Vertical realities | Vertikala verkligheter

Vertical realities | Vertikala verkligheter

Ə Vertical realities | Vertikala verkligheter

Editor: Simone KotvaLayout & design: Dmitriy Myelnikov

A publication forwww.festivalomodernt.com

A Pamphlet Original 20131

Copyright © Festival O/MODERNT 2013

The authors here included assert the moral right tobe identified as the authors of these works

Set in Joanna MTPrinted and bound in Great Britain by

ExWhyZed, Cambridge

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may bereproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the priorpermission of the publishers.

Vertical realities is a bi-lingual collection of prose, poetry and visual art commissioned by festival O/MODERNT for its 2013 season on ‘Rameau and the vertical’. The seven poems were performed by Björn Granath, Kjerstin Dellert, Hugo Ticciati and others on June 16th, at Confi-dencen, Ulriksdal’s Palace Theatre in Stockholm. The anthology would not have been possible without the generous and enthusiastic response I received from writers, artists, performers, organisers and friends––to whom all my thanks for giving me the opportu-nity to compile this little volume.

S. K.

Vertikala Verkligheter är en tvåspråkig samling prosa, dikter och bildkonst beställd av festival O/MODERNT 2013 under temat “Rameau och det vertikala.” De sju dikterna framfördes av Björn Granath, Kjerstin Dellert, Hugo Ticciati m.fl. den 16:e juni på Ulriksdals slottsteater Confidencen. Antologin hade inte varit möjlig utan det generösa och entusiastiska gensvar jag fått från författare, konstnärer, artister, organisatörer och vänner––till dem vill jag rikta mitt tack för chansen att sammanställa denna lilla volym.

S. K.

Contents | Innehåll

Vertical realities: introduction · Simone Kotva 3

[solen stiger] · Signe Hammar 8

Millrace remnants near Riverside Buttress · Sue Henderson 9

Upavasa · Robin Kirkpatrick 10

Vertical realities: grounding · Simone Kotva 13

[LAGEN] · Elisabeth Hjorth 18

Descent route, Uphill Buttress · Sue Henderson 20

Suspensions · Alice Tarbuck 21

[Rock-balancing still lifes] · Michael Grab 23

Vertical realities: scansion · Simone Kotva 31

Fr. · Pär Thörn 36

A SCENT · Paul Williamson 37

Falling out of the abyss · Sue Henderson 39

[varje gång jag var] · Khashayar Naderehvandi 40

Vertical realities: footholds · Simone Kotva 43

Biographies | Biografier 48

3

vertical realities: introduction

The vertical has many realities. Not least because, through a confused historical-linguistic voyage, verticality has come to determine the very way we describe the real. ‘Vertical’ and its relations were absorbed into Germanic languages via the French vertical and Latin vertex, derivations from the verb vertere, ‘to turn’. But the more ancient Sanskrit root with which vertere is cognate, vrit (वृत्), had already given rise to more familiar forms: German werden, ‘to become’, Swedish varda and English ‘-ward’ (to name but a few), the latter still retaining its original sense of turning––becom-ing––toward something.

Whence this development from turning to becoming, from directing to existing?

The philologist will speculate that the answer resides in the human head, organ of (partial) revolution, whose charac-teristic surveilling gesture steers the body’s course. From this corporeal vortex of motive sense is opened up the po-tential for figurative supplementation: that which governs is also that which causes to advance, proceed, ‘take place’; to live, exist, persist, come to pass. We may imagine the adverbial suffix ‘-ward’ as a dynamic marking: add it to a circular orbit, and observe how its smooth return is forced open into a biased spiral twisting toward a telos; apply it to the movement of a human being, and it will run through the entire person: ‘homeward’ is an orientation of the soul, as much as of the body. From the vertical as vertex, as head and crowning point of this continued teleological re-turn-ing, comes the association of loftiness, height and upright-ness, of the perpendicularity that gives rise to vertigo.

4

We find ourselves before a double image of the vertical. Physically centre and ascent, vertex and vertical, centripetal pull and weightless flight; metaphysically it is gravity and grace, immanent earth and transcendent heaven. On the one hand a unifying origin, on the other a diffusing spiral: both earth and starry sky. Verticality is the combined effect of depth and height which, after Immanuel Kant’s eighteenth-century re-working of Longinus, we now refer to as ‘the sublime’.

In 1722, over half a century before the appearance of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement, the French organist and composer Jean-Philippe Rameau published a Treatise on Harmony Reduced to its Natural Principles which relied on a construal of verticality not as vertigo-inducing depth, but as generative ground. Rameau’s landmark was to reorient the theory of music from the contrapuntal, largely hori-zontal and forward-moving lines of canonic polyphony to that of the now-familiar idea of the chord aligned above a ‘fundamental bass’ (basse fondamentale). In his introduc-tory notes he explains that ‘the source of harmony may be considered to be the harmonic centre’, vertically de-fined as a ‘chord’ of which there is ‘only one...from which all the others are derived’ [1]. Instead of approaching the musical score as a web of interwoven horizontal melo-dies with notes ‘pointed’ against each other (the original sense of the Latin contrapunctum), Rameau appreciated how these points, when stacked or played simultaneously, took on aural values independent of their melodic lines. Chords would thus become new vertices, each with a gravitational centre in its functional chord ‘root’.

5

In the spirit of the Enlightenment appeal to systems, the aim of the Treatise was to rationalise (rather than re-invent) the practise of composition and music-making in what we now refer to as the Baroque period. Smitten with René Descartes’ reduction of reality to innate reason, but per-haps more profoundly with the empiricism of Isaac New-ton and John Locke (and later, of Étienne Bonnot de Con-dillac), Rameau used his ‘discovery’ of his monadic chord to confer on music the status of a science ‘with definite rules...drawn from existent principles’––principles that could be grasped aurally as well as cognitively [2]. This is a more pragmatic (and perhaps stolid) elaboration of the earlier, Neoplatonic, image of the created cosmos as a Divinely tuned ‘monochord’ string, ‘which, when set into motion, sounds the harmonic ratios of the universe’ as the musica mundana [3]. Rather than present his chord as theological speculation, Rameau offered its centripetal schema to the budding composer as the mathematical mathesis needed to supplement the hours spent at key- or fretboard.

Since its publication, Rameau’s Treatise has frequently come under fire for its use of verticality as a reductive principle, compartmentalising music into static segments with ill-defined autonomy [4]. It is a criticism confirmed by the double image of the vertical, and Rameau’s mathematical error, as it were, is to misrepresent the dynamism of the horizontal axis as a static field. Yet this too is a reductive reading of Rameau’s effort (albeit unsatisfactory) to tease sense out of the paradoxical way in which the vertical combines vertex and vortex, movement and height.

6

Rather than dismiss Rameau’s tonal verticality as a naïve rationalism whose legacy must now be undone, we can see his work participating in an ongoing venture toward a counterpoint transformed beyond either/or schemata of unilateral directives. It is in this work of delineating the vertically real that the following seven poems and eight artworks participate. Read together they suggest three as-pects of what may tentatively be called a contemporary verticalism: a process of sensing the ground, scanning heights and finding footholds. The interposing essays will discuss each of these themes in turn.

[1] Jean-Philippe Rameau, Treatise on Harmony: Reduced to its Natural Prin-

ciples, trans. Philip Gossett (New York: Dover, 1971), xxxv.

[2] Ibid., xxxvi.

[3] Thomas Christensen, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlighten-ment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 72. The reference is to Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmi, where God is described as the pulsator monochordii.

[4] Ibid., 46, 132.

8

solen stigermarken sjunkeratt bära minnet så mörk är jorden att fröna glömmerjag kunde inget sägaett rassel bland lövenmaskinverkenkunde kärlekenvara över läpparnasom andetagoch rösten hjärtslagbland de högre husendär människorna blirför små, ett glittermaskinverkoch tunna molni stela nordanfingrarduvhöksspändasnönborta i dagsmejanvärldenbleker sig ut, ävenkroppenoch minnetkanske kunde livetvara i minnetkanske är minnetlivetoch jag hör ingentingbara solen

[solen stiger] · Signe Hammar

9

Millrace rem

nants near Riverside Buttress · Sue H

enderson

10

Fuoco Moto Feuer

Brand

Smoke tattooing an upward reach of arm

(finger an arrow tip to find, perfect,a perpendicular) fails as fire failsfalling through downward vertices until

harmonics alone remain and show where that has been.

Staccato

coals raked out overfar white terrain, shadow-bodies stuttering,ashamed of loss, hide in memories nowof height, of songs superillustrans,

of Helios danced in dust by sudden rays.

Upavasa · Robin Kirkpatrick

11

Who is it comes (from some, maybe dreaming,

pinnacle) to ordain all these embersremembering the light discord? Asking.recalls, invisible, that point ubi

the flaming line ascends, the gyre of hands.

Brand

Fuoco Moto Feuer

Upavasa

13

vertical realities: grounding

‘I am vertical’, begins a poem by Sylvia Plath, ‘but I would rather be horizontal’ [1]. Verticality only materialises in relation to the ground and horizon delineating it. This ho-rizon is immanent: it is where we stand waiting, where we walk and falter in our walk, where we map out our paths on an earth to which we will in time return. The direction of the terrestrial horizon is the now obsolete ‘againward’, the vertical turning toward that which faces us, though we do not face it––that which we constantly feel, touch, tread on. It is, as the philosopher Gilles Deleuze would describe it, ‘pure affect’, that is, the experience of life as a raw collision of bodies, inescapable except in the flights of pure spirit. Paul Williamson’s A SCENT, written to be performed as a stream-of-consciousness Sprechgesang, brings out this playful aspect of the sensed horizon. Here an accidental olfactory ‘collision’ with a coat turns into a nervous ascension: ‘my face in the fur and breathed in the scent | Until my skull was tingling’. But this sensuality is dispelled by the sudden appearance of the disenchanting cause of the perfume, and a return to the (we assume) equally disenchanted workplace, characterised by vertical relationships of debt and dependency: ‘And so I smiled, | And pulled myself together hastily...I must get back to work. I really must’.

In a lecture delivered in Liverpool in March 1992, the age-ing poet and critic Kathleen Raine (a friend of W. B. Yeats), reacted against the seductiveness of this ‘materialist ideol-ogy’ and its consequent ‘horizontal, flat-land world’ [2]. We have become obsessed, she exclaims, with the sensa-

14

tional aspects of so-called phenomenal experience. The latter turns our aesthetic creations (be they literary, musi-cal or visual) into an extended field-trip narrative: where did I go today, what was the weather like, what did I eat, how did I feel? It reduces the human imagination to a de-graded ‘naturalism’ of events, ‘data’ and psychological re-actions, as it has threatened to do for nearly two and a half millennia, ever since Epicurus taught that life was a series of emotive responses best confronted with an apathetic attitude. What Raine thought we had lost was the ‘verti-cal dimension’, the ascending, absolute relationship with the Divine Above embraced by mystical writers and poets, such as Emanuel Swedenborg and William Blake. Yet, as we have already intimated, a vertical viewpoint need not cast its umbilical chord exclusively heavenwards. The example of Rameau’s dalliance with the ‘foundation’ shows that the directives of the vertical are more shifting, twisting––in important ways swindling––than some of its indignant crit-ics would admit.

For if the the horizontal earth is the place of titillating ‘a-scents’, it is also the living expanse of memory. In brief lines resembling a stacked chord signe Hammar crafts a yearning for Plath’s horizon where, rather than the whole-some earth, it is the verticality of human endeavour (‘the higher houses | where people become | too small, a glim-mer | machine-works’) that constitutes Raine’s dreaded flat-land, ‘paling out’ in the monotonous plane of a Swed-ish midwinter. In Hammar’s poem the ground ‘sinks’ be-neath the rising sun which ‘bears the memory’, and the poet asks to be united with this more vibrant horizon: ‘also | the body | and memory |could perhaps life | be

15

in memory | perhaps memory is | life’. In a related man-ner, KHasHayar nadereHVandi contrasts human mobility with the stalwart tree, whose aged, gnarled verticality can paradoxically only persist in a horizontally rooted state. In the arboreal imagery we glimpse, perhaps, the Tree of Life, the axis mundi which in Northern Europe becomes the great Ash Yggdrasil sung of in the poetic Edda. These are all verticals whose presence transforms our quotidian angst into a wish for the strange death-in-life of the planted or-ganism: ‘Instead it was they who died | every time, they who died | and I fell asleep under | a blanket of leaves, | on my head, a blanket of leaves | and the crowns of trees that grew | into one another | reached all the way down | to the ground’.

This longing for a horizon of which we understand very little yet abuse as an end in our civilising enterprises, is poignantly brought out in the second stanza of robin KirKPatricK’s Dantean Upavasa, written to be accompanied by violin improvisation. We read: ‘Staccato | coals raked out over | far white terrain’. Here Hammar’s serene snow-scape has been transformed into an infernal plane, whose lack of subliminal height and depth creates the effect of a close-up granulated photograph. The sham terrestrial memory crumbles into bits and pieces of ‘shadow-bodies stuttering, | ashamed of loss,’ which can only ‘hide in memories now | of height’. Upavasa situates us at a differ-ent vantage from the nurturing horizon of the remember-ing earth. It takes us to the horizon below, the hell which appears as the inversion––or parody––of the vertical, di-vine, ‘height’. The peculiarity of this ‘plane’ is that it ‘fails | as fire fails | falling downward’, speaking not of the true

16

earth, but of a counterfeit (to ‘fail’ is ‘to deceive’) which differs from the ascent only by perspectival degree (where did you start out from?). This infernal plane does not har-bour the ‘happy bones | free of their joints, in round-ness resting, | touched to the earth, no more upheld by thinking’ that add their voices to alice tarbucK’s Suspen-sions, recalling John Donne’s ‘restful’ bones [3]. To the con-trary, it mimics their upward flight in a disastrous fashion, since below the horizon, pitch and tumble can promise no prospect of an end. Falling can produce only harmonics, notes which on a violin are created by partially depressing or ‘half-playing’ its strings: spectral signs of vertical sound.

