sunday's illness (ramón salazar, 2018)
"And we watched each other."
I know this is a topic I keep coming back to, and perhaps I'm starting to stretch your patience by returning to it so often, but all I can do is apologise and fortsett, which is continue in Norwegian.
Last week was the 20th anniversary of my mother's death, something I've been dreading just a little for quite a while now, but the day came and went without any real event. No tears, no thunder, no fanfare, it simply passed. As some of you may remember from previous articles, in terms of years I'm now the same age my mother was when she passed, although if you want to go by the number of days, I am now older than my mother ever was. It reminded me of a story Paul Auster wrote about a man writing a story about a man coming face to face with the frozen body of his father, who had been lost in the mountains some years ago. The man finds himself on the same mountain, stumbles, and falls into a crevasse. When he opens his eyes he looks down, straight into the eyes of his dead father, whose body is now encased in the ice that has grown over the intervening years, and at first the son thinks he's looking into a mirror, so similar are their faces. But then he realises that it's not a mirror, it's ice, and has preserved the body perfectly on the day that his father died, and it is then that the son realises his father is younger than he is now, and always will be. Order out of chaos. But perhaps we should remember that it is us who imposes order. For example: There was the day of the accident my mother had, the day she died, and the day of the funeral. These all occurred seven days apart from each other - on the 3rd, the 10th, and the 17th respectively. On the morning of the anniversary of her death (the 10th), I sat down on a log by a lake and impaled my right hand. A small spear of wood was left in my palm, and when I pulled it out a slice had been made that penetrated precisely where my heart line meets my fate line. This is true, this happened, and this might be why it is important to remind ourselves that there is no reason to any of this, if it looks like there's a pattern or a plan we have to remember that this is not the case. It's all just random. Anything resembling order is simply something we have imposed to try and make sense of it all. All this chaos.
And perhaps by writing about it all I'm trying to create order, to make sense of it. Or maybe I'm trying to invoke something of her, even just the smallest fragment, and bring it back into this world, even if only for a moment? Alternatively, maybe what I'm doing is trying to cover it all up, lay it to rest, as though these words were a handful of soil that I could scatter on top of her. And by writing about it, what do I say? Twenty years is an extraordinarily long time. How do you choose words that sum up a life after that much time spent without someone? On the occasion of the anniversary of a death where do you go? What do you think about while you're there? I don't know.
What I do know is that I spent the evening of the anniversary at a place with a number of statues - some of them were there to celebrate or remember specific people, and some of them were there as representatives of all of us, and all of our struggles. Which do you prefer?
Iconography for specific people is interesting because of its very specificity. People will look at the sculpted face of someone who is no longer with us and talk about their face. They might even point out particular elements of the brow, the mouth, to underline a point about character, or heritage, or something. But the face they're pointing to is not the face of the person they're talking about. It's a representation. One step removed. My eldest daughter took a photograph of me recently and then looked at it and said You don't look like that and deleted it. I mean... it was a photograph of me, so in some ways it very much was what I look like, but haven't we all done this? Seen ourselves in a photograph and been horrified by some aspect of it - maybe our facial expression - maybe something else - and come to the conclusion that that is not us? The representation simply does not ring true? But then if you're sculpting the face of a real human being and you include a wrinkle, does it matter whether that specific wrinkle is actually on the face of the subject? Maybe it just makes things look better? More real? And does it matter whether the face you remember is the real one or an interpretation? A reimagining?
When Gainsborough painted Mr and Mrs Andrews in 1750 he did something that many artists did at the time. He took two mannequins into the studio, arranged the bodies, and then dressed them in clothes owned by the subjects. When he was finished he added portraits of the faces of the couple and put them onto the bodies. If you were to see the painting you'd be forgiven for thinking that Mr and Mrs Andrews actually sat for the duration, maintaining their positions, and fighting the urge to scratch themselves or swat away a fly while Gainsborough took his sweet time working on the painting. But they didn't. Does it matter that this is how the painting was executed? Is it in any way a false interpretation of their likeness? Does it contain any less of their souls because those bodies underneath the clothes are wooden? You be the judge.
