In his new book, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences (McSweeney's, February 2006), Lawrence Weschler collects a series of essays on the visual rhymes and eerie resonances of everyday life. Weschler, president of the New York Institute for the Humanities and author of books including Vermeer in Bosnia and Calamities of Exile, talks about 9-11 photographs, Polish Solidarity, stray electrons, and more.
First, if you could just say a little about this book, about the pieces in it and how you came to put them together in this particular way.
What I do with these pieces is to begin with an eerie resonance between two images, or a kind of rhyme -- between an image and a poem, a newspaper or a scene in a film -- and see where they can go. These rhymes, though, are just like a rhyme in a poem: you've got the rhyme but then you've got to write the poem that goes around it. And you have to find a way that the rhyme has meaning, and keeps having meaning, and so forth. These aren't simply “separated at birth” pieces: maybe it's true that Mick Jagger and Don Knotts look alike -- and it's true, they do -- but that doesn't take you anywhere in and of itself. A convergence piece is a rhyme that begins to ramify in different directions.
Of course, I've had a lot of people read these things and say to me, “What goes on in your head?” We're all told that if you're an art historian, be an art historian, that if you're a political scientist, be a political scientist; or whatever it is -- that this is illegitimate, that you should stick to your discipline. This book records, for better or worse, my having permitted myself to make associations across these divides.
In the introduction, you mention the influence that John Berger (the great British essayist, novelist, and art critic) has had on your work. Is there any one thing in Berger's writing -- or perhaps we should say in his “way of seeing” -- that you could pinpoint as having been especially important to you?
Berger really is, one could say, the guardian angel for this project (though of course he shouldn't be blamed for it!). Years and years ago, when I was in college, I came across a piece of his in The Look of Things, wherein he's looking at this image of Che Guevara, that famous image of Che's dead body surrounded by his captors, and Berger essentially says, “We all know what this photograph is based on: it's based on Rembrandt's ‘Anatomy Lesson'.” And I just went, “God, he's right” -- that was the image hotwired in their brains, that taught the generals where to stand, the photographer where to stand to take this picture. And I thought, “Jesus, this guy does not look at the morning paper the way I look at the morning paper.” And reading Berger really did give me permission, on some level, to keep on looking at the world in similar ways.
As far as these rhymes go, is what's most interesting to you the notion that certain images may exist as archetypes somewhere in human consciousness, images that all people seek or create in the world? Or is this about human-made images that move across space and time, that move through and among different cultures, and become iconic?
It's both, really. And in the book, I would say it goes from one to the other. I start it with a conversation with the photographer Joel Meyerowitz, a conversation about the pictures he had taken at Ground Zero in downtown Manhattan during the days and months after 9-11. In looking at these images of firemen and rescue workers, in a setting that is chaos by definition, I had found that I kept seeing formal resonances -- rhymes -- with earlier images: a particular picture of a worker that is dead-on a Valezquez, for instance, a particular night scene that's Rembrandt's “The Night Watch,” and so forth. And the conversation with [Meyerowitz] really centers on how we can't help but bring with us the entire baggage of things we've seen before to what we see now, and how we see it. And I would argue that everybody experiences things that way, but with an artist perhaps you can just see it more.
Now, that's the extreme version of a cultural thing. But the arch of the book is to move from cultural kinds of rhymes to a wider rhyme, a kind of meta-rhyme, having to do with trees and branches, and the way with which the neurons in our brains recapitulate a kind of tree-and-branch formation. My questions there are about whether the fact that we think of “branches” of knowledge, that we have decision-trees in our minds, that we think of family trees -- is that in fact because our brains themselves have that formation? I just saw this great line of Robert Frost, where he says that a book of 24 poems should have a 25th poem, which is the book itself. And in the end that's kind of what I'm trying to do with this book: I have these convergences, but what I'm trying to do finally is to use them to get at that convergence of convergences.
It seems to me that the title, Everything That Rises, carries with it a double sense: On the one hand, everything that rises in front of us out in the world every day, and on the other, everything that comes to mind -- that rises, as it were -- as we experience and process the world.
Yes, certainly. And it's a play on two phrases: firstly, the title of Flannery O'Connor's book, Everything that Rises Must Converge, and second, that great line of Marx from The Communist Manifesto about how “all is that solid melts into air.” So for me, the title is drawn of these two different phrases, in combination, both of which could just as easily be applied to exterior phenomena as to thoughts. And beyond these sources, the endpapers to the book serve as a kind of more concrete visual representation of what the title evokes for me. The endpapers depict an enormously complex web of tree-and-branch forms, an image that turns out to be a microscopic image of a plexi-glass plate, super -saturated with stray electrons. Because the plate is insulated, these electrons, electrons that are dying to get out, can't get out. But if you tap it, suddenly everything bursts out. It's like a lighting cloud -- all these charges are nebulous in the air, but when they're trapped in this plate, you can see all these connections. So the joke here for us, putting together the book, was that my brain, with all its loose synapses, saturated with all these stray associations -- that if you just tap it, out come all these things.
Here, as in your last book (Vermeer in Bosnia), the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer seems to show up a lot -- in relation to those 9-11 photos you talked about, in relation to Szymborska's poetry, in relation to all sorts of things. What is it about Vermeer's art that makes it resonant in so many different contexts?
Well, I talk about that in the “Vermeer in Bosnia” essay, but for me, what is so powerful about Vermeer is that the creator of these images, images that are at the heart of our notions of peace, was in fact working in a world bracketed by war (17th-century Holland). For me, that's what his paintings are about: how to live in peace in a time of war; how to find peace inside yourself and breathe it out. I've done a lot of reporting, as you know, in war zones, on torture and so forth. And what fascinates me about Vermeer is the invention of the inter-subjective: that notion that the person looking at me is another self, like my self. It's the first time that happens in the history of art in a really profound way. And there's a peace in that; peace lies in that. And that peace falls away when you lose that sense of common subject-hood, when people are no longer fellow selves, but Kikes or Kurds or Hutus or Tutsis or what have you.
You just mentioned your time as reporter on political violence, and there's also a wonderful essay here about the poster-art of Polish Solidarity. Do you think there's something about your experiences reporting from Eastern Europe in the 1980s, a time and place with such a palpable sense of history-in-motion, that has stayed in your writing since?
What's astonishing about Poland is that there's this incredible poster tradition, and this incredible poetry tradition, and that both have come out of this country that's just been utterly savaged by history. I mean, the history of the 20th century -- certainly the history of the two world wars -- is essentially the history of Poland. In both wars, notwithstanding all the battles that occurred in Normandy and Sicily and wherever else, the great battleground was Poland: the contending armies went to Russia and back again across the country, each time. Anyone who has survived in Poland has a novel to tell about how they survived. Given that truth, it's no wonder that so much of the great poetry of the 20th century is Polish poetry -- Milosz and Herbert, Szymborska and Zagajewski -- people who have been thinking about this notion of living in history, about what it is to the object of other people's histories, and about what it is to assert your own subjectivity: how it is that people become subjects instead of objects. And so Poland has been a real touchstone for me. In the Passion of Poland, one of my first books, the “passion” is really this -- how objects become subjects.
You daughter calls your more unlikely convergences “Daddy's loose-synapsed moments.” These musings may try the patience of your child, but it seems that a lot of what this book is about is approaching the world with a sense of wonder -- a sense we often associate with children.
Absolutely. Einstein has this great line that all science arises out of wonder. It seems to me that every child, up to age of three, is an Einstein-level genius -- I mean think about what they learn! If you're in a room with a child, it's unbelievable what they get every single day. And so a genius might just be someone -- like Einstein -- who just let his childlike wonder persist -- you know, he just stayed a child a good bit longer, and he got that way.
Now, without making any kind of claims to genius myself, I think that that is really what this book is about: simply permitting oneself to keep making these kinds of associations; it's about continuing to think in a way that is knocked out of you as you grow older and become a serious person. It can be a point of access to some pretty interesting things.
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a San Francisco-based writer and a graduate student in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.
