Bottle in Which I Live

you can trust me, 
there is no planet stranger 
than the one i’m from.
— Lucille Clifton, “note, passed to superman”

Tucked into a corner of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude is the bottle city of Kandor. A bell jar about three feet high, it contains hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of Superman’s fellow aliens, once thought to have perished during the destruction of the planet Krypton decades earlier.

Superman happened upon the bottle city while on assignment for The Daily Planet. Disguised as bumbling, totally normal reporter Clark Kent, he spotted a spaceship, some ten thousand miles from Earth, on which the data-obsessed villain Brainiac was collecting cities to repopulate his own ruined planet. A long panel in Action Comics #242 from July 1958 shows London, Paris, Rome, and New York, all miniaturized, in a row of glass jars. “One after another, the world’s greatest cities become toy villages in bottles!” the accompanying block letters read. Brainiac examines his spoils with giant tweezers that rip through the George Washington Bridge. “Bah! Such primitive structures,” he gripes, holding the Eiffel Tower under a magnifying glass. Determined to stop Brainiac’s scheme, Superman returns to Metropolis and allows his city, with him in it, to be shrunk. Brainiac studies his new acquisition with glee. Tiny as he is, Superman retains his powers and buzzes like a bee out of the bottle. Fleeing Brainiac’s swatter, he hides in an open container—and as he plunks down, suddenly deprived of flight, past futuristic skyscrapers, Superman realizes he’s not alone after all. He’s in Kandor.

All of the cities on Brainiac’s ship are ultimately returned to normal size and put back where they belong—except Kandor. At the end of “The Super-Duel In Space,” Superman tucks the bottle city under his arm, takes it to the North Pole, and places it on a shelf in his Fortress of Solitude.

The boy who crashed into Kansas finally has a birthplace to visit. Over the years, Superman occasionally shrinks down to sojourn in Kandor, where he meets with the city’s top scientists and old family friends and responds to Lilliputian distress calls. Sometimes, the Kandorians make their way out of the bottle to cause chaos in Metropolis; at one point, a lookalike (thanks to a plastic surgery machine) crawls through a crack and threatens to supplant Superman entirely. At another, Lois Lane lives an alternate, tiny life there. Kandor is the one problem Superman can never solve. Ultimately, he is a tourist in the wee Kryptonian capital, torn not just between his dual identities as Clark Kent and the Man of Steel, but between two ideas of home. The bottle, a living relic, binds him to a past he never truly experienced.

“I’m a man of two worlds,” Superman says to himself.

***

A boy places a bee in a plastic pill box and drops the box into a pit which is to be filled with cement, the foundation of an add-on to his family’s house. As soon as the pill box is paved over, he realizes what he has done. The boy will spend the rest of his days in this house haunted by the bee buried beneath his feet. When he grows up, he’ll still remember the entombed insect. Consumed by a smothering claustrophobia, as though it is he himself in the pill box under the floor, he’ll wish to return and exhume the bee from the concrete.

This “recovered memory” belongs to the artist Mike Kelley. Included in Minor Histories (2004), a compilation of Kelley’s writings, it’s one of his many musings on how the past haunts us, and the sinister, slippery spatiality of memory. In the artist’s essay on his 1995 sculpture Educational Complex—a scale model reconstruction, solely from memory, of schools he attended, complete with architectural errors and absences—Kelley writes that he found himself unable to shake an image: the bottle city of Kandor. “I wonder if the eternal Man of Steel ever feels the desire to smash this city and finally live in the present. That would put a stop to the fear of ending up in the shuttered room.” For Kelley, Kandor represents the unretrievable past, paradoxically preserved among battle souvenirs, robotic doppelgängers, a giant steel diary, and countless other such objects in the Wunderkammer of Superman’s fortress—his museum of the self. Kelley spent a large part of the last 13 years of his life constructing replicas of the city-in-a-bottle. Unfinished at the time of Kelley’s suicide in 2012, the Kandors series is a vast endeavor: more than 100 tiny cities made of resin, housed in glass, plastic, and rock, along with video projections and lenticular panels, pieces of which are nestled in the cave-like crannies that so fascinated the artist.

