Men and Apparitions

by Lynne Tillman

  The American family sustains itself and mutates along with its movies, TV, reality, comedy, sitcoms, photographs, video, miniseries. Old genres for new ethnicities, types—easy makeovers—fill our many screens. With no end to war and cop stories, big and little monsters for an age of permanent war, and, with the cry for blind patriotism, an American’s fidelity to family can be converted into uncritical devotion to country or town.

  A family member’s self-interest can break a contract, implicit or explicit, in the name of honesty (often a dubious motive, except in the case of the Unabomber’s brother and sister-in-law: their disloyalty saved lives), to cure the family or to get just desserts.

  an art gallery in los angeles modeled

  on the unabomber cabin

  A new space by collector and artist Danny First may just take the weirdness cake.

  First has built a 10-by-12-foot gallery in his Hancock Park backyard using the exact shape and dimensions of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s Montana cabin—down to the plywood patches out front.

  … First says this isn’t out of some weird tribute to Kaczynski and his anti-technology manifestos. It’s the shape and the scale of the building that he found compelling. “I’ve never even seen [Kaczynski’s] cabin in person,” First says. “It really has nothing to do with the Unabomber. The simplicity of the structure is something that appeals to me—it’s like something that a kid would draw. I liked it from the first time I saw it on television.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  growing up is crazy

  I totally knew about possessions, and consumption, even obsession, without knowing I knew it, because of John Maurice Stark. Father wanted things, he collected things, because he could. “His things” were his possessions, and a notion developed in me, Zeke Stark, that I was pure of heart, and he was crude and grasping. Later, I learned the word “materialist.” He was one—a spirit enemy.

  To be possessed, but not possess life. Surrounded by materialists, I partook, resigned, acceding to the pathos of consumables. Pathetic. Working against that. Spirit as substance.

  I studied Father taking pix. He set up a shot, camera to eye, pressed the button, pulled the film out, waited like a scientist, and the chemicals acted, or “did its thing,” as he liked to say. Then, wow, emergence! The image would appear on the surface, risen! There it was. He showed us “the result,” as he called it.

  Father = the Polaroid speed of life. A slice of a tiny moment, but then you waited to see that moment, as if it hadn’t happened. It was so weird, we watched what we were doing as if we hadn’t done it, and now we could see what it was, a magic act that showed how reality might be deceptive—I mean, what would be shown that we hadn’t seen or experienced (see spirit photography).

  The emerging, part of its happening, happened as we watched. And, every moment you waited for the past to show itself was lost, not present. Like a caterpillar out of a cocoon, the emergence excited me more than the picture. It was a white door he shot, a normal thing, but the magic of its chemistry, way more cool.

  In his book America, Jean Baudrillard wrote of the Polaroid as a heightened form of photography’s uncanniness: “To hold the object and its image almost simultaneously as if the conception of light of ancient physics or metaphysics, in which each object was thought to secrete doubles or negatives of itself that we pick up with our eyes, has become a reality. It is a dream. It is the optical materialization of a magical process. The Polaroid photo is a sort of ecstatic membrane that has come away from the real object.”

  I learned my way around a darkroom, developing a picture, learning patience—the new magic until that ended, too. Darkroom days ended, mostly for everyone, but some artists keep at it; the preciousness of historical prints will count even more with time.

  shoot me but don’t shoot me

  Mother didn’t like Father to snap her, as she put it, because he didn’t let her snap him. “Don’t shoot my face,” she’d say. It was a power thing.

  Snapshots: an old concept.

  Snapshots; snap judgments.

  I’ll do it in a snap.

  OH, SNAP.

  Mother never accepted or believed women were inferior to men. It didn’t occur to me, either, but Father’s undermining her must have contributed to some negative internalizing. Father claimed he was a male feminist, but he was a condescending asshole contented with his bona fides: as he said again and again, he’d PARTIED, smoked it up, did some speed, and when he matured, he got real, studied law, settled down and married a woman better than he was, became an upstanding citizen, or a selfish, middle-class jerk-wad.

  Mother explained: many women bought that the home was their rightful place, her mother did, but her mother was very angry and took it out on her and Clarissa, with the silent treatment, white rage, Mother called it. Then, in 1963, when Mother was in college, The Feminine Mystique hit the stands, and a lot changed, she said, very fast. Oh, the times they were a changin’. For a radical few of them, there wasn’t a need to overcome what they felt was injustice and personal loss; she and her friends felt on track to equality. But people can’t lose what they never had, she said. Mother shot me her spooky gravitas look, the mother knows BEST and MORE expression. Ping! Which totally refers to my current story; but I don’t want to get ahead of myself, I mean, if that’s ever possible. No kidding.

  we the picture people

  Words make images.

  People make words, words make people.

  People make images. Words and images make people.

  How many fallacies fit on the head of a pin.

  I’m an image to you, you to me. We create each other in instants of connection, the identity process is interactive, a very fast game. We are The Picture People.

  All pictorial depth is illusory, and it may be that all depth is fictional, the mother of all simulacra. We’re living behind closed doors, metaphorically, and photographs are not windows; also, whatever an inner thought is considered to be it is carried by language, which is social, and therefore not “inner” at all.

