It happened to be the Newburgh asylum, with two or three inmates standing in the foreground, staring.
* * * * * * * * * *
The picture that suddenly appears to Merle, the picture that he describes as "clearer than real", is of the place in Cleveland where reality is the least clear. Nobody can say what the two or three inmates were staring at when this photo was taken, and nobody can absolutely sure that they weren't staring back at Merle himself.
What Merle is questioning with the development of these photographs how reality works and so the first picture he observes coming into being like magic, out of the pale Invisible, is of a place where reality is not only questioned but denied, disbelieved, unstable, un-understood.
What this sentence screams at me, in German, of course, is "unheimlich". It's uncanny. It's strange. It's a photo of the most un-home-like place you can be, a place that you must call home although you do not want to. Different from a prison in that the inmates, presumably, can not even know why they're here. And the inmates staring out from it makes them feel trapped, as they are in the photo. They are not looking back. They are not merely looking out. They are staring. They are longing. They are not home.
No comments:
Post a Comment