January 2020

VOL XXVIII, Issue 1, Number 321

Editor: Klaus J. Gerken

European Editor: Mois Benarroch

Contributing Editor: Jack R. Wesdorp

Previous Associate Editors: Igal Koshevoy; Evan Light; Pedro Sena; Oswald Le Winter; Heather Ferguson; Patrick White

ISSN 1480-6401

Introduction

Charles Baudelaire

The Albatross

Contents

Vasilina Orlova

‘I am a Little Poetess with a Huge Bow:’ Female Poets in Contemporary

Maria Jacketti

Late Drive through Hazleton, 2018

John Grey Four Poems

Diarmuid ó Maolalaí

Four Poems

Bob Ezergailis

Poem Sequence

Luigi Coppola

Six Poems

George F. MacDonald

Trip Report – Rio de Janairo, Brazil, and Beunos Aires, Argentina – October 22, 1986 to November 2, 1986. Post Scriptum

John G. Sabol

‘Surfing’ the Surface of Time in Archaeological Space:

Exploration, Performance, Memory, and ‘Haunting’

Charles Baudelaire

The Albatross

Often, for amusement, the sailors

Captured albatrosses, those immense sea birds, indolent companions who follow

The ship gliding over bitter chasms.

Hardly have they flung them on the deck,

These kings of the azure, became awkward in defeat,

Pitifully leaving their great white wings

Drag like oars beside them.

How awkward that winged traveler became!

Once so majestic, and now so comical and ugly!

One sailor teases his beak with a glowing pipe,

Others mock his woeful disability!

The Poet is like this prince of the sky

Who flaunts the storm and laughs at the archer;

Exiled on the ground amidst derision,

His giant wings prevent him from regaining his mobility.

Trans. kjg

Vasilina Orlova

‘I am a Little Poetess with a Huge Bow:’ Female Poets in Contemporary Russia

Even though the center of this talk is poetry itself, I hope to enable us to think about different ways of navigating, expressing, or denying gender-related ideologies in the practices of contemporary women writers in Russia and beyond.

I used the line from the poem by Irina Odoyevtseva as a part of the title and as some sort of epigraph. “I am a Little Poetess with a Huge Bow.” Odoyevtseva was born in 1895, in Riga, Latvia, emigrated to Paris in 1922, returned to Leningrad in 1987, and died in in 1990.

Note on Translation

Before I recite Odoyevtseva’s poem, I want to note that all the poems here are translated by me, and the rhymes poems I translated without rhymes. While this choice could be argued about, here I will limit myself to the above declaration.1

No, I will not be acclaimed,

Nor will I be crowned with fame,

I have as much right for that

As for the bishop’s rank.

1 The reason I made my choice was partly because I wanted to convey the impulse and the energy of the poems rather than transform them into the chess-like crosswords. While again, this is the kind of choice that is not without its downsides, even such pedantic translator as was resorted to the similar choice in his translation of “Eugene Onegin.” (Nabokov translated “Onegin” in the yambic rhythm.) Neither Gumilyov, nor evil media

Will call me a talent.

I am a little poetess

With a huge bow.

Irina Odoyevtseva is a poet who foreshadowed some of the creative practices of the contemporary Russian poets by and large, but as a woman poet she is not as often spoken of or widely read as Marina Tsvetaeva and . This Odoyevtseva’s poem encompasses the female image of the poet in the male world, as it were, with the soft irony that undermines the very hierarchy that it portrays. The irony is directed at the self (“I am a little poetess with a huge bow”), but it is a device that should bare the existing power dynamics by subverting and undermining them. The poetess performs femininity in an aggressive, almost-mocking way. Irina Odoyevtseva knew the famous founder of Acmeism poet Nikolay Gumilyov in person and is considered his pupil. In her poem, she put herself on display with her willful claiming of her own littleness in a powerful gesture of playful, teasing derision.

Odoyevtseva’s poem speaks to the performances of femininity that women and femme poets often choose and/or led to perform. Here, I am bringing together several prominent contemporary Russian poets from different aesthetic universes: Dana Kurskaya, Inga Kuznetsova, Irina Ysn, Alina Vitukhnovskaya, and Luba Makarevskaya. What allows me to bring them together is not merely femaleness of these figures of the contemporary “literary process” (as the Russian expression would have it), but their willingness to subvert or support the established cultural narratives of femininity and their ability in doing so to go at times sharply satirical, at times softly ironic way without losing the sincerity of self-expression. I am bringing them together not only at the arbitrary will of myself the translator, even though the arbitrariness is voluntary and undeniable, but also in order to open the space to connect these figures in analyzing the emergent poetics and defining points of imaginary cross-references to see if this is possible to take a broader view on the contemporary female Russian poetry writing.

