Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

There is such injustice in the way that people and their portraits cannot escape an immediate and basic inequality: the difference between the interesting and the not so interesting, between what draws our attention and what doesn’t. Everything is in silent sympathy with the tyranny of choice, always on the side of the beautiful and the charismatic (to the detriment of everything that has no claim on our attention and so remains on the dark side of this world), especially our bodies with their entirely pragmatic agenda. Our preferences have nothing to do with age or upbringing, even three-month-old babies vote for beauty, health, and symmetry.

And this is unjust. Just as the dictatorship of the viewer or “watcher,” with his unfounded demands on the image, is an unjust one. The word “watcher” in Russian has a second, less obvious meaning. In the language of prisons, camps, and the criminal underworld, known by a significant proportion of all Russian-speakers, the watcher is the one who sets the rules and makes sure the others follow them.

So perhaps we could characterize the relationship between the watcher and the photograph, the reader and the text, and the viewer and the film as small episodes of power, like ticket sellers in the museum halls of random access memory. Both the rules and how they are followed depend on this relationship, but let’s not pretend that the “watcher” is a righteous judge. His rules and his choices are not God-given, they are human. Worse than that, they are criminal. He is intent on the acquisition/absorption of the foreign body: his taste is based on the rights of the strong when surrounded by the weak, or the living when surrounded by the dead (who are deliberately denied all their rights).

Maybe that’s why I love photographs that need no interlocutor and have no desire to engage with me. They are, in their own way, rehearsals for nonexistence, for life without us, for the time when the room is no longer ours to enter. A family is drinking tea, the children are playing chess; the general bends over the map; the baker’s assistant lays out the cakes — and we can satisfy our ancient and enduring desire to gaze into every one of the windows of the house of a thousand windows. The point of this dream is surely to be someone completely different for a short while, to escape ourselves. Most old photographs can’t answer this need — all they can do is insist upon their own integral selves. Their identity is theirs, but this world is ours.

Photographs that failed to live up to the photographer’s hopes are the unrealized scraps from a manufacturing process: a running dog, blurred to an unending streak, someone’s shoes on a wet pavement, a chance passerby in the frame. All this waste was filtered out and destroyed in the age of printing on paper. But now these very pictures have a special attraction because they were not intended for us (or for anyone). They belong to no one and so they belong to me — these moments that survived by accident and are freed from all obligation, stolen from life by life itself. These images of people are utterly impersonal and this is their advantage: they relieve the viewer of the burden of succession, historical memory, bad conscience, and a sense of indebtedness toward the dead. In return they offer a sequence of images of the past and future, the more random the better. These pictures are not of Ivan and Mary, they are of contingent beings, him and her, her and her, light and no one. Freedom from meaning gives us the opportunity to add in our own meaning, freedom from interpretation makes a mirror of the image, a square pool in which we can immerse any version of events we please. “Photos trouvées,” little foundlings, useful in their very readiness to become an object and abandon their past as someone else’s subjectivity. To bury their dead: both the photographer and the photographed. They have no wish to look us in the eyes.

My grandfather’s letter can be dated by its content to 1942–3. He is thirty and has been sent back from the rear guard to a Moscow hospital for an urgent operation, as a special expert, essential to the war effort. His wife, mother, and baby daughter are all in evacuation in the Siberian town of Yalutorovsk.

On coarse buff paper, in violet ink that has seeped through to the back of the paper:

Dearest Lyolechka,

I received your letter (and you know I’m not sentimental), and once I’d read it through a few times I put it in my notebook where I keep Baby Natasha and your photographs, I haven’t been parted from them since I left, and now I can add a second photo of Natasha. Your letter touched me very deeply and left me thinking on a great many things.

Now the doctors have told me that I am well on the way to recovery, and since I do honestly feel this to be the case, I can tell you some things about myself I didn’t want to write before.

At one point I was very sick. I hardly thought I would survive.

The doctors wouldn’t confirm this, however… they allowed me visitors at any time of the day (and they only do that for the most serious of cases). And when they found out I had no relatives in Moscow at the time they noted down your address in Yalutorovsk. I knew what all that meant, of course.

But I fought back. In the hardest moments, please forgive me my honesty, I thought only about Natasha, and I felt better.

When it had passed I was so weak, and I know you know this, the worst thing for me is helplessness.

I got slowly stronger, I kept going. But I put up with a great deal (you can’t imagine what terrible headaches I had, my darling, the worst thing was how they never let up), and then suddenly I couldn’t bear it any longer and I gave in to my emotions.

So many thoughts came rushing into my head and (I had plenty of time to indulge them) I saw my unhappy life pass before my eyes, and… well, I indulged in the writing of some pretty bad poetry. I sought oblivion, wanted to drown out this storm of emotions.

I wrote an awful lot of drivel (I can’t even explain how now, but it all came easily and freely to me), and even a long poem, on a very difficult subject matter, but I didn’t finish it.

But something had a very strong effect on me (my nerves were extremely strained and even the tiniest inconvenience made me suffer terribly). There was a patient in the ward with me, an accountant from the Moscow Meat Processing Plant, his name was Teselko and he was 54. He had a brain tumor and he’d undergone a complicated operation, but it had been a success, and he was in recovery. His wife was four years younger than him, such a gentle woman.

You just can’t imagine how she cared for him, the love and the tenderness of her touch during her daily visits. There was so much love, intimacy, and friendship between them (everyone in the ward, even the most curmudgeonly patient, felt it). After his illness he had become anxious, fickle, querulous, at times coarse and cruel, even toward his wife. But she understood this and forgave him and he felt her forgiveness and appreciated it.

She’s a good wife to you, I said once, and he answered, yes, and said nothing more. Then we both retreated into our own thoughts.

I was thinking how they were older than us, but that they were still living and feeling far more fully than us, the younger generation. And how we could be living, if only we loved life and knew how to love as devotedly and boundlessly as they did, as our parents did.

[two lines crossed out with thick marks]

I’ve been thinking a lot, Lyolya. I’ve been analyzing my life, my past actions. I’ve been trying to understand things from your point of view and I’ve decided to change. I don’t mean in terms of my love for you, not that. I love you now just as I loved you before, with a strong devotion. But considering the flaws in your character, your tricky personality, I want to try to understand you in all your actions, and to yield to you. When you think about it, all our arguments grew out of silly misunderstandings, and it was only because neither of us would give way that they turned into nasty rows.