Join us at bookshop Ti Pi Tin in Stoke Newington on Wednesday 10th July for the first in a series of special evening events based on themes arising from an individual arts or literary publication. Each event will take an independently produced, small-run book or magazine as a starting point for a short programme of presentations, screenings and performances by artists, writers, filmmakers and publishers.
Focusing on the Anglo-German arts journal Verfreundungseffekt edited by Jen Calleja, this evening will feature talks, projections and performances exploring cultural exchange between the UK and Germany, the German language in English translation and bilingual publishing in a broader sense. It will also celebrate the opening of submissions for the second volume of Verfreundungseffekt, due for release in Spring/Summer 2014.
Curator Olivia Reynolds will discuss her work with LoBe, a residency program based across London and Berlin. Using the residency format as a curatorial strategy, LoBe manages two project spaces with a strong focus on installation and site specific practice, as well as art communication. Olivia will demonstrate how dialogue between artists from different cities has produced exciting new art situations, and further discuss the challenges faced by cross-cultural and cross-language initiatives and the current state of cultural and artistic exchange between the UK and Germany.
Rebecca May Johnson will present her ongoing work on Barbara Köhler's epic cycle of poetry Niemands Frau (2007). Niemands Frau is centrally an engagement with Homer's Odyssey, although it incorporates a vast number of intertextual references and themes including Ovid's Metamorphoses, T.S. Eliot's Wasteland, Plato's Republic, biographies of Alan Turing, the voice of Greta Garbo, quantum mechanics, computers and films. Rebecca will present Niemands Frau as an intervention in a tradition of translation; a ‘minor translation’ that represents a shift from an understanding of reality in which objective fact can exist and predictions made to an understanding which produces plural probability, and where finite, single truth is not possible.
Rebecca’s talk will be followed by a poetic response to themes in Niemands Frau, ideas around the “translator persona” and disintegration of the text written and read by Jen Calleja.
The evening will culminate with a very special, rare performance by multiple award-winning German poet Frank Klötgen , who will be travelling all the way from Berlin to perform on the night. His poems can be both hilarious and dark, and are remarkable for the energetic way the German language is made to dance through his writing and performance. Jen Calleja's English translations of the poems will be projected during the performance.
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Verfreundungseffekt is a German-English language magazine exploring 'Germanness' and 'The Angloamerican' designed by Joe Hales and edited by Jen Calleja. The magazine views cultures as 'mythologies' created by the tourist or the emigrant from another nation. This perspective raises questions about the performance, idealisation and stereotyping of nationalities, as well as the possibility and problems of translation, alienation and cultural understanding. Verfreundungseffekt is a more ethnographic record of the modern-day emigres moving from the UK to Germany/Germany to the UK/America compared to the academic, analysed and generalised accounts of these countries' history and culture. verfreundungseffekt.tumblr.com
Olivia Reynolds is the initiator of LoBe and lives in Berlin and London. As an artist she has exhibited throughout the UK, Scotland, Poland and Germany, and as a curator she was involved in ‘Out of Mind, Out of Sight’ at Kelvingrove, Glasgow and the group show ‘Hackgold’ at Space Gallery, London. She has recently been a judge in the U-Bahn Art poster competition in Berlin. Since 2009, she has run LoBe as a full time occupation. www.lo-be.net
Jen Calleja is a writer, poet, literary translator, reader and editor of Verfreundungseffekt. Her short fiction and poetry have been published in many independent publications and her first book translation Made On Earth by Wolfgang Korn is published by Bloomsbury. She has translated essays for PEN International and has written for Modern Poetry in Translation magazine and In Other Words, the journal of the British Centre for Literary Translation. She will soon become Acting Editor of the journal New Books in German. www.jencalleja.com
Rebecca May Johnson is a writer and journalist. She has written for The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times, Monocle, Tank for Observer magazine and Salt magazine amongst others. She is currently completing a PhD on Contemporary German Poetry at UCL with a focus on the theoretical and poetic work of Barbara Köhler.
Frank Klötgen is a Berlin-based poet and novelist. He has won the Die Zeit newspaper's Pegasus Prize for his work of hyperfiction Aaleskorte der Ölig, and has won and been runner-up of multiple national slam championships and competitions. In 2011 he was Writer in Residence of Innsbruck and this year was invited and supported by the Goethe-Institut Gulf Region to perform at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. He has published prose, novels and poetry and is permanently touring Germany and other parts of the world. www.hirnpoma.de
Ti Pi Tin was established in 2009 by Katja Chernova originally as an online platform, and has since developed in to a project space dedicated to selling, supporting and promoting publications made by artists. The shop offers a diverse selection of vibrant and stimulating works ranging from independently and self-published limited edition books to small press monographs, journals and zines. Ti Pi Tin initiates a dynamic program of events – talks, screenings and social gatherings aimed at offering visitors opportunities and catalysts for debate and discussion around contemporary independent art publishing. www.tipitin.com
‘Eine andere art von übersetzung’ Barbara Köhler, Niemands Frau
‘Use the minor language to send the major language racing.’ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
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Supported by the Goethe-Institut London - www.goethe.de/london
Contents
i. Do It Yourself
ii. Alphabet Day
iii. Self-Destruct Mechanism
The Value of Nothing
I. Islanders
II. Three Nurses for Sisters
(Taking A) Walk
On Sight
Effortless Rex
List of Power Stations
Poor Peacock
Order Manager
Mad Mind
Persistent Malaise
Borderlands
I've written 3 poems for a series of 3 poetry books for children being created by UCL in collaboration with the BBC to raise money for Cancer Research. I was asked to write poems on Friedrich's Ataxia, the Hypothalamus and spirit possession.
Fred’s Attack of Friedrich’s Ataxia
When Fred was ten he kept falling over
His mum began to worry, so they went to the doctor
Who asked him some questions, and sent him for tests
They watched how he walked, checked his back, then his chest.
It was Friedrich’s Ataxia that Fred had
Passed on at birth from his mum or his dad
They warned of speech problems and heart disease,
A curve in his spine and diabetes.
His physical therapist, a nice man called Tom,
Taught him exercises to make his arms strong
It’s good for when you use a wheelchair,
Or a cane for getting from here to there.
Now he’s like a super-robot with titanium screws
In both of his legs, so they are of more use
He can move around better than he could at the start
And takes medication to help with his heart!
You have one new message:
From: Hypothalamus
Hi again, it’s me: hypothalamus
Your body’s personal messaging service!
I tell your body when you need more heat
And also when it’s time to eat!
I remind you when you have to drink
Without you having to even think!
I make you hotter in order to kill
Some of the germs when you are ill!
I can make you stressed, or keep
you in top shape by promoting sleep!
I help you sense the night and day
All this from an almond-sized bit of your brain!
I change your mood in winter and spring
I think you’ll agree I’m a useful thing!
I Don’t Feel Myself!
I’m not feeling myself, the woman said
And promptly she went off home to bed
That night the whole village checked on her -
They were surprised by what they saw.
Her movements were slow and automated
She didn’t know her friends or family
The villagers knew immediately
That she had been possessed by a spirit!
