construct, the comfortable narrative we like to tell ourselves about our lives—it is, we console ourselves, all in our mind, in our sleep, in our night, in our room, in our house. But the dream has us, and not the other way around. The scales are reversed, the thing in us is larger than ourselves. To be seized is to be rapt. Its noun is rapture. We think we have experience in hand, in mind; but then everything we made secure is nothing, and nothing seizes us. This otherness is in us as the hollows are in the hands of the beggars.
It is for this discovery (the discovery that the true focus of the moment of art is not on an object but on a subject, that the missing center is not in the title but in the reader) that one loves the photographs of Robert Capa so much. One of his most terrible and eloquent photos is of a group of soldiers crossing a minefield. The field is ordinary, the shot is one of a thousand he would have taken and discarded in his life as a photographer on front lines everywhere. But this one is informed by what came after it. It was the last he ever took. It was shot a few hundred feet from the ground which would explode, killing him. That knowledge, coming from the future back into the photograph, informs it terribly for the viewer who knows Capa never saw it printed. As we live, as artists and sensitive readers of art, we cast our object ahead of us, as if it were seizable by will; but we must be seized, ourselves, must be inscribed as we inscribe. There is some at-onceness which is presence—partaking of past and future and something unlocatable, in time—at work in the work that moves us most. In it we recognize the inseparable claims of inward and outward, sayable and unsayable, seeable and unseen.
My greatest pleasure in studying the “Tour de France” diptych occurred on the edge of the unseen. It occurred in a glimpse that changed all the other moments for me and gave me the jolt of a revealed ideal, glimpse of the stilled thing, absence materialized. Within the rush of my seeing, with its busy intentions and connections, the noise of the before and after, breeze in newspapers, faces looking forward and then looking after, the speed with which presence has gone rushing by—within all that, there is, still, a sign of the presence that stays. In anticipation, you can't see it, though the anticipators have it in mind. Only after the actual bypassing of the bicyclists, only after the brush with the whoosh of the experienced, only, in other words, after THEY see them, can we see it: it was hidden by the postures of looking forward, and revealed by the turn to look after. These witnesses have their backs to the only form of the occasioning object we as readers could see: the stilled apparatus all this reference was about (“art is about something,” says Allen Grossman, “the way a cat's about the house”): image of pure potential, sign seized out of time. It was there all along, the mechanism of the missing subject/object, figure for the art itself, there all along in the photo's window. It is a kind of present for us; over against the occasion as passage, it does not pass. After we have registered the brimming breezes of the passage (subject always moving out of object), we see again, by virtue of still photography's medium, the sign of the mind's abiding occasion: a time that stays as idea, out of the stream of motions in time. Convinced we'd got the point (the object missed, but adumbrated in surroundings), were we, after all, the ones who failed to see?
One last look at a Rilkean passage, before we close.
Encounter in the Chestnut Avenue
He felt the entrance's green darkness
wrapped coolly around him like a silken cloak
that he was still accepting and arranging:
when at the opposite transparent end, far off,
through green sunlight, as through green windowpanes,
whitely a solitary shape
flared up, long remaining distant
and then finally, the downdriving light
boiling over it at every step,
bearing on itself a bright pulsation,
which in the blond ran shyly to the back.
But suddenly the shade was deep,
and nearby eyes lay gazing
from a clear new unselfconscious face,
which, as in a portrait, lived intensely
in the instant things split off again:
first there forever, and then not at all.
In the poem, as in the Capa diptych, the encounter is phenomenally exact, yet turns about an absence: this image of another figure entering the passage (in both pieces, the passage is of space as well as time) in which an orienting consciousness has paused, is touched with the Blendung which in German means at once dazzling vision and blinding vision. The figure of the Other has from afar something of the aspect of a ghost: it enters the passage from the far end, after all, and not the entrance, and boils, as sunlit figures seem to do when viewed from shady tunnels, with the light that seems to constitute its being and annihilate its features. As our vantage stays with the first and forward-going figure, this Other seems to move in time, from the future toward the present, until it approaches so close it too enters the shade of proximity: the deepest shade is nearest the self, and the new face, suddenly seen in detail, passes virtually into the self's own unseeability. (Remember how invisible the very near can be; at its limits it is as unseen as the very far-off is: we cannot see our own eyes). The moment when the object turns to subject—when the other and the self become indistinguishable, that moment which the sorting logics of an analytical language cannot register, when the lyrical recourse is paradox, that moment “as in a portrait,” Rilke tells us, (or, we might add, in the held present of a photograph), that time “lived intensely in the instant,” an instant in which “things split off.” It is a moment of birth, when inner is borne into outer, outer into inner; for self and other are born together, both at once, when as infant organisms we first distinguish ourselves. This moment has its own dark flash of insight, as if two times became simultaneous (the future entered the past), two became beings-at-once, as if (indeed) we could imagine birth at both extremes of existence's passage—all these temporal effects flash through this moment of encounter. The other enters and departs from the self, and the usual sense of life's passage (from nothing to something) is reversed: the other, like the self, is “first there forever, and then not at all.” Something timeless becomes nothing ever.
Look back at the “passage” Capa provides us, framing the stream of the bicyclists’ going-by, to show us how things looked before and after them. What of this occasion DON'T we see? The instrument of motion? The vehicle itself (which is, in some form, in art always “behind” performance)? It was present here all along—the spectators lining the street turn FROM its sign because they are drawn into its motion.
For what we didn't see isn't what is outside the frame. Most viewers are sophisticated enough to notice that missingness. We are sophisticated enough even to notice that two kinds of missing can go on—the missing before something's been seen, and the missing after: the bicyclists were at first anticipated, /unappeared; and then the bicyclists were remembered, disappeared. But the missing we do ourselves, when something's right before our eyes, that's the missing we miss (as viewers, not only as thinkers). If we watch the watchers closely, then their turning reveals something behind it all, resisting disappearance even now. Look into the lens of the window behind them: it is still there. It is still there. The storefront contains the stilled image of the missing (it's the store of the idea, not the action; and the idea is persistent). Look again, and you'll see! It delivers a gift, a hidden twist toward us, from the missing subject and the missing artist: its handlebars and gearshifts visible, the store is a bicycle store!