And is there anything wrong with a synecdochal image - a likeness of no one in particular who represents all of us, or anyone? Or which allows us to see ourselves in its amorphous visage? One of my favourite sequences in Ferris Bueller's Day Off (John Hughes, 1986) is the sequence in the art gallery, where Cameron is face to face with the image of a child's face in the painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jetee by Georges Seurat (painted in 1884). Cameron never tells us what he's thinking, but he doesn't have to. The juxtaposition of his face with the indistinct pointillist blobs of the child's face in the painting and the swell of accompanying music tells us everything. Except it doesn't. Even this moment is open to interpretation. We have our own phenomenological understanding of what we think it means - there is the scene in the film, us watching, and a third object - our understanding - like an invisible thread connecting us to the film that gives us our own private meaning. We might think that everyone shares this thread, but they don't, and the only way we can explain our thread to other people is through language - and language is so very inefficient at explaining these kind of things. It's so cold. And inert.
These were the thoughts going through my head last week, surrounded by statues, studying the wound on the palm of my hand. After sitting for some time, and after smoking two cigarettes, it occurred to me that even though I'm adverse to taking photographs to remember things perhaps I should take a photo on this day. Perhaps this was one of those days when I should let my own prejudices fall by the wayside. Do something different. As ever, I don't know. But I did. It took me a while to realise what to take a picture of. There were so many sights, and some statues that I felt genuinely went a long way in representing how I was feeling on that day, but none of them quite hit the mark. What I wanted was something far simpler, something that could be interpreted in many ways, something that provided no representation of any one thing. Something that would have very specific meaning for me on this day, but which could mean anything at all to me on another given day. Something that offered both quiet contemplation and celebration, sorrow and joy. Something bigger than us. Something that goes on forever. Something eternal. And then I looked up.
I know this is a topic I keep coming back to, and perhaps I'm starting to stretch your patience by returning to it so often, but all I can do is apologise and fortsett, which is continue in Norwegian.
Last week was the 20th anniversary of my mother's death, something I've been dreading just a little for quite a while now, but the day came and went without any real event. No tears, no thunder, no fanfare, it simply passed. As some of you may remember from previous articles, in terms of years I'm now the same age my mother was when she passed, although if you want to go by the number of days, I am now older than my mother ever was. It reminded me of a story Paul Auster wrote about a man writing a story about a man coming face to face with the frozen body of his father, who had been lost in the mountains some years ago. The man finds himself on the same mountain, stumbles, and falls into a crevasse. When he opens his eyes he looks down, straight into the eyes of his dead father, whose body is now encased in the ice that has grown over the intervening years, and at first the son thinks he's looking into a mirror, so similar are their faces. But then he realises that it's not a mirror, it's ice, and has preserved the body perfectly on the day that his father died, and it is then that the son realises his father is younger than he is now, and always will be. Order out of chaos. But perhaps we should remember that it is us who imposes order. For example: There was the day of the accident my mother had, the day she died, and the day of the funeral. These all occurred seven days apart from each other - on the 3rd, the 10th, and the 17th respectively. On the morning of the anniversary of her death (the 10th), I sat down on a log by a lake and impaled my right hand. A small spear of wood was left in my palm, and when I pulled it out a slice had been made that penetrated precisely where my heart line meets my fate line. This is true, this happened, and this might be why it is important to remind ourselves that there is no reason to any of this, if it looks like there's a pattern or a plan we have to remember that this is not the case. It's all just random. Anything resembling order is simply something we have imposed to try and make sense of it all. All this chaos.
