ONE
In April 1986, when I was thirty two and working full time as a performer and theatre maker, I was caught up in a catastrophe. It marked a kind of turbulent overturning of my life and the lives of those around me that now, in retrospect, seems peculiarly linked to the images and narratives with which I was then working. As if, in the mixing and of explanations and narratives around an event, there is an exchange between the imaginary and the real, so that they shift positions, and meanings are reconfigured in response to new circumstances. I think that such reconfiguring is both a collective and a personal process, and that it sometimes materializes as an awareness of coincidence, or a feeling of deja vu, or a belief in prophecy or the uncanny.
Catastrophe [Latin catastropha from Greek katastrophe overturning, sudden turn]
Metaphor [Latin metaphora from Greek, metapherein transfer, formed as META + pherein to bear]
In modern Greek a strophi is a turn, a bend in the road, a corner. Apo (up) and Kata (down) + strophi mark turns of different kinds. Apostrophe, the mark that turns above the written letter, a relic if you like of the breath, linking writing to voice. Catastrophe, a marked turn for the worse, the world turned upside down, 'the change which produces the final act of a dramatic piece' (OED).
Strophe. The turning which marks a bend in a road. The turning which is a paratextual mark on the page. Walking, writing, marking time and space. You follow one direction until you are forced to turn, but what the meaning of that turning is or was does not always emerge until later. Things look different in retrospect. Meanings change with the accumulation of events and words and memories.
When I think of the word strophi I see myself I am driving along a high narrow twisting road above the sea in Greece with my small daughter Zoe in the summer of 1986, we are on holiday and it is very dark and hot. There is no moon and below us we can see the lights of other vehicles marking out the bends. The cars are eating up the dark she tells me. I see her dancing in the saloni of in her grandparents' house in Athens, singing a nursery rhyme and turning round and round, arms held out, giro giro oli, sti mesi o Manoli. I think of her as she was in that summer, a little girl of six with long dark hair, travelling between countries, singing in two languages. I see her with her grandmother Aphrodite in the kitchen of the house in Athens making tiropites or melamacarona, hands covered in flour.
What is left on record? What is left in memory?
'These then are the things that remain : a few photographs, scribbled drawings on scraps of paper, indecipherable notebooks, diaries, reviews, injuries, scars, half-remembered anecdotes, faint recollections, awakened nostalgias.'(1)
TWO
In April 1986 I travelled to Warsaw to perform in a piece of theatre, The Carrier Frequency, which I had made with Impact Theatre two years previously. Warsaw was to be its last performance. We had been invited by Akademia Ruchu, a Polish theatre company we had met through our friends Cardiff Laboratory Theatre. We were, then, all working as artists and performers in collaborative visual and physical theatre, creating our own work and touring it in Europe. We - six of us plus our director - had been making work together then for almost eight years, and when we made The Carrier Frequency with writer Russell Hoban, we had just spent several months in Italy touring an earlier work, A Place In Europe. That April I left Zoe in London and drove to Warsaw via East Germany, through villages full of chestnut trees and fields of spring wheat. On April 26, only a few days after we arrived, and in the middle of an early spring heat wave, the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, 400 km away in the Ukraine, misfired, blew and began to melt down.
We had performed that night in the auditorium of Warsaw Polytechnic and later gone out partying. For three days afterwards the government successfully suppressed news of the explosion and then, equally suddenly, things changed. One day we were lying by the Vistula in the sun smoking grass and drinking beer, the next day the city began an evening curfew, iodine was distributed to children from stocks piled in case of nuclear war, schools shut and children under ten were told to stay inside. The Voice of America was claiming that thousands lay dead in Ukraine and a lethal cloud rapidly passing over Europe. We were told by up-beat British Embassy staff not to worry, but not to eat greens, not to drink milk, to shower every few hours to wash away any radiation, and to leave at once. We were told that borders were closing. Then it rained, bringing heavy metals with it. We took taxis into town to try and spend our dollars.
