"Love Letters Mostly" by Deborah Digges.

Last April I copied a (beloved) poem by a Deborah Digges into my notebook titled “Love Letters Mostly.”

Today, one April later, I find myself returning to its waters in order to study how it moves, or notate the steps of its dance within (and with) language, the particulars set into motion.

One stanza, twelve lines, ragged edges. Not a sonnet. Not stepping into the shape of a recognizable form, whether to constitute it or subvert it. 

The speaker is alone, standing near a shoreline. The tone is desolate and expansive, almost as if deserted by its own vantage. It surveys the scene and asks questions, but refuses to identify the questions as such by using punctuation. 

Unpunctuated questions may indicate that asking is either futile or humiliating, or perhaps too difficult an activity since the speaker reveals parts of themselves in asking the question.

What do we reveal when we ask? 

I mean, what do we say about ourselves when we constitute a question that identifies itself and addresses itself to others as such?

What does the poem want when it does that while celebrating the surreptitious cigarette smoked beneath an awning during a rainstorm. What does the poem want when it asserts this singular moment against the interrogatory mode? 

How did punctuation alter the atmosphere of the prior sentences? 

I mean isn't it strange how the presence of a question mark indicates an openness, a disinhibition, a willingness to be read as part of a potential future dialogue? 

What about the absence of punctuation inhibits the self and builds a horizon into the spoken.

I’m not sure it's because the period, itself, is a terminus. I think we say things in a landscape that may include the dead, as for example, when Digges references both Osip Mandelstam and Paul Celan by citing their view of the poem as a message in a bottle that may be on route to the reader who needs it. That is where Digges begins, in that image of the poem sallying forth:

Notes in a bottle floated up the bloodstream,
scripts hardly audible, a ringing in my ears,
love letters mostly, transfused through centuries,
once thrown from breakwaters
or cliffs. 

One sentence, this motion from the notes in the bloodstream that become a ringing in the ears, a non-signifying noise similar to tinnitus —- and Digges' use of the word 'transfused' in keeping with the river of blood on which the poems of poets travel —- there is soft demarcation here of the distance between the exterior (or public) water and the interior (or private) water, and Digges does nothing to bridge that gap or explicate it. 

The poems thrown from rocks or cliffs in ancient days— she calls them “love letters mostly” — are the things which return by becoming internalized. At the very least, they become internalized in the case of Digges' speaker, who then quickly picks up the next sentence without a line break, adding “And the writers,” — this is where she breaks the line, leaving us peering over the cliff near the water for the writers, suddenly present in that shimmering conjunction:

And the writers,
unrequited, walked toward home.

The 'unrequited' writers, this image of utter loneliness that infuses the poem.

And the perfection of those unmarked questions that intervene while also threading themselves into what poetry does, or what the poem asks of the poet and the world. 

Who knows how they lived out their lives,
if those they so desired did finally turn to them.
Who made me who I am.

And now the turn into an image of the speaker, smoking in the rain, alone, watching the skies. The other writers have left; their ghosts barely present here:

I love to stand under an awning, smoking,
while some storm hits hard the ports of Boston.

And then the flourish of that elliptical finale. If a razor can be a flourishing thing — 

What knows to do so dives deep as it can.

The poem takes it leave in the abyss, or what Heidegger called the “bottomless,” that homeland from which no one human is exempt, perhaps the originary that we build our obsessive homelands against. (Notably, Hannah Arendt references this abyss as the philosopher’s medium, in a section of The Life of the Mind titled after Valery.)

The questions posed in the poem are answered by the title—though we cannot realize this until after having read it, especially since the questions aren't indicated by punctuation. 

Other small things that strike me: Digges' dispensation with ordinary forms and conventions of address; the unstable temporality that carves the fleeting moment inside the eternal; the sense that eternity, itself, is unrequited and unrequitable.

*

Aaron Copland, “Nocturne”
Deborah Digges, “Love Letters Mostly”

Milena; or M no. 7

“Touch me! Touch me not! The existential work of portraiture lies in the inevitable exposure of the present absence and absent presence that portraits always overpromise but can never deliver: the Truth, am going away. Encapsulated in this phrase is the violence and separation of the image from its fleshy referent - the artist/sitter/beholder who loses himself or herself in the desire and fear, the love and envy engendered by the subject that looks back from the work. What remains is the portrait as irruption, as lacuna, as object of loss.”

— Maria Loh, Still Lives (2015)

The story of an M.

Her name was Milena Jesenská.

She was born in Czech and rendered motherless at the age of 13 (or 16, depending on the source). She described herself as a sentimental, rebellious, difficult teenager who found it difficult to respect her father‘s patriarchal control and competitive cruelty. Like other bourgeois bullies, he spanked her. He locked her in closets. He put a premium on social standing and obedience. He had a vicious temper. He was a moralist, a conservative, a dentist, a businessman, and an antisemite.

Once she began reading, her world opened. Milena read voraciously. Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Meredith, Lev Tolstoy, Knut Hamsun, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Thomas Mann were among her favorites. As a teen, she snuck out of her father’s house to sit on the wall of a nearby cemetery and watch over the dead in their dealings with their living. She loved beauty and giving gifts. She strolled through Prague like a pre-Raphaelite, loose hair, arms filled with flowers. What stood out was her intense fellow-feeling for others, her disregard for social state status or material wealth, her fascination with fallen humans. From an early age, she valued love and relationality above positional status and market-based success. Friends said she “glided through life” as if not entirely grounded in it.

There is a dress in this, and a hue of bright purple.

Crouched on the steps of the concert hall, Milena was studying the musical score when a man appeared behind her and began reading along. Ernst Pollak. The two of them fell in love over music. And it was in the name of love that he agreed to hike one of the hills near Prague to watch the sun rise, as she wished – though love did not prevent him from complaining about the cold and exertion as he made his way up the incline. That sunrise turned into a locus for friendship. A circle of friends grew around Ernst and Milena, and they would hike Prague’s hills and read poetry or recite poems from the hillsides. Since folk songs were one of the few art forms that had not been suppressed or excised from Bohemia, culture and poetry developed from its bones and conventions. 

Milena means “loving one.” And this she did fiercely.

In 1917, as a result of her lax behaviour and moral misconduct, her father had her confined for nine months in the Veleslavín insane asylum on the grounds of ‘moral insanity’. At the time she was having an affair with Ernst Pollak, a bank clerk from the provincial town of Jičín, well-versed in music and literature, whom she married when she came of age at 21 and left with him for Vienna.

The first time she and Ernst had sex, she appeared in a friend‘s room afterwards. Her cheeks were flushed, eyes sparkling, childlike joy radiating from her heliotrope-colored dress. She didn’t think twice about leaving Prague and going with him to Vienna in 1918. She never thought twice about things she knew. Milena was enamored with his mind, his appetite, his culture, his intellect. He insisted on free love, and she obliged him. But she felt out of place among the cultivated Viennese women whose passion had never burned fingers or slammed doors. She was reckless in love, and generous in friendship. She taught Hermann Broch how to read and speak Czech for money. In conversations with friends, Milena complained of feeling  limited by the ways Ernst beheld her. She suspected he didn’t desire her because she had only one dress. She did cocaine, published articles in Tribuna, and translated texts by Rosa Luxemburg, Hermann Broch, Franz Werfel, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Paul Claudel. 

Then, in 1919, she read a short story by a minor writer named Franz Kafka and wrote him a letter seeking permission to translate from German into Czech. The following year, she went to meet Franz Kafka in a small town where he was being treated for tuberculosis. He described her as the “loving one” in their letters. There was no shame in her approach to love, no coquetry or manipulation. She told a friend, “You know nothing about a person until you’ve loved him.” Franz and Milena spent four blissful days together in Vienna. The chestnut trees burst into flowers around them.

The Nevertheless appears, as Kierkegaard hums in the margins.

In a letter dated September 18th, 1920, Kafka condemns himself for making things too hard, acknowledges that his fear made it difficult to keep from catastrophizing - “I was living off your gaze,” he tells her. Milena sees him as he wants to be seen. There is no “solid ground” beneath a divine gaze. One cannot live on earth at the same time. They had Vienna, and then the failure of the next meeting. Kafka is ill. He lists sanatoriums. His syntax stutters and recuses itself. Exhaustion perfuses his letters; he indicates resignation towards death as well as loss.

Believing yourself to be loved is not the same as living or inhabiting the difficulty of love, Kafka suggests on the evening of Sept. 20, 1920, when he looks at the speech acts of lovers, adding: “But those aren’t really lovers, they’re just grammarians.” He dreams that she is on fire and he cannot save her — it takes a fireman. But the Milena that survives as a wan, lifeless, sort of shadow of the self.

The “nevertheless”: this is what Kafka craves in her marriage to Pollack, the nevertheless which she articulates in her essay as why happiness is a silly goal for marriage. 

And the Neverthelessness gets published a few years later, in January 1923, as  “The Devil at The Hearth” by Milena Jesenská. Marrying for happiness is selfish, frivolous, and stupid, Milena argues. It is the same as marrying for money, for title, for luxury goods. “The only good reason for two people to get married is if it is impossible for them not to. If they simply cannot live without each other. No remorse, sentimentality, tragedy: it happens.”

Although Pollack cheated on her constantly, she had given him her “nevertheless” - her partnership - and this unconditionality is what Kafka most craved and refused of the world. There is no way to know the person one is marrying, Milena says. The countless “risks of disappointment” exist from the nature of marriage, and accepting them is critical to relationships. Against “the modern hysteria a la Anna Karenina,” she says, we should see each human as a world unto themselves and accept each other in order to affirm “feeling justified in being” one’s truest, least performative self.

“Proof that he is loved ‘nevertheless’” is more ethical and precise than the vow of romantic love until death. Milena mocks the “miserable, shabby happiness” of the marriages in which partners sacrifice everything and have every good fortune and still can’t be happy. The vow itself amounts to the “accepting a promise that can’t be kept” and then acting victimized a year later. Variance in emotional needs (and some have “a talent for being happy") makes it impossible to form a baseline guarantee of conditions to produce this inexplicable state. Because there is “a talent for being happy,” and because some find happiness in less, there is no guarantee of conditions to produce this inexplicable state. “Longing for happiness” is the cupcake of a relationship, and the rot of all teeth.

Franz replied to her (and it) with a lengthy letter dated “January-February 1923” which ends: “The evil magic of letter writing is setting in and destroying my nights, even more than they are already destroying themselves. I have to stop, I can no longer write. Oh, your insomnia is different from mine. Please let’s not write anymore.” After this — and between his death in June 1924 —  Kafka sent only two curt postcards (one mentioning his forthcoming death) and two about notes which seem to struggle for breath, for oxygen, for life.

By the time of Kafka’s death on June 3, 1924, Milena had broken up with Ernst Pollack. She returned to Prague, and married an architect, Jaromir Krejeor, a few years later. In 1928, she gave birth to a daughter named Jana. A few years later, she divorced Jaromir in order to live her life, and to continue writing and thinking. She joined the CP and wrote for them, addressing social issues like abortion and censorship in her articles. She did this despite the eye-rolls from men on the left. She wrote about socialization and gender at a time when social issues were considered irrelevant to the revolutionary economic issues at hand. In 1936, she stopped broke with the Party after the execution of Zinoviev and Kamenev. She worked to help Jews escape to Poland and was arrested in November 1939.

Milena’s final years were spent in Ravensbrück, the Nazi concentration camp. She never stopped writing and studying the world. One of Milena’s friends in the camp described a grotesque scene she had witnessed: a withered fellow prisoner made a pass at a “hardened criminal” and the two humans as if nothing could stop the dance of lust from surging between them. Milena smiled at her friend’s disgust and said, “Thank God love is indestructible. It’s stronger than any barbarian.”

Milena Jesenská, 1939, arrest

Grigory Zinoviev, 1920 (Bulla Studio)

* Heliotrope means “to move with the sun,” in reference to the flowers that follow the light of the sun throughout the day.

"These masses were made of fire."

She and the mountain’s genius
licking at her ankle.

Living out its other life
while she considers this one.

— Elizabeth Willis, “Madame Cezanne as Saint-Victoire”

1

All firsts lead back to Paris. In Paris, the artist reckons with the work of others, and the hierarchies that anoint the new stars.

“I will astonish Paris with an apple,” declared Paul Cézanne, after leaving his childhood home in Aix-en-Provence for the capital city.

Cezanne’s early oils linger in a dingy, sober palette; the paint applied in thick layers of impasto; a focus on color and perfection of silhouettes and perspectives as emphasized by the French Academy and the jury of the annual Salon. The artist must prove himself to others. This proof occurs formally, in the adoption of dominant styles and motifs, but also takes us space in the subject as conventions get pulled into the work.

2

Louis-Auguste Cézanne, the Artist's father, Reading “L'Evenement” (1866) Cezanne includes his own still life in the background. Maybe he hopes to solicit recognition from his scornful, disapproving father, Louis-August, who is depicted reading a liberal newspaper even though he was annoyingly outspoke about his conservative politics. A sort of idealization . . . or a joke about the artist’s power to change the world?

3

Parisian artists and their patrons are talking, and the artist must paint something that is worth discussing. He can’t set the tone of the conversation, so he borrows the motif and plays with quotation.

A Modern Olympia (1869-70) Cézanne's adaptation of the theme of the demi-mondaine, or high-class prostitute suggested in Édouard Manet's scandalous Olympia of 1863. Notes of anxiety and unease in the expressive, abbreviated figures, their faces outlined as masks rather than flesh. A vacancy of the face while bodies are dynamic and contoured with curves. Unlike Manet, Cézanne portrays the prostitute recoiling awkwardly in her nudity, drawing apart the figure of her suitor (which Manet rendered completely invisible) as a stranger, an outside. Some assume that the suitor is Cézanne himself.

4

All Cezanne's submissions to the Academy’s Salon were refused. In between seasons, he returned home to Aix regularly to be shamed by his practical father. Despite rejection, everything kept happening in the city, in the family, in the art world, in the salons, on the canvas. Three years— from 1870 to 1873— a frame that emphasizes the horizon.

In 1870, Cezanne moved to L'Estaque in southern France to evade the military draft. There, he fell in with the Impressionist Camille Pissarro, who convinced him to experiment with a brighter palette and to leave behind the heavy impasto technique for smaller, more vibrant brushstrokes. The Mediterranean sunlight touched everything; the landscape of cliffs and water beckoned as did the blues of the sea.

Cézanne then returned to Paris, where his son Paul was born, to his mistress, Hortense Fiquet. Cézanne painted over forty portraits of Forquet, as well as several enigmatic portraits of their son.

In 1873, Cézanne exhibited in the Salon des Réfuses, the notorious show of artists who had been refused by the official Salon (he counted himself among a circle that included Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro, among others). The critics slammed the avant-garde artists, which apparently hurt Cézanne deeply. In the next decade he mostly painted away from Paris, in either Aix or L'Estaque, and he no longer participated in unofficial group exhibitions.

5

Aix-en-Provence, the land of hidden ruins and ancient stones, windswept trees whispering to anise twigs, processions of stately cloud-shadows painting the hillsides of my memory. Cezanne moved to the countryside in Aix-en-Provence to paint “nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone,” in his own words. His dearest friend, Émile Zola, also hailed from Aix-en-Provence.

Paul Cezanne, Montagne Saint-victoire (n.d)

6

Never underestimate the power of a train window to focus the gaze. On April 24th, 1878, Cézanne wrote a letter to Émile Zola from the cabin of the newly inaugurated the Aix-Marseille train. The “beautiful motif” of Mont Sainte-Victoire struck the painter as the train crossed the Arc River Valley bridge. Cezanne wanted his friend to know he had seen something indescribable. After this letter, Cezanne commenced work on a series of paintings devoted to Mont Sainte-Victoire. This mountain would become the subject of almost eighty paintings and watercolors for Cezanne.

7

The artist composes himself from inspirations, longings, and desires that elocute possibility. The mountain he has studied for decades becomes a proxy for the self’s perception. Critic Joachim Gasquet said that Cézanne urged him to look at Ste.-Victoire, to note its spirit, its “imperious thirst for the sun,” and the “melancholy” that descends upon its slopes “in the evening, when all this weightiness falls back to earth..” The mountains cull favor with the eye. “These masses were made of fire,” Cézanne said. “Fire is in them still. Both darkness and daylight seem to recoil from them in fear, trembling. There above us is Plato's cave: see how, as large clouds pass by, the shadow that they ast shudders on the rocks, as if burned, suddenly swallowed by a mouth of fire.”

8

Cezanne treated the canvas as a sort of screen to register the artist's visual sensations and perceptions as he gazes intensely at a given subject. There is, I think, a sculptural dimension to his later works, visible in the way he applied pigments to canvas, using a series of separate, rhythmic brushstrokes to construct rather than paint a picture.