To free her they put her in a trance
While she spoke in a strange voice
They banged their drum of choice
And moved around her in a dance
The villagers chanted, singing a prayer
They played music and wearing masks
They dedicated the night to the task
Of scaring the spirit out of her.
By the morning the spirit was gone
It rose up to the sky, where is belonged
You never know when you could be possessed
But your village will help put your mind at rest.
A Few Possible Observations on a Concert by Magdalena Schrefel, translated from German by Jen Calleja
An experimental prose text by young German writer Magdalena Schrefel, translated for Issue 3 of Young, Fresh & Relevant.
1: The ensemble introduces itself
It
enter the women and men of the choir
sings
a long-haired blonde a boy a woman holding a child’s hand a bearded man a woman with a red hat a woman with glasses a man with glasses a woman in a plaid coat a woman with long brown hair a man with a watch a girl with a pink jacket a woman with a scarf a boy with a hat a man in a cap a man in a red shirt with a black blazer
and
a child on a man’s shoulders
conducts
the young man with the mobile phone
for one night only
2: Some things really do happen en detail
Speech Act
A man enters the stage. The man positions himself at the podium. The man takes a glass of water from the podium. The man gargles and swallows. The man puts the glass back onto the podium. The man clears his throat.
The man raises his voice. The man reads aloud. The man reads for around 15 minutes. The man seals the last note in his mouth. The man bows to thunderous applause. The man bows again. The man exits. A curtain falls.
Score for 2 voices
A: One quarter note Two quarter notes
B: One eighth note Two eighth notes Three eighth notes Four eighth notes ---
A: Five eighth notes Six eighth notes Seven eighth notes Eight eighth notes B: Three quarter notes Four quarter notes
3: The premises are fully utilised
In the cloakroom
the first and the last violin check out each other in the mirror.
In the dressing room
- May I ask how it makes you feel when you hear music in the concert hall instead of making it? - I get frustrated. - Certainly seems like it! - What else is there left to do in your life? - Play better golf and rip out the weeds in my garden.
At the bar
-You’re repeating yourself Mary [Pause] - And, for heaven’s sake, stop looking so holier-than-thou all the time..
4: Finally there is also an audience
Walk Out
2 men in the audience stand up and flee. Loud cursing in the hall.
Outcry
2 women in the audience talk to one another in whispers (about the disadvantages of men in dress shoes)
5: Everything that could not happen anywhere else happens here
Entry
The harpist prisses the flautists fistule a word of greeting.
Continued
- This wretched translation really irritates me. - Translation is never literal though. [Pause] - Everything else bores me stiff.
6. Everything comes to an end, and then beyond Later a lady says to another in the queue for the toilet: - I have never heard it so gently before. -A serious matter. -A real pleasure.
Even later
the maid picks up (for a whopping six thirty seven an hour) the odd tissue, sweet wrappers and torn tickets from the floor of the auditorium.
Much later
the soundman checks the settings and wonders why no one but him heard the squeaking.
Too late
a drunk sixteen-year-old pees on the entrance to the music hall, Section B. He had 1.97 per mille of alcohol in his blood.
7. Finally, we explore the surrounding area
Nextdoor
2 children play a doorbell duet scored for four hands. N. Schmidt
Schmitz
Harmann
Dal Pozzo
Butter
Wiesengrund
Vollenweider Becker Schmidt
R. Löser
F. Einer K. Leiner Young Bach J. Bach S. Heider Mühsal Renz Himmel Haimerl
At the end
you can start all over again.
_
First published in Issue 3 of Young, Fresh & Relevant
Last year, I put out a limited edition print fanzine about Bruce Springsteen. It was called Jungleland and contained some great writing by fans and journalists about what the Boss and his music mean to our generation (i.e. roughly born after Born In The USA came out).
This is a short piece of written architecture I submitted for the Pyramid Schemes exhibition created by Lawrence Lek and The White Review. It also appeared in a limited edition book produced for the exhibition.
Finding you've been quoted on tumblr feels like your story is alive and it's blogging about itself.
“Television perfectly illustrates the theory of quantum physics, I birthed this intellivision in my head. Those pixels everywhere in every colour being everything, being there but not being there, I reasoned, they could be everything, though they will never be real, they will never really exist outside imagination. Possibilities mean so much more than reality these days.”
First we should look at a short history of the representation of pregnancy, which, just as Nettleton describes her history of dentistry, is ‘not a history of the past, but a history of the present’ (1994). It was Michel Foucault who established that the body and the social ‘truths’ surrounding it have been created over time as various components have been brought to attention through the gaze of science and other institutions of power, his intention being to ‘rob the differentiation between normal and pathological of its supposedly natural character’(Mol, 2002). What’s implicit is that in order for us to claim that the pregnant woman is perceptually a paradox (both a representation of life and, almost inexplicably in this time, of death), there must already be pre-existing notions of what a pregnant woman is allowed to be in society.
Pregnancy has long been linked with illness and fear, as ‘historically (and still today in some cultures), there have been grave risks for pregnant women, and their babies, that they may die in childbirth’ making a connection ‘not just between pregnant women and birth/new life, but also between pregnant women and death/the end of life’ (Longhurst, 2004). The more recent history of pregnancy and birth is in fact a history revealing, or as Mol would put it ‘skinning’, the pregnant female body to see this secret feminine miracle and harness the unruliness of the process; a history which developed in modern times due to patriarchal curiosity excused by science. What began as ‘the domain of women’ where ‘men would be ushered out of the room’ has now ‘all changed with the medicalization and technologicalization of pregnancy, gestation and labour’ (MacLachlan 2004). MachLachlan continues that ‘perhaps implicit in much of this is even an attempt to usher the woman’s
body out the door’, which is down to the female form, and especially the pregnant female, being embodied as unruly, disordered and uncontrollable in opposition to the male, for:
if the ‘other’ is unknowable and monstrous, it can also be intimate and indeed connected to what makes us most anxious about our bodily selves, disturbing our own sense of reality. It is perhaps, therefore, not surprising that the trope of the monstrous has had close connections with pregnancy as one of the most embodied, and least rational, of experiences. (Betterton, 2006).
That ‘women’s bodies are messy, unruly and out of control and that disciplinary technologies of repression and femininity have to be imposed upon them, and that men’s bodies are neat, clean and controlled and thus warrant no intervention’ is quite obviously false, and it is rather that ‘these are the body’s discourses, their representations’ (Holliday and Hassard, 2001).
The mess and the unknown associated with pregnancy have become unacceptable, but what is it that precisely makes bodily fluids, in this case emerging from the female body, abject? For clarity, abjection is defined as ‘the affect or feeling of anxiety, loathing and disgust that the subject has in encountering certain matter, images and fantasies – the horrible and dreadful – to which it can only respond with aversion, with nausea and distraction’ (Longhurst, 2004). Kristeva classified three main kinds of abjection, these being ‘abjection toward food and thus toward bodily incorporation; abjection toward bodily waste, which reaches its extreme in the horror of the corpse; and abjection toward the signs of sexual difference’ (Kristeva, 1982), which are all embodied by the female pregnant body.
