ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE
★ ★ ★ ★
EMER MARTIN
Image by Ashling McKeever
Ghosts on the Tracks
It’s been a long hollow night. I’m crouched in the tiny transparent tent they’ve built around the chair to protect us from a rain that never comes. The ground itself is parched and the leaves on the trees are curling brown with thirst. I won’t lie, these nights are rough and cold once the sun goes down. We’re a few miles from the bay here but I can still smell the pelican shit on the salty wind.
Every evening it is already dark when I get on my bike in East Palo Alto and cross the freeway to another world. I work for a security firm that has me sitting by the tracks all night by their high school. What am I guarding? I’m not guarding anything that is. I’m guarding against something they don’t want happening. The high school kids are throwing themselves on the tracks when the train is coming. It’s an epidemic. A cluster. They keep doing studies. Writing articles in magazines. The Centre for Disease Control even came in. If anyone would bother to ask me I could break it down for them. I would tell them: You have a high school full of wealthy children with crazy parents and a train going right by it. Work it out.
I’m here to shield them from the train. Guarding bourgie kids who have it all but don’t want none of it. Most don’t even look at me as they bike or walk by. Don’t get it twisted. I feel for them. They’re playing parts, and they don’t know it.
Nothing has ever happened while I was here until now. She appeared with the first breath of light. A young Asian girl, standing about 50ft up the tracks. Her dark hair, dyed with a blue stripe. She stands like a newly planted tree, slightly swaying back and forth. In slow motion I begin to walk towards her, all the while looking back because there is an unstoppable, lethal train growing bigger and bigger. I know how huge the trains are, how blind they are, how hard they are.
She is very young, barely a teenager, she is not looking at me. I keep walking until I’m a few feet away and she turns and looks straight through me.
“Easy, be easy,” I say softly.
She looks through me as if I’m the ghost. Her eyes red, her mouth set. The way she looks at me I no longer feel alive.
I close my eyes.
And then she disappears.
Liliana Resnick on her ongoing long-distance artistic collaboration with Emer Martin
Emer’s writing is layered. Her sentences are always very concise and sculptural to the point where they can stand their own. Not only is each sentence layered and full of meaning, but also they are supported with Emer’s passionate social justice and political views. She gives everything in her writings, and yet she controls all of it at the same time.
She implicitly understands how to integrate the layers of her words to fit different images in my work that encompass certain themes, ideas, and emotions. In her novels I see a quality of poetry based on deep experienced feelings that correspond with my experimental film work.
For that reason I think we two work very well together, we work fast, and without much corrections or revisions. We don’t have to explain anything to each other. My deeply emotional experimental films dig under the skin in order to make emotions visible, these particular emotions that carry us in a certain moments in our lives when we get overwhelmed or stuck or look for a different path of life to take. Emer understands that thanks to the life experiences she has had.
Maybe what we two have in common is we are artists who’ve experienced disturbances with life, both life as we have had to live it and life as we perceive it.
Liliana Resnick explores tensions between the inner world of human beings and the exterior world that encloses them. She works in narrative, documentary and experimental style and often mixes them all. Liliana holds an MFA in Cinema from San Francisco State University, and BA in philosophy and comparative literature from University of Zagreb. Her films are shown at many festivals around the world (www.cyclofilm.com).
Emer Martin is an Irish novelist, painter and filmmaker who has also lived in Paris, London, the Middle East, and the United States. Her first novel, Breakfast in Babylon won Book of the Year at the 1996 Listowel Writers’ Week. More Bread Or I’ll Appear, her second novel, was published internationally in 1999. Baby Zero was published in March 2007 and released internationally through the publishing co-operative Rawmeash based in the Bay Area California. Why is the Moon following Me? is her first children’s book.
She studied painting in New York and graduated from the Thomas Hunter Honors Program of Hunter College as class valedictorian in January 1998. She had two sell-out solo shows of her paintings at the Origin Gallery in Harcourt St, Dublin. She recently completed her third short film Unaccompanied. She produced Irvine Welsh’s directorial debut NUTS in 2007. She was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. Her new children’s book The Pooka will be released this Halloween 2016. Her fourth novel The Cruelty Men will be released in Ireland and the UK in 2017. She now lives in Palo Alto, California.
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Love this series. Emer, I know you have lots of other things to write about, but your attentive outsider status in Silicon Valley yields some really interesting material. You could definitely get a book out of it. I know, I know, easier said than done. But I’d sure read it!