That statement, I understand, requires some explanation. So I will explain,
with illustrations.
Everything about eBay is logical, yet amazing. It was
very logical that someone should have found an efficient way to market goods on
the Internet. It was very logical that such a market, once established, should
have produced a glorious "commodification" (to use the Marxist term) of
everything even hypothetically buyable, presenting millions of items for sale
that would otherwise have remained hidden in people's attics, or been swept out
of the house at the next spring cleaning. What was not logically predictable was
how much eBay would show me about emotional experience, in the simple act of
selling picture postcards.
I have always been amazed by the fact that when
we open a book of photographs, we are actually seeing the light that fell on a
Paris street in the 1840s, or on the face of the last Tsar of All the Russias, or
on the strange, contorted faces of creatures said to be ourselves, twisting in
our mothers' arms while our fathers struggle to get the picture into focus. But
the personal connection, the sensation that we as observers are actually present
in the scene, looking with the camera's eye on something indisputably real and
true, is something that we rarely feel.
Even when I look at pictures that
I myself have taken, or that other people have taken of me, I generally regard
them in the distanced way in which one regards a mildly interesting work of
history, or fiction.
"Ah," I think, squinting down at the stiff, one-sided
square of photographic paper, "I'd forgotten that big Buick. I guess that Dad was
doing better than I thought. And that's me standing in front of it. Must be about
1967." That's the factual approach: I've looked at the picture and obtained
information.
There is also the philosophical or speculative approach,
sometimes leading to the hypothesis of the Other Self: "Who are these people,
anyway? Could that be me? I don't remember . . . Oh now I do. That's our old car,
there in the background. Oh well . . . It must be me, then. Poor stupid little
kid! I wonder what became of him." There's no proof in my pulses that any
connection exists between the picture and my self, my real and authentic
self.
Yet everyone has experienced moments in which the past suddenly
leaps from the cells of memory, clear and sharp and overwhelming, and one
rediscovers, and re-experiences, exactly what one has forgotten about oneself. I
am not referring to the "repressed memories" that manifest themselves in
courtrooms. Those are "memories" of "facts." Anyone can know a lot of "facts,"
and some of them may actually be true. What is interesting are those moments when
the past is suddenly experienced as strongly as the present, and one sees the
world and oneself from a perspective that shows there is more to existence than
just the facts.
An example. Like most other people, I had an awful time in
high school. I could sit here now and draw a blueprint of the place, showing
exactly where every ghastly episode occurred. I know all the facts. I know, for
instance, that the east wall of the corridor that runs beside the gym at East
Jackson High School is an unrelieved mass of white cinder blocks. Yet when I
revisited the place after a happy absence of 35 years, and I walked down that
corridor and looked up at that wall, I suddenly re-experienced the world as I had
known it those 35 years before.
The hallway looked the same, smelled the same, sounded the
same beneath my feet, and I felt exactly as ignorant, oppressed, hopeful, and
young as I was the last time I walked that lonesome stretch of linoleum tile. I
had not really remembered any of those feelings, or if I remembered them, they
were not remembered as my feelings. They were the feelings of a horribly
maladroit 18-year-old, a being who might, as far as I cared, be dead and buried.
For that one moment, he returned; and I knew the connection between him and me.
We weren't the same person, exactly; but I knew that his existence was informing
mine, and vice versa.
So interesting was the experience that I began to
pay attention to anything that seemed likely to bring it on. I noticed that a
fall day of a certain temperature would drag my first day in college trembling
back across the horizon of emotions. The smell of a certain kind of auto exhaust,
which I believe must be particularly lethal, given its intensity, irresistibly
suggested my first trip to Rome. But the most dependable portal on my past, or
someone's, was the old-postcard market on eBay.
Before eBay came along, I
had never fully realized the degree to which heartland America used to be
obsessed with recording the way it looked. Today, it is almost impossible to buy
a recent postcard representing anything in a small town, or anything but the
principal monuments of Cleveland or St. Louis. In 1910, however, every street,
church, bank, post office, statue, and larger-than-average house had its picture
taken, reproduced, and marketed in postcards. And they're all coming out on eBay
— tens of thousands of memories of American life, almost all of them
available for $5 to $20 a hit.
With very little money, you can build an
enormous collection. The only question is, What do you want to buy? What appeals
to you? This is your chance to find out, and in so doing, to find out about
you.
In eBay parlance, I am "a great eBayer" — someone who
knows what he wants and pays for his purchases, right away. But to me, the idea
of merely collecting means nothing. I don't want a complete set of
anything; what I want is a new experience, or a new way of looking at an old one.
I soon discovered that I wasn't likely to get either of those things by buying
pictures of famous people or famous places. They seemed alien, somehow — too
public to have anything new to say to me. I passed up a lot of really beautiful
pictures of Washington, D.C., and the Golden Gate before the bridge. I even
passed up a lot of good pictures of places that have been important to me
personally — with one great exception. Right from the start, I was surprised
by how often my fingers typed "Jackson MI" into the little eBay search
box.
