"location-notes and love calls"

When I read about the man who leapt over barricades on opening day of the Berlin Madame Tussauds' to tear off the head of the Hitler figure, the first thing I thought of was the woman during the Roman Empire who, locked away by her family because she was Christian, ate the icon that was in her chambers. Paint, splinters, gold leaf - she ate it in a fit of - of what? - significant longing? Fetishization? Faith?

Perhaps it happened or perhaps not.


I thought that we had been told of it in our Early Christian and Byzantine Art History class. Michelle and I took this course together as undergraduates with the estimable Jean Givens. Michelle has a more encyclopedic memory than anyone I have ever encountered since, so when she didn't recall that woman, locked away eating her icon, zealous in it, I was prepared to release the memory to construction.


At Wellfleet last weekend, I was walking with my mother along the same beach we had visited when I was a toddler. She calls it my Kermit phase because there was a certain frog-shaped beanbag without which I was loathe to go anywhere at all (including into the Atlantic Ocean, freakish or not!). Walking there, feet bare and legs sea-slicked from the kicking tide, I asked her if she remembered the whales that stranded at Wellfleet when I was a girl.

She didn't, not particularly, and I started to question my memory again. For her, the first thing she thinks of when someone mentions Wellfleet is that trip we took, she and I together on the bus. For me, I think of the whales and how I heard, somewhere along the way, that rescue workers touch them near the big, inky eye to see how close to death they are.


When my father was a boy, they beached here, too, fifty of them at once.

We stood there together, dad and I, on the deck of the cabin he had visited since he was a boy. We took turns with Grandpa's binoculars. I insisted that, in Grandpa's honor, we always bow our heads through the strap before looking at the boats. "Brown-nose," my father said, but I knew he appreciated that I knew the way Grandpa would have liked things, just so.

Daguerréotypomanie

When Louis Daguerre announced the invention of the aptly named daguerreotype in January 1839, it quickly became a matter of State in France. Scientists, Artists, Politicians—everyone seemed to have a stake in what photography's uses would be. François Arago, a physicist and member of the French Chamber of Deputies, engineered the purchase of the process by the French government. It fit into his picture of how France could secure world-wide economic supremacy.



Daguerre had become obsessed with capturing the images in camera obscuras. Camera obscuras—in the Latin, "dark chambers"—were mainly used as tools for drawing naturalistically representative images. For this purpose, they usually took their smaller form:


But they also exist as room-sized chambers in which one can sit and watch an image of the world go by:


Daguerre's obsession is an interesting idea, one that strikes me as profoundly sad—fixing moments in time, disallowing their passing.

The beautiful Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art has in it a room sized camera obscura. I was visiting the museum with my friend Mark Williams this winter. We stepped into the room. It takes some time for ones eyes to adjust, but then, there it is, an image of Ridgefield, with its prams and golden retrievers, flags and stonewalls, painted upside down on the wall.

I don't know how to say this. There was something about it. Some kind of convergence of variables—being in this museum, founded in my mother's hometown when she was 14, being in that small space, being somewhat prone to liking camera obscuras over photographs (with which I have a possibly unhealthy obsession anyway)—made me not only certain that when I have my dream house it will have a camera obscura room, but equally certain that I will have lots of sex in it.

There you have it; I fantasized about photography's precursor.