Tremor

But isn’t there some consent in being so directed, consent to a certain definition of what constitutes “crime,” consent of a coerced sort to the idea that vicious loners are the worst criminals? There are other things that constitute murderous crime, things that do not trigger the same horrified fascination. There are killings carried out under the direction of men who wear suits and live in nice suburbs; killings done by men at computer terminals in nondescript facilities on the outskirts of American towns, and by women too; killings done at vast scale in the name of an economic system. Murder is not limited to merciless human hands on vulnerable human necks. Sometimes it is sufficient to have only the movement of money, the click of a button, the evocation of the legal right to preemptive violence. As for “the most prolific serial killer”: what would that even mean in a country built on genocide?

... and it was also only in that era as well with the invention of the gramophone that it became possible for anyone’s voice at all, no matter how eminent, to be recorded and heard after their death. The earlier privilege of remaining uncaptured, of dying with one’s death, was lost. Should the dead move around us like those who haven’t died? Should their presence be more material than those one sees in dreams?

Looking up the protocols around the Australian advisory notes, Tunde finds a different concept, also used by some Aboriginal people. Because it can be hard to tell if white people are happy or sad, if they are jealous or angry or moody, because the notion of a stiff upper lip is believed to make these public displays of emotion unwelcome for them, some Aboriginal people say “white people have no face.” A startling phrase and he can’t help but like it. White people have no face. An unwritten poem.

And it is this droll moment that makes him realize what else it is about the computer-generated faces that is bothering him: those faces are almost all white. A very few of them could be read as Asian or Latinx but in thirty minutes of clicking he has landed on not a single black face. White people have no face and that face is everywhere. It is probably a simple instance of algorithmic bias in this case. But he knows these things are never simple. In one sense the people in the photographs can be said to have no race at all, as they are fictional creations, not real people. But that is a language game since these are intended to be taken as people or as photographs of people. The project is implicitly a representation of the world. Why then does this imagined world, a world made by certain technologically minded Americans, have very few black people in it? He is not one to insist on black representation in every context. He is not aware of himself trying to keep score and he finds it fatiguing to even have to notice such things. But that is not entirely true. He does notice, in fact he notices automatically and he finds the absences egregious. It would be more exhausting to shut his eyes to such erasures.

It is as though to put black people into fiction or to imagine them in the future would be to participate in an unseemly exercise in political balance, as though black presence could only and ever be there to represent “blackness.” He can hear himself arguing now and he dislikes the sound of it.

He had thought of Tuymans and Dumas but now he thinks of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose portraits are all of fictional persons. There is an abundance of black presence in Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings, black people who do not exist anywhere but in her paintings, paintings that may be set in the past, present, or future.

I now interrupt myself with a small but crucial consideration, because now that I’ve said it several times, I realize that I am troubled by the title Slave Ship. It’s the word “slave”: a word which still strikes the ear like a lash. There are those who enslave others and there are those who are enslaved by others. But there’s no one whose essence or true description is “slave.” A person can be enslaved, can be trapped in the death-in-life known as slavery, but that is not who they are. It is something intolerable that is happening to them or that happened to them. For this reason I think that part of the original title is more accurate: Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying.

The world is a wild and wondrous place, it cannot be mastered, but within the dimensions of a painted picture, large or small, some of its complexity can be contemplated and some of its strangeness can be enjoyed.

Our education—I mean the kind of university education many of us here today have—has encouraged us to think of art as something requiring great care. We know not to touch objects in museums. We are all obsessed with preservation and we revere scholarship and curation. But we have not been concurrently taught to value the life-worlds of others, their autonomy,their ancestral rights. Particularly if the people in question are from the African continent, their ingenuity can be appreciated, their artifacts can be acquired and subjected to analysis, but their actual lives cannot be valued. What does it mean to care about art but not about the people who made that art?

Why should such a magnificent creature be on the verge of no longer existing? As I apply white clay and red camwood dye to depict the monkey’s fur, as I paint the monkey into being stroke by stroke, I feel I am engaging in a kind of public mourning, as though I were soothing the body of the dying animal.

Word got out and what people said was that Dad had been a person of such saintly character that his body had to remain uncorrupted. I was just a kid when he died and nearly my whole life I’ve been hearing everyone say what a good person he was. But to see him emerge that day shifted my thinking. It was as if his early death had been a metaphysical error. It was as if his body was refusing the fate that befell him, as if this whole time he had been awaiting a fairer judgment.

One wrong move could be fatal and so no one makes a wrong move. It is the reason a stranger should never set out into the city without a native guide. Some cities have a plan, a diagram of the city before its founding, or a map, a schematic representation of the city as it now is. Not this city. The choreography that keeps it going would be amazing could it be seen in a single encompassing moment. That is not possible in a city which changes faster than it can be described and which tolerates cartography only on a scale of 1:1.

But on returning to the city he found it grim and was tempted to call it a post-traumatic landscape except that would have suggested the trauma was in the past. It is a city of unspoken sufferings: the wordlessness of the disappeared dissidents, the blankness at the other end of the blackmailer’s phone line, the hush after a lynching, the shiver after a beating, the abyss following child abuse, the stillness after a murder, the muteness after a rape, the long-held hopes that vanish as soundlessly as a drop of water on velvet.

