Ancestral Assemblage (Absence)

Ancestral Assemblage (Absence) Rebecca Rebecca Rebecca Rebecca Rebecca Rebecca Rebecca Rebecca Rebecca Rebecca Rebecca

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Pt. 1 For years, I took comfort in such an absence of history: its objective crispness, its apparent obviousness, its innocence protected me; but what did they protect me from, if not precisely from my history, the story of my living, my real story, my own story, which presumably was neither crisp nor objective, nor apparently obvious, nor obviously innocent?1 ---

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Perec, W, or The Memory of Childhood, 6.

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--I hold in my fleshy Materialization(s) names of ancestors’ past, my body, a collaborative project: paper mâché made on a holiday in the park–– Long live their blood in my pulsing belly may their memories be blessings: my IBS, a sign of the messages greats and great grandparents wanted me to know.

Anxiety inherited to prove bodies before me Survived and mine has too (so far); Boldly: filter oxygen from salty substances; I’ve been told my des(s)ert people once walked on seafloors gills and mind open,­becoming human question marks, tessellated sweet as honey.

I imprint myself with peaches made of ink to remember; fleeting filaments of light(ness) to produce kindred relationships with selves ––

Sway, planted, vivid, root: body drinks savory nectar with bees, drunk on stories of past bodies alive in rings; viscous cascades of self.

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These narratives may not be as different as one might imagine from the physical debris that evoked them. The work is on the one hand assembled out of narrative fragments to create an apparent structure of meaning. On the other hand, the momentum of meaning must be delayed enough so that the plot's machinery falls apart, from moment to moment returning to narrative debris.2

--Our bodies are assemblages of loss; those who came before perish, and leave traces of themselves where their physical form used to inhabit.

We are material produced by the abstract: living born from ghosts.

There are no orphans, only traces.

We are as close to fullness as we are to absence, as construction is to collapse, as treasure is to wreckage.

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Schwenger 87-88.

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Pt. 2 In his article “Six Sections in Succession,” Paul Harris writes that the Watts Towers are "a whole full of holes” (Harris 81). He calls the towers "a whole punctured by things unnoticed, unnoted, views and perspectives never seen or even contemplated" and he approaches this interdisciplinarily when he called the towers mathematically and formally a fractal, "a structure where each part is a whole and each whole, a part" (81).

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Although not invisible, Dioramas persists only in traces, signs, and images dispersed all across the globe.

Dioramas, a kind of collective brain, represents the sum total of all human experiences of the Watts towers.4 ---

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An image of Nested Apollonian Gaskets. An Apollonian Gasket or Net is a fractal generated from a triple of circles, each tangential to the other, and successively filling in more circles, each tangent to another three. (wikipedia) 4 Harris 82.

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I agree with Harris that “we ourselves are, ultimately, just such an assembly of lived moments” (Harris 82). But I would add: Perhaps these moments aren’t all our own; perhaps they are part of the larger “collective brain,” or at the very least, an ancestral brain.

--Am I part of the same ancestral brain as Wallace Berman? What makes me ask? Well, I don’t know. It's partly his background –– my grandmother and her twin sister grew up in the Fairfax neighborhood of LA in the 1930s & '40s. They were part of what Ken D. Allen calls "an ethnic enclave" of Jewish culture (Allen 72). But it's also a lot of the themes Berman explores in his work. Berman’s Semina -- made from "to spread" -- is brilliant. I also feel attracted to the alternate name of the project –– Trace.

We are all traces: bodies constructed of genes of generations past; products of collective histories, memories, imprints.

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“Because the decomposition was so meticulous, something was revealed.”5 Frank Venaille interviews Georges Perec about “the work of memory.”

Perec talks about the way he accesses memory in his writing, and about one element of memory that particularly intrigues me: “fictive memory, a memory that might have belonged to me” (Species 129).

Fictive memory is defined by that “which we might have experienced, which was somewhere inscribed among our possibilities… so it’s work about memory and a memory that concerns us, although it’s not ours, but is, how shall I put it, adjacent to ours and almost as determining for us as our own life story” (129). In this description, Perec is envisioning collective memory as an assemblage of potentialities. Collective memory, in this conception, is a product of not only one individual’s memory in one time, in one space; it is an assembled construction of many individuals’ memories across time, across space –– re-imagined, re-created, and re-built as one possibility.

When asked by the interviewer if Perec’s work is born from “the will above all to stand out against death, against silence,” Perec responds: “It certainly has to do with the idea of the trace, of the inscription, of the need to inscribe…” (130). I, too, feel the need to inscribe –– obsessively, meticulously, compulsively. As an only child who lost my father at age 11, I fear my own failure to record ancestral stories, long-held familial wisdom, the memories – traumatic and joyful – is a profound failure for my people: past, present, and future. I’ve read about this as being called “duty memory,” the burden one feels to remember, record, and re-tell. To me, it’s less of a burden, and more of a necessary impulse. I am destined to continue inscribing the story of my people, in one way or another, infinitely.

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Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 128.

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In an article about Georges Perec's book W ou le souvenir d'enfance (W or the Memory of childhood), Marc Caplan argues that "the indelible mark of an absent voice is silence, and the trace that remains of it must be illegible" (7). Through assembling a book that blurs fiction and memoir, Jewish with non-Jewish, Utopia and Dystopia, Perec plays with real and imagined, presence and absence.

