Men and Apparitions by Lynne Tillman

Author:Lynne Tillman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2018-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

image crossings

Jesus explained to Lazarus’s sister, Martha: “I am the resurrection, and the life, he that believeth in me, though were he dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

I’m Lazarus, risen from the dead. OK.

After Jesus raised him from the dead, Lazarus lived another thirty years. He had to flee Judea because of threats against his life—Christ’s miracle man endangered the state. Tradition also says Lazarus never smiled again except once, when he saw a man stealing a clay pot. Lazarus smiled at him, and said, “The clay steals the clay.” Pretty good. A man’s life is a tautology. I suppose Lazarus’s was redundant too.

I look away from people’s prying eyes, I watch people running in the street, wonder who’s chasing them, I want to find pictures and not see illness, I wake up and go back to sleep, I do what I have to do, and get a day, a night, and etc.

One may surely give oneself up to a line of thought, and follow it up as far as it leads, simply out of scientific curiosity, or—if you prefer—as advocatus diaboli, without, however, making a pact with the devil about it.

—Freud

On Freud’s desk, in the room where he saw patients, he kept figurines, his collection of antiquities, including a statue of Asklepios, the god who loved human beings most, and maybe Freud loved people most, or more than most, or most likely he was one of the most curious people about other beings. Probably he was. Freud was an idolatrous Jew, a classicist, and in some ways he lived a life antithetical to Jewish belief, which reviled idol worship and proscribed graven images.

to analyst: I’m going to make a pact with the devil.

She doesn’t think that’s funny.

Maybe Geertz, who had no time for Freud, maybe Geertz never had a total meltdown.

Analyst says I’m delaying life, that I want to stay a child, return to childhood, blah blah.

Maggie loved me as an image. She fell out of love with it.

seeing proves nothing

Ansel Adams: “Not everyone trusts paintings, but people believe photographs.”

Gone like the rotten wind.

First, a photograph confirmed “reality,” proof of a bridge, a person’s existence, while, almost simultaneously, spirit photography burgeoned, the antithesis of so-called reality, and an inherent rebuke.

Photographic truth contained its antithesis.

Many early spirit photographers were women, many women mediums. New fields open up to all comers, since necessarily they’re non-traditional; but spirits and irrationality weren’t, they were analogues to, and stereotypes of, femininity—no big leap to accept a female medium or spirit photographer.

People believed ghosts spooked pictures, not photography’s chemicals. Those mistakes, splotches and blotches, like Rorschach inkblots, coincided with a wish to see the dead alive and hear from them, again. Especially, in the U.S., with the Civil War’s decimations.

Photographs documented ghosts (still now, as late as 1960, groups formed around spirit photography), and exhibitions, such as The Blur of the Otherworldly, at UMBC, curated by Mark Alice Durant and Jane D. Marsching, and one at

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