The Scenes of Falling Down
Fazel
Evin Village, Iran, 1355
“A delay in the feathers. The bird of pied forage, of semi-deserts, isn’t pricked with blessings, but with cassettes of dissimilar tempos.”
Fazel lowered his eyes to an aged crease and his body to his haunches, his left hand moved deliberately to his bare foot, while the long fingers of his right hand began preparing the ground with a blackened walnut.
Or, as it was halfheartedly told to me, ‘no song.’”
Just as Fazel finished outlining his map, those possessing binoculars debouched through a different opening into the musky fig trees. When everyone had left, Fazel returned to sorting the uncrated heaps of mint and fenugreek. Hanging above a rusty scale was a postcard that had been taped backwards to the wall. The card contained the handwritten caption: 35-year-old Viola Vess, whose breath is labored by the rhythms of warfare and pillage, detects willed naiveté in a petite earthquake, 1976, Card # 11.
Viola’s gaping arms and broomstick eyes were absent from the front of the card. In their place was an obstructed alley belonging to some Midwestern city. Besides two narrow shadows belonging to the parallel facades and the dark heap that lay between them, the photograph’s once-gritty tone was now an outwash of dull hues and embossments.
Fazel’s hands moved deliberately as he snapped back the green leaves, dropping the stems into a pile near his feet. From time to time he would close his eyes. The transparent tape of a modern cassette dangled from a nearby tree and Fazel would listen to the ribbons as they snagged and snapped against its bark. In the evening, Fazel would rinse and sweep the path before heading back down the mountainside.
This, of course, was the paradox of his project. Fazel, with his head perched slightly forward, climbed this same path every morning and every other morning he did so with a caged canary swinging by his side. He would sit cross-legged before a copper plate into which he would shuck the shells of raw walnuts or the mean, flapping skins of an eggplant.
It might as well be this way, he thought. I climb and others climb, and all in all, some of us avoid tripping on the cracks. Fazel never deviated from this daily routine, yet everyday he felt more and more responsible for those who strayed from his path to form her many bruises.
Deva
Cleveland, 2006
Perhaps it’s not so much of a surprise that on the day after the widely broadcasted kidnappings, billboards began to sparkle with questions such as:
What is the real cost of the authentic?
Are all your colors original?
Unperturbed but faithful?
These phrases found their strongest horses on the outskirts of the city where their amplified inquiries were met by a sobering lake-effect wind.
Deva was reading again. The magazine cover depicted a re-photographed image from a 1970’s illustrated travel books—an image of a city that the artist had never traveled to. The desire to read rose up in Deva every six months. She read in order to make travel plans and she traveled because of a phrase that she had once found shellacked to a telephone pole. Tourists, like pilgrims, seek recreation in the fullest sense of the word.
Deva flipped slowly through the pages containing ads for merchandise sold in Dubai. The apartment buzzer sounded. Different, she thought. It sounds less urgent this morning.
Deva lifted the plastic receiver, “Yes?” she said into the mouthpiece.
“UPS delivery,” came the voice at the other end.
She calmly returned the receiver to the wall and made her way toward the entranceway. She signed for the small package, shook it once while the deliverywoman reached around her to buzz another tenet, and then turned back through the door. The package contained a prescription for her mother-in-law and Deva placed it in the refrigerator, poured herself a glass of milk and returned to her reading.
Oh what a joy to slip unnoticed into a totalitarian state, to traipse across a jungle to a guerrilla camp! Some of these jungle groups were called “freedom fighters,” and they’ve disappeared for the most part.
Deva swallowed a mouthful of milk. She hated the taste of milk, but took pride in the fact that she had never missed an expiration date.
The advice given to travelers has changed. If, for example, you wear contact lenses, you must be sure to pack extra solution, or, even better, a pair of eyeglasses. It’s bad enough to be locked up in the dark, but you’ll want a clear view of your captors when they bring you food, escort you to the toilet or beat you up. … For the traveler looking to experience the pleasures of abduction (the tourist, the aid worker, the businessman) I will lay out the pros and cons of three destinations, in ascending order of risk.
Deva’s eyes glanced away from the line for a moment while she reread the article’s title. Don’t let me go. She tried hard to ignore what the title brought to mind. Don’t let me go.
If you allow me a sporting metaphor familiar to the downhill skiers among you, the following inventory comprises the blue, red and black runs of kidnapping.
Don’t let me go. And she wouldn’t let them go. Everywhere they went, her 65-year-old mother-in-law would cling earnestly to strangers’ arms and legs. Usually, these strangers would blush in embarrassment or try to ignore the older woman’s embrace by flooding Deva with questions.
Does she feel faint?
What is her name?
Oh I’m sure she just confused our handbags!
Occasionally, someone would gently wrap their arms around her mother-in-law while carrying-on with their conversation as if her behavior were completely normal.
Deva loosened her grip on the magazine. She chafed her knuckles together in a brisk motion and continued reading.
The blue run is undoubtedly Yemen. The first point in its favor is its magnificent landscapes, which means your time will not be wasted if it takes a couple of days to be kidnapped—or if you are not kidnapped at all. The second advantage is that almost all abductions in Yemen so far turned out OK in the end. The Yemeni ancestral code of honor guarantees their abductees first class treatment.
