We are in the open, standing in a row. My sister, my mother, my father, my elder brother, my eldest brother, myself – we are facing boxed lightning. When the flash comes, we all want it to illuminate us in a frozen instant of projected truth, and so this is what each of us does: My sister takes out her powder compact and examines herself in the mirror, dusting her nose; my mother leans closer to me, and puts her arm around my shoulders; my father makes sure his shirt is tucked the same length all around his waist; my elder brother scrutinizes us because he wants this photograph of his to be display-worthy; my eldest brother simply slouches against the railing, content. As for myself – I am staring at the camera lens, willing it to burst into enveloping light.
One second passes. Another. Another. Our collective clairvoyance is being unequally eroded away; when the blinding light finally wraps us in its grip, we are caught in separate limbos between knowledge and ignorance.
My elder brother walks towards the tripod stand, shakes the Polaroid into existence, and brings it back to us. We are huddled over this piece of plastic that purports to capture truth in its precision of lines and colors, but all I see is people caught in their choreography. When I look from our preserved selves to our existing selves to our preserved selves, there is an even more jarring sense of dislocation. I take the photograph in my hand, and this is when it strikes me. This is a photograph taken together – of separation.
This is what leafing through my family album is: always an affair tinged with suspended disbelief. Most of these snapshots are fairly recent, the result of my elder brother’s initial fascination with guerrilla photography. Here is my father being shot, his face looking away, his hand instinctively raised against the assault of the camera lens. There is a simplistic inscription beside the picture. I can imagine my brother sitting at this very desk, pen poised over paper, trying to deconstruct into letters all that he sees in his image of this picture; letters that might reassemble themselves perfectly in the minds of all those who read them. But before he does that he has to first ascertain what is it exactly that he does see. And what is it that he does see? Whenever I look at this photograph I am conscious of at least three images pulling at my mind: there is the nameless other’s, a second-guessed construction of what I think I should see; there is my own, a image, shaped by my own notion of what this man is, that I do see; there is my father’s, a possible portraiture of Father Playing Chess, reproduced on film, that he wants me to see. The three images are imprisoned within this white square, superimposed on each other, and I cannot tell which of them, if any, contains truth. I can imagine my brother struggling with these mental conflicts, and then resigning himself to doubt, and finally touching pen to paper, tried, writing – “Dad at a chess game.”
This frame being taken is of most of my family: it is one more collected conflict of a changing succession. There are four of us seated around the table, and we are engaged in conversation. Questions that could draw wanted responses are advanced. Responses that could forestall more unwanted questions are implemented. Smiling, strategizing silences intersect. We are constantly rearranging, inventing, and subtracting elements of ourselves, composing and recomposing them into fluid forms. I look at my mother, my father, my sister, but even here we are far across from each other, divided by the boundaries we lay across the table. We use one misleading answer to create another misleading question, until we are surrounded by all those meaningless words that pile up into only a likeness of ourselves, by and not by our design. We are each thinking of our lives, but we are each of us externally a continually created photograph. Even if I look as closely as I can, this is what I see – inscrutable people, lonely within the borders of their knowledge, each staring at something off-screen that I can never truly see. The dinner table, as is the breakfast table, as is any other social interaction, is a shared frame in which two heads might sometimes appear, or two hands sometimes cross each other, but we can only ever glimpse flashes of each other that may or may not be false. In each of our true totalities we are always a picture, isolated and ultimately unknowable.
In his book Backwards And Forwards, writer David Ball says that a picture “falls within a common range for everyone… and yet evokes different responses from person to person” (73) – even if it were possible to eliminate the infinity of obfuscating mental images each photograph invites, the photograph is also an infinity unto itself. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche asserts in his book Beyond Good And Evil that “around most people there continually grows a mask” (29) – even each facet of the photograph’s infinity is either false or rendered unknowable due to its irreproducible essence. Knowing all of these traps mental and physical between our conceptions and their cruxes, how can we ever hope to capture truth within the limited scopes of our eyes?
How can we even try, when the images we collect for the planning of the capture keep changing?
This is from the pages of my recent history: a memory of my friends and I, fixed as a picture of the past from my mind’s continuous accumulation. We are sitting in a café. We are talking about the past; we are using all the memorial snapshots in our collective history to paste together a world. But so many of them conflict because of the different frames of our eyes, and in addition to the overlaps there are gaps, black holes where remembrance has failed. This is a fraying world, divided by a million intersecting and chaotic lines, bounded on all sides and inside by the invading black borders of forgetfulness. This is a fraying world, and this is also a world that is dead and dying.