THREE
'In those days we were into prophecy, into connections between things, signs and wonders, hidden messages and rumours about the end of everything. But then, so was everyone else. Its hard to remember the Britain of that time, but I think of it now as haunted by nuclear threat and conspiracy theories, and still reeling from the shock of the Falklands war.(2)
The Carrier Frequency had been made in London in the autumn of 1984 among the abandoned and dessicated debris of the old Homerton Hospital in Hackney, whose wards had been leased out as studios. It was full of artists making work among the piled and rusted beds, the smashed glass, dirt and ash. It looked like the aftermath of a disaster. We had met Russell Hoban a couple of years before and his novelistic vision of a future world, Ridley Walker, had become a reference point for us, with its remade language and its sense of a future coming to terms with the storms of the past through myth. Russ had long been working on a novel, which later became The Medusa Frequency, that revisioned the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in postmodern terms, in part through reference to Rilke's epic poem 'Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes'. In his new work historical incident and mythic elements operated as radio signals picked up in the future, creating connections which opened out into new textual worlds. We spent days reading and listening to his work in progress and using it as a platform to generate material, as he began to write the two kinds of text which we eventually spoke in the piece - Eurydice's Long Dream runner speeches, with their oral-epic structure and mythical referents, and the Erny Warling dialogues, fragmentary traces of broken and remade language in the aftermath of a nuclear war. As we worked, The Carrier Frequency took the back-story of nuclear threat - conspiracy, illogic, the build up of random information, the break down of language, and the mapping of classical myth onto present day action - and exploded it, remixing the layers into a visual/textual and sound- scape that included radio broadcasts from imagined conquering armies, language lessons for those who have weapons but no water or food and only their bodies to sell, and the voice of a boy soprano singing the final lines from Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes in German. The piece was eventually performed in a pool of cold black water about 18 inches deep from which huge broken structures emerged, almost like a sinking ship, or the basement of a flooded factory or a power plant after an explosion.
Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes, is a meditation on death. Eurydice is taken into the underworld by Hades after being bitten by a snake and Orpheus comes to fetch her. Hades allows him to take her back to the world only if he doesn't turn to look at her until they reach the surface. He does look back, and her tragedy is that she remains in the underworld forever. But as Rilke writes her, Eurydice accepts her death. Being dead fulfills her, she is alone and complete. When Orpheus turns to her as they reach the light that signifies the end of their journey towards the surface,
She is already root
Gentle and without impatience.
When it is her turn to act Eurydice turns towards death and embraces it. Her catastrophe, her final and complete down-turn, becomes her turn in another sense, her turn to make choices, her turn to act.
I felt myself slipping that April in Warsaw. I felt myself turning away from reason, slipping out of the loop. I felt myself inclining towards prophecy. Inclined to connect radio gabble, made up languages, Voice of America, myths of lost girls, circulation of rumour and clouds of poison, radio waves and frequencies, coincidence, talismans. It made the idea of embracing darkness seem logical. Four days after Chernobyl I had a ticket to leave Warsaw but turned back at the airport and decided to stay with Akademia Ruchu, to see what happened in the next few days and drive back through Germany with our technician, Vic Kravchenko. As I watched the rest of the company go through passport control I felt a strange sense of being out of my body, floating above myself. I called my small daughter. When are you coming back? she said.
Warsaw was empty and silent. It was the 1st of May and after we left the airport we went straight to a church that, during the powerful Solidarity movement of the 1980s, had become a political gathering place. We parked several blocks away and joined hundreds of other people streaming towards a square that opened out from the front of the church. We watched soldiers with water canon begin to surround the huge crowd that had gathered and which, spontaneously and in complete silence, and as if on cue, fell to its knees and began to sing. It was about midday, very hot and clear. There were no children present. Children had been told to stay inside because of the radiation risk. Afterwards we went into the woods and drank champagne, and in the days that followed we sat in cafes and listened to stories. The sister of a Polish actor I know in London worked in a biological institute. She told us that when the explosion happened, she and her colleagues knew at once. They saw the radioactivity register on their machines but in the days that followed they had had no real idea what was going on. Its very bad they said, much worse than anyone is telling us.
