Adam Mohamed : The Sun is Always Setting, by Steph Yates

The Sun is Always Rising, Steph Yates
Glovebox Press, 2021

 

 

 

 

Following Yates’ multidisciplinary interests, the Preface of her chapbook outlines fourteen “spatio-sculptural … sites” that describe “spaces and objects, existing outside of time passing.” The individual sites resemble artworks bordered and curated like portraits hung in an exhibition. In each site, there are “no characters and no events,” but rather “pieces [that] embody the stillness and permanence of a photograph.” Like Keats’ “Ode on Grecian Urn,” we are asked by the Preface to imagine a site in which the stillness of a space or object could exist outside of time despite its mediation through a language grounded in absence.

To an extent, we observe such stillness in various sites Yates presents. We see an egg sliced on an angle in which the top half slides downward and is then “stopped forever” (Site i). We see an old “wooden ladder” that “never gets older” (Site ii). There are architectures that honeycomb into “endless rooms (Site iii) and a sunset that “just sits there in blazing stillness” (Site v), as on the cover of the chapbook and its title where the sun perpetually rises. We are even asked to imagine the “dirt-stench of continuous birth and continuous decay” (Site vi) in which scents are trapped by the perpetuity of a photograph. Yates' site invites us into a self-identical stillness in which “Today is today” (Site ix). Objects are sharpened by a geometric exactness in how they are staged. The self-certainty of how sites are presented replicate the intentional vision in curating objects for an exhibition. And, indeed, the launch of this chapbook was accompanied by a public exhibition hosted at the plumb in Toronto where sites from the chapbook, along with papier-mâché sculptures, were shown.  

Despite the stillness of these sites, there is a formless negativity that constitutes their motionlessness. Such negativity is intimated on the cover of the chapbook itself. The cover contains an image of a geometric arc on the plane of a line: a sun resting on a horizon. Yet, the entire cover is yellow, as if to suggest that it is not the geometric line and arc that signify a sunset, but the intense yellow background on which the geometry is drawn. We intuit a sunset, not from the geometrical shape, but the yellowing negative space on which the geometrical shape is placed. The Preface compares the sculptural sites to the stillness of a photograph, but Yates' comparison is not just one that asks us to read the sites as static images of photography. Her comparison of sites to images, along with the title of the work, allude to Lisa Oppenheim’s The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else, an exhibition in which Oppenheim recontextualizes pictures of a setting sun taken by U.S. soldiers in Iraq. She prints these pictures, aligns them with sunsets in her native New York, and makes pictures of this recontextualization on 35mm slide film arranged in a slideshow. Just as Oppenheim’s exhibition questions universal spatial and temporal narratives through the recontextualization of images, so too does Yates offer a way in which we might question the Preface’s desire for a perfectly still linguistic site. Film photography itself does not merely present a still image, but grounds the positivity of an image through negative development. Light-sensitive silver halide crystals are exposed to light which creates an invisible image in an emulsion. This invisible image is then developed as a negative image in which the lightest portions of an image appear darkest and the darkest portions of an image appear lightest. Yates' comparison of her static sites to photography is interesting because photography itself is only able to produce a positive image through its development as an inverted negative image—a suggestion that her sites are also only able to present themselves as a stillness grounded by the condition of negativity. Photographs, too, are mediated by a surrounding negativity outside themselves. A photograph’s meaning is determined in large part by the pervading negativity that haunts the borders of a frame. Such negativity is invoked by interpretive questions of a photograph that extend beyond its frame: who made the photograph, when was the photograph made, what was left outside the frame and why, and to what extent was the subject in a photograph posed and directed a certain way? 

Like the negativity that constitutes a positive still image, and Oppenheim’s exhibition that questions the universal and static perspective of images, Yates’ chapbook gradually invites us to question the possibility of reading her ‘sites’ beyond objects out of time. The Preface provides instructions on how the ‘sites’ of the book are to be read. It even mentions that the reader can rearrange the sentences in different “permutations” within each site, presumably without disrupting the stillness of the site. What is most intriguing about the Preface is the way in which it acts as an authoritative dictum outside the sites it tries to control yet is itself indistinct from the numbered sites it wishes to control. The Preface is organized as a curated sculptural object just like the proceeding numbered sites. When the Preface asks us to rearrange sentences within a site, I believe we are also asked to rearrange the Preface as one of many sites–to question the dictum of treating sites as motionless objects hung in an exhibition.

In the first few sites, we are presented with stationary objects that really do seem to exist out of time. Yet as we move through the later sites, details that are supposedly frozen fray into transient images. In Site iii we are presented with “stone slabs,” but the type of stone starts to blur as it “can look as though it is velvet, it is cotton, or it is wool,” akin to an underdeveloped photograph whose detail is lost in shadows. We never really know what stone is represented in the site as even the speaker cannot confirm its material. In other sites we get a description of a street lamp shining through the interior of a building, where the speaker notes that “It is as though the rectangle of light and the rectangular window were made for each other.” The speaker mirrors the reader in precariously interpreting the site that seems ambiguously wrought. Similarly, Site vii describes the speaker’s difficulty in determining whether “the structure looks down on the town, or the town looks up at the structure, or both, or neither,” to reflect our own uncertain questions that necessarily lead outside the site’s frame. In Site xiii, the speaker describes “Seven bubbles, full of a weightless liquid and ranging in diametre from one to three meters [that] cling to the ceiling.” The speaker further notes that “were someone to stand beneath them and look up, what they would see would surprise them.” This description does not tell us why or by what we would be surprised. The emotion we would experience, had we looked up at these bubbles, does not exist in the frame of the site but rather something we are invited to imagine outside the frame—a negativity that beckons us beyond the desire for self-identical stillness.

The slipperiness of Yates’ sites culminates in the last site where we are introduced to the myth that a “blue flower blooms a thousand years …” until it meets its mates’ pollen” (Site xiv). Because the speaker presents these details as a myth, we are never sure whether the descriptions of the flower are true or if they are mediated by an assumed myth whose uncertainty disavows the claims of myth. Instead, we are impelled, like the urn of crusty earth, to “remain, waiting” in determining the fulfillment of myth. Far from a still photograph out of time, the surrounding questions regarding the ambiguity of myth pull us out of the site–out of the frame that promises a linguistic object pressed in resin, untouched by time. Questions about the sites–questions that the sites cannot answer within their own atemporal stillness–serve as a negativity that exists beyond the sites’ sharp rectangular frame. 

Even Yates' accompanying exhibition with the launch of her chapbook performs an amorphous negativity by reframing sites from her chapbook in a different context. Yates prints and displays individual sites from her chapbook, amongst a display of papier-mâché sculptures, for purposes beyond a desired stillness. Rather than the sites existing outside of time, they are temporally bound by their curational fluidity that spills from book to exhibition as part of their recontextualization in a multimedia exhibition. Even the title of the exhibition, The Sun Never Sets, indicates a new way of reading the sites with a trace of mourning. The chapbook title, The Sun is Always Setting, could suggest a pleasure in freezing a transitory state, in which objects never deteriorate and fade, and where plants breathe in perpetuity. However, the exhibition title, The Sun Never Sets, suggests a mourning in which objects are trapped in these transitional states–a state in which the blue flower forever waits to see if it will bloom after meeting its mate, or a state where plants will never grow because “to grow is to change” (Site viii) and they never do change in their uniform cyclical breathing. Yates' exhibition disrupts a reading of her sites as still photographs and instead (re)mediates them in and outside her chapbook.

The Sun is Always Rising asks us to be a composer, to perform permutations and substitutions where sentences and sites are rearranged in tracing a negativity–a temporality–that passes through each spatio-sculptural site. If the sites of this chapbook aspire to the medium of photography, we might think of them like sheets of film folding and creasing on a body of water. Each site asks us to read in them a negativity that questions and interrogates their certitude–to glimpse the possibility of these sites beyond stationary objects outside of time. 

 

 

 

 

 

Adam Mohamed (he/him) is a Ph.D student in the English Literature department at the University of Western Ontario. His research concerns the ways in which nineteenth century British and German literature and philosophy overlap.

