nostalgia

Yes, it's very interesting that the idea of nostalgia has reappeared now (in the context of the wisteria). And, actually, that trait of insisting on the present as a way of disentangling oneself from nostalgia strikes a chord with me. You know, I realise that, whenever I go to places with a powerful charge of history, I always start feeling deeply suspicious of my own motives. Nostalgia is a sort of 'bogus' emotion, I think, and there are others. They all involve a sort of performance of sensitivity rather than some more authentic response and they all arise from a particular way of seeing the relationship between past and present.

principles of uncertainty

I'm so glad you and jess got something from the maira kalman. Here's a link to the most recent book of hers, which I love a lot... (I think she is currently working on a book about American democracy of which the jefferson essay is one section: if you look on the times website there are links to others in that series...)

maira kalman

It's beautiful! And Jess thinks so too. She says: are there any books that Maira K. has done in that style? There are, I think, but are there any you recommend?

time wastes too fast

nothing to do with the River Trip or Archives of Exile directly, but what a piece of work Maira Kalman did here (you remember I showed you some of her work when we met in the winter?)

wow. somehow I want you to have this, richard...

Methods #1

I've been thinking a lot about what kind of record to make as we undertake the river journey. This is still very much an open question but I'll write a little about it here, trying to avoid presenting my thoughts as more integrated than they actually are:

• I like the idea of keeping a book of notes and sketches. Not that I draw particularly well, but I'd like my written notes to interact with evocations of the space in another form (sketch maps, diagrams, drawings, etc). I'd also like to make my own recordings as we go. So, I'm effectively talking about documenting the journey in three media: text, image, audio. [It strikes me that this formulation is oddly reminiscent of Roland Barthes' title - Image-Music-Text, which wasn't in my mind at all when I started writing today:o)]



• When I talk about written notes *interacting* with images (or, indeed, notes with images and images with audio), certain processes come to mind: annotation, cataloguing, illustration, and so forth. These have their own histories and philosophies and I'd like my practice to pay some kind of attention to them. After all, annotation, cataloguing, illustration etc, are constituent processes of the overall practice of making an archive.



• I don't want to be too prescriptive about *what* I document or record. Serendipity is important. At the same time, I think I need to keep in touch with a certain point of reference, namely the complex that i think of in terms of VOICE-SPEECH-LANGUAGE.



• I want to treat Voice-Speech-Language as a very open-ended category. It might include such things as:
  
  
  
  
  • transcriptions of texts seen in the environment: memorials, signs, graffiti
    
  • notes on placenames, which are, in themselves, short texts
  
  
  • traces of languages other than English in whatever form
  
  
  • notes on overheard conversations
  
  
  • more formal recordings of interviews to be transcribed later
  
  
  • historical texts read in 'significant' places (e.g. the Eastmans at Fort Snelling)
  
  
  • new texts discovered en route
  
  
  • my own writing as a response to place
  
  
  
  


• My idea of reading historical texts in 'significant' locations is one that will need some preparation. I shall have to get a file of materials together in advance. It would appeal to me to do this collectively - read the stuff *to* each other - but if that doesn't seem an attractive proposition, it isn't a problem :o)



• Back when we thought we might use recordings of our own families, we wrote about the connection between past, present, and future. In particular, we talked about the limitations of a nostalgic focus on the past or an entirely future-directed kind of attention. I want to bear these things in mind as I make my document. I think it's easy to slip into a sort of romanticising mode as one writes, sketches, records, and I want at least to be aware of that.
  
  
• This romanticising dynamic seems to me particularly likely to assert itself in that first month of the journey precisely because of the nature of the terrain. The early stretches of the Mississippi pass through what are, by all accounts, areas of extraordinary natural beauty. It will be tempting to see them through the lens of the picturesque.

I'm going to stop for the moment. More later, perhaps...

Robert Coles: DOing Documentary Work (1997)

Don't you see, that's been our story–the black story: everyone calls us something! It's so hard for any single one of us to be seen by you folks [white people], even the kindest of you, even our friends [among you] as a person, nothing more. That's where we are; that's where we're coming from; that's our 'place' in all this! You folks–can be yourselves! You can wander all over the map. You can be here and you can be there. You can go set up your tent wherever you think it'll do you good! That's great–for you! That's what it means to be white, and have a good education. You can look at things with a microscope or a telescope, and from way up in the mountains and down near the seashore, and when it's sunny and when it's raining cats and dogs, and then, later, when you write or you publish your photographs–you're not a white writer, or a white photographer. You're free of the biggest label of them all, the one that defines us every single minute of our lives! So, you can take all roads, and you can stop at any gas station or restaurant while on he way. Us–we're trying to get people to give us just a little break, to call us Mister or Missus, to let me go where I please without thinking I might get arrested, and even killed. So, it's location, man, location, for us: where we're at, and where you're at, and where we can go, and where you can go–that's why I favor stopping to look at one person, then the next, and not running all which ways to corral folks into someone's pen, some circle, with a fence around it.

