There are ways civilizations died that we don’t know.
Stephen Hawking has warned the world about Artificial Intelligence: soon, he cautions, humans will be controlled by their own intelligent machines and devices, doing it faster and better. Hawking doesn’t strike me as an alarmist. It might be where our intelligence has been heading, to the ultimate metaphysical authoritarianism.
do our animals love us?
A cultural anthropologist can’t know but only assay reasons for behavior or activities. We investigate, listen, have informers. But, as Geertz wrote, “The ethnographer does not, and, in my opinion, largely cannot, perceive what his informants perceive.” Ethnographers surmise or “perceive,” as Geertz puts it, “with, through, or by means of.”
I want to know about a society’s attitudes toward pets, say, through photographs of them. Usually dogs and cats show up in family albums, parakeets, parrots, turtles, fish. (Not in the Stark family’s. Sigh.)
Humans recognize big and little, maybe big can protect little, we imagine. But how do dogs account for their size: in dog parks, big and little sniff each other’s genitals. What’s happening there? Humans are not meant to act strictly on instincts; they are there, though, but a maternal instinct in some human females might not have a chance.
Regularly, the family dog is pictured seated on a chair, apparently looking at the camera, smiling or straight-faced. Often it will be seated, on a chair or couch, next to the dog’s human companion. Cats rarely are shot this way, that is, posed, since cats don’t usually do what they are asked to do; dogs are eager to please and will obey commands such as “stay.” Often, a dog is shot risen on its hind legs, as if standing, humanly, at the sink, or with its paws on the kitchen table. Rarely are pets, now animal companions, shot in action, because the picture would be out of focus.
Most frequently, a pet is pictured in its owner’s or some other person’s arms or lap. This pose, the embraced dog or cat, marks ownership, of course, but as an “image” it is similar to landscape paintings that first showed a lord/owner’s territory, he having commissioned the painting; later, the landscape became a treasured common or accessible view—for example, the Hudson River Valley School artists’ endless representations of that river. With photography, artists such as Ansel Adams shot pristine pictures of the mountains and valleys in the West. Carleton Watkins’s photographs, for the majority of Americans, were the first pictures of the West. The first time people saw images of it, what was out there.
Imagine, what is prosaic now was once like, in our time, pictures sent back from the moon.
When a person and pet are photographed together, sometimes they look at the camera or at each other; alternatively, the pet might look at the camera, the person at the pet, and vice versa. Not unlike pictures of human friends together. Cats are mostly shot on their own; again they don’t sit still, unless well trained or nearly dead.
The anthropomorphizing of animals is clear in pictures with dogs. A double portrait shows the relationship between the two species; but, as codified images, they also construct that relationship.
Dogs and cats shot on their own represent the ultimate humanizing of them.
These are vernacular pet portraits.
The dog looks at or toward the camera—at the person behind the camera. The cat does not. These behaviors for or against (kidding) the camera figure as “display stances and position-motifs.” Pets, I’ve noted, signify for humans: they are image-status bearers, especially for those people I call “breed worshipers.” Breed worshipers are unconscious or conscious purists, who hope, by being represented by a pure breed, their own mixed or mutt-like flaws will be significantly muted or ignored. These same people are often the hounds of style.
national, iconic images
I found this pic in a bag of throwaways.
Handwritten on back: “June 15, 1949: Ernest + Dusty. ‘Look at my dogs ears. Ernest is mad. Notice Oddie.’”
A cryptic message, “Ernest is mad,” frames an otherwise iconic image of an American boy and his dog. Sun shining. Maybe a farm, or a house in the countryside. Anyone seeing this pic sees a version or typology, an image of “America.” There are several, but this notion of the West and prairie and farm remain most “symbolic.” The State Fairs, and all that stuff, so different from what’s actually going on in those places: meth, heroin, opioids.