A week later I left for London. Driving back from Poland Vic and I were Geiger-countered for radiation at the German border by men in white suits who assured us that there was nothing really wrong, they just needed to know what we registered. On the way to Poland, in a forest close to the border, we had eaten local meat and mushrooms, slept in a house among the trees and watched the buds of the fast moving continental spring snap into bloom as we drove past horse driven carts, along village roads, bordered with fields of early peas and greens. On the way back we did the things we had been told not to do, we lay in long damp grass, we ate greens, we slept by a trout lake in the sun and watched clouds scud over a seemingly innocent blue sky, things that seemed even then foolhardy almost, as if we wanted to tempt fate further.
Back in London, it rained. It rained heavily that spring. I cried a lot. Things seemed meangingless and absurd in comparison to what I had just been through. We had left something behind us. We never performed together again. That time in Warsaw, something ended. When Vic and I returned and we all met up and talked about what had happened we no longer wanted to tour. I thought a lot about loss and separation and darkness. I no longer wanted to leave Zoe. Instead I left performance making and took Zoe to Greece. In October 1986 I took up a writing fellowship at Churchill College in Cambridge.
In my mind's eye I return to the image of Zoe and her grandmother with their hands covered in flour, but now they are making bread. The flour is ground from wheat Aphrodite has saved from before Chernobyl. That summer of 86 we eat nothing that might have been poisoned. We even eat eggs from hens kept indoors. Greece is thick with connections between Chernobyl, prophecy and mythology, as well as reasonable fears about food safety. In 1986 the fields of old Europe are toxic. In Britain the meat of lambs fed on Welsh hillsides is considered unfit for consumption. Greek fields too are tainted with poison from Chernobyl and we have no idea how long it will be before it will change. Now we know.
FOUR
Catastrophe. Eurydice's turn into the dark space of death. Eurydice and Persephone, girls trapped underground, taken against their will, turning to death as a place of regeneration. Greek myth is full of mothers and daughters, women and girls in extremis, caught, bound, raped, held against their will, occasionally saved by their wits. Mythic narrative connects space, place and time, above and below, air and earth, earth and water. It links the pagan to the modern, the pre and the post, the before and after of modernity and it activates meanings we barely acknowledge that often lie buried - or smothered - underneath the trace sediment of etymological wanderings across time and space.
Persephone too slipped beneath the skin of the earth - at Eleusis, just outside Athens. She slipped underground and into the dark. Taken by Hades from her mother - Demeter - the goddess who governs crops and who, in response to this terrible loss, creates blight on the land until her daughter should return; eternal winter. Unlike Eurydice, Persephone comes back.
In the 1950s the Greek English writer Sheelagh Kanelli translated these miralogia, fate words, from improvised mourning songs sung by country women.(3)
'My child, you have left me to go to the Underworld;
You've left your mother bitter, death stricken.
My child, where can I confine such pain?
The name Eleusis refers to the underworld. It can be translated as 'the place of the happy arrival'. Grammatically it is different, by accent and inflection, from 'eleusis' (arrival) but both are related to Elysion the realm of the blessed.The Elysian fields are the after death realm, the place where wanderers and sailors, and heroes rest.
Where shall I let fall my tears at your going?
If they fall on the black earth no green will grow.
If they fall in the river, the river will dry up;
If they fall in the sea, the ships will sink;
and if I lock them in my heart, very soon I'll die
Persephone makes a pact. She becomes queen to king Hades and comes above ground for part of the year. She generates the seasons of dark and light, growth and decline. In Italian and Greek frescoes she sits beside Hades, straight and proud, as if she has embraced her fate, a sheaf of ripe wheat in her hand. She is not in love with death but she knows it is necessary. She makes her mark in the land of living. She intercedes between this world and the underworld, between dark and light, winter and spring. In 1986 the fields are tainted with poison and we have no idea how long it will take to change.
The ancient road to Eleusina, the actual place where Persephone slipped into the underworld, is still passable. I am looking at a photograph of it now as I write. It begins in central Athens where its street name is Iera Odos, the Sacred Road. It can be walked, all the way to Eleusina through what is now one of the poorest and most polluted parts of Athens, a place that was home, in the 1920s, to the migrants who fled from Asia Minor after they were expelled from Turkey. I don't know this in 1986. In 1986 I don't even speak Greek.