Bob Moses, the leader of the Mississippi Summer Project, SNCC
quoted in Coles, page 40

Sometimes I have to distinguish between what I am hearing, and what I wanted to hear from the person, before I even met him! ... That's our job, to make sure where we stop and our patients start: their concerns as opposed to our sense of what their concerns 'really' are–or should be.

Erik Erikson, quoted in Coles, page 43

The issue, was not these people nearby [at the Harvard Faculty Club], eating their lunch and conversing spiritedly about matters of the intellect, but my own readiness to use them, to keep looking long and hard at them rather than inward at the turmoil of memories, aspirations, worries that inhabited my own head. Moreover, as is so often the case with the one who scapegoats, the issue was finally what bothered me about myself: the wish to follow suit, to join those professors, to be one of them down the line–and to do so by writing up the documentary research done in the very place I'd just left. The more I let myself get worked up about people sitting in the Harvard Faculty Club whom I really didn't know, the more time I spent bashing folks in the tradition of Agee and Orwell, the less time I'd have to do what Mrs. Bridges was quietly hoping I'd do–hold her "people" in memory, remain in touch with them in whatever way seemed suitable. We forget about others in many ways–sometimes by becoming newly preoccupied with a righteousness that turns into self-righteousness, and feeds on any and all victims, many of them made up on the spot.

pp. 72-73

When you say 'documentary,' you have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. It should be documentary style, because documentary is police photography of a scene and a murder. . . that's a real document. You see, art is really useless, and a document has use. And therefore, art is never a document, but it can adopt that style. I do it. I'm called a documentary photographer. But that presupposes a quite subtle knowledge of this distinction.

Walker Evans, quoted in Coles, p. 130

[Reporters and photojournalists] know so very well how to go meet people, talk with them, take pictures of them, right away take their measure, decide when and how to go further, look for others to question. They know how to make those utterly necessary first steps (find contacts, use them) that the rest of us can be slow in realizing will make all the difference in whether a particular project will unfold.

p. 138

We speak, especially, about "seeing for oneself," as [Erik Erikson] keeps putting it–the importance of "making a record that you the writer can believe, before you ask someone else to believe it."

p. 144

For [Dorothea Lange], making a shot is an adventure that begins with no planned itinerary. She feels that setting out with a preconceived idea of what she wants to photograph actually minimizes her chance for success.

Willard Van Dyke in 1934, quoted in Coles p. 154

I have a cousin who is a New Hopi; he went to a BIA school, and lived with the Anglos in Albuquerque. He came back to us and said that he doesn't look at the mesa anymore, he doesn't watch the clouds, see them meeting, leaving each other, doing a dance for us. He thinks about them; he talks to himself about them. He wishes his head could be quiet, the way it used to be. Stick with the Anglos, and you have a noisy head!

A 14-year-old Hopi girl, interviewed by Robert Coles, quoted on p. 161

I worry about who's doing the "documenting," and what a person has in mind to see–before they even get here to take a look or take a listen! I say to myself: will they "document" our tears, but not our smiles? Will they "document" our rough times, but not show us having a good time, now and then–no matter how poor we be, and how down-and-out it gets for us, and how bad the treatment we receive from Mr. White Man? I know we need outsiders to lend us a hand. The people who run this country won't budge, unless they're pushed, and no one hereabouts who's got dark skin is going to push very long, without getting a bullet through the heart, or being pushed right into the Mississippi River!

But if people come here, and they want to help us, and they try to help us–but they end up thinking of us as only in trouble, and only in pain, and only persecuted–then we'll end up with the world getting the wrong picture about us. We'll end up appearing the way the Klan people want us to appear–as bad off as animals, and all the time whining, like a cat or a dog. The truth is, we've got bad troubles, but we're children of God, and we know how to hold our heads up high, and we're not always slinking around like animals do, and we can pray and we can look ourselves straight in the eye and not be ashamed, and we can sing–oh yes, we can! I told some people who came by last week–they be from New York City and California–that I saw those records in their cars, the jazz and the spirituals: it was all our music, and if we can make that music, it's a sign of God smiling on us–amazing Grace! They should "document" that part of us, too, you know.

