Pictures for the Fourth of July

Maybe this is an essay about craft, about words and pictures. Maybe it’s an essay about politics. Maybe it’s about the color of perceptions and our fears, our imaginations. Maybe it’s just a catalogue. An inventory.

I’ve been a writer for about 30 years, ever since I realized I wasn’t going to cut it as an actor, and discovered that the wildlife biology course I wanted to take in pursuit of my back-up plan—park ranger—was oversubscribed. But there was a creative writing course in something called “literary journalism” that fit my schedule. The professor’s name was Michael Lesy. He’d been working toward a PhD in U.S. history at University of Wisconsin at Madison when, almost as if of its own volition, his dissertation had mutated into something other than a monograph, a collage of old photographs and found text so strange and without precedent that it remains in print to this day, still unresolved. Wisconsin Death Trip. I wrote about it while wandering Wisconsin myself for the book that gives this Substack its name, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War.

Wisconsin Death Trip began as a staple-bound pamphlet and as a book became an unlikely mirror of its moment, even as it depicted the 1890s. History’s like that sometimes, our faith in the forward motion of chronology suddenly evaporating, leaving us standing, disoriented, in a dry, still riverbed. Death Trip was, on the surface, a benign album of seemingly ordinary photographs—portraits, patriotic displays, happy youth—from one small town in Wisconsin, Black River Falls, during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Interspersed are excerpts from the town newspaper, the Black River Falls Badger State Banner, and whispers from a “town gossip.” In 1973, a year of crises as varied and vast as those of this year, most White Americans still imagined the previous century as an idyll, apart from a brief interruption for civil war, fought for reasons they thought “romantic.” Virtuous country life, bustling urban industry. American greatness. The Banner spoke other truths. Epidemic disease, whole families consumed; diphtheria, the formation in the throat of a “false membrane”; “astonishing bank failure”; “incendiaries,” arsonists who loved to watch things burn; “vigilance committees”; “the private made public”; a woman, once a “model wife and mother,” who traveled the state smashing windows; soul after soul remanded to the asylum; so many suicides; a woman who died “from a criminal operation performed upon herself” after she failed to find a doctor with the courage to help her. There was beauty in the book, too, even in its carefully arranged photographs of dead infants. That’s what you did then, when your baby died. If you had the money, you hired the town photographer to make the infant’s picture, tucked into a little coffin with flowers, eyes tenderly brushed closed.

I included a photograph of my copy of Death Trip in The Undertow. Lucky me, a fly landed just as I snapped my picture.

Michael taught us to be alert to image as well as words. He assigned us a book called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by journalist James Agee and photographer Walker Evans. When Praise was published in 1941, the only way to include Evans’ photographs of the Alabama tenant farmers whose perceptions, fears, and material possessions they hoped to document was with a glossy insert at the beginning. Most of us would-be writers glanced at it and skipped ahead to the prose. Lesy—he became “Michael” after college, but back then he called us by our last names and we called him by his, no “professor” in between—told us to look again, and then again. I’ve been looking at Evans’ photographs ever since.

How do you learn to write? How do you learn to see—to perceive? I began by looking. From Evans I worked my through the WPA photographers—Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Russell Lee, & more—and then on to Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Sally Mann, Diane Arbus, Roy DeCarava, and Milton Rogovin, maybe the most human portraitist I’ve seen; and from them to color, to Stephen Shore’s muted American land, Nan Goldin’s gooey, golden intimacy, and the visceral and sometimes lurid saturation of William Eggleston. They and other photographers are as much a part of my education as a writer as the words I read. Composition and shadow, and framing, and depth of field, all translated, as best I could, into prose. But also something of the implicit why of looking. I found gritty and sometimes unexpectedly hopeful answers in Eugene Richards and Ruddy Roye, and gritty and often crushing answers in Boogie and Josef Koudelka. I picked up an abandoned copy of Boris Mikhailov’s Case History in 2000 and it’s been terrifying me since. The unsentimental tenderness in the work of Evgenia Arbugaeva, Graciela Iturbide, Dawoud Bey, and Stacy Kranitz are to me even more enduring. I try to find that tenderness within myself in even the most brutal stories. I envied the mix of text and image in the work of Wendy Ewald and Jim Goldberg; in my writing courses I teach the convergence image and text in The Notion of Family, by Ruby LaToya Frazier, who writes of her own early moment of revelation with Agee’s and Evans’ Praise, and of word, document, sound and image in Susan Meiselas’ brilliant Carnival Strippers. I gravitated toward people and their things, the topic of my writing, but I learned to see them refracted in the work of Masahisa Fukase’s Ravens and Stephen Gill’s The Pillar. As a writer, I got to shadow photographers working adjacent to my text—Pieter Hugo, Devin Yalkin, Tanja Hollander. When Vanity Fair used a photograph by Gregory Halpern with a story of mine, “Darkness Visible,” I wrote him a fan letter.

