Meanwhile, In The Tower was originally published in 3:AM Magazine.
Meanwhile, In The Tower
Well this room is much bigger than I was expecting. The lift that brought us up here was very distracting – you know what it’s like, it’s got mirrors all around the inside, and I got into a situation, well, it’s similar to a changing room where you’re surrounded by your own reflection, and I don’t know about you but I get extremely self-conscious when I’m in those mirrored rooms because you get these angles of yourself that you’ve never seen, and perhaps inevitably they’re not flattering because you’re seeing yourself in a way that’s, what’s the word, I guess uncomposed, yes, uncomposed, and your face looks wrong because you’re not in the traditional flat mirror scenario where you’re looking basically straight on, or maybe turning to the side a bit to check you’re at least roughly symmetrical, but in these situations you see all the angles differently, and I always notice at these times how my nose seems to stick out of my face at a degree that is completely alien to my image of myself, I suppose you’d call it a kind of projection, as if my nose is projecting forward, I’m thinking of 3D at the cinema, like one of those space films where the pointy spaceship comes out of the screen towards you, and that was the sensation I got looking at my face in those mirrors, not to mention seeing the back of your head or the way your shoulders, which you thought were very firm and broad and generally manly, are sloping and a bit stooped and your neck looks like it’s pointing directly outward from the front of your chest like a cartoon vulture, anyway that’s how those mirrors make me feel and obviously the lift here is full of them and had I not been constrained by your assistants I would have turned around to study the different angles, and in addition to the mirrors there are also a plethora of spotlights in the upper corners of the lift which gave me this atavistic idea of having been cornered, like escaping from Colditz or suchlike when all four spotlights hit the fleeing prisoner at once, and that’s the moment in the film where you know someone is really in trouble, that they’re not only going to march the escapee back to the cell but probably break out the firing squad, and his friends will be stuck in the prison but will hear the gunshots through the walls, and you won’t see the shooting itself and instead probably only a kind of symbolic series of shots leading up to it, where he’s getting given a cigarette, and then the old white blindfold, or the hood over the head, and you can see the patch of cloth over the mouth pulsing in and out as he takes his last breaths because despite being manly and stoic and dashing the guy has obviously got to be absolutely terrified at this point because he is definitely going to die, and I’ve often thought that it might actually be worse to not see death coming, that if I was in that situation I’d refuse the blindfold because you really don’t want to be alone with yourself at that point, silent and in the dark waiting for the bullets to hit, and I’ve wondered if maybe the hood or blindfold is more for the people doing the shooting, because imagine what that must feel like, I mean despite the fact that you’ve been in a war for years and everyone’s very battle-hardened and used to turning over dead bodies in the muddy road with their feet and looking glum and lighting a cigarette in the rain, how despite all that you’re still looking into someone’s eyes as you kill him, and they’re doing this day in and day out so I suppose the accumulation must be something, mustn’t it, all the dead or dying faces or pleading eyes looking at you, imagine, and apparently what they would often do is only load one of the guns with a real bullet, so in that way no one would know if they fired the fatal round, so you could perform a sort of mental gymnastics with yourself to avoid complicity, to say well I’ve been on the firing squad seventeen times and I’ve never actually killed anyone, and in fact while I’ve seen many people die I have never actually been directly responsible for someone’s death, which I suppose is the kind of thinking you need in a war.
