An American adventure

... my parents were setting off on an American adventure of their own. My idea was that they should fly to Minneapolis, rent a car, and drive to Seattle along the minor highways of the West, taking the better part of two weeks. No interstates, I said; choose dirt roads over blacktops. Use the DeLorme state atlases, with their large scale and full contours. They'd put up for the night in one- or no-stoplight towns. I promised them that they would discover an America rarely seen by Americans. They'd cross the Plains, the Rockies, the Cascades. My plan was that they'd lose their ingrained British notions of ' the Yanks' and see something of the grand, complicated, and hospitable country that had made an immigrant of me. I saw them arriving in Seattle astonished at the country, all their preconceptions and prejudices gone by the board.

Jonathan Raban: A Passage to Juneau

Hyperactive Americans

Americans pride themselves on being active folks. That however is far too modest a claim, rather they are hyperactive. Ever watched a TV-series made in America? Take my alltime favourite, the West Wing: Everybody's constantly running around while at the same time solving problems ...

In October and November 2005, I taught English in Istanbul. One of my students was a university professor. Her English was fluent, she gave guest lectures at American universities. Why did she take classes? I asked her. She wanted to feel more confident when socially dealing with her “hyperactive colleagues from Michigan”, she said.

Or, in the words of an islander in the Pacific (in "Equator" by Thurston Clarke, one of the best travel books I've ever read): "Our only criticism was that the Americans were too quick with their OKs … They were always saying 'OK OK OK OK … Let’s move'. They were in too much of a hurry, that’s why they lost so many men."

And lately, while rereading parts of "Grace and Grit" by Ken Wilber, I came across this one: " ... that her first impression of Americans was how frantic they seemed to her, with all their busyness and rushing around."

On Captions

Wonder Valley Bicycle 2007
Copyright @ Emelle Sonh

Photographs, in order to be understood, need captions - and these can of course be used manipulatively. Sometimes they are, and, occasionally, they lead viewers on to quite unexpected readings. The captions of a German hobby-photographer, who achieved some notoriety some years ago for having had his picture taken with prominent persons, read, for example, like "Should you have wondered who the guy next to me is, it is the Pope."

On 12 June 2005, the New York Times Magazine, published a cover article by Joseph Lelyveld entitled "Interrogating Ourselves" that, wrote Byron Calame, the public editor of the New York Times, "discussed the 'lies, threats and highly coercive force' being used to pry information out of detainees held in military custody. What caught my attention was the full-page photograph across from the title page of the article.
It was a color photograph with a mid-torso view from the rear of a person with wrists handcuffed. Below the plastic handcuffs, a red stain ran down from one wrist across the soiled palm onto the fingers. The credit at the bottom of the facing page: 'Photographs by Andres Serrano.' But there wasn't any explanation that the photograph had been staged. There was no caption. Four pages later, the same was true for the full-page staged photograph of water torture. The cover picture of a person with a sandbag hood also was identified only as a photograph by Mr. Serrano. For those who scrutinized the photographs, there was one possible clue that they were posed. The coloring of the backdrop in each photograph was similar. And a note in small type at the bottom of the contents page identified the artist who painted the backdrop for Mr. Serrano's cover photograph."

The problem is that hardly anybody ever scrutinises the photographs displayed in newspapers or magazines. And so we are constantly carrying images in our heads of which we do not know whether they depict something real or not. Is that relevant? In press photography it is. So what is there to do? A helpful suggestion was provided by David Travis, curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago in a letter to the New York Times:

"Because photographs by themselves cannot clearly separate reality from appearance, it is good to know as much as possible about how, when, where, and for what reason they were made. This is especially necessary for subjects that may be part of a national debate about the practices and direction of a country at war. The photographs by Andres Serrano that accompanied your recent Sunday magazine article 'Interrogating Ourselves' would have been better described by the simple credit line: 'Photographic illustrations by Andres Serrano'".

This should apply to all press photographs for without knowing that we are looking at a staged photograph we often cannot see that. Or, we might think a picture to be staged when it is not. To me, for example, the "Wonder Valley Bicycle" by the San Francisco photo-artist Emelle Sonh, shown above, seemed staged — however, it was not, as she wrote in an email to me

"It would be interesting to see if most people would say it is staged. My guess is that people who have lived for some time in the desert, for example, are familiar with such views, and would recognize it as quite likely not staged ... this is not to say someone at some time did not put that old bicycle in that spot but that is different than the photographer setting it there for the purpose of making a "staged" photograph. People have different capacities to believe the improbable ..."

I do not disagree ... yet, since most people have not lived in the desert for some time it would be helpful to include this information. For without being told what we are looking at we can only see what we already know.

Excerpt from my essay "Pictures with words", Soundscapes, Groningen, October 2008

We are not condemned

... we are not condemned to expect from the world what our culture has told us.
The culture we grow up in is not a static entity, neither is our identity fixed once and for all. We get older, might decide to live in foreign cultures, might even acquire knowledge that teaches us that some of the things we were once taught are quite possibly wrong in themselves, not only wrong in a given context.

Hans Durrer: Ways of Perception. On Visual and Intercultural Communication, White Lotus Press, Bangkok, 2006, ISBN 974-4800-92-5

Zukunftsgeschwätz

Die Menschen, die immer von der besseren Zukunft schwatzen, sind die grössten Verderber der Welt. Der Glaube an eine bessere Zukunft, er vor allem, muss den Menschen genommen werden. Denn schliesslich haben wir es ihm zu verdanken, dass wir uns ewig im Kreise drehen. Die Namen wechseln, die Institutionen wechseln, die Sache, nämlich der Mensch, bleibt immer derselbe. Es kommt aber gerade darauf an, dass der Mensch ein anderer wird. Die Fortschritte der Wissenschaft, der Institutionen sind daneben eine gleichgültige Spielerei.
Hans Albrecht Moser: Vineta

Satori

A idéia para uma crônica me vem sempre como uma experiência de alegria, mesmo que o assunto seja triste. Ela aparece repentinamente, nos momentos mais inesperados, como a visão de uma imagem. O que tento fazer é simplesmente pintar com palavras a cena que se configurou na minha imaginação.

Sou psicanalista. Meu trabalho se baseia na escuta. Cada cliente fala e, ao fazer isso, me permite andar nas paisagens da sua alma. Ao escrever uma crônica faço o contrário: sou eu que ofereço as paisagens da minha alma aos olhos dos meus leitores. E eles, sem o saber, são os meus psicanalistas ...

O escritor não é alguém que vê coisas que ninguém mais vê. O que ele faz é simplesmente iluminar com os seus olhos aquilo que todos vêem sem se dar conta disso. E o que se espera é que as pessoas tenham aquela experiência a que os filósofos Zen dão o nome de "satori": a abertura de um terceiro olho, para que o mundo já conhecido seja de novo conhecido como nunca o foi.

Rubem Alves: O retorno e terno

Portrait of an Addict

"This is the story of one of the most gifted, charismatic and successful young literary agents in New York and his catastrophic fall into full-blown crack addiction ...", the publishing company lets one know. For somebody like me who is not into such ridiculous superlatives (how would one measure such attributes anyway?) this is a bit hard to stomach. Then I looked at the back cover where Andrew O'Hagan (whose "Our Fathers" I had admired) is quoted as saying: "Anybody who knows anything about addiction will feel morally altered by this book." Well, it's probably the other way 'round for reading books will definitely not morally alter you. However, since nobody really knows what makes an addict change, I might of course be wrong and Mr O'Hagan's claim will revolutionise the treatment industry. Zoe Heller's judgement in The Independent is probably more to the point: "And it is hard for me to believe that anyone who knows anything about addiction will not be slightly bored by this book".

Don't get me wrong: Mr. Clegg is a fine writer (in fact: his prose alone merits reading this slim volume) and does a very good job describing the addict's mindset - the paranoia, the manic sociability, the hallucinations, the perpetual anxiety about getting the next fix, and so on - but the persistent repetitions of his drug-taking preparations and subsequent clean-ups: "I let my stem cool and wrap it in a wad of tissue paper. I gather two rocks and the remaining crumbs from the ashtray and put them in the mini zip-lock bag they came in. I ditch the towel, scramble into my clothes, and shove the pipe, bag and lighter into the front pocket of my jeans" are (Zoe Heller is right) rather tiresome - yet this book is still an excellent read, not least because it makes one (yes, I speak of myself) at times want to grab him by his coat, pull him back and shout: "No! Don't!"

Moreover, there are quite a few things to learn from this book: about New York City gay life - Clegg, who has a boyfriend, picks up guys by asking whether they party or orders male hookers; that crack use makes your contact lenses dry out, so that they pop right off your eyes; that there are - what a joke! - Harm Reduction Counselors ("which is another way of saying someone who helps you plan your alcohol and drug use, to get it under control."); that addicts "have antennae that can sometimes detect the kindred frequency of other addicts ..." and and and ...

But let me quote Zoe Heller (whose writing I love) again: "Thanks to a substantial savings account, he never had to steal or prostitute himself to finance his habit. He was never beaten up, or raped, or robbed. He lived out the grimmest period of his debauch in a series of expensive, modish hotels in downtown Manhattan. And when his money ran out, he entered rehab and got better. (He has since regained his health and will to live and is back to being one of the most gifted, charismatic, etc at William Morris.) The absence of any particularly exotic or extraordinary element in Clegg’s story is not, in and of itself, a mark against it. On the contrary, in an age in which the writing of memoirs seems to have degenerated into an atrocity contest, there is something rare and refreshing about an author who is content to confess such unexceptional miseries."

True, Clegg's rock bottom was still a somewhat comfortable one (if there is such a thing) but to call his miseries "unexceptional" seems, well, a bit of a stretch. The amount of crack he uses, the quantities of vodka he drinks, the erratic behaviour he shows, the anxiety he experiences, and the panic attacks he suffers, are undoubtedly extraordinary.

What drove Mr. Clegg to crack? Dwight Garner's guess ("a towering inferiority complex") in the New York Times is as good as any other guess ... but it is not more than a guess. Yes, a plausible one yet what we human beings think to be plausible needs not necessarily correspond to the complexity of human behaviour. Actually, Clegg himself comes up with a much better answer than Garner: "Why did I drink so much at L'acajou three nights ago? WHY, oh, Jesus Christ, WHY? I've asked myself the question hundreds of times in the harsh light of hundreds of mornings and, as always, there's no answer." As the biologist J.B.S. Haldane once penned: "The universe is not only much queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose".

In sum: this is a most captivating book, and I highly recommend it. Not least because Clegg's descriptions of his drug-induced paranoia - he feels followed by men in cheap suits, cabs, and helicopters - are still, even days after I finished reading his memoir, vividly with me.

Bill Clegg
Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man
Jonathan Cape, London 2010