The First Photograph (extract from novel)

In the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, there is a medium sized room dedicated to the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Among several of the most celebrated works by the 16th century artist, there is the remarkable Hunters in the Snow (1564). It is not a small painting, but not as big as you would think it to be. It is also much lighter than in reproduction, for while it is certainly a dark image, it is less the blacks and browns that dominate, and more the reds and greens; in this context the coldest and most inhuman of colours.
     It is only incidentally a painting, only as a matter of historical necessity. In all aspects but the vulgarly technical, it is really the world’s first photograph. Its brutal cropping (the treetops lopped, the inn at the left foreground severed at the edges) is not prescribed by some proto-renaissance rules of composition but is simply due to the limited focal length of the lens. The indifference of the hunters, themselves neither figures of Heroism nor Romanticised Peasantry, the simultaneous levels of arrested narrative (the inn-keepers tending a bonfire, the winter fowl hungrily observing the world of man, the old woman on the bridge carrying a faggot on her back, the villagers practicing their various pastimes on the frozen pond), and the very fact that it is winter, therefore hibernation, therefore creative hiatus, therefore unrepresented, and yet all ripe for contemplation, refers entirely to photography in the traditions of Kertesz, Brassai and Cartier-Bresson.
     Then there are all the peculiar geographic faults: granite spires reminiscent of Chamonix (Flanders is flat), the storks in a nest on the roof of one of the huts (storks migrate to Africa in winter), and the spectacular harbour that reaches out into the distance (there is no ocean in this part of the world). One may be inclined to dismiss such trivia as the compositional license of an artist inspired, but Bruegel is far too proud for a compromise so startling.
     But look further: tilted on its side, so that the foreground makes up the bottom half, and with one’s eyes partially closed, the highest summit resembles a harsh Gallic nose. And the bird in flight: his thin-lipped mouth. Suddenly, this resemblance established, the figure falls into place. The thin, wispy hair, the high collar, the awkward posture… It is none other than the father of photography: Daguerre!

Love Letters

(click images for enlarged versions)

I love these two letters. One is from a young (my age) Giorgio Agamben. The other is Hannah Arendt’s reply. I love Agamben’s gushing fan-ishness and spelling mistakes. I love that Arendt’s reply is a mere seven days after Agamben’s initial letter. I love, also, that Agamben makes an attempt at linking the two of them through a mutual acquaintance. And I love how he has included an essay of his, almost as an after-thought, almost as if he doesn’t want to, but propriety dictates that he should. I wonder if he showed Arendt’s letter to all his pals and put it up on his wall? His second letter might have been:

My dearest Hannah,

When and where?

Forever and only,
Yours,

G. Agamben

Zbigniew Herbert

I've been messing about doing some translations of Polish poets lately. Here's a translation of a poem from Zbigniew Herbert's book of poems Hermes, Dog and Star (1957).

Voice

I go to the sea
to hear this voice
between the blow of one wave
and another

but the voice is absent
there is only the senile chatter of the water
salty nothing
the wing of a white bird
dried to a stone

I go to the woods
where the uninterrupted
hum of the immense hour-glass
pours leaves onto black-earth
black-earth onto leaves
the imposing jaws of insects
entertain the earth's silence

on the field
green and gold sheets
reinforced with the spikes of insectine existence
ringing at every touch of wind

where is this voice it should
speak-up when at last
the inexhaustible monologue
of the earth falls silent

nothing but murmurs
clapping explosions

I return home
and experience presents
itself as an alternative
either the world is mute
either I'm deaf

or possibly
we are both
scarred with disfigurement

we must therefore
take one another by the arm
go forth
toward new vistas
toward the atrophied throats
from which one can pluck
incomprehensible babble

Criterion for Us All

The best music is the music that puts you to sleep.
The best film is the film whose title you no longer remember.
The grandest architecture is that of an indefinable era.
And great jokes have no punch-line.
And the greatest poem is that which goes:

Sha-nee-na-nah!
Sha-nee-na-nah!

Misery

Widower, 1914 by August Sander

Of course, there are all the formal elements: the boys' matching outfits, the baldness of the three of them, that identical mouth...

But the real punctum lies in the photograph's title. If the title was, say, Banker and Sons, 1914, one could be tempted to draw Marxist conclusions (“look, even the family, the back-bone of the bourgeoisie: corrupted!”).

Or if it had been entitled Health Spa, 1914, we could thrust our collective hands into our collective pockets and feel satisfied with the contemporary state of health institutions.

Or if the photographer had been a Russian (or indeed, anonymous) we would tie the year (1914), the oriental rug, the father's waistcoat (contemporary signifier of affluence in the early 20th century) and the somber faces of the three of them into a knot that could not but suggest Victims of the Bolsheviks.

Or let us keep the title, our knowledge of the photographer's Germaness, and simply change the date to 1938. The mother, obviously a Jew, perhaps a victim of Kristallnacht, has left her family motherless. (And although it wouldn't add up chronologically or even logically, the sunken faces of the thin sons, their shaved heads and pale striped blouses, in this context, from our myopic perch in 2008 we conclude with delight: Auschwitz!)

But our eagerness to place this photograph is ultimately stifled. Our context is arguably ahistorical and personal. A man and his sons, their despair uniform in magnitude but varied in its manifestations. Father is a chump. The boys are dunces. The dead are grieving their dead, are grieving their dead, are grieving their dead.

