Men and Apparitions

by Lynne Tillman

  What can any of us keep.

  I decided to be quiet.

  Silence can be like thunder.

  Hello, silence, my old friend.

  I see a cloudless sky, an open field rolling, and within its stillness and quiet, and from a plain bedroom, young John Cage hears sounds in a sweet breeze, bird songs, and the boy feels a rush. Sufficient unto himself, he knows that, and his ingenuity, his awareness, completes him. Silence gathers energy the longer it lasts; with duration, chance happens, life’s full of what’s not expected, he gets that. He wants that.

  Cage, in glorious solitude, listened to life as it happened. And, I could feel him: a lanky boy, in a plain bedroom, his large, pink ears sticking out, a skinny, long face. He’s grinning like a fool. He played the fool.

  Little Sister prepared me for the silence required in thinking, writing, reading. I don’t blame her for what happened between me and Maggie. Silence became an intangible obstacle. She has to deal with it, hers, all the time. Don’t know how she does it.

  Student silences sucker-punched me. An education major explained: a teacher needs to allow thirty seconds for a question to be answered, the prof can’t jump in until thirty secs. A student will respond, then. I tried it. How long is thirty seconds? One one hundred, two one hundred, three …

  four … five …

  Abandoned sounds of suppressed anger, repressed thoughts, tremble in the ear. No one wants to hear them.

  I landed in a family obeisant to history’s silent murmurs.

  Maggie’s placid expression—and beautiful smile—I took for acceptance and pleasure, in me. I never imagined she wore a mask, and don’t know why I didn’t. The stare: her slate wasn’t blank, prejudice had been written on it, by her mother whose bilious complaints about me were inscribed at the top. Daily, Maggie saw, with her own eyes, my flaws, and took invisible notes, and the slate filled up with my failures. The man she’d chosen to call hers disappointed her. In sickness and in health. Oh, man, meant zip to her.

  I need to listen, to hear, without ideas; without them I might have heard Maggie’s discontent.

  Silence can be dishonest, and violent speech threatens. The other’s silence might be stuffed with rebukes, even hatred. Mother told me about her best college friend, the person she trusted most in the world, who actually had so much contempt for her, and never said a word, and then a letter full of hate to her. No love, Zeke, not a word.

  Shithead’s multiplex head-nodding affirmations. Fuck him.

  Listening harder, I might’ve heard what was there that hadn’t caught my other senses. Might have heard what I didn’t want to hear.

  Yogi Berra: You can observe a lot by just watching.

  An image: Cage and Berra in a room, roaring together.

  Inchoate sounds are interpretations of loneliness.

  With no ideas, I could become an adept.

  The power of clairaudience: hearing sounds beyond the reach of ordinary experience or capacity, like the voices of the dead. Clairaudience entered the English language in the 1860s, a portmanteau of clairvoyance and audience.

  Where do the voices of the dead go, and old languages, endangered species, many dying daily. Life keeps dying.

  Consciousness of time, duration, sensing that IT ends, charges experience with finitude. That is, reality. That is, death.

  In silence, spirits roam.

  Cage looked to Kant: Kant wrote that there are two things that don’t have to mean anything—music and laughter. No meaning but to give deep pleasure.

  Explaining Clifford Geertz, Raymond Benton Jr. writes: Culture is not a force or causal agent in the world, but a context in which people live out their lives.

  Which means, culture vultures, back off! People can’t seek out culture, and, if they try, they do it within the context in which they exist.

  Cage: “The sound experience which I prefer to all others is the experience of silence. And the silence almost everywhere now is traffic.”

  I compare traffic with images.

  Everywhere, everything, everywhere, traffic. We walk, sit, think, drink, have sex, eat, etc., in traffic.

  Cage, sound, silence, chance: on photography’s compass. Photographs: silent. In need of explanation, response, facts don’t provide interpretation. A definitive moment comes by, with chance.

