Richard Fung | |
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Notes on a photograph in Richard Fung's Sea in the Blood
They are walking up the stairs together. Ascending. Or are they posed there? Forced to wait while the photographer applies to this moment a frame which will absolve them of the need to remember. Instead of walking: automobiles. Instead of witnessing: the television. In place of memory: the photograph.Richard is already looking into the camera, towards home, his face a blur of concentration, some part of him already understanding that he will be more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it. But in his years as an artist, he has not held the camera up like a shield, he has insisted all along, as he insists here, on his own visibility, his own mortification.
Besides Richard his sister Nan. She is six years his senior, the responsible one, so even though she trails behind him, she leads him nonetheless. Tempering the rush. Measuring the cost of arrival.
Just prior to this photograph, Richard dishes a little history, the setting of this picture. Excerpts from an educational film describe Thalassaemia, a Greek term which lends this videotape its title: Sea in the Blood. A baritone voice of science explains that it's a hereditary anemia, a kind of leukemia. Passed along bloodlines, this illness is a way for unmet generations to commune, remaking bodies as the stage for an ancient way of knowing. This communication, this illness, is also a kind of memory, the first memory perhaps, of the way we have to die.
There is something in Nan's dress that makes her appear older than she really is. Is it the puffed crinoline shoulders, the long sweep of fabric gathered in a train behind her? Or the pair of blank stays that hover at her back, the beginning of wings? Like Richard, she is pitched towards the future, though she's in no hurry to arrive. She knows only too well what waits for her at the top of the stairs, and this knowing has made her face serious. She is already a woman, though not yet a teenager.
Richard belongs in this picture, even as he moves to escape it. He is already reaching for the man who will one day hold this photograph in his own hands, the man Richard, wondering that he used to. That he could have once. For the boy, Richard, memory is still in his future, along with the understanding that each of our desires exacts a toll. His sister Nan knows this better than anyone, her childhood is over, and it's been over for a long time now. In its place, she takes hold of her brother's hand, this ghost in her too-tall dress, this old woman of ten. Richard must be young, stay young, for the two of them. Her childhood ended when she learned of her illness, the sea in her blood. Along with her brother, her Richard, the one who always smiles, she is trying to hold on, welcoming death the only way she knows how. Slowly. By degrees.
In his videotape Richard says, "Nan's eventual death was a fact I was born into, like mangoes in July..." The illness is there from the beginning, at Nan's birth, inseparable from her. She is the disease. Not a temporary shelter, or a way station, she will never know the other side, the blank horizon of intimacies not yet tasted, desires shared with strangers. In their place she adventures with her younger brother, in their early years tracking comets and trying on jewelry, and later, as conspiratorial confidantes, reading Mao's red book which she keeps hidden from their father.
In the photograph her right hand clutches her brother while her left is withdrawn, lost in the folds of her dress. Her left hand holds her secret, the thing she cannot say, and cannot show, not even here, on the steps of this shared oblivion.
She is the still centre of this family, the keeper of its mystery. Years later, she will be the first person Richard comes out to. Richard is the confessor, the one who has returned to tell the how much and why and what of it all, to race up the stairs and take the camera in his own hands. He is too late, and too old now, to be able to cheat death, but he can tell its story, and he tells it here, in this moment which shows two children on a stairwell, ascending.
Originally published as: "Stairs" in "Like Mangoes in July: The Work of Richard Fung ed. Helen Lee and Kerri Sakamoto (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2002)