Hold Still

by Sally Mann

  Except for White Mary, Harvard, and a few others, slender people were not much in evidence among the forty or so bodies in residence when I visited. Later, Murray told me that they had to buy a forklift to carry in the increasing numbers of the obese. And because the extra mass takes much longer for the maggots to reduce to bone and smear, they tie up the available parking places as they putrefy.

  Pausing by a body and waiting until the rustling of the leaves quieted, I could hear the maggots noisily eating, a sound sometimes like the crackling of Rice Krispies in milk and other times, like raw hamburger being formed by hand into patties. The bulging skin roiled with their movements beneath it. In one instance recorded at the Body Farm, the industrious maggots reduced a man by forty pounds in just twenty-four hours, expanding themselves from the size (forgive the culinary comparisons) of an uncooked grain of rice to a plump macaroni.

  Maggots had barely begun their work on Tunnel Man when I first saw him, although the vultures clearly had: they’d plucked his eyeballs from their sockets and torn the delicate skin around his ears. He was lying on his stomach, a diaper-like cloth still stuck on his pink buttocks, the red-berried branches of a common viburnum protectively arching over him.

  Within a day, however, his bizarrely pink skin had begun to peel back, as if he had suffered a bad sunburn, revealing heavy pores of darker, less lifelike skin. His fingers appeared to be wearing little wrinkled finger rubbers, akin to those clerks use for counting money. The following day, after his body had been snuffled over by some animal, I grabbed his hand to move his outstretched arm back in place, and the whole top layer of skin came off in my palm as though I had removed his glove. By then, his face had blackened and maggots had begun spilling out of his nostrils and ears. Soon the eye sockets were a riot of turmoil, and wasps and yellow jackets were drowning in the spreading brown pond of goo beneath what used to be a face.

  My tripod didn’t go down far enough to photograph him straight on, so I took the 8 × 10 camera off and set it on the ground. I then stretched out flat behind it in the dirt so that I could look into the ground glass, trying not to think of whatever, whomever, it was I was lying on. Since the day was cloudy, the exposure was a long one. The furiously churning maggots over the necessary six-second exposure gave Tunnel Man a beautiful diaphanous veil over his ruined features.

  I found him good company, Tunnel Man. He wasn’t afraid of death, he was in no pain, and he had finally relinquished control. He was so much less painful to be around than, say, my then-living mother, lying on her back in the retirement home, tears leaking from her eyes, her face balled up with fear. In a sense, Tunnel Man had more life in him; life was feeding on him, the beetles and worms making inroads and leaving behind soil into which stray seeds would sink their fibrous roots.

  Surely the people is grass.

  We don’t talk much about what happens when we die. Years ago, sex was the unmentionable thing; now it’s death. This modern form of prudery encourages the spectacle of funerary pomp and the ironic sight of cemetery visitors picking wildflowers from the gravesites that hold literally more of the dead than the carved tombstone ever could. Although I’ve never been prone to that almost universal form of squeamishness, I have long been afflicted with the metaphysical question of death: what does remain? What becomes of us, of our being?

  Remember that song by Laurie Anderson in which she says something about how when her father died it was as though a library burned to the ground? Where does the self actually go? All the accumulation of memory—the mist rising from the river and the birth of children and the flying tails of the Arabians in the field—and all the arcane formulas, the passwords, the poultice recipes, the Latin names of trees, the location of the safe deposit key, the complex skills to repair and build and grow and harvest—when someone dies, where does it all go?

  Proust has his answer, and it’s the one I take most comfort in—it ultimately resides in the loving and in the making and in the living of every present day. It’s in my family, our farm, and in the pictures I’ve made and loved making. It’s in this book. “What thou lovest well remains.” That line, from Pound’s Canto 81, is carved on the tombstone above the rank hole where we deposit our family’s ashes.

  What thou lovest well remains,

  the rest is dross

  What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

  What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage…

  I went back to see Tunnel Man a few months later. He was skeletal, unrecognizable.

