Collaborating with a Stick – Algernon Schtick Meets Nina Bambina

Always a loner, shy ever since childhood and downright catatonic when it came to making friends – that is me! A non-British postgraduate researcher, I am now very close to finishing a part-time PhD in Theatre Studies at the Theatre Department, University of Bristol. Throughout a period of six years, the idea of collaboration – whether in the form of offering my written work to a fellow researcher for review or engaging in more in-depth academic cooperation – proved a daunting task. Sharing the office space offered to postgraduates by the Department, exchanging ideas, going through the usual conversations about teaching or conferences, meeting academics in the Department, allowing intersections of thought in the usual empathetic and cooperative way – all these have been difficult for me, even if they are expected to naturally occur in any academic setting.

How then can a researcher with my socio-psychological profile resolve collaboration? Can my capricious inclination to solitude and isolation add any value to the concept of collaboration in an academic context?

My answer, explored in this paper, is the rather silly idea of a collaboration with a stick. The broader context for this peculiar idea is a project titled Algernon Schtick Meets Nina Bambina, a video work based on Konstantin Treplieff and Nina Zarechnaya – two of the main characters in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull. The video work also draws inspiration from The Man Whom the Trees Loved, a story written by British author Algernon Blackwood, first published in 1912. Within my video project, I have constructed the character Algernon Schtick as an alter ego in which to divest personal feelings of anxiety, awkwardness, stubbornness (frustration even) but also the rather bewildering sense of relief when realizing that I am unable to engender collaborations with my fellow postgraduate researchers. I grafted a character from Chekhov’s famous play onto a character from a less-known British story, in order to obtain a fictional vehicle with which I set out to search for an elusive, ideal human collaborator called Nina Bambina. I should note that the reluctance and difficulty in collaborating with others was never due to the fact that I felt unwelcomed in the Theatre Department: the choice of collaborating with a stick was a purely personal matter.

WHO IS ALGERNON SCHTICK? 

Algernon Schtick – the ironic, capricious yet sad look of the lonely researcher.

Who are Chekhov’s Konstantin and Nina and why Algernon? I was keen to construct a suitable alter ego for the loner-researcher that I was, and therefore imagined a triangulation between one of Chekhov’s protagonists, Blackwood’s first name and my longstanding passion for sticks. Konstantin is an apparently childish and self-defeating writer-in-the-making, rather late in the search for his true artistic voice. His self-deprecating, semi-hysterical and odd interventions – during tense scenes with his mother, a famous actress, and with the mother’s lover, a popular writer – bring a special, odd note of cynical estrangement and torment to Chekhov’s play. In Act Four of The Seagull, Konstantin, now a disappointed, unfulfilled writer and twice betrayed lover pathetically confesses to his former muse Nina Zarechnaya (just before taking his own life):

You’ve found your way and you know where you’re going, but I’m still drifting through a maze of dreams and images, with no idea what use it might be. I have no faith and I don’t know what my vocation is.1

In constructing Algernon Schtick, I felt that I resonated with Konstantin’s painful sense of drifting, made so markedly evident in the second (and final) failed amorous encounter with the elusive Nina, in the last act of the play. To underline Algernon Schtick’s difficulty in finding a suitable human collaborator, I have invented the name Nina Bambina: a sarcastic, bitter reference to Nina Zarechnaya’s own elusiveness and fleeting presence (in the play, she often declares that she feels homeless, like a seagull).

Nina Bambina: the human collaborator that never was — herself lost amongst branches, trees, sticks, forests.

I borrowed Chekhov’s unforgivingly ironic, cold eyes (a theatre critic famously noted that Chekhov was colder than the devil himself) and used them to look back at myself, to make sense of my own difficulties in establishing connections. Intoxicated (another side effect of my anxiety towards humans perhaps?) by the possibility of actually being a complete failure at collaboration (just like Konstantin), I chose to push the self-irony further and state: ‘I will never be able to collaborate with a fellow human.’ Thus, instantaneously, I pictured myself as a child, holding a stick, talking to it, talking through it, moving with it, allowing myself to be led by it. Ever since I can remember, the stick has been my most faithful companion and collaborator.

