Manufacturing Ghosts: On Making Images of the World While Being In the World

The first person to call me their muse was a former lover. When he told me, I knew with certainty he did not love me.

* * *

He took beautiful photographs of my body. He was obsessed with depersonalization—making the familiar strange via angle and scale. He photographed the curve of my stomach to look like a field covered in snow.

* * *

Barthes, on being photographed: “I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object.”
My lover: “You make me want to objectify you.”
Barthes: “I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter.”¹

* * *

The creation of a specter induces something solid to emerge. The specter’s transparency only exists in contrast to its background’s opaqueness. Elaine Scarry, on imagining solid objects: “The passing of a filmy surface over another (by comparison, dense) surface is [a key way] of solidifying walls.”² Even in text, descriptions of scarves, ghosts, and reflections dragged over walls make the walls easier to imagine. Specters make something that doesn’t exist more real.

* * *

Photography is erotic; it requires exposure. The photographer exposes not so much the subject as an image in the photographer’s mind. My lover asked me to turn my gaze, tilt my chin, adjust my limbs. I watched him tune my real body to match his imagination. I saw the photographs he took of me flick across the camera’s screen. I was spectating. 

* * *

My own image-making began with fear of death. When I was six years old, I was crushed by the sudden understanding that each instant that passed could never occur again. I attempted to record everything that happened, down to the minute, in a sparkling purple Lisa Frank notepad. It was a hopeless assignment. I cried effusively, mourning every irretrievable moment even as I attempted to save it. I felt the constant loss. 

* * *

This angered my older sister. We shared a room; I once refused to get us a glass of water because I didn’t want to have to write it down, couldn’t bear lengthening my catalog of grief. My sister called this period of time my “crying phase.”

* * *

The desire to record the world in resistance to death still strikes me often. Once, I felt a swell of emotion in a park by the river. The feeling began with glassy columns of water rising out of a fountain; I felt certain in that moment that I was connected to every living thing. I sat beneath a pink-streaked tree trunk whose afterimage seemed to be breathing against the insides of my closed eyelids. The tree looked like me, but more ancient. I longed for a pen; I needed to capture the language and sensations playing in my brain. Before I could, a dog scented me and barked.

* * *

What I wrote instead: “One cannot observe the world while being in it.” I had wanted to go undetected—an impossible wish. How often I find myself paralyzed in a dark hall, moved by live music, lacking a pen and paper to capture my feelings and unwilling to blind my neighbors with the light of my phone in order to record.

* * *

Light is the biggest betrayer of all. The average person shies away from a camera’s gaze. Barthes, on being photographed: “I do not stop imitating myself…I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares).”³ Light spooks; it alters a particle’s path. The Observer Effect states that the world changes fundamentally when it’s observed.⁴ An unobserved wave becomes a particle under machine or human gaze. 

* * *

But without light, there is no image. 

* * *

Is true capture possible? Not just a specter, spooked by light and observation, but the real thing? What would this require: complete darkness?

* * *

Annie Dillard, on the pine shed in which she worked: “One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.”⁵ In her dark shed, she ensured her desk was pushed away from both windows. “It should surprise no one that the life of the writer—such as it is—is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.”⁶

* * *

What I want to know: must one isolate oneself from the world in order to fully capture it? The problem of image-making is the problem of having a body. The eyes’ photons alter the trajectory of the particles they behold, the hands rustle a bag to retrieve a camera or pen, the skin silently gives off scent, alerts the barking dog. To stop the catalog of unending loss, to stop generating specters, must I cease to exist? Can it be done?

* * *

Pavese valued isolation “as a technique for the inciting and perfecting of his art,”⁷ as defense against life’s alienation by prematurely choosing that alienation himself. He saw isolation as one of three uses for suffering: the other two uses were literature and suicide. For Pavese, self-obliteration through suicide was “the ultimate way of acting on suffering.” Through it, he could cease to exist perfectly.

