Sitting, Reading, Falling through Hemon's Rabbit Hole

Into the final pages of Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project now, a rabbit hole of a book, W.G. Sebald reminscent. In which a contemporary writer goes searching for his subject (Lazarus Averbuch, a suspected anarchist shot down in March 1908, in the home of Chicago's chief of police). In which real life (but isn't this fiction?) collides with the imagined (but wasn't the suspected anarchist an historical artifact, his dead body photographed, the photograph here, in the pages of this book?). Hemon is a giant, a tease. He doesn't like the word novel, he has said. He observes the world astutely but refuses to take notes, or when he does, he can't decode them. He escapes classification. On purpose.

In any case, I have been sitting here, reading. I have glanced up now and then to get my bearings, watching the sun change shape on the door that divides my office from my home—the sun fisting through but bouncing back, turning around on itself. The camera, I realized, was nearby. I reached for it and took three photos. I returned to Hemon and then there was this—an exchange between Hemon's contemporary narrator (who is in Eastern Europe researching his Lazarus project) and his traveling companion, the photographer named Rora (who is not, we take it, to be confused with the actual traveling photographer who journeyed with Hemon to Eastern Europe as he researched this book).

In any case, this exchange was a startle in this, my mobius-strip afternoon:

Why did you take that picture?

That's a stupid question, Rora said. I take pictures.

Why do you take pictures?

I take pictures because I like to look at the pictures I take.

It seems to me that when people take a picture of something, they instantly forget about it.

So what?

So nothing, I shrugged.

They can look at the picture and remind themselves.

But what do you see when you look at a picture you took?

I see the picture, Rora said. What's with these questions?

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.