What I mean, Ma, is what button do I press and when?
I show him the eyepiece, lens, focus, and shutter, and as he looks around the space through the eyepiece, I suggest:
Maybe you could take a picture of that tree growing out through the cement.
Why would I do that?
I don’t know why—just to document it, I guess.
That doesn’t even mean anything, Ma, document it.
He’s right. What does it mean to document something, an object, our lives, a story? I suppose that documenting things—through the lens of a camera, on paper, or with a sound recording device—is really only a way of contributing one more layer, something like soot, to all the things already sedimented in a collective understanding of the world. I suggest we take a picture of our car, just to try out the camera again and see why the pictures are coming out all hazy white. The boy holds the camera in his hands like a soccer ball about to be kicked by an amateur goalkeeper, peeks into the eyepiece, and shoots.
Did you focus?
I think so.
Was the image clear?
Kind of, yes.
It’s no use; the Polaroid comes out blue and then slowly turns creamy white. He claims the camera is broken, has a factory error, is probably just a toy camera, not a real camera. I assure him it’s not a toy, and suggest a theory:
Perhaps they’re coming out white not because the camera is broken or just a toy camera but because what you’re photographing is not actually there. If there’s no thing, there’s no echo that can bounce off it. Like ghosts, I tell him, who don’t appear in photos, or vampires, who don’t appear in mirrors, because they’re not actually there.
He’s not impressed, not amused, doesn’t find my echo-thing theory convincing, or even funny. He shoves the camera into my belly and jumps back into his seat.
Back in the car, the discussion about the problem with the pictures continues for a little longer, the boy insisting I’ve given him a broken camera, useless. The boy’s father tries to chime in, mediating. He tells the boy about Man Ray’s “rayographs,” and the strange method with which Ray composed them, without a camera, placing little objects like scissors, thumbtacks, screws, or compasses directly on top of photosensitive paper and then exposing them to light. He tells him how the images Ray created with this method were always like the ghostly traces of objects no longer there, like visual echoes, or like footprints left in the mud by someone who’d passed by long ago.
NOISE
In the late hour, we reach a village perched high in the Appalachians. We decide to stop. The children have started to behave like nasty medieval monks in the car—playing disquieting verbal games in the backseat, games that involve burying each other alive, killing cats, burning towns. Listening to them makes me think that the theory of reincarnation is accurate: the boy must have hunted witches in Salem in the 1600s; the girl must have been a fascist soldier in Mussolini’s Italy. History is playing out in them, repeating itself in microscales.
Outside the only grocery store in the village, a sign announces: Cottage Rentals. Ask Inside. We rent a cottage, small but comfortable, removed from the main road. That night, in bed, the boy has an anxiety attack. He doesn’t call it that, but he says he can’t breathe properly, says his eyes won’t stay shut, says he can’t think in a straight line. He calls me to his side:
Do you really think that some things aren’t there? he asks. That we see them but they’re not actually there?
What do you mean?
You said so earlier.
What did I say?
You said what if I see you and this room and everything else but nothing is really here, so it can’t make echoes, so it can’t be photographed.
I was only joking, love.
Okay.
Go to sleep, all right?
Okay.
Later that night, I stand in front of the open trunk of our car with a flashlight, just staring, trying to pick a box to open—a box in which I will find a book to also open and read. I need to think about my sound project, and reading others’ words, inhabiting their minds for a while, has always been an entry point to my own thoughts. But where to start? Standing in front of the seven bankers boxes, I wonder what any other mind might do with that same collection of bits and scraps, now temporarily archived in a given order inside those boxes. How many possible combinations of all those documents were there? And what completely different stories would be told by their varying permutations, shufflings, and reorderings?
In my husband’s Box II, under some notebooks, there’s a book titled The Soundscape, by R. Murray Schafer. I remember reading it many years ago and understanding only a meager portion of it but understanding at least that it was a titanic effort, possibly in vain, to organize the surplus of sound that human presence in the world had created. By separating and cataloging sounds, Schafer was trying to get rid of noise. Now I flip through the pages—full of difficult graphs, symbolic notations of different types of sounds, and a vast inventory that catalogs the sounds of what Schafer referred to as the World Soundscape Project. The inventory ranges from “Sounds of Water” and “Sounds of Seasons,” to “Sounds of the Body” and “Domestic Sounds,” to “Internal Combustion Engines,” “Instruments of War and Destruction,” and “Sounds of Time.” Under each of these categories, there is a list of particulars. For example, under “Sounds of the Body” there is: heartbeat, breathing, footsteps, hands (clapping, scratching, etc.), eating, drinking, evacuating, lovemaking, nervous system, dream sounds. At the very end of the inventory is the category “Sound Indicators of Future Occurrences.” But, of course, there are no particulars listed under it.
I put the book back in its box and open Box I, digging around inside it carefully. I take out a brown notebook, on the first page of which my husband has written “On Collecting.” I jump to a random page and read a note: “Collecting is a form of fruitful procrastination, of inactivity pregnant with possibility.” A few lines down there’s a quote copied from a book by Marina Tsvetaeva: “Genius: the highest degree of being mentally pulled to pieces, and the highest of being—collected.” The book, Art in the Light of Conscience, belongs to me, and that sentence was probably something I once underlined. Seeing it there, in his notebook, feels like a mental petty theft, like he’s snatched an inner experience of mine and made it his own. But I’m somehow proud of being looted. Finally, from the box, though it’s unlikely that it’ll help me think about my sound project or about soundscaping in general, I take Susan Sontag’s Reborn: Journals & Notebooks, 1947–1963.
CONSCIOUSNESS & ELECTRICITY
I stay up on the porch outside the cottage, reading Sontag’s journals. My arms and legs, a feast for the mosquitoes. Above my head, beetles smack their stubborn exoskeletons against the single lightbulb; white moths spiral up around its halo, then plummet down. A small spider spins a trap in the intersection of a beam and a column. And in the distance, a redeeming constellation of fireflies—intermittent—landscapes the dark immensity beyond the rectangle of the porch.
I don’t keep a journal. My journals are the things I underline in books. I would never lend a book to anyone after having read it. I underline too much, sometimes entire pages, sometimes with double underline. My husband and I once read this copy of Sontag’s journals together. We had just met. Both of us underlined entire passages of it, enthusiastically, almost feverishly. We read out loud, taking turns, opening the pages as if consulting an oracle, legs naked and intertwined on a twin bed. I suppose that words, timely and arranged in the right order, produce an afterglow. When you read words like that in a book, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it’ll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produced. Then comes a need to possess that strange, ephemeral afterglow, and to hold on to that emotion. So you reread, underline, and perhaps even memorize and transcribe the words somewhere—in a notebook, on a napkin, on your hand. In our copy of Sontag’s journals, underlined once, twice, sometimes boxed-in and marked at the margins: