Editorial

How to cite this article in APA:

Marín Escobar, P. (2024). Blank space´s writing: the margins [Editorial]. Poiésis, (47). https://doi.org/10.21501/16920945.5070

Blank space’s writing: the margins

Paloma Marín Escobar

Poetry, like cinema, works with the musaraña of dreams, with the web of consciousness emancipated from its insomnias beyond the margins of life, which we usually narrate through the law of causality and subject to the subjective structures of a space and time whose familiar regularity keeps us safe: safe with our truths, safe with definitions, safe with the self, with being and its attributes, safe with the god of the final word about things, safe and in tacit agreement with history. On this, Maillard states that “every utterance limits reality, makes it smaller. Only the word that does not say: the poetic word expands instead of restricting…” (2001, p. 75). As named, objects flee, overlaying their clarity behind thick strokes of understanding, under the weight of memory that enervates and wears down, without comprehension, without experience, orphaned of meaning, believing there might be one, and that the abyss is faced from above.

Cinema and poetry place before us the shadows of the abyss, always looking up from below, striking sparks with stones against the walls of vertical labyrinths that only lead to the places we inhabit in dreams; regarding cinema, Zambrano (2009) relates it to a nourishment that allows us to “see,” in that sense, its power lies in showing, not in saying, feeding that hidden area of the soul made of threads, imaginary seams, and wounds stitched through dreams that flee from names, turning their backs on us in wakefulness and confronting us in dreams:

Cinema, due to its elusive nature, made from the very substance of dreams, with shadows, and for its continuity, achieves more than any other this character of being the bread, the daily bread for the need to see, to imagine, to weave and unravel dreams. (p. 300)

In the margins, Maillard reflects, there is a knowledge that “is neither weight nor image occupying time and space, cannot settle in anyone’s mind, so subtle it is that it would not form any idea or thought” (2001, p. 122). In the margins, in what is not yet said, or what remains unsaid, lies the truly spoken. In the silences that safeguard the poet’s wound, the erased verse replaced by a clear metaphor, or in the verse that remains and wraps the feeling of the poem in the image of its opposite, its heartbeat. Likewise, in cinema, in its out-of-frame moments, at the limit of the aesthetic architecture of a shot, its arrangement, its capacity to be dynamic or a receptacle; at the edges, on the shores, always living on the margins, lies the true film.

The margins “belong to silence, where life is different from the story told or that could have been told. There is a place, a no-place, where having meaning makes no sense” (Maillard, p. 122). The margins also allow us to dwell outside of what we are told and, in that sense, to inhabit ourselves. People often go to the cinema to escape, open a book to find testimonies of better worlds than ours; however, there are blank spaces in those writings: cinematic and poetic, which set in motion our spiritual retina, muted by a latent time and space seeking to objectify in the construction of a self that, in each case, does not align with the spiritual seat that only dreams elevate to the margins of our senses, leaving us with the taste of having finally known a truth.

Next, we propose a creative exercise to look at cinema, to observe what is shown in, about, and beyond its margins, behind the unsaid. To do this, we bring to the fore a film by David Lowery (2017): A Ghost Story, which will allow us to open a path to the absence of names, to what the margins whisper to us, of images and words from timeless intruders who come to meet us to complete the dreamlike plot and make plastic, acceptable, and habitable the reflective nature of cinema and poetry.

In the Margins, the Names; Out of Frame, the Faces

We barely know fragments of memory lost in the house that he and M inhabited. The former’s face is hidden, and his figure: an indivisible path of threads and a pair of abyssal orifices behind which he guards the secret of time. She, a duality: a body that follows intramundane impulses and a face, severed from the quotidian, eyes fixed on the wall that holds a secret-stain, of impossible projection in the times of grammar and the mortuary times of pain; with no aspirations for victories conjured in the medium and long term. He is no longer a face, and she bears the weight of being-still, of being-there.

The characters of A Ghost Story (2017, Dir. David Lowery) are existential oxymorons: she lives, though absent; he, already dead, colonizes the entire cinematic space, the ins and outs of the frame; the shot, with the aesthetic of a snapshot, becomes the dwelling of the instant and crosses my memory of ghosts from the 32 houses I have inhabited. The ghost invades what is no longer his: space, becoming vibrating light over bodies, in sound, in levitating objects, hegemony of anguishing infinitude. M plays juggler with old memories and pours the content of her space into a clock of sand memories. I wake up thinking I am in one of the houses once inhabited, walking to the kitchen thinking it’s a bathroom, battling not to put dirty dishes on the bookshelf.