At this point, it is necessary to detail the connection between my video project and Algernon Blackwood’s story The Man Whom the Trees Loved. In Blackwood’s story, Mr Bittacy – the main character – festers a true obsession for the trees growing at the back of his house. Gradually, and to his wife’s complete horror, Mr Bittancy becomes the victim of the ‘pull of a forest [which] can be tremendous and utterly overwhelming.’2 By the end of the story, Mr. Bittacy’s soul will have been totally absorbed ‘into the immersive whirlpool of [the] vast dreaming life’3 of the forest, unable to withstand the trees’ call. Mr. Bittacy muses that the trees display:

‘awareness’ of your personality and presence involves the idea of winning you – across the border – into themselves – into their world of living. […] taking you over.4

Behind Mr. Bittacy’s rather dubious mysticism towards the world of trees, I have identified the convincing, albeit strange instinct (or nostalgia?) to extinguish oneself, to allow oneself to be swallowed by the mass of trees, to drift into another regnum, to disappear. The element that attracted my attention in the story was the main character’s gradual and irremediable slide towards a non-human world. His semi-conscious surrender to the power of the trees rhymed – in a different key – with Konstantin’s drift through his own maze of dreams and images, that pre-empted his final slip into non-being. I considered that Mr. Bittacy’s peculiar shift towards the multi-faceted, non-human spirit of the forest could cohabit fruitfully with Konstantin’s failed attempts to establish successful connections/love with other humans. By creating a link between Chekhov and Blackwood’s characters, I sought to somehow sweeten Chekhov’s implacable irony with respect to Konstantin. Mr Bittancy’s absorption into the vegetal world appears somehow more benign and rather comical, and I thought that such a lighter tone would be suitable to reflect on my own drifting away from humans.

Inevitably, there is an immediate association that can be made between the stick and the trees/the forest that feature in Algernon Blackwood’s story. I will analyse this association later on. At this point, it is important to note that the image of the tree/the forest mainly interested me not in its possible association with the stick but as the final destination of a drift which is always anchored in a will to leave one’s species and regnum behind. The association should not be read ontologically, where the stick is ‘dead’ and the forest (seen as a producer of sticks) is alive. Rather, the forest is just a destination (the destination could have very well been an industrial park, for instance, had Mr Bittancy been sucked in by concrete walls and machines) and the stick is a pointer and a carrier of the human towards that destination. The stick as the collaborator of a human is not expected to ‘act alive’ at any point; it does not become human-like. The stick serves Algernon Schtick simply as an activator of drift and as a kind of guiding accessory in a drifting movement.

DRIFTING A-BRANCH

The stick teases a leap into infancy and childhood, when many of us used to play or improvise with sticks, teddy bears and other such objects. As infants, many of us were able to rehearse with such inanimate objects various types of affective investments: fending off anxiety or fear, exercising love and protection, etc. The phenomenon is very well theorized in child psychology, where teddy bears, sticks, pillows, heavy blankets, etc. are known as transitional objects. The concept was coined by British psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott and designates a material object which attains a particular value for an infant, allowing him/ her a shift from the relationship with the mother to relationships with real objects:

The transitional object and transitional phenomena may be conceived in three ways: as typifying a phase in the child’s normal emotional development; as a defense against separation anxiety; and, lastly, as a neutral sphere in which experience is not challenged – an area of play and illusion.5

I shall refer to all these ‘three ways’ but dwell more on the last quality of the transitional object: that of allowing the creation of a neutral sphere for play and illusion, in my case, for drifting. In this context, it is important to note that the practice of investing affection into a transitional object stretches beyond the realm of human infancy. Biologists Sonya Kahlenberg and Richard Wrangham, who have spent fourteen years observing wild chimpanzees in Uganda, noticed that the primates were often playing with sticks. The researchers generically called such activities ‘stick-carrying’:

The juveniles carried pieces of bark, small logs or woody vine, with their hand or mouth, underarm or, most commonly, tucked between the abdomen and thigh. Individuals carried sticks for periods of one minute to more than four hours during which they rested, walked, climbed, slept and fed as usual.6

It would be reasonable therefore to assume that Algernon Schtick’s collaboration with a stick indicates an intention to drift towards an idyllic (maternal) beginning in which he used to feel supremely sheltered and happy: an anxiety-free time. In this context, the similitudes with the animal regnum (the chimpanzees) is poignant: it enforces the idea of a drift in reverse from the human towards the vegetal, through the animal towards an elusive (ideal?) realm of an idyllic, safe beginning. In a somewhat similar key, Friederich Nietzsche talks about the urge to attain the un-philosophical, de-specialized perspective of the happy cow. When Algernon Schtick holds his stick, he too searches for a careless, inattentive, silent, detached (and perhaps equally aimless) vocabulary of mythical happiness and comfort:

Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. This is a hard sight for man to see; for, though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is human, he cannot help envying their happiness – what they have, a life neither bored nor painful, is precisely what he wants, yet he cannot have it because he refuses to be like an animal…7

Collaborating with a stick is not entirely different from contemplating the ‘happy cow’ in this context: there is something similar in walking with a stick and the endless chewing of the cow – perhaps that sense of rumination without direction, an abandonment to the forces of idle drift. Perhaps it would have been interesting to experiment with collaborating with a cow but that would have been, as anyone can imagine, rather difficult to organise. The stick, on the other hand, enables and conducts a sharper drift, by skipping the animal/living stage: lifeless, the stick allows the energy of the carrier to flow through it.

