Kahnawá:ke

I am told that jetlag hits harder the older you get so I accepted my lack of sleep on the day of my presentation without much protest, the entire night a feverish array of tossing and turning, multiple restroom trips, the shuttering of the eyelids and their eventual rising when the light filtered through the curtains and I spotted with my crusted eyes, A.’s meditative silhouette in the corner of the hotel room.

On the day I was due to present, my giddy anticipation before the presentation had to be tempered by a sobering trip to Kahnawá:ke, a First Nations territory located on the southern shore of Québec’s St. Lawrence River. Dwayne, a history teacher turned education consultant and our guide for the day, spoke somberly about the history of the Iroquois, a history of immense loss and the long, ongoing process of reconciliation. I thought I detected some chagrin when Dwayne said that he sees himself as a “floater,” someone who is in-between, having not adopted the Catholicism brought over by French colonizers nor fully reconnected with the dispossessed Longhouse culture of his people. But I also thought that I sensed some pride when Dwayne said that his daughter speaks better Kanienʼkéha than he does.

By late noon I was awake for over 16 hours. A catered picnic lunch offered a brief respite: cornbread, goat cheese, wild rice salad, and watermelon ice under patio umbrellas overlooking the river. I combed through some of the notes I jotted down:

The Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada was formed in 2008 to rectify the legacy of residential schools, a legacy that involved taking kids aged 4-17 away from reserves so that they could be assimilated into “Euro-Canadian culture.” The last federally funded residential school closed in Canada in 1997. In 2021, 215 possible unmarked graves were discovered under a former residential school in British Columbia. A memorial site in Kahnawá:ke was set up. People left flowers, bears, and children’s shoes.

Montréal

I am back from Canada and will attempt to organize my thoughts chronologically, though it might be an impossible endeavour, the dizzying effects of jetlag and a week that has unfolded like a dream. The evening we landed we took a cab to Verdun, where our first hunt for poutine was a failure, after the restaurant owner convinced us that poutines were “tourist traps” and we were better off having smash burgers for just a couple more Canadian bucks. Sleep was fitful that night: I closed my eyes and opened them again, at various hours.

In the morning we said goodbye to our temporary flatmates, a group of Indian friends, and found ourselves practising French at a diner with the stale smell of grease and waitresses who called you honey, saying “deux” everytime our coffee had to be refilled. I heard someone at the next table say that they fish the lobsters out of St. Lawrence, “not the river but the gulf.” At another table, a kid asked for more bacon. We continued our way north to go downtown, our suitcases straddling behind us on potholed streets like reluctant passengers. The sun glinted off the surfaces of skyscrapers.

At the anarchist bookstore we were introduced to the various shelves – classic anarchy, contemporary anarchy, shelves that deal with class and race, shelves that imagine a future. Though anarchy was distant to me as a concept, I was surprised to find that I had read a lot of related books, that some of my academic research could perhaps even be considered anarchic work but without the activism (which was key). Liz, who gave us the tour of the bookstore, said that the work of ideas is important too, that “we need everyone.” I found her words consoling and learned later that she is the granddaughter of Ksawery Pruszynski, a prominent Polish journalist who was present at the Spanish Civil War to cover the work of anarchists resisting against the Franco regime.

While A. checked in, I got a haircut in Chinatown. After exchanging pleasantries in Mandarin, the hairdresser asked if I was happy in Germany. I shrugged my shoulders and asked if she was happy in Montreal. She said no, but she had moved here 22 years ago for love, and it is home.

What Happens Now?

On my last day in Stirling, I checked out early and dragged myself to the old bridge to watch the imposing Firth of Forth dissect the landscape into the future and the past: to its South ran the train lines that would take me to Edinburgh, kick-starting a 12-hour journey back to Nürnberg through Berlin; on its other side nestled the university, framed by the towering Wallace Monument and the Ochi Hills, the Scottish highlands further beyond, from where I just came out of a 3-day conference organised by the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS). After uncharacteristically sunny weather, the day had finally turned a more familiar grey, and between the overcast and the gaping hole vacated by the intense intellectual intimacy fostered over a period of time, I returned to myself, allowing the theme of the conference, “What Happens Now?,” to percolate in my head. I am thinking of the 1967 film, The Graduate, where a torrid love affair between Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), Elaine Robinson (Katharine Ross), and Elaine’s mother, Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft) culminates in a kinetic closing scene at the church, as Benjamin arrives to break up Elaine’s marriage to one Carl Smith (Brian Avery). Benjamin’s reckless gesture of love succeeds. Benjamin and Elaine fight off dissenting wedding guests and escape onto a bus, with Elaine still in her wedding gown. But as the bus drives on, their expressions turn from ecstatic to blank – “what do we do now?” – and the screen fades to black.

