Tag: Shroud of Turin

Before me floats an image, man or shade,

Shade more than man, more image than a shade;

For Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;

(from Yeats’ “Byzantium”)

The threat emerges simply enough. A girl draws a mustache over the magazine image of a movie star to the laughter of her sister. A broken-hearted teenage boy takes an eraser to a photo of his former girlfriend. A political party Photoshops an opponent’s skin color to be just a shade darker. A dictator jails any who would deface his image, whether in words or in image, and when he is deposed, mobs throng a street in Baghdad in order to pull down his represented self. Like the harbingers of a human soul contained in the DNA of an ancient primate, it’s there, this threat, although perhaps hidden.

In ancient Byzantium, though, the threat was clear. An image, it was decreed, directed the eye away from the veneration of the authentically sacred. Representation, in short, was a very dangerous business indeed, and one that needed regulation. Down came the statues of saints and up went the plaster over the murals and mosaics. The adult equivalent of a child’s mustache? Certainly we can’t have that! Images are dangerous things. Inauthentic. Eyes might wander. Attention might stray. Interior landscapes might become polluted. We seek to call up wonder and in its place is the mustached celebrity. Perhaps. And yet, even in ancient Byzantium ambiguity clouded the imposed clarity of the holy decrees. What of the Shroud of Turin and the Mandylion — clothes said to bear the miraculous imprint of Christ’s visage? What of images of the Virgin Mary that spontaneously appeared on the columns of a church in Lydda? An emperor could not very well outlaw the artistry of God, himself! And if this act of artistic creation were true, if a representation could be a mirror that reflected a divine self, then the “child-like” actions of the Church could only be seen as a conspiracy of control rather than guides towards the authentic. 

Authenticity vs conspiracy. Those are the poles of our threat. Seems? In this Elsinore world of ours nothing is as it seems. A father’s death is murder. Comets hide UFOs. A tower falls not because of the burning fuel of a jet, but because of the planted explosives of a government. Increasing choice is synonymous not with a broadening of agency, but with profits and branding. It’s the military, the government, the bankers, the Jews, the corporations, the mafia. And why stop there? The self? It is but the feedings of history: a forkful from the Romantics, a forkful from our place of birth, a forkful from an abusive parent. Open wide, here comes the choo-choo train! No, nothing is as it seems, and nothing is freely given. It is a maze of mirrors – which is to say, representations and images, one mirror after another, refracting our perception from the “real,” “authentic” earth and into belief.  The first words of the diarist? Belief. The first edges constructed by our retinas? Belief. And yet, we know our own reflection, our own imprint exists. We are here, after all. The trouble is locating here. Let’s begin, then, with the maze.  

I.

Conspire
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French conspirer, from Latin conspirare to be in harmony, conspire, from com- + spirare to breathe
            1 : to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or an act which becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement b : SCHEME
            2 : to act in harmony toward a common end; e.g., circumstances conspired to defeat his efforts

On July 17, 1996 an explosion caused TWA 800 to fall into the ocean several minutes after taking off from the John F. Kennedy airport in New York City. How do we account for this fact? Just as “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” airplanes don’t just spontaneously explode in midair unless something makes them do so.  Indeed, there were eye-witnesses to the event, souls out at night and walking the Long Island beaches, and of these, some described a streak of light moving up toward the plane seconds before it exploded. That is how a mosaic begins, with the placement of the first tessera, and bit by bit an image emerges. The explosion must have been caused by a missile. Maritime charts revealed the presence of several ships in the waters directly below the plane. Some of these ships belonged to the U.S. navy, and were involved in “classified” military exercises. Obviously, then, a navy ship accidentally fired a missile that caused the explosion that led to the deaths of 230 individuals.  And we all know how efficiently the military hides its responsibilities: from massacres in Korea and Vietnam, to effects of Agent Orange, to weapons dumps located in the District of Columbia. 

