Caesura Number Four: Spring 2022

caesura. a journal of literature

number four: spring 2022

Mythmaking in Os Lusiadas Suffering in the poetry of Celan and Endō plus

an interview with professor Laura Wittman

caesura: from Latin caesūra, “cutting, metrical pause” 1. in verse (Greek or Latin): a break between words within a metrical foot 2. in verse (modern): a pause near the middle of a line 3. in music: a pause or interruption in the normal tempo of a composition, typically indicated by “railroad tracks”, i.e., two diagonal slashes (//) 4. any interruption or break

Mission

Staff

As Stanford’s only undergraduate academic research journal focusing on the study of literature, caesura strives to consistently spotlight the most current and insightful research being conducted at the undergraduate level. Each edition will feature scholarly and creative pieces that aim to provoke new ways of thinking about literature. In giving voice to a diverse range of perspectives, caesura provides an inclusive outlet for undergraduates to share their ideas and enrich the humanities community at Stanford University.

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Betty He ’22 Lily Nilipour ’22

Special Thanks Stanford English Stanford Comparative Literature The Stanford Humanities Center The Stanford Fund

COPY EDITOR Nicholas Welch ’23 EDITORS Cat Corliss ’24 Alice Fang ’24 Srihari Naheswaran ’24 Sera Wang ’25 Eyup Eren Yurek ’23 Cybele Zhang ’22 FINANCIAL OFFICER Betty He ’22 FOUNDING EDITORS Emily Elott ’20 JH Wagner ’20 FACULTY ADVISOR Mark Greif

caesura. number four: spring 2022

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since 2019

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Contents Cover art

CATHERINE WANG

NOW 6

The Unrequited Before LILY NILIPOUR Analysis as observation, as (anti-)elegy

ESSAYS 8

“Hear From My Lips” ZORA ILUNGA-REED Mythmaking and the black voice in Os Lusiadas

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Reimagining the Earth as a Canvas The Spiral Jetty’s multiple mediations

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McLuhan’s Nervous System JULIA GORDON A reading of the Thing from The Thing

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Suffering in Translation Celan, Endō, and the “turn”

OLIVIA MANES

PROSE 46

Glossing Vilém Flusser JULIA GORDON A brief catalogue of codified objects

POETICS & ART 52

Hey honey or something

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Lineage of Worry

ISABELLE EDGAR

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Three drawings

CATHERINE WANG

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Snow Globes and Wine

ISABELLE EDGAR

ZUNI CHOPRA

RONIT JAIN

INTERVIEW 60

On COVID Art, Valéry, and the Possible Mortality of Humankind with Laura Wittman with Eyup Eren Yurek

DIALOGUE 70

“A Drunken Banquet” CAI ZHEN A dialogue between Zhuangzi, Mengzi, and a fool

Light as Imagined through a Body of Ice Keith S. Wilson An expansion into light, or we could have been, or were for a moment. A painting is one kind of marriage between permanency and sight, but another is the flame of a photograph. Not our bodies themselves, itself, but the brief kiss of radiation, too tired in the morning to share with you its plans, a regular flash of sheets against wall. You go to museums to fall in love with the most impassioned strokes, to share the genuflections of love. And then you go home to what works every day, catch a glint of everything off the edge of the fork.

number four spring 2022

The Unrequited Before: Analysis as Observation, as (Anti-)Elegy “She was going to bed. And the sky. It will be a solemn sky, she had thought, it will be a dusky sky, turning away its cheek in beauty.

But there it was—ashen pale, raced over quickly by tapering vast clouds. It was new to her.” —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

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S I TRY TO WRITE THIS LETTER, I switch back and forth between tabs on my laptop, reading the articles on my Facebook timeline about the Uvalde school massacre just days ago. Sometimes words are not enough for such horror. It is, perhaps, only possible to state what has occurred, what is occurring. Two teachers. Nineteen children.

I scroll through news sites senselessly. I flip through Instagram albums of photographs of each of the children, reading the single-line snippets about who they were. Were.

I remember, nine and a half years ago, Sandy Hook. It was my birthday. I was sitting by the front parking lot, waiting for my mom to pick me up from middle school. I don’t remember how I heard about it—I didn’t have a smartphone or social media then—but I do remember how quiet it was outside, how strange it felt listening to the flags flutter in the wind, knowing that across the nation 20 children half my age had been shot at school, one of my favorite places on Earth. // This year was full of promises for better, but better never seemed to come. On the scale of our school, this year marked—so we hoped—a grand return to campus. A linear movement toward normalcy, toward that fabled “before.” Our lives will return to the way they used to be. Yet, as the year moved on, we

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found nothing of the sort (and what did we expect but this?). Time passed in a loop as the virus came back, and came back, and came back…. While vaccines and boosters seemed to point to an “end” to Covid, the virus evolved at every chance it got, new variants disrupting attempts to revert the world back to what it was pre-pandemic. We all experienced the dreaded flash of déjà vu over winter break, when administration moved classes onto Zoom for the first few weeks of winter quarter. As Covid cases soared and diminished in cycles, the air never felt safe.

Other societal woes continue to remind us that they are far from ever going away. Just two years after the murder of George Floyd, and the subsequent movements protesting police brutality and racial violence, no major systemic change has taken hold; still, Black Americans are killed by police every day.

In February, tensions in Russia and Ukraine rose until finally, suddenly, almost stunningly, war broke. War wages still, day after day. Just this month, a draft of a Supreme Court vote to overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked, which would revoke the decades-old protection of women’s rights across the country. And, days ago, 19 children.

How do you process a tragedy that is never-ending? How do you make sense of such suffering, at such a scale—a scale that simply grows and grows and grows as each day passes?

As one of the pieces in this year’s issue of caesura tells us, the answer may be simply that we cannot. Olivia Manes, in her essay on Paul Celan and Shūsaku Endō, writes, “No language is equal to suffering, and therefore no language can capture it. It seems to foreclose understanding.”

If so, what are we doing here?

Caesura is, in a way, deeply tied to this pandemic and all the events its timespan has encompassed. After our founding in 2019, we published one single issue before COVID-19 completely disrupted our printing cycle. The path forward has since been tenuous, as the uncertainty and anxiety of the pandemic follows us through the years. For me, caesura’s connection to Covid has been deeply existential: why do we, why do I, try so hard to keep this publication alive in the face of the insurmountable silence of suffering?

Professor Laura Wittman says in our interview with her in this issue, “Beauty affects people.” It is, perhaps, why we turn to literature and art again and again in times of crisis. The creation of art is perhaps the desire to process the world, a changing world: why we’ve seen so much art by nurses and medical professionals, why we’ve seen so much poetry from Ukraine. And so the study of literature— the close attention to art, form, character, symbol, theme, etc.—is in a way a mode of understanding these modes of processing the world, of re-seeing this so-named “beauty” of the world that often feels so absent. The critic and the artist alike search for that beauty, hoping, always, to see the world anew.

And indeed, this is a new world we inhabit. The dream of the past’s return will always be unrequited. No more before.

As tragedy continues to unfold every day, both across the world and in our own backyard, the literary critic’s job of observing, understanding, and returning becomes a model for how to live our lives. A poem

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may be an elegy, but criticism is anti-elegy: it refuses to put art in the past. When we write about text, we write about it in the present tense. // Every year on my birthday, the memory of Sandy Hook and the parking lot comes back, in one way or another; the day I am made most aware of my own life, I am also reminded of the 20 lives that were lost. It is one of those strange occurrences that has become an ingrained ritual for me. Processes of processing do not end.

This year, back on campus, I found myself looking up at the sky more often than ever before in my life. It may be that for the year and a half before I was deprived of it, holed up in my room at home. Maybe it was that I needed the openness more, a brief respite from the hours spent on the Word Document of my senior thesis. Maybe it was from spending too much time reading the news. Maybe it was knowing that I’d probably never get such access to the Palo Alto sky ever again, a sky I took for granted for three years, as I counted down the days to graduation. Whatever it was, I’d sit out on the front lawn of my residence, watching the birds, watching the overtaking blueness. It is so distant. Especially Stanford’s sky, that clear and “solemn” sky, “turning away its cheek in beauty.” But there it was. Every time I looked at it, just looked, nothing more. And the sky. It was new to her. And the sky. And the sky. // —Lily Nilipour ’22 Please direct any conspiratorial agendas, submissions, and tidings to stanfordcaesura@ gmail.com.

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Adamastor azulejo tiles, Palace Hotel in Buçaco.

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“Hear From My Lips”: Mythmaking and the Black Voice in Os Lusiadas Zora Ilunga-Reed I. Introductions & Context

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N PERHAPS THE MOST FAMOUS MOMENT IN LUIS DE CAMÕES’S OS LUSIADAS, DE Gama and his crew encounter the giant Adamastor in Canto V. He is a mystery to them.

They do not know his name, background, or significance: de Gama interrupts his prophetic speech to ask, “What art thou…?” (Camões, ProQuest, line 412). Yet for Adamastor, the seafarers are not strangers. Privy to their past, present, and future, he knows them and their country well.

He demands no identification from them, for he already possesses, in his mystical knowledge, their complete identities.

Os Lusiadas (Anglicized, The Lusiads) is a sixteenth-century epic poem penned by Portugal’s national poet, Luís Vaz de Camões. In classic epic fashion, the poem recounts the travels and tribulations of a group of seafaring adventurers, led by a fictionalized version of Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama. In the late fifteenth-century, de Gama became the first European to sail to India, connecting the West to the East via the Cape of Good Hope. In Os Lusiadas, it is just after rounding this historic bend that the explorers meet Adamastor, a titan so rare all the ancient Greek and Roman poets failed to mention him (Zhang and Sullivan).

Reading between the lines of de Gama’s account of Adamastor uncovers an early conception of whiteness. Latent and tacit, this whiteness reveals itself on the underside and as the underbelly of Camões’s poetic construction of Blackness. In this paper, I will focus on three elements of the Adamastor episode in Canto V: de Gama’s physical description of Adamastor, Adamastor’s prophecy, and Adamastor’s backstory as recounted by the king of Melinde.

Through a close reading of the epic and a critical analysis of its narration, I aim to reveal and define the implied notion of whiteness beneath these moments.

The context of the Adamastor episode in Canto V is an essential piece in the puzzle of interpretation that the encounter poses. Cantos III, IV, and V are told in retrospect by de Gama to the ruler of Melinde. As such, Canto V emerges as a multi-tiered myth. First, there is Camões’s implicit mythmaking that runs throughout the epic. Yet, additionally, Camões’s mythicized de Gama is also given authorial power in his retelling of the events. This power is no less than the ability to reshape and redefine historical events along ideological lines. Sandra Chait, interpreting Roland Barthes’s Myth Today, notes that “mythology is part-ideology, being an historical science, and as such it moves at all levels from ‘the real to the ideological’” (Chait 17). This process makes “constructed images, … with all their various embedded semiotic codes, appear natural to their readers” (Chait 17, author’s emphasis). In the case of Canto V, both de Gama and Camões construct their myths as “natural” for their respective audiences: for de Gama, the king of Melinde; for Camões, the Portuguese reader. They present narratives that are

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already interpreted, designed to deliver a history that is harmonic with its listeners’ or readers’ ideologies. In the following close readings, I will work to re-interpret the pre-interpreted, turning the focus on the interpreter himself.

II. Adamastor Appears De Gama’s initial physical description of Adamastor describes him as a terrifying monster, fitting for an epic. He is “a hideous phantom,” “high and enormous,” “tower[ing]” over the sea (Camões, ProQuest, lines 319-320). Yet, the details of Adamastor’s physicality—specifically, the colors de Gama uses to describe him—are disjointed and surprising: An earthy paleness o’er his cheeks was spread, Erect uprose his hairs of wither’d red; Writhing to speak his sable lips disclose, Sharp and disjoin’d, his gnashing teeth’s blue rows. (Camões, ProQuest, lines 322-325) Adamastor’s “earthy paleness” is a mystifying description: the two words seem to contradict each other. “Earthy” suggests soil or dirt, a dark and rich brown. In contrast, “paleness” would mean a faded or lacking color, a whiteness, or an absence of pigmentation. If not antonymic, the two words are at least inharmonious, presenting a confused image of the Titan. Nowhere else do we get a more detailed description of Adamastor’s skin color—it remains an open question. Yet, a penciled-in answer appears in the surrounding lines.

Adamastor’s hair is a “wither’d red,” and his teeth are “blue.” In the following few lines, de Gama describes his eyes, too, as “red” and imbued with “livid fires” (Camões, ProQuest, lines 330-331). This lengthy description offers a rainbow of colors but, notably, very little black. In fact, in de Gama’s telling, only one of Adamastor’s features is black: his lips. These are “sable” and, importantly, “writhing to speak.” The lips’ importance as the source of Adamastor’s voice and, it seems, the source of his Blackness, is underscored by the final line of de Gama’s introductory description: “His black lips trembling, thus the fiend began” (Camões, ProQuest, line 337). Here, as before, Adamastor’s lips are synonymous with both Blackness and voice. In both descriptive instances, they are in motion—“writhing” and “trembling”—and decisively black. This connection posits, quite literally, a voice imbued with Blackness, a Black voice.

Even so, though I suggest that it is de Gama’s description that brings this Black voice into being, it is crucial to note that, in his own telling, the voice is already active: Adamastor’s lips are “writhing to speak” thirteen lines before we hear what he has to say. As such, de Gama implicitly indicates a vocal Blackness that already exists, a notion of race that predates Portuguese exploration. This position is an anachronistic and disjunctive sociological one. In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s words, “race is the child of racism, not the father” (Coates 7). Camões’s mythicized de Gama, insofar as he conceives an active Black voice, simultaneously constructs an opposing, and implicitly racist, whiteness as its audience.

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III. Adamastor Speaks But what does this Black voice actually say? Helpfully, de Gama’s retold version of Adamastor’s speech includes a thesis statement of sorts: “Hear from my lips what direful woes attend, / And bursting soon shall o’er your race descend” (Camões, ProQuest, lines 350-351).

Again, the use of “lips” suggests a voice and a prophecy inextricable from embodied Blackness.

