What space is opened in this
trace of a performance? It is the drama of my undressing,
the covering of my uncovering, a personal and political
revolt. Initially it appears to be a death mask:
eyes are closed, covered with clay coins to pass safely
into the recesses of body and memory. Yet it becomes
apparent that the work does not give itself to death but
dramatizes an event of rebirth that---for whatever
reason---only this earthen clay can achieve.
The word that guides Frame's work, mnemismus,
refers originally to burial mounds and the memorial
festivals that took place at these sites to remember the
dead. And yet something else is at work in the clay: a
sense of being woken with faint memory, a sudden
recollection that I have been here before. The earthen clay
is the site of my burial and my excavation.
I feel in the cool, damp clay a sense that I am trespassing
on the land of strangers. They bid me welcome---"Welcome to
a place of exile." The trespass opens up an entirely new
space---a sky of evening stars and ancestry. It is
something like the space of a novel, something like the
composite of clay, in which I write of a coming sand
storm---which in fact, came long ago---that will recover
the American plains. I write of the "crazy aunt" who tells
me of distant relatives---natives to this Kansas land. The
memory goes down, down, down as the clay goes down into my
pores and down into my body. I enter a space of
singularity. Of absurdity.
I cannot help but notice that this modest, clay revolt
disturbs an order that is greater than my own: an order
that is deeply political. The mask is a kind of disguise I
wear, going about in a wretched world as a quiet stranger
with loud revolution in my glazed over eyes. It is the
absurdity of turning inward as a means of political revolt,
which, ever since Plato closed his eyes and went down, down
to the place of Piraeus, is the way revolution has begun. I
cannot help but see a new city being forged in the
composite of this earthen clay. I hear the disquiet of art,
of Proust’s Recherche, now audible in Frame’s
Relics.
Travis Holloway
Poet
Ph.D Candidate in Philosophy
Stony Brook University, Long Island, New York
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