Asunder: "It is, before all, to make you see"

To mark the 35th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the front page of the April 4, 2010, New York Times Book Review came into our homes speaking of two novels about the Vietnam War. One of these, Karl Marlantes's Matterhorn, was a first book which (according to the reviewer, Sebastian Junger) took 30 years to write. "Reading his account of the bloody folly surrounding the Matterhorn outpost," breathes the awed Junger, "you get the feeling Marlantes is not overly worried about the attention span of his readers; you get the feeling he was not desperate or impatient to be published."

But then Junger quotes a sample of Marlantes's prose. It goes like this.

No, the jungle wasn't evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares.

Well, as Samuel Johnson said about the Metaphysical poets, "To write on their plan it was at least necessary to read and think." To write this passage, Merlantes seems to have read Conrad (Heart of Darkness), Emerson (the Divinity School Address -- "Evil is merely privative. It is like cold, which is the privation of heat"), and Hemingway (passim).

But "asunder"?

In prose that attempted an act of representation all the way down to the heart of language, the washerwomen on the Liffey once listened and sighed and wondered:

Waterhouse's clogh. They took it asunder, I hurd thum sigh. When will they reassemble it? (213)

"Asunder" is a word signifying separation in a definitive way. It is to "apart," say, as adieu is to au revoir. Whispering such significances through intervals between the words in its lexicon, Finnegans Wake would seem to be an instructive textbook in the language of loss of meaning, negation, and the subsumption of the human into wordless time. But Finnegans Wake doesn't seem to be part of the library underlying Matterhorn. If Marlantes and Junger and the New York Times Book Review had a theory of language in mind when they wrote their words down and showed them to us, it was probably not much more ambitious than the serviceable goal that Joseph Conrad had in mind in 1897 when he wrote his preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus":

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel -- it is, before all, to make you see. That -- and no more, and it is everything.

But on the day in 1975 when the helicopters took off from the rooftops of Saigon, could it still be everything? In its formal capacity of an agent of the power of the written word, the New York Times Book Review doesn't seem to believe that itself.

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Even the compositor's math will convince you of that. Of the four columns on this page, prose occupies the one on the left and the one on the right, but the two in the center are all a wordless image by an artist whose wordy name is reduced to a fine-print legality in the corner, Patrick Thomas. On the page, the wordless image is the only thing close to a work of art -- that is, a piece of representation capable of lifting us off the page. Remembering as we rise free of the undistinguished prose on its margins, we look back at the picture and see silhouettes of Blackhawk helicopters and F-4 bombers, of peace signs and a map of Vietnam. The color scheme is camouflage, and that helps us set the silhouettes to words of our own -- moralizing words, nostalgia words circa 2010.

But two more of the silhouettes are redacted versions of images that evoked words in their own time: Eddie Adams's 1968 photograph of South Vietnamese national police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan blowing a handcuffed prisoner's brains out and Nick Ut's 1972 photograph of a scattering crowd of screaming children fleeing before a napalm attack. America saw those images shortly after their artists interacted with history to bring them forth, and after that it was harder to read Heart of Darkness as simply as Conrad had written it -- and harder too, of course, to think about war as it had been thought about in Conrad's time. Something in the relation between a writer and his readers had been sundered. Thanks to photographic technology, some of the artist's responsibility for making us see had passed from the written word to an instrumentality of less mediated sight.

So it may be that Matterhorn will ultimately have less to say about the Vietnam War than Finnegans Wake. Situated on a borderline between direct seeing and direct speech, whispering to us in dream language of an experience that its words can never completely make us see, Finnegans Wake may be readable as an episode in the representation of the extreme. And in the way it places words before us as simply there, irreducible to any morality except its own grammar, it begins to seem, in certain lights, like a photograph.

Hommage à Jean-Henri Fabre

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Salon: dance accessories

On a December day in 1961, Marilyn Monroe posed for the camera of Len Steckler in the company of America's folksy bard Carl Sandburg. Sandburg, off to the side of the image, holds his guitar close on his lap, but somehow he seems even closer to Marilyn. Curled kittenishly on her chair, Marilyn smiles absently at the camera but inclines her taut body toward Carl. Her shoulders are curved forward and her knees are held back only by the chair's arm. She irradiates Steckler's image with formal yearning. A still photograph, it desperately wants to be a movie.

