Photogravure

Notes towards a decalogue

“I had thought to make some glib remark—as that, nine months later, the verb had received its complement (‘I have sired offspring’)—but the majesty and the mystery of it truly do overwhelm all consideration.”

That, or something like that, was what I had thought to post to herald his arrival—out of some vague sense that heralding was needed, not for his sake (he would if anything have been injured by it), but my own: as if, with this birth, I had crossed some threshold, entered upon some new condition, not to acknowledge which made my utterances fraudulent, or, anyhow, more fraudulent.

I did not post it.

So many obscure injuries, so many depletions. When my parents visited, I forbade them to take photographs on their phones. “Just please take care in when and how you circulate them,” I wrote when I finally emailed, from a newly created Proton Mail account, the few images I had consented to have taken on a DSLR. “They are taken with my permission, but, frankly, against my will. If it were up to me, photography would not exist, and all photographed images would spontaneously be destroyed. Unfortunately it is not up to me.”

(Or, as I wrote to a friend, someone I know only from the internet, when she asked me via DM for a picture of my baby—to match the images of her own child she had been posting for the past few months: “I’d consider sending a photo if you have encrypted mail. I can’t yet imagine sending his image in any format in which it might get scraped by facial recognition software—you never know when the TOS might be retroactively altered. Feels like ceding him to Baal.”)

Did I not take a secret satisfaction in my father’s disappointment at having driven three hours and been forbidden to take a photograph? Doubtless he would have something to say about my “beliefs”—foolishly, since they are not “beliefs,” they stem from no estimate of probable consequences, but instead have to do with pollution. There are forms of circulation, there are mirrors, to which one should not surrender one’s child. (Bazin says that a photograph is a decal of the world. To be photographed would thus seem to be skinned. Then again, are you not more apt, yourself, to feel like the decal, as if you were the minor, analog replica of the images that have their own life and fate?)

What is photography’s fantasy? That time will afford us a vantage point from which to summon everything we once lived into presence?

Meanwhile, in his presence, a timelessness. To have been with him those first few weeks was to feel, not his newness, but his antiquity. He has not received the latest software updates. He is just a baby as any baby may have been; he could be here, or in Babylon.