Dana Kurskaya, born in 1986 in Chelyabinsk, since 2005, lives in Moscow, and is without exaggeration one of the loudest voices of the contemporary Russian poetry. She’s the author of the book Nothing Personal (Nichego lichnogo) and a writer on Facebook who posts poems that often reference existing people familiar to her readers in person (much as Odoyevskaya names Gumilyov in her poem), transforming these people into literary personages, which often arises heated conversations. Kurskaya maintains the publishing project Steklograf, which prints poetry, organizes the poetry festival in Moscow called Mayfest; she invented her own poetry prize, and is otherwise involved in the numerous organizational endeavors. She’s organizing the poetic space.

When you are being drunk

And shout at me

That no one needs you,

That everyone is laughing at you,

And something about pain—

Here, if at this very moment

One should lead me to the mirror;

It is possible to observe

That my eyes

Are startlingly similar

To the eyes of plush staffed animals

Left on graves.

These animals are called

Into support and encouragement

Of children

On their way to death.

But the animals never

Asked anyone about it.

They never chose

Such fate.

Irina Ysn leads a secluded life as an author. She says “I do not like all these ‘I was born there, I married here,’” but she belongs to the same generation (Gen X-senior millennials) that other contemporary poets that I am bringing together here. She has barely published her works. She is not presenting herself as a poet on her social media. Her works are known to the small circle of her friends. Another creative practice that she’s engaging with is jewelry making. She uses silver wire and semi-precious stones to compose earrings that she gives away as gifts and souvenirs.

He has an earring in his left ear

The eyes of Don Juan

I recognized the profile of the eagle

And lips of a tyrant

Conversation in a French manner

Skin of the olive

I had been waiting for exactly two centuries

Until he returns.

Inga Kuznetsova, born in 1974 in Protvino near Moscow, is a widely published poet and the laureate of literary prizes (Triumph Prize and the prize Moscow Count for her debut book Dreams- Chickadees (Sny-sinitsi, 2002)). In the last years, she published prose, Patchwork: Burn After Reading (2017).

I am growing a white flower of black melancholy white wind black earth teach me how to transform letters into silence lines into gaps a shadow into a person

Luba Makarevskaya, born in Moscow, the year of birth is not in the open access, initially attracted my attention as an artist posting her art on Instagram, in particular, a series of vaginas in aquarelle, and with her pale selfies. Rather than the author dies in text, the text dies in the author, as Dmitry Prigov observed; for poetry, it might be all the more so since it is not the poetic text by itself that charms us as much as the wholeness of the image of the author whose flute is producing these celestial sounds. Makarevskaya is the chief editor of the journal Sled (Trace); her prose published the portal Snob. She is the author of the book Love (Lyubov’, 2017).

When I was fourteen years old girls in school performed lesbians they gathered in a circle sang and then kissed wet trees looked askance at them their faces were like japanese masks not real faces digitized transparent pornographic faces out of an adult dream and in the news flashed zinc caskets and I knew letters perhaps even worse than they knew me worse than not familiar hands could have known me

I learned the alphabet by heart dry black I did not utter words until trees blew windows like grenades with eyes.

And the last figure of this talk, Alina Vitukhnovskaya, born in 1973 in Moscow, has long been enjoying renown since when she was arrested and accused of having drugs in 1994. Notable figures of the Russian intelligentsia wrote petitions and spoke in her defense, including Valeria Novodvorskaya and Andrey Voznesenkly. She refused the offer of political refuge in Sweden and soon was arrested again. Vitukhnovskaya was one of several female presidential candidates in the elections of 2018 in Russia, taking her candidature off in 2017 after Ksenia Sobchak also decided to run for president. Vitukhnovskaya perceived Sobchak’s candidacy as the Kremlin-orchestrated cannibalization of Vitukhnovskaya’s platform, and refused to further participate in what she deemed the circus of the Russian elections. She is the leader of the Party of the Republican Alternative in Russia and speaks about her poems as about first and foremost the tool that allowed her to acquire the beginnings of her biography in the literature-centric Russian political discourses. I wrote prefaces to two of Vitukhnovskaya’s books, World like the Will and Crime (Mir kak volya i prestuplenie, 2014) and, recently, to Notes of the Materialist (forthcoming). She is the author of many books, including The Children’s Book of the Dead (Detskaya kniga mertvikh, 1994) and The Last Old Woman Pawnbroker of the (Poslednyaya starukha-protsentshitsa russkoi literature, 1996).

