Eleven

 He could not yet find either the voice or (perhaps most importantly for him) the strength to address the children—at least not yet. They knocked at his front door in little rat-a-tat tats, a whole volley of them in quick and haphazard succession. It was a seemingly random but shaped chorus of voices that nosily followed up the knocking. All of this shook him from his quiet but frenzied scribbling (a habit he’d grown proud of whenever it fancied strike him, but which we would always later regret, as the frenzy of an over-zealous and incapable know-nothing whose efforts became tiresome faults that beat him back down into days of languid bed-laying and video-watching. And in those moments, it was all lost—all of it, goddammit, every last word or thought vanished, evaporated into torpor and vain hopes and …).

He was furious, and clenched his teeth, as if to explode into a seething rage. But then he listened to their insistent callings out for him. He wilted, and that spot in his chest leapt and fluttered and he was now in sorrowful need of them. He could not just let their calls go unanswered as he had on other occasions (those when his bed would not yield him up to the follies of trivial banter and childish play).

The violence in him subsided, and he slinked to the door, with a mind still perfumed from his racing thoughts of the future possible. Still, he could find neither the voice nor the strength to address the children directly. He made a plan to halt his ideas, his writings, let them in and let them play freely. They would run into the garden—but today the berries were ripe and he knew they’d be found before he could have a decent picking.

It was all part of the game, their game—of their innocence which plagued him and presented itself like a wall, or a law. They came in, they wanted a story, a tale … anything to make them laugh or scream in terror, to send them running into the depths of his garden. Sometimes they’d want to be found; other times they’d want to play amongst themselves and at still others, they’d return for more tales or toys or tulaberries. Today he accepted (almost willingly) the diversions.

He called to them softly—today, children, dear little ones, I am stuck behind this door! Why? they wanted to know, laughing and whispering questions and disbelief to themselves. It’s because of a great, though unfortunate, event that has transpired, he called out: the locking mechanism has become jammed by a small civilization that has decided to take up residence there—at least for the time being.

They laughed and shouted their disbelief. It’s true! he insisted, now raising his voice slightly, demonstrating to them, he thought, his sincerity (the louder the more sincere—wasn’t this the dictate of practical wisdom?). He moved from the door, smiling but then sinking deeply into his tale. He moved into a room adjacent that of the photographs, and found an old vinyl—Mozart divertimenti. Perfect. He turned up the volume. Over the music—the horns, the violins dancing and hopping around—he yelled: and this is the music they’ve asked me to play for you, dear ones. Listen!

Stunned, they did as he asked and he could, through a partially obscured window set behind shrubbery of ancient design, see their little frozen eyes in rapt attention as the music leapt out through the wide-open windows, striking them with its alien sense of play. They took themselves each by the hand and formed a circle of dancing. He quashed a roaring laugh, and returned to the front door to continue the story.

You see, dear ones—rotten little kids you actually are!—they have taken up residence en masse: their whole civilization, all their people, their little children, their belongings … everything that they have, and that they are, is now to be found right inside the lock mechanism. How can I disturb them? If I twist the door handle, then I will squish them, and throw them—their whole world!—all into chaos. Are you prepared to be called their murderers? No? I didn’t think so. Then are you prepared to hear my plan for getting you in here? Come ‘round, listen up then …

There was a series of somewhat complicated (at least for the children and his own imagination) alleyways and passages that, navigated correctly, led into the basement of the house, and then from a set of stairs, back out into the garden. Of course there was a more direct route, but now the labyrinths of yesterday’s tales, he thought, must be made alive in today’s tasks. That aphorism dried on his pages some years ago…

Ok, listen up again! His announcement was made after a long pause, letting the music finish (it was one of those sublimely playful yet profoundly sad adagios that drifted out of the player; he could not turn out his fables into the wind while it also carried such a master’s beauty to his ears, crafted for him so long ago). I am going to slip the instructions, the map, on how to arrive at the garden’s interior, out through the crack at the bottom of this here door. Here … do you have it? After a skirmish to retrieve it, one of them did.

Good—now let the eldest read it, and you follow them on. I’ll be waiting where the map ends. He knew that they’d have difficulty at first reading the map, but that once they found the right landmarks (berried shrubs, old wooden doors, windows with strange dressing, entrances with gargoyles and old lanterns and such), they’d find themselves in familiar territory, and then make it through the labyrinths effortlessly.

Don’t despair—and never give up! he yelled as he heard them at first quarreling about who should get to interpret the map and lead them through to the end, then quieting down to begin the task of locating the key landmarks. They finally scurried off, rustling the dry leaves left from many an autumnal age of neglect, and he then set down to work on the next patch of ideas that billowed out of those photographs. With the children lost to a paradise of labyrinths, he regained his inferno of slow, plodding toil at his writing desk. More defeat to chart out in exquisite detail, he smirked, addressing himself in that voice that has no vocalization (fitting, isn’t it, to declaim your failure in such an abstract manner?).

He thought he glimpsed the secret of her despair—or was it a joyful wisdom?—in the strange self-portrait that was at the same time a stolen glance of two others: a man, busy working and wholly unknown to himself in any thought, and a woman on the cusp of a day that she seemed to take in reflectively, and who seemed to succeed in getting the world outside of her to move in tandem with her slow and plodding gait up the stairs and out into a world of mundane but necessary toil (would he escape into another world? would she respond to her toil with abandon or with more concerted determination to make something more?).

It was just there—that’s all the picture was supposed to be about, which is to say, nothing at all. Indeed, it was supposed to be shuttered, sealed up and never exposed again to the light. But the tragedy of photography was this dual exposure, which she sought to resist, to fight in an alien way. A picture was already an exposure. In the darkroom, another process unfolded which brought it to a new life—to the world that would scrutinize. That scrutiny she eschewed with all that she was. She therefore retreated to the obscurity of an absent observer, hovering—and with children always (or usually) in tow. She tortured their innocence out of them—perhaps this was why he was profoundly drawn to her works. She stole innocence and beat it into submission, until it became lost—not lost innocence, but simply lost: illusions of being there for this or that, under this or that sign or for this or that reason—all that was beat free of innocence and all that was left was this naked thing itself. The innocence that was lost to childhood itself. Their philosophers, she thought over and over again, could not see this because they looked too closely: at either the things, or their ideas, or only at ideas. It was none of that. And in the vacancy of this earlier innocence, in the flash of the shutter, she restored it—but for no one. The secret of her work was precisely its absence from view. And inside the sealed canisters would be contained neither a promise nor a hope, nor even a new philosophy. It was a jumble of future possible—not what was there, or would be or will be or had been. Just a there lacking a being verb. What she created was not art or anything like that. What she created were the remains of the future.