When my friends talk now about going back to our high school, and when we forcibly drag out and unite our opposing pictures, we are at the same time aware that there is no going back, physically or mentally. We are comparing schedules, we are bending chance and purpose in our little date-books, but to what end? In the second that each of us took one last look at that school in order to fix it in the personal collections of our divided consciousnesses, it had already ceased to exist. The school still stands, but it doesn’t stand still; my school is already gone. Roland Barthes says in his essay Camera Lucida that photography is “the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency” (8), and that therefore “Death is the eidos of… Photograph” (19), but if every photograph and image that is carried by each person here, whether of the school or of anything else, can only be stillborn, then they must also be lies. If four people cannot make sense of a single photograph sitting right before them, what chance do the seven of us here have of deciphering a deceptive image, despite our number, because of our number, and also considering time? Consider a photograph, consider how it limits not only spatially but also temporally, and thereafter acknowledge the futility of our eyes – that most persistently clicking of knowledge-seeking cameras.
This is why when I look at my friends now, I cannot escape the instinct that even if I could somehow reduce each of them into a truthful photograph, those pictures would still be obscured by a double vision imposed by time. But worse than this is the fact that it is impossible at any given point to discern the twin outlines that constitute each of the endless permutations of each person. I think about the time I bought one of these friends a book written by his favorite author. I remember his face when he slit open the wrapping paper; the momentary flicker of confusion when he was confronted by the name of Kazuo Ishiguro is seared into my eyes, as is the immediate compensatory profusion of gladness that followed thereafter. There are assumptions that we hold about each and every photograph, assumptions that are imposed by us in the form of linear notes. But these single-sentenced labels of summation and explanation we write for ourselves, even if they are ever true, can only be held true for a period before time inevitably twists them into lies.
And yet they cannot be discarded, because without them we become devoid of the means of understanding, and the photographs themselves dissolve into meaningless scribbles and color-splashes. These assumptions, then, are necessary and knowing self-delusions, no less delusions because of our knowledge of them, and also no less necessary – they constitute the only lens through which we can even begin to view photographs. They constitute the only way we can even begin to try to remember – they constitute the only way we can even begin to try to take photographs.
This is one of the moments of my birth: a reminder preserved deliberately to celebrate its difference from its fifteen-year-old origin. I am here now with my friends and family; these disparate groups are gathered for my birthday, and they are distorted by my many cake-candles that are each bestowing confusing light. As I watch all of these people, their faces half-formed and indistinct disappear and reappear, dancing between light, shadow, and darkness. I start to notice that these people are different in light and shadow – but they are the same in darkness. What if I chose to extinguish all of these candles? I imagine myself pinching each fickle flame, one by one by one – and finally plunging the room into darkness. What, then? I would know that my family and friends are still here – but I would know something more.
Light is not always illuminating; when a candle is lit I can see, but not entirely – there are parts that will always be flickering, like two-dimensional walls of assumptions and delusions eternally wavering into new forms with the passage of time. Sight is always deceitful in the composition and preservation of the photographs it takes; no photograph is candid, because a candid photograph is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron – to see, to photograph, is always to frame, to frame is always to misinterpret, and to misinterpret is always to distance. And therefore no superficial knowledge is enlightening, because enlightening superficial knowledge is also a contradiction terms, also an oxymoron – to know is always to limit, to limit is always to falsify, and to falsify is always to distance. The only true connection that any two people can start to share, then, is in their mutual awareness that there is none.
Painters, as with all artists who seek to touch each individual uniquely, know this. I stand in front of Rene Magritte’s 1928 painting of The Lovers. A man and woman are clasped inextricably around each other under a darkling sky, two people in this desolate landscape with only each other to cling to. But they are together only because both their heads are willingly shrouded in white cloth, white cloth that melds them into one in the blackness that strips away an infinity of misrepresentations. If they were to tear off their blindfolds and see each other in the light of knowledge they would be separated in every possible way. This is why they do not even try.
I stand in this gallery, surrounded by those who knew this. Surrealism, impressionism, expressionism, even the relatively more factual representations of realism – all art is a testament to the power of transforming ignorance to intimacy. Every single painting seeks to imprint on us not just a truth hidden within their brush strokes, not just a truth unique within each of us, but a truth that is unifying in the fact of its incalculable facets. It is only when we have allowed ourselves to stop trying to understand others that we have truly understood them, because we accept that while we all live in the same world, each of us experiences the world differently. This is why when we communicate of paintings we can agree on the techniques that create them, and never truthfully on the feelings they engender. This is why truly knowledgeable men and women are silent in the face of not only great tragedies and happiness, but also small ones too. This is the secret gift of these artists to the people of today – the common knowledge that when we use words we must be aware of the eternal insufficiency of any form of language that aspires to a common truth.