Perhaps she should travel lighter this time, leave behind her journal, phrasebook and conservative clothing. She had plenty of supplements for energy and stamina…
For our Red Run, I nominate the Caucasus, particularly if you go seeking kidnappers on its southern flank (Georgia, Azerbaijan). The northern flank of this awesome mountain range (from Chechnya, North Ossetia and Kabardino to Balkaria and Dagestan) has a more daunting reputation. Take the Pankisi Valley, north of Tblisi, which is renamed “the Pankisi Gorge” by the international media every time someone is kidnapped there—
Deva was back at the refrigerator. She arranged a ham sandwich on the freshly bleached countertop. The blinds were down and she took her time eating in the dim white space. Her jaw pounced up and down until the meat was gone. When she’d finished, Deva sprayed bleach on the crumbs and wiped them into a paper towel. She bleached some other spots by the stove and then turned the water on over her hands. The weather channel moaned in the other room and Deva jerked her head around the corner to watch the Doppler forecast. Eventually, the rest of her body found its way in front of the TV. She took in every syllable of we’re calling for more rain beginning Sunday and then more on Monday and it was only after the meteorologist turned to the national forecast that she returned to the article she’d been reading.
The black run is, of course, Iraq. Iraq is in its own special league. Approximately one in two hostages are executed here, and it is appropriately a destination that I recommend to no one. An armed escort from the airport to the center of Baghdad now costs $5000, though you are likely to die before you are kidnapped. Moreover, the Iraqi route makes for bad writing.
“An armed escort from the airport,” repeated Deva out loud.
She reached for a pen and in skimming back through the paragraph, she drew a star next to Baghdad now costs $5000.
“Now if we could zoom in for a moment on—,” came the meteorologist’s voice.
Deva put the cap back on her pen. Her eyes darted from window to window, noting that each of the white blinds had been turned tightly upward. The apartment was bare down to the floorboards. She created nothing original in this space. So much so that she was often surprised by her own shadow and by that of the birds that occasionally hit the paned glass with an empty thud. The day was still quiet.
Before I conclude, a few words on homecoming. During the Cold War, the major risk faced by returnees was diarrhea. This risk lives on, but has been compounded by another: Stockholm syndrome. Symptoms include a deep attachment and nostalgia felt for one’s erstwhile abductors. It is of course Yemen, where kidnappers display such excellent manners, that Stockholm syndrome is most common. But I have a word of advice for the lonely ex-hostages among you. Remember that if your feelings for your captors were mutual, they would never have let you go.
Curator
New York, 2006
“Although many of the images in Vess’s photographs are suggestive of certain urban landscapes such as vacant passageways and abandoned property, Viola does not think of herself as one who documents urban space,” explained the curator. “Nevertheless, Viola does remember one period, during a spell of heavy olfactory input, when she spontaneously experienced what she calls ‘the space between.’ It was during these months that she bought a police scanner and began cataloguing fallen pianos. One of the first lessons she learned was that pianos rarely fell between the hours of twelve and two, regardless of whether it was day or night. When she eventually started using a taxi, she found that these forgotten hours could be best spent learning to play and so she began to take lessons from a retired schoolteacher.”
“Viola’s relationship to the piano had a profound impact not only on her photographs, but on her sensory activity as well. She describes how once, when she had been left alone with her teacher’s upright, she was bombarded by images of split figures and shape-shifting vibrations. This coincided with her fear of becoming invisible; and her old nemesis, the landmine, took on a new form.
“‘We became one while remaining two. My animal-allies were now more visible than ever before,’ a line which Vess recorded on the back of Your Ward Registers as an Arrhythmia,1976, Card #4, describes, in the artist’s own words, one such impact.”
The curator’s face flushed. She distributed personal players and headphones and instructed the crowd on how to start the audio-tour devise.
“There are two voices in this recording: the voice of Viola Vess and the voice of the male who is interviewing her. In the event that your battery runs low, you may exchange your audio-tour devise for a transcript of the author’s exchange.”
Viola
Interview that took place a month after Viola Vess completed her work entitled ‘Cards Mailed at Random’ in which the artist mailed postcards portraying her own photographs to seventeen remote destinations around the world. All but one of these postcards have been retrieved and secured by Western archives.
Transcript of Audio Recording, 1976.
I spent all of yesterday in the piano store.
Interviewer: Choosing?
Viola: No. Listening.
Interviewer: Sang and echoed too? Not without a certain pleasure.
Viola: No. Each key was a burden, each key erased a sound. This is exactly what I couldn’t hear.
Interviewer: Viola?
Viola: Those five hours were lessening but infinite.
Interviewer: How so?
Viola: It isn’t enough for me to tell you that B-flat knocked once like an earthquake. It was an earthquake with fin, minke and humpback whales; animal frequency taking its time.
Interviewer: What matters is that you’ve had a lot of unknown neighbors.
Viola: Maybe. Like cradles rocking, dock dock dock, but I become too weary from their pursuit, the sea, and the many names they’ve given me.
Interviewer: Artificial conflict?
Viola: No. Others are not a conflict. They panic behind the mud wall.
Interviewer: And you’re there too? You go to photograph the devastation, the atrocities, the refugees of refugee camps.
Viola: I never needed to leave the country. They came to me in fevers. And in the often unwilling arms of strangers.
Interviewer: And in music?
Viola: In the end of music.
Fazel
Evin Village, Iran, 1355
“I’d like to carry it over the sea intact,” Fazel said out loud as he opened his eyes, once again referencing the postcard.
There was much that Fazel wanted to carry over his shoulder—a lattice of tattooed butterflies, burlaped rice, plastic bottles of soda and doogh, a never-ending short-wave transmission that he’d committed to memory. His reverence for Viola Vess was yawning, but at some level he knew that nothing could be more impermanent than the violence that produced it.
Notes:
1. “Tourists, like pilgrims…” is a line from George Pendle’s essay “Sight Seers: The Spiritual Quest Of Tourists And Artists,” published in Issue 07 of Bidoun.
2. The cover artist mentioned in Two is Claude Hohl.
3. The italicized, indented sections in Two are from Serge Michel’s essay “Don’t Let Me Go: Thoughts on Kidnapping,” published in Issue 07 of Bidoun.