March Chronicle by Eglė Agnė Benkunskytė and Jamie Donald

Dear

I would like to apologize for the late letter, but realistically, deadlines have become my sworn enemy, and I do not show grace for them. Yes, I’m trying to repair this relationship with time and responsibilities.

It’s almost two weeks since the last confluence, and my memories of Cyprus seem to be in the distant past.

Today, my friend and I caught up in a bar, where I saw a familiar face: this woman, who somehow I got to know, and the last time we talked we were drunk and spoke about how we always keep on introducing ourselves, yet we know we have done it quite a few times before. That evening, we had spoken about something quite meaningful, yet I forgot what. Today, we just waved hello in this bar and continued with our conversations.

On the way home, I decided to take a slightly longer route, why not? The moon was up; maybe it was that that lit up people's faces, and I took a good look at the passersby, and quickly forgot them as well. Passing quite close to my favourite natural wine bar, I saw the same familiar face from earlier. We walked together for a bit, and she reminded me that we sometimes see each other on the street as well. Oh, yeah, I did remember that. We talked about stairs, and I spoke about how in the morning it’s hard to be a human being, but it’s okay, cause it’s hard not only for me, but for others as well—almost equality. The pause was not that long, because she said goodbye,  ______, swiftly, and entered her building. I responded with Bye, Ona. We finally proved we can remember each other's names.

But back to Cyprus, let me revisit my notes. I wrote some things I found important in the COOP letter. Maybe you’ll be a happy receiver of that, maybe not, maybe you’ll get a double of the same thing, same but different. When does something become a ruin, and When did things go wrong. Two beautiful questions one after another. I started to think about the moment we think things might be starting to go wrong, yet how often does the worst case scenario happen? For people with higher levels of anxiety many options of the future are possible, yet the horrible feeling, if only I had said something earlier.

I'm also thinking of masks. The infamous masks. In _______, we have this wonderfully weird and slightly racist, kinda antisemitic tradition. People, besides witches and devils, also used to dress up as Jewish people or gypsies. In one random source I read they also used to dress up as Hungarians, but I would love to doubleck this.

Why do I mention this? The celebration derives from the banishment of evil. Remember Asmaa's Jinn story? From a ritual to a traditional dance. In a way I would like to justify partying in times when doom is near. The collective energy carries so much power—how to challenge and what to challenge?

Maybe I'll stop here and can pick up the pace with the response. Thank you for entering my consciousness stream. I hope you won't get carried away in it. I also hope you're doing wonderfully, but how are you? What's up, what's beautiful and nice?

*

I don't recall what we said we would do for the Chronicle, but it was lovely to receive your email this afternoon. 

Did you notice that our full names have the same number of syllables? Yours goes, one-two three-four five-six-seven-eight! While mine goes, one-two three four-five-six seven-eight. Yours has more music, I think, where mine skips and hops. Maybe we could swap our naming rhythms and that would be a nice thing to do.

one-two three four-five-six seven-eight

one-two three-four five-six-seven-eight

I am glad to hear that you and Ona have moved into the next phase of your relationship, and enjoy what that anecdote adds to our conversation from the workshop about naming. I have been thinking a lot about Haytham's question: what tells us who we are? But now that I try and find it in my notebook, there is no trace. Maybe he didn't ask us this at all. I wonder if it is useful to always be forgetting, slightly, who people are and what they have said, so that they remain free to tell us who they are, anew. Most likely someone slightly different each time.

I would have liked to spend more time during the COOP talking about this question of ruins. It is tied, tightly, I think, to the question about being told who we are. If you care to read it, this is what I wrote, in the ruins that day:

'Ruin strikes always in the present. Its disaster is in its continuation, its extension; prolonged, drawn out, ongoing. I think of the phrase, ‘a ruined woman’, and think of the way she is ruined. She is outcast, and made to live without her roots, her nest, her supports. We tell people, keep away.

Her ruin is not of her being, it is not held in her body, we cannot point it out. We make her ruin, every day. It is constructed from the outside, every moment afresh. We ruin her. It is an effort. It requires force, vigilant maintenance. It is upheld with hard iron rods that pierce her shins, knees, hip bones; that hold up rigidly her spine. Her ruin is clinical, clean, scraped, dusted. Monitored and maintained. It is held in from all sides, a spectacle of ruin, a totem. It is work. A project of ruin. An aching construction.'

I thought later about historicization, stasis, and foreclosure, the pillars of identity.

My scribbles about 'something going wrong' were a bit less fruitful. One snippet I like: 

'Moments of wrongdoing, of wrong-going, don't articulate themselves clearly in the present. And even if they do, all articulation requires attention in order to be perceived and understood. We enter into a circuit, in which a lack of attention is both the beginning and the end.'

