‘But I said to you that you have seen me and yetdo not believe. All that the Father give me will come to me; and him who comes to me I will not cast out.’
* * *
When I was a child and unable to sleep, my father would sit beside me on the bed brushing my forehead again and again with slow, even strokes. Today such a gesture still carries this trace and with the feel of fingertips moving slowly across my brow, my body re-members -- and I allow myself to dream.
*
When I was a child and unable to sleep, I would sneak downstairs to find my mother outside on the porch. Sitting there amongst the plants and the incessant swoosh of traffic noise, I could barely make out her figure in the dark. Instead, the slow wink of a fire-hot cherry would expand and contract in a beacon of breath to indicate to me that she was there. Today the hot glow of a cigarette in the dark re-minds me -- and I think of her.
*
This touch and this image, in triggering a memory, displace me -- relocate me -- for even a moment. In such moments the entirety of my life with its supposedly sequential development contracts in a conjunction of then and now. Likewise, my body -- in re-membering -- is, for a moment, displaced. The entirety of my spatiality with its seemingly specific and embodied location contracts in a conjunction of there and here. In a sense, this touch and this image serve to punctuate my life, interrupting my ‘stream of consciousness’ with memory; disrupting my spatial trajectory with detour. I might signify them on the page with the use of a dash -- a mark of separation -- followed by a semi-colon; a mark of conjunction. In this way, movement and trajectory -- breakage and connection -- become signified as a mark with/in materiality: a mark with/in the page as a slowly unfolding ground of ink and woody pulp.
In an expanded use of the term -- and in relation to other disciplinary practices -- punctuation is not simply a system of notation grafted into a sequential sentence structure and relating to the rules of grammar and syntax (although any use of this word would necessarily allude to such a meaning). Instead, it might become an indication of movement; a means of shaping temporality and spatiality through breakage and conjunction. It can create links, ‘backwards’ and ‘forwards’; it can juxtapose; it can embed. It can speed up and slow down. Sometimes it can stop-time altogether
…syncope.
In this sense, punctuation indicates (even itself becomes) motion. Depositing space. Unfolding matter. Working in conjunction with the page.
So what is the page in an expanded definition?
Such a definition is not a conventional blank page, the 2-dimensional construct seen as writing’s embodiment and its metaphor. Standing for the ‘space of the page’ -- empty, homogeneous and void -- such a blankness awaits the mark of signification; that is, of a sequence of ‘time.’ And language? Phonetic writing? Becomes that which provides the mark, filling up the emptiness with the horizontal ramblings of essayist, journalist, novelist, poet, thereby mapping this ‘space of the page’ with a seemingly forward progression: with chronology; with linear time. Within this paradigm, time, language and ‘meaning’ would seem to be deposited into a pre-existing and ‘empty’ space. Further, such a progression of language -- structured according to classical rules -- can be said to map time chronologically while structuring meaning or making sense hierarchically.
So what happens when the page is not blank? And when the sequence is not structured -- that is, broken and connected (punctuated) -- according to conventions of grammar and syntax? In other words, what happens when the surface of a site of inscription unfolding materiality through motion, is understood, itself, to participate in the construction of meaning? Moreover, what happens when motion as the movement (of the reader) -- which is not of necessity left to right -- becomes incorporated into the practice of making the text; becomes intrinsic to -- even itself becomes -- punctuation? What kinds of spatialities and what kinds of temporalities -- further, what kinds of sense -- result?
* * *
'Dermagraphism -- writings on the skin. This event was documented in the late 19th century in an insane asylum in Paris by Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot attempted to classify certain mental disorders by means of their visual appearances. Doctors would lightly trace a word, the description of a female patient's illness, on a woman's back. Her skin would react, resulting in a welt that displayed the word. Charcot would then photograph the back with the classification on it. Sometimes a doctor would sign his name on the back if he thought he had made a work of art. (38) (From Georges Didi-Huberman, 'The Figurative Incarnation of the Sentence (Notes on the 'Autographic Skin'), Journal (Spring 1987): 67.
* * *
My work involves a specific and embodied engagement with the page in the making and practice of poetry. This introduction of the surface of inscription into the production of written texts has allowed me to make a transition -- to enact a displacement (through disciplinary breakage and connection) -- of poetry from the page to the architectural or urban site. Here I take into account not only the material specificity of the site as a scriptural surface, but also the historical, social, architectural and political specificity of the site as a place of writing. Ultimately, however, it is in the conjunction of text, surface and context with the movements and embodied engagements (ie: spatial practices or ‘punctuations’ of the ‘writer’ and the ‘reader/user’) that I locate specificity in these site-related practices.
Part Four
There is a silence of page beneathing all that is left to the site of a spoken
if only …
Herein lies the archaeology of word.
Heard in the ruins of this place;
felt by the gestures of that hand.
Fragments of I don’t know what
surfacing. Re-surfacing.
(although what is a question of surface)
* * *
So I begin to play with break. A break that lies less like transition. A break that is more like 3∨4stop!
or
listen …
chuig teanga nach dhfuil ar eolas agam
in ait nach dhfuil me in ann ladhairt
* * *
Pages (moments) like skin.
Perceptions that touch (rinse), trace (sink) and rise (vanish) into welts (into dust).
Dermagraphic, they say,[1]
sketching illness onto their backs.
In this way naming is another word for ‘outside’.
* * *
I feel the need to die a little every time I write.
Count to five.
(This piece here today explores the qualities of skin as a scriptural surface in relation to a filmic syntax. One component of a collaborative site-specific installation at the Swiss Church in London, the composition of the two-channel video projections relates to the elevational composition of the church façade, each projection being visible through the main windows after nightfall. I am currently developing this aspect of the piece to explore the full extent of skin as a medium for inscription, exploring those parts of the body I can grasp as well as those that which remain out of reach …)
Biography
Kristen Krieder is a full-time PhD candidate working in an interdisciplinary capacity between the Bartlett School of Architecture and the Slade School of Fine Art to develop film, poetry and text installations for a number of urban and historical sites.