From this thought he set down to write, in a specially chosen notebook, pages crisp…

And so (he began) my utopistic formula would begin where she left off. She usurped the throne that had been given to art by a world famished for a morsel of artistic substance, of renewed substance—but that’s neither what the world needed, nor deserved. No, it deserved nothing. That was her secret: locking away these unexposed residues that were, in this closure, this refusal to share or reveal or disclose, just secrets, forgotten, truly the lost. That’s what the world deserved—loss. It hadn’t really known true loss, until now. Thus, the dead corpse of the arts and all the rest had to be ditched, and all their vain hopes expelled—but not with a hopeful sojourn into a foreign, but temporary, land—like a flight to Egypt. No, this was not a sojourn with a promise of return, triumphal, into the City of the Vision of Peace. There was no returning to the starting point, or back to the Promised Land. It was a one-way trip, straight into the desert, a highway for our desolation (for our little gods that filled in the chasms and abysses); only then might we—they—finally run out of breath. God ran out of breath the moment he took that mud mound and breathed life into its hole. The mouth of God from which man gained his life breath was the first abyss. Mouth to mouth, God found His abyss.

The formula for utopia here had to be, he thought, an inversion of the three or four fundamental modes of human cultural creativity. Through that, it would be possible—no?— to invert the only form of civilization itself which we’ve known since the rise of world empires—and this in order to produce a different civilization, one we cannot foresee from what is or can be imagined. It must be built upon our refusal to know or to foresee. It must be a primordial refusal. Willful blindness? Turning our back on “history”?

All of this was in those canisters—left unopened. And it would be this incapacity for foresight or foreknowledge that would and must constitute our first anti-axiom: one that counters our epistemological hubris, so that, willfully blinded, we might versify a Homeric hymn that only the blind could find. And it would not be we who discover it—we would have become forgotten, or shrugged off as a stupid interlude that, even so, managed to yield some decent fruit. Founders who would never live in their foundation—builders who’re the first evicted.

How? Practically (which is also theoretically), my formula, he continued, is for science and art to exchange natures, one absorbing the substance and function of the other. Likewise for the rest, philosophy and religion. The final permutation literally yielding a vacancy sign at each of their former temples—a wonderful confusion of rooms and furniture, from out of which someone can begin again.

The foundation would be a new science—not a “new” or “revolutionary” one laden slow with the vapid sentimentality of the R—s, but burning with the furnace of impossible dreams of science itself, the music of art that had taken it over and converted it into a tool into which humanity may enter, only to leave with no understanding or knowledge or awareness of its former self, turned into a thing, the “evil” of nature in God come free at last…

The final shroud that innocence would lose before paradise was regained was the illusion of good and beauty which their God wore in that garden. His act of expulsion was the first of love for His children. He didn’t know anything of the future—he was its creation. All theodicy proceeded from this one, primordially false premise. What He had given to them was this power, to create, from good and evil. Creation was the outward expression of a magisterial, inner, evil that sought perfect expression. Hadn’t S— already realized this? Yes, of course...

Twelve

 The children! He jumped up and listened for sounds coming from the basement. Nothing yet. But they must have at least gotten round the first couple of obstacles…

Rusted doors, dead-end alleyways, false (but decorative) entryways, inoperative lights and doorbells. All of it awaited them, a maze of frustrations to try their little hearts. What pleasure, he thought. Before they arrived, he knew that he had to prepare a series of intricate digressions that followed the imaginative fable of the world within the lock mechanism. Where to begin? Ah! Of course: there were several notebooks dense and laden with elaborate descriptions from his several travels that awaited perusal. They were penned long ago, so long ago for him, and from such a time—one of youthful frivolities to be sure, but which was mostly stupidity waxing wise of the ways of the world (his world and only his)—so long ago it was, that rereading sent spikes of bitter remembrance through his delicate but lonely and souring heart. A page opened from his recollections—of love lost, or never gained. Sometimes he couldn’t recall which was which: whether it was a love that he refused, or abandoned, or ignored, or ran away from; or whether it was one he wanted but could not gain, perhaps unrequited love of the sentimentally romantic sort (an illusion he tried his best to engage in, with decisive seriousness), but more likely love forced through his own tortured sense (or lack) of self. Suddenly, his life felt empty and a certain kind of boredom crept upon him, from nowhere, a thermostat slowly turned up by a hand intent on a quiet, calculated malice. Where had it all gone? What had it all amounted to? Into which direction had the joy gone? It was strange, how now it was all the unhappiness and joylessness and profound sorrow that seemed to come from an infinitely small point somewhere in the distant past, only to now bloom into a wide delta flooding his later years, as if time had the effect, as one ages, of releasing and dispersing the immeasurably contracted and concentrated doses of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow and all the metaphysically arranged elements of opposition that haunt one’s life from its first tragic moment to its inevitably forgotten and lost final breath. The effect was cumulative.

At one time youth knows no desperation; but all of a sudden, in the blink of an eye, there breaks like lightning a sharp streak of desperation across the twilight horizon of life, and it shocks the heart into a sadness which remains with the soul until death—or senility. He was burdened now—despairing of a thousand, of countless, things, things he could not find enough notebooks into which to wail and scream and flood tears about it all.

Just yesterday, while lying in his bed, looking up at the monotonous ceiling of a room he didn’t care to redecorate, a face returned to him—was it one of his several dozen lovers? No, it was a random remembrance: a beautiful but seemingly sad countenance of a boy—no, a young man—playfully conversing with someone or other. He was adjacent to his table, seated with hands folded in lap, arms exposed with shoulders and chest, and chest hair wonderfully visible to his sneaking glances (he couldn’t tell if his pectoral muscles were firm or flat—no bother). The light created a glow upon the boy’s face, a pleasant shine, and his face received it well as his eye caught and reflected back some of that light. There then bloomed in him a radiance that imparted a joviality to his movements, his mouth, his nose and ears, the dark hair and eyelashes, the coiled black hairs grasping his muscular legs… He was entranced. But the young man looked only once in his direction. Taking careful note of this refusal, he all the while pretended indifference as he studied each gesture and especially the glances being exchanged between this youth and his dinner companion (were they the lovers, finally?). His heart fell and desperation broke out, quietly, killing something unfathomably subtle that had up to now preserved his levity of spirit. Add to this a thousand such indifferences he had to feign, and in no time upon your face a transparency forms that reflects and then projects another’s itinerary of love and hope and faith, rather than your own—a foreign scripture of the spiritual virtues that runs aground on the lonely island you’ve managed to cultivate for so long. Soon, all of your spirit is consumed out of desperate self-preservation, and you finally have nothing left to give—no radiance, not even a gray streak of personality.