CBC News in Calgary reported on how a mother had been banned from the local swimming pool for breastfeeding her baby in the water. Among the statements made by people at the pool were that it was ‘disgusting’ and should be banned. Though breast milk is harmless, and even one of the most nourishing substances for newborn babies, the swimmers were repulsed by even the idea that the milk would be incorporated into their own bodies. The coverage, which appears to side with the public’s revulsion, even siding with idea of bio-terrorism, holds the fear of contamination that harks back to times of epidemical contagious disease, while simultaneously evoking the relatively new panic of HIV being passed on from one body to another through breast milk. This fear of consuming or absorbing alien bodily fluids not only has a historical and therefore mythological foundation, but is also mirrored in the social fear of having one’s body and bloodline tainted, as exemplified by the Nazis’ attempted eradication of the Jews to prevent racial mixing (Mol, 2002).
The bloodiness and involuntary release of all kinds of bodily matter is clearly interchangeable with images of horror and violence, where the subject overspills, breaking the boundaries of the body in a way which puts in mind the destruction of life. The removal of images such as the infamous Benneton advert showing a baby still covered with the mother’s blood illustrate this fact. The
monstrous, rupturing births of science fiction films, such as those in the Alien film series where the birth of a new creature must result in the gruesome death of the host, play on the fantasies of the grotesque unknown residing within the body, similar to a parasitic disease or tumour. Finally, in accordance with Kristeva’s categorisations, the female form asserts a certain heightened and hyper visual version of the female form, almost a flaunting of the greatest difference between the sexes.
Society subdues all of the above instances of the pregnant form as a method of trauma prevention. Ernest Becker’s Terror Management Theory (TMT) dictates that if we were constantly reminded of our mortality we would ‘be rooted into inaction and abject terror’, so cultures hide ‘leaky’ beings which disorder boundaries. To ‘leak’, or merge the outside and the inside ‘can be associated with a loss of social acceptability’ (Nettleton, 1998), resulting in the disempowerment of the infirm, the young, and interestingly, the adult pregnant woman.
Arguably just as significant as abjection ‘proper’ are the technologies which can incite a distancing and disassociation with the pregnant woman’s own body, causing trauma and alienation. Contemporary human science theory has ‘a tendency to vilify what is usually called ‘Cartesian dualism’ as a kind of moral abjection’ (Csordas, 1994), this being a kind of disgust for the rupture between the body and self or where the removal of control creates a mistrust of the interpretation of one’s own body.
As a result of the normalisation of the extensive medicalisation of pregnancy and birth, the so-called medicalisation of everyday life, the inclusion of nurses, doctors and hospitals within these processes goes entirely unquestioned, and many would say that these are the ‘natural’ surroundings when having children. If we remember, however, that childbirth certainly hasn’t always been this way, we might agree that the modern ‘clinical context ‘tells’ women that their body needs medical and midwifery expertise to deliver their baby, when often this is not the case’ (MacLachlan, 2004).
Certain aspects of Bruno Letour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT) may help us understand what occurs within the hospital room which affects the childbirth experience. For Letour, there is no distinction between the individual and social, a widely accepted dualism, believing them to be entangled and in constant communication; the body does not end at the skin, but is inseparable from its surroundings (Blackman, 2009). As Letour explains, ‘it is not the way the room looks that matters’, but really, drawing on the ideas of emotional contagion, ‘the attitudes of the attendants’ (Rothman, 1991 and Lyerly, 2006). Ackrich and Pasveer (2004) explore in great depth the instances of trauma and distress which rise from disputes with midwives and doctors during labour, but also of ‘birth plans’ which offer ways of avoiding such traumas through the planning and performing of birth in more individualised ways. By nurturing the possibility of a positive emotional well-being alongside medical safety, instead of the latter usurping the former, outside mediation may be avoided. It’s
necessary to mention, however, by suggesting the only way of gaining a positive embodied experience is through the removal of oneself from the unfamiliar environment of the clinic in turn alienates those mothers who would not feel safe or comfortable or of good well-being in their homes due to health complications, familial or relationship issues or purely because they feel they could not cope. These women certainly should not be punished, or be thought of as ‘morally’ weak.
Leder’s theory of ‘dys-appearence’ relates to the difficulties we have of holding an embodied state while we go through any instances of prolonged pain, discomfort or illness that make one take notice of the body, or ‘appear’ during bodily dysfunction, in extremely upsetting circumstances, and create a ‘natural bias’ towards the negative’ (Csordas, 1994). Even though ‘the body is the most abiding and inescapable presence in our lives’ we are not constantly aware that we are functioning on an everyday basis with or as a body; our corporeal being is ‘essentially characterised by absence...the body, as a ground of experience...tends to recede’ (Leder, 1990). In the words of Mol, ‘[b]odies only speak if and when they are made heavy with meaning’ (2002), and this has a very literal meaning in the case of pregnancy and birth.
Once again, it is the work of Ackrich and Pasveer that illustrates what I’ve categorised as two different alienations caused by the corporeal not matching the cognitive: an alienation from one’s ‘self’ caused by the pain during labour, and then conversely the absence of expected symptoms, such as contractions and pain, which also alienates the woman giving birth from her body. The former is a willed dualism, as the ‘[a]lienation stems not from the emergence of this duality but from its possible obliteration, that is, the impossibility of maintaining through different forms of activity, a sort of reflexivity of the body’ (Ackrich and Pasveer, 2004), as without this consciousness the experience is lost. The latter means that the woman is forced to give up the interpretation of their ‘actual’ condition to those around her, such as the nurse who can see dilation, or the doctor who knows by inspection that she is ready to push, though she does not realise it.
Even after a test has been made, a woman’s pregnancy almost doesn’t become ‘legitimate’ until it has been recognised by a doctor. As mentioned above, her pregnancy is firmly, and literally, within the jurisdiction of medicine. Through the knowledge of science ‘expert professionals claim to know something about her future child, much more in fact, than she could ever find out by herself’ and so ‘before she actually becomes a mother she is habituated to the idea that others know better’ (Duden, 1993). This removal of total control from the start, and the fact that prenatal tests and scans are a legal requirement for the mother, convince her that her unborn child is not only hers, but the medical establishment’s too. Duden argues that:
the very fact that pregnancy is intensely medicalised – its character and quality diagnosed, its progress seen in relationship to a physician – necessarily produces an aura: the woman is led to think of disease, handicaps, intervention, cure, interruption (1993)
Or, in other words, women do not trust themselves, or more their own bodies, to known when something is wrong, and so feel they must give over control to another. The journey from the help of an untrained midwife to this state of intense medicalisation was surprisingly quick. ‘The physician’s finger, then his stethoscope, later X-rays, tests, and sonar...invaded woman’s gendered interior and opened it to non-gendered public gaze’ Duden summarises, reminding us that in recent history, labour would be signalled by ‘the woman’s statement about her quickening’(1993), and not by an outsider. The term ‘quickening’ cannot even be found in a modern dictionary, let alone in modern usage, as ‘today, this sphere of publicly recognized and impenetrable female intimacy has been destroyed (Duden, 1993). Surveillance, that is, the focus on prevention over treating a problem if it should so occur, came at the close of the classical era, according to Foucault, through the invention of medical standardisation (1974). From this time onwards, pregnancies would be monitored for their duration, to make sure that they followed rules and averages set by the medical institution in the name of optimal physical well-being. The relevancy of this medical history, and this history of standardisation, is that it is precisely these ‘processes of normalization that must seek to abject, name, and exclude the monstrous other’ (Orr et al, 2006). We can see, therefore, that as we do not want to be classified as abnormal or abject, as this would lead to social exclusion, ‘the examination transformed the economy of visibility into the exercise of power’ (Foucault, 1974). This kind of power is not something abstract, but allowed doctors from the thirties to the seventies to completely remove the consciousness of the mother through anaesthetic, causing all kinds of post-natal bonding issues (Rothman 1991).
