March  2011

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Silent Snow, Secret Snow   (full text)

by Conrad Aiken (1934)

“Just why it should have happened, or why it should have happened just when it did, he could not, of course, possibly have said; nor could it even have occurred to him to ask.  The thing was above all a secret, something to be preciously concealed from Mother and Father; and to that very fact it owed an enormous part of its deliciousness.  It was like a peculiarly beautiful trinket to be carried unmentioned in one's trouser-pocket -- a rare stamp, an old coin, a few tiny gold links found trodden out of shape on the path in the park, a pebble of carnelian, a sea shell distinguishable from all others by an unusual spot or stripe -- and, as if it were anyone of these, he carried around with him everywhere a warm and persistent and increasingly beautiful sense of possession.  Nor was it only a sense of possession -- it was also a sense of protection.  It was as if, in some delightful way, his secret gave him a fortress, a wall behind which he could retreat into heavenly seclusion.”

      This appropriation and critical-montage video project takes a strange new tact for me in that it draws inwards toward my own liminality, which began far-away in thin fleeting shadows of a twilight boyhood moment, standing naked at the threshold of betwixt and between.  But that alone does not make this video remix unusual, for this liminality (here being stasis between real life and image life) must eventually present itself to us all. 

     Conrad Aiken (1889 –1973) too, of course, most likely confronted this liminally at the age of twelve... upon his sudden discovery of his parents (blood cousins to each other) both lying dead on the floor in their home, done in by his father’s own hand.  This real image, this scene of Oedipal Interruptus, must have flattened Aiken’s reality into image, thus launching his normative progression into the mystical and quotidian realm of watching.  How could it not?  For we are not born with a love to watch the world pruriently flattened into pictures, rather we are seduced to love through them because of their thingness and commodity.  And once so easily seduced, with gaze congealed in specularity, can there be any turning back... or any advancement?  Hard telling, since each liminal seduction is unique to us all.

     Here in this video I attempt to locate this liminal threshold using Aiken’s short story; to identify this transom so heavily weighted towards the passage into visual materialism and commodity.  It is a place of the mystical nonpareil flash of pubescence, a vicarious and shimmering portal where all the world convulses into pictures, retracting and reappearing as if through gauze-scrim (perpetual snow).  This video appropriates a boy’s passage and considers that liminal flash when fetish inspirits the false law of equivalence, when equivalence itself conjoins in fetish... when all is tricked into pictures.

      Indeed, although my own mother and father reportedly died of natural causes, I too was forced to negotiate this threshold -- this fetish-image reality where subject blurs with object.  For it is that moment of conjuring a new vividness of optical tactility, plunging us into a plane where the object itself and its visual copy merge. 

     As Walter Benjamin wrote in his Arcades Project, “Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.”  Indeed, Benjamin called this the “sex appeal of the inorganic”... “I can no longer think what I want to think.  My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.”  But this video is more about the instant before epiphany, floating weightless before transitional puberty, before our recognition and embrace of non-somatic surrogates... at the very portal of voyeurism that “offers itself to the eye as fleetingly and transitorily as a constellation of stars”. 

     And so, this video appropriates not to build an interpretation of Aiken, but to proffer a glimpse of what could be a last moment of innocence -- through Aiken -- as a reminder of the guilt, loss and tragic transgression that only becomes imaginable when pictures enter into the family romance of human consequence.  As WJT Mitchell asks, “Do we get pictures, or do pictures get us?”

All Lovely Things

by Conrad Aiken (1916)

All lovely things will have an ending,

All lovely things will fade and die,

And youth, that’s now so bravely spending,

Will beg a penny by and by.

Fine ladies all are soon forgotten,

And goldenrod is dust when dead,

The sweetest flesh and flowers rotten

And cobwebs tent the brightest head.

Come back, true love!  Sweet youth return! --

But time goes on, and will, unheeding.

Though hands will reach, and eyes will yearn,

And the wild days set true hearts bleeding.

Come back, true love!  Sweet youth remain! --

But goldenrod and daisies wither,

And over them blows autumn rain,

They pass, they pass, and know not whither.

Over the Darkened City

excerpt, by Conrad Aiken (1917)

I bound her to me in all soft ways,

I bound her to me in a net of days,

Yet now she has gone in silence and said no word.