So he hoped for senility, maybe finalized by the barrel of a gun, someday … you can hope, can’t you? But whose hope would it really be, if you’re already partner to despair? If you truly despair, you’ve already lost hope—or it’s painfully and ridiculously redundant. Yes, desperation had taken hold of him quite suddenly. Relentlessly. A stubbornness to match his own. Each notebook page was another strike of a match to ignite the inferno that lay dormant in him—demons returned he thought he’d snuffed out by sheer force of the vacuum of his inner life. Never so simple, of course. Though there be an abyss buried within, even the abyss must breathe, and its inhalations simply keep the embers burning, the demons warm; at its edge, before the depths consume, there is warmth. Abysses radiate… There was some consolation in that, after all. Thus, an infinitesimal space for that one thing never needful in one’s life, but always present, like background radiation that registers just above absolute zero: hope.

He did hope. Serially. Sequentially. Tragedy, farce … but what about the eternal recurrence of the cycle? Neither tragic, nor farcical—somehow a great overcoming of the two. That, that!, was where the metaphysical fury came from, he realized. All of his notes, given from and to himself out of a desperate attempt to stay alive (almost a form of self-cannibalism, the singular point of non-reference that every writer must grapple with, and in the end be consumed by—their personalized abyss), they were not merely for the famished, as if they somehow provided the sustenance they did not otherwise receive from elsewhere. No, they were for the famished—not that they provided substance and sustenance with which they might help you to endure throughout the famine (something that gets them through the famine), but it was that these notes saw you unto the end. They could only be for those whose end was assured. For the doomed. Is hope at its most intense during this, the final episode? If so, his hope was a great conflagration, raging for years upon years for he was doomed, consuming himself in writing never finished but perpetually abandoned.

Another face—dozens threatened now—appeared, one full of both youth and its own solitary and unbreakable pain, a face that shined arrogant innocence and a false knowingness of things only age teaches (but which youth only hears or sees, from afar). He had, ridiculously (it now seemed) gone through the trouble of creating paper prints of the photos this youth (now likely a man entering middle-age) had sent him dozens of years ago. This was the one that hurt the most. This one was the most paradoxical of my loves, he remembered, painfully. This one just would not go. I wanted to be left alone, but I couldn’t—and he couldn’t let me alone, though he wanted me to let him alone. Why? I asked myself why for the days, and weeks, I tried to untangle myself from him. I couldn’t. He couldn’t. I knew what was going on—and this I knew with an understanding that powerfully rejected sentimentality. Yet, that part of my heart that was attracted by his youth, that was awash in sentimentality, in romantic illusions—all of this was stirred up in me by him. I could not, he thought, get him out of my soul. I searched for reasons, and soon the ‘why’ itself was like a demon, an anti-conscience that drew me closer to this enigma of a soul I could not fully fathom but whose heart I somehow understood, unconsciously. Nothing I could say or do would induce separation or loss. I began to think how loss was a gift, and that this gift, like any gift, might never be given.

Nine

 Don’t be fooled, brothers and sisters! There is more magic in what you bring to my art than there is in the art itself! I am only able to bring you into a room; show you a few of its more precious objects; allow you to study this or that item; take you from one place to another, an aspect here and there; introduce you to this person or that, so you may silently contemplate them; I allow a few choice words to appear, and eventually let some dialogue spring forth—but that is not all, is it? There is more! How much more, you ask me? There is as much as there is creativity in you, brothers and sisters. As much—or as little, sadly—as that. Don’t be lulled into drinking up so quickly the detail my art delivers, only to dispatch it when the cover slaps shut; even if it seems to wax and wane in its detail (have you ever thought about it?), this pulsation is contoured specially for you!

He became excited as the thought well up inside of him, and he searched frantically for his notebooks. Which one today? It must be the right notebook—one for philosophical sketches, one of poems, one for half-baked dear diaries, one for … They went on and on; all of them were the right notebook for a thing he would have dreamt, if only the dreams had deigned to arrive, he thought, cynically. Ah, yes—a black-and-white speckled notebook presented itself during his search. He took it up, and tried to continue, no, to stoke, the frenzy. Too late in the evening, there is no more power, but he couldn’t keep up the sleepless and frenetic nights, growing early into the morning with promise. The afternoons were the worst, after the children were shooed, or managed to escape one of his disquisitions, a ramble without connection to their innocent lives. He smirked at that thought.

One can measure—he continued, renewed in his convictions—the artistry of a work by the depth of its weakness, its unique deprivation installed quite on purpose only by the greatest of the geniuses (not all were great; genius could be like a reflex, automatic, boring, consistent, predictably felicitous; the greatest sprouted through chaos and pain, and nonetheless flashed brilliant with a gay science—yes!). This deprivation, this purposeful hole, was where you sat with the work, where you were actually allowed inside to do your work. There were gears and levers constructed for the purposes of working your imagination, dear ones. Had you not seen? Had you not known this? They were mechanical elements for the activation of what you’ve got going on inside you. It’s all basically pornographic: you do something to yourself in order to get your body working along with what you’re imagining. That’s the basic premise of any work, really. But there’s nothing specific in it about you—and here’s the genius. The gears and mechanisms are all perfectly general, until you sit down, open the cover, and start it up with your eyes. Then, if you’re careful and attentive, there you are—right inside, working it along with the work itself. It’s not right, therefore, to say that a work of art allows for infinitely many interpretations—for you’ve got to ask, what is an interpretation? No, that’s all abstract nonsense. The only thing that’ll ever be real for you is what you—you there!—can manage to get going, besides the usual passing of your eyes over the whole thing (which isn’t really working with it, anyway). Your limitations for feeling and working it are the ultimate limits of what you can actually get out of the thing; there’s nothing more for you. Somebody else can get something else out of it—maybe a lot more. And you can be made aware of that; but that’s all—it’s just “being made aware of something” that’s not your own. Unless … you do the work to sit in this stuff that somebody else got from the thing; then you can do what you might have not been able to do on your own with the original, which is get a lot out of it. And that’s the value of a second-hand experience. It’s still an experience, right? It’s first hand, just after it’s been handed off to you. You’ve still got something there, but then it’s going to get a bit fuzzier in all likelihood. What somebody manages to take from it, in their own way, is never going to replace the original—it’s just something else. The original is what it is, nothing more and nothing less. If it wasn’t like that, dear ones, then nobody could possibly fail at anything. Not that failure makes a thing less valuable or anything—but it’s just a failure if nobody can work with it, if there’re no functioning internal mechanisms, or if the gears don’t work right. Sure, you can try them, and try to repair them, but then you’re just refurbishing; and yeah, you can then say you built something. And if you want to know the truth, only the rarest and greatest of geniuses manage to do two things at once: refurbish something that’s already had a go at being a thing, a work—and also to show that it had to be refurbished, without saying so. It’s a double-whammy: you rebuild something nobody thought needed rebuilding, and you show that it had to be rebuilt, that it had become a failure and without your intervention, it would’ve just broken down to bits, scraps nobody’d soon care about.

