Book of September
BY Amelia Zhou
I go, we go, Hélène Cixous wrote. On the way we keep a log-book, the book of the abyss and its shores. Everyone does. Cixous wrote this on page xvi in the preface of a greatest hits selection of her work. This too will be the quote to preface my book. Yes, this book. What follows, dear reader, is a book.
One can go anywhere with an endless supply of paper. On the last day of August, which also happened to be my last day as a salaried paper pusher at the university, I left the dean’s floor with spools and spools of ravens—inkjet black-and-white ravens that flew illegally out a Canon printer, soaring from left to right ①. I loved our break-up. I loved our break-up so much that if I had to cherry-pick our favourite moments, it would be when I pinched those wings, and threw my face into some institutional bin. On the roof, I kissed the ravens on their paper foreheads and wrote to myself, remember to write this goodbye as the second part of the preface of this book.
It begins as always with a border, multiply with an s, then add a passport, which is not unlike a skeleton key unlocking a scene inside a gilded frame beside its passageway, and all of these things mark a life’s structure, by which I mean the limit and a means to pass through that structure—constrained, of course—with the conceit of freedom. I stole these items from J.D.’s dining table ②, sorry, I mean his book, and whispered a thank you—(To whom was I compelled to speak? There was no nobody home)—on my way out.
A book is a passport. A passport is a book. I can consider the passport’s other latent meanings bound between its biometric end pages, though let’s concentrate on this: that Salman Rushdie said his passport is the most precious book he owns. More so, the passport is possibly the most intimate book we own, or should I say, the closest forgery of intimacy, if intimacy were a product synthesised by the country’s great love affair with surveillance—and don’t forget you & I—there’s always a damned third in an affair. At the airport, stand under the WELCOME TO THE UK BORDER sign and open the most precious book you own for the Border Force Officer to read. Do this continuously, and hope for a bargain in return: to secure passage, to draw back to a departure point, to cling on, to escape ③. The longer you keep your side of the relationship up, the greater the odds for survival.
September’s frame: The port at the end of La Canebière. A cup of longjing tea. Forests of eucalyptus. Days later, after I am welcomed to the other side of the border—UK—France—Australia—I read the preceding paragraphs in which you, dear reader, have also just read and think: better trash it, start again. This book shall consist only of beginnings. The task is daily. The operative word will be flight. Throw this book away, let it mingle with the discards. Let it mingle with what doesn’t make it into the frame: the endless walk of a pen in a notebook. The notebook which, really, is just a book dressed differently—in diffusion, improvisation, inexhaustible inconsequentiality. All that to say, inside a notebook, there is excess, compressed. Take a 18,000km walk. Not a metaphorical walk, I mean a real life one, one from a eucalyptus tree located in Marseille, France then to Sydney, Australia, with a pen in your luggage or coat pocket. On paper, this walk equals the space bar between the end of one sentence and the landing of a next. The fact is, besides the space bar, I have nothing to declare. Except: I want to be kissed only by the ravens. Move that into frame. To the country of language I go.
Conjure a scene without risk. Conjure a frame for a scene without the name of a nation or real estate company or your employer carved on it. The picture lies against a white wall, waiting. In Marseille, in an Airbnb with broken doorknobs, I flip open the complimentary tourist guidebook, find Walter Benjamin in the index: the palate itself is pink, which is the color of shame here, of poverty. ④ I transcribe the sentence into my notebook. Cut to the present, where here I am in Sydney, writing these words, backspacing my path, revising and resurrecting it as I go along. Picture this: at the Australian border, the Australian Border Officer frowns carefully over a portrait of an Australian teenage girl—a girl that is mostly dead now but obviously once appeared very alive and real at the Australia Post headquarters where her portrait was taken before being swiftly dispatched to Strawberry Hills, Sydney. A walk between two points, which is always discontinuous. Paint the space of discontinuity. The 18,000km walk. Plus the colour pink, which I also wish to make palpable somehow. Outside the window of my childhood home, early spring, the gladioli are already past full bloom, their pink petals fallen and smeared brown on the white tiles below. Yesterday: awoke before dawn, and lay there waiting for the sunlight to put the pink into view, the colour to break. No. Scrub that out. The strawberries, the flowers, the pink. I dare you to paint it again, but this time, do it better. No, no, the paint strokes move back and forth and layer repetitively like so. Your memory, is it working today?
