I talked the talk, did the walk, but Zeke was gone, I wasn’t myself, or whoever he was, and no one knew, or if they did, they were too polite to say. They let me in, whoever I was, maybe their pet, their bitch. Kidding. I was American in some way that amused them, within our various differences, and cool, because I was an other to others, eccentric like them. My name to them, also, was Henry Adams, and no one took it as a joke, a simple old Anglo name. It wasn’t a joke, I was Henry Adams, in some way. It might be true, I didn’t know Zeke, the name in my passport. I couldn’t identify with it or his face. I didn’t want to be that failure, the man Maggie didn’t love, she had been so much of who I was to myself. Maggie loves me, so I’m the guy she loves. Then she didn’t, and I wasn’t.
Also, I convinced myself I could be Henry Adams, if he’d lived a very long time into the twenty-first century. I told one of the women, an artist photographer, that my wife had committed suicide. It wasn’t my fault, I said. The woman was totally sympathetic.
That pub bonhomie masked my sad nights. A bloke called Anthony, a critic from the Caribbean, thought I was wry. I probably talked about American anti-heroes and gangsters, and men born under the sign of feminism. I could spout theories, and had recall of quotations from Geertz, say, as if they were song lyrics. I had a mild form of dementia. Ranbir, a historian focusing on the Empire and its colonies, a skeptic, asked me if I was related to the Adams family; sure, I said, he’s an in-law; and the sympathetic artist, Benita, an Argentinian, toasted me warmly. Sometimes we kissed drunkenly, or snogged, the English say, harmless mammals getting warm. Miranda, a Marxist economist, a Nigerian Igbo, spoke French, and we talked about money and the market. She knew I had some money, to her I was a rich American, even if I wasn’t, I was for her, and, for sure, I had some, because I wasn’t living on air, even if my head held an empty space.
The English National Health Service is pretty cool, and I scored tranquilizers and sleeping pills, and anything I couldn’t get that way, I could from a private doctor. I don’t think I remembered my family for a while, and didn’t contact them; but I think Maggie let Mother know that I’d be staying longer than we’d planned, because life was good, she lied to her, easy for Maggie, and then I had flashes of being Zeke, or myself, and when I did, I contacted Mother, and, basically, I lied to everyone back home. I didn’t know what was the truth, or I knew the truth could lie. Betrayal was so dramatic, it counted as unreal. I’d been betrayed. Deceived. I’d been lied to by my fucking best friends. Feel me? I had a hard time saying Betrayed. Everything was on fire. Aunt Clarissa had betrayed me, but I didn’t consider it like that, because she was my old aunt and a little crazy. Maggie. “You betrayed me,” I said to a mirror. Believe that? I’m that cliché, Taxi Driver De Niro to his mirror, “You talkin’ to me?” but I went, “Maggie, I’m talking to you. You betrayed me. Betrayed. BETRAYED.” I wanted to make it feel real. Like, looking in a mirror, looking at myself saying those words, could make me experience it. Make it real. What a fucking joke, oh man, totally ironic.
I didn’t know what hit me, and it kept hitting me.
July 7, 2005, 8:50 a.m.
Suicide bombers set off explosives on three Underground trains in Central London.
An hour later, a London bus gets blown up at Tavistock Square.
Fifty-two people were murdered, over 700 people injured.
Four suicide bombers dead.
Two weeks later, several attempted terrorist attacks were thwarted or failed.
Four attackers were jailed for a minimum of forty years.
Their 9/11 was 7/7.
No one I knew had been hurt, but they knew some people who’d been injured, not killed. Terrible.
My head hurt a lot. Flashes, scenes, faces, corpses erupted in front of me. More and more horror and memories returned, a few, some very bad ones, in fragments. My life. It was too much. I decided to go home, I would, I couldn’t stay, and didn’t think I was fleeing, not London. The bombings had rocked me, everyone had been, everyone, shocked, I was no different, but it wasn’t home, and for me, straight up, it worked like shock treatment. That’s how I see it, now.
