Essays from the Nick of Time

by Mark Slouka

  On our arrival in California, I carried the cartons of photographs one by one to the garage. I stacked them carefully, noting with pleasure that the dry, Mediterranean climate would treat them well. Already I looked forward to afternoons of sorting and labeling; I imagined an entire wall of pictures, a sort of pictorial genealogy, rising like branches into the present. My son would grow up familiar with faces past. Someday we would add our own. I slipped the bolt and locked up carefully.

  Waking up early a few mornings later, my wife and son still asleep, I decided to go to the beach. A ten-minute walk down fog-bound streets, past fences and walls burdened by bougainvillea, brought me to the top of a wooden staircase that descended like a fire escape to the sand. I took off my shoes by the water. The tide was low, the air shot through with mist. Distance seemed nostalgic, hazy with surf. When the tide retreated, pieces of amber kelp flapped after it like fish trapped in the shallows.

  Perhaps because it was all still so new, because habit had not had a chance to dull my senses to the particular beauty of the place, I found myself moved by the quiet glory of that morning; by the dark lines of surf rising out of the windless ocean like tired swimmers; by the strange hieroglyphics of gull and tern… I knew (as sometimes happens) that many years later I’d remember that morning, that for the rest of my life, some detail—the smell of brine and broken crab, or the particular shade of wetted stone, or the lazy slap of waves—would suddenly bring it back, vivid and strong.

  I’m not sure if I noticed him right away or if I only became aware of his presence as I walked. A man, the only figure visible on the shore, stood with his back to me a few hundred feet ahead. To his left the sand rose in loose dunes to the base of sandstone cliffs. He seemed to be watching something—the gulls, I assumed. It was only when he turned toward the ocean that I noticed his elbows were pointed toward the ground instead of out, and that instead of a pair of binoculars, he held a camcorder. I watched him pan slowly across the cliffs, the sand, the ocean—then turn my way. I hesitated, not wanting to ruin the spirit of the piece he seemed so intent on; I assumed he’d quickly turn back to the deserted shoreline. He didn’t. Suddenly self-conscious, aware of myself as a subject, I stopped, then turned to look out over the ocean. It was an absurd moment. I’d had no intention of looking out to sea. It had just seemed like the appropriate thing to do under the circumstances. I turned and started back. Pretending to look up at the cliffs, I glanced discreetly over my shoulder. He was still there, filming me as I walked away.

  Even then I sensed that I’d just witnessed one of those rare moments that capture a society in transition, a trembling of the cultural chrysalis. It seemed fitting that California—land of the visual “event,” end point of a historical process, a culture, and a continent—should have provided the setting.

  Over the next few weeks, newly sensitized to their presence, I noticed camcorders everywhere. I saw them at the playground and the beach, at picnics and birthday parties, everywhere. A few blocks from where we lived, I watched a woman taping a young man washing his car. I was struck by all of these images of (in Michael Benedikt’s memorable phrase) “a life not really lived anywhere but arranged for the viewing.” At times it seemed that Californians, like Chauncey Gardiner in Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There, preferred to watch.

  And it pissed me off. I resented the convenience of it, the faddishness of it, and when a well-meaning neighbor came by with a videotape he’d made of our son playing in the plastic pool on the front lawn, I sat in front of the VCR and resented the sheer genius of it. With little talent, no effort, and no particular feel for the subject, he had fixed an essence no photograph could ever approach.

  Resentment, of course, is a symptom. We resent what threatens us. But in what sense was I threatened? It took me some time to realize that what I was arguing for—in some dim, unarticulated way—was the privilege of parents to make their own memories, to order and value and husband them in their own way. The resistance I felt when our neighbor slipped the cartridge into the VCR, I am convinced, was not unlike that felt by the Masai who until fairly recently would smash any camera aimed their way. The tape to me, like the photograph to them, was a transgression on a species of private property. I wanted to protect some sort of visual essence, to prevent an act of theft.

