Gấu có những kỷ niệm khủng khiếp về cái đói, khi còn là 1 thằng bé nhà quê Bắc Kít. Có những kỷ niệm, là của ông bố của Gấu. Thí dụ cái chuyện bà nội của Gấu, chồng chết sớm, nuôi đàn con, có nồi thịt, bắt con ăn dè ăn xẻn thế nào không biết, nồi thịt biến thành nồi ròi.

Vô Nam, phải đến sau 30 Tháng Tư, Gấu mới được tái ngộ với cái đói, những ngày đi tù VC.
Thê lương nhất, và cũng tiếu lâm nhất, có lẽ là lần Gấu Cái đi thăm nuôi, lần đầu, sau mấy tháng mất tiêu mọi liên lạc với gia đình.
Cái tật viết tí tí, không bao giờ dám viết ra hết, kỷ niệm, hồi nhớ, tình cảm… nhất là thứ kỷ niệm tuyệt vời, nhức nhối.... là do cái đói gây nên!

Nhờ lần thăm nuôi đầu tiên, nhờ tiền gia đình gửi cho, cuộc đời tù của Gấu thay đổi hẳn. Buổi tối, Gấu thường la cà mấy lán, dự tiệc trà, thường là do mấy trại viên ban ngày có gia đình thăm nuôi mời. Để đáp lại, Gấu bèn trổ nghề kể chuyện tiếu lâm, quay phim chưởng. Danh tiếng vượt khỏi đội, tới mấy đội khác, rồi tới tai mấy ảnh. Và được mấy ảnh mời, cho ngồi nhậu chung, kể chuyện tiếu lâm.
Câu chuyện về Bác, có thể là còn đầy dư âm những ngày “tù trong tù”, tức những ngày ở tổ trừng giới. Thế là bèn xổ ra, cứ nhè Bác mà thọi! Vì Bác mà nên nông nỗi này!

So với câu chuyện về Bác, của NQL, cùng một một dòng, "hậu quả của hậu quả”, nhưng chuyện của Gấu, thì quá thường, so với của NQL.

Nay xin kể ra đây, cho rảnh nợ!

Trước khi kể Gấu cũng rào đón với mấy Quan quản giáo, đúng hơn, mấy Đấng TNXP, đừng có bắt tội thằng kể, và được OK.

Theo như truyền kỳ, thuở đó, thuở đó, Miền Bắc có một đội banh vô địch, đánh đâu thắng đó, và lần đó, qua Âu Châu dự World Cup, mang được Cup về cho xứ Mít. Trong bữa tiệc chia tay, ông bầu, bị đám báo chí Tây Phương phục rượu, xỉn quá, bèn phụt ra bí quyết:

-Mỗi khi ra trận, tui kêu cả đám cầu thủ tới, dặn một câu... thế là tụi nó đá như điên.

-Câu gì mà ghê thế ?
-Thì biểu tụi nó, tưởng tượng trái banh là đầu Bác H!
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Bảnh nhất, là mấy anh quản giáo Đỗ Hoà.
Tha cho anh già!
*
Chuyện của NQL, Đóng vai Bác Hồ! (1), theo Gấu, phải những tay mê viết văn, mê tạo ra những nhân vật, tức những mặt nạ, những thế thân... đọc, mới sướng. Bí quyết của nó, là nằm trong giai thoại Trang Tử nằm ngủ hóa Bướm, tỉnh dậy, không biết Bướm là Trang Tử, hay Trang Tử là Bướm.
Về ba thứ này, Borges là bậc thầy!
Như là một độc giả, rồi, như là một tác giả.

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Thư tín 1
Saturday, August 23, 2008 1:05 PM 

