“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
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
Similar Books
