the picture people face values
Most of us live on the skin of existence, it’s where we are situated; it’s where photographs collide with lived life.
Skin of existence: a thin skein covers us, concealing deep-dish discontent.
If I can explain this: much of private life, so-called, is silent, a silent conversation with ourselves, we tell ourselves things we don’t tell anyone else, except therapists and psychics. We imagine acts that appear on the surface will be taken at face value, unexamined, unanalyzed. People don’t see themselves as superficial, but sometimes call their behavior transparent. Or know they’re difficult and admit it (often with perverse pleasure). People see pictures in both ways, as transparent and difficult to read.
We act based on an image: “I can’t see myself doing that.”
DO YOU GET THE PICTURE? DOES THE PICTURE GET YOU? (Bears repeating.)
Illusion shapes and shelters us, as necessary as oxygen and water. Illusions won’t die, they are not delusions, and seem part of a human being’s hardwiring. The illusion, say, that life will continue as it was yesterday or an hour ago, could be genetic.
family, family
Little Sister’s youthful discretions and silences didn’t stop me from talking to her, but she could put a freeze on, paralyze people the way Mr. Petey did his prey before gorging on them. She composed, in my eyes, an ideal picture, but in three dimensions; when I discovered an otherworldliness in her, or another dimension, I believed her linked to our ancestors in more ways than blood.
I accept the return of the repressed, though also have rational urges against it. But resemblances, not physical, temperamental, flowed between Clover Adams and Little Sister. Together, the metaphysical couple made my maternal family uncanny. Actual twins separated in life by 1,500 miles were often alike. But their separation was 150 years.
It was written, notably by her fiancé, Henry Adams, that Clover wasn’t beautiful.
Little Sister is. She owns symmetrical features, hazel eyes, porcelain skin, straight blond hair to mid-back, and is always referred to as pretty or beautiful. Her appearance, the surface, is unmarked by the inner turbulence that results in her not speaking. She speaks more, but still not much in public.
I’m creating her word-picture. Describing people—with adjectives I call “nonspecific descriptors” or “neutered language”—turns them into clichés, generics, brands. Millions of women fit her profile. In your mind’s eye there’s a version of her. Then add: selectively mute, left-handed—these aren’t immediately obvious, no instant visual (vis-factoid)—and what is imagined?
Words create images, right; but controlling them is trickily elusive, and visual images may be still more elusive, since there’s no dictionary for images, and always a diffuse etymology.
I prefer, maybe weirdly, the obliquity of pictures.
In photographs, Little Sister is never central in the frame but to the right or left, a stealth figure; even in a corner of a room or frame, she assumes space and volume, her physical presence displacing more than her small body. In my eyes.
When Bro Hart and I stood next to each other in pix Mother took, he loomed over me until I turned thirteen; I shot up ten inches, became the taller boy, which he hated. You can see it. I know his expressions. The power shift shows especially in later photos, after the family dispersal or common nuclear diaspora, when there are scant photos of us together, except at weddings, where we stand far apart. Totally obvious, because it was also physical that gaping distance between us, at his second wedding. It was plain as the noses on our faces. Ha.
Thoughts for today: efficacy of the word “plain.”
Plain observation. I love that. There is none, but I love it.
Plain talk. Pain talk. Haha.
anti auntie
Self-historicizing, selfie-narration: Clarissa dumped me when I became a “man.” I came of age, she lost interest, the boy had vanished, and this cruel exclusion struck at the dawn and curse of adulthood. She excluded me, ignored me as much as she could.
Who was the family symptom carrier: Little Sister, Clarissa, me? A family board game, spot the problem child.
OK, Clarissa had downed many potent combos of drugs, tons of natural remedies, and had doctors’ scrips to undo the damage. Her biological, neurological grid had already electrified her: she was like nobody I ever knew or would come to know. An object for study. Gertrude Stein stopped speaking to her nephew, Allan, when he was eighteen. From what I can figure, that was the deal.
