The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Salman Rushdie

  My fellow “Orphics” on East Fifth Street had all abandoned photojournalism for good, and the eagerness with which they were pursuing other interests aroused my envy, an emotion that’s always reliable as a guide to the secret heart, le secret-coeur, as Hulot’s Nebuchadnezzar partner Bobby Flow used to call it in his broad Yankee Franglais: that is to say, our deep neediness, the substitute in a climate of godlessness for the bleeding heart of Christ. Aimé-Césaire Basquiat, our beautiful young shaven-bodied Francophone, was using an old eight-by-ten plate camera, long exposures and gorgeous high-definition lighting to give a lapidary, Renaissance-classical look to a sequence of formal head-shot portraits and, more contentiously, to classically composed scenes of what were, to me, utterly stupefying sexual practices. The content of these out-there photographs made me feel like an innocent country boy who knew nothing of the world’s true diversity, who in spite of staring into the maw of horror had never begun to guess what ancient impulses were really swimming in our lightless, hidden depths. It was Basquiat’s simple idea to bring these things out of the dark into his sumptuous light and thus change our idea of what beauty is.

  His third project was a sort of photographic reply to his namesake Césaire’s celebrated poetic affirmation of négritude, the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Basquiat, who had left Martinique as a baby and defiantly stayed away ever since, was slowly creating a photo-essay—Cahier d’un exit—about exile, about rootless slip-sliders like himself, photographing them as if they were beautiful aliens floating an inch off the ground, as if they were blessed as well as cursed. Sometimes the three projects blended into one, and I was startled one day to see a powerful portrait of Basquiat’s fellow Martinican Rémy Auxerre, haloed in light and ingesting, in extreme close-up, what was all too evidently Basquiat’s own cock, an organ we all knew well because of its owner’s penchant for nudity.

  It’s easy to say—and after his early death, all wasted body, wizened skin and frightened eyes, there were many who were quick to say it—that Basquiat was on a fast road to nowhere. But what I remember was the exaltation on his face each day. That was a room to which I also desperately wanted to find the key.

  Johnny Chow and Mack Schnabel were involved in less edgy but equally rewarding careers: fashion and advertising work to support the high Manhattan society life they both adored, and more personal photo-essays for the good of the soul. Schnabel—a small man with a huge hawk’s head and more than his share of nocturnal demons—would go to Italy twice a year for the Milan collections. Afterwards he headed off to Rome and took eye-popping pictures of the half-mummified, decayed, skeletal bodies in the catacombs. From that he progressed to taking pictures of civilian cadavers on a regular basis, fascinated by deaths democracy. Violent death didn’t interest him any more; just the fact itself, our shared inheritance, James’s distinguished thing. The young and the old are the same age when they’re dead, he’d say. They’re as old as it gets. Other differences vanished also. Klansman and bluesman, Hamas fundamentalist and Jewish settler, Afrikaner and Sowetan, Indian and Pakistani, town mouse and country mouse, the farmer and the cowman, Mr. Tomayto and Ms. Tomahto, there they were, side by side on the slabs of his photographs, stripped of their frontiers, equalized for all time. To this continuing portfolio he gave the grandly Shakespearean tide Golden Lads and Girls, who, you’ll recall (Cymbeline, act IV, scene 2), all must, / As chimney sweepers, come to dust.

  As for all-action Chow, that driven, gambling-crazy roadrunner who called himself the ideal New Yorker because I’m like the city, man, I don’t fucking sleep: he was busy with his fifteen-year study Queens, a portrait of the polyglot borough. But he was at least as proud of the advertising photographs he took for Heinz. Multi-cultural street life, man, that’s already rich, he told me. It’s got texture, depth, does half your job for you. You got any idea what it takes to make interesting the surface of a cream of mushroom soup? Now that’s a challenge.

  One day Basquiat (fully dressed) came up to see me and wanted to hang out and play some music. Rummaging through my vinyl he came up with an oldie, Exile on Main Street, and put it on the deck. Rai, deed you evair see that tour movie, Cocksuckair Blues, they got Robair Fronk to make eet as well as thees covair, he wanted to know. Otherwise I can get eet, I know a man, we can run eet for ourselves some evening, que penses-tu.

