes suggested long ago, and is never corporeal.
Illusion! People believe in God, they own that illusion. But pictures exist, we can actually see them, factoids, whose effects contribute to “real” illusions. They have actual places in our lives—in a cell, say, on a screen or a wall—though they are not the thing, just a thing. The thing that makes its thingness is its quiddity, its whatness.
Creating an image is an achievement, culture. Early humans carved, scratched, images on cave walls. They depicted the animals they hunted and ate, or who killed and ate them. (See Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams.) With newer carbon dating, some scientists think Neanderthals might have made them also. The fear of and love for Nature resulted in new needs, for icons to protect them, gods, goddesses, saints. Yahweh didn’t allow graven images, which explains Christ’s entry onto the scene, half-man, all god, eminently picturable.
God enc
ouraged representation, that’s a conundrum. Why would a perfect being have lacks—especially in imaging, especially an omnipotent, omniscient protean God. Why did people abandon pantheism, and arbitrary, even erratic, gods, who are more like humans, for just one God. One God = the origin of the original and its claims.
Humans don’t want God to be like them, they want a perfect image.
uncle lionel is a story
I dreamed about being a medical doctor because of Father’s bro Lionel. Uncle Lionel told me people wore green uniforms at his hospital; I pictured him jumping around in the halls like a big insect, because of the way he lurched drunkenly in our house. But Bro Hart went into medicine.
When Uncle Lionel was drunk, he leaped on the couch, collapsed, slept, drool on his lips and chin, disgusting but kind of cool. My father held his gin better, for a while. An estate lawyer and his own state: he knew how to consume, until it consumed him. Uncle Lionel was two years younger than Father, so close they really didn’t need to talk, but they caught up every day in a kind of code. Somehow, Lionel loved my father a lot. Also, Lionel was easy-going, and took after Great Uncle Ezekiel, who was his generation’s family clown, roly-poly, wearing a fat man’s smiley face. Lionel’s sense of the ridiculous aided my dour father.
Father believed in himself: he was way more than a connoisseur, he was an artist manqué, and proud of it—a little self-deprecation showed how manly he was. Occasionally he shot a family picture; but his output—art. Mother earned her B.A. in English from one of the sister schools, but her super education didn’t count. The primary family photographer was in a classic no-win situation: my father considered that pretty much everything lay beneath him—including taking snapshots. He self-described as hip, because he had college buddies with funny names, Fluke, Bottle, shit like that. Sometimes they visited us, weirdos he was proud to know and not to be.
Mother’s shooting the family pinched the cheek of gendered behavior. Being Christian, she’d learned to turn both cheeks, a lot, like a revolving door. Kidding.
Great Uncle Ezekiel: when he and his brothers were kids, they formed their own basketball team in the Not-So-Tall League, they were all under five feet nine inches. They even had shirts made up; there are six photos of the team. I’m named after him, right, and the word handed down is, “Great Uncle Ezekiel guarded like a wild dog.” (My killer gene plays tennis.) Father’s generation is taller, mine even taller, except for Little Sister. She’s a throwback to long-gone shorter relatives, who stood in doorways that would decapitate me.
When I visualize my namesake, I see a shortish, round and robust man, smiling. He goes off half-cocked.
He wore comical ties, cracked stupid jokes, he was a raw guy. In a family photo, he’s a young guy, lean, a lad, an all-American, wearing a boater, his arms crossed at his waist, one of his legs forward, making him dynamic; his shadow looks long, probably it’s close to noon, but the wind is blowing, so maybe it’s not that hot. He’s standing on a boat named Sunshine (written on the back of the photograph), sailing on the Monongahela River. He calls it a “boat excursion,” somewhere between West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Behind him and facing the river, a woman has raised her arms and appears to be taking a picture or looking through a telescope. (To the side and front of her, there’s a large tourist telescope.) The American flag waves behind Uncle Zeke, seeming to touch his shoulder, creating a perfect photograph, the image of America on the Fourth. Can’t tell tie’s color, this is b/w.
Uncle Zeke looks like Mr. Independence himself, a spirited, red-blooded American fellow, exuberant about his future and country. That haughty, bad-boy smile: looks like nothing bothers this guy. When he visited us, he transformed my sardonic father, got him giggling, but I don’t think there’s one picture of my father laughing. Fake smiling, sure.
Great Uncle Ezekiel lived with two secrets: he was born an androgyne (intersex, we say now) and changed surgically to a male, a fact hidden from the family for a while. Great Uncle Zeke’s parents made the decision, urged by their doctors and followed. De rigueur, then.
(Bro Hart’s second wife has a secret—she was CIA, maybe still is.)
The family, and outside-others, mostly knew about Great Uncle Zeke’s first secret but not his second secret, which finally came out, much later. Madge knew about his being an androgyne, though not when they were dating, when he thought women didn’t go to the toilet. His other secret, that one landed heavy on her.
CIA biz remains a guarded family secret.
Nowadays there are no secrets.
