I didn’t want to see her portraits of me, myself as she saw me. I didn’t know she was shooting them. Plus, she never showed me any of her work. And I had never asked, a bridge I didn’t want to cross or a question I didn’t want answered, because YES or NO had its problems. Responsibility and rejection, in that order.
If I ever attempt more family image work, I might approach Tilda’s art by broaching treacherous ground. Specifically, a photographer’s disposition—the subject behind the camera toward the object—though this subject matter reeks of intentionality, almost an art crime.
I’m wondering about the effects of family resemblance: when an artist pictures a family member, what’s the psychological impact of that family resemblance? What is resonant? Is the image always a self-image/portrait, when the shooter resembles the poser, and projects into it?
improbable life
After Uncle Lionel gave up the ghost, and I don’t know who got his—kidding—on the way to the cemetery in a town about thirty miles from our family home, in a limo following the hearse, I had a weird sensation. I smelled an aroma associated with my kid-hood, I saw myself running in our backyard, Mr. Petey on the fence, and I lost myself for a while. Some town cars were following, snaking behind, headlights on. I’d never been in a funeral procession. Father said nothing. He wore dark glasses, so I guess he’d cried. Mother and Little Sister talked a little—Little Sister was crying. Closer to the open gates of the cemetery, the sensation intensified. Our car crawled to a stop at Lionel’s grave site. The coffin was poised over the dark, empty rectangle, and two grave diggers, one old, one young, stood, both smoking, in the distance. Uncle Lionel had lots of friends, he was a cool guy, not like his younger brother; everyone gathered around, a minister stood up, began to read, and I wanted to bolt. Mother, sensing my restlessness, took my hand, and I couldn’t. As soon as people had thrown flowers on his coffin, I wandered off, because I knew I would see Maisie’s grave, I knew it would be near Lionel’s, and I walked about thirty feet, and there it was. our dearest maisie. taken too soon. 1979–1985.
I touched the engraving, her name, the numbers, six years of life. I hadn’t thought about her in a very long time. But I knew I’d meet her again, find her somehow. Then I walked back to Uncle Lionel’s grave, sadder. The grave diggers were hovering. I stared at them, and wondered about how they came to be grave diggers, death’s maintenance men. They looked glum, then they didn’t, expressionless, or they were just workers. I kept watching them until my curiosity got to me. So I told them I was studying cultural anthropology, and was curious about how they’d become grave diggers. The younger one, who wasn’t that young, said, “Joe Strummer, you know, the Clash, he did it in seventy-three, so I thought, why not try it.” He turned away, laughing.
The older man told me his father did it. It was steady. He said, you get used to it. “I like it when families come back and put flowers on their graves.” Then the two began shoveling soil over the coffin, and I looked down at what was Uncle Lionel in a wood box.
No alas poor Yoricks, no bonehead skull in hands, but I knew those guys would have some stories.
And, there came a time when I did, when I volunteered as a grave digger, for the hospice. I could attend funeral after funeral, and observe the bereaved, their behavior, the rituals. I thought I’d understand death better, death rituals, anyway.
Some people attending were distracted, some weeping, some couldn’t stand up, some stalwart, the young wives and husbands stricken, very young children ignorant, playing; older ones looked confused, and often were crying. Some people couldn’t leave the grave site, some couldn’t get away fast enough.
When people threw themselves on the coffin, jumped into the grave beside the coffin, I hated it. It unsettled me in ways I couldn’t understand, which is what’s most unsettling.
Some hold religious services, with ministers of different types. Most do something. A minority do nothing, some family members argue about who should speak, right over the coffin. Some carry flowers or pictures, which get buried with the dear departed. Pictures going with them is what—poignant, pathetic?
I wait along with the other grave digger until everyone splits, then we fill the grave with what’s called backfill, pat down the fresh earth down until it’s flat. A few people stay behind and watch a long time. That makes the job harder, their watchful eyes, whose meanings I can’t know. They can’t leave, the sobbing ones, slump over and need to be carried or held up. Next year, the bereaved spouse might remarry. Move on, or never move on. Mostly people do, though.