Jackson, Michigan is the metropolis, if there is one, of the rural
county in which I grew up. It is a decayed industrial town. My childhood was
largely spent in developing a hatred and disgust for Jackson, Michigan, which
seemed at the time (and may well have been) the dullest, most trivial place on
the planet, a place that betrayed virtually no evidence of self-reflection,
self-knowledge, or mental complexity of any kind.
But Jackson should have been a very interesting place. It was
the hub of seven railroads, at least one of which had a dramatic history. It was
the reputed birthplace of the Republican Party. Its fortunes had been made in the
heroic age of Upper Great Lakes mining. In 1883–1884 it witnessed one of the
19th century's most fascinating crimes, the unsolved murders of the Crouch
family, whose ghosts are said to haunt it still. In the 20th century, the world's
largest prison was built just north of Jackson, and it experienced a famous
prison riot.
But if Jackson had been the scene of any human drama,
practically no one in my time seemed the least bit interested in it. As for any
concern with the material remains of the past, it's enough to say that Jackson
was a pioneer in what was euphemistically known as urban renewal. Yet when eBay
arrived, I soon realized that Jackson played about the same role in my life that
poetry played for Marianne Moore, who says, in her most famous
poem,
I, too, dislike it . . .
Reading it, however, with a
perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it after all, a place for the
genuine.
Looking over eBay's seemingly endless run of antique
cards of "Jackson MI," I saw my childhood home finally becoming a place for
genuine experience. Of course, what I was looking at wasn't my own childhood;
everything I saw on the cards had happened long before my birth. I was seeing the
childhood of the town. But it was real enough to seem as if it had happened to
me, and I was happy to make it my property in every sense of the word.
eBay showed me enormous locomotives, arrested for a moment in their headlong
progress from Chicago to Detroit, disgorging passengers beside the "Italianesque"
depot of the Michigan Central Railroad. I knew every brick of that elegant,
faintly preposterous structure. But it had never come alive for me as it did when
I looked at a postcard showing a line of horse-drawn cabs in front of it, ready
to convey important visitors to their business in the city center (see Picture 1). When I parked cars for a living in downtown Jackson,
the place had already given up on anything approaching class. But in the cards I
bought on eBay, I could fly down Main Street behind a high-stepping horse, then
turn and watch the trolleys rumbling behind me, and the Victorian storefronts
rushing past, spilling signs and awnings into the street, gaudy as the spice
market in old Stamboul. Off to the side, I could see the oriental mystery of
ladies swathed in voluminous skirts and blouses, flocking to a matinee at the
Bijou Theatre — a building dressed up like the Scarlet Woman, vending exotic
experience, hour by hour (Picture 2). As I said, they used to
make postcards of everything.
That was a lot more interesting than the Jackson that I had
known, but just as real — more real, in fact, if vitality means anything to
one's sense of the real, whether past or present.
Now step forward two
decades. It is 1930. We've walked up from the train station, the Otsego Hotel,
and the Bijou Theatre. We are looking at the new Union and People's Bank Building
(Picture 3), the tallest structure ever built in the city of
Jackson. The federally ordained, unnaturally low interest rates of the 1920s gave
Jackson, and many other little burgs, a considerable building boom. Along
Michigan Avenue ("Main Street," before Sinclair Lewis published his satirical
novel of that name), the prongs of little skyscrapers appeared among the
Victorian bricks. This is the biggest prong.
Unfortunately for Jackson,
its attempt to reproduce Manhattan at one-tenth scale ended abruptly in the Great
Depression. Even as a kid, I knew how pathetic the attempt had been. But Picture
3 enabled me to study the results from a new perspective — literally and
experientially. The picture's lofty vantage point allowed me to enjoy the fine
skyscraper-gothic of the UPB Building's top three floors. It allowed me to share
the building's condescending glance downward at the miserable structures of the
prior age. Approaching the structure straightforwardly, like a friend, I could
appreciate its wide shoulders and confident physique.
Naturally, there was
trickery involved, as there is in most good photography. When you see both the
side and the front of a building, it looks twice as big as it really is. And the
smoke rising from whatever is burning in the background, there on the left side
of the picture, makes the town itself look big and complex and mysterious. But
this is to say nothing more than that the picture let me see my hometown as I'd
always wanted to see it, and was disappointed not to be able to; and that it made
me realize that both I and Jackson, Michigan might be more complicated than we'd
ever let on to each other.
Photography always evokes the mystery of time.
The picture you see is always, necessarily, later than the scene it depicts. The
scene is gone; the picture remains; and the picture becomes the reality by which
you test and revise your memories of the scene, or create new and more genuine
"memories." But the mysteries of place are as strong as the mysteries of time. It
is remarkable how much a place can change in the process of being remembered with
the aid of pictures.
