[-empyre-] The city as a skin -- memory

[simon]

Dear <<empyreans>>,

there is an image that keeps coming back to me in regard to the 
exhumations and the missing from Ariel Dorfman's /Widows/, a book with 
only one image in it: the black-clad women standing beside the river 
claiming the corpses as they float down it into the village and wash 
ashore: Yes! Yes! That is my husband! That is my brother! That is my son!

Another text of Dorfman's that this discussion has brought to mind is 
his long essay in /Some Write to the Future/ on testimonial literature. 
The title of this book of essays further recalls Robert Bolaño's future: 
/2666/. The overwhelming litany of the lost in book 4, /The Part About 
the Crimes/. It is a monument built out of repetition, as effective and 
affecting in its way as the Holocaust-Mahnmal in Berlin, by Peter Eisenman.

It is perhaps interesting to note the difference in these two structures 
and that of the different 'cities' from which they came. Bringing us 
back to the future written but never arriving, like its people, missing.

Best,

Simon Taylor

www.squarewhiteworld.com


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