Thee Display, Nora Collen
Fulton
DOCUMENTS, 2020
Then the philosopher Eudoxus of Cnidus wrote a book about the constellations, said to be part psychology, part mathematics, part guide to maritime economics. It was lost.
Then the poet Aratus turned the social memory of that book into a poem he called The Phainomena and got almost everything wrong. Only fragments survived.
Then the astronomer Hipparchus of Nicaea annotated those poetic fragments with contemporary scientific knowledge to point out his predecessor’s embarrassing mistakes.
Then the politician Marcus Tullius Cicero translated the annotations into Latin as if they represented a whole and mistook the annotations for verse. His Aratea ended up becoming a canonical poem of natural philosophy, but everyone knew he was a bad poet.
Then some anonymous scribe(s) illuminated the Latin manuscript, depicting the now-customary forms of the constellations of ‘Aratos’ using Carolingian imagery, and reproduction of the poem ended up shaping its text into those visual forms.
Then the historian Robert Brown created the first English translation of the poem using both the Ancient Greek fragments and the illuminated Latin text. He then shaped the poem into a piece of evidence for a white supremacist genealogy of stellar image-making; it was called Phaenomena, or the Heavenly Display.
Then Google’s
automated book digitization project converted hi-res scans of his book into
text. at the time OCR technology was still having problems differentiating
splotches of ink or dirt on a page from language, and couldn’t compensate for
the curvature of a scanned surface, but the blind rush to archive left no time
for cleaning or contextualization of the results, which were unreadable. As for
the image-to-text process itself, “When a page is scanned, it is typically
stored as a bit-mapped file in TIF format […] To the computer, it is just a
series of black and white dots [tagging the space where language is
recognizable]. The computer does not recognize any ‘words’ on the image.”
Then my dog died.
On first reading, the fragmented and theory-driven poetic of Thee Display appears to exist as a deep study of translation, examining the limitations of translating knowledge, form and theory as well as the breakdown of transcription and legibility. Fulton writes on philosophy and constellations, the death of her dog, the external and the internal, power and its relations, and a variety of transcription errors, working exactly what her opening piece suggests she was going to: attempting to salvage a text from broken digitization, including commentary and, when necessary, filling in the gaps. Hers is a translation of fragments, keeping the inarticulations and misreadings, akin to Anne Carson working through the remnants of Sappho, or the scraps of text Emily Dickinson composed on bits of envelope, displayed in full through The Gorgeous Nothings (New York NY: New Directions, 2013), edited by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner. Whether constructed, salvaged or misread, Fulton puts the misreadings and mistranslations on full display, allowing scraps to remain as scraps, as she writes as part of the extended, and heavily fragmented, “Rededication”:
‘.V pl>>y on
worda, uijToi —’ —a ./>pm/-pm/=6utf -wiui
ReprewntedjHs on lliel”ann>>r
Tofiff. For not
iySioKoi xitKos iaitna TofuiiE of ffyj/mut by
Micyllus, and generajlv nt (he present
iiaipilrai (Schol.).
But there is a further meaning: time. The
Hone was Mwilryly portrayi-d (V. aifn
Fulton explores conversion, digitization and loss, and how information breaks down and shifts between forms, adapting through the translator’s work. There are echoes of Nathanael’s ongoing work in Fulton’s poetic, a way in which theory and language are pulled between two poles, existing in the between state: changing form, but not fully formed. “The stars are so numerous and so much alike,” she writes, as part of the piece “Summering,” which continues:
That some such
classification was absolutely necessary
To enable us to
speak of them with any exactness, and there-
Fore the wonderful
discoverer
And inventor
stepped in to assist mankind: —
So thought the
wonderful discoverer
It good to make
the stellar groups,
That each by one
other lying orderly,
They might display
their forms. And thus the stars
At once took names
and rise familiar now.
There are some cosmic things going on here, writing of stars and the heavens, offering slants on creation and re-creation, an origin story into how one body translated into another. Fulton offers both text and slant, fragments and commentary. “What proof does he give, or can anyone give for the original names of these constellations? None. Then, regarding the question from an abstract point of view, is it more probable that in the first instance people called a constellation by a name in some way associated with a beast or a bird, by a more general or a more special appellation? I reply, undoubtedly by a more special appellation. If a man thought, ‘This constellation reminds me of an animal or of a bird,’ he would be almost certain to go on in his thoughts to some special animal or bird. And so he did; and constellations reminded him not of an Animal but of a Bear, Lion, Ram, Billy Goat, Dodgy Hare; not of a Bird, but of an Eagle or a Crow or a Crane or a Piper.”
Thee Display is a book centred on and around translation and mistranslation, but also one that speaks to transition, as Fulton offers bookending prose on either side of the scattered and structured fragments of the book to speak to more personal ideas of change and between-ness. She writes a book not of becoming, but of shifts, misreadings and readings, the power dynamics that police bodies, and the possibilities of being fully, finally understood. As the final lines of the volume offers:
I told her what she wanted to to hear: that my relation to certain elements of my body and identity has become untenable and needed to be modified. But during one meeting out of our mandatory six, I slipped up, and in a moment of weakness and misplaced trust I told her the truth. “Why do you suddenly feel like it’s the right time to transition?” My answer, which I was barely able to relate due to the convulsions that the sudden sayability of it opened up in me, was “My dog died.” I’ll put it another way. Just as it really is our destiny to be separated from all that has ever truly seen us – perhaps in the same way that Badiou says that philosophy is destined to communism, to the inexistence of any “us” – this unmade destiny must now be made. Why? Because my dog died. That was when she stopped taking me seriously. She couldn’t see behind the constellation.