Plato’s prisoners are in a cave, sitting in a row. Their backs are to the fire; it casts their shadows on the wall in a primordial photograph that is distorted by others and themselves, and is shifting as time trickles away. But they are not us. They do not know that there is nothing behind them, but we know that there is nothing between us, and this knowledge is what makes us better. This knowledge is the only thing that can transfer meaning and value to where they should belong. Not in the fruitless goal of any universal and unyielding truth, but in the knowledge of its impossibility, and therefore in the fact that despite all these conflicts we know that we are separated together.
_____________________________
WORKS CITED
Ball, David. Backwards And Forwards. Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. 73.
Barthes, Roland. “Camera Lucida.” Writing The Essay. Ed. Darlene A. Forrest, Randy Martin, and Pat. C. Hoy II. New York: McGraw Hill Custom Publishing, 2005-2006. 8-19.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good And Evil. Dover Publications, Inc, 1997. 29.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
Monday, October 10, 2005
Story: Photograph
This is a photograph that is also candid. He is in a Raffles Junior College school uniform that bears six creases, and his tie is loosened three inches from his neck. He is staring at something off-screen, but there is also a flicker of recognition, a fractional turn of his eyes, an instantaneous clairvoyance of a moment as it happens. I have snapped him in my white box just so, at this one particular instant where knowledge and ignorance are superimposed.
This photograph was taken four weeks after we first met. We are sitting in the MacDonalds near our school, and we are chatting, questions that have answers that are really questions. He is organizing his thoughts about me into an emerging structure, he is filling in elements and building or extrapolating a background that may or may not become part of the accumulating foreground. As for me, I already have my elements, my background, and my foreground – an entire composition that now only has a him-shaped hole. I am simply fitting him into my structure. Then as we talk and the void is filled with colors, something happens, and he turns away, and I have my photograph.
This is what it means then to take a candid photograph of a loved one – careful planning, and the ability to impose order and structure in a flash. But when I look at him now in his almost nakedness, there is something foreign about him. There is something that I can neither understand nor name, and that I want to tear down. But when I touch his face, my finger to his cheek, there is a barrier, glossy, indestructible. I cannot shred it without shredding my image of him. I cannot reach him either way.
This is why I have never spoken of him to my family, and why I never will. I am sitting at the dinner table with my family members, but I cannot allow those words about him to leave my mouth, because if even I cannot deconstruct my image of him into letters, imagine the total lack of control I would have over the pictures into which those words might assemble themselves in my family’s minds. I know of my sister’s disapproved-of boyfriend, I know how he sneaks into our house late at night, and I know how she sneaks out of our house to drive off with him on his motorcycle. My sister and I know of my mother’s lost prince, we know of her rare dreams about him, and we know that she keeps a yellowed photograph of him together with one of her radiant youth. My mother and I know of my father’s past infidelity, we know that they used to meet in cheap hotels, and we know it ended with a mistimed telephone call. My father knows of my dissolved infatuation, he knows something of a boy in a picture, and he knows this boy never appears anymore. I know, she knows, she knows, he knows – but the only knowledge that we have are of images, limited in their frames, and worse.
I sit at dinner and look at my sister, my father, and my mother. This should be the frame of a traditional family photograph, but we are each far across from the others, divided by chasms of the table. We are each thinking about a person, we are each of us a photograph, alone in the white borders of our knowledge, and they are each staring at something off-screen that I can never truly see. The dinner table is a frame in which two heads might sometimes appear, or two hands sometimes cross each other, but in each of our totalities we are always an image of loneliness. And in his book Backwards And Forwards, writer David Ball says that “an image falls within a common range for everyone… and yet evokes different responses from person to person”. If we are each of us alone in a single and yet infinite photograph, how can we ever hope to capture truth within the scopes of our limited eyes?
Even when I am with my friends, I am also conscious of these peripheries of my vision. This is us now, sitting in the set of memory that is masquerading as a café. We are talking about the past, we are using all of the photographs in our collective history to paste together a world. But so many of the photographs conflict because of the different frames of our eyes, and in addition to the overlaps there are gaps, black holes where remembrance has failed. This is a fraying world, divided by a million intersecting and chaotic lines, bounded on all sides and inside by the intruding black borders of forgetfulness. This is a fraying world, and this is also a world that is dead and dying.
When my friends and I talk now about going back to our high school, and when we forcibly drag out and unite opposing photographs, we are at the same time aware that there is no going back, physically or mentally. We are comparing schedules, we are bending chance and purpose in our little date-books, but to what end? In the second that each of us took one last look at that school in order to fix it in our personal photographs, it had already ceased to exist. The school still stands, but it doesn’t stand still; my school is already gone. Roland Barthes says in his essay Camera Lucida that photography is “the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency”, and that therefore “Death is the eidos of… Photograph”, but if my photographs, as well as each of the photographs carried by each person here and elsewhere, whether of the school or of anything else, can only be stillborn, then they must also be lies. If four people cannot make sense of a single photograph, what chance do the seven of us here have, despite of our number, because of our number, and also considering time? Consider a photograph, consider how it limits not only spatially, but also temporally, and thereafter know the futility in this world of our eyes – that constant knowledge-seeking camera that is always thwarted by the superimposition of an obscuring lens.
