Story: We The Divided

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.