A Pursuit of Texture
An empty page is an intimidating thing. Smooth. Solicitous. Quiet…
But a white page also searches out blood and ink.
*
What if memory is a problem of texture? Experienced as it is in shards, a collage of sensation kept fresh with a crunch of bone, a chill in your spine.
Sound, smell, taste, evoke memories and memories evoke---what? A shudder. A heat which rises from the chest to the cheeks to the ears. A thick lump in the back of your throat.
Sometimes. I frustrate myself, unable to form images or words or scenes inside my head. Like white noise without the noise without the white. Sometimes. I search for touch.
*
Plato’s Phaedrus lyricises love and lovers, and divinity, all in the context of rhetoric, speech and writing. A passage on memory… Theuth describes writing as a “potion of memory and intelligence”, Thamous replied “It will atrophy people’s memories… writing will make the things they have learnt disappear from their minds.” [1] If memory may “atrophy”, surely then it must have a corporeal form to deteriorate. Atrophy implies a wasting of a body part or tissue. Perhaps even a muscle. Muscle memory is a familiar enough concept---those processes that are learned and repeated so much so that your body stops bothering to consult your brain. But can memory be strengthened, trained like muscle. Would infrequent or ill-usage leave the mind and memory feeble, unable to bear its own weight, bedridden limbs unused to the pull of gravity? Plato seems to think so. For my part I cannot reconcile the substantive memory of Phaedrus. Perhaps this is the norm and mine is sickened, allowed to “atrophy”, malnourished. Spend long enough staring into darkness and shapes start to form. More like trying to catch shadows, wisps. It’s hard to tell if they’re really there or your brain is just summoning phantoms to keep itself amused.
Your reflection becomes a ghoul in the dark.
*
What is memory? How do you define a space which cannot be seen, be touched? Again a singular response by Louise Glück:
It is coming back to me---lying on the couch has refreshed my memory.
My memory is like a basement filled with old papers:
nothing ever changes.[2]
This is quite distinct from muscle… from mist.
A “basement filled with old papers”. At first this assertion feels too concrete, too accessible---my own bias perhaps. Papers may be lost in mounds. Dusty boxes could block the stairs, a flood might render documents sopping pulp, ink is washed away in the damp. Or folders could be neatly stacked, filed in cabinets; perused simply and retrieved when needed. Brought to a neat wooden desk with a green-shaded banker’s lamp. Is this what it would be to think clearly?
Yet Glück began with, “It is coming back to me”, and it is a phrase which somehow touches me. Perhaps because it has the air of an amnesiac in a cosy television drama: an elderly man shines light on the clue at the heart of a mystery in a flashback.
No. An exaggerated conman, his memory suddenly revived by the moustachioed detective’s threat of jailtime. In either case there is anticipation; not frustration at information lost but warmth and excitement in the promised denouement. Certainty implies a comfort. I find it absent.
Can memory come and go? It seems obvious, it must.
“It is coming back to me”. Closer than a basement sitting in wait. Memory is a stray cat that comes and goes as it pleases. Sometimes it appears yowling, scratching at the door. A stroke between the ears might suffice but sometimes not even the promise of canned tuna will rouse it to visit. At one time or another she might bring with her… a small litter. Hungry mouths agape and crying, each to be fed a scrap. Memory begets memory, though they can’t all be tended at once.
*
I think maybe… Searching for thought in the sky, I can’t see the clouds, just the grey. There is something reassuring in the press of a pen forming channels in a pad of paper, seeing ink stutter, stop and start, then glide. Maybe I think through feeling… feeling the marks and watching the inscription. I know—almost know— that I’m real.
*
Glück’s ‘The Red Poppy’ is a perspective close to the earth… to feel but not to think, to show your fire without the knowledge that it will burn out. “I speak because I am shattered.” If we were whole---smooth and unbroken---there would be no need for speech, no need for literature, nor art. Texture drives us and is driven by a need to fill the cracks.
The great thing
is not having a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those; they govern me.
…
I speak
because I am shattered.[3]
*
“[T]here’s something odd about writing, Phaedrus, which makes it exactly like painting. The offspring of painting stand there as if alive, but if you ask them a question they maintain an aloof silence.”[4] I wonder, is there not something unique to be gained in lone communion with a silent object of study? The weighing of artistic meaning and merit against your own heart. Against the feather of Maat.
*
A finished piece is a moment captured; even as pencil touches paper the image is in the past tense. It may be lifelike, but it is not an active life, not the same as the moment from which it was initiated. Years fade a canvas, crack paint. Sometimes an image is re-used, painted over, perhaps to be rediscovered in a shock of turpentine. Art is formed of the rubbings of its past and present. But does it not also provide texture with which to grieve, to move on? A passage or a work of art when taken alone must be a means to incite reflection. Who are you, placed in its context? Sometimes the answer cannot be spoken. The words don’t exist or else they are too fragile, crumbling in the attempt. How then would you describe it to another?
a box – a space
held by flesh by bone
body contained and containing.
