I expected only dust when I opened the old photo album, but inside its plastic sleeves were the faces of a family. I flipped through the pages; they depicted a 1950s-1960s era suburban, nuclear unit: get-togethers, vacations, grandparents, infants, picnics, indistinguishable occasions. The Polaroids formed a strobe-like slideshow, each one an aperture into some past that had otherwise gone blank, yanked out of the darkroom of memory. All the recognizable life cycles emerged. Bay Area landmarks that popped up in my own daydreams of a childhood spent near San Francisco hovered in the backdrops—tacks on a timeline, pinning down the miniature epic I’d stumbled upon, fastening it to the known.
*
I bought the photo album that day for $8.00 cash at a west Berkeley thrift store, not sure what I would do with it. All I knew was that it contained a poem—or, maybe, reams of them. Back home, I opened up the album with the reverence it seemed to demand. Here was what was left of the history of human beings like me, like my family. Hardly a few decades separated us. And what could be said, what could I say, about them? I’d always distrusted the dictum about pictures speaking a thousand words, or at least wanted to qualify it: pictures could “speak,” but there was no telling what they might say, or how truthful it would be. Despite this, the pictures tugged at me. There were stories inside each one, real and unfinished. But were they more or less real, per se, than the fables of text, of poetry and fiction?
Less than a week later, I opened up Anne Carson’s Nox. The pages of the book (if one could call it a book) clung together accordion-style to form a single, unfurling sheet of paper. The narrative, in which Carson recounts and confronts the death of her estranged brother Kevin, leaps from appropriations of Catullus’s ode “Carmen 101” to photographs from her childhood to phone conversations and Greek etymology. Handwritten phrases features frequently in Nox, voiced sometimes through pen, pencil, or even crayon, but whenever typed text shows up, it never appears directly on the page. Paragraphs are printed out on a standard-quality inkjet printer, glued onto cardstock, and scanned back into the manuscript on a computer—blemishes, fingerprints, and all. In that self-described “epitaph” for her brother, individual letters are monuments: artifices, subject to erosion. Every word a sort of structure, no more than a sum of its parts, the alphabet itself a series of pictures.
*
“Who would I show it to” constitutes the entirety of W. S. Merwin’s poem “Elegy.” No question mark, no further elaboration.
The only names accompanying the photographs are first names. The address on the inside of the front cover has been scrawled out with straight, purposeful lines. Lines that trail off and leave the word “California” decipherable from within the ballpoint mesh, as if it didn’t matter that people who might find the album—people like me—would know. Who could find anyone in such a small country of a state? And what makes a remembrance carved in stone any different, any more lasting, from a monument on paper, or one born in the dark hallway of a shutter?
*
In I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time, Kristin Prevallet writes about the death of her father. More specifically, she writes about his suicide, about the permeable membrane separating the event’s “before” to its “after.” A strange semi-documentary ensues, in which Prevallet incorporates the themes of books her father read before he took his own life into her own discussion of the significance of his doing so. The sections of the collection are demarcated by pages of black ink, as much a binary to the whiteness of the pages as to the themes and issues they deal with.
Prevallet’s writing manages to acknowledge all of the terrifying and even ridiculous stages of the process of grief, of suturing sense experience and memory into one symbiotic organism. The segments of her essay are filled with Zen koan-esque minutiae that is, at turns, sarcastic (“Grieving is tricky because suddenly a fly will appear and you will know right away that it symbolizes something much deeper than ‘fly’”), admonishing (“Never fall in love with a text that attempts to convince you that you are already dead”), and hyperactively self-aware (“I am conscious that I am not using enough nouns in this text”). Whatever the tone, the process of perceiving—and its suite of pitfalls—is never taken for granted. “Here is proof,” she writes, “that one perception leads immediately to another: I have placed your heart on a platter to preserve it.”
*
But what, if anything, is preserved? Can a poem or an essay be as reliable an embalmment of a moment in time as a photograph itself? Or is a piece of writing—the words ornamental signifiers, signs pointing vaguely to some other place—more honest, in all its indefiniteness, than a single shot? Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi’s memoir of hosting a clandestine group to discuss controversial books in Iran, begins with a description of pictures: “I have two photographs in front of me now,” she writes. Before that, a disclaimer: “The facts in this story,” she assures us, “are true insofar as any memory is ever truthful…”
*
In I, Afterlife, Prevallet features the text of the police report that documented her father’s self-inflicted death in a parking lot. The wish for her father to be remembered, to remember her father, and to cobble sense out of the fragmentary experience come through in her distinction between “false closure” and “open closure.” False closure is “notes written at the scene of a suicide to express, narratively, the scene of the suicide,” while open closure is “a sketch of black and gray space, a field upon which any act of violence can happen.”
What follows is a convergence of the two: the stock-still certainty of journalism and the gray, chaotic mess of mourning. They inhabit the same page, battling for attention—or co-existing if, after all, the gap between them, the bifurcation between black and white, is wrong.
*
“…That at last I may give you this final gift in death / And that I might speak in vain to silent ashes.” This is the explanation Catullus gives for traveling through “many nations and many seas” to perform funeral rites for his brother, the recipient of the monologue in “Carmen 101.” An offering is made, even in futility. The kind of tribute that intersects history, a vein that runs through eras and communities and mythologies: the desire to capture something, to keep it, to save it. To cage it in a jar of formaldehyde, in celluloid, or in language.
Prevallet, in trying to map out the no-man’s-land between primal shock and post-grief self-analysis, wonders about the effectiveness of other ways to think about loss and retention besides the conventional groping for illusions. “Epictetus: play around with the power of moving towards an object and retiring from it,” she writes, citing the Greek philosopher who turned to Stoicism. “This gesture of approach is the closest you will get to the other side.”
*
Is Nox a book, or a photograph? Is I, Afterlife an essay, or a series of pictures—some in text, and others in shades of gray? In many senses, both seem more the latter than the former. But the line itself is unclear.
The characters in Nox (Latin for “night”), mainly the author and her brother, appear and disappear over the course of the collection. And the ways they manifest themselves are just as random: through photographs, anecdotes, poem excerpts, ink stains, scrawled words. Most startling are Carson’s obsessions with definitions, linguistic genealogy, and the act of naming. The dissection of words throughout the collection turns out to be an oblique poetry, as the seams of terse academic terminology give way to a more metaphysical, free-associative interior. The “definition” of each word, then, becomes less like a piece of brute data and more like a portrait. They are single angles from which an object can be seen; other perspectives remain to be negotiated.
Like Prevallet’s book, Nox concerns itself with notions of light and darkness, the dichotomies of white and black. Both volumes constitute family histories stripped of pretense and nakedly uncertain of what, if anything, they are. In one part of Nox, the lineage of the word “autopsy” is discussed, and with it, the notion of “eyewitnessing” an event, of becoming the owner of a perception. Carson points out that Herodotus introduced legends with some form of “it is said,” a method to sidestep such ownership. On the facing page, a shadow looms: the silhouette of a person, the taker of that particular picture, cast against a muted snow. The sun is long behind his or her back; Carson provides no identity for this human shape.
And how much can this shadow be said to belong to someone, nonetheless a human being? Does he or she own it; does he or she even own the photograph anymore, now that it has been handed to strangers, title-less and splayed open for interpretation? I wondered this as I thumbed through the anonymous photo album I’d found: how much of this history was public, or private? Where was its point of origin? How much of this was my inheritance?
Maybe, I thought, experience was something that lent itself the appearance of ownership only for a short time. One could attach names to oneself, to other bodies, to memories. And with time the names would blur into the entities they labeled. Meaning and its conveyance could switch places. Or maybe they have inhabited one place all along, and the disintegration (or not) of the boundary between writing and image—between the shards of one life and another, names and the named, realization and recollection—is just a manner of seeing.
*
In 1992, speculative fiction author William Gibson created a poetic project that would not only narrate memory but re-create the experience of its dissolution—an aspect central, it seems, to making memory what it is. Entitled Agrippa (a book of the dead), Gibson’s piece, which enlisted the help of artist Dennis Ashbaugh, consisted of 300 lines of poetry about a photo album on a 3.5” floppy disk. Unlike normal floppy disks, however, this one was programmed to erase itself after being used once; similarly, Ashbaugh’s accompanying booklet was saturated in a photosensitive mixture of substances. When exposed to light for the first time, these chemicals would accelerate the decay of the words and images in the book, mimicking the natural process any picture—or memory—goes through.
The second portion of the artwork describes the speaker’s impression of this physical container that holds the past. Memory, here, is not inseparable from the “mechanism” that delivers it, the apparatus through which it is transported:
The mechanism: stamped black tin,
Leatherette over cardboard, bits of boxwood,
A lens
The shutter falls
Forever
Dividing that from this.
But Gibson’s comments about the work confuse that division: “It’s never really the past; it’s always a version of your own time,” he remarked in an interview the year the book debuted. The now and the then “Forever / Dividing,” or forever sutured.
*
One can tell from looking inside of the photo album’s stain-spackled cover that a sheet of paper had been taped there and then torn out; a few page corners remain under yellowed rectangles of plastic. The sheet had included instructions on Spanish grammar, presumably for travel: present tense, the upper-left corner reads, the only sepia shred among the four with legible handwriting. Above it, on the album itself, someone had noted in cursive: aquí—here; there—allá. By the time one reaches the last page of the collection, with its long-dead subjects and missing frames, neither such locations in space or time, nor the people that inhabited them, seem fully real. Their lives take on that patina of otherworldliness found in long-ago-left-behind scenes of antiquity. The line between observer and observed, between visual “fact” and textual “observation,” is smeared and useless. Instead of that divide between object and imitation, event and witness: a vast expanse of gray.
But something is left, something that the shells of pictures and poems once held. Something like ash, the substance that recalls the cigarette before it burned. Desear, the same hand wrote inside the back cover. To wish. Then the verb conjugated to the first person, the frame locked onto the single figure: deseo. I wish. There’s no mention what for, though the visual chronology that precedes it—that tiny and failed try for permanence—seems as good a guess as any.
Images used with permission of Tom Roberge at New Directions Books and Stephen Cope at Essay Press.