Essays from the Nick of Time (8 page)

Rationally my response made no sense whatsoever. What was I doing except defending one representation of the past against another? Why draw the line at that particular point? In what way were the photographs in the garage superior to the videocassette in its neat cover, which I’d marked on the spine and slipped like a volume onto the bookshelf? I even had to admit to a certain ambivalence. Watching that twenty-minute tape, I’d experienced an almost supernatural pleasure. Whatever small resentment I’d felt had been overwhelmed at the time by a sort of dumb gratitude. If my neighbor had asked to make the tape beforehand I would have found a way to decline politely. Now that the thing was made, and mine, I’d fight like a badger to keep it.

That same afternoon I carried the cartons back from the garage. I piled them high in a bulky pyramid on the living-room carpet. It was time to unpack.

III

That the home-video library will eventually supplant the photo album seems beyond question. When have we ever been able to resist a new technology? Clearly, a new age—marked by a new relation to the past and defined by our love affair with the camcorder—has already begun. It would seem an opportune time to attempt to recognize the gains and losses. There are quite a few of both.

My case for the photograph is simple: I value it for its very limitations. We are drawn to the absences, the eloquence of what is not shown. This is true for two apparently contradictory reasons: first, because incompleteness invites the imagination (or, in the case of personal material, the memory) to play—to complete the gesture, establish the context, re-create the time and place and voice; second, because consciously or not we respect the humility and acknowledge the accuracy of the incomplete, the unresolved. Every photograph, every novel, every poem and painting carries an aura of mystery, a graceful reminder of our own mortality. And we do what we can to resolve that mystery. It is this dialogue—between things known and unknowable, between memory and death (for what is death but forgetting, writ large?)—that we chiefly love, that makes us human.

The camcorder, by contrast, offers the illusion of completeness; virtually everything—contexts, voices, background noises—has been provided. To all but the most jaded the result is a miracle of representation, but it’s a miracle that isolates us in the essentially passive role of observers. There’s nothing to do except watch and marvel. What we have before us is the moment past in all its eccentric glory—or at least this is what the video asks us to believe. But of course it’s not true. The camcorder does not capture the past; it is simply an exercise in mimicry raised to a higher level. Its success, its undeniable appeal, is the result of its ability to mask the spaces, to hide the gaps behind a more compelling, more seductive facsimile of what was real. The finished product, however, is no more “accurate,” no more objective, than the photograph. Both are acts of creative selection.

Every time we determine a border—whether around a photograph, a painting, or a frame of videotape—we are engaging in a more or less arbitrary act of exclusion. We decide what looks good, what “fits,” what “belongs”—and what doesn’t. We cannot avoid this; it is the nature of the beast. Whether we are snapping a picture or shooting a tape, we are in some sense “making history,” and making history is inherently a creative act. This is not to say (as has become fashionable lately) that history itself is an aesthetic construct. History was an empirical fact in time, undebatable as a balled-up fist. Our efforts to
recover
history, however, are of necessity creative. The video confuses the creative approximation with the thing itself, and that is dangerous.

Such confusion is dangerous first and foremost because it makes us lazy. It offers an easy substitute for the work of memory, the labor of reconstructing the past. In the foreword to his great autobiography
Speak, Memory,
Vladimir Nabokov celebrated the effort involved in the process of excavating the distant past: “I revised many passages and tried to do something about the amnesic defects of the original—blank spots, blurry areas, domains of dimness. I discovered that sometimes, by means of intense concentration, the neutral smudge might be forced to come into beautiful focus so that the sudden view could be identified, and the anonymous servant named.”

Nabokov’s obsession with bringing the neutral smudge into focus—like Proust’s need to follow the trail of memories triggered by the taste of a
petite madeleine
and tea, or the hunger of William Carlos Williams for “the strange phosphorus of the life, nameless under an old misappellation”—serves to underscore a common truth: art, ultimately, is archaeology. Our materials, actual or imagined, purely personal or broadly cultural, are mined from the past. Our minds need the blurry areas, the domains of dimness, the way our muscles need resistance.

A photograph offers that resistance. So does a painting or a letter. What drew me to the photographs and postcards in the garage were precisely those areas of ambiguity. Whose was the hand barely visible in a corner of the picture of my mother as an infant? Why was my father smiling as he painted the walls of that tenement in Sydney? What did his voice sound like then? How did he move as a young man? Who was Frantik Bacofske, in the postcard my great-aunt sent to her brother? Why did he shoot himself on “their” grave? Who were “they”?