And perhaps by writing about it all I'm trying to create order, to make sense of it. Or maybe I'm trying to invoke something of her, even just the smallest fragment, and bring it back into this world, even if only for a moment? Alternatively, maybe what I'm doing is trying to cover it all up, lay it to rest, as though these words were a handful of soil that I could scatter on top of her. And by writing about it, what do I say? Twenty years is an extraordinarily long time. How do you choose words that sum up a life after that much time spent without someone? On the occasion of the anniversary of a death where do you go? What do you think about while you're there? I don't know.
What I do know is that I spent the evening of the anniversary at a place with a number of statues - some of them were there to celebrate or remember specific people, and some of them were there as representatives of all of us, and all of our struggles. Which do you prefer?
Iconography for specific people is interesting because of its very specificity. People will look at the sculpted face of someone who is no longer with us and talk about their face. They might even point out particular elements of the brow, the mouth, to underline a point about character, or heritage, or something. But the face they're pointing to is not the face of the person they're talking about. It's a representation. One step removed. My eldest daughter took a photograph of me recently and then looked at it and said You don't look like that and deleted it. I mean... it was a photograph of me, so in some ways it very much was what I look like, but haven't we all done this? Seen ourselves in a photograph and been horrified by some aspect of it - maybe our facial expression - maybe something else - and come to the conclusion that that is not us? The representation simply does not ring true? But then if you're sculpting the face of a real human being and you include a wrinkle, does it matter whether that specific wrinkle is actually on the face of the subject? Maybe it just makes things look better? More real? And does it matter whether the face you remember is the real one or an interpretation? A reimagining?
When Gainsborough painted Mr and Mrs Andrews in 1750 he did something that many artists did at the time. He took two mannequins into the studio, arranged the bodies, and then dressed them in clothes owned by the subjects. When he was finished he added portraits of the faces of the couple and put them onto the bodies. If you were to see the painting you'd be forgiven for thinking that Mr and Mrs Andrews actually sat for the duration, maintaining their positions, and fighting the urge to scratch themselves or swat away a fly while Gainsborough took his sweet time working on the painting. But they didn't. Does it matter that this is how the painting was executed? Is it in any way a false interpretation of their likeness? Does it contain any less of their souls because those bodies underneath the clothes are wooden? You be the judge.
And is there anything wrong with a synecdochal image - a likeness of no one in particular who represents all of us, or anyone? Or which allows us to see ourselves in its amorphous visage? One of my favourite sequences in Ferris Bueller's Day Off (John Hughes, 1986) is the sequence in the art gallery, where Cameron is face to face with the image of a child's face in the painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jetee by Georges Seurat (painted in 1884). Cameron never tells us what he's thinking, but he doesn't have to. The juxtaposition of his face with the indistinct pointillist blobs of the child's face in the painting and the swell of accompanying music tells us everything. Except it doesn't. Even this moment is open to interpretation. We have our own phenomenological understanding of what we think it means - there is the scene in the film, us watching, and a third object - our understanding - like an invisible thread connecting us to the film that gives us our own private meaning. We might think that everyone shares this thread, but they don't, and the only way we can explain our thread to other people is through language - and language is so very inefficient at explaining these kind of things. It's so cold. And inert.
These were the thoughts going through my head last week, surrounded by statues, studying the wound on the palm of my hand. After sitting for some time, and after smoking two cigarettes, it occurred to me that even though I'm adverse to taking photographs to remember things perhaps I should take a photo on this day. Perhaps this was one of those days when I should let my own prejudices fall by the wayside. Do something different. As ever, I don't know. But I did. It took me a while to realise what to take a picture of. There were so many sights, and some statues that I felt genuinely went a long way in representing how I was feeling on that day, but none of them quite hit the mark. What I wanted was something far simpler, something that could be interpreted in many ways, something that provided no representation of any one thing. Something that would have very specific meaning for me on this day, but which could mean anything at all to me on another given day. Something that offered both quiet contemplation and celebration, sorrow and joy. Something bigger than us. Something that goes on forever. Something eternal. And then I looked up.