O who wants to spring for an exposure of nearly six thousand years…this winter, is it, no, couldn’t be, has it been that long, doesn’t seem — an exposure infinitely exposing…stay still, say still, and hold it. Our lives frozen forever into one shot, indivisible, and eternaclass="underline" as such is our venture outlasting generations, nations, languages, loves, not destroying, no, but preserving, even as any proscribed, prophesized against Image weathers the fires to outlast our forgetting, outlasting even itself, in its sin, that it’s forbidden and yet still exists. It doesn’t even matter if it’s never developed, never seen except in the negative, by the eye of the mind. Snap. This is your new house, Mister & Misses Israelien, yet to be built, of course. Click. This is the girl I was seeing before your mother. Smile. This is the boy I was seeing before I first laid eyes on your father. Here, this is what I looked like when I was your age. Shudder the wind. At His father’s work, atop his desk: twelve photographs divulged in an arc; tap open their glasses, then work the images through the vesseling shards. An album’s discarded, never replaced, another’s struck from the shelves for its ravage: Hanna’s had been leather, leafed in dundusted gold, must into the pages of which she’d meticulously pasted, plasticized, these keepers these how many years; flip the page, they lie empty.
Here, look here: His father in moustache days, laying hands on a suit high and thick with padded shoulders, Hanna’s, she’s seated, which is unlike her, though pregnant, which is; red, there’s writing on the reverse: Is & Han, Woodmere, with swingset and toy pony, it would’ve been backyard at the house she’d been born in, deep in what’d been known as the Five Towns, retroactively doubled to ten, fifty and further (neighborhoods expanding, the Affiliate sprawl), another island, another world to remember…another photo, this His father again, alone and younger, like what they’d take at a mall, or in an auditorium, lobby, or hallway upon graduation: gray screen behind him whitewisped, as if oceanwaked, hair’s styled wet, eyes, too, and on the reverse, another inscription, another hand: to Hanna, with love, XOXXOOXXXOOO; His PopPop, in a warmup suit, it must be polyester, he’s not warming up, He’s cool and removed, with casual knees seated at the edge of an unlit hearth; on the reverse, Dad, Hanukah, December/80; Hanna was always great with the details, organized was her life, she’d probably snapped the shot, too; then Pop-Pop at the ocean, in a suit, watertight, like a wet hand clutching his cluster, hairless, longnailed toes sinking under garish grains; reversed, Dad, Florida, July/76…relics, then, of the displaced, the replaced, made museum: Hanna’s father, her stepfather, stepstep and on up the stairs; recognition repurposed, reversed: some mensch in some country there in the uniform of its military, then the same mensch in some other country there in a suit and vest and tie; the same straw’s doll clutched to a breast by the same hands on two continents, who is she, she looks like Ima, but what about the girl holding her? MomMom’s pain if she ever even knew that emotion as separate, as a part of life, and not just all there was to it: PopPop and another, not Arschstrong, posed around the unit of the latter, condo’s hall and its tree for Xmas, mistletoedecked, about to kiss with closed eyes, with tongue. This’s your (great-great-great-)-grandmother, that’s her standing with a hole in her bucket and behind her, that’s Rus. See the trees. How the snow seems so white and as white, so pure, it’s so fake. Frames are savage, it’s been said; they’re terrible, as they limit the world, obliterating what is with what was, while also negating the future, forbidding any sense of what might still be. To be punished for this trespass in image — Ben should be forced to wander around until the end of His days, hung around His neck an unfinished frame, unwieldy, nailstuck wood. All this is mysticism, though, the world as we’ve posed it — this desire to know who we are today merely an outgrowth of our fanatical memory, our insistence on not denying anything its existence; the result of our demand upon responsibility, of our passion for Law; this obsession with preservation merely our own human, mundane, limited imitation of the next world’s coming to come. A reproduction in advance of this world to be divinely perfected. On every reverse is scrawled a last question in invisible ink: are we patient enough — to wait for everything we’ve ever been promised, being content to accept its fulfillment, however, only in image, in images of Image…in imaginings, hymn? Even here, amid this Eden we’ve so tastefully and expensively furnished and draped — nu, we’ll have to make do.
