Meditating the holocaust

PARADOX OF SILENCE:
Photographs, Lines, Verses and Wordplay
By Briccio Santos
Maria Bianca Publishing, 2004

April 18 is observed in the Hebrew calendar as Holocaust Day and Briccio Santos could not have chosen a more appropriate time than Easter to launch his first book, Paradox of Silence. Lent evokes and harnesses like no other the interlocked themes in dying and reviving, entombment and transfiguration, with which Santos seeks to come to grips in a manner that in all probability has known no precedent.

The first of a two-volume project, the book begins to enlighten the reader about its author’s intentions right on its front cover. He used a photograph – embossed to throw stark black into almost imperceptible relief in an expanse of white – that he took in what was once the Nazi camp in Dachau, which witnessed a good part of the attempted destruction of European Jews.

If that complex, infamous episode in history has retained its urgency two generations after it happened, impacting even on people born in another time and another place, it is probably because of persistent efforts by books such as Santos’ to root out the aberration displayed in Dachau and to surface its links in the groundmass of the human imagination.

The book’s subtitle – "Photographs, Lines, Verses and Wordplay" – enumerates the major forms to which the author plots the movement of his argument, starting, as the cover suggests, from a chaotic center perceived in the unprecedented violation of humanity represented by Dachau. The chaos is thickened, almost masked by darkness, but a headless human figure rises powerfully in the foreground to direct our attention to glimmerings in the distance, a picture not principally of foreboding but paradoxically of hope tempered by these elegiac lines:

Headless wondering spirit,

bewildered and puzzled

over an image that once fell

into a blackhole of darkness.

A guardian whispered gently "be not afraid my child this will fill your one desire relieve all memories of fire."

From this putative center that didn’t hold, the effort of understanding – the headless spirit – sprints like the spirit of storytelling and of Mnemosyne in innumerable directions, sustained in some measure by fragments of what would seem to be formulae for survival, esoteric codes and intuitive calculations in the form of alphanumerics. It is possible some of the intuitive numbers that Santos reproduces on a page references to particular space-time coordinates of the holocaust as it advances or declines, or to celestial progress on some ecliptic, or to some mythical invariance. It is equally possible they refer us to the bureaucratic digits that summed up an individual Jew and facilitated mass execution.

Once upon a time when man lost his way in these endless labyrinths of corridors, the gas chamber must have felt unreal walking silently in disbelief, feeling a sudden chill, as of wind passing implanting grief on every door.

Wittingly or unwittingly, the reader is swept across post-war terrain, principally of Paris, as an occasional signpost in a photo or dateline to a text suggests. But it could well be any place in post-lapsarian times, and Santos’ focus on the matter-of-fact, the banal item would seem to confirm our suspicion that he has extended an invitation to enter and wander in a maze of reflections in which distance is eclipsed and history is every journey’s destination.

There are hardly full human figures in the landscape in which we wander with the author, mostly shadows and limbs teetering on a demarcation and a decision to cross, or lurking in corners worn thin by the speed of error, waiting at the foot of strange hieratic structures once climbed as a matter of habit, or glinting on the surface of a river freezing, or hesitating in an alley.

Perhaps full human figures are "illusive" as the author puts it elsewhere in the book, in a play at "elusive." But surely the author intends the reader to fill up this gap, to flesh out the insubstantial, to inhabit the inscape, to step into the phantom shoes of stoics, and thus to travel with him, on condition that one acquire the agility.

... to sense between objects and space, presence and being where the subject is absent has implications quite unique of its kind as being able to step back or forward at no risk from the gravity of time.

The book has a complex minimalist structure. Throughout, it propels its argument through identically-sized twin-photos on every spread, one being a solarized version of the other, with the effect of establishing, sooner than later, an uncanny rhythmic sense of response and correspondence. This is heightened by the projection of lines from selected points in the solarized version, thus conferring on the graphic inversion the quality of striving extra dimensionality or surreality.

A saltimbanque invigorates every spread, attended invariably by a set of three close ups or views of details, integrated tellingly if with levity early on by the picture of a man (only his lower half is shown and characteristically from behind) leading a dog that casts behind the man its shadow which has spilled irrevocably like liquid on the concrete step. The details are of the man’s legs, the dog’s hind legs, and a good part of its shadow.

The dog, the follower and a shadow

Engaged in the art of dodging

Crowded city beat and noisy cylinders

Crossing safely, a gesture is silence

Rejoicing to be free and kin to be three.

The author adds oblique reference, ellipsis and overarching projectile the better to force a non-mechanical response to the twits of his meditation.

Such stratagems of art enable Briccio Santos to assault some blind spots in our perception and question the habit of assent as we plod, page after page, the spiritual terrain he covers effortlessly it almost seems in numberless expeditions launched without any alarums from some Cartesian nook of his imagination.