But perhaps obscurity is the answer to this question, the peephole to knowledge. See this birthday of mine happen in reverse. Everyone, family, friends, all these disparate groups are gathered here in the distorting light of my many candles, each bestowing confusing light. The last candle lit is now extinguished, and what happens? Faces half-formed and indistinct disappear; features previously dancing in shadows slide into a uniform darkness. The next-to-last candle lit is now extinguished, and the same happens with new faces. Each candle lit is extinguished, one by one, until the very last, whereupon the room is plunged into blackness. But this darkness is different, because I know these people are still here.
Light is not illuminating; when a candle is lit I can see, but not entirely – there are parts that will always be flickering. Furthermore, sight is always deceitful in its composition and preservation of the photographs it takes. No photograph is also candid, because a candid photograph is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron – to see, to photograph, is always to frame, and to frame is always to misinterpret, and to misinterpret is always to distance. And therefore no knowledge is also enlightening, because enlightening knowledge is also a contradiction in terms, also an oxymoron – to know is always to limit, to limit is always to falsify, and to falsify is always to distance. The only true connection any two people can have, then, is in their mutual awareness that there is none.
Long before photographs came into popularity, painters knew this. I stand in front of Rene Magritte’s 1928 painting of The Lovers, but every single painting in this gallery is a testament to the power of transforming ignorance into intimacy. Surrealism, impressionism, expressionism – all of the art in this gallery, even the relatively more factual representations of realism, seek to imprint on us not just a truth hidden within their brush strokes, not just a truth unique within each of us, but a truth that is unifying in the fact of its incalculable facets. Magritte’s painting demonstrates this in content as in innate structure. A man and woman are clasped inextricably around each other under a darkling sky, two people in this desolate landscape with only each other to cling to. But they are together only because both their heads are shrouded in white cloth, white cloth that melds them in blackness into one. If they were to tear off their blindfolds and see each other in the light of knowledge they would be separated in every possible way.
I stand in this gallery, surrounded by those who knew this, these precursors to men and women today who are silent in the face of not only great tragedies and happiness, but also small ones too, people who when they speak must be aware of the eternal insufficiency of any form of language of civilization that aspires to truth.
I take out my photograph of this boy I used to love, this photograph whose only real truth is not in its precision of lines and colors, but in his foreign unknowability, and in the barrier, glossy, indestructible. Ignorance is not the same as the knowledge and acknowledgement of ignorance. When we believe love to be transformative, we transform it, but when we know we have transformed it, we can begin to love.
This photograph was taken four weeks after we first met. We are sitting in the MacDonalds near our school, and we are chatting, questions that have answers that are really questions. He is organizing his thoughts about me into an emerging structure, he is filling in elements and building or extrapolating a background that may or may not become part of the accumulating foreground. As for me, I already have my elements, my background, and my foreground – an entire composition that now only has a him-shaped hole. I am simply fitting him into my structure. Then as we talk and the void is filled with colors, something happens, and he turns away, and I have my photograph.
This is what it means then to take a candid photograph of a loved one – careful planning, and the ability to impose order and structure in a flash. But when I look at him now in his almost nakedness, there is something foreign about him. There is something that I can neither understand nor name, and that I want to tear down. But when I touch his face, my finger to his cheek, there is a barrier, glossy, indestructible. I cannot shred it without shredding my image of him. I cannot reach him either way.
This is why I have never spoken of him to my family, and why I never will. I am sitting at the dinner table with my family members, but I cannot allow those words about him to leave my mouth, because if even I cannot deconstruct my image of him into letters, imagine the total lack of control I would have over the pictures into which those words might assemble themselves in my family’s minds. I know of my sister’s disapproved-of boyfriend, I know how he sneaks into our house late at night, and I know how she sneaks out of our house to drive off with him on his motorcycle. My sister and I know of my mother’s lost prince, we know of her rare dreams about him, and we know that she keeps a yellowed photograph of him together with one of her radiant youth. My mother and I know of my father’s past infidelity, we know that they used to meet in cheap hotels, and we know it ended with a mistimed telephone call. My father knows of my dissolved infatuation, he knows something of a boy in a picture, and he knows this boy never appears anymore. I know, she knows, she knows, he knows – but the only knowledge that we have are of images, limited in their frames, and worse.
