Year: 2006

 

 

From somewhere he heard a few hesitant notes from a piano. Perhaps it was coming from the back room, but it sounded even further away than that. It was the sound of a piano stretched to the point where it could possibly not even be a piano you were hearing. It could have been an audio hallucination, or just some of the loose and jangling noise of the world. There was no pattern, just a random pinging at the high end of the keyboard. Silence, then a burst of four or five notes.

He went through the front room and into a hallway heavy with shadows. The place was sealed up tight, and only an occasional angle of light snuck in from outside, crepuscular and loaded with slow cruising dust. There was blood on the kitchen floor, a substantial patch of it, cooled to the black edge of maroon, and become almost chalk, or tempera powder. It had splashed up onto the cupboards and across the refrigerator door.

From the kitchen window he could see out into the backyard, where there was an empty doghouse, and there he found his piano: a clunky set of windchimes swaying slowly from a clothesline pole.

At the end of town there were ruins of an ancient fort, perched right at the edge of the ocean on a hill. The ramparts and parapet were all more or less in place, thrown up around a cluster of terraces, each of them situated at a different height and connected by a series of damp tunnels and stone steps and the occasional wooden ladder. Above it all at the southermost end overlooking the water was a large terrace, completely exposed to the stars and sky.

He made his way through the tight lanes of the town to this fort, and through the labyrinths of the fort to the terrace above the ocean. It was a wonderful place for silence; whatever sound made the journey up there was oddly transformed and amplified. The voices from the little tavern at the bottom of the hill sounded as if they were rising from a great well.

The whine of an unseen boat in the darkness lulled him almost to sleep. He saw blazing cruiseships creeping along the distant horizon, and, exhausted and splayed on his back, watched stars crashing again and again into the ocean.

 

 

—Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1953

–Zellar, Basement Window, 2005

Monsieur Centrine was a fierce proponent of impossibility. That’s not to say he was one of these characters who will insist that anything is possible. Quite the contrary, in fact. Mssr. Centrine believed that life, the world, and every aspiration of the human heart represented a thoroughly impossible proposition.

From this belief he could not, and would not, be swayed by anything in the way of evidence to the contrary. Achievement or accomplishment that appeared to clearly refute his insistence on the thorough impossibility of everything was dismissed with a growl and wave of his fat hand.

Mssr. Centrine would not even grant such incidents –and he was routinely presented with many such incidents– the status of aberration, and he had no tolerance for the notion of miracles. No, Centrine chose instead to entirely deny the reality of the possible in any of its manifestations.

“That is quite simply impossible!” he would say. “It is inconceivable!”

Despite this stubborn embrace of what would seem to be a paralyzing idea, Mssr. Centrine was a man of considerable intelligence, immodest talent, and wide-ranging accomplishment. Presented with proposals that were easily within the range of his abilities, he would, without fail, offer one of his usual exclamations: “Never! I won’t even consider the idea! It can’t be done!” And then, inevitably, he would proceed to do whatever it was that had been asked of him, and to do it well.

Whenever he had succeeded in demonstrating the possibility of the very things he had proclaimed impossible, Mssr. Centrine would of course decline all praise and congratulations by protesting that what he had just done was, in fact, quite impossible.

Over time Centrine’s perverse world view permeated the thinking of many of those who were closest to him, to the point where there were some who began to regard the man as a sort of miracle worker or magician. Such, apparently, was the persuasive conviction of Mssr. Centrine.

Eventually, however, something appeared to shift in the man’s attitude, or perhaps it was a sort of evolution in his way of thinking about the question of impossibility. It seemed to some observers that Mssr. Centrine’s denials of the widest range of the possible became more reckless and extreme. Many of the things he now pronounced as impossible were, in fact, quite clearly impossible, and yet he would nonetheless attack these challenges with the odd determination of the possessed.

It was almost as if Centrine had come to believe the claims of his small legion of admirers, and that he had somehow become convinced that he alone was equipped to conquer all manner of impossibility. For a time he succeeded in many spectacular and seemingly impossible endeavors.

In the end, however, it was a challenge of a more prosaic sort that ultimately did in Mssr. Centrine.

While strolling one day with a small group of his followers, Centrine had paused for a moment to survey the intersection of a quiet and absolutely ordinary street.

“This street is utterly impassable!” he pronounced. “One cannot possibly hope to make it to the other side. It is impossible!”

And with that he plunged blindly from the curb out into the crosswalk and was immediately struck down by a garbage truck as it came hurtling around the corner.

—Mark Rothko, Black on Gray, 1969

–Zellar, Carpet, Shadows, 2006

If you’re looking for real life –whatever that is– I’m afraid you’ll have to go somewhere else. This is all in my head. There’s nothing real here. These are merely the words that roll down my fingers in the middle of the night as I wait for the light to come fetch me.