From another perspective, it could be inferred that Algernon’s relationship with the stick functions in a similar manner to that of a computer programmer who ‘speaks’ to a rubber duck, searching for mistakes in the programming codes that he/she has created (it appears that explaining a programming code out loud, ‘line by line,’ to a rubber duck is very helpful in identifying potential flaws in that code).8 In such a case, the inanimate object helps to focus the mind, replacing the human interlocutor. The programmer, aided by the rubber duck, is filtering through his/her thought in search for mistakes, enabling some controlled and muted projection outward, of a kind that loops back in.

For Algernon Schtick, however, holding and walking with the stick or touching its tip to the walls and floors of the Theatre Department signifies something more than just seeking comfort, re-arranging the line of thought or rehearsing anxiety-free neutral spheres. Gaston Bachelard – in his theory of shells – makes a very interesting remark: ‘Motionless, mute things never forget: melancholy and despised as they are, we confide in them that which is humblest and least suspected in the depths of ourselves.’9 For Algernon, the stick points towards that distant depth within oneself, a region that is as inaccessible and unintelligible as the forest that Mr Bittancy gets sucked into and as mysterious as the maze of loveless images and dreams in which Konstantin gets definitively lost. The stick is the implement with which Algernon Schtick circumvents potential human collaborations: a tool which points away from his fellow humans and towards a forest that we all (as there is a Mr Bittancy in all of us) feel drawn by. We must all become the ‘sensitive inhabitants of the forests of ourselves’10 the stick seems to remind us. The stick is therefore a providential prosthetic: an absolutely indispensable intermediary acting as a material bridge to our personal depths, auguring for a withdrawal from one’s regnum. Returning to the aforementioned association between a dead stick and living tree/ forest, it now becomes much clearer how the inanimate ‘dead’ stick does not need to act alive (not even metaphorically, seen as the former part of a living tree), but points or draws towards the tree, towards the forest in ourselves, which is evidently not an actual tree/forest but the metaphor of one’s departure from one’s humanness.

There is an expression in Romanian – ‘a umbla creanga’ – which in a literal translation would read: ‘to drift (like) a branch’. The expression means wandering apparently aimlessly, following an itinerary in which you allow yourself no deliberate input and which is dictated by a mysterious draw towards something that is not (yet) known to you. The Romanian expression also denotes a sort of doing nothing, an idle, unprofitable sort of wandering.

In this spirit, the stick is also more than a mutable, stand-in object: it becomes an instrument that leads and points to unexpected directions, tempting/carrying its carrier adrift or a-branch. Algernon Schtick walks through the Theatre Department, touches and scrutinizes it with the tip of the stick, led by the latter and complying with the draw of the inner forest, as the symbol of a much sought-after a-worldly non-humanness. Here lies the truly important connection between the ‘dead’ stick and the living branch/tree/forest: the stick encapsulates (like a fossil, or a seed) the frozen movements belonging to what was once a living branch. Gaston Bachelard notes:

A Jesuit priest […] once asserted that on the coast of Sicily ‘the shell-fish, after being ground to powder, come to life again and start reproducing, if this powder is sprinkled with salt water.’11

In the same way, when used in drifting (a mechanical procedure similar to that of shell-fish being ground to powder), the (now fossilized) movements of the former branch find a new life, animated by the stick holder. The stick’s function – by comparison to that of the former branch – now moves onto a different plane. This former (dry) branch now has to rely on the energy of the human carrier – the human who in turn it ends up carrying. Moved by the human and moving the human, it touches across the corridors and rooms of the Theatre Department invoking the motionless, stubborn isolation and taciturn-ness of the non-human depths of the forest of ourselves. The stick does not become alive but acts as a facilitator/intermediary for the walking adrift towards a realm of muteness, stillness and non-humanness, following the fossilized patterns of random, convoluted movement of the former branch.

POSSIBLE EFFECTS

My initial question was: Can my capricious inclination to solitude and isolation add any value to the concept of collaboration in an academic context?