How can we face these dazzling things, I ask you?

There is no use: we cry: and are not heard.

This Image or Another

excerpt, by Conrad Aiken (1932)

Walk with me world, upon my right hand walk,

speak to me Babel, that I may strive to assemble

of all these syllables a single word

before the purpose of speech is gone.

Innocence

excerpt, by Conrad Aiken (nd)

A dangerous red flame fierce as smoke,
And his young voice trembled when he spoke.
Meanwhile his eyes, with hungry stare,
Fed at the miracle of her hair;
And her white hand that moved so slow,
Combing the long hair to and fro,
Drew to a rhythmical delight
His young blood innocent till that night.
Behind her head a lantern hung,
A small red flame, where from were flung
Goblin shadows to spin and sprawl
On canvas roof and canvas wall;
And while she combed these shadows went
Dizzily, silently, blurred and bent,
Came out, shrank back, and swiftly fled,
A lift of her arm or toss of head.
She laughed, to watch his bashful stare:
Had he seen no woman comb her hair?--
She drew it out and coiled it then
To heap up on her head again;
Between her lips she held each pin
Till place was found to push it in,
Yet, holding them, could every while,
Manage, in spite of them, to smile.
And when she smiled her sweetness came
Through all his flesh like gusty flame,
Rich dissolution, sharp and sweet,
Making his full heart pause, to beat,
Before it hurried to keep in time
With measured rain, a delicate chime.
Backward, it seemed, on all his days
She shed from her heart a windy blaze,
And all that once had pained him so,
Somehow, in that bewitching glow,
Grew beautiful and far and strange;
He felt his buried childhood change
And blossom in him and grow fair
As if it fed on magic air...

“Listen,” it said. “We’ll tell you the last most beautiful and secret story. A story that gets smaller and smaller, that comes inward, instead of opening like a flower. It is a flower that becomes a seed, a little cold seed.  Do you hear?  We are leaning closer to you…”  The hiss was now becoming a roar -- the whole world was a vast moving screen of snow -- but even now it said peace, it said remoteness, it said cold, it said sleep.

      Television is where I learnt my place in scopophilia, but perfected not just in TV alone.  Learning the preference to watch is on-going everywhere at every age.  Seeing myself mesmerized wet and clean in the bathroom mirror; or fantasizing and fetishizing the young girl sitting before me in junior high school; or gazing through department store catalogues and hesitating at representations of translucent flawless skin posing especially for me, begging “Gee, I hope you like me.”  All irresistible visuality like shiny secret objects in a pocket.  Any willing image will do... even Roland Barthes mother, even my mother.   

     For all the world at this liminal threshold shimmers in whispering anticipation and promise (perpetual snow).  It beckons and offers itself to me as an immediate commodity for desire.  But a liminal world is always a safer, phantom between place of somewhere else.  Should I cross this transom to conjoin the infantile fray of aggressive prodigious image-making, or remain in static pre-pubescence, forsaking the ever-growing aggressive magic of our voracious imagistic realities?  A death of innocence is a requirement on either side.  

      I fear not.  And so, I choose to pass through liminality to another side.  I made this montage, mixing Kearney’s 1966 production with a 1951 “Miss U.S. Television Contest” broadcast (plus static-hiss snow).  In the spirit of Sergei Eisenstein’s “intellectul montage”, the montage is a critical collision of two factors in hopes of eliciting a third.  And as with all the projects I now make, it is but a tool to wrestle and write this ubiquitous gape of perpetual liminal fetish, to provoke and unbridle the fixity of adolescent/adult scopophila.  With this video, I build this threshold for myself in order to reclaim... in order to pass though the hypnotic rush of representation on my own terms with critical, distanced perspective.  It is the strategy of good watching over bad watching.

      For good and for bad we all eventually come to terms with imagistic reality and its “heavenly seclusion”.  Only sometimes we do it on our own terms; other times it happens to us.  But to be sure, disregarding our own liminal threshold leaves us monocled and impotent.  And lingering at the threshold offers little more than juvenescent fetish.  To pass through it, however, we discover for ourselves an acknowledged power to negotiate the seductive magic inside our  imagistic worlds.