Some of these words have been dictated to me by a hamburger with a pipe in its mouth. A hamburger with a mouth and a nose, and beady eyes and glasses. A hamburger with a little red hat on its head. A hamburger with legs and feet and hands. A hamburger with no ears.

This hamburger talks to me when there’s no one else around. It –he?– has a voice like a cartoon bullfrog. This is a hamburger that has lived a long life, much of it spent standing in one place with its arms extended in an empty embrace. This is a hamburger that has lived a long time alone; it has known –or so I gather from its occasional monologues– sorrow and despair. It can frequently be foul-mouthed and petulant, and despises much of the music I play, music which it nonetheless cannot avoid, paralyzed as it has been for so many years directly next to one of the stereo speakers.

Captain Beefheart or Pere Ubu, or even Husker Du, can drive the hamburger to fits of fevered lamentations. More than once it has pitched itself from its position on the shelf down to the floor, only to discover that, tragically, it is indestructible. It is an immortal hamburger.

It is not as difficult as you might imagine to tie yourself to a tree. It’s more difficult, of course, to shoot yourself full of arrows.

The moon can still, after all these years, damn near paralyze you. It could probably kill you if you were hungry enough.

Black birds huddle together in the tree out back, bitching about the winter and waiting for something dead to turn up, which is when things will get ugly.

Across the way an old man makes his wife a peanut butter sandwich, begs her to swallow her pills.

The sunlight moves slowly across the carpet, then just as slowly recedes, a dark tide rolling back out, dragging with it whatever the day might have been.

One evening, as dusk folded into darkness, when you were still a young man without any real disappointment in your heart, you sat drinking beer on a railroad trestle and watched the lantern from an Amish hay wagon swaying slowly across the fields.

Sometimes at night, when you’re driving in the country with your windows down and music blasting from the speakers, you’ll catch a whiff of that memory, clear and unmistakable. It will come back to you exactly as it was, and for an instant your heart will feel swept clean.

A moment later, of course, you will wonder where all that time has gone, and how you have managed to become a man with so many memories, and so many of them almost unbearably happy.

And in such moments you will have no choice but to conclude that you have been blessed, blessed beyond all possible explanation, blessed beyond all deserving.

The sacrifice acceptable to God is

a broken spirit;

a broken and contrite heart, o

God, thou wilt not despise.

–Psalms, 51-17

How many words do you think you can run through your head in a day?

It all depends on how many words you have in you, am I right?

Images, though, they’re something else; they represent a bigger, more universal language. All you need to do is look around and keep your eyes open. Yet I could pretty much guarantee you that there are people all over this country who are all but visually illiterate, people whose visual vocabulary is as impoverished as their command of the English language. They don’t really look at anything. Show them a photograph of a nook or cranny in their own house and they wouldn’t even recognize it. They’ve done all sorts of studies and experiments on this phenomenon, of course, asked people to identify their neighbors or co-workers from photographs, or to describe the cars their neighbors drive. You’d be surprised by how many people can’t do this, can’t even come close.

I once went to an exhibition of Irving Penn’s photographs, which I find occasionally astonishing but more often than not overly cool and stylized. At any rate, there were all these beautiful images of very common objects –frozen food, for instance, or a scrap of litter from the street– and people were lined up gaping at these photos as if they were looking upon something wholly exotic or unfamiliar. Which, of course, they were.

It’s what you look at that’s important, my father always told me. What you choose to see. He was a photo nut, and he was always pointing stuff out. Do you realize, he’d say, how much compelling drama goes entirely unseen in this world?

That was the way he talked. Look around you, he’d say. Take in the details. His one great dream had been to be a photographer, but he’d never been able, he felt, to come close to capturing what he thought he saw and what he felt was truly there. One day he dug a hole in the backyard and buried his cameras alongside the graves of our two dogs, which was exactly the sort of thing he’d have loved to see someone else do.

Look, he’d say, calling my attention at a stoplight to a stray hand protruding from the shadows of another car and drumming on a bright yellow patch of the driver’s-side door with long, thin fingers. Look, he’d say, isn’t that beautiful? That’s an Eggleston photo, right there.

I remember a few of his photos, and whether they were successful or not I couldn’t say. But I do remember a picture of a fiddle underneath a bed, nestled amid the dusty sprawl of shoes, books, and magazines. There was a photo of what looked like a ham strung up between two trees, and another of a plump strawberry sitting next to a burning cigarette in an ashtray. These things were what he was looking at, he would say, but not what he was looking for. That was one of his favorite questions: What are you looking for?

People, he said, didn’t see the trees for the forest; they couldn’t see the beautiful moments all around them, lost in the stream and bustle of life. That was the wonder of photography, of seeing the world concentrated through one lens, one eye closed, the other pressed tight to the camera, focused. Those were the pictures my father remembered, those moments when he’d zeroed in on something with his camera, or seen something he didn’t realize was there –never mind if it somehow mysteriously vanished in the developing tray or at the photo lab. He knew what he had seen, even if he had not quite captured it.

