Because in a photograph, so certain branches of materialist
science tell us, even a holiday snapshot taken without care (especially the ones taken without care),
all of the past--a boat, a sky--can be read backwards in time, so too can the
atoms and colours (the primary and secondary sense significations) be followed
forward in time, into the future, where we can see, through the frame of the
photograph itself, Daughter, aged twenty-three at an arty party and high as a
kite, staring into space when the ratty couch moves slightly and a voice says,
"Hi."
Unseen the camera sees (that is to
say 'unseen' for none of the four subjects of the photograph, i.e. the people
who are in it, being two adults and two children, are looking at the camera,
while simultaneously at the time of the click of the camera's shutter the
photographer himself is not looking at
the camera but rather through the
camera) the subjects of the photograph, being in a sense the authors of the
photograph qua photograph for they,
as a corporation, as a family, requested that a complete stranger take a
photograph of their selves standing in front of a lake cruise boat.
The fact that a camera picks up
every single detail of a person--every single external atom--who is the subject
of a photograph including facial characteristics and therefore quite possibly
the mental processes of the subject and furthermore the very imagination of the subject as it is
occurring not just in the present but the past and the future, unconsciousness
and sub-consciousness included in the mess that is a person's mind, all there
for anyone with the will to look closely enough, is a fact to which we shall
soon return.
Instead of starting before the light
that made either any sort of camera (obscura) possible
or even any laws of optics possible (insert ontological joke here), we can
start with the creation of all the light in that imaginable moment of making
everything visible and/or invisible in a single moment at the beginning of time
some time ago (which you can consider a day ago, a week ago, so relative is
it), light that we now know can be reduced to something on the order of
seventeen particles, and which can piece-by-piece pass through any aperture
onto any plate since the beginning of, see above, time.
Unseen, the Instamatic camera sees,
not itself because it's just an obscura after all, a plate and an aperture twisting light
right to left and up to down, constructed by the Kodak Corporation in just two
days in Rochester, New York, then shipped by ship across the lake to
An hour before the camera was
stolen, in the hotel room, Mother, still in her slip, sat down on the bed,
picked it up, opened the back of it, noticing the black sleekness of the walls
of this the closed room of the thing, thinking how dark it must be in there,
how lonely the film must be, and how much meaning could be taken from it,
namely, the story of Plato's Cave, with the camera only seeing reflections, believing
that language is up side down.
Through the photograph and in the future we can see Daughter as
she, at an arty party and high as a kite, turns her head and crosses eyes to
the strange voice that said "Hi" to her (not having thought about the
event of the photograph since two months before when she and two of her
roommates had been talking about things stolen wherewith Daughter had talked
about the trip to Kingston with her family), seeing a nice-looking guy with a
bottle of beer in his hand, deciding then and there she was getting fucked that
very night.
Behind the subjects of this eternal
photograph (notwithstanding that in the future it may not ever be developed,
still, it does exist even if it is only ever a plastic plate that has been
exposed to the sun in three layers of colours and one layer of white), is a
lake cruise boat called the Island Belle, a replica of a Saint Lawrence River
steamer, fitted to accommodate 250 people if one wished to hire it for a
wedding or a party, but which is now for the purposes of the photographic
subjects a vessel they will take for a so-called Discovery Cruise of the
The Son, a very visual child from a
very early age, who saw and would see the camera's click and the figure of the
photographer in his mind's eye from that moment on, three months later, in
October, knowing the camera would never be recovered and caught in some morbid
attitude, takes up a pen and paper to recall the view from the iris of the
camera, recalling the positions in which he and his family stood, with a boat
behind them and with a sky behind the boat.
In time there is the now in August
in which infinitesimally the shutter of the camera Father gave to Mother is
simultaneously open and closed for you must recall all the hullabaloo about Schrödinger's cat for that applies here,
for here we have a fragment of time in which it cannot be known if a photon has
breached the plane of the aperture of the camera or not and there's no way to
ask this photon, "Hey, are you a particle, or just part of some darn
wave?"
