Ascent

>The Space Between

Posted on August 30, 2010. Filed under: Ascent, Book Beast, Eliza Griswold, Eurozine, Geir Gulliksen, Ink and Ashes, Miriam Gross, Rebecca Solnit, Robert Root, Siri Steiner, Standpoint Magazine |

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It takes a little over two and half hours to travel between London and Paris on the Eurostar.    Racing between one 19th century capital to the other, I read Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (or its UK title of Motion Studies:  Time, Space & Eadweard Muybridge).  Solnit writes how the train, the telegraph, and even the camera forcefully annihilated time and space in the 19th century–and continues to today.  The experience of reading Solinit’s book on the fast train to Paris,  reminded me how space and time have so often been constructions that have been transformed and reimagined.  In the 19th century, before the adoption of international time zones in 1883, there was more than an hour time difference between Paris and London.  And, in one of history’s small ruptures, when England refused to adopt the pope imposed Gregorian calendar in 1582 (a move to readjust the calender more closely to the cycles of the earth), the time difference between England and the rest of Europe grew gradually, until 1752 when there was an eleven day difference between London and Paris. Under a law passed in 1750, England adopted the Gregorian calendar (to much rioting and resistance across the country), and Wednesday, September 2nd, 1752 was followed by Thursday, September 14th.

Russian didn’t adopt this calendar until after the revolution in 1918, when Wednesday, January 31st was followed by Thursday, February 14th.  The photos posted here come from a period just before Russia lost 13 days and its Tsarist empire.  They captivate me with their crude colors, done with three different lenses before the invention of color photography.  As the Big Picture notes, under the direction of the Tsar, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) went about capturing the people and landscapes of the vast Russian empire between 1910 and 1912.  Today, this large collection is housed at the Library of Congress.  These images present scenes of life before the 20th century wars would annihilate in a different way.  Looking at them today they are distant and strange, and yet at the same moment they feel contemporary.  They provoke our imagination and memory (other tools of annihilating time and space) as if the space between that time and ours was a short train trip between Paris and London. 

Miriam Gross remembers her childhood growing up in Israel before World War II at Standpoint Magazine: “I was born in Jerusalem shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. My parents had met there (my mother was married to someone else at the time), both having left Germany in 1933 soon after Hitler came to power. My mother, who was half Russian and half German, had had to abandon her legal studies in Berlin when the Nazis decreed that Jews could no longer practise law.” 

Siri Steiner writes about imagining the decay of her dead body in an unsettling and captivating essay at Ink (and) Ashes: “My family wasn’t religious. I could only comfort myself with the thought of nothing. I sat very still (a difficult task for me) and tried to clear my mind of everything—to play dead and see what it would be like. Try as I might, my mind raced and hummed. The harder I tried, the more I thought. I thought about what everyone I saw would look like dead. I thought about what I would look like dead.”

At Eurozine, Geir Gulliksen tries to imagine an androgynous existence outside of art: “Even before I started school I was uncomfortable with having to be “a boy”, and I am still uncomfortable with being “a man”, and it was clear to me early on that the simple opposites had to be re-adjustable so that it would be possible to be as gentle as a boy or as reckless as a girl. And when I started to write, it was this I wrote about, as if writing was the only place where it I could liberate myself from preset notions about gender.”

Robert Root meditates on his travels caught between time and nature in the Acadia National Park at Ascent: “What was simply a moment of attention for me is the timeless nature of their existence. Though few creatures hear it, the cobblestones have been making the same sounds, wearing themselves away slowly—slowly—by infinitesimal degrees, chattering, pinging and clunking all the while, eons upon eons, open to change on every ebb and surge of the tide. My clattering across the cobblestones was only an instant of static in the ever-varying, timeless transmission of sound.”

And at Book Beast, an excerpt from Eliza Griswold’s recent book The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam: “These rabbits were a gift for Ibnu Ahmad’s newborn son and his second wife, Farhia, 28, whom he had met while still in prison on Sulawesi, where the three of us were headed this morning. “Fathers used to come to the prison to marry their daughters off to us,” he said wistfully.”