This Is Running for Your Life (27 page)

All right, then. After all, in at least one sense it
did
happen to you. You flew to freaking Texas, where for five days in March junior Google techs attempt to spawn in Austin's Red River District; you braved the melee at Madison Square Garden (“Put your cell phones away and put your cameras down,” pop minstrel Lady Gaga commanded during a recent—and televised—concert there, “'cause this is only going to happen once”); you murdered that plate of buttermilk fried chicken; you boned a B-lister in a Reno hot tub; you were the point man in a brutal and sustained frat hazing; your first flight was to Baghdad, and anyway at Abu Ghraib, as Ali Qaissi told
The New York Times
in 2006, “All the soldiers had cameras.” Things happen to us as they ever did. It may be just as obvious to note that the way we experience those things, and the way we then frame that experience, and the way that those framed experiences are remembered has changed.

*   *   *

The still camera's earliest shills endowed it with the power to create memories. If such claims were to be believed—and it seems they were—the more photographs taken, the richer our individual and collective memories. The iPhone promised not only to create but enhance its owners' memories: “If you don't have an iPhone,” went a 2011 ad, “movies aren't this dramatic, maps aren't this clear, e-mails aren't this detailed, and memories aren't this memorable.” And, well—who wants shitty, unmemorable memories?

As a marketing strategy, tapping into memory anxiety has only looked smarter as we develop more ways to record and transmit reality. The smartphone camera may be the ultimate cause of and solution to all such anxieties; from here on out, both can only be perfected. The way we relate to images reflects the two kinds of memory: systematic recall and documentation—these things happened in this order—and the strange, slow emulsion that brings the invisible ink of experience into clearer view. The first lends itself to searchable cataloging; the second is completely unpredictable. Neither is entirely reliable, though one would seem more likely to harbor meaning. Yet it is the former type of image—if not memory—that has flourished. If the digital camera, with its promise of perfect recall, both reminds and relieves the shooter of the burden of being present, the resulting images often have more of a social than a subjective or individual purpose. The most common modern image is consciously about display and dissemination, giving a public order to one's persona and experiences. It's more about representing a certain reality than remembering it, although looking through carefully curated Facebook albums one often senses the longing of the subject to remember herself the way she would have others do.

The thing about memory, though, is that it's like a beautiful woman: you have to pay attention for a shot at its full reward. Part of being overwhelmed by the surplus of whiplashingly lovely women stomping the streets of New York City is the contemplation of the world of attention that must be built around each one. Every indelible face is the center of its own ecosystem of enchantment, or bloody well better be. The whole thing can tucker you out in a glance. Facing the deluge of social-media images can feel the same: by their nature each one—especially the self-portraits—seeks a spot in your dreams, despite being designed to die a quick, mosquito-like death. The digital image has presented memory with a paradox: infinite but transient choice makes it both more and im-possible to remember well.

Consider
DailyBooth.com
(slogan: “Your Life in Pictures”), a social network composed solely of photo updates—image statements that crawl across the bottom of the home page in real time. With few exceptions, the photos are classic laptop pics—pictures taken by the camera now built into almost every computer. These cameras have a slight fish-eye effect and bathe the subject in an eerie, deoxygenated blue. DailyBooth's live feed is essentially a gallery of puckering young girls, each obeying an instinct with ever-expanding possibilities for exploitation. Faces pass as soon as they pop up, glancing bids for attention that seem frivolous in one light, crushing in another. Who will love them all?

There's something unnerving about a social network composed almost entirely of self-portraits, of kids pulling in their chins, pointing a cheekbone to the ceiling, and staring into a pinhole while their hand goes
click
. Within the first dozen or so photos, you have trouble telling the faces apart, so similar are the boudoir backgrounds, the spooky lighting contrasts, the flagrant moues. What at first feels revolutionary—dispatches from the private, teenaged sanctuaries where so much of what has defined the last sixty years of Western culture was incubated—begins to look more like what it is: a vacuum of random, repetitive self-exposure, the mutation of a process that was turbulent enough when it was conducted in relative privacy. Your life in pictures turns out to look a lot like your life at a computer.

God knows I did hard time in front of the mirror as a girl. Had it been an option, I might have cleaved to the communal glass, where young and old now search for the features of a viable self. But I'm not sure I could have mistaken it for a social activity, and I feel certain that the mirror cannot be a source of memory.

*   *   *

Photography was conceived not to create memories but to record and represent beauty. Specifically nature's beauty. “In many ways,” John Fowles writes in
The Tree
, his sharply unsentimental 1979 treatise, “painters did not begin to see nature whole until the camera saw it for them; and already, in this context, had begun to supersede them.” And yet the world's forests and seas “cannot be framed. And words are as futile, too laborious and used to capture the reality.” We only truly encounter nature's fearful symmetries, Fowles believed, by way of consciousness, the subjective foregroundings and recessions of response, memory, and imagination. We must submit to her before nature will slip out a shoulder.

In this way, perception forms a kind of secret passage: the first, submissive step into an unrecordable reality is a first step toward the self. For Fowles, a certain quality of subjectivity defies sharing or re-presentation. It is unknowable the way the mind of an old, tail-whapping lion is unknowable. It is that unknowability which makes its near-penetrations—in art, in life—so terribly moving.

“It, this namelessness,” he writes of the ancient, stunted oak trees in southern England's Wistman's Wood, “is beyond our science and our arts because its secret is being, not saying.

Its greatest value to us is that it cannot be reproduced, that this being can be apprehended only by other present being, only by the living senses and consciousness. All experience of it through surrogate and replica, through selected image, gardened word, through other eyes and minds, betrays or banishes its reality. But this is nature's consolation, its message, and well beyond the Wistman's Wood of its own strict world. It can be known and entered only by each, and in its now; not by you through me, by any you through any me; only by you through yourself, and me through myself. We still have this to learn: the inalienable otherness of each, human and non-human, which may seem the prison of each, but is at heart, in the deepest of those countless million metaphorical trees for which we cannot see the wood, both the justification and the redemption.

Leaving Wistman's Wood, Fowles was resigned to the erosions of his own impressions: “Already no more than another memory trace, already becoming an artefact, a thing to use. An end to this, dead retting of its living leaves.”

The Tree
might seem like a strange memo from a fiction writer, whose business is finding a way to represent the world and what it's like to live in it. But much of Fowles's writing wrestled with the nature, as it were, of that business. In his most celebrated novel,
The French Lieutenant's Woman
, a filtering of Victorian tradition through postmodern prisms seems to forgo reality in favor of a self-consciously literary world. George Eliot and the rest of the social realists Fowles was tweaking saw human perception's lonely paradox as a challenge, not a red herring.

In conceiving Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of
Middlemarch
, Eliot developed a style of near-microscopically descriptive realism to illuminate the ways that a woman can remain unknown even to herself. Describing Dorothea's maiden voyage to Italy, Eliot acknowledges the Fowlesian, fleeting nature of pure perception, but offers the curious yields of memory as a kind of compensation:

The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions. Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotions. Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years.

Now consider the modern tourist making a quick swipe of St. Peter's with her Flip cam and moving on. Or a young man interrupting a conversation with an unknown partygoer to Facebook-friend her on his phone, skimming her likes and dislikes for offense, noting their mutual acquaintances, and appraising her profile photo as she stands mute beside him.

In her extreme youth, Dorothea Brooke is not a character in touch with what we might call “reality”: the ossified Casaubon's powdery marriage proposal makes her swoon, and she soon finds herself wedded to an empty idea of intellectual apprenticeship. Yet Dorothea is fundamentally awake to the world, a creature whose “deep impressions” will eventually furnish the richly appointed inner life she was so desperate to inhabit as a girl. Through Dorothea, Eliot suggests an ideal of memory as the bedrock of human understanding—a home for the self—rather than an act of acquisitive personal recording, where new experiences form a novel backdrop for an ongoing picnic of self-celebration. She and Fowles, who was born and lived much of his life in provincial England, shared at least one conviction: true memory is a forest; remembering is just the trees.

There was this too: they were both deeply ambivalent about photography. George Eliot set
Middlemarch
almost four decades into the past when she began writing it in 1869. It was set, in fact, in the two years before British inventor and nature-sketching hobbyist Henry Fox Talbot dreamed up the still camera during an 1833 trip to Lake Como.

Italy's beauty had struck again, this time as Fox Talbot pondered a camera obscura's projection of the Mediterranean landscape he was sketching. The “inimitable beauty” of the projected image gripped him, along with the idea that the same image might somehow be permanently imprinted on the paper where it hovered. Though he referred to the still camera he eventually invented as “nature's pencil”—a fortuitous but organic combination of glass and light—Fox Talbot's idea had something of science to it, not just a trick of chemical solution, but a way of seeing reformed by objectivity. Here was reality, recorded with a fidelity that matched and perhaps succeeded that of the human eye.

Reform and realism were much on Eliot's mind as she wrote
Middlemarch
, which sets the overhaul of England's political system and a shift toward science-based medicine into an intimate social relief. Some of photography's early critics vowed that it would spell the end of not just painting but writing: Why labor over intensive description when a photograph can tell us all we need to know about the world?

As if to refute the previous forty years of fretting over the future of the fine arts and nullify the competition for the most truthful rendering of reality, Eliot devoted herself to describing human experience with scalpel-like acuity. The author's partner, a philosopher and biologist (in a time when the two disciplines were often and intuitively bound together) named George Henry Lewes, noted that no response to
Middlemarch
pleased her more than that of surgeon Sir James Paget, who marveled that reading the novel was like “assisting at the creation—a universe formed out of nothing!”

As a young woman, the author was beguiled by phrenology—a “science” that connected character to the topography of the skull—going so far as to have a cast of her own head made. That interest seems reflected in her writing, where Eliot sketches faces, outfits, postures, and attitudes so closely they seem to yield a moral essence. Eliot has been included in a school of close description dubbed literary pictorialism, and indeed, portraits hang on many of her characters' walls, often serving as false reflections or otherwise improbable ideals. Though we are encouraged to universalize her characters (Eliot's suggestion that the picture of young Mary Garth is available in any crowd comes to mind), her descriptive scrutiny distinguishes the weight and consequence of every soul. (It's a technique, curiously, that now marks the work of no one more than nonfiction paragon and sometime photography critic Janet Malcolm.) Like Whitman, Eliot insists on the greater connections between us, on the least of our goodnesses as the highest human achievement—that is the progressive cause that most interests her.

In
Middlemarch
, the odious Naumann's proposed portrait of Dorothea drives Will Ladislaw, who doesn't believe her beauty can adequately be represented, to protective distraction. In
Daniel Deronda
, Eliot's final novel, set after the dawn of photography, the extraordinarily self-conscious, self-admiring Gwendolen exhausts the narrator, who considers the photographer's comparative ease in representing such a girl: “Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change—only to give stability to one beautiful moment.”