  Striking matches, I heard my father yell, Stop. I was five. Could have burned the house down, he said. I was awake, aware then. He gave me the idea. “I could have burned the house down. I could burn the house down.” A fantastic image.

  Our age began in 1839, with the proclaimed discovery or invention of photography, when the Picture Age or the Age of Images (as in, we live in a glut of images) took its impetus, its nucleus, from the camera and its products. In the modern and post-modern era people have persistently desired to create, remake and pull down images from, of, and off everything. The Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages, the Industrial Age, the Electronic and Technological Age. No one can argue against calling us the Picture People.

  In the eighth century bce, the poet Hesiod sorted the world of Man into five stages, Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron, complaining that, with each stage, there was a degradation. He regretted having been born into the fifth age.

  But this kind of articulation is OLD, too old to keep repeating. Current prognosticators believe our fall is imminent. Or is already here. Nonsectarian speakers own up to godlessness, but have anyway morphed sin and damnation into civil calumnies. Collapse, apocalypse, extinction, whatever, from our own hands, or our machines. In these predictions, heaven or hell isn’t waiting for anyone. Purgatory is here. Reason, probability theories, and statistics do predict the end of something. Oil, say, and water. And it’s true, we are incinerating the planet, poisoning and depleting it. Totally. Still, we are alive, we are here now. The earth has been disrupted and disturbed by humans at least since the invention of fire, which must have imitated nature’s lightning strikes.

  Some have said that our being absorbed in images is the sine qua non for our inevitable self-and other-destruction. Some have said that narcissism, shown by our avidity for images, turned us inward, into inner-bounded psyches, away from the natural order and from a necessary empathy, both underlying our immense species failure
and so on. Interiority—an illusion as great as Narcissus found the river/mirror to be.

  Narcissism is part of the natural order.

  The Picture People are unlike earlier humans only in requiring moment-by-moment proof of the world around them and their position in it. Systems to locate themselves wherever they are. GPS = technological solipsism. When the cell phone arrived, what did people first say on it? “I’m here, I’m walking home.” My fave: “I’m waving to you, can you see me?”

  Reflections in pools of water might have given rise to the earliest drawings. The Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon or earlier Man noticed an image in a stream, maybe his, probably first an animal’s—I can imagine that early man touching his nose, touching the water, the water’s slight turbulence contorting his image. Lucille Ball and Harpo Marx mimicked each other, pretending to be mirror images, that’s way back, 1950s TV, so if you know the reference, you’re doing your media history.

  First, I can imagine our ancient ancestor—let’s call him Magnon—watching his shadow track him. Shadows attract scrutiny, breed paranoid thoughts, i.e., who’s following me, and also provide ocular information and sight-protection when there actually is a stalker.

  Modernist and contemporary photography pay attention to the shadow.

  An essential immateriality attaches to these tantalizing dark echoes of existence, and what are shadows to this existence, what does their possibility suggest to future Homo sapiens? Can the apelike creature make them last? I mean, why did a scratch on a wall ever evolve into a drawing or a painting. That’s not really a question.

  My script is terrible, like claw marks. Also can’t draw, only hit keys, touch and press.

  It’s not what we know that matters to me, but does knowing it DO anything? What difference does it make to know, when forces within and without move you or even conspire against you?

  The need of prehistoric humans and us to make, homo facere, and to depict the world is an effort to explain Being. Even to make Being explicable.

  It might be a human instinct to leave a mark, to make or manifest an image, to court experience and existence into a cage, to keep it, EXPERIENCE, I mean. Claiming territory, marking it, scratching on walls the objects in our territories, what we capture and kill; animals do it, we are animals. An animal leaves scent on a tree or door, a cat rubs its furry body against a chair leg, darkening it, staining it, oh the stain.

  I’m off, off and on. Floating.

  What is my subject?

  There is nothing outside of images.

  family drama: growing up more crazy

  What happens first happens indelibly, while the brain is developing. The brain keeps growing, WET and gooey, and early neural pathways plant themselves and thrive. That’s childhood, the brain developing into a sweet and sour sticky hive.

  What happens in YOUR family first, when you’re a little one, is the basic drama of life, and melodrama also starts, shaping the child’s bandwidth of vision. I mean, capacity to focus, and understanding of what is seen. A child is beamed to life (and psychic death) by its family; the child magnifies and amplifies that organism, the family, toward all other beings and into all other events.

  Attachment issues attachment issues.

  Mother feels attached to her ancestors, an invisible mob surrounding her: she doesn’t really walk alone, and she still says, if I ask, They animate me. Clearly this is how I became interested in tribes.

  Beverly Farms, near our family home, was where Clover Hooper Adams and her historian husband, Henry Adams, had a house, for a time. Hooper is Mother’s “maiden” name.

  They made her image-obese, and verbose; ancestral images got under her skin, and became incorporated into her self-image. Mother’s descendants infused her blood, and she feels their specific inherited traits as effects, which occur by spirit, through character and psychology. Mother explains Little Sister was born an old soul. She laid eyes on her last baby, her only girl, and “I knew who she was. That’s why I gave her Clover as a middle name, she’s an old soul.”

