The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

memorial for my father, wilkes-barre, pennsylvania, first day

http://www.alansondheim.org/memorial1.mp4
http://www.alansondheim.org/memorial1.jpg

see - eyebeam: http://eyebeam.org/blogs/alansondheim/


Kittler just died, I remember Sartre going, my father at 97 was born in 
1914, his mother died very shortly after, the world went into flames, has 
continued along the same path. So everything, Derrida, Lacan, Jack Benny, 
falls apart, falls out, I continue to work not with _those_ references, 
but in new currents, until something withdraws, draws me back. It's too 
simple to think of the past as stories, that what one ultimately offers is 
stories, that these go the ways of mourning, lamentation, pain, death 
itself. As if we're continuously walking wounded. I'm tired of this; I 
want to work new for another twenty years at least. Memorials throw me 
back into pasts that gnaw away at my soul, with the appetition of souls as 
so many Barthian puncta, grasping away. It's all fiction. Tonight I was 
given a sheaf of pages from a scrapbook or photobook of myself at ages 
maybe 1-2 until 7, black and white museum pieces with my father smiling at 
me, openly in a way I cannot remember. Everything dates the images, which, 
analog, breathe with an other's air/heir; they crawl over me, and I cannot 
look at them directly, only askew. This memorial lasts four days, the day 
of arrival, the day of business and organization, the memorial proper, the 
day of leaving. The reading of the Torah begins anew during this same 
period, Simchat Torah, Friday the 21st, as if in preparation for the 
Shabbat. I need this renewal myself, this beginning of a beginning, not my 
own, not my beginning of the end as death is always making that beginning, 
something however otherwise. What am I saying here? That on the fifth day, 
the Monday morning I am meeting Monika Weiss to begin thinking concretely 
of a mobile installation/performance/video/workshop at Eyebeam, that this, 
for me, as to be as an infant, without the weight we may be leaving 
behind. And oddly it might be my father's smile, which was lost on me 
early on, that could create an uneasy resurrection, a false past, that 
gives me momentary grace.

In any case, the litany of names, Fred Astaire, Lucille Ball, Roland 
Barthes, must cease, not seize.

I am murmuring against or through the in-corporation of Eyebeam, with a 
sense of wonder based on any and every architecture, corners reflecting 
perfectly, hiding places full of magic, the smiles of the demons within 
us.