 

 

Adam Mohamed : Strategies of the Pre-Aesthetic in Shelly Harder’s remnants

Published by Baseline Press in 2018, remnants is Shelly Harder’s first single authored chapbook. The remnant, as it has often been understood and which is outlined at the beginning of this work, is defined as “a part or quantity that is left / after the greater part has been used, / removed or destroyed” (1-3), thus serving as a corollary to a pre-exiting whole.  However, it also functions as an Adornoean pre-aesthetic impulse which precedes and conditions the formation of an artistic whole. Unlike the common definition of the remnant, this work theorizes a concept of the remnant which is no longer subordinated as an effect of an artistic whole or unified meaning. This pre-aesthetic is explored through a series of inter-related poetic strategies, or remnants, some of which are outlined even before one begins reading the first poem.

Opposed to merely being a book of small collected poems, as the name chapbook commonly connotes, this work is an aesthetic object at the level of its material construction. Upon opening the book, the reader is met with a sparkling Philippine Sheen flyleaf against the backdrop of a white cover. The distinct silver fibres bundled together in sporadic and uneven spaces is illuminated by a white backdrop that allows viewers to trace the uneven fibrous and textured density of the flyleaf. This image of simultaneous disparate and bundled fibres on the flyleaf approximates a differential image of Adorno’s pre-aesthetic intimated in Aesthetic Theory.

In Aesthetic theory, Adorno outlines the constitution of an artwork as having a semblance of unity. According to Adorno, an artwork’s own consistency “is predicated on the illusory” (101) idea of the artwork as fully formed, completed, and unified. The semblance of closure is designed to conceal the fact of closure’s non-existence in artworks. Initially, the artwork “draws differentiated partial elements … into the amorphous realm” (101) which allows the semblance of an artwork’s unity to be possible. It is this grouping of elements before the ‘unity’ or constitution of an artwork which serves as a differential image of the pre-aesthetic, and which appears more positively as the shimmering image of the fibrous nexus bundled and loosened on the Philippine flyleaf in Shelly’s remnants. The clustering and scattering of threads on the flyleaf are an image of the pre-aesthetic that presupposes Adorno’s understanding of the artwork.

The remnant’s defiance of a homogenous aesthetic is also expressed through the use of the ungrammatical to produce new meanings. Take for example, the title remnants, whose non-capitalization suggests its divorce from a previous sentence out of which it came. The remnant is instead a grammatical fragment that conditions and precedes an artistic whole. In “Cyclades,” periods are deliberately removed forcing the reader to differentiate the clauses from one another. Grammatical fragments are often created to more directly present an image without immediately making them the subject or object of a verb. Thus, “A traditional village with narrow streets” (3) and “the port of bluest water” (2) present descriptions as a grammatical fragment without functioning in a ‘comprehensive’ grammar, i.e. without the aid of a predicate to form an independent clause.

In several of the work, there is an additional italicized text often presented as a grammatical fragment juxtaposed alongside a preceding poem. The relation between the italicized text and the poem-- as well as the relation between details within the grammatical fragment itself—is somewhat ambiguous. For example, it is not clear how Shelly’s description of Avignon in the poem with the same title relates to the italicized text that likens words to “toads slinking morning” or “a pig rooting across dew-dense fields” (7). But it is perhaps this judgement of ambiguity that typifies the relation of these poems and their text-fragments that we should be avoiding when reading these poems. It is not a case of making the relation of these text and text-fragments meaningful, but rather recognizing that the ambiguity of this relation as the pre-aesthetic grouping of elements which precede any ‘meaningful’ judgement of the texts. Instead of reading the relation of these poems and their text-fragments as something we should know, the relation functions as a Shellyean remnant whose formation precedes the whole that we often unconsciously presuppose.