M’s mourning for her lost lover is related to the fluttering memory of the 32 houses, also with my inability to grasp time as the sole measure and yoke of perception. Like M, the hands of my clock swing eccentrically from space to movement: a face-déjà/vécu, this landscape-déjà/visité, an object that detonates the filmic material behind the retina, flooded in saudades. Slowness makes me look back; haste pushes me to anticipate days to come. Today, with the fervor of a dog in heat, a cloud of disconnected ideas leads me to uncertain futures; yesterday, in slow walks, I counted steps until I drowned in saudades… and M?, with a cake.

Among the threads of this ghostly path, Milan Kundera and Virginia Woolf converse, interlocutors in the plot of nameless lovers. I guide them through the forced argument of the syndrome of artistic kinship, dwelling in a common universe of disturbed temporalities and apparitions; longing pursues their characters, the past (that could have been) becomes present in the form of heartbeat.

•P: The widow chokes on a cake that does not taste like oblivion. I cannot blink for four long minutes. She vomits pain.

•K: “It is a demand of beauty, but above all of memory, to imprint a form on a duration. Because the formless is ungraspable, unmemorizable.” It does not give way to the posthumous longing: “styska se mi potobe” (Kundera, 2000, p. 12).

•P: The ghost leaps into the abyss, still lost in eternal ellipses. The ghost accesses the treasure in the wall, disappears.

•W: “I must get up and see for myself what the mark on the wall truly is, a nail, the leaf of a rose, a crack?” (Woolf, 2012, p. 9). The piano keys sound, shadows and lights dance around the room.

•A: In the language of the stars, intermittence is an early form of forgetting.

•P: “Even if some form of humanity carries a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony into the future, the future will hit a wall; the universe will continue to expand and sweep everything before it” (A Ghost Story, 2017, min. 1:03:00).

•K: “All of Beethoven’s music would be summarized in a single long high note that would resemble what he heard, infinite and very high, on the first day of his deafness.” (Kundera, 1995, p. 103).

•W: “The ray that always sought to be extinguished behind the glass. The glass was death” (Woolf, 2012, p. 33). What was the buried treasure? “The light of the heart.” (p. 34).

•P: M. is not in the frame, there is no house or secret, only oblivion.

There are spaces where a being-there survives, pulsing, like a beam of light. The secrets they hold are the history of unfinished becoming: the “not-yet…,” “what would have happened if…,” the silenced voice of the unconfessed feeling of our heteronyms. I speak of Woolf’s secrets, of the couple that embodies the unfolding of time in a single plane of unfinished space, to which Lowery and Kundera subject us, perhaps to test our own conception of verb tenses in a single event. I speak of M’s emotional intricacies following the loss of her beloved and the stone of Sisyphus rolling through the haunted house.

Silence, the margins, are alienated ghosts of human memory, of annals, epics, tragedies, and farces, of History; they flow through the frozen channel of the defeated, indivisible in memorable faces and works that promise posterity; after death, or at least in dreams, where we inhabit the world like the dead, we are white sheets visiting layered temporalities through encyclopedic compendiums, lost in innumerable loops of repetition. At the limits-abysms of silence and the margins, at times the Kafkaesque top spins of being, at others the pure act of non-being, death rises victorious, indefectible, an always irrebasable, without a doubt, Kantian noumenon, Socratic daimon, “the only possibility of absolute impossibility” (Heidegger, 2009, p. 276), wu wei of the Tao, ascetic completeness, Kali’s tear, Sisyphus’s burden, Promethean flame, Antigone’s promise, syllogistic equality of the void, Mictlan in beds never shared again. The haunted house of slowness and forgetfulness embodied in M’s spiritual retina. Death is the synthesis of the margins.

References

Heidegger, Martin. (2009). El ser y el tiempo. Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Kundera, Milan. (1995). La lentitud. Tusquets.

Kundera, Milan. (2000). La ignorancia. Tusquets.

Lowery, David. (Director). (2017). A Ghost Story [Película]. A24 Productions

Maillard, Chantal. (2001). Filosofía en los días críticos: diarios 1996-1998. Pretextos.

Woolf, Virginia. (2012). Relatos completos. Alianza Editorial.

Zambrano, María. (2009). Las palabras del regreso. Cátedra.

Author note

Paloma Marín Escobar

Specialist in University Research Teaching from Universidad Católica Luis Amigó, Medellín, and graduate of the Master's in Creative Writing at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago, Chile. Faculty member at Universidad Católica Luis Amigó, Medellín, Colombia. ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6154-0797. Email: paloma.marines@amigo.edu.co