Antigone's Answer

In the thirteen years since Judith Butler published Antigone's Claim (having first performed the book as a series of Wellbeck Lectures), the question of what Antigone is claiming – as a woman, and in the aftermath of war – have become ever more pressing. In retrospect, the book seems uncannily prescient of the questions of grievability and vulnerability raised by the events of 9/11 and subsequent imperial wars, as addressed by Butler in her recent work. Both The Watch by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya and The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi draw on Antigone (the former more explicitly than the latter) for Afghanistan-set stories of female mourning outside the law.

Moira Buffini's play Welcome to Thebes resituated Sophocles' play in that mythical unnamed country, Africa; making surface reference to (and drawing a charge from association with) the revisioning of tragedy practised by Wole Soyinka, Sarah Kane and Yael Farber, Buffini's conventional drama - like Roy-Bhattacharya's and Rahimi's novels - relies, as an update and relocation, on a creepy, tired notion of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny -- that is, on a EuroWestern sense that contemporary Afghanistan or "Africa" are culturally analogical to ancient (mythic) Greece. These over-theres are cast as primitive, embroiled in the awful, terrible beholden-ness to gods and fate from which our supposed civilisation has supposedly rescued us. It's a melodrama composed out of pity porn, made august by its claim to the classics.

Of course, Greek tragedies are endlessly rewritten and updated, and the century after Freud's Oedipus has proved particularly fruitful for the Theban cycle. Butler recommends Antigone as a post-oedipal position from which to rethink psychoanalysis and ideas of both identity and identification, for example.    Rather than outsideoverthere, Butler puts Antigone in us: not as an archaising exercise, but out of frustration with the deathliness of her narrative. We have responsibility for working things out differently, not just watching endless repetitions and shaking our heads as overtheres repeat our mistakes for our edutainment. Antigone's claim on us is also in us, about us.

A new retelling, The Story of Antigone, by Ali Smith with illustrations by Laura Paoletti, started me thinking about the nature of Antigone's claim; maybe because it's a telling for younger readers, it both makes the issues of Antigone's claim clear (clearer than a highly academic philosophy book) and allows them to resonate in all their complexities. Smith's Antigone is young – only 12 – the youngest sibling of the family, youngest child of Oedipus. Both her innocence and her experience inform her powerful, internal sense of justice: it's not just because she's a child, seeing in black-and-white, that she decides to bury her brother against the king's orders; nor is it just because of the weight of familial trauma. She figures both with her implacable logic and its courage. She asks a lot of herself.

For Butler, Antigone's claim both legal – a cause of action – and a philosophical critique – a proposition – against Creon's agonistic jurisprudence. More than an argument, a claim can be a right, something staked. Perhaps even more curious, for Butler's interest in performativity and destabilising identity, in internet terminology claims-based identity uses statements made by online entities about themselves or their users as authenticating security tokens. Here, technical concepts of security, identity and authority both meet and play out their political equivalents, like a mini-NSA soap opera:

Claims are not what the subject can and cannot do. They are what the subject is or is not. It is up to the application receiving the incoming claim to map the is/is not claims to the may/may not rules of the application. In traditional systems there is often confusion about the differences and similarities between what a user is/is not and what the user may/may not do. Claims-based identity makes that distinction clear. Once the distinction between what the user is/is not and what the user may/may not do is clarified, it becomes apparent that the authentication of what the user is/is not (the claims) are often better handled by a third party than by any individual application. This third party is called the security token service.

Got that? So information technology has literalised Creon's command-control style. Sophocles' play shows what happens when a third party – in this case, the seer Tiresias, who is third-gendered and appears three times in the Theban trilogy – adjudicates what the user may or may not do, based on the service provider's claim about who they are or are not. Tiresias acts as a security token service, telling Creon to save Antigone from a living death, and to bury Polynices with full rights. The tragedy is that this authentication arrives too late: system failure.

Tiresias appears

In her prose retelling (with rhyming verse choral odes), which retains the mythic Thebes as a setting, Smith uses third person (which drama cannot), and begins in a third-party point of view: that of a crow sitting on the main gate of the city. As in Hans Christian Andersen's weirdest story "The Marsh King's Daughter," there is an affinity between a watchful bird and a troublesome daughter who stands outside the law (there, a stork and a princess who turns into a toad at night). In an appendix in which the Crow interviews her, Smith says her choice of observer comes from the play itself, which is full of references to the crows and dogs who scavenge at the feast of death that is any Greek tragedy, and this one – which starts at the end of a battle – in particular.

For the mother crow, human death is a source of nourishment, and human actions a source of entertainment – just as for the audience in the tragic theatre. Rather than catharsis, however, the mother crow spits up a bolus of food to pass on to her chicks: a story. So the crow – scavenging in death – is the (re)writer as well as the audience: Antigone's claim on her is that her body/story be ingested, taken in, processed, laid claim to. Antigone's death demands that the crow claim her. Antigone (is) in us.

Although the story shifts subtly in and out of being aligned with the mother crow's point of view, it ends with an epilogue, one year after the events of the play, in which she tells the story to her chicks as she feeds them. The call-and-response form in which it is presented, with the chicks demanding

"Tell us the story about: the mad black cloud of crows/the tasty body/the time our own mother sat on the hand of the wise Tiresias/the brave still-alive boy who stood up to his father/the piece of pink material that got woven into our nest"

is not only a vivid depiction of how human children engage with storytelling (and a reminder of our adult investment in narrative repetition and its pleasures), but also a model of responsiveness, in which each side of the conversation makes demands on the other, and is heard. This is the opposite of Antigone's negotiation with Creon, in which not only her side of the story, but her narrative structure, is denied by his. Storytelling places teller and listener, Smith's use of form argues, in a relationship of responsibility to each other, conducted via the tropes of the tale.

So displacement could never be enough: the (re)writer/reader needs to take seriously the claim made by the text if she is to act as a security token service, to authenticate the possibility of relationship and of the significant information about life, death and law that flows across it. As well as the dialogic form of the epilogue, the book as a whole creates a dialogue between the text and the illustrations, which shift between full facing-page and embedded in the text. Illustrations are like the family secret of our textual culture: a family member that is ignored. It's there in the work of WJT Mitchell and, in brief, in this thought-provoking discussion of the word/image interaction in children's books by SF Said.

Like the law (unto) itself, the pictures here tell their own version of the story. They tell the reader who does and does not count in the world of the story. Creon only appears once, riding out in pomp: after his declaration against Polynices, he disappears off the side of the page, being represented only by his horse (and finally, when he realises what an idiot he's been, by his horse's arse). The Elders of the Chorus, who are on the side of the status quo, are a faceless flock; instead, there are detailed illustrations of the crow, the dog, a feather, a flower, a piece of pink fabric that links Antigone and Ismene, as well as of the two sisters, Tiresias and Haemon, Creon's son.