The scientific gaze objectifies the baby, viewing it as something separate to the mother, and indeed ‘the working model of pregnancy that medicine has arrived at...is that a pregnant woman is a woman with an insulated parasite capsule growing inside her’ (Rothman, 1991). Rothman continues that though the pregnancy is ‘physically located within the woman’ it is ‘still seen as ‘external’ to her, not a part of her’ (1991), with the baby being given its own agency, and now its own legal rights. Rothman would prefer that the mother and the unborn baby be seen as ‘genuinely one’ and that what ‘meets the needs of one meets the needs of the other’ (Rothman 1991), denying the medical establishment’s splitting ‘how’s baby’ and then ‘how’s mother’ attitude.
The array of biotechnology used throughout pregnancy and birth, ranging from sonograms to heart monitors, exists in the hope that it will ‘ameliorate the human condition and decrease pain and suffering’ (Brodwin, 2000) by aiding in reducing the unpredictable and unseen problems which may arise. On the other side of this argument however is the ‘dystopian fear that technology uniformly strengthens certain forms of domination and destroys the subject’s autonomy’ (Brodwin, 2000) in a
similar way medical intervention may do. The two are obviously closely linked, in that they assure a lack in the mother’s ability to be aware of her baby.
The Doppler foetal heart monitor which relays the baby’s heartbeat ‘negates or devalues the pregnant woman’s privileged, embodied experience’ (Drapkin Lyerly, 2006) by bringing that which is occurring inside her out into ‘non-gendered’ space, while the sonogram or ultrasound, ‘a technique developed for the benefit of women at risk’, now is ‘being advocated as a test for every pregnant woman to certify absence of pathology’(Duden, 1993), creating not only the objectification of the foetus on the monitor, but also ‘multiplies diagnosis beyond therapeutic potentials...affects tissues...changes the juridical position of women’ and ‘introduces new qualitative distinctions into pregnancies’ (Duden, 1993).
What appears to be the most shocking aspect of sonogram use is that, after a study in conducted in Germany it was revealed that ‘70 percent of malformations are overlooked by physicians...while 30 percent of supposed malformations later prove to be overzealous imputations’ (Duden, 1993), resulting in an inquiry to establish the kind of psychological trauma inflicted on patients who had given over the trust in their bodies to a flawed medical legality.
Even in the absence of any kind of problem with the baby, the apparently normal procedure where one gets to see and then keep the first picture of their baby is seen as almost necessary and also as a great tradition in Western culture. Duden finds this process of making the baby an abstracted object dangerous, fearing that the ‘embodiment of a visual image, of photographic pseudo-identities’ makes this image and this photo ‘more real than flesh and blood’ (1993), which may result in an idealisation of the idea of the baby, and alienation from the real baby.
Celebrity culture and multimedia advertising frequently feature images and stories on the pregnant woman, and are sectors that Rose calls ‘technologies of citizenship’ (1990) which ‘regulate the private sphere through the production and dissemination of social norms’ (Howson). Bodies that are selected and made visible in this way are forced to look reflexively upon themselves to measure their acceptability against the normalised social version. By seeing who profits and who suffers under accepted discourses of abjection, we become aware of the reasons bodies remain abject. The simple and heavily mediated domain of the mass media appears incongruous when compared with the individual, complex, disordered and intense realities of pregnancy, birth and motherhood. Many modern artists have tried to give existence to the women who do not fit or relate to narratives and images created within general pro-natalist society averse to the abject, where the body and its experiences are rendered faultless and impermeable through narrative displacement, and cosmetic and technological tuning, and where ‘termination as an event...is currently absent from cultural memory’ (Pollock and Sauron, 2007). That ‘abortion is as natural, and possibly more prevalent, than birth’
(Greer in Pollock and Sauron, 2007) due to the natural cycles of egg and womb replacement, and that as much as twenty percent of pregnancies do not end with a live birth, highlights the massive gap in media representation.
By looking at ways pregnancy, abortion and miscarriage are being incorporated into modern art, we can see how ‘truthful’ and ‘natural’ states of disgust may change through the inclusion of subcultural ideas being incorporated into the mass consciousness, allowing for more positive states of embodiment. Artists, such as Tracey Emin, have brought the unmediated body into the light, depicting foetal and bloody matter in her portraits, and bringing her (not ‘messy’, but post-abortion convalescence) bed into the open gallery space. By making visible abject termination, such artists open up the possibility of socially normalising termination and miscarriage, and arguably the abject notions connected to pregnancy also. It is a heightened version of birth, bearing the mess and death connected to pregnancy, only with absolute surety; the ultimate abject experience.
It is Longhurst who summarises in part the argument of this piece, in that:
‘conceptions’ of bodies do not stay static over time and place. Feelings of discomfort about body fluids – the inside making its way to the outside – are a result of the construction or coding of the pregnant subject. There is nothing in her biological formation that makes a loathing or fearing of pregnant embodiment, or her absence from public activities and public space necessary. It is widely assumed that people have to possess consummate control over their bodily/mental functions in order to walk confidently in public space. (2004)
in the carriages of the underground is
a show of hands for marriage
arranged from intuition on fingered yellow rails
after a dash in slow motion.
when grassy youth is lost or never had
speeding in cars and running for trains in
wedding rings is a fatalist’s vitality.
in the black rain my bare hands hold a sandwich that
veils my face at rest
advertising that you may be somewhere
or nowhere or once there
and I have to lie that I am meeting you
and he thinks I am lying that you exist
and it feels like I am.
the following evening we meet at the brownswood.
this was the appraisal for reintroduction
like you had dropped me off at our room
on your way out the city.
I take the chance to walk twenty steps towards
the castle that I had passed on my walk to work
accepting I would never get closer and that
this road would once more be a route.
afterwards, my welcome or goodbye face held a second and
when I started for home
still in a state of kissing
thinking of nothing
I could feel them clinging to me and I could feel how they
fell away when dried and picked off by the wind.
I turned off when passing the brownswood on my passage home
so I could walk to the castle in a sort of defiance
touching the sign for indoor climbing with a drunken hand before leaving.
the pavement is formed of bricks and slabs actually
my afternoon periphery had made it smooth as it fell away
under foot for the last two weeks.
I held off wetting my mouth until it was paper
wincing when I had to lick off that kiss but I
let it all just fall away at the gate when I said
'brownswood' out loud as a warning
taping over the last words I had said to you.
A piece from a new book about how exiled German writers have influenced German-speaking writers abroad. Renate Ahrens talks about the effect Zweig's Chess Story had on her when she read it at a young age. Translated for the writers' charity PEN International.
