Recording battlefield sites, the interior of the Sydney War Memorial in Hyde Park offers a kind of cataclysmic catechism, a series of answers for which there is no question.
This lamentation, this litany, invites recitation.
Whether aloud, if that is allowed within the hallowed hall.
Or in one’s head, a silent internal navigation through places far away.
A poem without rhyme, or reason.
An ubi sunt prayer, the ‘where are?’ question echoing through the years.
Opposite this hotel apartment complex here in Sydney is an apartment building. With a facade of glass it is like a large vitrine, with lives exhibited. A distant echo of the small cabinets that would travel to the country school I went to as a child, magical boxes containing microcosmic exhibits from the museum in the city far away. Like the Wardian cases that the plant hunters packed New Zealand’s plants into to take them back to the Mother Land as exotic curiosities. And, echoes too, of Joseph Cornell’s constructions, shadow boxes containing surreal collections of elements, evoking a somehow forlorn air.
And these window boxes are most definitely forlorn. On display are not the exalted moments of life. These are not trophy cabinets, more like atrophy cabinets. Places where things go to waste away. Life’s detritus packed into these spaces, marginal zones, out of sight for the residents perhaps, but exhibited for the world beyond. Life as Readymade.
Joseph Cornell, Planet Set, Tête Etoilée, Giuditta Pasta (dédicace) 1950
Cockatoo Island, Sydney, April 2008
And now, silence for awhile, flying away to other shores, and head in the clouds …
The clouds’ play — nature’s essential poetic game.
Novalis, Fragments (in Bachelard, Air and Dreams)
Clouds are numbered amongst the most oneiric of “poetic things”.
Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement
Others’ lives glow, flicker, on the screen. Blogs, websites, youtubes, facebooks, relate the sometimes intimate details of lives. Recollections; fabrications. Transports of delight; flights of fancy. Windows. Screens.
Mining for melancholy is a trait more beloved of some cultures than others. Film endings are like cultural litmus paper. They give a kind of reading of the acidity levels. Americans are extremely alkaline, needing things to be happily resolved. The Hollywood formula has so often neutered ideas imported from elsewhere, so they became saccharine and safe. At the other extreme is the acidic Russian ending, where everything must be left in a state of tragic suspense, or calamity. The Russians like their wounds kept open, resisting the slide into the numbing niceness, and alternative endings were added to films to accomodate this.
I was thinking of this when recently recalling a film from my memory banks, Montenegro, made by director Dusan Makavejev, from the former Yugoslavia, in 1981. The film is set in Sweden, tracing the story of a housewife who rebels against her taedium vitae, her weariness with life’s tedium. An affair (with Montenegro) and a murder later, she seems to be back on the road to ‘normality’ - an American Ending is offered as the apparent denouement. She cooks a huge meal for her family, and it seems to have ended Happily. And, for most people going to this film, it did. Most audiences walked off with the American Ending in their heads, perhaps feeling somewhat unsatisfied … but those who stayed on past the credits, as I dutifully did as usherette, were rewarded with the Swedish Ending. A further few frames appear after the credits … one announcing “the soup was poisoned” (or words to that effect) … and the final one “this is based on a true story.”
Memento
The PillowBook
And to the thought of the forming of constellations, the combinations of things which begin to form new meanings through juxtaposition. Giorgio Agamben uses the term ‘constellation’ to describe the sense of a set of fixed co-ordinates within an ever-moving background of melancholy. Guiding stars. Walter Benjamin, too, tracks constellations, configurations which could be diachronous, from different times, yet “what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation” (The Arcades Project).
Cioran’s wings of melancholy in the previous post brought to mind sculptor Ilya Kabakov’s angel project. Under the advice of ‘how to change oneself’ the prescription is as follows:
You need to make two wings from white tulle fabric, using the same sketch that is appended to the project, and also leather straps for attaching these wings on your back and fixing them in place. After this, having stayed alone in your room (this condition is fairly important, for both the productivity of the impending activity, as well as for the avoiding undesirable reactions on the part of other people in the family) you should put on the wings, and sit completely without anything to do and in silence for 5-10 minutes, after which you should turn to your usual endeavors without leaving the room. After 2 hours you should repeat the initial pause again. After 2-3 weeks of daily procedures, the affect of the white wings will begin to manifest itself with greater and greater force.
