The Reenactments: A Memoir Page 10
TWENTY
BEFORE you enter the dimly lit gallery of the Glass Flowers, in a room off to the left, is a workbench (at least it was there when I first returned as an adult—it’s been since moved to inside the gallery), which we are told is the actual bench used by the Blaschkas in their Dresden studio. The workbench is a butcher’s block, its surface well-worn, scarred, burned in spots—It would be at home in a scientist’s lab or a welder’s studio. Pipettes, beakers, tongs, burners, needle-nosed pliers, petri dishes filled with sand—rough-looking, almost crude, these tools, tools that could be used to wire a house, or build a bomb—arranged, or strewn, over the surface. You would think they would be finer, like those of a jeweler (are a jeweler’s tools fine?). It seems unlikely they could have produced anything as delicate as these flowers. Framed on the wall above the bench is a card for the Blaschkas, from the time before they began making flowers, offering glass eyes, and below this, in a glass case, are a few of the eyes themselves, lined up on a little shelf—they could be mistaken for marbles, if a marble could look back at us.
NOW is the day we invent the homeless, now is the day we figure out where to put them. Here is where they will eat, here is where they will line up for a bed ticket. Here is the hallway where they will linger. Here are your showers and your funhouse mirror. Here’s where you undress, now hang up your clothes. Here is outside and the nowhere to go. Do you have anything for me? Paul asks after each take. I realize I’m not really here—sitting before the monitor, headphones on, gone. Can we have more black extras? I ask (again). Shelters, I point out, are as black as our prisons, but everyone knows this already.
THE process of making a film, I will discover, is as much of a mess as the Blaschkas’ workbench. The basement of St. Patrick’s has been transformed into the shower room at the shelter. Stainless steel panels are being screwed to the walls, the screws tightened just enough to distort the panels into funhouse mirrors. On the other side of the mirrored wall are where the showers would be, but there are no showers in that room, for the camera will never cross that threshold. De Niro will be in this room in two hours, in two hours the camera will be rolling. De Niro knows what he is supposed to say, but what is he supposed to do? It’s his first night in the shelter—two days ago, upstairs, Dano gave him a bed ticket—but what is De Niro supposed to do with this ticket now? Who does he hand it to, and what will this person hand back to him? I walk everyone through what I remember—a worker stands behind a counter, takes the ticket, and hands him a bin. Inside the bin is a coat hanger and a wrist tag—the wrist tag has his bed number on it, this number is also on the bin, I remember now, it comes back to me as I tell it. He will put the tag on his wrist, hang his clothes on the hanger, put his shoes into the bin, then hand everything back to the worker behind the counter. The worker will have to do something with these clothes, but what? At the shelter we had a hot-room behind the counter, we hung the clothes in it to disinfect them. But there is no hot-room behind this counter, so it is decided that props will need to find, or fabricate, a rolling stand to hold all the hangers. A lot can be done with duct tape. It isn’t really all that different from working at the shelter, where we had to invent it all the first time around.
ON the wall opposite the Blaschkas’ workbench are a few of the minerals used to make glass—silicate, quartz—brought in from the gem and mineral room. On this same wall is a piece of something called fulgurite (from the Latin fulgur, meaning “thunderbolt”), which looks like a black jag with branching roots. Fulgurite (also known as petrified lightning) is formed when lightning strikes sand—the lightning enters into the sand, travels through it, vitrifying the quartz it comes in contact with, all in less than a second. The fulgurite at the Agassiz measures about a foot, but the note says that the longest found is almost fifty feet long. The branches, apparently, are hollow, outlining the path of the lightning. It’s here, I assume, to show us one way glass can be formed. A hunk of bottle-green moldavite is beside this, formed by a meteorite impact radiating its energy outward. Moldavite, fulgurite—does anyone else think these two minerals are as beautiful as any of the Glass Flowers?
THE practical application of the Glass Flowers as research specimens subsided with the advent of precise color photography, plastics, air travel, and refrigerated transport. And, predictably, as the primacy of their scientific literalness receded, their role as fetish and metaphor gained power. Here’s a metaphor: A bar in Tokyo serves a cocktail made with ice said to be carved from an Arctic glacier—it is tinged faintly blue. Here’s another: In a solar-powered freezer, in the center of a dimly lit room in New York City, a 4.5-ton block of ice is on display, visible behind thick glass walls—white, almost imperceptibly blue. No twigs or leaves are embedded in it—it comes from a place without trees. As you sit on the bench provided, as you walk around it, it is almost as if you’ve seen it before—ice, of course, but this ice, you are told, is (like that cocktail in Tokyo) carved from an Arctic glacier, cut from a place that is vanishing. If you press your hand to it, the box gives off heat; if you press your face to it, the ice will blur—a faint blue distant blur. The whole idea is that the ice will keep its shape—it won’t become a glacier again, it won’t become a cloud (any day now I’ll make a knife out of this cloud). Perhaps there is a side, on top, perhaps, with frozen footprints, but this cannot be seen, not from your bench. Glaciers break off and fall into the sea, but this remnant, this chunk, will be on display forever, kept from melting by the sun.
1870—the Wares hire the Blaschkas to create the Glass Flowers. Leopold (the father) teaches his son (Rudolf) what his father had taught him (tact increases in every generation). My father spends his whole life writing a book (The Button Man) that to this day remains unpublished. I (the son) write a book (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City), which is, in part, the search for my father’s unpublished manuscript. Focus hires Paul to create a film based on this (these) book(s). For seven weeks I go to set every day with a notebook, watch my life reenacted, take notes. When we began shooting I was writing a book about the Glass Flowers, but then the film began to speak to the flowers—both, it seems, are types of reenactments. I was also reading books on memory, on what it means to have a sense of self, how we don’t really know what consciousness is made of, how we might never know. These ideas began to speak to the flowers and to the film, all of them reenactments, maybe everything is. Remember, no matter what your eyes may tell you, they are not real. They are made of glass. I began to see the structure of the project as a triptych—flower, film, memory—something that could be carried under the arm, unfolded anywhere, to create an altar. Not one to pray before, but one that asks, What are you feeling right now?
FIVE years after my father got off the streets, every few months or so, I’d go to Boston, maybe on my way to Provincetown, maybe I’d stop in to see a friend or two. I had an ex-lover who was housesitting a mansion, and part of me always wondered if we’d ever spend a night together again, in that mansion, but we never did. Often—usually—I’d end up stopping in on my father, but that wasn’t the reason I went, at least that was what I told myself. As time went by, more and more I ended up making the trip just to see him, which struck me as odd, after decades when it seemed neither of us wanted much to do with the other. Now, once a year or so, on one of these runs to Boston, I go to the Glass Flowers. The last time I went, I found the exhibit had been renovated. The workbench was no longer in the anteroom before one entered the darkened room of the Glass Flowers—now the bench was tucked inside, almost as an afterthought, without context, without the glass eyes and the fulgurite, without the business card. It looked far less mysterious, almost emptied of meaning. Clearly, with the renovation, we are meant to see the flowers as art, rather than as science.
I wonder if my mother held my hand as we walked these hallways, past bear and badger, to the room of the Glass Flowers. Did I have to look up to see into the gorilla’s eyes, just as now I have to look down? Did she lift me up so I could get a
better look, just as I lift my daughter now? I am now about the size of the gorilla, but part of me is still the size of that spider monkey, clinging to its mother’s back. I would like to say that I remember the Glass Flowers from that time, from before my mother went off the rails, I would like to say that the Glass Flowers fascinated me, at the beginning, but they didn’t. Not when I was a child. How can a room of glass flowers, tucked away in an ill-lit room, flowers that look just like the flowers we’d passed on our way inside—daisies and goldenrod, lilac and bittersweet—how could they possibly hold my attention, when here was a real gorilla, beating its chest, snarling?
CARVED into the lintel over the door to the museum is the name AGASSIZ—look up as you enter and you will see it. This is why we called it the Agassiz, but it’s no longer called that, perhaps because of the controversy around Louis Agassiz, its founder—apparently among his more enlightened ideas ran a vein of (white) racial superiority. His hypothesis was that if we looked closely at the flora and fauna and minerals of this world we would discover that not only were humans exceptional among all the creatures of the earth (and God gave man dominion over all that walks and crawls and slithers), but white humans were even more exceptional still. This idea of human exceptionalism is still rattling around in many brainpans, and may well doom us. Honeybees, I’d say, are pretty exceptional. Sequoias. Compost. Whitman had it about right: Why! who makes much of a miracle? As to me I know of nothing else but miracles.
IN 1976 a selection of Glass Flowers was loaned to the Steuben Glass Works in New York for an exhibition. The only way to move the flowers—the safest way—was to hire a hearse, and pack the flowers into the back where the coffins would go. As if the flowers were corpses. In 1989 the artist Christopher Williams made a series of black-and-white photographs of the Glass Flowers for a project entitled Angola to Vietnam. It consists of twenty-seven photographs, rearranged alphabetically according to their country of origin. Angola, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Central African Republic, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador—countries that would come to have the worst human rights records in the twentieth century. Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti. Each glass replica of a botanical species (Cedrela odorata, Musa paradisiaca, Ficus carica) that Williams photographed is from a country (Honduras, Indonesia, Lebanon) named in the 1985 Amnesty International annual report, which documents countries where political disappearances (Mexico, Namibia, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines) and other human rights abuses (South Africa, Sri Lanka, Togo, Uganda, Uruguay, Vietnam) have taken place. Angola to Vietnam reminds us that these Glass Flowers were always both a Victorian and a colonial project. Each flower was a declaration, meant to represent a distant land that we (white Europeans) now owned.
UGANDA, 1894
Blascha Model 482
Family, Leguminosae
Cajanus cajan
Cajanus indicus
The United Kingdom ruled Uganda as a protectorate in 1894, the same year the Blaschkas created Cajanus cajan. Cajanus cajan is also known as the Congo pea. As far as I can tell, no Blaschka flower came from the Congo (just west of Uganda), but we do know that ten years earlier (1885) King Leopold II of Belgium declared the Congo under his protection, and by the 1890s he systematically enslaved the entire population to harvest rubber for use as tires on a new invention (the automobile). Any local who refused, who resisted in any way, or who simply did not meet Leopold’s quota of rubber, was to be made an example of by having a hand chopped off. This included children. The quantity of severed hands amounted to as much as a metric ton per day, according to records kept by the Belgium protectorate. It is estimated that fifteen million people died under Leopold’s protection. All we are left with is a flower that will never die.
TWENTY-ONE
(2011) One of my mother’s boyfriends (Travis), or the actor playing him (Billy Wirth), comes into the house we have rented in Queens. In this scene he will show me, or the actor playing me (Liam Broggy), his photo album from Vietnam. Before the camera starts rolling someone from props walks downstairs with a handgun hanging out of his back pocket, which he then puts on the table, close enough for Travis to pick up, which he will do at the end of the scene—this is the gun Julianne will use. I take a picture of the gun. Then someone calls out first rehearsal. Carolyn Forché, after spending time in Japan with survivors of Hiroshima, noted that their memory began, seemingly, after the blast. Their stories of the minutes, then the days, right after the blast were the most vivid, the most intense—even in the midst of suffering, they felt most alive. The time before the blast was distant, vague, fading, lost. Even the present moment was somehow remote, unreal. The shot is now on Julianne’s shoes, wet from the ocean—she squeezes a wet towel out so the water puddles around them, but we won’t see her squeezing the towel. I ask Paul if it’s okay I’m here, I don’t want to inhibit him, or anyone. He says, No, no, it’s good—there’s a thread between Julianne and the film and you.
CERTAIN words, those based on the thing they describe, are wired into us—a snake is called a snake because of the way it moves, the way it hisses, how it wraps around your tongue as you name it. How you become a snake when you name it. As children we watch the way our mother’s mouths form the word—we need someone to say it to us first—to point to the cage, to point into the sky, to point to the snake. To say the word. A smoke machine is wheeled in, I don’t know why. I ask the script supervisor (Renee), who asks the cinematographer (Declan). It’s for the crack scene, he reminds us. The smoke Dano blows out will become the smoke Julianne emerges from . . . O, right, that. Certain words, for each of us, will always have more power over us than other words. I spent my first twenty years knowing every day that my mother was willing herself to stay—resisting her pills, her gun, the ocean. Gun, ocean, pill—I have receptors to these words inside me, we all do, but mine got lit up young, when I saw hers lighting up. Mirror neurons, the neuroscientists call them. Pill, gun, ocean. I can’t pretend they aren’t there, but if I don’t feed them . . .
JULIANNE is now in the bathroom. Paul comes up as I watch the screen, but all I can see is the way the light is caught on the tiles behind her. Julianne simply sits there, on the toilet, her painkillers balanced on the sink beside her. She stares at the orange pill bottle, she must have stared at it, before she struggled off the childproof cap, before she dumped out the white capsules, before she put them inside her. A month ago on the phone I’d told Julianne that my mother took Darvon for her headaches. Today she told me that her mother would take Fiorinal—Yes, that’s it, that’s what she took, I’d forgotten the word (maybe she took both—she took a lot).
Fiorinal—it sounds like a species of orchid.
It sounds like a glass flower we forgot to make.
ACTION.
Julianne looks away from the pill bottle first, looks at something outside the frame, avoiding the pills, for a while. I lean over, past Paul, to see into the screen, and I get a whiff of stale beer—three glasses on the table half-filled with beer. Props? Why use real beer? A cuckoo clock calls out. Is the cuckoo clock real?
IF all of this is invented, if it always was, why then did we write it as if she had to die? In the documentary The Bridge, the filmmaker set up a camera to film people jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge—a terrible film, in all senses of the word. One jumper survived the fall, though his body shattered upon impact. As his feet left the edge of the railing, as soon as he was surrounded by nothing but air, the words I have made a terrible mistake rose up from inside him.
Now Julianne will go to the upstairs closet and take out her gun. It will take some time, to move everything upstairs—the camera and the lights and all the cables. Doesn’t anyone know she is not going to make it? She won’t make it, by nightfall I’ll get the call, I’m up at college, then I’ll be in a car, two friends will drive me. I’m still in touch with Nina, but Edoardo, I worry he might be dead.
I know what she will say because I wrote it—it’s in the book, the book that
was written a thousand years ago, the book that predicted the son would fly six hundred miles an hour one day, over rivers and mountains, that in order to do this he would have to invent the internal combustion engine, and the airplane, and the wheelie suitcase, and the cellphone, all of it, just to find her, the mother who has been lost to him for so many years. She went away one day, carved a door in the air, but it was written in the book that she would come back, that the hole would heal, that the door would close. I wrote every word, but still, so much is unknown. What will she say, what will come out of her mouth, what will be her first word? Of god, the Kabbalah asserts: out of that which is not, He made that which is. He carved great columns out of impalpable ether.
IN Sherlock, Jr. (a film made before he was overtaken by his “long-creeping alcoholism”), Buster Keaton plays a hapless projectionist at a movie theater. In one scene he falls asleep and dreams himself into the film he is screening. The actors in the movie become people he knows, and his dreamself moves from the projection booth into the audience, and then into the film itself—bewildered, he approaches the screen, reaches out a hand, and steps (or falls) into it. The film he enters is much like the one in the Berkeley study (Scientists Use Brain Imaging to Reveal the Movie in Our Mind)—the narrative broken into a series of landscapes, connected only intuitively. A garden wall becomes a mountaintop, which becomes a lion-filled jungle, which becomes a hole in a desert surrounded by cacti. Buster pulls himself from the hole as a train barrels past, and then he is back at the garden wall.