The arrow being frozen for a split second here, a split second a little farther along, a split second a little farther after that.
These are not easy ideas, it almost (but not quite) goes without saying.
Movement being an illusion.
Movement being an illusion and, therefore, change being an illusion.
These are not easy ideas at all.
Life not amounting to a film, in other words, but a queue of photographs.
A queue of lifeless stills.
You simply send an email to Teaneck and now you do not have your job anymore and when you try to remember your wife through this shot you recall less of her than if you thought about her with your eyes closed.
You find it stuck to your refrigerator door with a pizza-shaped magnet one morning.
In a way, it occurs to you, standing there in your jockey briefs, turning the print in your hands, first this way and then that, jobless, photography is the opposite of memory.
We try to reclaim the past by means of its reproduction and yet photography cancels reclamation by force.
Somebody already said that, of course.
Somebody besides you.
Unfortunately, you cannot remember whom.
Photography feels like knowledge, somebody besides you once said, while in point of fact it floods your vision with the ineffectual optical noise of anti-knowledge.
A photograph presenting its information all at once.
Where your ideas stop and the ideas of others begin being the issue.
Study a photograph long enough and soon you will have no memories left at all.
The point being somebody already said that.
Somebody already said many of these things, no doubt.
Somebody besides you.
Jobless, you ask yourself: Do I recognize Andi here, or do I only imagine I recognize her?
Examine this photograph sufficiently and you can convince yourself that that wide mouth, those fleshy cheeks, and that contemplative gaze are embryonically hers.
You reinvent your wife in your imagination by extrapolating from these fragments.
That is how powerful photography is.
Doing so, your sense of her alters in infinitesimal ways.
Examine this photograph sufficiently and you can convince yourself that this must be someone you have never met or met on only a handful of occasions.
Your wife’s cousin Karla, perhaps.
Perhaps a complete stranger.
Unlike movies, say, you can linger over a photograph as long as you like.
You have never seen this person in the flesh or you live with her every day.
Have lived with her every day for a decade and a half.
It is not Andi, but it is no one else.
It is Andi, but merely to the extent that history and psychology are precisely those chambers from which you have been excluded.
Study her eyes, hold the image close to your nose, and the first thing you understand is that through photography you will never gain entrance.
Faces in photographs are put on, is the phrase they use.
Poses are struck.
Even caught in an ostensibly spontaneous instant, they remain impenetrable.
At least with respect to the questions that carry any significant weight.
At least with respect to the questions that matter.
This particular photograph strengthens your supposition that a household with children is twice as likely to own a camera as a household without children.
It speaks about the need of families to document themselves, their love and care for each other, their deep-structure sense of continuity and connectedness.
Photo albums work to certify communal experiences at the same time they foil these experiences.
They transform experience into a quest for the photogenic.
If you cannot take a picture of it, in other words, forget it.
Maybe it was Susan Sontag who said that, though quite possibly it might have been Roland Barthes.
Roland Barthes or Jean Baudrillard.
Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, or C. S. Peirce.
But still.
Raising children, marrying, copulating, celebrating, mourning — everything becomes an excuse for accumulating a couple of good shots.
A couple of good shots that serve to organize your life.
If you are frightened, shoot.
If you are in love, shoot.
If you are disoriented, excited, bored, depressed, stimulated, jobless, amused, or only mildly interested, take that picture.
Seeing is believing, they say.
Seeing is believing, unless perhaps it is not.
Perhaps seeing is not believing at all.
Perhaps this is what photography is really all about.
Which is why you chose not to bring a camera to Nepal, presumably.
You did not bring a camera to Budapest, Berlin, or Brussels, either.
Scotland, England, or Ireland.
Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.
Beautiful medieval heart surrounded by gray mile after gray mile of crumbling Soviet block-flats.
All the gray way to the gray horizon.
That far.
You did not want to think of your day as a series of potential frames.
Your parents brought a camera to Venezuela, a then state-of-the-art Polaroid, but only three shots from those years survive, none of which you recognize as your experience.
A house on a barren lot you swear you have never seen before.
A beach that is not the beach you found the large mucus-colored insect quilled with miniature black spikes burrowing into.
About which your teachers back in the States thought you were lying.
Examine this one sufficiently and you begin to wonder: Is this girl’s look actually a private contemplative expression, or a slack-faced daydreamy one?
Does it conceal thought or might it conceal the lack of thought?
Is it about a kind of meditative intelligence, the nascency of a particular aesthetic and emotional detachment from the world around her, or is it about some gentle, easily overlooked intellectual deficiency?
Does it invite these sorts of queries, or is that look more concerned with plain equilibrium, a new perspective on the bathroom in which she finds herself, the tight maternal pressure on her palms, her wrists, her forearms?
Now Andi joins you, naked and disheveled.
She kisses you on the back of the neck and stands on tiptoes to peek over your shoulder at the snapshot in your hands.
When you ask her about it, she laughs and touches her Adam’s apple.
That’s Nadine, she says.
Nadine?
Jared’s daughter. Nadine. Nadie.
What did you hang a picture of Nadie on our refrigerator for?
They’re coming to dinner Friday. I just thought it might be a nice touch.
You raise and lower your shoulders in an ambiguous gesture.
The first deer of the season catches your attention out the rainy kitchen window behind Andi.
You nod and she turns to see what you have seen.
Standing there side by side, wordless, you admire the tea-colored animal fastidiously picking its way through the lodgepoles and fresh green undergrowth near the cemetery.
Traveling.
You begin to live off your savings and Genia is born, for all intents and purposes, almost two weeks early.
On the first of April, naturally.
The delivery goes without a hitch.
This is what you write on your PalmPilot.
This is what you tell your friends.
Seven pounds, three ounces.
What is left of your savings and Andi’s small salary.
Genia arrives purplish-red as if she’s been bobbing in a hot tub for days, wrinkled as a cold scrotum, slathered in cream cheese.