by Martha Ronk
2. Her sense was that only the oblique could convey what she wanted to convey. If one of her photographic subjects stared out directly into the lens, she knew she had failed to capture the true image, that all she would have would be an imitation snapshot like those which filled family albums in which wooden figures stand squarely before the camera, look into the lens and smile the smile everyone recognizes as “the smile for the camera.” Her motto, “never look at the camera,” was therefore carried as well into her letters. Her model for this capturing of the truth was the photograph of Dauthendey with his wife: She is seen beside him in the photograph; he holds her; her glance, however, goes past him, directly into an unhealthy distance. So, she thought, the wife was captured revealing the future which at the time of the photograph was unrealized by any in the room but for the oblique glance into “an unhealthy distance.” The future was caught in the emulsion, not by human insight, but by a random mechanical process.
Yet it was difficult to hold off from the restless, but ever-so-human effort to predict the future. Therefore, she abandoned the quotations themselves and pasted in photographs instead, not of herself gazing romantically into some unhealthy distance, but of those who might be plausible stand-ins for herself and for that which she might wish to say if she knew what that were. The “stand-ins” were most frequently, however, figures with little obvious resemblance to her own person, unless one were to focus on small and almost insignificant details and unless one were adept in ways that seemed even to her to put too fine a point on the matter. And yet, of course, in some way, it was such “putting” that she was after, some way of making him see how she was “like” the image she had substituted for herself, and more importantly, to see how she had so finely predicated what she finally was to come to be, in essence that is, and what, although no one could have seen it coming, was to come to pass.
Of the countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing, and the like, the ‘snapping’ of the photographer has had the greatest consequences. A touch of the finger now sufficed to fix an event for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were.
3. Her focus shifted to the future and she began sending him letters not only full of reference to books she was reading, but also designed to arrive when he would not be home, letters, that is, which he would not receive until later or which, since she often picked up his mail for him when he was out of town, she herself would get upon her return before he did. Thus in some sense these became letters or postcards not to him, although he did ultimately see them stacked up on his living room piano, but to herself, since she would read them over and stack them up for him to read after she had, after his return.
Why does one want to penetrate a time, she thought, unavailable to one at the moment, to insert oneself into the future, to be certain, for example, of one’s existence at his house on August 16, although it is at the moment of the writing only August 3. It is “only” the 3RD, she thought, meaning, of course, that the place towards which one was tending was someplace down the road, in a distance one could not see, unless it were captured in some “stroke,” some mark on paper or emulsion. To try to visualize herself sitting in his house surreptitiously reading the descriptions of weather on August 3 at a future time, August 16, was like adding days to the week, was like stolen time on a lovers’ afternoon, was like the forbidden pleasure of knowing for certain that one would exist at a time not yet come into being, and that she had helped thereby to frame and predict the order of things.
To see her own words written there, it is raining, or it has stopped raining, was a pleasure that verged on a type of illicit potency, similar one might speculate to the alphabet itself, the way it could hold time as talking could not, and she imagined, the cessation of speech, the pleasure of existing only in the written word, and it was not so much that she wished to exist for him, but rather that she used him as a vehicle by which she could convey herself to herself, that she actually existed and had been wherever she had been and that the rain had been rain, not because she returned with a suitcase full of damp clothes and muddy shoes, but because it was written: it is raining. Also and equally satisfying perhaps, because the words in ink on the postcard of a rural landscape were smeared, running slightly down the card or because the card itself, an ordinary shot of rivers and trees, was curled as a card might be, especially a card left for the carrier in a mailbox standing for hours in the pouring rain.
Then she would hold it, standing as she was at a later time, by the piano in the lamplight, and realize that she actually had been where it was raining, and that she had, moreover, successfully projected herself into the room in which she was standing, had (having imagined it and photographed it in her mind’s eye—figure in room with postcard in left hand) brought it into being. And she felt a sense of prescience which nothing else, things far more momentous and significant in terms of what are called “life events,” could provide, nothing but her own words on the cardboard on the flipside of which a landscape in fake fall colors which she had never seen, shone in all its gaudy autumn glory.
4. What she wanted to do was create in him a desire for herself, but herself purified and expunged, exquisitely missing. So having gotten him used to reading quotations which she included in all of her letters, eventually, she cut them out. At first, she did this by cutting sentences and inserting the requisite dots (...) to indicate that some portion of the text was missing. Rarely did this change the meaning of the quotation; more often it simply served to smooth and “get to the main point” more quickly. Later, she took to cutting out the topic sentence or the sentence which, if he had been adept, he would have picked as the one, although not central to the quoted text itself, central to her, central not in any obvious or crass sort of way, but central to her understanding of what she might become given the ideal projections of her talents and predilections.
After more time had passed, the whole was composed of mere fragments and gaps. From a certain perspective and from a rather sophisticated one, the bits and fragments seemed to compose a sort of poetic assemblage, or at least she, assuming that he was missing her acutely, found it intriguing to imagine that he might find them so. Ultimately, she “cut” all the words out of her letters so that what was left was a piece of blank paper which hung together by threads, rather like the paper dolls which are connected by a thin strip of hands linking them across the accordion pull-out of their fates before being tossed in the fire. And since it became quite difficult to fold them neatly into an envelope, even a business envelope of more considerable size, she stuffed them into the envelope crudely and mailed them off rather unconscious of the mangled wad that would be retrieved on the other end. She imagined that he would pull out a perfect frame of paper, decipher the shape of the missing quotations, and even, in the rather hallucinated state of longing, be able to guess at her underlying intention and embrace the nature of things between them.
5. The letter itself became for her a kind of rival in love, not the means by which she wrote to him, not the link and conveyer of information which would maintain contact over the time they were necessarily apart, enabling her to call up his image and imagine the time when they would be together at last again, but rather that which she most looked forward to. The upcoming time when they had planned to meet completely faded in her imagination and she found herself delaying her return so that she could continue to write to him. Each day she worked quickly to complete the tasks that were at hand and that fulfilled her professional obligations in order to have the leftover moments in which she could turn to writing to him. Thus in the course of her stay in the country, what were to have been moments of snatched time, the rag-ends of time in which she might, if she had time, write to him just to keep him up to date and to assure him of her affection and her certain return, became in flip-flop, a negative to a missing positive, that which she most looked forward to and treasured.
Yet there were days in which, she found, despite writ
ing to him, that she could not remember what he looked like, could not call up the color of his eyes. She tried to remember his image and pulled out, as anyone would do in such circumstances, a photograph of him she had tucked into the back of a book she had been reading when she left, but for some reason the face in the photograph in no way matched what fragments of him she thought she could remember and even less seemed to match the image of the man to whom she had been writing. He wasn’t a complete stranger, of course. She realized that the man in the photograph was someone she had once known and she remembered his name, address, profession, quirks. But as to that memory that fills in the bare outline, that was completely missing. There was no feeling of animosity towards the man; it was simply that he had lost the limbs of familiarity and had become not an intimate, but someone she had once known. For a time she thought the photograph was to blame, that it was a poor likeness, taken from the wrong angle, or capturing—as photographs do from time to time—a fleeting expression that although quite uncharacteristic of the person being photographed, passed across his face and was fixed by the camera for all time, as if the person were turned into a caricature of himself, not what he was at all, but more like his opposite, not exactly an evil twin, but a shadowy figure with a hidden past.
6. Having realized this fact, she saw that somewhat like DNA is a snapshot in miniature of the whole person, so his face, or at least the top half of his face, was (if separated from the rest) dimly familiar and welcome. If she placed a piece of paper over the rest of his body, especially over his mouth, and looked only at his eyes and brow, she remembered in a vague way that she knew him and had known him well.
Therefore, once she had finished with work on one particularly overwrought day, she took this flimsy snapshot, the only one she had brought with her, to the local camera lab to have it blown up. She had in mind to select a manageable portion, a quotation, as it were, from the larger book of life itself. With the grease pencil, she outlined the square which she wanted and said she would pay and wait. It would be auspicious, she thought. This action was the best she had thought of yet. It was a way to enlarge, down to the pores and dots, that bit which was familiar, reassuring, her own. It was better than future time; it was stop-time altogether. For, she reasoned, with some controlled but obvious excitement, the further one went inward, the more intimate all would become.
Thus, whatever distance might have developed between them would be warded off by the increasing enlargement of the eye in the photograph, and, given what she believed to be her genuine desire for reparation, she had it enlarged until first only the eye and eyelid were visible and then finally only the pupil itself, round and black and firmly situated as if it were looking back at her through the lens of a camera, magnified and clear. The pupil was a firm black spot, a perfect circle. She moved in and in on it, both by the technical process of enlargement and by imaginative endeavor. She was so far in finally that there was no longer any way to conceive of the discrete letters or images which had haunted her all summer. All was blackness: a relief, a refuge, a familiarity so profound as to be unnerving, as if, she thought in the midst of staring, once the envelope was closed and sealed, addressed to the man to whom she would eventually send it, she was no longer on the outside, but, blissfully, surrounded by the blackness at which she focused and to which she was able, finally, to give herself completely, on the very inside itself.
The Photograph
The objective nature of photography confers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making. In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually, re-presented, before us.
—Andre Bazin
When she arrived at his house after some days alone, she moved awkwardly and started sentences at the front door which began in an artificial and stilted register. Whatever intimacies of their affair had been in the air were gone. She couldn’t see where the skin of his face might meet hers if she leaned towards him, so she backed into the kitchen in a kind of awkward dance, having made certain to bring in bags of groceries for their usual Friday night dinner so that their bodies would be occupied in carrying, lifting, unpacking. She folded the shopping bags along their creases and made a comment that was meant to sound polite.
