Monday, May 2, 2022

Émilie Dionne and Sean Braune : On Microbial Soup Kiss

 

 

 

On Microbial Soup Kiss:

 

 


ÉMILIE: At the beginning of the pandemic, it seemed like time was happening differently, and it did not only seem to be affecting humans. Time and temporality took on aspects of speed and slowness and there was a kind of “adaptation” period occurring in the natural world. It felt, at times, that all life forms were responding to the event of the pandemic: an overall sense of quiet. Even squirrels in urban settings seemed more at ease—more free to run in multiple, nonlinear directions. 

SEAN: Perhaps our “human” “cities” could become more nonhuman—a sort of nonhuman socius. This sensation was like, but not exactly like, a post-apocalyptic movie where large segments of the population have died.

ÉMILIE: There has been a lot written about how people’s “sense of time” was altered, affected. Many people actually worried about this and experienced this as something particularly destabilizing, scary even, but also disruptive of one’s sense of “grounding” and even perhaps “identity.”
         
A bit like something played with each of our forms of “proprioception.”
         
I felt the need to think about this, but differently than solely through hyper-cognitive mechanisms. To try to explain everything, to make sense, to give sense, to everything. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling like trying to make sense of all this doesn’t always feel like the right call.

         
Poetic writing appears more suitable. More connected with what I, personally, was experiencing.

SEAN: For me, writing the poetry of this chapbook was the expression of a desire to be with words and also outside of them—to dive into oblivion and a sort of negation of self by experimenting with the words and sounds and imagery that I heard all around me at the beginning of the pandemic alongside a new sense of silence, quiet.
          The writing process was largely unfocused and featured a series of e-mail exchanges between two voices and the editing of the poems reflected the sonic preferences of each voice.

ÉMILIE: And now that I think about it, that I try to think about it, I can’t even quite recall how it all played out. How we decided on this project.
         
For me, there definitely were events. For one, I recall—like so many other people—“discovering” my neighborhood. It was also, in truth, a “new” neighborhood, as I moved to this new locale about 6 months before the pandemic. Still, I’ve walked these streets so many times by now. About 2 weeks into the pandemic, I went up this little alleyway and discovered a series of very large and tall trees whose trunks were indissociable from the fences that run along the alley. It mesmerized me, these “city trees,” and I felt this was a true expression of the Anthropocene, where the metal, the “human activity,” had become intricate and inalterable to the trees’ “being,” their form, this form of life.

SEAN: Both of us were trying to come to terms with the new “pandemic reality” beginning in 2020 and, for this reason, the poetry is phenomenological in some ways—it dealt with individual temporalities—almost a form of sonic autoethnography. As Émilie says, we were both walking around our respective cities (Toronto and Montréal) and experiencing the absence of the streets and a natural world held often at a divide as it took up greater residence in urban settings.
           Microbial Soup Kiss
was like any poetic or artistic collaboration in that it reflected a sort of rhizomatic tension and unity that was a reflection of the complexity of the world as such—a reflection of the panoply of voices and schisms of natures/cultures, especially as that nonhuman “interloper” known as “COVID-19” disrupted the perceived (although strictly idealized) “normality” of human life.  

ÉMILIE: And, to me, this experiment—or experiments (perhaps ongoing)—is in itself a lifeform, a new life form. Re-reading it creates ripples—in me, my mind. It provokes, invites, entices; new voices, images, “tunes,” feelings (e.g. shivers, warmth, etc.) in me. It is a gift from the past where the past comes alive and engages a conversation with the present, and serves to recall the past, but also to give it new meanings. Earlier, I spoke of “sense-making” and how uncomfortable I was, and still am in many ways, with this compulsion, throughout the pandemic and the multiple other events that happened in the past two years—culturally, politically, environmentally, socially. Yet poetry is, to me, an undeniable force to make sense, to make sense matter differently, and that all matter, where we think both in discursive but also material terms (or “configurations”) about what happens, and what we allow to happen, or “participate” in shaping.

SEAN: I agree with Émilie on this point, but I would slightly alter my own poetic commitments to be an attempt to make nonsense matter differently and I see poetry as a force that can sometimes unearth the profound disequilibrium and absurdity that exists behind concepts like “normalcy” and “reality.”

 

 

 

 

 

Émilie Dionne is a sociologist, feminist ethicist and political thinker at Université Laval & VITAM, as well as a writer of fiction (novels, short stories), poetry, and visual artist (drawing, painting, ink, wood-burning) based in Quebec (Montreal & Quebec city). She's been writing since she was 10, wrote three novels, five plays, many short stories and collections of poetry. Her writing has been published only once before, Secrètes Immortelles (1999), and her visual art is available online (@emilie_fineart on Instagram). She's a runner, lover of animals and nature.

Sean Braune is the writer of the poetry book Dendrite Balconies (University of Calgary Press, 2019) and the philosophy book Language Parasites: Of Phorontology (Punctum Books, 2017). His first feature-length film, Nuptials, has been shown at the Cyprus International Film Festival (2021) and the Austin Revolution Film Festival (2022).

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