“Men and girls, men and girls: Artificial swine and pearls.” —Gertrude Stein
Clarissa’s nasty move provoked intense and close—
encounter familial shocks, especially for Mother, who’d beg her, “What is wrong with you? Be kind to him.” Clarissa adapted, the way our species does, and simulated gestures of civility. To be kind doesn’t require a lot. Kindness is a behavior; a kind person does no harm, and can be enough in a cruel world; but a kind person doesn’t necessarily have to sacrifice anything. Like: Kind people contribute to charities and don’t get their hands dirty.
To give Mother cred, she felt “grossly disappointed in Clarissa,” but “Ezekiel, we’re sisters.” Clarissa believes and has said, “I created your mother,” but it’s well-known lore that she tried to smother Mother five days after her birth. Not unlike Hart with me.
Aunt Clarissa sprouted from a poisoned branch of the family tree.
Self-admission, and here comes the dope (haha): I collaborated, was Clarissa’s puppet for a long while, and did her bidding. She fed me stereoscopic slides, family lore, and while I hated the mysticism of blood ties, etc., I ate it also, maybe I was force-fed, but it osmosed inside me, my system. When she dropped me, splat, I’ve come to understand, my puppet self yearned for a puppet-master, and was led in a direction where I caught a disease I was investigating.
Not unusual.
She never could make it up, dropping me, no way. I’m not the forgive-and-forget kind of guy, also not a love-’em-and-leave-’em guy. To the max.
miscreants / homemade failures
Bro Hart’s bad enough, but several assholes have married into the family, and there’s nothing to do about in-laws but despise and ignore them. I wonder if blood-kin marry idiots and bring them into the family with intention, to destroy it from within. In-law disasters occur regularly in families, where, and nowhere else, things happen that should get people jailed because of how dangerous they really are. Psychological outlaws.
My father’s brothers’ spouses and their children—and even Mother’s sister Clarissa—they didn’t spill their shit all over us. OK, Clarissa did work my nerves, and Father—he didn’t give a damn about anyone, really. Bro Hart and his first wife—a damaged duo—got divorced, but he kept the dog. Cool. Then Hart carted in his second wife, a creep like him, and, because she seethed about her wretched family and its traumas, and stuff no Stark had anything to do with, we were slammed anyway. In-law shit. Oughta be a law. CIA, as noted, or was.
Father stopped speaking to his older bro, Theodore, Teddy, an ordinary criminal, Mother said, a thief. Another family secret, another scarlet letter, and nothing to the world at large, but sinister in ours. Reason for the break, still reverberating. Weddings? How does the tribe meet, on whose territory? The schism started before I was brought mewling into the world, which I entered through Mother’s vagina, her birth canal, and when I see her, I’m like, How, and Wow. You feel me?
Teddy: a social outcast, a stigmatic, in Goffman’s sense, and our only “legit-illegit” relative in the family, intriguing to me. He did what is invariably called a “stint,” or four years, in the whimsical slammer.
He was an outsider.
There are outsiders in families, the colloquial black sheep, or they are in-laws, step-and half-sibs, etc., who are psychological outlaws.
There are very few outsider artists in photography, just semi-sophisticated weirdos.
The Godfather said: “Keep your
friends close, your enemies closer.” In families, there’s no difference between friends and enemies, and there is no choice.
All in the family. No kidding.
life after death: lived by the living
So, Great Uncle Zeke, had two secrets, right. He lived his other secret deeper, more hidden, and no one knew but the other secret-sharers: he was a cross-dressing heterosexual. Great Aunt Madge found out, after he died, going through his clothes, saw bras and girdles, dresses and slips, high heels in a size 11, neatly piled, she said, in a small trunk he’d squirreled away behind other, large boxes, on a shelf higher than she could reach. (She was even shorter than Zeke.) There were photographs, too.
I’m assuming that seeing him in drag was her last, grievous shock, because even though a picture can’t tell “the truth,” since it can’t narrate itself, along with the other breath-stopping evidence she discovered, the photograph of Great Uncle Zeke wearing a string of pearls, a long black wig—looks like the fifties or early sixties—holding a big doll close to his chest, blew her away, literally.