Additionally, “my lips” is set in opposition to “your race”: just as Blackness comes into being, so does whiteness, a “race” to which Adamastor’s “lips” do not belong. Most importantly, though, Adamastor’s intention, as described here, is inherently in service of the Portuguese. His stated purpose is to foretell the “direful woes” of a nation and people he has only just encountered.

Already and immediately, at its inception, Adamastor’s incredible prophetic power is confined to serve the Portuguese and their worldview.

Camões presents a Black voice at this central point in the epic only to silence it of anything but talk about Portugal, about whiteness. That is, even in the content of a Black character’s speech, there is an operative, controlling, powerful whiteness at play all the while. Recall, the reader never actually hears Adamastor’s speech from the Titan himself. Instead, it is retold to us as it is to the king of Melinde. By giving de Gama the power to speak for Adamastor, Camões inserts a Black voice just as he erases it. In providing a Black character the power of prophecy, he also gives a white character the ability to retell and reshape that prophecy: the power of narrative creation.

Within this narrative that is at once de Gama’s and Camões’s, Adamastor’s prophetic power itself conceals a whiteness, too. By giving Adamastor the ability to foretell the future, Camões implicitly absolves the Portuguese of the blame to come, of the “direful woes” that will befall them and the continent’s inhabitants. As Chait notes, “in the grand tradition of the epic … god and nature are one, mankind’s unity with the world a guarantee of human destiny and of humans’ inability to change the path of their future.

The end is foretold and, as in the epics of Homer and Virgil, structure dictates action” (Chait 20). Working in this tradition, Camões retrospectively exonerates the Portuguese by building in this prophetic African voice, one which knows all of what is to come and, therefore, one which cannot blame the European explorer for his misdeeds. Built into the land, Adamastor knows the future but is powerless to change

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it. He shares his wealth of knowledge with de Gama and his crew, who take it along with the powerlessness of destiny. Agency disappears, and the potential tragedy of the future metamorphosizes into the promise of the past.

IV. Adamastor is Named Throughout this paper, I have referred to the specter de Gama and his crew encounter as they round the Cape as Adamastor. Most of the secondary literature on this episode does the same. The connection between de Gama’s retelling of the story and the myth of Adamastor, however, is not as firm as this paper (and much of the secondary literature) suggests. In fact, when de Gama asks the “hideous phantom” to identify himself, his answer does not include the name he is later given. Instead, he responds, “In me the Spirit of the Cape behold, / That rock, by you the Cape of Tempests nam’d” (Camões, ProQuest, lines 419-420). Rather than identifying himself with mythic tradition and the Titans, he sees his identity as directly related to the landscape: he is “the Spirit of the Cape” first.

Only later is he Adamastor, and it is not de Gama who so names him. After de Gama concludes his recounted experience, after “the Spirit of the Cape” departs, the king of Melinde puts the pieces together as he sees fit: “Oh, wondrous faith of ancient days,” he cries, “Conceal’d in mystic lore and dark disguise!

Taught by their sires, our hoary fathers tell, On these rude shores a giant-spectre fell.” (Camões, Project Gutenberg {151})1 He goes on to share an ancient tale in which Adamastor revealed himself as such to a wandering pilgrim. The king’s story includes Adamastor’s backstory, his doomed infatuation with the sea nymph Thetis, and his subsequent eternal imprisonment as a fixture of the rocky cape.

Notably, this story itself is shrouded in “mystic lore and dark disguise,” and, unlike de Gama’s, its narrator speaks far removed from the first-person. Rather, he is sharing a story that has been passed down from “sires” to “hoary fathers,” seemingly for generations. Within the myth, another myth is made. It is a testament both to de Gama’s myth-making abilities and to the power of shared, storied symbols that the king of Melinde immediately picks up on.

Thus, Adamastor is born into the epic as a patchwork of myths. Stitching these pieces together, both the king of Melinde and de Gama are implicitly unified as the co-creators of this fantastical Black voice. They inject their Frankenstein-esque character with classic tradition,

Interestingly, the ProQuest version of The Lusiad doesn’t include this crucial narrator switch—from de Gama to the king of Melinde. The Project Gutenberg version does, but it doesn’t have line numbers; {151} refers to one of a few provided margin numbers. Aside from these differences, both versions are the same.

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Even in the content of a Black character’s speech, there is an operative, controlling, powerful whiteness at play all the while.

vast knowledge about Portuguese exploration, and a tragic backstory that indicates his undesirability. Their creativity betrays itself: the resulting creature is absurd and confusing, at once terrifying and sympathetic. The messiness of Adamastor’s character can arise only from a biased and mistaken retelling.

Whiteness, as the myth’s creator, is also the source of its unintelligibility. To de Gama, the “Spirit of the Cape” reveals that “you alone have dared to plough my main, / And with the human voice disturb my lonesome reign” (Camões, ProQuest, lines 429-430). Yet the king of Melinde’s story, from “deep in the days of yore,” includes a “human voice,” that of a “holy pilgrim” to whom Adamastor shares his backstory (Camões, Project Gutenberg, {151}). De Gama and the pilgrim cannot both be the first humans to disturb Adamastor, yet neither the king of Melinde nor de Gama address this inconsistency. They are not concerned with accuracy, it seems.

Instead, they collaborate to construct the Other as they see fit.

V. Conclusions In the centuries since Camões’s creation, scholars, artists, and historians alike have relentlessly shaped Adamastor into various symbols. Put best by George Monteiro in “The Adamastor Story,” “The symbolic figure of Adamastor has come to stand for many things. It begins as the symbol of African threat and danger to the European sailor, transforms itself into the symbol of the European menace to Africa itself, and finally into the symbol of Africa itself exploited by outsiders” (Monteiro 121). Notably, Monteiro does not question the validity of making such a disjointed and messily constructed character into a symbol in the first place.

Again, the power of myth-making conceals its drawbacks. If the symbols make sense or, to return to Chait, if they “appear natural,” then there is no need to dig deeper to uncover the

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instability of their foundation.

To take Adamastor as a symbol for anything, whether as further proof of European bias or as a kind of post-colonial African anger, is like cooking with rotten ingredients. The result may appear innocuous and consumable, but a few bites reveal its rancidness. It was spoiled to begin with—the only way forward is to start again with new materials. Yet, given The Lusiads’ prominence in both Portuguese literature and, to some extent, world literature, a fresh start is an idealistic fantasy; a tabula rasa is out of the question.

This iterative myth-making will not find its own end. Adamastor was initially crafted out of myth, and modern scholarship continues this process into eternity. Tragically fitting to his mythic origins, Adamastor is destined to a Sisyphean existence of repeated ideological shaping and reshaping.

The best one can hope for is a departure from past traditions, a new effort to dream up characters who are neither heroes nor monsters. Camões’s epic draws much of its inspiration from the past—it is like the ancients’ lost-and-found—but it is undeniably creative. If we become more critically aware and attuned to the errors of tradition, perhaps we can write and share new stories that avoid past pitfalls. Adamastor asks de Gama to “hear from my lips,” but de Gama has already perceived these lips as black, as Other. If he hears, he certainly does not listen. Perhaps, if we learn from his mistake, we can listen to the past with caution and critique.

Perhaps, we can cease the cycle and start a new journey with the wisdom and clarity of hindsight. //

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Works Cited Camões, Luís de. The Lusiad. Edited by E. Richmond Hodges. Translated by William Julius Mickle, Project Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg, 26 May 2010, https://www.gutenberg. org/files/32528/32528-h/32528-h.htm.

Camões, Luis de. The Lusiad. Translated by William Julius Mickle. ProQuest, 1776. https://www. proquest.com/books/lusiad/docview/2147614095/se-2?accountid=14026.

Chait, Sandra. “Mythology, Magic Realism, and White Writing after Apartheid.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 31, no. 2, 2000, pp. 17-28, https://www.jstor.org/ stable/3821042.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. Spiegel & Grau, 2015. Mt. San Antonio College. https://www.mtsac.edu/elj/english/documents/engl1a/engl_1a_reading_n.pdf. PDF file.

Monteiro, George. “The Adamastor Story.” The Presence of Camões: Influences on the Literature of England, America, and Southern Africa. The University Press of Kentucky, 1996, pp.

120-131. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=93 8414&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Zhang, Yanping, and Rory Rose Sullivan. “The Lusiads.” Harvard Wiki, Harvard University, 7 May 2015, https://wiki.harvard.edu/confluence/display/k104639/The+Lusiads++Rory+Sullivan#:~:text=Title%3A%20Os%20Lus%C3%ADadas-, Summary,major%20force%20for%20world%20exploration.

Works Consulted Banks, Jared. “Adamastorying Mozambique: ‘Ualalapi’ and ‘Os Lusíadas’.’” Luso-Brazilian Review, vol. 37, no. 1, 2000, pp. 1-16, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3513854.

Gray, Stephen. “The Myth of Adamastor in South African Literature.” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, no. 48, May 1977, pp. 1-23, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41801617.

Hilton, John. “Adamastor, Gigantomachies, and the Literature of Exile in Camões’ Lusíads.”

Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association, no.112, 2009, pp. 1-23, DOI: 10.1179/000127909804775623.

Quint, David. “Voices of Resistance: The Epic Curse and Camões’s Adamastor.” Representations, no. 27, 1989, pp. 111–41, https://doi.org/10.2307/2928486.

Richards, Moira. “Adamastor: a post-patriarchal approach.” Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa, vol. 4, no. 2, 1999, pp. 73-74, DOI: 10.1080/18125449908565944.

Van Wyk Smith, Malvern. “Shades of Adamastor: the Legacy of The Lusiads.” The Cambridge History of South African Literature, edited by David Attwell and Derek Attridge, January 2012, pp. 113–137, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-history-ofsouth-african-literature/shades-of-adamastor-the-legacy-of-the-lusiads/85016BC8AE33 85794123FB28BC7941E5.

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Spiral Jetty, 1970. Dia Art Foundation.

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The Spiral Jetty: Reimagining the Earth as a Canvas Ronit Jain

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NDER THE SCORCHING UTAHN SUN, A SERIES OF BASALT ROCKS ARRANGED in spiral formation bask in the sweltering heat. Iridescent from countless algal blooms, the reddish-pink waters of the Great Salt Lake gently lap at the rocks, with the murmur of waves filling the arid desert air. It is impossible to ignore the alluring shimmer of the landscape—the water’s sunlit sparkles echo the glint of salt crystals encrusted into the rocks.

In the distance, oil-stained steel structures loom, conspicuously incongruous with the rest of the landscape. As the sculpture coils in on itself from the shoreline, it takes on a distinctly serpentine shape, with its weathered, timeless appearance suggesting that it always has been and always will be here. Taken as a whole, the view is striking in its juxtaposition—the rugged, wild desert stands in stark contrast to the perfectly proportioned spiral whose presence is a potent signifier of man’s drive to manipulate the environment.

This is the scene you might encounter if you were one of the few intrepid souls who chose to make the trek to the Spiral Jetty. Located on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, this 1,500-foot-long land-art installation was created entirely out of basalt rocks, mud, and salt crystals by earthworks sculptor Robert Smithson in 1970 (Loe 1). Over a period of three weeks, Smithson utilized more than 7,000 tons of rock from the nearby shoreline to complete this monumental undertaking (Loe 67). Today, the Spiral Jetty is a seminal piece of artwork that has played a pivotal role in the creation of the modern land art movement, ushering in a radical reimagination of the relationship between humans and the Earth.

Utilizing materials derived from the Earth, such as rocks, mud, and forestry, the land-art movement has radically expanded the ways in which we conceptualize public art by blurring the lines between landscape and built environment. Founded in the U.S. in the late 1960s as a direct response to the “mass media, consumerism, and geopolitics of the 1960s,” the land-art movement found its footing in a distinctly anti-gallery, anti-elitist ethos (England 337). Through displaying their artwork in natural settings, earthworks sculptors sought to challenge the commercialization and cloistering of art in elite galleries by “literally and figuratively moving art away from the rarified white hallways of museums” (Smolucha). Moreover, as an outcropping of the eco-art movement, many early land artists framed their art pieces as direct responses to the sweeping environmental crises of the sixties and seventies, “reflecting a heightened awareness of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the proclamation of the first Earth Day in 1970, and the Greenpeace protests of the seventies” (Wilke 69). Today, most land art aims to deliver powerful environmentalist messages, albeit in a decidedly dualistic way, by both “drawing us towards nature” while also “highlighting the geo-engineering qualities of humans in the Anthropocene who have become shapers of the land” (Wilke 69). Although land art consists of a diverse array of artworks, the majority of land art shares some common features, including inaccessibility, a

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brief lifespan, and a proliferation of archival documentation.

As one of the most famous pieces of land art, the Spiral Jetty epitomizes many of the quandaries with which the broader land-art movement has had to grapple in one form or another. The implications of the Spiral Jetty’s site-specificity, such as its ephemerality and remoteness, and their impact on the conveyance of environmentalist meaning have not been well-discussed. Moreover, while the Spiral Jetty makes bold environmentalist declarations, its creation involved manipulating the Earth, which raises a host of eco-ethical questions that potentially subvert the artwork’s messaging. As such, I find it important to tease apart the complex relationship between the Spiral Jetty’s medium and its production of meaning, examining whether the medium bolsters the environmentalist meaning of the piece, stands in opposition to it, or perhaps both. I aim to tackle the following question: How does the usage of land as an artistic material shape the Spiral Jetty’s environmentalist messaging? In this paper, I put forth the argument that the Spiral Jetty’s ephemerality, physicality, and mediation through auxiliary art forms allow it to powerfully communicate environmentalist concepts, but that its messaging is complicated by the ecological degradation attached to its existence.

Ephemerality Perhaps one of the most dramatic consequences of the Spiral Jetty’s site-specific medium is its inherent ephemerality. Just two years after its construction, the Spiral Jetty was submerged underwater due to rising lake-water levels, disappearing completely (Tuttle 24). When it reemerged twenty years later, the artwork’s coloration had darkened significantly and its rocks had accumulated layers of white precipitated salts (Tuttle 24). By virtue of being inscribed into the Earth, the Spiral Jetty is perpetually in flux, mirroring the changes in its natural environment.

Its dynamism mirrors the entropic nature of the environment, or the concept that all systems tend to collapse, which is an idea that Smithson himself references, writing in an essay that the Spiral Jetty “is a collaboration with entropy, for it showcases changes in the material order of nature” (Smithson, Collected Writings). The Spiral Jetty’s shifting appearance—a direct byproduct of its medium—therefore allows it to visually convey a crucial environmentalist message to viewers: nature always has undergone and always will undergo dramatic transformations.

Additionally, it is important to note that the Spiral Jetty is not merely changing—the artwork is also gradually vanishing as the waters of the Great Salt Lake slowly erode it. This ephemeral quality of the artwork is anything but accidental—as Lunberry, an art history professor at the University of North Florida, puts it, “impermanence and loss are the active ingredients in this piece, for the piece was deliberately designed to sink into oblivion” (Lunberry 90). Through its gradual disappearance, the artwork not only communicates but also physically demonstrates the power of nature to reclaim that which man constructs, which is something that gallery-based artistic mediums might not have been able to accomplish. In a sense, the artwork captures and makes visible a broader power struggle between man and nature, with its transience testifying to the ultimate prevalence of natural forces over man-made ones. The message is almost Biblical: while humans may come and go, Earth abides. As such, the site-specific medium

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Figure 1 (left).

Spiral Jetty at the time of its construction in 1970, Gorgoni.

Figure 2 (below).

Spiral Jetty in 2008 after being submerged for 20 years, Smart.

of the Spiral Jetty plays a critical role in the production of its environmentalist meaning by forcing viewers to reflect on the “perpetual movement, drift, and decay of all man-made things in nature” (Lunberry 90). It seems, then, that the Spiral Jetty’s medium is inextricable from its environmentalism, with the two sharing a symbiotic relationship.

Mediation Due to the Spiral Jetty’s remoteness, most people cannot visit the artwork in person, especially during the current pandemic which has severely restricted visitors’ access to the Spiral Jetty. Moreover, the art piece is occasionally submerged underwater, making it impossible to view. The inaccessibility of the Spiral Jetty’s site-specific medium therefore means that forms of archival documentation are the primary ways through which the public experiences the art piece. From the very beginning of the Spiral Jetty’s history, various artistic mediums have facilitated the Spiral Jetty’s entrance into the public consciousness. Indeed, one of the Spiral Jetty’s first major public exhibitions was held at the Museum of Modern Art where Smithson displayed eight photographs of the Spiral Jetty by Gianfranco Gorgoni (Campagnolo). This strong association between documentation and the Spiral Jetty was orchestrated in part by

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Figure 3. Biannual photographs of the Spiral Jetty. Left to right: Fall 2020, Fall 2014, Fall 2013, Fall 2005. Dia Art Foundation.

Smithson himself, who was highly conscious of the role that documentation would play in his artwork’s dissemination and accordingly created photography and film around the Spiral Jetty. From the start, Smithson conceptualized his artwork as consisting of two distinct but complementary elements: the physical artwork, which he labeled “Site,” and additional “NonSites,” which were slices of the physical art’s reality that were displayed elsewhere (White 162).

The centrality of this mediation to Smithson’s artwork cannot be understated: the substantive corpus of photos, films, and drawings of the Spiral Jetty have taken on lives of their own, to the point where they almost cannot be considered imitations of the “original” physical artwork, but rather function as standalone pieces that provide unique ways of experiencing the Spiral Jetty.

By virtue of its relative accessibility, widespread circulation on social media, and visual appeal, photography has become the predominant means by which most people encounter the Spiral Jetty. Smithson commissioned Gorgoni to create an array of aerial photographs of the Spiral Jetty which circle around the art piece from various angled points of view. By showing the art piece from above, these photographs do not merely approximate the experience of visiting the artwork in person but rather augment it in some respects by allowing viewers to see the Spiral Jetty from aerial perspectives that they never could have seen otherwise.

Gorgoni’s photographs, however, are by no means the only photos of the art piece—the Dia Art Foundation (the steward of the Spiral Jetty) commissions geospatial aerial photographers to document the art piece twice annually (Dia Art Foundation). By capturing snapshots of the art piece at various points in time, photography shows viewers the dramatic evolution of the art piece as natural forces act upon it over time. When visiting the artwork in person, it is difficult to grasp the temporality of the piece as visitors can see the Spiral Jetty only as it exists in the present moment. Photography, therefore, plays a critical role in underscoring the ephemerality, volatility, and fluctuation of the artwork, which are key to comprehending the environmentalist meaning of the piece. Photography reinforces the connection between the Spiral Jetty and its environmentalist message, highlighting how the Spiral Jetty’s medium—and the auxiliary mediations that it necessitates—bolsters the artwork’s conveyance of environmentalist concepts.

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Reimagining the Earth as a Canvas

Film has been yet another prominent part of the archival documentation of the Spiral Jetty.

When the Spiral Jetty was in its nascent stages of development, Smithson began creating a film to document the construction, mythology, and history of the Spiral Jetty; the film includes detailed ground and aerial shots of the artwork as it slowly came into existence (Uroskie 58). By including shots from several angles, the film recreates the immersive experience of visiting the artwork in person, perhaps even more so than other forms of mediation such as photography. Art historian James Housefield offers a similar perspective, claiming that “the film’s multiple perspectives unwind Smithson’s earthwork, offering essential information about the site for those who cannot visit it” (Housefield 545). Film therefore plays a critical role in allowing remote viewers to fully behold the beauty of the natural landscape that surrounds the Spiral Jetty. But perhaps more important are the film’s subtly laced audiovisual symbols which alert viewers to the deeper environmentalist meaning behind the Spiral Jetty. Smithson’s film includes soundtrack elements of a Geiger counter as well as a respirator (Stephens 1). The auditory reference to a Geiger counter, a device used to measure radioactive decay, connects the Spiral Jetty to Smithson’s all-important concept of entropy, suggesting that the Spiral Jetty’s ephemerality is reflective of a broader universal truth: all things must eventually devolve into disorder. At the same time, the mechanical background sounds of a respirator can be interpreted as a subtle nod to the idea that the Earth is slowly dying, requiring life support to stay alive. Moreover, in the beginning of the film, the ticking of a clock is heard while pages of an atlas fall onto the cracked ground, after which Smithson delivers a voiceover: “The Earth’s history seems like a story recorded in a book, each page of which is torn into small pieces” (Smithson, Spiral Jetty). This proclamation is then followed by a series of interspliced images of fossils and dinosaurs (Smithson, Spiral Jetty).

Here, Smithson utilizes the clock’s sound and the atlas’s pages to metaphorically represent the Earth’s storied history, illustrating his preoccupation with issues of temporality—or, as Housefield puts it, with the concept of “geologic time, which is evoked by the opposition of dump trucks and dinosaurs” (Housefield 543). The inclusion of images of prehistoric creatures

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connects the Spiral Jetty to the history of the land it occupies, suggesting that the artwork comprises only a minuscule part of the long lineage of bodies that have existed on this land and, just like the prehistoric plants and animals before it, will eventually disappear. Therefore, the film reframes the Spiral Jetty within the context of geological time, drawing attention to Earth’s immense history within which the Spiral Jetty—and, by extension, humans—is merely a transient entity. This underlying sense of temporality is impossible to glean from just seeing the artwork in person, hence why film plays such a crucial role in elucidating the Spiral Jetty’s environmentalist meaning to viewers who may otherwise never have been able to fully grasp Smithson’s nuanced artistic intentions. In a sense, the Spiral Jetty is an exercise in subtle paradoxes—both its ephemerality and its immortalization through archival documentation bolster its environmentalist messaging.

Physicality While it is important to consider the artwork’s site-specificity within the frameworks of mediation and ephemerality, we must also examine the counterpoint scenario—the impact of the artwork’s physicality on the public who view the piece in person and at one specific moment in time. In her account of her visit to the Spiral Jetty, Rebecca Taylor, a self-described art-lover and writer, foregrounds specific sensory-linked details, such as the “smell of the salt air” and the “hot sun upon my skin,” and then summarizes these details by stating that “it was an all-consuming, olfactory experience[;] I felt the overwhelming presence of Mother Nature … I found a transcendental calm” (Taylor). The prominence of sensory imagery in Taylor’s narrative speaks to the evocative nature of the Spiral Jetty’s land-based medium: by exposing viewers to the natural elements, the artwork creates a whole-body, tactile experience that inevitably

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Figure 4. Stills from Smithson’s film on the Spiral Jetty.

Reimagining the Earth as a Canvas

impresses the grandeur of nature upon its viewers. Additionally, Taylor’s focus on her emotional, cathartic response to the piece highlights how the artwork’s physicality allows viewers to feel more intimately connected to the Earth. The conclusion to Taylor’s piece, in which she “hails Smithson for giving [her] a reason to make a pilgrimage to this breathtaking place,” is a testament to the power of the piece’s remoteness, which forces viewers to leave urban settings and immerse themselves in natural landscapes (Taylor). Additionally, Ian Tuttle, a journalism fellow at the National Review Institute, comments on the size of the Spiral Jetty in his writing, stating that standing on the massive artwork made him conscious of his insignificance in the face of nature (Tuttle 24). Tuttle’s comments demonstrate how the physicality of the artwork indirectly conveys man’s subservience to nature, which was a crucial message for Smithson to relay. Moreover, Robert Shane, who documented his thoughts in narrative form while visiting the artwork, emphasizes the importance of movement when it comes to interacting with the piece, stating, “as I travelled in an anti-clockwise direction along the spiral, I felt myself moving backwards in time” (Shane 56). Shane’s account underlines how viewers are made kinesthetically aware of a key environmentalist concept as they walk along the sinuous shape of the Spiral Jetty—geological time, or the vast and enduring history of the Earth. Thus, firstperson accounts from the public reveal that the Spiral Jetty’s site-specific medium amplifies its environmentalist message.

Even so, the extensive constellation of documentation around the Spiral Jetty begs the question: when the public has access to so many forms of mediation, why would anyone visit the artwork in person? Susan Ballard, another Spiral Jetty visitor, offers one potential answer in her account of visiting the piece: “there is so much in contemporary life that we are exposed to remotely, but it is not the same as feeling things in person—we wanted to see the Spiral Jetty for ourselves so that we could measure the distance between our expectations of the work and the physical work itself” (Ballard 154). Ballard’s commentary demonstrates that the public still finds value and relevance in the “original” artwork, despite the proliferation of documentation, precisely because the physicality of the Spiral Jetty’s medium makes for a uniquely profound corporeal experience that is impossible to fully replicate. While viewers get a sense of the Spiral Jetty through photography and film, their perceptions of the art piece are still filtered through those mediums—therefore, viewers are interested in visiting the piece in person and forming their own opinions that are independent of forms of mediation. Ultimately, the physicality of the Spiral Jetty’s land-based medium is what makes it so potent, for it communicates and tangibly displays a whole host of interlaced environmentalist concepts to viewers, which is not possible with other art forms that exist solely in the sterile halls of galleries.

Environmental Impact To fully unpack the implications of the Spiral Jetty’s medium, it is also crucial to interrogate the complex interplay between the piece’s environmental impact and its messaging. During the Spiral Jetty’s construction, Smithson excavated 7,000 tons of basalt rock from the shoreline using dump trucks, tractors, and front-loaders, which left the land scarred and damaged (Loe

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67). Moreover, the Spiral Jetty’s continuous presence has caused the Great Salt Lake’s shallow waters to become polluted and extra salty from runoff (Chianese 20). In a way, the ecoviolence behind the Spiral Jetty’s construction is concealed from the public consciousness, as viewers are given no indication of the destruction that the artwork’s creation might have wrought. It is precisely this veiled lack of eco-consciousness, however, that complicates the Spiral Jetty’s messaging: any environmentalist meaning produced by the art piece seems to be severely undermined by the ecological degradation that is tied to the piece’s existence. Robert Chianese, a professor at California State University, takes a similar stance on the art piece’s environmental impact, arguing that “little environmental consciousness seems to be involved in the Spiral Jetty, for it is nothing more than man trying to override irregular, messy Nature with a perfect arithmetic figure” (Chianese 20). Indeed, in the context of its environmental damage, the Spiral Jetty sends a distinctly anti-environmentalist message, highlighting the unethical, almost callous means to which humans are willing to go in order to impose their will onto the Earth.

As such, it seems that the Spiral Jetty’s medium stands in opposition to its environmentalism, for the two are inherently paradoxical and even incompatible when viewed through a conservationist framework.

But perhaps this all is an overly reductive reading of the Spiral Jetty’s environmental impact, as we must also account for the intriguing counterclaims that stem from the history of the land upon which the Spiral Jetty rests. The Spiral Jetty is located at Rozel Point, which is one of the oldest oil fields in Utah and was heavily utilized for oil-extraction purposes from 1904 to 1980, producing an estimated 10,000 barrels of oil (Milligan). By the late 1960s, Amoco Production Company had undertaken marine oil-drilling operations in the area, acquiring 610,000 acres of oil and gas leases under Great Salt Lake (Loe 197). Today, the landscape around the Spiral Jetty is dotted with industrial ruins—abandoned oil rigs, quarries, and the Golden Spike monument, which marked the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railway (Shapiro). The history of Rozel Point raises the question: is damaging land that was already scarred from previous human activities still unethical? I maintain that the fact that Rozel Point was already scarred from industrialized activities when Smithson first scoped the land lessens the egregiousness of Smithson’s environmental damage. Allen Carlson, a philosophy professor at the University of Alberta, agrees with my interpretation, arguing, “because the site of the Spiral Jetty is not wholly natural, the environmental work does not constitute a total affront to nature” (Carlson 644).

Yet, it is also crucial to consider the opportunity cost of the Spiral Jetty, whose placement in a site of environmental degradation effectively precludes any opportunity conservationists might have to restore the area through land rehabilitation. As such, it is in not entirely clear whether the tension between the Spiral Jetty’s environmental impact and its messaging is alleviated when viewed in the context of the land’s history.

Quite significantly, Smithson was hyper-aware of Rozel Point’s industrialized past and consciously chose the location for its symbolic value, writing in his essay that “the site gave evidence of man-made systems mired in abandoned hopes” (Smithson, Collected Writings).

