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After Katrina
By Mackie Blanton
Chapter 3 The Lens in Plato’s
Eye
I gave my single lens reflex camera
away the other day, on the very afternoon of the day
after I had decided to give it away. I left the US
without getting film for it, because I hadn’t decided
yet whether I wanted black and white film or more color
film, or film for slides. Why have I said “more color
film” is a mystery now to me, because the last three
sets of photos I snapped about two months before leaving
were black and whites. Of those photos, the only two I
packed to bring with me were of my wife and my daughter,
one photo each, both black and white. So I figured I
would just get new rolls of film once I had made up my
mind when here in Izmir.
But I gave my camera away eventually,
within weeks of starting my classes here. It was
Plato’s influence that forced me to do so. Plato taught
me a lesson this year, as I taught him, that I had long
forgotten from his teachings washed away in my memory by
so many other concerns over the years.
On the morning before the day that I
gifted someone with my camera, as I entered the campus
on foot, I spotted two dogs on the lawn parallel to the
sidewalk that curved well into the campus toward my
building. It was a warm September day; cold weather
wouldn’t really be on its way yet until November. Izmir
has lots of dogs roaming the streets, prowling around
bus stops and below overpasses of major motorways; as
well as cats roaming alley ways and popping in and out
of public dumpsters strategically slumbering along
curbsides or the walls and wrought iron balustrades, and
below balconies, of buildings. The dogs all seem to be
motley-colored, much-alone, hungry, sad-sack,
loose-limbed hounds, while the cats are the robust,
buffed jocks who forage everywhere in packs. Everyone
seems to accept both as if they were as natural a
presence of the streets as stones or stray, windblown
paper. Of course, it’s obvious that the cats dine well
during the night down inside the dumpsters, especially
those near restaurants, and every street of Izmir has
dozens of restaurants and pubs and kebap diners. I have
no idea what keeps the dogs alive.
So as I entered the campus on foot –
I walk to and from campus every day – I saw two hounds
lounging on the grass each a bit of a distance from one
another. The one nearest me, the black one, as I was
approaching near the two of them appeared healthier in
its body than the other one, the reddish one, who was
thin and bony in its sagging skin. Black Bully played
with a dead or a dying bird under its paw, nibbling at
it and pawing it as if to see whether it would flinch.
This hunter with its prey was facing the other one at
some distance removed but well in plain sight of the
other one, curled with its dead meal on the verge of a
casual lunge, if provoked, as if it were teasing Skinny
Red. Big Black was obviously in control of the moment.
Diffident Red cowered down into its lounge, down between
its paws, its snout deeper into the grass.
I thought to myself, What a great
photo that would make! I stopped and stared and studied
them. No other campus pedestrian seemed to be noticing
them. Why should they? For I was the one foreign to
the sights of Izmir and, curious about everything, took
nothing for granted yet. If only I had had my camera
with me, I thought. What is interesting about this
moment is that I experienced a succession of epiphanies
during the few minutes I spent staring at and gazing
upon these unremarkable animals of Izmir daylight hours
because they, for some reason, were remarkable and
unusual to me at this very moment. I first wished I had
had my camera with me. Then I admonished myself for not
bothering to lug it along everyday for opportunities
like this one. Then, as I stared at them, I studied
them discretely, casually from different angles, trying
to discern which angle would have given me the best
take. I studied them from the one place I stood, rather
than creeping closer on to the lawn, for fear of
disturbing or distracting them and therefore having them
canter off. Could I capture the cowardice of Red?Could
I capture the selfishness of Black Warrior? I was then
overcome by an epistemological shift. Why do I believe
any shot I take will capture the truth of the moment?
And how could I be certain of which truth this two-dog
moment held? How did I even know that Red was cowardly
and Blackie selfish? Had they already fought and
growled and tugged over the bird and the black hound had
won in a sudden fit of rage before I arrived? Or had
the red hound had his fill of the bird and passed on the
corpse to the black hound?
How could I be sure I was not simply
projecting my own flitting, fretful internal reality on
to these poor hungry street mongrels? Plato was right
after all, I realized. We can’t ever really hope to
capture the ideal moment, the ideal found object, in our
artful amateur moments. For through our senses all was
nothing but mere imitation, never the real thing. The
single lens reflex of Plato’s mind had captured a truth
greater than any subsequent teaching. No teaching could
ever hope to imitate it and any teaching that opposed it
would lack an eternal, perspicuous rationality. A
photograph or slide was no true ideal form, but only an
arbitrary, artificial structure ritualized endlessly by
an academic or artful searching down here below;
endlessly missing the mark, a mere approximation, a
representation at least thrice removed from Heaven.
Make pictures. Take pictures.
What’s the difference?
Can you see what I am getting at?
Why should I take photos of people, places, and things;
of faces, landscapes, and cats; of monuments, ruins, and
a dead bird between a hound’s teeth – when, as Plato
taught us, these photos will be merely mimetic,
imitative of the real, when the real itself is only
apparently real, since it also, being earthbound, is
imitative of ideal forms veiled from the human eye and
touch and taste and smell? But then there is the more
immediate question: Why should I take photos of anything
in which I see only apparent beauty, a beauty that
hurricanes and earthquakes will destroy, transforming
them into another kind of mimetic, though sorrowful,
apparent beauty? It’s the mere apparentness of even the
sorrowful that makes the sorrowful beautiful.
Let it go. Let it go. Let go, I
thought. Learn to live in the present moment, I scolded
myself. Learn to remember experiences through the
single lens reflex of your mind’s eye. Drop the
camera. Throw it away. Let it go. Leave it on some
park bench one day soon and be quick about it, I
insisted to myself. What new photographs held in my
palm could ever match the devastation that I still held
shuttered behind my mind’s eye of my destroyed city?
What new photographs could ever replace my thousands of
slides of North African cities, of France, of West and
East Africa – now washed invisible by the toxic waters
of the post-Katrina floods that entered my city, my
street, when the incompetent levees were breached by
competent, surly, insouciant, forceful waters pushing
through into the streets and homes of my city, into my
gardens, my home, my study, from my lake and my canals?
How many dogs and cats suffered along with the thousands
of miserable unfortunates who drowned as they floated
off against their will over their back yards and roofs
that they couldn’t even see at that moment, fear
blinding their sight, crushing their heart, debris and
water rushing down their throats?
What are photos anyway but
time-travel frames back to a past that once was but
never lives the same in memory or in imagination?
Time-travel slides or paper squares and rectangles that
we stack in a sarcophagus of boxes into a mausoleum of
cabinet drawers. Staring through the lens, imagination
distorts memory. Gazing upon the snapped, captured
scene, memory reuses imagination to redo fading, gone
moments.
How could I imagine that what I saw
on my way to the campus on some indifferent morning
could ever be important enough to file away in a
keepsake drawer or be framed for a library wall, ever
again? After all, this was only my imagination at work
here behind the camera. And what good ever is
imagination if it cannot divine the very essence of
confrontational, confronted, raw experience? No, I had
had enough of my imaginings that used to close with
certainty in the lit dark of my brain a second before
the shutter of the camera clicked.
posted 16 March 2006
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update 3 November 2007 |
