Reality Hunger (16 page)

Attention equals life or is its only evidence.

Why do you take photographs so constantly, so obsessively? Why do you collect other people’s photographs? Why do you scavenge in secondhand shops and buy old albums of other people’s pasts?

So that I’ll see what I’ve seen.

We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

In the end, I missed the pleasure of a fully imagined work in which the impulse to shape experience seems as strong as the impulse to reveal it.

Plot, like erected scaffolding, is torn down, and what stands in its place is the thing itself.

—praise for matter in its simplest state, as fact.

There isn’t any story. It’s not the story. It’s just this breathtaking world—that’s the point. The story’s not important; what’s important is the way the world looks. That’s what makes you feel stuff. That’s what puts you there.

Shooting must be done on location, and props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found); the sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa (music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot); the camera must be handheld; the film must be in color, and special lighting is not acceptable; optical work and filters are forbidden; the film must not contain superficial
action (murders, etc., must not occur); temporal and geographical alienation is forbidden (that is to say, the film takes place here and now); genre movies are not acceptable; the director must not be credited.

The most political thing I can do is try to render people’s lives, including my own, in a way that makes other people interested, empathetic, questioning, or even antipathetic to what they’re seeing—but that somehow engages them to look at life as it’s really lived and react to it.

Verboten thematic: secular Jews, laureates of the real, tend to be better at analyzing reality than re-creating it: Lauren Slater,
Lying;
Harold Brodkey, most of the essays; Phillip Lopate’s introduction to
The Art of the Personal Essay;
Vivian Gornick, pretty much everything; Leonard Michaels, nearly everything; Melanie Thernstrom,
The Dead Girl;
Wallace Shawn,
My Dinner with André;
Jonathan Safran Foer, “A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease”; Salinger’s later, consciousness-drenched work. And, of course, less recently, Marx, Proust, Freud, Wittgenstein, Einstein.

The first Resurrection of Christ is the heart of the backstory for the holiday of Easter and the original deification of Jesus. On the cross, he said that he would rise three days after his death. After he died of crucifixion, disbelieving Pilate and the Romans placed him in a cave and sealed the door with a boulder. On the third day, the boulder moved; Christ emerged and thanked his followers for their devotedness. This is where
Doubting Thomas gets his due. The risen Christ has Thomas actually feel the mortal wound (see the painting by Caravaggio). Jesus proves to all disbelievers that he really is the Son of God. He will return on Judgment Day. Up to heaven he goes, and he hasn’t been heard from since. The last Christian died on the cross.