Who Can Stay the Bottles of Heaven?

Loneliness is a rising music of

A space I can only go to without

You. The love-god says she’ll devote

A moment to make it up to me, move

Me back to your dance of spells, then above

To your pincushion eyes of light. She doubts

Anything can be done soon, she’s not about

To change her schedule for one lousy love.

I miss your cello voice, your midnight lows,

The color of your hair, and dancing blue

To blue-violet. I miss your until tomorrows,

The shape of your wrists, even the way you

Say loneliness can be cured with just two

Things only you and the love-god can know.

-From, Discography, by Sean Singer.

Came across this video the other day thanks to a friend’s post on the interaweb and was completely taken aback. In this 8 minutes long performance, Kseniya Simonova–winner of the contest ‘Ukraine’s Got Talent’– manages to bring her audience to tears while narrating a tragically beautiful visual rendition of the country’s history through swift motions of her fingers through grains of sand.

I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Her work is a series of temporal images that morph and change shape through time as she delicately brushes, indents, and sculpts copious amounts sand over a light box. Moving from landscapes to silhouettes to portraits, her movements through the sand evoke powerful emotional reactions from an audience watching her mold, sculpt, and re-create a deeply intimate moments in the country’s history. She conflates the public and private, shaping narratives of the past through her movements and changing images in the sand. Utilizing the protean nature of the sand, her material serves as a greater metaphor for the turbulent nature of history as it is remembered and re-told as she moves from close-up images of men and women, to distant landscapes of the country and city, only to be erased by the shaking of fingers or application of more sand. The process of shaping the images pulls the viewer between intricately personal and public worlds while never stopping for more than a second on one or the other, embodying the flux and motion of human experience over time.

Her performance is simultaneously in and out of time, occupying a liminal zone that extends into a realm where nothing but nebulous feeling exists. Her motions are too swift to linger on any one image or moment for too long. Perhaps it is the music, or the deep sadness portrayed in the images her fingers shape mirrored by the tears of the audience, but it is near impossible to watch her work without feeling a sense of nostalgia and loss, whether or not the experience is your own.

This will mesmerize you.

After some coffee and breakfast—1 tablespoon of instant powder coffee mixed with a 1/3 teaspoon sugar along with a petit pain au lait—I sat down to finish reading a book by an author who is “the Einstein of memory.” Throughout the past week I have been reading W.B. Sebald’s novel Vertigo. I have followed this German man on his journey through Italy, southern Germany, his memories, and the memories of others. At times his words bore me to death, but there are moments when he captivates my imagination. The way he renders place and experience, especially the unknown dark corners of memory, is remarkable. He tells less a story of what is remember than what is not remember, or what is never completely known. I would say he narrates the shadows that followed him throughout his life; only through telling the story does he begin to dissolve les ombres. His writing made me think about how memory functions when we do an about-face and chase down the shadows. By nature these semi-opaque entities seem tangible enough if not completely at our mercy to be sculpted as we please. But only the great craftswomen knows well how to manipulate the vellum-like figures. The rest of us, try as we may, only run out of time and misshape them. We try though, and that is what I found so fascinating about Sebald’s work. He danced with the shadows–getting close, but never too close as to chase them away. Conjuring them towards him, he wove them into new memories that were a hybrid of old imaginings and new experiences, crafting an entirely innovating kind of memory.