Bianca Stone, Antigo    nick

The illustrations take a passionate stand for Antigone: they are on her side. Unlike a conventional staging, they make the story only partially visible. The same is true of Bianca Stone's illustrations in Anne Carson's Antigo     nick (Sophokles), some of which are printed on slightly opaque translucent mylar, thus revealing/concealing the hand-lettered text beneath. Carson's text is entirely dialogic, using the form of the playscript, and she has performed it live, with a rotating cast (including Judith Butler as Creon!)


Anne Carson: Performing Antigonick from Louisiana Channel on Vimeo.

Carson's retelling is also set in mythical Thebes, and hews far closer to the structure of the play, although it includes anachronistic references to speedboats and Freud. Unlike Smith's chorus of Elders, whose awkwardly-rhymed platitudes are an exercise in comic relief, Carson's Chorus are profoundly poetic, and in some sense the narrator of the play, perhaps in response to Hélène Cixous' essay "Collaborative Theatre," which mourns the loss of the chorus from the post-classical stage, and wonders about the chorus – like Smith's crow's eye view – as a figure for democratic conversation and response-ability.

It is the Chorus who are the interpreters for Carson: figure of both (re)writer and reader/viewer.

WE ARE STANDING IN
THE NICK OF TIME 

[ENTER MESSENGER]

reads the end of the penultimate choral ode (where the stanza break is actually most of a blank page). It's a painful irony – the Chorus declare victory (Creon has saved Antigone and Haemon in the nick of time) at the moment defeat (oh no, he hasn't) arrives to announce itself. It's easy to think of the Chorus, especially in this moment, as somewhat smug, self-satisfied status quoters – not least as a way of doubly disavowing our own expectations of narrative satisfaction (we feel stupid because we, like the Chorus, want Antigone to survive and she doesn't; and we feel cruel because we really – according to the structural logic in which we have been educated by our culture – want her to die, and she does, and that makes us hate ourselves and feel responsible for her death). But their declaration is a very precise description of the claim made on the spectator: we are standing in / the nick of time.

That is, we are in some sense stand-ins for the historical witnesses (as the Chorus are also our stand-ins on stage); we experience the highlights of the drama, the nicks of time on which the playwright or (re)writer wants us to focus. The sense of 'in'ness coincides with Antigone's claim to be in us: we have to, in another of Butler's phrases, put our bodies on the line, be in the temporality and logic of the play. It could also be read as another kind of claim: can we, as the (offstage) Chorus, stand our bodies in the nick of time? Can we place ourselves between the story as told and its supposedly inevitable ending? Can we look closely at our disavowal in order to change the structural logic and its supposed satisfactions?

The nick of time is an uncomfortable place to be; it is like being in the beak of a crow: sharp, risky. Who would be there? Antigone is the first one to try and place herself therein, between Creon's Law and the law of entropy (time) under which Polynices' body will become the nothing – the lack of a claim-based identity – that Creon wishes it to be. She leaves the city gates in the half-light between night and dawn (a dangerous time for anyone to be about, let alone an unmarried girl traversing a military camp); when caught, she is buried alive, in Creon's casuistical solution to his own law and his own conscience. Time (Death) keeps nicking her, a device that Shakespeare will borrow for the final scenes of both King Lear and Romeo and Juliet.

In Carson's final stand on Antigone's side, Nick becomes a (silent) character, "who continues /////// measuring" at the end of the play (there's that blank-page-gap again). Antigone and Nick share the letters I-N (reversed) in their names; Nick is also the name of Carson's brother, the subject of her work prior to Antigonick, NOX. "in" is one of the final words of Catullus' poem 101, an address to his dead brother, spoken at his grave. The final line of the poem reads "atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale." Carson defines each word of the poem in depth, generally giving (some invented) examples of usage. For "in," she offers only one such, "in noctem death vote," in the exact middle of a long list of relations that "in" can denote.

Those that follow the invented usage could be said to describe Antigone's "death vote," her decision to use the only choice she has to join her brother in death:

in reference to, respecting, with regard to; in proportion to, considering; in comparison with; in accordance with, after, in the style of; so as to become, into; so as to produce or result in; in order to cause, with a view to; in order to make up (a total); for the needs of, for the use against; in expectation of.

This is how, as she says of Inger Christensen's masterwork It, prepositions form "all our raw hopes of relation." 'In' is complicated for Antigone: if she is in the city, she cannot be in the family – and moreover, in herself; she learns that with her father's exile and her brother's desecration. Or rather, she stands "in the nick," in the tension or interval of trying to be both: a good citizen and a good sibling; alive and dead; virgin and bride. She stands for the irresolvable, what both is and isn't, may and may not, for what is beyond "claims-based identity." As Smith tells the crow,

through the whole play, the whole story of Antigone, there are questions which, though they are unspoken, are still there nonetheless, about the borders of things… about wildness and tameness… about what is natural and what isn't, what is spiritual and what isn't.

Antigone, Laura Paoletti

Antigone is the embodiment of these questions, but not of their answer. In fact, what might be most important about her is that she is exactly a claim, not its resolution. That is part of being in: "in uncertainties, Mysteries and doubt," as John Keats said a good reader and writer should be. Updatings are perhaps too busy proposing answers to notice the abyssal complexity of staying in the question, being the person who – after exeunt omnes – "continues /////// measuring" – perhaps "in order to make up (a total)," that is, to invent an ending or solution, to add some more what isn't to what is, and vice versa.

That is to be epi-logos: after the word. There is an after, even to Creon's word, the unbreakable Logos of EuroWestern logocentrism. There's the bird-person who flies off for yet another round of food, for the chicks who will ask for the story again – and gets waylaid interrogating the author, questioning her control of the Logos. Whose point-of-view or appearance makes a nick in the temporal structure of the narrative into/out of which the possibility of change pours.

In Tents/Intense, or Why Be Outside When You Could Be Inside?

1. In Tents

You shall live in booths seven days; all citizens in Israel shall live in booths, in order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt. (Leviticus 23: 42-43)

If you want to save souls - and who doesn't - then a tent seems to be the best kind of temporary structure. It is a metaphor for this provisional life of ours - without foundations and likely to blow over. It is a romance with the elements. The wind blows, the tent billows, who here feels lost and alone? Answer - all of us…
In a tent you feel sympathy with others even when you don't know them. The fact of being in a tent together is a kind of bond. (Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? p.71)

October in the Jewish suburbs where I grew up was Tent City, so it felt entirely appropriate that Occupy the London Stock Exchange should pitch itself outside the Tabernacle on the intermediate weekend of Sukkot (Tabernacles).

Sukkot was as close as I got to camping, on the reckoning that Jews had had their fill of nomadic life long ago. All those patriarchs and matriarchs welcoming angels at their tent flaps were a thing of the past. We were intent on settlement, presented as the natural desire of a people forced into exile repeatedly, and then much mocked for their wandering, to stop, and be safe. Unlike the Pentecostal sect in which Jeanette Winterson grew up, Jews don't do tent revivalism or metaphors for provisional life.

But once a year, a little like middle-class kids heading to Glastonbury to 'rough it', we ate all our meals (with added daddy-long-legs dressing) under cover of leaves. With much swearing at his tools (hallmark of the bad craftsman) my father would erect the requisite booth. Hadar trees (Biblically mandated) being in short supply in North London, pine uprights and cross braces not dissimilar from the materials of our flatpack self-assembly beds were substituted, draped in a double thickness of flyblown plastic sheeting. As the trees in our garden were generally losing their leaves by this point in the year, leafy branches were purchased at the garden centre to create the 'roof.'

The letter imitating (and thus diminishing) the spirit, one could say. There was nothing natural about our sukkah; the natural world was something to be feared, despised and bug-sprayed, the opposite of culture, domesticity and divinity. God, of course, created the animals, mountains, etc - but that was just the prototype. Jewish life 2.0 took place indoors, estranged not only from nomadic, but also agricultural, life, smoothly assimilated into the post-industrial West. The prayer book held blessings to be recited on seeing certain animals and on seeing the little folk, and I only learned the latter. It seemed more likely to me.

But for seven days, that world-building aeon, we suffered the wind and rain and late, last insect life, claggy inside our plastic booth like overcoated end-of-pier mermaids. And on Shemini Atzeret, we returned - with abject gratitude - to the warm embrace of the dining room. Saved from the outside world for another year. It seemed inevitable, and appropriate, that the Great Storm of 1987 should occur as Shemini Atzeret slept into Simchat Torah. Sukkahs, held together with last year's nails and a prayer, were scattered to the four winds while their owners rested in the knowledge that they no longer had to eat in them.

The overall message being 'outside bad, inside good.' Outside the house, outside the community, outside God's embrace, you are lost to the wind, and a tent is no protection. Homemaking was the task of the Jewish woman, with the traditional tools of the exorcist: bread crumbs, books and candles. That warm, bosomy fantasy of home is emotively exemplified in Primo Levi's poem 'If This is a Man', which opens with an address to 'You who live safe / In your warm houses' ('Voi che vivete sicuri / Nelle vostre tiepidi case'), in contrast to those exposed and expelled from the domestic as a sign of the human.

But because Levi is an excoriatingly honest writer, he makes clear that the safety of those warm houses is a fantasy, one that is at once dependent on (ignoring) the exclusion of others from the boundaries of security, and on the precarious and temporary nature of that security itself.

God had the right idea, after all (not something I readily admit): a week of eating dinner in a booth should remind us that the security we seek and cherish is provisional, haphazard, and exclusionary. That we should live the 'precarious life' of vulnerability and dependability to others that Judith Butler advocates. Instead, it made us flee back into the consoling embrace of sofas, sideboards and second dishwashers, into the pretence that four brick walls could not be blown down by the Big Bad Wolf.

No wonder the temporary tent cities erected across the globe are freaking out the settled folk. As Jay Griffiths points out in Wild: An Elemental Journey, the animosity between settlers and nomads is perhaps the oldest violent binary in human history. The tent cities of the Occupy movement are like those of Sukkot: voluntary, intentionally provisional, intensely visible and highly symbolic. They quote the form of, but are not, the residential tent cities of necessity/desperation that are called 'shanty towns' or not called anything at all but swept away, as the Toronto municipal government did for the visit of the IOC in 2001.

That's not to say they are not pragmatic and useful: some Occupations have worked to provide housing and shelter for many people living on the streets (although this has also been a source of some conflict within the core Occupy movement, which is largely from the settled middle class; thanks to Maysie for linking to this excellent article from POOR magazine on the settled/settler attitudes operative at many of the Occupations; more on that at the end), as well as a free meeting place for discussion and connection that is increasingly hard to organise or discover in our increasingly privatised cities - the libraries and Workers' Institutes that Winterson remembers from her childhood in Accrington being slowly erased or, more insidiously, institutionalised into pay-to-play.

Perhaps Occupy, wherever it stands, is more like a revivalist tent than it cares to admit: a centre of charismatic speaking, gatheration, community feeling, action plans for saving souls, and the pragmatic and attractive benison of tea and sandwiches. A carnivalesque relief from the burden of maintaining our belief in the sanctity of property and the safety of houses. A moment of making a home in each other, while feeling the wind and rain on our faces. At John Kinsella's reading at Tent City University, unlit and unheated, I found myself experiencing a fierce ecstasy (ex-stasis, standing outside) at the sound of the rain, at the billow of the canvas Winterson describes, at the provisional rawness of the moment and the solid warmth of the crowd inside. Kinsella's work speaks fiercely and precisely about the living world (acknowledging the problems and possibilities of that term, ie: defiantly not a 'nature' poet, as he writes here) and our interconnections with it: it's a knowing un-pastoral engaged with the astonishing violence of the settled towards what unsettles them, be it animal, vegetable or human Other(ed).

While there's nothing to cheer or relish in the sadistic violence of police action against Occupiers, there is something ecstatic about the collapsible, moveable, resituable nature of this movement and its camps. The symbolic work of the carnival or revival is to be temporary and provisional and contingent, flexible and unexpected. 'We Shall Not Be Moved' as a song of protest re-interpreted to imply reclaiming all space as public, not putting down roots in a single spot and self-kettling into the illusion of stability.

2. Outside In

There was a person in me - a piece of me - however you want to describe it - so damaged that she was prepared to see me dead to find peace.
That part of me, living alone, hidden, in a filthy abandoned lair, had always been able to stage arid on the rest of the territory…
The lost furious vicious child living alone in the bottom bog wasn't the creative Jeanette - she was the war casualty. She was the sacrifice. She hated me. She hated life. (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? p.71)

But here's the thing: we all need to be held. In Sandrine Bonnaire's beautiful documentary about her sister, who is living with autism, Elle s'appelle Sabine, the therapist at the care centre (which Sandrine shamed the French government into co-funding after her earlier investigations revealed the brutalising conditions in which Sabine had been imprisoned for several years), tells Sandrine that (and I paraphrase) she interprets autism as a disorder in which a person struggles, more than normal, to sense the boundaries between self and world. They live completely without walls.

Temple Grandin, the celebrated animal psychologist and an autism sufferer, thinks similarly. Studying cattle as they massed together, she realised that there was something profoundly comforting to her, as well, in the idea of being 'cow crushed': having her head gently but firmly immobilised. Sabine's therapist argues that some of the key 'anti-social' behaviours associated with autism can be read, compassionately, as sufferers attempting (and failing) to find limits, boundaries that will stand. Autism is an amplification of both the necessity and impossibility of finding safety, something we all experience.

As Winterson reveals in her memoir, adoption can be another similar amplification. She writes movingly of her struggle to redefine and then create a home -- at once bricks-and-mortar, and interpersonal -- never more so than when she says that, after childhood experiences of being locked in a coal cellar and of having no privacy in her own bedroom, she only feels at home in her house with the doors wide open. Winterson's solution, her route to plenitude, is fascinating because paradoxical. It's a poem: to feel safe behind an open door.