I drifted off a couple of times, the films diegetic sound entering my dreams and prompting me awake at certain points. I would wake up slowly and my mind would project images onto the screen. At one point I awoke thinking I saw Jake surrounded by hundreds of figurines, and that this was the answer to his hermitage, building tiny sculptures. But they were actually hundreds of weeds enclosing his feet. Another time I thought I saw two faces superimposed on a mountainside, but my eyes readjusted to see that it was only the curves of the hills that had suggested a face to my barely conscious mind. I wonder if I would start seeing things if I too lived alone in the wilderness. Shot in black and white, in crackling, blown up condition, it is no wonder that I started seeing things.
Jake’s life is hinted at in five photographs he selects to be shown interspersed between ‘scenes’. I mean from Jake’s life before living alone. Documentaries can no longer discuss objectivity, but whether Jake’s life was affected by the filmmaker (and sound engineer) is made irrelevant by the film’s practically open constructed nature and the accentuated sound. Shots had obviously been planned painstakingly. The camera is set up pre-shot, flies up from below the ladder to the top. It knows when Jake will be selecting photos and where he will place the box of photographs.
The only moment Jake reacts to the filming, noticeably, is in the final few minutes of the film where he realises he is nodding off in front of the fire and acknowledges it with the tiniest of smiles. As the camera stares at Jake, it’s asking what we’re all asking. Who are you? What are you feeling? His stares, his silences; they could all too easily be interpreted as signs of him being morose and misanthropic. But his whistling, his cassette tapes in his car, nature like a direct projection from his mind, all signal a sleepy tranquillity, a weary motivation, a life chosen, planned. He reads and studies. He is growing.
In the deepest, air-conditioned aisle of the supermarket, assertion finally came. As I stared into the spread of bottled drinks before me, and followed the small prints of the multibuy deals and percentage-based offers, a decision surfaced on something six rows and several aisles back. I returned to a single step from the foyer. At the circular, turreted stand of flowers that had caught my eye on arrival, I had, several minutes before, entertained the thought of a gift. In truth, I had noticed first that the flowers were heavily reduced, some wilting visibly even, and beyond that dubious beginning, I had known already that perhaps the idea of a gift itself did not sit correctly. Yet still, I had preceded to cloak this brief, gallant flourish of spontaneity in something else. I had procrastinated. I had realised that I could only remember the flowers that somebody else would have once adored, and in remembering that, a leak had sprung within. The whole meeting seemed futile now, and presently, as I flicked through the labels once more at the flower display, I could not understand how I had slept with such self-assurance the previous night. My fingers stopped at the cellophane wrap of the camellias. They carried the heaviest discount, and seemed to represent too the healthiest of those that still remained. The colour of their oscillating petals was a little gaudy for my taste, yet I had removed myself from the distraction of emotion altogether, and as such, they were patently the correct choice. Prising them carefully from the stand, I caught my image in the metal sheet that backed the now empty shelves of a refrigerated unit. My reflection appeared grievously dishonest. I turned back into the aisle, clutching them self-consciously to my left breast.
Once on the correct bus I sat beside a woman completely unlike myself reading a newspaper. I sought out the important parts. I completely agreed with the style of dress chosen by a French politician. I read all the stories about America. I had to unpick the tears sitting on my lower lashes after reading about a memorial service up north. I didn’t notice the woman leave, but remember picking up the newspaper off her empty seat to continue reading it. My fingertips felt roughened and dry from the paper, I looked around in my bag for hand cream. There is so much space between molecules that we never really touch anyone or anything, I moisturised more air than skin. As the bus took a detour due to the Carrutherson Pass being closed on Thursdays, which I’d forgotten about, I was notified that my book was ready to be picked up and would be available for the next three weeks. I got off a stop early to pick it up.
As I pored over the magazines, I read, a little absentmindedly, the watch of the man adjacent to me. He, a silver-haired embellishment in a sheepskin lined jacket, was busy haw-hawing with a lady whom I assumed to be his wife. Her skin bore the same leathery tan and her teeth shone as intimidatingly as his anyhow. I realised then that I was behind schedule. I had woken myself an hour early than strictly necessary that morning to allow for moments like this - for the doubt surrounding the flowers, for the c-list fodder that had attracted me momentarily, for my foray into soft drink promotion. And yet I had miscalculated even my own capacity for wasting time. I strode back through the cheese aisle, beyond the meat and fish and the deli counters and those other pungent substitutes for their soothing French counterparts. I kept my head down at the passing crocodile skinned handbags and the top-knotted scalps and those vulgar pairs of boots I should surely face up to in time. I thought of how I must remove my agitations toward these grotesque appendages and the memories of what again they may replace. I fell into line at the counter. I paid for the flowers politely and discreetly. I found myself no longer angling for any kind of affirmation from the eyes of a seventeen-year-old. The checkout seemed to offer only disdain anyway - and that beneath the gravitas of a gloss pout. I crunched the receipt into a ball. It was unlike me to not have folded it with at least some degree of precision. As I swung beyond the automatic doors into the street outside, I could not adjust to the spiky protrusions of the synthetic paper form within my palm and I discarded it temporarily into the right hand pocket of my coat.
There was no one at the counter so I went round the back to try and find someone who worked in the stockroom who could find the book. I’d ordered it because the blurb used a turn of phrase I’d always admired and I was half-serious about highlighting any word in the book that I felt proved the existence of an ideology I’d been playing around with for almost two years. It started off as a miraculous discovery, a new way of seeing, but now it was the only way I saw, the only way I wanted to see. Not many others knew about it though, so I wasn’t a fanatic, I was just very interesting. The depot had a TV in the corridor outside the stockroom and I leant as if bored against its screen with a flat palm on the end of my stiff arm to twist my head and shoulders in for the thrill of guilt and culpability the international news would give me. Television perfectly illustrates the theory of quantum physics, I birthed this intellivision in my head. Those pixels everywhere in every colour being everything, being there but not being there, I reasoned, they could be everything, though they will never be real, they will never really exist outside imagination. Possibilities mean so much more than reality these days. They certainly do to me. If only he wanted to confuse me or contradict himself and smile because of it.
Above me, the sun had made itself known momentarily before slipping behind the burgeoning bank of cloud. I had expected the weather to be dour anyway. As I reached the monument at Perfrement Street, I examined it studiously. I cannot explain how exactly, but it was as if I had visited the site of a painting I had feared since childhood and found that it was merely the style of the brush work that had put me off. It seemed that the positioning of the statues and shrubbery, the planning of the park to my left - the curvature of the avenue ahead in fact - was so perfectly to my taste at first hand. I could not remember why I had always been so unmoved by it. At the corner of Beauregard Road I waited for a rush of traffic to calm. I released the balled receipt into a bin by the level crossing. Looking down upon the camellias, I saw that they were flagging somewhat more than they had seemed to be in the supermarket. I felt suddenly inclined to rid myself of them altogether, unable to imagine waiting on any bench with such poisonous ambivalence to the item in my hand and what it was inclined to represent.
I started walking towards the bridge, but very slowly. I was worrying, I remember, about whether things would turn out alright in the end, if things had already gone wrong some time up to this point. On the way I saw a cash machine but decided not to check my balance. It looked a lot like an arcade game with its fully flashing colour screen, full quantum. Where is my money? There’s more money than there is money, there’s more money than is needed for the whole world to be alright.