Thrashing under the water under the ice, He flails, He founders…He but not yet He, Ben not yet: only a dimness, a trifle of dark, diffusing in the depths of the bath to cleanse Him of He…purified, but into and for what: not fetal but unshaped in the solution, enwombed without form save flub, glub, and the bubbling — I can’t breathe, which given the wetness sounds only as ripples, as waves. Limbs liquefying, not their loss through melting but to become remade, to be crucibled. He tides into seas and oceans, turning up wake. Viscous uterine life. Maternal syrup. Paternal stick. Its eyes stinging, its nose, too, then its mouth and throat, then no eyes to sting, no nose nor mouth, tongue dissolving at the hint of honey, the faint taste of urine, then, of silvery poison: sensing its last…a substance that Hanna would’ve kept under the sink, always offlimits, kept locked.
Will you shut the goddamned tentflap? the traveling photographer yells.
Who’s he again, who does he think he is? A mensch time out of mind — he looks any way you want him to look, though most of the timeless you can’t see him because he’s looking at you.
Here, hold these — and there’s a great shuffling of glass sound, a crashing, the breaking of plates…pass that nitrate over here, will you, the sound of fumbles around. He’s yelling at his assistant, a slow, dullwitted girl disguised as a boy with bangs, the rest of her hair gathered in a pile under his cap, a slight moustache smudged on with tint; her first name’s Never, and as for her last name, Forget. Or else we’ll do the albumen, he says to him, or the gelatin; forget it, we’ll do it all, we’ve got the time. Smash those eggs for me, will you? And, this time, don’t forget to separate the yolks…
To stir, then tong flat — picked up then hung, they seem thousands of Him, they seem millions, Hims suspended from heaven by a pinch of the trees, their wooden reaches pinned to horizons. Dripping emulsion, He’s patted down with sheets, these sheets His selves in the sopped love of image engendering images. These padding clouds. He’s bent, then checked; memory’s done entirely inhouse; ripped already, pretorn, folded thrice, then shrunk, then enlarged: pores of an infinite process, He’s inhaling this whole time, in-taking, passingout, comingto, elementally, being assembled from every gradation of the mnemosynic bath; given focus only to dry: in a black & white encompassing every slowslipping tint, which if anything they might first yellow on their slow ways to, disappeared. To be developed, finally, then exiled out to the edge, posterity’s furthest diaspora. There, at last, to be framed. That is, if anything can ever contain Him.
Ben’s image will precede Him everywhere except here, it appears, amid these trees unknotted with signs, these forests left barren of martyring tacks through His face: this the most religious enclave of recent adherents, enemies of representation, of the modern, of even the olden made new — the land of the people formerly known as the Amish, the Pennsylvania Deutsch, if you’ve heard. At least for them, conversion hasn’t been tough; they’d already grown the hair, bought the hats. If yesterday’s habits die hard, what about its people, community, brotherhood. What else to do, they’ve already committed to black. In a field, Ben wakes to a rain, a drippingly dense precipitate, intermittent if implacably slow, deliberate, and thick. Ruddish raw milk, irritatingly unprocessed. He turns His face to the tasteless heavens, the pinked underside of a naturally nonhomogenate moon. He’s under an udder, bovine, that of a Joysey cow, not just any: a heifer red and so rare, whose bloodlet ashes would’ve served to purify the sins of His people back in the days of the pioneer temples. Exhausted from the trek, His owners who deep in their souls are the owned, masters and hosts of underground trade, that moneychanging hands passing hands fingering change, the cartrides then the horserides, the changes of horse and cart then the portage, hiding in steamers and trunks, amid bags, boxes, and crates, His entire smuggle wormhollowed, spoondug — He opens His lips now only to spit, as if there’s anything left to be said; this after having been ignominiously dropped, left in the Keystone, abandoned without ceremony or cerement as not worth the skin He’d been born shrouded into — that and His onerous appetites, this sleeping lazily late until too tired to wake — the pinchednasal kvetch of the slave whose soul’s the enslaving. He closes His mouth to the weather of this cow on the graze, turns away and sleeps on, the ingrate, not thirsty.