Occasionally, I’d feel myself break through the present to something deeper, or perhaps “fall through” is a better figure: on my rambles I might be overwhelmed with a sudden sadness, a primal ache spread wide like noise between distant stations on the radio, or the sound of surf at night. This I understood in some way to be a truth of childhood. I never knew when this uncanny visit might come, and despite often badly needing assurance that the flat and denatured present was not the world’s last answer to whatever my question was, such glimpses could never be willed. But when they came, they came with force: pedaling over my old school grounds one day, I rolled idly toward a rusty backstop where we used to play ball only to feel my whole body start to shake with some ancient emotion; it was all I could do to keep my balance. All through this period the precinct of the apartments continued to exert its gravity until I finally had a dream in which I gazed down on the apartment from above, filled with the uncanny knowledge that “here the work would continue.”
But of course a lot of time had passed—forty years. This seemed a long while to be obsessing over a worn-out apartment house. My generation had no shortage of narcissists fretting over their supposedly bad childhoods—not bad in the sense of violent, hungry, or poor, but as somehow not leading to a happy adulthood, a far less certain indictment. So I was a skeptical pilgrim. As befits soul work, signs and portents accompanied the enterprise. Once, seeing a new vacancy sign outside the apartment, I got the idea of passing myself off as a prospective renter in order to get inside—the interior spaces, I was sure, would act on me like the bike ride across the playground, only much better, setting off whole depth charges of forgotten feeling. These transports I would somehow hide from the manager as I went from room to room, ad-libbing a cover story. But when I finally worked up courage to pick up the phone for an appointment, my ear was blasted by a shrill howling, neither computer nor fax but a banshee wail I’d never heard before (or since), warning me off. Another time, again on my bike, I saw that not only was the very apartment we had occupied vacant, but that someone was inside cleaning it. With a rising sense of good fortune I dropped the bike in the ivy front yard and went to the screen door. “Hello,” I called to the woman vacuuming the living room, “I used to live here. Would it be OK if I looked around?” The woman briefly surveyed me, eager, large, bearded, sweating, wearing grimy bike gloves, and sensibly answered, “No.”
So later I began to take pictures. Photographer friends at the community college where I worked had taught me an old-fashioned black-and-white technique that seemed intriguing. Mostly I was hoping to make an image that would remind me of the Folkways album covers I had loved in high school, those post–Walker Evans photos of weathered doorways and played-out guitars filled with nostalgia and Americana. But the moment I set up the camera and tripod in the old neighborhood and saw these scenes from my past through a viewfinder, I felt a thrill that was a surprising ownership, a bringing to light, an alchemy that could turn a brooding sorrow into an artifact of reflection. Standing over the camera in the beach overcast early in the mornings and going through the somewhat arcane process of metering to accommodate such slow film often felt like a daring, righteous theft punctuated with a shutter click. I would hurry from spot to spot, muttering to myself with eye screwed to the viewfinder, nervous that an apartment resident might catch me: one by one I felt I was freeing objects and places from some drowsing captivity—the mailbox, the incinerator, the porch, the stairs.
Freud seemed to have felt that memory was a stratum in the mind where our pasts lay perfectly preserved, funerary objects in the burial chambers of recall, but as my pictures accumulated, this came to feel like an overly optimistic theory of the mind’s ability to stabilize the past. Poring over contact prints or making enlargements, I knew each revisiting of memory was as much creation as re-creation. Though the photos might make a sort of language for re-speaking the past, this was a tongue in which metaphor held priority over name.
An only child, I was already well acquainted with tropes of loneliness—the compulsive blank gaze at walls, window boxes, sea light, and the desert pleasure of empty sights and sounds. These spaces began to show up in the photos from the beginning. I felt drawn to child’s-eye views, and to surfaces that, like the suburbs themselves, seemed “blank” at first glance but on which could be seen a subtle patina of history as well, a trace of lost time within which some sort of answer to the present might wait.
I FOUND I took many pictures of blind windows, pulled to these voyeur’s locales where the desire to see within was suspended in the surface interest of the window’s texture itself, glass, muntins, frame, sashes, cracked putty, salt-corroded aluminum, the flawed stucco at the window’s edge—I began to imagine all these as figuring the ways we have of looking within and back. I felt drawn to doors and fences subject to the same decay against which they defended, as well as architectural details, walls touched with the circular rub of an absent plant, or the patina of repainting. There were plants as well, succulents, bamboos, grasses, palms, and pittosporums in subdivisions and vacant lots, once the subject of an orderly agenda but now vestigial, a scrim between past and present. There could also be images of power and understanding sent underground, ordering systems grown into crude networks, textured with time; I made pictures of taps, utilities, electric meters, wires, fixtures, and other traces of life’s galvanic body rising into the light, perhaps like the dreams we later recall and reconstruct, now condensed into daylight systems of value, of what we need to have been so, and what instead seems to be.
It was important that these images be unpopulated. It was objects I wanted, and the “tears of things.” Church icons, their historical roots in Egyptian funerary portraits, radiated a stillness that was a sign of their subjects having passed over, and the sacred nature of the image was a quality of that unreachable stillness. Now when I opened the shutter to let the morning’s gray light settle over the film emulsion, the shards and surfaces of my neighborhood seemed to take on a similar poise.
I WAS STAYING with Mother, back in my old room. This meant a lot of listening. Everyone told stories in our family, and many were delightful. However, no one was quite the tale-teller Mother had become over the years. Conscious as she was of dominating the moment with her own narratives, Mother greeted stories from others with extravagant praise and laughter, but the truth was that this was not a person who listened so much as one who waited to talk, and in fact waited painfully for the smallest appearance of that momentarily unclaimed silence she badly needed to fill. Father had long learned to stay out of her way, and saved rollicking tales of his Appalachian boyhood for his brothers and hometown friends—unless Mother felt that one of his stories was needed at the moment, when she became a relentless recruiter. Then his eyes would blink nervously and his gaze fall off to the side as he would launch awkwardly into the now deeply curtailed narrative while she guided him with corrections and reminders toward the desired punch line, which she would then repeat like a roofer driving home a nail.
Mother’s stories were never improvisatory or searching; in the theology of narrative, she was a firm predestinarian. Once a story was launched, at its first words the veteran hearer knew his fate ineluctably for the next few minutes, for the tales never varied in incident, detail, point of view, or conclusion. And it would have taken a bolder Lollard than Father or me to interrupt this ritual; the fixed brightness in Mother’s eye and the tiny but unmistakable tremor of emotion in her voice gave strong warning that her moment was not to be tampered with. In the usual family way, I had managed to grow up knowing all this without really knowing it, but after being married, at get-togethers and awkward “nice” evenings out with the parents, perhaps seated beside my wife at the Velvet Turtle in the Riviera Village with its oversized, padded menus and prime rib cart wheeled to the table, a more distant, anthropological view of the family folkways became all too clear while Mother filled the silences from her repertoire and Father smoothed his tie end as he gazed into a middle distance.
The stories fell into cycles, of family, employment, childhood, or travel:
What Father had said on arriving in Lincoln, Nebraska, after driving through the Missouri floods of 1947;