  Rationally my response made no sense whatsoever. What was I doing except defending one representation of the past against another? Why draw the line at that particular point? In what way were the photographs in the garage superior to the videocassette in its neat cover, which I’d marked on the spine and slipped like a volume onto the bookshelf? I even had to admit to a certain ambivalence. Watching that twenty-minute tape, I’d experienced an almost supernatural pleasure. Whatever small resentment I’d felt had been overwhelmed at the time by a sort of dumb gratitude. If my neighbor had asked to make the tape beforehand I would have found a way to decline politely. Now that the thing was made, and mine, I’d fight like a badger to keep it.

  That same afternoon I carried the cartons back from the garage. I piled them high in a bulky pyramid on the living-room carpet. It was time to unpack.

  III

  That the home-video library will eventually supplant the photo album seems beyond question. When have we ever been able to resist a new technology? Clearly, a new age—marked by a new relation to the past and defined by our love affair with the camcorder—has already begun. It would seem an opportune time to attempt to recognize the gains and losses. There are quite a few of both.

  My case for the photograph is simple: I value it for its very limitations. We are drawn to the absences, the eloquence of what is not shown. This is true for two apparently contradictory reasons: first, because incompleteness invites the imagination (or, in the case of personal material, the memory) to play—to complete the gesture, establish the context, re-create the time and place and voice; second, because consciously or not we respect the humility and acknowledge the accuracy of the incomplete, the unresolved. Every photograph, every novel, every poem and painting carries an aura of mystery, a graceful reminder of our own mortality. And we do what we can to resolve that mystery. It is this dialogue—between things known and unknowable, between memory and death (for what is death but forgetting, writ large?)—that we chiefly love, that makes us human.

  The camcorder, by contrast, offers the illusion of completeness; virtually everything—contexts, voices, background noises—has been provided. To all but the most jaded the result is a miracle of representation, but it’s a miracle that isolates us in the essentially passive role of observers. There’s nothing to do except watch and marvel. What we have before us is the moment past in all its eccentric glory—or at least this is what the video asks us to believe. But of course it’s not true. The camcorder does not capture the past; it is simply an exercise in mimicry raised to a higher level. Its success, its undeniable appeal, is the result of its ability to mask the spaces, to hide the gaps behind a more compelling, more seductive facsimile of what was real. The finished product, however, is no more “accurate,” no more objective, than the photograph. Both are acts of creative selection.

  Every time we determine a border—whether around a photograph, a painting, or a frame of videotape—we are engaging in a more or less arbitrary act of exclusion. We decide what looks good, what “fits,” what “belongs”—and what doesn’t. We cannot avoid this; it is the nature of the beast. Whether we are snapping a picture or shooting a tape, we are in some sense “making history,” and making history is inherently a creative act. This is not to say (as has become fashionable lately) that history itself is an aesthetic construct. History was an empirical fact in time, undebatable as a balled-up fist. Our efforts to recover history, however, are of necessity creative. The video confuses the creative approximation with the thing itself, and that is dangerous.

  Such confusion is dangerous first and foremost because it makes us lazy. It offers an easy substitute for the work of memory, the labor of reconstructing
the past. In the foreword to his great autobiography Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov celebrated the effort involved in the process of excavating the distant past: “I revised many passages and tried to do something about the amnesic defects of the original—blank spots, blurry areas, domains of dimness. I discovered that sometimes, by means of intense concentration, the neutral smudge might be forced to come into beautiful focus so that the sudden view could be identified, and the anonymous servant named.”

  Nabokov’s obsession with bringing the neutral smudge into focus—like Proust’s need to follow the trail of memories triggered by the taste of a petite madeleine and tea, or the hunger of William Carlos Williams for “the strange phosphorus of the life, nameless under an old misappellation”—serves to underscore a common truth: art, ultimately, is archaeology. Our materials, actual or imagined, purely personal or broadly cultural, are mined from the past. Our minds need the blurry areas, the domains of dimness, the way our muscles need resistance.

