Matter, Memory, Marker

by Thom Donovan & Kyle Schlesinger

I am writing you all this from another world, a world of appearances. In a way, the two worlds communicate with each other. An impossibility. Legends are born out of the need to decipher the indecipherable. Memories must make due with their delirium, with their drift. A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector.

— Chris Marker

For the record, there is an image. Sight unseen or sound unheard? Having heard too much to say – Sans Soleil. Anagram of an actual silence. Polarize & solarized. Details inhabit habitat and place. Particularizing the everyday or everyday particularizing? Obscure the commonplace and the commonplace obscures. Cut to hiatus – then departure.

If forgetting is memory’s lining, sleep the lining of wakefulness. People on the ferry. Susan Howe suggests that these passengers appear corpse-like, casualties of a “past or future war.” Sleep plays a major role in La Jetee, as the protagonist is sent “back in time.”

He remembers
                conjures
           haunted by

images of a woman who may (or may not) be from his past – a possible past. Possibly passes. Train divides the frame. As Gregg Biglieri has written, La Jetee simulates sleep insofar as the dissolves between select shots resemble a person shutting and opening their eyelids. To merely have photographic stills, instead of “reality” (24 frames a second) also calls attention to a somnambulistic preoccupation – but what must the film wake from? or to? (A) historical lining the compulsive-disjunctive. Memories of someone someone desire(d)?

The narrator says, “In the 19th Century, mankind had come to terms with space, and that the question of the 20th was the co-existence of different concepts of time.” En route to Japan, images of men and women aboard a train – rails parallel. Anticipation points between two departures – destinations arrive.

Then the eclipse
                 ellipsis
         shutter – cutting through

Threshold of document. Lining the burn itself. Form pressed from the beginning. Begin again. The silent splice unnerving historical particulars. Was the man sent back? In the scene of the couple praying to their lost cat, the narrator says “to repair the web of time where it was broken.” And what has caused it to be broken, in Marker’s time, in the world’s time? The events surrounding World War II, unspeakable yet pronounced. A sense that daylight doesn’t lead, enlightenment wouldn’t follow wakeful logic – logistics. As Cadava points out, Benjamin is all too aware of the problem of wakefulness, which was also a word meaningful to the ideologies of National Socialism.

“ post”: “to post the name of a ship missing or lost.”

Towards. (1530) Nicolaus Koppernigk challenged Ptolemy’s picture of the universe (accepted for 1400 years or more) by mapping anew – sun at the center. Sunless. Sol. Suppose anything thrown into the air would land far in the West. Marker moving East. Magnify.

Unable to find a suitable lens (lentil in Italian, after the shape of the glass) Galileo grinding his own – magnification proportion – the curve of the concave to the convex (more distant and opposing) lens. Face focused – framed and shot.

Post: Patson (of Ireland) saw the first spiral nebulas clearly through a telescope. One year following, Neptune was seen for the first time. My thought:

   “ Marker”
        a dead letter – his “selves”
misplaced “posts” in time–

Post: cards (ripped cords) letters to the future. From and toward as in Dickinson’s fragments – drafts of poems are arrows of time, virtualities, contingencies – where one steps to next – is the next draft – the becoming of writing inextricable from that of a “self”– from one journeying time and leaving traces: marks.

Or: my memory is the (post) time.

(Post) Post: 1851

Melville published Moby-Dick, and soldiers returning from the Mexican War could conceal their blindness through the insertion of a glass eye. The gaze returned through one lens. At the close of Moby-Dick, Ishmael and the whale are the only two survivors after the wreck of the Pequod. Ishmael the voice of testimony, Elijah of prophecy. Signing (inscription) marks death, and Queequeg's own predication is described by Ishmael when he notes that the harpooner's body wastes away to, "nothing but his frame and his tattoos."

