Exposures
Old Photographs
Looking at old photographs from the time of my parents’ youth, I think how complicated such looking is. I take in the image, as I do with any photograph, but right at that point I diverge. Most photographs do not propose a narrative, or if they do, I very rarely linger long enough to follow it. The image remains itself, aesthetic or informational. Whereas images of people we know, whatever their quality, put us in a completely different realm. They carry, each in its own way, the trace of our association. Schoolmate, friend, former lover, sibling, parent. . . Our feeling about the person is somehow co-terminus with the image we’re looking at.
I look one way at images of my parents in more recent years, another way at those from a deeper past. In both cases, what I see when I look has changed since they each died. Now I see them both in terms of my basic feeling, and also as gone. Every photo is of the past, even the one I took yesterday, but with death comes the ‘no more,’ and that changes everything. The photo is less a depiction, which up until their death it was. It is a memorial, as well as a memento mori.
Photographs from the long ago youth of my parents have a different inflection. For the passing of time long ago made the images a memorial to their youth, and to the past as well. They are in a world that didn’t contain me. I was not a witness; for me it’s all visual hearsay. This is troubling—but why? Is it because they introduce the possibility that I was not inevitable? These two young people sitting on an abandoned tank somewhere in Germany, obviously engrossed in each other—their lives, both separately and together might have taken so many other turns, each of which would have precluded me. Unthinkable. That the turn they did take is—how to put it—the founding fact of my existence.
Eden
If I ever need confirmation that I had a happy childhood, this photo should suffice. The gusto with which I bite into the apple my mother holds puts to rest any thought that things were otherwise. Which they weren’t. But the preserved moment does confirm what advertisers have known forever—that the image has the power to override most every other consideration.
The photo was taken, I believe, somewhere on the Cranbrook grounds, Cranbrook being the compound of private schools, an art academy, and museums designed by Eliel Saarinen and housed on the estate of Detroit’s newspaper family. My father was then working for Eero Saarinen, Eliel’s son, and we lived in an apartment complex just down the road from Cranbrook.
None of which matters to the photo or my response to it. I see only the archetype, though of course personalized, with my mother as the Madonna and myself as the baby Jesus. The iconography gets confused by the proffered apple, however, as that would take things further back in time, to the first man being suckered into tasting the forbidden fruit. But I can, with some exertion, bring it all back to what it really was: a young mother on a sunny day dandling her curly-haired son on her knee, letting him eat an apple. It’s fall, not in the sense of the origin story, but the season.
Civita di Bagnoregio
How strange this photo, taken by I don’t know who. Lynn and I are in the Italian hill town of Civita di Bagnoregio, doing amateur hour at one of the several festivals that carry on the age-old traditions. Lynn has a sweet, strong voice, and I am punting along on the mandolin, which I’ve only begun to get the hang of.
The photo, from the early 1980s, I’m guessing, used to seem more familiar—this I remember—but passing time has made it a souvenir. Impossible not to ask, looking, who were we? This can be asked of so many old photos, but the asking feels more pressing here. We were recently married, in our late twenties, early thirties at most, and we were staying in the house my father had had restored, and what I remember with surprising vividness is how Lynn and I would place a bit of string across our bedroom door so that we would know if Domenica, our caretaker (and so much more), had come to inspect the room in our absence. For in the eyes of the town, we were only ‘fidanzata’—affianced—and so not really allowed to share a bed (yet). It could be we exaggerated the attention our presence attracted, but on the other hand, one of the first questions we were met with, and more than once, was the simple query “Dove ringa?” Where is your ring?
But what I really see in the photo is ourselves as so young, starting out, years before the real domesticity, shocked as we always were to be making our way. So exotic to us both was the time we got to spend in this tiny spectacular town, billed in a local sign as ‘il paese che muore’ —the land that is dying.
“a day of fantastic clouds”
Bill
It has taken me much of my life to learn that no moment is simply itself, that it changes and changes again as time keeps passing. This was taken in August of 2016 when we were vacationing at Caspian Lake in northern Vermont. I took the photo while taking a walk with my friend Bill Corbett. He wanted to show me some views, and I remember he gave me a droll cautioning look when I said, “Two roads—”. . . A day of fantastic cloudy and sweet air. I didn’t take it for granted, even though in another sense I did—the way that most of us take most of what happens for granted.
Bill died two years later, in August, and up at the lake, where he insisted to his family that he needed to be. He’d had cancer and had suffered a good deal. The last time I saw him—they had rented an apartment in Beacon Hill to be near the hospital—the big-hearted enthusiast was physically diminished and deeply depressed. When I saw him, I thought, ‘this can’t be.’
But what can’t be so often is. And looking at this photo I think how beautiful is the innocence which is at the same time a kind of denial. We ate a big meal the night of our walk, prepared by Bill’s wife Beverly, a cook of some renown, and we drank too much wine, and enjoyed ourselves fully. When I look at that sky of clouds, and the top of Bill’s head, that innocence comes back, only now it almost feels like hubris to have surrendered ourselves so fully to the summer light.
Hands
In the last weeks of her life, my mother was bedridden. I would go to sit with her most every day but we talked little. Mostly she would just sleep, and I would sit nearby, imagining that my presence reached her in some easeful way. I sat, I let my gaze pan slowly back and forth over the shelves crowded with books, framed photographs, and small objects of all descriptions: a prism paperweight, a tiny music box, various Latvian mementos…
I was startled more than once by a sudden movement in the bed. It was not my mother waking. It was her arms lifting up independently, her hands gliding and fluttering, as if in her dreams she was conducting an orchestra. I mentioned these movements to her hospice nurse, who assured me that it was quite common. She gave me the name for it, but I have forgotten it.
Better thus. Knowing the name would turn those easy and peaceful-seeming movements into a medical phenomenon rather than what they were—and remain—to me, something tinged with mystery, what I can fancifully imagine as the soul rehearsing, moving this way and that as it begins to loosen the tether.
Sven Birkerts was for many years the Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He has reviewed widely and is the author of ten books, including The Gutenberg Elegies and The Art of Time in Memoir. His new book, an appreciation of Nabokov's Speak, Memory will be out in December. He co-edits the journal AGNI at Boston University and lives in Arlington, MA.