on barbarism, aging and preludes

Yesterday evening on the way to work, I heard back to back news clips on NPR. The first one lasted only a few seconds and informed me that the Obama administration was deciding whether or not to release the death photo of Osama Bin Laden. Apparently the ghoul was shot in the face by U.S. forces, and if the whole fiasco at Abu Ghraib taught us nothing else, it's that U.S. military personnel are always handy when it comes to a camera.

i
m
age
miss
in
g

(thankfully)

The second report was somewhat longer, addressed the unrest in the Middle East, and featured a State Department spokesperson declaring that the Syrian government's treatment of protesters was "barbaric". I certainly don't dispute this assessment, but it was nonetheless a curious statement given the context of what immediately preceded it. The fact that our own government is "debating" the release of the Bin Laden photo seems particularly barbaric to me, not unlike the ancient practice of placing the severed heads of one's enemies on stakes outside the city walls.

i
m
age
miss
in
g

(again, thankfully)

I suppose that – despite our modern era of globalization and technology, terror and media inundation – sometimes the oldest methods are still the best methods. Perhaps there is no deterrent so effective as the image of a corpse, and if André Bazin were alive I wonder if he would reconsider his "Ontology of the Photographic Image".

"The image helps us to remember the subject
and preserve him from a second spiritual death."

But this is beside the point.

The point is that I've been thinking about death a lot recently – not in the way of maudlinism or morbidity – but just in the general sense of getting older. When I was a child, thirty-four seemed very old; it was the age of my father, the age of my mother, the age of maturity and unfathomable responsibility. It was impossible to conceive of myself as such, and I don't think my experience in this regard is unique. Perhaps that's all that distinguishes adulthood from childhood: the ability to imagine oneself as older.

The author, unable to imagine himself as older.

As the name implies, imagination is dependent upon both the intake and output images. But how do we digest the images we see? How do we turn them into the future visions of ourselves? Why do our predictions always seem so faulty? How often do we ask children, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" without really appreciating what it is we're asking them to do?

The author's early imaginations.

Adolescence, with its fascination on the establishment and projection of image, seems especially useful in this way. Frightful haircuts (remember mousse?), dreadful aromas (remember Obsession?), and regrettable fashions (remember the tight roll?) are as essential to those years as Noxema and masturbation. Looking back it seems the entirety of my teenage years was spent learning to navigate the dialectic between things-to-be-seen and things-to-be-hidden:

The poles of the dialectic.

By the end of college, I found myself very wary (and weary) of this dance. Although inarticulable at the time, the gap between image and referent was experienced viscerally. Is our existence nothing more than a play of signifiers? A confluence of culture and biology? Are we reducible to nothing more than the interplay between light and darkness?

The author in the dark, 2001.

I spent some years exploring these questions, without the benefit (or detriment) of guidance, authority, or tradition. I was intent on dismantling every part of myself that was not a result of choice. Camus himself would have been proud.

Eventually I collected evidence of sufficient quantity and quality to answer these questions, and two years after that I bore witness to a graffitied bedroom revelation as to how I might present my findings.

The author's bedroom wall, circa 2008.

While all these thoughts settled, I went back to school and learned a little bit more about the image and how we negotiate our relationship to it. Specifically, I wondered how we reconcile our existence with our memories, or put another way – our experience of the people we are now with our images of the people we were then.

Besides one very long paper and two short letters, I knew that this process would somehow help me learn to articulate those things I could not say ten years ago. This forum has been a part of process, and from the beginning I've looked at this blog as less of a medium and more of a laboratory.

Now, though, my school has come to an end, and it will be at least 15 months before I return (if ever). So...

I find myself with more free time than I've had at any time since that bedroom revelation, which occurred precisely three years ago on the 24th of this month. This, coupled with a comment my father-in-law made yesterday, are clear signs that it's time to start compiling my results and see if I can actually spin them into the novel that's been kicking around my head for the past couple of years.

Time will tell...