Life, Death, Hate, and Photographs
An artist friend with whom I hope to work more in the future was here for a weekend rich in talk, plans, ideas, feelings, and even a little work: connection in this moment and possibilities for the future, as well as exploration of some web sites with remarkable work on them (more in a post to come). I attended a memorial service Saturday, a time of letting go and letting grief happen while also paying tribute. In the church were photographs of him, his family, his changes, his work; an oil portrait; one of his sculptures. The group that assembled to mark the passing of a remarkable man was as unconventional and various as he was, himself: his sister, his children and grandchildren, church ladies, bikers, artists, academics, hanging buddies, and his Honduran wife’s daughter and her extraordinarily beautiful family. Also on Saturday I got some virulent hate mail connected with something I had mentioned in the blog, which taught me that there are some people I cannot bring into the blog, no matter how important they are to me (about which more in a moment). And I spent a couple of hours at the Menil, looking at the surrealist collection I know so well, at Robert Rauschenberg’s cardboard creations, and at an amazing photography exhibit.
I have always been troubled by Joan Didion’s dictum, “writers are always selling someone out.” I take that to mean that the people in our lives are the material about which we write, and although some of us make no money from what we write, and don’t sell people out literally for filthy lucre, nonetheless we spend our lives writing about people who may not see themselves as we see them. I had been reading Joan Didion and thinking about that dictum in 1978, when I self-published the monologs of women which were the basis for my first one-woman show and dedicated it “To the women I exploited for the telling they do here.” I only used those women’s first names, but I was troubled way back then about how to tell what is in me to tell, how to write about my experience, without violating the privacy of the people who share my life. Writers’ lives don’t occur in isolation. Those of us who are “writers” weave the people in our lives into our personal narratives. But the people in our lives are not merely part of our personal narratives; they are their own narratives. The way they perceive themselves may be different from the way the writers in their lives perceive them. Using their names, even their first names, exposes them to the gaze of people who may be unhealthy and who may act out their unhealthiness in frightening ways.
Recently I have been angry because the son of someone dear to me has published what he calls a “memoir” that portrays his mother as a monster. I don’t object to his writing whatever he wants to write, but I object to his insisting it is “true.” What, then, is a blog? When does the blogger violate other people’s privacy by writing blogger-“truth”? How can that be avoided?
Because of the hate-mail, for which I am now grateful (innocence is always dangerous) I spent some hours this weekend thinking of shutting down the blog altogether. But that would shut down my own voice and the communication I enjoy with the few people I know who read the blog. Although I don’t have hundreds of comments on the blog, there are occasionally comments that delight, instruct, surprise, and connect, and that constitutes a small community that matters to me and to itself. While I don’t imagine this blog is vital to anyone’s existence but mine (there are other voices, other blogs, by the hundreds of thousands), I don’t want to shut down either my own voice or the voices of that small but eclectic community that reads and comments on this one. Silencing oneself or one’s community is never a healthy way to deal with hatred.
Anyway, I’m just about to travel again (to Mexico, a week from now), and this started as a travel blog; I love to blog as I travel. But I’m going to try a new approach. I’m not going to name people by their real names (not even their first names), from now on. I will either give the people I write about fictional names, respecting the fact that my perception of anyone is necessarily fictional, or I’ll describe them some other way, as I did in the opening sentence of this blog post–unless they have web sites of their own, or books or links of their own: public presentations of themselves. Then I might link to those. But how can I do that without exposing their link to me and identifying them with the fictional names I may be using for them in the blog? Don’t know yet. How can I share unpublished pieces of other people’s writing, or other artists’ work, and give them credit, without exposing them? If they give permission, is that enough? This will have to evolve. I’ll have to tweak it as I go. But I won’t silence myself. I will do everything possible to protect the people I love and care about, while not slapping duct tape over my writing mouth. I have also removed the folder called “My Family in Texas,” from MY PHOTOS (link on the right) thereby taking my family out of the public gaze. This is in some ways inconsistent with my love of photographs, but it now seems necessary.
I wonder whether, years from now, people will look back with rue on all the ways they have exposed (not themselves, because we have a right to expose ourselves if we want) their friends and family on My Space and similar sites. I think some already do have regrets. In some ways the very volume of personal disclosure is its own protection. Nobody has the time to read a quarter of a million personal disclosures and look at a quarter of a million people’s snapshots. But it is the odd nut-case we may have picked up like a burr in the grass, who may be clinging to our socks or lurking in the shadows (beware of metaphor bump) watching our every move with vicious intentions, whom we all need to beware of. I may calm down, in time, and worry less about this whole realm of ethics and exposure. I’m not intense about privacy myself (obviously). I’ve often joked that when my DNA was distributed, the privacy gene was somehow left out. But it is one thing to expose myself and another to expose people I love. I’ll keep sitting with this, welcoming ideas.
Bringing together my ongoing theme of impermanence and my absorption in photographs this week, I was especially moved by the photographs of people on exhibit at the Menil–not just because it is a powerful collection of portraits (which it is), but more because the subjects and photographers are all dead, while the images remain immediate, alive, open (exposed) to the gaze of strangers: mundane strangers merely browsing, holy strangers seeking connection or unity, profane strangers seeking thrills. The artists and their names, real or fictional, don’t much matter now. Nor do the gazing strangers. The images do matter. Photographs have always had great power for me. I love them. I am never bored by people’s photograph albums (well, I am certainly bored by some online albums of cellphone photos of teenage parties, so let me refine that comment): I am never bored by the photograph albums of people I want to know better–by moments frozen in time, by what is revealed and what is not, by what the photographer chose to see and preserve of the whole asparagus, the whole catastrophe, the whole banana. This piece. This moment, slightly less impermanent than the others. These fragile fingers (now dust), this smile, this flesh once stroked by a lover, or a mother, or a cat (all now dust), this moment preserved, as our memories preserve: but more reliable than memory (brain so fragile a store room). I’m grateful for all photographs, and I’m knocked to my knees in a deep bow of gratitude for great photographs.
Tags: Blogs and Blogging, Texas
Kendall
Á propos the second paragraph, back to Proust ….or we can be more specific and look at the business of portrait painting: how anyone adores to be painted, but only of course as they wish to see themselves