p e r f o r a t i o n s 18

RELICS

Call For Submissions

Richard Gess (libgess@emory.lib)

Robert Cheatham (zeug@pd.org)

ruins

status of the past in a culture that lives increasingly in the future

status of the object/aura/etc

'life' as relic and/or 'death' as relic

RICHARD:

As far as RELICS: ideas for contributions--something insome format (visual or verbal) about the ghosts incorporated inneighborhoods--not new housing but the 30-100 yr.-old worlds most people inside the perimeter live in--worlds whose creators and originalinhabitants have long since vanished, leaving traces that define thepresent--not just the housing stock but the whole environment. A 50 yr. old neighborhood, like mine, is a set from 1948 that serves, without much real change, as the set for today. We live in the shells left by our predecessors, and carry out our lives on their overwritten but still prescriptive map. Graffiti from 1929 is still calling attention to itself in the sidewalk everyone takes today to get to the bus stop. Phone numbers with two-letter prefixes and four digits are still visible on my basement wall, pencilled there before anyone in the house was born.

ROBERT:

I'd like to simultaneously widen it out, historically and temporally (relic as burnished--ie slightly effaced but ALSO brightened--fetish, as murmur which, subliminally as it were, directs the present course, as you put it so well with the shell analogy) as light from stars, destroyed now perhaps, provide illumination as message as mystery but GONE, anchored by nothing but its flourescing evanescence, walking skeletons seemingly rattling in closets everywhere now while reliquaries (museums, castles of the Mask of the Red Death) become increasingly airtight (and I am of the opinion that relics have to breathe also -- perhaps not oxygen though perhaps some other- dimensional blend of dustmotes in the ray of those aforementioned stars, feebled yet febrile quantum energies pulsating thru the floorboards of those old houses (I was born in 1948 by the way--date of founding of Israel and publication of claude shannon's seminal paper of information theory)

also: relic as ridgeline, the visible joining of separate realms, scar, cicatrix, suture, a raising-up, just as christ's promise to 'rise up' finally uniting the two realms, in fact the whole of history is covered with preemptory or propaedeuctic risings, goose bumps as it were, on the historical field, bits and pieces of bone, leather, blood, finger joints, circumcisions breaking through the flesh of 'history'---and now that eruptive quality resides where? It doesn't seem like there ARE any 'deep' eruptions, ontological eruptions, (Relics of the True Cross? now, only relics of crossings...) any more, only scribblings in the basements, the afflatus of temporaneity: schrunken relics yet still hobbled around our ankles, passed on from the original 'big bang' of the era of the inception of the great religions, at least passed on in form, the form become the bony pointing finger encased in a velvet box...but what is the FORM of the relic---the revenant, pure ghost, geist, breath, transmitting itself thru the mute exigencies of matter now BUT becoming vocal and visible for a fraction of a second, like new particles coming into existence? maybe even being forced to confess by techno relic hunters....Relic-ed matter put in the truth chair, administered serum (physicist: "Shroud of Turin, where WERE you on such a such a day...ve haf vays to make you talk...")

trauma and relics are intimately related. The basis for trauma is a gap or delay. Often the original event can not be 'seen' in its violent import, so that only at a later date does registration of the event happen. and of course trauma means 'wound' in its greek origin, the only recognizable physical relic being the scar that forms after the event. And it takes trauma to CREATE a relic, to sphacelate the part from the whole...It would seem that all relics have the same ontological relationship as bone to flesh.

Relics maintain as an originary stamp, this temporal gapping, a delay necessary, as in a spark plug, for the formation of uncanny energies which act to 'supercharge' matter...at least as it circulates in the socius. ( This 'uncanny supercharging' requires no transcendent entities (doesn't exclude them, but doesn't necessitate them either)...only a metonymic doubling, its reduced doppleganger (wood from the cross, veronica's cloth..but ALSO Dracula's soil from his native land, maybe even Dracula himself, relic of some hindbrain phantasmagoria as it sutures night/day, life/death, past/future...same with the X-man for that matter.)

Revenge of the Relic:

s. spielberg's THE POLTERGEIST--thought of it apropo yr house story

RICHARD:

I think the notion of "supercharging" is very important here--especially when we enter the realm of created relics, things we make because no trace or fragment of theoriginal remains identifiable for veneration. Thinking of this via a book,3 or 4 years old now, by Geoff Dyer called *The Missing of the Somme,* an extended meditation on the structures of rememberance created in the wake of World War I, especially around the Western Front, where cemeteries, shrines, and huge memorial structures pervade the landscape all up and down the former trench lines. Much of the energy was expended on memorializing the missing, seeing as the conditions of the conflict had a bad tendency to either drown the combatants in mud or blow them apart so throughly that little was left, besides their absence at roll call, to remember anyone by. There is still ongoing care and maintenance of the cemeteries and shrines, and no end is in sight or under consideration. These are the consensual reliquaries; in parallel, French and Belgian farmers, roadbuilders, foundation excavators, etc. still turn up tons of unexploded ordnance and lots of occasionally identifiable human remains every year, all of which are disposed of without fanfare...trying to remember the other book I read recently about the survival through time offormer war zones, detailing the continuing finds on the Western Front and other places, including the fields in the former Sov. Union where trapped Wehrmacht regiments froze to death en masse; strollers today walk through acres of exposed skeletons, rusting gear, etc. None of which are known to most survivors in Germany. The villagers in the Ukraine just spit on the stuff; for them its good riddance. Anyway what this is about is examples of the necessity of injecting that charge to make a relic a relic: the marble lists of names at Vimy Ridge are the cathedral of the missing, the actual bones of the missing discovered during road grading are a small public health problem, with a small bureau on call to take care of it. The scars are where we choose to wear them? No transcendent entities necessary, just community agreement.

