Libations in Saturday's Waters: A Series of Estranged Libations
by Alina Stefanescu
Ashes & dust
Ancient Sumerians spent their afterlives in eternity eating dust. Generous descendants would pour liquid into their ancestors' graves with clay pipes to unparch their lips, to moisten their mouths. Thus water was added to dirt, making soil: the breath of creation.
After my mom died, I baked cookies to ingest ashes. I bleached my hair to draw a line between the daughter and the newly-motherless animal I'd become. I dreamt of a scientist that invented a vaccine against the envy generated by Mother's Day. I read mom's lips into dogwood leaves and druid oak trunks.
Grief is a banal ravishment, an obsessive interior landscape. But I have discovered small things which preserve an untenable relationship: to spit on the ground when I feel her near, to drop the first sip of tuica before swallowing.
Ritual tippings
Libation, itself, evokes drinking; it is a ritual pouring of liquid as an offering to spirits, deities, or the honored dead. It is a gesture of gratitude returning a part of all we receive before laying hands on our share, as Walter Benjamin explains in his essay, "One Way Street," which focuses on the problem of unidirectional traffic flow. "For we are able to make Mother Earth no gift of our own," Benjamin continues. There is nothing this planet needs to survive except, perhaps, our disappearance.
Wandering through human customs in search of a relationship, a two-way street, Benjamin focuses on ritual actions which inoculate against avarice. Over time, ancient customs of libation turned into prohibitions. We think of prohibitions as conditions for punishment, but the price of not libating is closer to banishment from communion with nature and ancestral spirits.
In ancient Greece, libations were ordinary parts of life, daily rituals in the performance of piety. The typical form, spondee, was ritualized pouring of wine from a jug or bowl with a flick of the wrist. Sailors poured out the first sip of wine for Neptune to ask for mercy from the sea. Athenians left crumbs on the table to feed dead heroes.
This idea of showing "respect in taking" doesn't sit well with capitalist desire-engines, since we assume that purchasing, or the act of spending money, cover the bases. But it's more complicated than cash. By giving rise to expectations of fulfillment (see advertisements promising an immediate solution to household labor or chronic pain), modernity quieted the back-and-forth relationship between humans and the planet, severing traditional access to ancestors and their afterlives.
Before our hungers were rendered insatiable by consumerism, before our desires were transcripted by ad culture, humans sustained relations with their ancestral path through rituals. It is these rituals which are absent--and with them, relationships.
*
Today, I squat on a sidewalk curb near our house, listening to Tupac Shakur tip his dead friends with malt liquor from a forty before taking a sip. It is glum, the sky grayer than the edges of my mom's eyeballs. The rain calls me to the window, the rain reveals the metal gutter who faithfully libates the neglected flower bed with freshwater stolen from the sky.
"Gestures," Mom explains, her eyes blue as the hottest part of a fire, the part you shouldn't touch.
I poke her with my pen; I palpate the ghost flesh who bore me, raised me, then abandoned me in two-faced Alabama, the rodeo of bigbox religion, the snubnose of cotillion cults and haute-southern drawls. Since Mom died, the world is charged with invisible connections, scenes set outside the discrete borders of my nervous system. The world’s nerves twitch and tingle. A lakeside sunset loses control of its outermost limbs, its prominent layers.
Foam on the lips turns a pinkish froth.
There was a thin line of black blood running from her left nostril to her lip when my aunt found her.
Because she loved art--because she flew to Amsterdam to catch my cousin's installation, I imagine she died for it.
Curated self-preservations
The local museum environment is controlled, painfully artificial, contrived at such fine pitch that it feels taupe, an escape from the uncontrolled chaos of groceries and parking. An exhibit featuring art that depicts Native American tribes from the colonizers' perspective. Gilbert Gaul’s smooth, golden buttocks, native male exposure, beneath a small white fabric square tied to a long branch.
I leave. Sit in my car and stare at old walls. I argue with her ghost in the remembered hallway of the Otherhouse: the brick with red awning in a country which has disappeared. It is this country that raised me: the Romanian Republic of Alabama, co-ruled by defectors: a man named after longing, a woman who couldn't stop looking back towards the bones of her mother to make mantle-piece monuments from salt.
