Spartakiada

bodies full of world

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Revisiting Revolution

Recently I put together this special report on the centenary of 1917 for The Calvert Journal. Read it for the Russian authors – most of these kinds of retrospectives have predictably and depressingly sidelined relevant voices. But if you want some tourist babbling then I wrote a few things:

– workerist documentary coming out of Vertov/Medvedkin

– Lenin the popsicle

– Central Asia and the imperial trace

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Dmitrii Prigov on the failure of ‘Drumpf!’ and the general flaw in liberal textuality

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Eisenstein/Mexico/the foetus/the skeleton (fragments)

“In cinema’s transformative potential (stemming not only from its rich repertoire of technical tricks, but also from its omnivorous approach to the myths and paradigms of all of human culture), Eisenstein discovered a perfect modern home for the exhilarating and savage game of thinking, in which ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’, like bull and matador, circle each other warily, waiting for that ecstatic, painful moment of consummate penetration when even the most intellectual idea and its figure might hop finally to achieve the ‘complete synchronous identity’ of the Bororo parrot-men.” 

[Anne Nesbet, Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking, p. 20]

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“The figures ‘hover’ in space; that is, the atavism in them belongs to the period before being set upon solid ground, to the amoebic-plasmatic stage of movement in liquid. This is the graphic equivalent to the sensation of ‘flight’ among ecstatics: an identical uterine sensation of gyroscopicness...” 

[Eisenstein on in utero life, November 1932]

*

“There came a day when I both rose to the highest limits to which a person can hope to rise and descended to the lowest depths out of which a person emerges. It was on the same sunny day in Zurich. In the morning I flew with the now deceased Mittelholzer on the snowy whiteness of the Alps. In the afternoon we piled into the no less crystalline whiteness of one of the nest women’s clinics in Switzerland... Here for the first time, on a napkin, I saw a little living being, dying in my hands in about ten minutes after its premature appearance in the world. This stage of life interested me very much.” 

[Eisenstein meets a foetus in the summer of 1930]

*

“On these pages there are all the bones you could want and they absolutely won’t come together into a frightening combination!”

[Eisenstein on filming the Mexican Day of the Dead]

*

EISENSTEIN LOOSE HIS COMRADES CONFIDENCE IN SOVIET UNION STOP HE IS THOUGHT TO BE DESERTER WHO BROKE OFF WITH HIS OWN COUNTRY STOP AM AFRAID THE PEOPLE HERE WOULD HAVE NO INTEREST IN HIM SOON STOP AM VERY SORRY BUT ALL ASSERT IT IS THE FACT STOP 

[telegram from Stalin to Upton Sinclair, Eisenstein’s sponsor in Mexico, calling him home, 21 November 1931]

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‘Chaplin doesn’t change his costume or wear make-up’ (Varvara Stepanova)

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It may be your birthday but I’m going to France

At this point in our lives (not our life)

we trade in conveyances and parcelled affection.

You convey yourself to where I am,

and I avoid the inverse impulse

- as I’ve avoided many pieces of stuff

lest they remind me of us.

I was raised and shed by zinc, brown breakers,

and you were always already –

docile child of something prior –

in a succession of airless rooms –

where love happened behind our ears,

and built up in half-remembered jumpers,

under unmown grass and dog shit.

(When I knew that I loved you, you’d

already left – a fitting lack.

Amidst that disappointment of mud,

a hopeless monotony of future tenses,

only pain needed an echo and felt its lack;

hearts grew accustomed to no glance back).

Conveying myself I think, brother, that

I might die before I know quite

how to tell you straight-faced: my best-unbeaten,

that one day you might restore me. Compensating for all

those times when I should have thought of you

and missed you, Tim, and your loping soft head.

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pienso que no he aprendido aún el ronco idioma de las ranas

Neruda, ‘Bestiarío’

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POSTmatter - The Games That We Play

In Conversation: Lucile Hadžihalilović talks mysterious childhood rites, as her first film in eleven years is released

I spoke to Lucile Hadžihalilović about her second film EVOLUTION and how starfish are aliens. 

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Aleksandr Deineka, ‘Kto kogo’ (1932)

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It fits the dress of the children reflecting every stage and custom of necessity — Chimneys, roofs, fences of wood and metal in an unfenced age and enclosing next to nothing at all

William Carlos Williams, ‘The Poor’

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МаяковскийВоВесьГолос MayakovskyAtTheTopOfMyVoice

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City of Mahogany

Set in 1928, Boris Pilnyak’s novel Mahogany describes the emergence of a dynamic Soviet city:

Moscow rumbled with truckloads of actions, beginnings, achievements. Automobiles and buildings hurtled into distances and into space. Posters shouted Gorky’s State Publishing House, cinemas, and congresses. Noises of streetcars, buses, and taxis affirmed the capital from one end to the other.

