22 HAZIRAN, 2024

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22 HAZIRAN, 2024

BETWEEN NEVER AND EVER

Curator and writer Tamara Khasanova contemplates movement between embodied and liminal states of presence as a means of constructing meaning, and as a balm for conflict, desire, alienation, and chaos.

Tamara Khasanova

“O astonishing immateriality of distances!”
Sea and Fog, Etel Adnan

“You sometimes find yourself on a plane that isn’t the one you meant to go to.”
Changing Planes, Ursula K. Le Guin

I think of a day in the future when I will be able to board a plane. Any plane. I think about a day in the future when I will be able to change a plane. Any plane. But maybe it will be a train that will take me there, or a car, or a bike. Or I’ll just walk and see how far I can get. Eventually my feet will touch the sand and I will reach the ocean. And maybe I will enter it and see how much further I can push. Perhaps I will continue walking until the top of my head disappears in the waves, or maybe I will swim until my arms can’t hold me anymore. The cold water will carry me further and guide me to reach my destination. Oh sweet fantasy.

***

Ursula K. Le Guin begins her collection of stories Changing Planes by telling us about a character named Sita Dulip who discovered how to change planes. Found amidst the mundane setting of an airport, consumed by boredom while waiting for her next flight, Sita realizes that she can transport to a completely different plane of existence. The method becomes so popular and easily accessible that later on it is widely adopted by many others. All these different worlds suddenly become accessible. The borders vanish and distances disappear with sudden reachability being at once riveting and repulsing. Throughout the story, the narrator’s emotions alter between excitement and disillusionment from witnessing the imperfections and differences across other planes. While this collection is mostly described as a story of the challenges of comprehending different cultures, languages, and societies, I find another meaning for myself that more directly implicates the question of the sociopolitical dynamics between the individual and the collective, history and time. Le Guin’s depiction of different planes extends to the dynamics within the most intimate of environments, provoked by the smallest of social formations and found everywhere you look.

I don’t remember the first time I changed planes like Sita Dulip. But what I do recall is that it wasn’t at all related to any physical process (or even if it was, the physicality was secondary). Rather, it was a strong emotional sensation that carried on across time. I am convinced that, to this day, the after effect of the change is still present. The only difference is that it’s now layered with all these other kaleidoscopic changes, making it impossible to untangle what came before or after.¹

***

I stand at the threshold of the first plane; there’s a lot of silence here and so much void that it all feels sticky. It latches, it lingers, it doesn’t want to leave. But how can an absence be sticky and clingy like that when its sole purpose is to be reduced to nothingness, to not exist? Let me be clear: I am not here to pretend that I know about loss. Perhaps I know about some of it, but certainly not all. Yet I am also not here to deny that I don’t think about loss constantly. It’s a prolonged moment, a pause, before the inexorable split. One truly learns and understands loss and pain only through the act of living and so much of our learning about this is intertwined with the experience of those around us who undergo loss. What becomes of the silent witness to the suffering of a loved one who is torn between the desire for solitude and the scrutiny of society?

***

There’s no shortage of pain, as there’s no shortage of splinters. The sharp ache following the lingering presence of a splinter beneath one’s skin can be among the most exasperating pains. More often than not, one barely notices when a splinter penetrates their flesh. The prolonged presence of the foreign intruder often results in inflamed and damaged tissues; the body recognizes the object’s alien nature and attempts to expel it. The body’s resistance at its simplest. Pain, irritation, and soreness serve as indicators of the unwelcome intruder. As a child, picking out splinters with bare hands felt like an extreme accomplishment. While my mom would carefully sanitize and prepare a needle before removing the splinter from my skin, my sole satisfaction was diving straight in without any precaution. I was fascinated by the hollowness left after the foreign object was successfully eliminated, small yet large enough to feel. So as I enter this plane, I am marked by splinter cavities; their endless number renders my body foreign to itself. Like splinters, existing power structures leave cavities again and again until one reaches a level of detachment. Until one doesn’t belong to themselves.

***

You want to imagine that you’re outside of it, but you must face that this is your personal delusion. You consume, you discard, you fixate. You resist repeating it, yet still fall into the same cycle. It’s daily, it’s weekly, yearly. It coincides with your birthday or the birthday of your loved one. Maybe a funeral if you’re less lucky. Something darker, something heavier. Devoid of joy or a decoy of joy. The luster of status and prestige, of upward mobility, exceptionality, or being better. There’s a plane that contains all of that, and it’s our reality. We don’t even have to go anywhere to imagine it because we live in it. We are the ones who maintain its alluringly putrid carcass. So then, what’s left is to wade through piles of bones, flesh, and tendons. This is the quality of the third plane: twisted abundance, trickery, and curses of time.

***

“Sometimes learning a fact is enough to make an entire series of corroborating details, previously unrecognized, fall into place,” thinks the narrator after receiving a call from Carlos Argentino in Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Aleph.”² But how does fact differ from fiction, especially now in the wake of the 21st century? To enter the last fourth plane is to labor through the fear of the unknown and undetectable, to overcome the limits of our own imagination that measures this world by the standards of what is known and easily perceptible to humankind. To travel with light that surpasses everything around us; its perseverance evident even in the face of walls, deep voids, and secluded corners. Between the invisibility of the Earth's inner core and the infinity of outer space. So much of our relationship to the unseen and unreachable relies on acceptance and trust in our imagination. Otherwise everything would be darkness.

***

To change in this lifetime. Once, while writing a few words for this essay, I got a call from my mom. She was sharing about things back home and hinting at her frustrations with the family dynamic. “Everyone has their own picture of the world,” I heard her murmur. She has lived with the same three humans in one apartment for the past ten years, but having a familial relationship and sharing a consistent routine doesn’t guarantee the mutual understanding that we all crave throughout our lives. “It suddenly occurred to me that you don’t need order to live. There is no pattern to follow and the pattern itself doesn’t even exist: I am born,” proclaims Clari Lispector in Água Viva.³ Yet the feeling that we fall into the pattern forever haunts our steps. As we feel our planes of existence confine and close in upon us, the ability to change planes, relate to a story that is not immediately our own, and resist retreating into the isolation of set beliefs is what allows us to endure the forces of life alongside one another.

Note: This current Protodispatch text has been adapted from its earlier version written for Protozine: Parable of the Planes, published in conjunction with the exhibition Parable of the Planes, with artists Aiza Ahmed, Jaimie An, Ashley Bergner, Suiyuan Jin, Christine Jung, Da eun Lee, Elena Bulet i Llopis, Julia Helen Murray, Lorena Park, Suiyuan Jin, Shori Sims, a Protocinema Emerging Curator Series exhibition in partnership with Rhode Island School of Design Sculpture Department taking place at NADA East Broadway, New York from June 13 – 30, 2024.

References

1. Here I am thinking about Clarice Lispector’s novel Agua Viva, where Lispector writes, “But I am kaleidoscopic: I am fascinated by my sparkling mutations that I here kaleidoscopically record.” Clarice Lispector, Água Viva (New York: New Directions, 2012), 27.
   
2. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph” in The Aleph and Other Stories (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004), 127.
3. Clarice Lispector, Água Viva, 31.

Read Past Protodispatches here