The Many Faces of Time

Is it just me or did you, too, have the sense back then, climbing into the photo booth, that you were clambering aboard H.G. Wells’ time machine? In fact, I used to think that’s where Wells had gotten the idea for his contraption in the first place. Shows you what I knew about history and chronology in those days.

I’d been passing a pleasant hour amid the stacks at Arcana Books, that marvelous little art-book emporium along the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica and, as I was getting set to cash out, I’d gotten into a rambling conversation with a mildly daft clerk there by the name of Babbette Hines. Turns out she was quite obsessed with the things--both the booths and the strips--and had been haunting flea markets and yard sales for years, scrounging about in the bottoms of boxes and filing cabinets, scaring up hundreds and hundreds of anonymous snaps and carefully, reverentially reclaiming and preserving them. Here, she said, look--did I have a minute? She’d organized her stash into a sort of album; did I want to see? She pulled the bulging volume from a shelf under the cash register and invited me to dally a little longer.

And it turns out I did know something about time: For here those visages came hurtling back into the present, right this instant, traces from another era, fresh and cocky, spry and shy, goofy and glum, tender and tendentious, clueless and self-conscious as the day they were first prized.

Time machines, indeed. For as I turned the pages, it was as if the strips were revving up and sending me hurtling back there, back to that prior age: a sequence of little wormholes, coiled there, unsuspecting, unsuspected, on the page.

In a luminous little essay on “The Face,” Jean-Paul Sartre once evoked a marble bust in his exploration of the human face, in an effort to heighten the contrast between the two. A marble bust, he suggested, exists in “universal time,” which is to say, the time “of instants set end to end, of the metronome, of the hourglass, of fixed immobility.” Such a bust floats in “a perpetual present.” But the face “creates its own time within universal time .... Against [that] stagnant background, the time of living bodies stands out because it is oriented .... In the midst of these stalactites hanging in the present, the face, alert and inquisitive, is always ahead of the look I direct toward it .... A bit of the future has now entered the room: a mist of futurity surrounds the face: its future.” The face, Sartre goes on to insist, “is not merely the upper part of the body .... It is corporeal yet different from belly or thigh: what it has in addition is its voracity; it is pierced with greedy holes.”

The greediest, the most ravenous of those holes, of course, being the eyes. For “now the two spheres are turning in their orbits: now the eyes are becoming a look,” and in so doing changing the very nature of the thing they are looking at--say, that chair over there--a change which is in turn reciprocal. “If I watch his eyes, I see that they are not fastened in his head, serene like agate marbles. They are being created at each moment by what they look at.”

But look at what was going on here. For, yes, these sitters in their long-ago photo booth, frozen though they had become, weren’t anything like marble busts; rather, in orienting themselves toward a future, composing themselves (in fact, they were gauging their own reflections in the pane of glass that intervened between themselves and the camera), beholding themselves, they were looking at how they would be seen. (And now do get seen!) They’d tried on this pose and then that (funny the way that by the third or fourth pose, as if on second thought, they’d often reverted to the first)--addressing first themselves (there in the mirrored glass), and beyond that the intended other (girlfriend, boyfriend, parent, sibling, pen pal, bureaucrat), but beyond that, well, something like the undifferentiated future--faceless posterity--us!

Sartre goes on to conclude how “[I]f we call transcendence the ability of the mind to pass beyond itself and all other things as well, to escape from itself that it may lose itself elsewhere; then to be a visible transcendence is the meaning of a face.”

In the months since, Babbette Hines found a publisher--the book will be out in October from Princeton Architectural Press--and, the other day, I received an advance galley. The experience of browsing through the coming volume proved no less absorbing.

For one found oneself holding a veritable album of such Sartrean transcendings. Nameless, typified (the Flirt, the Dowager, the Hood, the Accountant, the Kid, the Sailor and his Buddy, the Patriot, the Lovers, Pals, the Tough, Pattycakes, the Virgin, the Cadet, Grandpa) and yet each one tinctured with individuality (that hat, that drooping cigarette, that brooch, those brows, that smirk, that muff, that grin, that grief)--like no one so much as one’s very own self, here on the page: a nameless, typical, typified individual momentarily struck dumb, pillow of air lodged in his mouth, marveling, particulate, as the transcendent came hurtling forth and struck home.