In a memorial essay, longtime collaborator Tony Oursler wrote of Kelley’s “process of reformation and self-mythologizing.” Even the Detroit-born, Los Angeles-based Kelley’s early work involved “double takes on his past.” He had a thing for underworlds and cramped spaces ever since accompanying his father, a janitor, to the boiler rooms under the school where he worked. One of Kelley’s first series consisted of birdhouses whose entry holes were the wrong size or in the wrong place. He returned, repeatedly, to motifs of temporality and interstice. Along with a rejection of the social structures he saw as tools of repression, division, and exclusion, Kelley was obsessed with “keeping certain histories alive while rewriting and creating others,” according to Oursler, who sees Kelley’s mining of the allegory of Kandor as an “existential endgame.” Via the bottled city, Kelley continued to dig into his own past, only now it was all “disturbingly sealed in a bell jar.” The lost home, with the bee beneath the floorboards, had morphed into these resin replicas trapped under glass, scale models of a space both close and very far away.

***

Against a yellow sky, Clark Kent and Lois Lane stroll in the park past a bronze sculpture of Superman. Lois, holding a red notebook that matches her skirt suit exactly, sighs, “Oh, Clark . . . Isn’t he wonderful!?!” Broad shoulders filling out his blue suit, Clark stares ahead at us. A recently uncovered poem by Vladimir Nabokov takes this Superman cover as its subject. “The Man of To-morrow’s Lament,” written in 1942, four years after the superhero’s debut, is purportedly the first poem about Superman ever written. “I shall tell you now / my fatal limitation . . . not the pact / between the worlds of Fantasy and Fact / . . . but worse: / a tragic misadjustment and a curse,” Nabokov writes. He likens Clark Kent to the Earl of Kent from King Lear, two characters displaced and in disguise. He considers what might happen if the hero were to act on his love, an imagined conjugation deemed too crude for the New Yorker, where the Russian-American author submitted the verse. The magazine’s poetry editor, Charles Pearce, thought readers simply wouldn’t “get it.”

Writing about how the Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström used the comic form, Kelley explains that “to the upper class viewer, a cartoon may symbolize the undifferentiated mass mind of the lumpen proletariat.” With their “clear image tropes,” comics render mythologies and values in an accessible pictorial style—which is why, Kelley argues, they appear anonymous and invisible. “They have an air of truth about them; they appear given, pre-existing, unconstructed.” Superman, simultaneously a myth and a pop culture icon, embeds in the cultural consciousness and seems real. His world is also ours, a simultaneous projection.

The idea of Superman, the symbol of strength and goodness, alienation and fracturing, is more potent than the stories themselves. Even in the character’s first years, readers recognized his tragic pathos: his invincibility causes him psychic pain, and the splitting of his identities wrenches him apart. Forever a smiling, chaste, adult choir boy, he can only be himself when he is alone—therefore, he is forever alone, isolated, the only creature of his kind not doomed to life in a bottle. Keeping his “split personalities rigidly separate is a psychotic desperation,” the science fiction author Larry Niven wrote of Superman. It wouldn’t be surprising, he posits, if Superman “drifted gradually into schizophrenia.” At the end of Nabokov’s poem, the Man of Steel longs “to be a normal guy instead.” Because Superman is so immediately recognizable, these complexes invite self-identification (just as one may project onto the miniatures that are Kelley’s Kandors.) You might find a chasm within, a sneaking sense of being from or belonging to some other place. To be torn between two worlds is really not so strange.

***

I was 22 when I first encountered Kelley’s Kandors. It was the autumn of 2013, and a guy I was dating had brought me to the big Kelley show at PS1. I followed his faded brown leather jacket, and the backpack always slung over his left shoulder, through the former public school’s alveolar rooms. I was overwhelmed and claustrophobic. There was so much to see, and so many people. I’d already been feeling overwhelmed and claustrophobic, panic in my teeth and a constant pressure in my diaphragm. I’d been feeling cracked, out of whack—not of this world but under it, or over it.

