Crypt-Poesis

Abstract

How might writing be a performative archaeology? First, go down into the depths of the earth. Into the chthonic materiality that is archaeology's domain. Here can be found the traditional notions of darkness, burial, hiddenness, and exhumations from the crypt. Then things hidden in the dark appear. Ancient stone tablets are examined as an example of a textual crypt, made even more resonant when they are spell tablets; an enfolding of embodiment and exposition, in a performative intersection of site, matter and inscription. Spell casting vacillates between writing archaeology, and breath, as seen Artaud's spell works, that burn holes in the gap between sign and signifier; inside and outside; body and material support, as demonic marker. Looking at the crypt structure and its relation to writing, extending its role from chthonic charnel house to generative transmitter, the crypt will be seen to be a method that allows writing to enact this rift, unearthing never-present psychic sediments of the past, and their invocation into the air to disrupt the archive – that is, a magic performative writing that invokes flickering suspension of the present.

Notes

1 Whereas a straightforward view of Plato’s treatment of writing suggests that writing is to be rejected as strictly poisonous to cognition and dialogue, Derrida argues that writing is more ambivalent and irreducible, and is thus poison and cure (see Derrida 1981).

2 Ancient Mesopotamian texts were written on small blocks of unfired clay, the material for which was bountiful in the dry marsh plains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, near modern-day Iraq. The name Mesopotamia denotes the area between these rivers. The name for this early writing system was termed ‘cuneiform’, denoting the spiky wedge characters of the script made with marsh reeds as styli, from the Latin cuneus, meaning ‘wedge’ (see Finkel 2014).

Sophie Sleigh-Johnson: RIFT>GLYPH, 2016, demon relic sketchbook

Sophie Sleigh-Johnson: Radio Bifrons, 2017, demon relic photocopy

3 Cave patterns, drawings and writing are all forms complicit within the supplementary structure of the trace and the cinder (see Derrida 1972; Harris 1986).

4 See the work of Sound Archaeologist John Schofield (2014).

5 One instance of Artaud's instrumentalizing of threshold spaces is his use of the stairwell in the recording studio for the production of his posthumously broadcast To Have Done with The Judgment of God (1948) where he screamed from the staircase, with his cry being picked up by a microphone in the adjacent room.

6 See also the author's radio programmes on Resonance 104.4 FM at sophiesleighjohnson.co.uk: Sleigh-Johnson, Sophie, (2015b)ChthonicLive [radio], Resonance 104.4 FM, 7 MAY 2015 and Sleigh-Johnson, S. (2015a) Chthonic Index, Southend: Focal Point Gallery.

7 Spell tablets, also known as Katadesmoi or defixiones, are curses (also known as binding spells), and are usually fashioned from thin sheets of lead inscribed with spells in the form of magical symbols, incantations and letters. They are ‘binding’ because they influence others against their will through the intercession of supernatural agents that are invoked in the making thereof (see Armitage 2015).