Well yes, of course, I suppose I must confess to a certain amount of nervousness because I don’t know what kind of information you want, what I can tell you, you know, and this bag, yes, sorry, the bag with my camera, I suppose you’ll want that, though I told them downstairs that there’s not much to see, and it’s not even my camera if I’m honest, it’s my friend’s, and he won’t mind me saying that, I mean I suppose it’s obvious it’s not mine isn’t it, the way I cart it around with me like an amateur, you know the way professionals just do stuff like it’s second nature, while amateurs are still too caught up with the idea of doing stuff, of showing that they’re familiar with the language and the moves, and of course they look like absolute rubes drawing all that attention to themselves and paradoxically end up looking even more ignorant than they are already, the way that if you see a band play and they’ve been doing it for a long time you can see them going about their business when they take to the stage, performing all of these very complicated things, not only the music but the matter of standing, of being in certain places to avoid getting in the way of each other, making sure that the cables won’t go shooting out of their instruments if they perform a particularly daring physical manoeuvre at the emotional apex of the song, and I remember remarking to my friend, the friend whose camera I’ve got, who I’m guessing you probably know already but I understand if you can’t say, I remember saying to him that the professionalism of artists was very comforting to me, that I knew they had it in the bag, that they were in control of the situation, like when I see a film I want to know that the director did nothing by accident, that they set up every shot and timed every movement to the point where the margin of error was eliminated completely, that they have absolute mastery over the vision of what I’m seeing, and it’s only really then when I can fully relax into a piece of art of more or less any kind, though my friend is very different and in fact the sheen of professionalism you see with more successful artists he tends to find a bit of a turn-off, his belief being that something is lost in the smoothness, something that erects a barrier between you and the work, that what you need to see to appreciate the work is its rough edges, its working out, this is the friend who runs the magazine, and well obviously I’m involved but I think I’ve already told them downstairs that it’s not exactly my thing, so to speak, I mean I’m sure you all know this already, we’re in year five of this thing after all, you’ve had time to work out who everyone is and where everyone lives, I mean I knew you knew who I was, for example, that all this was going to happen at some point or other so I had sort of mentally prepared myself for it, that is, I’d started to anticipate your watching of my movements by calculating my actions in advance so you would see a version of what I wanted you to see, but as I’m sure you already know the fact that I’m telling you this strategy is itself proof of its failure, because after a while you reach this point where you don’t really know whether you’re performing an action for someone who’s watching or for yourself, and of course that then opens the whole pandora’s box of what it means to perform an action for oneself anyway, as in who is even the beneficiary of that action if it’s performed behind closed doors, or even closed doors with someone else watching remotely, which you obviously know all about, and so I suppose I reached this point where I developed a persona that was permanently on the border between public performance and private self, if you know what I mean, and the one time I mentioned this to the friend I’ve just described to you, who I’m guessing you know already, who might even be in this building, not that you’re going to tell me obviously, and the friend in question said something like I’d basically made myself neutral, that I’d somehow found the balance between two things that resulted in neither position, and this reminded me of that cartoon with the family, the one that’s been running forever, of some episode years ago when the patriarch of the family, who is a kind of loveable oaf who can nevertheless occasionally display a sliver of empathy because in the humanist tradition of all those sitcoms he has a good heart at the end of it all, and anyway there’s an episode where this patriarch has somehow acquired a lobster, and he puts it in his fish-tank but of course being a seabound crustacean it requires a constant supply of saltwater, so the father-oaf goes to the kitchen cabinets and finds a cylinder full of salt which he then pours into the fish-tank, which of course results in the lobster floating the right way up, but the family’s pet fish, to whom saltwater is of course anathema to wellbeing, these fish then start floating upside down, so there follows a process where the father has to keep adding and subtracting just the right amount of freshwater and salt in order to make both lobster and fish float on their sides, and my friend who was berating me about my vacillating position made a markedly similar accusation towards me which was that by taking this position I pleased no-one, not even, if I was completely and totally honest, myself.
Sorry, I’m very aware that I’m probably providing something of a shower of information here, though I should say that I tend not to be this garrulous normally and I would ask you to take the general situation into account, that is not just my current position but also your appearance and obviously the appearance of the people standing around who accompanied me to this room, if that’s not too cordial a term for what they did, and normally any information I give would be fairly clear and concise, as they say, but in the circumstances things can become a little scrambled in the process of relating things to you because there’s obviously a distinction between what you might want to hear and what I think you want to hear and of course what I actually know, which might well not be what you want to hear and might result in the impression that I’m, for want of a better word, withholding certain details from you, which let me be very clear is absolutely not the case here for one moment, not at all, not in any way, and to circle back to some territory that I imagine you’re more interested in, brevity apparently not being a strong suit of mine today, though of course brevity itself is so much the form of general social communication that I believe sometimes when prompted for information, whether for a recipe for a hearty meal or a simple inquiry into our general wellbeing, that we fear we are rather deluging our interlocutor with detail, which said detail is always pushing somewhat against our rather clipped way of communicating with one another, I’m talking electronically now, of that tendency to reduce words to single digital syllables or perform vowelectomies or even replace words altogether with a series of faces in different forms of affect, the most common apparently being the face sprouting tears of laughter, and in some extreme cases sprouting said tears in such a state of abandonment that the entire face pivots forty-five degrees to the side, a sign that all decorum has been thoroughly lost in the Dionysian frenzy of the moment, though I often thought that whoever designs these faces should construct a more extreme variant on said emotion which consists of the face tilted to the full ninety degrees and thus horizontal, indicating that the extremity of the laughter has actually resulted in loss of equilibrium or even consciousness, perhaps embodying in electronic form that famous phrase about perishing from excess laughter, but I then considered that perhaps the reason that this face hadn’t been created is that the not-quite ninety degree cry-laughing face, the one that we all use, derives a substantial part of its power from its potential to become more extreme, and to inform our dialogic partner that in our hilarity not only have we surpassed the need for public decorum but that we might lose yet more of our composure, falling to the floor or passing out, and that this is a way of communicating to said partner that they have the potential to increase the laughter even further, and thus maintains a kind of flattery about their comedic powers, because if you simply responded with a horizontal laughing face it would effectively be game over, and in fact the use of said face could even be misconstrued as an attempt to end the conversation there and then, as if to say congratulations, I’m dead, I cannot become any more dead so you have achieved your purpose and can now go away.
