Postscript: of traveling companions and fractured worlds

In the fall of 1998 I began to compose the first of my Traveling Companions/Fractured Worlds essays, publishing them periodically in Art Journal and elsewhere. (1) "Rachel Marker and Her Book of Shadows" is the tenth text in the series. Through the Traveling Companions text--together with those of two newer projects, The Library of Maps and The Cyber Theater of Mneme (Memory) and Melete (Meditation) (2)--I have immersed myself in a wide range of histories, including Cambodian, Chinese American, African American, feminist, and European modernist literary histories, together with the histories of astronomy, the atomic bomb, and the Vietnam War. These travels have taken me far afield from California, where I live, to Thailand, Japan, China, Cambodia, and Burma, as well as to London, to Eastern and Central Europe, and, in my imagination, to past and future spaces.

My traveling companions--both literally and metaphorically--have been equally varied, including Claudia Bernardi, Rose Hacker, Suzanne Lacy, Dinh Q. Le, Boreth Ly, Yong Soon Min, Linda Nochlin, Faith Ringgold, and Flo Oy Wong, together with Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Desnos, and Marcel Proust. But it was less than two years ago that I conceived of a fictional character, Rachel Marker, as a traveling companion. I discovered Rachel Marker--or did she discover me?--while staying in Berlin in the summer of 2001. (3)

I wanted a solitary time in the city in which to walk, think, read, and write. Without a plan in mind, I took many photographs during my wanderings.

I brought only one book with me, Borges's Collected Fictions. (4) Deliberate, too, was my decision to bring no computer and go only to places I could reach by walking: areas around the Brandenburg Gate (strangely veiled under construction at that time), the Potsdamer Platz, the Alexanderplatz, the Topography of Terror outdoor exhibition, (5) and the block-long excavations for Peter Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial. (I was to see Daniel Libeskind's extraordinary Jewish Museum for the first time in early 2003.) I sought out graffiti murals with a young East Berliner graffiti artist, looked out at the city from Norman Foster's Reichstag dome, traced the path of the Berlin Wall (1961-89), and wandered along beside the river (at one point taking a river boat to seek out Nefertiti.)

During these three weeks of walking in the center of Berlin, an area perpetually under construction, I unsystematically came across many sites of history and monuments and witnessed the largest gay parade in the city's history, following it from the Potsdamer Platz to the Brandenburg Gate. (A new mayor of Berlin, openly gay, had just been elected.) Probably most moving for me of all the monuments was a 1996 work that I found by accident in a small park. The Abandoned Room, by Carl Biedermann and Eva Butzmann, commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom and consists of a bronze table and two chairs, one overturned, resting on a bronze "floor."

I rented a simply furnished, high-ceilinged room with a loft bed, whose window looked down on a cobbled courtyard in an old building in the Mitte (formerly an area in East Berlin), on the Schlegelstrassse, very near the Chausseestrasse. This room--and the courtyard, which d u r in g my stay was transformed from an idyllic, silent space into a noisy construction site together with the nearby Bertolt Brecht Archives and a cemetery containing Brecht's grave, later became, to my surprise (for I had not anticipated writing a short story but rather a poetic essay about Berlin), the "set" for Rachel Marker's struggles to regain her memory and record the city's shadows. I conceived "Rachel Marker and Her Book of Shadows" while staying in my Schlegelstrasse room, writing in a notebook and endlessly editing. When I returned to Berkeley in July 2001, I quickly finished the story and immediately wrote a sequel, "The Death of Rachel Marker." (6)

Back in California, I contacted Shimon Attie, as I had been told by a friend (Joyce Kozloft) about his 1992-93 Berlin project. I was profoundly drawn to Attie's series The Writing on the Wall from the moment I first encountered it. (7) Thus, it seems natural now, two years later, that his project--although created over ten years earlier and totally unconnected with my narrative appear in the same issue of Art Journal as this Rachel Marker story.

I am consumed in my life and in these current projects with brooding over the fractured nature of memory and history, and the oscillations between forgetting and remembering history--concerns I share with many these days. Indeed, it was a major focus of my last Traveling Companions text. In "Obdurate History: Dinh Q. Le, the Vietnam War, Photography, and Memory," Le, the Vietnamese American artist, and I exchanged emails between Ho Chin Minh City and Berkeley for almost two years, speculating about the nature of "obdurate" history, be it personal or public, which "stubbornly and insistently returns to confront us." (8)