Out of the vacuum comes the desire and the need for completeness, for narrative. We imagine rain, a late spring, a soldier still in uniform asking the graveskeeper—an old man in a bulky rain slicker struggling to cover an open grave—for directions. The old man is nearly deaf, with great hairy ears like an overgrown fencerow. He runs a wet sleeve under his nose and points to the far end of the yard, then returns to work. The soldier thanks him politely, walks away… and so on, following a trail of our own making. Forced to recall or imagine the moment, the situation, the quality of voice, we grow stronger and more familiar with the territory of the past, both real and imagined; we become more capable of naming the anonymous servant or, if need be, creating him anew. In the video age, arguably, all these things required to fill in the blank spots—things like the powers of imagination and memory—will atrophy.

And that’s not all. There is another danger in perfect counterpoise to the one I’ve described. As the camcorder, in its perfection, threatens to do our remembering for us, it jeopardizes the privilege of forgetting—a basic human right. The memory, after all, both recalls
and
erases as the mind requires. And it is not just
our
ability to forget, to reconstruct, to heal, that is at risk here, but history’s willingness to let us do so. To the religiously inclined, one of the signs of divine benevolence might be the fact that history invariably washes away the worst. Even horrors, in all but the most extreme cases, begin to blur almost immediately. Pleasures tend to keep their shape, to remain poignant. Forgetting, in other words, whether it is done by us or for us, is an essential kindness. The positive side of time.

Videotape tampers with this, as with so many other things. It disturbs the balance, disrupts the flow. The pleasures it offers come at the price of others, far greater though more elusive. The pain it brings—whether by keeping the dead constantly before our eyes in a sort of suspended animation, or by preserving the mannerisms, the habits, the cruelties best forgotten—is potentially exquisite.

IV

To the charge that I belong to the ranks of the technologically impaired—an anachronism, a throwback mired in a nineteenth-century sensibility—I plead partially guilty. I’ll admit that I prefer basic materials: wood or stone. Basic tools: an ax, a pen, a wood clamp. Basic entertainments: conversation, a book between two covers, a musical instrument. In my own defense, however, I can honestly say that I’m not incapable of appreciating the wonders—from gene splicing to lasers—that everywhere crowd in on my attention. I’m not insensible to the benefits and beauties of technology. Faced with major surgery, my allegiance to the wood clamp would quickly fade. And yet, my respect for technological marvels is of the same sort a pre-Columbian tribesman might feel for a gun or an automobile: grudging, suspicious, a product of the head not the heart. I can’t help it. No Luddite, I nonetheless keep the crowbar handy.

As near as I can tell, my suspicion springs from my instinctive allegiance to the physical world, to the present moment, to the strengths and limitations of the human mind. I distrust whatever tends to improve or displace them. As far back as 1930, Freud had already noted the technological trend I find so disquieting. “Long ago,” he wrote, “[man] formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. To these gods he attributed everything that seemed unattainable to his wishes, or that was forbidden to him.… To-day he has come very close to the attainment of this ideal, he has almost become a god himself. Only, it is true, in the fashion in which ideals are usually attained according to the general judgement of humanity. Not completely; in some respects not at all, in others only half way. Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.”

It is as a technological prosthesis—an artificial memory—that I fear the camcorder. I see it as part of a much larger cultural phenomenon marked by a willingness to tamper with the limits of our world, or to replace it altogether. This is not quite as absurd as it sounds. Though they are admittedly primitive, alternate “virtual” worlds already exist. Already it has become possible to move and work, to communicate and accomplish physical tasks, to run and jump—with many of the sensations normally attributed to these activities—in worlds that exist only on a computer screen. At any given moment a spot census would reveal hundreds of thousands, even millions, at work and play in artificial landscapes. And when they return from their journeys, like all travelers, they return only partially. The dominion of the real is everywhere under siege. Most would see this as harmless and fascinating. Perhaps it is, but I’m unable to believe it. I’ve tried.

All of this has led not so much to a revolution in my lifestyle as to an adjustment in my thinking. My priorities have changed somewhat. Near the top of my list, I believe, would be to live in such a way as be more and more “here,” as Thoreau once put it. Have I banished all videotapes from my house? Not at all. Would I accept another, were it given to me? More than likely. Resistance, taken too far, becomes an affirmation. But I would keep the videotape in its place, restrict it, refuse it the reverence it demands.

