In Pripyat, there is a duplicity, a double city: there is the ghost town of ruin porn and internet fame, and there is the space you find in situ, teeming with nature and filled with objects left behind after the city's undoing. There are the YouTube videos of stalkers swaggering and drinking radioactive water, and there is the softening concrete of the former atomograd, pine-eaten and tender. There is the end of writing on the once-beautiful desks dissolving, and there is the beginning of something like research, thanks to Svitlana's invitation. Writing takes place ex situ in the West End of Vancouver on a desk made in Brooklyn by an anthropologist who dreamed of becoming a carpenter.
For this project on the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, I'm trying to train myself to think zonally. My method is to write by encircling: small paragraphs surrounding ideas, memories, historical facts, and feelings of place. To think zonally, in this case, is to consider a place inside a kind of magical circle, both sacrificed and sanctified for its relationship to disaster. Part of thinking zonally, for me, is to chase the circling affects and memories of the Chernobyl disaster and to trace how a certain 86ness can never leave the place. Half-lives twirl from then-time into our time like the swirling eyes of cartoon characters under hypnosis or in extreme shock.
