The Fountainhead

In my thirty-third year, I received a envelope of photographs with no return address. For the most part, they were pictures of places from my childhood: the home I grew up in, schools I attended, and Phelps Grove Park, which is about a block from my former house. The photos were arranged without explanation, and for the most part, with no human figures. They gave me a disorienting sensation of being stalked, observed from an unlocalizable location, but the object of this voyuerism was a former self. I was both within and outside of the photographs, the orgainizing principle behind their gaze, but absent from any particular image--both everywhere and nowhere.
At the bottom of the stack, I found two photographs of my parents in the park, a place where I spent most of my unstructured time before puberty. On a recent visit back to Springfield, Missouri, I was startled to find Phelps Grove is so familar to me that I recognized individual cracks in its concrete. From the time I was in high school, I have dreamt of this park at least once a month, often nightly.
In one picture my father stands with foot braced against the indistinguishable remains of a fountain made of concrete & red, clay-stained rocks reputedly unearthed by WPA workers with horse-drawn plows during the park's construction. The rocks are everywhere, but with its meandering waterfalls and convoluted design, the fountain was a newer addition, and I have a dim memory of it being built by the counter-culture. Whatever its origins, it is the centerpiece of my earliest dream--a recurring dream of wandering through towering trees till I arrived at the fountain to contemplate my unstable reflection. In some versions I reach for something in the water, but wake empty-handed.
Now, perhaps twenty-six years later, I receive a blurred photograph of Jim by its ruined hulk. The father intrudes on the primal scene, interrupting its narcissism. Yet he remains indistinct, inadvertantly stumbling into a place that exceeds his intent. The photograph also invokes a significance, a context, which precedes me. The camera looks at the rock, but my father looks elsewhere--crossed tangents. In search of origin I find not a fountainhead, but a geography, a plane formed by disconnected gazes.
If the unconscious is, as Lacan maintains, a language, in my case it is a spatial one, dotted with landmarks, riven by circuits of movement, and--most of all--traversed by others. Hence the tourist-like quality behind my father's image. Sans guidebook, the traveler pauses and faces the mute impossibility of completed knowledge. His presence documents the relic, but authority comes from elsewhere, from a set of relations.
Maybe true biography would not document events, but evoke these relations--shifting contexts and historical lines of force. At any given moment its subject hangs like a leaf in a mobile, embedded in recognizable structure, but one in perpetual motion, and whose architecture spirals far beyond the picture frame.