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Anabases Chronologies
401–399 B.C.
Ten thousand Greek mercenaries retained by Cyrus the Young, the king of Persia’s brother, march across Anatolia. As they cross the Tigris near Babylon, Cyrus reveals his intention to seize the throne from his brother Artaxerxes II. At the battle of Cunaxa, the Greek mercenaries outmaneuver the Persian army, but Cyrus is killed as he charges the king. The sudden death of the commander who brought the Greeks to Persia, and whose service they were in, marks the beginning of a journey known as the ‘anabasis’: an unguided wandering through unknown territories that ends when the Greeks reach the sea, leading them home.
391–371 B.C.
Period during which the Anabasis is written, an account of the famous retreat of the Ten Thousand. The military memoir is attributed to Xenophon, a student of Socrates, despite being signed by a mysterious Themistogenes — a pseudonym intended to lend objectivity to a story that Xenophon not only chronicles but in which he also plays a leading role. Having joined Cyrus’ expedition as a simple observer, Xenophon is eventually elected rearguard commander by the routed Greek mercenaries and becomes a protagonist of their journey. “Anabasis” names a movement towards home of men who are lost, outlawed, and out of place. In Xenophon’s memoir, the term symbolizes the collapse of a sense of order that gave meaning to the Greeks’ presence in Persia. In a single instant, their status shifted from that of heroes to strangers in a hostile land. Like the voyage recounted in the Odyssey three centuries earlier, the Anabasis transcends the military memoir form to become a much-referenced literary allegory. The name comes from the Greek verb αναβανειν which means at once ‘to embark’ and ‘to return.’ For the lineage of authors who have since appropriated the term, anabasis contains two linked yet seemingly opposed literary motifs: a quest for home and the invention of a destiny in the new.
1924
Future Nobel laureate Alexis Léger, using his pen name Saint-John Perse for the first time, publishes the collection Anabasis, inspired by a journey in central Asia. T.S. Eliot’s 1930 translation of the title poem includes these verses:
A country here, not
mine. What has the world given me but
this swaying of grass?
1963
Paul Celan (the pseudonym used by poet Paul Ancell) publishes The No-One’s-Rose which includes a poem named Anabasis. Michael Hamburger’s translation from German reads:
This
narrow sign between walls
the impassable-true
Upward and Back
to the heart-bright future.
There
Syllablemole,
seacoloured,
far out
into the unnavigated.
Then:
buoys,
espalier of sorrow-buoys
with those breath reflexes leaping and
lovely for seconds only- : lightbellsounds
(dum-,
dun-, un-,
unde suspirat
cor)
released,
redeemed,
ours.
Visible, audible thing, the
tentword
growing free:
Together
1964
Sol Yurick publishes a first novel entitled The Warriors, largely inspired by Xenophon’s Anabasis but set in the context of New York City gang warfare. The book is adapted on screen by Walter Hill in 1979, a cult classic depicting the night-long retreat of the Warriors to Coney Island following the murder of Cyrus at a city-wide gang meeting in the Bronx. Robert Fitzgerald Diggs, a.k.a. RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan, produces a kung-fu / hip-hop adaptation as part of his Bobby Digital persona, but the film has never been shown. Tony Scott’s remake, this time set in Los Angeles, is planned for release by Paramount Pictures in 2010.
1999
In a series of conferences at the Collège International de Philosophie on ways in which the twentieth century “reflects upon itself,” philosopher Alain Badiou uses the anabasis as an allegory to describe the trajectory of a century drawing to a close. The seminar’s eighth chapter is named Anabasis: for Badiou the term, in the movement it names, “leaves undecided the parts respectively allotted to disciplined invention and uncertain drifting. In so doing, it constitutes a disjunctive synthesis of will and wandering.” Anabasis is described as an itinerary into the new which isn’t simply a return because it “invents the path, without knowing whether it is a path home. Anabasis is the free invention of a meandering which will have been a return, a return which, prior to the wandering, did not exist as a return.” (Alain Badiou, The Century, chapter 8, Polity Press).
Of Signs & Senses
1907
Article 175 of the Japanese Penal Code outlaws the sale and public display of “an obscene document, drawing or other object.”
1947
Article 21, paragraph 2, of the postwar Japanese Constitution reads “no censorship shall be maintained.”
1957
The Japanese Supreme Court upholds a ban on D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In the main piece of jurisprudence seeking to clarify the apparent contradiction between Article 21 of the Constitution and Article 175 of the Penal Code, the high court upholds the ban on obscenity, which it defines as “that which unnecessarily excites or stimulates sexual desire.”
1976
Nagisa Oshima’s Ai No Corrida (In the Realm of the Senses) is shown at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was shot in Kyoto, but the negative was developed and cut in Paris. As a trial balloon for a release of the film in Japan, a book containing the script and twelve film stills is published in Tokyo. In July the publisher is charged with obscenity. During the trial, Oshima requests that the high court explain the philosophical, political, legal, conceptual and practical visual standards used to define “that which unnecessarily excites or stimulates sexual desire.”
1982
The Japanese Supreme Court declines to clarify the concept of obscenity any further, but nonetheless acquits Oshima. In a legal and semantic grey area that remains to this day, graphic materials imported into Japan are subject to subjective self-censorship: explicit anatomical representation is replaced with ‘bokashi,’ a fogging, blurring or scratching of male and female genitalia in films and publications.
2008
In a warehouse in Yokohama, employees of Yohan, a foreign magazine distributor, individually leaf through stacks of imported art and fashion publications, deciding where to apply the blade that will delicately scratch ink off the surface of certain pages.
Chanson d’Automne
1866
Paul Verlaine publishes Poèmes Saturniens. In Arthur Symons’ 1902 translation, the first stanza of the poem “Chanson d’Automne” (Autumn Song) reads:
When a sighing begins
In the violins
Of the autumn-song,
My heart is drowned
In the slow sound
Languorous and long.
1944
The BBC, in its French service from London, broadcasts a coded message in two parts: a few days before D-Day, the first three lines of Verlaine’s “Chanson d’Automne” are read on the radio, a signal for the French Ventriloquist resistance network to prepare attacks on railway targets in the Orléans region; the (slightly misquoted) second three lines of the poem are broadcast on June 5th, ordering the sabotage to start immediately.
2008
In September, the world financial system nears collapse with the sudden failure of large banks, a massive drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the paralysis of the credit markets, marking the onset of the worst financial crisis since 1929.
The Makes
1967–1969
Following the success of Blow Up, Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni makes plans for a film project in Japan. Opting for the United States instead, Antonioni conceives and shoots Zabriskie Point in California.
1983
Antonioni publishes That Bowling Alley on the Tiber, a compilation of notes and intentions for films that were never made. A second volume, Unfinished Business: Screenplays, Scenarios, and Ideas, is published in 1995.
X-Rayograms
2008
Unused rolls of photographic film, brought from Paris to Kyoto for an artist residency (and left unexposed as the artist fails to imagine a photographic project to conduct in Japan) are sent on an open-ended journey. The film is mailed abroad or placed in the luggage of visiting friends and family, eventually traveling to destinations connected, in one way or another, to the artist’s readings while in residency. Over the course of a few months, traveling through postal systems and checked luggage to Tokyo, Beirut, New York, Beijing, and Seoul, the pieces of film are eventually collected by the artist after returning to Paris.