59 The aura of conclusion.
There is no language I can create in order to speak across the borders of paranoid readings, and how these readings vary by culture. Every story wants to become a myth or legend, a thing worth remembering that is both recognizable and shareable.
“The artist and the dictator stand at opposite ends of the concept of agreement, which is essentially the concept of storytelling,” wrote Rachel Cusk in an essay titled “On Marble.”
My father’s imaginary involves one version of a story about leaving his homeland. In the meantime, my post-family imaginary uproots the soil in which his trees were planted. His videos can be read as texts that both create and perform possibilities for recognizability. Documentary film-makers, like writers, use closure to bind the material to the reading: to authorize it, and be authored by it. This closure is simply a mark or a signature demonstrating what the author wanted to be recognized for.
In a letter, Theodor Adorno mentioned Walter Benjamin’s “medusan, fixating gaze.” I suspect this accords with how Benjamin wanted to be seen: as one who reads the world closely and freezes it in order to transcribe the communication between statues. Medusa is terrifying and transgressive: her unpredictability asks to imagine the impossible.
For me, “conclusiveness” can’t be as interesting or accurate as uncertainty. The film my father developed in Romania, in the months they prepared to leave me behind and defect to the U.S., is a souvenir, a memorial, and a speculative fiction.
The “final cut” is the director’s choice of how the film should look before studios intervene. In mangling my father’s home video, I am interfering with his final cuts. In choosing which stills to share, I am determining which parts of his story should be permitted to speak. The “could” speak is inseparable from the “should” speak here.
Since it lacks a title, I refer to it as “The Last Days” film.
In The Last Days, the infant Alina tries to raise the dust in her hands but she cannot understand why it keeps disappearing. She is exploring object permanence. She has no way of knowing that she will wake up one morning with her parents gone—and no way of communicating with them until their reunion a few years later.
For the infant Alina, the parents disappear like the dust of The Last Days.
Studying the way my father made this film, I notice that the car occupies the same space as the child’s head. While the film plays, Maria Tanase’s “Ciuleandra” links the motions, drawing the characters into a sort of moving tableau. This is what music does: solve for X.
I can see a family, a community, a life, but when I pause the film and look at the still, there is no music, no connective texture.
The still is absolutely silent.
“The still is a bracket as well as a quotation,” my aunt says when looking at this photo after telling me the joke.
“Then let things remain as we established,” I think, as my aunt takes a deep drag from her Kent and glances away from the screen.
I keep playing with the still, trying to meet the “unthought” that hovers behind the toddler.
I keep telling myself that the corona is her grandmother’s ghost, since her death in the house nearby was still so fresh and recent that the other Alina hadn’t yet finished her thirty posthumous days on earth. But one silence is louder than the silence of her death, and that silence is so loud that I cannot even hear it until I watch my father’s film and take a screenshot whose accident reveals the silence.
One song in the video pops up briefly towards the end—only 20 seconds of the song plays before the video fades. It is awkward and strange and jarring. That cut-off song performed by Maria Tanase is titled “Cine Iubeşte Şi Lasă (Târaitul Şarpelui),” an adapted folk melody that developed from Tanase’s friendship with folklorist Harry Brauner. As the singer and the folklorist sat in his home one day, Brauner played a love curse he’d collected from a widow in the village of Drăguș (near Brașov, near Bran, near our family house in Transylvania).
Tanase adored the song, Brauner adapted it for her voice, and Columbia Records made a 1936 recording of Maria Tanase singing “Blestem” (technically known as “Cine iubește și lasă”) accompanied by Costică Vraciu on the tarafului.
The song is a love curse, or “un blestem de dragoste,” which I have always taken as a curse against those who love and leave. “The one who betrays pulverizes the earth,” etc.
My parents often wept when listening to this song in Alabama. For them, it represented the curse of the defector who flees a country. They loved Romania and then left it. Their unfaithfulness to a homeland descended like a curse on their marriage, their health, their daughters, their lives. This is one reading, or one way to hear a song.
The haunting, lament-driven lyrics don’t translate smoothly. American syntax tears apart the way the words modify each other internally. It bothers me how English enacts this division in a song where the division is parsed so carefully by language, and how this complicates translation. Nevertheless, the song begins: “Who loves and leaves / who loves and leaves / May God himself punish them / May God himself punish them”.
“You’re always more unreal to yourself than other people,” Marguerite Duras wrote of photographs.
Touching the screen, moving between stills, loitering in a limbo which feels truer to life than reality, I do not see myself.
I see my origins in the starburst pattern, the subdued violence of being left behind, the unspeakable black holes whose gravity cannot be calculated although their influence becomes evident in how they swallow the space around them.
There is no memory of this moment. In fact, if the home video serves as a form of documentary memory or material memory in its slippage, or the space between movements, the selection of an iconic instant as a still, which reveals the explosion of memory and the heart at its center.
Some holes cannot be patched or sealed unless one is willing to become completely American. Gheorghe Gancevici is one of these holes. He was 18 when his only sister died of lupus at 16. He went into medicine because there is no magic to cover the ways humans find to rewrite the past. There are only obsessions.
Alina loved Gheorghe Gancevici. She loved him so much that she turned down a marriage proposal from pianist Dinu Lipatti. Gheorghe and Dinu both had formidable noses.
What I mean is that the hole in the ground, this caesura to which the eye is drawn, becomes an aperture. I read life through the slits and gaps and silencers and gaping holes. The Judas slit—the name for the slim window in a prison door used by guards to surveille or check on the prisoners.
In this photo of Gheorghe, it looks as if clay is being spun rapidly and all the solid parts are moving out towards the edges—as clay does in a pottery wheel. But normally, the center also moves to the edges. Gravity dictates that the center moves to the edges first. Here, however, the image of Gheorghe remains intact, it is as if Gheorghe is not part of the clay but part of the wheel, the hard metal fist in the center.
A part of me will always be spinning in this wheel of origin and trying to understand it. That part is the critic
A part of me wants to tell a story about a world without loss. That part is the fiction writer.
A part of me despairs when watching the toddler play with dust. That part is the mother.
A part of me cannot stop rewinding and replaying the cycle of repetition, as if something might yet bloom from it. That part is the poet.
As for the child, she runs the dust between her fingers and closes her hands, noticing how it escapes her grasp.
Again and again, she picks up handfuls of dust to watch them fall. She is completely absorbed in the task, in the study of not being able to hold something.
Don’t listen: they might take everything,
but they can’t have your ignorance,
they’ll leave your mysteries, won’t uncover
your third homeland.— Adam Zagajewski, “December”