As to what Carl Sandburg might be saying on the movie's soundtrack -- who cares? As to his guitar, who cares about that either? Most of what we feel, I imagine, is something like a focused desire that the picture may one day, somehow, help us understand its silent way of experiencing Marilyn as a song.

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But the publication in whose presence we experience Len Steckler's vision doesn't ask us to think about song. Here on its page the image of Marilyn remains rigorously silent among words, and the words are without music. After all, this is the TLS. "The film star was 'three hours late, but had an excuse,'" quotes the TLS caption writer from the book where this image has now been published for the first time. "'She had been at the hairdresser, trying to get her hair colour to match Carl's.'" Hair, round little shoulders, and eager, devoted knees incline themselves silently toward a dark-clothed man. Poetry receives the tribute of grace, in silence. The TLS encourages us to interpret the comedienne's image as an allegory.

But the allegory is isolated in a soundproof box, and around the box run TLS words, their flow undiverted by the printed topography that renders the form of a woman's body. In the expanded margin of the image, George Steiner reviews a collection of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's letters and quotes their author: "I rejoice only in the grotesque and at the frontiers of Death."

And the question arises then: what wordless dance can bear us over the printed line between that image and those words?

How small a part of time they share

Palm Beach, Florida, about 1905:

http://www.shorpy.com/node/7830 

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The caption is by Henry James.

The velvet air, the colour of the sea, the "royal" palms, clustered here and there, and, in their nobleness of beauty, their single sublime distinction, putting every other mark and sign to the blush, these are the principal figures of the sum -- these, with the custom of the short dip into the jungle, at two or three points of which, approached by charming, winding wood-ways, the small but genial fruit-farm offers hospitality -- offers it in all the succulence of the admirable pale-skinned orange and the huge sun-warmed grape-fruit, plucked from the low bough, where it fairly bumps your cheek for solicitation, and partaken of, on the spot, as the immortal ladies of Cranford partook of dessert -- with a few steps aside, the back turned and a betrayed ingurgitation. It is by means of a light perambulator, of "adult size," but constructed of wicker-work, and pendent from a bicycle propelled by a robust negro, that the jungle is thus visited; the bicycle follows the serpentine track, the secluded ranch is swiftly reached, the peaceful retirement of the cultivators multitudinously admired, the perambulator promptly re-entered, the darkey restored to the saddle and his charge again to the hotel.

 -- The American Scene, chapter 14, section 4

The part of speech in this caption which changes Palm Beach from a location in space to an experience in time is one of the adverbs: "promptly." "Promptly" helps us to understand the tourist attraction as an experience defined in the imperative mood, passive voice, and past progressive tense, as a thing to have been seen. It tells us that the tourist attraction is experienced across time as an anticipation of its own memory. Even as it takes us in, the attraction forcibly defers our sense of what it is in the present. That pleasure won't come until the vacation is over. Then, in the future, the experience can be completed by a willed nostalgia for what is now forever in the past. Hence the term souvenir, which in its French original is both a noun and a reflexive verb.

Some forty years before this picture was taken, another part of speech related to memory became briefly important for photographers: the adjective "instantaneous," as opposed to the newly adjectival noun "time." That grammar hadn't been a feature of the earliest photographs, because all of those were what we now call time exposures. In 1840, for example, John W. Draper was able to make the world's first photographic portrait by managing to reduce exposure time to 65 seconds: an interval short enough for the sitter to remain still, allowing only for animal necessity. The marmoreal significance of the resulting image, as Draper wrote, is that "the indistinctness which may be detected in some parts arises mainly from the inevitable motions of the respiratory muscles -- a slight play of the features, and the tedium of a forced attitude" (Taft 30). 

 

But if there was tedium during the fraction of a second in 1905 when a shutter opened in the light of Palm Beach, it was only the momentary trace of a mood. In 1888, Gerard Manley Hopkins had referred to a photograph of himself as "taken instantaneous" -- that is, in instantaneous mode, at a time when photographs were associated equally with both modes -- and by 1905, instantaneous images were so much the norm that the term "instantaneous" itself had almost dropped out of use. 