[1] Sylvia Plath, I am vertical [1961], in Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (New York: Buccaneer Books, 1998), 162.

[2] Kathleen Raine, The Vertical Dimension. The Kenneth Allott Lectures: 8 (Liv-erpool: Liverpool Classical Monthly, 1992), 4–5.

[3] John Donne, Death Be Not Proud [c. 1610].

18

LAGEN

Lagens fjäril, hur lyfter lagen med sin lätta last, hur lyder den?

F som i fjäderA som i ankare L som i illegalaL som i illegala

lita på lagen lita på listorna lita på liv som lagförs lika

pojken bakom hänget ”jag önskar att jag blir pilot” bakom lagen gömd

ena vingen bokstav – andra vingen kött

[LAGEN] · Elisabeth Hjorth

19

HISTORIEN

Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas under den grå himlen, grå block uppåt i betongi raden framför, kropparsidledes kroppar och i det underjordiska museet ansikteninnan de suddas ut

ena vingen bokstav – andra vingen kött

MÄNNISKAN

På sidan eller på rygg, jorden svettas under henne, människans tyngd

R regnE eftermiddag V vila A avsked

hennesryggradstjälken i den andres hand

ena vingen bokstav – andra vingen kött

20

Des

cent

rou

te, U

phill

But

tres

s ·

Sue H

ende

rson

21

i.Sing-and-sing-and-sing. The morning: flung from bronze bells,pluming startled starlings heavenwards, drawing in the scattered sky, to attend more closely round the grey slate spires. Then back, the ripples flattening outto silence and clean air.

Make what is heavy, heavenly:let the bells sing up to the wind untethered,let what is set furthest in the groundguide our feet heavenward.

ii.The afternoon's long heat has risen to the arch. Stone fingersbend at the top, two learnt-rhyme loversconsidering the glory of the world.

And what words travel there beyond?Low, holy psalming, murmured moans, the distant cattle’s breeze-caught mooingcollect like burrs at the cassock stitching,floating there, as sunshine strikes the nave.

Make what is gone hence, quicken here:let the saints keep covenant, convene.Let our hearts be the halls that cloister them,courteous, serene.

Suspensions · Alice Tarbuck

22

iii.Now, evening's shadows deepen to contain;calf-skins heavy with the pour of wine,the fullness of it, peaceful.Beneath this, still the happy bones,free of their joints, in roundness resting,touched to the earth, no more upheld by thinking,locate in the day's libation their repose.

23

Rock-balancing still lifes · Michael Grab

24

25

26

27

28

29

31

vertical realities: scansion

‘I hear nothing | only the sun’ reads Hammar’s conclud-ing line. A recurrent theme in the present poems is the idea that achieving the vertical involves an apprentice-ship to the primitive sign of ascension, the rising sun. In KirKPatricK’s Upavasa––the title one of the many Sanskrit words for ‘fire’––the failing fire of hell is contrasted with the dance-inducing Helios and the angelic ‘flaming line’, which ascends in a vortex of hands. It is a movement made possible by one descending ‘from some, maybe dreaming | pinnacle’ without falling, visually able to re-form the words for ‘fire’ recited at the beginning and end of the poem from a vertical line to a spiral. The approach of verti-cality (‘who is it comes’?), is the approach of the superla-tive mountaineer, the scaler of the non-linear sublime––in nadereHVandi’s poem the inflected line of the tree casting its shadow against the ‘otherwise | radiant sun’.

To ascend, from the Latin ad-scandere, is quite literally ‘to climb up’, but its figurative sense has been divested of that physical exertion we see in sue Henderson’s depictions of a rock-climber’s labour, and instead imbued with an aerial lightness. In tarbucK’s Suspensions we are, like birds caught in a breeze, flung upwards together with the ringing bells of an ancient church. Under the prayerful rhythm of a saecula saeculorum the world is ‘flung from bronze bells’ in order to ‘make what is heavy, heavenly’, to transform the word itself through the ecstatic pealing of the poem’s lines. To scan is to climb through stanzas toward new Longinian heights, to intuit the brevity of language; verticality is then what Pär tHörn describes as the potential for ‘everything

32

we would become’––a matrix from which we rise upward from murk to blinding clarity.