I drive home in a slight frenzy, park the car with its nose in the ditch. When the kids ask why I'm using their glue sticks, I tell them I am recovering, which is to say I am gathering words, recipes, notes for its preservation. There is a recipe for cooking ghost food from petals and twigs; a guide for appropriating the dead mother's spirit on the 40th day after her death; a syllabus for Romanian poetry and basme.
In this process of gathering and preserving, I cross the unstable line between life and death to linger in the displaced present, seeking the sounds of the Otherhouse's parties, its karaokes, how all the adults sounded the same in the romanialabamian accent, the twang playing counterpoint to diacritics on the tongue. I am trying to explain why Patsy Cline must always be Romanianish to me, a saint of the republic whose anthems she sang.
Longing & the time of the giants
I was born in a language that takes longing seriously. My father's name is Doru, which can be translated as "someone's longing" or "something longed-for" in Romanian. He was my grandmother's only child.
I do not know how to translate a republic founded by the longing for a home in a land with no word to hold it.
When I mention this to my father, he turns a glass in his hand, smiles.... ah, there is a story. And so, the ship launches from the port-wine stain of his mouth.
Once upon a time in a land, in that territory of golden silence, the giant's daughter roamed through meadows as she spoke with the Sun. One day, while roaming, she came upon a plough with six bulls and two small Romanians at work. Of course, the romanians have always been small compared to the giants; the romanians have always suffered from the small-nation syndrome. But the giant's daughter could not imagine this--she being large, she having the world at her fingers, she thought the tiny romanians were toys, and so, like any giant, she scooped them into her apron and ran back to share this discovery with her mother. The giant's daughter was so proud: O mama, look at these little worms I found scratching the soil! At this, the giant's wife frowned. Return them! she said, for in the Time of All Times these worms will rule the world.
How does the giant's wife know so much? I wonder.
The giant's wife is the mother of the giant's daughter. "She is a mountain," my father concludes. "She is all the mountains I used to hike with your mother in the Carpathians....."
He doesn't call her the giantess: she is mother of or wife of, the modified. I consider modifications--and the mode of being a modified subject-- while my littlest daughter collects snails from the steps after rain. She lifts each tiny snail, one by one, and places it carefully back in the soil. Back and forth she goes, carrying snails to the small patch of dirt. She does this from fear that we will step on them--They get too excited after rain and wander out everywhere; she has learned this by watching. She cannot know that she is saving the world in this returning.
My father smiles, asks for more wine, says that my youngest child knows more than his eldest. This too, is a form of libation--the child tears a hole in time to assure its continuance--he speaks of the snails, then the sky, then Dante's relation to shorelines.
When I interrupt him, draw him back to the story, to the vessel I seek in translation, he closes his eyes as my grandfather did when presenting his mouth to the long poem about the North Star, a gesture intended to offer himself as the container for its transmission. Nevermind the tuica it took for my grandfather to arrive at the threshold of recitation.
Translation as libation
Translation is a form of libation, my father says, eyes narrow as the slit of sea-facing horizon. You should know this, if you are so concerned with translation - libation is the oldest form of translation on the planet. It is the form in which one returns.
On my father's reading, translation keeps something alive by multiplying and changing it. The life of the original text stands in relation to the end of its untranslated singularity. To live in one language is to be known in one's own; to be translated is to live in the mouths and idioms of others, it is to be made foreign, it is to live over walls and across borders. In this sense, death is part of translation, part of the process by which something is made memorable or shared with the world.
After mom's sudden death, I struggled with how long it took to process her, to secure transmit papers for her body, to bring her home to the US. I am obsessed with translating the mother tongue, preserving the Romanian Republic of Alabama. Now, all time has assumed the shape of no-time--and I am it's only possible translator, the last mammal of its lineage. This fact translates itself into imperative.
You write a missing mother to find her, my father says. It is as if she was taken from you.
He is right. To insist on mom's existence is to map what I seek from the sky or the stars or the river. When something is taken, the act of taking is acknowledged in libation. I add more wine to his glass.
Since it is Sunday, we debate whether or not to get drunk. We talk about what we are drinking, and what it means to libate. We unsettle ourselves with revelations.
The un-libated wound gapes open, the desperation of an open-mouth O, often a poetic invocation of sublimity. Are there angels in this?