NQL tả chân quá siêu. Liên minh các chế độ hà khắc tạo ra những con người ẩn ức, để mặc bản năng hướng dẫn, đọc thấy thương, không thấy tục.
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NQL theo Gấu, cũng một thứ đệ tử Freud, coi libio là lực sáng tạo, thúc đẩy bánh xe lịch sử.
Tuy nhiên, phải nhìn ở tầng cao hơn, và đọc NQL song song với "Ba thằng lăng nhăng" của Tô Hoài, thí dụ, thì mới nhìn ra cái toàn thể. Đây là cuộc chiến giữa vai rớt Mác Xít và vai rớt Libido!
Và đọc đối chiếu với Võ Phiến, chẳng hạn.
Nhân vật VP, sở dĩ theo CS, là muốn huỷ diệt virus libio bằng vai rớt Mác Xít. Khi biết thất bại, ông về thành, từ bỏ con người tập thể, tìm lại con người như một cá thể, viết những truyện ngắn, tìm cách đào sâu cái phần libio như lực đẩy…
Đọc ông khi còn trẻ, Gấu lần ra Zweig, thầy của ông.
VP có những xen thật là khủng khiếp, thí dụ, hai cha con đóng vai Lã Bố, Điêu Thuyền, hay anh chàng cù lần ra đồng, đào miếng đất có bàn chân của bà vợ bỏ đi theo trai, về thờ...
Mailer, mới đây thôi, cũng toan tính giải thích virus Nazi bằng... libido, khi tưởng tượng ra một thời thơ ấu loạn luân của Hitler, trong Lâu Đài ở trong Rừng.

 

PHOTOGRAPHY

Susie Linfield

THE CRUEL RADIANCE

Photography and political violence 325pp.

University of Chicago Press. $30; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £19.50. 9780226482507

Susie Linfield takes as her title, and her text, a passage from James Agee. In the remarkable work of lyric reportage that he fashioned to accompany Walker Evans's equally remarkable photographs of the poor sharecroppers of Alabama in the Great Depression, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Agee wrote:

For in the immediate world, everything is to be discerned, for him who can discern it, and centrally and simply, without either dissection into science or digression into art, but with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the remissive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is.

For Agee, the crucial agent of influence here is the camera. He continued: "This is why the camera seems to me, next to unassisted weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time".

Linfield takes up where Agee left off. It is the camera, she argues, that has done so much to globalize our consciences; the camera that has brought us the twentieth century's bad news. Her work is at heart a serial reflection on our visual encounter with human suffering: the suffering of strangers. It speaks to our response, and our responsibility - "the opportunity, and the ability, to be moved by the plight of others". She adopts the question framed by the philosopher Richard Rorty, "Why should I care about ... a person whose habits I find disgusting?" and his suggested answer: "Because her mother would grieve for her". Linfield's contention is that the photograph is a tutorial in the grievous and the grievable. "The camera has been a key tool - perhaps the key tool - in enabling such empathic leaps." The Cruel Radiance is a treatise on moral witness and empathic leaps: a book of brief lives - grief lives - on both sides of the camera.

Put differently, it is a book about the ethical freight of that little sliver of sentience, the photograph, sparingly but discriminatingly illustrated. Inescapably, it is also about the bearer of the bad news, the photographer. Linfield examines three of the masters: "the optimist", Robert Capa; "the catastrophist", James Nachtwey; and "the sceptic", Gilles Peress. Each in his own way is exemplary, as their sobriquets serve to indicate, and her treatment of them is exemplary, too, for its impassioned clarity. John Berger is lauded in this work as "the most morally cogent and emotionally perceptive critic that photography has produced". For Linfield, criticism is a high calling. If these attributes are the test, she is equal to it. There is a scrupulous attentiveness to her looking-in and arguing-out.

The case study of Capa is a thoroughgoing revaluation. For Linfield, Capa was something more than the wild rover, if-your-pictures-aren’t-good-enough-you' re-not-close-enough debonair existentialist of the combat zone. For the world's greatest war photographer, he was surprisingly uninterested in carnage, or for that matter in battle. What drove him was not atrocity but possibility - "the lived knowledge of political possibility". His interest was, fundamentally, the moralist's. Capa was a moralizer, one might say, as opposed to a demoralizer. "His photographs record the twentieth century's moments of militant humanism", resumes Linfield in a moving peroration: and they do this by how he, working at the time, made them and by what we, in the present, bring to them. His images are antifascist because they document a flawed, deeply scarred humanity, and because they honor rather than scorn those flaws and those scars. Capa's photographs show us that human beings suffer, and make us want to know why; they show us that human beings endure, and make us want to know how. They show us that striving for a more-just world can sometimes succeed but more often fails, yet that to do so is never absurd or inconsequential.

The case study of Capa's successor, James Nachtwey, is the best thing yet written on that remorseless ascetic. As a bringer of bad news, Nachtwey is unparalleled. At the beginning of his signature collection, Inferno (1999), he quotes Dante: "Through me is the way to join the lost people". Linfield is a disquieted admirer; she wrestles with her scruples and his detractors (most productively with the philosopher J. M. Bernstein).