I sit at dinner and look at my sister, my father, and my mother. This should be the frame of a traditional family photograph, but we are each far across from the others, divided by chasms of the table. We are each thinking about a person, we are each of us a photograph, alone in the white borders of our knowledge, and they are each staring at something off-screen that I can never truly see. The dinner table is a frame in which two heads might sometimes appear, or two hands sometimes cross each other, but in each of our totalities we are always an image of loneliness. And in his book Backwards And Forwards, writer David Ball says that “an image falls within a common range for everyone… and yet evokes different responses from person to person”. If we are each of us alone in a single and yet infinite photograph, how can we ever hope to capture truth within the scopes of our limited eyes?
Even when I am with my friends, I am also conscious of these peripheries of my vision. This is us now, sitting in the set of memory that is masquerading as a café. We are talking about the past, we are using all of the photographs in our collective history to paste together a world. But so many of the photographs conflict because of the different frames of our eyes, and in addition to the overlaps there are gaps, black holes where remembrance has failed. This is a fraying world, divided by a million intersecting and chaotic lines, bounded on all sides and inside by the intruding black borders of forgetfulness. This is a fraying world, and this is also a world that is dead and dying.
When my friends and I talk now about going back to our high school, and when we forcibly drag out and unite opposing photographs, we are at the same time aware that there is no going back, physically or mentally. We are comparing schedules, we are bending chance and purpose in our little date-books, but to what end? In the second that each of us took one last look at that school in order to fix it in our personal photographs, it had already ceased to exist. The school still stands, but it doesn’t stand still; my school is already gone. Roland Barthes says in his essay Camera Lucida that photography is “the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency”, and that therefore “Death is the eidos of… Photograph”, but if my photographs, as well as each of the photographs carried by each person here and elsewhere, whether of the school or of anything else, can only be stillborn, then they must also be lies. If four people cannot make sense of a single photograph, what chance do the seven of us here have, despite of our number, because of our number, and also considering time? Consider a photograph, consider how it limits not only spatially, but also temporally, and thereafter know the futility in this world of our eyes – that constant knowledge-seeking camera that is always thwarted by the superimposition of an obscuring lens.
But perhaps obscurity is the answer to this question, the peephole to knowledge. See this birthday of mine happen in reverse. Everyone, family, friends, all these disparate groups are gathered here in the distorting light of my many candles, each bestowing confusing light. The last candle lit is now extinguished, and what happens? Faces half-formed and indistinct disappear; features previously dancing in shadows slide into a uniform darkness. The next-to-last candle lit is now extinguished, and the same happens with new faces. Each candle lit is extinguished, one by one, until the very last, whereupon the room is plunged into blackness. But this darkness is different, because I know these people are still here.
Light is not illuminating; when a candle is lit I can see, but not entirely – there are parts that will always be flickering. Furthermore, sight is always deceitful in its composition and preservation of the photographs it takes. No photograph is also candid, because a candid photograph is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron – to see, to photograph, is always to frame, and to frame is always to misinterpret, and to misinterpret is always to distance. And therefore no knowledge is also enlightening, because enlightening knowledge is also a contradiction in terms, also an oxymoron – to know is always to limit, to limit is always to falsify, and to falsify is always to distance. The only true connection any two people can have, then, is in their mutual awareness that there is none.
Long before photographs came into popularity, painters knew this. I stand in front of Rene Magritte’s 1928 painting of The Lovers, but every single painting in this gallery is a testament to the power of transforming ignorance into intimacy. Surrealism, impressionism, expressionism – all of the art in this gallery, even the relatively more factual representations of realism, seek to imprint on us not just a truth hidden within their brush strokes, not just a truth unique within each of us, but a truth that is unifying in the fact of its incalculable facets. Magritte’s painting demonstrates this in content as in innate structure. A man and woman are clasped inextricably around each other under a darkling sky, two people in this desolate landscape with only each other to cling to. But they are together only because both their heads are shrouded in white cloth, white cloth that melds them in blackness into one. If they were to tear off their blindfolds and see each other in the light of knowledge they would be separated in every possible way.
I stand in this gallery, surrounded by those who knew this, these precursors to men and women today who are silent in the face of not only great tragedies and happiness, but also small ones too, people who when they speak must be aware of the eternal insufficiency of any form of language of civilization that aspires to truth.
I take out my photograph of this boy I used to love, this photograph whose only real truth is not in its precision of lines and colors, but in his foreign unknowability, and in the barrier, glossy, indestructible. Ignorance is not the same as the knowledge and acknowledgement of ignorance. When we believe love to be transformative, we transform it, but when we know we have transformed it, we can begin to love.
Monday, October 03, 2005
Story: A Letter
Dear John:
All knowledge is only fiction with an earnest smile. You say to me, “We are not as good friends as we should be, because while I know you the longest, I know you the least”, but writer H. L. Mencken once said that “We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine”, and I will go one step even further and say to you because even here and now are frequently moonshine, we are not only as good friends as we should be, we are also as good friends as we can be, as any two people can be, because we are still friends.
For the past twelve years you have come to my birthday celebrations as I have come to yours, and since we follow the same rituals you yourself must know the truth of what I am about to say.
Birthdays are microcosms of life, and like any life the morning is given to the family. I sit at the dining table, me on my side, my sister on hers, my father on his, and my mother on hers, and we are four people divided, divided by experience, divided by memories shared in secret with one but not all. In my family this experience appears as the specters of my youthful crush, my sister’s disapproved-of boyfriend, my mother’s lost prince, and my father’s infidelity – ghostly men and women, perhaps even joined by more that we know not of. But whoever they are, whoever they were or will be, known or unknown, they share our table, sometimes forgotten, sometimes noticed, but always there waiting. They sit between us, they whisper in our ears, and they cannot be driven away. It might not be the same with you and your family; your specters might not take human form, but each family has their own ghosts, ghosts who stop the tongue and dam the ears, who speak with our words and ask things like whether school was good or whether we want more vegetables. And on any birthday morning, yours or mine, this is true as it is of most days – this I know, and this you know too. But even our mutual knowledge is not a bridge across a chasm, because my specters haunt only my family, as your ghosts haunt only yours. There are no words I can use that would let you see the specters in my family; there are no words that would summon them to a table shared by you and me. And so as my family is divided by what we know, so are you and I divided by what you cannot truly know, because these are things I cannot truly show.
But would you want to see them, even if I could find the words that would open your eyes? Friendship is two people covering their eyes; it is two people blinding themselves with the white cloth of the morgue so each need not see the other’s ghosts; in the same way we cover the dead so as to not offend the living who have no connection to them. I see this when you step through my door as morning passes into afternoon and life passes from family to friend – I see you stooped over from the daily imps that burden your back, and I know that you do not want to have to carry mine as well. Like in Rene Magritte’s 1928 painting The Lovers, life is sometimes an ink-filled sky, made even more horrible by the comicality of its darkness, and we need to blind ourselves if we are not to realize how alone we are in our troubles. We need to cling onto each other in the necessary pretence that you are like me as I am like you, featureless and generic in our feelings so that we can understand each other. I understand this, as do you, and this is why we keep our distance, why we bind the cloth around our heads as in the painting, why we use words not to build bridges across chasms but to push each other further away even as we hold onto each other. As we sit down, we are aware, you and I. You think to yourself that this is my birthday, and I do not want to hear your problems. I think to myself that this is my birthday, and my problems should remain my own. We both think that we sympathize with each other’s problems anyway because they are, if not the same in themselves, then the same in our suffering of them. The hilarious thing in this would-be farce is of course that we both know all these truths are lies. We sit across each other, and we are blind – we cannot see each other’s ghosts, we do not want to see each other’s ghosts. We only want to think and say that we can and we do.
And so that is exactly what we think and say, even as afternoon passes into evening and friends and family begin to merge, proving once and again how little we can know of each other as we sit and chat. You are no longer the only friend here – people from all around the city-state have come, each of who see me in one particular way, and thus render me a fraud in everyone’s eyes. This is what you feel when I speak with other people; you feel my falseness because you cannot understand, you cannot see me in those circumstances no matter how much you smile and nod, and so my outline begins to fade in your eyes. You try to reach out to me; you may try to include yourself in this exclusive circle circumscribed by superficially shared knowledge, but how can you? When names are meaningless sounds to you, when the pictures we draw with words are for you like the pictures in a stranger’s scrapbook, the elements instantly recognizable but the whole they make never so, how can you possibly do anything other than feel like an invoked monster outside this group of human beings, and in the end finally become one? And so it is with you, so it is with me, and so it is with everyone else in this room – we are all monsters, we are each one of us something other to everyone else, even as we sit and talk to each other, even as we pretend that we are connected by something as illusory and frivolous as human DNA.