Universite de Paris - Faculte des Sciences

The Fog

This morning I managed to get to work before the fog had lifted and I stopped momentarily at the top of a small hill between the car park and my office and was delighted to find that the only thing I could see was the lawn below, the leafless cypress beside me, the wide expanse of dull gray everything, everywhere. I thought of Novalis:

By giving a lofty sense to what is vulgar, a mysterious aspect to what is commonplace, the dignity of the unknown to what is familiar, an infinite extension to what is finite, I romanticise.

So said the fog, to me, this morning.

Connection of the Sticks

(or, The Grand Tapestry of Homos)

The great poet Frank O’Hara was a beautiful man who was struck and killed by a dune buggy at Fire Island in 1956.

In 1980, the philosopher Roland Barthes tragically died a month after he was hit by a van. It is believed he was writing a novel at the time of his death. He wanted to write his own À la recherche du temps perdu.

Marcel Proust is written about so much, mythologised so endlessly, and admired so shamelessly that it’s kinda hard to take him seriously. Sometimes, though without a shred of intentional disrespect, I laugh at him.

Down the hill from Proust’s grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery lies the dancer and librettist Boris Kochno. He was a muse for many composers and Szymanowski wrote a novel and several poems for and about him.

Karol Szymanowski is possibly the most prominent of Polish composers since Chopin. He was a passionate admirer of Polish folk music, particularly that of the Górale highlanders. Poland today remembers him fondly, if selectively.

In 1958, Henryk L. was hired by the Polish Security Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to lure visiting academic Foucault into his arms and thus have him expelled from the country. Henryk is now 67, ashamed and remorseful, and lives in Wrocław with his daughter and her family.

After his stint in the Uniwersytet Warszawski, Michel Foucault presumably fucked many more students all around the globe. Foucault’s biographers suspect that he, teaching and fucking in San Francisco in the late 70’s and early 80’s, acquired AIDS in a BDSM club.

The social history of AIDS is littered with alleged ‘Patient Zero’ cases. There’s the African man who died of a mysterious disease in the 50’s. There’s the St Louis rent-boy whose death baffled doctors in the late 60’s. A poor fellow named Gaëtan Dugas was fingered by the American Journal of Medicine as the root of all the HIV cases in New York City. There’s also Arvid Noe, the Norwegian sailor turned truck driver (what promiscuous professions!) who infected a number of fellow sailors, port prostitutes, highway hookers and his wife and consequently, his daughter.

Far, far in the remote north of Norway, between mountains at the shores of the deep dark and cold fjords, in a town named Skjolden, the young philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein lived and worked, safe from the harmful influences of Bertrand Russell.

A New Zealander I met in Kathmandu many years ago claimed to have met Wittgenstein during the war. Lighting a joint wrapped in a fresh nettle leaf, the New Zealander put his arm around me and pointed to the sun and said something that he thought to be profound and I thought to be the chorus from a Little Richard song. As he got friendlier, one half of me wanted to say “see you later grandpa” and go back to my hotel room while the other half was thinking “but think of the stories!”

Little Richard toured Australia in 1957 and after the Soviets announced the successful launch of Sputnik, he quit showbiz, dumped his jewellery into Sydney Harbour and returned to the eternally outspread arms of Jesus, sweet Jesus.

North of Sydney Harbour, near the beach of Manly, is Fairy Bower, a famous right-hand point break first surfed by Snowy McAlister in the 1930’s. McAlister’s pioneering spirit is remembered annually with the Snowy McAlister Longboard Competition.

In 1970, Yukio Mishima, author of The Sound of Waves, lead a paramilitary group which stormed the Tokyo headquarters of the Japanese Self-Defence Forces and demanded some very passionate things (some reasonable, others not), which were instantly giggled at and ultimately ignored.

The Sacred Band of Thebes was an elite, virtually invincible army that was finally defeated in 338 BCE at Chaeronea.

During the US Civil War, Walt Whitman served as a military nurse, attending to basic medical needs and accompanying soldiers to the thresholds of their deaths.

Several years ago, a good friend named Reeve accompanied me on a work trip to Washington DC. Just before the Pennsylvania border, on the New Jersey Turnpike, there’s a sad little rest-stop named after Walt Whitman. We stopped to stretch our legs and we ate at a hamburger place and Reeve went off to the toilet, or as they call it in America, a rest-room. (A rest-room in a rest-stop.)
      Reeve returned a couple of seconds later and asked me to get my camera from the car and come to the toilet and photograph him making sex-love with some other fellow he had just met. I hesitated for a moment and finally met the two of them kissing in a dirty cubicle with the door wide open.
      Oh how they heaved and moaned and grappled and grunted! How athletic was their activity! I shot a roll of film in a few minutes and looked away when they, you know...

Cruise Ship

By the time the liner left its mooring at Fort Lauderdale, it was twilight and the sky and the water were the same hue of violet. The ship turned slowly, artificially, as if the tugboats didn’t so much yank us free but, rather, reverentially altered the earth’s axis in our favour. On deck, lining the sides of the ship, there were a number of people talking and throwing an occasional, casual glance toward the disappearing continent, at the colourfully dressed teenagers on the beaches.

I squatted down on the deck at the stern, opened a can of lemonade, and watched the deep churning wake work its way well out into the Atlantic. I could still see land, but it was distant. Too distant, certainly, to swim, and for the first time on the cruise, I noted in myself an awareness of the instinct to flee in an emergency. In planes, without ever consciously articulating it, I similarly note the emergency doors, I notice the vulnerable and helpless. If there were a crash landing, my internal workings suppose, I’d have a head start to safety. But with that advantage, I realised, there's the obligation to the others... Suddenly, my anus sharply contracted in fear and self-pride, like a Venus flytrap prodded by a child’s inquisitive finger. I exhaled and I drank from my can of lemonade.