Looking at Pictures

Look at this old photograph. We sense its age from the texture of the patina on the platinum. In it, a girl reclines on a divan. She is just eight years old. Her eyes are closed. Her left arm falls limply across her stomach, her hand resting just below her waist, in the folds of a loose-fitting silky satin dress or nightgown that has come off at one shoulder, exposing the upper part of her chest, but not quite her nipple. A loose strand of hair tumbles over the other shoulder. Her legs are bare.

Like the girl, the picture itself is charmingly beautiful. Its composition is informed by the trials and errors and triumphs of five centuries of European painting. Textured fabric is set off against skin. Rich sepias contrast with ivory whites. The arms of the divan gently embrace the girl, who, we naturally assume, must be fully aware of our gaze because she is so obviously posing for the photographer.

We stare at her uncomfortably, through the disquiet of a century of now discredited but still potent, Freudian analysis, our understanding of which has come to us through the self-effacing, sardonic wit of the early Woody Allan films. At the time of course, Freudians had a field day interpreting Wonderland’s rabbit holes and tiny keys and the bit about Alice growing and shrinking.

Here’s another photograph, contemporary, high-definition, glossy, colour. She looks fourteen or so. Aside from a long blue frond that hangs over her right eye, her hair is cut brutally short into black spiky tufts that give her an angelic, yet deviant sexuality. Lips slightly parted in flashbulb surprise, she wears multiple ear rings and a discrete tattoo.

On the edge of right now, she fills her blue-jeans-with-the-knees-ripped-out like a surgical glove. Her tiny breasts beckon for gentle caresses through the t-shirt with Just Do It! printed across the front. The intermittence of skin flashing between these two articles of clothing, between t-shirt and jeans, this is the flash that seduces. Through her eyes and in the very gesture of her stance, she implores, and this impels us to purchase.

The Distant Past

I can still remember how it ended. The twentieth century, I mean. We were free to make whatever moves the constraints of physics and chemistry permitted. Amid dreams and visions, signs and wonders, everything was relative, value neutral. All behaviour was culturally relative and socially constructed.

We all knew, after all, that social reality is a kind of collective evolving fiction, constructed and maintained by the processes of socialization, institutionalization, tradition and everyday social interaction, all through the medium of language, the jostling world-views of different social classes, religions, cultures, media exposures, and so on, to be escaped only through drugs and alcohol, religious transcendence, psychotherapy perhaps, schizophrenia or love. Only then do our hallucinations and fantasies become real, and metaphors become literal.

Thus everyone's actions were morally equivalent to everyone else's actions. Heroes acted out of self-interest, just as criminals did. The guy who risked his life racing into the burning building to save the child was no better than the arsonist who had set the blaze. There were almost no taboos left to transgress. After Tito died, the Croatian authorities renamed the streets after Fascist leaders.

Some of us aspired to a refined hedonism, a celebration of luxury, of the pleasure of satisfying desires in the most refined way, with no expense spared. Others of us scrounged in litter bins, hoping to find the remnants of a Big Mack or a sweet-and-sour takeaway that the flies and rats had not already commandeered. There was the texture of plastic and new-age philosophy, the re-release of Star Wars and the re-appearance of flared trousers, all parts of a kind of nostalgia industry for the increasingly recent past, to fill the void that lay at the heart of experience.

How Things Stand

The current thinking is that at the center of stars, the primordial stuff is squeezed so tightly that it fuses; becoming stuff that’s slightly less primordial and that weighs an infinitesimal bit less than the original primordial stuff. This tiny difference in mass is released as radiant energy. We sense the heat. We see the light. We feel the beat.

         Among the people who think about these things, most seem to believe that the universe will continue to expand forever. That is to say, no big crunch; that the possible future or futures stretch much farther ahead than the fourteen billion or so years of the past that have so far accumulated, notwithstanding the idea that there might be no theoretical limit to the size of a hydrogen bomb, or a reactor meltdown, these being fuelled by the most plentiful element in the universe.

We can even go as far as to say that hydrogen has a single proton with one electron orbiting it.

No. But wait. We shouldn't say orbiting anymore. That would be seeing things through the frame of the outdated and discredited Rutherford model. It seems we would be much closer to the truth if we said, more or less hovering around it, or associated with it, in a fuzzy and indistinct sort of way. But even so, we can still feel an exhilarating certainty that hydrogen has one proton with an electron more or less hanging around with it.

Things were once much simpler. The trees of Eden bore both fruits and flowers in the same season. The first realization of Adam and Eve, after eating the forbidden fruit, was that they were naked. They found themselves harvesting the fig tree, for its leaves, not for the figs.