  A photograph offers that resistance. So does a painting or a letter. What drew me to the photographs and postcards in the garage were precisely those areas of ambiguity. Whose was the hand barely visible in a corner of the picture of my mother as an infant? Why was my father smiling as he painted the walls of that tenement in Sydney? What did his voice sound like then? How did he move as a young man? Who was Frantik Bacofske, in the postcard my great-aunt sent to her brother? Why did he shoot himself on “their” grave? Who were “they”?

  Out of the vacuum comes the desire and the need for completeness, for narrative. We imagine rain, a late spring, a soldier still in uniform asking the graveskeeper—an old man in a bulky rain slicker struggling to cover an open grave—for directions. The old man is nearly deaf, with great hairy ears like an overgrown fencerow. He runs a wet sleeve under his nose and points to the far end of the yard, then returns to work. The soldier thanks him politely, walks away… and so on, following a trail of our own making. Forced to recall or imagine the moment, the situation, the quality of voice, we grow stronger and more familiar with the territory of the past, both real and imagined; we become more capable of naming the anonymous servant or, if need be, creating him anew. In the video age, arguably, all these things required to fill in the blank spots—things like the powers of imagination and memory—will atrophy.

  And that’s not all. There is another danger in perfect counterpoise to the one I’ve described. As the camcorder, in its perfection, threatens to do our remembering for us, it jeopardizes the privilege of forgetting—a basic human right. The memory, after all, both recalls and erases as the mind requires. And it is not just our ability to forget, to reconstruct, to heal, that is at risk here, but history’s willingness to let us do so. To the religiously inclined, one of the signs of divine benevolence might be the fact that history invariably washes away the worst. Even horrors, in all but the most extreme cases, begin to blur almost immediately. Pleasures tend to keep their shape, to remain poignant. Forgetting, in other words, whether it is done by us or for us, is an essential kindness. The positive side of time.

  Videotape tampers with this, as with so many other things. It disturbs the balance, disrupts the flow. The pleasures it offers come at the price of others, far greater though more elusive. The pain it brings—whether by keeping the dead constantly before our eyes in a sort of suspended animation, or by preserving the mannerisms, the habits, the cruelties best forgotten—is potentially exquisite.

  IV

  To the charge that I belong to the ranks of the technologically impaired—an anachronism, a throwback mired in a nineteenth-century sensibility—I plead partially guilty. I’ll admit that I prefer basic materials: wood or stone. Basic tools: an ax, a pen, a wood clamp. Basic entertainments: conversation, a book between two covers, a musical instrument. In my own defense, however, I can honestly say that I’m not incapable of appreciating the wonders—from gene splicing to lasers—that everywhere crowd in on my attention. I’m not insensible to the benefits and beauties of technology. Faced with major surgery, my allegiance to the wood clamp would quickly fade. And yet, my respect for technological marvels is of the same sort a pre-Columbian tribesman might feel for a gun or an automobile: grudging, suspicious, a product of the head not the heart. I can’t help it. No Luddite, I nonetheless keep the crowbar handy.

  As near as I can tell, my suspicion springs from my instinctive allegiance to the physical world, to the present moment, to the strengths and limitations of the human mind. I distrust whatever tends to improve or displace them. As far back as 1930, Freud had already noted the technological trend I find so disquieting. “Long ago,” he wrote, “[man] formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. To these gods he attributed everything that seemed unattainable to his wishes, or that was forbidden to him.… To-day he has come very close to the attainment of this ideal, he has almost become a god himself. Only, it is true, in the fashion in which ideals are usually attained according to the general judgement of humanity. Not completely; in some respects not at all, in others only half way. Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.”