The derelict industrial site around the artwork serves as a kind of entropic residue—a tangible, quintessential example of the ephemerality of man-made constructs and nature’s ability to

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Figure 5. Examples of urban land-art, Arend. outlast that which humans create. Land art’s messaging cannot be divorced from the history of the land it occupies: as digital archivist Elizabeth England puts it, “the Earth itself is a memory house” (England 339). As such, the Spiral Jetty’s message on entropy is quietly reinforced by the archival memory of the land upon which it sits. Delving further into Smithson’s essay reveals that the Spiral Jetty’s unusual landscape formed a critical part of Smithson’s conceptualization of environmentalism: “the image of the lost paradise garden leaves one without a solid dialectic … nature, like a person, is not one-sided” (Smithson, Collected Writings). By choosing a landscape that consisted of a mixture of man-made structures and natural ones, Smithson rejected the notion that nature should be viewed only in its bucolic, virginal state and rather acknowledged the role that human agency plays in shaping the Earth. The duality of the Spiral Jetty’s surrounding landscape echoes the nuanced dichotomy of Smithson’s environmentalist message: while the Earth’s pastoral beauty must be preserved, the interplay between humans and their environment cannot be ignored. Smithson does not, however, just reference the land’s immediate industrial past—he also harkens back to the land’s prehistoric history through the dinosaur images in his film as well as through the artwork’s galaxy-like shape, which invites contemplation of the long history of our universe. Thus, while Smithson pays homage to human agency, he also situates that agency within the context of cosmological time, thereby diminishing the power of humans and reminding viewers of the ultimate endurance of nature.

Housefield corroborates this view, stating that “man’s activities are humbled by comparison to the very age of the site itself, which was once inhabited by dinosaurs” (Housefield 543).

Considered within the framework of land history, the Spiral Jetty’s land-based medium becomes even more crucial to the piece’s production of complex environmentalist meaning, although we cannot overlook the environmental degradation caused by the artwork. But ultimately, this question of ethicality must be understood as inherently intractable, for it implicates a sort of moral calculus that requires us to determine whether the environmentalist value of the artwork can offset the material damage caused by its production. Whereas the destruction wreaked by the piece can be captured by quantitative metrics, the environmentalist benefits of the artwork elude such quantification, thereby forcing a comparison between the tangible and intangible that can never fully be resolved.

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Conclusion The Spiral Jetty is by no means a stand-alone piece—rather, it has engendered an entire generation of land artists who seek to memorialize the poetics of the environment through dramatic earthwork installations. Slowly but surely, eco-art is becoming more ubiquitous in our everyday lives as land art stops clinging to the ethos of the barren, remote wilderness and instead begins to trickle into metropolitan areas. As more people find themselves face-to-face with land art, questions about man’s impact on nature, whether artistic value can outweigh environmental damage, and the transience of man-made constructs have outgrown the confines of the art community and permeated the broader public psyche.

But this is precisely the beauty of land art: unlike other art forms where the medium solely functions as a vessel for meaning, land art places the spotlight directly on its medium, thereby re-centering our focus on the Earth itself. Due to this inextricable connection between medium and meaning, land art evolves with the Earth, serving as a memory reservoir that documents the shifting relationship between humans and the land. As with the Spiral Jetty, the land artists of the future must grapple with the eco-ethical implications of manipulating the Earth for artistic purposes while also contemplating whether the conservationist messages that the medium produces justify any environmental damage wreaked during construction. Moving forward, Earth art will undoubtedly raise questions as diverse as the ground it sits on, and, as these quandaries spark conversations across temporal and spatial boundaries, land art will continue to reshape our relationship with the natural world—one rock at a time. //

Works Cited Arend, Lucien. “Urban Land Art.” Denarend.com, 1998. Web. <https://www.denarend.com/ urban-land-art.htm> Ballard, Susan. “Spiral Jetty, Geoaesthetics, and Art: Writing the Anthropocene.”

ANTHROPOCENE REVIEW, vol. 6, no. 1–2, 20190401, pp. 142–161. doi:10.1177/2053019619839443 Carlson, Allen. “Is Environmental Art an Aesthetic Affront to Nature?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 16, no. 4, 1986, pp. 635–650. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40231495.

Accessed 18 Nov. 2020.

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Chianese, Robert Louis. “How Green Is Earth Art?: Spiral Jetty.” American Scientist, vol. 101, no. 1, Jan. 2013, pp. 20–21.

England, Elizabeth. “The Archive of Place and Land Art as Archive: A Case Study of Spiral Jetty.”

American Archivist, vol. 80, no. 2, Fall/Winter 2017, pp. 326–354. doi:10.17723/03609081-80.2.336.

Gorgoni, Gianfranco. “From the portfolio ‘Smithson’s Spiral Jetty Photographs, 1970-2014.’” 1970, digital print, 13 x 17 in.

Housefield, James. “Sites of Time: Organic and Geologic Time in the Art of Robert Smithson and Roxy Paine.” Cultural Geographies, vol. 14, no. 4, Oct. 2007, pp. 537– 561. doi:10.1177/1474474007082293.

Loe, Hikmet. The Spiral Jetty Encyclopedia: Exploring Robert Smithson’s Earthwork Through Time and Place. University of Utah Press. 2017.

Lunberry, Clark. “Quiet Catastrophe: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Vanished.” Discourse (Detroit, MI), vol. 24, no. 2, Mar. 2002, pp. 84-118.

Milligan, Mark. “Geosights: ‘Bubbling Crude’ at Rozel Point, Box Elder County, Utah.” Utah Geological Survey. Web. 3 September, 2005. https://geology.utah.gov/map-pub/ survey-notes/geosights/bubblin-crude-rozel-point/ Shane, Robert. “Rozel Point: Robert Smithson.” in Amanda Renshaw (ed.) Art & Place: SiteSpecific Art of the Americas (London; New York: Phaidon, 2013), pp. 56–57.

Shapiro, Gary. “Spiral Jetty.” Holt Smith Foundation. Web. Accessed 7 November, 2020.

Smart, Tom. “Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty on the shores of the Great Salt Lake on Feb. 27, 2008.” Deseret News. Web. 27 February, 2008.

Smithson, Robert. Spiral Jetty. New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art Circulating Film Library, 1990.

Smithson, Robert. “Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings.” Ed. Jack Flam. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996.

Smolucha, Larry. “Earth Art Movement.” Salem Press Encyclopedia, 2019.

“Spiral Jetty Aerial Documentation.” Dia Art Foundation. Fall 2020. Web. https://www.diaart. org/collection/spiraljettyaerials Stephens, Chuck. “Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.” Cinema Scope, no. 76, Fall 2018, p. 80.

Taylor, Rebecca. “Spiral Jetty: A Monument to Paradox and Transience.” HuffPost, 7 Dec. 2017, www.huffpost.com/entry/spiral-jetty-a-monument-t_b_741310 Tuttle, Ian. “Where Time Wears Thin: On Visiting the Ever-Changing Spiral Jetty.” National Review, vol. 68, no. 21, Nov. 2016, p. 24.

Uroskie, Andrew V. “La Jetée En Spirale: Robert Smithson’s Stratigraphic Cinema.” Grey Room, vol. 19, Spring 2005, pp. 54–79. doi:10.1162/grey.2005.1.19.54.

White, Duncan. “Unnatural Fact: The Fictions of Robert Smithson.” Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, vol. 1, no. 2, July 2008, pp. 161–175. doi:10.1386/jwcp.1.2.161_1.

Wilke, Sabine. “Anthropocenic Poetics: Ethics and Aesthetics in a New Geological Age.” RCC Perspectives, no. 3, 2013, p. 67.

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Still from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, 1983.

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The Thing in McLuhan’s Nervous System Julia Gordon

M

ARSHALL MCLUHAN’S UNDERSTANDING MEDIA (1964) HAS ME STUCK thinking about John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). McLuhan’s descriptions of an electric, over-tendriled media system produce a deep, itchy feeling, like that produced by watching the Thing (the titular, shapeshifting alien villain of the film) erupt fleshy insect legs and skitter into the overhead air ducts of the film’s Antarctic research station. I suggest that there is a formal aspect shared by McLuhan’s proposed media model and the Thing of The Thing, one oriented toward evoking a white-noise wash of dread; comparing the two through metaphor may reward us with insight into our communication-formed neuroses.

Through McLuhan, we can understand that the Thing represents a pervasive anxiety about our ability to control new media in the electric age.

The Thing is a science-fiction horror film following a lone research team in Antarctica after they discover an alien ship buried under ice. The crew realizes they have been infected by a mimic creature called “the Thing.” The Thing transforms itself into an imitation of its victims, sometimes producing a verisimilar replica of the individual, sometimes producing a halfformed, tumorous mass of unrecognizable flesh. It behaves cancerously, infiltrating the body and constructing for itself a copy, an extension of the original. When one character realizes the Thing’s capacity to assimilate all life on Earth, he cuts the station’s radio contact with mainland and demolishes the crew’s vehicle fleet—both things we may consider as communication and media in the broad, McLuhanian sense. The Thing, with its abundance of “skin, hand, [and] foot” extensions, is a productive metaphorical double to McLuhan’s technological central nervous system, an apt point of reflection in untangling how these electric protrusions “[affect] the whole psychic and social complex” (4).

Framing the Thing as the medium that is always “the content of any medium” allows us to better discern how its threat is felt by the research crew members (8). McLuhan argues that each medium is the carrier of another medium; for instance, “the content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph” (8). In the case of The Thing, we will designate the film itself as the outer medium, that which contains within it another medium. We will regard the Thing, the mimic creature, as the inner medium of the film, that which is the content of the outer film medium.

The Thing, the creature, is the self-expanding “central nervous system” named by McLuhan that threatens to “involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us” (4). It acts as a servomechanism, consuming its victim’s energy and metamorphosing the body into an uncontainable state, capable of physical actions and formations much greater than the victim’s normal, previous capacity. But to what end does the Thing pursue this transformation? The Thing cannot speak as itself but only through the assimilated identity

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of its victims—it communicates from behind the shroud of another medium—and thus leaves us without an articulated directive. To follow McLuhan’s methodological suggestion and begin our media analysis from the Thing’s “effects”—the final impacts of a text—we may note its accomplishments in the film: violence, self-proliferation, communal alienation (forgive the pun), and homogenization of once-distinct individuals (62). The creature behaves like a movie, carrying us “from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure” (12). The Thing is an electric subject, flattening space and time to recreate the mechanical process of growing a body, now executed with relatively instant speed.

It takes hold of its victim, the recipient of its dispatch, and rearranges his limbs—which have already been “translated” by technology into “information systems”—and, by effect, his psyche into that of the Thing’s desires (57).

The combined inscrutability of and total submission to the Thing’s (the medium’s) desires is horrifying. It is particularly horrifying for a culture “long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control” to confront this illegible aberration and to then attempt

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Still from John Carpenter’s The Thing, 1982.

to understand it (7). The Thing is a repulsive, abject sight: it is a skinless, snarling mutt; or a too-long and too-bony imitation of a degloved arm; or a scuttling lobster-spider creature, growing spindly legs and fleshy eyestalks from the head of a freshly decapitated crew member, leaving a slime trail in its wake. The Thing, swarm-like, attempts to draw us within its system of consumption and replication, and we react with immediate “revulsion against [its] imposed patterns,” an instinct which McLuhan argues is the “mark of our time” (5). We may behold the Thing while we do “gods or minor religions,” mystical and ultimately unknowable, as its mutative force evades the ensemble’s and our attempts to isolate, contain, and understand it (46). The Thing distracts us with the grotesque malformations of its content from the operation of its medium; the eye is so consumed by the Thing’s physical horror that we neglect how it came into being. Its mimetic extension of the human body—that the Thing is capable of this replication—has consequences as frightening and fragmentary as do those of electrical technology and all the information it transmits instantaneously. Watching The Thing, we encounter head-on the fear that in the electric age we may cease to be individuals, and that we

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will notice only when it is too late.

We may read the Thing as a myth, as defined by McLuhan: “Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, and the instant speed of electricity confers the mythic dimension on ordinary industrial and social action today” (25). The Thing, then, with its rapid compression of the flesh-generation process, stands for a much larger fear. Confronting the Thing, the prospect of being assimilated and imitated by the creature, evokes the same anxiety, dread, and numbness as confronting the labyrinthian central nervous system crafted through technological self-extension. It is the horror of realizing that in the electric age, “the entire business of man becomes learning and knowing” (58). The whole body is mere information to the Thing, able to be consumed and understood violently and immediately through the medium of the Thing itself. The Thing, the creature, condenses the fear of lost individuality and subjectivity into mythic form as the ancient and monstrous screen villain, the parasitic body-snatcher—the unknown alien creature that can operate your body better than you can—the technological product of forbidden knowledge run amok. The Thing warns that we are permeable and open to media, and that our ability to control technology does not promise us the ability to grasp or live on unchanged by the media we let under our skin. //

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McLuhan’s Nervous System

Works Cited McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Signet Books, 1964.

The Thing. Directed by John Carpenter, Universal Pictures, 1982.

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Anselm Kiefer, Des Herbstes Runengespinst, 2006

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Suffering in Translation: Celan, Endō, and the “Turn” Olivia Manes Introduction

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HERE IS A UNIQUE PAIN IN KNOWING THAT THE EXPERIENCE OF SUFFERING is one that cannot be conveyed entirely through words. Yet it seems that the task of the writer is to channel suffering into language, an act that presupposes that suffering is something that can be “translated” so as to be made understandable to the Other. The impossibility of this endeavor is prominent in the work of the poet Paul Celan as well as the novel Silence by Shūsaku Endō. Throughout the works of both authors is a painful sense of the limits of language in its ability to convey that which is ineffable—namely, suffering. Suffering presents a unique challenge to the artist—arguably the challenge—because inherent in the notion of suffering is a sense of isolation, of the singularity of an experience. To suffer is to suffer alone.

