Articulations: On Eleni Stecopoulos’s “Dreaming in the Fault Zone”
Eleni Stecopoulos | Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing | Nightboat Books | October 2024 | 432 pages
Quotations from Dreaming appear in italics, unless otherwise noted.
All profiteers of knowledge find it articulable.
I watch a video of a fish bang a mollusc against a reef until the meat breaks out. The reef is coerced into the project of the fish’s hunger. It labors regardless of what is produced. Bleached, useless, unagentic, nonproductive, it is used, recontextualized, appropriated from, treated as a tool in wider circulations of desire and (dis)satisfaction: tiny shards of itself float away now in the dark water, where away from the lethal collusion of surveillance and apathy, [its] stillness means [it] makes “nothing.” The fish, at least, seems happy. As all profiteers.
The nothing composes itself with the water. It becomes important that the voiceover calls it a kitchen. Some precise effort in making for the point of nourishment, or pleasure, or no purpose at all is conceded to the crumbs left over. The YouTube queue turns to the silk moth, bombyx mori. Having been domesticated to the point where it can only dream of flight. It’s a figure now for the future of architectural design and animal rights. Having been instrumentalized.
My thought unravels regardless while I think about how beautiful the silk thread is, how soft it must be. It becomes important to know whether its thread is pulled or pushed out of its body. The moth produces a jagged syntax that listens with human wounds and bones, to dress us, or a floss, and the floss is biodegradable and eco. With this floss, my gums will never bleed.
It is a case where art is utilitarian. And what was wrong with utility? It aims for precision. As if the moth exists for the sole purpose of machining, its body given a standard without a paycheck. It makes nothing if not for the hunger surveillants who overdetermine its shards. Who move through water as a means and not a way.
Away from lethal collusions of domestication and misuse, a tool is only ever as useful as its user. So that we can consider the implications of a collective dream.
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In Dreaming in the Fault Zone, Eleni Stecopoulos turns a critical eye toward healing. What is conventionally offered as cure tends to treat symptoms and subjects in isolation without attending to the general process that peels things apart: the new age, still part of a therapy-industrial complex, itself a reaction to western medicine’s tendencies to extract and pathologize, to name subjects relative to their capacity to work. Reframing healing as inseparability, Dreaming offers that what needs treating is not the patient but the ways of reading illness – of the body, of the social, of the earth.
Can there be a reparative mode of reading the earth, Dreaming seems to ask, that draws us into an epoch of the geopathic? Or a mode of repair that does not draw from the paradigm of work and working? The everyday is what is chronic or seasonal, a pattern that has been rejected and repressed…in the name of progress. It is the pattern that, having been made static, made solid, made nothing, becomes a dream of utility. How could the dream become a site of the commons again…a many-headed, multi-organed sensorium of and for all?
Against use or uselessness, Stecopoulos establishes a model of healing as dreaming-for: a form of reading that accounts for materiality as a measurable distance between self and other; the poetics that might articulate it, less legible, not easily disseminated or shared, nor reproduced as method. A form of reading more like mimesis of errancies and changes (external) by mapping them in the body (internal). This hermeneutics claims access to a different kind of mediation – as a collective and porous subject – where work creates the possibility that one could sleep in another’s place; one could dream for them. The one who dreams-for – being precise about – looks experimental. Because matter itself experiments.
But something is made from the shards of Dreaming. They’re acts of precision that articulate the non-self as dreamwork. Whether a poetics is audible or opaque matters less than how it gets taken up, how it is described in relation to other processes, and what that does. So it’s less about the sick or useless object – the nothing that dreaming against management might make – the flakes of coral reef reincorporated to mean something in a narrative of justice or cure. Rather it is how the patterns shape other patterns.
A dream resembles the shape of its making. In this case, water is poesis, is chronic. The poet notes that in the Greek context, karst topography creates hollows and caverns and these landforms made it possible to theorize what could not be seen with the eyes, where water flows easily through limestone and dissolves the earth, makes aquifers, and from this habitation springs a word. Or a mythology, how something comes to be from a place of “incubation,” how sleep gives you the way in/out. Sleep creates access. But to get that access you need to lie still in inaccess.
Dreamwork is site-specific, a practice bound to specific soil, springs, caves. The ability of every shrine or oracle to act as a medium of communication depended on the earth whose flows it channeled. Dreamwork is flesh that filters. Air among things, and shadows that reject voice as the sign of a unique subject who recovers, reports, and is allowed back into the normate. In and of air, voice is many things, is touch, is sound, the wind, the shadow, the flake.
