Memorialising the moment
On Hua Hsu, Grizzly Man and being 'in the moment'
Not infrequently this summer have I been in a group of friends—at a barbecue, by the beach, at the pub—when one has turned to the group and said something along the lines of: ‘god, guys, we’ve really got to appreciate this while we’ve got it.’ This is both in reference to the beautiful, perfect moment we are all sat together sharing, but also more broadly, in reference to the fact that a big group of friends currently live within a 5-minute radius of each other. It’s not lost on us that this is incredibly rare for London, and so the feeling prevails that we have to be extra grateful right now, enjoy this while it lasts.
This is followed up with choruses of ‘you’re so right’, ‘aren’t we so lucky’, ‘love you guys’. All of which are true, factually and emotionally. In addition to the sentimental noises I make at such a moment, oohs and aahs of loud agreement, there’s something that keeps me slightly apart. Yes, we are so lucky. Yes, we should enjoy this while it lasts. But weren’t we just doing that before it got pointed out?
Of course, gratitude is important. Life moves so quickly these days that being able to distance yourself enough to take a step back and say, this is what is good about my life, is a skill. It’s what keeps us grounded and appreciative, saving us from the likelihood that we’d all be anxious wrecks running around stressing the small stuff and believing ourselves to be the most beleaguered being on the planet.
Is there such a thing as ill-timed gratitude? When these moments occur with friends, I regularly feel taken out of myself, out of the moment that we were all so enjoying, forced to give it a postmortem before it’s even passed. I have a similarly fraught relationship with photos. I regularly tell myself that I need to take more, to remember the mundanities of my life, then promptly leave it weeks then months without anything interesting entering my camera roll. I regularly leave dinners and nights out without taking photos of anything more interesting than a funny bit of latrinalia.
E recently lent me Stay True, the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir by New Yorker staffer Hua Hsu about his friendship with Ken during college, and Ken’s brutal and sudden death in a carjacking. Hsu’s writing is tender and compassionate, a heartfelt look back at a time and place (the 90s, Berkley campus) that meant so much to him and formed a part of who he is. He approaches the kid he used to be with the clear-sightedness of the adult he currently is, acknowledging his shortcomings and analysing the reasons for his passions and prejudices.
About Ken’s murder, he captures the senseless violence of it and the hole it left in his and his friends’ lives, the ways in which they all separately tried to cope. For himself, Hsu says, ‘mostly, I became obsessed with the possibility of a sentence that could wend its way backward. I picked up a pen and tried to write myself back into the past.’ He writes things down constantly, always writing to Ken, always scribbling down scraps of moments, things half-heard, ‘because it was my way of coping, of telling stories, of thinking that stories could build a bridge over an abyss. Maybe it was legacy, a way of bringing Ken into this moment’.
For Hsu, memorialising each moment becomes a necessity in his grieving for Ken. He and his friends have a sudden realisation that they, at such a young, tender, impressionable age, are growing older without Ken, forming themselves and hardening, calcifying and stretching, without their great friend. He is given the task of writing Ken’s obituary, he says not because he was any great shakes as a writer at that time, but because he was seen to be writing these scraps constantly. His friends and Ken’s parents assumed that he would want to. Wanting doesn’t come into it. Hsu takes the task on graciously, piecing stories about Ken together from his wider group of friends and acquaintances.
Writing and memorialising becoming a looping compulsion for Hsu, so much so that it seems to lock him into his grieving. The loop’s trick is that this is a way that he has found to be close to Ken, but it keeps him at a distance from everyone else, so that when another of his friends questions whether him and Ken were even that close, he is shocked. I recognise Hsu’s instinct to keep writing through the hurt, to bring someone in with scraps of words that you think might matter to them, might make it better for you. As quickly as the sand runs through our hands, we try to grasp it to make it stay.
Recently, I was watching Grizzly Man with T, the 2005 Werner Herzog documentary about Timothy Treadwell, the self-described protector and advocate for bears. Treadwell was mauled to death by a bear after 13 years of ‘protecting’ them in Alaska. Herzog’s documentary is a mixture of new footage (interviews with those close to Treadwell, visits out to the site that he frequented each summer) and collaged edits of Treadwell’s own footage. He filmed himself incessantly, creating his own mythos around who he was and his mission. Herzog is by turns admiring of Treadwell—he has a director’s instinct, keeping the camera rolling and taking several takes, knowing when to stick to the script and when to improvise—and parsing through the footage to find the man as he really was. Herzog uncovers that Treadwell was performing solitude; his girlfriend/companion Amie Huguenard died with him but hardly ever appeared in his footage. She is occasionally seen, her face obscured, or felt to be there, because it is a handheld shot of Treadwell and she is presumed to be the one holding the camera.
Grizzly Man is a lesson in documentary making and how to show empathy for your subject while also unpicking their foibles. I am not the first person to say or think this since its release in 2005; watching it now, I was struck by Treadwell’s near-constant recording, his performance for the camera, his constant rapturous repetitions of ‘I love this’, or ‘I love you’ to any furry animal that crosses his path. Deeper than gratitude, Treadwell memorialises everything exactly as it happens to him, and with a running commentary that then extrapolates a deeper meaning from it, from every fox’s ear twitch to every trampled patch of grass. He paints himself as lord god and supreme protector of the wildlife, raising awareness of conservation issues, which of course is a good thing, but the way he does so, at least on tape, is unsettling. There’s something Uriah Heep-like about him, professing his smallness in the world as he then proclaims that he’s the only one who cares about these animals. His voice is high-pitched and aiming at childlike while his careful choice of hairstyle conceals a rapidly receding hairline.
Without attempting to psychoanalyse the man from beyond the grave, I am haunted by the reality he attempted to construct for himself through film. As Hsu tried to bring his dead friend into the present with him, Treadwell creates a life for himself that he never had, one where all eyes are on him, where he gets to be the centre of attention. So much so that he takes explicit pains to edit out any companionship, making himself the sole hero of his life.
I think about my friends, these moments of ensuring presence when in fact we are then taken out of it completely. Compared to Hsu or Treadwell, these moments are far more innocent, more marked by a desire to ensure we take advantage of the time here, together, now, while we are all at and in the same place (geographically, but also in life). It’s true, we have far too few photos of these times. For the most part, we are all together, enjoying one another’s company, loud or quiet. Honestly, the times we have photos of are the big, loud ones, the Euros final this summer or a night out. There’s something of Treadwell’s self-mythologising there—we were and have always been big, loud, smiley, happy, together—and something of Hsu’s grief-filled scribblings—we may not always be together again like this, let me bring you with me as a photo until we are.
I am unsure of how to end this; ending a piece is always the part I find the most difficult, but there’s a symmetry here. As much as I may resent being taken out of the moment, shaken into gratitude and examining The Moment like a pearly snow globe, if I was left to my own devices I would barrel on with no memento of any moment whatsoever. I don’t want to find or acknowledge endings by taking photos or scribbling things down, but I’m always glad I have them.
In other news, I have written two pieces recently:
An interview with the painter Lewis Hammond for Plaster Magazine.
A piece on buying a house with a vineyard in England for the Financial Times.
They were both very fun to research and write! Thanks to Lewis and to everyone that spoke to me about vineyards.