  I feel attached to my backhand.

  My parents started me on tennis early, because Father wanted me to have a sport I could take into old age. Old age to a kid?

  Tennis at day camp, sleep-away camp, I played every minute allowed, high school team for a while, and, from when I was a baby, pretty much, I watched John McEnroe, Johnny Mac, he’s screaming at the linesman or umpire, stamping his feet. Wow! He’s having a tantrum, Mother dismissed him and his behavior, I was glad, and Father, I don’t know, when I started beating him at his game, he withdrew. Didn’t matter. Johnny Mac. His sweat-wet curly hair bounced around his furious face, and I watched him rant, and watched him win. So, weirdly, I was into sports, baseball, football, a nerd, a smart kid, a jock, all emblazoned on my T-shirt, Zeke Starchaser. My tennis aptitude became part of family legend: I wasn’t a bully, even too sensitive for a boy, whatever that meant, or would mean to me, but I held the court. Sliced, slammed, spun, confused my opponent—I wanted to win like Johnny Mac.

  In Little League, I switched from short-stop to third base. I had good hands, hand/eye coordination, speed, but I wanted the baseline, I liked how the third baseman would leap, glove hand out, for a speeding ball, perpendicular to the field, like a bird in flight. I liked the image.

  Bo Jackson was IT, my main man. Breaks my heart thinking about him, his career finished because he actually outran his body, and screwed up his hip. To me, Bo was just like a shooting star. Football ended his baseball career, so I have a declared hatred of football.

  To break myself down (didn’t know it) I shifted positions in baseball. Also, I ran. I stopped running the mile, stayed with sprints. If you want a change in your life, you have to change position, which is to change your image of yourself. An image is a position, both mental and actual, and vice versa. If you want a different life, outrage your former self-image.

  “silent speaking in plain sight”

  I once argued that a family photo album effects a silent conversation (traditionally, men were taught to keep silent about their feelings; these were always secret), one that constitutes an unspoken familial story, which adds to what’s reported from sib to sib, generation to generation. The image of the family is built, though, by a combo of words and pix—all media play a big part. For this article, I didn’t interview families but grabbed images and read them only as pictures: formal in terms of composition, how the image was constructed, etc., and as interpretation, what they projected. Compared compositions and meanings with earlier family albums. I broke down the photograph: who was placed where, etc. Hierarchies in families determine placement in pictures. I studied their gestures. I’m very interested in facial expressions, especially smiles: they are often duplicitous and deceptive.

  For an undergrad paper, I studied an older friend’s family album from the fifties and sixties, mainly, in which no one ever smiled. Here, then, since these pix were posed, I considered the role of the photo-taker, the father, who ordered or chose unsmiling subjects. He did not say, SMILE, please. That would not have pleased him.

  In the flow between subject and object, between taker and taken, which can incorporate a sadomasochistic element—the actor and the acted-upon—an exceptional development silently declaimed itself. The family dynamic, especially because of the picture taker’s POV—he could have chosen to shoot his subjects differently—was manifested: the unseen photographer determined the atmosphere.

  It turned out that the man who took these pictures later took his own life.

  Both his children, unsurprisingly, grew up without senses of humor, and with fear of others’ humor, of jokers. They misunderstood jokes and viewed jokers suspiciously: the joke must always be on them.

  I’m looking at whether image has dominated a person or family’s sense of itself, themselves or their family, as in, upholding an image of the family.

  In the way Mother believes.

  humanism: homo sapiens agitprop

  Conste
llations align in the sky to predict our fate, because we solipsists gaze from and about ourselves. (I was an avid cloud-and star-gazer once upon a moon. Still like clouds.) Stars are not FOR or against me, which doesn’t mean I’m not susceptible to superstition, I am, and might conjure solitary stars shooting across the sky for my nighttime pleasure, a stelliferous, heavenly decoration for me, or prophesy.

  Humans haven’t been on earth long. Stars live infinitely longer but they’re hanging in the heavens, ancient reflected light, to spread Nature’s glitter over terrace parties, blinking to create atmosphere on date night. Shooting stars serve us the way everything once served humanity, all for us, because solipsism goes a long way as consolation for human limitation.

  People could perceive in a cloud any image they desired—God’s face, jewels, a dog, a dead lover—while the stars and constellations, with lives infinitely longer than human beings’, could predict human fate. Cool, right.

  The natural order looks cool, until an animal stalks another’s defenseless cub and eats it; floods wash away buildings and thousands drown, and massive craters open and swallow entire villages.

  Still, people live on fault lines and in flood zones. I’m not getting into that. Emotions rule, and science can study them, and does, but feelings don’t lie down and play dead. They morph faster than we can capture them.

  Human narcissism is cultural and psychological. Individuals carry the gene, because it serves survival. Narcissism lies, embedded, in the strands of our DNA, as a coping mechanism for, as just mentioned, survival, species-protection. All the mirrors/screens humans have concocted to gaze at themselves, to record themselves as factual characters or fictional ones—they’re for image-grabbing.