To me this is a heart-striking way of thinking through the vexed question of outside and inside that we experience in the home as a manifestation of the body, and which informs not only domestic and relational negotiations, but the very idea (I think) of property and its 'proper' protection. We build walls to shelter from the storm -- but the very existence of those walls reminds us that we are not, and cannot be, safe (because the storm is inside us). So we put locked doors in the walls. Then we alarm them. Then we build electrified iron fences around our properties, with armed guards outside them: each gesture that should make us feel safe(r) simultaneously reminding us that we feel unsafe. Freud says that's how the fetish works, constantly reminding us of the lack we want it to supply.

I thought about the fetish of the house a lot while watching Andrea Arnold's adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which - like Winterson's memoir - is a story of adoption, something that had never occurred to me before encountering the two texts concurrently. Arnold's 'controversial' casting of two dark-skinned British Caribbean actors to play Heathcliff (the controversy's utter risibility being that this casting is textually accurate) intensifies and crystallises the novel's passionate politics of love as the freedom from all oppressions, not least by focusing the viewer on Heathcliff's difference, his outsiderness. His inability to find and trust boundaries (both because they have been taken away, and because they are later used to exclude him) is performed in the film through a behaviour that is common for people living with autism: head-banging, a literal attempt to reimpose boundaries on the frightened and flailing self.

As an adoptee (Mr. Earnshaw finds him on the streets of Liverpool), Heathcliff -- like Winterson -- is hungry for a home. The film suggests that he finds this home (safety) initially in a relationship with Catherine, and in the space of the moors where they are equals in, and equalled by, the force of the land and elements. Arnold's adaptation traces, subtly through costume, light and framing, the shift that occurs as Catherine is coerced into increasing identification with the domestic space of Wuthering Heights and then -- as her only possible escape from poverty and oppression -- with the wealthier domestic space of Thrushcross Grange, which, with its higher walls and refined wallpaper, appears to promise her security.

Heathcliff, in exact opposition, is forced out of the house and into the stables, and into a labouring relation with (or rather, in alienation from) the land. What had once been an affective, ecstatic identification -- Heathcliff, moor, horse, wind, rain, desire -- is brutally inverted by Hindley's assertion of his power. Afraid, Hindley takes the associative chain and puts it in its cultural place: outside bad, animal bad, desire bad, Heathcliff bad. In turn, driven by Catherine's choice (that is not a choice: her coercive consent) to marry Edgar Linton for his money and property, Heathcliff becomes fixated on the values Hindley values. His revenge, when it comes, is propertied: he buys Wuthering Heights out from under the drunken Hindley, and (although Arnold leaves the unto-the-second-generation aspect out of the film) attains control of Thrushcross Grange through his daughter by Isabella Linton. Then he neglects both.

The film ends with Heathcliff, having bought Hindley's son's birthright after breaking into the house the previous night, walking away from it. A film that's almost obsessively conscious of framing shots through windows, door frames, cracks, takes off into the moors for the final time (which is, in ritual time, the first and forever. Momentarily secure in his ownership of the Heights, Heathcliff also secures ownership of his memories of himself and Cathy playing un-house on the moors. It's an uneasy and untriumphant ending, a vicious revenge fantasy that Arnold does her best to unromanticise.

Instead, she admits Heathcliff, in his grief for Catherine, to a temporary reprieve in his turning-away to the moors. And, in making him the point of view character of the film -- often framed in tight close-ups -- she brings us into the painfully uneasy, almost unnavigable relationship for Heathcliff between being held and being trapped. Central to this is the wall that borders Wuthering Heights, a marker between domestic and wild space. It's a tumbledown thing when young Heathcliff arrives, jumpable but jumbled enough to hide behind on the wild side. It's the only wall to his and Cathy's 'home', the divide they cross to come together.

When Hindley assumes ownership of the Heights, he sets Heathcliff and Joseph to rebuilding the wall. In a scene that places slavery squarely in the heart of the English literary canon, Arnold has Heathcliff pounding rocks with a sledgehammer, building the wall that will keep him in/out. Defiant, Heathcliff downs tools to run about with Cathy, but this adventure leads them to the Lintons' house and a higher wall to scale -- a wall they fail to reach on the return in time to avoid the Lintons' dogs. While neither wall offers much physical challenge to the young, strong Heathcliff (and he continues to use the over-the-wall route to Thrushcross once he's a legitimate visitor), the social boundary of class and race hierarchy that they signify remains impassable. Until he buys his own walls.

Winterson's description of her destructive, unheld, abandoned, angry aspect applies to Heathcliff too: the part of him that is a "war casualty" returns, takes over, makes him destroy the possibility of love-freedom. It's an anguishing spectacle (bewildering that so many people find it romantic). Arnold's version is unblinking on the bitter unstoppable replication of degradation and oppression. But the film also asks, not least in its casting choice, what other option does Heathcliff have? Beaten, spat at, abused, unhoused, made wild and degraded, what tools or skills or hopes has Heathcliff been given to do anything but aspire to unseat and replace his tormentors?

That's the most frightening spectre the film offers: our society. Full of "lost furious vicious child[ren]," myself included, oppressed by walls that exclude us, and by walls that trap us, and by those that promise a safety whose lack they point to insistently.

3. Unbuilding the Wall

In Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, the protagonist Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is lured from his revolutionary anarchist society to the fraught capitalist society that his parents left behind by the promise of research funding, time and space. It's a fantasy that, for those of us toiling in the bottom rungs of academia, is increasingly and apparently threadbare. Not only has the corporate university torn away the veils draping research in romantic notions of high-minded independence and social good, but the walls of the university themselves are utterly pervious. As students and faculty at Berkeley and UC Davis have encountered this week on their own campuses, the university is a walled institution, and will do whatever it takes to protect its walls.

On his return -- possibly to death or disgrace -- Shevek comes with only one idea in mind: to unbuild walls. Specifically and literally the wall around the space port that had long prevented any curious anarchists from travelling off-planet to visit the decadent society on the planet that gleams in their night sky. But what that might open up is left open. What we're left with is Shevek, in orbit around his home, planning to land publicly and to meet protestors and supporters with 'open hands.' As Judith Butler has argued, one thing the Occupy movement has demonstrated is that there is no such given as public space or the commons (the other side of the nostalgic/utopian fantasy of complete intimate/domestic security is that of complete public freedom): public space occurs where bodies declare themselves to be public, and that is a risky business.

Metaphorically and affectively, the walls we internalise -- our fears of abandonment and invasion, our sore lack of boundaries -- which we build outside us, and which are never high enough. And those walls persist in at Occupy: as a number of indigenous activists have pointed out, Wall Street has been Occupied for four centuries: as Ray Cook writes in 'A Haudenosaunee Observation of Occupy Wall Street' (thanks again to Maysie for this link).

