Works of Simple Witnessing, and Other News

An 1861 lithograph of the Great Fire of London

 

• The “Art Under Trump” essays have been coming fast and loose all week. Today, Margaret Atwood weighs in, sounding a bit leery, a bit tired of wondering what will come of it all. Even as she endorses certain creative forms over others (sorry, satirists) Atwood suggests that artists might be powerless to curb their own suppression. Keep your eyes open, write down what you see, and maybe take out a safe-deposit box: “Some will produce ‘witness art,’ like those artists who have responded to great catastrophes: wars, earthquakes, genocides. Surely the journal-keepers are already at work, inscribing events and their responses to them, like those who kept accounts of the Black Death until they themselves succumbed to it; or like Anne Frank, writing her diary from her attic hiding place; or like Samuel Pepys, who wrote down what happened during the Great Fire of London. Works of simple witnessing can be intensely powerful … American artists and writers have seldom been shy about exploring the fissures and cracks in their own country. Let’s hope that if democracy implodes and free speech is suppressed, someone will record the process as it unfolds.”

• The fourth and final volume of Beckett’s letters is here, covering 1966 to 1989, which means it contains Beckett’s musings on 1968 (“was ever such rightness joined to such foolishness?”), surviving tragedy (“don’t give up that bottle, whatever you do”) and, naturally, death. David Wheatley writes, “As the light dwindles, however, the real pleasure lies in the ‘black diamonds of pessimism,’ to borrow a phrase from the early work Dream of Fair to Middling Women, in which much that is moving and memorable about these letters crystallizes. ‘Dans vos ruines je me sens à mon aise,’ he tells Cioran in 1969, acknowledging receipt of Le Mauvais Demiurge. To Lawrence Shainberg in 1979, Beckett confesses the ‘preposterous conviction’ that ‘here in the end is the last & by far best chance for the writer.’ ‘I work on, with failing mind, in other words improved possibilities,’ he tells Herbert Myron in 1980, relishing his receding prospects. ‘I try to think,’ he writes in Watt-like cadences to Franz Wurm, also in 1980, ‘with what mind remains, that now is the time at last, the chance at last, in these remains, with those remains, though think is not the word, at last not the word.’ ”

• Looking for an explanation, any explanation, for the president-elect’s (alleged) urine fixation, Sam Kriss stumbles onto some very apt Freud: “Extant legends … leave us in no doubt about the original phallic interpretation of the tongues of flame stretching upwards. Extinguishing a fire by urinating on it … was therefore like a sexual act performed with a man, an enjoyment of male potency in a homosexual rivalry … It is remarkable too how regularly analytic findings testify to the link between ambition, fire, and urinal eroticism.”

• And while we’re on the potent power of liquids, Emmanuel Iduma has brought this exchange to my attention: “One day at dinner, while Manthia Diawara was making One World in Relation, his film on Édouard Glissant, the filmmaker turned to the philosopher and asked, ‘How can I simplify your ideas for a wider audience?’ Glissant looked at him and smiled. ‘If I were you, I would wait until we were in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, then point the camera at the mass of water, its abyssal expanse. And that would be the whole film in one shot.’ The ocean is the world, without partition and division, only depth and expanse. Because of its depth, it serves as a burial place. So if you point a camera at a mass of water, you get an opaque representation, of gods and languages and objects and songs, everything thrown in with bodies from the West African coast. The opacity of the sea is therefore its rich, dangerous promise. Some will drown, and some will reach harbor.”

• Amid the continuing unrest in Cairo, Yasmine El Rashidi recommends The Last Days of the City, the debut of the Egyptian filmmaker Tamer El Said: “Floating between fiction and autobiography, In the Last Days of the Cityis inevitably about real people and events in various ways, using Tamer’s own family and friends as well as professional actors. It follows Khaled, a young Cairene filmmaker, as he goes about his days, struggling to make his first film … In the Last Days of the City is beautifully rendered, capturing at once the energy of Cairo, and also its particular, defining light—grainy and filtered, much like faded Kodak photographs from the eighties. Indeed, each scene in the film is framed and captured as if in a snapshot; for all the apparent entropy of Khaled’s existence, every moment is carefully chosen.”

from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2iFi054