Mistaken memories, 2: the moonbow
(You may ask, dearreader, why “mistaken memories”? All my life, for various reasons, I’ve been obsessed with destroying documents and erasing traces, giving things away, dropping friends, abandoning things, taking no photographs and having no photographs taken of me. The traumatic events that have happened have always been easier to deal with by walking away, keeping no evidence, pretending they happened to someone else, in another place and time. I have a very weak memory for my own life; anything more than a year or two ago blurs into the general specular whiteness, vague outlines, of an overexposed snapshot. What I recall of my own life is thoroughly unreliable and hard to verify. And I want to start recalling things. The desire for the clear and vacant past experience, as characterless as the furniture in an airport departure lounge, is part of a very destructive turn in how I did things. And as it happened my memories kept me alive.
In 1979 in New York City, Brian Eno bought a video camera off one of Foreigner’s roadies. My best guess is a Panasonic WV-3320, a single tube color camera that uses frequency separation to dissect color, a heavy analog device. It didn’t come with a tripod, so he set it on its side in the window of his apartment on the Lower East side, hooked up to the TV — which he also turned on its side, so the screen was oriented like a portrait — and turned on the VCR whenever he saw something compelling. What he caught on tape is mostly views from Broome Street and around 5th Avenue next to the Park. And it’s beautiful, or at least I find it beautiful. The video has a delicate texture, a fluttering analog richness between the pick-up tube and the capacity of the tape, a touch of blur, the sky the blue of a still-wet fresco. He called it Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan. (You can find the footage on the disc Fourteen Video Paintings — it’s on Netflix.) A reviewer on the Panasonic WV-3320: “It produces accurate color and it is moderately sensitive.” That’s all I really hope for in my writing — moderate sensitivity, accurate color — and what I hope for in writing out these analog, blurred, lossy, mistaken memories.)
How did it come about, to be on the island where the world’s lost shipping washed ashore, thousands of left-foot sneakers, in the black night, BBC with the sound off on the couch of somebody’s guest house living room? If you get jet-lagged enough, the darkness of night in which you are so palely and limply awake becomes granular, it seems to fall in front of your eyes constantly, in flakes, and get grittily under your eyelids and in your mouth like sand. I was exhausted and full of dread, because I already had the terrible feeling that we were fucked, and I hadn’t even looked through the (mostly unlabeled and unlogged) tapes and tapes of footage yet. I was on the island of Terschelling in the Waddenzee off the Dutch mainland. This was in mid-September of 2004. I was in way over my head, nominally directing a documentary for a friend of mine despite having no prior experience making movies apart from a train wreck of a student art picture whose Pharaonic stasis and forty minutes of creaking voiceover dried on the screen like cement.
Something about my total geographic disorientation at this point is probably relevant. The doc was about a community of expatriates and natives in a small town in southern France putting on an opera. My friend had invited me to help him make it earlier that year. I can’t remember when precisely but I remember reading the email. I was living in Japan, teaching English and sleeping in a tatami-floored room in a second floor apartment in a beach town called Tsujido, about an hour’s train ride out of Tokyo. I would go to a media café in town, renting time on a cubicle full of playback systems for the racks of video games and music, where I could plug in my laptop. I remember the café’s toner-and-ozone office smell, how comforting that was. (I’ve always found offices soothing, maybe because they’re such affectless spaces.) They were putting the opera on in July and early August. I’d already enrolled for an MA at the European Graduate School, which meant some advance studying and then August on the campus in Saas-Fee, in Switzerland. What all this meant, in the end: I took my savings, spent some time in the south (where I tried and failed to teach myself French by translating) finishing my reading for school, met up with the crew, shot a bunch of documentary footage, took a train from there to Switzerland, did the first August of my MA, flew back to the U.S. for ten days and then to Amsterdam, and up the country (I can’t remember — did we drive? Did I take a train?) and on a ferry that went very slowly through the night sea to the low hard glitter of the halide harbor lights of Terschelling.