That is, by 1905 most photographs had ceased to incorporate past time. They had become only serial instances of present times. When Henry James came to Palm Beach in 1905 to see, he probably saw under the influence of photography; that is, as an artist who saw images moving into and through and then out of a frame. His record of the experience, The American Scene, was published in 1907, the same year as the New York Edition of his novels, with its photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn. Modeling for language two years earlier, Henry James, portly adult, mentally posed himself as entering his large-sized baby carriage and then promptly leaving it. The counterimage of a slender infancy may have come amusingly to mind during the ride between poses, but it wasn't recorded because neither of the two instantaneities had evoked it. The sense of elapsed time between them would emerge in memory only later, developing in Henry James's prose word by slow word.

And, word by slow word, the photograph and its illustrative words continue to drift apart in time: the words a text continuing to speak to us in a grammar measured across time, the image an instantaneity ever more untranslatable as it makes its way outward from the human beings on the beach and the time when they were alive before the camera, an instant before memory set in.

Work cited: 

Robert Taft, Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839-1889 (1938; rpt. New York: Dover Publications, 1964).

Large unconscious scenery

In the large unconscious scenery of my land with its lakes and forests . . .

-- Whitman, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, sec. 14

"It's almost as if they can talk," we say when we see patterned activity executed by the non-human. "It's almost as if they're thinking." Something that looks like art is coming into existence before our eyes, but neither this art nor its creator is anything but the play of some molecules under the explanatory dictation of physical chemistry.

I see blue and orange, overlapping like lacquer plates on a suit of samurai armor. I see the wasp's head, simplified like a Brancusi to its essential parts of a sensing apparatus (dark dull still eyes, bright moving antennae) and an active mouth. Knowing too that what I see is being underwritten by a tourist economy and its requirement for light and color, I see the leaf of a hibiscus, whose color and form are part of Hawaii's currency. Under a brilliant sun, a kind of Sotheby's is being reenacted: one kind of symbol system (call it art) sheared away from its originating biology and consumed by another (call it money).

But here there is no auctioneer to call out words that could give human significance to the exchange of reflex communication. The only words I can bring to the experience are my own. A wordy spectator, all I can supply is a stereotyped explanation of what I'm feeling. This, I think, must be dramatic irony. If only the wasp could speak to me and tell me how to feel. If only she could know.

But on college campuses, grassy spaces full of talkatoria, there are times when the play of instinct does take on words. At those instants, the beauty created by reflex action becomes the beauty of high comedy. Consider, for instance, the text known as the Kaye Report, at

http://www.suny.edu/Files/sunynewsFiles/Pdf/KayeReport.PDF.

Written by retired Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals Judith S. Kaye, dated February 11, 2010, and officially titled "Report to the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York," this text documents what happened after the administration of SUNY's Binghamton campus decided that its basketball team needed some really successful players. An early consequence of that decision played out on October 26, 2008, when one of the team's new stars, Malik Alvin, conducted a smash-and-grab raid on a Wal-Mart and collided with an elderly woman while running out the door with a stolen package of condoms ("Report," p. 42). Apprehended, Alvin was sentenced to an apology and some community service.

That much of the report is history. But its text makes the transition from history to art by presenting us these data in its creators' own words. On pp. 83-84, for instance, the report transcribes for us a series of text messages between Alvin and assistant coach Marc Hsu, with Alvin demanding money from Hsu to pay his community service fee and Hsu complying. Offered the opportunity to explain the words printed out on Judith Kaye's page, Coach Hsu simply denied that they said what they did say (85). It was as if he were creating a poem: playing with words as if they were a basketball in motion, nothing but the visible trace of a play of vanished invisible forces.

And then:

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Soberly, in accordance with the canons of academic respectability, the report brackets its editorial emendations: "Where [are you] at[?]" (83). Visually, too, the report is canonically academic. Its font is Times New Roman, Microsoft Word's default for all versions before 2007. Named for the paradigmatically respectable London newspaper that sponsored its coming into the world, Times Roman is a conservative font, with its decorative flourishes (such as its asymmetrical W) serving only to set off its sober ensemble like the tiny pattern on a funeral director's tie. Translated from the sans-serif and primary colors of a cellphone screen to the black and white employed by Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, Malik Alvin's words transform their new context just as (T.S. Eliot teaches us this in "Tradition and the Individual Talent") a new poem which enters an anthology makes the whole old book new.