Wild animals, undomesticated, under-domesticated, increasingly show up in people’s habitats and photographs. Many reasons for keeping lions and tigers at home: I prefer to think that, as human beings become more dissatisfied with their own over-domestication and conformity, a wild animal substitutes for the losses that civilization has brought. Civilization, so-called. The many wars now, everywhere (in 2014, forty-one active ones), and the West’s participation, starting or aiding them, also suits this interpretation, augmenting other more rational “irrational” reasons—economic, territorial, sectarian, etc., human beings are bellicose, and have not stopped being territorial, in small and large ways. Small ways: the academic community, where fights over subjects, claims to have been there first and to own the subject abound, ad nauseam; these claims are not so different, only in degree, from dogs pissing on trees (which humans do, at times; certainly men still spit from rooftops) or going to war for land, oil, diamonds.
little and/or big inheritances
Dumb and dumber times in the nineties, when I came of age, whatever that means, with a super-smart president, Bill Clinton, impeached for lying to Congress. During his trial, his emphasis on the verb “is” turned tense dinner-table conversations into discussions about tenses. And blow jobs. So, BJs became the sex act de rigueur for high schoolers. We boys got lucky.
In high school, I acted “regular,” a boys-gone-wild character, haha, good with my crew—checking out bands, downing multiple shots and vomiting, going to raves, clubs, a little stealing and mischief, nothing felonious, and girls, and yeah, drugs—weed and what was in our parents’ medicine cabinets. Predictable. I drove too fast until I stopped driving completely, I freaked out, blind drunk driving.
Later I was stunned with regret, because I knew I’d forgotten important things, lodged maybe deep inside a strange brain zone. Hormones, too, chemicals = voodoo and magic. Those days and years, walking in the halls, going to one dopey class after another, thinking about my hair, my skin, my penis, their penises, her breasts, their vaginas, maybe I’d wear eyeliner for a week, holing up in my bedroom, taking tokes out a window, I felt me was also not-me, this me might be me or, conceivably, a traitor. Could I decide that, or anything?
I quit the tennis team end of my junior year, because it wasn’t cool, and I was smoking a lot of weed, and on the court had thoughts like, Why am I doing this? But much worse I lost sight of Mr. Petey.
I DJed in high school, LOUD, a kind of counterphobic acting out to renounce loving Little Sister’s quiet. Didn’t last too long, because it encouraged my control issues. Actually, now I’m supersensitive to sound, probably because of my early predilections.
But in bars and clubs, doing field work, I blend in, wearing tiny ear buds, disappearing into a scene the way Mr. Petey taught me, and the way an ethnographer should be. (See later, MEN IN QUOTES: To stay on course, and, with monastic deliberateness, even at loose ends and at odds with myself, but my self needed something to be myself, I found a new field, New Men.)
If I were hired as a history DJ, of cultural and psychological sounds, I’d underlay a hiss on every track to signify what you can’t really hear anymore but that resounds, and gets submerged by current noises, or might be totally repressed or somehow erased from consciousness, and the hiss would remind everyone that life-stuff is disappearing, involuntarily.
I’m near the fence in the backyard. Mr. Petey is hiding. A breeze wafts and causes a slight movement, a leaf rises in the air, and he is revealed.
A praying mantis is so cleverly and naturally hidden, I had to learn it.
I see him, he notes me. Mr.
Petey doesn’t lift even one elegant leg to run. No, he turns his tiny head, and faces me, and looks closely at me. His protruding eye beads stare at mine, or me. Mr. Petey cocks his particular head to get a better view of this large, clumsy, fatheaded creature staring at him. Intelligent Mr. Petey. I want to stroke his slender back.
I hold this image in my mind, vivid as it was then, maybe. I don’t want it to tarnish. What if I can’t, and this never returns. HISS.
When I freeze in place like Mr. Petey, I make myself invisible, and people walk right past me, or forget I’m there. In London, where I went, in part, to study “others like me,” I practiced invisibility. I wanted to be able to disappear.
Some tell me stories as though they’re talking to an empty room. I know how to turn into an ear; then, nothing stops them from revealing private episodes. I give them no resistance, sure, like a shrink.
I know, the capacity for invisibility sounds crazy, but I’m sure I have it, since I’ve performed it frequently.