--I think of an essay I wrote last semester for a cultural rhetorics course, “Bodies of Knowledge: Tracing Generations of Jewish Ancestral Rhetorics.” I’ll share an excerpt that feels relevant here: Becky Gross was the daughter of Selig Krypa and Sarah. She was born on January 18, 1878 in Toren, Germany, and she died in March 1966 in Oakland, California at age 88. The second-to-last son she had was my grandfather, Sylvan Gross, who she birthed at age 42; her last child was born when she was 45 years old –– unheard of for the 1920s. I was named Rebecca after Becky, something that my grandfather, Papa, would tell me every time we talked during the final few months of his life. “You are named after my mother. She was an incredible woman...” My parents didn’t know that Becky’s full name was Becky, not Rebecca, on her birth certificate, and Ketubah​ , immigration documents. So I became Rebecca, a palimpsest of Becky written, erased, and re-written.

I trace Becky with my name and my DNA. ---

Absence defines identity more than presence is able to. I never knew my great-grandma Becky. She would have been 118 years old by the time I was born. But I often consider what it means to carry her name inside my own, what it means to carry traces of Becky in Rebecca. Though I never knew her, “I know what she makes of her memories. I know what she remembers. I know her memories” (Michaels 285).

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Pt. 3 In the Nouveau-Realism lecture we watched for our Assemblage class in the Spring of 2021, we learned about Yves Klein's The Void, which deals with this idea of "subtraction." Prof. Damon Willick said something about this installation "emptying to create space for spirituality."

I'm interested obsessed in with the way this might translate to post-WWII Jewish literature, which is often dealing with absence, silences, and traces of the fractured past.

For said class, we read some Georges Perec (“Notes on the Objects to Be Found on My Desk”), but Perec is certainly worth revisiting in a project rooted in absence6. Georges Perec's mother was killed for being Jewish during the war (likely in Auschwitz), and his father was killed fighting in the French resistance against the Nazis. “The oddest thing is that [my father’s] death,” Perec writes in W, “and my mother’s, too often seems to be obvious. It’s become part of the way things are” (29). Absence is implied; void, expected.

As Prof. Harris mentions to our class: Perec's work often deals with absence (not so incidentally, his book that abstains from using the letter "E" is translated in English to A Void –– the same title as Klein's piece, with an indefinite article instead of a definite. This lack of definition in Perec's Void emphasizes the abstract nature of the absence he is attempting to confront in this meditation.

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Is it oxymoronic to refer to something as “rooted in absence”? Can absence be rooted in anything? Can absence be rooted at all? Perhaps absence can only be rooted in more absence.

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Word-play of my own, in response to the Schwenger from last week, and Perec's style: ALL THIS TOO, IS DREAMLIKE.7

Strangeness licks us beneath our eyelids, (re)constructed by found objects-turned mechanics. Language walks by us in a row – “C” behind “B,” in front of “D,” like children at school, shortest to tallest. They are so organized, clean, zero percent fucked-up.

I pull on “D” and tell them to come with me.

They aren’t much interested in staying in line. “D” lets “E” cozy up to “C” and welcomes interruption of their routine. Lets the line become confused. Lets language dissolve, break down.

Just think: Sing the alphabet song and forget about “D.” Do you have space where “D” used to be? Do you squish “C” and “E” together, thereby changing the entire song to follow? And what would happen if another letter chooses to jump out of line? Must, then, the singer begin again?

Must, then, the singer keep singing, as though nothing happened at all? And what should happen if “M” and “Q” and “L” and “V” should be drawn elsewhere? Does the song simply become a hum?

What does the alphabet song sound like, when all its letters have left?

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Schwenger 84.

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As we were wrapping up our class zoom session on Feb. 3, 2021, I was taking note of the beautiful chat we were all engaging in on the right side of my screen. I began to think of the chat as an assemblage of sorts, a "method of juxtaposition," "an appropriate vehicle for feelings of disenchantment with the slick international idiom that loosely articulated abstraction has tended to become, and the social values that this situation reflects" (Seitz, "the Art of Assemblage," 87). The feelings of disenchantment our chat responded to are expansive in this moment: The traditional classroom, disciplinary boundaries, canons of knowledge, the pandemic moment, lives of isolation and anxiety, etc., etc.

With that said, our chat is overwhelmingly positive, shockingly intimate; it is an antidote to such feelings of disenchantment. It is light, full of different styles of "truly magical transformation: from banality and ugliness, dispersion and waste, tawdriness and commercialism" (92). When class was over, I wasn't ready to part with the chat. I saved it, and knew I wanted to do something with it this week in my journal that would further disrupt what the chat was doing. I wanted to dis- and re-assemble the chat in a dada-like fashion, using the left-overs of our class discussion to create something new. I called this piece "CLASS CHAT, DECONTEXT-UALIZED." Notice, I wrote the title in a blue similar to IKB, and purposefully left the backwards, bled-through blue marker visible on the second sheet:

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When I was done assembling the chat in the form I wanted, I debated what to do with the debris left-over: the sheets of paper I had cut the chat quotes from. I decided to make art from this, too.

I've chronicled my performance below:

--The method of juxtaposition is an appropriate vehicle for feelings of disenchantment with the slick international idiom that loosely articulated abstraction has tended to become, and the social values this situation reflects.8

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Seitz 87.

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--I calque​ and divide: Falling into inter-canem et lupum​ I become the dog and the wolf; into biidaaban,​ I hold light and darkness; in the blue hour, I blend and dissolve into lumen and shadow. “In a kind of limbo. Neither here nor there. You’re between the two, the real and the shadow” (Twilight Zone, S1 E32).

--I juxtapose sel(f)/(ves).

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Rebecca L. Gross Rebecca Rebecca Rebecca Rebecca Rebecca Rebecca Rebecca Rebecca Rebecca Rebecca

L. L. L. L. L. L. L. L. L. L.

Gross Gross Gross Gross Gross Gross Gross Gross Gross Gross

Ancestral Assemblage (Absence) https://www.rebeccagross.com/ https://offmenupress.com/

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