Issue 30: Sleepwalkers
Medieval carving, Nineties arthouse, somnambulist fiction, solitary retreat, human monuments
In my childhood home there is a chunk of carved stone dating from the 12th century. It depicts Eve and the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, divided by the Tree of Knowledge. Eve is crouched behind the tree and appears to grip its trunk in fear. The Serpent, coiled as if ready to strike, glares directly at the viewer. The scene is chiselled from coarse, tan-coloured sandstone, letterbox in shape and remarkably heavy. The back of it is worn shapeless, but the carved face is beautifully preserved. A medievalist we met dated the piece and identified it as part of the lip of a baptismal font. He theorized that the font had been vandalized during the dissolution of the English monastaries in the 1530s. Our chunk had fallen face-down into the rubble. Soil preserved the carving for centuries, while its verso, exposed to the elements, eroded to formless anonymity, hiding its identity in the earth.
The carving always makes me think of Rip Van Winkle, asleep for years then waking up to a changed world. England was deeply, violently, religious when this fragment was buried in the ground. When it came up for air in the 20th century, aftershocks from the Reformation could still be detected—in Northern Ireland, in the fact of a state church—but almost everything else had altered beyond imagination.
Sleep is the fate of most artworks. When they’re made, and only if they’re lucky, they receive applause for topicality, spark hearty debate, inspire magazine articles about the maker’s favourite designers and recipes for world peace. If doubly lucky an artwork can make a lasting impression on its period of facture and become one of those paintings or songs that TV documentaries use as shorthand to denote a decade’s upheavals. For most, however, the fizz dies away until only the artist and their most devoted followers care for the thing in question. Years, decades, pass in dormancy, at best spent being taken-for-granted, until something about the artwork begins to appear fresh to new eyes. (Note the excitement, for instance, about the Ed Ruscha retrospective that has just opened at MoMA in New York. I’m excited too. I love his work. But I can’t recall the last time a friend mentioned his paintings in conversation.) Like one of those rare plants that only flowers every few years, the artwork blooms into relevance again. The artist wonders what everyone had been thinking all these years, why the sudden interest, how nice it will be to have a flush bank account for once. (I think here of a Bedwyr Williams drawing which depicts an older artist looking uncomfortable as an ambitious younger curator takes a selfie with them.) The word ‘legacy’ gets thrown about. Claims are made about how those of us with taste and discernment had loved the work all along, about how ignorant our predecessors were for neglecting it.
These days ‘legacy’ is one of those words, like ‘classic’ or ‘heritage,’ that were once used by historians but are now found on egg-cartons and in the kinds of restaurants where they “tell you about the menu.” A word, like many of the kindest and strongest ones, that has been ruined by inflation, that could do with a long rest. Despite the fact that such rediscoveries happen privately every day to a person, to an artwork somewhere in the world, today’s reissue-industrial complex can seem like we are living in an era of historical strip-mining and I find myself getting stuck on easy phrases such as ’lost classic.’ Lost when? How? Never-found-in-the-first-place is often more accurate.
Just like everyone else, I enjoy this kind of rediscovery process only for the purest, most virtuous reasons. Nothing to do with the self-isolating pleasure of ignoring what everyone else is talking about, of wanting to evangelize the obscure. I experienced it recently with the work of director Hal Hartley. When his films emerged in the early 1990s—movies such as The Unbelievable Truth, Flirt, Amateur, and Henry Fool—he epitomized American arthouse cool. His world was peopled by stylish but troubled eccentrics. These characters could seem remote and awkward, but at the same time Hartley gave his films an oddball warmth and anxious humour, as if to bring the audience closer. (Adrienne Shelly, playing a young woman perpetually distracted by her fear of nuclear armaggedon in The Unbelievable Truth, is a great example.) The dialogue was sharp and served in arch and highly-controlled bites of self-awareness. Deadpan. Lots of poignant… space… between each line. The kind of acting which, to those of us watching from afar, could make you imagine that everyone in New York City read Brecht for breakfast and lived in the Wooster Group’s SoHo theatre. Hartley made imaginative use of an ensemble cast of then up-and-coming actors, including Martin Donovan, Michael Imperioli, Elina Löwensohn, Parker Posey, Adrienne Shelly. Occasionally they burst into song and dance. His soundtracks were beautiful, written by Hartley under the name Ned Rifle—hints of Philip Glass, rousing, mysterious—and also featured songs by musicians such as Liz Phair, My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth.