The children of the West (Americans) are fighting amongst themselves (again) over distribution of a wealth that does not belong to them, a wealth derived from Indigenous lands. The opportunity to redefine wealth based on a more realistic view of the earth and an understanding of man’s place may be now.

What's necessary is Decolonize Wall Street / Oakland / Toronto / Vancouver (where the decolonisation struggle has become immediately and pressingly centred on the Keystone Pipeline) / Melbourne -- and even St. Paul's, in multiple complex ways. It's not just a change of vocabulary: to decolonise, rather than occupy, is to rethink the Eurowestern-dominated language of political protest at the same time as rethinking ideas of settlement, security and possession.

We need to know, and acknowledge fully, the history of the ground we stand on (which is never an island) in order to decolonise it. I'm reading The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliffe with my students at Middlesex this week; re-reading it, as I loved her books at about the same time I was grizzling miserably in a sukkah. While all the stern bivouacing adventures she puts her characters through never really filled me with the call of the wild, re-reading the book I have a startling sense of recognition: it's a book that's dramatically and passionately against colonisation (even as it has a Roman soldier as a main character) and slavery. The Britons have a coherent, complex culture (not the painted, child-killing savagery seen in the film), one that even Romans might opt into. The book made me think about Britain as a (multiply) colonised, as well as colonising, country: Romans, Saxons, Vikings, Normans. In our historical fantasy, the loss of the commons has been, since the Levellers of the English Civil War, associated with the Norman invasion. Can the British Empire be read as an acting-out of the scars of colonisation?

The great skyline of London, from Hawksmoor's and Wren's churches via the British Museum and Tate Modern to the execrable Shard, is funded by, and founded on, British imperial ambitions (much as the great era of the English novel was concurrent with Empire, and few readings are, like Arnold's, bold and brave enough to look that imbrication squarely in the face). London glistens with money made in slave-trading and plantation-owning (both, in their day, supported by and enriching the Church), and now the new imperial hegemony of financial trading, which politicians on all sides are so revoltingly keen to keep in London. London is in urgent need of decolonising, as much by recognising this heritage as by the important investigative work by Iain Sinclair and Patrick Keillor (Robinson in Ruins) into the creeping colonisation of both city and countryside by the military-industrial-financial complex.Occupy LSX shifted from its original target of Paternoster Square because that land is privately-owned and thus has bigger-better-stronger walls.

So the invisible walls of capital are left unbroached while the visible walls, a rainbow of slogans, protests, mantras, shouts of joy, sit ecstatically outside St. Paul's. But the walls remain.

4. Armour

Water resounds like stock epithets, strains
at our neglected gutters – tomorrow
score-marks of run-off, potholes dusty hollows:
the ground, a gullet, swallows the rain.  (John Kinsella, 'Gullet,' Armour)

John Kinsella's latest collection, nominated for this year's TS Eliot prize, is called Armour. It's a strange title for a collection by an anarchist-pacifist poet. Hidden inside the bristling exterior of the word is its root: arm, the body part that has become militarised, a metaphor older than the Roman occupation of Britain. The body part we use to grasp, but also to hug; to punch, but also to help. Strong in and of itself, its strength extended by the fetishes of armour and weapons. How, the book asks, can we refind our arm (note the first-person plural: the arm as shared vulnerability and mutual assistance, as never possessed by the fiction of the 'I') under the armour?

Sitting under the rain in the tent at Occupy St. Paul's, listening to Kinsella's open field compositions crossed by rail lines and songlines and atomic scars and toxic salt pans and family journeys and bird migrations and long memories, I was scared. Scared by the intensity of Tent City. It's not just the numinous aura of the bells of St. Paul's, or the shadowy twilight in the unlit tent, or the silent, focused listening of the people huddled on cushions (different in quality from any other poetry reading I've been to: seeking something different in the listening). It's the thought of uncovering our arms and unbuilding walls, person by person.

And also of putting our arms to work building new kinds of walls: shelter is a paramount animal need. Walls can protect, gather, offer communion -- but they can also be an armour of exclusion. Is it possible to have one without the other? A house that is defined as home by its open door? To carry, even within brick walls, the thought that this is but a booth? At the end of Gwyneth Jones' Bold as Love series, the Chinese army arrives in revolutionary England with its secret weapon: a nanoculture that produces a living fabric called di. The walls of the Chinese occupation are alive. They billow as a tent billows. They are provisional. They are a recognition of where magic meets technology. They are a utopian dream.

But we are all made of living fabric. We are di. Maybe we can't build houses that can change shape and move, can fold down and be erected and expanded at need. But within ourselves, we can make an inside that is open to the outside. Uncovered arms, released from flak jackets and badges and wristwatches and bags and all the other forms of armour (defensive aggression) we carry. Arnold's Wuthering Heights stops before the end of the book with the hope that Heathcliff can recall himself: that outside, on the moors, he can be free enough in himself (of others' oppression) to stop the cycle. To grant others' freedom. If Heathcliff -- beaten, abused, degraded -- can go outside, leave the 'filthy abandoned lair' that is deep inside the fantasy of home, can't we?

"With his kiss the riot starts": What Hades Has to Say about Poetry

Anaïs Mitchell's Hadestown has been on my mind (and in my ears) constantly for the last few days. When it came out last year, I was struck by its ambition (the story of Orpheus and Eurydice retold as a modern folk-pop-blues opera) and its reconfiguring of lyric, ie: songs of love, of which Orpheus is the mythic father. The economic, political and affective complexities of the male poet hymning (always-already lost) love are laid bare through the subtle shift of the story into multiple perspectives, including Eurydice's.But relistening to it in the last weeks, what has come to the fore is its political observations, which seen incredibly timely -- Orpheus the folk poet-hero of a revolution against a tyrant who has imprisoned his songbird (who stands for freedom).

Reviewing the London performance of the opera at Union Chapel for the Independent on Sunday, Simmy Richman concludes:

At the show's centre is a song so sensational that even the discomfort of our hardwood pews is forgotten. "Why We Build the Wall" is both the story of life in the mythical underworld and as potent a parable as it is possible to write. "Why do we build the wall?/We build the wall to keep us free/And the wall keeps out our enemy/What do we have that they should want?/We have a wall to work upon/We have work and they have none/That's why we build the wall."

When I read the review in January I was more compelled/intrigued by the start, where Richman admits that "finding out about the best album of 2010 a few weeks after compiling your end-of-the-year list is about as grave a mistake as it is possible to make if you review music for a living," which made me think cynically about the multiple ways in which the UK music press ignores a class of female singer-songwriters whose work is not "freak" enough to fit their hipster folk tastes, or poppy/pappy enough to be patronised.

