Reading Room for the poem The Glass Essay by Anne Carson
Video Installation
Concept: Nicola Caroli, Video: Joanna Kane
06. - 29. November 2009, wortwedding, Berlin
In The Glass Essay the narrator visits her mother in the country after the break-up of a love relation-ship. During her solitary walks in the wild moor landscape and the talks with her mother in the kitchen, the narrator connects personal memories with the life and work of Emily Brontė.
Poetry mediator Nicola Caroli and photographer Joanna Kane have created a space for the poem and a reading room. The reading room places the visitor symbolically in the midst of the action of The Glass Essay which takes place mostly between the mother's kitchen and the moor landscape. The interfaces of inside and outside act as springboards for the continuity of the narrtive of the poem. Emily Bronte is present in form of her books. The video is inspired by the recurrent motif of the moor, both as psychic and physical space, which also references Emily Brontė's Wuthering Heights and her poetry. Joanna Kane transposes both Brontė's moors in Yorkshire and Carson's northern Canada to one of Scotland's largest areas of remote open moorland, Rannoch Moor, near Glencoe.
Continuous time-lapse video footage was taken from a single fixed camera position over 4 days in March 2006 on Rannoch Moor, correlating to the time frame in which the narrative of The Glass Essay takes place. Kane explores how the expression of time and space through language can be translated to visual expression with time based media. The flatness of the moor stretching for miles seems to become an index of time itself, with the video depicting time passing over this emptiness.
Anne Carson (born in Toronto, Ontario, 1950) is a Canadian poet and professor of Classics and comparative literature. She addresses ideas and themes from those fields, often modernizing Greek myths or referring to ancient philosophy in her poems and essays. She has written several books, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, and non-fiction. She has received numerous prizes and fellowships, a.o. the Pushcart Prize, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship and the Guggenheim Fellowship. .
Extract from the poem
"It's stunning, it is a moment like no other,
when one's lover comes in and says I do not love you anymore.
I switch off the lamp and lie on my back,
thinking about Emily's cold young soul.
Where does unbelief begin?
When I was young
there were degrees of certainty.
I could say, Yes I know that I have two hands.
Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands
occasionally disappear -
From the next room I hear my mother shift and sigh and settle
back down under the doorsill of sleep.
Out the window the moon is just a cold bit of silver gristle low on
fading banks of sky.
Our guests are darkly lodged, I whispered, gazing through
The vault.."
(from The Glass Essay. Glass, Irony, and God, New Directions, 1995)