  Listening to “Sweet Virginia,” the druggy music of another age, a strange, mouthy admixture of South London and the American South, I found myself staring at the album’s collagist sleeve, its strips of film featuring a funeral (civilians and soldiers saluting a hearse), snapshots of faces both famous and not, a newspaper front page, a scrap of handwritten lyric, the repeated image of the road. The crudely hand-lettered credits. Amyl Nitrate: marimbas. Clydie King, Vanetta, plus friend: background vocal. Bill Plummer: uprite bass. The music inspired only nostalgia but the photographs still had plenty to say. Yes, Robert Frank, I thought. This was the sign I’d been waiting for.

  Cocksucker Blues was okay, messy and of its unappetizing moment, but I was still primarily a stills man, and what really spoke to me was Mabou. In 1970, after separating from Mary Frank, Robert Frank bought a house in Mabou, Nova Scotia, with the artist June Leaf. The raw, strong work he made there was, is, a demonstration of how far a photograph can stretch, how much it can include, once it gives up the idea of including it all, once it accepts that it isn’t going to break on through to some universal truth. A human eye, disembodied, floats against a high-contrast seascape. Words as well as images hang pegged and drying on a windblown clothesline. There are many photographs shot through glass on which words have been scrawled or else the words are written right across the image itself. No Fear over a typewriter with, once again, the ubiquitous sea. Hold Still Keep Going. Against that stark flat mournful landscape articulated by poles and frames the fading name of his dead daughter. For Andrea who died. I think of Andrea every day. Look Out For Hope. Pigs’ carcasses. Hospitals. Cold. Ice. Packing cases. Nothing cropped, nothing aligned. Photographs like torn images in broken glass. A woman, I think it’s June Leaf, lies on sand, full of joy. I had looked at these pictures before but never seen them. Now they led me to discard much of what I’d thought, they gave me what I wanted: a way of starting again.

  Looking at the Mabou pictures, I remembered these lines of Virginia Woolf: A masterpiece is not the result of a sudden inspiration but the product of a lifetime of thought. Henri Hulot, my first master, had been a great believer in the sudden inspiration, the decisive moment that reveals an underlying harmony. Frank wasn’t, and had probably put together his Black White and Things as an answer to Hulot’s thesis, much as Catch-18 is an answer to The Naked and the Dead. I realized I had been pursuing the unattainable, looking at atrocities in search of capital-A Atrocity, searching in so many deaths for Death. Now I decided to abandon universals and harmony to absolutists like Hulot and Ormus and concentrate on the inexhaustible happenstance of life.

  I decided that nothing was forbidden. I was re-learning the imagination’s alphabet and so it was okay to play with all the toys.

  For some reason (I really don’t think this needs to be spelled out) I became interested in double exposures. I constructed story sequences in which beautiful, often naked young men and women—Basquiat’s perennial nudity had had its effect on me—were attended by see-through wraiths: a mother standing like the Christ of the Andes, arms spread wide, atop a skyscraper, a father hanging from a ceiling fan, a dream lover, a second self. As I opened myself to the language of dreams I was shown, and tried to re-create, images whose meaning was obscure, whose obscurity excited me. A man at a desk was visited by a phantom horse which put its hooves over his eyes. A naked man in an empty room talked to a white-masked version of himself. (This with sentences of text, scrawled by myself at the foot of each frame of the sequence: Do you know who you are? Do you know what you want?) To my surprise I found that much of the imagery that came to me had religious overtones: a double-exposure seque
nce describing a dying woman’s out-of-the-body experience, another sequence in which a man suddenly explodes into pure light: first his head, then his body and clothes. I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more. Religion came and imprisoned the angels in aspic, tied our winged beauty to a tree, nailed our freedom to the ground. In these sequences I tried to reclaim the sense of the miraculous without having to bend the knee before any god. The god of the imagination is the imagination. The law of the imagination is, whatever works. The law of the imagination is not universal truth, but the work’s truth, fought for and won.