  On one of my last days at the Body Farm, a female graduate student showed up around noontime and began futzing with the body she’d apparently been assigned—taking measurements and counting the carrion beetles and moth larvae. His skin was like mummified leather, a golden caramel color, as if it’d been basted with a buttery glaze and run under the broiler. Next to him was a nearly skeletonized woman haloed by an enormous grease stain, suggesting that she had likely decomposed during the hot weeks of September.

  I was awfully glad to see another living being, having spent two days alone, or at least among some very uncommunicative company, so I went over and struck up a conversation with her. She seemed to have a corollary custodial assignment and, while I was chatting her up, she set about raking loose bones into a greasy pile. As she stuffed each body into its own gray plastic bag, a rack of ribs curled out of the top of one and sharp shinbones pierced the edges of another.

  After a while, from outside the big gates, came the sound of an engine and two doors slamming. We went over to find an idling minivan, a sticker on its back window asserting that a middle-schooler was on the honor roll, and two men who looked to be in their late thirties, wearing baseball caps, standing uncertainly next to it.

  They addressed me first, as the elder, but immediately realized their mistake when I blanched as they opened the hatchback, to reveal a body laid out amid the sports equipment. They then turned to the graduate student, who was busily putting on a pair of blue surgical gloves, and explained that they’d brought their friend Shelby to her, even though they had no idea why he wanted this for himself.

  The men and I stood looking at the body, and one of them began to cry softly, his head pressed against the car, while the graduate student presented the other with the necessary paperwork on a clipboard. Shelby had been a tall man and was in good flesh, about the same age as his two friends. Except for the crudely sewn autopsy scar and his oddly deflated stomach cavity, he seemed perfectly healthy. He had a cloth covering his hips.

  The grad student, like a dorm counselor checking in a freshman on the first day of school, glanced up from the clipboard and reported that the plot assigned to Shelby was at the top of the hill. We all glanced up in the direction of her gestures, then stood looking at this dead man, who must have weighed at least 200 pounds. After a beat, the crying friend rubbed his eyes and said, “Let’s get on with it,” and he and the other man began pulling Shelby out by the feet. The cloth pulled away and revealed a handsome phallus nested in pale pubic hair as the two men dragged the lower limbs out of the family minivan.

  Grabbing an arm each, they pulled the corpse upright, the heavy head flopping on its stalk, front to back. Then each man draped an arm over his shoulder and began to haul Shelby along, his feet leaving a trail in the leaves. They got about ten steps and the crying man stopped, overcome.

  The graduate student and I exchanged glances, and she suggested that she and I grab the legs and the two guys could carry the arms. We flipped him over and, with the woman and me in the lead, one of Shelby’s legs in each of our arms, we lurched past White Mary, Tunnel Man, and several large oblong grease smears crosshatched with the impressions of rake tines. Both men were crying now, taking turns covering Shelby’s flopping genitals with their baseball caps. The grad student and I pressed forward like two dray horses between the carriage shafts of Shelby’s big legs.

  Nothing is deader, or more ungainly, than a dead body. Dead weight is right. The pitch of t
he hill steepened, and the men were stumbling and sobbing behind us. Periodically Shelby’s legs would be ripped out of our arms as one or the other of the men lost his grip, both emotionally and physically. Shelby’s shoulder would sag heavily to the ground, the man supposed to be supporting it weeping against the chest sutures. Shelby had been allotted a berth alongside the fence at the very top of the hill and as we approached it the two friends, hooking a baseball cap on the bouncing testicles for the last time, lowered their end of Shelby and peeled off into the woods, leaving us holding the legs. Sighing, we reversed ends and each of us wrapped our arms around Shelby’s clammy torso in an unsettlingly intimate embrace. At the count of three, we hefted him upright, his naked body pressed against us, and man-hauled him to his weedy little plot. At a second count of three, we both released and Shelby folded to the ground, his head making a sickening melon-y sound.

  Panting, we stood looking down at him, crumpled inelegantly against some stickweed, and then we turned him onto his stomach, the preferred method for Body Farm decomposition. The grad student reached into her pants pocket and brought out a scalpel and made a quick slice in the back of the thigh, revealing a layer of fluffy fat and bright muscle.

  She was putting a sample of the still somewhat bloody flesh in a plastic bag just as the two friends emerged, red-faced and snot-nosed, from the underbrush. Since they seemed to have composed themselves, I asked them about Shelby. Who was he? How had he died?

  They said he was a schoolteacher, the picture of health, and had died watching TV in the basement.

  What? Died just like that? “What was the cause of death?” I asked, trying to keep the alarm I was feeling out of my voice.

  “No clue,” the friends said. There had been an autopsy that found absolutely nothing.

  At this point I was on pretty good terms with dead bodies, inured to the putrefaction, the pus and particles of exploded tissue, the slime and lymph leakage from ruptured membranes. I had watched unperturbed as flies, just done laying their eggs in Tunnel Man, had lit on my arm as I focused my camera. I had returned at night to my room reeking of decomposition, the gag-making stench wafting up afresh from my film holders as I changed negatives in the motel bathroom. I had slipped on chunks of fatty adipocere and found hair stuck to the brake pedal of the Suburban as I drove home at night.

  But nothing, none of this bothered me as much as realizing that I had pressed myself, as a lover would, against a man who had just died of completely unknown causes. His skin cells were now invisibly woven among the fibers of my shirt, and a rusty smear from the autopsy incision bloodied my forearm. I felt a little queasy. The first crying man placed his baseball cap, no longer needed as a fig leaf, back on his head, and we went down the hill.

  Death as an artistic theme always produces a self-portrait, Joseph Brodsky once remarked, but this was coming just a little too close for me. I packed up for the day and drove back to the seedy airport strip, locating my motel by the bright lights of a liquor store that sold Everclear grain alcohol by the half gallon. I got in the shower and scrubbed down until I was as pink as Tunnel Man’s back.

  24

  The X Above My Head

  When my father casually handed me his travel-scarred Leica in January 1969, I knew almost nothing about photography except that I had occasionally been on the receiving end of the camera, modeling some at Putney for Jon Crary, my boyfriend at the time, now a distinguished art critic and academic. The Putney photographs reverberate still with the plucked string of actual memory, but not so the pictures from a decade earlier that my father took. I only “remember” him taking those pictures in the photo-adulterated way that the past becomes accessible to us. No transporting resonance floods my senses with the smells, temperature, textures, and emotions of that time. Those notes have faded, the string is stilled, the memories silent.

  I have only the pictures. From them, I reconstruct full-blown, photo-detailed memories based on scraps of information I can pick out with a magnifying glass held over my father’s contact sheets, memories constructed entirely of silver grain suspended in gelatin. They have no continuum; they float untethered from any recollection of the moments on either side of the fraction of a second during which my image was committed to film. I have no memory of the preparations for the trip to Goshen Pass, where he set me up to be photographed, pensive and (I’m guessing—or do I remember?) chilly in the morning light.

  Nor do I remember the formal portrait session in the living room for which my hair had been carefully parted and combed, probably with some protest and doubtless by Gee-Gee, who had the patience of a stalagmite. Studying the many failures on the contact sheet, I suspect that I was not the most willing subject and understand why he was so proud of this picture, submitting it to contests and framing it for his office.

  It has a limpid directness, and I happen to know how hard it is to get a peevish child to look with intent into a camera.

  I wasn’t peevish for the picture that Jon shot a decade later, although I see a similarity in the gimlet gaze, a gaze that knows how to respond, in a post-Blow-Up kind of way, to the suave seduction of the lens.

