John Muse: There’s a famous and infamous paradox that philosophers take up when they, as Wittgenstein would say, succumb to the temptations of language. The Argo is the ship on which Theseus and his crew returned to Athens. It became a memorial to him and his rule and, according to Plutarch, was preserved for several hundred years. Preserving it meant replacing the parts that would rot or were damaged. Imagine then that over the course of its sitting in a bay and being taken out once a year for hundreds of years to journey to the island of Delos to commemorate Theseus, that every plank of the ship has been replaced. Is this ship still the Argo? Is the “new” ship the “same” ship?
It’s very easy in this example to be tempted by the worries created by words like “new” and “same” and to put aside the commemorative power of the boat, the agency of the boat itself, the agency of its materials, the elements that are rotting and falling into disrepair. A wooden boat sitting in the water for however many years becomes part of new systems and those systems include all sorts of microorganisms that consider this boat delicious, the parts of the boat now also doing their job as food and support, home and castle, etc. There are other agencies at work then than those of the sailors and boat builders.
In the Crossbones story, too, there are other agencies at work in its decomposition, and if you go into the uncanny and into spectral territories, it’s the agency of the dead as beings who through the only means available, in being broken down by microorganisms and being disturbed by earth and construction, are protesting, are making various complaints. They are employing their remaining power to disturb and to all but say, “here I am.”
There’s one way of hearing a word like “maintenance.” You preserve things as they are. Another way though is that you quell the disturbances of matter when those disturbances risk chaos. What is this chaos? Other systems or other processes emerge, ones that have lives of their own. Preserving things as they are may be fairly anodyne and super tidy. It’s the tidying, it’s what you do to straighten the books on the shelf. But what if the books are now rearranging and deranging themselves because they are, like in a contemporary version of Fantasia, alive, moving, making mischief. They have places to go and things to do. That’s not really part of the tidying story. We have to split the concept of maintenance between maintenance as preservation and maintenance as intervention into autonomous processes. One is to obliterate, and the other is to manage chaos and entropy.
Aubree Penney: During the invigilation training for Crossbones I learned that there’s a chance that you’ll find a loose bone that has come unburied. You’re encouraged to rebury it. And you bury them all under this certain tree, no matter where they emerge from, and relocate the bone because the space they emerge from has already been pulled apart by microorganisms, and research, and land development. But it’s not a cause for disruption; you wouldn’t have to dig it all up and start over to avoid such emergences. The bones are allowed to be there.
JM: If you think of the project as a series of compromises, could you reanimate the “either/or” that each one of these practices memorializes? For example, putting the bones under a tree is the solution to a problem, a compromise, and I want to remain alert to what that problem was and the two extremes that are being avoided. My version would be as follows: on the one hand, we can’t throw them away, obliterate them, nor can we, on the other, reconstitute them in their proper place, in their integrity, in their relationship to a singular being, in the way that we typically and properly memorialize the dead, whether in a proper graveyard or a proper ritual of letting go and of giving a place to and giving a name to. So, if you find a bone, placing it under a tree is the solution to a problem, a compromise.
AP: It lends itself to the idea of tidying up as opposed to just letting objects go about their business and do what they want to do. And there’s a sense that the object, the bone has gotten to do what it wants to do, but at the same time it’s for us to reintegrate it into the space and take this intentional moment with it to do so.
JM: That’s lovely, really inspiring to hear you say the bone does what it wants to do. I’m thinking of how Barthes would handle something like this, which is to always be alert to the paradigm. The paradigm is made of all the excluded possibilities, the things that you’re not doing which become meaningful precisely because the thing you do keeps the things you’re not doing in a certain virtual state. To place the bones under a tree is an act that is meaningful to the degree that is in relation to these virtualities. It is not just a binary, either obliterate or a recompose; there are all sorts of other permutations of action both on the side of the bone itself and on the side of the human actor there that, because you’re not doing them, the thing you’ve done is meaningful.
The good memorial, according to a loose definition, is the thing that remains. A good memorial must survive, must persist, must be durable, and durability only ever comes at the cost of maintenance, and no matter what the materials. Every cemetery has a gardener, a grounds keeper, and every public memorial must be taken care of, perhaps by the public works sector of the city government, and therefore tax dollars, and therefore all sorts of interventions and commitments.
All of that labor, all that work of the hand to keep something in the world and also to quell other forces—it’s a massive intervention to keep something the same. Which is counterintuitive, because in one understanding of time if you want something to change you have to put in energy. And the flip side is, if you want something to stay the same, because of entropy, you have to put in energy. Both are true, but the second part of that story is typically left out, and then once there’s a political stake, there’s no such thing as hands off; you know someone’s hands—to speak metonymically here—someone’s hands always have to be at work. And mostly those are human hands, and so it’s politics all the way down. You’re now in the business of laying your hands on things, and you’re sensitive to doing the right thing or the wrong thing, according to that whether it’s principles or collective energies.
AP: You make decisions and you never sit down and think about the scale of the other possibilities. And you lose track of all those decisions that have led to this seeming like the next choice that you make for the space. To go back to the ship, someone has to decide what part needs to be replaced, and who’s going to build them and replace them, and what do you pay the people, and where do the parts get stored, and in what capacity those removed parts exist or are cared for, and what steps you make to maintain them. There are a thousand small decisions and efforts that go into this. There’s a political quality inherent in the bureaucracy of maintenance.
I think at the heart of this lies the question of who gets to rebuild the boat. Who is getting to make those decisions, and who shapes the new parts, and what agency do these parts have regarding what the narrative of the ship becomes, beyond the philosophical implications, and what agency do the dead have?
JM: There is something to the project of hearing and of being able to listen to the dead without needing a living person to represent them, in a flat political sense of what representation might mean. I wonder whether you’ve thought about the degree to which the past that you’re walking on and being in relation to is not past or not only past, is not only not forgotten but is still lived in particular bodies, by particular people. For example, there are still poor people, there are still sex workers, there are still people whose lives are being lived according to scripts that are several thousand years old, and therefore they are connected to this place in ways that curators and archaeologists and city officials should try to be in relation to. It’s tracking the events and all the actors that are in play. Then you could include the contemporary actors, to include all the resonances that put one face-to-face with the way that everything is the same, that everything we’re encountering in its difference, in its possible obliteration testifies to the long ongoing moment that includes the present and the future also. It’s an error to think that when you dig through deeper and deeper strata you are discovering an absolutely alien world. Yes, affirming difference is really important. But the idea of the absolutely alien, the absolutely other is also dangerous.
It may be an enabling fiction because it helps you treat whatever you find as evidence and testimony, as precious, precisely because if it is lost nothing can replace it. But the bone that’s placed under a tree in all of its singularity and all of its difference, in all of its uncanniness—the fact of that difference shouldn’t turn into “This has nothing to do with me.” The bones under the tree are your Argo and its planks, are at the same time parts and wholes. The bones of Crossbones are the same, somehow, and absolutely new, including as they do all of the hands that have held them and will hold them.
About John Muse John Muse is a Visual Media Scholar at Haverford College. His work can be found at finlymuse.com and johnmuse.academia.edu.