olya
salimova
rememberings
performance with Timothy Fawkes, 15 min
Chicago Artists Coalition, Chicago, IL
The relations of poetry are revealed through sound, aural images, the living voice, and all the other modalities poetry is able to gather and use. Poetry is a remembering of tongue, to paraphrase Jacques Roubaud.
Eleni Sikelianos
“give me waves that carry the past tubes so fine that they
suck in the least extricable of moments (the chromatic escalade
of remembrance) give me moving backdrops films
furs paintbrushes of photons characters tastes give me
markings never before used”
_E_ by Jacques Roubaud
rememberings could also be called anamnesis. which is a term both theological and philosophical. In Platonic philosophy, anamnesis is used for recollection of a prior life. the word consists of two parts – ana and men. while men only means – “to think”, ana has a range of meanings, including "up," "on," "upon," "throughout," "back," and "again”. somehow, it is linked with a meaning of “equal quantity”. perhaps, this is because it implies a distribution "up to.” in old medical prescriptions, the symbol āā or āa for ana used to indicate "an equal quantity of each".
because anamnesis allows to both think back and to think in equal measure upwards and backwards, its architecture sprawls in at least two directions on a time-mental plane. time is best materialized in music where such qualities of time as duration, rhythm, measure, intervals, repetitions are made into the matter of sound waves. on a mental plane, there are fragmental reminiscences of the past in a form of poetry. but I am not always interested in my own history. what interests me is the collective memory, knowledge and experiences carried in texts. so, many poems points of departure are someone else’s observations, believes and dreams.
all photographs by Lillian Heredia