In the ’80s we lived in L.A.
I worked as a clerk in a large majority-minority high school just south of L.A. Sometimes the clerks and secretaries would have a girls’ night out – we were all women – and we’d go to someone’s house for the evening. I can’t remember the occasions. Birthdays, perhaps. In these established working class living rooms there were no books; surprisingly often there’d be a piano. On the piano or a shelf, so many times, there was a framed 5x7 or 8x10 inch black and white photo of a young man sparkling with youth and happiness, looking upwards and to the left, dressed in a cap and the knife-sharp creases of a military uniform. They were the graduation photos, sons in the service.
There were so many of them, over the years, so identical, so insistent on the knife-sharp clothing they seemed to me to be a code. I couldn’t understand it but I could see it there, insistent, glimmering in plain sight, just below the surface…
One of the teachers had twin sons, one of whom was in the Army in Germany. He showed me a Polaroid his son had sent: three or four very young men in fatigues with beer cans and grins, high-fiving in front of a banner spread across the wall above them. DOOMSDAY DOGS. The unit name above and the cheering lads below. An earthquake of fear and unmooring in that photo, in me as I looked at it.
Doomsday – the end of the world, war, chaos, fire, fury, rubble, death; smashed land and landscapes, cities, smashed wheat and insects and trees. The unit had been formed to function in that spectrum, couldn’t function properly except within it. Doomsday Dogs. The mindbreaking, heartbreaking, inculcated relish in that phrase.
We moved to Portland in 1992.
Daniel’s kneeling golem figures were inspired by photos of interred Afghani prisoners. They were a meditation on vulnerability, he said at the time.
But as well as being simply smashed the figures were psycho-sexually mutilated. Body parts – hands, heads and the penis – were missing.
The remaining fragments were pushed into piles. In the charcoal deposits from the original firing there were tyre marks, the lot reclaimed for parking.
Despite the flowers and other marks of grief and respect left by passers-by, the piles of fragments were still torsos, thighs, hands; outlines like thick skin opening into interiors dark as our inner geography. They were simulacra; they were also bodies as garbage, stone-sized pieces of clay with the shine of wet blood (after the small rain) flung by cars or chance next to a single carnation or a stray anonymous and yellowed stalk.
In a sense it was a battlefield, the rubble from conflicting claims on public space, conflicting ideas about what to do with (or to) vulnerability, about who should be permitted a place in the public’s attention, what to do with disagreement or discomfort, how to behave as individuals and groups, the difference between groups and bands and bandits, about what happens at night and what happens by day. It was a battlefield. It was the site of what any moment might break apart and reveal, the hellscape at the bottom of the sinkholes normality covers.
Despite documenting the site I could sense its meaning still lying outside my understanding.
It wasn’t a code. It felt like a hologram.
About a month ago a friend sent me her Bookiversary announcement. I realized that it had been a decade since Daniel and I had published his limited edition of artist’s book, Golems Waiting Redux. It’s rare and fragile and out of print now. A few days later I began remembering the graduation photos, the loss of all anchor in the Doomsday Dogs polaroid.
Among the fragments, body parts – hands, heads and the penis – were missing.
And there: the secrets of the photos and the vacant lot amalgamate, like joined like the halves of a walnut in its shell.
On the left there is war, revealed as a vast permission. It gathers up all the psychoses already swirling through any population and annexes them, nominally controls and directs them, unleashes them. War criminals outnumber their trials. On the right there are the graduation photos, revealed as false promises. The code of the knife-sharp crease avers that destructive potential is under control, leashed and leashable, commandable, unbetraying and unbetrayed; and always and only used in the service of the good.
I worked as a clerk in a large majority-minority high school just south of L.A. Sometimes the clerks and secretaries would have a girls’ night out – we were all women – and we’d go to someone’s house for the evening. I can’t remember the occasions. Birthdays, perhaps. In these established working class living rooms there were no books; surprisingly often there’d be a piano. On the piano or a shelf, so many times, there was a framed 5x7 or 8x10 inch black and white photo of a young man sparkling with youth and happiness, looking upwards and to the left, dressed in a cap and the knife-sharp creases of a military uniform. They were the graduation photos, sons in the service.
There were so many of them, over the years, so identical, so insistent on the knife-sharp clothing they seemed to me to be a code. I couldn’t understand it but I could see it there, insistent, glimmering in plain sight, just below the surface…
One of the teachers had twin sons, one of whom was in the Army in Germany. He showed me a Polaroid his son had sent: three or four very young men in fatigues with beer cans and grins, high-fiving in front of a banner spread across the wall above them. DOOMSDAY DOGS. The unit name above and the cheering lads below. An earthquake of fear and unmooring in that photo, in me as I looked at it.
Doomsday – the end of the world, war, chaos, fire, fury, rubble, death; smashed land and landscapes, cities, smashed wheat and insects and trees. The unit had been formed to function in that spectrum, couldn’t function properly except within it. Doomsday Dogs. The mindbreaking, heartbreaking, inculcated relish in that phrase.
We moved to Portland in 1992.
Daniel’s kneeling golem figures were inspired by photos of interred Afghani prisoners. They were a meditation on vulnerability, he said at the time.
But as well as being simply smashed the figures were psycho-sexually mutilated. Body parts – hands, heads and the penis – were missing.
The remaining fragments were pushed into piles. In the charcoal deposits from the original firing there were tyre marks, the lot reclaimed for parking.
Despite the flowers and other marks of grief and respect left by passers-by, the piles of fragments were still torsos, thighs, hands; outlines like thick skin opening into interiors dark as our inner geography. They were simulacra; they were also bodies as garbage, stone-sized pieces of clay with the shine of wet blood (after the small rain) flung by cars or chance next to a single carnation or a stray anonymous and yellowed stalk.
In a sense it was a battlefield, the rubble from conflicting claims on public space, conflicting ideas about what to do with (or to) vulnerability, about who should be permitted a place in the public’s attention, what to do with disagreement or discomfort, how to behave as individuals and groups, the difference between groups and bands and bandits, about what happens at night and what happens by day. It was a battlefield. It was the site of what any moment might break apart and reveal, the hellscape at the bottom of the sinkholes normality covers.
Despite documenting the site I could sense its meaning still lying outside my understanding.
It wasn’t a code. It felt like a hologram.
About a month ago a friend sent me her Bookiversary announcement. I realized that it had been a decade since Daniel and I had published his limited edition of artist’s book, Golems Waiting Redux. It’s rare and fragile and out of print now. A few days later I began remembering the graduation photos, the loss of all anchor in the Doomsday Dogs polaroid.
Among the fragments, body parts – hands, heads and the penis – were missing.
And there: the secrets of the photos and the vacant lot amalgamate, like joined like the halves of a walnut in its shell.
On the left there is war, revealed as a vast permission. It gathers up all the psychoses already swirling through any population and annexes them, nominally controls and directs them, unleashes them. War criminals outnumber their trials. On the right there are the graduation photos, revealed as false promises. The code of the knife-sharp crease avers that destructive potential is under control, leashed and leashable, commandable, unbetraying and unbetrayed; and always and only used in the service of the good.
No comments:
Post a Comment