On Steep Waves
“All
those who leave, always leave a little of themselves in you… Is
that then the secret of memory?” It is the
question asked by director Ferzan Özpetek
in his film “Facing windows” (2003) – What can we learn from
that question? Why is it that the memory is so important? Why would
the message, any message, would be completely lost without it? Hannah
Arendt wrote in 1929: “It is memory and not
expectation (the expectation of death as in Heidegger) which gives
unity and wholeness to human existence… Remembrance in man
discovers the two-fold before of human existence… This is the
reason why the return to one’s origin can at the same time be
understood as an anticipating reference to one’s end”.
The secret
of the memory is not revealed to us there but our voyage begins with
the question of the message –What is it? What is it that we do when
we speak? What happens when we live a little in order to die and die
a little in order to live? Words, images, thought… What are they?
Gifts of life? Gifts of death? Why are messages always, like letters
and postcards, delivered a little too late? Even the messages from
above and beyond come as belated greetings – for we are always
caught unprepared for death. Here you picture Ingeborg Bachmann’s
“Malina” as she
anxiously wrote letters and immediately thereafter disposed of them,
angry at the thought that they would never be delivered on the same
day. What is there in the delivery of a message? Is it the world?
What kind of
world is this in which messages, like philosophy and prophecy, can
never arrive on time? What kind of world is this in which we want to
live and speak, even be heard? Michael Cunningham brings this
question to life in his novel “The Hours”:
“Still, she
loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows
others people must love it too, poor as well as rich, though no one
speaks specifically of the reasons. Why else do we struggle go to on
living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed? Even if
we’re further gone than Richard; even if we’re fleshless, blazing
with lesions, shitting in the sheets; still we want desperately to
live. It has to do with all this, she thinks”.
The same perplexity of Clarissa Vaughan, Cunningham’s fictional
persona is what stays when we realize all what time has left engraved
in us – the faces and the proper names.
But the
facts of the world remain as it is - we are harmed and transformed by
them. We need to withdraw not only in order to understand and
analyze, but also to create alternative versions with which we may be
able to live unmolested. That is how we transform the world into a
recollection of images, postcards and photographs – not even a
collection because collecting would imply that we are able to choose
the finest pieces and not as it is often the case, end up walled and
carpeted with advertisements, inebriated geographies and absurd
topologies in lieu of earthly experiences. Philosophy is the
recollection of world history, in the words of Hegel.
We leave the
comfort but also the immense responsibility of the home and begin
wandering in the world as if through an anonymous hotel, checking out
at our earliest convenience when the turbulence becomes uncomfortable
to handle; all what we have for a reminder of our life on earth is
the remainder of the post cards and photographs that we carry instead
of suitcases or passport. The postal system of world history in which
messages are exchanged not only across cities but also across the
most distant ages, between gods and philosophers, between writers and
heretics, between lovers and soldiers, between rulers and fallen
divinities; that postal system out of which we have derived religion,
literature, thought and the arts is a slow but necessary device to
protect our secrecy. If we were to have unmediated encounters with
the words and the loudly speaking facts of the worlds, we would be
burned down and torched so completely. Yet even in our intimate
cities of refuge there is little we can do to protect ourselves from
acts of hearing and speaking, either of the indirect kind (art) or
the direct kind (politics). King Solomon and Socrates have warned us
about the bear trap of knowledge, yet it is not only in reading and
writing that the memory is set free – the act of seeing itself
suggests as well the acceptance of what we are seeing as facts; there
is nowhere to run.
Reality and
language intersect in the postcard as a token of the broken memory,
as a fragment of something that in itself has no beginning and no
end, what is the gift then? To visualize the intersection it is
necessary to resort to more than reason and faith; we must learn to
see with the two eyes of Ibn al-‘Arabi - ذو
العين – doing
enough justice to transcendence-cum-immanence: Both the eternal
transience and the mortal worldliness of things. How lonely it is to
live or to write or to remember if the message is not delivered –
It is in the message, the postcard, the image, where the lens is
amplified and the word leaves the flesh to become one with the world.
The composer
Hans Werner Henze responded to Ingeborg Bachmann’s “Malina” and
her despair over the belated message of the letter by saying that
“I’m very touched by the richness, great
sadness and despair in your first symphony, which is in fact Mahler’s
eleventh”. How could one live with the fact
of having written an unwritten symphony? “Nothing
else will come” responded Ingeborg Bachmann
in a poem sent to Henze in 1968. Do such ends of history exist at
all? Do we cross invisible lines after which poetry and art can be no
more? It seems as if what happens is that fragments of the world show
such incredible resistance to being forgotten – unlike the world
itself that survives on a dynamic of oblivion and instinct.
To
understand the postcards and the messages from the past as forms
without a soul of its own deteriorates into what Ibrahim Kalin warns:
“It does not enable to find a home in a
world of homeless minds, uprooted traditions and soulless masse;
there must be something else that pushes the boundaries of the
archive into a telescope of mnemographies, act of delivering messages
across times and spaces – as though a Copernic voyage. The message
is more than the visible – why would we want to live if it is not
for facing windows? Peering into distant silent worlds? Into distant
worlds that remind us of the natural sounds of love and war? One can
conjure up images of Susan Sontag directing ‘Waiting for Godot’
during the siege of Sarajevo and jotting down the Bosnian text into
the English lines and memorizing a play in a language she doesn’t
know. Isn’t that hunger to deliver a message?
“Live
dangerously and you live right” in words of
the great Goethe. The intensity of the living is made manifest there:
There’s no insurance against life, it is impossible to live without
the risk, without the danger, without sinister panic and guilt. We
rather navigate in the open sea at the expense of a boat perhaps
sunken or drunken; it is always preferable to the eternal ennui of
Paradise – Adam and Eve followed commandments but did not remember
things! The postcard is not a vault but a telescope, we are allowed
to peer through only for a fraction of a second and we are not
permitted to keep anything. What we experience on the steep waves of
the ocean before shipwreck is that any attempt to communicate, to
deliver a message, is nothing but hunger for freedom – vertiginous
freedom. When Tim Hetherington shot his “Diary” in 2010, an
experimental film recording a decade of his photojournalism work
covering the most restless corners of the world, he was only offering
us a pornographic tour through the naked limbs of contemporary
history; little did he know then that after his death in February –
murdered by mortar shell fires fired by Gaddafi’s forces in Libya –
we would see now through his diary how desperate he was to live. And
so are we. That is why we fluctuate through oceans of disrupted
messages, seeking in our origin, our end – like Postcards.
By Arie Amaya –
Akkermans/ Dedicated to Maikel Nabil Sanad, political prisoner at El
Marg Prison – Egypt, since March 28th
2011