Being a gravedigger turned into routine work, fast, the way the old guy said. The thrill was gone. Half-kidding. Not exactly just like clocking in, but I adapted to it, became inured to it, the process, the grieving families. It must be like what a medical doctor feels, watching sick people and knowing the end is coming, that there’s no hope. They step back. They adapt.
I became too detached, and felt it was unsafe to continue. But what is safe for someone like me. Unsafe at any speed.
people do their lives
Some people want to forget, just go on. Not me.
My speculation is that “never having to remember” will be an add-on for future brains. Memory implants will also be available, seem natural. The synthetic knowledge/memory servers or providers will first be expensive, then cheap. The ante will always go up. The lobe/region of the brain for memory will wither, turn into an atavism. (Like the appendix, it might erupt with infection—killer memories?) Learning will be moot. Chip in, chip out. Could be a good thing, but depends on who makes the chips and on their uses.
Security is the biggest problem, the way Etta James sang it, “I want some security … / Without it I’m at a great loss.”
But why trust companies that promise security. “Are we not men?” Not kidding.
Without accrued memory, people won’t have a conscience, remorse, or guilt, all of which depend upon memory-work. If it’s not remembered, no one regrets a past bad, or good, act. Forget about it. Memorials and monuments will be built for a while, to assuage or prick conscience. But they’ll be more instances of public hypocrisy, since, in the future, the dead won’t be owed anything.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
—1 Corinthians 13.11
Not where I live.
—EHS
Mick Taussig describes ethnographers as strangers. I’m a pro at strangeness and estranged-ness. And, Estrangeness. Taussig doesn’t see “us” as estranged, but as outsiders whose position helps us see what insiders can’t. Best case version, in my view, Geertz, in After the Fact:
To convey … what it is to be an anthropologist not off somewhere beyond the reach of headlines but on some sort of fault line between the large and the little, photographs are quite inadequate. There is nothing to picture … They marginalize what is central. What is needed, or anyway must serve, is tableaus, anecdotes, parables, tales: mini-narratives with the narrator in them.
So, I wanted to collect those, some of which Goffman would call “atrocity tales” or “circles of lament.”
I began my project, MEN IN QUOTES, earnestly, knowing my department wouldn’t go for it, which added a thrill, probably inspirational, and also I was close to taking the pause, or in their terms, a leave. Bye-bye!
Plus, the field work didn’t require me to go off the reservation, since I was already living on it. Or off it.
man up / many down
Ethnographers research the usual and unusual, normal and abhorrent, on the prowl for material, subjects, the true enchilada. With my tribe, sample, or posse, I’m a native informant as well as a researcher. I watch myself and similar beasts. I was a new man among new women, and we new men needed help, and Zeke to the rescue.
I was a privileged, educated fuck-up, semi-successful, part-demi-new man, a suitable subject for treatment. I wasn’t looking for myself, not mirro
r images, either, but maybe to learn more about who this guy was, or thought he was, beside and with other New Men. Without presuming objectivity, I can remain inquisitive, skeptical, open, naïve, sophisticated, or D. W. Winnicott’s “good-enough” observer.
To do my field work, which was among people I knew, I developed a survey with open-ended questions, and emailed it to my sample group. For the purposes of this report, I ganged together responses to questions, as if each of the guys was in the same room talking, say, at a local bar. They weren’t. (But, in a larger sense, aren’t we all in the same room talking, usually not listening?) I did one-on-one interviews, and taped them, also (as I did with hospice nurses and counselor).
My thrust: to observe and engage with my male peers as if studying an ethnic group or a tribe, a sub-subculture that also selected me, in which I’m also a member, and this in itself upends the subject/object dichotomy. I don’t pretend I’m “just” an observer. In the field, ethnographers become engaged, entranced, involved, even entangled—to the extent they know where they stand and where the “other” stands; they can draw a perimeter, a boundary. They have a chance of maintaining distance, to “see” as outsiders the way Taussig has proposed, but …
My informants have anonymity, and, without naming them, they agreed to let me quote their stories and comments. To protect the innocent and guilty, I shift characteristics, and paraphrase remarks. Subjects will be identified by a number, which denotes nothing, not their place in an alphabetical list, etc. Pure randomness is impossible. I won’t provide the usual categories—race, age, religion, etc.—alongside the number, because these tend, even subliminally, toward prejudicing reactions. Unfortunately and ineluctably, everyone bears internalized, imbibed culture, and society lives within and brings these to every thought, response, everything read, heard, seen, etc., filters reactions. Expectations about others are waiting, like the herpes virus, to strike.
My sample is comprised of indigenous (no exogenous) urban, self-identified men between the ages of twenty-eight and forty-five. All classes, putatively; class in U.S. is self-defined and labile. Various races, ethnicities, all major religions (plus Baha’i, pantheist, atheist, agnostic): ancestry and origin ranging from Vietnam, China, Africa, Europe, Latin and South America—majority, hyphenated Americans: all U.S. citizens, one naturalized. Mostly heterosexual men, since my interest has also to do with attraction between men and women. Two divorced, many married, or living with, dating, or single. One gay/queer man, two trans men. All daters use or have used dating apps, hookup apps, social sites, for sex, in one way or the other. (Lust is single-minded.) All have watched porn, some are regular users. Many grew up suburban like me, or in farmland/country, but each considers himself a city-dweller, urban. None expresses longing for the plains and wide-open spaces.
My native informants (and I) do not represent a cross section of U.S. males. This is a self-selected subset, a minuscule percentage of the male population. Still, they represent “something.”
I intend to explore: what are “men” now, after the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, feminism, generally, how has that changed us, in what ways, and the women we know and love or hate, and what do we want from women, not what do they want. What about our fathers? (What about mine?) How did our feminist mothers and sisters and aunts and the women and girls affect us? New rules?
Subject 10: I would say having an older sister helped me. She was of my generation, and I saw what she would go through, and how she would handle things. I think simply having a sister caused an ingrained understanding of a female view of the world—one which was quite different than mine and my brothers’. It’s true, though, that we felt there was quite a bit of favoritism bestowed on her from our parents, and this caused resentment. She had her own room, for instance, while all three of us were housed in one room. This was a childish resentment, though felt, but I see now that this was simply based on economics, as my parents are not wealthy, and it costs to build separate rooms.
man qua man (toward an ethnography of
the new man)
Not leaving home, I could strip field work to basics, a minimalist’s approach, say, the way structural filmmakers and certain photographers, such as James Welling, Marco Breuer, Liz Deschenes, Vik Muniz, Shannon Ebner, bare the elements and materials of a photograph—to shoot “for” the illusion, to shoot light, say, not to deny its essential presence (pre-digital photography, especially). As a participant observer I don’t sojourn in foreignness, in otherness, place, language, customs. Sure, I still make interpretations, I’m not totally against them, just not through layers of a language that’s not my mother tongue, plus, I can sleep in my own bed. I don’t have to be any more disoriented than I am.
A participant observer can “thickly describe” better, understanding where he’s coming from, and the other’s idioms, gestures, intonations, etc. Geertz cautions ethnographers about digging in our own field. (Digging your own grave.) I get that. I also look to James Clifford for intellectual guidance, a free-thinking spirit with an agenda, in part to take down the old guard, which he has.
My interest in Freud and respect for psychoanalysis aren’t usual in ethnography. Geertz has been vicious about it. (I read Freud in college, and have been in psychoanalysis. That’s a bias.)
The New Man, a construction—or fiction—observed in the 1990s, designated, inadequately and vaguely, characteristics of boys born under the sign of feminism. The term has explanatory power. There’s irony in its use, because new gets old so fast. There is irony, everywhere.
