The Undying Present

by Erika Staiti, Syd Staiti

The Undying Present, Syd Staiti's remarkable debut, unfolds in a time not unlike ours, in a city between worlds, in the space between bodies, in the camera's flat gaze and the eyes of a crowd that exceeds it. Robin Tremblay-McGaw writes, "You know the subjects, you too have been surveilled; we've also gotten something wrong." The Undying Present risks getting something right, too: It's a new day. Anything is possible. Everything is waiting to be seized. Anything,everything, both are at stake here. The language that writes gender into the body, the body that refuses the text of gender, text of capital, text of labor, caught within it and seizing it also, being seized. All the time. Extending from Monique Wittig's "action overthrow," The Undying Present cleaves the world that it builds.

Genres: Poetry

131 pages, Paperback

Published April 3, 2015

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a hyper-exposed world afflicted by ‘a present and ongoing catastrophe’ known as ‘the rupture’, a loose congregation of operatives (‘we who live inside my torso’) navigate an environment in and around the City of Margins and the Second City. Written chiefly in first-person POV but possibly with shifting narration (and certainly with fluid gender), the text is a mosaic of recursive cut-up scenes fractured and imbued with dream logic, laced with menace and expelled onto the page from poetic lungs. Events occur on screen, on stage, possibly in dreams. A particular relevance to our present time ripples in the probing at the nature and significance of social justice protest. The flow of words is hypnotic and disorienting, offering an infinite number of possibilities spiraling out from the text into the reader’s mind. Not surprisingly I was enthralled.

We are living in the ongoing advancement of the rupture. All time is concurrently present in and around us. Tendencies from the old world prick our skins like shards of broken glass. We get nicked, cut, scarred by the things we hold on to and the things we try to forget. We watch images from the archives for remembrance. Figures arise before our eyes as projections in memory or in the flesh or from a future yet uncharted as we reconstitute ourselves at boiling point in this scalding crucible of time and place.

This operates in the zone of poetic post-dystopian literature (see also: the Ravicka cycle of Renee Gladman)—a natural divergence in our chaotic times from the often overbuilt, over-explicated behemoths common to the dystopian genre and moving instead toward a more freeform engagement with individual and collective social concerns. In this zone the setting, the trappings, the very nature of the dystopia are tangential to the immediacy of the text—the individual moments accrue at a creeping pace into an ambiguous total more accurately suggestive of the void ahead than any more specific conjecture could ever hope to offer us.

It is difficult to undo the centuries of rupture that have corrupted our selves. A solitary person cannot undo. It takes all people struggling to undo. We fail and learn. Sometimes we fight the forces and sometimes we fight with each other and sometimes we comfort each other. We learn how to comfort ourselves.

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. my feelings on this are complicated. i loved it. especially loved the rhythmic, circular pulses to the narrative(s). and i know nothing is ever truly original, but about two pages in i felt that this work owes much of its cadence, its ideas, and its power to gladman's collective works. it specifically felt like the activist and the ravicka series coming together. this influence is acknowledged at the end, but somehow i still am left with a strange, sweet, imitative taste on my tongue. probably something personal i need to work through around ownership and originality, but it's what i feel right now.

[Carrie]

I want to see the movie.