Brain

Controls

Handy

Tool.

Machine protracts its hand

(tentacle?

rose?

nail?)

I materialize through the screen like beheaded medusa at the crossing of two centuries.

I radiate.

And you

Smashed

Me-arachnid.

I am a droplet.

The poets that I named and quoted are oftentimes working with the aesthetics positioned on the edges of the respectability; in their writings, they consistently push boundaries and limits of acceptable in terms of what constitutes the poetic utterance. These poets build different universes of meaning and affect.

Perhaps it is worth noting that while the aesthetics of Makarevskaya feels like closest to being called “feminist,” Vitukhnovskaya adamantly rejects the feminist discourse and sees no value in it. On the third side, Irina Ysn many times stated that the femininity is a separate energy and a separate way for a woman to grow in the world, in relation to the masculinities that have their own sovereignties as well, and it is best when a woman knows that her energetic best is feminine. Irina did call herself a feminist on occasion, she called herself a “real feminist.” Her views of the separateness of the femaleness and maleness and their independent existence as a set of different energies seem to be not widely shared within the Russian feminist communities. As far as Kurskaya and Kuznetsova are concerned, they expressed interest in the feminist discourses but did not state their allegiances explicitly, to the best of my knowledge, nor did they make clear their attitudes to feminisms and many issues that feminisms can entail. I think this presents us with a startling contrast to the Western writing practices of the female writers where belonging to one or the other feminist discourse is short of mandatory, and even the conservative public figures, not the writers only, claim their allegiance to the feminist ideas by and large, even though there will be no agreement on what constitutes the feminism and feminist takes on the left and the right sides of the political spectrum.

By virtue of their femaleness, they are often expected and pushed to be performers of femininity. Some, like Kuznetsova, Kurskaya, and Ysn, choose to embrace it, but in this very embrace they perform femininity very differently; Alina Vitukhnovskaya is an avid denialist and rejector, often speaking dismissively on any women’s issues and abhorring any lumping of herself with women, and, finally, Makarevskaya is doing what I see as the practice of raising above the dictates of gender by displaying the constant and full of tension reflections on the gender issues. By no means the list of the poet(ess) that I presented here is exhaustive. Speaking of the contemporary Russian poetry even limited to the representatives of the “generation X and millennials,” one has to name Vera Polozkova, Linor Goralik, Polina Barskova, Anna Logvinova, Anna Tsvetkova, Ksenia Buksha, Galina Rymbu, and Ksenia Charyeva. Inclusion of these figures would have allowed us to significantly wider our horizon and perspectives on the performing and/or denying the performance of femininity female writers in connection and disconnection to the Russian, Western, and Eastern feminisms. But this is the task for another endeavor.

Maria Jacketti

Late Drive through Hazleton, 2018

In the parking lot of the bygone feast

I stop the car.

This world broods empty, except for the saloons’ neon throbbing of so much oblivion.

It is almost 2 a.m.

This used to be a forest, ravished for a place to get closer to church with more ease, since walking became just for processions, and everyone who mattered drove, behold, they slashed the trees for cars and here I am, proving them right, oh the ghosted paradise of this place.

I remember when the bulldozers came, and in grief, my mother baked more to warm us, warning us of the anger of the trees we cherished, the trees that protected us from the storm.

Now, If I went into the grotto to light candles and stuffed dollar bills into the cash box would I get mugged or be seen on God’s hidden camera by the police and end up arrested for praying after hours?

All good people sleep inside something, snuggling their guns.

But I never went into battle with one, yet.

The squirt variety were not even allowed in our house.

Peace be with you, Mom;

I hope you are enrobing one skyscraper of a cake with royal icing beyond here--- but you know the truth:

This was always war.

John Grey

NEW GUY ON THE SCENE

I slap Nautica Voyage about my chin but that doesn’t begin any ocean voyage.

I don’t have the outfit for their black-tie dinner dances.

Just jeans and a t-shirt and sneakers not worth stealing.

But, on weed death row, every last one of those unruly growths is being sprayed.

Meanwhile, the theme from “Star Wars” is playing in my head.

My mission is to impress Monica with just this stuff I’ve mentioned.

MY VOTE

The eagle’s cry is a kind of paid political broadcast.

All politics is sky politics after all.

And this is our precinct.

This is what we want represented.

The lake, the cabin, the woods – they need someone earnest and vociferous to press our case in congress.

Why not the raptor on that high rock, a pivot of local knowledge, positivism, action and hard work.

He descends to the ground then soars upward, a mouse wriggling in his talons, shrieking with delight.

There’s something I’ve always wanted to say.

And now I’ve found a voice.

