Men and Apparitions

by Lynne Tillman

  There’s an overproduction of ego artists jerking the chains of under-nourished narcissists, who don’t know how to protect themselves. I know some pretty well.

  facing family values

  I was the brat, the family’s oppositional bugger, enjoying the current of life—buddies, Little Sister’s weirdness, Mr. Petey’s appearances, pictures and photography. I ignored Hart, mostly ignored parents’ battles, because all of that took up my time and energy. I followed, or was led in, a direction from which or where I caught the disease, even as, later, I was writing about it. Not unusual. Check out medievalists who converted to Catholicism. Similar deal.

  But with any ideology—cameras: ideological machines, with positivist assumptions—there are holes, and at first, cameras were just holes and boxes, camera obscuras the first images. They left nothing.

  “Family” never leaves. Full of holes. Holes full of holes.

  OK, photography was invented before anesthesia. What phantom pain was its lack causing?

  Human grandiosity needed proof to assure its assumptions about being human and of its superiority in the creature kingdom. Consciousness doomed us to be proof-seekers. The God of religions couldn’t assure eternal life, a hereafter, God is dead, right—fundamentally, but often reborn—but a photograph, a picture, offers hope that there is a there—there.

  Descartes’s assertion, I think blah blah, deified rationality, when people needed to claim immortality by way of human reason, not God’s love. But how can I “show” what I think in the world, what I have made?

  Later, Descartes’s fallacious proof of God’s existence came, because he needed to rid himself of doubt. If God no longer needs to think of me, this rids me of some doubt, for instance, about my responsibility to God.

  So Empiricism replaced Faith. Or, fostered another Faith—in the positive appearance of things, objects. But Reason didn’t promise an after-this-life, and rejecting immortality isn’t easy. The search to fix an image also was a quest for an afterworld to soothe the nonbeliever. The rational nonbeliever believes what he or she sees, and relies on proof of existence, which no religion could provide, though miracles once sufficed as evidence, even proof—this character wants a photograph (see spirit photography).

  A life span is nothing compared with death’s eternity.

  Is there life before birth?

  Seeing might be believing, if evidence existed that what we saw we saw in common, communally, or in communion. If everyone apprehended the same sense or meaning from a photograph, we might agree on a reality, but that goal for a photograph’s purpose, its value, could never be achieved; the phenomenologists made that clear, and the spirit photographers, and the psychoanalysts, and clinical psychologists with the TAT test and the Rorschach, projection. Perception is overdetermined. It also matters who gives the tests and reads them, because this influences the results.

  Take a study of rats and grad students: one group were told their rats were brilliant, the other group told theirs were stupid. Same rats, same batch. Which rats did better on the tests, “the smart ones.” The handlers’ attitudes produced results. Expectations. I’ve been told by students my expectations for them are too high. Not kidding.

  family values its secrets (domestic terrorism)

  Secrets swallow families whole.

  Suicide. Alcoholism. Murder. Incest. Kidnapping. Disappearance. Adoption. Sperm donor. Individuals spend years searching for people and answers.

  Transparency is a cool notion, sure, but it’s also an idea-game, or a game idea. Seeing through IT is fantastical, to watch the apparatus at work, the process, whatever, fine, semi-doable, but it’s deceptive: other processes lie deeper. The panopticon may once have worked to police prisoners in cells; but observation doesn’t stop conspiracies by, say, nonverbal gesture. How we survive is also often a secret. Conspirators barely need to register consent.

  I know firsthand.

  Prosaically, people in the U.S. rarely reveal their salaries. Even the most socially minded will not reveal theirs. Think about how that works.

  Society has its ways to cohere, and prevail.

  Sick, quaint secrets thrum subcutaneously on both sides of my family.

  Aunt Clarissa doesn’t like men as a class, but especially my father and me. Not a family secret. She’s not reserved about her feelings. Disdain—no problem expressing it. But she’s a recluse and a hoarder.

  Ants creep and crawl back and forth to the Queen in the colony, carrying food. Are we not ants?