Like the book—memory too—the historical bark of a tree. A trace around and around an event. And even the lies I tell, I think, are true. What I am telling you is: I walked around in circles, before the three preceding sentences, in the distance of three weeks, wringing my hands, trying to write what the ravens said to me on the rooftop, before we parted. La fuga hacia adelante. Am I remembering that correctly? Was that what they said? (Our communication was naturally telepathic.) I’ll translate the phrase before the three preceding sentences for you: the flight forwards. That’s not the ravens speaking anymore, that’s Aira; I got the phrase off César Aira, who uses it to describe his writing method. Its imperative? The daily task of propulsively improvising through and out of whatever sentence, picture, plot hole, crevice, scene, frame, et cetera, already committed to page the previous day, without revision. In order to begin, an unexpected passageway must reveal itself, as a clue. Let the field stay open, surplus. Then tomorrow, choose to get lost, is lost, quiver, find your key, the home it unlocks, compose the home, stay composing.
When I first imagined this book, I thought to set out with a similar intention to Aira: write forwards; stay passing; no revision. Dear reader, I failed at this task. The relief of confession just then was enormous. But back to my old problem of composition. So okay, I kept thinking, how can I keep on, when I have no desire to keep on. And I kept thinking: how can I begin from my so-called failure and shape it into form. What ‘failure’? What ‘it’? At the moment of writing I am never eager to know what failure is. In my wayward inclinations against failure, I might say that simply, by writing, I reversed my walk, sutured the space bar, chose another path. Memory can be an origin. And a tense a body moves through, still being written. Begin anywhere (Cage). With a dead start (Kapil). And on the way, remain alive, if possible (Kefala). ⑤
So okay then, how shall we begin again? Maybe like this: Preface to begin the book, part three. Pull the Airbnb doorknob off its hinge. Walk up and down and up and down the Strawberry Hills. Perhaps it is useful to note down somewhere (any scrap piece of paper will do) that in French, ‘log-book’ (cahier de bord) contains the word for ‘shore’ (les bords). Everything I am about to say in this book is therefore a matter of getting out—(if the desire so leads)—but also of going somewhere. ⑥ Let the entire body be an ear, I mean an oar, or maybe an I, waiting patiently as if towards a conclusion. And this time, on the way, do not forget what the ravens said, before we parted: At any moment, points can be chosen and solutions invented without beginning and end. ⑦ Meaning time gets elastic. Or time will stop when I am left, standing in a rockpool left by the Pacific. This is tomorrow’s plan. I think it’s already a gift.
London — Marseille — Sydney
30 September 2023
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Notes
① I am thinking specifically around Félix González-Torres’ works Untitled (Passport) and Untitled (Passport #II). The first realisation consisted of a stack of blank white paper. The second realisation consisted of stacks of passport-sized paper booklets containing photographs of birds in flight against an open sky. Audiences are encouraged to take a piece of paper/booklet away with them, the stack being endlessly replenished. González-Torres wrote of the first realisation: ‘The title: (Passport) is very crucial and significant … an empty passport for life: to inscribe it with the best, the most painful, the most banal, the most sublime, and yet to inscribe it with life, love, memories, fears, voids, and unexpected reasons for being.’
② The term passe-partout describes a mounting for a picture between a piece of glass and a sheet of cardboard (or another similar material). Here I’m riffing off its other cognate meanings, which Jacques Derrida alludes to in The Truth of Painting (‘If I were to put them all in a table, there would always be one that would play among the others, one taken out of the series, in order to surround it, with yet one more turn.’)
③ At London Stansted Airport, a tea shop wallpapered with the United Kingdom passport cover page in the style of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can paintings. Next to the shop, a sign points towards the airport ‘Escape Lounge’. The caveat: Access restricted to paid members only. (‘Step into a diverse space away from the crowds, where you can find all you will need before your flight … your trip is never at risk.’)
④ Walter Benjamin writing on Marseille, France in 1928: ‘…the palate itself is pink, which is the color of shame here, of poverty. Hunchbacks wear it, and beggarwomen. And the faded women of the rue Bouterie are given their only tint by the sole pieces of clothing they wear: pink shifts.’
⑤ Sources: John Cage; Bhanu Kapil, Schizophrene; Antigone Kefala, Sydney Journals: Reflections 1970-2000.
⑥ ‘Getting out but also of going somewhere’ is from Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape.
⑦ ‘At any point, points can be chosen and solutions invented without beginning and end’ is from Isaac Julien, Lina Bo Bardi—A Marvellous Entanglement.
Amelia Zhou is a writer and researcher. Her artistic work often explores intersections between language, movement, and performance through a range of forms. Her book REPOSE was selected for Wendy’s Subway 2022 Book Prize and will be published next year. Born and raised in Sydney, Australia, she is currently based in Cambridge, England, where she is working towards her PhD in English.