This assemblage is conspiracy as we commonly know the term: a system of deceit and motive acting on us unawares. Embedded, though, in this word, “conspiracy,” nested like a Russian Babushka doll, is a linguistic conspiracy that points not towards consciousness or motive or even maliciousness, but towards harmony. Just as an ant might conspire with her sisters to take care of the colony’s larvae (most of whom will be sisters), a worker in the U.S. who raises potatoes and another worker in, say, Mexico, who assembles deep fryers for export to the U.S. are conspiring to bring us french fries. Within the same exhalation resides an act of manipulation and an act of harmony. For some the orderliness of Nature confirms, as it did for Galileo and Newton, the hidden machinations of God. For others the orderliness is merely the harmonic residue of blind, lawful forces. Let us, then, return to TWA 800. 

Anyone who has been on a plane is familiar with the phrases, “Return your seat to its full and upright position” and “No smoking is permitted in the cabin for the duration of the flight.” We even have a sense of the rationale behind these requests. But what about the new phrase “Please turn off all portable electronic devices,” that has crept into the jet-liner lexicon? Well, it’s related to the fact that electric shavers disrupt televisions and radios. Electronic devices in general tend to produce interference, electromagnetic interference, that makes the reception of other signals more difficult, and a plane that cannot perceive the world will crash. Secondly, what happens when an exposed wire moves rapidly through a strong electromagnetic field? If you’ve ridden a bike with a generator, you know the answer: the wire conducts electricity. In a piece published in the New York Review of Books, Elaine Scarry suggested that TWA 800 should be thought of as an exposed wire moving through a strong electromagnetic field. The wiring near the plane’s fuel tank was, indeed, found to be in poor condition. The secret exercises of the U.S. navy involved the production of strong electromagnetic pulses. Therefore, in this sense, the forces of nature and situational factors conspired to bring down an airliner. 

But hypotheses, no matter how elegant, and conspiracy theories, no matter how gripping, are ultimately only stories. A year after the event, the general consensus of the teams investigating TWA 800 was that there was no evidence to support a missile or bomb hypothesis. The streak of light was the plane either falling or being pushed upward by the force of the explosion. Sound travels more slowly than light, so that a person who viewed a streak of light followed by an auditory percussion might be easily deceived into thinking that the end of the light initiated the beginning of the sound. And the electromagnetic environment? It was found to be of insufficient strength to disturb the aircraft. Yes, but of course this is exactly what they would say, isn’t it? 

***

Let’s take an exam.

Question 1: Imagine that you are walking along a city street. Your name is Albert Camus. It is late Spring, and the streets contain cars with their windows rolled down and engines idling when stopped at traffic lights. You are waiting at a crosswalk, when from a car radio you hear a piece of a song “No one knows how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.” Do you think

            A) “Yes, what would make me whole?” and cross the street.
            B) “Funny, the car from which that song is playing is a VW Beatle”
            C) “Now, which one of them was the walrus, again?”
            D) “Mon dieu, people who read things into songs sure are silly.”
            E) None of the above.

If you answered A, B, C or E, congratulations! That is the correct answer. If you answered D, too bad, but here is a chance at redemption.

Question 2: Imagine that you are walking along a city street. It is night. The streets, the windows, the empty lots – they are not familiar, and from one street lamp to the next you hear only your own breathing and footsteps. Ahead, a block or two, a figure turns the corner and walks towards you. Their head is bowed. You cannot yet tell if it is a man or woman. Mark all of the following that apply. Do you

            A) hope for the appearance of cars?
            B) cross the street to the opposite sidewalk?
            C) clench your fists, straighten your posture and clutch your keys?
            D) fix your eyes on the horizon?
            E) seek out the figure’s own eyes?