It’s possible to survive just being asleep. Asleep, my forms of empiricism become precise, in that distortions are logical. When one is asleep it is not necessary to say anything directly or clearly. It is like or it is poesis, the excess of a room where what we call knowledge is reactive. Awake, it is fashionable to disavow expertise, systems, institutions that aim to regulate the many-headed monster. To know knowledge is many-headed. But what thrives in incubation is not human. What if a dream belongs to chemosynthetic bacteria and algae that eat oil, methane, or hydrogen sulfide? Or the silkworm whose cocoon is for no one but itself? Or listening is about mishearing and failures as always, refusals, errancies, imbalances of power, imbued with the residues of indifference? Why not a voice you have to slow down your listening and your thinking for, a voice extravagant with time and space?
I am only ever interested in writing that keeps the strangeness of nothing intact. I like to know about the way water beads up on a humidifier and the circulations of microplastics in the blood and species that cannot be classified and what happens when we become puny and deaf in the wind. In general, I want to snap shut the part of me that dreams in favor of the part that forecasts the weather. When listening is understood as techne…enlisted in a collaborative process not to diagnose but to establish what is happening. Like a way of texting “did you feel it?” to measure an earthquake: a transducer drawing power away from one system to activate another? Then (you said) I stabbed the air.
Listening is about precision when forms unravel.
Stecopoulos notes that in the community performance collective The Olimpias, disability culture shows up in their practice of contact improvisation as fractured storytelling that veils more than it lays open. No one is asked to tell their story or to use one to justify their presence. Offering that the cultural mandate for narratives can prevent us from exploring mobility and mobilization, she describes writhing and twisting with others and allowing the body to be a fragment that hangs there – sometimes not making sense, sometimes connecting unintentionally, sometimes drifting off, sometimes clear as day. Form is not ‘prior’ to coherence; not something on the way to narrative, lying in fragments until the end of pain allows them to be sequenced and developed into reason – coalesced into a “whole” body.
Somatic performance is a way of refusal that illustrates the way the mandate of telling one’s story turns recovery into an individual responsibility – something that can be measured, assessed and circulated – and instead makes room for aporias and silence, new geometries…emerging from our contact. This is contact that cannot be mapped out in advance, it is not bound to a litany of contexts or histories, but moves with how something shows up in a moment. An interoceptive sentence, a term she borrows from Bhanu Kapil, that traces the nervous system as it is morphed by its modes of contact, a kind of crumple.
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I was reminded of Catarina, the subject of anthropologist Joao Biehl’s Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, and how a means of articulating the world to herself “was not simply a matter of transfiguring or enduring that unbearable reality; rather, it allowed her to keep the possibility of an exit in view.” She wrote what she called a dictionary of memories on napkins – single words or images she wrote and rewrote. Biehl writes that, as an anthropologist, he was “faced at every step with the terminal force of reality,” a configuration of social institutions and structures where Catarina says she “lived kind of hidden, an animal” making their relationship “not a perfect form but the means of knowing.” For Biehl, enabling this world to take shape – and to allow Catarina an exit – is not to use her to make a statement about the failure of institutions. The patient is not a tool for progressive aims to cure or end the chronic.
The intimacy of encounter does something else, a different thing. A different thing may be happening entirely with the works we set out to write, if listening: …what if the narrative is co-authored? what if feeling is co-feeling? That is the crux and promise of a sensoria unbound from its historical determinations, or revealed to have been bound. The utility of poetry comes from the patient who has the ability to recognize the strangeness of their own body and express it in a language that draws your attention to it. In which case it exists as critique without needing to state what it’s doing. Poetry does not need theory. Some of us write so-called experimental poetry out of a visceral need for realism, which is precision for what matters and is happening.
Or an attachment to or process of looking away. I tend to read for bits and pieces of writing that feel less considered, less stuck in tone, less enlightened, less morally prescriptive, more spare and more attuned to the strangeness of sensation or the inhuman or emptiness that feels itself being written, as is suggested by poesis as excess and aberrant. About a quality of light or a small gesture blown up: a stain or smudge. Which feels rare now. At what point does the medium become an imposter in another’s dream. Whose familiar are they making strange? A lot of people think they know, I thought. Yet the new age persists in its a-historical shimmerings, in dissatisfied moods.
I read for gaps and openings. This is a book that puts everything in. In the dream, unusual ways of speaking or thinking are the habit of an atmosphere that keeps shifting, changing colors. In the dream, form doesn’t come from walls but from moving points of sound which shapeshift. In the dream, what is chronic is closer to flattery of the object, poking at a dry well. And because of this, a poem can’t remediate the toxicity of chemical exposure. The sensoria is limited by inarticulations of the immaterial and sensed, but the sensitive are also at involuntary attention. To be bombarded.
Looking away finds solace in the loosened bits of things – those forgotten in the pursuit of one dream over another.