He got up from his writing desk, which was found in a hovel of a room tucked in the back of the house, just off a later addition and near to one of the several sheds in the garden. It was a small room, with a sloping roof but good light that, at the right time of the day, in the summer months, was mottled by one of the many dozens of fruit trees his former, and now long gone, friends had cultivated through their retirement years. It was of course a chore in the autumn, with the dropping fruits and the endless cleaning and clearing; and of course there was the great startle you got from them as they slammed to the roof, and then, bouncing, made it finally to the earth. He thought of them as comets, transformed into asteroids—at least from the perspective of the ants and flies that flitted about all summer and who then died, or hibernated, sometime in the late autumn as the bright summer light itself seemed to gasp for breath. Autumn meant hiding, resting, recounting the wonders of summertime spent producing things of joy. But the autumn was itself productive in its own way; everything reversed, and what had been produced dried, had to be picked and transformed, for the winter. Nature produced again and again.

Now he moved into an interior room, which was again filled with notebooks where there weren’t books. But the specialty of this particular room was the many dozens of photographs. Everything in the room was somehow related—the works on the shelves, his notebooks, the writing that took place here, all of it was beating with the heart that was behind the images he covered these walls with. They were tall walls, and the room was actually comprised of several rooms interconnected, and joined by a hallway, which itself contained at least two stairwells to different levels of the house. It was a house of dreamwork. He fancied that only his dreams could send him clues as to how to proceed through the many passageways he envisaged over and over as he went about the house.

He thought that he must soon, and quickly, connect with another of his sets of ideas somewhere else—hence he took up another frantic search for the right notebook. It was found only because, as he suddenly recalled upon seeing it, he had put the spine of the thing into the opposite direction as the rest, so that its fan of pages was visible—a band of white amidst the multicolored panoply of books whose spines revealed something of their contents. This notebook would have none of that.

From behind the photographs, she leapt at him. She was free, yet he found in her a freedom that was like a hoped-for moment of repose after a long, difficult journey. But it was more than this, he thought. It was a battle; great battles were behind those eyes, long decades of ceaseless fighting which ripped open the ground where famine or blight sealed it from human hands, where vanquished lives, lost in the battles, left fields fallow—graves for forgotten harvests and impossible hopes. They had hoped through these years, but for what? Surely not for unison of voices filed into compliant bands, arguing out abstract matters of rights and justice for a people patched together from the fragments of prior nations, bloodties, kinship (all the ancient ways laid to rest in those fallow plots). Now, their bodies disfigured with that failing hope, bruised, mutilated—it was only now that they turned inward and to each other, and found new wars. But she turned from them, leapt straight out from her photographs, and pulled herself inside out with the lens, speculating with the grandest of speculators, and, with a presence so given over to her individual self that she, like them all, vanished in a gust of creative drive.

She left behind a clue, he thought, to a different world—and insight from an outsider into something that was only in its initial stages of formation. A promise and, yes, a hope and a vague, visionary prophecy that took them all into its beating chest and converted the hope and promise into a substance of nourishment, but a thing utterly banal for all the fervor shown in all their tiresome speeches, treatises, and commercial ventures made live from the new fuel. And suddenly, in a flash, he thought, and sought quickly to find his old place in these his penned recollections of a time and people that strove never to know or concern themselves with this thing called history. Yes, in their images—in her images—was a genocide. Of moments. If there were to be no past, what then was death? Was it a victory for life? He flooded the pages hastily…

Ten

 I don’t know why I took so many self-portraits. Was I investigating myself? Was I investigating others? Often it seemed to me that the mirror was not the truest reflector, but rather the most tragic, for it merely reflected reality and gave it back to us to look back onto it, the whole world, but in reverse. When I look into the world I see it through my lens and what looks back at me is the world that I would have never known, the world that I could never love, the world that loved only itself, the world that found no place for me. My self-portraits are my own absences. I find a space in the world for myself despite the world’s self-involvement; I therefore have sought to kiss reality in these images. To french it, indelicately, in the face.

The face of the world does not know tragedy, only its underside; and yet we are told surfaces are all. Even the best of the philosophers across the ocean tell us that. But I know better. What is reflected, it is not the truth, nor is it what hides the truth. It just is. It’s just what’s there. And it isn’t even as though I like what’s there. Often I don’t like it. But it’s there, and that’s what counts—it’s present to me, to my eye, and I guess to the screen where it might be printed someday. But you see, once you project an image the image is lost and it’s only at this point when you can say that either truth hides or truth is revealed. But when the shutter activates, in that instant, and only in that instant, is where truth can neither hide nor be revealed. There’s no place to hide and there’s nowhere it can reveal itself. In that instant that’s where what is simply is and remains. And that’s what counts. The remains.

The world will never know me but I knew the world. And it found a place for me always, because I insisted on that place and if you insist hard enough it isn’t that you’ll find a place, or maybe that the world will find one for you, but it will be there nonetheless, waiting. The world’s always waiting. You just have to wait long enough so that your waiting and the world’s waiting are just one waiting. Yes of course that’s silly but then you click the shutter and there you have it, the remains. And what remains is a relationship with something that could have been but that never was yet which seems to have been. And that’s good enough for me.

