Stuart Kendall works time in a physical way — takes the ancient tablets and breaks them into pages, pages that shatter the ongoing narrative into (instead) confrontative moments. So that looking at a given page of text (in the strikingly handsome Contra Mundum edition [of Gilgamesh]) has the feel of picking up a fragment of the cuneiform tablet, miraculously lucid, magically set in order so the reader can follow the story. The solemn priestly tablets of the “original” (don’t ask) are transformed into communiqués from the field of action: the page. The page is the field. The page is spacetime itself, your moment. The page (since Gutenberg) has been the only time there is. ... the page as unit of imposition, golden tablet of revelations. ... By chopping sentences into lines, staggering them down the page, not letting the sentence rest, Kendall keeps us going, each page a reward and a challenge to go on. It’s wonderfully unsettling ... Kendall’s dramatically urgent starting and stopping like a man in rage, his timeless pauses, his insistence on bringing us at every moment into the hero’s moment. Emotion is a gate we can’t walk around, we have to go through. Kendall can make us feel the baffled stammer of a hero unsure of what to cry out next. His method is frictional, making the reader react tablet by tablet, ever thrown back into the story. Ability to react to stimuli is the universal property of, surest sign of, life. — Robert Kelly, “Tensions,” Nomadics
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 10:01:47 +0000