Leslie, Michigan is a little town ten miles north of the house
I grew up in. As a very small child, I was in awe of the size and intricacy of
the place. As a teenager, riding my bike there, I was impressed by its absolute
deadness and plainness. I remember a movie house with a tin roof, playing hits
like "Snow White and the Three Stooges." I remember an elderly gentleman who
called himself the Leslie Observer and published a mimeographed newspaper in
which he argued that capitalism was the Whore of Babylon, as prophesied by St.
John the Divine. Those were the village high points.
Much later,
researching the history of anti-state ideas, I discovered that Leslie was the
birthplace of Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912), a leader of American
anarchism. Writing about her, Emma Goldman, a more famous anarchist, called
Leslie "some obscure town in the state of Michigan." Right, Emma. Leslie was like
a fruit that had dropped off the vine and was lying in the fields, returning to
its elements.
If there really was such a vine, it was the interurban
railway that once connected Jackson with the capital of Lansing, passing through
Leslie. Picture 4 (1910) shows the opening of that former agency
of mass transit. I like the sturdy, self-confident people in this picture,
standing proudly in front of their sturdy, self-confident iron cars. I like
seeing the ocean of mud that their machines have conquered. I like seeing the way
in which the train, although it is called "light rail," humbles the buildings
around it. (It is stopped in front of the post office, the center of the town's
affairs.) I like the train's generic name: "Capitol City Limited." It is
archetypically American. Which Capitol? Any capitol! This scene of progress could
have been enacted anywhere in America, in the world before the wars. I even like
the unconsciously humorous effect of "Limited": if the train stops at Leslie and
Rives Junction, as the sign on its prow says it does, where doesn't it
stop?
Ninety-five years later, the interurban's right of way has
gone back to the spooky Michigan woods. No one knows or cares where it was. But
Leslie is better in my memory, now that I've been there on its greatest
day.
When you like the people in a picture, when you start feeling that
you almost remember them, you naturally wonder what became of them after the
picture was taken. Frankly, I would give a good deal more to find out what
happened to the competent gentlemen in the Interurban picture than I would to
find out what happened to most of the people I've actually known. Now look at Picture 5. This one is entirely about curiosity. It has nothing to
do, thank God, with the circumstances of my own life, but its sense of a
particular place and time is so strong that it has almost the force of
memory.
Part of the impression results from the fact that several of the
people in the picture are looking back at us, as if we already knew the first
part of their story. But we don't know anything more than that this is a group of
reformatory inmates, photographed sometime around the turn of the century. The
civilian behind them, looking so full of self-esteem, is presumably a doctor.
Perhaps he is examining them on entrance to the institution. Perhaps he is simply
displaying them for our benefit. The more one looks at the picture, the more
changes of perspective one experiences. The striped uniforms first obliterate
individuality, then enhance it. One sees how various the young men are, despite
the lockstep and the stripes. You wonder how each of them came to this particular
place and time; then you wonder what happened to them all, later. Their stories
hover just out of reach, like a memory that doesn't quite come into focus —
a memory that seems more important, the less it reveals.
Of course,
stories aren't the whole of memories. There are also memories of pure states of
being. Picture 6 is another scene from Leslie. The postmark is
November 7, 1908. We are standing just around the corner from the Interurban
scene, near the intersection of Main and Bellevue, Leslie's two principal
streets, looking west from Main. I recognize the fragment of building you see on
the left. It's the rump end of a typical three-story brick commercial structure,
the sort of building that fortified the main street of every 19th-century
midwestern town. But it was a very thin thing, Main Street, USA.
Perpendicular to Main Street and its stores is the dirt road leading out of town.
Despite its snooty French name, Bellevue is just a country road, a road starred
with trees — the white trees of springtime, blooming as if for themselves
alone. No persons appear. The carriage parked on the right shows by its scale how
wide the street is, how wide and neglected the town's ambitions for progress. The
horse is in its stable; the driver is inside one of those buildings on the right,
taking his nap. Time has stopped. There is nothing but shade and sunlight, and
the implicit memory of a certain kind of place, a place that one meets in myth.
"In the afternoon," says Tennyson, Odysseus and his companions "came unto a land
/ In which it seeméd always afternoon."
Somehow, I wasn't surprised to read the message on the back
of the card: "We are having a fine time here[.] Things look natural. But it was
to [sic] bad her funeral." Thoughts of death are easily transcended when it's
afternoon and the streets are full of blossoms. When I look at this worn little
card, something in my mind blossoms too, as if I had visited the land of the
Lotos Eaters.
Maybe the same thing wouldn't happen for you — but
that, in a way, is the point I want to make. The picture that you regard as
nothing more than a random view of "some obscure town" may be alive for someone
else with the great messages of existence. The electronic marketplace —
logical but miraculous — invites us all to begin our own odysseys, into
whatever worlds have meaning for us individually. Every journey of this kind is a
journey into one's memories and curiosities, aversions and attractions. Every
picture that grips your imagination is in some sense a picture of yourself. You
don't need to argue. You don't even need to buy. All you need to do is look.
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