I've spoken about the fluidity of time because it moves past our consciousness with such alarming velocity. The impossibility of stopping time to capture the moment, the sheer irony of trying to do this in an image obsessed culture that is continually in motion.
By the time the particular sliver of an instance of a movement through space- i.e. what we call "now"- is downloaded (much less read, seen and printed) it's gone forever.
There's an image of my granddaughter age 31/2, standing with her arms bent at the elbow and hands placed on hips, fearlessly and innocently facing the camera, the world, and all the future to come.
She's barefoot and wearing a periwinkle blue dress remindful of a pinafore, with little vines of red and yellow and orange daisy-like flowers trailing up and down along the sides; it gives a happy smock effect and is at least a size too big, and so it reaches almost to her ankles and resembles the kind of outfit a child might have worn a very long time ago. The little wearer of this apparel is standing on the wood floor of a front room that could pass for a parlor. On the wall in back of her is a small, cozy little fireplace of painted white brick with some lit candles placed inside its hearth for illumination.
The scene could be a portrait from a hundred or more years ago evoking a simpler time, and the house is almost that old too. But in the mere seconds it takes to view this latter day tableau vivant on a monitor or hand held screen, taking into account as well the minutes passed before the "send" and the moments in which it all was captured and snapped so confidently into the photographer's hugely intelligent though quite tiny phone, that exact reality and everything contained in it has changed inexorably; now it's just a fleeting scene from the a receding past, never to be repeated in precisely the same way.
This among other reasons- such as not having access to instant moment-capturing, hand held computers or even primitive, personal cameras- no doubt is why the practice of tableau vivant was so popular among a certain, hoity toity, self-obsessed class from the famed Gilded Age, the ruthless though exceedingly well dressed old and newer monied robber barons and their blue-stockinged consorts of a century or so ago.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, at a gathering or party of the old money gods, tableau vivant or "living scene" served as a form of amusement, like home movies or stills projected onto a screen. Participants would dress up and pose as a character from a painting by one of the old masters. The live imitator of the still portrait would start this party game presentation behind a curtain, which then would be lifted in the manner of revealing a famous portrait into which the party guest had inserted or substituted her or himself, in the full dress of the original artists' model, and voila!
This practice was historically encoded to great effect in Wharton's House of Mirth, when the heroine Lily Bart participates in such an early image-copying bit of fanciful fun.The delicate and naturally ravishing Lily is an aspiring flower whose family unluckily has suffered financial downgrading in an upmarket society; thus is she forced to barter her inherited facility of being ornamentally pleasing and socially accommodating, in order to retain a tenuous place in the realms of in gold. It's a tricky balance however, and won't keep her in everyone's good stead forever unless she marries eventually and marries well, which means in her case (the declining social status being a major element) most probably to a suitor whom either she does not love or who is part of the clan but like her not really that well provided for. One example of the latter situation would be hooking up with someone who actually must work for a living, even if it's just hi falutin' selective lawyering or part time doctoring (we're not talking ditch diggers here in this set). The novel is part Victorian, part modern, and a wonderful read (barring Wharton's genteel anti-semitism in the character of one of the more socially unacceptable suitors with an income, Sam Rosedale, described as of the "blonde Jewish" type, but still a Yid; just ascribe it to the times and the authorial pedigree, and read it anyway- it's worth it).
Meanwhile, back at one of those fancy soirees that will feature tableau vivants as part of the evening's self aggrandizing amusement, Lily chooses a magnificent though somewhat suggestive pose from a Reynolds, and when the curtain is drawn back, she reveals more about herself than just a two dimensional image of some rich dame hanging in a museum. The diaphanous, subtly sensual pose of a blue blood's pretty wife in which Lily chooses to cloak herself for this fantasy reveals her classic beauty in all its allure, and has people gasping.
In Wharton's cautionary tale of the pitfalls of vanity however, this particular scene in the novel also has a special, foreshadowing meaning; Lily, a flower whose bloom like all living blooms will not last forever, still has refused to compromise, to assume a more acceptable, usual place in the standing social order, and just marry someone already.
The 3 1/2 year old in the present portrait, facing down the viewers in front of a simple, candle lit fireplace, is wearing the periwinkle pinafore with many colored flowers that also hints of something from another, more distant era. And although she may indeed grow up as lovely as the former Lily, even now she has that slightly knowing and subtly mischievous expression that signifies girls have come a long, long way since then, if still not totally the whole route. Sometimes she acts like a black belt, takes a firmly defensive, keep-your-distance bodily stance and screams lollypop power! It can be quite unnerving and effective, taking her young age into account. In addition, she even may choose to become an astronaut if she wants.
And that's good. Or as my granddaughter might say, reaaaallly good. And so we keep encoding history and the swift passage of time with our little cameras, whether internally or externally; and at the very least all these nano seconds of experience form memories and create abstract guideposts as we travel through our allotted spaces. The yesterdays comprise an ever fleeting present, and they live on in stories and images remembered from an eternal past.