I was tired in ways I didn’t really understand, then. I don’t want to dwell on these things — the memories, as I write about them, reveal memories within them — but I’m a terrible traveler, with a special combination of tight-fistedness and a kind of fatuous faith inspired by favorite writers of my youth that if I just went, without planning, I would somehow open myself to the world and some destiny would appear that could satisfy my frantic sense of failing to live my life meaningfully. In practice what this means is that no stage of that geographic process went smoothly. I kept booking cheap flights with seventeen-hour layovers in remote airports: it’s fine, I’ll just sleep in the airport (as the floor-polishing machine rumbles by and the fluorescents glare). I stumbled in a dense blear around the sunny, silent noon streets of foreign towns, from one full hotel to another, looking for a place to sleep. I slept in a cemetery in my suit jacket, on many hours’ empty stomach, in the cold and dewey night, walked into town as the sun rose and found the only open boulangerie by the fountain, bought a baguette and ate it with the cold under my skin — I could feel it inside my jaw, under my tongue, on the surface of my bones, that cold — and started to sob with loneliness and exhaustion. My destination a good way out of town, I started just walking: hours up a hot two-lane French mountain road, with my ridiculously heavy suitcase full of books and a dysfunctional electric guitar over my shoulder, the carrying strap painting a fat stripe of sweat on my shirt when I took it off. A ticket for the right date but the wrong month, kicked off the train at 3 am in Ventre Ville, wandering desolate and furious with myself. No, not a good traveler.
And tired too of the life I was trying to somehow create for myself, of almost constant flight from certain questions I couldn’t answer. But let that be for now, another mistaken memory for a different time.
For now: we’ve been on the island a few days. It’s a huge party destination in the summer, but in the fall it’s very quiet, with those unimaginable northern nights, their primal darkness. I remember the little white shed illuminated by the floodlight in that night, so bright with the circle of radiance falling rapidly away into the kind of pagan night that falls when Fenrir finally devours the sun. During the day, huge white clouds move slowly across the sky, sometimes trailing thick curtains of gray rain across the floor of the world, rain that lashes the roof of the barn like chains. The borrowed concrete-floored barn is where we’re working, with our folding tables, computers and portable hard drives, cable ties and tapes — the sound design happening in the stall spaces through the door, so there can be some sonic protection — the coffeemaker, the Pelican cases on the floor. (What did I eat? Sandwiches, or something, presumably; but I remember mostly being too nervous to eat.) We were fighting to save the project from my incompetence by editing it back to life, finding all the good moments, assembling a story.
Into this room, one night, came the photographer, the subject of this memory. A burly Dutchman, with the body of someone who could at least place in the shot put, wearing fatigue cargo pants, as I recall, boots, carrying an enormous duffel bag and some kind of hard-sided container. The man who took pictures of moonbows.
I remember him being intense, almost fierce, in his concentration and self-presentation. He took pictures of the phenomena of weather and light; he took out the laptop, and began clicking through them. He spent — was it a spring? — some length of time living in isolation in a lifeguard’s shack on the northern coast of the island, making a sundial from a ball in the sand, taking pictures of every sunset, trying to catch the green flash, and documenting all the phases of the moon and the way it fell towards the horizon over the year. He specialized in auroras, their folds and draperies with the stars visible through them, brushing across the sky, translucencies in a printer’s magenta and a damp electric green like the skin of a mamba. Pictures of a bicycle against a tree under the auroral light, bathed in a green like the neon fog that filled the hotel room in Vertigo. He’d lived in Alaska for months, waiting for an aurora that never came, until he ran out of money and had to leave; the children in the town where he stayed called him, he translated, “the man on whom the aurora turns its back.” He took (did he? I’m no longer sure if I remember this or not) pictures of the Brocken specter, the converging lines in the fog to the horizon, the humming colors of the glory around that distant point. He wanted to travel to Antarctica to photograph the icebows in the air (the source, he said, drawing on a piece of printer paper in blue ballpoint, of the cross Constantine I saw in the sun). He made soundtracks out of the electromagnetic interference from the solar wind heard on a shortwave radio.
And he had pictures of moonbows, an event of impossible delicacy, a bow barely sketched by the moon’s light behind him, in the mist over grass that in his print came out crisp and black. Almost colorless, this white rainbow, a hovering thing in the night mist of this field, its long grasses black as ink. Somehow this image sustained me, the fragility of this moment. Person, sky, weather, interlaced.
(I’m 11,000 days old, today. To the next 11,000, to filling every day with something, to letting no time on this planet be wasted: cheers.)