Throughout these years, though, I just looked. I never clicked. I bought a decent beginner camera, sure, but it wasn’t something I could bring with me into the field, where I needed a notebook in hand. Then came the smartphone, when we all began to learn to look, and sometimes to see.

Here’s the first snapshot to enter my work as a writer, a decade ago:

And the words that went with it, at the beginning of the book it opened, This Brilliant Darkness:

THE NIGHT SHIFT is for me a luxury, the freedom to indulge my insomnia by writing at a Dunkin’ Donuts, one of the only places open at midnight where I live, up north on the river between Vermont and New Hampshire. Lately, though, my insomnia doesn’t feel like such a gift. Too much to think about. So click, click, goes the camera—the phone—looking for other people’s stories to fill the hours. This is Mike; he’s thirty-four, he’s been a night baker for a year, and tonight’s his last shift. Come six a.m., “no more uniform.” He decided to start early. He’s says he’s going to be a painter. What kind? “Well, I’m painting a church . . .” He means the walls. The new job started early, too. “So I’m working, like, eighty-hour days.” He means weeks. He’s tired. He doesn’t like baking. Rotten pay, rotten hours, rotten work. “You don’t think. It’s just repetition.” Painting, you pay attention. “You can’t be afraid up there.” The ladder, up high. “I’m not afraid,” he says. “I can do anything.” He says he could be a carpenter. “But it hasn’t happened.” Why does he bake? “Couldn’t get a job.” Work’s like that, he says, there are bad times. Everything’s like that, he says. There are bad times.

“Who’s the tear for?” The tattoo by his right eye.

“For my son,” he says, “who died when he was two months old.”

This Brilliant Darkness is a book of words and pictures, dependent on each other, as in the comic books that taught me to read.

That’s a panel from Jack Kirby’s mid-1970s series Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth, so much better than a story about a post-apocalyptic muscle-bound white boy with Dolly Parton hair has any right to be. It hangs above my desk at the college at which I now teach literary journalism. It’s the combination: fantastic, the truth that the truth so often outpaces our imaginations; and, yes, “hope-destroying.” I, too, want hope, but not the kind that depends on looking away.

Which brings me to Scenes from a Slow Civil War. The one I think is occurring right now. The growing simmer of institutional violence and the violence of eroding institutions, the national gaslighting that yes, costs lives.

That’s a link to a memorial page for a young man named Ashton Clatterbuck, the nephew of a friend, who struggled for justice and happiness as long as he could. Suicide has many sources, but for Ash’s family there’s little question that the fatigue of maintaining his right to simply exist contributed terribly to the weight he carried. He carried that weight bravely—he once stood stood in line to meet the fascist Gen. Mike Flynn, just so he could tell him he was shaking the hand of a trans man—until it broke him.

I don’t want to look away from such losses.

***

The sight lines aren’t always direct.

The book that followed This Brilliant Darkness, The Undertow, is a survey of grief. I meant it as a form of mourning. I thought that grief, unmourned, turns rotten. Three chapters, “The Ministry of Fun,” “The Undertow” and “The Great Acceleration,” were made with, and through, photographs—not as illustration, in which I have no interest, nor as artworks, of which I’m not capable, but as sentences, paragraphs, within the body. My publisher, gracious in publishing Darkness full-color, couldn’t see the logic of color for just three chapters. So we made them black-and-white, and printed them on ordinary paper. It’s ok; but part of the story had to do with color. So here’s a catalogue of the images as I made and found them.