Still, it’s an uncomfortable position I find myself in, constantly wavering like some red-blooded apostle between temptation and righteous resistance. To paraphrase Nathaniel Hawthorne’s description of Melville’s “metaphysical wanderings,” I’m neither able to believe in the new prosthetic god nor comfortable in my unbelief. The analogy strikes me as apt. Melville spent the majority of his life engaged in a prolonged quarrel with God. I seem doomed to quarrel—instinctively until now, the way an opossum will hiss at a speeding truck—with the new god of technology: a deity and its acolytes intent on a new genesis, a new world marked by a new relation to the past, to history, to reality itself. Hawthorne went on to say that Melville appeared to have “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated.” In my own small way, I too have no choice but to side with the naysayers, the new heathen.

I suspect that on some level, life is a matter of indefensible loyalties. Sometimes in the evening, after our youngest has been put to bed, I drag my favorite chair—a brown leather wingback, broken and worn—to the wall of pictures still growing in the hallway. Some are hardly larger than a postage stamp. I study the faces—the expressions, the eloquence of caught movements, the gestures of the heart. The air seems full of their presence, thick with their voices and their distant laughter. I like the sound of that crowd, enigmatic as the murmuring of shells. Even the most reserved among them, looking out from their respective windows on the wall, seem glad to see me. And I, for my part, enjoy their company almost as much as I do that of the living.

I

It’s a small thing, really.

Every June, soon after the oaks have leafed out over our cabin, a pair of phoebes weaves a small, tight nest under the eave by the door. The nest is quite low, and by holding a long-handled mirror under the slope of the roof we can see the clutch of white eggs glowing there against the twigs and the dead grass and the pocket lint. There’s always something hidden and wonderful about this first glimpse: the wavering reflection as I tip the mirror this way and that, searching for the right angle, the glass reflecting down to us the sixty-year-old cedar boards, the moldering supports, and then, like a quick window into another world, like that tiny couple in the mirror in the painting by Van Eyck… the nest. This is Act One.

Nearly every year, soon after the phoebes lay their clutch, another, larger egg appears in the nest. It’s mottled and lovely, and it hatches first. Thus begins Act Two. The fledgling cowbird that emerges from the egg is grotesquely huge, nearly the size of the adult phoebes themselves. The parents, however, notice nothing wrong; they work frantically to supply that cavernous open beak, that gaping yellow throat, even as their own offspring (if they haven’t already been shoved onto the planks of the porch) slowly starve under the imposter’s wings.

Act Three: The cowbird chick crams the nest, its wings folded over the sides, absurd as a bear in a bassinet. It grows silky and fat. And then one day they’re all gone and the nest is empty. Sometimes I find a desiccated packet—a beak and a few bones, little more—under the nest. Curtain and applause.

One year I carried the cowbird’s egg into the woods and threw it against the trunk of a tree, where it made a dark, wet spot.

Another year I didn’t notice the egg until after it had hatched. Unable to watch the nestlings starve, I took the intruder out of the nest and then, feeling like a fool, tried to feed it chopped worms and minced bits of largemouth bass with a straw. It died—to spite me, I think—sitting hunched up in a corner of the shoebox like a bitter old man in an ill-fitting suit.

A third year, shamefully, I killed the thing outright like a miniature chicken, though the distress of the phoebes over its disappearance touched my heart. After that I let things alone.

And that’s where it stands now, more or less. Some years the cowbird comes and the phoebes’ nestlings die. Other years it doesn’t, and they live. As it has always been, as it was long before I was around to be troubled by it, so it remains. A cowbird was laying its eggs in a phoebe’s nest (this is what I tell myself) when Jamestown was founded, when Christ was a somber lad wandering the streets of dusty Judea, when the Enlightened One, moved by mercy, supposedly threw himself into a pit to feed a starving tiger.

What troubles me about the ritual that plays out under the eave, I think, is my own uncertainty in the face of it. It’s a problem. I don’t know how to read it. On the one hand, its mute endurance awes me; disturbed by my interference, it simply parts like a stream around a child’s finger—for years, if necessary, or decades—until the finger is moved. On the other, though I recognize the play’s authority, sense its rightness, I find it difficult to be still. The Sophoclean cruelty of the arrangement, which has the parents dutifully feeding their children’s murderer even as their own young, unseen, starve under its wings, gets to me every time. Antiquity and endurance are not quite enough. I can do something, save something now. And yet…

And yet, far off, I can hear something whispering that this compulsion to do, to intrude ourselves, to improve on what is—even when wholly well intentioned,
particularly
when wholly well intentioned—is the source of all our troubles. Could it be that one of our most quintessential, even admirable human traits constitutes a richly ironic sin, a sin for which we, in the fullness of time, will be punished? Could it be that the pendulum, having swung over the course of the centuries from humility to hubris in the face of nature’s mystery, has reached the top of its arc?

Caught in the pause, neither moving forward nor yet falling back, I do nothing—badly. I sit on my sagging porch reading the
New York Times,
trying to ignore the parents flicking to the nest over my head, their beaks crammed with broken insects and worms, trying not to hear the insatiable screeching of the invader or, worse, the faint asthmatic peeping of the phoebes’ brood. I fold the page, snap the crease—turn my mind to the pointless (or pointed) cruelties of men, to which I am accustomed. I stand up. I sit down again.

II

I spend my summers—or the bulk of them—in a four-room cabin by the side of a small pond, immersed in the chanting, rasping, riotous chatter of the natural world, a chatter I adore but cannot understand, a chatter punctuated at regular intervals—as if by an invisible host, tapping his knife to a glass—by death. One day I returned to the shack in which I write to find the makeshift door pushed open and my papers covered in blood and hair. Cleaning up the mess, I discovered a hoofed leg, like a miniature satyr’s—caught in a crack in the floorboards.

On a hot, still August morning, walking the road that encircles our pond, loosely, like a necklace on a table, I found a painted turtle crushed into the dirt. An aquatic species, it had obviously come from the water to lay its eggs when the car’s tire found it. It was only after I’d gently pushed it into the weeds with my foot so the kids wouldn’t see it that it occurred to me that I didn’t know if it had died coming from the water or returning to it. I bent down and drew it back out of the grass.

Like all painted turtles, it had been beautiful to the point of tastelessness, the underside of its indigo shell, now broken into unfamiliar continents, a child’s swirl of yellows and reds spilling, as if through an excess of sheer joy, onto the soft, phallic folds of the neck. I lay it upside down on my hand. It felt warm, I realized, because it had been in the sun. And though I didn’t want to, I slid my fingers into the ugly split in the skin and under the cracked plastron and felt them there: small, smooth, oval. I slipped them one by one out of that wreckage—startlingly white, apparently undamaged—and brought them back to the cabin, where I placed them in an old Thompson Cigar box between two layers of sphagnum moss left over from some gardening venture.

They meant a good deal to me, those five orphans, and over the next few weeks I checked the box often, already imagining the Washington quarter–sized hatchlings—perfect miniatures—scurrying over the moss, the aquarium we would set up for them on the bench, the day in September when, half-grown, they would swim off our palms into the darkness of the lake. Instead they browned, then collapsed, as though something inside them had left. The world has its own imaginings.

That afternoon, carrying the box with its increasingly aromatic cargo into the woods, I noticed for the first time the design on the lid—a seventeenth-century antique map of the Americas, complete with representations of three-masted schooners sailing the
Mare Pacificum
and monstrous cyclones under the
circulus aequinoctalis.
In the lower left-hand corner, inside an ornate frame suitable to a wall mirror, were the words: America:
Nova Tabula.

In another age, I might have heard the low chuckle of divine mirth, sensed a smile in the fiddlehead fern waving frantically on a windless day. “The
nova tabula
is in your hands, you fool,” the wind would whisper to me. “There is no map—read as you may, write what you will.”

III

The very notion of an intelligent design, I have to say, is slightly embarrassing—it seems so open-faced and naive, so primitive, so depressingly lacking in irony. It suggests that one has somehow missed the fact that life is now all DNA sequencing and logarithms—wetware, to recall the cyberists’ piquant phrase—or worse, that one has bought into one of the religious right’s cartoons, which is mortifying.

Since I have little hipness to lose, I’ll confess it straight out: intelligent design is a notion, a myth—all right, a theology—I’ve always been attracted to. Unapologetically in love with both the natural world and the written page (between which I sense all manner of linkage, both of which seem to me to be fading from our lives, to our inestimable loss), most at home in myself when I am navigating one or the other, I’ve found myself wishing at times that on some level it could all be true. Not that Toto might reveal to us at long last the benevolent, white-haired wizard behind the curtain, but something… subtler: that we could glimpse the wisdom behind it all, sense, even if momentarily, the pattern in the carpet. How glorious it would be to feel the key turn, to be able to enter the culture of things outside of us, to understand not only the
what
of the universe, but the
why.
To read the slow rain of rising trout, or comprehend—really comprehend—the shocking orange of fungus, labial and exquisite, shining on the underside of a rotting log. To grasp the intent and the glory, the slow fire of life, behind them.

It’s a fantasy with a long pedigree. For countless millennia, after all, like three-year-olds who can’t read but nonetheless turn the pages, move their lips, we imagined meaning, a narrative, agency. And since everything ultimately has to be about us, the story we imposed on nature was largely our own. The agency behind the screen had not only to resemble us but to care about our welfare. It’s almost touching, this presumption. Knowing nothing, we assumed all. Nature became our mirror, our metaphor bank. The cruel sun? The spendthrift weed? Nature was the vehicle; we were the tenor—always. For millennia, and well into the nineteenth century, we read the world metaphorically, much as a Freudian psychoanalyst might read our gestures and verbal slips as clues to the workings of the unconscious. The visible world was a system of signs, pointing to some deeper, hidden actor, who was communicating with us. The cigar was never just a cigar.

It didn’t work, of course. The cigar, it turned out, was just a cigar; the sand flea just a sand flea. Nature was not “a grave,” “a kind parent,” “a merciless stepmother.” It didn’t “abhor a vacuum,” or “the old.” Alas, it didn’t abhor anything at all. It just went on, perfectly. If nature was a story, it was a new kind of story: plotless, endless, at once both circular and linear, so vast it seemed not to move at all—a millennium hand, an eon hand—yet everywhere seething with a strange and wondrous energy, telling over and over of two great armies folding into one another without rancor or victory… we couldn’t grasp it.

So we made up our own, more suited to us. And when our made-up story no longer satisfied us, round about the seventeenth century, we decided to take the book apart. Thus, science. As if untying the volume’s signatures and teasing apart the paper’s weave could reveal something, some wisdom; could teach us, at long last, our place.

Eventually, rounding the curve of the second millennium
antes
deum,
the majority of us simply lost interest in the game. We had outgrown childish things. The Other had nothing to do with us. Starting in the industrialized West, we migrated indoors, into mediated environments from which the natural world in all its mystery had been seamlessly removed. We were enough for ourselves. We exchanged “information.” We worried about our equity. We spent large portions of our lives watching people we didn’t know pretending to be living lives that were not their own. The high wind tossing the continents of trees, the paper wasp tending its soft, masticated nest, the blossom trembling in the sun—these had nothing to do with us. The Other had become merely other—an afterthought, an irrelevance. If it got in our way, or troubled our oversensitive skin, we killed it. If it didn’t work the way we wanted, we shaped it to our needs. Wonder? What was there to wonder at?

It occurs to me, though, that our inability to read the Book of Nature—and yes, I intend that uppercase
N
in all its Romantic glory—doesn’t necessarily mean there is no book to be read, only that we can’t read it; that the stories we’ve told and the tools we’ve developed to disarticulate it and the indifference we’ve cultivated to make it go away won’t do. That we need something different. Why? Because the text still matters, whether we can decipher it or not. Because, as seems increasingly clear, unless we reach some proper accommodation with nature, show it a bit of respect, admit our ignorance of it, it will bury us with as little fanfare as night follows day: the evolutionary tide of a billion years will wash over us and recede; a few ticks of the clock hand, and the scars we’ve made will heal; a paper wasp, moving in the shadow of Lincoln’s lower lip, will tend its soft, masticated nest. Which would be a shame; I’ve grown fond of our maudlin, murderous tribe.

IV

Seen through the other end of the telescope, from the kind of distance that confers clarity, one thing seems certain: we have not yet found the language with which to front the world we inhabit, a world that has worked superbly, if life is the proof, for unfathomable time; a world that continues to hold us—despite the din of our distractions—precisely the way a nest holds an egg. We have not even begun to learn this language; its alphabet is a mystery, its declensions unknown.

There are times, sitting up to my chin in a warm pond watching a damselfly the precise iridescent green of cheap tinsel perch on a spear of weed protruding above the water, feeling the velvety sides of the bullhead catfish bumping against my feet, when I can almost feel it. A genius. A music just beyond my range of hearing. The surface film, cooking in the August sun, stretches before my eyes, a teeming graveyard of mayflies and midges and tiny, ivory-white moths, a macabre and gorgeous litter of wings and legs and antennae, of pale exoskeletons like comic-book armor and lime-green duckweed. Twenty feet out, I can make out the dull glint of a dead bluegill. Water striders and dragonfly larvae move over and through this mat, this mulch. Organisms I know nothing about—a thousand to a bottle cap—zip and spin in every palmful of water. Something is swirling now beneath the dead bluegill and the fish jerks and then rises to the surface again. And I think to myself: This is beyond us. Only reverence is appropriate here.