In the years leading up to and during the second world war, critic and poet Eugene Jolas launched the journal Tran-sition, where he introduced ‘Verticalism’ and ‘vertigralist’ as labels to describe a burgeoning ‘Pan-Romanticism in the Atomic Age’. Whilst the journal is now remembered for hosting parts of James Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’, for Jolas, a devoted Catholic, Transition was the home of ‘Ro-mantic-mystic ascensions’. It catered to the ‘new poetry’ which, ‘in its daemonic-celestial tension, reconstructs the myth of voyage, flight, ascent in all its Romantic-mystic dimensions, and seeks the marvellous of the skies’ [1]. Its im-agery would draw on the latest aeronautical technology, transforming despised machinery into a vehicle of spir-itual as well as bodily flight, in ‘a kind of music, a mirror of a four-dimensional universe’ [2]. In Transition, Dante’s journey through the celestial heavens becomes a sidereal voyage of exploration into the dreamlike, pleni-paucity of space. Not unlike Raine’s lecture we encountered earlier, Jolas’ 1932 manifesto ‘Poetry is Vertical’(signed by Samuel Beckett) derides this ‘world ruled by the hypnosis of posi-tivism’, encouraging its readers to recollect that poetry should lead ‘the emotions of the sunken, telluric depths upward toward the illumination of a collective reality and a totalistic universe’ [3].

Nigh on a century has passed since Jolas’ vision of Verti-calism, and his quasi-militant rallying cry for new idioms of totalising ascent are today received with some caution. The weightless abandon of dreamlike wings can reveal a sinister indifference to the burden of life they are carry-

33

ing. Like Icarus (‘a favourite figure of Jolas’) the dreaming Verticalist flies, but does not pause to consider their flight, and those flying with them are thrown into vertigo and ‘swindled’, ‘made giddy’. Thus in tHörn’s Fr. the repeated formula ‘from x we rise toward y’ is not merely an idyll of progression from the primitive to the perfected, but an unpredictable oscillation between affect and civilisation: ‘from murder we rise toward the bench of falsehood’. Considering these political implications of verticality, elis-abtH HjortH is led to ask: ‘butterfly of the law, how does the law lift with its light burden, how does it obey?’ Of course, the burden never is insubstantial, but its seeming lightness makes the fall all the more savage, spelling out a capital failing:

F as in feather A as in anchor L as in illegal L as in illegal

In his 1918 poem An Irish Airman Foresees his Death, Yeats re-flects that our flight is propelled not by law at all but by a more elusive––and potentially dangerous––duty: ‘A lonely impulse of delight | Drove to this tumult in the clouds’ where ‘the years to come seemed waste of breath, | A waste of breath the years behind | In balance with this life, this death’ [4].

Like Yeats’ anonymous Airman we desire the pilot’s vertical surrender, we are HjortH’s little boy who says ‘I want to be a pilot’, but who in truth is ‘behind | the law | hidden’, behind its wings: ‘first wing the letter - second, flesh’.

34

[1] Eugene Jolas, Vertical: A Yearbook for Romantic-Mystic Ascension. (New York: Gotham Bookmart Press, 1941), 17.

[2] Eugene Jolas, ‘Paramyths (July 1935)’ in Eugene Jolas: Critical Writings, 1924-1951, ed. Klaus H. Keifer and Rainer Rumold (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 277, 211–213; 266–267.

[3] Eugene Jolas, ‘Poetry is Vertical (1932)’ in opus cit., 266-267.

[4] W. B. Yeats, An Irish Airman Foresees his Death [1918], in W. B. Yeats. The Poems (London: Dent, 1992), 184–185. I am grateful to Catherine Pickstock for this reference.

36

Från märkningen stiga vi mot livsduglighetenFrån mästaren stiga vi mot livsledanFrån mästerverket stiga vi mot livsmedelsproduktionenFrån mätarställningen stiga vi mot livsmörkretFrån mättnadskänslan stiga vi mot livstidsarbetetFrån mödernet stiga vi mot livsviljanFrån mögelskadan stiga vi mot livsödetFrån möjliggörandet stiga vi mot livvaktsskyddetFrån mönsteranfallet stiga vi mot ljudlöshetenFrån mönstersamhället stiga vi mot ljudskriftenFrån mönstringen stiga vi mot ljudvallenFrån mördandet stiga vi mot ljugarbänkenFrån mörjan stiga vi mot ljungblommanFrån mörkret stiga vi mot ljusetFrån intet allt vi vilja bli A SCENT

Fr.· Pär Thörn

37

I’m so infuriated, I could spit!I could take pleasure in grollying upA massive gobbet of thick, jammy phlegm,Like a fat spoonful of strawberry jam –Except for the colour, of course – not red –I’m not hawking up clots of blood – not yet!What colour is bile? A lump of black bile –Or yellow, whichever is angrier –That’s precisely what I’d like to discharge:A bilious clot of tawny-black sputum,And who cares where it lands? Because todayMy materials are not pliable!The topic, I have. The merely contingentI’ve disregarded. I can see the forms,How the figures grow out of one anotherAnd yet retain particularity:The sharp twist here, like the arm of a manWho lifts a glass to his wet lips, and thereThe curved plane of a woman’s shoulder blade,With all the ordinariness stripped outAnd just pure understandings juxtaposed.Except the paint is not pliant today,The pattern isn’t sparking into life:The shaping gestures lack integrity.