My sample humor me or partly agree about resuscitating the term New Man, and I’m hoping that, as we go along, it’ll become useful to them.
Subject 18: One characteristic of the New Man? Prone to getting kinda overwhelmed. Will develop a certain degree of self-righteousness as a defense against guilt, though won’t voice it—will just rub and warm up that gland every so often when confronted with his lack of productivity. There’s a certain self-consciousness that comes from being in that position: New Man, New Dad, New Husband. So you kinda talk about what you do. You notice how you conduct yourself. And, because, if you’re me, you’re spending more time engaged as a parent, you’re juggling work more and that produces this amped-up thing. And you refer to yourself as you all the fuckin’ time. At least I do.
Subject 1: It’s funny. When you ask if I’m interested in these issues, and I really am, but I hardly ever spend concerted effort thinking about them. I wish I did. I don’t know if I needed feminist theory to understand, but then again I don’t know a world where I didn’t feel its effects on my conception of myself as a man. I feel like feminism is so deep in the men of my generation that it’s elemental, invisible and ingrained. With some men I know, though, yes—it’s just invisible.
As an ethnographer, I understand there will be exaggerations, half-truths, and lies. I lie or reshape my narrative, also, and, also like other people, I don’t always know when I’m lying or mis-remembering, or if I’m reshaping my tale because of, say, trauma or sadness. Lies have their own truths, if you catch them, and I listen closely for omissions.
When taking notes, I have to find the words that’ll fit, while maintaining meaning. Tone is something else—harder to represent. Email works: lets the subjects present themselves; their answers tend to be lengthier and, usually, clearer. (This might be the first of a series of studies on NEW MEN.)
notation, interpretation, translation: when not by email
Trouble reporting a speaker is demonstrated when, say, a U.S. subject speaks the word “really.” Really? Really! Really, with low voice, meaning some irony. Really—with no specific emotional demarcation, flat, more subtle—it may demand an as-yet undesigned emoticon. (Hieroglyphs: expanding or limiting expression?)
Or, take “fuck.” Sometimes the F-word repeats several times in a sentence: That dumb fuckhead, he totally fucked up our fucking deal. Nuances.
Again, this is a start, far from perfect or definitiv
e, suggestive, yes, and it’s not a longitudinal study, I’m not hanging with these guys for their lifetimes or mine. At least I don’t think so. Men die younger than women, though New Women increasingly have stress-related coronary disease. Heart disease is underreported in women, and heart attacks come on differently for women.
I’m into a view of the New Man, focusing on specific traits and attitudes, here and now. For instance, during my posse’s lifetime, abortion has always been legal, the pill available, which delineated or encouraged men’s changed attitudes.
I had met most of these people by going to a neighborhood bar. One actually went to my college but I never knew him. Being a participant observer can be dicey: while noting subjects’ comments, I need to add to the conversation, never dominate, and let it go where it wants but also not be passive, not just an observer. An uneasy, indefinite status.
Here’s a story I wrote them to display my openness:
My mother took a man down with her “acute return of gaze” [they liked tennis terminology], so she was called “challenging.” When I was a boy, I became totally self-conscious about looking at females; I mean, I was noticing Mother’s sexiness before I even knew I was, and then I’m absorbing her ambivalent responses, which made me conscious of what might have felt or become a “natural” response, socially approved, or whatever. I got stymied. I got stunted: how was I supposed to look at females without being a creep.
I have theorized: it appears instinctual for males to tag females as their sperm carriers. But cultural behavior is also class-related: grunts, lip-smacking, whistling, shouting obscenities occur among some men and not others.
I can’t say that story elicited much.
My subjects recognize their differences from their fathers, especially in relation to women and masculinity, but are, in varying degrees, wary of making claims for themselves, very skeptical. Some talk more confidently of having progressed from their fathers’ “older” positions. Some feel they have inherited more attitudes from their fathers, mostly unwanted, occasionally not. Others deny any inheritances.
Men and Apparitions Page 25
