The Best American Essays 2018

by Hilton Als

  Thich Quang Duc in the fire, like MacArthur in the water, is another photograph that records an act of self-dramatization. The monk is one shade closer to death than the Saigon civilian with the gun at his head. He has crossed even farther, but every viewer “knows” the photographed monk is still alive in the fire; a photograph of a burning corpse would fail to have this effect. It would become a grotesque or obscene photograph: imagine the Saigon civilian being photographed after his head was blown off. The photograph would become something unfit for widespread replication. The moment before death is dramatic, and the closer the image can get us to its threshold, the better: too far, and the image instantly hemorrhages all its drama. This is why none of the truly famous photographs of war, Asian or otherwise, are photographs of corpses. Corpses leave us cold.

  So the monk freshly burning commands our gaze, while no photographs of the charred, humanish mound are available. Nor are there any easily procured photographs of the people sweeping up the monk’s remains. Did locals pour buckets of water over the blotch? Did they scrub at it? Assuming they didn’t get it completely clean, who pedaled the first bicycle over the black stain?

  The Detainee at Abu Ghraib Hooded and Draped in Black

  Of the roughly 2,742 photographs that emerged from Abu Ghraib, 689 involved pornography or simulated sex acts, 540 were of corpses, 37 involved dogs, and 20 involved a swastika between the eyes of an American soldier. So a considerably smaller number of images were actually fit for potential widespread replication in the media. If we subtract images of detainees either naked or near-naked (although admittedly, the Pyramid of Naked Arabs did gain some dissemination), it stands to reason that the cover of the Economist, and countless other websites, should have replicated the image of the prisoner standing on the crate in the black hood and black poncho-like drape, with what appear to be wires leading to his fingers.

  Paradoxically, an excessively covered-up figure became emblematic of a torture facility that, in a clear majority of cases, stripped people naked. The arms are held out, which falls just short of the ninety-degree angle required for a parallel with the Crucifixion. The hint is unmistakably there, however. Notice that the image that provokes sympathy for The Muslim dovetails with the central image of Christianity.

  Notice also that the face, and indeed the entire head, is covered—instead of hinting at Someone Like You or Me by the device of the green eyes, the photograph creates a black box (or bag) inside which we can imagine Someone Like You or Me. Even the smallest visual hint of sweaty black hair or overlong beard or large nose would estrange the viewer instantly; the image’s power resides in its multivalence.

  The torture scandal, represented most frequently by this photograph, managed to remain a self-examination regarding the methods, not the enterprise. Our pity for the enemy could rise to the surface without diminishing our sense of the cause’s righteousness. The detainee’s black hood and loose-fitted black drape resemble the veil and robe worn by women under the rule of orthodox Muslim males; the black hood, with its cone shape, resembles the white hood worn by members of the Ku Klux Klan. These are the cues that reinforce the detainee’s guilt, subconsciously reminding the Western viewer of Arab Muslim misogyny and intolerance.

  This photograph and the one of the nameless Afghan girl succeed on the same principle. To move us to empathy, one had to be photographed as a female child with green eyes. The other had to be photographed without a face at all.

  Rick Moody

  Notes on Lazarus

  from Conjunctions

  What do we know about Lazarus of Bethany? He lived thirty years after his resurrection, according to the Eastern Orthodox Church, and in these later years, he was said never to have smiled—for having seen the underworld.

  “Jesus wept,” it is well known, is the shortest verse in the Bible (John 11:35). This sentence describes Jesus’s confrontation with the facts of the death of Lazarus of Bethany. There is reasonable consistency, among the many English translations, on this passage, although I have also found the much inferior “Jesus cried.”1 The strength of the passage is in its brevity. The brevity suggests, embodies, incarnates the feeling.

  There are thirty-two modern cases (that is, cases here in the twenty-first century) of people whose hearts spontaneously restarted after they had been pronounced dead. A significant number of these deaths are owing to drug overdose. The technical name for a heart restarting without assistance is “auto-resuscitation.” It’s also called: Lazarus syndrome.

  Why is it that Jesus feels such waves of grief at Lazarus’s death, when he knows already that resurrecting Lazarus is possible? Is it simply because he feels the loss that the sisters of Lazarus, Mary and Martha of Bethany, also feel? Is the sibling relationship such as to suggest the pain of grief as no other does?