When I saw Hartley’s films in the 1990s I liked them. But I only got their mood and not their meaning. Then the times moved on. The movie business changed. Different flavours of filmmaking came into fashion. Nobody was yet nostalgic for 1990s New York—post-9/11, perhaps a little—because they were too busy being nostalgic for 1970s New York. (They still are.) Hartley continued to make films—from the ‘lost’ artist’s point of view it’s the world, not them, that disappears—which were crowdsourced from fans. He kept a following but his name seemed to drop from sight. I didn’t think about these films for 25 years.
This week, the Criterion Channel launched a season devoted to Hartley’s work. By coincidence, I had watched Amateur earlier this summer. It tells the story of Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert) who meets Thomas (Martin Donovan) in a coffee shop. She is struggling to write a dirty story for a porn magazine. He has just woken up in an alleyway with amnesia. (It’s the famous Staple Street alley in TriBeCa, which also, coincidentally, opens Chantal Akerman’s News from Home and Jim Jarmusch’s Permanent Vacation.) Isabelle attempts to help Thomas recover his identity. Meanwhile, porn actress Sofia (Elina Löwensohn)—seen in the opening moments of the film with Thomas’s unconscious body on the street—is on the run from a criminal group, after she threatened to blackmail its shadowy boss. Their net is closing on her when she crosses paths with Thomas and Isabelle. Isabelle, Sofia and Thomas must now come to terms with the terrible past Thomas is only beginning to recall.
I don’t know why I came back to this film. I had likely seen the director’s name in a book, thought my god I haven’t thought about Hal Hartley for a while, which triggered a memory of the 1990s, which sent me in search of a mood I wanted to feel again. As the opening credits played, I was transported. Donovan and his suits! Huppert the wayward nun! Parker Posey and Dwight Ewell squatting the West Side piers! Pamela Stewart, the over-empathic cop! The mannered acting! That music! Its style and artifice seemed alive again. I wanted its moral ambivalences. I wanted SoHo in 35mm. Nostalgia, yes, but nostalgia isn’t always about wanting to return somewhere. It can be the desire to put something from the past in useful combination with the present. I wanted a film about what happens when the world turns while your face is buried in the dirt.
Dialogue with a Somnambulist is the title of a new collection of short works by Chloe Aridjis. The book brings together stories and essays that date back to her debut story ‘The Kafka Society’ in 2005. Many first appeared in literary magazines or exhibition catalogues, and each has floated alone through time, no doubt changing weight of meaning for the author, disappearing then resurfacing as a new reader discovers them. Sleep is a recurring theme in Aridjis’s work. She suffers from insomnia—one of the stories, ‘In the Arms of Morpheus,’ is even set in a sleep lab—and her writing has a powerful dreamlike quality, a strange yet agile logic, as if yearning to be in a state she cannot quite enter, as if always stuck in an hypnagogic antechamber just out of rest’s reach. Dreaming being able to dream. Insomnia seems to prime Aridjis to notice anomalous events occuring at the corner of her eye, to note what happens in shadow, to speculate about the secret lives of strangers she sees on the street. (In his introduction to the collection, Tom McCarthy suggests that the author’s upbringing partly explains her interest in thresholds: “Born to the Mexican son of a wandering Greek and the expat Jewish daughter of second-generation immigrant New Yorkers; raised in a set of transfers between Manhattan, The Hague and Bern; steeped in French literature in New England and English subculture in Mexico City; writing in English although bilingual”.)
In the book’s title story, ‘Dialogue with a Somnabulist,’ the narrator falls for a wax statue resembling Cesare, the sleepwalker from Robert Wiene’s silent film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. This somnambulist is “seven or eight feet tall, with jet-black hair matted to his forehead”, eyes lined with “thick strokes of charcoal,” sharp cheekbones, “black turtleneck, black leggings, hips narrower than shoulders […] like a dormant mime.” He decorates a hidden bar in Berlin. The narrator has a friend who buys the Somnambulist waxwork for her as a gift. Like a kind of domesticated golem, the Somnambulist comes alive and performs tasks for the narrator around her home, shares in awkward intimacies, but becomes withdrawn when she and her friend begin a real, flesh-and-blood love affair. The statue is donated to a waxworks museum, with fateful consequences.
The story might be read as a parable about idealizing art. The Somnabulist is discovered in a bar filled with models of monsters and mechanical grotesques. It’s run by a woman who plays gypsy punk music and Einstürzende Neubauten records. Aridjis’s descriptions evoke a Berlin that could be straight out of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, or a romance between the Weimar avant-garde and 1980s West German post-punk scenes. It’s a romance of place that feels familiar to me, a combination of a period that I may have brushed against with one that predates my existence. But the narrator discovers that she can’t inhabit an ideal. She works at a furniture store not in underground punk bohemia. She can’t love a waxwork, can’t live inside a German Expressionist film. Those touchstones only retain their power if she remains awake to her present, lets them live in her imagination rather than tries to force them into being.