  Chance massively affects field work. It should, anyway. Things should be unpredictable, right. You shouldn’t know what’s what; who will say what, you can’t know—it’s about discovering who, what, how, why, while there; who knows why. (Who’s on first, ha.) You read about your subject, place, religion, customs, foods, rites. Still, researchers, theorists, and critics travel with their preconceptions—why else would they go? They have IDEAS about something, right? An ethnographer tries to dissuade herself from preconceived ideas. Chance must have a chance at rearranging the so-called mindset.

  It’s chance, meeting the one you love. It’s chance meeting the second or third or fourth one you love. We’re not mourning doves who mate for life, OK, some humans do. With a bird’s small brain, maybe there’s no monotony.

  Even with humans’ bigger brains, monotony—bad sex, boring days, bad jokes—is tolerated. Monogamy arose along with or after monotheism. Many gods could wreak their terrible wrath, and monotheism simplified existence, and made it safer (more boring).

  Monotheism gets high grades for progress, but there’s no logic there. Without proof of one god or many, what difference does it make? Any valid argument for why worshiping one god trumps worshiping many, or why mono-anything implies sophisticated thinking? Don’t think so.

  Monogamy enabled males to track their progeny, protect the gene pool. Same deal with lions, etc., in the animal kingdom.

  Monogamy brought monotony, Fordism and the factory line, repetitive labor, and tendinitis.

  The aleatoric is denied in a factory line and marriage.

  Mother had a close friend whose husband bored Mother to death, he said dumb, obvious stuff, no sense of humor. I saw, when I was a kid, that he bored his wife. But she never left him. Takes all kinds, people say. Actually, there aren’t that many kinds.

  Longevity isn’t a matter of chance, genes, sure, and environment. The well-off live longer than the poor-off. Rich men find it easier to marry again than poor ones. Old men draw younger women, with power and money. Anthropologists note the sense of these arrangements, then reserve judgment. Western women don’t like to acknowledge their attraction to and dependence on earners, successful men who keep them in the style they want to become accustomed to, and believe in love, holding to an illusion of their purity.

  Some people take advantage of chance, most don’t. The ones who do are called lucky. “Luck” means a person who takes chances others don’t (out of fear of change, lack of foresight, stunted psyches), finds opportunity in a random event, say. If things work out, the person is called lucky. “Lucky” people have less fear of failure.

  People find what they want to find, because they look for it (how stereotypes work; see Goffman’s Stigma), and don’t see what they don’t want to know.

  I need to finesse chance into dailiness, to rearrange my brain and sever those entangled neurons that keep me on the wrong “neuronic” tracks. Ha.

  images: true and false

  Inevitably, a ghost haunts pictures. A ghost is also an image, the word ghost gets used variously. I might say, a ghost in a picture is the amorphous shape of wishful thinking, or the “spirit” of hope. The interpretive ghost haunts people who try, as ethnographers do, to understand what may be indifferent to human understanding and the idea of sense.

  No person alive lives without wishes that might morph into ideas and beliefs.

  Some illusions are held to be true.

  Not an illusion but: what if there were one right way to do it? I’m haunted by that idea, and that I will never find it.

  Time passes, and what is “true” or “false” changes, which makes absolutes tricky. Convincing nonbeliever
s to believe a theory, or believers not to accept it, is near impossible.

  An atheist, like me, takes an absolutist position, and probably I shouldn’t, still I do, because I don’t believe in a god or many, but also paradoxically believe there are things I can’t know, like a god, or spirits, or ways the dead inhabit the living.

  If I were to believe in God, I would test my ability to be free from a habit.

  So-called “reality” contains many contentious, enthralling realities, or belief systems, in which people believe in life after death. What does that mean? The Lazarus story is a model, right.

  Realities transpire, one after another, emerging from, while also binding to, predecessors.

  on “the persistence of an ideal image”

  In the beginning there is nothing, and then nothing becomes something, and something becomes everything, and you’re fucked.

  I own an old photograph—not a mental image—of a little girl in a garden. I don’t remember where I found this stray. Can’t see her face (not unlike the Bonnard in this way). The girl wears a white, long-sleeved cotton dress, like a smock, and is smelling peonies. It’s an antique, creased photograph backed by cardboard. In white, she—I call her Alice—and the white blossoms share center space. Around her, leafy trees and bushes create dark shadows, so negative space encircles and frames her. To me, an idyllic image. I like to think she’s being embraced by her garden.

  That picture foments wordlessness, if that’s possible, because I’ve just used many words describing it. I’m not without words, but only believe I am. How can that be a feeling? Now, that little girl dies at thirty-one, say, but the love doesn’t die. It exists, somewhere, in its own field. It’s immaterial, right.

  I hold the love and her in my mind like in a locket or my garden. I tend my garden, it’s what I have.

  Now, hypothetically, you enter a garden.

  You are entering a garden. Do you see an English or French garden, wild grasses? A rosebush. Flower pots. How is it you, or I, imagine this or that, first? Then other images intrude, and a scene fills out. Other views, mental pictures, manifest. Or maybe your garden is cacti in a sullen desert—daunting, stark shapes, nature’s gravestones.

  Take a stroll in your image garden. Where are you? Is it around you? Maybe you’re at a desk or on a train or in a bathtub or sitting before a screen, or staring breathlessly at an indifferent, glorious horizon, or, walking on a city street, where buildings rise, taxis run by, horns hitting dissonant notes, and last night’s ravers lope along the streets, ravished.

  You want to be ravished, you were, once. That garden. That playground. That forest. That ocean.

  Look at the roses, tulips, crocus, peonies, lavender, myrtle.

  You experience memories as olfactory sensation, and yes, you can smell the flowers. In that garden, baby love wanders, first love, love at first sight, all those wishes, those hopes.

  Treasured images.

  Fading images.

  Revive them!

  In mine, she stands beside a sunflower and screams joyfully at a passing butterfly.

  In mine, Mr. Petey appears on the side of a wood fence, and only his movement shows him, because he blends in. He turns his head, his magnificently detailed head, and looks at me. Where have you been, Zeke? he asks, silent and still. Why have you forsaken me?

  I haven’t, I haven’t, I say. I’m crying now.

  There’s too much loss.

  The endurance of specific memories, and only those, mystifies me. Scenes return, seemingly haphazard, repeat and repeat, and, later, lose their distinctive edges and blur into others, become one more loss, just another question: did it happen? Or was it a video? Or, memories find other colorations from the current flow of new interpretations.

  Let me go against type (mine)—let me recognize prophesies, salutary unknowns, and please let me embellish my time here with unusual possibilities.

  The brain WANTS memory, must need it, because it’s part of the evolution of the species, though it’s imperfect and imperfect-able, so far. Am thinking that will change.

  Why does memory outwit us?

  Much of mine is painful. How does that help evolution. Or, anything.

  shoot me

  By 2011 I had owned a BlackBerry, two iPhones, two digital cameras; by 2013 I had an iPad mini, Android, another iPhone, another camera. I’d round a corner, send a text, see something (say nothing), click. I’d look at it, upload. Or delete it, it didn’t matter in so many ways, let me count them. Can’t. Lots more where it came from, like piss.

  It’s all about you and your reality, life is your personalized stationery.

  I felt no urge to be an artist, just to keep up and happy with novelty, the tech snap-ons, la vita nuova. But I became occupied with things, collected objects and held on to stuff. I couldn’t throw anything out and it was dismal. I’d lost Maggie, and everything I thought I knew I didn’t. My analyst suggested I couldn’t throw anything out because I’d been thrown out. I identified with everything, lost and found. Not kidding.

  I was further from my image of perfection, whatever that might be, not that I had ever been near perfect.

  I noticed what I framed and didn’t, a central metaphor, “What do you, Zeke, let in, or leave out?” Asked myself: does this picture show how I see the world, or is the world always already there? Or, why is it I see this way, not that way? Do I have the chops to make a picture that matches how I see the things before me? Or, can I change the way I see the world before me, and make others see it the way I do? Unlikely.

  Information isn’t knowledge, information is data in need of interpretation.