Crossing the road, I realised I would arrive early by default. I would expect poor time-keeping already; merely two weeks in, it was a habit, and I realised then I would not look on it with the same wry romance as I had harboured in the past. I remembered now, in amongst the brilling throng of lunchtime, the despondence I had felt during those sporadic sittings with others. It paralysed me as a feeling of utter distraction in the washy light of a pub garden. It was a cold disaffection toward a glass of Diet Coke at gone seven-o-clock. I was a terrible liar, it seemed, and yet with desperation I had always remained. I had forced myself drunk beyond the seams of my conscience.
I thought of a joke I could tell if I thought he was trying to make us feel serious. I read it through in my head while my facial muscles held a tech rehearsal. I knew I’d missed the chance to cross the bridge, but by this I had saved myself.
I had pursued at pulling teeth for the sake of some momentary cling or the notion of something I had already dismissed. This that had seemed a self-deprecating and trustworthy punch line in the safety of a relationship, now seemed inescapably accurate once more. I arrived alone at the bench, camellias still in hand.
He visited the nineteen homes, furthest half a mile east, the closest straight through a single patch of thorny undergrowth. Picture frames, chairs with fallen through seats, skirting rails and boards, broom handles, wood for the Easter bonfire he told them, and for each the same question of, ‘oh! A few feet of the barb from your farm if you can, something’s making an attempt on the lives of the chickens and the pussies and I’ll never hide them in the house. They be free, okay, so I’ll keep the thing that’s out, out’. It was believable, he had so many hens and so very many cats, both kept in cages. His cat enclosure was on the left of the house a foot from the kitchen window and housed nineteen felines on three levels connected by coarse rope ladders and wooden planks. The second level was in line with the window ledge so he could talk at the cats face to face if they stopped to sit and stare at him plucking the chickens in the sink. The chickens’ smaller cage was to the right of the house, along with the barbed wire, rolled like sleeping mats and leaning against the outer wall, shifting an inch here and there in the pre-morning wind, scratching the flaky paintwork.
There was a young woman, young in the body but old in the face, a mute, who would walk along the shoreline and stop on the stretch straight down from his house. She wore a long, over-washed dress that was now a grey-blue instead of white. Obviously she was a daughter belonging to a family on the island, and actually somebody’s wife, but in his mind she was in complete opposition to every part of the place and was something newly arrived. He misread her silence as an opposition to the ways of the island. He misread the name she silently mouthed as Hermia. It was Amie. He really had hopes of her becoming an Apostle of his in the Church of His Own Autonomy.
He began to join her on the shore, and would chatter at her. In his mind he sounded authoritative, respectable, but she couldn’t take him seriously. So many contradictions and so much energy. She preferred to float, but by no means in a noncommittal way. After a few weeks of his monologues he invited her to the house to see his plans for Crucifix Row, and she admired the time he had put into his drawings, every one of the fifty or so sketches being exactly the same. She doubted he ever had the idea himself; it was far more likely that it had come to him in a dream and had become a valid conception through its repetition on paper, like writing your name over and over until it feels real.. A raise of her eyebrows asked for some paper and a pencil. She changed a dozen crosses into five slapdash columns in a large loose circle, the barbed wire grew and lost its stings. Fishing nets as hammocks is what they became. Amie could see it becoming a freestanding porch, higher up the beach but still an inch or two in the water.
He laughed. He playfully pushed her away from the table, she took a step back shaking her head with a derisive smile, but turned white as her foot met a nail-head peering up out the floorboards. She didn’t scream, she held her foot in her hands while her blood ran and jumped off her sole. It made the preacher furious that she wouldn’t scream, she didn’t even cry. He carried her outside in a blustery mood, popped her down by the cats and washed her foot in a bucket of clean water. He let her hold one of his sleek grey purring creatures while he bandaged her up. Afterwards they walked back up into the house, and she held up a sketch to show that she would help him build his Row.
They decided that they would erect it in two weeks, and spent many hours together constructing the haphazard crosses out of the bits and pieces he’d collected. She was making a plan all the while, but didn’t feel like she had to tell him. One twilight evening they met to drag the crosses onto the beach at low tide while the cats whined and the chickens hooted at them. With a stepladder sinking in the sand the preacher took a mallet swing after swing to force them deeper and deeper into the ground while Amie watched the rate both cross and man were sinking. The tide turned, and he rushed to keep up. Ten were in, but it was becoming difficult with wave after wave almost reaching his feet. He managed to get the last two in while Amie moved to stand up on the land, but had walked off around the side of the house. He shouted for her to put on the gloves and bring the wire, they had to finish it. She didn’t reappear. He shook on the stepladder and jumped down, waist high and fuming to get the barbed wire. He found her, grappling with the wire, almost torn to shreds in an effort to cut it into bits, parts too small to wind around Crucifix Row. He made a fist in her hair, and she screamed, wiping the blood off her arms with her fingers and rubbing it into his face. ‘Your vanity is disgusting’ she said.
In the dark of a later morning there was something like a torn sheet dancing in the shallows amongst the crosses; a creased projection screen for the lights of searching torches. A dress. Amie had been missing for three days. The searchers went up to the house, its lights were on. They peered through the window and saw her in a ruffled shirt with cut-off jeans adjusting a radio while the preacher spun a fishing-net in a rocking chair.
I wake up at 5.30 in Watt, California and take a 20 minute shower immediately: twelve minutes for the shower, eight minutes for ‘other activity’. Staying in bed with my wife once I’m awake is no longer an option; it’s just not fair on her. I have breakfast and focus on every slow chew, no rushing. The radio and the television have to stay off. Sounds and fast moving images encroach on my movements. Fingers start tapping, knee starts bouncing. Deciding to stay collected keeps me my job. There are bad days, and bad days make me late. Dressing can, understandably, get me excited. If I don’t dress quickly enough the material makes my skin sensitive. The moment I feel I’m losing control I try to quickly undress again. I do not wish to sweat in my fresh shirt before I’ve left home, and the sooner I preempt that I’m starting to slip, the sooner I can finish, redress and leave. A few times in the past I’ve lied to myself that I can hold on until I can get into work, complete dressing, wet and comb my hair, lean over to tie my shoes by the front door with extreme difficulty. Straightening up creates a pull, my eyes close, my forehead moistens. Blankly, sternly, I stroll along the corridor, lay out my jacket, shirt and trousers on the couch and go to the bathroom. I sit on the toilet seat, tap on my thigh with my right hand, and jack off with the left. Just before I cum, I stand and turn to do it in the sink. Wash self, wash hands, re-comb hair, redress, rush from the house. I hate rushing, but denial spoils your plans. That first poor decision to not accept an unstoppable event sets off a car crash. Running to the bus causes a new friction to start and the ride will be excruciating. I’ll want to touch. Once I even placed my briefcase on my lap and ran a fingertip up and down my zipper. I could barely stand up for my stop. After that I’ll have to storm up the drive to the building, avoid goodmorningprofessor at every turn, go to my office, lean against the unlockable door and throb into a handkerchief. Could be twice more before I’ve even had a coffee. If I don’t rush I can normally focus my mind away from the tingling in my crotch for the journey and enjoy the walk into the university, pick up a newspaper in the shop, pick up my mail, brew a pot and learn the news while I gently begin to allow my arousal.