Coffin caulked and carved by the vessel's carpenter. In the wake of disaster (detritus) death’s vehicle. Finally, it is Ishmael’s body – lone mark upon the sea open, a buoyant text. The engrammatological significance of the whale's scars are the only other mark of testimony to surface from the wreck, surviving Ahab. Ishmael alone to interpret these scars. As David Farrell-Krell asks, “What then about the graphics of both typography and iconography?”

Melville’s Ishmael writes, “this is but a draught of a draught.” Your alibis. Position only. Vision larger than perception. Marker: to paraphrase, film is a blueprint for the future.

        spiral repel:
is love?
                    generosity?

energy – perpetual motion machines. Generative of their own force, infinitely. What comes first? Where does one start, initially.

Sequence. Rung.

The acoustic images of Sans Soleil are somehow generous – recorded in “the cadence of the heart.” The children passing rocks in West Africa, parades various in Time’s multiplicities open generously in these durations. Not only “descriptive” but also demonstrative – perhaps s(t)imulating insofar as these durations are experienced by the viewer qua witness qua participant (as a ritual of watching).

A spiral is a generous source, as if ascend by helicopter to be at a place above where one could witness the precise situation of a body among the landscape from a distance: from the exteriority of an other’s gaze, an aerial or Olympian advantage. Many have wondered how cultures made earthworks before aerial photography. The fact of the spiral jetty– Marker is a contortionist of time, bending the boundaries between history and memory.

Implicated in this, no doubt. As Poe’s reader, who is the receiver of the bottle, and possibly the only one privy to the poster’s death. Lanzmann’s viewer – confronted by interviews of survivors, victims and witnesses where their faces (dis)figure prominently in the frame.

The narrator says, “Who says time heals all wounds. One should say, rather, that time heals everything except the wound.” I have always read this in terms of a traumatic structure of history, where what marks time are events that can not be assimilated by a chronological concept of historical time. Time is marked by timelessness and the timelessness of time inhabits those wounds.

Benjamin notes in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” such days are marked by the Calendar as ones when everything changed, when a linear path of time was set into question. The time of a Messianic or revolutionary promise. On commemorative days, rituals are enacted. My memory is drawn back to the priestesses of a Japanese archipelagos, who the narrator claims are the keepers of the island’s memory. What strikes me about the rituals in Sans Soleil is their predatorial violence. Dolls being burnt. Children celebrating the first days of spring beat sticks against the ground as a fire burns in the center of their circle. Fire, in particular, seems to have a unique place in the film: the title of the film is “sunless “ – named after a score by Mussorgsky, so we are told.

Sunless, though the sun is mythically associated with fire. As Susan Howe, and perhaps others, have already recognized, much of the footage from “The Zone” is “solarized”: the name for the negativizing and saturating effects Hayau produces with the help of his synthesizer.

The way he conceives of the film (presumably San Soleil) that will be finished in 4001 when he has amassed every image ever generated on a strip of black film leader, resembles Bergson’s distinction between the Past and History. Following Eliot’s epigraph is found- footage of three children accompanying one another on a celestial hillside in Iceland in 1965.

This “illustration” of happiness is an isolate image, affixed at the edge of the film. The narrator says “One day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a long film with black leader. If they don’t see the image of happiness, at least they’ll see the black.” A military aircraft drops beneath the deck of a battleship.

Marker is interested in precisely that which falls beneath, the residual aftermath. Marker shares with Stevens and Oppen also,

                                   the (pre)
                             sentation of the
image(ination)
                                                      time travel (verse) sing

the gaps between time(signs). Imagination – that reconnoiter of history in the crags between invisible matter and memory. Channeling time through a microscopic lens– focus (fuse) the arbitrary, incidental, the incident objects. Gone now.

Chambers of historical (mnemonic) compression (elision). That is, the black is the virtual. Blank, ground zero, from which an image or aggregate series may emerge–

envelop.

© Thom Donovan & Kyle Schlesinger. All rights reserved.