I’m an image of a member of the human race who revisits the past in images, like Mr. Petey, he’s an image now. I think this, and wonder, “What is a thought?” An image is one, maybe. As an image I’m thinking of an image.
appearance is reality
A character can be redeemed especially when the “actor” is televisual. Then they can escape the stigma of being “ugly as sin” with plastic surgery (see Paula Jones, who said she had an affair with Prez Clinton—soon her “witchy” honker disappears; Linda Tripp, Republican operative spy in the Clinton White House—she ratted out Monica Lewinsky—face totally done). People believe the “even-featured.” A straight face tells it straight, right, Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty blah, “Ugly” False and Evil. The bad guys have scaggy skin, banged-up noses, ruddy scars, etc. Literally, marked
(up) men.
A proposition: people shed ignorance by gaining knowledge and changing attitudes, change can create forward movement in one group or arena, stasis in another. There is backward movement too, which some might call differential progress on an economic model. There’s also nullification and cancellation: famine here, plenty there; floods here, droughts there.
I’m in my time, a knowing ignorant or an ignorant knowing. What I know is a bit of something that’s not whole, and it’s all about disconnectedness, I’m in the drift. Then there’s drag. Drift, Drag, Drift, plus the Goertler effect: turbulence in everything.
Change changes change. Many get shortchanged.
OK, there’s reliability in DNA, the latest omniscient narrator in our lives. Still, O.J. got off: one of his dream-team lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, said of the L.A. police, “In their minds O.J. was guilty, and therefore it was OK to
frame him.”
I met Barry Scheck, another of his dream-team, in a restaurant, I’d had a few, and went up to him. “Alan shouldn’t say things like that,” he said. So, I pressed him, because who didn’t watch that trial, I was sixteen: “O.J. never said he did it.”
People get off even with masses of DNA evidence indicting them, because human beings’ minds form in sync with prejudice; prejudiced witnessing does not evince credible “evidence.” Vision is free of culture, society, never. The video of Rodney King, in slo-mo, a black man clubbed, kicked, beaten, “proved” only that seeing is believing what you want to believe. Cops get off. LA riots.
Slo-mo—“invisible to the human eye” movements made visible. Eadweard Muybridge: his magical series of a galloping horse’s four legs in the air. He wanted to know if all four legs went airborne. Great inventions come from curiosity. Prosthetic limbs developed, with the help of slo-mo, and helped also by Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, the brain makes a fake arm move. Watching motion, suspended, helped make machines become airborne; with animation, Pixar, etc., bodies can be re-made, wholesale plastic surgery.
Slowed-down dream scenes serve “past-ness,” and slo-mo beautifies “reality,” sex, for one. Drug experiences, say, in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, slowly turn bodies into plastic, elastic forms, slithering and flowing like molasses. The characters have sex, sleep, walk in druggy dreams, so slowly. The mechanics of bodies encounter the effects of entropy, bodies not in motion remain immobilized, static. Slo-mo’s a downer for eyes, evanescence without a pulse.
Bodies can resemble their own ghosts in this sluggish limbo-land, a tech purgatorio.
The camera tweaked Walter Benjamin’s imagination. With a machine, no-hands, anyone can make art, it was social, democratic. The eye isn’t the hand, it’s mechanical, the hand in art is trained, though the hand “feels,” and a bass player, say, has a touch and a feel. People feel music, also. But skill is involved in seeing, also. Benjamin wasn’t considering an educated or educable eye, “eye-education,” selective vision, and subjectivity. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is brilliant, seminal. Just saying.
All inventions are either for us or against us, and sold that way, even washing machines.
Designs for prosthetics, etc., slo-mo’s benefits when stoned, are damn cool. Technology can also distract: human claims for its successes inculcate passivity in users. Humans can come to believe too much in their tools, and depend on them for happiness.
