“It might be lonelier / Without the Loneliness”

 

 

by Jonathan Boulting, poet

 

 

Published in Katarina Radović's monograph Until Death Do Us Part, Belgrade, 2011

 

 

 

To wed, and thereby cross the threshold into the world of married life – Jonathan Swift´s world of “bad words in the day, bad smells in the night” (“For Love has pitched his mansion in/ The place of excrement” – and it wasn’t just about Eros Yeats’ Crazy Jane was speaking to the Bishop, but the Lord of the “many mansions”.) With photographs, we neither hear those words nor smell those smells:  the photographic image, relieved of all acoustic, olfactory, textural context – relieved of climate – assures us of a safe distance from the dangerous matters at hand, the imminent entanglements of wedlock. We will not even hear the nicely chosen ‘nice’ words or smell the odours or perfumes of the wedding day itself.

 

Ours is the safe distance of the voyeur, that comfortable somewhere between envy and repulsion. A grateful distance, too, should one be suffering from delusions of extra-marital freedom (everyone is hopelessly ‘married’ to someone or something – be it only oneself).

 

A photograph of a moment one has experienced deepens one’s feelings of loneliness, since it testifies to the absence of that moment (for evermore? until the end of Time?) It has passed away, metamorphosing into a memory. In the words of Emily Dickinson, with whom Miss Radović shares a solitary fascination with the Beloved Other: “Perception of an object costs/ Precise the Object’s loss – “. 

 

But a photograph distances one from the memory of the moment also: it presents what is in fact a camera´s memory, and is therefore, by its very otherness, a reminder of the loneliness of one’s own memory. A photograph is nobody’s past, nobody’s memories.

 

This is partly why wedding photos possess a particular poignancy. A wedding, the union not only of two individual human beings but also of the millions of other beings, human but also animal, vegetable and mineral (stardust included) present in their genetic make-up, promises an end to all loneliness – a universal union. A photograph, on the other hand, if absorbed by a truly naked eye, can only bear witness to solitude. Here we enjoy and suffer the paradoxical experience of the camera as a chamber of solitudes, but solitudes which are celebrations of human unions at their most intimate, most universal.

 

What is additionally ‘particular’ about this solar plexal poignancy, which perhaps constitutes the essence of Miss Radović’s art, is that it introduces – I was going to say, ‘us’, but perhaps I should say ‘me’, the isolated observer – to the other half of the truth about marriages: that maybe there is no ‘other half’ – that there are moments (on the Cross, for instance) when one feels “One is one and all alone/ And ever more shall be so”. Indeed, in the mountains of Bosnia-Herzegovina (where one of these weddings is celebrated), newly-weds are exhorted to love and honour one another as one another´s ‘crosses’ – gratefully, as the cruces of one another’s immortalities.

 

2 is the loneliest of numbers (unless you are a swan and at one). But among all these newly-weds, only one (perhaps two?) seems to have realised that s/he is already solo – that where 2 = 1, 1 = 2, the key equation in the mathematics of the heart (this more conscious newly-wed is probably the more loved, less loving of the two, since there is more burdensome loneliness in being loved than in loving.) And if the occasional (female) wedding guest seems slightly envious of the couple’s innocence, doesn’t she also derive a furtive solace from the knowledge that that innocence will eventually surrender to experience… probably to babies too (and their unexemplary behaviour!)? Was it Ogden Nash who remarked, your spouse isn’t someone you can be with, but someone you cannot be without?

 

Promising marriages start with promises – with what G.K. Chesterton called ‘rash vows’. Since these photos show trans-tribal and often secular European weddings, in most cases it is unclear what kind of promises have been made, and in the presence of which goddesses, gods or God. However, whether she knows it or not, the wide-eyed, dead-pan Miss Radović is both an intuitive and a logician – a laterally somnambulant detective? – and a prophetic eye will discern in her photographs some small detail, such as the lift of an eyelash, a crease in a jacket or reflection off a dress, a twist to a finger, a bite in an abandoned bit of wedding-cake, or a shaft of light across a kitchen bin, which augurs with infallible accuracy for the imminent ‘lover’s night’ (every night is a ‘first night’) and for the future of the marriage, its duration or intensity.

 

(And duration and intensity are not necessarily incompatible dimensions – it will partly depend on the lighting. The discovery of Uranus, planet of divorce, coincided with the discovery of electricity, and there can be no doubt that the principal cause of divorce is the electric light bulb. Constant wattage monotonises the face of the beloved. Face and body were never meant to be seen under a static light, but under sun, moon and stars, firelight and candlelight... ) 

 

However, another thing these photographs promise us is that none of the marriages are going to be boring – least of all the boring ones! There is truth in W.H. Auden’s gaily perverse dictum, “The most boring marriage is infinitely more interesting than the most passionate romance”. The interest lies in the mystery of cohabitation. That the attraction should be so strong or the repulsion so weak that two beings should choose to share the same miniscule corner of an immense universe must be especially fascinating for a visual artist, such as a photographer, whose Prima Materia is space (in light). And some of these photographs reveal, in the odd gesture of hand or foot, couples already rehearsing the dance that will negotiate their territory.