In the Metropolitan Musuem of Art's online collection I find an ancient libation bowl dated from 4th-3rd century BCE: a golden phiale is covered in bees, acorns, and beechnuts, and worked in repoussé. According to Roman replicas found in Hadrian's villa at Tivoli, acorns were also present on the phiale held by the caryatids on the Athenian Akropolis. Like the Latin patera, the libation bowls are flat, lacking handles or indentations for holding. They are intended for use in sharing drinks and pouring libations.
In time outside time, the book of Revelations suggests a relationship between angels and plagues and libation. There, we learn that the temple's sanctuary contains seven golden libation bowls for ritual worship. The seven bowls rest in the hands of seven temple-dwelling angels, who were given these bowls with the knowledge that they contained the wrath of God. The relationship between God's rage and an upset world occurs in both semantic and material realms. A voice from inside the temple orders the angels to pour out their bowls, one by one, to spill the wrath of god onto the ground. Slowly, each angel upsets their respective bowls, and each bowl unleashes a unique plague: physical sores, the turning of waters into blood, the burning of humans by sun, complete darkness, profound pain. This is the wine of God's wrath, as distinguished from the wine Christians will sip in communion. In the hands of angels, the libation bowls deliver affliction to earth's inhabitants.
"The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and bedecked with gold and jewels and pearls, holding in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the impurities of her fornication; and on her forehead was written a name of mystery: ‘Babylon the great, mother of harlots and of earth’s abominations’. And I saw the woman, drunk with the blood of the saints..." [Revelations 17: 2-6]
Just as mom reaches to run her fingers along the edge of the bowl, my father gets restless. We have been wandering through this virtual museum too long for his taste.
"Leave the end of the world alone," he says. "Speaking of one-by-one, did I ever tell you about the beginning?"
I'm not sure where to start, or where to meet him. A sky opens near the edge of my father's mouth, the ash-gray side of a building in Bucharest:
I was in Russia when you were born but I heard from your mom that your godmother left the fairies three books... By fairies, I mean Ursitoarele, the fairies of fate, who come to visit on the third day after a birth. They come to the windowsill. See, fairies keep time by showing up, and they make time by changing its direction. Your godmother--she was a kind soul--left books alongside the usual gifts: flour, salt, coins, wine, flowers, sweetcakes. A good godmother knows that pleasing the fairies is also a secret language, one in which you ask for what you give.
As he remiscies about my godmother, who died young of breast cancer, my father's sky feels farther, but the fairies suggest libation is aspirational, a conversation in which the mortal tells the god what one hopes will be granted in the future.
Libation's paradox
Libation is a paradox of pardon. This antimony exists in the ritual itself, which holds the human act of paying back the gods in the same hand as the god's laying plagues upon humans. An angel holding a golden libation vessel may be a curse, a blestem with wings and bright jewelry.
I think of Walter Benjamin's attention, his commitment to studying the rules and conventions as they shifted in his time, and how the things which he studied did not permit him the papers required to survive them. Benjamin never crossed the Spanish border to safety. He died for being born into a Jewish family. The headlines in Alabama kindle the notion that one must die for how one is born, or where. As if geography's accident can be naturalized into divine ordinance.
In some strange periscope, Benjamin returns when I follow Don Mee Choi through DMZ Zone; he returns in the dialogue between earth and sky some continue to label horizon; he returns when the neighbor's blue plaster Virgin crosses the street to sit with me on the porch. The virgin looks through my eyes and says nothing - nothing--a vast silence which means everything to immigrants.
For a year, I have wanted to argue that intertextuality in Benjamin's work left a model for how to libate him, how to bring minds and things into a place of a dialogue which is a messy place, a cadaverous place, a grotesque one for a culture steeped in avoidance of death. I find libations in so many words which lift his (still-missing) bones and lay them to rattle in their books. Minds converse across time; they rot together like compost; they speak from inside the trees cut down to create the page.
But, what I want to find in Benjamin increasingly resembles a portrait of homelandless- human, a still-life with Bucharest arcades modeled on his Parisian subject, the contents of a suitcase with manuscripts, the words marked missing, the unseen thing inside the visible.
Saturday's waters
"Let it go," my father says, "S-a dus pe Apa Sâmbete!"
This Romanian idiom can be translated to mean: "It is gone on Saturday's water!" But I am missing the context. A conversation begins in my question, the valence carried by his answer. What does it mean to say it is gone on Saturday's water? What is Saturday's water?
"It is the water that travels deep into the earth, into the Otherworld where the little romanians live. They are like us, only smaller, more innocent. They know God without symbols or fasting. What is holy has crawled inside them without words and become interior, a landscape who never read the holy books but learned it from the son of sheep. They keep all the feasts but they do this without referencing calendars. They don't have calendars because they don't need them. Our time is different from theirs."
"Then how do they know it's Christmas?"
"They have us. We have nuts which serve as vessels. We let them know in December when we make pies from walnuts and toss the shells into nearby rivers. The water takes these shells like little ships all the way to Saturday's water, which is where all the waters of the world meet to travel beneath the earth. When the little romanians glimpse walnut shells, they know to prepare for Christmas. And when they see eggshells, they know Easter is near. The materials we return to the river help the underground residents keep track of time and seasons."
"Have you seen Saturday's water? How do you know it exists?"
"One knows. In the same way you know that rose petals on a cloak are blessings from Rahmiel, who is the angel of mercy, the one your mom loved in that Leonard Cohen song. The way I know chaos theory explains our unknowing of time-space events. See, Saturday's water never changes; it circles the earth three times like a snake making doughnuts in mud. At the end of this circle, it crawls into the ground and passes the Otherworld, the land of little romanians."
"Are you sure it exists in America?"
"The world exists everywhere even if people disbelieve it. Saturday's water goes on whether Americans know it or not. Saturday's water passes the Otherworld and continues to the gates of hell, where it brings the souls of sinners to spare them from further wrongdoing. Saturday's water is generous; it keeps the dead from haunting the living with their crimes. It is horrible to be horrid and life with one's self. It is better to go to hell than haunt your relatives for eternity. So it is written: the souls of sinners are collected and taken to Saturday's waters."
"All waters?"
"All waters. All creeks, rivers, puddles. All rain spouts. This is why you should cross yourself and blow your breath over the river before swimming. We are not alone in this world, our ancestors travel with us. To look into the lake's surface and see yourself is the oldest illusion. There are others in your image. Even after drawing water from a well, you should blow over it and spill a little to chase the souls of sinners which have collected on the surface."
Saliva
"If society has so degenerated through necessity and greed that it can now receive the gifts of nature only rapaciously, that it snatches the fruit unripe from the trees in order to sell it most profitably, and is compelled to empty each dish in its determination to have enough, the earth will be impoverished," warns Walter Benjamin. He speaks, again, from that one-way street, or that route in my mind to the Otherhouse in Alabama, or the Otherworld's rivers under my feet.
What to make of all this? The first fruits are left for the gods, the unripe fruit curse those who take them. The furious god demands the soul of the firstborn daughter, the one they left in Romania when fleeing. The daughter, trapped between the homeland and the river, writes to recover the incantatory speech that raised her.
The libation serves as a symbolic vessel for blessing and curse, gesture for salvation or damnation. As an action, it evokes the golden bowl dotted with acorns, possibly carrying the plaque of god's rage.
The noun for tongue in Romanian is limbă, which is also the word for language. In the motherland, there is no distance between the tongue and what it speaks. And this relationship between the language and body exists in magic, in the binding of spells to protect villagers.
The villager who keeps the spells selects which person to teach. She hands the spell along with an exchange of saliva (sometimes evolved into a kiss): it is the inherited saliva that ripens the mouth for the incantation.
After my mom died, a swallow hounded me through the backyard; it sat on my notebook and cocked its head as I wrote. The swallows nest is made of saliva and mud. It reminds me of the importance of saliva in Romanian spells. It is the saliva which keeps you safe, the saliva which builds the nest and creates the spells of protection.
An outsider, an Intsta-witch, for example, could not know the names or spells which hold power over soil they colonize with their monied mouths. She lacks the wet tongue. No one cursed her or kissed her enough.
In Dialogue With:
Walter Benjamin, "One-Way Street" in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). Translated by Edmund Jephcott.
Benjamin Fondane, "Existential Monday and the Sunday of History" in Existential Monday: Philosophical Essays (New York: NYRB, 2016). Edited and translated by Bruce Baugh.
Warren, Meredith J C 2018. "The Cup of God’s Wrath: Libation and Early Christian Meal Practice in Revelation" Religions 9, no. 12: 413. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel9120413
Also includes a "translation" of my father's version of a Romanian mythology about the expression "It's gone on Saturday's waters."