*
Anselm Kiefer is a German painter and sculptor whose work is built upon layers of grief, memory, and texture. It can’t be taken in with ease. The texture which history imposes on art and which art imposes in turn is here seen most readily. Kiefer weaves threads of folk heroes and corruption, of pride and shame. Andrea Lauterwein’s Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory speaks to the ways in which he layers icons and historic figures into a patchwork of an uncertain identity.
When a memory, or a sensation, can’t be adequately described we borrow pieces from elsewhere. With image, with motion, with speech taken from others. Others to whom you are connected by experience. Others who come nearly, not quite… almost, close enough.
Kiefer’s work wounds in its rubble, in its fragments. Knotted along the way with poetry, with leaden pages, with straw. His work resists the idea of cultural stasis. Perhaps amongst his most notable influences are the poetic works of Paul Celan. “The almost compulsive repetition of images from the same poem Death Fugue…comes to resemble the creation of memory through ritual.” Fugue. The term connotes pieces, layering, absence.
*
A pursuit of texture; skimming the dregs of my being
for something to clutch with both hands.
*
Kiefer has frequently used and referenced pieces and fragments of Celan’s early works in the titles, textures and themes of both paintings and sculptures. Seeing significant use are the final lines of Death Fugue:
dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein achenes Haar Sulamithyour golden hair Margarete
your golden hair Shulamith[5]
Hair lingers like bone, long after death. Long after skin and blood and flesh; “your golden hair Margarete”. Once blue eyes are gone blonde hair lingers. Yet sleek it lays next to Shulamith, equal in death; “your ashen hair Shulamith”. Not black. Not Shulamith’s “famous purple”.[6] But ashen. Images of fire. Absence. Dust. Forgotten. What hoards does trauma take in its grasp?
*
The pages in which it is displayed are thick, smooth but not sleek, as if to imitate the painting’s weight, its stubble. Upward streaks of paint. Yellow black white blue orange. A field of wheat and a thin stretch of sky. The image is clearer if you squint. A path is trampled through the field, leaving behind it an implied presence. There was a person-- even people -- crushing grain with their boots. They walked through the field. They walked hand in hand. They don’t walk it now. Left in their wake are the words. Deine goldenes Haar, Margarete… trailing off into the sky. It is handwritten, the letters are looped, the sky is blue, it could be a letter of love. But the field is blackened. The earth is dry, crumbling red. Famine…Or flames.
A dark streak runs parallel to the trampled path and diverges, its own route crossed by a bundle of straw. Not paint or charcoal, but straw. Hewn from the earth. It creeps in strands across the canvas. Yellow streaks which mock those shadowed and flat. It is not alive. But it remembers life. In the dark field it is brighter in contrast, although its roots are diminished.
*
“I speak because I am shattered.”
*
A book made from lead---even if I could touch it, I couldn’t flick through the pages as I wish. If it was paper it would crumble; the pages are wrinkled. Like the folded skin of your palm. Blackened edges and ash and dirt, all ensure it was burned. But the pages are warped. Not with the crackle of burning wood, but seeping like water. The open page is patterned by damaged rivulets and pools with swirling edges. Blooming outwards like white ink into murky water. I know the pages are metal. Are burnt. There was no ink to be washed away. And yet the words---whether sparked into flame or wept into water---the words which weren’t written are gone.
The hair. Left until last. Maybe because it hurts. Human hair---black. Human hair---a lock on each page. Human hair---under ash. In one strand I see a serpent, in one strand I see a noose. The symbols are relevant---
he plays with snakes and
dreams death is a master from
Deutschland[.] [9]
But nonetheless, they are a distraction. Maybe because it hurts. An attempt to distance the thing from itself. Hair, an uneasy texture. Sensuous on the neck. Repulsive in the drain. Even removed from its life source---on a brush or stray on the carpet---it can be a sign of life. It is a texture which implies presence. A person from which it has grown.
On the page of a burnt book it means death. The black hair is ashen. Not an implied presence, but a determined absence:
your golden hair Margarete
Your ashen hair Shalumith.
Repeated lines and a collage of discomfort. So Celan, so Kiefer builds his layers and traps you---confronted with the paint, the hair, the memory.
Textured art and textured artist. Surfaces---subjects daubed and waxed and scraped and waned in the trauma, the creation. If memory cannot be safely accessed from within, it will be sought without.
*
Filling space, a pursuit of…something. Finding sensation on the page, in ink. In blood. In bile.
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Plato, Phaedrus (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 275a, p. 69.
Louise Glück, ‘Fugue’, in Poems 1962-2012 ( New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2013), p. 516.
Louise Glück, ‘The Red Poppy’, Poems 1962-2012 . ( New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2013), p. 271.
Plato, Phaedrus, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 275d, p. 70.
Paul Celan, ‘Death Fugue’, Poets.org <https://poets.org/poem/death-fugue> [Accessed 23 December 2022].
Andrea Lauterwein, Anselm Kiefer and Paul Celan, (London and New York: Thames and Hudson), p. 88.
Ibid., p. 86.
Ibid. p. 104 & 105.
Paul Celan, ‘Death Fugue’, Poets.org <https://poets.org/poem/death-fugue> [Accessed 23 December 2022].
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Katherine Stewart is a third year student in English and Creative Writing at the University of Dundee.