But it's the wall that I have come back to, and to the character of Hades, "king of the kingdom of dirt," "a mean old boss / With a silver whistle and a golden scale," sung on the album by Greg Brown, with a thrilling depth and steeliness. Hades only has one solo, "His Kiss, The Riot," where he lays his plans to trap Orpheus in the mythical double-bind of the terrible "don't look back." "Nothing makes a man so bold / As a woman's smile and a hand to hold / But all alone his blood runs thin / And doubt comes in, doubt comes in" he concludes, leading into Orpheus' and Eurydice's duet "Doubt Comes In." Though he uses it cruelly, Hades knows his psychology: he knows Orpheus, like all of us, is susceptible to fear (as is Hades himself), just as he knows -- and uses -- Eurydice's fear of poverty in "Songbird," when he seduces her to stay in the Underworld.

In "His Kiss, The Riot," Mitchell offers a fascinating insight into the psychology of dominance: her reading of Hades makes it clear that tyrants are not enormities, bizarre distortions of human nature, exceptions to the rule, aberrant perversions or magicians who put whole populations under a dangerous spell. They are human and -- under capitalism, with its structuring metaphor of competition -- they are inevitable. Hades speaks the language of spin, with its niggling, irritating grain of truth under layers of nacreous polish, when he says that "All my children came here poor / Clamoring for bed and board," arguing that he offered the miners, gravediggers, and -- in that spectacular image of the futility of capitalism and empire -- wall-builders work to raise them out of poverty (while of course, as Persephone's seductive "Our Lady of the Underground" hymns, keeping them in poverty by selling them illusions to buy with company scrip). "Now what do they clamor for? / Freedom! Freedom!" Hades protests, the music dropping away behind his barks of "Freedom!," as if there were no music that could support such a word. For him, it is the disruptor of harmony, of his perfect, closed system.

In Hades' cry, we can hear Ben Ali, Mubarak, Gaddafi, the House of Saud -- but also every politician and manager who believes in the system. But the song also suggests just how vulnerable the system is, if it can be brought down by a kiss (or the image of a suicide, or a cardboard sign, or a line of poetry), and how insecure every tyrant, every person of power, is concomitantly. Power's main belief in itself is in its unshakeable stability: if it's not perpetual, it's not power. But Hades is "stricken… stung" by Orpheus' song -- so stricken that, after this cruel unfolding of his well-laid plan, his voice is not heard again. Orpheus falls away, as Hades predicts, and it is Eurydice and Persephone who end the opera, mourning and remembering him.

Hades is troubled by Orpheus because his devotion to love suggests that there is another way of life, one that is potent and provocative: "With his kiss the riot starts." That kiss awakens not only love, but love's insurgence, its refusal of ownership and hierarchy, its need rather than want, its poetry of productlessness, the very qualities that Hades puts forward so snidely when seducing Eurydice:

Hey little songbird, let me guess
He's some kind of poet - and he's penniless
Give him your hand, he'll give you his hand-to-mouth
He'll write you a poem when the power's out

Again, there's that irritating grain of truth: Orpheus is a dreamer, offering to get the river, trees and birds to arrange a marriage; the fear of poverty and hunger is real. But Hades, with his clever lines (as the Devil gets the best tunes, so Hades gets the cleverest turns of phrase, which in itself becomes a kind of cheapening of the poetic power of language), presents the symptoms (poverty, hunger) as the disease. Orpheus isn't poor because poverty is the natural state of poets, but because the society Hades runs doesn't value their labour -- and demands that they pay for the necessities of life.

But Hades' words are persuasive: "Hey, Little Songbird" is not a solo, but a duet, as are "Why We Build the Wall" (with the Hadestown Chorus) and "How Long" (with Persephone). Hades' system works because others are complicit in it: his workers and his wife. But complicit is a complicated word: Hades and his lifestyle are powerfully charismatic. "Seems like he owns everything / Kind of makes you wonder how it feels," Eurydice sings. And there Mitchell pins the biggest problem of power, which is that it itself is seductive. Rather than protesting, dismantling or exiting the system, the Workers and Eurydice want to use it, to become like Hades; to shelter in his power and thus to have it. Orpheus, compelled by his love of Eurydice, needs and offers something different - an outside, an unravelling of the whole system.

But Hades identifies that Orpheus, too, thrives on power of a kind: "Bravery can be contagious / When the band is playing loud." As well as the touch of a woman's hand, Orpheus -- as a poet -- depends on his audience and his culture for support. He needs to be heard, he needs to be approved, to move, to connect. And so he is vulnerable to the machinations of power that would separate him from that audience (and this is the springboard for much of the work of PEN, like this event for Chinese Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo tomorrow night). And this raises a profound question for me about vulnerability, one that has been mulling since I read Judith Butler's Frames of War.

That question is about how to sustain vulnerability when it is exploitable by power - but is also, Butler concludes (in alignment with Gandhi), the most durable form of resistance to power's depredations. I don't know how -- but Tahrir Square seemed to me to offer a model. My friend Rebecca passed on a translation of a sign she had seen there: "I was afraid -- and I became an Egyptian." Rather than repressing fear, as power does, or buying goods to cover it up, as power exhorts us to do, the protestors walked into, and with, their fear as a shared expression of being human. Not just "I was afraid," as Orpheus finds at the end of the song, but "and I became an Egyptian." Rather than putting the author out front in a combat for hearts and minds, or in conflict with his forefathers, or trying to win his crust, is there a poetry that can sing this shared consciousness?

Butler thinks that this is exactly what poetry (and only poetry/song, freed from the cause-effect constraints of narrative), removed from the marketplace, can do. She says: ‎

When the Pentagon offered its rationale for the censorship [of poetry by Guantánamo detainees], it claimed that poetry 'presents a special risk' to national security because of its 'content and format'… Could it really be that the syntax or form of a poem is perceived as a threat to the security of a nation?

and concludes that its not the syntax of form of the poem that's a threat, but its relation to the body and its relation of vulnerability. Even Hades, when he sings, sings of emotions -- song itself breathes with and from affect. Orpheus, who is all poem and no body (as the end of the classical myth recognises), finds himself overwhelmed by doubt -- that is, a belief in his own isolation -- and loses Eurydice, who asks him to "hold on tight."

Hadestown agrees with Butler, that interdependence and vulnerability (Butler calls it injurability) are inextricably linked and are definitional of life; they also agree that poetry is the form for voicing this injurability. But poetry also needs to "hold on tight", not to the sound of the band or the praise of the crowd, not to its reflexive, hyper-critical sense of itself as poetry, but to its relations with life, the body and freedom. It needs to feed us more than rivers and trees. It needs to "hold on" to its connection to us all -- and so it needs to have an informed comeback to Hades' clever lines and cutting insights in order to keep language vital. This is another way of saying that poetry is always political, that the lyric cannot shut its eyes against that busie old fool the sun and the world it brings in.