FROM A FATHER'S LESSON BOOK

One shot and the caribou fell.

The rest of the herd stumbled away.

White ptarmigan panicked out of camouflage into the harsh blue sky.

A snowshoe hare bolted, a blur of fur.

My father trudged through heavy snow to claim his prize.

I trailed behind, kept my distance.

So vast the landscape, yet he could never be out of sight.

But nor could that dead buck, its proud rack cracked like china, its body slumped, fat with meat, sticky blood oozing from the chest.

Too heavy to haul, my boyish frame no help, he had to cut it there, pulled out his wide-blade knife, quickly hacked and sliced, sinew, liver, heart and bone, like a wolf excited at fresh kill.

My job was to help him carry the pieces to the truck, toss them in the back, red and raw against last night's ice.

He didn't say much as we drove home.

He didn't have to.

This is what you do when you are older.

This is how it's done.

You don't get yourself an education, find a job, marry, have kids, buy a house, two cars, and all the rest of it.

Rifle in hand, you journey to the wilderness, kill a fine wild animal, strip and cook and eat the carcass.

Or if not that, you act just like you do.

A FATHER/SON ACT

Sure I've been drinking up in my dusty ivory tower.

Doubles with beer chasers while ogling the street below.

My usual. The traffic. The passersby. The heat.

The fumes coming up from the subway grids and the toilets.

And the old man in the next room who can't remember anything he ever loved.

I should tell him how much he reminds me of my father but why get his hopes up.

Besides, he's as sour as curdled milk.

The only thing he's good for is prize-fighting with his own shadow.

If I've nothing better to do,

I'll go in there and referee.

But right now I'm occupied.

The bottle sees to that.

Oh he'll go into a home eventually.

My sister says he should be in one now.

Obviously, she doesn't think that where I live qualifies.

I can just picture her on the other end of the telephone, head bobbing on a chicken neck, full lips, red hair, spitting across a thousand miles how every last man alive has got six bugs up his ass.

She's taught me how to hang up the telephone with pleasure.

Meanwhile, more alcohol lies in my path, so if I don't drink it then I can't move on from this place.

The old man's growling.

And, in between guzzles,

I'm tossing insults his way.

We're a grim parody of how we used to feel about each other.

I figure we should work up a stage act.

He could forget his lines.

I'd throw up all over mine.

We could call it "the family that stays together."

The audience could feel rotten enough for both of us.

Diarmuid ó Maolalaí

Something soft. the night is blue not black and yellow in places and sometimes with orange and autumn has just slipped in through the back door when we were busy playing cards in the kitchen and knocked us around the back of the head with an old yellow sock filled with broken stones and seashells. and the women who walk up and down the long footpaths are just beginning to put their coats back on and the rain on the tarmac makes the sound of traffic dim and far away and the sound of people talking to eachother too and all the other small night movements and makes life seem like something so beautiful and candlelit and so sad and so soft.

Drunk, and trying to be quiet. moving through the kitchen drunk at 11pm on wine, and a little beer afterward, and trying your best to be quiet. putting down bottles by the backyard door with a sound like tanks crushing houses in palestine. then you turn and knock a fork over. turn again and pick it up. upstairs someone turns over in your bed and snorts cars crashing and collapsing mineshafts. you freeze. then move, more freely now, feeling a fool in your concern, remembering how heavily she sleeps.

A photo.

5am. tramping through chinatown on my way to the train. shift start was at 7 and I wasn't thinking about anything very much. it was cold. I stopped in for coffee and the girl was pretty who sold it. then I stepped out back into a cold toronto morning with the sunrise snaking along avenues like dripping poured fat. these kids were out, teenagers, and asked me to take a photo. the light was good - they were on the tramline on bathurst, their background the corner with spadina. no cars coming, I stepped into the street holding their camera to my face. they shot poses like birds on wire and then relaxed after 3 snaps. they were all good - I wondered was the photo for music or for something else. I was going to ask but didn't - just handed it back and walked on feeling artistic.

The chef. she has two shelves with spices, and a fridge filled with bottles of sauce, while meanwhile your idea of a good meal is boiled water with meat and more than one kind of vegetable. you boil it and ignore it, then snap back and remember when it's eventually soft enough to chew. you're healthy anyway - at least you try to be. whenever you go over she asks what you want to eat and thinks you're being polite when you say you don't mind. but really, you don't - anything is better as the stuff you have at home. you're putting on weight, and you know it, getting to know her. but god, the energy after a good plate of butter chicken on rice or perogies with a side of beetroot two draughts of beer - you could fuck her six ways left of wednesday and you do it - it's amazing what spices can do. Honeymoon at a cheap hotel. it was the 3rd week of the month but we were at it anyway. we sank, gone to oak and the bedroom floor so as not to stain our bedsheets.