For years the arrangement has been that I don’t give or supervise a lecture until past ten o’clock. It’s a measure that I greatly appreciate. Most of my colleagues understand my build-up routine. Rumination, notation, ejaculation, meditation. After greetings, I begin speaking at the lectern clearly, full of hope. ‘Government deregulation and failed regulation of the commercial and investment banking industries were important contributors to the subprime mortgage crisis,’ I’ll say, followed by ‘these included allowing the self-regulation of Wall Street's investment banks and the failed regulation of Wall Street rating agencies, which were responsible for incorrectly rating some $3.2 trillion dollars of subprime mortgage-backed securities’. A few years ago I’d be able to go on for at least half an hour, but these days I have to sit down after a few sentences. They provided me with a chair; I cross my legs and stare ahead. After a time the students barely registered the transition. At the end of lectures no one asks questions, they know to email them. I remain seated as students come up, nod and smile, pass me their papers and leave quietly. They probably guess that I head to the store cupboard to crouch and get off just to be able to walk out the hall straight. I stopped eating lunches in the cafeteria and now keep to my office. It’s not an oral fixation thing, it’s so I can phone my wife at the Devina Opera House where she is a Composer in Residence while I eat the salad or sandwich or cold lasagna that she’s prepared for me. Eating and calling is like taking a tranquilizer, it means there’s no thought process space left for my dick. After lunch I usually take one-on-ones with the student body. These are done in fifteen minute spurts, and we leave the door open to reassure them, as well as myself, that I will not be doing anything rhythmic save for sharpening my pencil. Of course I have jacked off under the desk during meetings, but never with students, only longer occasions with other members of faculty. My oldest colleagues, my friends, know that long periods of time without release can create a tension that is almost an agony. As the conversation progresses I start to mumble, my chin dips, and my eyelids loll, inexplicably, kindly, they direct their words and looks away from me without a pause, and silently allow me to tick-tock in my underwear.
By the time I’m home I am exhausted, sticky all over. I wash while my wife plays me new recordings. They soothe me. We sit and eat dinner, side by side, to warm her up to my presence. The moment we finish eating we have sex; I love spending time with her in the evenings, and feel immeasurably guilty if I have to leave her to masturbate. She knows this, understands I love her, dinner is foreplay, shoulders and knees softly rubbing is foreplay. We lie on the floor and I try to hold back that yelp of urgency while she undresses. I cup her face in my hands, look only at her eyes, nod and smile while I try and fuck her in a consistent way at least. The evening is spent relaxing or working together in the lounge. She sits on the floor effortlessly curling note tails, while I sit apart from her on the sofa reading journals, covering my heat with my laptop. In those hours I want to cry, I want to scream. I want to tie a dog leash around my wife’s throat and drag her upstairs. I want more than one bathroom break. I want to sit naked, stare at the television, dribble down my chin, dribble into my hand. At bedtime we brush our teeth while she touches me, this is the time she likes to enjoy me, and then we make love and laugh, work out the weekend, and I quietly pray that I’ll fall straight to sleep around her so she knows how I feel when I’m only warm and not hot.
___
I own Joe Bethancourt’s first banjo, the old S. S. Stewart his grandfather gave him at the age of nine in Phoenix. I am Bethancourt’s nephew, Tom Purtill. Bethancourt picked up the bango after hearing his grandmother, C. H. Burnett, play the fiddle. I’ve never played the banjo, except strumming at his in time with the lunging steps of Li Ling the Chinese shot-putter during his winning throw in Osaka across my television screen in two-thousand and seven. Scratching at the strings was a remote distraction, something to ride on my mental hopes that he would somehow fall or fail. He got nineteen point thirty-eight metres.
Back then, as I had done for many years previously, I enjoyed driving around making faces at on-coming drivers, stretched wide-eyed smiles, dramatic and painful frowns, screaming mouths, that kind of thing. I didn’t bother doing this on my way into college, Bryn Mawr. I was always feeling drained of mischief in the morning and early afternoons after nights away in the city minutely adding to the spreading tattoo on my stomach at Roy Chamb’s, or laying around on my ex-girlfriend’s bathroom floor reading out-of-date photography magazines while she had four-hour baths. My mother was from Abra de Ilog in Occidental Mindoro. She left to study the genus of moth called Melgona, in spite of her simple family’s assurances that this would only end in trouble. Within months of landing in America she starred in Maxwell Anderson’s play Valley Forge, playing George Washington’s wife. She could play any nationality, so long as she didn’t have many lines. It was her particularly sublime features, beautiful in how striking she was, that detracted from a question of nation. Only mother could help me when I murdered Stefan Ekberg. Murdered him from my past. Stefan had returned from the motorcycle speedway championships in Great Britain having won in the Premier League that season. He came to me, me in my shabby smooth suit and flat shoes, him in his bad skin, to tell me he was leaving me for Herbert Kraus’s grandson, Thomas. Mother and I took this as a personal familial insult, us being cousins of the Oehler Brothers, the true masters of Nietzchean scholarship, unlike the disgraced Herbert Kraus, a weakminded Joo-sympathiser. I completed my studies full of rage and insecurity, and became junior head of Remote Surgery at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, New Jersey. To think I’d only gone into telepresence purely because of the Lindbergh Operation, the first remote surgical procedure, which I read about in the newspaper. Dr. Jacques Marescaux removed the gallbladder of a man in Strasbourg from New York in two-thousand and one.
I kept a copy of the opera, or rather drama per musica, Scandebeg in the second drawer of my desk. I was consumed by how much the picture of Vivaldi on the inside cover looked like both my old lover and my mother. I couldn’t read the actual opera very well. Vivaldi’s white hair didn’t so much grow from or seem even attached to his scalp, but sat on top in obvious wig-status; floating and emitting a yellow-grey light from his young-man-old-woman face.
My first operation would be on Adam Silverman. Silverman. Silverman. It wasn’t successful, this silvery man, he went the colour of money. Someone in Atlanta brought him back to life, mistaking my smile on the videoscreen for mild hysteria at my remote robotic hands subtle fuck up. I kissed my own hands post-op. I’d read up on this man. He’d written an opera, found on the same shelf i’d accidently come across Scandebeg: Korczak’s Orphans. Janusz Korczak, or Henryk Goldszmit, supervised orphans in the Warsaw ghetto, his death march with the two hundred young Jews was seen by Wladyslaw Szpilman himself. An opera for a martyr-Jew? And a Theaterstück inspired by Nabokov’s Lolita? I shook my head in sorrow. Four months after the operation, Adam Silverman stood in the foyer of my apartment building, seven floor’s below me, while I watched The White Tower, drawn in by Alida Valli, counting out her ancestry in tears.
When we were children
my brother and I would visit
DIY warehouses with our dad
to be shown the greasy teeth of cashiers
cooing at our eyelashes flapping like flags
where sawdust settled on them in the queue.
We had interest enough only for the shelf of tester telephones
and the wall of homefront ornaments
shaking hands with doorknobs
highfiving doorknockers
choosing which door to come home to from a
rail of confrontational wooden curtains.
