KPrevallet

Nothing Erased But Much Submerged

What is remembered are fragments separated as shards of glass never to reenact the totality of the past. What material objects have been left behind to fill in the gap? Here, the apophatic in-directs attention toward the reconstruction of memory based on the ritualized touching and re-collaging of objects that, for reasons often quite mysterious, have been put into boxes and hauled from dwelling to dwelling for the past 60 years.

I have no house to shore an archive and so am working with it as material, malleable like clay and colorful like paint. I sort through a lifetime of photographs, diaries and manuscripts that I cannot continue to haul around which, like a burning, I am transmigrating into collage pages before throwing them away.

This apophatic portal is heavy and lonely – treating my archive as “material” to be collapsed into collage is difficult. Meret Oppenheimer’s My Album and Joseph Cornell’s boxes are a talisman and a guide. I know I am not alone and that many others entering cronehood are having to shed material objects in order to prepare for the dissolution of ego and the slow return to the earth.

I hope that in being transparent about my process I will find company in the space where this deeply personal, spiritual, and yet elder human project can be understood within the larger context of the ineffable experience of dealing with the past as material.  I can only describe the apophatic portal through the materials left behind of writer's life as a profound, unsayable dimension of craft and process which erases simultaneously with coalescing as insight.

See also: Apophatic Archive