  I invented an alter ego for myself, an enigmatic Mitteleuropean photographer, named Moosbrugger after the murderer in Musil, prowling the streets of New York looking for echoes in this New World of Vienna, of Budapest, of Prague. This pseudo-photographer photographed the love affairs of gargoyles, the Arthurian adventures of the great population of statuary living high above the city streets. The statues came to life, loved, fought, lived according to their personal codes. They were like the knights of Charlemagne, as well as the American pioneers. Moosbrugger’s statue-work was some of my favorite stuff.

  I worked with reflections, glass, shadows. Using mirrors, I became skilled at scale distortion. I learned how to hold the galaxy in the palm of a man’s hand, and what happened if you placed mirror images inside other mirror images and photographs inside photographs, dizzying the eye, until the last image was crushed in a fist. First to create an illusion, then to show that it is an illusion, then finally to destroy the illusion: this, I began to see, was honesty.

  One day I developed a roll of film and there was the ghost image of a woman I didn’t know superimposed on several of the shots. I couldn’t work it out. On this occasion I was certain I had not run the film through the camera twice, and anyway I didn’t recognize the woman’s silhouette. True, it was not unlike Vina’s body, but it wasn’t Vina’s body. It was a stranger, moving through a space that was and was not mine.

  As if I had penetrated a membrane and touched an otherworld.

  That night while I slept the woman showed up in my dreams and told me her name. She said a little too contemptuously for my liking that she could read me as if I were a book. She said if she wanted to she could close me and put me back on her shelf and then my story would never finish, it would stop dead in the middle of a sentence. I was lying naked in bed and she leaned over me, murmuring threats. I tried to argue back. I told her the inside of a book is there whether you read it or not. Even if nobody ever reads it, it’s there, doing its work. That’s enough, I said. Being there is what counts.

  She hissed, do you remember when we were lovers? Do you remember our wonderful first night of love? No, she said, you don’t even remember me, do you, you bastard. Fuck you. I’m going. Maybe I’ll never come back.

  I woke up sweating and alone. Maria, I thought. I just met a girl called Maria.

  I began to take pictures of infidelity: my apartment just before Vina entered the frame, or just after she left it. The rumpled bed of guilty passion. The water on the tiled floor by the shower. Used glasses. Half-eaten food. After a time Vina agreed to participate in the sequence. Her masked face. Her anonymous, naked body moving rapidly out of shot. Her extended arms, stretching towards the forbidden. These photographs brought us a new kind of closeness, and as she gave more and more of herself to the work, becoming more collaborator than subject, so I began superstitiously to fear the power of crazy Ormus’s eye-patched, shamanic eye. Some days I could swear I could feel it roving the cosmos like a searchlight, like Robert Frank’s eye at Mabou, like the cloud-razored moon in Un Chien Andalou. Like the eye of the Dark Lord Sauron searching for the Ring.

  Thus I became an autobiographer, using whatever came to hand, drawings, stories, crayons, surrealism, Vina, texts. Realism isn’t a set of rules, it’s an intention, I pontificated at an amused, unusually tolerant Vina. The world isn’t realistic any more, what are we going to do about that? Think of a photograph of people who never change, leading their grooved lives with if they’re lucky a bit of bedroom psychodrama: that’s the fantasy. A battlefield on which you don’t see the undercurrents of history doesn’t show enough of the truth. A battlefield on which you don’t see so to speak angels and devils, the so to speak gods with their super-weapons, and the let’s say ghosts. Somehow to show the metaphoric beneath the actual, driving what happens, making things so.

  And how do you propose to photograph an undercurrent, she asked.

  I don’t know, I grinned. I guess start by looking in the right places.

  You’re changing, she told me. Don’t stop?, I like it. I like it really a lot.

