Michael T. Stowers

"It's these modalities which hook me. That's how it feels, like hooks with those little barbs on them that prevent the fish from unhooking itself, those 'hads' and 'shoulds' and 'woulds'. Life is, as you know, woven out of a million threads, 999,999 of which end in one of those hooks.

...

Time. Such issues with time. To me, you see, your assertion that the past is unredeemable is the opposite to my reality. For me, the future is the only unredeemable thing. The present is the persistence of evanescence. The past, though, is the only part we can change. And we do, all of us, all of the time. Memory is around seventy to eighty percent fabrication; we know this now. Add the rose-tinted glasses and the exponential fall off of memory and you get a situation where the past becomes more story-like than any myth."


Michael T. Stowers




We would often fight about the all-time-is-unredeemable-motto of the Bridge, whose constant and passionate supporter he had been ever since he first came here, in march 2011. It deeply irritated him and time and again he would try to convince me of the contrary. His sudden death, on the 29th of August, has left this debate open (or closed it forever, it depends on how one wants to look at it). Perhaps it is exactly through this shocking disappearance that he has been proved right: the future may be the only unreedemable thing, and my memory has already begun to fashion the story of him, of our close friendship into a myth, an ever-shifting tale which has become part of my ever-shifting self.


I would like to say more, but words fail me.

visiting Ravenna's mosaics

i find the contrast between this stark exterior of the monuments and the lavishly decorated Byzantine mosaics in the interior breathtaking. 

below i include Carl Gustav Jung's account of his mysterious experience when visiting the mosaics, in 1933.

Even on the occasion of my first visit to Ravenna in 1913, the tomb of Galla Placidia seemed to me significant and unusually fascinating. The second time, twenty years later, I had the same feeling. Once more I fell into a strange mood in the tomb of Galla Placidia; once more I was deeply stirred. I was there with an acquaintance, and we went directly from the tomb into the Baptistery of the Orthodox.

Here, what struck me first was the mild blue light that filled the room; yet I did not wonder about this at all. I did not try to account for its source, and so the wonder of this light without any visible source did not trouble me. I was somewhat amazed because, in place of the windows I remembered having seen on my first visit, there were now four great mosaic frescoes of incredible beauty which, it seemed, I had entirely forgotten. I was vexed to find my memory so unreliable.

[There follows a detailed description of the frescoes which i skip]

After we left the baptistery, I went  promptly to Alinari to buy photographs of the mosaics, but could not find any. Time was pressing this was only a short visit and so I postponed the purchase until later. I thought I might

order the pictures from Zurich.

When I was back home, I asked an acquaintance who was going to Ravenna to obtain the pictures for me. He could not locate them, for he discovered that the mosaics I had described did not exist.

Meanwhile, I had already spoken at a seminar about the original conception of baptism, and on this occasion had also mentioned the mosaics that I had seen in the Baptistery of the Orthodox. The memory of those pictures is still vivid to me. The lady who had been there with me long refused to believe that what she had "seen with her own eyes" had not existed.

As we know, it is very difficult to determine whether, and to  what extent, two persons simultaneously see the same thing. In this case, however, I was able to ascertain that at least the main features of what we both saw had been the same.

This experience in Ravenna is among the most curious events  in my life. It can scarcely be explained. A certain light may possibly be cast on it by an incident in the story of Empress Galla Placidia (d. 450). During a stormy crossing from Byzantium to Ravenna in the worst of winter, she made a vow that if she came through safely, she would build a church and have the perils of the sea represented in it. She kept this vow by building the basilica of San Giovanni in Ravenna and having it adorned with mosaics. In the early Middle Ages, San Giovanni,  together with its mosaics, was destroyed by fire; but in the Ambrosiana in Milan is still to be found a sketch representing Galla Placidia in a boat.

I had, from the first visit, been personally affected by the figure  of Galla Placidia, and had often wondered how it must have been for this highly cultivated, fastidious woman to live at the side of a barbarian prince. Her tomb seemed to me a final legacy through which I might reach her personality. Her fate and her whole being were vivid presences to me; with her intense nature, she was a suitable embodiment for my anima.

The anima of a man has a strongly historical character. As a personification of the unconscious she goes back into prehistory, and embodies the contents of the past. She provides the individual with those elements that he ought to know about his prehistory. To the individual, the anima is all life that has been in the past and is still alive in him. In comparison to her I have always felt myself to be a barbarian who really has no history like a creature just sprung out of nothingness, with neither a past nor a future.

