Square Octagon Circle by Ellie Ga
Square Octagon Circle
Ellie Ga
Square Octagon Circle by Ellie Ga
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Reading becomes diving in this astonishing palimpsest by Ellie Ga, SQUARE OCTAGON CIRCLE. There are books on top of books, images upon images, transparencies on top of pages on pictures of graffiti on concrete walls. There is language on top of language. Concrete on marble, water on stone. The sea is on top of the ancient statues and columns of pink granite and the lighthouse.
In Ga’s quest to learn everything she can of this drowned Egyptian lighthouse; translations, myths, interpretations, misinterpretations, regime changes pile meaning upon meaning, resulting in a lush and motley reef of a book. To my eyes and hands each page feels like a kelp forest of pages.
With patience, with gentleness and quiet reminiscent of the great Sophie Calle, Ga handles layers of story like they are skins of leaves. She follows them with a gaze that does not push them, flippers and fingers that do not press them or ravish them, instead holding back . . . (the eye at the beginning of the book is a painted eye on the surface of a boat).
Some of this is by necessity. In her attempt to piece together bits and pieces of stone and speculation, which are all that remain of Alexandria’s Pharos lighthouse, Ga meets barriers at every turn. Sometimes made of stone, sometimes of water, sometimes paper and bureaucratic machinery. She’s not permitted to take photographs of artifacts in Egypt. Drawings aren’t permitted either except with permission from an unreachable government office. “Ever since the revolution this is the way it is,� one official tells her. She resorts to other people’s photographs. To photographs of photographs in other people’s books. Her photographs are beautiful. Her collages want to be looked at slowly and in stages. Returned to. I’m thinking she wants me to swim through them.
Even where Ga could press down on the surface of a story, she refrains. As when she meets the filmmaker Asma El Bakri, who campaigned to save the ruins of the lighthouse from crumbling under concrete blocks dumped on top of them by cranes. Ga gives us only a glimpse of the surface of the filmmaker’s story. She gives us surfaces beside and scattered over surfaces. As one marine archaeologist says to her, “a decomposition and recomposition of surfaces� that refrains from delving below “seems to be a handicap, but it gives you time to think. It forces you to invent, reflect . . .�
And so even as I dive into the book—a metaphor which, from my first glance at the cover and on every page, Ga seems to want me to take seriously—I experience a growing sense that the deeper I dive, the more irreparably I’m tethered to the surface. The farther I swim, the sooner I must lift my face out of the water. This is true even when it comes to “diving into� something’s history, “immersing ourselves� in what seems to be the life of an object or a person. Especially when that life is underwater, a milieu that’s not our own. We cannot leave behind our airiness forever. We cannot be without it. “I find memory works very differently when you are underwater. Everything seems very clear but as soon as you surface . . . ,� says Ga in a hanging thought.
To glimpse even a surface in Ga’s book of surfaces, I must look through other surfaces. I must look through the photograph of branches to the photograph of the statue of Ptolemy, through the photograph of Greek-Egyptian Ptolemy to the photograph of a Roman coin. When we go underwater, everything we see we must see through other thicknesses. Through blue fluid waving. Through greenish-yellow plankton and around the traces of fishes. We are always disoriented there even when we think we’re not. We are always disoriented when we dip into the story of another. Whether they’re human or lighthouse. History is surfaces brushing together.
Geometrical drawings, see-through photographs, notes, photocopies, sticky tabs crisscross one another on a single page, producing at their intersections dark ripple zones. Like when currents meet in water. Or air and light meet water. A single page might have five authors. Five languages together on top of each other, peeking out telltale from underneath each other, in the cosmopolitan history of the Pharos Lighthouse. The submergings, surfacings, and sinkings of the lighthouse have to do sometimes with colonialism, sometimes geology. Sometimes with love of wondering and of drowned things.
On some pages I see Ga’s hand holding transparencies in place or preparing to sweep them away. I see my hand holding her page or preparing to turn. So in some sense reading really is like diving. Both bodily. Both interactions with strange outsides adding layers of finger oil or fish oil to one another. I too am eighty percent water.