We ambled around, dodging visitors. It was only when we entered a series of dark, cool, slate rooms that I could breathe properly again. A handful of encounters of this kind stay with me: the Edward Hoppers on the top floor of the old Whitney Museum, where I spent hours on my own as a teen; alone and tortured with the Caravaggios, downstairs in the dim hallways of the Uffizi; coolly combusting in front of Cai Guo-Qiang’s gunpowder drawings at the Guggenheim; Marc Chagall’s Paris Through the Window, before which my father and I sat for what seemed an eternity. Kandors belongs to this set. I will never forget those rooms, and I can still walk through them, even if they are fraying at the edges in my mind, even if looking at photos of those sculptures threatens to overlay the filmic image I’ve stored.

It’s sepulchral and quiet in those rooms, save for murmurs and, somewhere in the distance, cartoonish screams, giggles, and coos. A voice booms from a speaker, the atmosphere changes, and suddenly I’m breathing cave air. The rooms are full of miniature cities. Incandescent, powdery resin cities. Foggy grey crags, gummy red arches, slick turquoise plazas, and lucent cubist malachite towers. Icy cobalt needles, and ringed, spiked, globoid amber-orange structures that look as though they might melt at the touch. Some reside on pedestals; the rest are encased in huge Pyrex jars. Some are connected to oxygen tanks, some stand freely. Lenticular prints of comic book versions of the bottle cities adorn the walls; they fade and reappear as we pass.

Immediately I recognize myself in these cities. In “small figurative objects,” Kelley once wrote, projection by the viewer is invited. There were no tiny Kryptonians in these Kandors—the replicas devoid of inhabitants—just intricate outlines detailing, in their lack of detail, a penetrating distance. Yet there I was, a small being among the curved flèches and tiered domes. For a long time, I’d been trying to contain, to compress and seal off, what would later be identified as chronic dysthymia—a depression with no perceivable source—and here was an image I could use, making it possible to not have to explain. An eerie comfort overtakes me, as though I’ve been here before, in some unremembered past, or in a dream, maybe, or a greyed-out dissociative state, on the drugs that made everything seem fake. And that was where I wanted to be, or thought I belonged. Alone, enclosed, peering from behind glass that would keep me safe—or others safe from me. I could live there instead, I thought.

The voice, it turns out, belongs to a man dressed as Superman, his image projected across from a standalone cave. He recites Sylvia Plath’s 1960 poem “A Life”: “With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle, / The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture / She has one too many dimensions to enter. / Grief and anger, exorcized, / Leave her alone now.” In the background plays soft synth music that Kelley composed.

***

The silhouette of a man kneels, hands hovering around the shadow of a water jug, as though performing a spell, or prayer. His genuflection seems a pleading worship. Superman Recites Selections from ‘The Bell Jar’ and Other Works by Sylvia Plath (1999) is one of the first pieces Kelley produced in conjunction with the earliest Kandors. The actor portraying Superman (Michael Garvey) rearranges Plath’s poetry and prose, converting past tense to present and displacing proper narrative order. He speaks of masked people, of “a blue flash” that shakes him until his “teeth rattle.” He speaks of the end of the world, a great jolt, sour air crackling with blue light.

It's not inconceivable that “A Life” is about Kandor, and Kelley must have clocked this. Convergences abound. Like Superman, Plath haunts the American cultural landscape to the point of myth. And like Plath, Kelley was interested in social systems, in the domestic and the institutional, in the feminine “other.” In “Cross Gender / Cross Genre,” an essay from 1999, Kelley writes, “If America’s problems were the result of being militaristic and patriarchal, the antidote would be the embrace of the prototypically feminine.” Later, in the video Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1 (A Domestic Scene), from 2007, two men speak of “the perfumed oven-gasses of Kandor,” which “produce strange flowers.” Plath is there, one of the men says. “There she is—holding out her hand to me!”