I was writing this while thinking about a big mistake I made at work once, about which I remain anxious to this day. I had tried for a while to find something redeemable or salvageable in the story of this mistake, in the hope that I could turn it into a good answer in a job interview one day (tell us about a mistake you have made, and how you handled it?). But sometimes, we make mistakes, and that's all there is to it. 

The mask burning you shared gives me an uncomfortable feeling, as does the Jinn ritual, mostly due to hearing that it is predominantly women who are the target. I can't help but think that the 'firework' student-led we did last time became its own kind of banishment ritual. It worked through communication/articulation, rather than music, song or dance.

Today it is sunny in ______. I am becoming more familiar with people here, but it is nice to be surrounded by strangers when the weather is good. I have just finished a coffee. The sky is greying slightly as the sun goes down. 

Do you know anything about Wolf Children?

*

The quickness of your response pleasantly shocked me. I'm a slow writer, throwing words onto a screen and using grammarly to finesse the sentences, and here you swooped in! I also love having this chance to meet you in writing. Thank you for sharing this glimpse of your notebooks. During confluences, I wonder what you put in there. 

When I received your letter, you mentioned coffee, while I was staying in the office after work hours and wrote things down while already having a beer. I did not know if I should continue Friday night adventures, but eventually I hopped on a bus and went to this artist-run bar. Not at all surprisingly, I saw Ona there. What I find beautiful is that I believe our friendship will stay on the same level of saying hi and having small talk, which in late or early morning hours can be quite existential, but this is evening friendship—camaraderie of the late-night dwellers. Maybe that's what living in a small city means. The artist community is not that big, and the lost souls who frequent the bars and clubs are even smaller. Maybe we do develop a sense of kinship. 

I think we texted about writing a script, I mentioned it during the confluence, and you mentioned it on Telegram. I have never done it. Have you? But maybe my life has enough random episodes, or shots. Sometimes the seemingly unrelated absurdity just keeps on building on top of each other. Also, before Cyprus, I was watching The Lighthouse and my pirated version of the film did not have English subtitles and it was hard for me to comprehend what was happening. I have no clue why, but instead of finding the subtitles I just found the script and read along, or ahead. I'm not sure if it's a respectable way to watch a movie, but at the same time I loved it. The script contained information that explained what was happening. It felt like cheating. 

I have heard about Wolf Children, last year on my Grandmother's 90th birthday she mentioned her family took a few children, but I don't remember what happened to them in the end. It was the first time I have heard this story. But she used to tell me that after the war there were a lot of orphans around the town. Maybe she had in mind WWII. The cruelty of war is overwhelming, not only the soldiers and civilians, but also infrastructure and ecology. But I'm pretty sure you're well aware of this. I think I might know somebody who researched this a bit, we're not close, but I can ask! But why do you ask?

My ruins sounded like: 

Ruin might be a headspace. A ruin is a site of a history that we will disconnect yet try to force a feeling out of. Otherwise it would be an abandoned place. But ruins are full of history we know only through books. It’s hard to relate to a place when there’s no roof. Ruins physically do exist in the present, but not everybody knows how to read it.  

A physical decay is a nice touch, how can something old be well preserved. We do trust the aesthetics of ruins, but are more suspicious of things that seem whole. A luxury is a luxury, and a well preserved artifact is a luxury. 

A ruined woman. But does she know she is ruined? She only becomes ruined if she starts to believe the voices from the outside? The true tragedy strikes when she stops fighting? Honestly, I don't think about ruined women often. Maybe it's my geographic coordinates, a small community, people are assholes and still have friends. People change, sometimes they fallback into their old ways, but you really have to fuck up to ruin yourself. 

I love, love, love this idea that we did banishment. That whole confrontation will stay with us for a long time. I loved how uncomfortable for me it was, how necessary it was, how naturally it evolved. If I could make a movie I think that this could be a scene. Or something based on that. It felt even too artificial to just occur like this. 

As for the chronicle, I don’t know, we could also just do something easy, paint a picture? Take a picture? Make a mask? I'm scared of committing to ideas, making choices and suggesting something that I deeply believe in. But I'll work on it, cause you don’t deserve to take responsibility either (unless you want to, then please do).

And one more thing, there's this folk story I think in all of Europe, about Rumpelstiltskin, are you familiar? I will let myself assume you are, but I do find this idea fascinating, that fairytale creatures, if they know your name, can use it against you. Maybe our name is something that we should treasure. Therefore, I do feel honored knowing your full name. I love knowing people's full names. I think it calms me down reading the different rhythms of our names. Names are home.

*

I had worried that the quickness of my reply might give you a fright. I swear that it’s not normal behaviour for me who usually umms and ahhs over writing for the longest time until it has lost all of its initial charge. You just caught me at an exactly right moment in time.

But I must say I like this kind of writing a lot, letter writing almost, because I don’t have a plan at the start and can write in this kind of spontaneous way. Today it won’t be quite like that, because I’m working, but I have a sense of urgency so I might try and continue intermittently throughout the day.