This bustling image of modernity and political happenings is undercut by another Moscow; a Moscow littered with ancient religious buildings and artefacts that recall the ‘forests, swamps, villages’ of the vast steppe. A ‘prehistoric’ Russia ‘untouched by man, pine, firs, birches, boulders, clay, water,’  encroaches on the contemporary communist city: ‘everything was sinking into mud’. The city is also littered with material objects - ashtrays, sofas, mirrors, icons, dressing tables - which bear witness to the past. Things outlive their creators: ‘People die, but things live on; ancient things give forth ‘effluences’ of bygone days.’ In the aftermath of the ‘thunders of Revolution’, Pilnyak writes, people flocked to antique shops and ‘breathed in the living essence of dead things.’  Pilnyak’s analysis of Moscow suggests that the historical moment could not be fully apprehended by the then dominant paradigm for understanding historical development, which assumed that the past could be definitively and triumphantly left behind.

Pilnyak’s ancient material objects also stand as metaphorical testament to the failure of revolution. People bear the weight of history. He describes the Civil War generation as ‘men of arrested ideas’, embittered alcoholics reduced to living in caves, weeping over their thwarted hopes. These people had understood communism as ‘the renunciation of material things.’ We encounter a once fervent communist whose thoughts are pervaded by the vast and unchanging Russian landscape:

He should have been thinking about the fate of the Revolution and of his party, of his own fate as a revolutionary - but these thoughts would not come. [Instead he] thought of forests, wilderness, marshes.

Pilnyak describes a coexistence of dynamism and stasis, pre-history and modernity, that is not accommodated by the dominant Marxist-Leninist model. He says: ‘The Revolution was the beginning of life, and life itself - and the end of life.’ But the persistence of a pre-historic nature un-conquered by humanity is not only a source of despair but also of hope: ‘He looked at the sky and thought of sky, clouds, space.’ The coexistence of past and present, nature and history paradoxically enables a movement into the future. Pilnyak perceives the limitations of Bolshevik discourse without dismissing the egalitarian dreams of his protagonists.  

This Moscow is the same Moscow as the one described in Benjamin’s Moscow Diary (written 1926/27) and the one we talked about here radiolacis.tumblr.com 

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As usual, HP takes the things I’ve been thinking about and says them out loud with a-plomb. 

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untitled, 2014

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#blessed

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Castle for Bees, Wales 

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Akhmatova the communist

Recently I’ve gone back to Akhmatova, specifically to her Requiem, for the first time in several years. I admit to never having been too fond of her glacial late poetry and was struggling to find my way back into the severity of her tender concrete prison-song. I realised that my problem lay not with the words themselves, but with my attempts as a reader to comprehend the connection between these perfectly comprehensible expressions of grief and the perfectly incomprehensible fact of the Terror and its millions of executions and interments. At this point I remembered something that James B wrote (here: http://piercepenniless.tumblr.com/post/23729180487/akhmatova) on Requiem and the questions that it posed for him: what precisely is it that makes poets so threatening; what are the demands that Akhmatova makes of us who live with the Requiem, the rememberers; and what a poem like this tells us about the possibility or otherwise for something called ‘communist literature’. This is a brief response to James and the issue of Akhmatova’s relation to communism. 

Requiem is not about claims to justice as much as it is about rejections of shared heritage, when it is only rarely and tenuously that these amount to the same thing. The mother does not throw herself at the prison wall to beat at it, but asks, ‘what is this for?’ What was ‘modernity’ for if this wall exists? [И ненужным привеском болтался/Возле тюрем своих Ленинград. - And like a useless appendage, Leningrad swung from its prisons.] J’s statement that ‘Through it run currents of Russian culture that were supposed to have vanished’ doesn’t go far enough. The idea of a history, whether positive or not, has collapsed to the point where the projected dignity of the pallbearer and the shadows of murdered or co-opted comrades like Mandelstam and Blok run alongside tired allusions of sanctioned Soviet literary heroes like Maiakovskii (his laudatory ‘100,000,000′ resurfaces as Akhmatova’s wailing ‘hundred million strong people’) and Shokholov (a quiet Neva, if not a Don). We only have to read the dates and locations that mark each of the poem’s extant sections to get a sense of the scattering at hand: 1961, 1957, 1940, 1935, 1940, 1939, 1940, 1943 (this year is marked ‘Tashkent’, the fact of exile tossed in as incongruity), again 1940. Or the simple expressions of grief that silently erase the notion of a present [Что случилось, не пойму - What happened, I won’t understand]. 

The self in Requiem is fragmented, then, ground down far beyond the point where we might speak about its possessing any meaningful ‘desire’. But this is the blankness in which Akhmatova starts to construct the shadow image of a world where people live through one another and not in solitary vigils of mourning. If there is a communism in her writing then it is one in which desire is irrelevant. As the poem frames it, Akhmatova the mother would never have remembered the Terror like this without the question posed in 'Instead of a Preface’ by the woman ‘with bluish lips’: ‘А это вы можете описать?’ - ‘And can you describe this?’ Requiem is not a demand that we speak to the fact of the Terror, but already a response to such a demand from without. Akhmatova’s desire has nothing to do with it, or with the fact that she has anything to do with this blue-lipped women in the first place [Где теперь невольные подруги/Двух моих осатанелых лет? - Where now are my chance friends/Of those two diabolical years?] 

Of course, this amounts to saying that solidarity means the dismembering of the self, and such a conclusion shouldn’t be acceptable to us. Akhmatova splits herself over and over across places, years, lines: part II of the Prologue bleeds into part III in a typical act of self-denial.

Муж в могиле, сын в тюрьме, Помолитесь обо мне.  /// Нет, это не я, это кто-то другой страдает.

Husband in the grave, son in prison, Pray for me. /// No, that is not me, but some other who suffers.

The language of solidity arrives only later, in the implacable ‘Sentence’, in the imagery of stone - first as the dread pronouncement of the state, then in a desire for hard emptiness [И упало каменное слово/На мою еще живую грудь... Надо, чтоб душа окаменела - And the stone word fell/On my still-living breast... I must turn my soul to stone] We are left looking for a way to take this stone and at least make a weapon if it, use it for some act of rupture. 

But in the final instance, Akhmatova’s stone heart is itself a function of the solidarity of the ‘still-living’. As she re-centres herself, adopting the implacability of the walls around her, she reverses something of that fragmentation and scattering of desire. She is now a part of the world of others: she can be held in their hands, turned over, experienced through the senses, as she can turn them over in her mind, blue lips and all. If there is a communism in Akhmatova, or a move towards a response to the question, ‘can you describe this?’ when the Terror is lurching all around, then it is in the body, the senses, the eyes and gangrenous fingers and hunched backs that at least proclaim, not ‘I am here’, but ‘we are’. And this is the chorus of broken women that she rallies to speak through her in the second part of the Epilogue: women who leave a material mark on the world and on each other, even as their status as human beings is inked, frozen, and blasted away.

Опять поминальный приблизился час. Я вижу, я слышу, я чувствую вас:

И ту, что едва до окна довели, И ту, что родимой не топчет земли.

... Хотелось бы всех поименно назвать, Да отняли список, и негде узнать.

Для них соткала я широкий покров Из бедных, у них же подслушанных слов.

*

Once more the day of remembrance draws near, I see, I hear, I fell you:

The one who they almost had to drag at the end, And the one who tramples her native land no more.

... I’d like to name them all by name, But the list is confiscated and is nowhere to be found.

I have woven a wide mantle for them From their meagre, overheard words. 

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Phlegmatic Mountain

I'm just getting round to watching this Kotkin - Zizek thing from a few weeks ago. The man is an embarrassment. Anyone who does the amount of leg work that he (or his interns) has done, and then sagely proclaims to the world that the 'big revelation' of the archives is that - the horror! the horror! - people in the Soviet Union were actually communists is fatuous beyond belief. 'Lenin played for keeps. He was for real. I don’t think there would have been a Bolshevik seizure of power without Lenin. He is a major figure… He was for real on communist revolution.' Please, Professor, translate these pearls of acuity into several thousand pages of popular-academic non-sequitur.

Everything about Kotkin here - the ugliness of his vocabulary ('Bukharin didn't have the right skill set', Christ), the fixation on counterfactuals not just as throwaway 'thought experiments' but as a mode of crucial historical analysis (I guess anything that Penguin will pay this much for seems crucial at the time), the way he luxuriates in his retreat into the most tired, cod-psychological 'explanations' for the 1930s ('Where did those demons inside him, where did those snakes in his head come from?') - everything speaks of a man devoid of the kind of basic human insights/empathies that should be the precondition for this kind of work. And that's without mentioning the grotesque, repetitive metaphor of the GermanWings disaster ('he crashed the plane, he crashed the plane', please shut up), or the self-satisfaction of his wondering out loud (! the mic's still on, Stevie) how crazy it is that a normal lower-middle class guy like him should end up writing books on Stalin. If you find it so hard to compute, feel free to just stop.

http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/rupaul-paul-holdengr%C3%A4ber

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Give me back what is mine

Orfeo is about music, but only in as much as it is about power. It objectifies music in as much as it asks us: how and to whom do we appeal against injustice - what is the melodic line that will make our lament most affecting? Is there a place where we can exist in exposed relation to each other, somewhere of mutually inculcated affect?

chi ne consola, ahi lassi? o pur, chi ne concede negl'occhi un vivo fonte da poter lagrimar come conviensi

The bitter blow - cruel Fate - hateful stars - avaricious heaven - as the chorus of Nymphs and Shepherds frame Eurydice's sudden (offstage) death is spoken of only as terrible misfortune. And yet there is an authority to which Orpheus can appeal. In his production for the Royal Opera House, Michael Boyd has taken this tension and blown in up; the Roundhouse is fashioned exclusively in terms of the politics that ebb beneath the interrupted pastoral of Acts 1 and 2, and coagulate into the severo ed immutabil bass of Pluto in Acts 3 and 4. 

Here, Pluto is monarch of the entire world of the opera, onstage throughout, the tragedy recapitulated for his entertainment, and twitched and turned to his whims - crucially, we witness him order the offstage sound that breaks Orpheus's will during the ascent from hell, turning him back. If Boyd wants to magnify the kingdom of death, imposing it as a superstructure upon the pastoral in which Orpheus and Eurydice are wed, then he makes the injustice which music seeks to atone into an immutability - a hinge of nature. The power of the unjust is a snake in the grass. 

gentil conforto a sconsolato core, vostre cetre sonore squarcino d'ogni nub'il fosco velo

In this case, of course, 'cruel Fate' is a ruse of power. Pluto, who bemoans his impotence in the face of l'ordin fatal, can yet choose to disregard the laws which govern the pastoral world - just long enough to grant an illusory balm to Orpheus and Prosperine. And then instantly, fato is replaced by voler - and the world is reformed into the image of Pluto's desire. Né di cangiarlo altrui sperar più lice.

Boyd's Apollo is made into the Archbishop/Patriarch of Pluto's court, and the Shepherds his clergy, fostering a brand of spiritual justification that makes authority all the more implacable. Hence when Apollo grants his bereaved son ascension to the stars in the final Act, this is not, as per the libretto, emancipation from a world corrupted arbitrary misfortune. For Boyd, even the heavens are a facet of the regime, and Orpheus is granted only access to the proper institutional channels - the warm embrace of bureaucracy.

In making the Shepherds, Orpheus's companions, into faces of the court, Boyd makes a half-hearted mockery of their frequent laments and interjections. Are their words of comfort purely obsequious? Are they now to be snake-oil peddlers, another refraction of a world made in the image of power? The space from which Orpheus stakes his claim to justice - rendetemi il mio ben - is one in which mortals are able to promise themselves to each other, to commit to an experience that takes them outside themselves. This is the capacity that allows for music, and music-within-music - dance, song, call and response, sex. The pastoral world is a tactile one, and whether Orpheus is intended to stand for the potency or the futility of 'art', this artifice itself is material, corporeal, agricultural. Boyd rids himself of flesh and mud, and in doing so relinquishes our hold on the central radicalism of Orfeo, the anarchic promise of the Sinfonia of the Spirits of Hades that closes Act 3.

nulla impresa per uom si tenta invano, né contro a lui più sa Natura armarse, ei de l'instabil piano arò gl'ondosi campi e 'l seme sparse di sue fatiche, ond'aurea messe accolse. quinci, perché memoria vivesse di sua gloria, la Fama a dir di lui sua lingua sciolse, ch'ei pose freno al mar con fragil legno, che sprezzo d'Austro e d'Aquilon lo sdegno.

[no enterprise by man is undertaken in vain, nor can Nature further defend herself against him. he has ploughed the waving fields of the uneven plain and scattered the seed of his labour, whence he has reaped golden harvests. wherefore, so that the memory of his glory shall live, Fame has loosened her tongue to speak of him who tamed the sea with fragile barque and mocked the fury of the winds of the North and South.]