I was on my knees while she made herself comfortable and slid in, feeling around and wondering at all the stupid usual male questions, such as the effect someone's blood might have on the urinary tract. and it was slippy as a well-washed tile, but warmer, and when it came it came hot and soft and onto her belly just to be doubly safe. on the whole afterward there was very little blood - just the red shadow of my cock pressing up her navel like an old round tower rising from a cemetery - but when she stood up and went to shower there it was - blossoming on the floorboards like we'd been fucking on rose-petals, and red squashes all along her ass. as if we'd been on our anniversary or a honeymoon at a cheap hotel and trying very hard to be romantic.

Bob Ezergailist

171119A

Formalities are the new hatred when you are not a pass over ritual silence. Candle vigil melt downs to tear jerked at lost innocence into brutality. No one called in dead winter came early chills marrow of discontent. Stirs cold broth of made up clinging to shredded terror scrapes of maybe. None remained to pick at pieces closed up failures to find real answers. Walking circles emptied to bird chatter crumb scratch defeats.

171119B

Never went up that way on the slip slide strain of try time and again. Slaughtered by boredom curdles blood to fried sausage consistency. Cut up routines a paper target folded flight test. Life is crash chanced pretend into it around back derelict corners. Back and forth slow motion crawling choke hold doldrums. Insect gut squeeze out the middle pressed under foot squirm. Sounds throat stuck anticipation of censor scissor tongues. Flapjack bed tossed night turn over chewed sudden sleep disruption. The numbers fallen out spit of mind into overwritten file folders. Hot keys jammed up clumsy chorus tripping on screen death. Crush of bad habits people addictions to disinterested greyed shades. Fall out ravage confined empty space collapse into suction. Frustrated print outs spool barely audible scandal rap to ear shot. Commentary sidewinder rattle trapped closure objections over ruled . Divide by zero blue screen consciousness crash flicker into day dream. Cut off deadline spew force fed along hard lines of expectation. Alcoholics sweet talking their poisons black listing the tight wads. Checkered race cancel flag drops past double crossed quick finish. Perpetual trauma stimulant urges seeking spiritual morphine in heavy doses. Dead time burial under taking in nothing doing up bandaged scars.

181119A

Pretend to enjoy supposed to requirements spread thin varnish gloss over the real torment of it all. Sponge the lies with absorbent pieces of attitude becoming saturated make believe fake fullness. The riot inside being put down and held in denied bail money freedom of being. Nothing as ugly as single out declaration manifestos of unmatched loneliness. The loathing discomfort lock up inside own sense deprived skin bag insignificance. Lawyers declare we have few options for legal relations knowing many interpolated forms of estrangement. Last connections fail at start up only to leaving proper wakes of obliteration in dead stop.

181119B

Restless ear wanders in to drumbeat long march of failed steps as concerns going forward. Lingering verge of wave actions vomit of carried up and sharp down onto the dagger stone. Pierced dreams beaded up on string theory rationalizing the true nature of misfortune filled in spaces. Maceration claims ragged rope flesh flayed anchor point despatch dropped to new depths. Jumping off point to blank face cover over bobble head dodging friendly sniper fire jive. Sidewinder strike raw trajectory an old delirium opens up venom discourse calculating angles of failure. The only rule the destruction of anything built up knowing friends tear you down in secret. 181119C

Getting along with people you hate getting along with. No options left in the curriculum as to subjects to get into. We do our best clown act impersonations of nice. Acting position filling in public dildo gestures of popularity plus. Hopes reality chanced mid in out frictions. Well oiled feels numb touched passing in come and go. Feeling fever delirium of becoming raised up token. Been dead far too long past short term memory. Make believer wants more than want ads and wanted posters. Costs money in never have past chisel scraps from grave markers. Praise on those blessed by governance to good marriage greedy pocket fulls. Open up in slow processing emptiness scrambled into never get. Held to watching the idea being destroyed at each surfacing.

221119D

Looking at the blank looks of no idea and who knows. Crowds kept looking up sky eyed and expectant. No messiah air lift to take them out of the valley. In the shadow of high rise scurrying to avoid notice. Ant farm soldiering along trend lines of identical. Antennas texting sexual commodity valued open markets. Chemical attractions make promises of delivery. Vapour trail sky ride high eliminates need for any dialogue. ------A few urban ditties for the wisely disinterested. All ye minions of the great Oz. The same wizard who can grant your having a semblance of love, courage, and intelligence that will serve adequately to delude you into believing that you have found something “real”. The sort of thing that has to suffice when nothing else is going to be made available. The worst of it is that clicking your heels together three times and saying “there is no place like home” will no longer function as there has been a software upgrade in conjunction with a hostile takeover of the yellow brick road by the wicked witch.