Yes, of course, to cycle back to my friend, that person I mentioned earlier, the one who prefers his art to be somewhat rough and ready, in his words, and who is also the individual who edits the magazine in question, and I suppose this gets to the heart of the matter now, in terms of what I’m here to talk about, or at least in terms of what you want to hear, and that actually my input into the magazine has always been relatively small, that I’m really more of an enabler rather than what you might call a content creator, in that I provide the occasion or the space for said content to materialise, and this has taken the form of a number of things including the donation of paper or printing materials and occasionally allowing my living room as a storage space for stacks of the periodical before its shipment to another space, that is to say my space was always more of a holding rather than ground zero for distribution, if you will, and anyway the only contribution I made to the magazine was limited to a cartoon that ran in one issue, an idea that I’d thought up while failing to sleep one night, and this cartoon featured a young man sitting in his reading chair ensconced in what to all intents and purposes was a piece of seditious literature, a samizdat, and the moment of the cartoon caught this man looking up from his tome and saying to no-one in particular, well, in essence to the reader of the cartoon but without any of that self-conscious fourth-wall breaking that you might sometimes see in the more experimental end of the cartoon market, and this man says, if to no-one else but himself, he says I’m not convinced that the paranoia provoked by this book is justified, or something like that, I must admit I’ve had to paraphrase here as it has been a while since I saw the cartoon and even longer since I drafted it, and around the edge of the speech bubble that contains this pontification are visible many tiny little cameras that are in fact watching his every move and when one pulls back to look at the rest of the cartoon it becomes obvious, perhaps in a way that causes one to slap one’s own head in recognition of one’s previous obliviousness, that in fact there are little cameras all around the room in which he is reading, disguised as pieces of furniture, pictures, tables, bookshelves and in fact even books themselves, and the obvious irony here, though you’re clearly intelligent and it isn’t as if I have to explain it to you, though I fear looking back that the message might have been so obvious that a reader may consider there to be a further message, or in fact as one reader pointed out to me the positioning of the cameras seemed so obvious that they wondered if the man had placed them there himself, that he had constructed an elaborate surveillance rig to keep watch on himself in case he should need to detect any other surveillance from a hostile party, all of which contributed to my not drawing any more cartoons for the magazine because of a desire not to be misunderstood, but what I was meaning to say was that this magazine, in case you don’t know which you likely do anyway, was structured in an unusual way, which was that every issue consisted only of a single article, and that the subsequent issue’s article was a response to that article, and the subsequent one a response to that article, in such a way to resemble the kind of paper chains you might make at school, those where you folded up a piece of paper and cut out something approximating a human shape only to leave the paper uncut at the extremities so that when you opened it up you created a sort of accordion of humans holding hands, and I think this was how my friend envisioned the magazine, as a kind of communicative chain that expanded outward with each iteration, though thinking back I can’t recall the content of the first issue, because it would be impossible to generate a response without there first being something to respond to, and I wonder if my failure to remember the first issue, which is uncharacteristic for someone of my general retention, might have something to do with this problem of origination, or that maybe the first issue was in fact the second issue, and was created with a facsimile of the first issue to make it look as if the argument had already begun, which is effectively a lie but a fairly benign one, and might also have the effect of ensnaring potential readers who are convinced via this deception that the publication has been sufficiently popular to warrant not only a second issue but also an explicit response to the first issue, though this is something that only my friend will know authoritatively and I’m only really in a position to guess at it.