If you answered A, B, C, D, E or any combination of these, congratulations! You answered the question correctly. Oh, and for those of you who missed Question 1, here is a chance at some extra credit: where do A,B,C and D come from? Are they authentic responses? Of course, we all know that crime is prevalent, and one does need to keep one’s guard up. Really? And on what is this knowledge based? Television? Movies? Gossip? First-hand experience? Did god hand down this belief in a manner like the supposed creation of the Shroud of Turin, or is this belief a conspired creation of x, y, and z? Speaking of the Shroud of Turin…

Question 3: Is there a difference among the following? Please support your argument with personal experience.

            A) The shroud of Turin
            B) Mount Rushmore
            C) A “shifty” individual
            D) A checkbook

***

When I was in 7^th grade, the school which I attended required a year of “bible.” Directly beside my desk was a bulletin board, and tacked to this bulletin board was a clipping – a newspaper photograph of trees coated haphazard in snow. Haphazard and frustratingly so, because the caption to the photograph described how the photo contained the miraculous face of Jesus. For most of the year I blurred my eyes and tilted my head, only to see a cartoon-like profile of a “man” wearing a “top hat.” And so the situation remained, until one day I asked a friend to show me the face in the picture. And when he did a benign and bearded image of a man popped out from the picture. The new image was so pronounced, in fact, that it was no longer possible for me to see the cartoon-man in a top hat. The “scales had fallen from my eyes” and there was “no going home again” to that land of face-less innocence.

Well, not exactly. We now know that infants are predisposed to attend to face-like compositions. Further, in human adults and primates, specific neurons respond almost solely to face-like compositions. Finally, neurodegeneration in humans can produce a symptom known as “prosopagnosia” in which the patient cannot recognize faces. Perhaps, then, there never was a “face-less” innocence. Just as humans are animals that make stories, they are also animals that look out at the world and see faces. What does a dog see when it looks up at Mount Rushmore? If it tastes like rock and smells like rock, well it must be rock. No more, no less. A cheetah sprints, a gazelle leaps, a chameleon hides, and evolution has seen fit to give us faces. But if a face is a life preserver latched onto by our perception, what are the waters in which we might drown? Are they not waters of deceit, of machination, of advantages taken at our expense? A face allows us to respond, to rally, to support, to target. In short faces, each one a hypothesis, float above the depths of conspiracy.

Surely, just as Hamlet is predisposed to see murder behind his father’s death, so too we are predisposed to see E.T. on the surface of Mars and Christ in the patterns of rust on a water tower. These are the mirrors of our existence. Is it possible to get behind them? Let us see. 

II.

Authentic 
Etymology: Middle English autentik, from Middle French autentique, from Late Latin authenticus, from Greek authentikos
            1 : obsolete : AUTHORITATIVE
            2 : worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact, e.g., paints an authentic picture of our society b : conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features, e.g., an authentic reproduction of a colonial farmhouse c : made or done the same way as an original, e.g., authentic Mexican fare
            3 : not false or imitation : REAL, ACTUAL, e.g., an authentic cockney accent
            4 : true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character 

On a canvas is painted a smoker’s pipe. The kind from which one sucks in the rich smell of burning tobacco. The background is a flat tan. The cup of the pipe is a polished brown. The black handle curves up and flattens to the right. Written in a black cursive script below the image are the words: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” This is not a pipe. 

Let us continue. 

This is not a pipe. Nor is it the observation of a child for whom words are as simple as blinking, as taken for granted as the contractions of a pupil. “What is this?” It is a pipe. “No, this is not a pipe.” The child looks at you, trying to ascertain whether “This is a joke.” Perhaps, but it isn’t a pipe. Nor is it the observation of a teenager cursed with inchoate articulation – a tongue stiffened as if by ice and words weighing more than the reality in which they are embedded. “What is this?” It is, …it’s a, like… “This is not a pipe.” Well duh. 