  Breaking all the parietal rules, I had snuck Jon up to my attic room in Tower Dorm on that Wednesday afternoon in 1968, my seventeenth birthday. He shot the picture by the light of a dormer window just before we burrowed deep into the under-eave closet and washed down a bag of chocolate chip cookies with half a bottle of Scotch. After puking all night, I never again touched Scotch whisky. The memories that are conjured up by the photograph Jon took that day would have been disparaged by Proust as too shallow, limited to the single dimension of the visual, and, ultimately, voluntary. I think he has a point; the memory payoff from the picture is nothing compared to the pungent revelations provided me by all my other senses. Proust would call these involuntary memories, which reside within an impalpable and complex scaffolding of recollection. Unbidden, I have a vivid imaginative recall of the textures, tastes, and smells of that afternoon kneeling at the Tower Dorm toilet each time I accidentally mistake a whisky for a bourbon. These are memories that cannot be ripped apart and thrown in the woodstove like my journals or photographs; there’s no burning up the layered memory trace of smell and taste.

  Those few times on the other side of the lens and the pictures in The Family of Man and You Have Seen Their Faces were all I knew about photography when my father initiated the wobbly momentum that righted itself to become my artistic life. On my first day of taking pictures, with the Leica and a perplexing Weston light meter in hand, I did what I still do to this day: I headed out into the Rockbridge County countryside to find the good light.

  And the subject matter?

  Well, judging by the earliest pictures from the first rolls of film, I shot many of the same things I still focus on today: the landscape of the rural South, with its keen ache of loss and memory; relationships among people; the human form; and the ineffable beauty of decrepitude, of evanescence, of mortality.

  (It should be noted that Robbie Goolrick, longtime family friend, probably has as much claim as I do to this picture of—l. to r.—his sister, Lindlay, me, and my Putney roommate, Kit, but we have agreed to share the credit.)

  Most intriguing to me now as I look back through my earliest work is clear evidence of a precocious premonition of mortality, like this image from my twelfth roll of film late in 1969.

  It was taken shortly before I left to work, as part of Bennington College’s nonresident term, with the Frontier Nursing Service in one of the poorest pockets of lost America, Harlan County, Kentucky. My job was to muck out the stables and care for the mules and horses that carried us into the hollers of coal country, so remote and treacherous that no vehicle could reach them. Although our mounts were burdened with saddlebags, and we carried backpacks of medical supplies, I usually also carried my camera and occasionally photographed while the nurse worked.

  Possibly I knew that taking pictures under these circumstances was a breach of some ki
nd of nursing (and photo) morality, but I was so enthralled with the power of photography to convey a concept (never mind how ham-fistedly) that the altered end result was all that mattered to me. Was I Jim Lewis’s asshole who makes lousy art? Does a picture this bad deserve Faulkner’s moral pass? I fear not, but these complexities had not yet troubled my art-bewitched, embryonic photo-ethical sensibility.

  Clearly subtlety wasn’t my long suit, but upon my return from Kentucky I toned down the corny skeletal symbols and pressed into service some Byronic drama to make my morbid point. Originality wasn’t my long suit, either, in this post-Kentucky work. My father had recently purchased a set of prints of Duane Michals’s Death Comes to the Old Lady, a sequence of five images of an old woman who, at the approach of a bourgeois-looking Death, wafts skyward in a blur. I had clearly taken careful note of it before beginning my own death-narrative series.

  The first picture in The Dream Sequence is of a pensive young woman at breakfast, still in her nightgown, her robe hung over the chair. In it, she is daydreaming of (or remembering?) a predawn visit from her deadly doppelgänger. The first and last images of the sequence are crisp and sharply focused. Those in-between, depicting the dream state, are soft-focus. I achieved this effect by placing a stocking under the enlarger lens, a trick I had learned from my accomplished and influential photography teacher at Bennington College, Norman Seeff. My models were seventeen-year-old identical twins, Eve and Rhea Huntley.