Essays from the Nick of Time (7 page)

I

Let me begin with an observation on human nature so generally accepted it borders on truism: identity, both individual and cultural, is defined by one’s relation to the past. Whether we resist or embrace the past is relatively unimportant; either way history deals the featuring blow. If that is true, however (and there is overwhelming evidence—both mythic and empirical—that it is), then our ever-increasing ability to freeze time—to embalm the passing moment, as it were—is of vital importance.

Every step in the evolution of technology designed to preserve and store the past—from the mnemonic iambic line to the development of writing, from the daguerreotype to the camcorder—has been a transgression on the territory of private memory. For millennia, after all, the passing of each generation was accomplished by a great dying-off of the past in all its particulars. The sights and smells and sounds of an entire lifetime—transcribeable, if at all, in only the most primitive, partial way—would pass into night with the individual consciousness that had experienced them. To a great extent, the slate was rubbed clean, and each generation could begin the process anew.

That human beings have always fought this recurrent tide is not only true but inevitable. In many respects, I suppose, it is the
desire
to fight it that makes us human. To what extent we should succeed in our fight is another question. We have come a long way very quickly. Although we have been able to freeze visual images since the advent of photography midway through the nineteenth century, we tend to forget that it was not until 1935, for example, that we developed the ability to store information electromagnetically. With that first tape recorder—like beachcombers snatching shells from the surf—we could permanently save a world of sounds and voices from oblivion. Now, at the dawn of the video age, we stand ready to preserve the particularity of physical motion, the fluidity of individual expression, the unique juxtaposition of the aural and the visual.

What our technology has tapped into, obviously, are a number of great and timeless human dreams—dreams so pervasive they border on cliché: to stop the flow of time; to relive moments from our past; to preserve, in ever-greater detail, our private histories; to perpetuate ourselves and those we love. These are things not easily resisted, and already there’s a vast and growing library of private moments. With every passing hour, the past takes up more of the present.

I was born on the day the Soviets lofted
Sputnik
into space: technology’s child. But sensibilities, like obsolete organs or useless limbs, adapt slowly to new times. Real adaptation occurs over generations, not years or months. My unease over the prospect of vast video libraries of the dead, forever moving and talking and laughing in amber, must be understood for what it is: evidence of a sort of stunted psychic development, an evolutionary case of the bends. I’m not ready; I’m not sure any of us is. All traditions die hard, particularly the old and rooted ones, and at issue here is a cultural tradition as ancient as human consciousness: the tradition of giving over to death what rightfully belongs to it. To put it bluntly, I’ve lately had cause to wonder whether death
should
have some dominion.

If experience teaches anything, it is that some dreams are best fulfilled slowly and carefully, others not at all. Our free fall into the video age bears watching. Or, to shift to a less ominous metaphor, the game may be fun but the rules are vague and the stakes impressive. What we risk altering is nothing less than the time-honored demarcation between life and death, the quality and the grain of private history, the privilege of memory, the right of revision, the balm of forgetting. A great tinkering has begun. We are playing at the psychological equivalent of genetic engineering, except that
we
are the scientists and our own minds are the frost-proof strawberries, the three-pound mice. None of this should be taken lightly.

II

There are times in every life when the past acquires a particular resonance, when we grow sensitive to sounds and voices normally beyond the range of hearing. The past shades into present always and everywhere, but only rarely do we acknowledge the process; only rarely does some trigger force us to recognize ourselves as citizens of that frontier.

Last summer I spent two weeks carrying the past over a landscape bent on forgetting. In June I spent a rainy afternoon, evening, and night in the basement of my parents’ home in suburban Pennsylvania. After forty-six years of marriage, they had gone their separate ways. My mother acted out that most repressed of American dreams and returned to the old country, to streets and courtyards thick with memory, to the smells of cooked cabbage and
knedliky,
to the constant presence of companions both living and dead. My father chose to stay but moved out of the house. The past (an entire basementful) became my ward.

I descended with a chair and a cup of coffee, naively confident that I’d be up before my wife put our son to bed. Eight months and three thousand miles later, I still haven’t completely emerged from that basement. Surrounded by the dim bulks of boxes outside the light’s circle, I sat up late into the night. Dispersed among the acquired mementos of several generations—the shells and stones and snake skins, the fishing lures and first-grade spellers, the children’s clothes stiff and delicate as parchment—were thousands upon thousands of photographs. Some were in boxes and envelopes, others haphazardly stacked in great, curling piles. Pictures in shoeboxes, pictures in jars. A handsome man in a First World War uniform smiled up from the bottom of an old tackle box, his teeth showing white in the shade of a summer oak. I descended and surfaced, regaining the present only to be drawn down again by the next photograph, the next letter or telegram.

Hour followed hour. I struggled with great handfuls of letters, many still in their red and blue
luftpost
envelopes, the pages packed and densely scripted; with shoeboxes full of negatives; with piles and mounds of postcards, many featuring the five-heller stamps of Emperor Franz Josef that dated back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Entire lives passed before my eyes. I was reminded of the way clouds gather and disperse in high-speed photography.

The impression made by one postcard remains especially vivid. My great-uncle, a boy of sixteen, was a prisoner of war in Russia. On May 15, 1917, his sister Ludwa wrote him a brief note: “At noon today, Frantik Bacofske arrived and shot himself on their grave. He shot himself in the head but still talked. Before they got him to the hospital, he died. I’ll tell you about it in a letter. I don’t have time now. Till then, Ludwa.”

And everywhere, gloriously random but threading the whole, the photographs—history and geography meshed as arbitrarily as though the entire dusty mass were some grand metaphor of the mind relaxing into second childhood. My mother in 1949, at the age of twenty-four, overlooking postwar Munich from St. Peter’s Church, the row of buildings to her right ripped open like a torn honeycomb. My father in 1952, shirtless, a handkerchief on his head and a bowl of paint in his hand, whitewashing the walls of some apartment in the slums of Sydney. My mother again, this time in 1928, a round-faced toddler on a sunny hillside in Moravia, staring suspiciously at the cameraman. Even me, at fifteen months, all drumbelly and baby fat, walking purposefully along the edge of some pond in the Catskills, so similar to the child already asleep upstairs as I write this that I thought for an instant a current photograph had slipped into these labyrinths by mistake. My great-grandfather, mustache exquisitely waxed, surrounded by women in white “Gibson girl” dresses—1903.

Each photograph seemed ripe with secrets; each face contained its own private catalog of fears and desires, of things seen and people loved and mistakes made. And above it all, carrying the not-unpleasant odor of old, dry books: the scent of mortality. Lives rose and fell like bubbles in a vat, and what remained was a tangled skein of connections, of links and intersections, a thrush’s nest in January.

With the night edging toward dawn, I returned one more handful of photographs to the carton from which I’d taken them. The task I had set myself was impossible. I’d done nothing, and in two weeks we were moving to California, already terribly pressed for space. The cartons bulked large in the shadows, suddenly mute. My own past seemed to linger there with them. I turned and walked up the stairs. It was decided. We’d take them all with us.

Driving west across the country at the wheel of an eighteen-foot U-Haul, with a car hitched to a tow dolly that made it literally impossible to back up, I was struck by the strange symbolism of it all. Here I was, after all, like some latter-day Puritan leaving the Egypt of the past, bound for the promise of a New Canaan. Westward was heaven, or rather heavenward was the west, as Henry David Thoreau had put it. I wanted freedom, forgetfulness, a new beginning. And yet I, apparently no less than John Winthrop aboard the
Arabella
in 1630, needed and nourished a link to the past. My ambivalence toward all those lives curled up against each other—riding in their envelopes behind me—was, I suspected, a particularly American sentiment.

The very landscape confirmed this. Everywhere I looked, the past showed through like the ghostly outlines of wallpaper through paint. On one hand, the mini-marts and the shopping malls and the velvet paintings of Indian maidens with Anglo features—what Melville, in a less egalitarian age, had called “the vulgar caldron of an everlasting uncrystalizing Present.” On the other, signs of a great instability: Warsaw, Kentucky; Prague, Texas; Paris, Arkansas. The lesson seemed clear: the past was essential, inescapable. Canaan could not be Canaan without Egypt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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