The critique of singular authorship through the mode of commentary is another pre-aesthetic strategy with which to probe the remnant. Some of the poems appear to be in conversation with both themselves and other poems by their facilitation of a dialogue. In “Charcoal Nectar,” the speaker initially describes a state in which different “Irises have waned” (1) as the “smooth of sleep unfolds” (2), yet it is unclear whether this description also applies to the speaker. Soon after sleep, the speaker notes that “some / unthought hunger skulks” (2-3) although it is also unclear to whom the hunger of these unthoughts belong. These questions always end in judgements of uncertainty because they presuppose a subject to whom these verbs are attached. Instead, the remnant refuses to posit the pre-conceived idea of the predicative subject in favour of a set of experiences (i.e. the falling of sleep, the desiring of unthoughts) that acts as a pre-aesthetic anterior to the subject.

In “conversions,” the speaker engages in conversation with a Catholic missionary while simultaneously—at a formal level— conversing with another poem, written in another voice, across the following page. This polyvocality in conversations challenges the authority of a singular author spoken in a monolithic voice; the multivocal effacement of the single author is the pre-aesthetic which both precedes and produces the idea of a single author in the first place. This is not the first time Shelly has used the mode of commentary to challenge the authority of single authorships. In 2016 she and Brescia University College professor Monika Lee co-published a chapbook Skin to Skin, which gathered a group of poems that were written by both authors such that a reader could not tell from whom each poem was written; the question of a singular authorship was challenged by both Monika’s and Shelly’s undifferentiated composition of the poems, similar to the way that some of Shelly’s poems in this collection refuse to posit a single authoritative voice.

Perhaps the most visible strategy of the remnant is the disruption of conventional understandings of time. If time is commonly understood as a sequence of linear events, poems like “There and Back Again” directly challenge this linearity. In the poem, the speaker notes that “places happen in no predictable way” (1), which conditions our perception of places according to spontaneity and precarity rather than causality. Unlike tropes like the Romantic Return popularized by Wordsworth which describes a subject’s changed perception of a location after lengthy travels ‘there and back again,’ locations in these poems are explored through specular and novel productions of experience without assuming the stabile representation of these locations. This is why there is “no knowing where / you’re going,” (1-2) if where you’re going is confounded with the same uncertainty as where you’ve began. These locations that Shelly describes are not meant to be positively signified as part of a cohesive aesthetic, but are instead conduits for pre-aesthetic affects that produce new experiences. Thus, in some locations we are given surreal descriptions such as “poodles … strolling” while “pigeons [are] pecking in heaven” (5). In “The Story of Berlin,” we are not so much presented with an impression of Berlin or the story of Berlin, but rather a set of events that ‘could’ or ‘would’ have happened without directly relaying what did happen.

These pre-aesthetic experiences that exist before linear formations of time are not only explored in relation to locations through the genre of travel-writing, but also through the re-writing of well-known works of philosophy and poetry. Instead of merely offering an impression on philosophy, Shelly emphasizes a pre-philosophical concept which precedes and alters the composition of well-known philosophical concepts. In “Being and Teatime,” itself a reference to Heidegger’s Being and Time, the repeated ontological question inquiring about the ‘what’ of objects like “cat[s]” and “shadow[s]” (12) mirrors the ontological questioning of Dasein. However, unlike a feature of Dasein who makes its own Being an issue, Shelly presents a different kind of phenomenology which asks the ontological question of what it means “to be woman” (14). Instead of merely commenting on Heidegger’s phenomenology as an already formed idea, Shelly makes a new phenomenology by imbuing within the traditional primordial question of Being, gender.

The remnant is expressed in Shelly’s work through various strategies including the material composition of the book, plays with grammaticality, and modes of commentary. While these strategies emphasize the remnant as an originary production anterior to the unified and cohesive ideas of the artwork, they are far from exhaustive of the remnant’s function. We need only look at the Philippine flyleaf at the beginning of the book. If you look closely, the legibility of the title remnants struggles to break through the slightly translucent texture of the flyleaf. The partial and on-going struggle of legibility beneath the webbed flyleaf appears differently to each copy of the chapbook; since each copy of this chapbook uses a unique pattern of the flyleaf, Shelly’s remnants encourages us to trace how the semblance of aesthetic coherency in our own lives and reading of this work is produced from an originary remnant.

Adam Mohamed is an incoming Ph.D student in the English Literature department at Western university. His research concerns the interdisciplinary nature of poetry and philosophy explored in British and German Romantic literature.