In the course of my confrontation with the anima I had actually had a brush with those perils which I saw represented in the mosaics. I had come close to drowning. The same thing happened to me as to Peter, who cried for help and was rescued by Jesus. What had been the fate of Pharaoh's army could have been mine. Like Peter and like Naaman, I came away unscathed, and the integration of the unconscious contents made an essential contribution to the completion of my personality.

Since my experience in the baptistery in Ravenna, I know with certainty that something interior can seem to be exterior, and that something exterior can appear to be interior. The actual walls of the baptistery, though they must have been seen by my physical eyes, were covered over by a vision of some altogether different sight which was as completely real as the unchanged baptismal font. Which was real at that moment?

My case is by no means the only one of its kind. But when that sort of thing happens to oneself, one cannot help taking it more seriously than something heard or read about. In general, with anecdotes of that kind, one is quick to think of all sorts of explanations which dispose of the mystery. I have come to the conclusion that before we settle upon any theories in regard to the unconscious, we require many, many more experiences of it.

from Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections



note: photographs of The Church of San Vitale and the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia

spring cleaning

and what if the oldest shoes are the dearest?

with more precision and more truthfulness than our memory, they keep track, in each crack and dirt mark and dust-blackened spot, of what we have learned to call "our life", "our past" - though nobody knows exactly to whom this past, this life, belong.

with tenderness, the old shoes stare back at us, while we, gentle hypocrites or simply forgetful, unable to glimpse beyond our self-woven illusions, never take notice.

twenty years after

i have always hated the imposture of such titles, i found them unsettling even when i would read the books with delight, in those early years (those early years - saying this loud, with different accents, yields different meanings, none of them right, though). it is not in front of god that the soul is groundless, it is in front of memory.  

(and still no lover's lips pressed upon hers taste as excruciatingly bittersweet as those crushed petals, that day)

for you do not describe the past...

Nacre upon nacre upon nacre, bluish upon bluish upon bluish, each age and each house in which I have dwelled (if it was not all a hallucination of nothingness) is a filter deforming the previous one, blending itself with them, making them narrower and more heterogenous bands. For you do not describe the past by writing about old things, but the misty air between you and it.

Thinking about myself at different ages, as so many consumed previous lives, it is as though I spoke about a long, uninterrupted chain of corpses, a tunnel of bodies dying one within the other. A moment ago, the one who, reflected by the dark lacquer of the coffee cup, had written here the words “dying one within the other” collapsed off the stool, his skin cracked, the bones of his face became visible, his eyes leaked out oozing black blood. In a moment, the one who will write “the one who will write” will also collapse down upon the other’s dust. How could you penetrate this ossuary? And why would you do so? And what gauze mask, what surgical gloves would protect you from the infection emanated by memory?

from Mircea Cărtărescu's novel Orbitor, translated into English as  Glaring (vol. 1)

.

the mirror and beyond

If you throw even a cursory glance into the past, at the life which lies behind you, not even recalling its most vivid moments, you are struck every time by the singularity of the events in which you took part, the unique individuality of the characters whom you met. This singularity is like the dominant note of every moment of existence; in each moment of life, the life principle itself is unique.
The artist therefore tries to grasp that principle and make it incarnate, new each time; and each time he hopes, though in vain, to achieve an exhaustive image of the Truth of human existence. The quality of beauty is in the truth of life, newly assimilated and imparted by the artist, in fidelity to his personal vision.


Andrei Tarkovsky, from Sculpting in Time

There's another kind of language, another form of communication: by means of feeling, and images. That is the contact that stops people being separated from each other, that brings down barriers. Will, feeling, emotion — these remove obstacles from between people who otherwise stand on opposite sides of a mirror, on opposite sides of a door. . . The frames of the screen move out, and the world which used to be partitioned off comes into us, becomes something real.


from a letter of a young girl to her mother, in which she writes about Tarkovsky's films, as quoted in Sculpting in Time




..

early september

returning home, and returning home in early autumn - impossible not to fall prey to the sweetness of melancholia, i don't even try not to, supposing that i were someone investing such struggle with meaning (which i am not, i don't know whether fortunately or less so).