The Bay of Marseille, Seen from L'Estaque (1885), with its bright colors and architectonic houses defining the foreground; sky and sea concentrate the blues and complementary colors create illusion of pictorial depth. 

9

In 1886, after the death of his father, Cezanne married Hortense, and she became the official Madame Cezanne. The title of his paintings begin to reflect this shift, as in Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress (1888-90), where the various tones of red in the dress seems like the subject more than Hortense. The sitter's figure is rigidly imposing, almost soldier-like, her face plain and asymmetrical with only one ear visible. Geometrical accents dissect the canvas in both horizontal and vertical directions, thus creating the impression of a carefully arranged, monumental still life, as opposed to a portrait of a lifelong companion or lover. There is something of Cezanne’s late mountains in this portrait? Something of that constructive impulse?

10

Towards the end of his life, Cezanne painted one of the last landscapes of his beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire, offering the view in an abstracted, elliptical vocabulary.

Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire c.1905

Rather than depicting rocks and trees in detail, Cezanne daubed them lightly, as if to soften and illume the representation. The mountain looms over the objects, its hues presenting the eye with a sort of assembled puzzle. Seams between colors are visible, loosening the grip on pictorial representation. Forms overlap; cool and warm hues interpenetrate; light is the story—- this relational light that burrows inside each object, bodies touched by light, surfaces altered by an earnest commitment to this two-dimensional aspect. (Egon Schiele was also driven by longing to relay what light does to each body. . .)

11

I mentioned Cezanne’s portrait of Hortense earlier —- there is an exquisite poem by Elizabeth Willis that treats “Madame Cezanne” as the mountain Cezanne adored:

And, of course, there is another “late” painting of the mountain, an painting that Cezanne left unfinished, a painting that might be more properly called the final brush with the mountain.

Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen From Les Lauves, 1902-1906

Marginalia on the self’s “composition”

“Of what use is biography in assessing someone who made himself up?” wondered Peter Scherjahl in a piece on Arshile Gorky’s art and persona. “Gorky told people, including his wife, that he was Russian, a cousin of the writer Maxim Gorky (evidently unaware that Maxim Gorky was a pen name) born in the Caucasus in 1905 and educated in France,” Scherjahl noted. But that is a false story. A story that made Arshile legible to an American audience who knew very little about Armenia or the rest of the world.

As PS tells it: “Actually, [Arshile Gorkey] was an Ottoman Armenian, Vosdanig Adoian, born circa 1902, in a village near Van. He couldn't speak Russian and never saw France. His father emigrated to America in 1908. His mother died in Yerevan, perhaps of starvation, in 1919, four years after the remaining family had fled the Turkish massacres. In 1920, Adoian and a sister joined relatives in Watertown, Massachusetts. The first evidence of his new identity appears as the signature Gorky, Arshele, on Park Street Church, Boston, a skillful pastiche of Neo-Impressionism that he painted in 1924 while teaching at an art school in Boston. He admired the work of John Singer Sargent before latching on to Cézanne as a god of art second only, later, to Picasso. Early imitations of Cézanne, in the show, are astonishingly acute. Cézanne is the foremost of painters who unfold their majesty to close-up inspection. (Gorky stumbled in his tyro emulations of Matisse and de Chirico, artists more reliant on overall design.) With Gorky, influence is no incidental issue. I think he never ceased to regard his own creations vicariously, through the conjured eyes of heroes—he cited Uccello, Grünewald, Ingres, Seurat. He spoke with scorn of "originality" as a criterion of artistic value.”

Dark days the bright gods willed,
Wounds you bore there,
Argos old soldiery
On Troy beach teeming,
Charmed out of time we see.
No life on earth can be
Hid from our dreaming.

— The Sirens

*

Brenda Hillman, “Cezanne’s Colors”
Elizabeth Willis, “Madame Cezanne as Saint-Victoire”

How Brenda Hillman describes the animating hope that Rainer Maria Rilke studied in Cezanne.

Zarathustra's laughter.

The phrase “science fiction” is superfluous because all science is fiction.

— Agustín Fernández Mallo

Bruno Schulz on the fictions of the ‘human being’:

The word ‘human being’ in itself is a brilliant fiction, concealing with a beautiful and reassuring lie those abysses and worlds, those undischarged universes, that individuals are. There is no human being--there are only sovereign ways of being, infinitely distant from each other, that don't fit into any uniform formula, that cannot be reduced to a common denominator. From one human being to another is a leap greater than from a worm to the highest vertebrate. Moving from one face to another we must rethink and rebuild entirely, we must change all dimensions and postulates. None of the categories that applied when we were talking about one person remain when we stand before another... When I meet a new person, all of my previous experiences, anticipations, and tactics prepared in advance become useless. Between me and each new person the world begins anew.

Alexander Kluge, “The Movement of Angels Above a Given Expanse of Snow Refers to Other Actualities Than That of the Present”

“a surprisingly lively intercourse of angels”

BATAILLE:

I feel I am among you as the opposite of the person who calmly watches from the shore the ships which have lost their masts. I am on the ship which has lost its mast ... I am having a good time, and I laugh as I look at the people on the shore, I think, much more than anyone could laugh from the shore while looking at the mastless ship, because after all, I don't see that anyone could be so cruel as to laugh freely from the shore at a ship without a mast. If you're sinking, it's different, you can welcome it with a joyous heart [s'en donner à coeur joie].

HYPPOLITE:

It's Zarathustra's laughter.

BATAILLE:

If you like. In any case I'm amazed that people see it as so bitter.

HYPPOLITE:

Not bitter.

MARCEL:

All the same, that story ended badly ... Just a historical point. [C'est tout de même une histoire qui a mal fine . . . Simple référence historique.]

BATAILLE:

And?

MARCEL:

Was Nietzsche still laughing in Turin? I'm not sure he was.

BATAILLE:

On the contrary, I believe he was laughing then.

DE GANDILLAC:

We are not speaking about the laughter in Turin.

BATAILLE:

What does anything mean at that moment?

*

Alexander Kluge, “The Movement of Angels Above a Given Expanse of Snow Refers to Other Actualities Than That of the Present”

Mouths.

the only truth is face to face, the poem whose words become your mouth,
and dying in black and white, we fight for what we love, not are

- Frank O’Hara, “Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets”

Mouth as Sentinel

Capricious, it speaks in the name of the entire body. It is full of others. Its anxiety stems from what are basically incompatible tasks: to express and ingest, to offer and swallow.

Many talkative people are equipped with a small mouth, as if its cavity were striving to restrict speech. Following the same principle, an uncommonly large mouth can correspond to shy speakers, who prudently administer its impressiveness.

Then there is the deep, wet well mouth. Every time it opens, someone drowns. Meticulously rounded, the whistling mouth remains on the prowl. Between its welcome and its derision there is little more than a millimeter. A landscape mouth occupies the cheeks as a window does a wall, gargling with light. The asymmetrical mouth is quite different: one lip is at odds with the other, in an argument that may create outrageous polygons.

According to buccal mathematics, if we subtract the second lip from the first, the mystery is solved. Two plus two make a kiss, an ephemeral tattoo. If a straight lip curves, the lips form a parabola. The marksmanship of that smile determines the size of the mouth.

There are lips that abstain and pull back. Others are so inflated they hinder language. A protruding lip plays the part of the know-it-all student, and also their vulnerability. Occasionally we find a top lip that appears slightly raised by a finger, as if calling for discretion. Well-defined lips are the mouth’s patriots: even without speaking, they mark its territory.

Renouncing any attempt to convert, the pale lip becomes blurred. A red lip emphasizes its rights, savoring its color, conspir- ing with the gum. The pink lip becomes interesting in old age: it attracts our attention as it fades. A purple lip is at its best in winter, while the dark one is perhaps best able to stay up all night.

The mouth’s craftsmanship is exaggerated in the teeth, those masterpieces of erosion. Each one is the blade of a desire: sharp teeth ask; broken ones plead. None of them bites without permission from the lip, proving that gentleness outweighs savagery.

A white tooth shows off a tuxedo, glinting at balls and fearful of dawn. Crooked teeth have something of the drunken dance about them. A yellow tooth is slightly embarrassed, and yet there is so much sincerity in its enamel. Tiny teeth nibble at words with aphoristic rigor. However, nothing can compare to the childish delight of gap teeth, in among which happiness slips stealthily.

With the chewing of the years, teeth become filled with engineering. Their geographical features are lashed by tiny inclemencies. The entire set of teeth then begins a slow game of chess, which will inevitably end in the defeat of the white pieces.

Muttering its preachings between clenched teeth, the tongue marks the rhythm and punctuates our prose. It awaits the arrival of the next phrase, sentinel of silence beneath the palate’s sky.

— Andrés Neuman (translated by Nick Caistor & Lorenza Garcia)

Mark Goodman, Suspicion (2014–2017)

Jerzy Pilch opens “Heart in Mouth” with that (dangerously earnest) declarative, an articulation of positionality that foregrounds a way of speaking rather than the throne or podium authorized for use. This position might seem overly sincere to English artistocracy— but Pilch is Polish. The soil of his words lacks the confidence of empire. Heart in mouth, panic in mind, shades of distance:

It is with my heart in my mouth that I set about an unceremonious description of those close to me: with my heart in my mouth and panic in my mind, for there's not much that I know. Truth to tell, I know only one thing: that before I finish this scandalizing narrative, begun today, the new government, which by a curious quirk of fate was also called into being today, will have fallen. I have the certainty, founded upon the strength of the eternal superiority of writing over politicking, that I will be writing longer than the government will govern.

“Their mouths are all little circles—oh, they say, / there are so many places to be,” writes John Gallaher in “Anecdote of the Field”.

They are telling me something about time
that I know, something about eternity I can't
take in. There's anger, there's anguish. Put them
in their corners and turn your back. They will
make mouths at each other behind it,
acknowledge each other across it. But how
do you get out of the room and what do
they do when you are gone?

— Sandra Kohler, “Litany”

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

— T. S. Eliot

*

Andrés Neuman, Sensitive Anatomy, translated by Nick Caistor & Lorenza Garcia (Open Letter Books)
Barbara Deming, “Song”
Emma Bee Bernstein, Self-portrait with lights in mouth, photograph, c. 2006-2007
Jerzy Pilch and Bill Johnston, “Heart in Mouth”, Chicago Review, Vol. 46, No. 3/4, (2000)
Mark Goodman, Suspicion (2014–2017)
Sandra Kohler, “Litany”
Terence Hayes, “The Blue Sylvia”

Saints of hysteria.

I don’t think I’m smart Adam Smith
but what we despise may be a mystery
coping with shyness.

— Joe Ross & Rod Smith, “Interlacktual Za”

LENS: Any kind of thing could be the accidental cause of joy, sadness, or desire.

— Norma Cole & Michael Palmer, from A Library Book

Having stumbled upon a veritable treasure-trove of collaborative poetry and poetics— Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry, edited by Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton & David Trinidad — a spellbinding elaboration of possibilities and ruses, complete with notes on process by the authors. Take “Waves of Particles,” for example, co-written by Bill Berkson, Michael Brownstein & Ron Padgett:

Waves of Particles

Television is great. The wind blows
across a screen in Nevada, Utah. That’s great,
greater than Utah. The little dots come out to play
in lines of grey and waves of gravy. Navy blue.
A physicist lights a cigarette on a horse,
although he doesn’t know it
because the TV doesn’t show it.
But we can see it although we can’t smoke it.
Maybe that’s the end of it, a little dot of light
shining its name on the great white what.

According to the process notes, in late summer 1969, Michael Brownstein, Ron Padgett and Bill Berkson visited the home of Berkson’s mother in Port Jefferson, Long Island. “Waves of Particles” was conceived there, with Brownstein recording lines as they were called them out, before adding his own response to a pad of paper, thus acquiring the dual titles of “coauthor” and “director” for this poem. As for B’s mom and the house, she/it acquired the code name “Brenda” to honor the hurricane that passed through the Long Island around the time this poem was written.

*

Cover art by Larry Rivers for Hymns of St. Bridget by Bill Berkson and Frank O’Hara.

Speaking of resonance — even if I wasn’t, even though I’m always thinking of resonance in some way or shape— there is much to be said for the creative potential in glitches and tiny errancies. To say: I collect beautiful accidents to keep myself from inadvertently falling prey to the binaries of purity. There is a poetics of place in this, which is to say, particular (and titular) misspellings make it possible create an alternate version of a person or place.

Example: In 1962, Bill Berkson and Frank O’Hara co-authored a splendid book titled Hymns of St. Bridget, but the name of the eponymous Irish saint they referenced is actually spelled “Brigid.” And this makes their hymns of St. Bridget particular to the St. of their manuscript, a being that arose from the poets’ shared walks in relation to a perceived flaw in a “steeple”. Berkson describes the genesis in his process notes:

One autumn afternoon in 1960, Frank and I were walking up First Avenue [in New York City] and suddenly noticed something odd about St. Bridget’s Irish Catholic church on the Avenue B side of Tompkins Square Park, across from Frank’s place at 441 East Ninth Street, near Avenue A. The left-hand steeple of the church was curving inward. This flaw (on account of which, apparently, years later, the steeple was removed) struck both of us as hilarious. Later that day, I went home and wrote “Hymn to St. Bridget’s Steeple,” the first of the “St. Bridget” series, in rather clunky imitation of what Frank later called his “I do this I do that poems.” Most of the hymns were written, taking turns at the typewriter, either at Frank’s or at Larry Rivers’s house in Southampton. Frank’s keyboard attack was fabulously quick, so most of these—as well as most of the other collaborations we did—are mostly by him, and the parts by me are mostly me trying to keep up. [ . . . ] Whenever the exact date of writing is indicated on the manuscript I have included it (the dates are cumulatively October 19, 1960 to April 1, 1962). Otherwise, the set is pretty much in the order as retyped by Frank for a possible book manuscript (he thought Grove Press might be interested) in 1962.

Meet St. Bridget, the “Saint of Hysteria” — the muse-friend of two poets moving through their shared world, making a jig of it, knowing that most of what thrills them will never be published:

A note adds that “St. Bridget’s Neighborhood” was inspired by — and partly imitative of — Robert Desnos’s poem, “Quartier San Merri.”

And —- since it is snowing in Alabama, and Radu’s head is covered in snowflakes — an excerpt from Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover’s “Slow Flurries” seems like an appropriate way to distend this:

Two birds on the same stretch of air—
two leaves, different trees.
But pinching someone else’s skin
is very different from pinching your own
a different shading.
If we pinch each other
at the same time,
we’re doing the same thing

Radu with snow.

*

Allen Ginsberg & Ron Padgett, “Thundering Undies”
Bernadette Mayer and Alice Notley, “From a continuing collaboration” (PDF)
Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton & David Trinidad, eds. Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Penguin Random House)
Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton, “Madame Bovary”
Dennis Cooper & David Trinidad, “S. O. A.”
Douglas Kearney and Haryette Mullen, “Sprung Flung” (PDF)
Miles Davis, “Minor Ninths: Part 1”
Stephen Dunn & Lawrence Raab, “In the Cities of Someone Else’s Anxiety”

Postscript

A painting by Suzanne Valadon that I came upon in the Baltimore Museum of Art last week. I love how an ersatz eye looks down from the vase.

Céret.

His only exercise was pacing in front of a canvas, and his idea of dieting was to take large quantities of garlic pills and shun egg yolks, desserts, and coffee—while continuing to guzzle a half-dozen bottles of wine and eat two or more large restaurant meals a day.

— Mason Currey on Francis Bacon’s process, from Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

Baltimore last week presented me with the pleasure of encountering Chaim Soutine’s View Overlooking Céret (c. 1922) in the flesh, so to speak. Soutine left Paris and lived in Céret, a small town in the French Pyrenees near the Spanish border, for three years, a period that resulted in painting around 200 canvases, most of which are landscapes including boisterous rivers and energetic lines unrolling in rich ribbons of thickly applied color.

Rather than divulge the exchange between myself and Soutine’s painting, I will note a lovely coincidence that occurred a few nights later, as I sat in the hallway of a Baltimore hotel around 2 a.m., flipping through my AWP purchases, only to bump into a poem by Cole Swenson mentioning a different Céret-based painting, as if to insinuate that Baltimore would be my Soutine-Céret pipeline.

And why should I resist sharing this poem in its entirety?

