Ancient Graffiti

Initially, when encountering this weeks text I found myself questioning what images carved into stones have to do with poetry. Having focused on oral performance and translation over the past few weeks I nearly forgot the multiplicity of mediums for engaging in ethnopoetics. I nearly forgot the five senses one can appeal to in a poetic interpretation.

Toward the beginning of the semester I jokingly suggested the translation of the graffiti on the desks in our class room. While the limited access to the primary source (the wood desks) and the vast array of possible interpretations/re-presentations kept me intimidated enough to restrain from the removal of IUP property (which in its being used for academia makes the indiscretion completely justifiable if not commendable) and an attempt at interpretation it is still an idea which I revisit week after week as I'm sitting with you all on the second floor of Leonard Hall. After reviewing Juniper Fuse I've come to the conclusion that a translation or interpretation of the graffiti carved into a desk is not much different from the images carved into rock walls of caves thousands of years ago.

In the introduction to Juniper Fuse Eshleman writes, "cave imagery is an inseparable mix of psychic constructs and perceptive observations. That is, there are 'fantastic' animals as well as realistic ones." This statement is also accurate when considering the desks of Leonard Hall. While the flowers and marijuana leaves are quite realistic and known to exist, the cartoon characters and whimsical designs are nothing but psychic constructs--psychic constructs which have been produced semester after semester as a direct appeal to boredom. This graffiti is produced not as a historical record of the actual beings who've inhabited the desk over the years but as a record of human weakness and attention span. Is it not possible that the earliest cave imagery is also the direct result of boredom? Perhaps the cave dwellers felt just as claustrophobic, stuck, and anxious to pass time as today's young undergrads struggling to stay awake in a core class.

Desk graffiti also allows for the layering of images or the transformations of form that occur over time. Eshleman explains, "Animals and animal parts are often superimposed as if passing behind, through, and before each other with no sense of contradiction or subordination. There is no background, no frame." In other words, it may be impossible to know what came first. So, here we are again, questioning the integrity in translation and perhaps getting at the root of my intimidation as far as the translation of desk graffiti is concerned--"there is no background, no frame." How is it even remotely possible to interpret/translate/re-present something without any impression or idea of the environment which produced the text/image? Or a better question, how can we do this while maintaining the desk's integrity?

I don't have an answer. But if forced to attempt the translation of desk graffiti I suppose you would go about it in a similar manner of all poetic interpretation and attempt to get a sense of where it came from--to pin-point its existence and narrow the scope of interpretation. In other words defining the poetry as desk graffiti, the primary example taken from a wooden desk, in a class room at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana, Pennsylvania. We are starting to have limits as to the "history" of our graffiti.

It can be taken even further. Some basic research in to IUP's approximate purchase date of this particular desk style, the desks geographical history in terms of random building location or staying stationary in the same hall since said purchase date. Research into the classes taught in the room the desk graffiti was created and the demographics of the students taking those classes provide us with a good start in shaping the environmental history of the graffiti, therefore maintaining a level of integrity/education in the interpretation.

While there are unquestionably huge gaps in the accuracy and detail of the environmental history shaped, I believe Eshleman accounts for these holes and justifies the integrity of my imagined desk graffiti interpretation/re-presentation saying, "I served the cave images as observer, to ask them to serve my imagination, so as to translate them not back into their own original unknown-to-us context, but forward to my own idiom....to created my own truth as to what they mean, respecting imagination as one of a plurality of conflicting powers." In the translation of desk graffiti it is impossible for me to know what shape or image came first...it is impossible to know whose imagination first exerted the power. It is however possible to realize the beauty of this visual poetry...to see generations linked, to appreciate the plurality of carved images in time. And as an imagined translator of this desk graffiti (I have yet to do this) I find comfort in the knowledge that my translated graffiti will become a base for future generations to layer interpretation upon therefore adding to graffiti's plurality yet maintaining a unity in a common origin...the first exertion of the power of imagination onto that particular wooden desk forty some years ago at IUP in Leonard Hall....