Somewhere that Is also Nowhere

Abstract

> I have lived my own book. One I never planned to write, recording time backwards and forwards. I have watched the snow fall onto the sea and traced the steps of a traveler long gone. I have relived moments that were perfect in their certainty…. We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation…. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go.1 In her memoir M Train , Patti Smith writes about nothing and everything: her life as an artist; her relationships and debts to books, writers and artists, and places; her love and mourning for her late husband; traveling in both time and space; her deep affection for the arts of the detective, black coffee, Polaroids, black coats, slices of toast with olive oil. Smith's writing demonstrates how objects and artifacts, bodies, ideas, and memories speak to and of us as what Jane Bennett describes as vibrant matter —the liveness and liveliness of things and people as they interact.2 Smith writes: “Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words tumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen.”3 One way of listening to the “dead speak” is to attend to the performance of artifacts, memory, histories, and identities not as an exchange that trades what the body knows for what the mind re-members and puts down as knowledge (the latter forever exceeding and eclipsing the former), but instead as a “vital act of transfer.”4 These …