I'm sure you can't help but see far into the future along with
me through the snapshot where you see Daughter and her man the morning after
the arty party not in her shared accommodations but rather in the man's house
which is much more let us say civilized what with a mattress not on the floor
but on a genuine wooden platform from which they did not stir except to get
more drugs or liquor but never condoms because Daughter didn't care what the
future held disconnected as she was from her family and having no hope save for
the man's protective arms on a Sunday.
The camera is noticing that, at the
moment of its click as light hits its plastic plate, the four standing there,
who are so obviously the subjects of its impression, are of different shapes
and sizes, from highest to lowest and from fattest to thinnest being 1) A
middle-aged man (smiling) in white shorts and a blue shirt 2) A middle-aged
woman (smiling) in a blue dress 3) A boy (smiling) in grey shorts and a yellow
shirt and 4) a girl (not smiling) in orange shorts and a pink shirt with her
hands clenched at her stomach.
Further into the future of the photograph we go, where and when
Daughter and her man are living together with all their stuff combined, where
and when they are painting paintings and photographing photographs funded by
his full-time job at a university's chemistry lab (from which he steals interesting
chemicals), where and when they are still learning about one another's pasts
and likes and dislikes, and where and when Daughter, alone one afternoon,
shamelessly snoops through her man's things, discovering a small wooden cigar
box which she proceeds to slowly open.
The son, as we can easily see
prospectively through the camera without the opportunity to err, as he grows
and as he becomes a man, perfects, for the sake of unconscious nostalgia,
conscious ambition, and sub-conscious anal eroticism, his mastery of the pencil
line and the paint stroke using as his subjects, oh, anything one can name:
buildings, pets, flowers, vases, tables, automobiles, monsters, hands, legs,
cocks, birds, clouds, fire engines, parties, abstracts, cunts,
newspapers, garbage piles, streetlamps, landscapes, faces, beaches, speeding
ambulances, skeletons, prison bars and tin cups, and twenty pictures of four
people in front of a boat.
The camera, looking on Mother as she
holds her purse, sees the recent past wherein Father gives the subject of this
sentence to her, saying, "I hope you find a good use for this," with
Mother responding, because she doesn't really find photography all that
interesting, non-committally, "Maybe I can, on
the trip," thinking Why for me, what
does he mean by it, don't I have enough problems, now I'm the family documentarian, and she thinks How can I get rid of this, maybe I can drop it in the river, I have a
mind, I don't need pictures of July.
Unseen, the film not only sees, but
hears beyond its casing, hears Kingston in July, hears the young man say to
Father, "Excuse me, sir, can you take my picture in front of this
boat?" whereupon the Instamatic camera feels itself carried, and raised,
whereupon the camera's shutter is quickly opened and closed, whereupon it is
lowered, moved horizontally, and is changed from hands to hands, whereupon the
young man is heard to say, "Thanks," whereupon Father says to his
wife and his two children, "What a nice boy."
The camera, having arrived in
Kingston two days ago (because we are eternally in the present for cameras are
fundamentally all about the present and are fundamentally always in the present we use the present tense
at all times for there is only space in a camera), looks through a circle but
only reacts to a square which means it is seeing though not recording parts to
the sides and to the top (all reversed of course) but the camera doesn't know
the formula for the minimum amount of ever-lost information though it (the
amount) is as fixed as an image on a plastic plate.
The July Instamatic photograph, taken twice so to speak, once
with a click and once with a dash, will be developed as part of a chemistry
experiment, will be hung up to dry along with pictures of Fort Henry, of a
Holiday Inn, of a sunset, of a sign reading KINGSTON 40, of three people at a
picnic table, and of a gas station, will be looked at and laughed at for some
time, will be left on a coffee table for two years, and will finally be put in
small wooden cigar box that will be opened slowly by Daughter.
This camera now is closing its iris
and its aperture through which according to the factory specifications has
provided enough information to the film and its chemicals to ensure that an
image (though upside down and left to right) of four people standing in front
of the Island Belle has been made now and forever while at the same little
minute the photographer is already planning his getaway because he has the
opportunity and the will to simply rob this family of their camera and their photograph
without so much as a fare-thee-well because we all have our natures and this is
his nature.