Nachtwey's photographs are didactic .... [His] particularly potent blend of graphic, sometimes  disgusting subject matter and bold, imposing compositions make it hard to maintain, or even establish, a free rein of emotions, much less of ideas. His images are overwhelming; they can make the viewer feel very small. (I sometimes think of Nachtwey as the Richard Serra of photography.) His photographs' great value - their utterly uncompromising depiction of physical suffering - is also their limitation. Nachtwey's images are astonishing, but they are also inflexible.

In the end she concludes that it is necessary work. "Nachtwey's photographs are an odd, compelling combination of misery and serenity, of edginess and supreme control, of horrible content and stylized form: they are, in short, visual oxymorons. But the perfection of their compositions - their so-called beauty - should not deflect us: Nachtwey's photographs are brutal, and they show us more than we can bear. But not more than we need to see." As if to underline her argument, the examples chosen as illustrations of his work are not to be seen in this book. What appears instead is a grey box, with a bare legend: "James Nachtwey Studio denied permission to reproduce this photograph. It can be found in James Nachtwey, Inferno, p.174". Revealed and concealed, the starving man of the Sudan and the hanging man of Afghanistan continue to perturb. If photographs teach us about our failure to comprehend the human, as Linfield believes, James Nachtwey's photographs help us to come closer: to fail better.

The pages on Nachtwey's contemporary Gilles Peress are no less searching. "For Peress", Linfield observes, "photography 's a way to think about the world." He is a philosopher with a camera. He is also a democrat, and a humanitarian. Photographs are open documents, he has said, "where half of the text is in the reader", a proposition brilliantly illustrated by an off-centre, out-of-kilter group portrait of the victims of the Shah of Iran's secret police, bearing the scars (and the prostheses) of their torture; and an oddly tender still life of bare feet, shoes and socks, left for dead in a Kosovan field. Peress contends that every image has four authors: the photographer, the camera, the viewer, and reality. In Linfield's words, his genius has been ... to incorporate a critique of photography's objectivity into that obstinate bit of bourgeois folklore formerly known as truth. He embraces postmodern skepticism, but uses it to enlarge photographic possibilities rather than to discredit the medium. Peress has taken the alienated sensibility typical of, and prized by, modem photographers and fused it to a passionate engagement with the world outside himself.

It is not too much to suggest that Linfield herself wishes to do something similar. Her book is at once a meditation on the democratic possibilities of the medium and an intervention in the somewhat impoverished critical discourse about it. Not for nothing is the opening chapter entitled "A Little History of Photography Criticism; or, Why Do Photography Critics Hate Photography?". The first part of this title summons the ghost of Walter Benjamin, and his "Little History of Photography" (1931); the second targets one critic in particular, together with her epigones, "the post modems". If John Berger is the benchmark, Susan Sontag is the bête noire. By her own admission, Linfield is writing against Sontag, against coolness, against detachment, against condescension - against the critical tone set by On Photography (1977). Linfield pits Pauline Kael on the movies against Sontag on photography and finds Sontag wanting. (Impossible to imagine a Sontag collection called Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.) The tone, and the reservation, are neatly encapsulated in Sontag's last utterance on the subject, "Photography: A little summa" (2003). "A photograph may be telling us: this too exists. And that.  And that.  (And it is all 'human'.) But what are we to do with this knowledge - if indeed it is knowledge, about, say, the self, about abnormality, about ostracized or clandestine worlds?" The Cruel Radiance is an attempt to answer that question. As criticism, it is a work of deep distinction. It will surely become part of the history of its field; in its own comer, Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) suffers by comparison. As treatise, it is not quite an integral whole. Betraying its origins, it remains a series of essays, or investigations. (Why is the literature of photography so essayistic? Does the sliver insist on the short form?) There are lacunae. "Perhaps the camera promises a festive cruelty", Judith Butler has suggested, of the images of Abu Ghraib; she writes provokingly of "the moral indifference of the photograph, coupled with its investment in the continuation and reiteration of the scene as a visual icon". Thus are Sontag's theories dealt with. Butler's are still current. Linfield joins a select company.

In the preamble to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee posed a series of unforgettable questions to his readers. Susie Linfield bids to do the same. "Who are you who will read these words and study these photographs, and through what cause, by what chance, and for what purpose, and by what right do you qualify to, and what will you do about it?" In the preamble to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee posed a series of unforgettable questions to his readers. Susie Linfield bids to do the same. "Who are you who will read these words and study these photographs, and through what cause, by what chance, and for what purpose, and by what right do you qualify to, and what will you do about it?"