Luigi Coppola

Squaring the Ouroboros

I licked the Mona Lisa

I licked the Mona Lisa I pissed on The Scream I spat on The Thinker I shat on The Starry Sky and, after all that, I hugged a puppy

I kicked The Empire State Building I slapped The Pyramids I sneezed on The Sistine Chapel I screamed at The Great Wall and, after all that, I planted a tree

I poured coffee on The Quran I scribbled on the Vedas I blew my nose with the Tanakh I let dust forever settle on The Bible and, after all that, I kissed you

And the Earth Moved

The Mountain raised itself left the earth and paved a way walked and strayed a Titan reborn but as The Clouds it touched railed and The Trees that were tenants fell The Mountain knew a hell how could it walk away?

It caved in eyes sent quakes through its limbs and drew a breath the size of itself then gasped again for Her kiss

Kneeling he suckled every drop and rock and became a plain asking for nothing but to calm The Clouds and to once again home The Trees who only laughed and remained ungrateful

Licking Hearts

I collect them for you stamps the other kids laugh but I don’t care

I buy some everyday and keep the most pretty the dark ones I use on letters to your dad

I’ve got one that tastes funny a bit like sherbet and dust it’s only half licked do you want to try it?

I also make them from card and hair gel don’t lick them though they made my cat ill

But this one tastes nice a little like cherryade You can have it I cut it this shape for you

Mr Flat

Mr Flat lived in a flat town He wore a flat cap His suit had fine, flat seams His cufflinks, shoes, haircut were all flat His mortgage was on a flat rate His beer was often flat His batteries were frequently flat His spare tire, whenever he needed it, was inevitably flat

And Mr Flat never really went flat out for anything He sang flat His jokes fell flat His choice of decor and furnishings could all be described as flat If he tried to impress, with what he thought was dancing, he’d end up flat on his arse Every penultimate day of every month, he was flat broke Hell, the ‘a’ in his name was flat His work called him ineffectual when he was fired His family called him boring when they disowned him His girlfriend called him dull when she left him – all synonyms for flat

And the concrete was ever so flat And hard and flat and cold and flat and waiting and flat and waiting To flatten out Mr Flat When he’d had enough of living alone In his 13th floor, one-bedroom maisonette

Poetry after Marianne Moore

I, too, dislike it: I especially dislike it, and sigh as if through a collapsed ribcage, when it goes on and on and over the page.

‘Surfing’ the Surface of Time in Archaeological Space: Exploration, Performance, Memory, and ‘Haunting’ John G. Sabol I.P.E. Research Center

Let’s begin at the beginning, before the archaeological exploration of a site/landscape. In the beginning were the words about (past) worlds. There was the creation of the idea that we, with so little effort, “will never be able to know anything about the past ‘in the past’, when it was the present unfolding. It has passed by and gone” (Olivier 2011:30). I believe we can still connect to fragments and traces of those sensorial modalities and moments of time.

If “archaeological time is one of repetition” (Ibid: 10), I suggest that repetition must be based on ‘in-sync performances’, not experience or “adding things to a box of memories”, as a “material entity in which the memory of a moment in time is recorded” (Olivier 2011:10). It is a performance that is that ‘moment in time’, not the object preserved, the artifact or structure uncovered, though “at every moment in time, remains from the past function in the present as memory” (Ibid: 97). That memory, as ‘material memory’, is the present time, not the past present. These moments are ‘etic’ newness not ‘emic’ actuality because “archaeological constructs are unconcerned with time, even if they are a product of time” (Olivier 2011: 96).

Too often, through time, archaeology is merely riding the waves of a vast, deep surface map of what came before through LIDAR scans, ‘peripatetic tripping’, and partial site/landscape excavations. Archaeological excavation, specifically, is focused, immersive depositions of nonresonant occupations, piercing through stratigraphies of past occupations marking their archaeological acts with strange, rhythmic signature trace patterns. This is contemporary, mediated ‘incavation’, creating an etic “hygiene in the forensic imagination” Pearson and Shanks 2001:61) at the space of excavation. It is the archaeologist, as ‘ghost’, that haunts the scene of the ‘crime’ of archaeological fieldwork. The character of this ‘crime’ is “one of fluid and contradictory fragments” (Ibid: 61) that are exposed by the trowel, interpreted at its edges, within traces after (not of) the event. Are these ‘incavations’ palimpsestual sweeps of the archaeological, a cleansing of ‘matter out of place’? Part of this ‘etic cleansing’ is also what remains of the archaeologist as ‘ghost’, as a contemporary presence of mood and atmosphere, occurring before, during, and after excavation. What these ‘remains’ are, are an “active relation through which to think issues of temporality…also issues of production of cultural reality…”(Parikka 2019:3), that focuses on the present as interpretations of presence ‘standing-in’ for the past. It creates a different rhythm of time.