It was neither in the shadows, nor round dark corners; nor at twilight nor even at dawn, when I could find myself in the world. Rather, it was in the brightest light that I found myself in the world, reflected there in my lens, in my eye, in the eyes of my subjects—objects of my love.

I needed no philosophy, no French discourse on the self; what I needed was a postcard from myself to the self I wanted to be and which, because of that wanting, I was. I therefore needed no words. I could have no words; and I would not have them.

I never announced myself to the world for I have no words to offer it, yet such a high price was paid for words, or for text. But this was not a generation, nor even an epoch, of words. No, it was a time of images and I sought to find the images in the only land which had ever produced the image properly … appropriately … Now the world turns back through text to images, to my images. But I have now vanished without a trace except in these lilting words, drifting, searching, yearning to be expressed in a thousand different ways, interpreted, curated, posted. I clear my throat, and when my mouth opens, it’s only the sound of the shutter that you hear. You will never know who I was, because I only left my images and the sound of my voice. Not even images of myself. And even that voice that I left is not myself. I left images. I left what was. Which to me was an is. To you, it is a print, a purchase, a gallery opening. I will never have known these things nor did I ever want to know them.

My mind was empty of such things. I filled it with the junk I collected, I filled it with the context of life, the life my images would never have known themselves. I gave my images my life, and they in turn yielded life for me.

So yes, I suppose those clever autobiographers are right in a sense, and all those clever museum curators are also right; but they’re right for the wrong reasons. Yes, my life is my images; when you look into those images and you try to see me, yes you do see me, but you do not see what you think you see; you see only the image, you see the surface because the image is already projected and you look at the projection and you don’t look at me. You see what you want to see; you do not see me. The shutter has fallen, and like a cat dashing from the shadows, when you look it is already gone; I am already gone. When you turn over the image you do not see any longer an image, you see a blank canvas upon which you can write a message for those who are looking at the image to interpret the image with. And that is all you’re left with.

There was a woman in one of my portraits, rising from a darkened side staircase. I saw her in my image and my image saw her; and then the shutter fell and she appeared, triumphant, in her daily work. And this is where I work, in daily work, and daily routine; in the rhythm of things that are simply there, with no fanfare, no drama. Here there are no dramatic outcomes or possibilities, no abysses, no precipices, no mountains except the mountain of my homebirth to which I ran out in sudden joy. Even in the most tragic and disturbing of events there are no abysses—so long as you give yourself to what’s there. Whatever is there has no powers of redemption, nor of explanation. I never could ask ‘why’. There was never a question. I could never ask questions. Questions found me, but I would never answer. I think that someone from the Continent once thought that life could be lived in a question—but I don’t know about that. I do know that something finds me, but only after the shutter has clicked. Even so, I always think it best not to pry into the privacy of the shutter and its work. Canisters upon canisters of unopened film are all that I can say about that.

That woman rising from that side staircase was a motivation of mine, I think. Just simply in taking one step after another, kerchief wrapped around her large fleshy head, not even staring up into the sky to greet the gray afternoon that hid the sun (perhaps her only joy for that day), she spoke to me of simply being there, doing something, not just a whatever mind you—but a something, a definite, concrete something. There was not even a suggestion of something else, a dilemma, or a heaviness surrounding her head like a philosophical nimbus. There was none of that. There was just that something, one step after another, and again, and again—not even a Sisyphus could have taken upon himself this task. No philosopher, no poet, no one at all could’ve taken those steps up and out into the gray, into the rain, into that something. And that was why I clicked. It just so happens that my own image got in the way.

But the truth was there like I said, neither hiding nor waiting to be revealed. It was simply there, and her steps, and that kerchief, and her eyeglasses, and in that whole day, even in that worker’s working to put that mirror in its place, all of it just there, and I am in the middle of it all, looking off to the side, to see that woman rising from the side staircase into the day, into the gray, into a sunshine she would not know that day, out into that something which I would never pry into trying to find out (which is why the canister held not the secret but the is of this woman’s effort).

Once I take the image, the image leaves me, I leave it. Alone. There’s nothing else. There’s nothing more. That’s it. It’s done. And so I guess you could say to that poet from the Continent that I live in an endless series of endings. It’s not that the picture starts when you click the shutter and it shuts and the light is let in and leaves its remains behind. I don't start anything, and I don’t even end anything, but the moment the shutter shuts I guess it’s all over. And I move on. And in that movement when I pack up and move on that’s the beginning of an ending. But my life is only suspended in that moment. It really lives inside of that shutter, but only when it’s open, wide open. That’s when I look in. And that’s when that woman leapt from the side staircase into that something, and that’s where I went in, with her. And this is why I don’t need to develop anything. This is why I can leave thousands of canisters unopened, film coiled back into its metallic cylinder hidden from the world outside, holding something from the world which the world will never get back ever again. That’s why I wanted them closed. Forever.

Every time I hear the term ‘street photographer’ I never see myself. I don’t even know what a ‘street photographer’ is. That’s a term for the curator. That’s not my term. I carry a camera. That’s what I am. Yes it has long become a cliché to renounce labels and such; and when I took most of my pictures that kind of stuff was in the air. Well I guess I’m just a product of my time (which should be no surprise to any of you) and I am saying that I don’t even believe in labels, that labels should not be labeled as labels. Yeah that’s playing around, I suppose. But on the more serious side what I’m saying is that a label kills. But I like my murder plain as day, right up there on the headlines, displayed prominently on the newspaper salesman’s rack, or even better, in a trashcan, crumpled up, with coffee stains and mustard droppings. That’s where I like to see my murder, the killing, the rape, the torturous place we call our world or whatever you want to call it. So I like labels to come second. You see, it’s not just that I hate labels, it’s just that the labels come first and I don’t want the labels to come first. What I want to come first is the image. After the images a thousand labels can be applied, and I don’t care thereafter. Labels are an afterthought. Street photographers are an afterthought. I’m not an afterthought. I’m an image. And that’s where I’d like to live. Not in the question, not in an explanation, not in any ‘why’, just in that thing that hits me—the image.