 

Weddings remind us that sex is only part of the story. We see here evidence of other instincts driving towards marriage: food, territory, will-to-meaning; sleep, death; here and there, traces of fear.

 

Most couples, in the reality of their appearances, are either incestuous mirrors or complementary opposites of one another, and Miss Radović´s samples provide no exceptions to this rule. Interestingly, the cultural &/ racial differences the photographer celebrates here often seem to mask an incest. In all of the marriages I sense considerable ‘interest’ and at least a modicum of ‘respect´. In only one do I perhaps detect the betrayal of a Shakespearian “Married Chastity” (à la Phoenix-&-Turtle), the diversion of a passionate attraction from its creative teleological imperative towards a probable merely genital consummation. With another wedding, I wonder whether it isn’t perhaps a not uncommon case of two people finally getting married in order to separate for ever. And am I right in suspecting that for one of the grooms, it is just about to dawn that in marrying him, his bride is marrying her mother? But, alas (for a nostalgic Byronian such as myself), with none of the brides (except one?) do I feel that the lady is destined for an old-style ‘cavalier servante’.

 

Despite the frequently secular appearances, Christianity still casts its mysterious ninth-hour shadow over these ‘post-Christian’ European celebrations – the protective, forgiving shadow, I would suggest, of a religion which originated in the deophile ‘adultery’ of a 15-year-old Jewess, and Whose Divine Son’s first miracle was performed at a wedding feast: the Dionysian transformation of the water of the Law into the wine of Love. Celibacy was urged as the ‘better option’ by St. Paul not because he was a Balkan Bogomil, but simply because he believed that Christ’s Return and the End of the World were imminent and there was no further point to procreation. The Abrahamic imperative had always been, “Be fruitful and multiply!” But for the uninitiated, who seem to imagine that ‘religion’ (i.e. Christianity) = marital fidelity, it will come as a surprise to discover that the miracle at Cana was a miracle of marital inebriation... and that in the Christian Heaven, there is “no giving or taking in marriage”.

 

Marianne Moore, another inspired spinster, raises an apposite question: “This institution,/ perhaps one should say enterprise/ out of respect for which/ one says one need not change one’s mind/ about a thing one has believed in,/ requiring public promises/ of one’s intention/ to fulfill a private obligation:/ I wonder what Adam and Eve/ think of it by this time...” We all know of ‘public marriages’, tragical-farcical unions with no secret core of privacy, whose imaginable (as well as economic) factuality can only be preserved by the attention of the media – marriages which depend for their very survival on their existence in the mind of the ‘Public’. I can think of at least one such marriage, almost touchingly grotesque, in Belgrade. And of quite a few others in London. My own family, for instance, boasted a film director heavily invested for some years in pseudo-scandalous wedlock to a former Hollywood child-star even wealthier than himself and less than half his age. It was, in fact, one of the most boring ‘middle-aged’ marriages one could ever hope to fall asleep in. What kept it going for an empty while were the distractions of jealousy (she of his past, he of her future lovers) and the voyeuristic attentions of the interviewers and photographers.  Strange to say, only rarely does one feel that the Miss Radović’s camera has been invited to help validate any of these unions. Or was the photographer’s gently ironic posture too apparent to permit of masquerade?

 

Nevertheless, all weddings are in some sense public spectacles. Paradoxically, as with other public spectacles, it is perhaps side-, back- or off-stage where the important things are usually happening – the ‘butterfly effect’ of Chaos Theory, be the ‘butterfly’ a wide-eyed child, an ancient widow or divorcée, an uneaten fruit, a closed window, an empty chair, a billboard, a patient radiant tree, or even (shocking in a photograph) a painting. Or (also living that loneliest of numbers perhaps), a couple of horses, a couple of dogs.

 

Things happen centre-stage too, with the couples themselves, in a glance off-guard, or somewhere between the lips and the teeth. I have found it illuminating to view these fascinating documents alongside Veronese’s ‘Marriage at Cana’, where Christ, although &/ because He is absolutely centre-stage, is almost invisible, although &/ because He is the worker of the miracle. The photographer of these weddings seems to participate in the same creative modesty, or auctorial invisibility.

 

When we come to Tintoretto’s ‘Cana’, however, at Santa Maria della Salute (inspiration for Laza Kostić’s beautiful poem of that name, the strangest epithalamium ever composed), I must stop – or risk (another) fight! Here is where the chiaroscuro of a Master silences photography. Photos offer glimpses of how we actually look at life – intermittently, promiscuously. So photographs are perfectly suited to the reality of weddings as we actually experience them. They even offer us a little extra time to experience the experience. But Tintoretto is how we could – or (dare I say it?) should – see life.

 

“At the touch of a finger” Miss Radović´s camera has threatened, in Walter Benjamin’s words, “to fix an event for an unlimited period of time”. But this is only a nightmare: photographs too pass on into our memories, entering the soul and participating in its metamorphoses, its infinite evolution. They provide us with absent glimpses of moments wholly and eternally present only in the Mind of God (from every angle, including inside-out, and including the camera’s) – a God Who is always in Three Minds... a God of Triangles...

 

My most vivid memory from Until Death Do Us Part is of the photograph – or rather, the still? – of heels, houghs and hems... That photograph says it all.