Kelley could have plundered various other Plath texts. Throughout Ariel (1965), Plath writes of caves, statues, mirrors, and shadows; of glass cracking, secrets, leaps, and doubles; of split lives, X-rays, Lilliputians, and the bottle in which she lives. Sometimes she’s god-like, and other times a mere toy woman. She dresses up, as Superman dresses down; each has their costumes, worn to obfuscate their alien status and conform. Plath’s 1962 poem “Face Lift” features a “nauseous vault” that booms with “bad dreams.” Plath watches herself in a mirror, which becomes a container: “They’ve trapped her in some laboratory jar.” Always either within a vitrine or outside, larger than life, looking in, cleaved between diminution and immensity. There is more in The Bell Jar (1963), too. When Plath’s alter-ego, Esther Greenwood, first begins to feel out of whack with the world, she cannot force herself to pick up the phone, as if her hand had “collided with a pane of glass.” As she contemplates suicide one day in the park, everything looks bright and “extremely tiny.” After this episode, Esther swallows sleeping pills while squeezed into a crawlspace in her family’s basement—much like Plath herself did in 1953.

In 1955, Plath published a story in Smith Review, at her alma mater, titled “Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit.” It’s about a young girl whose idealistic notions are split apart by both the war and her playmates’ lies. Superman, in his “shining blue suit with his cape whistling in the wind,” invades her dreams, and she and a friend listen to Superman stories on the radio and play Superman games in a “perfect alcove.” By the end, make-believe shattered, the girl feels “the black shadow creeping up the underside of the world.”

***

In the late ’50s, a shadow crept up the underside of the world. The first satellite hurtled into the ether in late 1957; Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act at the end of July 1958, the very same month that Kandor debuted in Action Comics. At the time, Kelley was still a child, and from the Space Race emerged a burgeoning concept of Earth as small and fragile within the vastness of the universe. From outside, Earth had a shadow, like the moon. Photographs from that vastness showed the destruction of WWII; in the early 1960s, astronauts returned with urgings to consider our delicate pale blue dot. Environmental architects like Buckminster Fuller championed the sphere, the dome, and the bubble as methods of protecting our interior zone. Superman editor Mort Weisinger had similar notions in mind when he endowed his comic book hero with a more mortal psychology, represented most pithily by Kandor: human interiority is as big as space and time, but fragile, nonetheless. Even the indestructible all-American hero had a susceptible core. Kelley’s Kandors mirror this idea, in miniature form: this space of memory, where loss and alienation are contained, could be the shape of a boundless psyche, the stage on which it is performed—or it could denote a view of the self as sealed off, isolated.

Kelley also wrote of the entrancing nature of miniatures, and how you lose yourself inside of them. Visiting Kandor, Superman becomes a third version of himself—alien three times over. Maybe he loses himself, instead of finding himself, in the place he thinks he might belong—the strongman shrunk down, deprived of his alienating powers by his native atmosphere. Kandor is not only a relic but a living diorama, and the diorama, as Umberto Eco puts it in “Travels in Hyperreality” (1975), “aims to establish itself as a substitute for reality, as something even more real.” In a way, Kandor, in all its tiny displacement, threatens to supersede Superman’s already fragmented identity.

***

“All great, simple images reveal a psychic state,” the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space (1958). Kelley references this work in the same essay in which he first mentions Kandor, noting that Bachelard’s idea of the cherished past, of nooks and crannies, could also be the site of the horrific and ominous. “The miniscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world,” Bachelard writes. “The relationship of contained to container makes us shrink.” For the philosopher, this was a magical state, but for Kelley, the narrow gate had the potential to open into darkness, to seed a desire to destroy the past, “yet all the while wallowing in it.” In the “recovered memory” of the bee, whether fact or fiction, Kelley imagines himself in his parents’ home: “This is an elastic architecture that stretches forever, encasing me always,” he writes, “even to the very ends of the earth and time.”

On several occasions, Kelley said that he wasn’t interested in the Superman mythos, though he worked on the Kandors installations for more than a decade. He was drawn, instead, to what the bottle evoked about memory and alienation, about secrecy. That Kandor lacked a blueprint or a master plan, and was impossible to accurately reconstruct from the flatness of its source, was crucial to Kelley’s project. It was as though each time Superman entered the city, the space of his past changed, while Kandor itself remained the same. Flipping through my worn Kandor omnibus, the crisp, clear bottle, and the spires it contains, pop among the panels and draw the eye. If I didn’t already know, I’d wonder what was stored under that glass and why it requires such protection.