The impossibility of suffering to be relieved by another person, the inability to convey suffering in its entirety to others, is what makes it unbearable. No language is equal to suffering, and therefore no language can capture it. It seems to foreclose understanding. As Elaine Scarry argues in The Body in Pain, “pain does not simply resist language, but actively destroys it” (Scarry). Since language is the basis of sociality, suffering must be radical solitude.

To “translate” suffering through language is to lose that radical solitude, in service of making it “communicable.” It seems as though a unique part of the pain of suffering is that no language, narrative, or explanation is equal to it. Yet we need to seek an explanation for our suffering, some language that might explain it away. The desire for something that cannot be is in fact an integral part of suffering. In translating, it seems, the essence of suffering is lost. In his book Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, Abdelfattah Kilito articulates a theory of translation that conceives of converting a text from one language, time, and place as a “turn towards the Other”—but it is a turn that requires the erosion of language. In learning one language we destroy the other (Kilito 23). We can extrapolate from Kilito’s theory of translation as a “turning” (and as necessarily destructive) to frame the conversion of suffering into language in the work of Celan and Endō.

Both Celan and Endō engage in a project of “translation” that entails a paradoxical engagement with the world and with the notion of silence as a sort of speech; in the act of suffering, which is a fundamentally solitary and therefore untranslatable act, they both call for a response. While Celan proposes a response through the poem itself, Endō explores this tension through the structure and language of the novel. Celan conceives of a moment of reconciliation of the untranslatability of suffering in the poetic encounter, which he imagines to be a “despairing conversation” with the Other—a conversation that reveals the broken nature of language itself and creates a sort of silence that allows us to turn towards the Other. Endō, on the other hand, suggests a solution that lies in the absolute absence of speech, in uncovering

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that which lies beyond language—for Endō, it is the act of falling silent, of maintaining silence, and leading a life of silence, that paradoxically allows suffering to be converted into meaning and therefore translated for the sake of the Other. For Endō, suffering with the Other (as demonstrated through the life of Christ) is the ultimate translation. Ultimately, Celan finds a solution that lies in language itself, whereas Endō believes that translation must come through the surrender of language entirely.

Defining Translation and the “Turn” in Relation to Suffering To understand translation in the context in which it will be used throughout this essay, it is perhaps most fruitful to outline Kilito’s understanding in relation to its relevance to suffering.

Kilito is using translation in the seemingly traditional sense of the word, which is the conversion of a text from one language, time, or place to another. In discussing bilingualism, Kilito references the Arabic poet al-Jāhiz, who developed a theory of translation and bilingualism as a “turn” towards the Other. For al-Jāhiz, language is temporal and locational. Therefore, in learning one language you destroy the other (Kilito 23). But Kilito problematizes the traditional interpretation of a “turning” (learning another language) as understood by al-Jāhiz: necessarily destructive, pointing to the form employed by the poet, a dialogue between interlocutors, as, in fact, a dialectic. This dialectic suggests there may actually be something redemptive in turning (Kilito 32).

Therefore, I am not employing the term “translation” in the traditional sense of the word (the conversion of a text from one language to another) in this essay; rather, Kilito’s discussion of al-Jāhiz’s concept of translation as “turning” to the Other is a useful point of departure from which to approach suffering. There seems to be a similar impossibility, a similar paradox, at play in Kilito’s, Celan’s, and Endō’s works. I evoke “translation” in this essay because this awareness is the basis of Celan’s poetry and Endō’s novel. To “translate” suffering is to convert it into language itself; but in the conversion of suffering into language, the essence of suffering is lost.

Language itself is broken in the process of this translation. Much like Kilito conceives of turning as necessarily destructive to both languages, the communication of suffering may result in a

To “translate” suffering is to convert it into language itself; but in the conversion of suffering into language, the essence of suffering is lost. Language itself is broken in the process of this translation. Much like Kilito conceives of turning as necessarily destructive to both languages, the communication of suffering may result in a loss of what it means to suffer.

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loss of what it means to suffer.

If poetry conveys the momentary, the ineffable, as al-Jāhiz suggests (and Kilito problematizes), then it is perhaps within it that suffering might be captured. Celan and Endō do not provide us with any easy answers, but in framing their work in the context of “turning” we can perhaps better understand their understanding of the relationship between language, suffering, and the Other.

Positioning Celan and Endō in Relation to Suffering Before delving into why it is clear that each author believed suffering was, to some degree, “untranslatable,” it is necessary to contextualize the haunting nature of their work in order to better understand the unique positionalities from which Celan’s and Endō’s conceptions of suffering derive. Both men led difficult, painful lives. Celan, born a German-speaking Jew in present-day Ukraine, survived a Nazi labor camp but lost both of his parents. Endō, born in Tokyo and baptized as a Catholic at the age of eleven, suffered from a number of painful illnesses throughout his life. That both men were born only years apart and lived through the horrors of war does not explain the entirety of their work—but to live through war (and for Celan, the Holocaust) is to witness and experience unimaginable suffering, which colors much of their writing.

Endō and Celan both understandably struggled with their religion. For Endō, the challenge was what it meant to belong to a faith that was forced upon his country through colonialism, in addition to a sense of what suffering means in the face of God’s silence. For Celan, the tension lies in the absence of God in the moment of suffering. Here lies a real commonality: God remained silent in the face of the horrors of this world, including the Holocaust and World War II. For both Celan and Endō, even God could not explain or justify the moment of unimaginable suffering.

Thus, while both men seemed to conceive of suffering as something that could not be captured or conveyed by language alone, they engaged in projects that endeavored to do so.

This painful awareness unites their work. But the two writers arrived at different solutions to this impossibility. Celan’s response is one of encounter. Much like Kilito, his poems suggest that in making language suffer and therefore revealing its brokenness in the space between speech, we can make suffering into meaning, thus translating it. Endō, on the other hand, proposes a solution that lies in the total surrender of language, a move that requires turning through the withdrawal from language and instead the shape of a life. This departure, turning through language or turning through the rejection of language, warrants further examination.

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Celan’s Poetic Response: Belief in Language While Celan’s work resists the urge to be located in one time or place, or in relation to one historical event, it would be disingenuous not to place his poetry in proximity to the trauma he suffered during the Holocaust. For Celan, the question of engaging with the world in the face of its absolute disintegration, in the face of its shattering, is a battle fought through language. Celan’s work is not gratuitous—it is scarcely, in fact, even imagistic. Readers are never painted a clear picture, never given the verbose details characteristic of so many poems. For Celan, language seems to exist in isolation, hanging in empty air, unattached and unmoored from something lasting and stable. He does not convey suffering through graphic imagery but rather through the collapse of language itself. The poems enact the suffering they signify. Three of Celan’s poems that perhaps best demonstrate the shattering of communication are “Stretto,” “Deathfugue,” and “Pain, the Syllable.”

Before analyzing these poems in depth, it is important to contextualize his work. In his speech “The Meridian,” Celan articulates a theory of art that sheds ample light on his work and on the question of suffering. For Celan, it is clear that poetry speaks in the cause of the Other.

In “The Meridian,” Celan labels the poem “a despairing conversation.” This echoes al-Jāhid’s notion of translation as a turning, but a turning that requires some loss, some resignation, and one that is ultimately insufficient. For Celan, it seems, the poem is a dialogue, a space in which two beings reach towards each other: “The poem wants to reach an Other, it needs this Other, it needs an over-against. It For Celan, language seems to exist in isolation, hanging in empty air, seeks it out, speaks toward it” (Celan 404). unattached and unmoored from The poem at once needs the Other even something lasting and stable. He as it is marred by the awareness that it will does not convey suffering through never quite arrive at it. As Celan states, graphic imagery but rather through “Poem are bypaths from thou to thou … the collapse of language itself. also paths on which language gets a voice, they are encounters, paths of a voice to a perceiving Thou, sketches of existence perhaps, a sending oneself ahead towards oneself, in search of oneself … a kind of homecoming” (Celan 401).

Here, Celan says that poems are merely “paths of a voice to perceiving Thou”—he does not guarantee the arrival of that voice to the Other. In the notion of “homecoming,” Celan proposes that departure can result in a productive reconciliation, but one predicated on loss, in a leaving of oneself. The “despairing conversation” leads to a sort of paradox. In the apparent futility of conversation meant to convey suffering, the broken nature of language is revealed—and within that dissolution the I-Thou relationship is affirmed, according to Celan.

This dissolution is present in one of Celan’s most famous poems, “Deathfugue.” The poem can perhaps be read more didactically than Celan’s other poems in that it clearly references

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the Holocaust. The poem starts with the drinking of “black milk of daybreak,” which, paradoxically, is drunk in the evening (Celan 31). From the outset, we are met with a sense of displacement, an impossibility of language.

Indeed, here we see the collapse of the historical and the ontological brokenness of language: the speaker says, “we shovel a grave in the air”; once again, he employs language that is its own undoing. But it is an undoing that leaves us with something intangible, something haunting—as much as these words seem nonsensical, they make sense in the insane context of the death camps, where Jews found that their only grave was in the air, after cremation. Interjected throughout the poem are seemingly unrelated phrases and words which recur again and again.

For example, the phrase “when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margareta” repeats throughout, interrupting any sense of continuity as fragments of ideas, words, ideologies (here Margareta and her golden hair seem symbolic of Nazi Germany and its ideals of Aryan beuaty) are thrown about. It is as if language itself has survived a great battle or disaster and what is left is fragments and wreckage.

The poem lacks structure and predictability, leaving us unsettled, knowing that at any moment a verbal chaos might interrupt.

In “Pain, the Syllable,” the shattered nature of language is similarly pronounced. The speaker says, “wordfree / voices spun about; void forms, everything / passed into them, mixed / and unmixed / and again / mixed” (Celan 201). “Wordfree voices” at once suggests an impossibility, even as it speaks to the way language is constantly reaching beyond itself. The mixing and unmixing points to the task of language to at once make us discrete and separate (suffering) even as it attempts to unify (translation), a movement that means it is doomed to fail in its attempt to convey suffering. Similarly, Celan says that “numbers were woven into the innumerable.” Here, as in “Deathfugue,” language undoes itself and collapses like a black hole— and in doing so, creates a collective sense of suffering that seems to transcend its own solitude, that reaches toward the Other. The poem ends, “Let there be / tied into / serpentheaded free coils— / a knot (and retro- and counter- and over- and double- and Thou- / sand knot) where a carnival-eyes brood / of weasel stars in the abyss was / book-,book-, book–, / stalling and stalling.” Notable is the way in which language here interrupts itself, with the use of prefixes, unable to finish itself—as though “stalling.” Language is cognizant of its own insufficiency in reaching and conveying meaning; it is constantly arriving. Language itself suffers.

This suffering also presents itself in “Tubingen, January,” as “eyes talk into blindness” (Celan 159). Here, there is a lack of understanding and of communication. Instead, we only have “visits of drowned joiners to these plunging words.” In the desire to reach an Other, in the attempt to communicate pain, it seems that we are pulled under, that we are drowned. There is a danger there—a mutual destruction. If a man “spoke of this time, he could only babble and babble, ever- ever-, moremore.” Suffering is senseless. It reveals the incompleteness of language, reducing it to an infinitude of babbling.

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Thus, for Celan, the translation of suffering necessitates the revelation of the broken nature of language. But it is only through this destruction that we can dwell together—reaching toward the Other, a path to a voice, and ultimately, a reconciliation that affirms ourselves even as it destroys us. This is his “turn.”

Endō’s Response: The Withdrawal from Language At the beginning of Silence, the protagonist Rodrigues is committed to his ideal of Christian suffering. He expresses his readiness to suffer in Japan for the sake of spreading Christ’s message and His word: “Born into the world to render service to mankind, there is no one more wretchedly alone than the priest who does not measure up to his task” (Endō 39). Upon reaching Japan, he references perpetually his lack of physical comfort: “Needless to say, we don’t have here a bottle of wine nor a piece of meat. The only food we get is the fried potatoes that the peasants of Tomogi bring us. But the conviction grows deep in my heart that all is well and God will protect us” (Endō 36). But it seems that this suffering is something he craves as an affirmation of his Christianness, as confirmation of his role as a priest. This commitment to a particular type of suffering leads to the suffering of others—namely, the Japanese people Rodrigues purports to be responsible for. Rodrigues’s fixation on martyrdom comes at the cost of Japanese lives. He bears witness to the torture, abuse, and suffering of others, but suffers very little himself. Indeed, Rodrigues’s true suffering derives from his inability to suffer in the way that he wants, through physical trials. Instead, he must watch as others suffer in the name of his God. Father Rodrigues craves a particular type of suffering, one that will confirm his understanding of himself in relation to others: that of the Christian, wedded to a life of asceticism in service of spreading the word of God. But this self-confirming, easily digestible suffering (from which meaning is easy to extract) is not what Rodrigues finds in Japan. Instead, he is met with the suffering of others in the name of his self-affirming enterprise. When the Japanese officials ask for two hostages from the village because they suspect the presence of Christians, Rodrigues cannot help but ask himself, “Why has our Lord imposed this torture and persecution on poor Japanese peasants?” (Endō 85). This inability to suffer in a way that lends itself to meaning (to translation) is the real cause of suffering for Rodrigues. Instead of martyring himself for others, Rodrigues must face others (the Japanese people who he has converted) martyring themselves for him. So he is offered a choice: renounce your Christianity, or force others to suffer for the sake of your convictions.

This choice is extremely painful for Rodrigues. He questions the silence of God in the face of the suffering of others, and in the face of this decision. In renouncing Christianity, Rodrigues must deny himself the suffering he wants and craves. This decision presents true suffering to Rodrigues, because it is the suffering of betrayal, of Judas, not the suffering of the Christian martyr he imagines himself to be: “He had believed in his

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pride that he alone in this night was sharing in the suffering of that man. But here just beside him were people who were sharing in that suffering much more than he” (Endō 178).

In this way, he makes the ultimate sacrifice for the Other—and therefore both rejects and fulfills the project of Christianity. Rodrigues must give up his identity to fulfill it. Before Rodrigues apostatizes, Father Ferreira, his former mentor and a priest who has since apostatized, tells him: You make yourself more important than them. You are preoccupied with your own salvation. If you say you will apostatize, those people will be taken out of the pit. They will be saved from suffering. And you refuse to do so. Certainly Christ would have apostatized for them. You are now going to perform the most painful act of love than has ever been performed. (Endō 181) Thus, it is the shape of the novel—and Rodrigues’s life—that imparts suffering with meaning, that makes it translatable. Structurally, the novel begins in epistolary form. We are given unmediated access to Rodrigues’s thoughts.