“Chaïm Soutine: Reeling Trees” by Cole Swenson

The children are lost — is the central fact — and that —
is what holds on —- what factors in

and what losing is — and how its moving parts
come together with that clicking sound — how are

we a product of wind? Everything here is

four paintings by Chaïm Soutine
hanging in a single room —- though of only

two scenes — two large trees — and two of
two children running home — we see them at two

different points on their road where
the huge sky backs up - fills with trees - huge

trees full of wind that we can see — warm wind

along the road behind them curves
beyond the curve where a world — which he built — from paint

painted over paint — breaks
into a world just barely — out of sight

it opens out — into a broad valley — dotted with majestic trees
alone — in great fields of horses in a storm — the children are on

their way home. Clarisse Nicoïdski claimed
that Soutine was the painter who made the wind visible.

“In the curve of a feeling,” he once said
that feeling always curves

sharply toward
or from
having been raised in a tradition that prohibited representation (see Exodus
20:4) Or self-exile in which the line is drawn before it's formed.

He arrived in Paris in 1913 (though some sources say 1912) at the age of 20, or
perhaps 19 or 21, having the liberty of not knowing quite when he was born, and
went to stay with friends at La Ruche, with its affordable studio-housing built
from the ruins of the most recent Universal Exposition.

We're falling up a hill
are a man up a red hill will
a fallen green through climbing
branches that hold a house up to the sky
and that the house is then thrown farther
up as we pick our way down the red cliff
running in the sun.

Which he translated as:

Paysage avec Personage or The White Road 1918-1919

Still as the light shines
and they're walking away
as the road divides as the cliff falls
and climbs, the trees climb. As the
sky falls and the road flays and the world
tilts rather red where it isn't green walking
along a road falling off houses into the sky
and into the sky walking and into the sky
running into the sky.

Soutine was a great reader of Montaigne, who claimed that the world is
constantly churning, never achieving an equilibrium. This is what Soutine
painted and what allows his landscapes to avoid classical landscape's
implicit argument for a single legitimate point-of-view, which can only be
occupied by a single person at any one time, thus also avoiding its inevitable if
subtle support of rigidly hierarchical social and political systems. Instead,
Soutine's riotous slippages multiply, and the viewer, too, slips, skids, and the
trees reel overhead.

Or more slowly — wandering under light — sharpening — the light — making
color — come off on the hands- and- sometimes the hands- are larger than
life and — always the hands — and they live alone

“waiting for the wind to rise,” he said to a friend who, passing again hours later,
had found him sitting in exactly the same position.

that the wind had made his hands

the wind of his hands

and what the wind had made of his hands

was not said

it was not that the wind

was the face of his hands

nor that his hands were faced in wind

but that his hands made faces

of the wind and faced them.

To wit:

Paysage à Céret, 1920

if the house entered the wind or rather
if the wind is in fact or becomes the windows
or in what order wind and house arrange
themselves there is a shroud
to find or lace or veil at times the whole town
wearing out, wearing down
to the face of the animal beginning to show
the procession of white walking out of itself, not
at all as violent as one would have thought or
it was not the wind

Soutine painted some 200 landscapes around Céret in the three years he spent
there between 1919 and 1922. His first dealer, Zborowski, took him down to the
south to give him the time and means to paint. First to Cagnes, just west of Nice,
but Soutine was restless, and so moved on to Céret, a small town just above the
Spanish border and some 20 miles from the sea. Dr. Albert Barnes, who put
the Paris art world into a frenzy when he came in 1923 to buy contemporary
works to fill his new foundation, encountered Soutine's work and was instantly
struck, marking a permanent and positive change in the latter's fortunes. He
ended up acquiring 60 of the Céret landscapes, though another source puts the
number at 100. Many others Soutine cut up or burned in anxious fits in which
he couldn't stand his own work.

He went through these fits off and on all his life. His good friend Paulette Jourdain
once, hearing strange sounds from within, looked through the keyhole into his
room and saw him in a rage slashing canvases and ripping them to shreds. He
once commented to another painter, “One day, I'm going to assassinate my
paintings.” Zborowski routinely fished them out of the garbage, and gallerists
refused to sell his works back to him, knowing what he'd do to them. At other
times, he would stare at a painting for a while, and then go over to it, cut out a
particular part, and keep just that.

Many of the landscapes are houses, and many others are trees. Les modes de la
vie. The rooms into which. We move through rooms, whole in the air, which is
open, opening the doors, a house on a hill that spins on its own, undone. This is
the case with The Oak, c. 1939, which is mostly sun, and The Tree, c. 1939, with
houses the size of marbles somewhere down below.

Is a painting of a tree a landscape or a portrait? He painted so aggressively that
one day he dislocated his thumb.

Lacking anything of significance to add, I offer you the music of my room, where Dinu Lipatti plays Mozart Sonata in A Minor, K310, at his last recital . . . and a view of the vertiginously-gilded sky from my flight to Maryland.

*

Celeste Marcus, Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession, and a Dramatic Life in Art (Hatchette)
Chaïm Soutine,View Overlooking Céret c. 1922 (Baltimore Museum of Art)
Cole Swenson, “Chaïm Soutine: Reeling Trees”
Giovanni Sollima, La Tempesta
Ignaz Brüll, Melodie in A minor, Op.53/2
Steve Tomasula, ed. Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art (University of Alabama Press)

Interpolations.

Woke up from a strange dream… standing outside a bar, drinking whiskey with P and an ex that was not entirely an ex and the whole question of me and P hovering in the air like static electricity but also a fore-shadow, or the forearm of a shadow extending from that night when his tool-belt would wind up in my trunk and force me to meet up with him in order to return the objects — one of which was a hammer — and all the wet fires between that moment and this morning, when “c’mere” still feels like the most earnest contraction ever spoken. A wheel of c’mere-spokes — and the drill of the daily descending . . .

Cassavetes' Faces (and a psychogeography)

Crush my calm you Cassavetes
I was sitting tight so quiet quiet
In the dark till the lights came up my heart
Beating like a riot riot

— Fugazi

”I’m interested in love. And so, that’s why I have a need for the characters to really analyze love, discuss it, kill it, destroy it, hurt each other, do all the stuff in that war, in that word-polemic and film-polemic of what life is. And the rest of the stuff doesn’t really interest me. It may interest other people, but I have a one-track mind. That’s all I’m interested in – love. And the lack of it. When it stops. And the pain that’s caused by loss of things that are taken away from us that we really need.”

— John Cassavetes

“— love. And the lack of it.”

Love was the whole story for John Cassavetes. Cinema was a way of trying to tell it under varying conditions. As for personal character, Cassavetes never downplayed his penchant for drama, whether throwing his temper through rooms and meetings, hanging up abruptly, cancelling dates at the last minute. Intimate meetings collapsed into performances. Privately, Cassavetes maintained that his extreme emotional displays were a way of studying and learning the range of human responses. Social scenes gave rise to plays and possibilities; he could game them. “I love the fight!” he said in an interview. “Making a scene. Yelling. Hanging up on someone. How many times, when I was just getting started, I slammed the phone down, then played with my chess pieces, knowing it would ring in a few minutes. They always call back!” Cassavetes owned up to things. He called himself “difficult”; “a bigmouth”; “a troublemaker”; “temperamental.” Owning up wasn’t separate from the questions of ownership, autonomy, masculinity, and emptiness that drove his thematic interests. “It’s a question of manhood,” he added. Being an asshole was a way of announcing his refusal to be owned or controlled. He learned from his bad experiences. Hollywood and Kramer taught him that he would no longer be capable of “compromise” in filmmaking. No more “making a film where we didn’t say something real.” Only the real and raw, as visible in his excruciating close-ups.

“You kill me.”

“You kill me,” Richard says to Maria in Cassavetes’ Faces (1968). Then he says it to Jeannie. He gets ice for drinks and turns on the music. The same Mad Men-style language carries the emotional palette that develops between Richard, his wife, and his mistress. Blues and jazz. All the music in Faces is diegetic, or heard live from source within the film [rather than an overlaid edit unheard by the characters.] Scenes are marked by intentional pauses when characters put the needle on the record, but no scene is carried by the music. No scene gets lost in it. No scene offers us a whole song that feels out the shape of music itself. A gruesome absence of ecstasy and astonishment. Music cuts in to cue sex; jokes cut in to cue relief from anxiety. Laughter feels diabolical, unmoored from context, based on a sort of repeated explosion of canned feeling, as steady as the click of cue stick to ball. A constant recitation of jokes and limericks. At one point, the laughter becomes so unbearable that we pause the film, leash Radu, and escape into a night-walk. Our shadows form a triangle shape that precedes us on the sidewalk. “Two small people scared of each other,” He says softly, hand on my waist like the ghost of a favorite fanny-pack. “It’s so dark,” I tell him. The sound of people trying to have fun. Radu perches in P’s arms as I pay for ice cream and sour straws. A strange energy in our shared silence. We stand near the streetlamp and share the sweetness, divided into licks, mine then his, the dance of the ice cream cone. Radu finds a baby blue sock in a bush. He carries it back to the house. We return to Faces and its desperate loops of self-helpy cheerfulness . . .

“I have been seduced.”

Convivial vigor. All-American social rigor. Uneasy, the faces barely touching each other. The laughter like cheap cologne. At Jeannie’s apartment, the two johns and her friend parry jokes; the room is vapid, overworked, exhausted by the men’s resentment. Like boys at a frat party wearing tailored suits. The men bicker about women and memory and how tough they are. It’s business. Everyone is nervous and batty. Only the transactional relation to the sex workers puts the businessmen at ease: they know how to navigate this. The only thing the working woman can expect or demand is money. Like the secretaries in the opening scene, the women exist to make the man comfortable—- to service them with a smile. (Not really to serve them but to service them, to provide the particularity of agreed-upon services.) To meet their needs. A one-way street. The women are reflective surfaces upon which the men apprehend themselves. “A startlingly immediate and vivid vision of mid-life insecurity and hysteria,” Ross Birks said of the film. “The death of an undeveloped eros,” I tell P. We are thrown into Maria’s excruciating desire to be touched. Her loneliness rolls over us when Chet kisses her; the sequence of actions is framed for maximum impact, tracking Chet as he carries Maria across the room. A camera shot delivers their melded bodies: his black turtleneck mixed with her black dress. Fade out. New scene. “I have been seduced,” Dickie announces as he strolls into Jeannie’s bedroom in a towel. She serves him eggs on a silver tray; he laughs maniacally. (“He has never been seduced,” says P.) Dickie criticizes her eggs as “lousy”, notices she wears false eyelashes and then announces: “So help me god, you’re stupid.” Jeannie (Gena Rowlands is amazing, as usual) calls him a son of a gun and asks, “So how come you hate me, now?” Dickie replies: “Jeannie, do me a favor. Don’t be silly now. Just be yourself.” But she knows he doesn’t mean it. She leaves and sings happy ditties in the kitchen while crying quietly, knowing that there is no world in which she can be ‘herself’, since a self is simply whatever role the man desires. That is her job. That is the business she transacts.

Gibberish, gobbledy-gook, inane utterances, sports-related shit: the structure of communication preferred by the men in Cassavetes Faces. The film is all about making the men feel safe. And it’s a short crawl from meaninglessness to madness; Maria goes from joking about cunnilingus at the dinner to table to determining death as the best alternative for a life of continued, constant silence. Not once does she express hurt or pain. Chet says he prayed to God for her life and that he almost killed her. “No one has time to be vulnerable to each other,” Chet says, it’s ludicrous “how mechanical we can be.” Faces makes cheerfulness seem like the worst lie we perform for one another. The cheeriness of withholding the real in order to tender the transaction.

Simon Hsu nails it:

The routine performed by the two males not only reinforces the notion that we’re watching a film within a film, but also the theatricality of the characters within the reality of the film’s world. Cassavetes’s goal to reinstate realism into acting is lead by the belief that “the artificiality of expression of emotion was more than a dramatic problem. It was a problem in life.” His argument, having been a young actor and a young man, was that most lived experiences were as artificially staged as most dramatic experiences—the real problem “for modern man” was to “[break] free from conventions and learning how to really feel again.” The routine scene is a sublime fusion of these ideas—performance in film and artifice in life separated by a thin line.

A few sites in John Cassavetes’ psychogeography

THE SAND-PITS ON LONG ISLAND

. . . out in Port Washington near the small town where John grew up. He and the guys would go to the sand pits to hang out. This is the place that gave rise to the realization that other young men “were afraid” — and fear defined them. Other boys had curfews. Other boys “didn’t want to go near the edge.” They didn’t want to risk the possibility of falling into the sandpit. Their parents packed the same lunches for them. “I saw the kids having their lives planned…Their whole lives were mapped out before they began.” They would go to Ivy League schools and inherit their parents’ biases, their parents’ politics, their religion and taste and preferences. Avoiding the question of asking, What do I want to be?

A scene in Women Under the Influence, when the husband who has lost control of his wife and family, lost the script of masculine success, goes to work with his crew in the sand pits. Surrounded by bulldozers and sand and large tools, the husband loses his shit completely with co-workers. At the edge of the sand pit, a man slides down it during an altercation, the body lifting small clouds of sand as it moves down the slope. And nothing happens. He returns to work. No being is transformed, enlightened, or resolved by this fall.

HEIGHT

Cassavetes was 5 ft tall at fourteen. He only grew to 5’7” (which he flubbed as 5’10” in interviews, due to the boots he wore to make him look taller). Being short made the strictures of masculinity legible to him at an early age; he invested in being charming. As he phrased it, he learned to work for attention.

ROUTE ONE

John failed out of Champlain after his first semester. Only desire was to leave or escape his hometown. Hitch-hiked down Route One in search of difference. In St. Petersburg, he saw all the same faces, the same loneliness in the elders, the same cavernous silences. John picked up a pay phone and called home; his dad wired him money for a bus fare back to Port Washington, the score of his failure and disgrace. He had no dream, no ambition, no skills–basketball, girls, and fear of work. Fear of the cult of work ethic. Fear of the world of the fathers. Loathing for the world he inherited. 

TALKING GAME

… and selling the self as a business, selling life for the next opportunity to score a desired role in a film. As an actor, John saw how Hollywood’s careerism killed the art of performance. “The greatest danger for actors is this success drive” that leads them to sacrifice their visions and beliefs for celebrity, he said in an interview. The greatest death is to give up on one’s defiance and drive for material safety or gains. Actors learn their way from “that first flash of enthusiasm, that first first flash of wanting to be something more” — the seed of desire in relation to the script. John lost “that crazy enthusiasm” and so he quit.

THE STAIRS . . . where Maria and Richard sit smoking cigarettes at the end of Faces. A motif gets set in the first shot — and early in the film, when Maria and Richard are fighting and she cries, “I am not a sex machine.” Richard leaves and heads for this dark hallway of ascending stairs, a way out of nowhere.

DINING ROOM TABLE

. . . where Gena Rowlands’ performs the role of wife for husband and his work crew. The idea of the family table and its head–but the female wobbling, lovely, her role unscripted, her pedestal learning to pimp itself.

We know ourselves imperfectly, Cassavetes insists across films, plays, and interviews. He mentions an ex-girlfriend who thought he was “the funniest man alive.” The two would go on dates and when Cassavetes would make a romantic gesture, she would respond by roaring with laughter. “At everything I said and did,” C. said. The lesson being “that we really aren’t ourselves, and the impression we make on people is often the direct opposite of the one intended.” The performance of love undercut by our mis-readings or scripts that cannot be inhabited. John later compares the role of lover to actor…

Lover as “profession” rather than dream. Actor as “careerist” rather than dreamer. The visions of others draft our own and make roles of them. Husband can’t act the role of the lover anymore, and couples dance in the cauldron of these role-based restrictions. In the unfreedom of social designations that define the nature of relationships.

DRIVEWAY

The opening scene of Woman packing the children off to her mom’s for the weekend, the frantic gestures, the toys and small faces in car windows. And the driveway at the end of Husbands, when the father returns home from hisoung business to find the young daughter weeping in the driveway. The absent fathers and husbands whose charm entices the world, variations on the good guy, the all-American fellow talking game, winning the pot, hacking the satisfaction of winning. Disappointment morphing into resentment that resembles what Cassavates said about NY acting school–how much they despised Hollywood because they could never aspire to it. The beat of midlife restlessness is all-American, shorn of Godard’s aesthetic lure. Grit, grime, and staging: we suffocate in the wallpaper. There is no elegance.

And so, that’s why I have a need for the characters to really analyze love, discuss it, kill it, destroy it, hurt each other, do all the stuff in that war, in that word-polemic and film-polemic of what life is.

*

Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes

*

Fugazi, “And the Same”
Fugazi, “Blueprint”
Fugazi, “Cassavetes”
John Cassavetes, Faces (1968) and/or Film trailer
John Cassavetes, Woman Under the Influence
Simon Hsu, “Emotion Through Bodily Motion: Acting and the Frame in John Cassavetes’s Faces” (Slant)
Stuart Klawans, “Masks and Faces” (Criterion)

The thigh of the mind; or a few words that delight me.

Untimely meditations.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen have been translated as Untimely Meditations and/or Unfashionable Observations and/or Thoughts Out of Season. Of the two untimelys devoted to Schopenhauer and Wagner, Nietzsche said:

“What I did by and large was take to take two famous and still altogether undetermined types... in order to say something, in order to have a couple more formulas, signs, means of expression in my hands... It was in this way that Plato used Socrates, as a semiotic for Plato. — Now I look back from a distance at the circumstances of which these essays are a witness, I would not wish to deny that fundamentally they speak only of me.”

*

Speaking of timeliness, Julian Talamantez Brolanski titled a poem as an instruction to hasten slowly, or to hurry lolling, to slack about speedily. I love his use of “betelgeuse” as a marker in this poem’s soundings:

“hasten slowly and you shall soon arrive”

hasten slowly and you shall soon arrive
priyanka said, quoting milarepa

after all this time
my patience waned its way
into the dipping sun

with the pin-tailed one
whose knowledge was encyclopedic. . . .

betelgeuse is turning on and off
like your love—everybody knows
it’s dying.

the angels might get so sad
knowing what I do
as I mourn over you
in this weird atonal interlude

and then to know
what makes a pleasant music
who played their fiddle knee-to-knee and whose
wings beat in tawdry time

cinch up your saddle
what could be worse
than a home without a horse

you may never know my mind
and you may never
stroke its thigh
and that is how you’ll go
unto the clotted breast of god

---

Labyrinthitis.

Intense vertigo of the spinning variety, hearing loss, tinnitus (ringing in the ear), nausea, vomiting, and imbalance.

These are the symptoms of a condition caused by an ear infection or a virus attacking a particular part of the ear known as the bony LABYRINTH, a delicate complex located inside the inner ear that includes three specialized structures: the vestibule, the semicircular canal, and the cochlea.

The labyrinth converts mechanical signals transmitted by the middle ear into electrical signals, which are then relayed on to the auditory pathway in the brain.

The labyrinth also detects motion and position in order to maintain balance.

An inflamed labyrinth.

A hidden snail snell with oval handles.

A series of letters in which Samuel Beckett mentions his ear issues, and how motion is displaced by vertigo.

---

Inexistance.

A fellow named Skeffington died.

This fellow’s death gave birth to a widow.

The widow knew her husband had attended Beckett’s lectures in Paris.

On March 7th, in the year of the lordless 1972, Beckett offered his condolences to Mrs. Shechy-Skeffington in a letter confirming “a vague memory of a lecture” that had given on “an inexistant literary movement baptized Le Concentrisme.”

It is true that Beckett delivered this presentation in November of 1930 to the TCD Modern Language Society as a parody of academic scholarship on the work of fictional poet Jean du Chas.

And it is also true that Beckett's 'inexistant' is a fabulous way to deny the lecture's nonexistence.

A full-breasted being spied when looking up on my walk today.

And a poem by Franz Wright thanking the leaves:

Leave Me Hidden

I was having trouble deciding
which to watch: Night
of the Living Bloggers, or
Attack of the Neck-Brace People.
In the end I just went for a walk.

In the woods I stopped wondering why
of all trees
this one: my hand
pressed to fissures
and ridges of

bark's hugely magnified
fingerprint, forehead
resting against it
finally, feeling
distinctly

a heartbeat, vast, silently
booming there deep in
my hidden leaves, blessed
motherworld, personal
underworld, thank you
thank you.

*

Destroyer, “Labyrinthitis”
Franz Wright, “Leave Me Hidden”
Julian Talamantez Brolanski, “hasten slowly and you shall soon arrive”
Saul Williams, “Untimely Meditations” (from Amethyst Rock Star)
 

Mojave Ghost.

Poetry is the language of intensity.

Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.

— C. D. Wright, “Collaborating”

These words were provoked by a tweet from Matthew Leger which shared the first page of C. D. Wright’s poem, “Approximately Forever”:

Approximately Forever

She was changing on the inside
it was true what had been written

The new syntax of love
both sucked and burned

The secret clung around them
She took in the smell

Walking down a road to nowhere
every sound was relevant

The sun fell behind them now
he seemed strangely moved

She would take her clothes off
for the camera

she said in plain english
but she wasn't holding that snake

The poem doesn’t end here, but these seven couplets reconvened in the music of a poem I’ve been reading. Forrest Gander’s Mojave Ghost is subtitled as “a novel poem” traversing the geological features of the poet’s birthplace. In the process, Gander makes the lyric a site of encounter. Interior landscapes blend with exterior landscapes; outside and inside commingle; desert colors evoke the memory of an interlocutor resembling C. D. Wright, who was Gander’s wife (and whose death occurred from a similar cause as my mother’s, around the same time).

Time — geological time, lived time, human time, historical time — is thematic to Mojave Ghost:

The oldest extant pigment of color, scraped
from rocks beneath the desert,
is a flaming pink

Spring comes. It breaks into me. You
break into me.

While the past goes on lifting out of itself like a wave.

But you had the sense to linger by the shore
as I snorkeled out over the nebulous,
slo-mo, shark-eerie drop off
of the shelf.

Across the page of the book, the poem’s speaker pivots between this direct address of a “You” and a more general third-person description. There are no transitions or titles to mark these turns from addressing to narrating, from invoking to telling:

He's seduced by an intelligence that outleaps his own.

She's funny. Her jokes
become his. And she adopts
certain gestures from him
into her vital movements.

Each is charged by the charge in the other.

Each summoned to what
if not a sacred assimilation.

The moments brim with her liveliness. He's
aching to see all the colors in her spectrum.

And her ass, like two cloves of garlic.

After all they've undertaken and lived through,
have they effaced one another's outer limits?

Everything seems the same. The Pacific
chorus frog in the front yard is answered
by the one in the back. The firebox remains
clammed shut. Don Mee's green birdhouse
hangs from the limb of the olive tree. Only now
it is all quivering. Holding its breath.

When they pass in the morning in the kitchen,
he spins her around and kisses her.

As though in response to the question:
How do you answer for your existence?

I couldn’t resist imagining the green of Don Mee Choi’s birdhouse as brighter than the olive from which it dangles. Like the speaker, I acceded to “aching to all the colors in her spectrum” — and heard them in tatters or pieces from Wright’s own poems, the blues of her flowering vines, the hues of her own blooming landscapes:

Imaginary Morning Glory

Whether or not the water was freezing. The body
would break its sheath. Without layer on layer
of feather and air to insulate the loving belly.
A cloudy film surrounding the point of entry. If blue
were not blue how could love be love. But if the body
were made of rings. A loose halo would emerge
in the telluric light. If anyone were entrusted to verify
this rare occurrence. As the petal starts to
dwindle and curl unto itself. And only then. Love,
blue. Hallucinogenic blue, love.

That “loose halo . . . in the telluric light” . . .

Gander evokes these reflections and glimmers from Wright’s poems epiphanically. He grieves and reconceives his love for the one who opened (opens?) a part of him. I hear it in his “audible sunlight”:

I admit: all my gestures are addressed to you. You,
the starting point, the rhapsodic precedent.

Even now, these years later, I'm still
turing my head, listening for your words.
know I imagine them into being, there
being nothing else I can imagine.

In photographs taken of me before we met
I see only the impending joy in my face.

Audible sunlight, the western meadowlark's opera.
And each dawn, your sing-song greeting to the cat.

As if our happiness had its own desire,
the desire to trill, to cling to us, to stay.

Just as I hear an echo of Wright’s love for language in the trilling and the vine-cling.

“I love that a handful, a mouthful gets you by, a satchelful can land you a job, a well-chosen clutch of them could get you laid,” wrote Wright.

A handful. A mouthful. A satchelful. A clutch. The sound of a stick-shift in a truck carrying lovers across the American highways and byways.

At several points in his book, Gander mixes narration and invocation, making it difficult to tell one from the other:

You are the love of my life.
No. You are the love of your life.

Did he keep his word, or only his skepticism?

From the lake's edge, his eyes remain fixed
on an indeterminate wake. What is it
swimming just under the surface?

One from the other is a hard tale to tell, and echoes are infinite. Echoes insist on the trail of sound winding from a distance. I remembered how Wright insisted on meeting the “unplaned” surface as a possibility in a different poem:

Lake Echo, Dear

Is the woman in the pool of light really reading or just staring at
what is written

Is the man walking in the soft rain naked or is it the rain that makes
his shirt transparent

The boy in the iron cot is he asleep or still
fingering the springs underneath
Did you honestly believe three lives could be complete
The bottle of green liquid on the sill is it real
The bottle on the peeling sill is it filled with green
Or is the liquid an illusion of fullness

How summer's children turn into fish and rain softens men
How the elements of summer nights bid us to get down with each other on
the unplaned floor

And this feels painfully beautiful whether or not
it will change the world one drop

From Mojave Ghost:

Oh no. I see suddenly
that what I've caught in my trap
is the favorite hunting dog
of the God of Excoriation.

And everything is scarcely moving
like the mirage of a lake.

No one bears tragedy. It holds you in place.

Indisputable, they say. Two
plus two equals four. As though
reason unlocks truth,
the logic of the universe. But
for some, two plus two
equals many. Which isn't less true.

To reach for a world
that is out of reach.

What seest thou else in the dark backward?

At this point, I pause in my reading. The sparkles and greens of Wright’s Luciferian poem, “Morning Star”, interpose themselves, mid-page, disrupting the flow. And so I quote from the poem by Wright, if only to banish it so that I can return to the question and its “dark backward”:

Morning Star

This isn't the end. It simply
cannot be the end. It is a road.
You go ahead coatless, light-
soaked, more rutilant than
the road. The soles of your shoes
sparkle. You walk softly
as you move further inside
your subject. It is a living
season. The trees are anxious
to be included. The car with fins
beams through countless
oncoming points of rage and need.
The sloughed-off cells
under our bed form little hills
of dead matter. If the most sidereal
drink is pain, the most soothing
clock is music. A poetry
of shine could come of this.
It will be predominantly
green. You will be allowed
to color in as much as you want
for green is good
for the teeth and the eyes.

(I suspect Gander knew Wright’s ghosts well, and befriended them, including the shade of Frank Stanford whose death compelled Wright to reckon with loss, poetry, and inheritance early in her life.)

Returning to the next words in Mojave Ghost, repeating three lines as well as the italicized question:

To reach for a world
that is out of reach.

What seest thou else in the dark backward?

Though no one calls, I look back again.

Which is when. Which is when I see you.

Repetition. A slant rhyme linking Gander’s “when” to Wright’s “again” in a different poem where she offers a question and punctuates with a period:

how does the cat continue
to lick itself from toenail to tailhole.
And how does a body break
bread with the word when the word
has broken. Again. And. Again.

Poetry has always sought conversation and risked misinterpretation. It is often accused of metaphysics. And yet it continues tilting its ear to the Aeolian, lest it miss a shade or a form. But this porousness and permeability is what lures us listen to Gander’s speaker, and study each syllable for sibilance or sibyl:

Glancing up from the page to acknowledge
no one there. Which is only
one of your forms.

Your voice, a rapture of silence. Incessant
immanence.

I look away. I look
back. And all has changed.

Like a moth hitting the windshield.

A lit cigarette tossed from a car
bursting into sparks along the dark road.

I recall the human event
of you turning your face
toward me for the first time. How
many lives before I fail to see it so clearly?

There are times when, in our mind at least,
we must swim back upstream
to where the love originated.

That it might be what it was and is again.
In bed and out.

Because all that is in me is in your eyes.
You, who are the discharge of my singularity.

I kept looking for better words to describe the infinitely-immediate music of Mojave Ghost. So I carried it on a trip to Rhode Island and let it meet snow. And I read the lines below aloud as the airplane rattled through crosswinds. And I copied them onto a postcard.

Tonight, I give up and elect to admire what it invests in the language of poetry. And so I close with an excerpt from one of Wright’s poems followed by a few lines from page 31 of Gander’s Ghost and leave the two to continue their dialogue:

WRIGHT

Believe me I am not being modest when I
admit my life doesn’t bear repeating. I
agreed to be the poet of one life,
one death alone. I have seen myself
in the black car. I have seen the retreat
of the black car.

GANDER

Narrative, you say, is just one way of navigating time.

And those perceptions culled
by the restraints of narrative
become available to other trajectories.

Meanwhile, the future blows toward us without handholds.
It is a gaping. An already. A maw.

What happens when the mind is no longer a place of duration?

If you want to resuscitate your destiny, you joked
early in our relationship, start with the present. Which
is when, for the first time, I took in the resolute
openness of your face.

*

C. D. Wright, “Against the Encroaching Grays” (Poetry Daily)
— “Alla Breve Loving”
— “Approximately Forever” (as shared by Matthew Leger)
— Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (Copper Canyon Press)
— “Everyone in their car needs love…”
— “Everything Good between Men and Women” (Divas of Verse)
— “Flame”
— “Floating Trees”
— “Hotels”
— “In A Word, A World”
— “Jean Valentine, Abridged”
— “Lake Echo, Dear” (Read A Little Poetry)
— “My Dear Conflicted Reader…”
— “Obscurity and Selfhood”
— “only the crossing counts” (Divas of Verse)
— “Our Dust” (Divas of Verse)
— “Poem in Which Every Other Line is a Falsehood”
— “Scratch Music”
— “The Night Before the Sentence Is Carried Out”
— “The Secret Life of Musical Instruments”
— “This Couple”
— “What Keeps” (Poetry Daily)
Forrest Gander, Mojave Ghost (New Directions)
Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, “Relative Poetics: On C.D. Wright, Appropriation, and the Decentered Self” (Post 45)

C. D. Wright, excerpted from Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

Globolo.

Gift of the Book

lights go off
all over
rhode island
everyone falls
into bed
I stay awake
reading
rereading
the long-awaited
prose
of your
body
stunned
by the hunger

C. D. Wright

Kapaneus (inscribed in Etruscan letters as Capne) struck by Zeus' thunderbolt.
Carnelian scarab. Etruscan, from Populonia, ca. 480–45 BCE. Plethoras.

GLOBOLO. As in globular. Inclined towards rotundity. In the 4th-3rd century BCE, Etruscans perfected globolo-style carvings useing rounded drill bits in varying sizes to carve figures into carnelian. Carnelian is the color of raw carne in romanian or maybe Latin. I’m staring at one side of a scarab gemstone with the carving of a dog in globo-style. The other side gives me a simple scarab beetle.Two-sided gemstone carvings served as seals for the Etruscans. There are two sides to everything including sealant which reminds me of a letter Philip Guston wrote to Ross Feld in September 1979, as if opening the whole symphony with a confession— “I don’t — can’t — write letters anymore — am writing this one in blood.” Dashes make the blood splatter over the walls and the linoleum and yet Guston said Feld’s letter had hit him like an earthquake. I remember wondering if one was coming as I walked along a shore in Santa Monica twenty years ago. “A miracle . . . that all you say — every word, matches my own sensations and thoughts,” Guston muttered. Look, I’ll say it, he continues in this letter — “You are Valery — Proust, and I must be Cezanne.” We are always the icons in our early notebooks the eldest daydreams come back to rouse us at our best. We crotchet these selves for the pleasures recuperated in the words and images of others. I dream of my mother with two paper airplanes folded near her head.

A poem for the year of the horse.

As found in Bianca Stone’s The Near and Distant World (Tin House Press)— with apologies for the rinky-dinky quality of the recording and the bad pixelation and (of course) the putrid billionaires who rule our governments in the name of personal profit.

Larry Levis: For love of immanence.

“The moment of writing is not an escape, however; it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it.”

At one point in March 2024, I copied these words into a yellow notebook. It was the spring of Larry Levis; azaleas aching to bud, stammering possible colors in the margins of former journals. I remember thinking spring would destroy me, as it does annually, gutting me with its flushes and fevers, distracting me from the needs of surrounding mammals. Each day lengthening by inches of light. Moths moving like nocturnes near the doors. And Levis’ poems garlanding the floor of the porch with their gentleness…

WOUND

I’ve loved you
as a man loves an old wound
picked up in a razor fight

on a street nobody remembers.
Look at him:
even in the dark he touches it gently.

Like the ravish of spring, Levis seasons his stanzas with unremitting tenderness for life, the sap-work of being. I return often to his “My Story in a Late Style of Fire,” for the momentum it accrues as it winds down the page, working the space between the biography and the apologia:

I also had laughter, the affliction of angels & children.
Which can set a whole house on fire if you’d let it. And even then
You might still laugh to see all of your belongings set you free
In one long choiring of flames that sang only to you—
Either because no one else could hear them, or because
No one else wanted to. And, mostly, because they know.