Right now it’s lunchtime and I’m sitting in a square where some blossom trees are in bloom, having a cigarette in the sun. I wanted to write down quickly that I think there is something interesting in your email about access and privacy. 

I read on Wikipedia that Rumplestiltskin had his name revealed because the princess snuck out to his cottage, and listened at his window, where, in his excitement about his ruse, he was singing a song about his name. It’s like the bit in movies where the villain reveals his plan just before he kills the hero, except in this version the villain doesn’t know he’s being overheard.

This resonates with your story about reading the film’s script, instead of finding subtitles, and the additional access you gained through that (cheating) and also with this thing we have done in our emails, sharing the words from our notebooks with one another.

It also reminds me of one of the texts we read a couple of confluences ago, about the female voice in film. I will try to find the relevant parts when I next take a break. 

*

What do you know, it is now two days later.

I am looking at the PDF of the book I mentioned, which I now can tell you is the chapter, The Female Authorial Voice in Kaya Silverman's The Acoustic Mirror. Did you read it? She describes how commonly used approaches to the female voice in cinema deny the woman the status of an authorial subject. She (the female voice-holder) rarely has purview of the cinematic apparatus; she doesn't have agency over courses of action, she is always internal, her voice is always glued to a body. If she provides a voiceover narration, it is always in the manner of a diaristic, diegetic, internal monologue, and not an authorial narration. She is ignorant to the film she lives within, as it were, and we are always just kind of spying into her internal thoughts. If for a moment it seems as though she is disembodied and with some kind of authorial oversight, you can bet she'll land back in (/be joined up with) a body by the end of the film. Silverman uses lots of weird psychoanalysis stuff to frame this thought, which frankly I find jarring because I've just never jived with psychoanalysis, so if you can ignore or abide that, it's an interesting read. 

Do you see a relation to the things you said in this?

Maybe we could do something very small. I think we could write a one page screenplay, using words or thoughts from these four emails. I love the image of you reading the screenplay on top of the existing film and wonder how we could play with that approach. And thinking of the princess peering into Rumplestiltskin's window. And something about our names, and secrecy, and sharing. Maybe it's interesting to think what a collaborative or conspiratorial authorial voice would be.

I know we're drifting away from Cyprus but I am enjoying thinking about how films work, and I think this stuff about names and power is important in matters of land struggle, so I think an experiment like this could be worthwhile.

It's humid and still and thick outside. The air pressure has been very high these past few days; lethargy inducing.

*

It’s Labour Day today. I went to the March this afternoon where the drums felt nice and the sun stung my eyes, then came back here to the cinema where I was when I very hurriedly sent you that first email, a couple of weeks ago. I think we stopped being able to work on this together because I invented a difficult problem by having an idea. Lots of nice ideas are actually the beginnings of difficult problems.

Instead of addressing that problem, I am thinking about some writing I did with a friend a few years ago. We were asked to write a response to an event being run by an arts organisation that we both worked for (through a string of precarious casual gigs/short term contracts). The programme included lots of really great artists and academics that we were happy to be engaging with, but we were also working under poor and confusing conditions; working in overstretched production roles on the same day and at the same time as being invited writers. We were struggling with the conflict of being both external and internal voices, and with the power dynamics at play—who our voices belonged to. To manage the task—writing something that managed to hold our conflicted feelings without putting ourselves at risk—we wrote collaboratively in the first person, under a single “I”, to disguise ourselves within each other. A collective mask, if you will. Maybe there really was some potential in that big silly mask we made?

One last thing on Rumplestiltskin: I saw this picture, and was thinking about how fitting it is that he banishes himself by singing his name, circling around a fire.

*

I don’t think I actually want to take this Chronicle exercise any further. I think we are both a little overworked at the moment, and that we have made nice connections here already. I have enjoyed reflecting on the time in Cyprus with you in this way and getting to know you in writing. I think to simplify things, and reduce the labour (in honor of the day), I will do something simple to turn these emails into one text, which I can send off to Flip, and just like that it will all be over. 

*

I’ll only add a few things.

I remember a few months ago I was telling a friend of mine—a wonderful artist, who is currently making a movie—that he should at some point decide to stop, because he could be working on this forever. In other words, I gave this simple advice to a person who will definitely already know when to stop, when I actually wanted to give this advice to myself. In these few weeks, I wrote a text, and my biggest issue was knowing when to stop. I have already missed the proper deadline, but I do know what decency is, I was late beyond decency. I finished the text in the night, and sent it to my friend who read it in the morning. Only then I submitted the text. I needed that validation, that check-in to move forward, to start believing that I can make complete things. Maybe I should always look at writing as a collective activity.

Your letters brought me joy, they brought me images and perspectives of how you view the world. I appreciate it. It once again reminds me that we don’t have to agree on everything, and that’s the beautiful part—having this chance to listen. The stories never end!