ROBERT:

Relic as persistence. a persistence which leaves room for vengence,ressentiment, expiation, the enactments of fate (inserted in the marrow of the saved severed digit, henceforth forever pointing BACKWARD: miracle stories both sacred and profane often show as dubious the showering of munificence by relics--God's grace, preordination, predestination can be unwanted and uninvited. Set free of such ironclad 'grace' and 'mercy' we have merely the sorcerer's apprentice--technology--the relic as inescapable conclusion, technological imperative...or Aladdin's lamp, with it's three wishes, the first two errant, the last erasing the previous two, sending the unlucky recipient BACK to her original state.) In that sense, the relic, of whatever 'religious' orientation partakes always more of the pagan and the ancient Greek 'middle ground' of the daemonic [midway, in the air as it were, between god(s) and men] than any churchified sanctimony. The opposite of nihilism, the 'philosophy' of the relic, whether the intimate knowing of the fetisher, the instrumental efficacy of the sacred relic, or the disjointed leftovers of a postmodern age, leaves nothing behind: each part saved fans open into the POTENTIALITY of a state of grace, full re-membering, salvation though the worm hole.

.......

Relics--increasingly, plastic casings, computer chips, prefab homes, cars (how can these possibly be relics??!), all the detritus of a society for which nothing new is ever new enough--no longer have the sublime gaze of the distance looking back at one (age, time, space, vast separation) compressed into a fold, a crack). Rather, 'relics' now have an insufferable closeness about them, the blank stare of an idiot savant, the automatism of pure calculability, its gap-toothed grin of broken agency being its only familiar component. "Relics' now maintain half-life relationships to discernability (unlike previous relics where, inversely, unfathomable distance ruled in the smallest gap [benjaminian gaze]) As a consequence, relics always remained apparently outside (another lineage to techne)--outside of the body, outside of time, shivered to occupy the smallest (supercharged) space, their force always a consequence of this unconquerable, unbridgeable gap (but which the relic always PROMISES to deliver by the EVIDENCE which it self-produces. The status of the relic is always dependent on the status of 'evidence'. Evidence is now a suspect category in some arenas. In a postmodern world of the event and its shadow, and the confusion over which is which, the evident relic is mutable, contradictory, has a high refractive index.).

Now the relic is firmly planted 'inside', is debris (even abject--tibia and fibia protruding from the battlefield soil) as soon as it comes into existence 'there'. Does anyone seriously doubt that every object now comes into existence virtually still-borne, expiration date stamped on the forehead? (Perhaps that's the new meaning of the hebrew 'TRUTH' engraved on the golem's forehead--the 'truth' of an object's coming to be is it's passing away, then veneration of mute matter's dessication that allows it to pass through time, expanding at its destination [ie, consciousness].)

One of the most phenomenologically pronounced effect of this internalization of the relic (even the body seems on its way to becoming a 'relic') is a displacement, a doubling whose main comportment could be called 'uncanny'......'un-homed' thought, nomadic thought, thought becoming other than itself, thought running in place beside itself; even thought becomes a relic, a vestige redolent of signification but incomprehensible 'ultimately'. (Is even the 'Ultimate' now a relic, a metaphysical vista only available as a contingent shard, 3k background radiation?)

(In the future, always coming, the word becomes an image, becomes obsolete, becomes revenant, heir to paleo-logic, a left over from the time when language could leave, go out and be transformed and come back. Now language no longer leaves but circles as broken code, reliquary of [ultimate] meaning.)

so: two things (at least) coming to odds--everything is on the road to the relic--and nothing seems (yet) capable of making it cross the border, either to 'finally' disappear or be 'totally' reconstituted. These two slots correspond roughly to a circumscribed scientific world view and a more 'ontological' rendition: relics are mere evidence in the first instance of matter's relationship with itself. In the second, they function as evidence of matter's relationship with consiousness (notwithstanding the chiasmatic turnings which 'evidence' goes through at the hands of both--so called 'postmodernism' and its significant other(s)--which threatens to illuminate evidence till it chars and disappears/evinesces/ashes-- or to ignore the possibility of the 'judgement of matter' (evidence) even as one views it through the bars.)

At any rate, the relic waits, co-terminous with time even as it attempts to subtly cruise 'through' it ... yet strangely anxious.