But this is not the extent of the unspoken and accepted tragedy of humanity as a civilization. We are not only our incalculable selves, each one unique and therefore unrecognizable – we are also the victims of time, which will twist every true word we speak into a lie. I loved once, but that man I loved is not here, because he does not exist now, not anymore, and neither does the I from that time. I built him up with my illusions, I clothed him in the colors of my fancy and made him a beautiful creature, but he was never that creature, and now I am not that I too, because time will strip away all these paints to reveal the strange monsters that we are, were, and always will be. Love is not transformative; it is we who transform love and with love, just as we transform friendship and with friendship, and so friendship is not transformative either – and time will thus kill all those I’s that dare to dream otherwise. This I know, and this you know too. Birthdays are also death anniversaries of those I’s that have passed into nothing, killed by time, and some presents are also our gifts of mourning to those selves. As I open a present, as my face flickers for an instant in an awoken memory of a self that liked it but that no longer exists, you can see in that moment the ghost that I am. How wonderful, I might say, but you know better. And you will look back at those conversations that we have had this day, and you will realize this terrible fact – when I speak to others I am a monster, and when I speak to you I am a ghost, because the only way we can connect is through shared and fading memories, memories of things dead and gone, with only our words dragging them forcibly from the grave like so many tomb-robbers hoping to find something valuable in our dead memories. And so as my outline begins to fade when I speak to others, so it is fading when I speak to you too, because I am an amalgamation of not only something alive and something other, but also of something that is always dying and is always dead. We are all monsters, but we are also all ghosts – we cannot help being either, and that is why we dress up in our uniforms of skin, not only to hide ourselves but also to give us an enduring substance.
You know this, as do I, and as evening passes into night the facts of our existence only become clearer. Look at us, we are gathered around the table, and the lights are switched off, and this is what we are – alike only when the darkness comes. Then one candle is lit, and this tiny and solitary flame illuminates a few faces, but not completely. Features dance in and out of shadows, and the whole scene is grotesquely mocking from the beginning, as it will be until the end. Another candle is lit, and another few more faces are brought into being, even as this same candle casts the faces before into struggling obscurity. Another candle is lit, and another, and another. But they will all burn down to nothing, beginning with the first, leaving only their unchangeable and easily removed traces upon the mutating cream scribble of my name. And this is what we celebrate – this is what we celebrate when we sing the song of life.
Now it is over, and people begin to leave. You will too. You may choose to stay longer than the others, but you will leave, sooner or later. And when it is over I will clean up the mess, kiss my parents goodnight, and go to my room. And the day will end as it began, with me alone.
This is a birthday, but this is also every day of every life. We cannot see each other’s ghosts, we do not want to see each other’s ghosts, we cannot even see each other clearly for we are all ghosts and monsters, and we will all leave each other in the end, if we were ever together. This is what we are, and since you and I both know this, I say to you – are we not already the best of friends, simply because we are friends?
All knowledge is only fiction with an earnest smile. You say to me, “We are not as good friends as we should be, because while I know you the longest, I know you the least”, but writer H. L. Mencken once said that “We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine”, and I will go one step even further and say to you because even here and now are frequently moonshine, we are not only as good friends as we should be, we are also as good friends as we can be, as any two people can be, because we are still friends.
For the past twelve years you have come to my birthday celebrations as I have come to yours, and since we follow the same rituals you yourself must know the truth of what I am about to say.
Birthdays are microcosms of life, and like any life the morning is given to the family. I sit at the dining table, me on my side, my sister on hers, my father on his, and my mother on hers, and we are four people divided, divided by experience, divided by memories shared in secret with one but not all. In my family this experience appears as the specters of my youthful crush, my sister’s disapproved-of boyfriend, my mother’s lost prince, and my father’s infidelity – ghostly men and women, perhaps even joined by more that we know not of. But whoever they are, whoever they were or will be, known or unknown, they share our table, sometimes forgotten, sometimes noticed, but always there waiting. They sit between us, they whisper in our ears, and they cannot be driven away. It might not be the same with you and your family; your specters might not take human form, but each family has their own ghosts, ghosts who stop the tongue and dam the ears, who speak with our words and ask things like whether school was good or whether we want more vegetables. And on any birthday morning, yours or mine, this is true as it is of most days – this I know, and this you know too. But even our mutual knowledge is not a bridge across a chasm, because my specters haunt only my family, as your ghosts haunt only yours. There are no words I can use that would let you see the specters in my family; there are no words that would summon them to a table shared by you and me. And so as my family is divided by what we know, so are you and I divided by what you cannot truly know, because these are things I cannot truly show.