Hadestown shows this subtly: in between "How Long," Hades' duet with Persephone where he argues that "nothing comes of the songs people sing / However sorry they are" and the collapse of his wall in "His Kiss, the Riot," comes Orpheus' solo, a reprise of his earlier song "Epic," which is a description of Hades and his world. Envisioning Persephone "in her mother's garden" he sings that "suddenly Hades was only a man / With a taste of nectar on his lips." Love undoes even Hades. But it's not just the lyrics, which contrast the man of steel with the woman of flowers and pollen; the song is followed by an instrumental "Lover's Desire," a traditional Afghani piece. Persephone's image is at once Greek and part of the tradition of ghazals and shash maqam, the musical styles of Persia and Central Asia. And she is married, inextricably (if seasonally) to Hades: by kidnapping her, he has connected himself to her forever. Interdependence begins in vulnerability -- but acts of violence cannot destroy it, only secure the bonds tighter. That allows, just maybe, for that vulnerability, for the party that has remained vulnerable, to begin -- amplified by poetry, perhaps -- to effect change, to destabilise the violator. Just maybe.

You can see why the Pentagon banned those poems. Hades does the same.

Random Reading vs. Critical Connection or, What Would Amazon Sell Me?

An odd weekend's reading: Mrs. Dalloway's Party by Virginia Woolf, a "lost classic"; and Dervla Murphy's The Island that Dared: Journeys in Cuba, published by Eland, one of those presses whose elegant logo remains a guarantee of a provocative read (I'm thinking also of Verso, which celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year). Woolf's stories, which single out and interweave different characters attending the party that closes her novel Mrs. Dalloway, is full of her customary precipitate percipience -- made all the more marked by the slenderness of each story and character, no more than (no less than: these stories are all concerned with mirrors, fabrics, shimmer) polished surfaces that reflect passionate aphorisms.
Scintillating, soul-charging -- but frivolous? The Island That Dared is about the overthrow of the bejewelled aristocratic society that Woolf eulogises in her novel. Murphy's travel writing has always been intellectually (as well as physically) intrepid, but her engagement with Cuba leads her to interweave travelogue and political history, reading moments from Cuba's various wars and revolutions into the landscape she traverses. More personal and more transparently angry than Sebald, Murphy nevertheless pursues a similar engagement between the detail of place and the layers of human interaction written into it, and from it.
I bought both books at the same time, from the same shop (the marvellous Clerkenwell Tales), along with Bluestockings and The Jewish Husband.
Amazon would no doubt have just the algorithm to understand my purchase (although would it notice the basic common denominator: all four books have female authors) and to predict (or rather, nudge me towards) future purchases. Participating in debates about the value of criticism, and of arts and humanities in general, of late, I've come to realise that there is a common critical understanding of reviewing as similar to Amazon's "If you like this..." function. And, subsequently, wondering how I feel about being a human algorithm/cultural personal shopper, which is where the idea of humanities' "value for money" as currently pitched against the government's cuts ends up -- telling us how to buy better, buy smarter, and make more things to buy.
So how to explode criticism so that it's also a critique of the marketplace in which it (inevitably) circulates? Is it enough to write outside the official circulation of paid criticism, to write subjectively, occasionally, tangentially, speculatively? What kind of connections can my mind make between the books that does not package them into handy recommended reading? What do they share (even in contradicting each other) that is sustaining and sustainable rather than a surface BOGOF marketing hook? Because, of course, there's nothing random about even the most random of reading lists: they are curated by my opportunity (educational as well as retail), language, location and history (all four are publications from the last five years), politics (gender, but also internationalism) and that more indefinable momentousness that Woolf describes so well: the way we are caught in the double web of historical time and the time of consciousness as they link to and break into each other.

Woolf, as a politically-engaged writer, endlessly rehearses and revises her arguments about the "value" of arts and critical thinking, about the social intervention of the artist, not only in her essays but through her characters as they grasp at and flutter with such moments. Murphy's travel books, which move deeper into place rather than moving ever onwards, are in themselves workings-out of Judith Butler's argument that "at global level, there can be no ethics without a sustained practice of translation -- between languages, but also between forms of media" (Frames of War).
Murphy's mingling of sense-impressions and incisive political history is not only a work of translation, but of aesthetics - a response to the particular expressions of colour, sound, joy, ecology, memory and attentive community that she encounters in Cuba. As Woolf writes: "but the root of things, what they were afraid of saying, was that happiness is dirt cheap. You can have it for nothing. Beauty." According to Jeremy Hunt, this is superficially why artists should work for free, 'paid' by the pleasure that we derive from our work. But I think Woolf's argument is more radical and tendentious than that, more in line with Murphy's encounter with Castro's Cuba: that arts can remind people that capitalism is a bizarre wrong turning in human history, a powerful and distracting illusion that stops us looking in the mirror and disallows daring; that turns impassioned writing from a conversation to a commodity and means there's no way for me to recommend that you read these books without shilling for Bertelsmann...

What Can Poetry Do, no. 479854: Judith Butler on Poems from Guantánamo

American poet Brian Turner has recently published a second collection, launched in the UK at Poetry International. His first collection, written in response to his service in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker brigade, is described as Sarah Crown as "pick[ing] up where Wilfred Owen and Keith Douglas left off, impressing the human horror of the conflict on a nation for whom it felt impossibly remote."

But there were poets writing about the conflict who were not impossibly remote, but held in a prison that is ostensibly US sovereign territory on a Caribbean island, poets whose rights and lives were scrutinised in detail by the press, and whose orange jumpsuits have become a visual shorthand in contemporary cinema, poets who do not fit our conventional image of war poets as noble combatants under sufferance. As they were written about, so many of those held at Guantánamo wrote: on polystyrene cups, with toothpaste, and later - as a humanitarian gift from the guards - with paper and pencils. Many of these poems were destroyed as a threat to US security, but some were smuggled out by human rights activists and lawyers, and collected in Poems from Guantánamo.

In her most recent book Frames of War, Judith Butler takes up this collection to explore two questions (well, many interwoven questions, as ever in Butler's complex thought, but two that I want to tease out): what is it that poetry can do, or does, that might make it a threat to US security; and she finds the start of a response to a larger question ("what is the self?") in her answer. Poetry records both the injurability of the body in conditions of war and torture, and its ability to survive. On the surface, both of these might challenge 'official' narratives of Guantánamo by creating sympathy for prisoners, and by providing evidence of torture.

But looking deeper, Butler argues that these poems, recording injurability and survivability, attest to the interconnected social nature of the body and self in a way that complicates the frame of war, which demands, in her words, that some lives be rendered worth less than other lives, or even not lives at all, and therefore ungrievable. So poetry, because it is shaped around recording the affect of the writer and generating affect in the reader, can restore grievability to these devalued lives with maximum impact.

But Butler also points to the nature of poems as written artefacts:

The words are carved in cups, written on paper, recorded onto a surface, in an effort to leave a mark, a trace, of a living being - a sign formed by the body, a sign that carries the life of the body. And even when what happens to a body is not survivable, the words survive to say as much. This is also poetry as evidence and as appeal, in which each word is finally meant for another. (Frames of War, 59)

The materiality of these poems, their embodiment - she goes on to talk about the relationship between poetry and breath - make them part of the exchange that is the interdependence of self and other.

