MATERIAL MEMORY: LIVING AMONGST (THE) BOXES OF HISTORY
The Madam’s Cellar: Saint-Cecilia’s Cages; Or, My Private Underworld II by A.G.
INTRODUCTION
Presented here for the first time is an “exclusive”, straight from the Archives of A.G. For some reason, I have over 400GB of digital archives containing every digital file I’ve every created — containing every image, text, audio and video file I’ve created since January, 1994 — BUT… this single page of 4 paragraphs ESCAPED IT ENTIRELY! I explain, then I print the document for the first time.
The thing is, I found this text entirely by accident. It was in a pile of papers in a box somewhere in my massive “Archives-Land”, as I like to call it, imagining an archive that takes up 100% of planet earth, also referred to in my more recent fictional work as “The Sublime Warehouse” (From “The Archives-Project” sequel to “The History-Project”, circa 2001–2004). It was in a pitiful condition, but as you can see in the image above, I’ve been able to restore it and have finished transcribing it. I just don’t remember the title, exactly.
I wrote a similar piece called “My Private Underworld”, in 2003, a short while before I wrote this one, as part of the aforementioend “History-Project”, which lasted from 2001 to 2004, officially (though it keeps resonating 20 years later!). To the best of my memory, the piece below was called “The Madam’s Cellar”, part of a larger work about a man in political exile seeking shelter in a “Madam’s Cellar”, away from his captors (although this page in particular doesn’t seem to mention the Madam in any real way, directly).
I hope you will enjoy this brief, yet poignant piece of truly “inspired” writing. I can say that I was at the “top of my game” in my early 20s, when this was written. I am now an aged, withering 46, and having trouble putting the pieces back together of my crazy life, after almost 30 years of clinical insanity. I still hope I can find an audience for this type of work. It seems to pertinent to me to the times we live in, and it’s to my eye a great piece of writing. Everyone should find this resonating with their basic experience of our contemporary landscape. But, alas, people are too stuck in the “mediated” experience of living OUTSIDE OF THEMSELVES, in the “media” — hence, through “mediation” — to truly experience their IMMEDIATE REALITY, the only real experience there is.
MY PRIVATE UNDERWORLD II (circa 2003)
The silk scarf that my mistress Evelyn left in my apartment on Clifton street before disappearing in the fog. The hourglass I inherited after my grandfather passed away. It seems that the objects I have kept are signs for what I have lost. My cellar is an index of my own creeping disappearance. I put an object in a box moments before it becomes useless so that it can forever retain its utility. Frozen material memories, traces of habit and habitat. The object’s spirit speaks a material history, the steel canister for ghosts of remembrance, voices from out of the smoke and mirrors. I reflect on these objects, or they reflect a part of me. I sit on a wooden chair and stare at the neat stacks. Before me is exhibited the nakedness of my soul, stashed away into square receptacles so that I can remain cloaked from my own eyes. I spy on myself in my younger years, prying into the minute details of my passionate youthful existence, prostituted to the wiles of a world too bright for a soldier wishing for perpetual camouflage. Through a crack in the door, I smell the fragrance of a perfume absent for so long. Perhaps it is my mother coming down the stairs to call me up to supper. Or it might be Evelyn to reclaim her silk scarf. Though I am in the most familiar of surroundings, submerged in my own eccentricities, I feel feverishly bewildered, forfeited, irrevocable. I will someday be forced to awaken from my agoraphobic seclusion, or is it an addiction to closed places, a claustrophilia?
Within the cellar I can be freed from the smothering of dates. No May ’68, no September 11th, just scattered elements, substances with no structural system, just mobile relations, associations not fixed by any stifling scheme. The only tactic here is to drown myself in my own treasure-chest of retrospection. I can be disjointed from my own foundation, wafting in disembodiment.
This is the fabric of my melancholy reveries. An underground dwelling safe from daylight, from being seen, from overt manifestation. I am sheltered by matter of fact, or factual matter, shelving the ongoing chronicle of spiritual perdition, of being both lost and found. Each box registers an absence, each object a memoir of a poorly lived existence, my own life where I was so much more of a castaway than a productive citizen.
This dreamy cavern full of silhouetted shapes, words, figures, letters I can barely read, things that have absorbed the frail aura of my being, the very life abstracted from me and graphed in cardboard residence, verifying the only permanence I can know. A have-been. A relic, fossil, a monument in ruins. Reminiscence can only take you so far until you cower into deliberate amnesia for refuge from your blaring chimeras. And then the radio wakes the fantasist. “You just heard Boxcar Boxcar Boxcar’s 50s pop-flavor ‘I used to love you’. Next up is Cornucopia Revisited with their hit ‘Train to Dementia’.”.
In the end, I blend into my belongings, part of the forest of forking paths, so to speak, me and myself, two mirrors reflecting to infinity. I have erected the perfect simulation, cardboard boxes who replicate every nuance of my actual chronological voyage. Anachronisms implanted in an abyss, in a dissemination of wood-chips, a cellar that is both basement and casement of my subjective House. This is what lies beneath the masquerades that have been my vocation for so long. Under the mask is a face carefully segmented into compartmentalized spaces. A box of poetry, my eyes, a box of old neglected records, my ears. If I ever lose sight and sound, I can feel through these containers and touch my heart, grasp onto the faltering core of my reality. Or is it virtual? I now know the dangers of being an archivist, of reading into matter the movements and stillness of a civilization, yet unable to appropriate it as one’s own.
This secret lair, this private underworld, I must confess, though it is my own, though it represents the person I have been, the places I have inhabited, the score of years of displacements and vain quests for re-establishment that have made my life, has become alien to me. And the networks that link all these things together have managed to catch the butterfly. A prisoner to my own dilapidated freedom, I have regressed back into my cocoon. The walk back up the stairs is likely to take an eternity!
[THE END]
Editor’s Note: Below is a recording of a live performance I made in 2009, from an album of songs called “Winters of the Soul” (which has now become part of the corpus of songs I am calling “Seasons of The Heart”). I call it “Saint-Cecilia’s Cages”. It was composed, performed, recorded, and now distributed for the first time, in the very same spirit as the document “My Private Underworld II”, as well as sharing the sentiment of the prior piece I shared not long ago, the first version of a Word document called “My Private Underworld” of a story called “The Private Underworld, or Diary of a Pack-rat by Jonah Cartier”, both written around the same time, in the year, anno domini, 2003. — A.G.
Editor’s Addendum: For those who are interested in the musical aspect of all of these more textual, documentary “Voyages of Speculation” into the “Boxes of History”, be sure to listen to my current, new album of material for piano and organ, the aforementioned “Seasons of The Heart” liturgical song cycle (secular).
A.G. © 2003–2023. All Rights Reserved.