When 9/11 happened, I was twenty-three, with Maggie, and we were good, the world outside us turned to shit, and with 7/7, that returned, not the trauma but it awakened one, it was more like a reality external to me, internal only insofar as everything, back then in the good ole USA, had changed. Hope sank with Cheney, Rumsfeld, W, their criminal, vindictive war.
I read about a guy who heard that some people hadn’t died on 9/11, because they had changed their plane reservations at the last minute, and they were saved. So now this guy makes a res and always changes it at the last minute.
Fate-cheaters and fare-beaters get caught.
Told my pub posse I was splitting for home, and sobbed, heaving, piss-faced, but it was time, the great cover story, so abstract: it’s time, right. I felt moved toward something, the crimes and consequences of home. I am this home boy who flies home. I’m not a refugee, I’m not a DP, I can fly away. Privilege, yes. I don’t know what they thought. I didn’t know, and in a way didn’t care, since it was all temporary. The next days or week are blurry, blurrier, still.
Anyway.
I returned with dread, with some small hope for respite, relief from anguish, a hope to get it back, my memory, Maggie, my mind.
Home to Mother. Really.
The unavailable woman, ur-woman: Mother didn’t reject me, ever. No joke.
At home, no one talked about the English 9/11. 9/11 overshadowed their 7/7, it existed in the shadow of the towers, right. The English won the war to lose it, that kind of thing all over again.
I started treatment, talk and drugs, the story came back, or stories, I related various versions, and was able to finish my dissertation, OK, like a zombie. I was already in the last chapter, and could rouse myself to write a paragraph, check footnotes; I contacted my committee, efficient or catatonic, because I wanted it done I told my chair, and doing it kept me going, at first.
At first I wanted to live, to murder shithead and hurt Maggie. Or, win her back. I flowed both ways. Retrospection, when it came, kept killing me: I saw us together.
Retrospection about the weight of non-response, which oppresses differently from loud, violent speech. A silent partner can drive you mad.
I took non-response for love, unqualified.
A silent partner can murder your heart. For the uninitiated, silence can be unusually terrifying. I should never have believed in her.
My dreams were ugly, pills helped me sleep, shoved my unconscious down, and when it did rise up enough to penetrate the brain drug-fog, shit everywhere, rooms and rooms of shit. Life was shit, my life was shit, an easy association.
Delete all. Right?
image crossings
Jesus explained to Lazarus’s sister, Martha: “I am the resurrection, and the life, he that believeth in me, though were he dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”
I’m Lazarus, risen from the dead. OK.
After Jesus raised him from the dead, Lazarus lived another thirty years. He had to flee Judea because of threats against his life—Christ’s miracle man endangered the state. Tradition also says Lazarus never smiled again except once, when he saw a man stealing a clay pot. Lazarus smiled at him, and said, “The clay steals the clay.” Pretty good. A man’s life is a tautology. I suppose Lazarus’s was redundant too.
I look away from people’s prying eyes, I watch people running in the street, wonder who’s chasing them, I want to find pictures and not see illness, I wake up and go back to sleep, I do what I have to do, and get a day, a night, and etc.
One may surely give oneself up to a line of thought, and follow it up as far as it leads, simply out of scientific curiosity, or—if you prefer—as advocatus diaboli, without, however, making a pact with the devil about it.
—Freud
On Freud’s desk, in the room where he saw patients, he kept fi
gurines, his collection of antiquities, including a statue of Asklepios, the god who loved human beings most, and maybe Freud loved people most, or more than most, or most likely he was one of the most curious people about other beings. Probably he was. Freud was an idolatrous Jew, a classicist, and in some ways he lived a life antithetical to Jewish belief, which reviled idol worship and proscribed graven images.
to analyst: I’m going to make a pact with the devil.
She doesn’t think that’s funny.
Maybe Geertz, who had no time for Freud, maybe Geertz never had a total meltdown.
Analyst says I’m delaying life, that I want to stay a child, return to childhood, blah blah.
Maggie loved me as an image. She fell out of love with it.
seeing proves nothing
Ansel Adams: “Not everyone trusts paintings, but people believe photographs.”