And, again, Coach Hsu simply denies that he and his collaborator Malik Alvin have written a poem. But about that wordy gesture, of course, a poem was already in existence to help us make our way through the expanding cloud of new beauty.

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

So thank you, text of the Kaye Report, for your brackets and their graceful educational gesture of homage to the old, dead language which colleges once existed to teach: "I left the stuff from the internet the same so you can know what you[']r[e] changing."  Thank you, Times Roman, for fronting for your content the way American universities front for their athletic programs. But above all, thank you, dull expressionless eyes and tightly packed sphere of thoracic muscles, for focusing the drive of a hard aerodynamic shape toward a hibiscus-shaped reward (you could call it a leaf; you could call it a condom) but never once breaking the beauty of silence to call it anything.

Art as appropriation

Here's Detroitfunk's take on the playful tourists of the art world. Somewhere in the great blankness, Andy Warhol is securitizing the asset.

http://www.detroitfunk.com/?p=4159

But a difference between Warhol and Detroitfunk is that Detroitfunk and his camera make a way into the spaces under their gaze and record the traces of what once existed as human before it became archaeology, artifact, and (once it was finally dead) art.

Sous rature: illustration becomes invisible

Five years ago, a Danish newspaper published twelve cartoons which depicted the prophet Muhammad -- an act considered blasphemous by Muslims. In his review of a book about the affair, Jytte Klausen's The Cartoons That Shook the World (Yale University Press, 2009), Eddy Portnoy summarizes what happened next:

The cartoon crisis began in September 2005, when the nominally conservative Jyllands Posten Danish newspaper published 12 cartoons that featured the Muslim Prophet Muhammed as their mark, a provocative ploy meant to counter the news that a biographer of the Prophet Muhammed could not find an illustrator out of fear of fundamentalist retribution. After a few initial, small protests, the episode seemed to have fizzled, but the following February, the Muslim world exploded in protest, violent and non. What happened during the five-month incubation period between publication and explosion forms the most compelling portion of Klausen’s book.

And yes, people were killed in the protests. And yes, the entire nation of Denmark was subjected to a devastating economic boycott. Prudently, therefore, Yale University Press refused to allow Jytte Klausen to reproduce the cartoons in her own book about them. Writing in a liberal newspaper, Portnoy draws this liberal conclusion from Yale's action.

To many Westerners, the cartoon crisis seems like a wild overreaction to an obnoxious but ultimately innocuous set of cartoons. Regardless, its repercussions continue to abound. Certain Islamic countries, for example, have been working to pass anti-blasphemy resolutions in the United Nations. Upping the ante, the Organization of Islamic States wants to enshrine anti-blasphemy laws in the U.N. convention, making them enforceable. Last October, Pakistan requested "legal prohibition of publication of material that negatively stereotypes, insults or uses offensive language" on matters regarded by religious followers as "sacred or inherent to their dignity as human beings." Those are pretty broad reasons to put the cuffs on someone. To progressive democracies, this development should be extremely disturbing.

In December, the Vatican copyrighted the name and image of the pope. An attempt to control perceived blasphemies, this unprecedented step is a result of this whole sordid affair. "Pope on a Rope" may soon become a collector’s item. Also in December, the highly respected British journal Index on Censorship published an interview with Klausen in which the paper refused to publish the cartoons in question. When an organization that calls itself "Britain’s leading organisation promoting freedom of expression" censors itself, you know you’ve got a problem. Even Klausen said she was "flabbergasted" by this failure.

The ball continues to roll: Ireland enacted a blasphemy law January 1, the results of which we've yet to see. The first day of this year also saw the attempted murder of Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist who drew what is considered to be the most offensive of the original 12, by a Somali Islamist. Ultra-violence as a critical response to art has been with us since the Rushdie Affair: A demand that artists and scholars muzzle themselves does not seem to be the appropriate answer.

Now click on Portnoy's review at http://www.forward.com/articles/124886, and what you'll see there is an anti-censorship cartoon. That too is clickable. So go ahead and click on it.

Are you enjoying the funny joke that the liberal newspaper has played on you, and on us all?