***

From “The Ministry of Fun”:

…I started pacing, revisiting the murals I’d earlier squinted at under the sun. A stag, by an artist called Nychos, galloped along the blue-and-white wall seventh graders might pass on their way from second-period math to a third-period study hall in which they’d daydream ordinary daydreams of transcendence and fear. That was the stag on the wall: it was coming out of its body, head twisted back in terror like it was looking at its hunter. The stag was still alive but witnessing its future. It was gorgeous; it was horrifying.

*

From “The Undertow”:

We watched her die before we knew her name. We watched almost in real time or soon after, her death looped and memed before the fight for the Capitol was over…

This was the image with which I began my essay. A quotation of a video the insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt made of herself in her car, screaming her anger, not long before she “stormed” the Capitol—her word—and leapt into a broken window beyond which members of Congress had been hiding, and was shot down, dead, by a Capitol Police officer. I lost my nerve. I began instead with a photograph of a coin the Proud Boys made in her honor. An abstraction of what they saw as her martyrdom. I don’t want the abstraction. I want to reckon with the panic, the bright orange, the white light, the darkness on the other side, the glaring sun slashing across her face—

—Ashli was posting videos. In her kitchen, driving to work, her voice an outraged squeak that swings low every few words. Indignation. “There’s riots, there’s arrests, there’s rapes, there’s drugs,” she says, sitting at her breakfast table. “I—I am so tired of it!” she says, at the wheel of her car, looking back and forth between the camera in her phone and the road. “Where is everybody?” she demands. “Huh? Huh?” Her lips curl like the mouth of a vase. Driving to work, she rants about migrant caravans. She’s fifteen minutes from the border. “Thousands of people on the other side.” They’re coming. Nobody’s doing anything. She’s posting a lot of social media. She’s a digital soldier. She was a real soldier. She’s going to take it IRL…

*

The Church of the Insurrection, Yuba City, California

…Straight was no typical evangelist. He didn’t so much take the stage as drift toward its center. A large-shouldered man in an anonymous outfit of blue denim and black slacks, at ease in the space among others his broad-beamed back afforded. He combed his graying hair back loosely slicked, but he was not slick. He had no notes. Nothing prepared. He would speak, or not speak, as the spirit led. He paced, not speaking, one hand in a pocket. “I’m one of those guys you probably don’t know,” he murmured. He looked away. His voice was a rumination. “I’ve always worked in the shadows, and”—a pause just long enough to let us know he didn’t care if we believed him—“I’ve done a lot of things. I travel all over the world and”—that pause—“I’ve done a lot of missions.” He had worked “in intelligence.” He had “guarded presidents.” He had served President Trump under three executive orders. He was out here, he said, in the churches, because President Trump “looked at me right in the eye and said, ‘I’ve done everything I can. It’s up to you to be hard on your people.’ ” Us. “He says, ‘Get ’em to stand. Give ’em power. Show them how to have power.’” …

*

Jackpot, Nevada

…How to say then, that Ashli Babbitt is not a martyr? There’s the word itself, martyr, which means “witness,” one’s life given as testament to some larger truth. The story for which she put herself in front of the gun, that the election was stolen? Verifiably false. Count, recount and do it again, Georgia or Michigan or Arizona, and the outcome is the same. But what if she died as a witness not to fact but to dream? The solace of the surreal, the comfort of chaos, the great relief of all the “issues” falling away, like a body letting go, falling backward, into the Foreversville of conflict itself as the cause for which one fights…

*

…It felt drier here, inland. “Record heatwave,” warned the radio. The Christian stations were serene. The sky darkened. Smoke, not rain. I was driving through fire, detoured onto leaner roads. Some where I paused to watch flames lick over a ridge. What was it that that burned? Wildflowers? The smoke wasn’t just black and orange but green and sometimes purple. The sun peered through, copper, like a far-away penny…