… and for the inflammatory, unforgettable scherzo:

One of the flames, rising up in the scherzo of fire, turned
All the windows blank with light, & if that flame could speak,

… and for how Levis circles the figure of Billie Holiday, a talismanic figure that animated his jazz pantheon, jazz being the musical form that Levis deployed and studied for its repetitions and returns and metaphysical resonances.

“My Story in a Late Style of Fire” is a self-portrait that leaps from the canvas like the face in Caravaggio’s convex shield, occupying the continuous present of poetic address. Yet its speaker takes leave of the reader with an embrace, a likening as bright as it is critical:

I know this isn’t much. But I wanted to explain this life to you, even if
I had to become, over the years, someone else to do it.
You have to think of me what you think of me. I had
To live my life, even its late, florid style. Before
You judge this, think of her. Then think of fire,
Its laughter, the music of splintering beams & glass,
The flames reaching through the second story of a house
Almost as if to—mistakenly—rescue someone who
Left you years ago. It is so American, fire. So like us.
Its desolation. And its eventual, brief triumph.

Brief, it is. Brief as the blooming set to a season. And what literary form turns this brevity to face vastness? Poetry.

Early in life, the gazer within commits the hand to grapple with traces. Poetry is the space he commits to inhabit, as Levis explains in “Autobiography”:

. . . when I was sixteen, I decided one night, to try to write a poem. When I was finished I turned out the light. I told myself that if the poem had one good line in it I would try to be a poet. And then I thought, no, you can't say “try.” You will either be a poet, and become a better and better one, or you will not be a poet. The next morning I woke and looked at what I'd written. It was awful. I knew it was awful. But it had one good line. One. All the important decisions in my life were made in that moment.

“One.”

Either you will or you won’t.

The once-upon-a-teen in me recognized a trajectory upon reading “The Poet At Seventeen”. The poem’s speaker dallies across an originary landscape without seeking to establish an origin in the calligraphy of resonance between the touch left on the billiards and “The trees, wearing their mysterious yellow sullenness / Like party dresses. And parties I didn’t attend.”

Levis narrows in on the significance of fingerprints in another poem, allowing an image to do the work of touching. I’m thinking of how a prefigurative “later” can be sweetened by the stone-scented dolor that straddles the span of his enjambments in “Those Graves in Rome”. The speaker imagines a fingerprint on a hotel barrister linking up with the name of a child who died of malaria long long ago in Rome in this speculative act known as metaphor:

weathered stone still wears
His name—not the way a girl might wear
The too large, faded blue workshirt of
A lover as she walks thoughtfully through
The Via Fratelli to buy bread, shrimp,
And wine for the evening meal with candles &
The laughter of her friends, & later the sweet
Enkindling of desire; but something else, something
Cut simply in stone by hand & meant to last
Because of the way a name, any name,
Is empty. And not empty. And almost enough.

Like that promise to save the poem in the name of one good line, Levis committed his words to their shadows, articulated by life’s tremulous conjunctions, its hesitations, its inconclusive hopes sparkling through the nearly’s and almost’s — “Is empty. And not empty. And almost enough.”

Maybe the presence of Levis’ younger selves is what lends his poems that particular texture of innocence (for lack of a better word) I associate with his speakers? Not blamelessness. Not purity. Something closer to motion, as in this splendid sentence from “Adolescence”:

And if death is an adolescent, closing his eyes to the music
On the radio of that passing car,
I think he does not know his own strength.

And what does the poet know?

How does he know it?

Contra the linear epics of empire, Levis eschews grandiosity for a tone and texture that subverts of the military decorum of officialdom. If he reminds me of the love-driven heresies committed to text by the Roman erotic elegists, it is because he lingers there, in the otium of elegiac, as with “Elegy for Whatever Had a Pattern in It”:

There is a blueprint of something never finished, something I'll never
Find my way out of, some web where the light rocks, back & forth,
Holding me in a time that's gone, bee at the windowsill & the cold

Coming back as it has to, tapping at the glass.

… or “Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand”. (I should add that Tom Andrews wrote an unforgettable Wittgensteinian essay in dialogue with Levis’ elegies titled “The World As L. Found It”.)

None has been so brazenly “wrong” as Levis in his poems — or so earnest in declaring it. One glimpses his “back against the oak” in “The Crimes of the Shade Trees” . . .

One meets them in the lowercase of “bible” demoted to improper noun, as well the wrangle of a difficult relationship with his father, as given in “Winter Stars”:

And for years I believed
That what went unsaid between us became empty,
And pure, like starlight, & that it persisted.

I got it all wrong.
I wound up believing in words the way a scientist
Believes in carbon, after death.

Literalism was lost on Levis. As was the fine art of disavowal. He holds his faults as close as his virtues in the self-portrait. There is an urge to Ars in Levis’ texts that calls to to mind something Terence Hayes once said in an early interview:

“Shaft and the Enchanted Shoe Factory” asks what kind of language (the shoes are a metaphor for language) should one wear into the world and do battle. That is part of what I'm interested in as a poet: how language can be worn and changed. Which is to say, I have very little interest in establishing a fixed style or subject matter. The Shaft poem is an ars poetica because it reflects my own quest for language. I'm very interested in wearing Larry Levis on one foot and Harryette Mullen on the other. Or on another day—in another poem- Gwendolyn Brooks and Frank O'Hara. Perhaps this quest is part of being a young poet. I hope not. I'd like to think I'd never be comfortable wearing the same shoes. Reading provides an infinite number of shoes and paths.

How to describe the surface tension of end-stopped lines like the one in “Map” — “At night I lie still like Bolivia.” — picking up the background noise and static electricity in the softer parts of the room?

Addressing the things that stir him, Levis turns the poem to face them, as with the “First Architect of the jungle & Author of pastel slums, / Patron Saint of rust” in “Twelve Thirty One Nineteen Ninety Nine” — and then layers rhetorical questions before orienting his eye to the small, nameless characters of the small town, calling them forward:

Goodbye, little century.
Goodbye, riderless black horse that trots
From one side of the street to the other,
Trying to find its way
Out of the parade.

The “riderless black horse” may have better answers than the conclusivity we crave. Levis burrows into these pockets where light is absented; he studies silhouettes and reflective surfaces; he garners luminescence from mirrors. The metaphysics of prom night bubbles up in “Toad, Hog, Assassin, Mirror”:

At the other end of the hedgerows someone attractive is laughing, either at them, or with a lover during sexual intercourse. So it is like prom night? Yes. But what is the end of prom night? The end of prom night is inside the rodent.

Lines from his poems appear in Nicole Sealey’s “Cento for the Night I Said 'I Love You’” as well as Simon Meunch’s “Wolf Cento” — which I offer in full below, out of sheer love for this ancient form:

[Aside: Notice how the use of a large space between words in the 6th line —- “leaves a trace    leaves an abscess” — adds breath and visual interest to that particular line. Meunch’s “Wolf Cento” is a vestigial sonnet, and it maintains a relationship to that 14-line length, so that spacing might also be the result of a divided quotation, or the desire to not add an extra line between the two. Hewing close to the erstwhile sonnet asks Muench to refuse the line break. These are the compositional and structural choices involved in cento-making, particularly when one is playing with multiple forms simultaneously, as the poet does in this poem.]

*

Jacques J. Rancourt wrote a splendid tribute to Levis’ legacy, noting “a catechistic logic to Levis’s poems: memory, confession, penance” as well as the prevalence of “liturgical vocabulary: loss, testify, darkening, late, exile.” What caught my eye was Rancourt’s insight on Levis’ ampersand:

This shift toward the ampersand came at a pivotal moment in Levis’s career. While his first three books offer glimmers of the poet he’d become, it isn’t until Winter Stars—when the ampersand first appears—that his vision and style crystallize into the virtuoso work we know today. The ampersand embodies one of Levis’s signatures: yoking together two surprising ideas or dyads to complicate and expand each through their pairing. Take lines like “the missing & innumerable stars” from “Anastasia & Sandman,” or “having to imagine everything/In detail, & without end” from “Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire,” or “My father died, & I was still in love” from “In the City of Light,” or “The morning will be bright, & wrong” from “Gossip in the Village.” But if we zoom out, this technique is also emblematic of how he fuses different recursive narrative threads, images, and motifs across his long poems and collections. Consider, for example, how the phrase “the sprawl of a wave,” a shape whose image mirrors the curling glyph of the ampersand itself, echoes across all of his later books. The ampersand, quicker than the coordinating conjunction, accelerates the pairing, blurring their edges until they deepen each other.

Rancourt expresses the beauty of Levis’ ampersand perfectly.

I made a note of it, and then took Radu for a walk on this night of the Chinese New Year.

Amid the shadows of alley cats dilated by street lamps, I mulled what prevents me from hearing Levis’ liturgical references as Catholic. Something about his fluency with negation feels closer to mysticism and the kenosis of Simone Weil, threads of the sacred that hover at the rim of the heretical. Formally, Levis gravitated across poetic forms and lineation strategies; his range includes a poem composed entirely of tercets (like “A Study of Three Crows”) as well as the long lines of his lengthier pieces. He can’t be easily classed as part of a particular school.

If one thing remains consistent across his writing, it is Levis’ unrelenting attention to light —- to light and shadow, the eye transfixed by chiaroscuro. I can’t find a poem that misses this shading, and it often determines the perspectival decisions in his ekphrastic poems like “Edward Hopper, Hotel Room, 1931”:

You think of curves, of the slow, mild arcs
Of harbors in California: Half Moon Bay,
Malibu, names that seem to undress
When you say them, beaches that stay white
Until you get there. Still, you’re only thirty-five,
And that is not too old to be a single woman,
Traveling west with a purse in her gray lap

Until all of Kansas dies inside her stare...

Edward Hopper, Hotel Room (1931)

Edward Hopper painted countless unpeopled landscapes, but when a poet wants to talk about loneliness, they usually refer to one of Hopper's paintings of humans in a room or a diner. Unlike the field or the mountain, a room is a space created by humans to protect and nurture what is human. Rooms imply safety, security, relationality— but Hopper's rooms give us humans inches away from each other, incapable of connecting. 

Light touches both.

Light, or the way light is depicted, can connect figures and subjects in art. Light enters a room through windows, doors, crevices, etc.; it speaks at a distance by creating its own characters, namely, shadows. 

The shadow is a being created entirely by light. 

Between dusk and sunset, the golden hour descends, running its gilded hands over skin, burnishing human eyes and hair, as if to warm them from the inside before leaving them to vanish in darkness. 

Sunlight covers the constructed human environments as well as the given, natural ones. In his early years, Hopper believed that sunlight was a hue of white rather than yellow. 

“Utter whiteness is scary: it can be erotic in an incredible way, and one which seems contradictory— eros and terror," Larry Levis said in an interview with David Wojahn. And  "nobody knows how to make light work on skin in its utter whiteness the way Hopper does," he added. Levis suspected Hopper "wanted to paint sunlight on the side of walls" more than he wanted to paint characters or people.

Oil and charcoal on cotton duck— the materials Richard Diebenkorn used to create Ocean Park #17 (1968) — convene in the textures and surfaces of Levis’ “Ocean Park #17, 1968: Homage to Diebenkorn”.

Again, light meets Levis’ yellows in interstitial space of remembrance:

And the inextricable candor of doubt by which Diebenkorn,
One afternoon, made his presence known

In the yellow pastels, then wiped his knuckles with a rag — 

             Are one — are the salt, the nowhere & the cold — 

The entwined limbs of  lovers & the cold wave’s sprawl.

Unlit, this presence of “no one” in “Unfinished Poem” . . .

Here are all the shadows that have fallen on
no one in particular

The starkness of the immediate in “La Strada”. . .

This life & no other. The flesh so innocent it walks along
The road, believing it, & ceases to be ours.

The way light reverberates through the rooms of Levis’ life like the gold leaf of illuminated manuscripts, hallowing particular moments and bringing them into the sharp relief, as with the final stanzas of “The City of Light”:

A body wishes to be held, & held, & what
Can you do about that?

Because there are faces I might never see again,
There are two things I want to remember
About light, & what it does to us.

Her bright, green eyes at an airport— how they widened
As if in disbelief;
And my father opening the gate: a lit, & silent

City.

The promise and premise of brightness across multiple poems . . .

GOSSIP IN THE VILLAGE

I told no one, but the snows came, anyway.
They weren't even serious about it, at first.
Then, they seemed to say, if nothing happened,
Snow could say that, & almost perfectly.

The village slept in the gunmetal of its evening.
And there, through a thin dress once, I touched
A body so alive & eager I thought it must be
Someone else's soul. And though I was mistaken,

And though we parted, & the roads kept thawing between snows
In the first spring sun, & it was all, like spring,
Irrevocable, irony has made me thinner. Someday, weeks

From now, I will wake alone. My fate, I will think,
Will be to have no fate. I will feel suddenly hungry.
The morning will be bright, & wrong.

The constant attention to lighting, as if light itself could forge the line break in poems “A Letter”:

And the emptiness of dusk. Someone put it
Crudely: to fuck is to know. If that is true,
There’s a corollary: the soul is a canary sent Into the mines.

There is a Latin phrase commonly used on ancient graves (shortened as STTL) which catches the light that emanates from Larry Levis— it is a different form of light, a lightness that doesn’t resolve in transcendence.

Sit tibi terra levis — or, May the earth be light to you, Larry Levis. May the immanence of your lights continue speaking as lyric.

Larry Levis, from The Gazer Within

*

Billie Holiday, “Good Morning Heartache”
Billie’s Best, the Verve album released in 1992 that played as I watched the first sunrise of 1993
Edward Byrne, “The Life and Legacy of Larry Levis” (Valparaiso Poetry Review)
Edward Hopper, Hotel Room, 1931
Elissa Gabbert on Levis’ Swirl Vortex (New York Times)
Jacques J. Rancourt, “Destroying Time: On the Lasting Legacy of Larry Levis” (Poetry)
Larry Levis, Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems edited by David St. John (Graywolf Press)
Larry Levis, excerpts from “Some Notes on the Gazer Within” (PDF)
Larry Levis, “My Story in a Late Style of Fire” (PDF)
Larry Levis, “Elegy for Whatever Had a Pattern in It” (PDF)
Larry Levis, “In the City of Light” (PDF)
Larry Levis, “Winter Stars” (PDF)
Larry Levis, “Linnets” (Blackbird)
Larry Levis, “Readings in French” (courtesy of Maureen Thorson)
Larry Levis, “Edward Hopper, Hotel Room, 1931”
Michael Thomsen, “Anatomy of a Deathwish” (Berfrois)
Norman Dubie, “A Genesis Text for Larry Levis, Who Died Alone” (Nashville Review)
Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #17, 1968 (Stanley Museum of Art)
Shara Lessly, “Beautiful, Hopeless, and Wrong” (Adroit Journal)
Talia Marshall, “This Is the Way He Walked Into the Darkest, Pinkest Part of the Whale and Cried Don’t Tell the Others” (Poetry)
Terence Hayes and Charles Henry Rowell, “‘The Poet in the Enchanted Shoe Factory’: An Interview with Terrance Hayes” (Callaloo)
Tom Andrews, “The World As L. Found It” (Blackbird)

Szilárd Borbély's Berlin-Hamlet.

Above the cloud with its shadow is the star with its light.

— Pythagoras, as quoted by Bin Ramke in the poem titled “Lighthouse”

o crowd of my lived life

— Bin Ramke

Kenneth L. Callahan, Conversation, ca. 1944–1945

In between airports and beds this week, I returned to Szilárd Borbély’s Berlin-Hamlet, as translated with eloquent tenderness by Ottilie Mulzet… Perhaps there is no better way to revisit Walter Benjamin’s arcades than from the alienated ghostscape of the present. Borbély’s arcades are haunted by what Benjamin’s strolls could not yet see; the past meets the unstable present in its lacunae and absences.

As mentioned on the book’s jacket, Berlin-Hamlet strolls through Berlin as if it were 19th-century Paris, filling the air with “disembodied scraps of written text, remnants as ghostly as their authors” —- including Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Attila József, Erno Szép, Paul Celan (given to us as Anschel) and others. Images of post-1989 Berlin and its invisible guest-workers (Borbély mentions “Slavs and Romanians” at one point) are overlaid with paraphrases and repurposed quotations from a history haunted by the Shoah. The epistolary nature of these poems is fragmented, unfinished, en-route and yet somehow failing to be delivered.

39. [Fragment VIll]

I can no longer bear the aggressiveness of poetry,
and I do not wish my deeds to be investigated.