Let me tell you something: a small confession,If you will. I came into the hallwayOutside my office in the Institute,And on the coatstand somebody had leftAn olive green coat: a different coat, A coat I’d never seen before. Sheepskin,

A SCENT · Paul Williamson

38

I thought: velvety olive with a collarAlso green, but darker. Some kind of fur,Or imitation fur: fine, weightless strandsStanding upright in a single proud wave.And then I smelt an unfamiliar smellOf citrus fruits and pine and sandy soil,And distantly the faintest trace of brineAnd dry sea wrack mixed with sweetish sea rush.All at once my head felt full of that aroma.I was drawn towards it like a small stoneTurning in the surf until I came close,Quite close, till the scent filled up my whole head,And mindlessly, my eyes closed, I immersedMy face in the fur and breathed in the scentUntil my skull was tingling, and the napeOf my neck too, and the room was silent:Only the swish of the breath in my headLeading the way to that seascape of scent.

And then I sensed a presence in the room.I turned. A woman was there, watching me,A stranger with eyes the colour of lichen,A grown-up, substantial woman of fortyWith lichen-coloured eyes. And so I smiled,And pulled myself together hastily.I smiled again and laughed an awkward laugh, And then I spoke: ‘If you’ll excuse me, please,I must get back to work. I really must.’

39

Falling out of the abyss · Sue Henderson

40

varje gång jag varnågon annanstansville jag döen längtan, en önskan.

En glädje att dö blandandra som jag.

Det var istället de som dogvarje gång, de som dog

och jag somnade underett täcke av löv,

på mitt huvud, ett täcke av lövoch trädkronor som växtein i varandrasträckte sig hela vägen nertill marken

skugga idet annarsstarka solskenet

[varje gång jag var] · Khashayar Naderehvandi

43

vertical realities: footholds

As a fragile, winged thing, verticality is finally delineated in the balancing act of the butterfly with its two wings, one pulling towards the ground, the other scanning aer-ial currents. Karin Boye, the Swedish poet who like Plath found the vertigo of life exhilarating but also unendurable, put her hand to this vertiginous sensation in her debut collection Clouds from 1922. Standing in the vault of the ‘world’s unlocked copper gate’, she reflects that ‘however deep I look, however far I look | my gaze receives no help below. | All that I know exists there no more–– | not great, not small––not life, not death’ so that ‘one single step on trackless path | and for me the return is closed...’ [1].

Roughly contemporaneous with Jolas’ Catholic Vertical-ism, Boye’s more sombre ‘Buddhist fantasy’ is aware of the dangers attending the dreamlike ascent, of losing one’s sense of footing on its pathless highways. She is at a conscious remove from the exaggerated gestures of any neo-Romanticism: with her we are no longer in the fin-dè-siecle of August Strindberg’s Inferno, enthralled to a Ni-etzschean seduction of diametrically opposed damnation and/or salvation, as Arthur Rimbaud ironically caricatures it in his A Season in Hell:

Theology is serious business: hell is absolutely down below––and heaven on high. ––Ecstasy, nightmare, sleep in a nest of flames’ [2].

With the visual art of sue Henderson and micHael grab, verticality becomes concerned with expressing tension and balance as well as grandeur. Henderson’s vertically

44

cropped images of ascending Cataract Gorge in Tasmania deliberately eschew the traditional horizontal viewpoint-perspectivism of landscape painting to simulate a partici-pation in––rather than picturesque rationalisation of––the sublime height prior to the hackneyed ‘view from the top’. What transpires is a close-up, so-called ‘aerial’ per-spective which is not Jolas’ sidereal vantage, but rather the way ‘we see through air––close up and with strong tonal contrasts...lighter and bluer in the distance’ [3]. This tac-tile ‘depth’ is not ‘raked out’ as on KirKPatricK’s infernal plane, but felt. It is the kinetic interstice of the vertical ex-perienced by the climber as she is literally within the ‘ver-tical plane’, suspended from ropes, surrounded by a space which to the viewer becomes visually ambiguous because of its perspectival realism: poised above a height or below a towering depth, as we see in Falling out of the abyss. The paint-ings capture the concentrated, physical reality of the verti-cal foreshadowed by Longinus’ description of the sublime as rhetorical ‘height or depth’ [4]. But in the twenty-first century this sublimity has become a tensed sequential point of viewing, clinging and climbing––the ‘horizon’ of the vertical endeavour.

