Image Study I: “He invisioned his life as a stutterer’s thought, wildly out of his control.”

This old picture reminded me of the Swede when I saw it– I think it’s a good way of showing the immense care he took in shaping his life; helped by luck and talent, he drew lines of normalcy and happiness around himself and his family quite like his father took so much care in making those Newark Maid gloves– and Merry blasted him out of those lines as surely as Newark itself has been swiftly changed from idyllic childhood playground to a noisome, dangerous place of car thieves and drag racers.

It is just as fascinating as it is horrifying, and Merry took it to heart. The Swede believed that this monk’s immolation, and that of other monks, later, had touched Merry somehow, so deeply and so profoundly… that it was the immolation of the monks, televised into their living room, that caused her to bomb the general store. So far, it’s hard to tell whether or not that’s only wishful thinking. How else could the Swede try to understand the pain his daughter caused in the town– in himself– in herself? “Out of nowhere and into their home, the nimbus of flames, the upright monk, and the sudden liquefaction before he keels over; into their home all those other monks, seated along the curbstone impassively looking on… into their home on Arcady Hill Road the charred and blackened corpse on its back in that empty street. That was what had done it.” (p. 154)

There are so many things about this picture that remind me of the main character, Skip Zuckerman, and his high school reunion– the picture is old and the people are clearly aging, first of all, which is one of the main things he seems to focus on– the fact that everyone is old, and the people who act young are lying through what teeth they have left. The dancing, too, struck me, not because Skip danced at his reunion with a girl he used to like but because of how the picture was taken; the couple in the center are awkwardly close and the others are completely in the dark, their legs skewed at weird angles and their faces hidden. All the dancers seem rather mismatched, their faces blurred and strained, as if they are trying hard not to upset or irritate their partner and so stay moving, with cheery smiles, the whole time. The entire thing has an air of awkwardness to it, actually, and disappointment; like you’d imagine a high-school reunion to be, and like Zuckerman found his.