  It is as a technological prosthesis—an artificial memory—that I fear the camcorder. I see it as part of a much larger cultural phenomenon marked by a willingness to tamper with the limits of our world, or to replace it altogether. This is not quite as absurd as it sounds. Though they are admittedly primitive, alternate “virtual” worlds already exist. Already it has become possible to move and work, to communicate and accomplish physical tasks, to run and jump—with many of the sensations normally attributed to these activities—in worlds that exist only on a computer screen. At any given moment a spot census would reveal hundreds of thousands, even millions, at work and play in artificial landscapes. And when they return from their journeys, like all travelers, they return only partially. The dominion of the real is everywhere under siege. Most would see this as harmless and fascinating. Perhaps it is, but I’m unable to believe it. I’ve tried.

  All of this has led not so much to a revolution in my lifestyle as to an adjustment in my thinking. My priorities have changed somewhat. Near the top of my list, I believe, would be to live in such a way as be more and more “here,” as Thoreau once put it. Have I banished all videotapes from my house? Not at all. Would I accept another, were it given to me? More than likely. Resistance, taken too far, becomes an affirmation. But I would keep the videotape in its place, restrict it, refuse it the reverence it demands.

  Still, it’s an uncomfortable position I find myself in, constantly wavering like some red-blooded apostle between temptation and righteous resistance. To paraphrase Nathaniel Hawthorne’s description of Melville’s “metaphysical wanderings,” I’m neither able to believe in the new prosthetic god nor comfortable in my unbelief. The analogy strikes me as apt. Melville spent the majority of his life engaged in a prolonged quarrel with God. I seem doomed to quarrel—instinctively until now, the way an opossum will hiss at a speeding truck—with the new god of technology: a deity and its acolytes intent on a new genesis, a new world marked by a new relation to the past, to history, to reality itself. Hawthorne went on to say that Melville appeared to have “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated.” In my own small way, I too have no choice but to side with the naysayers, the new heathen.

  I suspect that on some level, life is a matter of indefensible loyalties. Sometimes in the evening, after our youngest has been put to bed, I drag my favorite chair—a brown leather wingback, broken and worn—to the wall of pictures still growing in the hallway. Some are hardly larger than a postage stamp. I study the faces—the expressions, the eloquence of caught movements, the gestures of the heart. The air seems full of their presence, thick with their voices and their distant laughter. I like the sound of that crowd, enigmatic as the murmuring of shells. Even the most reserved among them, looking out from their respective windows on the wall, seem glad to see me. And I, for my part, enjoy their company almost
as much as I do that of the living.

  Eclogue

  2008

  I

  It’s a small thing, really.

  Every June, soon after the oaks have leafed out over our cabin, a pair of phoebes weaves a small, tight nest under the eave by the door. The nest is quite low, and by holding a long-handled mirror under the slope of the roof we can see the clutch of white eggs glowing there against the twigs and the dead grass and the pocket lint. There’s always something hidden and wonderful about this first glimpse: the wavering reflection as I tip the mirror this way and that, searching for the right angle, the glass reflecting down to us the sixty-year-old cedar boards, the moldering supports, and then, like a quick window into another world, like that tiny couple in the mirror in the painting by Van Eyck… the nest. This is Act One.

  Nearly every year, soon after the phoebes lay their clutch, another, larger egg appears in the nest. It’s mottled and lovely, and it hatches first. Thus begins Act Two. The fledgling cowbird that emerges from the egg is grotesquely huge, nearly the size of the adult phoebes themselves. The parents, however, notice nothing wrong; they work frantically to supply that cavernous open beak, that gaping yellow throat, even as their own offspring (if they haven’t already been shoved onto the planks of the porch) slowly starve under the imposter’s wings.

  Act Three: The cowbird chick crams the nest, its wings folded over the sides, absurd as a bear in a bassinet. It grows silky and fat. And then one day they’re all gone and the nest is empty. Sometimes I find a desiccated packet—a beak and a few bones, little more—under the nest. Curtain and applause.