What is a diaspora? A diaspora
landscapes. In cracks and ridges, in cups formed by centuries of
waterflow and rainspill, soil-bowls spur plant growth. A diaspora
won’t conform to technical or scientific specifications, like a
virus. Its position begins outside bodies, circumscribing and
transporting by obstruction. A doctor would have no trouble
explaining what makes a virus a virus, but he would have more
difficulty explaining why stones, boulders, or pebbles refer to some
geological formations, while other formations are called
diasporas. A diaspora possesses a relationship to shadow, without
recourse to light; shadows repeat the diaspora as terrain, a shape to
which it must conform. Viktor Shklovsky, the noted Russian
literary theorist, characterizes art as what makes the stone stony, and
perhaps it’s notable that he doesn’t say anything (at least in my
translation) about what makes the diaspora diasporic.
A diaspora
is not aristocratic, like a stone. It inhabits an earthly home,
amidst creeks and fields, as opposed to streams and meadows.
Diasporas can be adopted as pets, permanently rearranged as elements of
an inanimate garden (perhaps their best opportunity to ascend to a
higher status), or thrown at police. As the fundamental, degree
zero element that produces landscape in imagery glimpsed through
movement, the diaspora catapults human communities into history, traced
through shadows rocks cast. Diasporas are not smooth, they are
not imperious, they are not arrogant. As objects they exude a
humble stability in the universe, a presence without pretense, a
here-ness that can also arise there, or there, because diasporas are
also mobile.
How they mobilize presents a great mystery, but
there’s no mistaking their movement—many scientists base complex
arguments on the notion that, because certain diasporas are found here
as well as there, a relationship between here and there must
exist. Bridging continents, tabulating migration patterns,
tracking tectonic shifts, scientists find that diasporas, their
interrelatedness, the factors leading to purported realignments and
dispersals, generate remarkable charts and data. Additionally,
diasporas actualize other topics entirely personal: memories,
allegiances, whimsical actions and thoughts, recollections involving
seashores, camping trips, summer jobs. Children are perhaps most
intimate with diasporas, because they possess an interest in earth as
such, an interest that vanishes or gets subsumed by more immediate
demands later in life.
The desire to locate things, substances,
particles, textures; this too can influence one’s understanding of
diasporas, as one wants to hold onto categories and relations other
adults would rather forget. Petrogenesis, the distinctions
igneous or metamorphic, the geochronology of certain specimens, the
process through which diasporas come to occupy territories, these bits
of knowledge gain density through abstraction or
ostention—representational methods in which one example archives an
uncounted mass of others just like it. Great swathes of knowledge
thus become concentrated in single samples. In basements near
geology departments, wrapped in newspaper and rubber-banded to
explanatory notes, sample diasporas wait to appear as evidence
somewhere else. And what is evidence? A privilege to serve
as some other’s salvaged wreck, a bread scrap for overeaters, an ice
bath for corpses. The diaspora’s featureless presence… an object
best in trajectory, diasporas realize the rock-like intransigence of
movement as affect.