A few years ago, thanks to artists Tyler Coburn and Ian Hatcher, I took part in an experiment in remote viewing. A group of us assembled in a room at Triangle Arts in downtown Brooklyn where, using pencil, paper and clay, we were guided through a set of exercises in astral travel. In the 1970s, the US government developed a covert programme, named Stargate, that trained people to develop psychic powers for military purposes. Remote viewers allegedly used clairvoyance to spy on enemy defence sites located thousands of miles away. Their reports were given in the form of written descriptions, drawings and clay sculptures. For Coburn and Hatcher, both ESP skeptics, remote viewing provided an allegory for contemporary surveillance: the ‘black box’ of data harvesting, our sense of always being watched, assessed, categorized. But it also made for a lucid illustration of the artistic process, the back-and-forth between an engagement with the world—gathering experiences and source material—then withdrawal, sequestration, in order to make something from it. (Productivity can come with loneliness: I just finished Steven Millhauser’s poignant novella The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne, which tells the story of an artist working in the early, heady days of the animated cartoon, whose devotion to his laborious craft comes at the expense of his marriage and friendships.) I was pleased with the drawing I made during my group remote viewing session—it looked like Los Angeles as seen from an aeroplane—but the real ‘target’ of the session was the group itself, a lesson in constructing and directing truth for each other.
Coburn is always a surprising artist, with each new project conceptually distinct from the last. Earlier this year, he published the book Solitary. It’s the result of an unusual group writing project he staged in South Korea at a facility called Happitory, located in the countryside east of Seoul. Happitory—a portmanteau of ‘happiness’ and ‘factory’ in its English translation—offers visitors a range of programmes that allow them to disengage from the pressures of life for short periods. One of these is solitary confinement: 24 hours locked in a cell, with no electronic devices, only food, bedding, pajamas, yoga mat, tea-set, and writing materials.
The programme affords “freedom through restriction,” as Coburn puts it, underscoring the Happitory founders’ view that “we all live within restrictions,” and that there are psychological or social prisons within us. “For the duration of our stay,” Coburn writes, “we live inside ourselves living inside a concretized version of ourselves. We are doubly imprisoned, trapped inside a redundancy,” inside what has already happened to us. Following his own experience at Happitory, Coburn invited nine colleagues, all based in Korea, to visit, and for each one of them to produce a piece of writing while locked in their cell.
Happitory sounds, on the face of things, like wellness in bad taste. Pay to enjoy the tortures that tens of thousands of incarcerated people experience daily. Coburn acknowledges this. “It would be reckless to call this writing process “liberating,” he writes, “or claim that my confinement felt freeing, as so little of my experience approximated that of an actual prisoner. I chose to enter Happitory’s “prison.” I had the privilege of leaving at any time by pressing a panic button in my room.” Coburn explains that one of the facility’s founders, Jihyang Noh, has worked for many years with the incarcerated, and brings groups of juvenile offenders to Happitory—not, presumably, for solitary confinement—in order to work on positive rather than punitive forms of rehabiliation.
Solitary makes for fascinating reading. Among the contributors is Min Kyoung-Lee, an artist who has made a number of studies of how people seek spiritual enlightement. She treats Happitory as a monastic experience, akin to specific Buddhist methods of retreat. Min goes in alert and vigilant, attempting to observe changes in perception within herself, waiting for a “mental break” with her usual thought structures. By the time the door is unlocked, she has given up and relaxed. Things have become “amusing and light, like in the days of [her] childhood.”
Jaeyeon Chung and Russell Mason, a couple, are locked up at the same time. To pass the time Jaeyeon tries to recall a song she was taught at school. It’s titled ‘Nostalgia’ and her memory of it is hazy. Her thoughts turn to her husband, in a nearby cell, and to what she’s observed of his meditation practice. How it changes him, how he becomes a different person after he goes on meditation retreat each summer. These thoughts lead her back to the problem of her own busy mind. Meanwhile, Russell diarizes his attempt to record the meditation process. He doesn’t mention his wife.