  Maybe Jesus weeps so over Lazarus’s tomb because he knows what is commenced as a result. According to John 12, the Jews of Jerusalem plotted to kill Lazarus a second time immediately after his resurrection (in various later versions of the story I have seen this same intent attributed to the Romans)—because they knew what the miracle would occasion in and around the ministry of Jesus.

  The “grave clothes” of Lazarus are the bandages covering both face and body, at the time he climbs up and out of the tomb. He is, more or less, mummified. Covering the face as the body is buried removes what’s most human about it; it’s a recognition of the absence of self. The body of Lazarus will be evacuated of its spirit while decaying in the tomb. And thus: when Jesus wants to reveal what is human about the resurrected Lazarus, he first has to have the grave clothes removed, meaning uncovering the face.

  Why Lazarus? Why Lazarus more so than any other deceased candidate who might have been proposed among those in the Jewish community? Lazarus is selected for his excellent abilities to serve in a heroic narrative capacity. Jesus must have felt as much. Lazarus was the Rosa Parks of the New Testament, in the right place at the right time. We might say that Lazarus had an honest face. Perfect for unveiling.

  In John 12, Jesus goes back to Bethany later, to check up on Lazarus, after the miracle, and they have a meal together. Oh to have been a bystander! Did Jesus ask him about the four days in the underworld? Weather? Politics? That year’s agricultural yield? “But Lazarus was one of them that sat at the table with him,”2 according to John. Jesus knows, feels, comprehends what Lazarus saw! And yet the scene goes on to discuss the issue of poverty: “For the poor always ye have with you.”3 Lazarus is scarcely mentioned again at the table and yet always present (apparently without a smile).

  Lazarus is not resurrected for all eternity, as Jesus promises the believers after Judgment Day. Lazarus gets his human death sentence commuted only temporarily. His is the kind of miracle that we all long for and are suspicious of, whether religious or irreligious. Lazarus is a revival-tent miracle. (After my sister’s death, I remember any number of movies featuring dead characters returning, some of them profound, some of them imbecilic. I watched these films with envy.) I recently heard a sermon about Lazarus that spoke to this point: Unfortunately I must disappoint those of you who, because of this story, are hoping for the resurrection of your own relatives.

  And what did Lazarus feel? The eternal repose, the sense of traveling down and into oblivion, must be reassuring in a way. I think of oblivion as potentially satisfying, lavender-hued. Imagine Lazarus of Bethany living at the edge of the Roman Empire, good friends with some itinerant Jew, some wandering mendicant, whom everyone wanted to put to death. An undeniable rabble-rouser, afoul of the authorities. Dying, for Lazarus, may have been a relief from constant political adversity and physical threats of the Romans, with their superior weaponry and numbers. And then having to be raised up from that repose, to face, again, contemporary political horror?

  Or: maybe Lazarus suffered from the considerably rare Cotard’s syndrome, in which he believed he was dead already. One can imagine, in the premodern era, when sanitation and medicine were not what they
are now, when death was the kingdom at hand, that one could easily come to believe that one already suffered with the condition. And maybe Jesus of Nazareth did what he did (as when Jesus cast out the demons, in Matthew 8:28, by transferring them into a herd of swine) simply to commute psychic suffering. Maybe Jesus abbreviates Lazarus’s preoccupation with death. Feels it and commutes it.

  Maybe Lazarus was a member of one of those ancient mystery cults, one of those Greco-Roman schools of the forbidden and secret, as with the Dionysian cult, in which chthonic rites were prized. In this version of the story, Lazarus perhaps courted the underworld, according to the rigors of the cult, but was somehow lost in the process, and, at the urging of Martha and Mary, Jesus came to call him forth from the religion of error and schism, trying to bring him back to the true path. The weeping would have been, therefore, about the pointlessness of Lazarus’s initial sacrifice.

  This cultic narrative of Lazarus would nicely anticipate his value to Vodoun spirituality, where Lazarus is subsumed into the wild and anarchic presence known as Papa Legba. Or what about the feast day of San Lázaro in the Afro-Cuban tradition, which conflates the Lazarus of the Gospel of Matthew (a beggar) and the Lazarus of the Gospel of John (the resurrected guy). According to this tradition, San Lázaro was scourged on the flesh before being beheaded in AD 72. This San Lázaro allowed himself to be licked by dogs, too, after being scourged, and is therefore the patron saint of dogs. In Cuba, there is a pilgrimage to Rincón in honor of San Lázaro, to the former leprosarium there. Now they just treat skin diseases in Rincón. There is an insufficiency of lepers.