*

“It was an incredible thing,” a Nevada patriot named Matt Virden told me over the phone. He meant the moment Ashli was killed. He was there, but outside when a man who said he’d been inside, with her, staggered from the building. Virden told me he could see it, the death, the meaning: “the ghost on his face.” I wanted to meet Virden in Reno, from which he’d traveled to the Capitol, but I was already east of the city and its great or maybe just midsized casinos with their red-tinted doors and their Roman fountains and their many-pixeled fantasias, in which I’d spent the night, listening to the never-ending jingles and the dull clinking payouts of the slots, reading the sliver-thin Reno Gazette, a kind of ghost paper, like a ghost town, gutted of news, drifting off between what classifieds remained. Virden returned my call later. The FBI had been to visit. He hoped they wouldn’t return. If they did it was God’s plan. Spiritual war is moving, onto the material plane. IRL. No more hiding. But his calls to me kept being interrupted. His kids, he was a young father, and his job. He worked for his father, a doctor, selling his father’s invention, pellets implanted beneath your skin to raise and lower your hormones. Testosterone. Estrogen. And his own health concerns interrupted. Once, while we were texting, heatstroke came over him. “Super hot.” Dry heaves. “Luckily, I had been fasting.” He started losing his vision. “In my eyeballs.” So he drove to the ER. Turned out to be nothing. He didn’t take chances—he’d had an aortic replacement, his chest cut right open. I told him I got it. With me, heart disease at a relatively young age. Through this—the unreliability of our most essential organ—we recognized one another.

*

Rifle, Colorado

…There were three tall white crosses at the entrance, and a life-size cardboard Trump, and an image of Trump cut into an American flag made of steel, and a map of America on which was tacked play money—what looked like a $20, featuring Trump; a $1,000 bill, featuring Trump—and a picture of John Wayne. There was a woodcut of “We the People” above an AR-15. A woodcut of a Blue Lives Matter flag bracketed by AR-15s. A wooden sign that listed “Top Ten Reasons Why Men Prefer Guns Over Women.” (Number 1: “You can buy a silencer for a gun!”) The waitresses by day were young and looked White. The guns riding their hips were huge. I spied an empty seat between two men at the counter. Both wore black T-shirts with a monochrome American flag on the sleeve. Maybe they were together. It’s the practice of such men to leave space between them. I sat in it. Neither nodded. I tried the man on my right. His shirt advertised Shooters, his red hat MAGA, the gun on his hip a certain sense of the American threat level…

*

*

01/06/21. Evidence photo. The knife Ashli Babbitt was carrying when she was killed.

*

From “The Great Acceleration”:

Cecil, Wisconsin

…I went back twice to find out what the coffin meant, but though cars came and went in the driveway, nobody ever answered the door. Halloween in June, or a sign? Kitsch, or a warning? Both: a symbol, a symptom…

*

Marinette, Wisconsin

…How many guns? Classified. But those that I could see, said Rob, were as legal as his combat-grade body armor. He hoisted it to demonstrate its weight, far greater than that used by the police, which he deemed unfit for real battle. “You can shoot me with a nine-millimeter in the chest all day long, and I will laugh at you.” He shouldered the armor sometimes eight hours a day. Training, he said; “I am the head of a local militia.” …. The gear was for an upcoming training operation. “Last Friday,” he said, “we did night ops.” He showed me, finger on the trigger, and Megan laughed at my wide eyes…

…“They call me a Nazi,” she muttered, sitting stooped on a tall chair beside the pool table. “Just because of my German-flag tattoo.” Sometimes, she said, they told her to kill herself. She didn’t say who “they” were. She bent her shoulder to show proof of “their” idiocy: “They” couldn’t even tell the difference between a swastika and the Iron Cross…

*

…Near Mountain, Wisconsin, a local took me to meet his “favorite billionaire.” A rich man who had made a fortune, my friend said, by inventing the jalapeño popper. He had plowed it into a small empire of good barbecue and guided hunts and, illuminated at night, a curiosity cabinet of magnificently antlered bucks, dozens of heads expertly stuffed. The rich man said it was all for God. He was also interested in artificial intelligence. His brother was investing heavily in Tesla, he said, to get closer to Elon Musk, so he could bring him to Christ. “Imagine,” said the Popper King, “what Elon Musk will be able to do when he knows Jesus!” The Popper King wondered if we might yet discover the ghost in the works, whether a God-fearing Elon might build for us robots with souls…

*

I came across a copy of the original Death Trip, published before the book, the movie, the operas (there are two), the many shadows it has since cast across music and literature and film. “Look what I found,” I wrote Michael.

