Kyiv by Bateau Press

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Kyiv

ÂŠ 2020 All Rights Reserved. Published in the United States by Bateau Press. www.bateaupress.org Typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro and Helvetica L'Entroduction by Mihir Kaulgud. Illustrated by Olivia Soter. Layout designed by Morgane Saint-Cyr. Bateau is able to function due to the generous support of College of the Atlantic, and the dedicated, hardworking students found at COA. www.coa.edu

I have seen Leviathan sprawl rotting in the reeds Of the great seething swamp-nets; The calm sea disembowelled in waterslides And the cataracting of the doomed horizons. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Arthur Rimbaud (trans. S. Beckett) This zine was produced by Le Bateau Ivre, an imprint of Bateau Press. Le Bateau Ivre to honor the work of French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who wrote his symbolist masterpiece, Le Bateau Ivre in 1871, when the Paris Commune was in full swing, and France was ripping apart at its hinges. Rimbaud was sixteen years old. Le Bateau Ivre will work with COA student artists, writers, and designers. And in this time of dynamic chaos, we will blanket the world with wonderful things.

“Death may not, after all, be the end of life; after death comes the strange life of ghosts.” — Anna Tsing: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene “Capital is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.” — Mark Fisher: The Weird and the Eerie

i On the last day of every month, a red minivan enters the courtyard enclosed by the tall walls of the apartment block where I live. It stops next to the back entrance of a rundown thrift store on the ground floor, and the peculiar acoustics of the courtyard make it seem as if there is an engine idling right next to my bed. A few of the store’s workers come outside through the narrow door, grab some twenty or thirty large plastic bags stuffed with clothes from the back of the van, and carry them inside. In the sectioned-off backroom of the store the clothes get sorted by category, size, gender, and the level of wear and tear. Eventually, they get assigned a price tag, an act that finishes the metamorphosing of western waste into eastern commodity. Later in the day, a sign appears on 7

the storefront: “LATEST SUMMER COLLECTION”, though everyone knows that most of the clothes in the store were produced at least a decade ago and in places with a distinctly different understanding of what winter or summer is. I go thrifting one day before a “new collection” is put on display, when the clothes are the cheapest. Strategy is the name of the game. On my last visit, after thirty minutes of subtle psychological manipulation, I managed to save a vintage Adidas shirt from an old man with oval sweat stains around his armpits. It was a beautiful piece of clothing, a white button-up with short green sleeves and the iconic logo, the kind I see my father wearing on the pictures from our family photo album, the kind that gives me an air of someone quietly defying modernity while humbly appropriating its artifacts, the kind that in combination with my matching white Adidas socks, my vintage black Levi jeans, and my 1980s Ray Ban shades should give me the authority and sophistication of someone versed in retro aesthetic. That day I also scored a sweet deal on a pair of dark purple vintage Puma sneakers because I dominate at thrifting. It was also the first time I saw him. I was in the male clothing section, going through the rows of t-shirts arranged by color, dark colors on the left, offwhites and pale yellows on the right, each individual shirt hanging faithfully on its own individual hanger which in 8

turn rested on a long metal bar. From where I stood I could see into the other section of the room where a line was forming in front of the fitting room. It was a hot summer day, and the people in line were trying to restrain the sweat on their temples with improvised hand fans, newspapers, wallets, bottles of water, bottoms of their shirts, anything that would create minimal airflow. The sunlight struggled to penetrate the announcements of the upcoming ‘SUMMER COLLECTION’ taped in multiple layers on the windows, and the office-style tube lights contemptuously hurled their ugly blue hue onto the clothes and the shoppers, making everything look cold like death from asphyxiation, confusing everyone’s senses. I was nearing the end of the t-shirt section when I suddenly felt extraordinarily self-conscious. It was as if I was in the middle of a busy square and something I had accidentally dropped made a loud bang against the concrete. Everything stopped around me — cars, buses, people, dogs in midstride, pigeons in the middle of flight-shitting — as if this collision dispelled my anonymity with a force capable of shattering all sound and motion. Everyone and everything turned eyes to look at me, even the security cameras on the surrounding buildings panned sideways to capture the incongruous source of public distress on footage, and I felt a giant magnifying glass in front of me focusing the gazes directly onto my forehead.