Algernon Schtick is a Nietzschean human contemplating escapes into non-human vocabularies of collaboration: he walks around the Theatre Department with a stick in hand as a gesture of active absence, reversal and forgetting. Does this walking with a stick along corridors trouble the human co-habitation/collaboration arrangements of those working in the Theatre Department? Does that ‘mad’ researcher carrying a stick spoil the collaborative arrangements as they are provided by the Theatre Department? The stick that points to the forest of oneself may – in an eccentric manner – reveal the sometimes constricting nature of human-withhuman collaboration, may unveil entrapments of thought, limitations of possibilities for new, less routine approaches to research. Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk advances a daring indictment of universities as ‘institutions [that] are strongly self-referential, fully critique resistant, and barely reformable.’12 As Algernon Schtick, I find – I think – a milder, more humorous way of commenting on possible blockages in the ecologies of collaboration as they are engendered in academia. Watching Algernon wandering through the Theatre Department led by a stick, some may ask themselves: why don’t we grab our supervisors’ hands and lead them into the forests of ourselves, for some unusual supervisory meetings? Wouldn’t new ideas, new vocabularies and new ecologies of knowledge and collaboration emerge as such? Wouldn’t blockages of the kind that Sloterdijk mentions wane?

These effects should all be taken into consideration but from my point of view, they are only secondary. When Algernon Schtick points towards the forest of oneself, towards another (non-human, a-worldly, vegetal even) side of oneself, it allows what is human in the researcher to recede, to become more and more absent. The stick teaches me the value of wanting to disappear, to push myself – as much as possible – to ‘become imperceptible’, in philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s words, to:

enter into a state of movement that eludes any perception (whether actual, photographic or cinematic), such that perception is no longer centred around subjects, but the duration and passages between them.13

Algernon’s stick pointing towards the Theatre Department.

The stick points towards a sarcastic absence-through-presence, an ironic turning of the back, a fumbling and idle drifting, like a branch which abandons itself to the whims of the wind, laughing.

Having a stick as collaborator teaches me – researcher turned Algernon Schtick – to look at my research (and the confines of my existence as a researcher) in boundlessness. Algernon Schtick travels out of the postgraduate office, the Department and the University and out of the customs of collaboration that define them: he travels towards an inner forest, to encounter forgetting and mindlessness, guided by his inanimate stick, who offers transition from one world to the other, from one regnum to the other, from perceptibility to imperceptibility. In its strange, gnarled form, the stick signifies this boundlessness, giving its human collaborator some temporary (or perhaps even permanent, who can tell?) access to forms of accidental, drifting thought and absence in presence.

The final reward of collaborating with a stick is therefore a totally new fantasy: to drift (or grow, or disappear) unrestricted, free, with a voice unbound. To maintain the absolute privilege and right of being an outsider. Is this achievable? For people who are determined to disappear (like Mr Bittancy and Konstantin) or become imperceptible (like me, in my search for Nina Bambina) it should indeed be possible! Is this valuable? I argue that any kind of inclination to escape from a/the current state of affairs is inherently valuable.

1 Anton Chekhov, The Seagull, Christopher Hampton (trans.) (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 80.
2 Algernon Blackwood, ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved,’ in Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural (London: Spring Books, 1964), 93.
3 Blackwood, ‘The Man Whom,’ 92.
4 Blackwood, ‘The Man Whom,’ 102.
5 ‘Transitional object,’ Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/dictionaries-thesauruses-picturesand-
press-releases/transitional-object
6 Sonya Kahlenberg and Richard Wrangham, ‘Sex Differences in Chimpanzees’ Use of Sticks as play objects resembles those of Children’ Current Biology 20/24 (2010): R 1068
7 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, R. J. Hollingdale (trans.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 60.
8 Joe Mayberry, ‘How a Rubber Duck Taught Me to Be a Better Programmer,’ WSOLBlog (blog), September 15, 2014, https://blog.wsol.com/how-a-rubber-duck-taught-me-to-be-a-better-programmer.
9 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Maria Jolas (trans.) (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1994), 143.
10 Jules Supervielle, La Fable du Monde suivi de Oublieuse mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 54.
11 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Maria Jolas (trans.) (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1994), 115.
12 Peter Sloterdijk and Hans- Jürgen Heinrichs, Neither Sun nor Death, Steve Corcoran (trans.) (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011), 63.
13 Eugene B. Young, Gary Genosko, Janell Watson and Gregg Lambert, The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary (London, New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 40.