He called a few hours later. “The issue is,” he said, “why is this book still fucking breathing?”

He’d made the book as a young man, fifty years ago, and now he was old. His “hinges,” he said, were breaking. He’d had a shoulder replacement and he needed new knees. His doctor had prescribed him a small daily dose of morphine. He’d made many books since Death Trip, but it was the one that followed him, the book that wouldn’t leave him alone. To wit, my email with the picture. He said he genuinely didn’t know why this book endures. He’d been training as a historian when he’d made it, but instead of writing what he’d studied how to write, he’d stumbled into something else. “The arcane and actual history behind and within conventional ‘history,’ ” he said. Behind and within. The “Trip” in the book’s title, he said, had been a youthful journey. “If you drop acid, every once in a while—God forbid it should be often—something happens to you. You think that you’ve been obliterated, and then you realize that you’re still alive, and not only still alive, but you look around and it’s like a Hollywood movie. You thought you were dead. Now you’re not, and you can hear the birds sing. That’s exactly what a death trip is like. Where you touch bottom.”

Michael, a very Jewish man, liked rabbinical tales. “There’s a lot of stuff about touching bottom among some of the Hasidic masters. There was this one great man who used to convene his classes in a cemetery. One of his followers asked the master, ‘Why are we meeting here of all places?’ And the Hasid, the tzaddik, said, ‘You have to go down to the bottom. In order to realize what the light is. And that’s why we’re here.’ ” In the cemetery, the living among the dead. The book wasn’t all so deep. Very little of it was, in fact. Instead, “all sorts of chatter, absurdity, and dark humor, and all that shit,” he said. But the light, behind and within, could be beautiful.

While he was making the book, he told me, he’d get in his car and slide into traffic. “The guy in front of me, I just followed him. I didn’t turn away. I didn’t turn right, I didn’t turn left, unless he did. I just gave myself over to the current. It was like giving yourself up to a stream. Once he got to where he was going, I did it again. And again, and again. As a kind of surrender. It was amazing.” He stopped, mocked himself for saying “amazing,” a term he deemed sentimental. He settled instead on primal for the current that carried him to the “news” of another century. Or maybe for the news itself, as recorded in the Black River Falls Banner and the archive of the town photographer: suicides and incendiaries and “religious derangement,” con artists and would-be inventors and star-crossed lovers. A woman was photographed draped in snakes like feather boas, her face illuminated by a grin that crossed decades; a strongman stood buck naked for the camera and flexed. A Mrs. Friedel commissioned a photograph of her baby “in its coffin”; then, an enlargement of the baby’s face alone, on which she further commissioned an artist to paint the infant’s eyes, open and alive. “Frederick Schultz,” reported the November 15, 1900, edition of the Banner, “cheated his undertaker by suddenly jumping out of the coffin in which, supposed to be dead, he had been placed.”

Such things happened then; adjusted for period detail, they happen now. Michael thought they’d always been happening. Persephone, Mrs. Freidel’s wide-eyed dead baby. Looked at one way, such an image is a nightmare; turned another way, it’s a consolation. “And if you read more, or talk to learned people, you realize this primal shit is archetypal shit.” That is, you never need to make anything up. “It’s just right there.” He meant the patterns. “It isn’t like you dress up like a shaman, or light some sage, or bow to the four compass points. But you do have to give yourself over.” To the current, into the river. “That’s the deal. It isn’t like the world is divided between stuff that is kosher and stuff that is treyf”—the Yiddish word for that which isn’t kosher. A death trip doesn’t honor such distinctions, no simple good and bad and that’s the answer.

Remember Alice in Wonderland? Michael asked. “She’s chasing a white rabbit, if memory serves.” He didn’t need to spell out the rest: down a rabbit hole, the mind-ruining metaphor of our times, in search of certainty. No such luck. Instead, “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, pointing in opposite directions.” This is the death trip: “possibilities of almost unremitting suffering, and also of clear-minded understanding, even in the presence of this kind of craziness and very bad odds.” Our odds, he meant. Our very bad American odds. This was what he had called to tell me.

*