44 Reifications.
When Calin Bota asked if photography created a souvenir of his performances, Grigorescu said he never intended performances to be ephemeral—one-off events. Performances, for Grigorescu, serve as substitutes for painting or drawing. “The whole universe, our life as humans, I always felt to be related to movement and the way it becomes still,” Grigorescu told Bota.
To some degree, I’m dividing a motion picture into discrete images that serve as reified souvenirs. I am sacralizing certain images by saving them.
The sacred is always at stake in the games invented by humans.
Although the dictatorship was officially atheist, Ceaușescu’s secularism was religious. He built a religion of the state and rendered things sacred accordingly. Even the dictator’s name was hallowed—using the wrong appellation was a crime. Radu Jude remembers first hearing a Radio Free Europe broadcast at his cousin’s house and being petrified by the blasphemy. “It was beyond shocking for me to hear Ceaușescu referred to only by surname,” Jude said, since the Romanian press always preceded his surname with a superlative, “‘Our Great Leader Ceaușescu’, or something.
In his memoir, Me and Him, writer Ion Ianosi never uses Ceaușescu’s name, thus bringing to the page the spectacle of the televised speeches and the act of identification with the leader which lay at the heart of both grammar and syntax. The “me” exists only in relation to the “Him.”
“One could say, in socialist Eastern Europe, the camera did not shoot you: you shot the camera,” Ovidiu Țichindeleanu said, speaking of Ion Grigorescu.
“I write against the dictatorship, against the words of the dictator,” Carmen Bugan wrote in her memoir, a hybrid narration that juxtaposes flashbacks, images, quotations, and fragments in voices and documents that refuse to sit quietly side by side. The past distorts the present. The present is not rescued from distortion but loved despite its ruin. The reader is torn between the tenderness of childhood and the absurdity of surveillance. The official voices compete for the imagination, but Then, like Now, is not redeemed or made comprehensible.
Bugan believes poetry’s power comes less from physically deposing dictators than from opening speech to probe the inarticulable, thus pulverizing the hold of the language of the oppression. Because the language of poetry and oppression are often co-present, they enable us to view human vulnerability outside the lens of power. Rooted in a radical hope rather than a utilitarian focus on outcomes, Bugan’s poetics downplays achievement or American ideals of success by foregrounding, instead, the speaking truth for its own sake.
After opening her family’s surveillance files, Bugan refused the gaze of the dictatorship. The act of opening, itself, was a repudiation of fear, as poetry is a repudiation of facile binaries. Since the aperture is built into the work of poetry, it is accessible—unlike the police files, the administrative apparatus, and the system of justice. You shot the camera and then focused on stanzaic divisions and lineation.