FIVE
To begin (writing, living) we must have death.(4)
pagefield
fieldpage
This too is a field. Ploughed in Roman and in medieval rhetoric, by the pen.
Writing hands husband the page.
They seem like oxen
Ploughing white fields
Holding a white plough
Sewing a black field'
Page [Latin: pagus (pag- to fix)] a fixed place, an enclosure, a civilised space
It's curious word 'page', connected as it is to enclosure and to concepts of civility and also, in a complete about-face, to the word 'pagan', since the word pagan originates in early Christianity when Roman Christians styled themselves 'miles', or soldiers, of Christ, in opposition to pagans who represented the enclosed civil world, urbanity, secular order, that which is fixed and enclosed.
Eurydice never comes up to make her mark in the fields. She stays down among the dead. Perhaps her real catastrophe can be seen as the failure to write. Kathy Acker wrote about Eurydice in the months before her own death in 1997. Her Eurydice says in Eurydice in the Underworld, 'I am in the middle of dirt'.(5) She speaks from inside her death because it is the only place she can speak from. Dirty girl. Gone to earth. She slipped down under the surface of the earth, like the girl in the Grimm's tale who trod on a loaf of bread to stop her feet getting wet. 'I am in the middle of dirt' might be her fate words, her improvised mourning song for herself. For Kathy Acker it was all about writing.
My feelings about Chernobyl and about Carrier Frequency settled into the sediment of my own life. Catastrophe acted as a turning point. I left performing. I took up a fellowship at Cambridge. I later wrote about Eurydice in an essay about Kathy Acker and about Persephone in a collaboration with Greek artist Lizzie Calligas, who in the late 1990s walked the Ieros Odos, the Sacred Way and gave me an image of a fresco of Persephone, queen of the underworld, her sprig of wheat in her hand. At the site where she was taken into the underworld is the Kalihorou, and by it the Agelastos Petra, the stone where Demeter mourned her daughter. In the 1920s and 30s, after migrants who had lost their homes and been expelled from Turkey, came to Eleusina, the whole area was destroyed by cement factories and industrial development. Much of the ancient site was lost.
What is left in a site? What is left on record? What is left in memory? For about five years I was unable to believe that April 26 1986 was not indelibly printed on the minds of everyone in the western world.
SIX
'These then are the things that remain : a few photographs, scribbled drawings on scraps of paper, indecipherable notebooks, diaries, reviews, injuries, scars, half-remembered anecdotes, faint recollections, awakened nostalgias.'(6)
The writer Mike Pearson spoke these words at a symposium on the restaging of The Carrier Frequency in 2002 by a theatre company called Stan's Cafe. Mike is a theatre maker, and was earlier an archaeologist whose formal training eventually connected with his theatre work. For the last several years he has been working on the archaeology of performance, on ephemera, on the ways in which we recontextualise the traces of experience.
'Archaeology is the relationship we maintain with the past: it consists of a work of mediation with the past. In a sense, archaeology is something that each of us routinely does. This we might call the archaeological imagination. So what then might this lead us to say about the project upon which Stan's Cafe are currently engaged. Well certainly it is a work of archaeology. But as I've suggested the past 'as it was' or 'as it happened' is an illusionary category, neither stable nor homogeneous. 'The Carrier Frequency' never was one thing, we can never 'reconstruct' it. But we can recontextualise it. Informed by contemporary interests, we can reconstitute its traces as something which stands for the past in the present. We produce the past in the present.'
I am thinking now about the ways in which, as writers and artists, we retrieve material from the sediment of past experience. The ways in which things come back to the page, in which the need to work things out on the page emerges from past experience in ways that seem prophetic, uncanny, coincidental, at times; about the page itself as material and about the way the page itself is both a formal holding space and a place of wandering, and about fields and pages; slipping through and under, marking and turning; about the ways in which we can never tell what will be, but in which, in retrospect the logic seems clear.