Photographs DEPICT secrets; or they can have no secrets, being just what’s there; or photographs intimate secrets, and anything else you imagine might be there. Contemporary artists, in very different ways, play that hand: An-My Lê; John Divola; R. H. Quaytman; Anne Collier; Barbara Bloom; Stephen Barker; Gregory Crewdsen; Sarah Charlesworth; Roni Horn; Bill Jacobsen; Justine Kurland; Jack Pierson; Arthur Ou; Seton Smith; Barbara Ess. Actually, this list could be endless; photographs tell nothing of themselves.
I stare at old Zeke, in photos ranging from when he was three, posing for a professional in town, sticking his finger up his nose in a high school graduation photograph, his eyes bugging out at a party after his college graduation, looking boisterous with the Not-So-Tall basketball team, or beaming as he cuts the cake with his bride, Madge, and on and on. Three years before he died, an arresting one of him with his head drooping to the side, a melancholy expression on his face. I want to peel away the emulsion, get under that sad sack image.
It’s a primitive urge, or just silly, but no matter what I might seem to know about fiction and the illusion of images, I’m a small boy rushing around, curious to learn what’s what, riveted by who’s who, like Great Uncle Ezekiel, and still shocked at what I see that no one told me would be there. I want other pictures to rub away what I do know, and bare a braver, newer world, something exciting—for a change.
A family resemblance shares tragedy’s attribute—it can’t be avoided. You can’t escape what it says about you. Genes have predictive power; epigenetics depends upon both environment and the genome, because a gene’s protection against cancer, say, can be switched off. They’ve done studies with identical twins, one smokes, gets cancer, the other doesn’t and doesn’t. Some people can’t handle how much the genes affect outcomes; sure, environment is important, probably it’s 60/40 genes vs. environment, or maybe 50/50. Consider family resemblances: your parents’ genes show in your body type, your facial features, so genes must have similar effects upon raw intelligence, proclivities. Some accept one part of this equation, physical resemblance, but reject the other. Not logical, but that’s human beings, picking
and choosing.
Few want to believe how much is predetermined. I find it reassuring. Free will, maybe THE contentious issue, anyway, definitely limited, and I prefer relinquishing power to my genome, and its taking some responsibility for my predilections and tendencies.
I’ve wondered since I was a teenager: could Great Uncle Ezekiel have had any kind of a sex life? He and Margaret didn’t have children, if that means anything. I don’t know why they named me after him, I’m not like him, according to Mother, but l feel implicated in his ignorance.
Families do that, implicate you in them. When I think about Great Uncle Ezekiel’s shock at seeing his blushing bride, Margaret, on the can for the first time, I immediately see a pic that could never be pasted in our family album—the unrecorded image, one of the awkward notes of life, always unpictured. Or sad occurrences are shot, they’re not in family albums, they’re obscene, or they’re in art galleries, blown up bigger and bigger.
On the left: Great Uncle Ezekiel age four, with his mother, Rose née Turner, holding him, and anon woman. On the right: Great Uncle Zeke at eleven or twelve, carrying what might be presents. Are they his, for a birthday, or is he giving them to someone?
Everyone saw him as a clown, at least acting like one. But what does comedy tell, and does it reveal as tr
agedy does? Say, about Great Uncle Ezekiel.
Was his life really a tragedy? With inevitability to it? A comedy’s only inevitability is surprise, an unforeseen punch line. You guess it, it’s not funny. Uncle Ezekiel—his life’s a toss-up, he was funny, everyone said, but his life wasn’t funny, only surprising—but no joke.
Tragedy builds to a foreseeable inevitability—consciousness
of it rising like the sun—the end is inescapable.
I can’t see that in photographs—fate. Clowns terrify some children. Clowns look like sad figures, dressed in funny clothes, and they make weird faces. They could easily morph into tragic characters, never heroic ones. A clown rescuing a child from a fire would look funny, wack. Capturing the Friedmans was a documentary about an ordinary suburban family, father, mother, three sons, until the father was accused and convicted of multiple counts of child molestation. One son, Jesse, was convicted, also, then paroled from prison after serving thirteen years. Inside, the father committed suicide, or just gave up the ghost. Another son, who was not involved and never accused, became a professional clown. In the movie, you watch him arrive at a child’s birthday party, in his clown outfit, bursting with fake joy. This guy chose to entertain children. You have to wonder. It’s a crazy irony.
Bernie Madoff’s sons, they didn’t know, I just know it; one was a suicide, the other died of cancer. It had been in remission, and returned, he said, because of the tragedy in his life, the accusations against him. He argued for his innocence, to his death.
I bought it, buy it. They were all duped.
Madoff’s wife, the boys’ mother, was interviewed on 60 Minutes. A sad character, she was alive like an afterthought, and slumped in a chair way too big for her small frame. She looked shrunken, a terrified little doll. Defeat and trauma braided her face; she is hated and considered a monster, because her husband destroyed people’s lives. She says she didn’t know. Wives can be entirely out of it that way, and I don’t think she had a clue, or her sons. She won’t have anything to do with her husband, but she’s already on the fade, while Bernie Madoff goes on, coaching inmates about money, etc.; they respect him, he said in another 60 Minutes interview. He shows no remorse. Worse, he doesn’t appear miserable. The other prisoners don’t mess him up—no biggie if the wealthy get robbed.
Men and Apparitions Page 13