I looked up and my eyes, as if following a pre-programmed code, set on the mirror in the fitting room. He was standing in the fitting room with his back to me and the curtain wide open. Through the reflection in the mirror I saw his eyes, or rather where they should have been and where instead there were two black holes that seemed to manipulate gravity and distort time. The field of my vision cracked a little on the peripheries. He was wearing a white sheet, slightly soiled in several places, and ripped up at the bottom where it rested on the floor. The cracks in my vision crept from the peripheries towards the center, dissecting the image in front of me into multiple squares and triangles, rendering the entire picture illegible, making his reflection fragmented so that I could concentrate only on certain parts of what I saw at any one time. Next to him, on three different hangers inside the fitting room there were three different sheets, two white ones, and one with a deep cosmos pattern. The latter had a yellow tag instead of the blue ones like the rest, which meant it was one of the more expensive ‘exclusive designer’ items. I couldn’t help but feel that I was witnessing something profoundly ironic. The only sound in the room was Kanye West’s and Kid Cudi’s “Reborn” emanating as a crackle from the worndown speakers attached to the ceiling. I accidentally misunderstood Kanye’s expressive auto-tuned back-vocal chanting to be his voice. I mistakenly thought that that mournful humming half way between a lethargic whale and 10

an elegant vocal flourish was the way he communicated to me, beyond his gaze, relaying his profound nostalgia and the obsessiveness that made his eyes glisten. I started to notice that the variously angled fault-lines that sliced up my field of vision were, in fact, long pieces of string with one end attached to the clothes all around me, including my own, including the three sheets in his fitting room, and the other extending beyond the walls of the store, criss crossing the room from east to west, north to south. The only reason I refer to him as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; is because at the moment of our first encounter I registered within me a fleeting sense of brotherly/fatherly/son-ly kinship. I could not identify with him, nor did I feel any sense of empathy towards him, but we did have something in common. After all, he was my thrifting competitor. I held onto my Adidas shirt and Puma sneakers tighter. The people in the line couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t care less, they grunted and rolled their eyes theatrically, prompting whoever was taking so long to move along. He reached out for the cosmos colored sheet, brought it up in front of his body as if to see whether it fit without putting it on, and twisting his torso slightly from side to side, marveled at himself in the mirror with a sort of unexplainable dumb masculine pride. I finished looking through the t-shirts section, hustled through the crowd towards the check-out, paid for my findings, and left the store.

After our first encounter in the thrift store I started noticing him, and others like him too, more often, in the crackle of the subway announcements, in the way the sun reflects off of brand new cars and glass buildings. There were a few other times when I saw him in that particular thrift store again. With the same obsessive glistening in his eyes he kept on bringing different colored sheets to the fitting room, even the ones with the yellow tags, but he always wore the same ripped up stained white rags. He had an air of quiet triumph about him, as if under that white sheet he wore an arrogant smirk, satisfied with continuous self-reinvention, with his ability to invoke substance from emptiness.

“The serenity that is often associated with the eerie — think of the phrase eerie calm — has to do with detachment from the urgencies of the everyday. The perspective of the eerie can give us access to the forces which govern mundane reality but which are ordinarily obscured, just as it can give us access to spaces beyond mundane reality altogether” — Mark Fisher: The Weird and the Eerie

ii When I came back to pick up the pictures, the man at the store told me that most of my film was damaged and only seven out of thirty six negatives were printable. With a sympathetic look of someone able to truly understand the tragedy of memory loss he handed me an envelope labeled with my name. I thanked him, put it in my backpack, and went home. It was an early evening by the time I got home, I put some water to boil for tea, sat down at the little kitchen table next to the window, and started looking through the photos. The exposure on the first two out of the seven was too low. The frames were nothing but black rectangles interrupted by occasional red and yellow dots and trails of light. The next one in the stack was a close up of my brother’s chin. I put the first three photos to the side and, having low expectations, laid out the remaining ones in front of me. 15

To my surprise, these were perfectly exposed, although rather blurry. All four depicted a blue sky weighing down intimidatingly on a homogeneous green expanse, a field extending far and wide towards the horizon. In each photograph there appeared to be two figures, partially obscured by the tall grass. Their faces weren’t quite recognizable, either blurred by the slight motion of the camera at the moment of film’s exposure, or too far away from the lens to be visible. Judging by the shape of the figures and the clothes, the pictures were of my younger self and my childhood friend, Vitaliy. I was also quite certain that the person behind the camera was my brother, Artem, since at that time only he had the necessary expertise to operate the film camera we owned as children. Besides, the top right corner of one of the pictures bore the signature mark of my brother’s early career as a photographer - the tip of his blurred out, out-of-focus finger. What I wasn’t so certain about was the time when these pictures were taken. The plastic container with the roll of film said simply “Summer”, but did not specify which summer. Judging by my height I must have been ten years old or so, but taking into consideration all the variables such as the height of the grass, the blurriness of the shots, and the distance between the figures and the lens I could have been anywhere between seven or thirteen years old. No less than seven because prior to that I wasn’t allowed to go far without adult supervision, and no more than thirteen because Vitaliy and I had a falling out around then. 16

Still, six years is a pretty wide margin, I thought. No matter how hard I searched my memory I could not remember being photographed in that field. I found the film in my grandmotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cabinet, in the village, so the photos must have been documenting one of those days when my brother, my best friend, and I ventured outside the village onto the surrounding hills on some unidentifiable afternoon. It was merely a guess, within themselves the landscapes bore no recognizable markers of geographical location or time period. It was a plain green field, blue skies, and two kids. Generic to the point of being familiar. The photos appeared to be spatially and temporally indeterminate, and, to an unknowing eye, they could have been taken virtually anywhere, and anytime. The cogwheels of my memory span fast and furiously, but a name that I could attach to what I saw in the photos would not come. No matter how closely I tried to look, Vitaliy and I were barely visible, on the horizon, an uncanny pair, repeating and doubling, poking out from the grass, as if caught on film incidentally, as if by some mischievous collaboration between my brother, the lens, and the grass we were being denied our rightful centrality in the frame, our objecthood. In one of the pictures, unlike the ill-defined figures, the tall grass in the foreground was perfectly visible, in focus, its blades as sharp as a razor, some with their tops bent, some standing straight, animated with intense agency, with distinct characters, engaged in a mindful conversation with each other, in the forgotten practice of conviviality, questioning human self-obsession. 17

The finger in the top right of one picture, the sun flare staining the left side of another one, those were not at all defects. They indicated a presence acting on the film, a presence that took the form of questions suspended just outside of the frame, encroaching on it from all the sides, the lurkings of the unknown, the strange absences within my memory. The photos had a life independent of my own, and in the evening haze everything, including myself, felt a little less real. I was trying to imagine being in that green and blue landscape, looking at my indeterminate young self from the vantage point of the camera. I could feel the gentle breeze on my skin, hear the mighty rustle of the field, see the clouds move lazily across the sky. Everything around me was animated, but I could only see as far as the frame of the photo allowed me. My imagination was unable to fill the gaps and construct a continuous landscape. Beyond the peripheries of the frame was a grey shimmering blur. I started walking towards the figures in the distance, but with every step I took forward the figures took a step backward, maintaining the original separation between us. I had a sense of being in motion as I eased my way through the tall grass, but the landscape around me stayed the same. What happens when the marks against which we can measure distance are no longer there? Somewhere off in the distance, on the left, a tree appeared that wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t there before. The boundaries of the photo began 18

to stretch, incrementally at first, faster and faster with each passing moment. I was no longer walking, the landscape stretched in all directions and my body, as if embedded within it, grew wider and longer too. It was almost as if the landscape, or the portion of it that was captured in the photo, was at the same time extending itself outwards and superimposing itself onto the surrounding world that emerged from the grey blur. More trees came into the view, now both part of the landscape as well as superimposed under it. Then came the winding river with steep sandy banks, expansive grasslands, a pine forest, pine covered hills, an old logging road growing wider and concrete into a highway leading to a recognizable city with its intersections full of cars and pedestrians, its brick buildings in the old town and the slick glass buildings elsewhere, its various squares, cubes, circles, rectangles, parallelepipeds, three dimensional orthotopes, elongated octagons, semi cylinders, triangles, its residential areas with multistorey apartment blocks reproducing by self-pollination, the playgrounds funded as acts of self-promotion by local politicians, its twenty four hour chain grocery stores with peaches too soft and bruised, its heat rising from the asphalt in summer. I was walking down the street next to my apartment block and hearing the rustle of the field, the kind of sound unheard in the city, warning me of the ravenous skies ready to consume me. I could no longer tell one place from the other. I could no longer tell where one started and the other began. Where did one start and the other begin? Was it just about the geographical point at which the name of one 19

could no longer claim authority? In the world that spawned fog, geography seemed to have never been invented. The city and the grass field were one and the same, despite the fact that the topographies of one were intensely intimate, and my relationship to the other existed in the vacuum of four frames. In this indeterminacy, in the world where places spilled beyond their borders like milk at the brims of a glass, I felt an exile, an utter dislocation. How could I belong to a place? How could I belong to a place that was at the same time several? How could a place contain multitudes and not be several at the same time? How can this superimposed entanglement be ever unravelled? Without the ability to locate myself in space, without the comfort of being partly defined by my relationship to a particular landscape, I felt a part of myself missing.

L’Entroduction. — Mihir Kaulgud Danylo and I spent much of spring 2020 isolated together in our house. We negotiated both the banality of everyday existence in isolation, and the vast (spatial, temporal, political, economic) dimensions of the pandemic. In my reading, stained by memory, Danylo’s stories grew out of our navigation of this period. Rather than recount specific details, I want to map out this navigation as an uneven and unsteady shuttling between three coordinates. After all, the pandemic lends itself quite well to hyperbolic reflection. The first coordinate: Bon Iver’s song ‘Woods’, which is essentially a choral piece, a lone voice refracted through AutoTune into a full-bodied emphatic ensemble. I played Danylo ‘Woods’ when talking to him about Simon Reynold’s essay on AutoTune and vocal manipulation. But since then, we’ve never discussed how the song wound up soundtracking many of our days or why we repeatedly sang the song, trying to mimic its vocal effect. But I suspect it had something to do with how the song’s fluttering serenity, tinged with longing and quiet determination, momentarily dispelled a sense of upheaval and roiling uncertainty. Bon Iver sings, ‘I’m lost in the woods/ I’m down on my time/ I’m building a still/ to slow down the time’-- that is quite literally what we felt like doing sometimes. But the technologically averted (or amplified?) loneliness of the vocals also reflected the monotony of attending online classes and physical isolation. And so, the stillness of our lives often 22

bled into glacial lethargy. The second coordinate: Kanye West samples ‘Woods’ in ‘Lost in the World’, retaining its attempt to cope with feeling lost, but reaching further simultaneously to break out of any induced lethargy. Kanye sets the sample in an accelerator, surrounding Bon Iver’s voice within insistent drums, heady with forward momentum. This song is something like an Ultralight Beam (to reference another Kanye song) - a light that bursts through the malaise inflicted by the world. Navigating within the tension between ‘Woods’ and ‘Lost in the World’ is to shuttle between ‘I’m building a still to slow down the time’ and ‘Lost in this plastic light/ Let’s break out of this fake ass party/ Turn this into a classic night’. The deliberate cultivation of joy, with the limited means at hand, was often what Danylo and I had to do. To inflect each other’s days with some kind of forward momentum, often a silent but deeply felt need. Shuttling between solitude and being together in (or despite?) solitude is the work of social gathering. The third coordinate: the work of, the work done within and through, social gathering. These stories, and making them into a Bateau zine, are all projects of social gathering. It began with Danylo and I hanging out, trying to make each other’s schoolwork interesting. We joked around and shared readings, music and ideas. Then over time, the propulsion of our hanging out enveloped Dan, Gaby and Olivia, and became this zine. Such work is what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call ‘study’, the work that is done with and for: with people and in service of a project. The project 23

could be anything, anything that makes the list of ‘these are the things that kept me alive this time’. Because the point is that study “is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible conver-gence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice”. Intellectual work is already happening around us, if we let it be that. And it cannot be neatly boxed into institutional life. The work of social gathering might be latent, but ever so often you get attuned to it, and it opens up new modes of thinking, doing and being with others.

Acknowledgements Mark Fisher: The Weird and The Eerie David Whyte: Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words Fred Moten and Stefano Harney: The Undercommons Anna Tsing: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene Paul Bowles: The Sheltering Sky Hanif Abduraqqib: They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us Shubhangi Swarup: Latitudes of Longing Ocean Vuong: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing: The Mushroom at the End of the World Valeria Luiselli: Faces in the Crowd Arturo Escobar: Designs for the Pluriverse Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, Bruce Erickson: Queer Ecologies Bon Iver: Woods; Hey, Ma Kanye West: Lost in the World; Reborn Marvin Gaye: What’s Going On Dark Rooms: I Get Overwhelmed John Frusciante: Curtains David Lowery: Ghost Story