"Ah, but just wait!  Wait till we are alone together!  Then I will begin to tell you something new!  Something white! something cold! something sleepy! something of cease, and peace, and the long bright curve of space!  tell them to go away.  Banish them.  Refuse to speak.  Leave them, go upstairs to your room, turn out the light and get into bed -- I will go with you, I will be waiting for you, I will tell you a better story than Little Kay of the Skates, or The Snow Ghost -- I will surround your bed, I will close the windows, pile a deep drift against the door, so that none will ever again be able to enter,  Speak to them!..."  It seemed as if the little hissing voice came from a slow white spiral of falling flakes in the corner by the front window -- but he could not be sure.”

      Gene Kearney (1930-1979) undoubtedly willfully confronted this liminality at some point as well.  For Kearney not only chose to adapt Aiken’s short story classic for screen, he also produced, directed, photographed and edited this 1966 TV version of Silent Snow, Secret Snow.  Kearney’s film production of the short story is quite respectful to Aiken with its haunting ethereal fidelity and elegant simplicity.  Indeed, Kearney and Aiken’s ‘kinship’ runs deep, for instance, both were both schooled at Harvard.  But while Kearney graduated with honors and Aiken barely receiving his AB, Aiken went on to carouse with the likes of T.S. Elliot and become one of America’s preeminent poets. 

     Kearney, in contrast, is best known as a frequent script writer for Kojak, the forgettable 1970‘s American TV series starring Telly Savalas.  Yet Kearney, like Aiken, worked for many years in many styles and roles, for instance: Lou Grant,  Night Gallery (an extension of the ever-popular Twilight Zone), and garnering writing credits for the cult favorite Night of the Lepus.  But it should be noted that these works came well after Kearney’s TV version of  Silent Snow, Secret Snow.

    Indeed, images at every turn today are increasingly made by an increasing number of people in increasing permutation with increasing consequences -- consequences which un-sanely transmography everything in-frame in ever-higher definition... for all to see.  And where images rush in, each of us begins to inhabit the point-for-point correspondence of the body to the body part... of a truth to its liminality... to its picture.  It is a place of correspondence that cripples the conjugal relationship between body and reality and cleaves judicious blending of two distinct realities.  *

     Jet-black hair on white-fleshed nakedness, the voluptuous female making mockery of, yet heightening, strange desires coming together in flashing moments of clear elusive image.  It... open-mouthed with heaving breasts in little multicolored performances of civilized magic ejaculated against the dark backdrop of suburban jungle.  Who exactly is seen and who is looking inside this world of undisciplined pageantry newly proffered as image?

      Like alternating electrical current, the eye must also grasp what the hand cannot touch.  But if so, why then must we choose to cross this epiphanic passageway into the world of Image-Other recognition?  Maybe it is safer to remain alone, impuissant, in this darkened liminal doorway and simply allow graven images to wash over us.  This is where I attempt to locate young Paul Hasleman in Secret Snow -- and myself auto-ethnographically.  Because it is familiar.  It is exactly the yet-unrequited instant of Nanook before the phonograph; of Damoure, Lam, and Illo before their Jaguar; of Gilligan before Ginger.  And it is exactly what happened to me at home in the vacant farmlands of western Michigan -- through broadcast television.  (And to be reclaimed yet again through TV.)

NOTE:  As I write this text, I sit again in a kind of fulsome liminality, for it is exactly equinox.  And true to form, it has indeed been snowing heavily outside my window all day long, silently and secretly muffling my entire world.  Do we make projects, or do projects make us?

Books on my desk during this project:

Barthes, Rolland. (1980). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang.

Baudrillard, J. & Guillaume, M. (2008). Radical Alterity. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

Brauchler, B & Postill, J. (eds.). (2010). Theorizing Media and Practice. New York: Berghahn Books.

Brill, Dorothee. (2010). Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus. Hanover: Dartmouth University Press.

Elkins, James. (Ed.). (2008). Photography Theory. New York: Routledge.

Emerson, Caryl. (1997). The First One Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Jones, Amelia. (2003). The Feminist and Visual Culture Reader. New York: Routledge.

Madison, D. Soyini. (2005). Critical Ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

Mitchell, W. J. T. (2005). What Do Pictures Want: The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mulvey, Laura. (1996). Fetishism and Curiosity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Schechner, Richard. (2003). Performance Theory. New York: Routledge

*  Taussig, Michael. (1993). Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge.