the ingenuity of history | Chris Marker and the Future Anterior

He used to write me from Africa. He contrasted African time with European and Asian time. He said that in the 19th century, mankind had to come to terms with space, and the great question of the 20th century would be different concepts of time.

—Sans Soleil (1983)

Since Chris Marker's death in July of last year (remarkably the 29th, the exact date of his birth 91 years earlier), there have been any number of attempts to address his life's work. One particularly memorable piece is an obituary by Finn Brunton aptly titled "Future Anterior,"¹ the verb form of future remembrance, a mark of what will have been. Brunton writes:

The heart of both Marker's art and his politics lay in the future anterior, the knowledge that there is always an after, a next, which we cannot predict and which will change irrecoverably the value of what we have been and done. (69)

During his lifetime, Marker himself often reflected back upon his earlier work, as when reediting his 1977 film Grin Without a Cat (Le fond de l'air est rouge) in 1993 he added a coda of sorts to the end, commenting among other things on the words that did not then but have gone on to have great political resonance, "words like boat people, AIDS, Thatcherism, ayatollah, occupied territories, perestroika, cohabitation ...." Marker, significantly not in his own voice but in that of a commentator, not in the first person but in the third, continues: "Thus our author marvels at the ingenuity of history, which always seems to have more imagination than ourselves."

What is remarkable here, in the comment and in Marker's work in general, is that deference to the imagination of history itself. Not that he was not engaged, that he did not have a stance—he absolutely did—but that he took his life in some great measure to be more fully or accurately a "marker" of his time. A time that was not his alone, that always was in some very real sense beyond him.

image: from Grin Without a Cat (1977)

¹ Radical Philosophy 176, November/December 2012, 68-71. [available here]

earth also is a private language | Eleni Stecopoulos's Daphnephoria

Published last May by Michael Cross's Compline Press, Daphnephoria, a recent chapbook by Eleni Stecopoulos, remains one of the more exquisite unions of felt language and physical production in the relatively small but determined world of small press literary endeavor. The poems are difficult to delineate in terms of content. Rather, like the later sections in her full-length collection Armies of Compassion (Palm Press, 2010), they seem to set out points on the periphery of a researched, imagined space, a place of remedy and ritual recuperation.

Channeling back through the roots of words, she finds in the Greek of her "mother's/ancestral tongue" (as she explains in aresponse to the question of "somatics"¹) a language commensurate with such a place:

            No man is an oikos

            but a mother

            husbands the economy

            Three-legged

            dogphysician porous as rock

            plastic as Greek

            turning

            every word

            compounded from two

                                                      (7)

Even the neologism of the title announces this concern. The Ancient Greek combining form pherein "to bear" exists in English primarily in the morphological diptych euphoria and dysphoria, through which we can think ourselves as bearing (what exactly—inner or outer, psychical or physical—the whole complex) either well or ill.

Under the duress of Apollo, Daphne chose to return to the earth, and from there blossoms forth as a tree, leaves, paper. Not only in the language of the poems themselves—

            to be a girl who asks in remedy

            black walnut white cedar

                                                           (4)

            I'll become

            metal   wood

                              (5)

—but in the workmanship of the chapbook, a profound care and desire almost to be the material are manifest. Like other of Cross's work, the design as a whole, and in particular the layers of endpapers (within which the poems rest encased as though in bark), reveals a mind obsessively attuned as much to the minimal as to the baroque.

¹ This from a response to the question of "somatics" as posed in a questionnaire by Thom Donovan. The response was posted on Harriet: a poetry blog on April 29, 2011 [available here]. Stecopoulos writes:

... soma as a Greek word has been in my ear my whole life, and it carries a potency and warmth that “body” does not for me. And this is despite the fact that English is my first language. (So why this should be the case—the paradoxical way that the mother’s/ancestral tongue feels more natural or intimate than the native language—is itself an example of somatic knowing, which can’t be extricated from an imagination of cultural identity.)

two mouthfuls of silence | Jean Daive's Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan

Near the beginning of his memoir Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan (Burning Deck, 2009), first published as Sous la Coupole in 1996 and recently translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, Jean Daive writes:

Being incapable of speaking had long made my life impossible when I met Paul Celan, who had written Sprachgitter (1959): a grid, language. Not of words or images, but gathering the world into a grid to elucidate it. (14)

Since I first encountered Celan's work a year and half ago, I'd been almost entirely focused on the serial, or cyclical, procedures of Breathturn and the volumes following it, written in the late 1960s and translated by Pierre Joris. Daive's account of Sprachgitter, or Speech Grid, as it appears in Waldrop's translation of the memoir, sent me back, however, to that earlier volume.

Both Joris and John Felstiner translate the title as Speech-Grille. This seems a significant difference. Perhaps it is Jean Daive's translation of the title and its associations into French, or Waldrop's translation of those into English, that creates the alternate take. "Speech-Grille" grates, literally; it connotes obstruction, defense, even paranoia. "Speech Grid," on the other hand, implies an order, a clear attempt to comprehend, in the space of the poem, the world. It implies a network, a nexus, which is to say, a community and, within it, communication.

The poem he wrote in the street and then telephones to her [Gisèle] from a public phonebooth. (14)

I imagine the poems of Sprachgitter, Speech Grid, telephoned this way and written along the Seine. (14)

The Seine, into which Celan ultimately leapt to his death, shadows Under the Dome. Celan and Daive repeatedly pass it on their walks. Like silence, the river seems to underscore all that they manage to say (or are unable to muster). Alongside Celan's evident hunger for constructing poems out of language—

Paul Celan chews a word like a stone. All day long.... (8)

Paul Celan's joy on discovering a word—Windgalle. He burrows into words. (8)

We are working at his big table in Avenue Emile-Zola. He is very concentrated, very precise. He loves words. He erases them as if they should bleed. (17)

He weighs his words carefully. Every moment he evaluates the word. I should add: every moment he evaluates silence. (37)

—there is the seemingly ruthless tendency to excise, to cut out, to cancel:

He sorts. Always. He tears up. I've surprised him in his office sorting letters and papers with feverish exasperation. He sorts. He tears up letters, papers with extraordinary violence, other sheets, flyers, advertisements with rage, passion, fury, despair, revolt. His waste basket overflows with torn paper, but not crumped into balls as with others I know. (50)

The moment that are most chilling in Under the Dome are the ones that reveal this penchant of Celan's for erasure. On his return from the fateful (or fatefully inconclusive) 1966 trip to Germany during which he visited Heidegger in Todtnauberg, Celan tells Daive:

... Man wants to conquer and conquest wants gold. I've always thought the poem should cross out the world. You know engravers are supposed to cross the plates once the edition is printed. Yes, the poem should cross out the world. The poem is a diagonal that crosses out the world .... (102)

Perhaps the poems don't elucidate the world. Or they do and yet it is crossed out. Yet here it is. Or was it only the engraver who crossed himself out? It's all very unclear. After reading Under the Dome, and rereading it, the repeated, doubling fragments continue to add up to little more than a deepening hallucination.

image: manuscript of "Es Wird Noch Ein Auge Sein" [detail] 

(http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2011/music-and-continental-books-and-manuscripts/lot.58.lotnum.html)