Smuggle in a Sandwich
Reprinted from For Your Art
While waiting to view Christian Marclay’s The Clock at
LACMA, however—and thank whoever there is to thank for this—I not only had Guy
Davenport’s essays but also, by happy accident, I had chosen from the
collection “Walt Whitman”: an essay about Horace Traubel’s conversations with
Whitman over the course of 1,458 evenings from 1888 to 1892. Davenport
specializes in plucking mind-altering nuggets from massive amounts of
information, and out of mountains of transcripts, he notices, more than
anything else, Whitman’s dirty floor. Davenport finds young Traubel surrounded
by an ever-growing sea of paper, fragments, notes, and bits of snipped rhyme
reaching a point of mass. It was difficult even to find a place to sit.
Little wonder Leaves of Grass went into 6 editions during
Whitman’s lifetime alone. If not for Whitman’s death, no doubt, he would have
continued his additive promiscuity, still aggregating, still making lists,
synthesizing and promulgating themes into his epic. Whitman’s poem grew as the
country grew, collecting words as the U.S. collected lands and states,
dividing, fighting then moving west, constantly taking in and taking on more of
the continent. The best way to get to the “we” of America was by exploring the
multitude of the “I,” and Whitman wanted his “I” as big as possible. The floor
got dirtier and more personal. Traubel’s record of his conversations with
Whitman grew to 9 volumes and took 90 years to print.
However, I had to leave Whitman in Camden. LACMA’s Bing
Theater opened and there was The Clock, running on the big screen. I was eager
to see it and slipped seamlessly out of the poet’s clutter and collection of
American realities into Christian Marclay’s collection of time.
I got my bearings in the dark theater, but I was already in
The Clock as soon as I sat down. I’ve always been involved with and always been
inside this flowing movie of clips. A Japanese boardroom, all white, with an
enormous clock. Two people in bed—she’s naked and he’s late. An effortless turn
down a dark hallway, and another turn at its end. A gleaming set of doors with
nurses stitching in and out, carrying newborns, white again. A family sits at
table. Orson Wells in The Third Man, examining a car crash. Christopher Walken
kept the watch, “Up his ass,” only to come here, “little man,” and hand it to
you. Back to the family table. Time for grace.
How easy it is to list these events kissed and assembled
with Marclay’s poetic touch. With Whitman close at hand and floating in my
head, the list could even flow right back into Leaves of Grass:
“The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles,
talk of
the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb,
the
clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of
snow-balls,
The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous’d mobs,
The flap of the curtain’d litter, a sick man inside borne to
the hospital,
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath . . .”
“What living and buried speech is always vibrating here,”
Whitman says to close his stanza, and he could as easily be describing The
Clock. I imagine multiple servers, hard drives, DVDs, pampas of notes and
storage trying to hold Marclay’s big memory—a memory that aims at nothing less
than everything—and feel the echo of Whitman’s dirty floor.
The Clock, however, might even be a more elegant synthesized
whole than Leaves of Grass, which likes to groan and twist as much as wander
into performances of virtuoso union. Neither can be taken in one sitting and both
compulsively suck you in. Yet the tastes and gears of the contemporary give The
Clock a sort of smuggle in a sandwich and pressure on the bladder addictive
nature far beyond books. You push impossibly into the whole of it and are not
content to stop. You are constantly in the pseudo-involvement of a film, but
cannot pick up the story because there is no story (Isn’t it strange to be
unable to leave a story because there is no story?).
Instead, you follow The Clock, are absorbed into The Clock.
My eyes twitched and sought, followed each stimulation. Even after I made
myself leave The Clock for my car, each billboard and point of ordinary
fascination on Wilshire was something I had to have and take in like a bag of
M&Ms. The Clock mimics the hungry joy of Whitman and gives it tight
entertainment value.
Zadie Smith called The Clock “neither bad nor good, but
sublime, maybe the greatest film you have ever seen,” and she’s exactly right.
The Clock is a constant sublime apparition, a ceaseless trove of awe-production,
at least at the moment. Certain people may have lost their interest in the
Grand Canyon. Not so for The Clock, at least not yet. You don’t get bored. You
can say you “get it,” that you have the concept of The Clock, but the
minute-to-minute dazzle of the film quickly reminds you that there’s more to
life than concepts. You are checked only by biological need and the schedules
of the day. If you are Geoff Dyer, even the schedules evaporate, for the writer
confessed that on seeing The Clock, there was nothing in his day to rival it.
Appointments are ignored. Such is the tightly bound but densely fascinating
world of The Clock.
The Clock both is and isn’t Whitman’s dirty floor. It has
the fragments but not the clutter. It is an aggregation but is fully mature. I
think of Whitman and Whitman’s poem and necessarily see a vibrantly bearded
madman containing his frowzy America. Equally just is thinking of Marclay as he
is: a thin, serious Euro-DJ bent on perfection, turning time in an almost
perfect machine.
I find this distinction significant. In Leaves of Grass,
life is ever in the process of becoming art and therefore remains life. In The
Clock, life has gotten so close to art, so remarkable sown into a whole, that
the dramatic difference between the film and life becomes miraculously
apparent. While in Whitman, the collective “we” emerges from the dramatically
large “I,” in Marclay, the collective “we” and thousands of little “I”s arrive
as a seamless whole.
We gasp together in The Clock, we get scared together, we
laugh together, and it’s haunting because we discover we are haunted: by an
imperfect but ever present past; by various voices that can seem so utterly
perfectly like our voice that we forget we come from those very voices. We can, if we get meditative, entertain
notions of how we are built and how we are all a population of ghosts—all
reflected facets of a thousand faces. In The Clock, we dance with Eisenstein’s
and Hugo’s automaton, a creature only half alive. It’s the best we can do before
we lose control and become ourselves.
How we are built is the knowledge that we collectively build
the significant particulars of each moment of our lives. We start with a shared
biology—we eat in intervals, we lose steam in the afternoon, we sleep at night,
and frequently because of the popularity of sleep as a nighttime activity, we
find that the deep night is often spent alone. These biological details, with
consciousness, become metaphoric—dawn becomes a stand in for birth, the early
morning a time of youthful inspiration, the adult grind and reality of the
afternoon, the soft decline of the evening, death at dark. Certain historical
moments try to transcend metaphor—Jesus died at 3 o’clock on Good Friday and
Christians believe that at 3 o’clock on that day, they are literally closer to
that point in history than at any moment. It is not always a religious impulse
though—anyone who has discovered that at 8:46 in the morning it’s easier to
feel closer to 9-11 knows this: it’s the moment the plane hit the first World
Trade Center Tower. No other moment of the day is closer.
The Clock is built from these significant particulars, which
are subsequently built from thousands of sources and authors. It is a collage
of art based on what is collectively built by humans out of stories and into
movies; out of movies and into other movies. Each instant is the vision of
someone else, yet collectively, it is a vision of us, as though a multitude of
ants were sent by an unknown impulse out to an array of paths, and when each
returned with their individual found, hewn, or constructed pebble, the built
mound still looked like a mound. Biology appears, metaphor comes naturally, and
historical flash points organize, just like in history. And also like history,
Marclay’s The Clock, ultimately, with all of its clips, alternate realities,
and mixed music, miraculously is still a day.
And like all perfect art, The Clock brings us to the point
where we are all remarkably passive—to the ledge of becoming what we are, which
transcends representation, which means being an ambitious actor inside
Whitman’s multitude, which means leaving the theater. It will be messy once it
starts, and it starts once we leave art and enter life. In my viewing of The
Clock, this was the moment, having seen all the tables set and food prepared, I
discovered I was hungry. Right on time.