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RE-TURNING

[It] starts out in the middle by going forward to the past – not in order to recount what once was, but by way of re-turning, turning it over and over again, tasting the rich soil from which ideas spring, and opening up again to the uncountable gifts given that still give, to proceed to the place from which we never left/leave. […]

We might imagine re-turning as a multiplicity of processes, such as the kinds earthworms revel in while helping to make compost or otherwise being busy at work and at play: turning the soil over and over – ingesting and excreting it, tunnelling through it, burrowing, all means of aerating the soil, allowing oxygen in, opening it up and breathing new life into it. (Karen Barad, Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart, Parallax 20 (3), 168-187, 2014)

RETURN

Return often and take me,
beloved sensation, return and take me —
when the memory of the body awakens,
and an old desire runs again through the blood;
when the lips and the skin remember,
and the hands feel as if they touch again.

Return often and take me at night,
when the lips and the skin remember…

Constantinos P. Cavafy, 1912 (translation from C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, Princeton University Press, 1992)

ENCOUNTER WITH ARCHAIC APOLLO

In the spring of 1973, [Françoise] Sullivan realized a performance work, Walk among Oil Refineries (Promenade parmi les raffineries de pétrole), during which she strolled among the massive shapes of oil tanks in an industrial park in the east end of Montreal. The October 1973 oil crisis was just about to happen. The environmental movement was still in its infancy, but Sullivan was already questioning our increasing dependency on fossil fuel and the ways cities were transforming because of it.

In 1974 she revisited the photographic documentation of that walk and created a photomontage in which she included the image of a Greek statue of Apollo [Anafi’s Apollo from the British Museum], a reference to the ancient cultures she had encountered in her recent European travels. The presence of Apollo, god of music, purification, and beauty, in the tank farm alongside Sullivan herself bridges ancient and contemporary times. It also asks what the role of the artist has become and if beauty still has a place in the contemporary, industrialized world.

Sullivan has always been keenly interested in the impact humans have on the natural environment. In a 1993 interview she stated that had she not become an artist, she most certainly would have joined the environmentalist movement: “I am astounded by the lack of discernment humans have shown with regard to our beautiful planet … I would say that, in a certain way, this is the inherent subject of all of my work.” (Annie Gérin, FRANÇOISE SULLIVAN Life & Work, Art Canada Institute, 2018)

ON ETERNAL RETURN

The first published presentation of Nietzsche’s version of the [eternal return] theory appears in The Gay Science, section 341, where it is proposed to the reader as a thought experiment.

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence” … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” (Wikipedia, Eternal Return)

THE RETURNING BLUE BOX

Fieldnotes, Anafi, Friday 30 December 1966
In the evening, in the Dhamighos café, the agrofilakas brought in a blue painted wooden box about one foot square, addressed to the monastery of Michael the Archangel at Simi (an island in the eastern Aegean). The islanders say such a box would probably contain oil, incense, candles, money for mnimosina. It will be thrown back into the sea to be taken on by the current. There is a monk at Simi who goes round the beaches to find such offerings. This has happened at least once before and they wrote on the side of the box that it had been washed up on Anafi and an acknowledgement was sent from the Monastery on Simi. It was argued that with the wind from south, siroko, the box wouldn’t go in the right direction; response: the saint would look after it. No one would open it as it was protected by Saint Michael. Simi is a very important place of pilgrimage. […]

Letter 69, Anafi, Sunday 28 May 1967
Do you remember the blue crate with wax and incense and money that was found in the sea and thrown back again after village contributions? Well, a letter came to tell us that it arrived at the monastery at Simi and they said a Liturgy for all the names, so you and I have been recommended to St Michael along with the Anafiots, so that should ensure our safe meeting in Athens in eight weeks time. (Margaret E. Kenna, Greek Island Life, Fieldwork on Anafi, Sean Kingston Publishing, 135 & 147, 2017.)

ON ETERNAL RETURN, AGAIN

Eternal return cannot mean the return of the Identical because it presupposes a world (that of the will to power) in which all previous identities have been abolished and dissolved. Returning is being, but only the being of becoming. The eternal return does not bring back ‘the same’, but returning constitutes the only Same of that which becomes. Returning is the becoming-identical of becoming itself. Returning is thus the only identity, but identity as a secondary power; the identity of difference, the identical which belongs to the different, or turns around the different. Such an identity, produced by difference, is determined as ‘repetition’. Repetition in the eternal return, therefore, consists in conceiving the same on the basis of the different. However, this conception is no longer merely a theoretical representation: it carries out a practical selection among differences according to their capacity to produce – that is, to return or to pass the test of the eternal return. (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Columbia University Press, 41, 1994)