He used to drag me down to the public library, where he would build big stacks of photography monographs on one of the long white tables upstairs. We would sit there for hours while he slowly turned the shiny pages of those books, pausing over each photo to say, Look, look at that, or, just as frequently, I don’t see it. I can’t tell what she was looking for.

He liked the periphery, photographers who found things in the margins and shadows. The frame isn’t always what or where you think it is, he’d say. Get outside the frames and you get away from the self-consciousness that photography has instilled in so many people. If people think they’re being looked at or watched, even if by a camera –or perhaps especially if by a camera– they become actors, actors hiding in their own skin.

He would open the pages of a book of portrait photography –by August Sander, perhaps, or Disfarmer– to illustrate his points. You see, he would say, portraits can be fascinating for what they reveal, but also for what they disclose, and on entirely different levels. They work when the subjects have either fierce delusions or no illusions at all; the best and most fascinating portraits of all –and you will notice this often in these works of Sander and Disfarmer– are of these last types, people who are comfortable in their own skin, or who are not yet truly conscious of the power of the camera. You could look through thousands of contemporary portraits and never stumble across a single such photograph. The camera has made a pet of the average American. Point a camera at someone and they retreat into the dreams and archetypes of childhood; they become mugging clowns or vamping starlets. I love it when people recoil from the camera, my father said. These are the people I give my heart to, the people with the fascinating peripheries.

It’s a gift to look away, my father also told me. Few people even know how to look around, but the really special people learn to look away. Think about what I am saying: in any situation –in every situation– there is always something that commands attention, the focus. The people in power and the people who manipulate desire know this; the mythmakers understand this as well. It is hard to look away from that focus of attention, whether it is a beautiful woman walking down the sidewalk, a movie screen, or the batter in a baseball game. Yet if you can teach yourself to look away you will see all sorts of startling and wholly unfamiliar things; you will see not just reactions and response, but indifference and an infinite variety of furtive behaviors that are absolutely human. You will see things that no one ever looks at or sees closely. A great photographer, my father said, can find desolation in even the brightest colors, romance in squalor, heartbreak and loneliness amid jubilation, and beauty in even the most ordinary objects –maybe beauty is not even the correct word. Grace, that’s perhaps more accurate.

Look at this, he would say, absorbed in a photo of a rack of candy bars or the inside of a freezer. Look how mysterious this world is. Isn’t that the message of every one of these photographs? Can you even begin to imagine?

Photography was my father’s obsession, but he had plenty of other strange habits. I suppose, really, that you could define him as a collection of strange habits. Among his many peculiarities was the fact that he never ate anything much beyond breakfast cereal and cottage cheese. He couldn’t keep a job, and would often tell me, It’s awfully hard to hold down a job when you don’t have a work ethic.

It didn’t seem to bother him in the least, though, that he bagged groceries or worked as a night clerk at a local motel. He’d claim that he couldn’t afford to invest any of his available pride in anything the “real world” would consider a job. His real work was looking at photographs, and finding –but not taking– photographs in the world around him. Certainly no one was going to pay him to do either of those things in a little river town of fewer than 5,000 people.

Movies, he said, were a poor substitute for photographs, and television was even worse. Yet even when he watched a film my father would be studying the margins and the backgrounds, looking for his own stills, the things no one else would ever notice.

My father hated America, or at least he hated what America was becoming and what it had allowed itself to become. This was twenty years ago; I can only imagine what he would make of the place now. He seemed to have an almost foreign perspective on America; he saw the country from some great and distorted distance, and condemned as imperialism all laissez faire capitalism. The biggest victims of America’s cultural imperialism, he would tell anyone who would listen, were Americans themselves. I can’t afford to be an American, he would say. It takes more energy than any civilized human being should ever possess.

Yet for all his contempt of America, my father never went anywhere else. He never even visited New York except in photographs. I think he actually thought of himself as European, or at least he saw the country primarily through the eyes of European intellectuals, artists, and, especially, photographers. Foreign photographers took the best pictures of America, he said, because they saw things differently. That was another of his pet phrases: I guess I just see things differently, he’d say whenever somebody in our little town bothered to disagree with him, which was less and less often the older he got.

My father certainly didn’t have an easy life, and I know his frustrations were compounded by the fact that he had so little access to the images he craved. He never had any money, and there wasn’t even a bookstore in our town, so he was left with the limited resources of the local public library. He always used to say that the only American institution he supported without reservation was the public library. I’m sure my father drove the librarians crazy with his requests for inter-library loans; most of the monographs he was interested in had to be borrowed from the collections of larger libraries.

The only camera he kept after he gave up on himself as a photographer was a cheap old 35-millimeter that he used to make personal photo copies of his favorite images from the collections he pored over in the library.