It is time to really ‘dive’ in to the surface of the present historical. This is the time of the ‘ghost’ and, as Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal has said, we must “make room for ghosts”. This time of the ‘ghost’ is always out of joint and, as archaeologists, we know that memory very well. But archaeology is, itself, also out of joint, bringing different rhythms of behavior, movement (‘slow science’) and technologies to a ‘host’ site, which probably has ‘hosted’ many such ‘disjointed’ periods of occupations in its ‘time’, alongside many continuously resonating periods of time.

Archaeology should take this occupational, both site and personal, ‘untimeliness’ seriously. After all, archaeological exploration, whether a technological scan, ‘wayfaring’, or excavation is not a ‘ghost story’, but rather these ghosts’ stories of time disconnects. These archaeological

‘ghosts’ are not metaphors, the ‘archaeological imagination, or generic clichés that explore a ‘beaten’ path as a form of ‘ghost hunting’. These ‘archaeological ghosts’ are real entities through time. They are timely reminders of what is absent in recording the archaeological record. They deal with basic, but fundamental things such as absence, death, ruin, and destruction, even more so today in this time of ruination (cf. GonzalezRuibal 2019).

Buildings and landscapes transform through time, a process of neglect, becoming out of sync with the times, and subject to processes of ruination and destruction. They become, in the process, a subject for archaeology. They become in sync to archaeological exploration. But the ‘ghosts’ of this material cultural decay are oft times frozen to that specific moment before the ruination begins, and their time unsynchronized with both the ruin and those (the archaeologists) who encounter them. These ruins become the ‘haunted houses’ of these ‘ghosts’, out of sync with contemporary memory, as much as the archaeological immersions into their spaces.

In archaeology, we are not scanning, surveying, or excavating, as ‘working with’ what remains of the past in the present. We are immersing into surfaces of time, specifically, though many ordinary in their time, spaces that ‘haunt’ us with other trace and fragmented assemblages of sensorial moments of/still in time. These remain ‘once upon a time’, sometimes active ‘timescapes’. Some of that rhythm, that ‘vibrancy’ in time, still matter. Are we, as archaeologists, through our own rhythmic timing, out of sync with these ‘timescapes’ so much so that we are really ‘surfing’ the surfacing ‘waves’ of time, without really knowing ‘what lies beneath’ these waves of percolating presence?

The question is not ‘where’ this surfacing ‘wave’ of time lies or percolates, but ‘when’ does it surface. This leads us to a different performance in, not experience of, time, one that differs in rhythm from our contemporary explorations of a ‘hosting’ site. The ‘when’ of time becomes present when we perform within it, not surf its surface through scans and excavations, as our contemporary archaeological ‘taskscape’.

If we are able to participate as ethnographers, not merely observe with the ‘archaeological eye’ within a particular ‘timescape’, then this is only because our presence, not what remains, forms a continuity with a particular memory of time in that specific ‘timescape’. The existence of this ‘ghost’ of time is predicated on us having a relation to it, as a particular rhythm, not mere ‘atmosphere’ of time, not merely material culture: a ‘timescape’, not ‘working with’ a physical ruin.

This ‘ghostly’ time can be ‘percolating’ as residual presence, but one of the contemporary roles of archaeology is to control the ‘when’ of that percolating rhythm of time. This goes beyond a contemporary sensorial archaeology (or archaeology of the senses). It can only be understood as a sensorial layer of situational, habitual, or eventful stratigraphy in time that can affect the present, when we immerse ourselves into a contextspecific performance, not ‘surf’ the LIDAR scan or a ‘troweled’ ground. This is because the ‘emic’ rhythm is different from the archaeological ‘etic’ one, exposed through archaeological intervention.

Archaeologists, performing within particular contextual ‘timescapes’, do not experience ‘working with’ what remains of the past in the present, but rather a performance of an ‘emic’ present that one is relative to a particular time, a ‘working within’ a ‘timely’ way. The ‘dig’ site becomes a particular articulation of time, disrupting the archaeological ‘etic’ present. The site is a ‘latent’ present, not history, because it is ever present within these timely rhythms, marked by a sense of surface (and surfacing) depth.