I remember how my neighbors dragged me out to dine at an Afghan restaurant in October 2001 on the weekend theAmerican invasion began, I remember the uniquely American stupidity of dining out on Afghan food on a night when Afghans were being incinerated by our government.

The problem is that the series is well made. It is well acted, thoughtfully paced, and meticulously produced. It would be less irksome if it were not so watchable. As I watch I become distractingly aware of how my sympathies are always being directed towards Paris and never towards Raqqa, Damascus, Tehran, or Algiers. Most of the characters, regardless of origin, are depicted as having both flaws and admirable qualities and the direction is subtle by the standards of most television. This is what I find increasingly grotesque: that something objectionable has been so carefully designed to be received as unobjectionable or even as admirably candid.

And anyway, how different finally is this character from so many others? He is only one of the many heroic or heroized white characters who commit crimes that are not figured as crimes because the crimes are committed against foreign nobodies. But no, no, I have to stop making excuses for what I find upsetting. I have to respect the part of myself that is upset by what is upsetting. Halfway through the second of five seasons I stop watching.

In that age of optimism when the colonial shackles were newly off and the future was bright, statesponsored ensembles presented a cosmopolitan mix of Caribbean, European, American, and African music, a musical modernity with an unmistakable local inflection. Some of the bands included in their repertoire the traditional songs of various ethnic groups but the kora, balafon, and traditional drums were supplemented with modern instruments and sometimes supplanted by them. Whatever was played was played with focus and with that effortless virtuosity that is a byword for Manding musicianship—but one should never call virtuosity effortless.

To say someone is doing something effortlessly is to betray ignorance of the effort they put into it.

The keening so evident in his playing sounds like an outflow of that heritage received from two black men preaching the Word of God in North Carolina in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Coltrane enfolded into his sheets of sound the eloquence of the AME Zion Church but also the weirder and weirder dissonances of Holiness practices. His choices are musically driven but in his spirit is a consistent preference for ecstasy over entertainment. Every note he plays is air from his body, every song on these albums a transcript of his breath.

Lucas speaks more freely than I anticipate. He tells me an unexpected story and I know he’s telling it to me precisely because we don’t know each other. I recognize this wish to reveal intimate secrets to a stranger, a wish that contains the unspoken understanding that we will have little contact with each other afterwards. The story is a parting gift not the beginning of a closeness.

A lot of the suffering we will witness in life will be greater than ours. There’s the question of what we can do to help and the different question of what to do when we can’t help. Often one thinks of another’s suffering: my dear friend you have so much life due you, how can this be happening? (I’m at Mass General waiting to see Emily.) For the sake of loyalty we keep in our minds the imagination of their private anguish. We cycle through all the emotions with them but often we also think—or behave as if we think—the abyss is remote for us.

She stands up from the sofa perhaps to go get a glass of water from the kitchen and at just that moment I enter the living room. I walk up to her and bring my face close to hers. Our arms hang at our sides. Love is stunned into silence. She runs her hand along the scar on my forearm. I rest my right cheek on her right cheek. Our faces are the same warm temperature and I remain there for almost a full minute. We remain there, standing with our cheeks touching, in contact but without pressure.

Through the Olive Trees was released in 1994 and is like many other films by Kiarostami simple and repetitive. Or rather it makes complex and intentional use of simplicity and repetition. At the beginning of the film is a scene at a girls’ school in rural Northern Iran featuring a director, Mrs. Shiva, and a gaggle of girls. The director asks the girls questions about themselves: their names, where they live, what subject they are studying. Mrs. Shiva takes their answers down. Some kind of casting is going on. The director is interested in having one of the girls play a role in a film that he is making in the area. The fictional director’s film, part of the making of which we see, is thus a film within the film by Kiarostami we are watching.

She’s coming down the stairs as I’m going up. She’s wearing a thin shirt. My left hand brushes her left hand. She turns around and takes my hand in hers. Between her thumb and four fingers I place my four fingers. Between my thumb and four fingers her four fingers are placed and we slowly walk up the stairs. Not for a moment longer can I bear not to be inside her.

We see people who have come through the impossible and have resigned themselves to the necessity of being practical. Survival is living on, living above the wreckage: survivre, supervivencia. You think you know how hard life can get. Then something else happens, something of a kind different to what you ever allowed yourself to expect and you have to revise your whole picture. This doesn’t stop happening, there is no end of surprise. Strangeness arrives again and again, without end. We live on the accumulated ruins of experience. Überleben, sopravvivere.

In the darkness our guests will begin arriving, boots off at the door, coats on the bed in my study upstairs. For a brief moment each guest is in the silence of a room in someone else’s home, divesting themselves of unneeded warmth. They can hear music from unseen speakers: Gladys Knight’s “Since I Fell for You.” Their eyes rest on my botanical drawings and on the framed photograph of John Coltrane. Then they come down into the hubbub.

She places her hand on my fist. Her hand covers my fist. I let my hand fall open. She moves her hand down and crosses her wrist against mine and now I’m almost asleep. When and where were you happiest? My one remaining contact with wakefulness is the flat inside of her wrist resting on the flat inside of mine, as though each wrist were seeking the other’s pulse. I listen for the soft beat of blood through the skin. I listen as best as I can in the dimming stillness. I slow my breathing and soon I hear nothing.