Something is always trending.
a boy, a shutterbug
With my starter-guy, I shot trees, flowers, clouds, cloudless skies where Great Uncle Ezekiel and Uncle Lionel might be rocking. The little disc camera did everything automatically, but I shot out of focus, because I moved the camera, liked blurs, unformed things like me. I wasn’t into the mechanics of cameras—lenses, focal length, speed—just the imagination behind the camera—me. I was engaged in me, what was before me, which became a strange ownership, probably symptomatic or evidence of a little person’s pride in what he believes he controls. Silly tot.
Later, when Father allowed it, I fooled around with his Polaroid cameras. Dad knew Land, its inventor, personally, or I thought he had to, the way he talked about him and his camera. John Maurice Stark bought every Polaroid camera that came to market. Top of the line. Each time, the newest version was sleeker, flatter, faster.
Polaroid collapsed past, present, future, and started me up, collapsing past, present, future (waiting for it). I LIVE that. We live unaccountably with time. Time does damage. I can’t account for my time, no one can. Time just goes on, and humans are left alone, wondering what the fuck they’re doing in the here and now.
acadoomia
Scholars fall for their objects of study and nurture them, their childhood dreams. When I’m grown up, I’m gonna be …
Few of them know why their interest becomes a passion, a purpose, a mania.
Biographers relinquish their own lives, absorbed in another’s for years.
I might want to analyze a person who does that. Wonder if they’re a class or type, discernible.
Necro-image-love (my term) has its advocates—Edgar Allan Poe, for one.
English profs and historians et al. profess a love for their period, “their person,” usually dead, my him’s or her’s, they say, and these enunciations reek of scholarly necrophilia. Professors may also closely mimic, in style, their self-proclaimed soul-mates. When listening to them at conferences, as they talk about their subjects—Marilyn Monroe, Lincoln, Tupac Shakur, Marx, Sappho, Emerson, Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Steve Jobs—I hear their urgent claims for their idols, scholarship a facade for image worship and identification.
Image worship thrives, because of distance and lack of actual contact; a pseudo-intimacy relies on DISTANCE, because to be close while far, intimate but remote, makes any relationship possible. The “other” has no way out. (In his bio of Jean Genet, Edmund White admitted that his subject would not like him.) Like operating a zoom lens, people at a distance own the ability to be close, maybe to what shouldn’t be allowed near, which again exalts and exaggerates people’s position in the universe, to themselves. Runs the grandiosity engine, big time.
In my field, I
didn’t have that kind of love. True, I was all about Geertz, say, Jean Rouch’s anthro movies, cool stuff. Cultural anthropologists do have favorite tribes, clubs, gangs, thriving on multiples is dope, and years and years ago, one of them might have extolled “his pygmies.” Pathology is where so-called sanity also is.
inheritance, a value?
Clarissa talked way too much about our sterling ancestors, and turned me off. Mother’s family was “image-saturated,” my term. Many pix were taken or painted by amateurs in the family and artists, such as salty Great Aunt Dot. Clover Adams had earned a few lines in history books, because of her marriage to an Adams, and she was Mother’s and Clarissa’s very special claim to fame, to their family’s importance. I was kind of, well, underwhelmed. But Clover Adams’s birth was coincident with the birth of photography: the historical Clover was born into the same age as mine, and she was a picture person. That’s solid. Plus, she took photographs, sort of a professional. But her husband, Henry, believed that the medium couldn’t “catch the spirit” compared with painting, say. A brilliant historian/writer, but not a visionary.
Clover was a hero to my feminist mother and aunt.
Photography was also the family’s vice, in some sense, by fostering life as images, especially of the past.
What’s a vice? Never personal. Usually compulsive behavior, bad behavior, according to society’s dicta.
Love photography, live it, and life is behind the eye of a viewfinder.
Aunt Clarissa was not about being in the moment, but about finding IT, transcending base society, aka Transcendentalism, by meditating on life’s bounty and breathing in, breathing out poetry. Possessed by family history and the literary arts, she mostly did her present in the past, a fusion she made work, or, let’s say, in her mind she did, and maybe that’s all that counts when you’re an egomaniac.
Spiritualism had a doctrine: there was an interplay between the living and the dead.
Men and Apparitions Page 12