Gone like the rotten wind.
First, a photograph confirmed “reality,” proof of a bridge, a person’s existence, while, almost simultaneously, spirit photography burgeoned, the antithesis of so-called reality, and an inherent rebuke.
Photographic truth contained its antithesis.
Many early spirit photographers were women, many women mediums. New fields open up to all comers, since necessarily they’re non-traditional; but spirits and irrationality weren’t, they were analogues to, and stereotypes of, femininity—no big leap to accept a female medium or spirit photographer.
People believed ghosts spooked pictures, not photography’s chemicals. Those mistakes, splotches and blotches, like Rorschach inkblots, coincided with a wish to see the dead alive and hear from them, again. Especially, in the U.S., with the Civil War’s decimations.
Photographs documented ghosts (still now, as late as 1960, groups formed around spirit photography), and exhibitions, such as The Blur of the Otherworldly, at UMBC, curated by Mark Alice Durant and Jane D. Marsching, and one at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, confirmed continued excitement in them and what we can’t know and want.
Oh no, we don’t believe in it, but wait, there’s life on Mars, potentially, right, they’ve found flowing water, and no one ever expected that. “Following the water is a good idea,” a scientist said. Mars had been believed to be arid.
Mostly they were fakes, those pictures.
The field, bifurcated from the start, split. Like others of Western civ’s products, a binary evolved, fiction/fact. Christ: a man and God. First, a picture of an actual tree, or house; a little later, dead babies, like dimpled clouds, at their mothers’ breasts, husbands’ faces sprouting from their widows’ eyes.
To mix it up more, take the imagination—not fact, not fiction. Imagination is the mind’s psychic product. The mind is an abstraction, right, and there’s no physical entity for “mind” or “imagination.” Both abstractions that allow
for abstractions.
Lately, an interest: What is it that people of different cultures imagine, and why? Why do people want what they want, what is the fantasy in their minds, and why?
Back in the day, photographic chemicals, the fluids, were likened to vital fluids, human fluids. In a sense, they flowed into each other.
Facts flowed into fictions or fused with them, and the other way around.
True is not Truth, but also what is untrue or, let’s say, unprovable, is not a lie, not fallacious.
Spirit writing is the mysterious appearance of words on photographs, and it fascinates me, in the same way that scientists fascinate non-scientists who ask, How did you know to do this; or, writers are asked, Where do your ideas come from? And, children want to know why is the sky blue, or how do voices go through telephone wires, and pictures arrive on screens.
Sometimes, mediums heard the dead speak, and acted as conduits for messages from them, and wrote them down.
Moses heard God (not dead yet) and wrote the Ten Commandments. Spirit writing?
Ted Serios (as in, seriously?) photographed himself “thinking,” “stuff” emerging from his head, usually his forehead. Imagine a photograph of Einstein thinking. Ideas might produce a kind of thought-sweat or halo of energy.
Are we not fields of energy, matter?
Aura photographs, from Duchamp to the present: the light or halo around a head, and its colors, describe or report a person’s state of being, or affect. People do see auras. Is every one of them crazy?
Contemporary artists also work with auras. Artist Susan Hiller, from her book Auras and Levitations:
Walter Benjamin described loss of aura as symptomatic of the artwork in modern times. He knew that the word “aura” would be widely understood, either as a visible reality described by mediums and clairvoyants and researched by certain scientists, or as an imaginative paradigm familiar from images of halos in traditional religious paintings …
Digitally montaged photographs … , presented to us as visible traces of the phantasmal, they are the most recent manifestation of a desire to experience, record and classify spectral phenomena, a desire that coincides with the history of science as well as the history of art, with complicated connections to both.
Augmenting Hiller’s claim that science displays a “desire” to know about auras, and other manifestations: in the 1970s Ralph Abraham, a mathematician, wrote a proof showing that vibrations exist. When the Polaroid SX-70 Land Camera debuted in 1972, it was called a “wonder.” Some groups thought it could photograph “miracles.”
analyst: What miracle are you waiting for?
me: Funny. I’m not waiting. I feel her.
Silence.
me: She’s around.
the inenarrable
Before 1802, cirrus, cumulus, and altostratus clouds hadn’t been given names. Untitled before 1802, the shapes were present in the sky, ethereal or ephemeral, presumably since the big bang, but undesignated, until they needed to be. Why then?
The world hasn’t been fully seen, until it is named. Different cultures will have many names for an object that another doesn’t even have one for. But there are specific words for nonspecificity, or non-states: the word “nonexistence”; names for states that presumably can’t be described or defined adequately but that can be experienced, the “in” and “un” words: inexpressible, indescribable, ineffable, inchoate, unreal. Some conditions can’t be translated—a transmission or flash of insight when a problem is solved, as the brain leaps, neurologically.
Certain states of mind, our species decided, can’t be described but we still have words for them. Wittgenstein would object: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”
People are rarely silent.
All naming is a form of translation, and the written translates events, impressions, etc., into a representation, and often misses its mark. WHY?
The inenarrable—incapable of being narrated.
Spirit photography courted the inenarrable.
Paradox: this word names the un-tellable.
Inenarrable, a strange word, was needed, right. It actually defines the paradox of ethnography: it’s assumed, by the field, that everything can be narrated. Ethnography is, at its core, because of its emphasis on field work, trusting of various translations, say, languages and facial movements, based in storytelling.
A straightforward, uncomplicated transmission? No, there’s always mediation, which accounts for Geertz’s emphasis on “thick description.” Non-ethnographers often use this term, which Geertz took from Gilbert Ryle, and out of context. (Ironically.) Geertz called ethnography an elaborate exercise in thick description. “Thin” description doesn’t get at context, and doesn’t pay attention to the significance of actions. The classic example: one boy’s eye involuntarily twitches, while another boy winks. In appearance they look the same, but a wink is part of culture, a twitch is involuntary. The ethnographer must record the winks, not the twitches.
So, ethnography, first, is an activity; second, it’s exploration and interpretation. Third, writing, and writing narratives.
>
All accounts must account for it, the unaccountable.
Human nature isn’t natural, it’s an invention of human beings, totally reflexive.
To account for the new, people find new words, and with these new products, come apprehensions, experiences. Take sexting.
Take the noun od, äd. It was a hypothetical force formerly held to pervade all nature and to manifest itself in magnetism, mesmerism, chemical action, etc. Od was coined by chemist and philosopher Karl Ludwig von Reichenbach as a name for his hypothetical force. He proposed od because he thought a short word starting with a vowel would be more easily combined in compound.
I studied mind-cure, or metaphysical healing, which strikes at the root of disease; I went into hypnotism, mesmerism, and phreno-magnetism, and the od force—I don’t suppose you know about the od which Reichenbach discovered.
—Edward Eggleston, The Faith Doctor:
A Story of New York, 1891
In 1784, Mesmer’s name was applied to a technique for inducing hypnosis. I could not have felt mesmerized before Dr. Mesmer appeared on the scene.
Words don’t betray us, we do.
Words insinuate. Pictures doubt.
home turf (the domestic field)
Being more or less “regular,” or functioning, by 2008 I began work at the Library of Congress, researching family albums of the celebrated or famous—in comparison with the volk, and my found families. I came upon material about Henry and Clover Adams, especially Henry, because the Adamses may be the most written-about family in American history or the family that wrote the most.
Clover Adams was known for her wit, charm. Henry Adams and she married in 1872, and had no children. Clover’s salon was famous in D.C., and she and Henry entertained only the best D.C. had or who visited there. In the last three years of her life, she took photographs, seriously, and published some. Clover’s life was full—of books, art, talk, purpose of a kind, let’s put it, “for a woman of that time.” No one knows exactly why, in 1885, she took her life: there’s conjecture and supposition. She appears to have been clinically depressed after her father’s death, and to this day her suicide is considered a mystery. That’s the skinny. Also the family lore that I knew, repeated by generations of hagiographers, but now I got into it my way.
Men and Apparitions Page 16