She seemed stripped of memory, her body gone neutral and suspicious, as if she hadn’t spent nights in his bed. She was, she was proud to say, a skeptic, sophisticated in her sense of how deeply time affected all emotional connections. I am, she thought, someone who has been through more and I am certain of this as he cannot possibly be, living here in this suburban house with the pastel wall-to-wall carpeting, what can he know about how people betray one another. I have only, and she thought this somewhat smugly, taken up with betrayers, and she counted them. She tried to explain to him that everything always changed and that he wouldn’t, once time had passed, think of her in the same way ever again.
It turned out he never quarreled and when there were differences between them, usually slight, he sat under the Chinese lamp by the stone fireplace to talk about them and see where they would get to. Despite this, she found herself unable to give up the habit of opposition. That she geared up for argument, walking about the room, crossing and uncrossing her legs, superstitious and unwilling to let go any advantage, seemed to matter to him not at all. He simply went to the corner of the large room, sat down under the Chinese lamp, and waited for her to say something. She made up a story. Last night, she said, she had been at dinner with two friends who were going to China. They had eaten knotted tofu. It was the Chinese lamp that set her going this time, she realized after two sentences in, but by then it seemed so plausible and was after all analogous to the truth (she had eaten tofu one night last week) that it sounded, as specific information tends to, true.
On the lamp were fading figures of monks climbing up a faded mountain, a craggy line that jagged up the porcelain. The lamp was old, had belonged to his mother whose second husband had been a missionary, and he had inherited it along with, oddly enough, the posture of his stepfather. No genes, just the crook of their backs and the quiet of their voices. The story of the Chinese restaurant came out of her mouth in a line of sentences that seemed plausible; the paragraph made a certain amount of sense and avoided, so she hoped, clichés. Clichés were far worse than lying. Indeed, lying seemed these days not only interesting but closer to something she was trying to get to. It reproduced a kind of etched reality, like a photograph of a crime scene that could catch the clues the scene itself would obscure.
Sometimes she thought she was trying to get close to childhood. Didn’t psychologists speculate that childhood was a placeholder for authenticity? Ironic, she thought. She looked at a snapshot of herself as a ten-year old. She had never looked at the camera and she never, so far as she could remember, told what she believed to be the truth, although the adjustments were so small as to be undecipherable and, more importantly, completely irrelevant. The pact of honor she made with herself was that none of her lies should count for anything, should bring her any gain, should hurt anyone, and they didn’t, she thought, unless the act itself counted as transgression, but she thought or rather hoped, not. Perhaps her parents always knew she was making things up. Perhaps the little games she played were not of the consequence she had thought them, but simply the insignificant games of children. The gap between what was going on and what she said was going on seemed enormous at the time, but perhaps not.
What words might there be for a child of nine for the mixture of emotions she felt when she watched her little brother move slowly from room to room. His head was too large for his body and he moved with maddening if rather graceful attention to his efforts as if without that attention to his foot pointing forward into the next step, he might wobble, though he never lost his balance and he never fell. She, on the other hand, ran from room to room, sped through corridors, smashed up elbows and shins. She watched him as if he were a gelatinous
being from a far-off world she could never inhabit.
Her feelings about all this did not present a moral problem exactly, but neither was it a problem simply of movement. When she had said to her brother, Come with me, knowing that he would and that he would move in his slow underwater way with his feet pointing out towards the space in front of him, it was a false premise really, a denial, since she didn’t mean come, but more like stop, who are you, why do you do that? But her brother would simply come as if she had said the simplest thing in the world, whereas she knew that it was not.
The man she sat next to on the couch by the Chinese lamp moved this way as well, with slow and quiet attention to his movements as if the air were thick. She looked at him and tried to remember what it had been like two nights ago in the warmth of his bed, but time had betrayed her and she couldn’t remember a thing. She looked at him, his head always bigger than she remembered. Sometimes she wanted to bang up against him as he moved from room to room to jolt him out of his reverie, to see if she could find out something. Sometimes she wanted to move so quickly that he would be forced wide awake, his hair standing on end and glistening.
She kept a photograph of her brother in her wallet and took it out to show him. Come here and look at this, she said and he did. The man in the photograph had indeed a quite large head, beautifully shaped with hair long and flat enough to curl around his ears. He looked as thoughtful as a mathematician ought to look. I bought him that Batman tie for his twenty-first birthday, she said. It was, however, despite the seemingly obvious evidence at hand, not her brother but a man who was not the first but the most skillful of her betrayers. She carried it in her wallet and always said it was her brother although she didn’t know why since it wouldn’t have mattered to anyone who it was and she needn’t have ever opened her wallet to anyone except for purposes of identification to clerks who didn’t, of course, care. Even the man himself under the Chinese lamp wouldn’t have cared or wouldn’t, even if he had thought of it, have asked why she had the photograph and what it meant. But that was for her the point: its meaning was contained in its lack of meaning, its very ordinariness and banality. She had helped make it more than that, she would have argued, by the additional fillip of the lie. The man looked slightly to one side of her face and listened, as he always listened, to her talk. He took the photograph in his hands and pushed his hair behind his ears.