  My brain amps misty, wistful, totally. I see the barbecue pit, my father disdainfully flipping burgers; Little Sister scarce and present, a selectively mute angelic vegetarian taking distance from us way-too-ordinary beings; Bro Hart moaning about some shit; and Mother, reticent, there-not-there. What the hell? MOTHER.

  At nine I stared at pictures of Mother when she was nine, so cool, Mother, Ellen, a girl, and only I alone could force a Mother into Being. Mother? I asked the photo. Mother, I demand, still. Catching me out, Mother called me obsessive or a nut job, depending on her mood. I still say to her, “How about, ‘My son’s impassioned about love, mystery, and loss.’”

  We can photograph a life from birth, minute one, to death’s last breath.

  After-death or post-life is covered by spirit photographers.

  Mother says, OK, you’re right, you’re impassioned, but you have to move on.

  That kills me. Mother’s beliefs permeated my kid-brain—parental beliefs land hard.

  After people die, Mother told me when I was little, what remains are memories and photographs, that’s why we take them. Later, she contradicted herself: Your interest in the family photos is morbid, the photos, videos, you’re holding on to your childhood, it’s almost sick. I ignored her caution and still do. Maybe when she’s dead, I’ll reconsider.

  Often when people die, you reconsider their statements. I stare at their pictures.

  I didn’t recognize Mother’s games playing in my mind. Or in what ways my desires and views began with hers, but then things happened to upset that, and desires settled in another place entirely. A non-place, basically. Or, an anti-place with antimatter. But let’s say spirit dominates.

  OK, I can’t really know Mother, or the other.

  The family is other than you, but also the other is in you. You should know yourself, but also you can’t know yourself, mostly you can’t, because of how you’re inhabited by others. Sometimes that other is you.

  family abuse

  The worst things happen in families, disgusting, painful, with long legacies, yet the family is idealized, and there’s no replacement for its form, not yet. In the 1960s political and social agitation affected social values, and media also remade family: blood ties, no longer necessary, but family cohesion still required loyalty and secrecy.

  Communes didn’t work, ideal communities—Brook Farm, Millbrook, etc.—and, in whatever form they take, queer or straight, single parent, etc., families remain a tool for survival. An orphan’s fate is usually worse.

  Child abuse is family abuse. The exceptions, the ones who tell, are temporary sensations—Roseanne; La Toya Jackson, Lindsay Lohan, Patty Hearst, Patti Davis. (The men? Ron Reagan: witty in his indiscretions.) The Kardashians have constructed their own category, a phenomenon of images based only on images. Their celebrity roots lie in O. J. Simpson’s relationship to Robert Kardashian, father of Kim, Khloé, Kourtney, and Rob (Jr.), that started in 1971. Father Robert was O.J.’s friend and a lawyer-turned-entrepreneur, let his law license lapse, and renewed it when O.J. murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, not criminally “proved,” so allegedly murdered. Kardashian was seen carrying O.J.’s duffle bag from O.J.’s house—it was filmed—maybe hiding O.J.’s bloody clothes, a day after the murders, and before O.J. was arrested on June 17, 1994. Robert and Kris Houghton Kardashian divorced in 1991; later, Kris married Olympic decathlete Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn Jenner. Her Hollywood “reveal” was a Vanity Fair cover. />
  What, if anything, does Kris K. know about her ex’s, Robert’s, involvement?

  What is it we watch when we watch. A family. We watch a family.

  where was i?

  At puberty, life changed, totally. First, Hart, four years ahead of me, set the stage. I watched him shave, hoping he’d slit his throat, knew when he was jerking off, because his door stayed shut and locked. His voice dropped, stupid Adam’s apple grew. His aggression amped. He hit harder. His hair was everywhere. His smell, the products he used. His penis. So it would go for me. And it did, in Zeke’s way.

  Mother had a vagina. I’d learned the word “vagina” on the playground, or maybe Mother used it, to be anatomically correct. I was already into my penis, pulling on it. But I wanted to see a girl’s, for real.

  At fifteen, I wanted to kill my brother and father. Figuratively, mostly. To be on the safe side, like all teens with bedrooms, I chilled there.