But halfway through the novel, this epistolary form is interrupted by the interjection of a traditional third-person narrator, conveying Rodrigues’s thoughts and feelings. Interestingly, this interjection coincides exactly with the inability of Rodrigues to martyr himself for others as he is captured by the Japanese authorities, and forced instead to watch as others suffer for his cause. The novel thus exits the privileged subjective position, as Rodrigues “falls silent” for us the reader as he falls silent in his Christianity.

But it is in this silence that God speaks. Giving up everything that is meaningful to him is the ultimate form of suffering for Rodrigues, but it is also redemptive. At the end of the novel, Rodrigues confesses, “Lord, I resented your silence.” A voice responds: “I was not silent. I suffered beside you” (Endō 203). Christ suffers silently beside the sufferer. While he is himself silent in suffering with us, his answer comes in his suffering. Similarly, Rodrigues suffers the ultimate pain (the loss of identity and his self) and in this sense goes beyond the need for words in response to the suffering of the other—or the word of Christianity. It is the shape of Christ’s life, his act of ultimate sacrifice in suffering, that makes suffering meaningful.

“Prayer does nothing,” Ferreira says—and indeed, the novel suggests that language itself cannot meaningfully convey suffering (Endō 179). Rodrigues does not translate the suffering of the Other through language but rather, through experiencing it himself and thus lapsing into silence. The very shape of Rodrigues’s life, lived now in silence, is what produces speech. Unlike Celan’s immediate, poetic encounter in the deconstruction and failure of speech, Endō suggests that it is beyond, not through, language that suffering is converted into meaning—in suffering with the suffering Other.

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Shūsaku Endō’s approach to the impossibility of suffering differs markedly from Celan’s.

Whereas Celan suggests the possibility of the affirmation of the self through the destruction of language, Endō proposes something entirely different: the complete abnegation of the self in service of suffering. Falling silent is a necessary part of self-abnegation—the giving up of the idea that there is anything for you to say paradoxically allows you to turn toward the Other. For Endō, the rejection of language is necessary to convey suffering.

Because of this loss, unlike in Celan, no conversation can be had—but there is still a turn.

Rodrigues gives up talking and instead turns toward the lived social world. He lapses into silence, and the shape of his life is his only word. Celan, on the other hand, keeps talking, keeps the conversation going, even if the broken nature of language is revealed in the process. Both turn, but in different ways.

The “Turn”: A Comparison Thus, Celan turns through language, while Endō turns through action. Celan might imagine Kilito’s turn as a sort of encounter, one he makes space for in the poem itself. Much like Kilito, he imagines it to be destructive, but in a paradoxically productive way: the dissolution of language while describing suffering is destructive, but that destruction makes space for the Other and thus allows for a silence that makes suffering communicable and translatable.

In “The Meridian,” Celan says that “the poem holds on at the edge of itself; so as to exist, it ceaselessly calls and hauls itself from its Now-no-more back into its Ever-yet” (Celan 403).

The “now-no-more” presents the momentariness of the poem, and the “ever-yet” suggests an everlasting-ness, a transcendence. But the imagery Celan uses here, of a poem holding onto the edge of itself, imparts this relationship with a tension. Indeed, it is almost as though by asserting its momentariness that the poem reaches a permanence—the permanence of encounter with the Other. Celan suggests that in an encounter, in exchanging suffering between I and Thou, something lasting is revealed.

The relationship here to suffering is that by surrendering to its limits (the edge of itself) to convey that which is non-conveyable, the poem makes space for something transcendent.

Celan asks, “and then what would the images be? Something perceived and to be perceived only now and only here, once, again and again once. And so a poem would be the place where all tropes and metaphors will be carried ad absurdum” (Celan 406). Language becomes meaningless—it dissolves. The play between “now and only here” and “again and again once” is irreconcilable—but if we take into account Celan’s insistence upon the poem as an encounter, then it suggests that, in “turning,” this irreconcilability is somehow made transcendent. In the act of perception and being perceived, in the space between people (and words), something lasting dies and is reborn each time.

Celan thinks we have to be honest about how fragmented and shattered our language is—especially his language, German, in the wake of the Holocaust. For that reason he seeks

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to uncover this shattered, fragmented character from within language, and from within this shattered-ness to uplift sparks of the other—the sparks that are irreducibly connected to and embodied in language. Thus Celan keeps talking, keeps the conversation going. Language itself is suffering, and must be saved from this suffering.

Endō removes the self from the equation entirely. One must go silent to allow suffering to speak. He suggests that by abdicating identity, by living a life of silence, suffering is given meaning and therefore is “translated.” It is only through this process that we can turn toward the Other. For Endō, language in and of itself is not a viable pathway to communicating suffering.

Language points to what it cannot itself do—bear witness to suffering in a lived way by living a life shaped by it. The image of Christ silently suffering alongside us is one that Rodrigues constantly returns to, even when he receives no answer from God—in a place beyond language, without words. Indeed, Rodrigues must reject the word of God in favor of living in His image. Endō presents language as a temptation of sorts, as a straightforward but illusory path to meaning and the Other. Unlike Celan, he suggests that we have an ethical obligation to look beyond language as a means of translating suffering.

The comparison of these two texts is productive insofar as it allows for the possibility of language as at once profoundly insufficient and also necessary. While Endo does reject language, that rejection in itself is necessary to achieve the kind of turn he hopes to engage in.

Without the act of rejection, there can be no turn. We cannot interpret either of these authors, thus, to be suggesting that language is pointless, or that words hold no meaning. It is in fact the act of translating suffering that reveals something everlasting and transcendent for both authors. While for Celan it involves an encounter through language, for Endō it necessitates a recognition that language is insufficient and therefore its rejection. And in these very different moves, something lasting is revealed.

Conclusions: Importance to the Field These writers uncover a series of paradoxes: that suffering is untranslatable but in need of translating, that silence is a form of speech, and that the loss of something is its fulfillment. For Celan, the revelation of the always already-broken nature of language allows us to turn toward the Other and translate suffering. Silence is a repeated act for Celan. For Endō, the loss of the self through silence, through a rejection of language as a means of reaching the Other, allows us to understand suffering and to turn. Here, silence is a state of being that one attains.

So how do we as comparatists approach suffering? How can we characterize suffering through language and through literature, in a way that is not purely destructive? Neither author provides us with an easy answer, but Celan perhaps provides the more literary model in thinking about how we receive language as critics and readers. Indeed, Celan might problematize the notion of “reception” entirely—for him, the poem, and language, must be bidirectional if it is to make space for translation. We have

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a duty to rescue language from itself, to reveal its true nature. How exactly we might apply Endō’s understanding is less clear; at some level it seems as if a surrender is necessary to understand and convey suffering. This surrender has applications in thinking about decoloniality, about the past, and even about translation in the traditional sense of the word. Especially when thinking about traditional structures of power, this surrender and removal of the self might prove useful in interpreting and analyzing texts about or involving colonized peoples.

But the immediacy of each author’s mission cannot be understated. Like Celan, we live in a shattered, fragmented world. The question of how the shape of our lives might speak, of how we can turn to the “Other,” is more pressing than ever. Suffering is inevitable, but both authors suggest a way to fashion it into something meaningful and thus reach beyond ourselves. //

Works Cited Celan, Paul. The Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, W.W. Norton, New York, 2002.

Endō, Shūsaku. Silence. Picador, 2017.

Kilito, Abdelfattah, & Hassan, W. Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language. Syracuse University Press, 2017.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. Oxford University Press, 1988.

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Matt Keagan, Have you seen my language?, 2016.

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Glossing Vilém Flusser Julia Gordon

V

ILÉM FLUSSER’S 1978 ESSAY “THE CODIFIED WORLD” ARGUES THAT WE MUST pay close attention to surfaces. In an information-dense environment, objects constantly bombard us with meaning, and any material is fair game for inscription. Our everyday ephemera becomes codified, and our “[w]alls, screens, paper surfaces, plastic, aluminum, glass, textiles, and so on have become important ‘media’” (35). The physical surfaces of these commercial objects, which are encoded with symbolic meaning during their mechanical construction, are the surfaces of interest here. The industrial revolution and the (now past) dominance of alphabetical text have primed us for and created a “codified world” where we approach objects searching for implanted symbols that we may read. And we now expect these objects to be representations rather than natural reality—their industrial artifice is an obviously germane location for code-making. Meaning must transmit quickly, so these coded objects appear to us “in color,” pointing “to an increase in the importance of two-dimensional codes” which reduce “four-dimensional situations of time and space to [flat, legible] scenes” (35, 36). We imbue our post-industrial world with codes because we “have lost direct contact with the meaning of symbols,” so instead, we come to know this world through “logical and mathematical” lines of abstracted text (37, 40). Even so, we find now a new type of codified object: the techno-image. Flusser uses “techno-image” to mean the image created through mechanical reproduction and similar industrial means, as opposed to the image created by, for instance, human hand through ritualistic process. It remains unclear to what end these technoimages are programmed with meaning, but as Flusser insists, it is imperative we learn to use them—otherwise, “we are condemned to endure a meaningless existence in a techno-imaginary codified world that has become meaningless” (41).

In this spirit, I set out to wrangle with a specific category of codified item: the glossy object. If it is true that we live surrounded by babbling surfaces “which have become important as carriers of messages,” then we must confront the object’s visuality carefully to decode its quasi-textual styles, motifs, and tones (35). If it is also true that “Colors are the manner in which surfaces appear to us,” then gloss is an affectation of color, twisting and playing with the object’s codified appearance in the same way that a sarcastic tone twists and plays with the received meaning of a line of text (35). Flusser notes, for example, that “the obnoxious green of peas means ‘Buy me!’”—an added coat of gloss on the can of “obnoxious green” peas transforms the encoded message into “Buy me!” (35). Gloss is reflection; gloss is a condensation of light draped over the colored surface of a codified object. Gloss is distance, an additional semi-layer of abstraction or mediation that preserves, separating the affected surface from the viewer.

I intend the following to be a brief bestiary of everyday glossy objects, an anecdotal catalog on the phenomenology of gloss. My particular attention to gloss as a texture is personally motivated. I am drifting in a world of images, and their bombastic glow glazes over my mind’s eye—my memories all gleam with the same, wet light. As I pull these codified objects from my

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quotidian surroundings, I hope to begin developing a method to understand the ubiquitous codified techno-image and its plans for us.

I. Shop Window It strikes me that I cannot see through the window without first seeing myself in its glossy reflection. I feel cautioned by this startling realization: the window is informing me what it costs to look through the glass, my dazed image—obscured by adhesive abstract color swaths and seasonally rotating ad copy decals—in exchange for the commercial object of my (suddenly) utmost desire. Between where I stand and where the object waits, in the window’s gloss where the two images overlap, I can see the improved image of myself with the object’s significations (for instance: charm, grace, or the overall impression of “having it together”) integrated with my own. I believe this glossy vision to be the antidote to my neurosis, but only momentarily—then I keep walking, and that glossy image dissolves.

II. Magazine Page It is not so much that I want to make myself look like them (the women who are paid to be beautiful glossy images); rather, I am just certain that it is what adulthood will look like. The advertised objects are delightful, and I want them, but never outside the page—without the dreamworld universalization of the magazine gloss, I cannot see my future in the commercial object. I feel faintly aware that this techno-imagistic object, the magazine, which arrives at my doorstep routinely and (seemingly) by magic, programs my cycles of desire in some way, as do the daily paper and the all-night news channel and the tickering content feed. They speak to me in codes and archetypes, and I receive them like I receive the Greek myths. The techno-image’s matrices of desire, however, operate under an additional blanket of abstraction compared to the text-dominant press object, and I live without the vocabulary to explain why these glossy images fill my imagination so fully yet distantly.

III. Saliva This is a strange one. It is an imperfect and shifty gloss that coats the tongue, bubbling and drippy. It is where I must put my food, my forkful of fibrous vegetable miscellany, and it gets coated in that mucous-y gloss. I know it looks like this, salivacoated, but the actual sight of the glossy, half-eaten food is offending. The gloss is a marker of this object’s precarious borderland state—it sits on the tongue, pulverized and shapeless, its potential energy obviously latent. Why is it unswallowed still? The longer it sits, soaking in the tongue’s cushion bed, the more I fear the two coming apart again, the glossy food object falling away with a shimmery, smelly trail in its wake.

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Glossing Vilém Flusser

IV. Family Photos Printed at the Drugstore They arrive on the kitchen table stacked and in a thick paper envelope. The photos are glossy and cost about a quarter each to print nowadays. Fingerprints show no matter how lightly the memories are handled—the gloss makes them obvious. The picture’s moment is trapped in amber, and the held glossy object takes the place of the actual memory. In Flusser’s terms, the family-photo-as-symbol “replaces the experience of ‘that which it intends,’” and the referent memory grays in comparison to the glossy image (37). As I finger the corner of the photograph where the camera has stamped a date, I worry that I will remember my childhood only as these images which I love and not as the cold shock of ocean water lapping at my sand-crusted ankles.

V. Slime I cannot escape slime. It appears constantly, like a recurring nightmare, on the doubly glossy black surface of my phone. Almost always it comes packaged in a minute-long video, where it is prodded, massaged, stretched, ripped, mashed, stabbed, and plopped by the disembodied and distinctly tweenish hands of a girl who definitely makes more from her custom-order Etsy slime shop than I do at any sort of spreadsheet job. The tween slime girl’s online following regularly requests videos of the slime being stuffed with smaller objects (for example: ball bearings, packing peanuts, confetti-like slices of character icons), and content featuring these miniature shapes buried and beaten into the glossy slime seems to gain traction fast. Sadly, slime remains glossy for only so long before it absorbs too much dust, hair, and brown-speckle dirt to be alluring.

VI. Tide Pod I occasionally encounter a stray Tide Pod sitting lonely atop a dormitory staircase. The glossy plastic case is pulled taut; it is filled densely with even glossier blue and orange fluid, separated into two shining crescents. I like to imagine the detergent has the same viscosity as honey. With a toe prod, it jiggles and glimmers as if burgeoning with life. It is not standard practice to pop it—the (missing) package warns it will not work if I pop it—but its glossy, plump shell seems to predestine its violent rupture. If I throw it forcefully from a great enough height, it explodes, leaving behind a muddled brown splatter that shimmers in the daylight for only a minute before seeping into the gray asphalt.

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VII. Lip Gloss This is the governing symbol of my many vain desires. It demands from me an asceticism: to preserve its reflective sheen, I must not eat, I must not pick absent-minded at the corners, I must keep my hair out of it, I must not swipe anxiously at it with my tongue (cosmetic gloss and saliva gloss are incompatible), I must not kiss, I must not press my lips together in contemplation—I must be judicious in what I choose to express because it comes at cost of the gloss. Once applied, I am acutely aware of the sticky magnetism sealing the seam of my lips. It makes me feel like an image—it makes me feel like glamour, trapped in still life, momentarily safe from time’s decay. //

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Glossing Vilém Flusser

Works Cited Flusser, Vilém. “The Codified World.” Writings, edited by Andreas Ströhl, translated by Erik Eisel, University of Minnesota Press, 2002, pp. 35-41.

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Hey honey or something Isabelle Edgar In between two tall mountains, there’s a place they call lonesome.

Don’t see why they call it lonesome.

—Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains), Connie Converse Your hands feel like dried apricots was the first thing you said to me and from then on I started taking shorter baths.

The days that I don’t feel like leaving silently are extraordinary. Ringing in blush tones. You always look at me way too long. I miss many things I said, and you said you wish you could be everything that I miss: you are cans of sardines and broken glass, Japanese maple, bay leaves, an eighteen year addiction to redefining respect.

I don’t dry my hair—I don’t have the patience. Instead, I wring the strands out on our wooden fire escape: quintessential chicago architecture. A quick cavity sort of city. A I am never going to feel anything fully sort of city. Pick your poison and stick to it. Can’t be a martyr and a saint. But you, you here, kiss my eyelashes and my clothes fall off.

I brush crumbs onto the floor. I give up on puzzles. No one actually likes monogamy, you said, and I decided to build something out of wood.

This, here, is full of superficial adulation, sticky slivers of grins. Overly positive people scare me.

Please leave me alone, which means stay right here quietly.

I can be alone with you because you’re lonely too. So stunning. When we dance we don’t touch.

In this little life we have a painting Lucca gave me when he decided he wanted to open a gallery.

You said it looks like a finger painting and I got mad and said it looks like a woman. So far his gallery is just pile after pile of commissioned dog portraits because that’s where the rent is at.

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We got pierogis and the orange beer with the bee on it or the honey kölsch as you say and I learned how to spell kölsch. And I wore my nice coat, that dark lipstick from Ohio because you said we were going out to the kind of dinner where you worry you’re gonna stain everything involved.

We went to that Polish restaurant and got one of those grocery bags. With one of those scary smiley faces on it and went to sit in the snow. We didn’t talk, my plum lip staining the plastic spoon.

When I’m on my way I’ll keep my feet nice and quiet for you. Talking sweet to my dusty eyes, you’d like to hear it too.

I like your shirt with the bear playing bass on it. Threadbare. I think I’m often a different type of temperature. You used to follow me outside when inside was full of people and their bad breath, buckling your knees over and over.

I told you about the half combed hair. I’m not so good at yelling when I should but I am good at card castles. Not houses of cards, the whole castle. You put the orange beer on top and it stays standing.

Off to two tall mountains. Maybe see Connie Converse in her underwater Volkswagen Beetle. So stunning, honey.

Just keep adding more vinegar and salt until it tastes good. Or lemon. I want to be very near to you, mycologist wannabe. Growing faster after lightning storms.

To be a red door, a rug. To be this tall without you. We built a bench together that neither of us will sit on. When we dance we don’t touch. Fill our palms with fresh apricots. One of these days, someday, I’ll exhale for you, clear waters.

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Lineage of Worry Isabelle Edgar

It was frayed cotton swabs and flossers, and grime glued gray to where the wall meets the sink.

In 2004, they sold more digital cameras than film for the first time, Bubbe died, and I stood on a step stool seeing only my widow’s peak hug the rim of the reflection.

I soaked each strand with the watermelon detangling spray that doesn’t smell like watermelons but like a sugar solution a person mixes to draw hummingbirds towards their fingers while they hold their breath.

I combed clean lines—one two three—around my head, grit in the teeth. Like smoothing wallpaper over sandy walls, mother, grandmother, Bubbe. One two three, sitting alone under yellow lamp light, making worry stones of their temples. One, two, three.

And I’d keep combing until my mother’s hands—my mother’s mother, and her mother’s hands—pulled the comb from mine, and placed it on the lip of the sink.

She stood behind me, hands nested in the pool of my collarbone, cheek to hairline.

Next to the grime and watermelons, she could see me in the mirror.

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Untitled Catherine Wang 57

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Snow Globes and Wine Zuni Chopra “Funeral wine, the kind you drink for the gods. They haven’t made it for a long time. It’s seasoned with bitter aloes and rosemary, and with the tears of broken-hearted virgins.”

—Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys Door-to-door salesmen have it worse, I think.

The worst you can tell them is no.

“I do not want the knick-knacks you pulled out of a dead grandmother’s attic I do not find you worth the strength it takes to tarry at the door I wish you had not rung at my address at all I wish your shirt wasn’t wrinkled and your pit stains didn’t seep till your middle and your briefcase didn’t jam when you tried to open it, and you hadn’t wasted my time.”

That is what you would tell him.

“No. I will not buy your snow globes And you will not eat dinner tonight.

And you might even starve.

And no one will find your corpse, keeled over on the table, Until it starts to smell funny and the lady next door complains that it makes her stomach hurt and her baby cry And the policemen break down your door, because what if someone has done something terrible to you, And they find you there, dead, because you didn’t sell a snow globe And they are peeved, a little Because you wasted their time.”

The worst you can tell me is far better than that.

You can tell me no.

“I do not want the knick-knacks you pulled, dusty and cracked, from a wasted heart I do not find you worth the patience it takes to listen to your sonnet I wish you had not fallen in love with me at all I wish your affection wasn’t sticky and sour and your desperation didn’t sweat off your tongue and your face were painted over a little bit better, and maybe your tits too, at that, and you hadn’t wasted

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my time.”

That is what you would tell me.

“No. I will not keep this ragged thing safe, And you will not be loved tonight.

And you might even starve.

And you’ll melt to hunger until you meld with hunger, and you do not remember what it was that you hungered for, only that you are hungry, and you’ll roam the world like a dead man’s shadow trying miserably to find something that’s hungrier than you.

And you will not find it.

But you’ll peeve a lot of people off in trying, you see, Because you’ve wasted their time.”

And I will go home.

And I will sit on a random bus stop when it rains, and a door-to-door salesman will come sit beside me to let the rain wash away the funk of well-kept suburbs And he will tell me, “Don’t worry too much.

My mum would say, you know, that tomorrow’s another day.

And who knows, perhaps you’ll find someone tomorrow who thinks you’re awful shiny And decides he would like you on his mantlepiece And maybe it won’t matter that you’re crying now. Anyways Maybe you would laugh at how pathetic you were then And you won’t even regret that you were crying Because the rain will take your tears To brew with honey, mist and matches To make wine, red like curdled blood, so tawny and salty and silken No mortal could ever deserve it At least your tears will please the gods.

And they will drink them at funerals, then, Toast to Cupid and Icarus and Aphrodite, Maggot-riddled in graves that you’ll never find, And drink your grief to the ones who died.”

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James Gouldthorpe, COVID Artifact 116, 2020.

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On COVID Art, Valéry, and the Possible Mortality of Humankind with Laura Wittman with Eyup Eren Yurek As we chose pieces for this issue and began to edit them all together, we saw that many were connected through shared themes of emotion and reflection through another, perhaps modernized, mysticism. That’s why, for this interview, Stanford professor of French and Italian Laura Wittman came to mind. Her work on religious, spiritual, and mystical French and Italian poetry, as well as her desire to understand and analyze forms of grief, resonates directly with this issue. Her use of archival resources as well as cultural artifacts and literary works speaks to this moment in humanities scholarship in which scholars are expanding their research to a wider variety of media.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our lives in many ways, some of which we may not even be aware of. Professor Wittman seeks out this unknown; her most recent research looks at how art forms and literature have reacted to, adapted to, and grappled with the pandemic. Wittman applies her knowledge of artistic and literary reactions to global crises like World War I to critically understand how the arts are being formed in the crisis of our times. The questions I asked her were related to the humanities and arts, but we also talked about much more: cultural knowledge, religion’s place in 2022, anthropology, and the importance of the personal story and the archive in the humanities.

Throughout this interview, Wittman was also kind to ask me questions related to her work and the topics in humanities we discussed. This interview felt more like a conversation.

Eyup Eren Yurek (EY): Would you first like to talk a little about yourself?

Laura Wittman (LW): Sure. As you know, I teach in the department of French and Italian. But what I really do is, essentially, comparative literature. My work has a more modern focus, and one of my main interests is how religious and spiritual experience is expressed in literature, but also facilitated, sometimes even catalyzed, by art. I’ve done a fair amount of work with grief and mourning in art, and in fiction in particular.

And so the art and COVID project, which I’m currently working on, comes out of research that I did on the post-World War I era, when the numbers were not dissimilar for the dead in the Western European context. Obviously, World War I was not on a world scale the way

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COVID has been. But nonetheless, it is the kind of scale that’s really hard to think about for humans. And that is the cause for a lot of grief. I’m starting this project really to investigate how our world will commemorate not just the victims of COVID, but also the whole experience of COVID, and what it means to people.

EY: That sounds like a wonderful project. And thank you for explaining how you’re coming into this topic. To take a few steps back: I wanted to start by asking you what drew you into literature? You did your undergrad and your PhD all in French and Italian literature.

LW: It’s a very personal story, as it is for a lot of scholars. My mother was essentially dying of cancer for much of my adolescence, and I found literature to be what for me was really the only place I could start to make sense of this—essentially, tragedy, disaster, injustice, all these things that you can feel when someone is dying. Literature was my solace, but also my attempt to understand the human condition. When I got to college, I just kind of went on with that.

There are plenty of other fields where you can think about these things. For me, anthropology was a really big one. I did a lot of anthropology as an undergrad as well. Still I think it’s a fascinating field.

EY: Thank you for sharing that intimate story. I come into literature from an emotional background, as well as with a keenness to understand the human condition. And as you said, anthropology has also been, for me, an interesting way to look at it. But at the same time, I ended up with literature. For you, how do you think anthropology is different from literature?

LW: Well, I think there are a couple of things. One of them is the importance of the aesthetic in literature, which is not irrelevant in anthropology, but it’s really the focus of what we study.

There is a conviction that the form in which things are presented in is meaningful. In a sense, it conveys just as much meaning as any more abstract or conceptual way, if not sometimes even more, in that form. Beauty affects people is probably the simple way to put it. I feel like that’s what we study in literature. In anthropology, I think there’s a bit more of a focus on how there’s a social construction within a community. It can be more conceptual when you look at the social embeddedness of our experience and ideas.

I do sometimes really envy the way anthropologists can go and interview people and say, yes, people are affected by this, and I spoke to hundreds of them and interviewed them and talked to them. It’s not just my reaction, or the reaction of a few readers, it has a backing of a culture.

So that’s fascinating to me. What do you think?

EY: I also envy the way not merely one text, or certain texts, are much more prioritized within anthropology. It feels like they get to work with different people, different texts, different speeches. Whereas sometimes literary studies can be too narrowed down in one specific text.

And it has its benefits: I feel like talking to many people, or having that much evidence might be

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too distracting. But that actually ties with my next question. As you said, you work with lots of different materials, like arts and literature, but at the same time you work with cultural artifacts.

Within your work, how do you see the place of materials that are not published, or texts that we don’t see as literature or art works that would be in museums? And with your work on forms of grief and your writing on, for instance, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, how do you mediate between these two types of archives? Or the media? And how do you see them separate or similar?

LW: I see them as interacting. I do think that works of art reflect a kind of cultural imagery and imagination. They also transform that cultural imagination. When it comes to the Unknown Soldier, the main argument of my book is the idea of a single body as a representation of all the missing bodies. I think that idea was literary before it became an actual object. But at the same time, it was also something that soldiers talked about, and that’s where you get into trying to find documentation that really is historical and not artistic, things like letters, soldiers’ diaries, testimonies of people who were at the front, newspapers. You look at all these materials, and you try to get a sense of what was present in the cultural imagination at the time. And there was definitely the idea of anonymous bodies that were being found on battlefields, and what to do with them. There was something really powerful about these bodies. And literature kind of poses the question of, well, what if we have one to represent all of them? Wouldn’t that be a very powerful thing?

James Gouldthorpe, COVID Artifact 66, 2020.

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In this case, it actually was enacted, which I think often doesn’t happen. Literature will present these fantastic ideas, some of which are completely impractical, or which no one wants to happen in reality. But I think that there’s also a way in which the nonpublic materials are really important if we’re trying to grasp how art connects to the lives of real people, putting it in this context.

EY: This might be too early for this project, but you mentioned how literature, in a way, becomes reality, and those sentiments may turn into sentiments within the cultures. Are you seeing that with what’s happening in terms of arts and COVID and literature and COVID, in relation to cultural sentiments?

James Gouldthorpe, COVID Artifact 1, 2020.

LW: It is a little early to say, but I have some ideas. One thing that I’ve started to notice and explore more is that I think the experience of COVID is different from something like World War I and other disasters because it’s so global.

And a lot of what I’m seeing is that artists are kind of taking stock of the sense that a disaster this big can happen. Before COVID, with the atomic bomb in particular, there was certainly a discussion of how humankind could eradicate itself entirely. But I feel like that discourse, perhaps wrongly, kind of faded away. With COVID, we’re seeing a resurgence of this awareness that humans could disappear, it could be the end of humanity. There’s this weird link between talking about COVID and talking about environmental issues and possible environmental disasters, other kinds of disasters. So for now, the thing I’ve been interested in is this kind of awareness of the possible mortality of humankind, and what it means. How do we think about that? It’s a very difficult thing for humans to think about.