Notions flood my head, while I project into hers. It’s not their house, but where was he? Clutching a doll? They didn’t or couldn’t have children. He’s gazing at the camera, the photographer, sexily, giving a low, sultry look that Margaret … I never saw that look, she’s thinking. Look at me, I’m a woman, a made-up, lipsticked, sheath-wearing man. I’m happy like this, and you never even guessed, Margaret.
It’s reported she fainted, or collapsed, survived a near-fatal heart attack, and died ten months later, just about a year after Zeke (both pretty old, in their late eighties). Married people often die within a year of each other (should discourage marriage). Couple mortality is a real phenomenon, but people who register it think it’s just a coincidence. Humans are related to other creatures that mate, from big to little, mammals to birds, and die when the mate dies. Lovebirds drop dead in their cages soon after their partners do.
People might recognize how the loss mattered to their friends’ health. So, I’m not saying humans don’t realize it, but they shake their heads, bemused, and toss it off. They don’t prepare for that eventuality: grieving people can will themselves to die. A broken heart, say, becomes a bad heart.
Margaret’s death came as a total shock. I heard how it happened, and it stunned me, really, and taught me about good and bad secrets, and trust, which was a big reason, later, I saw a shrink, to trust someone, not unique. Great Uncle Zeke’s being a cross-dresser wasn’t meaningless, but it wasn’t such a big deal. I mean, my gen and younger think of gender issues differently, and, after 9/11, some of us expect terrorist attacks, etc. Not in a paranoid way, just part of the zeitgeist. But Uncle Zeke’s secrecy was scary to me: personal secrets could have tragic consequences.
I began pondering consequences, which I never had, not as a child, for sure nothing felt consequential then, although everything actually lands in a profound way. The consequences of bad stuff caused time-outs, punishments, criticism of my behavior. Maybe I’d made Little Sister cry because I grabbed her toy. At four, you wouldn’t care; by nine, you would, if you had a heart at all. A child feels free, unhampered by consequences. This child did.
Besides, timing matters. You don’t necessarily find out when you need to know, to act, to avert disaster, say: a message arrives, post-dated. OK, it arrives, but if it’s not timely, temporality affects its meaning. People say, “If I knew that then …”
Steve Locke, an artist, told me, after he’d figured out a problem, “Like most discoveries, mine came too late.” (He contributed to a panel I organized as a grad student, on painting’s and photography’s relationship to time.)
Location, location, location.
Position, position, position.
Time’s not on your side.
in a foreign field
Things were going along OK, with some changes and hitches, but Maggie and I were good.
The first week of 2005, we traveled to London for our big break, our time against and escape from the usual, and no school. Etc.
Foreign field work: delving into unfamiliar zones, becoming unsettled in my being, happily disoriented, happily observing other attitudes, behaviors.
I noticed ordinary details, walking speed, dress styles, voice volume on streets, in the Tube, in cafés. Male vs. female differences in all of these, also.
Listening to people speak, paying close attention to understand what they were saying, upper, middle, and lower class accents, was hard at first. I watched their mouths. Everyone seemed to eat faster than Bostonians. Noticed more halitosis, maybe because of speed of ingestion and poor digestion.
Pub life differed from bar life, unless they were destination hot spots, then pretty much the same, crowded, louder music. Wine bars, classier, less raucous everywhere. Local pubs had a vocal, even vociferous cheeriness that bars don’t foster. Bars, in Cambridge, Boston, New York, felt mute compared with pub bonhomie, until much later in the night, near closing, when drunkenness ruled. More vomiting in the streets in London.
Maggie and I visited the usual places, some of them. She opted for the literary: Keats’s house, Dr. Johnson’s, Dickens’s, Woolf’s, Bram Stoker’s.
