Songs for Olympia, by Tomoé Hill: Beneath the warmth of the skin (Part 1)
Book comment and notes on reading
Juhani Pallasmaa: The eyes want to collaborate with other senses.
Writers are foremost observers and listeners. Tomoé Hill has an amazing literacy for scents and a keen interest in how memory relates to the sense of smell… smell being the most potent trigger of memories folded in our bodies. This concoction becomes uniquely interesting in relation to written text, text being a curiosity which sits between optics and how we interface with memory and emotion—that at the same time overlays and plugs into both.
Portability and seemingly infinite adaptability make literature a resilient art form. One of the biggest advances in writing in the last 60 years comes from the world of computing. The idea of interest to us here traces even earlier to the 1940s and Vannevar Bush of MIT. Bush proposed a desk-sized machine for personal use that could house entire libraries of books and references and create new hybrid documents, intimately interlinking the researcher, his machine and the body of civilizational wealth in the form of published writing. Memex, the precursor to modern hypertext, is outlined in Bush’s 1945 groundbreaking and succinct writeup titled “As We May Think”. [link]
Just before reading Songs for Olympia, a book-club I had frequented at the time was reading The Rings of Saturn by Max Sebald. I’d take copious notes wanting to see into why the book had worked on me so effectively. Combing twitter archives for clues surfaced this line from an interview with Sebald (James Wood) [link]:
“I think that fiction writing, which does not acknowledge the uncertainty of the narrator himself, is a form of imposture and which I find very, very difficult to take.”
Unmooring the narrative means losing the crutch of genre-writing/reading but can yield interesting effects, one of them being: it slides the reader into co-inhabiting a zone usually reserved for the artist. If a bond with the text develops, such imposed yearning to orient will result in internal maps, perhaps leveraging reader’s memories, emotional complexes. As the text reveals its inner workings, the reader gains an intuition for the developing form, sort of in tandem. This is I think why at times reading RoS for some feels like witnessing History. In hypertext writing, the craft is in the link.
[Note 1] Putting these in Tinderbox (software for hypertext/notes) reveals several running themes repeating and transforming. It can be described as method of working with cards: you move them around on a table, link between them, place one text-card next to another in hope of revealing unexpected connections and—who knows—maybe even a new, otherwise hidden story! I don’t know if RoS was directly inspired by hypertext, or wether it grew from serendipitous gathering of narrative trinkets. In any case, this tangibility of link is one of the two key aspects that, in my book, makes Songs for Olympia kindred to RoS.
In the Foreword Tomoé describes Songs for Olympia as “a response to a response” the other being The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat by Michael Leiris. From Joseph Schreiber’s (@roughghosts) notes on Leiris: [link]
“ […] and yet his activities and interests defy simple categorization. Early Surrealist, poet, novelist, essayist, ethnographer, critic, traveller, and art collector, he is best known today as the pioneer of modern confessional literature.”
These days, outside of the mostly self-contained ‘indie’ literary scenes by-the-writers-for-the-writers, practically only books which find their readers are either fan-fiction or confessional writing. The world is seen as unmoored and that of internet cliques. Readers of today are sophisticated in the—they know what they want way—and, the sales numbers show, respond to being reached for directly. Being artful in the art-making process is important and admirable but it is artwork—the product—that will reach readers’ palms… is the prevailing attitude today.
I do believe I would’ve been better now if Songs for Olympia could’ve found me in my 20s as well... It would’ve given me the chance of cohabiting woman’s eye—a thinking woman’s eye—which is one of the several ways this book can be read…
My first approach to the book was a mix of “critical reading”—the way essays are ordinarily read—and “open mindedness” but these kept slipping into ‘male gaze’, the allure of words as the text unfolds unassumingly and lushly… a sort of gen(de)re-less(ness) kept confusing me, as—at that early stage—the text allows its tone be morphed by/in the reader’s eye. I’d learn later it was the pull of Discovery.
The process of painting involves nesting of translations, and just as every translation does, the yearning is to bring the affect from one (the artist) ever closer to their others. A painting—the art product—must embody this translation, the ineffable being in the impossibility of doing so and the miracle of succeeding, of broaching the abyss between occupied worlds, an intimacy in expression.
“Now I know I straddle a line between worlds, a stray silent phrase or feeling coming into the view of my consciousness which becomes the start of a conversation, a communication with another kingdom.” [Segment 4, Page 4]
“My mother had a translucent porcelain set, hiding and revealing its veins of colour when held up to the window. But the true fineness of such a cup can only be discerned in the dark by touch, when your hands attempt to translate the creation of another.” [Segment 5, Page 5]
To wrap the first part of my comment on this book,
“In responding to your words, Michel, I am responding to myself. Observing Olympia with you, I see us as a tripartite Sibyl: we are the ones, as Heraclitus said, with frenzied mouths, but she is the one speaking through us.” [Segment 4, Page 3]
For Tomoé Hill and Leiris as writers Manet’s painting of Olympia has created a possibility for two books to coalesce around a shared yearning and the resulting art is wedded by how elements of the painting linger in our minds and eye. The subtly geometric brushstrokes of bouquet’s wrapping, held gently like a newborn.
More than ever before, the character in choosing which passions to pursue in both life and art matters: a kernel of strands to that which matters acts as red thread to hoist the eye pulled by yearning into discovering its own form. In that, the craft has to be invented and-or discovered as the structure emerges. On the reader’s side such book can be deeply intimate as the investment resides in assembling a sense of self through nooks and spaces of another.
For the next part of this comment on Songs I want to show some examples of the said craft and study them in more detail.