  What do images do? Do they illustrate? … But do we not already have too much to look at? (Generosity.) Left to myself, I would be perfectly contented with black pictures, providing Rauschenberg had painted them.

  —Cage

  Selfies, Instagrams, gifs, etc., here now, gone when, change changes, people want change to feel new when they’re not, because when you are new, you don’t think about it. We’re born heathen, promiscuous, polymorphous perverse, and then gimme gimme, and headlong, bound to betray first, second, third loves. Is there a rationale behind the change, does it lead to something? Oh, sure, commerce, but is that ever all there is.

  Disassembled, dissembling in pix that r us.

  Picture people unite! Fight images! Deny images! No? Love ’em, love our voluntary servitude, or leave ’em.

  Vilém Flusser: people LOVE being functionaries of the camera.

  DO WE KNOW WHY WE TAKE PIX? Is it a “PERSONAL” or “SOCIAL” DECISION? WHAT IS THE IMPULSE?

  in my backyard

  Where was I then? Looking at the sky. Mother, totally present. I led a supercharged-child-existence, unhampered by reality, mostly.

  Self-narrating, self-history-building.

  It was a bright afternoon and school was out. The school-bus driver, Chubby Lola, dropped me at the top of the road leading to our house down a long lane, I guess I was eight or nine, but on an impulse, I suppose, I turned in the opposite direction, because I didn’t want to go home. As far as I can recall, it was the first time I didn’t want to go home. I’m not sure why it occurred then, this feeling. I don’t think Father had punished me or something like that. I walked until I reached a little post office that served the area. I knew it was there, but didn’t know I was heading to it. Walking in alone surprised me, opening the door by myself, I hadn’t done it there before. By myself. I liked that.

  The postmistress, Cassie, knew me. Hello, she said. I mumbled, Hi, and looked at the stamps in the glass cases, lingering, because I really liked the pictures, especially of animals, and then read a wanted poster, a fuzzy picture of a girl and a boy, teenagers. They had robbed some houses in the area, and the poster said anyone who sees them shouldn’t approach them because they were armed and dangerous. I stood there. These strangers looked very mean, they weren’t acting like criminals, this wasn’t TV, and they might rob our house. What if Mo
ther was killed. I’d hear the shots. Her screams. I’d hide under my bed, but they’d find me, they do on TV. Or, they wouldn’t see me, but I’d be forced to do a line-up, then I’d have to testify, and the killers would put a hit out on me. I couldn’t identify them, I’d plead to the cops, they’ll kill me. No way, I wouldn’t be able to escape, they’d find me under my bed. The girl would yell, “He’s just a kid!” “But he saw us,” the guy would say. “He can identify us.” And there’s no Bruce Willis or Liam Neeson, no fanatic to kill them and save me. I scream, “I won’t tell I won’t tell don’t kill me.” Boom, boom. I’m dead.

  I’m kid-sobbing. Cassie runs out from behind her cage, but as she did I raced out of the door, and ran all the way home. Mother wasn’t back. Nobody was around to know I was late. Little Sister was two or three, her nanny in the kitchen making dinner, which she did when Mother drove to Boston. Bro Hart was probably in his room, jerking off. He was about twelve or thirteen. I avoided him, stayed out of his way, he could beat me up.

  I didn’t know what to do about what happened, talk or bury it. That seems crucial, how a kid handles a bad event. I felt humiliated, totally freaked, and I was still scared in the house, because the crazed criminals might invade it any time, armed and dangerous. I’d never taken those words seriously. Just TV talk.

  I walked into the garden, it was late spring, maybe that’s why I didn’t want to go home, and I looked for Mr. Petey, but he wasn’t around.

  The only people I worried about being murdered were Mother and Little Sister, not Bro Hart and Father. I don’t remember feeling guilty. I don’t know how I got over it, either, and maybe I didn’t, maybe it’s soiled my psyche forever.

  I’m sick of love; I wish I’d never met you

  I’m sick of love; I’m trying to forget you.

  —Bob Dylan