Yes, I do understand about the matter of time, but the problem that I was intending to describe was that the particular issue of the magazine in my possession, though in fact very many copies of this magazine were in my possession, as I’m sure you know, that there were copies stacked shoulder-high in my living room which are presumably not there now, being on their way to somewhere else at whoever’s discretion, but I wonder if you were informed how I was surprised to meet your colleagues when they arrived, and that they might have said that I was in something of a distracted state, the reason for this being that I had developed a fixation on the cover image of the latest issue of the magazine, which was a reproduction of a photograph I had never seen before, and it’s hard to describe the photograph without an actual copy of the thing in front of me, and in fact it might be impossible to exactly render the general sensory effect it had on me because as we all well know one person’s reaction to something can be markedly different to someone else, and in fact whenever I say that I have a specific point of reference to which my mind always travels, a memory of visiting an art gallery with my family when I was probably in my early teens, and my father standing in front of a painting by Goya, one of those famous dark paintings that he composed towards the end of his life, and the image was of a group of peasants being lined up against a wall to be shot, and I can’t now recall whether they were in the process of being shot or had just been shot or whether the firing squad were on the point of opening fire, and I seem to remember one man pushing himself to the front of the throng with his chest bared in a way to invite a kind of martyrdom, and I recall very strongly feeling that I did not like this painting at all, that I didn’t like the colour or the composition or anything around it or even the frame, which is probably beside the point as I doubt Goya picked the frame himself, and in fact I seem to recall some of these pictures were painted directly on to his wall so in fact we were seeing the picture completely divorced from its context, and on that basis I began to wonder whether the only true way to experience a painting was to see it in the environment in which it was composed, which of course would be a virtually impossible thing to obtain as it would involve literally thousands of discrete art galleries located around the world and in tiny apartments with small and winding stairwells that would be hard to traverse for the elderly or infirm, and which could only take a small number of viewers at once, and in fact the question then arose to me that without the gallery itself as a kind of cultural public space the concept of the famous or superstar artist simply wouldn’t exist in the same way as it does, and that perhaps this was a good thing all told and when I imagined the context of seeing Goya’s paintings on the wall of his house in the darkening evening, having been led by a loping guide across a mountainous ridge during a rainstorm, and arriving at this dwelling where it was told a strange deaf man lived who had transformed his environment into a sort of living painting, and the fact of experiencing the work not in a gleaming white room with children picking their noses and sliding on their knees in boredom and adults standing with coats draped over arms and manufacturing coherent responses to seeing literally hundreds of lifetimes of artwork in roughly the amount of time it takes to watch an episode of a daytime soap, that I was surprised that more people didn’t feel that this way of viewing art completely leached the work itself of all content, and that it was in fact as incongruous to see these things in this environment as it would an animal on the surface of the moon, with that juxtaposition completely divorcing both from their individual or respective energies, and despite all this I vividly recall my father leaning towards the painting, his feet planted remorselessly in place and tears starting in his eyes, and my being extremely uncomfortable at seeing such an open display of emotion from my father, who was after all what one might call a denizen of the old school, of the world of stiff containment of anything loose or weak, and I recall strongly the utter disjunction between my feelings of absolute indifference and his Stendhalian response to the same square of paint and wandering away to the gift shop where I saw an exact replication of that very painting on a child’s eraser, which at least in my reckoning was an object with a semblance of use-value.