Then there is Kyungmook Kim, an artist, who spent 15 months in actual solitary confinement as a conscientious objector to national service. He found Happitory tranquil. “I felt keenly how much this place was unlike my former prison cell, where I woke up to the propaganda music of the Ministry of Justice” rather than the gentle theme to My Neighbor Totoro, his alarm at Happitory. During his stay he turns to Reflections from Prison, a 1988 book by pro-democracy prisoner of conscience Shin Young-Bok, which Kyungmook had read while behind bars. One sentence in particular comes back to him, a line he had repeated to himself hundreds of times while in prison: “Today is just the day I wait for tomorrow. Today is yesterday’s tomorrow, and tomorrow is just tomorrow’s today.”
My girlfriend and I visited my family in England last month. One afternoon we took a walk with my dad ‘Up Top,’ the nickname we used to give for a farm that overlooks the village where I grew up. I used to walk Up Top regularly as a child. We knew the farmer, who let us walk his fields to look for fragments of roof tile and other artefacts from the Roman-era villa and Anglo-Saxon cemetery that once occupied the hill. Up Top, a narrow, dusty track banded by grass verges, cuts along the crest of a hill. Fields slope down from either side of the path. To the east, the county falls open to lowland fields, smeared brown and yellow in late summer, that stretch for miles to the distant edge of the shire. A tinnitus sizzle comes off the nearby A40 motorway that cuts a notch in the Chiltern Hills on its route to London. In the middle distance are the bright white sails of a windmill in the next village along. On an adjacent hilltop, a bristle of poplars makes the landscape look more French than English. On a clear day, you can see Wittenham Clumps to the south, a pair of tall wooded hills that the painter Paul Nash used to describe as ‘pyramids in England.’
During our walk we scanned the path for interesting stones and for orange-red fragments of tile poking out of the dirt. Dad reminded me of something that happened one summer holiday when I was a child. We had gone Up Top with a packed lunch. Sat on the grass verge, eating our sandwiches, a man approached us along the track. He was wearing old-fashioned hiking gear, carried a rucksack on his back and in his hand a wooden staff. He stopped to say hello and rest for a moment. Dad asked where he was going. The man explained that he was following the old pilgrimage route to Dorchester, some ten miles south, near Whittenham Clumps. Dorchester was the site of a powerful Christian abbey until the Reformation, the same period our carving of Eve and the Serpent was broken from the font it had decorated. Dad observed that our meeting had been repeating itself for centuries along this path. The size of the fields had since gotten bigger. The motorway, electrical pylons, had arrived in the landscape. A light aircraft buzzed high above us. But a pilgrim, a couple of locals eating bread by the side of the road, the Clumps and the Abbey rippling in the summer heat haze: these things were unchanged. Last month I was able to articulate what I had only sensed in that moment as a child. It was like something taken straight out of an Alan Garner novel. The meeting had been the inverse of going to visit an historical monument, a castle, say, or a stone circle. We were the monument. Fragments of something bigger dropped into the earth.
RECOMMENDATIONS
—Dennis Harte recorded ‘Summer’s Over’ when he was a teenager in the early 1970s. I don’t know much more about it than that, other than it’s a miserably perfect song for September.
—Another teenage curiosity: Shira Small, who grew up in East Harlem, recorded the haunting and metaphysically-tinged ‘Eternal Life’ while attending a Quaker school in Pennsylvania in 1974, with the encouragment of her music teacher. “When I was younger, I could do a great Joni Mitchell imitation,” she said in interview a couple of years ago. “I used to really nail it.” If Shira had become as famous as Joni, we might have been able to witness thousands of people singing in unison, at some huge music festival, the classic pop lyric: “eternal life is the intersection of the line of time in the plane of now (we live forever).”
—New York’s Film Forum is running a season devoted to the early days of 3-D film in 1950s Hollywood. A raft of big name directors made 3-D movies, including Alfred Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk. Remarkably, two of them—Raoul Walsh and Andre de Toth—each only had one functioning eye, so couldn’t experience the 3-D effect.
—Shout-out to my friend Geoff Cox for putting me onto this short documentary about the great Australian author Gerald Murnane. The film brings out Murnane’s modesty as a writer, and captures his remarkably detailed description of an imaginary horse-racing league he created.
—Sean Howe’s action-packed, head-melting new head-history, Agents of Chaos: Thomas King Forçade, High Times, and the Paranoid End of the 1970s, tells the story of the contrarian prankster-activist Forçade, who ran the Underground Press Syndicate in the 1960s before founding, in 1974, the pro-pot magazine High Times. The future Forçade predicted has, sort of, arrived, and Howe is a superb writer, so read an excerpt here or buy the book for your most paranoid friends and that special FBI informer in your life.
—This Kelly Lee Owens and John Cale song came out a couple of years ago, but every time I use a toaster I think of this video: