preparing the book

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

another abîme

when ‘research’ reveals an encounter with past thoughts and everything coils

‘Why do we always do the opposite of that we like doing? Because, unable to achieve it fully, we try to attain it through indirect, ambiguous means.’
Pierre Schaeffer, In Search of a Concrete Music

Ambiguous.

Pierre Schaeffer.

Pierre Henry.

Pierre Henry, Concerto of Ambiguities (1951)

Herman Melville, Pierre, or, The Ambiguities (1852)

or, the double book, or, the ambiguous nature of writing.

facts around En Abîme / 1. Mike Cooper, Rome, Melville, Pasolini. another layer

On 4 September 2012, a few weeks before the publication of En Abîme, I receive an email from Mike Cooper from Rome, saying he’d been walking along the river Tiber and had come across some pages from Melville’s diaries and Pasolini’s poems “that are attached to the wall along the Tiber as part of an installation that has been there for some years. The pieces (maybe you know them?) are set in huge glass boxes attached to the stone walls quite close to Castel Sant’Angelo – over the years they have been abused and nature has had a hand in transforming them into something other than what they started out as – now they resemble something the Spanish painter Antoni Tàpies might have made. Good luck with the book – I look forward to reading it.”

Although I lived in Rome for over ten years, I was never aware of those journals and poems under damaged glass boxes. And yet some of those quotes appear in my book. And Mike, in turn – who appears as a faint reflection at the end of the photo sequence below – is not aware of the fact that he is too in my book, in the same pages as the quotes by Melville and Pasolini that he came across and posted to me.

En Abîme, of layers and surfaces, receives pictures of more layers and surfaces, dust, leaves, pages. Overground and buried.

[all pictures by Mike Cooper, September 2012]

Rome: “uncertain shape like of a fire / in the fire of a New Prehistory”.

En Abîme is published today

En Abîme: Listening, Reading, Writing. An Archival Fiction is published today by Zero Books:
http://www.zero-books.net/books/en-abme-listening-reading-writing-an-archival-fiction

En Abîme explores listening and reading as creative and critical activities driven by memory and return, reshaped into the present.
The narrator revisits, at different points in time, a number of places in Rome – the Protestant Cemetery sung by Pier Paolo Pasolini in The Ashes of Gramsci, via Appia, the Catacombs – and attaches onto them a series of connections to her archive of poetry, music, literature. The words of Herman Melville in Rome, Pasolini’s verses and films, a number of songs and poems build up a mise en abîme; knots of visions and densities of prose are juxtaposed with sparse moments of stillness, as the book zooms in and out of the archival fiction of a city, morphs into criticism and abstraction, and back into a literary landscape.
En Abîme appears as a trace of the experience that made it, in a contingent present singular.

‘…poetic, incisive, grounded in politics and history yet continually pushing at the edges of what we now consider to be sound. She interrogates notions of music and the shifting experience that is silence with a freshness and coherence that is inspiring’.
David Toop, author of Ocean of Sound, Haunted Weather and Sinister Resonance

‘…compulsive and fast, rushing with you through textual territories that seem spoken, direct and contemporary while being nostalgic – invoking a past that creates the present tense’. Salomé Voegelin, author of Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art

You can read an extensive interview about the book on Earroom:
http://earroom.wordpress.com/2012/09/01/daniella-cascella/

Review copies are available from: maria.barry@o-books.net

voicing the unheard

I have started to write a series of short texts around lesser-known Italian authors. While working on En abîme I realised that many Italian writers have not yet been translated in English – many of them because of a certain magmatic quality in their language that resists translation, others because of a certain insularity in their work that does not make them appealing or easily accessed. Once more I struggled with the slipping away of many of my references.
I also thought of hegemonies and canons – even in the work of giants such as Melville: why always quote Bartleby and Moby Dick? Where are the meta-textual disguises of The Confidence-Man, the ambiguous guises and writing struggles of Pierre, the enigmatic, horizon-driven narrative in Daniel Orme? How to make space for the marginal, the less universal, the less appealing? Books and texts that cannot be easily converted into a slogan or a flag, that might be hostile on first read, that do not lend themselves. They draw you in as you read, insidiously: you cannot draw an extract from them. You have to be in them and be stuck and be aware there is no easy way out. They are marshy books, quicksand-texts: paludes (1). There might not be much to distil out of them: because they’re not always finished or coherent. These books and texts give me a full if uneasy sense of freedom because of their peripheral destiny outside of official histories and surveys – with no known followers or descendants, they are provocatory because of what I would call a heremitic quality – so precious today, where everything in art seems to be driven by the need to contextualise, fit into grant categories and strategies of visibility and coherence and networking.
There is no seeming coherence in my choice – perhaps these writers do not appear to mean much in my current research and perhaps they will not lead me anywhere in a linear logic of consequence. And this ability they have, to lead me astray in unpredictable turns: this is exactly why I want to read them.
Of course some writing always follows.

[Question: Oh, and where is sound? Answer: I would call this a voicing. Enough.]

 

(1) André Gide.

 

pierre, or the ambiguities / a book, then another book

wax cylinder recording / Rome, Her Litany

On 5 April 2011 I recorded an excerpt from my book for the Phonographies archive of wax cylinder recordings, curated by Aleks Kolkowski. The chapter takes place along via Appia and the Catacombs in Rome. Most of the book is structured on layers and returns, and the idea of superimposing two voices on the same wax cylinder seemed appropriate to reflect the phasing and unsteady unisons that occur throughout the book.

 

Here is a longer excerpt from the book chapter:

Ghosts on via Appia this morning. Twenty degrees, rain and damp. Catacombs of Saint Callixtus, the archives of the primitive Church. Ninety acres of land, four levels of subterranean galleries twelve miles long. Half a million tombs. Cemetery of Saint Callixtus, Crypt of Lucina, Cemetery of Saint Soter, Cemetery of Saint Mark, Marcellianus and Damasus, Cemetery of Balbina. Tomb of Cecilia Metella. And when the sun falls down the pine trees I still walk on these stones and there is a humming coming from below the catacombs and these slabs of history. It whispers death along this evening, it breathes in, it breathes out, in, and out, following me chasing me out of this still city of tombs. I keep listening. This still dead city of tombs is chasing me, I walk. Up to this very moment walking, listening, recalling.

I return to via Appia and to those Roman aqueduct arches, and to the mellow suburban countryside on a hot, rainy morning, November 2010. Once it was August, the year 1995, the heat unbearable, the black silhouette of the Cecilia Metella Mausoleum and the maritime pines drawing a silent backdrop to the early evening walk, that you and I had decided to take. We’d spent the whole midsummer day driving around the ring road of Rome, in one direction and backwards, filming – an exorcism against the boredom of that Roman summer and against that whole year, as a double noose holding and hanging that whole year. We’d spent the whole mid-summer day driving around the ring road of Rome, in one direction and backwards, listening – in the extreme sunshine and in the lethargic pace of Roman summers, car windows open wide and music full blast, until the texture of those sounds reached and merged with the melting lights.

I return to via Appia and think of August. Signposts to depots circle like coils on this evening. Your Fiat Punto exhales hundreds of miles. We are going to circle, and circle. You scream, these coils are closing in. You’ve gone crazy in your rotten daydreaming. You’ve gone crazy for your rotten dreaming, that is to say: it hurts. We circle, enwrapped in this spiral of heat. It arrives as a piercing signal, a ruthless clasp of frequencies pointing right at the essence of rhythm. It arrives as the sound of a new disquieting language; as a rhythmic pattern and oscillation devoid of any reference, other that the push-pull of sound you feel in your body, and the grip of our sonorous now. A bony creature is dancing along the broken structures of audio tracks, built upon the sonic detritus of what once was called techno. Stark on a sensorial plateaux, a thousand needles pierce this sonorous now. Subtle, severe, insidious: here is a plus, here is a minus. A plus, a minus, a minus. Then come the bass sounds, to the earth and up from the earth. Don’t tell me these sounds are cold. If something resounds here, it is a shivering body: the body of rhythm exposed in its nerves, in the contractions that keep it alive. It might be mutilated by the cuts of this sonic blade but it is always there, in its presence and denial: a plus, a minus.

I return to via Appia, with you and it is evening. In you Fiat Punto we are listening to Metri by Ø, aka Mika Vainio, I think I wrote about this record sometime. Then we park and we walk along the stone-paved street from twilight into night, listening to noises sifted from the sheltered villas. A knot of voices, smells, slivers of light. All the buildings, pines and stones narrated by the daylight have crumbled down into a storyless black. Across the metal bars of gates and the tall brick walls the night is here again. A low hum propagates, made of the same substance of the heat. Our blinded eyes and our deafened ears hope to see a new vision and chase a new melody. I follow the train of my thoughts once more, and the visions of those trains along the tracks down South, to a small town where one of us was born, it has one of the few preserved mythraeums in Italy.

I returned to via Appia this morning, and I was lonely. Arthur Conan Doyle set one of his Tales of Terror just around here, The New Catacomb. The great Aqueduct of old Rome lay like a monstrous caterpillar across the moonlit landscape, he wrote. This evening the great aqueduct of old Rome in the moonlight doesn’t look much like a monster, but as a tamed force. I think again of your tamed silences, the long glances, and your restless longing for a space you will never allow anyone to circumscribe. I’m not sure if it is afternoon or early evening, but I know it was night when you first told me of this sense of waiting and longing. You are the imminence of a storm of ice, you smell of hunt and blood. You dark eyes, every day you lose some glow and gain some shade. Out of pure will you commanded your heart to be irregular as nothing ever in your life is regular: not the friends, not the hours, not your lovers or the lives you go through. Everything in your space deformed. Now a summer breeze moves through those pine trees, smells of sea salt and resin and cooking and smoke. Tomorrow it’s another go, another lap. You crawl.

I walk back, alone and toward home. I enter the Basilica dei Santi Quattro Coronati and listen to the enclosed nuns as they sing the Vespers. Even the stones are drenched in the void of this confinement. Spargens sonum, what is this voice whispering muddled tunes into my ears?

This morning I returned to via Appia, and to those Roman aqueduct arches and the mellow suburban countryside, following the steps of Rainer Maria Rilke, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville. I was on their traces along the old Roman road, and as I walked I engaged with all of them in a series of fictitious interviews.

I would ask Rilke of the void he saw in this sky while he walked along these same stones, while these same stones breathed into his verse another type of void, another type of voice. I would ask him of how lieber rhymes with Fieber. I would try to anticipate the answer.

I would ask Melville of the solitude and silence he felt around these Roman walls, in March 1857. Then he felt lost; this morning he was a reminder. To engage in an imaginary interview with Melville was like picturing Time in front of me: the Time of words when they take time to resound or seep through the mind, the Time of thoughts as they take shape into words, the Time of actions kept forever inside words. Everything seemed gathered, concluded; it now opens up again and draws a new horizon. It all has to be part of some other yet uncovered landscape.

I would ask Hawthorne of an entry in his diary, 23 October 1858. What now impresses me is the languor of Rome – its nastiness – its weary pavements – its little life pressed down by a weight of death.

Did you know this weight is even heavier today?

Between these unspoken interviews, loaded with memories and echoes, and filigrees of sounds recalled from reading, I did not feel any loss in the absence of my interlocutors. Maybe I just wanted to be in that silence, in the time of a recordare. To record, to recollect.