Right, so to get to it, the image on the magazine cover was a photograph that was, I believe, taken during the momentous American election of 2016, although there isn’t really anything in the image to indicate the date or time that I am aware of, and in fact I have up until now just presumed that this was the time the image was taken because of the people involved, being that the photograph depicts the 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in a small apartment, standing in the doorway to a galley kitchen and looking into the room, hemmed in on either side by walls and so framed by the doorway itself, but while other apartments might afford a view back through the doorway into the rest of the living space, there is only a white wall behind Clinton that consists of built-in wardrobes of some kind, and there is no natural light at all in the kitchen, the only illumination coming from an electric bulb in the ceiling, with the kitchen window, presuming that the room actually has one and not instead a vent system or extractor to remove steam, completely out of sight and most likely situated behind the camera, and the room is thus bathed only in a sickly kind of low light, and the nature of the galley kitchen means that the horizon of the photograph bends towards Clinton and the back wall, making her the de facto vanishing point of the image, and her positioning is all the more striking because she is wearing a suit that is completely black, and the kitchen light is positioned directly above her head presenting a kind of artificial halo that has started to float away from its owner, and Clinton herself seems very small indeed, this being an occasion where she is not situated on a podium or another kind of elevated platform, or is climbing up the steps to a jet or battle bus, and the problem here is that the perspective generated by the kitchen and the comparative lack of other bodies in the space makes it virtually impossible to tell how tall Clinton actually is, and of course one could simply look up Clinton’s height in seconds on one’s device with a matter of ease, but this does not diminish the inherent oddness of the picture’s aura, and while I mentioned a comparative lack of other bodies, there are in fact two other people in the picture, excepting the invisible photographer, one being an individual of indeterminate age or gender standing just behind the left of the doorway with only an arm visible, a limb that on first glance could easily be mistaken for the handle of a refrigerator or cupboard, and the second person located directly to the right of the cameraman, again indeterminate, with again their left arm visible, only on this occasion the left arm is pulling the focus on a news camera, or at least a compact video camera, technology now likely obviating the need for large and cumbersome equipment, and the size of the apartment itself probably prohibiting the possibility of such a camera being brought in anyway, and projecting from the left of that camera is a small rectangular black-and-white viewfinder which replicates almost exactly the image that you are viewing, with Clinton diminished and monochrome and a slightly wider view of the left-hand side of the kitchen, where the owner of the apartment has for some reason placed their houseplants in the sink, possibly because they needed to clear some space for the film crew or perhaps because they felt that the rather utilitarian aesthetic of the kitchen needed a hair of something natural to offset its whiteness, and this creates the odd effect of the plant appearing to have grown directly out of the sink, as in some apocalyptic scenario where human dwellings are left to decay following a conflict that has decimated the population and where nature begins to reassert itself through gaps in architecture, and the sink itself presents such a contrast to the rather sterile or ill-fitting lines of the cupboards and washed-out colours of the rest of the image that one’s eyes are drawn immediately to it, and moreover it appears to be the plant that Clinton is looking at, and this is where I come to the point of my fixation on this image which is the nature of Clinton’s expression, which is so far removed from the usual campaign trail photographs which of course tend to show a homely smile and a wave to infants lining the highways and byways of the route, and the likely heavy vetoing of any pictures that present the candidate showing anything like disinterest or distraction, a process which I imagine involves a great swathe of youngish people sitting at banks of computers and swiping through images until they find the right one before consigning the others to the skeuomorphic pixilated dustbin at the bottom of the screen, and of course in today’s situation the possibility of a rogue photograph emerging into the public sphere is exponentially higher, and not only this but emerging often within seconds of being taken in a way that any authority would be impossible to prevent, and for some reason this picture of Clinton, which could never have been okayed by any member of her campaign team, seems to have made its way out into the wider world.
Yes, and well, it is Clinton’s face that gives the image its quality, and that quality, though one maybe contributed to in part by the oppressive lack of natural light and absence of egress into any other living space, is one of sincere and unwavering dread, a sense that something here is fundamentally and utterly wrong, and as one looks at Clinton’s expression it is possible to see a moment of complete bewilderment, and to be clear here I don’t mean a sense of distaste, which would be bad enough for a candidate seeking to cement themselves in the public consciousness, but a sense of genuine fear and unease, looking almost as if she has at this very moment materialised in this kitchen, the light above her head then taking on the appearance of a transporter beam from any number of science fiction tv shows, her face communicating without words a sentence approximating something like what am I doing in this place, and as I say not a sense of downward social mobility or a matter of repulsion at the scene she sees laid out in front of her, but the conveyance of a genuine inscrutability of environment, as much as if you or I were to suddenly find ourselves beamed up to a planet populated by aliens made of an arrangement of dust and water and that spoke with voices like rivers and sand and lived in buildings in a constant state of nano-transformation which defied human phenomenology to such an extent that, in the well-worn term, you literally did not believe your eyes, and this is the expression on Clinton’s face, that she has emerged into a world that she does not recognise and that this emergence has brought with it a realisation that goes beyond simple physical dislocation and deep into psychic disquiet, that in some sense the rules of the game have been reconfigured, and so when the door opened and your friends greeted me I was stood in quiet contemplation at this image, and when they drove me here and told me what to expect I was still thinking of it, and truth be told as I stand here talking to you now I’m still looking at that photograph in my mind’s eye, even now as you’re pushing the piece of paper towards me and your associate is drawing the pen from its holster in his pocket, and as I sign this paper that I’m signing right now I’m still thinking of it, still deep within the contours of that photograph, feeling such a strong attachment that I might imagine turning around and seeing the invisible cameraman as I push the piece of paper back to you across this desk, as I turn around as I am doing now and can see that the window that I imagined is in fact just a long wide white wall.