  The insistence in the biblical account on Lazarus reeking upon emerging from the tomb is narratively admirable. In literature descriptions of scent make a passage more indelible. There should be more biblical smells. A friend of mine who was present on the set of Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ tells the story of Scorsese attempting to re-create the horrible smell of Lazarus in a filmic way, instructing all the extras and the cast members to recoil visibly when Lazarus came forth, but, according to this same friend, this bit was mostly cut from the finished project. It just didn’t look right.

  Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977) has a nice Lazarus sequence. The white-guy-with-blue-eyes incarnation of Jesus (as played by Robert Powell) feels a bit dated, and there are all those British accents to lend dramatic seriousness to the undertaking, but despite the epic qualities of the project, Jesus manages to convey the immensity of his life and sacrifice. In fact, the raising of Lazarus, a miracle heavily outfitted with a retinue of observers, is the depiction wherein I best understand the sequential importance of Lazarus to the unfolding of the ministry of Jesus. This raising of the dead puts in motion Christ’s own execution. What’s at stake is this: if Jesus can resurrect the enemies of the state, the powerless, the Jews, the slaves, the indigent, then he has to be neutralized. And therefore when Martha and Mary stop Jesus on a footpath among cypresses to tell him of Lazarus’s death, you can see a real dread cross the face of Jesus. He knows.

  There’s a moment of total black screen in the Zeffirelli miniseries, before Lazarus comes forth from his tomb in the hillside. The camera closes in on the blackness inside the tomb entrance, and then goes completely black to the edge of the screen. It’s lovely and complete as a suggestion of the nothingness of the underworld. If I could put black screen in this essay I would. Right here.

  More resurrections? There’s “Po’ Lazarus,” the work song recorded by Alan Lomax, and made popular after the rerelease of some of the Lomax archive in the ’90s, and again in the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? by Joel and Ethan Coen. In the original (as opposed to the filmic recording), the words to “Po’ Lazarus” are improvised by one James Carter with some other inmates who were chopping wood in 1959 at a certain penitentiary in Mississippi. James Carter, who therefore “wrote” the song, when presented with a royalty check after the release of the Coen brothers film (and at a point in his life during which he was working as a shipping clerk), could not remember having sung the song for the original Lomax recording. Couldn’t recall it. He had to be convinced. He did attend the Grammy Awards, however, when the soundtrack to the Coen brothers film won album of the year. He died a couple of years later, in a state of redemption.

  So adaptable is the Lazarus narrative to poetry and song of African Americans, so easily does it graft onto a civil rights dramatic arc, that it is possible to think of Lazarus as though he must have been black himself; thus, perhaps, an Ethiopian Jew, which would give the whole story an arresting subplot. Because if Lazarus were black, then so were Martha and Mary, his sisters, and there’s a much more resonant intersectionality about the raising from the dead. It was to make central to Jesus’s ministry the exiled community of Beta Israel, those who fled oppression, those who lived further out in the waste. This Lazarus, the black Lazarus, recurs again and again, and his struggle with prejudice and contempt in the Jerusalem of Jesus’s ministry makes his narrative that much more lasting. Jesus, after the raising from the dead, goes to have dinner with the Beta Israel, with the Africans.

  Terry Callier’s powerful and moving song “Lazarus Man” finds Lazarus with a fever to narrate his journey (“Since he bid me to rise / I ain’t been to sleep!”).4 Callier, an African American folk singer from Chicago who made a number of recordings in the ’70s, completely dropped out of the music business, only to be rediscovered by British deejays (and Beth Orton) in the ’90s, and he makes of Lazarus an allegory for renewal, both in the fact of his singing about Lazarus and in the words of his composition.

  Callier’s Lazarus, by inference, is African or African American, too, and it’s interesting to think of the Lazarus narrative repurposed to describe the struggles of the disenfranchised (as the Jews themselves were in the Holy Land of Lazarus’s own time). Callier’s two chords, here, are modal like Miles Davis and John Coltrane (“Lazarus Man” feels closely related to Coltrane’s “India”), so the song also situates Lazarus in the heroic liberation of jazz, the kind of music they play at New Orleans funerals: elegiac, tragicomic, mnemonic, celebratory, deep.