  During a siege of parental passive aggression, I’d wait until it blew over or Father drank himself quiet, and imagined another life and another family. Who doesn’t, consciously and unconsciously, want to invent a different family story. Obliterate the birth parents, concoct another that fits a wistful, burgeoning image.

  I was living a modified second-generation punk life, less violent and into the mix of heavy not death metal, Kurt Cobain. Alt-rock, moaning and groaning. Enraged by everything and everyone. Rage against the machine, dude. The Velvet Underground. Later I got pacified. Loved Pavement.

  Rage is normal, Mother said, to pacify me and herself. Progressive parents ruin teen spirit. Seriously, it blows.

  Normal is on a continuum between insanity and sanity, but who defines those degrees and what they mean, family to family. Hell. Barely sane, functionally insane, frequently sane, infrequently insane, moderately sane, THIS PERSON COULD GO EITHER WAY, worse than but approximating normal.

  I fell into science, first, because of insect-interest and photography, second, because of a supercharged madman high school biology teacher, Mr. Church, Franklin Church, sounds upstanding but seemed kinky. He had a purple scar across his forehead from fighting in Vietnam, hand-to-hand combat is what I pictured. Biology. Math. Chemistry, the warring test tubes.

  Mr. Church was cool, at the front of the classroom, tall, bald, his spherical head and bulging forehead, his protruding proboscis, framed by a green board. His scar shone scarlet in the sunlight. Mr. Church wasn’t superhuman, he wasn’t my hero, but he approximated or had a semblance of uniqueness as he stood in front of us. He appeared indifferent to everyone, removed, distracted, a whack job. Everyone knew that the war had done something to him.

  Like Great Uncle Zeke, he will become, in his high school class picture, a yellowed face, just an enigmatic smile, a beefy hand gesturing, goofily spoofing his usual, up against a wall.

  What’s that expression, what’s Uncle Zeke thinking, what’s happening in him—interiority. OK, I want that fantasy: mouth opens, shockingly, speaks the Truth. Isn’t that the thing we think we want from others—the truth. You don’t want the truth, believe me. This little boy wondered: Would the pictures wake up while I slept?

  family image, etc., the family majestic

  In my family’s photo album, Clarissa’s and Mother’s great-great-great aunt Matilda stands slightly off-center in the frame, in a longish shot, and central is a leafless tree, tall and straight, bifurcating the picture plane; behind that, a wooden house, whose gable-style roof rises in an inverted V. It’s a saltbox house with, it appears, an addition that slopes off the side of the roof. The door is roughly centered behind Tilly’s body, just slightly to the right of it. She’s a dark shape in a shapeless long dress, her white hair in contrast to her dress. The white frame of the door’s window also seems to frame her, partially.

  The print is overexposed. (A “self-exposure” in relationship to “exposure time” is a connection I’m working through.) It’s set on stiff, gray board. The composition: the long windows in the house mimic the shape of Matilda, or Tilly. She’s no Whistler’s Mother, but the photo’s symmetry creates serenity, and drew me to her, Aunt Matilda, there she was. Is. I see her now.

  A photograph doesn’t speak. If it did it would be just another unreliable narrator.

  Everyone is unreliable, except Aunt Clarissa. Ha.

  Clarissa has nurtured her highly strung instrument, and believes neurasthenia is a distinction bred of fine minds. Great and small minds think alike.

  you are not actually having fun

  Society plays itself out in images: Take picnics.

  Now, picture a picnic: a romantic, comforting, and/or familial image. But a picnic won’t be as pleasant as its mental picture.

  Call it up: Last summer you bought a hamper. It’s summer again. Let’s have a picnic. Wow. You, mother, sister, lover, brother, father, or buddy spend time buying the food, preparing it, packing it up, etc. You and yours jump into a car, damn, someone’s late, wait, wait, then because it’s Sunday the roads are jammed, what did you expect, right? Plus, the AC doesn’t work. Or someone forgot the blanket. Or the bug spray, and there might be black ants, black flies, mosquitoes. OK, whew, you locate a spot in a park, but it’s way more crowded than you imagined; or you decided on going to the beach, and the blanket’s down, but there are soda cans and plastic wrappers everywhere. Disgusting. Still, you’ve arrived. All the food, carefully wrapped and prepared, comes out of the hamper, but the wind gusts and sand sprays over the blanket, the food, people move quickly to save the potato salad, then need to straighten the blanket, more sand lands. OK, the blanket’s wrinkled and sandy. Then something spills. Twenty minutes later, you’ve eaten, everyone’s full, and you all sit there, looking at the ocean, lake, a tree or two. After all that effort, an anticlimax. Then? Get drunk. Sleep. Argue. Have sex. Clean up. Drive home.