In grab’s photographic recordings of balanced rocks, the camera has deceived us with a still life of inanimate ob-jects which were only stationary for a limited time frame, since the rocks are held together by nothing but the dy-namic adhesive of gravity, just as the climber is suspended in her ascent. grab’s arabesques, stacked as slight arpeg-gios or delicate cairns, belie Rameau’s confidence in the grounding quality of his ‘central’ chord. These structures of seeming stability are not the immovable balancing acts

45

of the arches of Utah but the ephemeral artifice of man, which, just like music, can fall, fail, and swindle––unless, that is, they rest in a vertical midpoint which is also a vor-tex: a whirling, spiralling centrum of gravitational com-motion. This vortex is Rimbaud’s ‘heaven on high’, but it is also the ‘midpoint’ of the world familiar to mysticism, where all latitude collapses into one intensive heart of di-vine Being––a cosmic scheme which runs below the su-perficially ‘serious business’ of theological Verticalism. In the ancient cosmology which informs Dante’s Commedia, the centre of Hell is synonymously its apex: the difference lies in the manner of approach.

These several realities of the vertical, drop-spindled, scan-ning and de-scaling, run through the pieces by the art-ists and poets in this collection. A midpoint torturously poised and circumvented, a point which becomes and yet remains, unravels yet turns against itself, iterates yet does not simulate: this was an image that also intrigued the philosopher Gaston Bachelard. It prompted him to argue that uniquely to humans, ‘the time of the person, vertical time, is discontinuous’ [5], consisting of super-imposed, balanced, moments, whose upward thrust con-stituted an ‘axis of liberation’ from the relentless (hori-zontal) flow of life. Vertical ‘pointillism’ was Bachelard’s riposte to the construal of time as experiential continuum, a theory greatly in vogue during the first half of the twen-tieth century, with advocates such as Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead. It is no coincidence that Eugene Jolas’ wife Maria was the English translator of Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. If to be in the ‘vertical dimension’ is to live against the horizontal grain of life, what matters is not

46

the temporal mode of execution along a given line, but the place where one is standing at the suspended, vertical moment.

What I hope can be gleaned, though, from a reading of Vertical realities is the impression neither of disconnected points emitting straight lines to be followed until they fail nor of an amorphous whirlpool of pure sensation, but of the winding vertices whose complicated chords, poised tip-toe against each other, explicate in a choreography of turning, vertigral, intensity.

[1] Karin Boye, En Buddhistisk fantasi [1922], in Karin Boye: Dikter. Stock-holm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1942, p. 12.

[2] Arhur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell. In Rimbaud Complete, Volume I: Po -etry and Prose, trans. Wyatt Watson (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 193–220.

[3] As discussed by the artist in a private correspondence. See also her ‘Constructing vertical visions: Cataract Gorge––a visual ex-ploration of place, space and perception’ (Ph. D. diss., Univerity of Tasmania, 2010).

[4] Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. A. O. Prickard. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), I. ii.

[5] Gaston Bachelard, La Dialectique de la durée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950 [1936]), 102–103

48

Biographies | Biografier

micHael grab lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he stumbled onto the art of rock balancing in the sum-mer of 2008. Since then he has attracted repeated visi-tors and sometimes small crowds while he performs, and has recently begun performing internationally. micHael maintains that stone balancing teaches the practitioner lessons through silence. Through manipulation of gravita-tional threads, the ancient stones become a poetic dance of form and energy, birth and death, perfection and imperfection.

signe n. Hammar debuted with Bladtätnad (Leafthick-ening) and also writes libretti for ensemble Dråpera. She attended Litterär Gestaltning and her work has previously appeared in Ord & Bild.

Michael grab bor i Boulder, Colorado, där han stötte på sten balanserandets konst under sommaren 2008. Sedan dess har han dragit till sig återkommande besökare och ibland smärre skaror medan han uppträder, och har nyligen börjat uppträda internationellt. Michael vidhåller att stenbalansering förmedlar lärdom till utövaren genom tystnad. Genom att manipulera gravitationstrådar blir de uråldriga stenarna till en poetisk dans av form och energi, födelse och död, fulländelse och ofullkomlighet.

Signe n. haMMar debuterade med Bladtätnad och skriver även libretti för ensemble Dråpera. Hon har gått Litterär Gestaltning och är tidigare publicerad i Ord & Bild.