EY: Definitely. So you talked about the globality of these losses, like how COVID is making people think globally, in terms of human extinction. But at the same time, you’re working with different geographies in different languages, and as you said, you’re much more of a comparativist. Are you seeing differences in different places and different cultures?

LW: Absolutely. In fact, a big part of the project is trying to look at how different communities have experienced the pandemic and emerge from it in different ways. One of the things that has been very clear from the beginning is that there’s been a great deal of injustice in how the pandemic has affected people. It has brought out a lot of the inequality that exists

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A lot of what I’m seeing is that artists are kind of taking stock of the sense that a disaster this big can happen. ... With COVID, we’re seeing a resurgence of this awareness that humans could disappear, it could be the end of humanity. within societies like the United States, and the fact that poorer communities and nonwhite communities have all been affected much more. And this is also true on a global scale. There are countries that are affected more and still have extremely low vaccination rates and difficulty getting vaccines.

I am really interested in how art is turning into activism in this direction, as far as I’m seeing.

In the countries where it’s more manifest in the art, it’s more visible. In the United States, for example, there’s really been a lot of polarization in how COVID was experienced. And so there is a lot of activist art happening. That’s less true in Italy, for instance, where there is a big immigrant population but inequality is not as pronounced and certainly people are not as aware of it. I’d also like to figure out how politicization works differently in different countries, but I don’t quite know yet. The political context matters, too, and I’m trying to keep that in mind when I look at what artists are doing, and how they position themselves vis-à-vis the government and the official story.

EY: Yes, I feel like COVID has always been a political issue, if not all issues are political.

Everyone was talking about a war between Iran and the US. And that stopped, and in a way, all the political things stopped. And so where are we right now? Because there have also been other things happening within our world for the last two years.

Within this project, when you say arts, do you mean visual arts? Do you also include, for example, music or performance arts? What genres are you looking at, and how did you arrive at these genres?

LW: Because I’m at the beginning, I’m still doing a broad investigation right now. I’m teaching a freshman seminar on art and healing and COVID, and in that seminar, we’ve been talking about all kinds of art, from dance, performance, to sculpture, music. And, of course, writing and fiction.

But I think that, eventually, I will want to narrow down what I write about to a more incisive comparative angle.

One thing I’ve been thinking about is that there’s a lot of art being produced by medical professionals, people that we consider to be on the frontlines. I’ve been wondering whether it would be interesting to just write about them. In that case, it wouldn’t be narrowing it down by

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COVID-19 street art across the world, in Mumbai, India (left and middle) and Jakarta, Indonesia (bottom).

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the type of art, but rather, by this very specific world of people who were very close to what was happening in hospitals. I’m not sure that that’s what I want to do. But that’s one possibility.

Another approach would be to consider only textual things, of which there certainly are plenty.

In the humanities, people rarely do collaborative work. But in Europe, it happens more than here. People will put together a team of five, six, or 10 scholars to work around an issue.

A friend of mine had a team in France. They were working on the idea of brotherhood in European politics, which is a very broad issue, but an important one. Brotherhood is a very powerful notion. She worked with a lot of people, and different people could explore different aspects of the topic. So, if I find people who are interested—I’ve already found a few, but I need more—I think it would be interesting to do that kind of collaborative work where, potentially, someone who is more of an expert, for instance, on performance than me could work on things like dance and music, because my own training is much more in textual analysis.

EY: I hope you find that group. I think everyone has that question in their mind to some extent, but it also depends on the effort they want to put into it.

You mentioned that you work much more with literature during or post-World War I, and I’ve also seen your work on, for instance, Valéry. I was wondering if, when you’re thinking about this research project, any authors from the past come to you.

LW: I’m tempted to say someone like Valéry, that you just mentioned. What makes me think of him is that he really had a kind of dual life where he wrote poetry, but also these critical essays.

He really described it as having these two voices, the lyrical voice and the critical analytical voice. He was very interested in self-consciously exploring how these two voices work together. Are they two parallel tracks? Do they ever intersect? How? What do they do? And to me, that speaks to the present moment where there is grief, which, to my mind, needs a kind of lyrical expression. But there’s also, I think, a kind of urgency of learning from grief to make a better society or a better world, the activism side of it, which can help us see how we are all connected in a really deep way. So how do these two things come together? I think of Valéry as an interesting guide for that.

EY: This also makes me think about public versus private. We have been staying in our own places much more, but we’re also really connected all the time through social media. And we’re always trying to analyze what’s happening in life, but at the same time, we’re in solace with ourselves or our families.

I think those are most of my questions. Do you have any questions for me? Is there anything you would like to add?

LW: It’s really been a pleasure to talk to you. I’m curious to know how you got to work on this

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journal, your work for it, and how you see it.

EY: I always wanted to do editing, and this is one of the organizations on campus that allows for editing, so that’s how I first came to it. I joined last quarter, so I’m still a relatively early person in this journal.

This year’s issue has, I would say, lots of reflection on pain and grief, which I really resonated with. In the 20th century, for example, I’m really interested in working on people like Paul Celan. I feel like he is the German voice of all the affect and the grief and that’s how I, in a way, came to him. I’m also really interested in mysticism, and I work with Professor Huber a lot.

LW: Oh, yes, of course.

EY: Persian poetry is really about that. I took the class on poetry and mysticism, which she taught. And I’ve been really fascinated by the idea that in beliefs, in religion, and in spirituality: there is always poetry. In medieval lyrics, Paul Celan, everywhere. I’m looking at those relationships.

LW: Yes, I really see that in poetry as well. One thing I will add about the COVID art project is that people really want that spiritual aspect in art. And there’s the challenge of having it be culturally inclusive. This is, I think, especially the case when you look at the situation of caregivers. For instance, in my class, we had a medical student who has been performing the cello. She does these private concerts for patients who are really sick, and in isolation. She comes in via Zoom and does those one-on-one performances. She let us watch one of them, which was really incredibly beautiful and moving. To me, it’s profoundly spiritual, but because it’s playing music, she doesn’t have to resolve the question of, for example, if the patient is a Christian, a Muslim, or none of the established religions. The spirituality comes through in her playing. In my opinion, poetry can do that for people as well. The desire to communicate spirituality, but across these cultural boundaries, is an interesting problem.

EY: Yes. And at the same time, there’s the idea that we have to fight with one’s own secularism.

It feels like everyone’s trying to form their own type of grieving, or solidarity, but they’re often separated from ideas of religions, and much more personal. In a way, I think, for humanity, we’re losing so many bodies for that gain or knowledge.

LW: Yes, we are losing a lot. And it is in the arts that some of that knowledge is being transmitted. I think that, in Western culture in particular, there are more contemplative practices being rediscovered or transmitted through art. //

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Bian Wenjin, A Hundred Birds and the Three Friends, circa 1400-1425.

A Drunken Banquet: A Dialogue between Zhuangzi, Mengzi, and a Fool Cai Zhen

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t the heart of Zhuangzi lies a paradox—the essence that a “Fool” personifies. His presence is, in many ways, an attempt to investigate the boundary of Zhuangzi’s deconstructive process and the underlying vision that inevitably arises as a guide to living a good life.

This question that remains unanswered is the invitation to embark on our own self-reflections.

His voice is in part my own and part of both masters—glimpses of Zhuangzi’s wit and lucidity, Mengzi’s concern and challenges. In the irony of the words and the unfolding of the dialectical process, we must also, so to speak, drink with the masters, with a sense of self criticism and personal humility that surfaces in both the sages’ teachings. The Fool’s resort to silence in the end is a sign—a recognition of our limitations and a celebration of life itself. Though perhaps I have given him too much—much more than he is or supposed to be. The character has become a drunken vessel, overflowing with too much depth than it can surface—though I hope it is one that can right itself, as a kind of transformative force that is only possible through artistic creation.

When the Fool walks into the room, he trips and falls on his face. Zhuangzi sees this and laughs.

Mengzi, who is seated across from Zhuangzi, is startled and stands up to help. Before he is able to offer a hand, the Fool hops up and brushes the dirt off the grin on his face. He takes a deep bow and proceeds to sit down with the two masters.

Zhuangzi: What a grand entrance! You must surely be a fool!

The Fool: You are very right, very right indeed, master. A fool I am and a fool I will always be. If anything, I am the fool.

Mengzi: A gentleman never laughs at the misery of another.

Zhuangzi: There is no occasion too great for laughter. Even a gentleman must have a sense of humor. In fact, a gentleman who does not know laughter will not know gentleness.

The Fool: Truly, it is no bother at all; I am just glad to be of entertainment!

He pours wine into their cups.

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Mengzi: But have you no compassion? To laugh and not extend a hand?

Zhuangzi: What is this you call ‘compassion’ but a name? Names are empty. Surely you cannot capture the wind with a cup. I will not be moved even if a baby were to fall down a well.

The Fool: Is this what it means to have an “unperturbed heart”?

He fills Zhuangzi’s cup to the brim.

Mengzi: Being human, the heart cannot but feel compassion—for the baby or the dead. Once the heart is cultivated, it will align with the qi. The heart will move in synchrony with the flow of the universe.

Zhuangzi: What you seek to fill, I cultivate to empty. My heart is empty.

Mengzi: I have no doubt you feel. You are the most courageous.

The Fool: Is singing and dancing at a funeral courageous?

Zhuangzi: I have no concern for courage. In my dream, I dance; in meditation, I sing; in life and in death, I celebrate. One state is no different than the other, thus it’s the occasion to do all— dancing, singing, celebrating.

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Mengzi: Propriety accords with benevolence and virtue. If fulfilling one’s duty through mourning is the will of the heart, it is appropriate to give this closure. For the sage who wanders in the divine realm, he has no concern for the worldly.

The Fool: Is this not simply a matter of time? No one mourns forever and the sage needs not an instant. How silly it is to debate about duration!

He fills their cups.

The Fool: Is Master Mengzi not concerned with the perfection of the human form while you, Master Zhuangzi, are concerned with the totality of the Way? Zhuangzi: The sage walks both at once.

The Fool: Are these not two ways of walking the same road? Wandering within or beyond the realm, does your wandering bear an essential difference to mine?

Mengzi: The path of benevolence and righteousness is the only path towards cultivating a virtuous person and a just society.

Zhuangzi: But who justifies the criteria on which you judge the absolute, the good, and the virtuous? On what grounds? Even Confucius himself cannot decide. Out of the sixty times that he has changed his mind, who is to say which is right?

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The Fool: And who decides to not decide, and not deciding to decide!

Mengzi: The governance of people requires more than just consideration of the one. You merely play with words, but do not shake the foundation.

Food arrives at the table.

The Fool: How beautifully the meat is carved! It matches the mood so perfectly.

Zhuangzi: The skilled butcher is a true master altogether. He moves not through matter but space. The Way lies in the space between.

The Fool: Is the butcher a gentleman?

Mengzi: Quite the contrary, a gentleman should never step into the kitchen in order to nurture his innate goodness. Without maintaining the proper moral sentiments, one cannot hold fast to the Way. The Fool: A butcher of morality, a moral artisan! How brilliant!

Zhuangzi: A proper sage indeed.

The Fool: True or not, I’d recognize a sage when I see one! The sage eats, drinks, and sleeps!

Haha! That is the truth!

Zhuangzi: Now the Fool does have sense. Actually more, you have imagination. Please teach me the way of the Fool!

Mengzi: But you who call yourself a fool, are you really foolish at all? If so, even the great Kongzi would like to learn from you.

The Fool: Words are too big and useless for the fool. My foolishness begins and ends in silence.

Raises his cup.

The Fool: The two masters emerge from the shadow of the Great Sage. Your light burns more than the flames of tradition! Come now, let’s all cheer to the Way! All: Cheers to life!

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Our Contributors Zuni Chopra is a junior studying English and Creative Writing. She has an interest in poetry, prose and scriptwriting, favouring fantasy or fantastical realism. She’s fond of painting (which she is terrible at), chess (which she is slightly less terrible at) and adores her canine family (and also her real family, she supposes).

Isabelle Edgar is a sophomore studying English who calls Woods Hole, MA home.

Julia Gordon is a writer, student, and spectator. She is interested in American literature from 1980-2001, media theory, post-Internet artforms, commodity cultures, and the alleged end of history. Currently, Julia is teaching a course about Vaporwave, curating bad films, and celebrating the completion of her English honors thesis on Infinite Jest.

Zora Ilunga-Reed is a senior studying Philosophy and Literature. A native New Yorker, she enjoys hiking and working through a seemingly endless reading list in her spare time. You can find more of her writing in The Stanford Daily and some of her art at zilungareed.com.

Ronit Jain is a sophomore studying English and Biocomputation from Seattle, WA. Always fascinated by the power of story, Ronit has developed interests in the digital humanities, the modernist novel, and representations of otherness in the Western imagination. In his free time, you can find Ronit listening to music, people-watching, or appreciating the pitter-patter of rain on a window.

Olivia Manes is a junior studying Comparative Literature and International Relations. She is interested in narrative and its construction as it relates to politics and history, freedom of the press, and Latin American and Russian literature. In her free time, she enjoys reading, writing, listening to a psychotically diverse range of music, watching movies that are so bad they’re good, and spending time with friends.

Cai Zhen: A voice brewed in silence.

Catherine Wang (they/she) is a Chinese American artist living in Southern California. They earned their bachelor’s degree in Art Practice and Computer Science from Stanford University. She makes vibrant landscape drawings of her immediate surroundings, finding joy in ordinary scenes that usually go unnoticed.

Image Credits Pages 36-45: Details from etching by Gisèle Celan-Lestrange.

Pages 72-73, 75: Emperor Huizong, Finches and Bamboo. Early 12th century.

Remedios Varo, Ojos sobre la mesa, 1935.

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© Caesura Journal Number 4: Spring 2022 Please direct any submissions and tidings to stanfordcaesura@gmail.com.