SEVEN
As I write I can hear planes taking off from National Airport, perhaps two miles from where I live in Washington DC. The Pentagon is also a couple of miles away. Both are just across the river from here, in Virginia. On September 11 2002, two days ago, I was driving across the 14th Street bridge listening to National Public Radio at exactly the moment when, year ago, the second plane hit the World Trade Center. The bridge passes across the Potomac river, between National airport to the left on the bank of the river, and the Pentagon below and on the right. As I drove south I could see the river below me, dotted with moored sailing boats. It was a very sunny day, blue and clear. About halfway across the bridge a plane rose very slowly into the sky on my left, up and away from the airfield and over the Pentagon as, on the radio the bell began to toll for the dead of that other moment. Below the plane, directly in my field of vision, a flock of geese passed over head, necks strained and long, there were maybe thirty of them, marking the sky in a trailing 'V' like tiny apostrophic gestures.
Plane, birds, bell, river, driving fast across the moment.
I am looking
wayupthere
to that
'soft imperceptible field which has been made possible by the century and which thereafter made the century possible, becoming one of its defining locations, the place of movement and of war, the planet shrinker and power vacuum, most insecure and transitory of zones , illusory, discontinuous, metaphoric'.(8)
I think this too is a field, discontinuous, metaphoric, haunted by voices, ghosts of words, ghosts of events.
wayupthere
Aeroplane combines Greek aeros, air with planos, wandering. Aeronaut combines aero and naut - naftis, sailor. A sailor of the air. The air a sea, a place of wandering.
Sometimes things surface in strange ways. Sometimes the answers to questions come before the questions, sometimes links break, and sometimes threads emerge, connections form only in response to something long glimpsed, half heard, then dreamed.
To begin (writing, living) we must have death.
At the end of her long forced march from the underworld to the surface of the earth Eurydice suffers/encounters/experiences catastrophe. Orpheus turns to look at her and she is lost, she returns to the world of the dead. A dramatic turn of events, a catastrophe, a change which produces the final act of a dramatic piece.
Eurydice never comes up to make her mark in the fields. Dirty dead girl. Forever grounded. She is the namesake of Eurynome, the endless wanderer and first woman, the mother of the earth. Her fate, but perhaps also her choice, is to stay down among the dead. But her catastrophe is the failure to write.
Asked to write a response to catastrophe, to the meaning of September 11 2001, I return to this image, prominent among my own recurring images and icons. Asked to think about tragedy I dredge up other images, other catastrophes, other metaphors. The work they do is to run a textual thread that connects memory, image, icon, word within the terms of my own history, which is the sediment from which my own emotional world, and my writing, is made. In the moment of driving across the 14th Street bridge, I see a plane take off and hear a bell. In a moment already layered with meaning I remember that night drive in Greece, with my small daughter and the cars eating up the dark. A train of images is set in motion that connects skies and fields and pages to an earlier catastrophe that turned my own life inside out, to lost girls and the power of death, to the voice of my child and the hands of her grandmother, to Greece, to myths, to the summer of 1986, in a textured narrative that gives meaning to being here, now, haunted by voices, watching a plane lift, listening to a bell toll.
Words work. Words do the work of wandering across time and space, creating live connections. Pulling on the thread of an image, the dirt girl Eurydice, creates a text that is itself a piece of archaeological ephemera. Sometimes things seem to connect: flight, falling, fields, dreams, explosions, lost girls and their fates, portents, prophecies, talismans, earth, fall-out, rumour, bodies and words, fields and pages, white sheets of paper and the marks on them, bodies and birds. And order. And rest.
Claire MacDonald
References
1. Mike Pearson, from a talk at 'The Carrier Frequency Symposium' organized by Stan's Cafe, Birmingham, England, May 1st 1999.
2. Claire MacDonald 'Making the Carrier Frequency' liveart magazine, spring 1999 S
3. Sheelagh Kanelli, Earth and Water: marriage in Kalamata, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965
4. Helene Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993
5. Kathy Acker, Eurydice in the Underworld, London: Arcadia Books, 1997
6 & 7. Mike Pearson, 'The Carrier Fequency Symposium'
8. Salmon Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, London: Viking, 1988