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Ellie Ga
Square Octagon Circle by Ellie GaMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Reading becomes diving in this astonishing palimpsest by Ellie Ga, SQUARE OCTAGON CIRCLE. There are books on top of books, images upon images, transparencies on top of pages on pictures of graffiti on concrete walls. There is language on top of language. Concrete on marble, water on stone. The sea is on top of the ancient statues and columns of pink granite and the lighthouse.
In Ga’s quest to learn everything she can of this drowned Egyptian lighthouse; translations, myths, interpretations, misinterpretations, regime changes pile meaning upon meaning, resulting in a lush and motley reef of a book. To my eyes and hands each page feels like a kelp forest of pages.
With patience, with gentleness and quiet reminiscent of the great Sophie Calle, Ga handles layers of story like they are skins of leaves. She follows them with a gaze that does not push them, flippers and fingers that do not press them or ravish them, instead holding back . . . (the eye at the beginning of the book is a painted eye on the surface of a boat).
Some of this is by necessity. In her attempt to piece together bits and pieces of stone and speculation, which are all that remain of Alexandria’s Pharos lighthouse, Ga meets barriers at every turn. Sometimes made of stone, sometimes of water, sometimes paper and bureaucratic machinery. She’s not permitted to take photographs of artifacts in Egypt. Drawings aren’t permitted either except with permission from an unreachable government office. “Ever since the revolution this is the way it is,� one official tells her. She resorts to other people’s photographs. To photographs of photographs in other people’s books. Her photographs are beautiful. Her collages want to be looked at slowly and in stages. Returned to. I’m thinking she wants me to swim through them.
Even where Ga could press down on the surface of a story, she refrains. As when she meets the filmmaker Asma El Bakri, who campaigned to save the ruins of the lighthouse from crumbling under concrete blocks dumped on top of them by cranes. Ga gives us only a glimpse of the surface of the filmmaker’s story. She gives us surfaces beside and scattered over surfaces. As one marine archaeologist says to her, “a decomposition and recomposition of surfaces� that refrains from delving below “seems to be a handicap, but it gives you time to think. It forces you to invent, reflect . . .�
And so even as I dive into the book—a metaphor which, from my first glance at the cover and on every page, Ga seems to want me to take seriously—I experience a growing sense that the deeper I dive, the more irreparably I’m tethered to the surface. The farther I swim, the sooner I must lift my face out of the water. This is true even when it comes to “diving into� something’s history, “immersing ourselves� in what seems to be the life of an object or a person. Especially when that life is underwater, a milieu that’s not our own. We cannot leave behind our airiness forever. We cannot be without it. “I find memory works very differently when you are underwater. Everything seems very clear but as soon as you surface . . . ,� says Ga in a hanging thought.
To glimpse even a surface in Ga’s book of surfaces, I must look through other surfaces. I must look through the photograph of branches to the photograph of the statue of Ptolemy, through the photograph of Greek-Egyptian Ptolemy to the photograph of a Roman coin. When we go underwater, everything we see we must see through other thicknesses. Through blue fluid waving. Through greenish-yellow plankton and around the traces of fishes. We are always disoriented there even when we think we’re not. We are always disoriented when we dip into the story of another. Whether they’re human or lighthouse. History is surfaces brushing together.
Geometrical drawings, see-through photographs, notes, photocopies, sticky tabs crisscross one another on a single page, producing at their intersections dark ripple zones. Like when currents meet in water. Or air and light meet water. A single page might have five authors. Five languages together on top of each other, peeking out telltale from underneath each other, in the cosmopolitan history of the Pharos Lighthouse. The submergings, surfacings, and sinkings of the lighthouse have to do sometimes with colonialism, sometimes geology. Sometimes with love of wondering and of drowned things.
On some pages I see Ga’s hand holding transparencies in place or preparing to sweep them away. I see my hand holding her page or preparing to turn. So in some sense reading really is like diving. Both bodily. Both interactions with strange outsides adding layers of finger oil or fish oil to one another. I too am eighty percent water.
View all my reviews
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Book Spelunking
Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ reviews by Mandy-Suzanne Wong, author of AWABI (Digging Press) and DRAFTS OF A SUICIDE NOTE (Regal House).
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