But would you want to see them, even if I could find the words that would open your eyes? Friendship is two people covering their eyes; it is two people blinding themselves with the white cloth of the morgue so each need not see the other’s ghosts; in the same way we cover the dead so as to not offend the living who have no connection to them. I see this when you step through my door as morning passes into afternoon and life passes from family to friend – I see you stooped over from the daily imps that burden your back, and I know that you do not want to have to carry mine as well. Like in Rene Magritte’s 1928 painting The Lovers, life is sometimes an ink-filled sky, made even more horrible by the comicality of its darkness, and we need to blind ourselves if we are not to realize how alone we are in our troubles. We need to cling onto each other in the necessary pretence that you are like me as I am like you, featureless and generic in our feelings so that we can understand each other. I understand this, as do you, and this is why we keep our distance, why we bind the cloth around our heads as in the painting, why we use words not to build bridges across chasms but to push each other further away even as we hold onto each other. As we sit down, we are aware, you and I. You think to yourself that this is my birthday, and I do not want to hear your problems. I think to myself that this is my birthday, and my problems should remain my own. We both think that we sympathize with each other’s problems anyway because they are, if not the same in themselves, then the same in our suffering of them. The hilarious thing in this would-be farce is of course that we both know all these truths are lies. We sit across each other, and we are blind – we cannot see each other’s ghosts, we do not want to see each other’s ghosts. We only want to think and say that we can and we do.
And so that is exactly what we think and say, even as afternoon passes into evening and friends and family begin to merge, proving once and again how little we can know of each other as we sit and chat. You are no longer the only friend here – people from all around the city-state have come, each of who see me in one particular way, and thus render me a fraud in everyone’s eyes. This is what you feel when I speak with other people; you feel my falseness because you cannot understand, you cannot see me in those circumstances no matter how much you smile and nod, and so my outline begins to fade in your eyes. You try to reach out to me; you may try to include yourself in this exclusive circle circumscribed by superficially shared knowledge, but how can you? When names are meaningless sounds to you, when the pictures we draw with words are for you like the pictures in a stranger’s scrapbook, the elements instantly recognizable but the whole they make never so, how can you possibly do anything other than feel like an invoked monster outside this group of human beings, and in the end finally become one? And so it is with you, so it is with me, and so it is with everyone else in this room – we are all monsters, we are each one of us something other to everyone else, even as we sit and talk to each other, even as we pretend that we are connected by something as illusory and frivolous as human DNA.
But this is not the extent of the unspoken and accepted tragedy of humanity as a civilization. We are not only our incalculable selves, each one unique and therefore unrecognizable – we are also the victims of time, which will twist every true word we speak into a lie. I loved once, but that man I loved is not here, because he does not exist now, not anymore, and neither does the I from that time. I built him up with my illusions, I clothed him in the colors of my fancy and made him a beautiful creature, but he was never that creature, and now I am not that I too, because time will strip away all these paints to reveal the strange monsters that we are, were, and always will be. Love is not transformative; it is we who transform love and with love, just as we transform friendship and with friendship, and so friendship is not transformative either – and time will thus kill all those I’s that dare to dream otherwise. This I know, and this you know too. Birthdays are also death anniversaries of those I’s that have passed into nothing, killed by time, and some presents are also our gifts of mourning to those selves. As I open a present, as my face flickers for an instant in an awoken memory of a self that liked it but that no longer exists, you can see in that moment the ghost that I am. How wonderful, I might say, but you know better. And you will look back at those conversations that we have had this day, and you will realize this terrible fact – when I speak to others I am a monster, and when I speak to you I am a ghost, because the only way we can connect is through shared and fading memories, memories of things dead and gone, with only our words dragging them forcibly from the grave like so many tomb-robbers hoping to find something valuable in our dead memories. And so as my outline begins to fade when I speak to others, so it is fading when I speak to you too, because I am an amalgamation of not only something alive and something other, but also of something that is always dying and is always dead. We are all monsters, but we are also all ghosts – we cannot help being either, and that is why we dress up in our uniforms of skin, not only to hide ourselves but also to give us an enduring substance.
You know this, as do I, and as evening passes into night the facts of our existence only become clearer. Look at us, we are gathered around the table, and the lights are switched off, and this is what we are – alike only when the darkness comes. Then one candle is lit, and this tiny and solitary flame illuminates a few faces, but not completely. Features dance in and out of shadows, and the whole scene is grotesquely mocking from the beginning, as it will be until the end. Another candle is lit, and another few more faces are brought into being, even as this same candle casts the faces before into struggling obscurity. Another candle is lit, and another, and another. But they will all burn down to nothing, beginning with the first, leaving only their unchangeable and easily removed traces upon the mutating cream scribble of my name. And this is what we celebrate – this is what we celebrate when we sing the song of life.
Now it is over, and people begin to leave. You will too. You may choose to stay longer than the others, but you will leave, sooner or later. And when it is over I will clean up the mess, kiss my parents goodnight, and go to my room. And the day will end as it began, with me alone.
This is a birthday, but this is also every day of every life. We cannot see each other’s ghosts, we do not want to see each other’s ghosts, we cannot even see each other clearly for we are all ghosts and monsters, and we will all leave each other in the end, if we were ever together. This is what we are, and since you and I both know this, I say to you – are we not already the best of friends, simply because we are friends?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)