Moving Matters by Susan Ossman

Author:Susan Ossman [Ossman, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Emigration & Immigration
ISBN: 9780804770286
Google: caZXswEACAAJ
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-01-09T03:22:38+00:00

CHAPTER 5

PRESENT CONTINUITIES

International life is composed of five canvases. Though large, it is easily disassembled, boxed up, carried in a suitcase: it was rearranged to fit the cover of this book. The collage includes several colors of newsprint, scribbles, and photographs. Events, conditions, and actions float in a wash of rust and aqua that cuts the image vertically. A sapphire band is fed by a stream that appears to flow down toward a sky-blue lake, or perhaps it is a genie emerging as smoke from a magic cerulean lamp, the wishes he might grant protecting the dream world from the bright orange environment where conversation erupts in the shape of a broken tower or a missile. In the bright public space, English-language ads for houses in southern France mix with Arabic headlines about nations at war; a masked man hangs upside down while making the news. The obituary of a once famous opera singer is splashed in turquoise, intimating how music can evoke that other dreamworld of sea and night and unseen beings, a signal of how public worlds partake of intimate flows of thought that jumble time in ways difficult to put into words.1

In contrast to a book of hours that brings together multiple representations of an iconic life intellectually, this mundane record of a private existence shows the flow of a single cloth interrupted. Five panels, consistent in tone, broken into regular intervals by the edges of the canvases, coax the eye into a saccadic rhythm to bring the whole into focus. The completeness of the image emerges from breaking up what is continuous; each panel is an interval of sight, a momentary resting point on the path of the eye that sweeps upward to rest on the touch of fingers on the back of a hand.

Sitting across the table from the anthropologist with her notebook or tape recorder may trigger memories of the moment when one crossed a border or touched a brush to a white canvas; one gathers one’s thoughts to reflect on one’s life, one seeks to express one’s biography as a continuous gesture or to account for changes in plot in ways that seem logical. Images and letters, memories and reveries that make up one’s experience are ordered in succession to tell one’s story. In contrast, International Life evokes the tangle of words and images, facts and emotions, reminiscences and feelings that intermingle in the present in an internal conversation that is difficult to translate into narrative. The continuity of the subject is always more than can be said, one’s history more than a set of choices and deliberations. Evidence of who one is now, made up of pasts seemingly forgotten or left to the side, sometimes erupts into present consciousness; one might observe one’s own hand gesturing in a manner that brings some place of the past into the room uninvited, or register a word uttered with an accent that adds to the meaning for oneself but for no one else who is present.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.