  The word “picnic,” meant to be an idyll, signifies an idyllic image; the actual event is mostly hellish.

  Our family once picnicked inside the car, as rain poured down.

  We can plan them, the way we do weddings, anniversaries, a picnic of delicious eats, sun-joy and togetherness, happiness galore: high expectations for a luxe day to remember, pleasant indolence, blissful relaxation.

  Reality disappoints regularly. When people are supposed to have fun, it’s likely they won’t, because fun can’t live up to its image.

  Does anything live up to its image?

  self, narrating

  My first pure love was Maisie, the model for all my true loves. Maisie was a tiny, perfect girl. She lived in the neighborhood and we went to nursery school together, my girl next door. We played together, sort of, that is, I acknowledged her presence, even though I didn’t like girls. She was in my kindergarten too. I figured I’d marry her, understanding that was the way of it, and I may have asked her.

  On the morning after Christmas, barely morning, I awoke because of a weird moaning, a lowing, a freaky cry, never heard before, oh Maisie, Maisie, Maisie, oh no, no. An awful howling, that mother’s still crying in my head, Maisie Maisie. Her mother was running or walking on the road, back and forth, shrieking and crying. They lived a long ways down the road.

  Maisie passed away in her sleep, Mother told me. Died. She was sick, but no one knew it.

  Her parents didn’t know? How come they didn’t? It’s their fault.

  No, it’s no one’s fault. She was sick. She had walking pneumonia.

  So, Maisie walked sick in her sleep, walked and walked until she met death, she walked right up to death.

  Death kept her perfect in my mind.

  The drive for perfection brings suffering.

  Maisie was beautiful like Little Sister, who hadn’t come into our lives yet.

  culture values looking

  “Looking” feels outside of time, call it timeless; but looking is always in time. Looking can make anyone feel out of time, since looking has an ahistorical feel. But when we look at pictures of the past, we look with our history, from
inside our time.

  Critics, notably Barthes and Sontag, proposed that photography is necessarily about death, because the moment in the photograph is gone, past (even when the person in it isn’t, just always younger), the photograph represents the past, and death.

  Photographic theory shouldn’t ignore the reality of a viewer’s presence, who activates a picture. A viewer looks in the present, and brings the past into the present. And context changes, attitudes change, etc., toward the so-called “lost object.” Reception, how we read, is also part of the picture.

  Roland Barthes birthed reader-response theory, in “The Death of the Author”: the rise of the reader was at the expense of the Author.

  Humanists went CRAZY. No authors?

  A viewer invests in pictures. Projects into them. How far that projection goes, how much “life” the photograph can deliver, sustain, depends on its “art.” A vital receiver often sees more than a taker might have intended. Viewers create dimensionality from one dimension.

  From nothing to nothing. Nothing more. More nothing. Kidding.

  What is inexpressible? What are there no words for? What if you can’t experience what there are no words for? So this conundrum is why positivism brought the camera with it. Hypothetically, the invention appears to tell stories and report moments, which themselves can’t say what they are but show SOMETHING.

  The totally appropriate apparatus for a species that imagines it has more to say than it does.

  Plus, the photographic apparatus: one, is an entity proving existence, and its opposite; two, is an entity encouraging projections of the highest and lowest order.

  An image is an image is an image is an image. But a rose names something.

  the picture people i: the family album

  as totem

  In hundreds of albums I haven’t found cigarette burns or other defacements of pictures of reviled relatives. It’s hard, even when you hate people, to deface their pix. Or burn them, though filmmaker Hollis Frampton did just that in his film (nostalgia). He filmed the burning of photographs he’d taken; it was his entry into filmmaking, his negation of photography, or of his photographic practice.