What Butler doesn't add is that there is a long and lasting tradition of poetry as a social art throughout the Arabic and Persian speaking worlds, of poetry as part of the weaving of community as it is performed at ceremonies and parties and in competitions. Poetry is "meant for another" in this sense as well: meant to connect backwards through references to the Qu'ran and even pre-Islamic poetry that still echoes in composition in Arabic today; and meant to connect forwards (or rather sideways, through the bars) to make a prison - an enforced atomisation - into a community where each self speaks with and answers to another, and thus each poet restores himself to grievable life, not by writing for himself, but for the others.

I think this note of cultural specificity, oriented to the shared poetics of the Qu'ran as a communal literary form, adds weight to Butler's reading of how the

poems communicate another sense of solidarity, of interconnected lives that carry on each others' words, suffer each others' tears, and form networks that pose an incendiary risk not only to national security, but to the form of global sovereignty championed by the US… As a network of transitive affects, the poems - their writing and their dissemination - are critical acts of resistance, insurgent interpretations, incendiary acts. (Frames of War, 62)

What Can a Library Do?

Photo Credit: A. Burger, Courtesy of Roni Horn and Hauser & Wirth

This is a question prompted by two recent encounters: one with a film, Examined Life, and one with an installation, Vatnasafn. The encounter with the installation came first -- in driving rain and then brilliant sun, embodied and breathlessly alive -- but the encounter with the film is more recent (today in fact) and is the source of the title.

Examined Life is an attempt to show that philosophy is part of everyday life, that it has something to say about walking, shopping, listening to music, throwing away garbage and, er, boating in Central Park. Director Astra Taylor points out early on, in conversation with philosopher Avital Ronell, that philosophy is usually done in books, where an argument can unroll over 300 pages and hours or days of the reader's thought-time. So, in a sense, the film is a spoken library, embodied and kinetic and discursive: a library for the era of the Twitter attention-span, some might say, or an insightful return to orature and face-to-face communication as the transmission of thought and feeling.

I feel both: I love books -- especially long books -- but since finishing my Ph.D. I've come to wrestle with the fetishisation of footnotes and cross-referencing and polysyllabic jargon. No-one in the film talks much about books and their importance to an examined life (Cornel West gives a brilliant jazz soliloquy on the centrality of music to his examination of life) -- only one person apart from Taylor even mentions books (rather than quoting from them): Sunaura Taylor, an Oakland-based artist and disability activist who walks through the Mission District in conversation with Judith Butler, who raises Gilles Deleuze's question "what can a body do?" as a productive way of thinking about embodiment without barriers or definitions. Thinking about how she has been defined by what others perceive her as not being able to do, Taylor comments that she was alerted to the systemic oppression of disabled people by reading a book review -- although she doesn't say what book.

But the film made me think (among many other thoughts) that libraries do not just contain books -- not only in the sense that they now contain CDs, DVDs, computers, but that they have always contained bodies, at the very least the body of the librarian. We are fascinated, culturally, by what bodies do in libraries: generally what they cease doing, given the extensive genre of murders in libraries. The Dr. Who episode "Silence in the Library" gets at the reason why, encapsulated in its title: libraries *are* a kind of death, with the containment of knowledge paralleled in the silence that living, breathing bodies are supposed to assume.

It's that deathliness that haunts Roni Horn's installation in Stykkisholmur: Vatnasafn, the Library of Water, consists of twenty-four glass pillars filled with water sourced from twenty-four of Iceland's shrinking glaciers. Early viewers describe the water as being cloudy, opaque, vari-coloured, but now it's clear, the sediment having settled to the bottom of each pillar and glowing in various shades of gold refracted from the dun-coloured floor. The pillars are grouped almost like readers standing at shelves: the room in which they stand was the town's library, now fitted with huge windows that reflect in the pillars creating optical illusions and miniature cinemas of Iceland's changing weather.

The room is intensely beautiful but also sad, reminiscent of a laboratory test for water purity or the Arctic Seed Vault.That is, after all, one of the functions of libraries: to announce imminent death and loss through the work of preservation (hard not to hear the echo of conservative in conservation). One day the library may contain all that's left of Iceland's glaciers, filed neatly by location and surrounded by words for the weather that may have been altered beyond recognition -- no more hly.

This library isn't entirely without books -- there are copies of some of Horn's books and catalogues for browsing -- and it is populated, like a lot of Horn's art, by words, here scattered on the floor in tone-on-tone rubber (which, when scuffed by the rubber soles of the slippers you have to wear to avoid tracking weather onto the floor, gives off a properly Icelandic sulphurous scent). For Horn, words speak insistently of the body: on the floor she has cast, rune-like, a demotic meteorological vocabulary that, as she points out, doubles as a language of feeling: moist, sweaty, dull. So these words are also bodies, ghostly readers (of weather as well as/doubling as books), falling at the feet of the readers who still clamber up the hill and see themselves disappear and distort in the columns.

Which reminds me of a line from the Ani Difranco song "Reckoning": "the funhouse mirrors of your fears." Because reflected in the Library what I saw were my own anxieties (intensified by reading Dreamland) and our cultural anxieties, which is also a function of the library: not just to store knowledge, but to organise it in order to reflect and inflect -- to lead us to an examined life. In the film, Cornel West talks unabashedly about the almost-excessive exhilaration of the encounter in the library with a book *as if* with another person. There's something of that in Horn's Library as well (and in all of her work), that exhilaration of meeting yourself as a water spirit, as a manifestation of weather, as not there, insignificant in the timescale that forged and moved glaciers, tiny compared to the racing clouds.

So why, amidst the exhilaration that reminds me what a library can do -- that it doesn't just file books no-one wants to read, but creates the possibility of a mind-expanding, time-bending encounter -- did I feel so sad? Perhaps because I was also reading Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover (I never have fewer than two books in my bag when taking long bus journeys, just in case) and something about the installation made me think of a photograph I saw in the exhibition of Annie Leibovitz' work at the National Portrait Gallery. It show Sontag in the National Library in Sarajevo in the early 90s: she is sitting on a pile of books and rubble amidst other piles and devastating, dramatic shafts of light falling through the lack of a ceiling. In the frankness of Sontag's gaze there's nothing of TS Eliot's shoring up the ruins (a line she quotes in the novel), but there's something profoundly shocking about seeing Sontag, arch-priestess of high culture, sitting amidst its quite literal ruins.

But even full of rubble, the library is still patently a library, and a familiar image in itself, one in a long line of ruined libraries stretching from Alexandria to Iraq. Part of what it does is to sort, store and conserve the chaos of its own ruin. Who doesn't have nightmares about all their books burning or getting soaked or even just falling off the shelves and becoming hopelessly disordered? As Sontag describes in The Volcano Lover, the collector wants to impose order on a chaotic world: the library is a communal extension of that. The exhilaration comes both from order and the potential of disorder, from preservation and the chance of loss, from the encounter and its disappearance into silence: the paradox of glacial water, a solid represented by its liquefied form.