I would like to be an opened knife: the inscrutable.
A razor-wielding murderer. With a tongue oozing flattery,
who drips

poison into your ear. Who makes you mute, so you cannot
scream. As the guards turn into the corridor,

I count five steps. Now is the time to cry out. Before
they throw themselves on me. Then in the stillness, there
are no sounds.

43. [Allegory VIl]

The “heart which is free of all base thoughts,”
already having surpassed “the borders of beyond”
and gazing back upon language, upon that costume
which was its body, the tapestry of speech,
*
which, as now it seems, has already departed,
without bidding farewell, and without looking back,
in its tread the voice of all that is irrevocable,
perhaps the misapprehension of things uttered,
*
or perhaps, on the contrary, the certitude
of silence, that strength which destroys,
and that something which is withheld,
until now unperceived and unthought,
*
like everything which is infinity's antipode,
the disavowal, that is, of time and of space,
at once the boundary and the unbounded,
which exists in this very word,
*
but not even here, for there is no looking back, for
there is no backwards and there is no was, and not even
memory to disturb his attention,
no telling what will occupy it now.

William Anastasi, Without Title (Bus Drawing) (recto); (Subway Drawing) (verso)

49. [Epilogue II]

[i]

For the dead are expected to know the path
above the precipice of the everyday. When
they leave the lands of despair, and depart
towards a kingdom far away and unknown,
which is like music. Swelling, a solitary
expectation everywhere present. This music
does not break through the walls. It taps gently.
It steals across the crevices. Silently it creeps,
and cracks open the nut hidden deep within the coffer.
It sets in motion the glass marble believed lost,
it plays with it. Suddenly, the cut crystal glasses
begin to crack in the china cabinet. And the chord
bursts apart.

[ii]

God's being is an open box, filled
with the dead. Thrown upon each other
they lie, and look far away
into the distance. They do not close their eyes, even
for a moment. God cowers and trembles
in a remote corner. Eyelashes convulsively
knotted together. In a thin
whimpering voice he cries.

[iii]

God's being is an open box, filled
with toys. Sometimes children sit around him,
they rummage through the box. Every toy is an
enigma. God sits among them, and
watches. He too is a child, who searches
through the toys. When he finds something,
he is happy. He turns it over a bit
in his hands. Then throws it back.

George Grosz, The Upheaval of Nothingness (1948)

In closing, I leave you with an excerpt from Bin Ramke’s poem, “What Is Memory A Name For, The Word”, which skims through the dust of this constellation for me, and asks (again) what temporality is given to us:

Putting back together the pieces
into a new shape the mind minds its own
business through the night the day

winds like a clock. Like what a clock
once was, a thing of parts clicking
into place time and time again.

Time and materials he called his book
his plumbing manual for leaks and
living with them. Sleeping to their

timing; clepsydra is a name for it.
Thief of time, thief of water, waste
of night the shape of an hour-

glass refracts the light of Venus
which is to say glass bends parts
of Venus the star the name of

(The remainder of Ramke’s poem can be found in the April 2025 issue of Conjunctions.)

*

Bin Ramke, “What Is Memory A Name For, The Word” (Conjunctions)
George Grosz, The Upheaval of Nothingness (1948)
Kenneth L. Callahan, Conversation, ca. 1944–1945
László Bedecs, “An interview with Szilárd Borbély” (Asymptote Journal)
Szilárd Borbély, Berlin-Hamlet t. by Ottilie Mulzet (NYRB Poets)

Nate and Alina, with respect to earaches.

ALINA STEFANESCU AND NATHAN KNAPP IN CONVERSATION 

12/14/2004

A One-Act Play That Is Categorically Opposed to So-Called ‘Autofiction” & Anything Resembling the Metaphysics of Earache

SCENE [Alina’s porch. A cool December night in the darkest depths of Alabamania. A party just ended. Whiskey in two glasses and wine in one. The smoke of many cigarettes mingled with rising woodsmoke. A’s man has just stoked up the fire in the outdoor porch chimney. Those remaining gird up their loins, settle into outdoor chairs.]

NATE: All right, getting into serious literary conversation now.

ALINA: I loved your tweet awhile back that mentioned that three words that you never use are trauma, traumatic, and creative. It made me think of Parul Seghal’s essay on the trauma plot—

NATE: Are we recording now? That sounded like it was your serious voice.

ALINA: I was curious about why you mentioned those three words. 

NATE: Such an easy question. Right off the bat. 

ALINA: That's all I've got. 

NATE: I don't know, I try to avoid using the word trauma because it feels like it has had all the edges worn off of it in our culture. One of my best friends is a therapist, my wife is a therapist. I live in that sort of intellectual milieu a lot of the time. Trauma comes up so easily that it doesn't seem to have much if any meaning anymore, as a word. A lot of the students that I encounter where I teach, which is close to a military base, have served tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan or both, and when they talk about PTSD, a lot of the time they're talking about something very different than the way that the word gets thrown around these days. As far as my dislike of the use of “creative,” I was talking about how it makes me angry when it gets used as a noun, not as an adjective. I feel like the idea of “the creative” is just another way to devalue actually making art. Maybe this is a bad answer to the question.

ALINA: [stares at a moth moving in circles and tracing an aureole in the space above Nate’s head] Amazing.  

NATE: Maybe I’m too aware of the fact of being recorded to actually give a proper answer—

ALINA: —because I'm holding the recorder up to you. [Alina puts down the recorder.] So now it doesn't feel like you’re on trial!

NATE: It infuriates me when language is used as a mask for reality. When language is used as a mask for what is actually being talked about. I think I mentioned this on twitter too recently, the way that AI use is talked about as this alternate to doing your own writing when it's really just a new version of plagiarism. But while there’s no profit in the word plagiarism, there may be in this new thing called “AI use.”

ALINA: I’m hearing the word “creative”  as a rebrand here?  

NATE: Yeah, it's a rebranding. You know you can fire everybody who used to actually be creative and replace that person with a creative. This is also how a university can replace everybody who actually has the kind of job where they teach a couple of classes, and then have enough time do their own artistic work. To get around actually having to fucking deal with real artists, who are increasingly a kind of anathema in our culture, you instead prioritize creatives, who as a rule aren’t interested in this thing called art. The creative serves capital and that’s it. I've been reading Chateaubriand’s memoirs lately, and could help noticing how he mentions the word casualties being used about people killed in the French Revolution. I may be remembering this incorrectly, but it inspired me to go look at where that word came from. Casualty, a word for a killed or wounded person with the word casual buried in it. I wanted to know how we got from killed to casual-ty.

ALINA: Right— ‘collateral damage.’

NATE:  It's much easier to say we suffered eighty-nine casualties today than we had eighty-nine people were fucking ripped apart and killed today. Easier to say eight Gazans died yesterday of malnutrition or a so-called accidental so-called airstrike than to say four babies and their mothers were slaughtered in their beds by the Israeli war machine. This kind of debasement of language both covers over and leads to the debasement of humanity. It’s disturbing. On a much different note but in the same ballpark when it comes to the use of language, it’s easier for a university president to use the term AI use than it is to talk about how plagiarism is running rampant on college campuses. A creative can benefit from AI use—potentially—but an artist can’t. If they have any self-respect, they know it.

ALINA: In my late teens, I visited the Vietnam Memorial to DC.  A few men were sitting in lawn chairs next to a sign: Vietnam Vets Against the War. The vets led me to Howard Zinn. Those names on the wall trembled, shifted, became lacunae about empire. Each name had a person buried inside it. Nobody spoke of them as people who had put themselves in a position where the only thing they could do without being declared a traitor or an enemy of a nation was to keep going forward. Among the stone monuments, I felt the power of systems, and heroism, exemplarity, resume-building . . .  What we construct as “success’ became horrifying. To love the world, I had to become a pesso-optimist. 

NATE: What you're saying about these names and the power of names and naming reminds me of something I write about in my novel. One of the scenes in Daybook is about going with my kid to the Confederate cemetery at the battlefield in Franklin for the Confederate dead. Instead of proper headstones with names and dates—in part because such a spectacular amount of Confederate soldiers were killed in that battle in the space of little over an hour, well over a thousand men just absolutely mowed down like grass facing a lawnmower blade, this necessitated first burying them where they fell and then reburying them later a few hundred yards away—this particular cemetery just has blocks in the ground with initials on them, grouped around the various states that the soldiers were from. There are no names, and the starkness of that is striking when you walk through that cemetery. I don’t write about this particular aspect in the book, but I later learned that one of the soldiers buried there was a Chinese immigrant who fought for the south. Not the kind of Confederate soldier that first comes to mind. But he was a person, a person caught up in an enormous and doomed fight that is usually framed in the popular imagination as being a pitched conflict between two very clear ideological perspectives, one based on enslaving black people and one based on the idea that all people should be free. While there is definitely some truth in that way of looking at the war as a war, to do so ignores the fact that individuals took all the risks for one reason or another. A Chinese immigrant would seem to make a very unlikely Confederate soldier—but for one reason or another, he was one. 

ALINA: You know, we have a powerful need the belong. When I was young, my parents would put up the flag a day earlier and take it down a day later than everyone in the neighborhood for the Fourth of July. 

NATE: Why?

ALINA: Because they were defectors and they needed to prove that they were American enough. And when you mentioned these immigrant names,I think about the longing to be “of”, the hunger for belonging. We seek validation through this idea that we can belong to a group. And when we talk about nationalism  or Trumpism or ethnostate ideologies–  we open the darkest box of the human heart. How do we as writers—your book is so much about the loneliness of the writer—well, what's up with us? 

NATE: I’d much rather you answer.

ALINA:  I’ll pass on this dildo, to paraphrase William Gass.

NATE: I don't know about this dildo. Can you rephrase the question? What's up with us in which sense?

ALINA: How do we resist the urge to belong? Like, what is it about in your book when I read…when I read the desire, your book? And this is related to the difference between minor literature versus the mainstream, because I think bestsellers want to belong and do belong and create the conditions for belonging and mimic the terms of belonging—

NATE: Sure, but about the dildo—

ALINA: —whether religion or sports team or fan culture or  whatever sense. Your book doesn't give us a solution for belonging, doesn't ever belong, the speaker doesn't ever belong, and I'm interested in what it is that enables or creates the capacity in a human being to give up on that. 

NATE: I don't know. I don't really feel like I ever have belonged. Not that I think I’m special in that sense. Almost everybody feels this lack on some some level—and I’m curious, too, about some of the ways in which you talk about this in My Heresies, like the poem where you talk about the rapture/Left Behind craze and how someone tells one of your kids the antichrist will be Romanian. 

ALINA: Ha ha. Poetry is a constellating medium of thought for me. I was thinking about how Tim LaHaye and Jerry whatever, the authors of the Left Behind series, really testified to literature’s capacity to shape social change and ‘revelate’ new interpretations of scriptures in the novel. Left Behinders believe they are “chosen” – and this idea of chosenness is the source of every originary ethno-supremacist myth in the Balkans – so you have one group that has been chosen to occupy a particular geographic land by some transcendent being. . .  and who can argue with a god? No evidence or reality can challenge that fiction. Social conditions aren’t simply reflected in culture representations. Social conditions are also developed and normalized by those fictive representations. The dynamic between facts and representations isn’t cold or set: it’s hot. It keeps moving. So, how do specific social representations become influential and internalized? Publishers, academics, patrons, and institutions pad the influence pathways. The media monetizes the performatives and passes the new myth along. The story is absorbed until that description becomes a usable fiction, one that finds recognition more broadly and becomes heritable. The birth of the national “self-image” competes with the religious icon in art. Look, your antichrist is the story you tell about the story that makes you feel “safe.” But feeling ‘safe’ isn’t compatible with thinking. Since Dante, the poet has been tasked with describing the inferno. I pledged myself to describe the corridors of the present through the eschatological hunger that constructs hell? 

 NATE: Are “the corridors of the present” where the dildo went?

ALINA: What dildo?

NATE: The one that you said belonged to William Gass.

ALINA: No, it is in New York now—paving the way for vital new work in the so-called corridors of the present. 

NATE: That is a tough one. Let us hope so.

ALINA: Yes. But you were talking about resisting the urge to belong.

NATE: Right. I’ve never been interested in it. The people that raised me weren't joiners and I’ve never been one either. Most of the people involved in any particular group or pursuit or scene are either profoundly mediocre in any case. As the old cliché goes, I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me, and I've always lived for the most part outside of the so-called literary community. For a long time I felt really angry about the fact that I couldn't sell my books even after I got an agent. It felt like New York wouldn't have me. 

ALINA: But was that anger good for you? As a writer?

NATE: Yeah it was, it was because it was like, okay, I'm going to do my own thing. 

ALINA: You gave up, you stopped trying—

NATE: Exactly. Stopped caring about it, stopped trying. But even in towns where I've lived—not the Capital L Literary Community, but the smaller ones, I've never really wanted to be a part of them either. No interest in being part of a group. And I think that goes back to the fact that I was raised in this very, very insular version of Christianity, where I was part of the group, and even that never felt good. 

ALINA: Do you think it's because you were aware of the conditions of being part of that group? 

NATE: Yeah, that they’re de-humanizing. The conditions to be a part of a group are always dehumanizing.

ALINA: [nods]

NATE: Which is the thing that brings me back to Gombrowicz over and over again because that's what he talks about. To be with other people in a group setting–to fit in–is to give up who you are. To deny who you are. Can’t avoid the suspicion, which definitely comes from my childhood in evangelicalism, that to truly become a functioning part of a scene or something would mean to cease to be myself. 

ALINA: This makes me think of my favorite book by Thomas Bernhard, My Prizes. 

NATE: I adore that book.

ALINA: The reason I love My Prizes even more than I love his memoir, which I love so much—

NATE: Gathering Evidence is my favorite of his!

ALINA:  When I read the memoirs about how much he loved his anarchist grandfather, I understood Bernhard completely, in some way. That said, My Prizes does an incredible job of pointing out exactly what it is in literary "community” that asks us to accede, to give up, to in a way to, um, to perjure ourselves, right? I think we forge—

NATE: Perjure?

ALINA: Yes. 

NATE: That’s an interesting word—

ALINA: I think we forge…hold on, let’s go back to your last name. Knapp. What did you say [before the play began] that it means in English? I think you said it refers to a blacksmith?

NATE: Sort of—it means to work with stone. 

ALINA: So to work with stone, to forge something, but to forge something also means to fake something. 

NATE: Well, in the original old English sense the sense is not to forge, but to make a tool. 

ALINA: To make a tool, right. My dad is a metallurgist, and he talked about forging steel a lot. I used to wonder if he knew it also meant forgery, or faking it? For me, as a child there was this physical love of language that gave me goosebumps when my dad said, “I forged this steel.” As a writer, were there moments in your young days when you recognized that your relationship to language was different from other people’s? 

NATE: Not my relationship to language, that came later. But my relationship to stories and the fun that could be had with them—that was very early on. That and the deliciousness of being in another person’s world, inside another person’s head, another person’s life. But my relationship to language in terms of being conscious of language itself came a lot later. But I say that in terms of a writer’s conscious relationship to language. My people on the mom's side where I grew up, in far southeastern Oklahoma, have one of the most particular ways of using the language that I know of, they speak in a dialect and accent that exists outside of the norm even for southern-leaning English speakers. When I first brought my to-be wife, who’s from the pacific northwest, to meet my grandfather, she could barely understand him.

ALINA: Wow. 

NATE: It's very particular. Or maybe I mean peculiar. It’s a variety of southern accent, I can imitate it later [thankfully, he did not –ed.], but I was aware early on of there being something interesting in the relationships that obtain in the sounds of words, because my dad, who came from a different part of the state, didn't speak with an accent and I don't speak with an accent—or at least for the most part no longer do. In any case, paying attention to language as a writer came a lot later. Long after my interest in storytelling, which is a bit odd to me now because I don’t particularly care about storytelling anymore except in the sense that one’s use of language in telling the story influences that story and vice versa. The one influences the other but language tends to arrive first.

ALINA: The wind is blowing in your hair. There’s no way the interview can convey the way the wind is blowing your hair right now. 

NATE: If you want it to be in the interview, you’re going to have to put it in [laughs]. Like at the beginning of the piece you could say something about the wind blowing—

ALINA: Like it was like a Bon Jovi video, but not—

NATE: I think if you describe it that way in the published interview I would come back down here to Birmingham and kill myself. In your house.

ALINA: [Laughs.]

ALINA:  Okay, but back in the 1900’s, there was a roundtable: Grace Paley talking to Donald Barthelme and Walker Percy, all three yapping about modern literature, or what it means to be modern, with  Donald and Walker complimenting each other. (Grace didn’t get to say much.) At one point, Percy said, um I really don't know anything at all, and Barthelme was like, yeah, me neither, and there was this moment where you could almost hear the audience’s horror that we were in the twentieth century and writers were failing to tell  us how to live the future. Does your writing aim to teach us how to live? 

NATE: No. 

ALINA: Why bother then? 

NATE: I am hostile to this question because I feel like it will show up in the interview. 

ALINA: It will. I promise.

NATE: Ugh.

ALINA: [waits].

NATE: I write because I have to. And because I become extremely unpleasant to my family if I don't. 

ALINA: Tell me more about that unpleasant part. Why are we like that? Why are we shitheads if we don't write, and also when it's not going well. What is wrong with us? 

NATE: I think maybe it's just the only really good part of us. I don't know if that's not true either. None of that stuff is true. 

ALINA: Will our kids hate us for it?

NATE: Probably. Hopefully. If we do it correctly, maybe, I don't know. But I feel like I'm giving bad answers. Do you think they will?

ALINA: I hope so. Part of me hopes so. But how can we know? And how can a “right” answer exist given the construction of good, which is pure pop and easy product for the Self-Help Industrial Complex. . You mentioned your wife was a therapist, which fascinated me because—

NATE: She was a therapist before she died. Yes. 

ALINA: What?

NATE: I said that because you mentioned her in the past tense. 

ALINA: Are you fucking with me here? 

NATE: [bahfaws…]

ALINA: What the pseudo did you just do?

NATE: [lights cigarette]

ALINA: Your wife is a therapist, Nate!

NATE: She is, that’s true.

ALINA: And that fascinated me because your writing in so many ways to me—or what I appreciate about it—is the way that it really debunks the value of the therapy both in this room [gestures around porch] and/or or history. I don't mean to start anything here.

NATE: Sure. 

ALINA: But as someone who has been told many times that she needs therapy [laughs maniacally]. Sorry [chuckles maniacally .] There’s no way to describe that laugh in an interview, is there?

NATE: Not unless we go to New York to find our friend.

ALINA: It is, alas, too far.

NATE: We don’t do this—writing, that is—to actually make ourselves feel better. Because it doesn't. And if there is any value in therapy or the kind of art that results in therapy, wouldn’t it make you feel better, at least eventually? The therapists in my life would probably hate that answer. I think that part of the trouble with therapy or the art that attempts to act therapeutically, is that both lead you to a set of easy answers about who you are and how you are, and I think the interesting thing about art is that, if it's any good, it leads you to places where you don't know the answers to those questions, and so you ask another question, and if the art is any good, it leads you to another question and it continues to befuddle you. So if there's anything that's wrong with the culture of therapy or art as therapy, it's that—the pursuit of and eventual arrival at answers. And so I think that good therapy if it exists, and I hope that it does, and good art, if it exists, and you can put that in italics [I did—ed.] and I hope that it does, if it is leading us anywhere, it's leading us into a further set of questions. I should also say that I think that my friend who’s a therapist would say that that’s exactly what they’re trying to do in therapy, though. 

ALINA: Which reminds me that Freud wanted psychoanalysis to be something that opened more doors than it closed. Reading Freud is like reading a story of someone who suddenly became beguiled by power, or proving that what he was doing was a science. And when he decided that it needed to be a science in order to be authoritative is when he stopped settling for questions. There is a relationship between closure and the articulation of definition, the urge to be definitive.  And this reminds me of what we see in narrativity, in the context of literature and life—this consistent discomfort with an incapacity for us to generate closure. There is no closure that isn’t a coffin. Closure is death. 

NATE: Well, life is run by idiots and so is literature. So, that makes a lot of sense. 

ALINA: You put “life” in quotation marks. In scare quotes.

NATE: I put life in quotes, because life is ultimately lived in the individual sense we talked about earlier. But not literature. Literature, in the publishing sense, really is run by idiots, don’t you think?

ALINA: Right. That’s why minor literature matters more. Because it risks more. It risks the lack of closure, and — in some cases — makes insatiability the condition of the text. There are so many levels of address within a single work, and that experience of polyphony in an echo-chamber thrills me. It massacres my brand! To live the selves one writes as a possibility, or as a foreclosure of expectation. We are never ‘finished,’ so to speak. Minor divines differently. 

NATE: I don't know, I write major literature. 

ALINA: You say that. What I love about minor literature is that it has no pretension to being major. Something happens when we want to become read by many. There is something that happens to the monumental arc, something that riddles the narrative, something that steps in the same river twice and hides the river in the flood of language. John Ashbery alluded to it in Three Poems, when he said “As soon as it was not looked at it ceased to exist.”

NATE: You write in My Heresies—this is one of my favorite pairs of lines in the book—that “Near the cost of knowing lies the sin / of being known.” I think part of what we’re doing when we write relates to this desire to be known and yet there’s a massive distance between the writer and the reader. And in some cases maybe we write not so much out of our desire to be known but rather out of our fear of being known. And you even call it, here, the sin of being known. Can you talk about how this relates to who you are as a poet and writer?

ALINA: You mean the fictions or the facts? There is a cicada near your sneaker and maybe I’m the orange notebook that tries to make Leo Bersani’s critique of “the culture of redemption” go to a drive-in movie with Heather Love’s insistence on maintaining “the imaginative function of criticism” alongside its critical function in order to resist the temptations of emptiness presented by politics of optimism. [picks up her orange notebook and starts flipping through it as Nate tries not to fall asleep] There, at the drive-in, when the culture of redemption goes to relieve itself in a Port-a-Potty, I am the Jesus that appears in that tomb for piss. “Noli me tangere” Jesus says to Mary Magdalene as she stands in the presence of his resurrected body. And what does Mary do with this secret? What did she feel in that moment when death unlooms itself from the world of evidence? According to my notebook self, Mary said: [reading directly from her notebook now as Nate plays with a dog toy] “Don’t touch me because I cannot be what you need. Don’t touch me because this touch will render me no longer real to you. Don’t touch because asking for verification of what you know as I stand here before you in my impossibility– which is also the truest form of me, the form that constitutes me– would be a betrayal of everything that exists between us, namely, the intimate relationship that makes it possible for you to see me now, a relationship permeated by longing and extraordinary trust. All beauty and tenderness inherent to longing is built on this unstable, impossible trust in the Other’s alterity.” [looks up from the notebook and cringes] But when the movie ends and I am no longer the notebook, then I’m simply another human in Alabama who can’t sleep because she desires Mary Magdalene and wants to be close to her, to be unsettled by her, and to feel more alive in this desire that hinges on encountering an Other so different and external to myself. This is what it would mean to eroticize historical alterity. The sin of being known is tangled in the sin of being and desiring and imagining. I just want to be the pen ruining the paper at the impossible drive-in.   

NATE: There are only two things that I want to do as an artist. I want to make people feel really bad—

ALINA: —Cheers. You did that for me. I felt awful. Let’s re-enter the river that began when I started recording this and you worried about giving a “bad answer.” 

NATE: And then I want to make them laugh about how bad they feel. That’s it. I don't want to teach anybody anything. 

ALINA: Don’t be sad, Nate. I learned things from Daybook, felt horrible, loved it. I can’t wait to stand by the ocean with Jesus and the philosophers in that scene from the forthcoming thing. It would be fabulous if it won a prize. 

[Glasses are refilled. New smokes lit. End scene.]

*
Emile Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist (t. by Trevor LeGassick and Salma Khadra Jayyusi)
François-Réne de Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1815–1830 (t. by Alex Andriesse)
John Ashbery, Three Poems
Parul Seghal, “The Case Against the Trauma Plot”
Nathan Knapp, Daybook
Thomas Bernhard, My Prizes: An Accounting (t. by Carol Janeway)
Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence: A Memoir including My Prizes
The Weird Show on “The new wave of collage”
Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, The Left Behind Series
Witold Gombrowicz, Diary (t. by Lillian Vallee)

40 ways of looking at similes.

“Something is absent, offered to you, perchance. A hole made in a poem; a poem made whole by a cut.”

– McKenzie Wark in a letter to Cybele

Boris Tishchenko, Requiem (1966), after Anna Akhmatova, for soprano, tenor and orchestra

1 - OFFICIALLY.

A simile is a figure of speech in which one thing is likened to another, in such a way as to clarify and enhance an image. It is an explicit comparison (as opposed to the metaphor, where the comparison is implicit) recognizable by the use of the words ‘like’ or ‘as.’

2 - ETYMOLOGICALLY.

“Simile” comes to English from the Latin similis, meaning like.

3 - NOTATIONALLY.

See Boris Tishchenko’s Requiem after Anna Akhmatova, for soprano, tenor and orchestra (1966), pictured above.

4 - COMPARATIVELY.

“Dreams resemble poems in their crucial mechanisms: compression, condensation, preference for metaphor to simile, and in how little time they take,” said William Matthews of the being shared by poems and dreams.

5 - PROVISIONALLY.

“A good simile refreshes the intellect,” said Ludwig Wittgenstein in the year 1929.

6 - ESOTERICALLY.

A “simile reveals more than what is already in that for which it has been chosen,” as Hans Blumenberg put it.

7 - TITULARLY.

Similes may glimmer as with Stephanie Burt’s “Like: A Speculative Essay About Poetry, Simile, Artificial Intelligence, Mourning, Sex, Rock and Roll, Grammar, Romantic Love”. Other similes may toot their poem’s horns brazenly, as with Albert Goldbarth’s “How Simile Works.”

8 - APPETITIVELY.

“Like that unpocketed peppermint which has, from fingering, become unwrapped, we always plate our sexual subjects first. It is the original reason we read…the only reason we write.” So wrote William Gass in On Being Blue.

9 - HALF-HEARTEDLY.

“But I shall leave my simile and I shall return my subject,” wrote Heinrich Kleist in an essay titled “On the gradual formation of thoughts in the process of speech”.

10 - REVERBISHLY.

Similitudes in Olivia Giovetti’s brief on graphic scores and Kurdi forms of notation that admit indeterminacy.

11 - IMPULSIVELY.

As If Only. This was the title of a small, limited edition sonnet corona I printed and passed out at a reading in Tuscaloosa, on the spur of the spur of the moment.

12 - DIEGETICALLY.

“As if I had become happy,” Mahmoud Darwish begins, in Fady Joudah’s translation.

13 - WITH AN EYE TO THE EXIT.

A simile may appear when a poem prepares to take leave of the reader. I’m thinking of how Sara Teasdale ended her poem, “The River,” where simile seals a final image that attests to the change the poem describes: “And I who was fresh as the rainfall / Am bitter as the sea”

14 - INVOKING ORAL TRADITION.

In an interview with Barbara Guest, Haryette Mullen cited the lines “hip chicks ad glib/flip the script” as a reference to the performance of female rappers Salt N Pepa who used rap as AIDS education through their song, “Let’s Talk About Sex.” Mullen told Guest: “When I sought a line to complete the quatrain that fit the rhythmic and phonemic patterning of the other three lines I’d written, ‘tighter than Dick’s hat band’ popped into my head, as an automatic simile that I’d heard throughout my childhood whether my mother or grandmother referred to tight clothing, or tight situations. But it was only in the context of the lines about female rappers, whose tight distichs (couplets) inform my own improvisational approach to rhythm and rhyme in this poem, that I grasped, for the first time, the origin of this folk simile: a metaphorical description of a condom. I saw a continuum, in terms of oral tradition or verbal performance style from my own matrilineal heritage—in a religious, lower middle class family that spoke of sexuality through metaphor, circumlocution, and euphemism— to the bold public style of today’s women rappers. The poem embraces all of that, while also using language as verbal scat. Print and electronic media, as well as orality, provide my materials.”

15 - AS A WAY INTO “IMAGINATIVE CRITICISM”.

Similes are central to critique in Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful, a book that pays tribute to the jazz musicians Dyer adored. The preface tells us how the piece will be played, namely by allowing the writing to be “animated by the defining characteristic of its subject.” All Dyer’s attention goes to his subjects; form and content do the work of co-creating a shape that deserves to be studied on its own terms, as an object that works in its own way, which may or may not be recognizable. Moving into his subject without invoking an authoritative elitism, Dyer practices what he calls “imaginative criticism,” a speculative telling that admits its debt to fiction. “Even the briefest simile introduces a hint of the fictive,” Dyer reminds us, since a good simile becomes emblematic to the reader. Associations build across paragraphs, and Dyer doesn’t try to tame them. His metaphors bloom into “episodes and scenes” with dialogue and action. Asserting his loyalty to the “improvisational prerogatives of the form” itself, as seen in his improvisation around the jazz standards and his use of quotation cribbed from the way quoting functions in music, Dyer speculates data and information into scenes.

Generally, musical scores don’t cite their quotations. That labor is left to the performer or the listener. Reading voraciously expands the field of possible recognition. This goes for music as well: the more you listen to, the more you can recognize. At a jazz performance (or a classical one), music-lovers are more likely to “overhear” conversations between the performer/composer and the quoted source. Although musicologists help listeners decipher the quotes, the composer's responsibility doesn’t include citation. Dyer, to his credit, applies the composer's expectation of his audience to the text. He doesn't bother with fastidious citations because this is jazz. This is music. The quotes blend in.

16 - INTERROGATIVELY.

“My pain is like . . . — what is my pain like?” asks Albert Goldbarth in “Like”. Ricard Selzer’s essay, “The Language of Pain”, circles the simile-despair that strikes us when attempting to describe pain.

17 - ASPIRATIONALLY.

Once upon a time, Friedrich Schlegel imagined a fragment that didn't aspire to wholeness, a fragment capable of standing as a smaller work of art divided from its surroundings. “It must be complete in and of itself, just like a hedgehog,” wrote Schlegel. But this simile flattens me. No matter how one looks at the hedgehog, the simile feels fruitless. What is uniquely complete about the hedgehog? The hedgehog is completed by our description of it, and this hedgehog, once it exists, is already tangled with its life, the conditions of its livingness, its food sources, its ecological niche, its particular habitat.

18 - SINUOUSLY.

“Shadows rise like water / white fences comb through their hair” as in Denise Levertov’s “Images for Odette”

19 - WONDROUSLY.

Srikanth Reddy’s “On Wonder” touches the simile beautifully.

20 - DISCURSIVELY.

Sometimes a gap entertains the possibility of a simile, perhaps because the simile agrees on its own transience.

21 - FOUNDATIONALLY.

“Despite those who say that poetry makes nothing happen, humanity continues to be built on the literary device of the simile: Love thy neighbor as thyself,” Mark Yakich wrote somewhere.

22 - INTERLUDICALLY.

Trying to eat while reading Dan Albergotti’s poem, “Listening to ‘Twin Peaks Theme’ while Thumbing a Smooth Stone Nine Months after Angelo Badalamenti’s Death” — and admiring his similes.

23 - SCORNFULLY.

Daniil Kharms actively denounced the simile, setting his mind against the “like” and the likening, opting for a more esoteric, mystic-inflected space which may have been influenced by his father’s pacifist spirituality, or the man his father became after decades of prison. Kharms et. al traded the simile for apophatic speech (using the language to negate itself). Apophasis is found in the writing of Christian mystics including the Philokalia, which Kharms read in 1926, alongside Gregory the Theologian.

24 - POSITIONALLY.

Denis Donoghue looked down on the simile’s feebleness when comparing it to the metaphor.

25 - ATHELETICALLY.

Robert Rauschenberg’s etchings of Dante’s Cantos leaned heavily on images of athletes engaged in physical activities. He used these images to map Dante and Virgil's journey through hell, to suggest movement, or to picture the characters' actions. In Canto XV, for example, an athlete running gives visual form to Dante's simile in the famous final lines in which Ser Brunetto, running to rejoin his band, is compared to the winning runner for the green cloth in Verona."

26 - OMINOUSLY.

“As the world grows more terrible, its poetry grows more terrible,” said Larry Levis, quoting Wallace Stevens.

27 - BRILLIANTLY.

A. E. Stallings said many wonderful things under the title “Shipwreck Is Everywhere”.

28 - DARKLY.

“Grieved like, pined like... Why must there always be a simile? Why must you drive always to first questions, way beyond the goalposts every time. Well, what do you keep sacking our quarterback for, when it comes to that.”

— Renata Adler, Pitch Dark

29. DOUBLY.

Haryette Mullen

30 - CONVERSATIONALLY.

One night in 1908, as Hans Richter journeyed home from anatomy class, the sculptor Max Krause, unexpectedly asked him what was his “special credo” might be. Although surprised, Richter replied without hesitation: “Cosmos seen from a charmed star, looking like a melody of forms and colors.”

31 - INTERTEXTUALLY.

Shortly before Krause asked this question, Richter had been reading Schopenhauer, who said that “the cosmos, looked at from a blessed star, should appear like a solved geometrical problem,” in Richter’s interpretation.

32 - COSMOLOGICALLY.

Hans Lichternberg’s desire to use the mineral ball a simile of the Earth had long been preceded by his seeing in the terrestrial body "a miniature tourmaline" 17—one of a long series of ideas that use miniaturization as an optical means to grasp the whole: a higher being might perhaps think the tree and plant cover of the earth a mold. The human optic on the universe could thus have arisen from the exaggeration of the incidental, and the preponderance of emptiness in the universe could be more exactly captured through a reversed telescope, because in that perspective "the most beautiful starry sky" would simply vanish.

Magnification also produces speculative analogies, above all with Lichtenberg's repeated fascinated viewings of the planet Saturn, which he regarded not as the exception but as the norm of planetary eidos. It leads to the forecast that Jupiter is also in the process of acquiring a system of rings, and to the still bolder speculation that the Earth is already like Saturn. The whole anthroposphere unfolds on the surface of the outermost ring, conceived as a solidified shell; it also supplies another explanation of the Earth's magnetism.

33 - DISLOYALLY.

Tristan Tzara’s poem, “Maison Flake” (from of our birds), gives us the chair that “is soft and comfortable like an archbishop,“ a figuration of speech in the form of the simile Tzara had repudiated in a dada manifesto. He was never faithful to himself, I think. That’s why he wanted to banish the weight of personhood, this idea of a voice, a language, a nation, a construction that could be faithful. Tzara preferred loyalty to fidelity.

34 - APOSTROPHICALLY.

TO HÖLDERLIN

We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most
intimate. From images that are full, the spirit
plunges on to others thar suddenly must be filled:
there are no lakes till eternity. Here,
falling is best. To fall from the mastered emotion
into the guessed-at, and onward.

To you, O majestic poet, to you the compelling image,
O caster of spells, was a life, entire; when you uttered it
a line snapped shut like fate, there was a death
even in the mildest, and you walked straight into it; but
the god who preceded you led you out and beyond it.

O wandering spirit, most wandering of all! How snugly
the others live in their heated poems and stay,
content, in their narrow similes. Taking part. Only you
move like the moon. And underneath brightens and darkens
the nocturnal landscape, the holy, the terrified landscape,
which you feel in departures. No one
gave it away more sublimely, gave it back
more fully to the universe, without any need to hold on.
Thus for years that you no longer counted, holy, you played
with infinite joy, as though it were not inside you,
but lay, belonging to no one, all around
on the gentle lawns of the earth, where the godlike children had left it.
Ah, what the greatest have longed for: you built it, free of desire,
stone upon stone, till it stood. And when it collapsed,
even then you weren't bewildered.

Why, after such an eternal life, do we still
mistrust the earthly? Instead of patiently learning from transience
the emotions for what future
slopes of the heart, in pure space?

Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

35 - POLYPHONICALLY.

From Paul Klee’s notebooks dated July 1881:

Thoughts at the open window of the payroll department. That everything is transitory is merely a simile. Everything we see is a proposal, a possibility, an expedient. The real truth, to begin with, remains invisible beneath the surface. The colors that captivate us are not lighting, but light. The graphic universe consists of light and shadow. The diffused clarity of slightly overcast weather is richer in phenomena than a sunny day. A thin stratum of cloud just before the stars break through. It is difficult to catch and represent this, because the moment is so fleeting. It has to penetrate into our soul. The formal has to fuse with the Weltanschauung.

Simple motion strikes us as banal. The time element must be eliminated.

Yesterday and tomorrow as simultaneous. In music, polyphony helped to some extent to satisfy this need. A quintet as in Don Giovanni is closer to s than the epic motion in Tristan. Mozart and Bach are more modern than the nineteenth century. If, in music, the time element could be overcome by a retrograde motion that would penetrate consciousness, then a renaissance might still be thinkable.

We investigate the formal for the sake of expression and of the insights into our soul which are thereby provided. Philosophy, so they say, has a taste for art; at the beginning I was amazed at how much they saw. For I had only been thinking about form, the rest of it had followed by itself. An awakened awareness of "the rest of it" has helped me greatly since then and provided me with greater variability in creation. I was even able to become an illustrator of ideas again, now that I had fought my way through formal problems. And now I no longer saw any abstract art. Only abstraction from the transitory remained. The world was my subject, even though it was not the visible world.

Polyphonic painting is superior to music in that, here, the time element becomes a spatial element. The notion of simultaneity stands out even more richly. To illustrate the retrograde motion which I am thinking up for music, I remember the mirror image in the windows of the moving trolley. Delaunay strove to shift the accent in art onto the time element, after the fashion of a fugue, by choosing formats that could not be encompassed in one glance.

36 - HOMERICALLY.

Among the techniques Homer used in The Aeneid, we find invocation to the Muse, the expanded simile, the conventional or repeated epithet, and the use of the supernatural to influence events. Vergil would borrow these, as would many others.

37 - HOPEFULLY.

And to you, reader—let us here recall together William Carlos Williams's famous lines— “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die Miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” Let us embrace the good news, which is that we do not have to be like these miserable men. There is so much crazy shit we can stuff into our mouths, with or without the simile.

— Maggie Nelson, Like Love

38 - AS PART OF “A SINGLE SEMANTIC STREAM”.

[In 1933] Mandelstam read the essay [Conversation about Dante], read his poems, and talked copiously about poetry and about painting. We were struck by the remarkable affinities between the essay, the poems, and the table talk. Here was a single semantic system, a single stream of similes and juxtapositions. The image-bearing matrix from which Mandelstam's poems emerged became strangely tangible.

— Lidiya Ginzburg, “Poetika Osipa Mandelstama” in Izvestia Akademia Nauk SSR, July-August 1972, translated by Sona Hoisington in Twentieth Century Russian Criticism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975

39 - FIRST-CONFESSIONALLY.

The Catholic Church understood Freud's concept of the superego centuries before he articulated it in 1940. The cathedral on a hill is its palpable and visible representation, or, in Freud's simile, the superego is “like a garrison above a captured town.” In the case of the church, it is a garrison so effective that it doesn't even need soldiers. Its windows are beautiful. Its frescoes and painting and sculptures, depicting absence in enormous detail, are priceless. It enabled Dante to imagine hell, and it was at least the stepmother to a ninety-year period of Italian art, a period of corruption, betrayal, incest, assassination, intrigue, and unsurpassable art. The church knew beautv and evil were sleeping together, and gave doth allowances to do it. Iwo thousand years of stolid, industrious virtue and Swiss peace perfected the cuckoo clock and the dairy cow. I suspect the Swiss dairyman had a good deal of placid self-esteem. Michelangelo hated himself. And a later figure, Caravaggio, was mean-tempered, an inadvertent murderer whose self-portrait, as Goliath, is full of self-contempt and despair.

In the Age of Therapy, First Confessions could be seen as a ritualized form of child abuse, psychological in method, permanent in effect. But you can't take the Vatican to court. The painting on the chapel's ceiling doesn't respond to a summons and is tricky evidence.

In my case, I would lie awake as a child, full of vague yearnings which were sexual, which I did not know were entirely normal. I was never abused nor molested nor violated as a child. I simply felt that I was a violation, that I was guilty of being alive.

But if it was a violation, it was a pleasure. Besides, how guilty can anyone feel, at seven or eight? I was a boy like other boys. I didn't rebel against guilt, I forgot about it.

— Larry Levis, “First Confession”

40 - EVENTUALLY.

The final day of notes for Roland Barthes’ projected work, Vita Nova, was September 2nd, 1979. In these notes, Barthes referred to “Account of my evenings ( endless, futile diachrony)”,  and quotes Pascal’s Pensees again, “Fragments: like the remains of an Apology for something.”

Eavan Boland's Eurydice.

static range is a mountain of voices: piled on top of each other, they are sometimes cacophonous, sometimes polyphonous.

— Himali Singh Soin

Now you all have seen hundreds of poems about roses and you know in your bones that the rose is not there.

— Gertrude Stein

For * spring is dangerous like love and love survives the lovers *, Himali Singh Soin and Kostas Stasinopoulos asked friends to share messages, traces and transmissions of love.

The gallery description reads: “Inspired by a letter that a nuclear-powered spy device —installed during the Cold War and as yet missing— addresses to the patron mountain of the Indian Himalayas, Nanda Devi, this valley of notes makes transcontinental, cosmic trajectories in search of love. What it finds: loss.”

*

Eavan Boland’s Eurydice opens her silence in song, a counter-song if you will, to that of Orpheus’ lament, a lyric that gives us reason to believe that knowing one another is fundamentally impossible. The lovers lament different things.

Euridyce Speaks

How will I know you in the underworld?
How will we find each other?

We lived for so long on the physical earth
Our skies littered with actual stars,
Practical tides in our bay —
What will we do with the loneliness of the mythical?

Walking beside ditches brimming with dactyls,
By a ferryman whose feet are scanned for him
On the shore of a river written and re-written
As elegy, epic, epode.

Remember the thin air of our earthly winters?
The gas ring burned blue flowers.
Frost was an iron, underhand descent.
Dusk was always in session

And no one needed to write down
Or re-state, or make a record of, of ever would,
And never will,
The plainspoken music of recognition,

Nor mark how I stood at the window —
The hills darkening all around, saying,
As a shadow became a stride
And a raincoat was woven out of streetlight

I would know you anywhere.

Boland’s poem reminded of a wonderful essay by Jack Foley on Gertrude Stein’s portraits, and how he notes that time “is not only a subject but a condition of the piece,” a text which was also a portrait.

Foley thinks Stein deploys palindromes as a sort of mirror for which “the line runs out and then runs back.” The idea of recognition that Boland’s poem engages aligns somehow with Foley’s description of Stein’s palindromic relationality:

The first half is identical to the second half—except that the second half is backwards. She has a phrase in still another portrait, “A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson”: “Idem the Same.” The word “Idem” is Latin and means “the same,” so the two halves of the phrase are saying the same thing—but they are saying them in two different languages. Stein’s relationship to the people she makes portraits of is like that. She and Picasso are “Idem the Same”—the same but different; they are like words which mean the same thing but exist in two different languages. Together, they constitute a kind of palindrome; they are full of the same elements, but one of them is running one way and the other is reversing that movement.

Similitude meets me in my daily life as a lyric of resonating surfaces, or patches of sound that connect the world across languages, linking the experience of being as I apprehend it in the fluidity of Romanian and the more rigid, consonant-heavy textures of English.

An aside on miracles is due. For the word “miracle” comes to us from Old French and the Late Latin, miraculum, which means “a wonder, marvel” as well as mirari , which means “to wonder at.” And Foley adds that “the old Latin root is mir-, to look (at), esp. with astonishment.” It is this monosyllabic little root that leads goosebumps to pebble across my arms, mirroring one of my favorite verbs in Romanian, where mir appears usually in conversation as mă mir, drawing on the verb a se mira.

One of the valences of this verb is how it elicits a middle voice, a being that neither acts nor is acted upon. If it isn’t yet obvious, I should add that the Romanian word for “wonder” is mirare (see also minune, uimire, admiraţie, surprindere, miracol, surpriză, uluială).

There is a gap I love in this wondering. A gap like a tabernacle holding its secret intact as the sacred. This gap appears between the verb mir and the noun mir, which gets transformed away from the verb in Romanian. The noun mir refers to "holy oil, chrism, unction,” as used in the context of Eastern Orthodox blessings and rituals. There is no mir that means, simply, astonishment.

To resonate — once more — and inscribe this repetition with its root, when I searched for Eavan Boland’s poem online earlier this week, I found it on a wordpress blog run by someone who speaks Romanian. And maybe I, too, would know you anywhere.

“Miracles play. […] Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.”

— Gertrude Stein, “If I Told Him”

*

Eavan Boland, “Eurydice Speaks” (poetry will save me)
Himali Singh Soin and Kostas Stasinopoulos, * spring is dangerous like love and love survives the lovers * (Serpentine Gallery)
Jack Foley, “‘If I Told Him’: Gertrude Stein and Performance” (Exacting Clam)
Patricia Meyerowitz, Gertrude Stein: Writing and Lectures 1909-1945
Spiritualized, “200 Bars”

Alphonso Lingis on the "dangerous emotions" of being.

(Language ripples our lips) 

– Susan Howe, “Pythagorean Silence”

the ground which is an absence of ground

– Michel Foucault, “Distance, Aspect, Origin”

A few excerpts from this book by Alphonso Lingis that I am currently enjoying —

OF TORPOR AND SUBLIMITY

People who shut themselves off from the universe shut themselves up not in themselves but within the walls of their private property. They do not feel volcanic, oceanic, hyperborean, and celestial feelings, but only the torpor closed behind the doors of their apartment or suburban ranch house, the hysteria of the traffic, and the agitations of the currency on the stretch of turf they find for themselves on the twentieth floor of some multinational corporation building. 

If one person regards a thunderstorm over the mountains or the ocean waves breaking against the cliffs as dangerous and another as sublime, the reason is not, as Immanuel Kant wrote, that the first clings to feeling the vulnerability of his small body, while the second initially verifies that his vantage point is safe and then forms the intellectual concept of infinity, which concept exalts his mind. And it is not simply, as Nietzsche wrote, that the first cramps his weak emotional energies back upon himself, resenting what threatens his security, while the second has a vitality whose excessive energies have to be released outside. It is that the first draws his emotional energies from the forces that hold walls together and closed. 

OF “GREAT” CIVILIZATIONS (AND GREATNESS AESTHETICS)

About halfway through grade school I brought up a linguistic problem to the teacher. She and the text-book called the Roman civilization a great civilization. It was said to be at its greatest when its military dominated the greatest number of lands and peoples. When its empire shrank, it was said to be in decline. This terminology persisted in history class after history class throughout my schooling, and in museum after museum I have visited since. The great religions are the world religions. Civilization advances with military and economic expansionism.

A euphemism is competition: without competition there is no artistic, literary, or religious advance. (Without grades, prizes, honors, there is no philosophical achievement.) My first trip was to Florence, where I was beset by the evidence that its grand artistic, literary, and musical achievements coincided with its richest and most rapacious century . . .

OF ANEMONES AND US

Sea anemones are animated chrysanthemums made of tentacles. Without sense organs, without a nervous system, they are all skin, with but one orifice that serves as mouth, anus, and vagina. Inside, their skin contains little marshes of algae, ocean plantlets of a species that has come to live only in them. The tentacles of the anemone place inside the orifice bits of floating nourishment, but the anemone cannot absorb them until they are first broken down by its inner algae garden. When did those algae cease to live in the open ocean and come to live inside sea anemones?

Hermit crabs do not secrete shells for themselves but instead lodge their bodies in the shells they find vacated by the death of other crustaceans. The shells of one species of hermit crab are covered with a species of sea anemone. The tentacles of the sea anemones grab the scraps the crab tears loose when it eats. The sea anemones protect the crab from predator octopods, which are very sensitive to sea anemone stings. When the hermit crab outgrows its shell, it locates another empty one. The sea anemones then leave the old shell and go to attach themselves onto the new one. The crab waits. How do sea anemones, blind, without sense organs, know it is time to move?

How myopic is the notion that a form is the principle of individuation, or that a substance occupying a place to the exclusion of other substances makes an individual, or that the inner organization, or the self-positing identity of a subject is an entity's principle of individuation! A season, a summer, a wind, a fog, a swarm, an intensity of white at high noon have perfect individuality, though they are neither substances nor subjects. The climate, the wind, a season have a nature and an individuality no different from the bodies that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken in them.

Let us liberate ourselves from the notion that our body is constituted by the form that makes it an object of observation and manipulation for an outside observer!

Let us dissolve the conceptual crust that holds it as a subsisting substance. Let us turn away from the anatomical and physiological mirrors that project it before us as a set of organs and a set of biological or pragmatic functions.

Let us see through the simplemindedness that conceives of the activities of its parts as functionally integrated and conceives it as a discrete unit of life. Let us cease to identify our body with the grammatical concept of a subject or the juridical concept of a subject of decisions and initiatives.

The form and the substance of our bodies are not clay shaped by Jehovah and then driven by his breath; they are coral reefs full of polyps, sponges, gorgonians . . . A pack of wolves, a cacophonous assemblage of starlings in a maple tree when evening falls, a marsh throbbing with frogs, a whole night fizzling with fireflies exert a primal fascination on us. What is fascinated is the multiplicity in us— the human form and the nonhuman, vertebrate and invertebrate, animal and vegetable, the conscious and unconscious movements and intensities in us.

(Italics are mine.)

*

Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions (University of California Press)
Arnold Schoenberg, Notturno for Strings and Harp (1895-96)
Eugène Delacroix, The Duke of Orleans showing his Lover, ca. 1825 - 1826