But if this is not a pipe then what exactly is it? That’s easy. It is a painting of a pipe. We say this triumphantly, as one who has seen through a trick question. One in the know. Except that answer isn’t quite correct, or so we have rather smugly been informed. Actually, it is only blotches of colored paint spread on a canvas, or patterns of reflected light hitting the back of a retina, or neurons firing in a particular pattern, or genes growing the neurons into the pattern that will be activated in a particular way such that the word “pipe” will be emitted. Others, of course, prefer that we be corrected in the opposite direction. The pipe, you see, is obviously a phallus and a hostile one at that! Did you know that Magritte’s mother committed suicide? Did you know that the society in which he was raised was patriarchal and colonialist? Did you know that this “painting” is actually an item of consumption? Indeed, this is certainly not a pipe. It is a conjunction of historical vectors. Just as children play the game “last one there is a rotten egg,” whoever is stuck with the pipe loses. Meanwhile, the rest of us can be assured of our superior honesty, superior clarity, superior authenticity, and assuming that authenticity is a virtue, our superior virtue. Isn’t that right? 

*** 

A Café – Afternoon. If Martha Stewart could set up her own café, this would be it. The interior design is like a brochure that reads “European but with a rustic American undertone.” Wooden blinds that have been roughly sanded hang from one brick wall. A watering can and a pair of garden gloves hang from another. The tables are small, and the conversations intermingle with the smell of coffee. 

Person 1: Let me see. Oh my God! I can’t believe you’ve still got that! You know I used to believe that I looked like Farah Fawcette. 

Person 2: Really? 

Person 1: Just like I used to believe in romantic love. 

Person 2: Ha! You got me. 

Person 1: God, we were so sincere. 

Person 2: It just kills me… 

Person 3: What do you mean? 

Person 4: I mean, it’s like, I don’t know. I guess we’ve just grown apart. My therapist says that we haven’t come to terms with how our own parents repressed us. And we were practically still teenagers when we got married. 

Person 3: But you seemed happy.

Person 4: Oh, don’t get me wrong. I was happy. I’ve got the wedding pictures to prove it. But I guess it wasn’t a real happiness. How can you give yourself to someone when you don’t know who you really are? Now, it’s like we’ve become weights that we can’t escape. Tired. Boring. Dishonest. It’s impossible to live, trapped like this…

Person 5: But the best part was seeing the real Nepal. 

Person 6: Really? 

Person 5: Yeah. The company that like puts these tours together has been doing it since before Nepal became, you know, trendy. I found about them through a friend at business school. We were only in Katmandu with all the tourists for the first and last nights. The rest of the time we were like really out among the real Nepalese. Yeah that’s a good one. That’s me on the Annapurna trail. 

Person 6: Thanks for the shirt by the way. 

Person 5: Hey buddy, no problem. Just my bit to help world trade. The family that I got it from were the nicest people you can imagine. Real, you know. The children had these huge dark eyes. Look, I got a picture of them here. Simple folk. We’d taken the escort vehicles that day. And then, there on top of the world was like this town. Incredible. God, it was a great trip. Spiritual, you know? 

*** 

But talk is cheap. Especially when it is the same tired cliches over and over again, and anyway a picture is worth a thousand words. So quick, let’s get back to that pipe. Actually, what you have before you is not a pipe. We have segued from Magritte to Warhol, and let us suppose that we have before us a mass produced food item – a Hostess twinkie (or a Coca cola, or a can of soup).

As much as an airplane, a twinkie is the culmination of hundreds of years of technology. It is a cake-like snack food item with a pale yellow color. It is oblong and rests on a thin cardboard plate. It is wrapped in cellophane, and looks vaguely as though it might have been baked, although rumor has it that this is a clever illusion instilled by the production process. The interior of a twinkie is filled with a white, sweet, creamy substance. You can eat the whole thing in three bites that leave a waxy after-film in your mouth. Best wash that down with a soda. The question we must ask concerning the twinkie, though, is what is it?

It is a twinkie. 

