Affinities by Brian Dillon review – in the eye of the beholder | Essays

Why do some things combine and others separate? Add nitric acid to gold, and nothing happens. Pour on aqua regia, a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids, and the gold dissolves. The chemical doctrine of affinity emerged as a way to explain these reactions. In his 1809 novel Elective Affinities, Johann Wolfgang Goethe applied the idea to human relationships. Charlotte and Edward may form a stable union but if Edward has an affinity with young Ottilie – ah, well, then all bets are off.

What is an affinity? A little like a crush, I suppose, at least at the beginning. And sometimes just as fleeting. But sometimes more stable, more serious, and more revealing of our ways of engaging with things. Brian Dillon’s writings have always been marked by affinities – for artworks, for writers, even for particular sentences. In this work he turns his attention to the notion of affinity itself, through an examination of images that have drawn his gaze.

We start with a picture from Robert Hooke’s 1665 work Micrographia: a full stop as seen under a microscope, the tiny circle revealed in magnification to be “disfigured, ragged, deformed”. We pass through Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of her niece, pictures of seahorses from a documentary, a scientific drawing of a migraine aura from 1870. There are abstract patterns captured in the ruins of Hiroshima, dadaist collages, a still from the BBC film production of Samuel Beckett’s Not I – our attention guided always by Dillon’s attraction and fascination. The effect is not unlike having a better-read friend take you by the hand and show you around the things he loves.

Dillon tentatively suggests a connection between the images: many of them seem to capture a blurring and becoming, a mutability between opposing forms. But anything can be like anything, at some level. The real link is Dillon’s watchful eye. Like students of a teacher, or colonies of an empire, the relation of these images to each other is their relation to him.

One of the most personal reflections concerns a set of photographs taken by Dillon’s aunt. He outlines the story: a bullying father who would take umbrage at some perceived transgression of the household rules. A daughter who inherited this rage and mixed it with illness and self-pity. A retreat into paranoia and fantasy. And the images: a series of photographs documenting the beheaded roses, the trampled flowerbeds, the holes in the hedges that showed that they – whoever they were – were at it again.

It’s a sad story, movingly told. And Dillon is attentive to its implications. “There are forms of keen, habitual, and even morbid attention to the world around us,” he writes, “that don’t merely preclude self-examination or disallow self-knowledge, but rather stand in for a close look at our lives and a proper expression of what we find there.” In lesser hands, Dillon’s essays would have been used simply to make the case for the benefits of close attention. Dillon’s discussion of these photographs forestalls this reading – close attention is one thing. Loving attention, another.

And Dillon does love. That shines out from each essay. An affinity can be a relation of significance: of blood, of temporary likeness, of marriage. Dillon notes that the word also once meant a gathering of like-minded people. The images collected together in this book become, in Dillon’s hands, an affinity. And, by looking at them with him, he makes an affinity of us, too.

This is key. Dillon’s aunt was always looking. But she was looking alone. Dillon’s book is an invitation to look together. It is one of life’s intimate pleasures to attend closely in the company of someone else. Done properly, it opens us to the other’s world.

Why do some things combine and others separate? Add nitric acid to gold, and nothing happens. Pour on aqua regia, a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids, and the gold dissolves. The chemical doctrine of affinity emerged as a way to explain these reactions. In his 1809 novel Elective Affinities, Johann Wolfgang Goethe applied the idea to human relationships. Charlotte and Edward may form a stable union but if Edward has an affinity with young Ottilie – ah, well, then all bets are off.

What is an affinity? A little like a crush, I suppose, at least at the beginning. And sometimes just as fleeting. But sometimes more stable, more serious, and more revealing of our ways of engaging with things. Brian Dillon’s writings have always been marked by affinities – for artworks, for writers, even for particular sentences. In this work he turns his attention to the notion of affinity itself, through an examination of images that have drawn his gaze.

We start with a picture from Robert Hooke’s 1665 work Micrographia: a full stop as seen under a microscope, the tiny circle revealed in magnification to be “disfigured, ragged, deformed”. We pass through Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of her niece, pictures of seahorses from a documentary, a scientific drawing of a migraine aura from 1870. There are abstract patterns captured in the ruins of Hiroshima, dadaist collages, a still from the BBC film production of Samuel Beckett’s Not I – our attention guided always by Dillon’s attraction and fascination. The effect is not unlike having a better-read friend take you by the hand and show you around the things he loves.

Dillon tentatively suggests a connection between the images: many of them seem to capture a blurring and becoming, a mutability between opposing forms. But anything can be like anything, at some level. The real link is Dillon’s watchful eye. Like students of a teacher, or colonies of an empire, the relation of these images to each other is their relation to him.

One of the most personal reflections concerns a set of photographs taken by Dillon’s aunt. He outlines the story: a bullying father who would take umbrage at some perceived transgression of the household rules. A daughter who inherited this rage and mixed it with illness and self-pity. A retreat into paranoia and fantasy. And the images: a series of photographs documenting the beheaded roses, the trampled flowerbeds, the holes in the hedges that showed that they – whoever they were – were at it again.

It’s a sad story, movingly told. And Dillon is attentive to its implications. “There are forms of keen, habitual, and even morbid attention to the world around us,” he writes, “that don’t merely preclude self-examination or disallow self-knowledge, but rather stand in for a close look at our lives and a proper expression of what we find there.” In lesser hands, Dillon’s essays would have been used simply to make the case for the benefits of close attention. Dillon’s discussion of these photographs forestalls this reading – close attention is one thing. Loving attention, another.

And Dillon does love. That shines out from each essay. An affinity can be a relation of significance: of blood, of temporary likeness, of marriage. Dillon notes that the word also once meant a gathering of like-minded people. The images collected together in this book become, in Dillon’s hands, an affinity. And, by looking at them with him, he makes an affinity of us, too.

This is key. Dillon’s aunt was always looking. But she was looking alone. Dillon’s book is an invitation to look together. It is one of life’s intimate pleasures to attend closely in the company of someone else. Done properly, it opens us to the other’s world.