Essays from the Nick of Time by Mark Slouka Read Free Book Online Page B

torn from the back of the
New York Times Magazine,
are the faces of seventeen men and women whose portraits were taken by KGB photographers more than half a century ago, then filed, along with hundreds of thousands like them, in the top-secret dossiers of Stalin’s secret police. Over the years, I’ve come to know the faces in these photographs nearly as well as I know those of the living. I study them often—the woman at the left whose graying hair has loosened from its bun, the beautiful young man at the right, the fading lieutenant at the bottom corner whose cheeks, I suspect, had the same roughness and warmth as my father’s—because each and every one of them, within hours of having his or her picture taken, was driven to a forest south of Moscow and executed; because all, or nearly all, knew their fate at the time their pictures were taken; and because, finally, having inherited a good dose of Slavic morbidity (and sentimentality), I couldn’t bear to compound the silence of all of those lives unlived by returning them—mothers and fathers, sons and lovers—to the oblivion of yet another archive, the purgatory of microfiche. On my wall, in some small measure, they are not forgotten; they have a voice.
    Today, as the panopticon reveals to us, as never before, the agony of our species, the lesson is repeated daily. We read it in the skulls of Srebrenica, growing out of the soil, in the open mouths of the dead from Guatemala to the Thai-Cambodian border, whose characteristic posture—head back, neck arched—seems almost a universal language: the harvest of dictatorship, properly understood, is not death, but silence. Mr. Pinochet’s
desaparecidos
(like Slobodan Milošević’s, or Heinrich Himmler’s) are really
los callados
(the silenced), the snuffing of their voices only the last, most brutal expression of a system dependent on silence as a tool of repression. The enforced quiet of censorship and propaganda, of burning pages and jammed frequencies, is different from the gun to the temple only in degree, not in kind.
    And yet who could deny that silence, though both the means and end of totalitarian repression, is also its natural enemy? That silence, the habitat of the imagination, not only allows us to grow the spore of identity but also, multiplied a millionfold, creates the rich loam in which a genuine democracy thrives. In the silence of our own minds, in the quiet margins of the text, we are made different from one another as well as able to understand others’ differences from us.
    In the famous John Cage composition
4
33
,
the pianist walks onstage, bows, flips the tail of his tuxedo, and seats himself at the piano. Taking a stopwatch out of his vest pocket, he presses the start button, then stares at the keys for precisely four minutes and thirty-three seconds. When the time is up, he closes the piano and leaves the stage.
    Nearly half a century after it was first performed,
4
33
rightly strikes us as hackneyed and worn, a postmodern cliché intent on blurring a line (between art and non-art, order and disorder, formal structure and random influence) that has long since been erased. As simple theater, however, it still has power. Cage’s portrait of the artist frozen before his medium, intensely aware of his allotted time, unable to draw a shape out of the universe of possibilities, carries a certain allegorical charge, because we recognize in its symbolism—so apparently childlike, so starkly Manichaean—a lesson worthy of Euripides: art, whatever its medium, attempts to pry beneath the closed lid of the world, and fails; the artist, in his or her minutes and seconds, attempts to say—to paint, to carve, in sum, to communicate—what ultimately cannot be communicated. In the end, the wedge breaks, the lid stays shut. The artist looks at his watch and leaves the stage, his “success” measurable only by the relative depth of his failure. Too bad. There are worse things.
    But if silence is the