Ars Memoriae, or Permit Patty Leaves a Message
Why do you watch all these videos shot by black men and women whose voices we hear but whose faces we never see
that document the violence against them
in case the people who come to protect and serve them don’t
or they’re not there when it comes time to testify
or there’s never any chance to?
Why watch all of this nastiness? And hatred?
They are pilgrimages
temporary journeys for people privileged to not have to take the videos ourselves
that
to do our age the honor of
seeing it for what it is
seeing it from the eyes of the woman with the camera who cannot dare to feel outraged at this outrageous behavior
You can’t get out of the way you see the world
how you’ve been raised into it by teachers myriad and diverse
but you can try to see
the thin translucent barrier
between brain and skull
that you can’t take off
or entirely see
Is the project of life
to try to see
what your perspective might look like?
To flatline acid trip our way to
oceanic deliverance
categorylessness
prelapsarian plentitude?
Do we reverse the Fall
into coercive civilization
by an uncivilized order
when we chart its crimes?
Is this why we line up outside of Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam
in the cold at night
and then funnel through
a gradual and subtly dawning
claustrophobia
propelled by the waves of people behind and in front of us?
Do there have to be hordes for it to work?
If the space wasn’t filled would there be this
panic
as we recede into smaller
and smaller
spaces
on vertiginous steps that creak and creak and creak,
into their hideout
where the audio guide goes silent
past photos glued to the wall,
a map of the Allies’ movement from Normandy dotted with scattered and hopeful pins
into the attic terminus where there is space for only two or three?
A small sign by the door explains
that originally the room ended here
the door to the street
was added later
for us
because the thought of turning around and squeezing through the throngs crushing behind us sucks the air out of my chest
which now swells with gratitude,
because the room they were trapped in
has a door
for us.
Like the video on Facebook that ends when the police arrive.
“I wouldn’t have stopped recording when the police arrived,”
someone comments.
When would you have stopped?
It is not deliverance we are looking for,
a gaze that erases itself,
but an honest depiction of the only gaze we can know
a map of its particular contours
the great work of a fully-realized life
replete with gaps and lacuna
moments of incredible attention
and then a door
through which
we can pour into the street hungry, thirsty, and free
to go home.