And that’s why I place myself in those pictures, right in the middle, right in the image. I’m there stealing something, something that was stolen from me, maybe even from you. I’m a thief; but I don’t come in the night, I’m right out in the daylight, and I’m not even searching for anything. I know exactly what to take and I take it. I take it from you. I take it from them. And I take it from the world. When I steal it is forever. It is not a moment that I take, I take a hole out of the world. I take a gap, I take an abyss from the world because it doesn’t have an abyss there for you to see or to look into or to tremble before. I have to find its place, I have to take it, and I have to give it to you. You will never fear and you will never tremble before an image—wasn’t that even a Commandment? But what you will tremble before is what you can’t ever find in my images, and what you cannot find in my images is yourself because what you find in my images is only the world’s own self-importance. And that is the most frightening and cold thing there is—beyond all the murders, the rapes, the death, the tragic loss, the wailing, the lamentations in sacred books, the poems, the philosophies of existence and all that stuff. It’s this narcissism of just plain being there that is so frightening. And I am a documentarist of that narcissism.

You see, with the world it is a gentle kind of narcissism, one that always beckons to you, comforts you in all of the tragedies, is a warm comforting blanket that surrounds you forever and ever and promises you eternal this or that (love and so forth). But my camera sees through all of that narcissism and it takes away the blanket and what it leaves behind is just, well, the world—a nakedly tragic, profoundly exposed, shuddering, even empty world just there, with no significance, with plainness, with everything just there. And that’s why I press the button, that’s why the shutter comes down, that’s why the light comes in to the camera and exposes itself. It’s really just public indecency. And then the curators come along, after the film is developed, and they comment, and they add the words, the thoughts and so forth—and what comes rushing back is that blanket, the narcissism of the world. That’s the real purpose of humanity, really: the world’s own self-deception. That’s why I hide the pictures in those thousands of canisters. Yes it is about protection. But I’m protecting you from the narcissism of the world which you rightly refuse to see, but which my images protect and display. So you do not want to see my images, you do not want to see the world’s narcissism. You want to see yourself through the world’s narcissism. But that’s not how narcissism works. The world robs you of yourself and you can never find yourself.

Seven

 The relationship between love and freedom is difficult to explain. Is it antagonistic or complementary? If freedom becomes absolute, is love impossible or does love simply attain an infinite potency? If love becomes absolute, is freedom made redundant? Is love possible in the absence of freedom, so that freedom is love’s condition? And must all true freedom reconcile itself to love, or its possibility?

I know that love binds, so that the lovers suddenly realize their mutual incompleteness. This is a kind of fall, not from paradise but the opposite: the paradise is gained through the fall itself. Love here produces the lack for which it is the salvation. Thus, love is first positive and productive before it knows any deprivation or loss.

But what can we say about freedom? Either in love there is absolute freedom, or freedom is irrelevant. For when I love truly, I taste the hæcceity of the other—their absolute uniqueness, what the beloved contains within himself which no other possesses. This utter and potent “thisness” we taste (which the Medieval philosophers knew and struggled over), this intoxicates. We drink of the power of the pure difference and uniqueness in the other, who remains both near and far. We never can recover from this experience, for it is the closest we can get to another. It takes us over. It is this hæcceity that produces the desire in us for our beloved. We are at once liberated to the other’s difference and uniqueness and thus free of our own immanent horizon of difference—we become through our beloved, and they become through us. Thus there is a portion of freedom—an absolute liberation or falling away from ourselves to another self—right here in the taking in of another’s hæcceity. Yet, we lose something of the infinite movement of absolute freedom in love because we become through the beloved—thus love in this case is a reduction in the absolute and infinite motion of freedom. So we can say that freedom is not contradicted by love. In fact, we can say that love is simply freedom moving at a low velocity—the velocity which is the characteristic movement of our beloved, in their hæcceity.

Love and Freedom are therefore related by differences of movement, for all fundamental questions return us to the question of time, and speed is nothing but a form of time.

And somehow this relation I’ve tried to describe is already understood clearly only through music, through art alone. And here is where I heard it expressed: —

Eight

 But he returned to his garden, called back to life by the children, now returning to find him. As he looked at them, he suddenly realized that he saw the seed of either his own fame, or the budding recollections of his own obscurity in their sometimes-glazed faces—a kind of infamy all unto itself. There were those praised for centuries for their ‘unflagging’ brilliance; some found this epitaph only because they died in obscurity—to be resurrected only in the course of their discoverer’s own search for fame. Those artists burned a second death, suffered at the hands of an Inquisition, but could neither confess and repent, nor recuse and repudiate. It was a forced birth, and therefore a tragically unnecessary death a second time. They had died, and had found peace, only to be disturbed by a forcefully requited love. Whole histories would have to be written or rewritten, retroactively, in order to restore their supposed and re-discovered brilliance.

Was it bitterness that stoked the flames of these purple lines, suddenly flowing through his mind? Perhaps it was just a compromise with his own moldering vanity, doomed to fade with the indifference of his many gathered years—they did whisper about the old man, after all. Well, he could not hope for anything else. It was a flagging brilliance that his guilt implied, a tattered cloth blowing in invisible but powerful wind, blowing towards something whose direction he had the grace to accept, to lose his ship to, breaking off the rudder to finish off the job.

It was getting somewhat late, and children have no place in the gardens much after noon. That was his rule. Perhaps when the sun went low, and was about to be extinguished, when the statuary here took on new life without the light of scrutiny these summer days gave forth, when his stories could emerge in the twilight and stir up new fantasies for them—statues come to new life—perhaps then they could return, he thought. But now was time for them to depart, and so with particular patience this day, he ushered them out, back through the house to the front door, which he gently clicked shut behind the last of them. It would be a melancholy afternoon.

He hated anything that had the regularity of a habit; but he had habits nonetheless. Being human is a habit, he said often, like a readymade prayer—and it’s habit enough. So he went for a walk through the garden. He was fortunate enough to have it at all. In the confusion of his younger years, when it was all happening to him, the whole swell of joy and despairing sadness, he had the fortune of meeting someone whom he could love only in that I-never-loved-them kind of way. They shared various things, and had a fair bit in common—until sometime towards the end of his life when a crushing depression moved in and divorced their relationship, with death. Was it a suicide? He had just disappeared, into the Russian River. Or something like that. A trip with friends had taken him there, two decades ago one late summer afternoon; he never heard from him again, nor had anyone they’d known in common. Well perhaps, he thought, someone knows where he went, someone who was not a friend-in-common. But in any case, through a strange loop in a legal arrangement they’d made a decade before that, he’d ended up with joint ownership of a cottage in the northeastern shore area of a rather distant country, one wrecked some time ago by various political stupidities, but which still managed to keep its ancient charm.