49

sue Henderson is a visual artist, educator and rock climber in Launceston, Tasmania. Her PhD study ‘Constructing vertical visions: Cataract Gorge—a visual exploration of space, place and percep-tion’ explored the expe-rience and perceptions of the climber in the construction of paint-ings. Paintings reproduced in this anthology are from this investigation of verticality, perception and place. Sue is an academic at the Tasmanian College of the Arts, University of Tasmania, Launceston.

elisabetH HjortH was born in Ramkvilla in Småland, but now lives in Uppsala. She is active as a literary critic and teaches at the Biskops-Arnös writers’ program, whilst also re-searching a doctoral thesis on literature and resistance. She has contributed to a number of journals, such as Ord & Bild, 10tal, and

Sue henderSon är bildkonstnär, pedagog och bergsklättrare i Launceston, Tasmanien. Hennes doktorsavhandling, ‘‘Constructing vertical visions: Cataract Gorge—a visual exploration of space, place and perception” utforskade bergsklättrarens upplevelser och varseblivning genom att studera hur målningar är uppbyggda. Målningarna reproducerade i antologin är tagna från denna utforskning av vertikalitet, varseblivning, och rymd. Sue är akademiker vid Tasmanian College of the Arts, Tasmaniens universitet, Launceston.

eliSabeth hjorth är född i småländska Ramkvilla och bosatt i Uppsala. Hon är verksam som litteraturkritiker och undervisar på Biskops-Arnös författar-utbildning, samt arbetar med en avhandling om litteratur och motstånd. Hon har medverkat i en rad tidskrifter som Ord & Bild, 10tal och Bang. Våren 2008 debuterade hon med diktsamlingen Kärn-

50

Bang. In the spring of 2008 she debuted with the po-etry collection Kärnfamiljen (Nuclear Family). Her first novel, the critically ac-claimed Hängivelsen (Ravish-ment), appeared in 2011. 

robin KirKPatricK is professor emeritus of Italian and English Litera-ture at the University of Cambridge. He has written extensively on Dante, Shakespeare and Renais-sance culture. His verse translation of Dante’s Commedia, published by Penguin, has appeared over the last eight years in a variety of formats.

simone KotVa writes, reflects and reads at the University of Cambridge, where she is pursuing a doctorate on the relation-ship between repetition and reciprocity. Among her current projects are a children’s book and a resourcing of theological vitalism.

familjen och hennes första roman, den kritikerrosade Hängivelsen, utkom 2011.

robin kirkpatrick är professor emeritus i italiensk och engelsk litteratur vid Cambridge uni-versitet. Han har skrivit vitt och brett om Dante, Shakespeare och renässanskultur. Hans versöver-sättning av Dantes Commedia, utgiven av Penguin, har över de senaste åtta åren kommit ut i en mängd olika format.

SiMone kotVa skriver, re-flekterar och läser vid Cambridge universitet, där hon doktorerar på förhållandet mellan repetition och reciprocitet. För tillfället arbetar hon även med en barnbok och en historik om teologisk vitalism.

51

KHasHayar nadereHVandi is a poet. He debuted in 2011 with the poetry collection Om månen alls syntes (If the moon was but visible). During the spring of 2013 he will be releas-ing his new novel Vilar i era outtröttliga händer (Resting in your indefatigable hands). 

alice tarbucK graduated from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, with an MPhil in Medieval Literature. Her writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including [no definition] and The Phoenix. She has per-formed work for Inky Fin-gers and Rally and Broad. She is from Scotland, and lives in London.

Pär tHörn is a writer and musician resident in Berlin. His latest publication is the book dräl with Storno Förlag. 

khaShayar naderehVandi är poet. Han debuterade 2011 med diktboken Om månen alls syntes. Under våren 2013 är han aktuell med romanen Vilar i era outtröttliga händer.

alice tarbuck tog en masters-examen i medeltidslitteratur från Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Hennes författande har givits ut i ett antal publikationer, bl.a. [no definition] och The Phoenix. Hon har upp-trätt för Inky Fingers och Rally the Road. Alice kommer från Skottland, och bor i London.

pär thörn är författare och musiker bosatt i Berlin. Senast utkom han med boken dräl på Storno Förlag. 

52

After writing a doctoral thesis on eighteenth-centu-ry poetry at Balliol College, Oxford, Paul Williamson lectured for several years at the University of Vienna. He has published widely on literary, art-historical and musical topics, includ-ing Gainsborough’s Vision, a groundbreaking study of the artist.

Efter att ha doktorerat i sjutton-hundratalets poesi vid Balliol College, Oxford, föreläste paul WilliaMSon under flera år på Wiens universitet. Han har skrivit omfattande om litteratur, konsthistoria och musik; bl.a. Gainsborough’s Vision, en banbrytande studie av konstnären.

Ə