Always at work, sometimes cursing
drunkenly about his vision to the few friends he has, always checking how light
falls on things first closing one eye and then the other to see that what he
considers to be his subjectivity is in two
places, the Son, 5H pencil in hand before a cotton duck canvas primed and ready
for whatever he has to offer and La Mer on the CD player, closes his eyes to see what this
week's project is going to be while somewhere far away, maybe in a landfill,
the glass of an iris is whole or in parts.
The Island Belle, which can seat so
many strangers from far-away places such as South Africa, Japan, and America,
does not completely fill the photographic frame at the moment of the fabled
click, for the stranger taking the photograph is no stranger to photographs,
knowing as he does that, if possible, the boat's size should be a subject of
the photograph, and for that reason a patch of blue sky with a bright
cumulonimbus cloud can be seen above and to the right of the back of the boat
which is called the aft.
Daughter, carefully holding the photograph to the light, sees
herself, her sister, her brother, and her parents staring at the camera and
smiling, unaware of the future and barely conscious of the past, concentrating
merely on the moment there in Kingston in front of the Island Belle, about to
have something change forever with the click of a shutter, shutting down the
moment and sealing it up; and Daughter put the photograph down and recognizes
her home qua home, there with her
man, her photographer man, and she wonders if he knows it's her in the photo;
and though she doesn't take a match and burn the photo to ashes, she is
suddenly aroused by the idea of stabbing someone—anyone—to death.
An hour after the Keystone camera
was stolen, back in the hotel room, Mother, as she sits down on the bed, is
thinking about time rather than space (though both are implied by the action of
said camera), thinking about these two children of hers, thinking about how old
they're getting so quickly, of the promises from her husband that the camera
would be recovered, comparing the lost camera to the end of the world, thinking
about how meaningless photography is in the end, how much of a lie permanency
is, how much she now hates her husband.
The camera, unseen, felt the
trembling finger on its trigger, felt the finger push down on the trigger, felt
its shutter open and quickly close, capturing thereby an image of four people
in front of a train, felt the light press against the film and leave its stamp
there, felt itself fall then travel quickly horizontally as the
photographer-man ran but knew not much else, did not hear Father shout,
"Hey!", did not know it had been pilfered, didn't know the room it
wound up inside, didn't care about its environs (all environs being equal to a
camera), and was completely indifferent to who possessed it, being just an
ordinary camera.
The camera, operating on the principle of light
being wave, particle, whatever, captures a picture of four folks in front of a
boat, and a long time passes and I'm not talking about a day or a week or a
month no I'm talking about a bazillion
years passing, to the point 'whereupon' there's like no more energy in the
universe to be used thermodynamically, so to turn back the clock to that
moment, with the to-be-thief photographing the family would require more energy
than all the energy ever, thus all time ending with not unlike a whisper, and the only good part is that
all that is forgotten must necessarily be forgiven.
The Son, sitting not merely in a posture which
could have been predicted by someone who somehow studied the Instamatic photograph
taken thirty years before in Tobermory, of himself,
his parents, and his sister, but also in a posture that describes limb by limb
a sense of breathlessness brought about (reading unconsciously) by an
exhaustion of cathected loss like a child astonished
that he finally hit the target with the arrow or like the sense in the morning
after losing one's virginity as the memory of the event slowly re-inhabits
one's mind, says, simply, "I have finished."
Having had the shutter click and having lowered it
down, the photographer of the family quartet, a teenager who is, like them, a
visitor to Kingston, knowing his own family was set to leave later that day, in
just a few hours in fact, and judging the four he has just photographed quickly
realizing there is no way any of them could ever catch him neither now nor
ever, runs off with the camera he knew so little about, never actually having
before held a camera, without looking back, up into the July holiday crowd as
fast as he can, never stopping until he'd reached one of the cheaper motels.
How did all this come about, asks the camera fifty
years after it closed and opened its shutter one unspecified day in Kingston,
Ontario, that its creation, faded ochre with time, would be still around,
against the odds, in a photo album possessed by Daughter and husband, and
looked at with question by a boy and a girl who never knew their grandparents
but rather knew how to hunt and how to fish, having heard many times how the
miracle of their genesis lay within this small white edge cornered by black
right-angled triangles with equal legs?
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