Letters from Erlangen

The first few days I spent wandering around the city, reading at the university park, occasionally cocooning myself in cafes to look for flats and register myself with new doctors. I am housed temporarily in a university apartment in #erlangen for international researchers, an overly bright, glass-panelled three-floor building that reminds me of the office in the Apple TV series, Severance; I guess the resemblance is apt because I feel that there is always a certain amnesia involved every time one moves away into a new environment, as memories of the past contest for space with the unfamiliar. There are supposed to be 11 other residents living in the building though I’ve only seen one of them once, after I inadvertently scared him in the common kitchen when I tried to grab some snacks at midnight. He left before I could properly apologize or say hi.

The evenings can sometimes get quite lonely. After the daylight absconds and the anonymous small city charm reconfigures itself into rambunctious gatherings between families and close friends, I get pangs of homesickness – for Berlin or for Singapore, I’m not too sure, though I suspect it’s a little bit of both – but I’ve also found some daily respite wandering north of the apartment into the woods separating Erlangen from smaller villages in the vicinity. I cherish these moments because once I get my keys to the office, and the programme officially begins at the end of the month, a more familiar busy sets in, one that may allow for less introspection. Anyway, sending lots of love to everyone from Franconia, Charles.

Dear [intended], I am writing to say hello and thought I also frame my greeting as a continuation of a response to the fascinating question you posed yesterday, on how Berlant’s work might be politically useful. I guess my answer now isn’t too different from my initial answer to your question, except the words that absconded from me yesterday have perhaps found a more distinct shape today. I still can’t quite remember where I’ve read it from or from whom I’m citing, but it goes along the lines of how revolution isn’t achieved through the utter domination of the opposition but it only truly arrives when you have found an ideological cause that would compel even the opposing soldiers to drop their arms and stop fighting. When Berlant tries to deconstruct the fantasies sustaining hegemonic structures of power and reconstruct a new kind of “commons” from the dissociative middle, I see a similar impulse towards this kind of ideological cause. I am quoting from pages 123-124 here: “when one’s attention is bound to something that organises one’s energy or interest,” it “provides an infrastructure for understanding and moving through a situation or world” and by freeing this “energy and attention,” you can redirect them towards “recomposing the world, causality, and possibilities.” I don’t want to romanticise and over-determine Berlant’s political usefulness and suggest that reading Berlant will translate to material transformations in the sociopolitical realms, especially with a world out there that seems so keen to move so fast with its violence and destruction, but I found the whole notion of ‘unlearning and relearning’ very emboldening against an easy fall into conformity and nihilism, to think about disrupting our attachments to the status quo and slowly feeling our way towards affective foundations that might eventually transcend late capitalist logic. As Nicholas Brown says in Autonomy (2019), “the power of an argument is of an entirely different order from the power of a union. But you can’t have a union without an argument” (182). And for me, Berlant’s work certainly makes a compelling “argument.” Dreaming of another world, [subject]

Dilation

I packed almost 9 years of #berlin life into 7 boxes, 3 backpacks, and 2 luggages. But how do you pack the non-material things, the grey miserable winters alleviated by spontaneous coffee dates and cat cradles, the hilltop view over Mauerpark on dusky evenings, the staggered walk home after a house party, carrying a headache that continues to pulse with party music and lively conversations. And the people? How do you condense the people, the votive flames that keep the temple of my heart lit. How do you keep the light burning on memories? Of their idiosyncrasies, their hopes and dreams, of the moments together when time briefly dilates, like when we sat around the table folding dumplings or laid by the lake to look up at the blue sky as the blackbirds sang?

Over the next few days, I suspect I’ll process these feelings more, perhaps give a better shape to them; it’s not quite like love, not quite like sadness, but something more infinite.

All Life Long

A thin fog descended as I was emerging out of the station at Dahlem, adding a veil to a day that had already attained a darker tenor from Trump’s reelection, a topic which later too coloured most of my conversation with my doctoral supervisor, who was coincidentally, supervising my project about boring apocalypses. What would the world look like when it ends? In fire and brimstone? Or a mundane descent into darkness? These scenarios clouded my head on my way back to the station as I dug my hands deep into my jacket pockets to brace myself against a sudden gale of air that portended an extra cold and gloomy winter.

Later in the evening, on the hallowed ground where the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church stood, it was perhaps fitting then that Kali Malone’s concert prolonged my considerations of doomsday’s advent. There were to be no revelations from her extended organ chords, no angel heralds or Christ-like saviours. The music droned on mournfully, almost endlessly, one long note leading to the next, between silence, hushed murmurs, a cough or two. For an instance, I couldn’t tell if these were the voices from the church or from her music, the hypnotic collapse of dichotomies, between the sacred and the profane, between the apocalyptic and the ordinary, a mere constant of the human condition. In the cycle of repetitions, I was suddenly reminded of Beckett’s plays and his adage that there is “better hope deferred, than none.”

All Life LongDownload

Arctic Hysteria

July ends with me thinking about my place in this dying planet, sweaty and flushed in what my phone says is weather 5 degree celsius warmer than usual, as Gobs sits on my face at 6am sharp before he runs off at the sound of his feeder dispensing a fresh batch of dried goodies, leaving me smelling like cat butt and surviving on 5 hours of sleep. Food 1 Charles 0.

In the opening pages of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, the narrator goes to the Prado as part of his morning routine in Madrid. Standing in his usual spot is a man looking at Van der Weyden’s Descent of the Cross. The man suddenly breaks down crying, presumably because he was “having a profound experience of art.” This leads the narrator to reflect upon whether he was capable of feeling the same thing; I have never cried in front of a work of art, no matter how brilliant I found it, but at the Pia Arke exhibition at the KW Museum in Berlin, I came close to what was probably a “profound experience of art.” I did not cry, but it triggered something primordial in me, something I can only describe as perfectly captured in Sufjan Stevens’s song, Casimir Pulaski Day, something about the human condition and life, that “[it only] takes [and it] takes [and it] takes.” And that was what I found mesmerizing about Pia’s work: about the colonization of Greenland by Denmark, about her being both an Inuit and a Dane, and not really belonging anywhere, not by choice, but by life’s cruel circumstances. “[And it] takes [and it] takes [and it] takes.” Bit by bit from her Inuit heritage, bit by bit from her Danish inheritance, until she is stripped naked, quite literally in some of her portraits, a lone figure standing in front of a landscape that is pristine only in memory.

La Chimera

Weeks of unvarnished sunshine gave way to clouds and scattered thunderstorms, bringing about the sudden sense that summer was coming to an end, languid days and sweat quickly unspooling before me to evoke a dread that is not unlike the feeling you get before the roller coaster drops. Out of an instinct to insulate myself against the darkening days, I found myself retreating into a melancholic interiority, burnished by faithful company from raccoon memes, my Nintendo Switch, and the occasional nihilism, the third of which I had sought to escape from by indulging in my Yorck Unlimited subscription. In two weeks of false spring or doomed summer or a hugely misconceived notion of what the weather foretold, I caught about one movie every two days.

On my 2nd viewing of Alice Rohrwach’s La Chimera, a rare incursion of beauty. The film follows a British archaelogist, Arthur, who in his besotten white suit and foreign Italian accent, looks severely out of place in 1980s Tuscany. Arthur fills his time consorting with a band of local graverobbers to profit and be merry, except we see that he is not really merry. The source of his misery seems to be connected to a mysterious woman, who appears in dreamlike sequences, leaving behind the red thread of her knitted dress which Arthur tries to follow but fails. We later find out that the woman is Benamina, a former lover who has died. Throughout the film, Arthur is continually seized by his memory of her, and the audience is seized by the terrible truth that Arthur can unearth as many Etruscan treasures as he wants, but he can never recover a past forever lost to him. Interwoven with this symbolism of lost love is the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus. To symbolize their love, Orpheus ties a red string around Eurydice’s finger, promises he will find her wherever she goes, even in the underworld. Naturally a lot of the film involves the underworld, the underground digging for totemic offerings, the seedy underbelly of art-trafficking, but its most poignant iteration is also its most literal: towards the end, Arthur gets buried alive. He yells at first, beats his fists against the earth. But then he notices a red thread, follows it into an opening. Emerging from the ground, he sees Benamina and falls into her embrace.

Ghostly Kisses

My compendium of sleepless nights is mostly febrile, drenched in wiki-dumpster diving and inchoate thoughts, relieved only by brief moments of clarity. In one such moment last year I discovered the music of Ghostly Kisses, named after a line in William Faulkner’s poem, Une ballade des dames perdues: “And brush my lips with little ghostly kisses.” The debut album – Heaven, Wait – was my entry point, waxing and waning between heavy synth beats and stripped-down classical arrangements to aestheticise the themes of transition and rebirth, written about reflecting on difficult times from a more grounded present. “Heartbeat” for instance captures the insecurities of young love; “Carry Me” looks at the people lost along the way.
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I couldn’t sleep tonight. Margaux’s ethereal voice continued to hang softly in the air long after the concert ended. But as dawn broke, I sensed the trees shiver with the anticipation of spring.

Beton Fuchs

A white space surgically carved into the foundations of a Plattenbau, illuminating the grey. Inside, 77 different artworks vie for the Marzahner Publikumspreis “Beton Fuchs.” The concrete fox. Yes, that must have been what he felt like he was when he entered the gallery, a fox lost in the urban jungle, head lowered, eyes shifty, though looking, looking for something to open up to him, something that would open him up.

Exhibit #35: Bees pollinating, nature’s blue-collar workers in yellow hi-vis jackets. They die. On the canvas, a hole is burnt through their bodies. The palette dulls. The plants wither.

Exhibit #45: Refined wooden blocks, meticulously shaped, colourful backdrops. A miracle of man’s enterprise and manufacturing prowess. But the blocks don’t fit, a gaping hole where nature should be.

He speaks to the two artists. They talk about their art and their motivations. He nods and listens, thinks about his own writing, how futile it is sometimes as the world burns. Yet when he imagines a world without art, without literature, he cannot imagine himself in it.

Projektraum Galerie M opens Tuesdays to Saturdays 12-6pm. Voting for Beton Fuchs has to be done in person and ends on 15th Dec 2023.