Perhaps that kind of melancholy, that deep sorrowful knowledge is too much for men to bear. It may be deliberate in Pliny’s tale that it is a woman who stands at the liminal moment of birth, of the knowledge that ties remembrance to its physical double. It is no accident that most early photography was the recording of the dead. Denied the ritual of making, the recognition of loss becomes even more acute, but there is nothing to staunch the wound. Not so much that their souls would be stolen, but rather that they realized upon seeing a photograph that its lifelessness reminded them that memory and its truth, its deeper value lies in what we bring to representation, not what the representation offers us. Perhaps this sadness is the root of the instinctual fear that pre-technological cultures harbored for photographs. It is a reminder of that which we no longer have. But there is nothing sadder than a photograph. Perhaps because we no longer carve plastic representations of these simulacra of loss with our very hands, with our sweat, we forget. Perhaps in this age of photography and film, of being able to record images and videos on our cell phones, we overlook the importance of the rituals of making. What is important is the ritual, which helps orchestrate these creative interventions.
In a sense, religion is a complex language for melancholy and nostalgia. It is just that the ritual of reclaiming loss has found expression most often within religion. The idea of religion, of any religion, of a belief in deity or doctrine, is not what is important in this moment. The act of the ritual of mass is an elaborate ritual of remembrance, a mnemonic device that reminds us of the essential message of the Christ: my peace I give you. More than the transformation of matter, is the transformation of the imagination its very transubstantiation. It can be argued that the creative process is a ritual of remembrance.Ĭonsider the Catholic order of mass, as the priest raises the communion wafer and the chalice of wine, the moment he seeks, and the magic he is working is that of transubstantiation, the turning of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. This intervention in the world is repeated through time and culture and place, regardless of the truth of this or any other myth. The need to remember, to create (or re-create) a body out of loss, but also against loss, and against forgetting, is what drives the artist.
So it seems that the desire to make art, to draw the limits of the body, to create a simulacrum has its roots in loss or at least, the possibility of loss. The myth, as Pliny recounts it, locates the impetus to make this work, this mark, to capture this shadow in the fact that the potter’s daughter’s lover was leaving to go abroad, perhaps to fight a war. The quote above comes from a larger piece within Pliny the Elder’s book, Natural History, and alludes to Pliny’s attempts to trace the mythical origin of sculpture as an art-form its very conception, when allegedly a potter’s daughter traced a human figure on a wall from its shadow and began to mold a clay form from it. And every night, in the convent after a meal of rice and pork too rich for hunger-taut bellies, we threw up contentedly while my mother washed and rewashed the same old dress, hanging it to dry from the convent balcony, her nude body singing to the night.Īll agree that it began with tracing an outline around a man’s shadow
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And the many, many old women who pushed sweets and their sadness into the hands of us grateful boys and bounced my crying sister on their laps trying to coax her to take her feed from a bottle all the time singing softly in Portuguese, silencie bebê pequeno, while my mother smiled and sipped gratefully on the free coffee strangers bought her in street cafes. And all those people in the street staring at this bedraggled white woman in a faded African print dress, worn flip flops and crazy white hair who trooped her black brood through the city center because she thought, why not see the sights while we wait for a plane to England. They loved all the attention I think, these women who had given their lives to God and silence unperturbed even by my baby sister who cried and cried because my mother’s breasts were too dry and emaciated to make milk for her. The nuns met us with bristling beards and the warm embrace of old aunts and took us to a convent where it was impossible to hush the noise of four boys bouncing balls down hallowed halls. It listed to a stop and we emerged, a fat priest, a young photojournalist, my mother in her one faded African print dress and five children in little more than rags. We had been traveling for days when that little plane touched down in Lisbon with only two out of its three wheels working. And so as with many things, it begins with a war.
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