  Terry Callier’s Lazarus, moreover, seems to have something in common with the outlandish Provençal tradition in which Lazarus (and his sisters Mary and Martha) are put out to sea by hostile Jews, to drift all the way to Provence, where Lazarus becomes bishop of Marseille, after which he is put to death (he always dies eventually) during the persecutions associated with the reign of Domitian. In this French tall-tale, his head was preserved.

  The Marseille narrative, which gets taken up and embellished by French believers of the medieval period, is Gnostic in the way it ties up loose ends (the Mary in the French Lazarus story is Mary Magdalene, even though there’s no evidence for this; and Lazarus is a thief, like Barabbas, who was crucified next to Jesus of Nazareth). The Marseille narrative indicates that Lazarus is one of those pieces of the New Testament that is so powerful that people want to claim it, to manipulate its particulars, to bind up its disparate material. They want to make the story so plastic that it might, somehow, continue to grow, right before our eyes.

  In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Lazarus became a bishop in Cyprus. He may or may not have been appointed to the post by the Virgin Mary herself.

  Henri Cole’s poem “Hens” deals with a Lazarus, a pullet called Lazarus.5 Cole’s singular gift is for a richness of metaphor in which human struggle and human longing constantly appear recast into things observed in nature, and accordingly in the protagonist hen we feel both Lazarus’s raising anew, in tragicomic form, a figure of sport, an entrée, or a layer of eggs. As in Cole’s work elsewhere, the metaphorical layering is so dense that Lazarus’s incarnations shimmer multiply before us at first. And some of these layers are very funny.

  At least until Cole’s Petrarchan turn in the sixth line of this pellucid sonnet-like form, when again Lazarus, the chicken, bereft of smile, comes face to face with the particulars of suffering and nonbein
g: “Last spring an intruder murdered her sisters and left her / garroted in the coop.”6 The dread never far off, a muscular, exceedingly sober gaze at the facts of the world, where, as Cole puts it, anguish is inevitable and universal. Maybe, in this incarnation of Lazarus, his story tells a precisely human truth: that in the cycle of death and resurrection there is eternal recurrence of suffering.

  Schubert never finished his oratorio about Lazarus.

  Did you know that the site of Lazarus’s tomb is contested? Like many places in and around the Holy City, it has been contested for thousands of years. There is a tomb, now underneath a mosque, the al-Uzair, which the Muslims sealed off. It was sealed off, that is, until the Franciscans cut a different entrance into the tomb. None can say for certain if it’s the actual tomb of Lazarus or not, of course, but there have been churches in the area since the fourth century. It is more exactly an exemplary tomb from the days of the early church, a site plausible, and—because plausible—spooky. It is more exemplary than actual. The tomb, originally, was connected to Lazarus’s house, or so it is said. He was buried right next to his house.

  In “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!,”7 Nick Cave (and his Bad Seeds) reduce Lazarus (nicknamed Larry in the verses) to a rock-and-roll drug adept, a hallucinating addict, a sort of fin de siècle decadent trying to achieve satori (I’m using the Beat terminology) through deformation of the senses, and this, in the chorus—“Dig yourself, Lazarus, dig yourself back in that hole”—indicates the coming-awake of Lazarus, in which Lazarus, realizing the enormity of his resurrection, the fearsome responsibility of it, tries to return to the underworld. It’s more comfortable down there.

  I sort of dislike this song. It’s as if Nick Cave is the Susan Sontag of contemporary music: a popularizer of avant-gardes more trenchant elsewhere. The secret weapon of the Bad Seeds, once upon a time, was Blixa Bargeld, a founding member of the Bad Seeds (and lead guitarist at one point), and former member of Einstürzende Neubaten, whose inability was his mastery, and who gave the Bad Seeds a genuinely unpredictable element. The removal of Bargeld (and Mick Harvey) made the band sort of a pop band, the way I see it, and Cave tried to resist this transition into more palatable and socially acceptable material by making the Grinderman album (a garage-rock side project), after which came Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, somewhat in imitation of the Grinderman sound. It’s a simulated punk rock album, therefore, and the song “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” is obviously influenced by New York punk. When Cave, on “Lazarus,” doesn’t sound like Mark E. Smith of the Fall, he sounds a bit like Richard Hell (of the Voidoids), and the lyrics allude to New York (and San Francisco), and you know he means the drugs and chaos, the energy, the Todestrieb of punk.