  We were all changing. The change in Ormus, his sleep-masked retreat into locked and darkened rooms for days on end, his worsening migraines, his sobbing fits, his shrieks, these things gave rise to a great turbulence within Vina, tore her apart, made her feel helpless, alienated her, made her sit outside his locked door pleading to be let in. When she was let in she would attend at his darkened bedside for days on end, holding his hand, nursing him, while he thrashed like a great fish out of water and screamed about the imminent catastrophe. Doctors were brought to him, sedatives were prescribed. The condition of his mind was not good. Vina came to me more often now, fleeing the melodrama at the Rhodopé Building, leaving Ormus to be cared for by the infinitely patient Clea and the Singhs. She said, His breakdown leaves a hole where our relationship used to be. I still love him, you know, love’s a mystery, right, but there’s nothing between us any more. He’s off in outer space or the fifth dimension, watching out for the end of the world. Sometimes I think he isn’t coming back.

  She knew she had to resume an independent life, to find her own new way. Gradually she became an enthusiastic participant in the alternative art scene, working with indie filmmakers, performance artists, dancers. Meanwhile she was writing her own songs for the first time, trying them out on me, jamming with her many A-list music-world friends. She made surprise appearances at small downtown music venues with a scratch band and was pleased by the reception she got. By the fall of 1988 she had an album, Vina, and was planning to go on the road. Not America or Europe to start with, she told me. I don’t think I’m ready. Just a small tour of Latin America for a start?, the music is pretty much influenced by those guys anyway. Brazil, Mexico, just a toe in the water.

  I want to remember her the way she was then, surging into her mid-forties full of beauty and courage, alone and scared but heading back out there, looking for her life. I want to remember that in those days before the tour she at last admitted what I’d waited my whole life to hear, namely that I had become a factor, a problem. I was no longer an occasional snack, a side dish. No longer containable. For too long it had been a case of Ormus and Vina sailing along with Rai clinging to the side of their racing yacht. It had been their story; now, at long last, it was mine too. Mine, at last.

  She said she was disoriented, confused, she needed time to think, all of that. Yes, she was thinking of leaving him. She couldn’t bear to be there any more. She couldn’t bear to leave him. She couldn’t stay.

  She said, You don’t know how alike you are, you two, except that he’s going down for the third time and you’re coming up for air.

  She said, I have to get away. I’m going on this tour. I have to think.

  I’ll come with you, why don’t I, I said. I could be your official tour photographer. All I’d ask is total access. You know? Total.

  No, don’t come.

  I can’t let you go. Vina, after all this. We’re this close. I have to come.

  Jesus, Jesus. I don’t know. Okay, come. No, don’t come. Come. Don’t come. Come. Don’t come. Don’t come. Don’t come. Come.

  I’ll come, then.

  No. Don’t.

  We should have listened to Ormus. It wasn’t just the great San Fr
ancisco earthquake of 1984: the 1980s had been a bad time for the whole faulty earth. In October 1980 twenty thousand people were killed by a 7.3-Richter event in El Asnam, Algeria, a quake so severe that it broke many local seismologists’ measuring instruments. Three thousand people died in southern Italy a month later. In October 1983 a quake hit Hasankale village in eastern Turkey (two thousand dead); in September 1985 the Mexico City authorities were forced to use the baseball stadium as a morgue (over two thousand dead). A medium-size event wrecked San Salvador in August 1986, and then, two years later, a mysterious rash of quakes broke out along various international frontiers. A 6.7-Richter whopper rocked the India-Nepal border in August 1988 (over five hundred dead), and just three months later a thousand people died, this time on the China-Burma line. One month after that, a force of 6.9 on the Richter scale devastated the Armenian-Turkish border. The town of Spitak, with a population of fifty thousand, was totally destroyed; eighty percent of the buildings in Leninakan (a city with a population of three hundred thousand souls) tumbled down; one hundred thousand people died, and Gorbachev paid a visit to the scene. When, in January 1989, two villages in a border area of Tajikistan were buried by landslides and mudslides (one thousand people dead, also many thousand head of cattle), the so-called “borderline fault” phenomenon began to attract worldwide attention. Is the world coming apart at the seams? was the question asked by a cover story in Time, and even though the official, seismological answer was a resounding No, I began, for the first time, to wonder what Ormus Cama was seeing in his delirium. If dogs and pigs and cattle could feel quakes before our measuring instruments, was it possible that a human being could predict them months, years, in advance?