Polaroid Frame Quotes

I took a Polaroid of her one night and stuck it into the frame of the mirror in the living room. Reva thought it was a loving gesture, but the photo was really meant as a reminder of how little I enjoyed her company if I felt like calling her later while I was under the influence.

Here is a life in still frames. Moments like Polaroids. Like paintings. Like flowers pressed between the pages of a book. Perfectly preserved. The three of them, napping in the sun. Addie, stroking Henry’s hair while she tells him stories, and he writes, and writes, and writes. Henry, pressing her down into the bed, their fingers tangled, their breath quick, her name an echo in her hair. Here they are, together in his galley kitchen, his arms threaded through hers, her hands over his as they stir béchamel, as they knead bread dough. When it is in the oven, he cups her face with floury hands, leaves trails everywhere he touches. They make a mess, as the room fills with the scent of freshly baking bread. And in the morning it looks like ghosts have danced across the kitchen, and they pretend there were two instead of one.

Here’s what strikes me when I think back to my childhood, particularly those first nine Internet-less years: I can’t account for everything that happened back then, because I have only my memory to rely on. The data just doesn’t exist. When I was a child, “the unforgettable experience” was not yet a threateningly literal technological description, but a passionate metaphorical prescription of significance: my first words, my first steps, my first lost tooth, my first time riding a bicycle. My generation was the last in America and perhaps even in world history for which this is true—the last undigitized generation, whose childhoods aren’t up on the cloud but are mostly trapped in analog formats like handwritten diaries and Polaroids and VHS cassettes, tangible and imperfect artifacts that degrade with age and can be lost irretrievably. My schoolwork was done on paper with pencils and erasers, not on networked tablets that logged my keystrokes. My growth spurts weren’t tracked by smart-home technologies, but notched with a knife into the wood of the door frame of the house in which I grew up.

Ulay’s Polaroids of that period often showed him piercing his own flesh in various bloody ways. In one work, he tattooed one of his aphorisms on his arm: ULTIMA RATIO (meaning final argument or last resort, referring to force). Then he cut a square hunk of flesh containing the tattoo out of his arm, slicing so deeply that the muscle and tendon were visible. He framed and preserved the tattooed flesh in formaldehyde. For another image, he held a bloodstained paper towel over a self-inflicted razor wound in his belly. A series of shots showed him slicing his fingertips with a box cutter and painting the white tiles of a bathroom with his own blood. (...)somebody gave Ulay a Newton’s cradle. He was fascinated by the back-and-forth swinging of the shiny metal balls, the little clack they made when they collided, the perfect transfer of energy. “What if we did that?” he said. I immediately understood what he was talking about: a performance where the two of us would collide and bounce off each other. We were naked, standing twenty meters apart. We were in a warehouse on the island of Giudecca, just across the lagoon from Venice. A couple hundred people were watching. Slowly at first, Ulay and I began to run toward each other. The first time, we just brushed past each other as we met; on each successive run, though, we moved faster and faster and made harder contact—until finally Ulay was crashing into me. Once or twice he knocked me over. We had placed microphones near the collision point, to pick up the sounds of flesh slapping flesh. (...) then [Ulay] took out a heavy needle, the kind used to sew leather, attached to some thick white thread, and he sewed his lips shut. This didn’t happen quickly. First he had to penetrate the skin below his lower lip—not easy—and then the skin above his upper lip. Also not easy. Then he pulled the thread tight and tied a knot. And then he and I changed places: Ulay sat down among the audience, and I sat in the chair he had just occupied. “Now,” I told our friends, “you will ask me questions and I will answer as Ulay.