Adeena Karasick

Video poem

from The Book of Lumenations: Eicha I 

Introduction

“Eicha I” of The Book of Lumenations is the first of a five-part series of visual-verbal pieces. It takes as its jumping-off point the Biblical Eicha, The Book of Lamentations, which laments the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 BCE. Through reflection, deflection, refraction and the fracturing of language, this video poem homophonically re-situates the original text to the horrors and hope of the present moment. Tracking through “the city” as a desolate weeping widow overcome with misery, it moves through desolation and ruin, prayer and recovery, exploring ways that in rupture there is rapture.

As a text of defractions and transpositions, “contrascription,” substitutions, it becomes a discourse of contemplative hunger, a ventriloquized latticework in which each phrase acts as a kind of contaminative “lexicell,” exaltically and ecstatically dis-easing—the way a virus might enter another’s DNA erupting as a consanguinity of interconstellated contingencies. And as transpoesis, the video poem acts not only as a “time binder,” but through a luminous, voluminous threading of light it highlights the way in which darkness becomes a form of light. It suggests the way in which the text itself is, in essence, a black light on white light. It thus opens up new ways of seeing the cyclic nature of meaning and being, speaking not only to the specifics of this piece’s own historical circumstances, but serves as a reminder of how war/genocide is an ever-present horror in today’s cultures.

Like McLuhan’s Laws of Media, whereby an artifact enhances, reverses, retrieves and obsolesces, this “translation” does not so much as obsolesce the original, but in Zohair terms (13th century mystical discourse), employs the concept of attain haditin, a pseudo-Aramaic neologism that means “ancient new.” “Eicha I” journeys deep within the original text of the Book of Lamentations, and through a dialogue of war and p[ie]ce, makes an ancient text new.—Adeena Karasick

**

This poetry video was written and performed by Karasick. The digital music was composed and performed by Grammy Award winning composer and trumpet player Sir Frank London. Visuals were created by Karasick, Daniel F. Bradley and Jim Andrews.