O who wants to spring for an exposure of nearly six thousand years…this winter, is it, no, couldn’t be, has it been that long, doesn’t seem — an exposure infinitely exposing…stay still, say still, and hold it. Our lives frozen forever into one shot, indivisible, and eternal: as such is our venture outlasting generations, nations, languages, loves, not destroying, no, but preserving, even as any proscribed, prophesized against Image weathers the fires to outlast our forgetting, outlasting even itself, in its sin, that it’s forbidden and yet still exists. It doesn’t even matter if it’s never developed, never seen except in the negative, by the eye of the mind. Snap. This is your new house, Mister & Misses Israelien, yet to be built, of course. Click. This is the girl I was seeing before your mother. Smile. This is the boy I was seeing before I first laid eyes on your father. Here, this is what I looked like when I was your age. Shudder the wind. At His father’s work, atop his desk: twelve photographs divulged in an arc; tap open their glasses, then work the images through the vesseling shards. An album’s discarded, never replaced, another’s struck from the shelves for its ravage: Hanna’s had been leather, leafed in dundusted gold, must into the pages of which she’d meticulously pasted, plasticized, these keepers these how many years; flip the page, they lie empty.
Here, look here: His father in moustache days, laying hands on a suit high and thick with padded shoulders, Hanna’s, she’s seated, which is unlike her, though pregnant, which is; red, there’s writing on the reverse: Is & Han, Woodmere, with swingset and toy pony, it would’ve been backyard at the house she’d been born in, deep in what’d been known as the Five Towns, retroactively doubled to ten, fifty and further (neighborhoods expanding, the Affiliate sprawl), another island, another world to remember…another photo, this His father again, alone and younger, like what they’d take at a mall, or in an auditorium, lobby, or hallway upon graduation: gray screen behind him whitewisped, as if oceanwaked, hair’s styled wet, eyes, too, and on the reverse, another inscription, another hand: to Hanna, with love, XOXXOOXXXOOO; His PopPop, in a warmup suit, it must be polyester, he’s not warming up, He’s cool and removed, with casual knees seated at the edge of an unlit hearth; on the reverse, Dad, Hanukah, December/80; Hanna was always great with the details, organized was her life, she’d probably snapped the shot, too; then Pop-Pop at the ocean, in a suit, watertight, like a wet hand clutching his cluster, hairless, longnailed toes sinking under garish grains; reversed, Dad, Florida, July/76…relics, then, of the displaced, the replaced, made museum: Hanna’s father, her stepfather, stepstep and on up the stairs; recognition repurposed, reversed: some mensch in some country there in the uniform of its military, then the same mensch in some other country there in a suit and vest and tie; the same straw’s doll clutched to a breast by the same hands on two continents, who is she, she looks like Ima, but what about the girl holding her? MomMom’s pain if she ever even knew that emotion as separate, as a part of life, and not just all there was to it: PopPop and another, not Arschstrong, posed around the unit of the latter, condo’s hall and its tree for Xmas, mistletoedecked, about to kiss with closed eyes, with tongue. This’s your (great-great-great-)-grandmother, that’s her standing with a hole in her bucket and behind her, that’s Rus. See the trees. How the snow seems so white and as white, so pure, it’s so fake. Frames are savage, it’s been said; they’re terrible, as they limit the world, obliterating what is with what was, while also negating the future, forbidding any sense of what might still be. To be punished for this trespass in image — Ben should be forced to wander around until the end of His days, hung around His neck an unfinished frame, unwieldy, nailstuck wood. All this is mysticism, though, the world as we’ve posed it — this desire to know who we are today merely an outgrowth of our fanatical memory, our insistence on not denying anything its existence; the result of our demand upon responsibility, of our passion for Law; this obsession with preservation merely our own human, mundane, limited imitation of the next world’s coming to come. A reproduction in advance of this world to be divinely perfected. On every reverse is scrawled a last question in invisible ink: are we patient enough — to wait for everything we’ve ever been promised, being content to accept its fulfillment, however, only in image, in images of Image…in imaginings, hymn? Even here, amid this Eden we’ve so tastefully and expensively furnished and draped — nu, we’ll have to make do.
