If I had it to do over, I would begin this sentence again. I just don’t like how it’s turning out; it’s so seven seconds ago. In truth, however, the distance between two sentences is an infinity. Each word is a candle placed between facing mirrors – receding endlessly into a long-forgotten past, extending eternally into an unknowable future.
(Aside) There is an ancient Russian traditional method of cleansing, i.e. energy, as in negative in a room or house, that uses such a combination of candles and mirrors. "Traditional Russian healers believed that all forms of negative energy would be pulled inside the corridor created by two mirrors and so disappear forever" and that this method would clear the negative energy from a single room.
But it is the present that confounds me.
"The story is there for everyone to see, you can't now transplant yourself into the present and say we should have known what we in fact did not know in 2001 and 2002. ... The record on weapons of mass destruction was one that appeared to be very clear." Condi says (regarding assertions in Scott McClellan’s book to the contrary).
I can’t now transplant myself into the present? Then where am I now? True, the present is infinitely dissolving and beyond grasp, like water in one’s hand, which is why we expand it to mean this minute, this hour, today, the times in which we live, and so on. A shutter opens for 1/60th of a second and captures an image. Immediately it is a picture of the past. Although I fear I have digressed beyond my ability to return to a salient point, the photograph accomplishes in its own way what a poem attempts or what a novel creates: a meaning unrestricted by linear time. In his short work Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes states,
What the photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what cold never be repeated existentially. In the photograph, the event is never transcended for the sake of something else...1
When we read now the President’s Daily Brief (even in redacted form) of August 6, 2001 entitled Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S. we can not do anything to stop the events of 36 days later. Yet even though we know about the butterfly effect and entropy, we do not understand the consequences of a single heartbeat, let alone their sum total. But, of course, Condi misses the point: the intelligence was doctored, cooked, contorted to fit the narrative. We were taken to war (in Iraq), we bombed and invaded and occupied a country, based on a pyramid of false premises, not told of what ever delusional, utopian (dystopian), hegemonic reasons formed the actual dynamic, and the present then and the present now occupy separate realities (not just perspectives) from those who were complicit and those of us who have watched in horror (and are also complicit to varying degrees), and certainly from those who have been eviscerated from their own dissolving present.
As Barthes says regarding the photograph,
Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.2
the same is true of the present’s relationship to the past and the future. Although we experience time as something infinitely linear, occasionally a memory will wash over a thought before it finds its own repose. How will the very word one would have chosen be altered by that passing shadow? Everyone is discussing Mr. McClellan’s book as though we had not already had the Downing Street Minutes, Abu Ghraib, absolute proof that there were no WMD in Iraq, and on and on. Yet John McCain speaks before crowds of cheering people who believe his we will never surrender fairytale, as though there is an actual war taking place and not just the right panel of the triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delightsincarnate.
These words are already gone. Life’s meaning is a simple as a song title: Que Sera Sera; Is That All There Is; Blowin’ in the Wind; Comfortably Numb; pick your favorite.
The reader is well along in Camera Lucida, and has looked at a few photographs, before he or she encounters, along with Barthes, the photograph that inspired Barthes to write this book, or to consider the epistemology of the photograph from a semiotician’s perspective. Shortly after his mother’s death, "one November evening", Barthes begins looking through some old photographs, not in the hope of "finding her" (as Proust said, "photographs of a being before which one recalls less of that being than by merely thinking of him or her") but of "recognizing" her. After perusing many, he finds one.
There I was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under the lamp, gradually moving back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face I had loved, And I found it.
The photograph was very old. The corners were blunted from having been pasted into an album, the sepia print had faded, and the picture just managed to show two children standing together at the end of a little wooden bridge in a glassed-in conservatory, what was called a Winter Garden in those days. My mother was five at the time (1898), her brother seven.3
In the face and gestures of this child he rediscovers his mother, recognizing hints of who she would become, was, is. I had forgotten about this second half of this book. So it surprised me to return to it and realize that I too have only one photograph of my own mother, gone from this world, that speaks to me of that nameless recognition.
She was a child in a photograph, with an overbite smile, and chopped short hair, a white, homemade dress, skinned knees upon which sat her little hands, as she sat in the dory, the water reflecting the old fisheries on the dock, as she smiled for her father who was taking the picture and composing the image that would fascinate me for a lifetime – my mother, as a child in a boat, full of life and hope, sadness and joy.
1 – Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980) 4
2– Barthes, 6
3– Barthes, 67