Of course it is. It is not a schwarzwälder kuchen. It is not a mousse au chocolat. It is not a pipe, nor does it pretend to be. It is in this sense that a Hostess twinkie is as honest as, say, the Sistine Chapel, or an oil stain soaking into the concrete of a rest stop, or a view of mountains across a lake. Each of these is equally artificial which is to say that each of these is equally honest. The Sistine chapel is the output of belief as much as a landfill is. The Sistine chapel is as much for consumption as is a twinkie. Isn’t that ultimately what the painting of a pipe alludes to? This is not a pipe. That is an illusion which all clever people should, if not dispense with, then certainly question. The goal is honesty above all else. Facts. Data. Measurements. Everything else is at best baroque, and at worst dishonest. Indeed, one might reasonably claim that there exists an honesty anxiety. There’s something new to add to the Freudian cornucopia. If I’m not being honest, if I’m not being authentic, then I must be failing at this thing called life.

*** 

The phone rings. Imagine this. You are in your living room, or lying on your bed, or watching television. Your phone rings. 

Hello?

Have you ever seen a child learning to talk on the telephone? You see them nod. You see them shake their heads. A grandparent is feeding them questions, and then finally asks to the heavy breathing, Are you still there? And you have just picked up the receiver and placed it against your ear (How many times does this make since you were that child?). 

Later, you will recall the sound of traffic outside your window. You will recall the sad, desperate annoyance of the television – a commercial for a new cleanser. You will recall the texture of the floor, how it needed to be swept. 

But “recall,” of course, isn’t the right word. It implies something voluntary and under control, but you (the you who you will become), you won’t be able to escape the details – the sound of the traffic outside, the commercial speaking from another room, the texture of the floor – because you, after all, are still here, and she or he, your husband or wife, your child, your parent, your friend is not. 

You say, “Tell me what you can see.” You say, “Can you get up?” You say, “Try the door.” Each of these in their own way a hypothesis, a story, a piece of hope burnt as an offering. 

You could flee. You could say, “Look I am going to call someone to help.” They would accept this. You take charge. You hang up. You take a deep breath, pick up the phone and begin dialing. Perhaps you even enjoy this– setting things in motion, having an impact, accepting (strongly) the inevitable sympathy. Finally, with a sense of triumph, your fingers quickly press the familiar number. And it rings, and rings, like a lost echo. 

Well, you did your best, didn’t you. There was nothing you could really do, was there?  Honestly, how could you be prepared for something like that? It was a tragedy. It was an accident, so pull yourself together. Move on. That is what they would want. But that misses the point, does it not? “They” after all are not here, and the only “it” that remains is your own response given the voice, the texture of the floor, the receiver that was pressed against your ear. These are no accident. They are a gift, the authentic detritus of living, and nothing more than deserved. 

*** 

Is honesty, then, really enough? If it is, how do we explain what it leaves behind? We do not choose this place in which we have been born or the responsibilities which have been placed upon us (even if those responsibilities are to ourselves, alone). These are facts that no amount of honesty can absolve us from or disassemble for us. “I have that with in which passes show,” says Hamlet. What the pipe is, is to me alone, he might add. “I have that within which passes show,” he says in response to the honest and sincere questions of his mother, and it takes the duration of the play for us and for Hamlet to learn what that is. 

In the final act a group of mourners are gathered around the grave of a young girl whose name was Ophelia. Hamlet observes them. They are his people. They are his birth and his death, and thus recognized he strides forward to meet them. The mourners turn. Who dares infringe upon this moment? What is this new threat? “This is I, Hamlet the Dane.” 

This is no pipe. This is no conjunction of historical vectors. It is no pattern of nerve cells, nor even a pattern of genes. It is a story. It is a leap of faith. It is a choice, but into the all-too mortal. It is an achieved fiction fought for and finally won. It is, indeed, a paradox: honesty providing a clarity that leads us back to fiction, back to the imperatives of authenticity.

This essay originally appeared in a now defunct literary zine that I created in the early 2000’s, The Tesserae Review. Given that “authenticity” is in the current political zeitgeist, I decided to re-post it here. The piece has been tweaked and updated it a bit since from the original.