The wingnut ricocheted between his molars. The noise of its impacts, amplified tenfold, blared from the speakers, CHUCKETA-CRACKETA. He dropped looking up and his mouth sprayed particles. A sticky mist of atomized blood, pulverized teeth, spearmint saliva.
Eliyahu was shouting, “Gurion is here!”
I cleared the pink grit from my eyes with a sleeve.
Fifty armed Israelites stood in the bleachers.
20 PROPER
Friday, November 17, 2006
10:41 a.m.–10:49 a.m.
Because otherwise scholars, once they start the next chapter, will wonder to distraction how it is I could have witnessed all that’s being described, I’ll clarify here: I didn’t witness all of it. There’s no way I could’ve. Not firsthand.
Yet it feels like I did. It feels like I did but, just like the rest of you, I’ve also seen the videos.***** I’ve seen hundreds of the videos, many more than once, and while it’s easy to conclude that what I witnessed in the gym and what I’ve since seen on screens have overlapped in my memory in the six years between the Damage Proper and this writing, it is not at all easy to separate the overlap’s components. In fact, it’s impossible. I know because I’ve tried.
Just yesterday, for example, I watched a clip of the Five firing down on Shlomo. It looked like I remembered, exactly like I remembered, and I realized my memory must have been of the clip, not the experience.
Except then, just a split-second later, where I expected to see Eliyahu vault the bleachers, the cameraman turned to a wide-eyed Ashley, and this seemed to suggest the memory of Eliyahu was not a memory of something I’d seen onscreen, but of something I’d witnessed firsthand.
Yet on second thought, I thought, it might not have been firsthand. There were, after all, nine cameras in the gym, most of them by that time filming, and Eliyahu’s leap may have been recorded with one of the other eight — I might have been remembering that camera’s footage from another video.
So I checked the footage and, sure enough, the Fox News cameraman had captured the airborne Eliyahu, and so had the CBS guy. But then again, yet again, that didn’t mean I hadn’t witnessed it firsthand as well.
I might have witnessed any of it firsthand is the thing. From centercourt you could see anything in the gym. You could see anything in the gym from nearly anywhere in the gym, just not everything at once. I could have seen any of what I remember, but I could not have seen all of it, yet I remember seeing all of it. At least I seem to.
“But so why, in light of your memory’s unreliability,” wonder scholars, “why write any of the scene, Rabbi? After all, there are, as you’ve already mentioned, those thousands of videos. Why not just point us toward one or two — even ten — of the best? Certainly most of them are chazerai and narishkeit. Certainly most of them — particularly those second-class mash-ups inspired by the latest in user-friendly software, crafted with mouseclicks and readymade algorithms by spendy technologists who claim to believe that authorship is just a kind of editing, who confuse DIY with owning an iMac, and artfulness for art, and Bal with Adonai: all those rap- and ska- and punk-scored fanvids; all those rapmetal-soundtracked hatervids; those fishlensed and widescreened and retro-black-and-whited; those overdubbed with soundbytes from rabbis and governors; those spliced with your baby pictures and paintings by June, with scenes from Columbine and the Seung-Hui Cho biopic, stills from the Six Day and the Yom Kippur Wars; and the ones with the halos cartooned on your heads, the ones with the halos on the heads of your enemies, those captioned with verses from Ezekiel and Judges, those with their titles atop Israeli flags, the ones that are bordered with stars of David, the Black Power ones that darken your skintone, the Gun Lobby ones that redden all the blood, the ones from the contest held by Al Jazeera, the ones from the festival funded quietly by Marlboro; the splitscreened ones with the footage on the right and the GIDEON MACYNTIRE: COMING OF RAGE RPG on the left, their auteurs moving their Gurion-shaped avatars through virtual ballcourts and doorways and bleachers (past bleeding STELLARKIDs and spooky LEAVE-OFFs, in the background SLAM HOKUMs cursing BANJO NICKYNACKs, ENDURING JANE PAPERSTAMPs proclaiming love for GIDEONs, JELLO ROSENs biting HEATHERs, and so on) in as much the same pattern and at as much the same pace as the filmed you in those filmed settings moves as possible… and all the rest of their ilk — are for the birds. Surely they are. Surely, surely. But what,” wonder scholars, “about all the others? like the more straightforward, documentary-type ones? What about the video your father commissioned? What couldn’t the right one or few of those show us that a description in here could? Why include the Damage Proper in the scripture at all?”
To all of these questions, the best answer first: Torah is written. The one perfect narrative in the world is written, and not by default — not because Adonai, Creator of the Universe, lacked the technology it takes to make movies, nor because our ancient Israelite ancestors, for whom He bled rivers, split seas, and made manna, lacked the technology to play them — but because truth is best, if not exclusively, conveyed in writing.
The second best answer (for those with a more Nakamookian bent): Video is the chosen medium of tyrants, and that’s not because tyrants lack print technology, but rather because video cannot be examined as rigorously as can the written word. It cannot be as deeply plumbed — at least not yet. The reality a given video does or doesn’t convey, even without effects (allowing, hypothetically, that rendering three dimensions as two isn’t a host of effects in itself), cannot be fully parsed = The viewer can all too easily mistake realism for reality. E.g., every actor in a movie is wearing makeup, but few of them ever seem to be.
Furthermore, while filmed imagery may very well be possessed of a grammar, that grammar is either mostly unknown to us or changing at a pace with which we can’t keep up. It’s impossible to tell. Video may be like a beautiful girl whose every genuine emotion, thought, and intention gets betrayed by the expressiveness of her brow, but that’s of no consequence if we don’t look at her brow. And we don’t, scholars. Not at all. We can’t take our eyes off those fulsome… lips.
I could go on to enumerate video’s other problems — the thousands of ways in which the medium starves the muscles off signifiers, draping the bones that remain in sculpted fat — but that would, at this point, be redundant, I think. In any case, it’d be condescending. You’re well past page 798 by now. Were you not a scholar when you began this book, you’ve certainly become one, and you know it in your heart: books are truer than movies; when they are books of scripture, they are truer, even, than what they describe.
So the perspective you’ll get in this Damage Proper’s telling is that of the first-person-limited omniscient. This is not, of course, because I know everything, but rather because of my particular type of ignorance: because I don’t know how I know what I know, and there is no way to figure it out. First-person omniscience plus this disclaimer — it’s the only honest option. It’s the best I can do.
And lest that last line be read falsely, lest it read humble or apologetic, let me append it:
The best I can do is the best that can be done. I am the author of all of this.
GYMNASIUM at 10:41 AM on 11/17/06
Disoriented basketballers cursing in pain, Nakamook’s soldiers reloading. The Five plugged Shlomo in the eyes with pennies. Eliyahu of Brooklyn vaulted five bleachers. Desormie mumbling hey-nows ten feet east of me, Main Man two-stepping three feet west of me. Brooklyn landing, scanning for Baxter. June was equipping up in her corner, Israelites all across the bleachers were equipping, and all those around them remained ass-to-bench, the Shovers and bandkids and robots alike, and the Jennys and Ashleys, and the everykid no-ones, immobile as anvils, as hunted opposums, pillars of salt, anonymous animals all gawking courtward: here lay Boystar; there stood Gurion; sillhouettes, stage right, were ducking, scrambling; Brodsky as static as his name on a page.