The house was thatched, and rather large for its type, which he hadn’t the first inkling about (nor did he much really care, though that part of his soul that harbored illusions of being an engaged, well-read and knowledgeable intellectual still hounded him for not reading up on the place, or the general location). It was occupied by two old lovers whose stories and intrigues occupied his, and his departed friend’s, attention on numerous occasions, but which was now just a dim and fading memory. He’d befriended them, but circumstances—those turbulent and chaotic circumstances that induce idiocy in even the hardiest of souls (went a line in an abandoned memoir he read in the house when he first acquired it)—led them to a falling out. They’d died a charmed coupled, it seemed, though he knew better, or rather, they themselves did. He knew that they knew their relationship was trying, and fraught with buried frustrations, impotence, and unhealthiness—but all quite glorious in their undertaking, he realized. They’d lived a full and rather rich life—at least as one lived it through their recounting of it. Everyone is their own kind of fabulist; some were more gifted in crafting the tales than others, and the two were geniuses. But a fabulist is only the more talented in proportion to the truth contained therein—certainly that aphorism stuck like the glue which held up his writing desk.

He knew that he himself was incapable, constitutionally unable, to have the kind of life he admired through the window, which was always rather carefully but freely dressed with the splendors of what seemed like endless recreation, in food, travel, reading, entertainments, conversations, friendships—even in their enemies it seemed that, though ruin sometimes threatened them, it was meaningfully integrated into their ongoing, vibrant life. He hoped that they saw some of this reflected back to them in his wistful and admiring glances, before their break. He always tried to communicate as much, but somehow, whatever he did for them, whatever he wrote to them, however long or sincere, there was always something they didn’t quite like, or approve of. Typical, he always thought—and yet, he ended up in his later years precisely where they’d finished theirs.

How they found their end, and under what circumstances, he had no idea of—they were some four decades and more older than he was at the time they met, and he’d never really made many friends in common with them. Perhaps it was this stupid, provincial sort of prejudice he noted in them (not without foundation, of course, for he shared their prejudices yet somehow thought himself exempt, as was the general rule in matters of self-understanding) that ultimately forestalled the possibility of building lasting relationships among the friends they kept. But the truth was that he really didn’t care one way or the other; they were older, stiffer, and insufferable in numerous ways—always set into a certain indistinct hierarchical order he couldn’t understand, like jewels in ancient cosmographs, out of reach, yet glittering with the rays of a distant sun which warmed the earth, his earth, but never their crystal.

To warm his heart, as the cold grey clouds now suffocated the sun, from the old creaking player he let play out his copy of the violin sonatas, composed by his own countryman Mr. I—, and he thought how the irony of intellectual devotion worked. His works were filled, like a stilted or lopsided archive, to overflowing with the themes and tunes of a fractious, tattered and failing experiment in an ancient Greek political idea from which he had escaped, exasperated, an idea which these people here never seemed to fully embrace—perhaps for some good reason or other; and yet this other occupation of his was the most ridiculously mundane, tedious and pedestrian: selling insurance, at which he seemed to also be a genius. A double-life such as this was redeemed, in their eyes, only by the genius of his art. Everything in its lines seemed to refute this small, little place (an island really) and their (in the end) rigid, insular way of life. Recreation for them, he realized, was a cultivated duty; but for him, puritanical under the hedonism he tried to exhibit, and even nourish, there could never be cultivated recreation. He had to create his life, everything about it, over and over, and it all seemed to bleed away as fast as he created it. It was hard to explain; but he felt the vast difference between himself and these two lovers, whose love he really had no access to (he confessed that he couldn’t even really use the term ‘love’ when talking about them). Yet this was all the difference, the difference—the essential thing. The industry of his homeland melded with the music whose legacy this place, extending over to the continent beyond, had bequeathed to Mr. I— and the insurance he sold in support of his life expended itself in the tedium not in its selling, but in the exchange which the music afforded him. What had drifted across the ocean centuries ago was what he saw in these two dead lovers whose cottage he now owned, and occupied: as they burned up their life in recreation, whiling away in retirement, gathering together the thousands of years of their collective and intertwined history into a great and admirable—and constant—fire, the ash collected on that other, distant and newer continent and became nourishment for something else altogether, but which appeared to be nothing more than a continuation of what had come from before, from beyond the ocean’s shores on the other side of the world. But in reality there was an absolute difference between them, a decisive break that took centuries to come into its own.

Six

 

In his kitchen, through which the kids had to always run in order to access his backyard and gardens (though ‘gardens’ is putting it too strongly: overgrown paths that led in on themselves and hence to nowhere, circling and winding and confusing) … here there was a great feat of expressionistic design displayed upon his walls. Wallpapering of his own design. The essays. Nonfictions. As he cooked, it seemed wildly appropriate to him to have his essays paper the way to his—and another’s—stomach. That was, and of course there was to it, a story…

 

™˜

 

In a distant land, he told the kids one chilly afternoon in early fall a few years back, there lived a very old man who surrounded himself with single leaflets of paper. His entire house (a kind of hovel he dug into the side of his favorite childhood getaway place, a small and well-hidden hill) was papered with yellowing, some fresh, sheets of paper with but a single idea drawn out endlessly. Each point made in those sheets, however, had a corresponding place and a very precise thing you had to do or place to move into, or—and this was best of all—dish you had to digest, in order for you to be able to advance to the next page. But, conversely, in order to advance to the next place, dish or thing to do, you had to produce another page, and place it in a very certain spot on the wall. At the end of his life, the old man managed to carve out a labyrinth for himself—a giant, underground (though it was in the hill, so it was sort of underground) cavern of winding tunnels that were the product of years of eating, doing, writing, papering and so on.

 

But the old man had an odd habit throughout this, his odd occupation (which was a morbid self-preoccupation, the moralists and philosophers came to believe—to which the old man just shrugged his shoulders when reading their essays, as his characteristic indifferent defiance expressed itself): he prepared, whenever he had to, two dishes even though he was perpetually alone. (Not even stinking, rotten children such as yourselves dared bother him, he snarled—at which the gathered kids chuckled, cautiously, unsure of the degree of his seriousness in the matter.) And to that second dish there corresponded a second page that was another entry into a second essay. Thus, he constructed, they supposed, not one but two whole works of this kind—however the mystery was that only a single labyrinth was found, the old man dead at the end of one tunnel on that day of discovery, with a stew under his chin and a sheet of paper and pen to his side as his head lay atop a small eating table. If the old man was consistent, there should be two labyrinths. And where had he put this second essay (of which only a few pages have survived, one of which he was in the middle of writing up when he was found dead upon the little table)?