A black minister in Greenwood, Mississippi in Summer 1963, speaking to Coles' wife, quoted on pp. 169-70

[According to Wright Morris,] writers like Mark Twain and Thomas Wolfe and Hemingway got caught in the traps of nostalgia; they allowed the past to define the present, to narrow their vision of what is in store for us, and ultimately they paid the price as writers. Henry James certainly sought out the past, and even left his native land to find it, but, says Morris, "We have had hundreds of exiles, and many of them talented. . . .Among all of these exiles, he alone is not a captive of the past."
p. 195

The experience of service can soon enough prompt a need for reflection–and so it is that documentary work can itself become a kind of service: the narrative work done among those vulnerable "others" can enable us to stop and reflect upon who "they" are, and what "we" are trying to accomplish.

p. 251

Fanny Howe

here is a link to an essay by the poet Fanny Howe that has some wonderful stuff in it that speaks directly to our project for me... I need to re-read it and mull it over more, so I am putting the link here for both you and me!

tapes and time

Sorry - I'm in posting overdrive this morning but, the more I feel my way through it, the more the sense of past, present, and future seems important to me, so just a quick comment about the medium of the audio recording: I *think* that there is something very particular about the way audio material plays with our sense of time.

If you read a letter written by someone in the past, no doubt you do experience a particular kind of connection based on the fact that that person's hands touched this paper, formed these letters, etc. But there is something much more immediate about hearing a voice - if the quality of the recording is good enough, the person could actually be in the room with you, whereas the letter is a relic, something left behind rather than an index of the person's presence. (In fact, we normally write letters because we are *not* physically present in the same space at the same time.) So an audio recording seems to make the past available to us in a very direct way, as if we were allowed to be present in the past for a moment, and it is the fact that it only *seems* to do this that makes the experience of listening to tapes potentially so upsetting.

Actually, as I write this, I'm becoming less and less convinced by what I'm writing. I often keep cards that people have sent me - I had a clear-out a while ago but, even so, they still go back a few years - and going through them can be quite a fraught experience because, in each case, I imagine the sender choosing that particular card for me, looking at the others in the rack, and picking out this one and not any of the others. So maybe the cards give me the sense of being present in the past for a moment too.

In short, I'm trying to work out whether there is something distinctive about the recorded voice in terms of the way it conjures up the past, but it's eluding me for the moment...

T.S.Eliot

I love that quotation about Balanchine! It reminds me a little of the opening of 'Burnt Norton', the first of T.S.Eliot's Four Quartets. It might turn out that the resemblance is superficial and that they are not saying quite the same thing. Still, I thought I'd post Eliot's lines in case they turn out to be helpful:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

sayings of Balanchine

from an article about Balanchine by Arlene Croce in the 26 Jan 09 New Yorker:

[Balanchine] subscribed to the Hegelian view of history as a spiral: everything recurs, but in a different form. Not only dance movement but all art, even the most novel-seeming, is a version of something that has already been said or done. For this reason, he saw no harm in appropriating; he stole and was stolen from–that was the way of art. ... With Stravinsky, he shared a firm belief in the labor of art as perpetual renovation: Stravinsky, who liked to quote Goethe– "Everything has been thought of before; the task is to think of it again."

Balanchine used to say, "We all live in the same time forever. There is no future and there is no past."

"It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice--there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia."

--Frank Zappa

I am noticing that spending all this time exhuming and listening to these cassettes throws me out of a rather important balance I work hard to maintain: between past, present, and future. it somehow hadn't occurred to me that "archives of exile" as a subject is AUTOMATICALLY about engaging with the past. of COURSE it is!!! and while I love history, love finding cool old stuff and bringing it back into the present, I realize that it's an ENTIRELY different thing to be dealing with MY OWN old stuff, which is actually very difficult and makes me a little crazy.

my mother rewrote her childhood as some kind of perfect idyll from which she had been cruelly exiled by being forced into adulthood. (nostalgia is indeed the end of the world.) my father, on the other hand, dealt with the early death of his parents, and his immigration to the US at age 19, as the start of an entirely new life: a blank slate over which he hardly ever looked to see his childhood or youth. my mother was almost entirely past-directed; my father almost entirely future-directed.

what does it mean to honor the past without wallowing in nostalgia? what does it mean to embrace the future without denying the present moment and the gifts of the past? how can an archive of exile be a LIVING thing, a thing that serves the present moment?

that's what I'm grappling with on this shiny cold spring evening right before heading out to the theater with my friends on 22 Mar 09 after spending perhaps too much of this day on 14 Sep 96.

I need to BE HERE NOW.