There is no ‘paranormal’ or ‘para-history’ in this immersive performance into a specific ‘timescape’. The idea of time, not the typical archaeological trope of time, is as a ‘haunting’, one dependent upon a relation between memory and space, by ‘doings’ in rhythm to a time in space and place. The location, as a series of percolating, surfacing timely dimensions is already haunted by the ‘ghosts of time’. What archaeology normally does, as a non-rhythmic ‘time’ of presence, is to suppress these ‘ghosts’. It creates other ‘ghosts’ brought to the place in the form of other rhythms, technologies, and uses of time.

The site, in contemporary archaeological occupation, contains a ‘time’ (many ‘times’) present (not ‘past’) that is (are) older than the archaeologist’s personal experience of time. It is these ‘times’, rising to the surface in waves from a deep, fluid map of time, that needs to be ‘performatively’ excavated. It is what remains of the rhythms of time after the events of a particular situation, behavior, habitual acts are completed (but not necessarily over) at particular times. The site consolidates these ‘times’ as a series of ‘timely’ archives of divergent space-time rhythms.

The archaeologist must become an actor (or ‘actant’), rather than a social scientist with an ‘etic’ perspective, performing ‘twice-behaved’, timely behaviors. This transforms the mise-en-scene of exploration from an ‘etic’ to a specific and timely ‘emic’ mode, one targeting a particular layer of ‘memory time’. These ‘timely’ performances generate a dissolution between the time of contemporary presence and the time of absence, normally a liminal period of time. This, then, is not the past in the present, presently interpreted, that lies at the edge of a trowel, something still not fully mapped by the ‘archaeological gaze’. It is something within us, not something that is uncovered with the trowel.

This ‘timing’, as space-specific performance practices within a particular ‘timescape’, is not the re- enactment of the past, returning as a static, represented image. It is not an archaeological reconstruction, ‘working with’ what remains of the past in the present. Finally, it is not the use of the ‘archaeological imagination’ to ‘fill-in’ the gaps left by traces of what remains of the past in the present.

What these performances must afford is the ‘unearthing’ of a present time from a different time, already there on the surface of the site. It is the time(s) contemporaneous with the present, but not yet exposed through technology or excavated ‘sight’. It is ‘site time’, and its dormant phase becoming present again. This is the sense of an archaeological site, any site, as an archive of haunting presences, time and memory being layered on the surface in behavioral, habitual, and eventful stratigraphies.

If this sedimentation continues to accumulate, and populate each new present, then new inscriptions (behavioral, habitual, situational, eventful) do not erase but rather suppress older ones deeper into the surface of the present, and contribute to the array of site formation processes. These ‘ghosts of place’, as affording relationalities in particular site-specific spaces, become forms of “fossilized duration” (Bachelard 1994:8). This means that the same space has multiple surface sensorial contexts, apart from the physical. Hence, a site context-specific performance ‘excavation’ is essential in isolating and documenting each individual ‘timescape’ archive.

Thus, to determine what comes after the situation or event means, first, what ‘event’ are we attempting to performatively ‘excavate’ in any given space. It means what ‘haunting’ presence of memory in a particular ‘timescape’ is attempted to be uncovered, as specific spatial rhythms of movement, an artifactual sensorial assemblage that is there since occupational inception. This type of ‘excavation’, and it’s ‘timescape’ recovery, as a ‘haunting’ spacial phenomena, involves the materiality of surface space, its sensorial archive, and the performance practice(s) of the archaeologist.

In summary, this spatial and temporal surface depth differs from its physical depth, but it too structures both the site biography (as an archive of ‘timescapes’) and the experiences of the archaeologist (as both participant and observer). This is achieved without altering (or destroying) the ‘memory profile’ that is embedded at the site, and those sensorial memories specifically attached to particular present-past rhythmic patterns characteristic of the site. This affords the retention of specific occupational ‘timescapes’ within spaces of behavioral, situational, habitual, and eventful rhythmic durations. And all form part of the social elements of the site’s formation processes.

Bibliography

Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Translation: Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press.

Gonzalez-Ruibal, Alfredo. 2019. An Archaeology of the Contemporary Era. New York: Routledge.

Olivier, Laurent. 2011. The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory. Translation: Arthur Greenspan. New York: AltaMira Press.

Parikka, Jussi. 2019. Remain(s) Scattered in Remain. Ioana B. Jucan, Jussi Parikka, and Rebecca Schneider. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Pearson, Mike and Michael Shanks. 2001. Theatre/Archaeology. London: Routledge.

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