 

The children waited, apparently aghast and momentarily frozen, for the conclusion, but he simply left them hanging, along with his with story, in mid-thought. Legends must remain as legends, he said, coyly. Besides, how could the story be told in truth? he continued, now distracted by the preparation of one of his minuscule meals. What we really have there in this story is the history of something whole, something complete unto itself, which no child can understand. Again, he looked at the frozen children (who now began to stir back to life as they realized his coyness was a lure towards something funny—perhaps), and then slowly and deeply bowed his head towards them, again coyly, continuing: anyway, it’s not for children. It’s for idiot adults to hear, and to bear. They pleaded to hear more, and he slinked closer to that something more.

 

Ah, well, it’s really a story of the whole history of a hermit. Do you know what that is? he said, looking down again. Before they could answer, he anticipated the inquiry and continued without missing a beat. Well, a hermit is somebody who not only has no time or concern or interest in children, but who also cares not for anyone a’tall. Not the very least other human soul, none of them, whether they care to have a body or not. With this, a chuckle could be heard creaking its way through his distracted preparations. But on the topic of souls, hermits are, in fact, the most adept—the most knowledgeable. For their one virtue is to go deep-sea diving in order to find out the truth about them. Trouble is, they never leave their houses. And why was that, the kids wanted to know? Because they think—well most of them anyway—that everyone’s basically the same, and one soul is good enough to go diving for, at least in their lifetime. So they usually chose themselves. Yes—they deep-sea dive into themselves, and come up for air only on condition that they find something worthy of going to the surface for, so they can take a breath that will allow them to continue living. Otherwise, they die a horrible death: they drown in the act—on purpose!

 

The children shuddered, not sure whether to laugh or recoil in horrified sadness. But children are always in this in-between state of either/or emotions, he thought as he watched their expression with a measure of gratification; that’s what a kid is—unsure because the whole of existence weighs upon them, of which they haven’t the slightest or faintest clue … ah yes, he thought quietly, the innocence of childhood. He couldn’t help but see on their faces that expression that must have taken hold of the children that overtook one of his favorite sometime-aphorists, Herr S— as he called him. The children, awaiting the opening act, before the curtain is drawn, have no idea of what is about to befall them; to this a profoundly creased smirk appeared on his face as he continued.

 

Now this particular hermit was keeping a kind of log, a journal—you could even call it a diary. But it had this odd quirk to it, that it kept him going around and doing things, and especially eating dishes that were, somehow, required preparations based on the things in this endless essay. Though this second labyrinth wasn’t discovered (at least not yet), nor was the second essay he composed as he drew out the necessary elements for the first ever recovered in its entirety, we can make certain guesses about what was contained in it—the essay, that is, and possibly also the labyrinth (though we can only speculate about its actual form, as we have nothing but the words to go on).

 

The kids started to lose the thread of his story, for he couldn’t always account for the fact that they didn’t have a certain vocabulary or intellectual facility (and he could care less when he did realize the fact), and so he inevitably appeared to them a bit shadowy, a bit odd, opaque in that kid sort of way—like the obverse experience you have watching the strangely blank, fluttering and distracted appearance of an infant: there is somebody home, but they’re sleeping though the eyes are wide-open staring intently around and around. His voice was audible, his mouth moving up-and-down, sounds were being made, but only occasionally did they have meaning. This fact brought him unending titillation and a strange joy.

 

It was early enough that he still had his coffee with him, and it was slowly being drained away. It always made him feel terribly anxious, in that not-terribly-about-anything-in-particular sort of way. But by the time the morning evaporated, his mind had settled down from the anxiety, and this allowed him to ease into the languor of the afternoon, a time he despised above all other times. Only the early morning hours, and then later in the early and late evening, was he anything close to being a human being—that is to say, if we follow the ancient conception, a social animal. The children always rushed in as his mind was descending from the heights of chemical anxiety, a flush state of mind wherewith he worked best. He could not fault the children for this wonderful habit of rushing in where fools otherwise would have feared tread—they were anxiety itself, he considered. Oh well…

 

You know, each letter of the essay scrawled upon those many pages, he said, found a whole strange world balanced atop. At this the children were revivified. They now were rapt with wonder. But how could that be? they considered, literally. Of course it’s possible, he said to them, looking askance and then into the air, where philosophers always found the sublime. Anything is possible in the life of a hermit such as this. For this hermit—his voice now seemed to be gathering momentum, and he carried them along and out again into the garden, where they loved to run around, hide and jump at each other, crying of monsters, and of creeping things all around his overgrown garden—this hermit was a very special sort of hermit. We already have found him buried alive, in a way, inside this hill-house; and we know what he was doing inside this hovel—at least we have the general idea. But what we don’t know is the exact stuff of the second essay, or the location of this secondary labyrinth, now do we? The children all synchronously shook their heads: no. But I say, atop each and every letter was balanced a whole world, maybe even as much as a galaxy of things we can only dream of this morning. Lots of stories to tell you about, then. But because of this, there was and could be no end. The hermit had to die in the middle of it all. He couldn’t come up for air, so he had to stay submerged. That’s how it works—even right here. He pointed, swirling, around the room just before they crossed the threshold in the sunroom that led outside, onward to the passages that opened up to the interiors of his garden. Nuts, mister! one of them shouted, and took off running, disappearing into a path whose conclusion was obscured by bushes and its own (well-planned) curvature. You were meant to disappear in this garden, he thought to himself. The rest of the children dispersed, and likewise found obscurity in the garden. He was left alone, with a shudder stirring in him—right on time. Each morning, after he felt that something (it could be anything he invested himself into) had been accomplished, he experienced an odd sensation: like something abandoned him, but which also left a profound hole in him, and a rush of memories, mostly echoes of childhood, came flooding back. He wanted to express it somehow, but it felt like the memories, and the accompanying affectations, slammed up against his insides, wanting out, but continually failing to find a way out. He had the same, the exact same, sensation of weird affectation when he was a child; so it wasn’t right to call these echoes of childhood—not exactly. They were like permanent stains that, as he changed clothes throughout the years, reappeared when exactly the same stained clothes were donned. Or something like that. He lost himself for a while, as the children played …