I saw the Queen’s residence in Richmond; the peacocks in Holland Park wandering the grounds, sometimes unfurling their tail feathers, an obscure thing or two; Maggie and I visited the crazy architect John Soane’s house together, and we also did a lot with CW. He squired us.
By the end of the second week, restless, I found some people to talk to about their family photographs—CW put me in touch.
On the street I wrote notes and took pictures as aide-mémoire, and felt touristy but I behaved the same way at home. My perceptions of self changed in another context, as if foreignness was itself second sight. Really, I fit right in, but that sense of being a curiosity remained, and later registered more.
I wanted to investigate, experience solo days and nights, and the night life. Maggie was cool, we never stopped each other. I continued to practice invisibility, a skill I’d worked on forever, Mr. Petey as my guide, and, as an outsider, I practiced blending into the crowd, a necessary job description for an ethnographer.
I went to a club, where I’d heard people were scoring drugs, easy to spot with the bathrooms busy, heavy pockets, furtive hands clasping, unclasping, hands in pockets again, and then I noticed two guys enter, they were dead wrong for the place. The men stood there for a while, looking around.
I knew they were undercover, and instantly, but very calmly, I
stood up, quiet as Mr. Petey on a branch, and left the guys
I was sitting with, all mates, they said they were, and walked like a ghost past the undercovers, who didn’t notice me, because they were looking ahead. They had an object in view, and I wasn’t it, not yet. I sidled by them.
I was often living in my head, even with Maggie beside me, so it was easy to act like a ghost. I returned the next night, or the night after, can’t remember now. The mates didn’t know I’d split, and there had been some arrests, and then they noticed I was gone. They were cool, though.
I’d go into cafés, workers’ ones, so-called, and have a poached egg on toast. Or, I’d go to a fancy hotel and have tea. I could move in and out, not having a classification in London, except American or foreigner. I’d watch people. I wanted to be a fly on the wall. People’s conversations depend on their day, news, weather, mishaps, and often a crisis. I’d listen in. The English are famously more circumspect than Americans, they even fear Americans’ rage for informality and blurts of intimacy.
Often CW was showing us around, the city’s huge, and he knew it pretty well, he took us to the V & A, and often we were riding the Tube, traversing the city below more than above.
Our sublet was big, a London flat with many rooms and solid walls. Maggie and I had a huge bedroom at one end of the apartment. CW, when not taking us around, was often out all night with friends and he often slept on the couch in the living ro
om, down the hall. Maggie could be super-energetic, editing her novel, optimistic, sometimes I thought frantic, and by the third week she was losing weight, and I worried she might be sick. She felt fine, absolutely brilliant, she said, adopting the coin of the realm. Her mother phoned more than usual and sent emails, her daughter far away, OK. On some days, her enthusiasm waned, but her work was work. Mine too. Can’t be high all the time.
Sometimes, Maggie seemed more concerned about appearances than usual, what people thought of her and me, or how I looked. What I wore. She seemed more unsettled than I was. Either I was realizing it more, as we knew each other better, or I was finally seeing it, what had always been there. Living together is weird, a marriage of true minds means you can deal with the untruths, also.
Right, we’re out and about, walking a lot, eating well, getting drunk, sleeping late, keeping up with the English Joneses, and we’re both doing our work.
The fifth week we’re there, a chilly morning in early February, I’m on a double-decker bus with CW. Maggie had decided to sleep in. CW and I were heading to the Tate (Turner Whistler Monet exhibition). I like staring out of windows, ever since I was a kid, from our house or from the car, or the school bus. Life goes along, and keeps going, and this was sadly comforting, that constant movement.
CW is beside me, and then I hear something from him, he says something, eyes down, face obscured in shadow, so I turn to look at him. His face has a startling expression, trouble smeared over it.
Wassup, man, I ask. Or something.
“Starkie, man, I’m sorry, man, I don’t know how …” Then he lifts his head, I will always see that head rise, his twinkly blue eyes darting like a snake’s.
“Starkie, Maggie and I are in love.”
Men and Apparitions Page 14