* * *

I don’t want Pavese’s isolation. I don’t want to use suffering as a tool to separate myself from loved ones to perfect my art. I would rather be in the real world recalling the real world. 

* * *

Some of my most creatively productive periods of writing have occurred in cities where I lived just briefly enough to resist even attempting to make friends. I once spent a sober winter in an unheated Victorian house with acquaintances who provided just enough human interaction to sate me socially. A visitor, I didn’t have much in the way of warm clothes. I cut my hair into a blunt bob and rode the bus to the public library each day, wearing the same gray shirt. Untouched by concern for my appearance or my life outside of the page, my ideas developed their own gravity under the library’s large dome, clambering for space across my many notebooks’ pages. I happily sat in a large room recalling the real world.

* * *

When Dillard wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she let all her houseplants die of benign neglect. She told all of her “out-of-town friends they could not visit us for a while.”⁸

* * *

Back home, I love having my out-of-town friends visit. I love returning from a night of dancing to find the bathroom a confusion of mascara tubes, none of them mine. I love Agnes and Aileen and Esther and Garrett and Jackie and Jeff and Lyndsey and Nikki and Ryan. 

* * *

Dillard: “The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good.”⁹ I love to get my blood going. I love the company of people. I love the tickle of air bubbles racing up our bodies right after we’ve leapt into the sea. 

* * *

Frequently when I’m in the company of beloved friends, out on a Saturday, nursing glasses of white wine in the afternoon light or splayed on a park blanket, I suddenly feel that I am imitating the act of living. The images—our table cluttered with ramekins of olives, or sunglasses strewn across a turtle-printed beach towel, or our muddied black boots in a row on the long train home—begin to seem unreal, a picture of my life and not my actual life (“I do not stop imitating myself”¹⁰). Perhaps, just a moment ago, feeling deeply joyful and blessed, I had attempted to commit the image to memory. In my image-making, I am constantly manufacturing ghosts.

* * *

I want to live, and I want to record life’s images. But a sunny blanket in a park meadow is hardly Dillard’s shed. Perhaps the problem is timing—if only I could pause the out-of-town friends’ coming to visit? But life smells too good and my friends are too tempting. They are going skiing in the mountains before the weather turns. They are getting married in June. Is my body, and my permitting it to feast from the wedding table, really what stands between the world and the perfect, undisturbed images of my dreams?

* * *

“Do you like sentences?” This is the question a writer bids a student answer in order to know whether he should write.¹¹ Barthes: “The only thing that I tolerate, that I like, that is familiar to me, when I am photographed, is the sound of the camera…I love these mechanical sounds in an almost voluptuous way.”¹² Do I like sentences? Do I like the weak written word?

* * *

I don’t like words so much as I like their sound. Once, on a train, Jackie said “deniable plausibility” instead of “plausible deniability.” We laughed and laughed.

* * *

Dillard: “The art must enter the body, too.”¹³

* * *

I sometimes forget that created images also have a body. The first time my sister held my book in her hands, we were laying in my bed in my tiny apartment. She gripped its thin sides fiercely. “You put so much of our family into this, this thing.” She shook the book as if by its shoulders. She was the one crying.

* * *

The lover promised to send me prints of the photographs he took. “To keep in your attic and look back on in your old age.” He liked to speak about me in the future tense. I liked the way his naked body looked holding the camera.

¹ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 1981), pp 14.
² Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 1991), pp. 14-15.
³ Barthes, pp. 13.
⁴ Baclawski, Kenneth. (2018). The Observer Effect. 83-89. 10.1109/COGSIMA.2018.8423983.
⁵ Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (Harper & Row 1989), pp. 26.
⁶ Ibid, pp. 44.
⁷ Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (Penguin Classics 1961), pp. 42.
⁸ Dillard, pp. 37.
⁹ Ibid, pp. 17.
¹⁰ Barthes, pp. 13.
¹¹ Dillard, pp. 70.
¹² Barthes, pp. 15.
¹³ Dillard, pp. 69.