We would use four fingers for that satisfying snap of
lightswitches
to turn off America
start our car in the carpark
bring people back from the dead.
We’d mash the stiff keys of phones
dialling the number for home though we were all out
and the display said we were eternally calling ‘John’,
enjoying the goodbye from either end of the aisle on
mismatched receivers, and I would imagine his voice
deeper, troubled,
out of sync with the boy’s ridiculous little mouth.
M.M.
we ate a fragrant paper chrysalis of cherries,
the waste-plate of stalk and stone debris
a side-dish of spaghetti
in the darkened room, where mugs of
gone-cold Earl grey, with a
winter’s broken ice, or
smashed mirror
floating on their upturned
kaleidoscope’s lens of a
surface, are pools that we talk about
girls over.
when girls dye their hair red
there’s going to be
trouble for the rest of your life.
both these girls sit next to us in the dark
but when they’re ten and bratty.
the one day we needed photography
a crowding sticky mist decided to push passed us by the sea,
crisping up my skin and hair
(who both feigned indifference
to not seem affected or offended).
there’s a chip of glass like a grain of salt
where I crouch half cheering half abusing you while you
ride your bicycle at stirring carrier bags that are
really birds.
if a pigeon did get chewed up in your bike chain
you’d regret your aim.
Effortless Rex
Sweating up a newspaper in a damp armpit
I check the rim of my hat with a pinky for icicles,
barely touching it: a thumb reading a blade
at the close of splitting an apple.
Snow tires on wet metal railings
Snow catches in the dipping thoroughfare
Snow is destined over vents in the road
to implode like my patience with a succession of thunderclaps coming
from the blustering gauze sails of the building I’d, just then, exited.
I whistle with them, the waterproof coat
of the guts of construction spidering the walls,
and subsequently cough.
You both show up, late.
Who declared me ‘irresponsible’
to the authoritative windows of the place?
Livid, I puckered up for a kiss: ‘Not possible’.
Poor Peacock
Peacock you peck red rubber bands from pavements where
Postmen spill them in the street, counting out the population,
One band for every house,
Enough to string a shoebox guitar a day.
You’ve taken to holding my hand out in the street and
When you pluck up the vellum rings
I stoop too, to watch you dearly.
I swear I’d not seen a single rubber band in the street before
But now they’re all I see.
Buttons, pins, plastic fish, a valid rail ticket,
Even an earring wave up at me.
You couldn’t make it, so I squatly sat where ukuleles are strummed
And restrung with garroting wire,
Never to keep familial correspondences together.
Each ‘lele is a veritable variation of tension, just like the
One red rubber band around my wrist,
A different one each day, one day at a time,
Each a keepsake of a new grip;
One’s like a finger and thumb, gently leading
One’s always asking me like a feathery query
One checked my pulse so hard I shot it out the window
Hoping it would hit the future out of hiding.
The Heavens
In the summers we
eyed folks hunting for
those ad-ver-tised bottles of water
on the neighborhood.
It drove us to sing out,
call out to each other,
to the people.
We wished them luck,
checked if we could sip from
the grail too.
The winters made us quiet,
hushed up our mouths.
No one looked for nothing,
it was all here,
all your questions answered,
the most simple things out of reach ‘til the
roads opened up again.
The billboards were just
postcards from
places we were sure
weren’t anywhere at all.
Temporary giant broken birdhouses with spilling nests gave away the Pompidou Centre. The building, like a lot of modern Parisian architecture, plays on inversion; draining and structural guts crawl all over it, a series of escalators like a massive water-flume is clipped to the building’s exterior. From the Sacré Coeur later in the day, the gallery would look like a stepladder in a field. The short film about Freud prepping a painting session we watched out of choice before entering the exhibition proper; a naked man and dog out on the floor, great heat burning at the window, comments about plants and flowers coming into bloom, the obvious punctuation of nakedness hitting their chatter. Freud appears old but strong, squeezing out paint onto a palette, smooth squeeze-and-scrapes, using bright colours you couldn’t imagine actually going onto the painting. The model swivels the canvas around to be nearer to Freud and the bright window and the film cuts out just as he’s about to put the first dab of paint onto the canvas. The dog lies still and the model is comfortable, shaking out his hand to ready it for long periods of rest.
This exhibition was a marathon without a warm up. It immediately struck you in the face with its sleepy violence. Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, the painting of the infamously fat woman with eyes closed across a couch with skin that looks pinched and pressed, appears with bite marks all over her body, skin rested flake by flake with a paintbrush like gold leaf. She’s made of bruised putty stretched with a dirty hand smudging her skin, and has feet flattened from the weight of pink paint. Up close his women are unrecognisable and battered, broken-limbed. Too close and they break up, but from afar they are cool and smooth, seamless, moist, with limbs softly lolling. The chair leaning unsteadily, retreating from the same David and Eli from the film at the start of the exhibition, totters to bring the painting into a third dimension. There are Cubist touches in the chair legs, and you peer down on the plant pot on the chair while simultaneously peering at it. David, the co-subject alongside Eli the whippet, is assuredly a gentleman from his many layers of icecream skin; a face of pure angles, as gritty as the soil in the plant pot. It’s as if Eli’s licked his face, removed some skin, given him back a lick of paint. Now here are two Irishmen, a father and son. They have bodies full of blood, you can see blue pockets of it in their faces. They wear stiff crepe paper suits which are almost transparent, hardly capable of covering their naked vulnerability.
Freud’s self-portraits range from hilarious to traumatic. He can be comically and happily naked in painting stance, or only veins and bones with hatched skin braided to his collarbone. His face is all stitched up like a thrown together sackcloth mask, milky with chalky rivers running in the creases. The way he sees his subjects, himself included, is similar to how I see people when I’m drunk, when you notice all the very slight components of their flesh, their veins, individual hairs. The extent of concentration you only get rarely and unusually, giving his works a sense of occasion. No one is seen in this level of clarity unless designated this attention for a reason; these bodies have had hundreds of hundreds of hours spent on them. It reminded me of those love poems by the Metaphysical poets, where they explain that if they could spend a thousand years on describing all the parts of their lover they could get it right. If they were paintings they’d be Freud portraits. Maybe Freud portraits show the ridiculousness of these idealistic poems, showing that if you did spend hours and hours on certain aspects of someone it starts to become monstrous, so unnatural in its naturalness, overwrought but completely in focus in a light so soft and clear that it refreshes but unnerves you.
The final room has, thankfully, only a small selection of photos; the mint after a meal. A picture of Freud’s studio defines my theme for the exhibition. An entire wall of the attic room where he used to work has dozens of layers of paint, as if he’d flayed the wall to death to work out colours that complement each other through accidental and experimental means. It would have taken literally years of frantic movement to create this frozen, multi-coloured television static, just as it took Freud months or years to get down his subjects and objects. Men and women whose skin is decayed like dried bird shit, trees that hold green leaves but are deadwood, a strangely muscled child lying stiffened on a tilting floor: just as Barthes told us that photography shows that which is dead and in the past, Freud’s work shows moments lost and youth spent. It is death tricking you that it’s life.
Paris 2010
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Illustration by Richard Phoenix: www.richardphoenix.tumblr.com