back then, in the days of childhood, autumn used to mean diving into a world of distinct tastes and fragrances, a world of jubilation untouched by what i would later learn to call nostalgia: grape juice and fresh walnuts. grape juice from the small vine adorning the front wall of our house, facing the street, and fresh walnuts from the big tree, pivotal like an axis mundi in the middle of our garden. i was not aware then that we were blessed to be allowed to have this small piece of land around the house, even to have a house, when everywhere around us houses fell under the madness of the communist regime, eager to replace them with the grey blocks of flats, the ugliest buildings ever. i would also find out later that our house had finally been included on the black list, the erased area had spread around us like a death wave, at last reaching the point of swallowing us when the revolution came, only months before the fatal blow.

i don't know the name of these grapes in english, for whatever mysterious reason they are called 'ananas' in Romania (meaning 'pineapple', though everybody had yet to see a real pineapple back then). i was fascinated by their dark-bluish colour and by something like fog on their skin, the way breath stains a glass in winter or haze seems to remain attached on the hair of the beloved, on a frosty day. as everybody else privileged enough to have a garden, my father used to make wine in a big barrel which would be brought out of the cave weeks before the wine ritual and left in the yard, filled with water, to our delight (among other games, we could bathe in it, on really hot days). it is a custom still alive now, when good wine is widely available.

i bought these from the market the other day. coming home, i had found the grapevine gone, it had gone dry, my mother said, there are blooming oleanders now in its place, their beauty as sweet and poisonous as every memory is, i said, oh why are you upset, my mother asked, don't you like the new look of the garden and the new light green paint on the walls of the house, and for no reason at all i remembered these lines:

see the world ripple beyond this current.

(I look at you with eyes of oleander)

& in this ocean

a single harp plays a taunting homage.

but i didn't say anything.

upon my tongue of now, this taste of then, forever - a taste of fog and, beyond that, the fragrance of the unspeakable, the silent tune of a single harp.

..

romantic palimpsest, revisited

you said:

"one may ask all the questions, but one should not"

i don't even think you knew then
about my love for grammar, the awe-struck trembling
in front of the countless doors hidden in modal verbs,
opened and slammed in my face
every minute.

now, when the summer light has lost its gentleness,
when it cuts through the curve of my thigh as ruthlessly
as an indicative,
i ask:

why did you say i was beautiful?

why did you say my hair smelled like red moss
under cedar trees?

why did you say you wanted us to look at each other
the same way as then, as long as we lived?
(i smiled, amused at this image,
coming from one like you, with your deep disdain for romantic
pose and sentimentalism, we were both, damn it, too old
for rose and myrrh -
but too young to know how to look at a face hiding a face
and another face and yet another face,
an endless labyrinth of deception.
i believed it, though, there was something hard and warm
and true in there
like the heaviness of your touch upon me,
beyond modal verbs,
a kiss like a bird in a mouth
who hadn't yet learned to tell the poem
about kiss and mouth).

why did you say you wanted me to have all the books
you had ever read?

























now, inside the walls of this living library
i, the captive, am free to run from modal verb to modal verb
waiting in vain for a flutter of page to hurt my blood,
for light to break your absence
like bread upon my skin, yet again.

















..

the frying pan

(you can change to 720p and watch in HD, if you like - which i recommend anyway. i didn't take it with me so i can't upload it now to my main Exposure Room site, this you tube version will have to do. i somehow was in the mood to post it tonight)

..

unbearable fullness

that night, before leaving, i stood in front of the window for a long time,
staring into the night, or what should have been the night.

yet life was still there, unbearably full, clinging to me like algae to a dead body.

..

the quiet, slow and steady distortion of memory

The broken mirror will not again reflect;
Fallen flowers will hardly rise up to the branch.

from Zenrinkushu (1429-1504)

..

autumn palimpsest

why do you keep re-writing
the faces of what has already been,
layer upon layer of feverish scribble?
the past cannot be altered,
the stranger said, his amber voice
stern.

i stood there broken,
the quiet of the dead for my only flame.
oh if the sky could know of the loneliness
of its blue.

outside, the tree was gently falling
into autumn, unaware that it did so,
and why.

and how hard i wished for the time of the tree,
how hard.


.
.

...

what do i know about you? tell me, what can one know about the other?


between the impenetrable and the unattainable, i lay down my arms - even memory escapes me.




.
.

the melancholy diary of hotel rooms (Paris)

'He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?'

... a melancholy whose color I can give you by copying a few lines from Samura Koichi: “Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound... disembodied.”

(excerpts from Chris Marker's Sans Soleil)