Sul ponticello.

1

Someone asked me where the poem “came from”— and this is an attempt to answer that question. It is also an acknowledgement that answering such a question cannot be definitive, for the nature of poems, of the material of a poem, eludes its creator in conversation.

After all, the color of fire has never been properly established. What does fire say? How do we hear a thing whose breath is smoke?

2

The poem in question was published in a 2019 issue of Prairie Schooner. I reproduce it below, as it first appeared— though later versions are slightly different.

3

Someone told me that the will-o'-the-wisp — that flame-like phosphorescence which flits over marshy ground due to the spontaneous combustion of gasses from decaying vegetable matter — is a wandering fire. And each wandering fire is actually the spirit of a stillborn child who wanders between heaven and the inferno.


4

There was music and literature in it. Also: money, or the art of 'making money' alongside modernity's questions of self-fashioning. The gun of those absent kreutzers in Leo Tolstoy's 1891 novella, The Kreutzer Sonata. The question of art as it intersects with life, marriage, virtue, and family. 

In 1923, on the edge of October and into November, Leos Janácek composed a string quartet based on the Kreutzer Sonata. This quartet wasn't his first tribute to Tolstoy's scandalous novella: Janácek had written a Kreutzer-inspired Piano Trio in three movements in 1908-9, honoring Tolstoy's eightieth birthday that year, and this piano trio had been performed in Brno the following April, at a chamber concert. The Kreutzer piano trio appeared in local piano repertoires until 1922, when Janácek disemboweled it by pulling the material into his first string quartet, and destroying the piano version. 

Some musicologists refer to Janácek’s 1908 Piano Trio as “now lost.” But this underestimates the composer a bit. I think some things must be destroyed. And they are. This, too, is part of art.

5

Janácek's First Quartet situates itself firmly within the scandal of chamber music, as carried by the quartet form into bourgeois homes of the late nineteenth century. Each of the four movements touches itself somehow, or exists in that intimate self-consciousness birthed by proximity.

00:00 - I. Adagio - Con moto

The opening adagio in E minor moves as if carried along a river, silvered with the short violin motif that resembles what Janácek called "the sigh of the Volga" in another piece. The cello enters and expands the melody, picking up the viola's ostinato triplets and smashing against the broken chords of the Vivo only to finish, bewildered, quivering, with an echo of that opening sigh motif.

04:47 - II. Con moto

The second movement is a scherzo in A flat minor, a form laden with associations of elegant dances in salons, overseen by the presidium of coquettes and gentleman bachelors. The aroma of inherited wealth rustles through the heavy curtain fabric as the viola picks up the polka-like melody. Dances like the polka cue us to a particular kind of social performance that celebrates constraint and inhibition, the kissing cousin of aestheticized elegance. A mouthful in that moistness—

Suddenly, the viola introduces a new motif marked sul ponticello (indicating to be "played near the bridge”). This anguished, slightly horrified motif works against the convention of the polka. There are the markings as understood by the performer of this viola motif. And there are the markings as understood by the reader of bridges, and the resonances of the Bridge of Sighs that appear elsewhere, in a different piece, tuned to a different time. 

[Viola, what have you done?]

6

Her name was Kamila Stösslová. She was happily married to a well-to-do doctor, secure in her life and finances, surrounded by household staff and care, a mother with time on her hands to live and read and exist, in addition to the labor of parenting. Both Leos and Kamila were married. It began and then ended.

It began and ended and went on forever.


7

08:58 - III. Con moto - Vivo - Andante

The third movement is marked “lightly, timidly”. Here, the duet between violin and cello evokes the theme in Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata, which Tolstoy introduces into his novella when it is performed at a concert given by Pozdnishev's wife and her admirer. The sul ponticello expands to cover new figurations as Janácek builds from his signature staggered parts, combining ostinatos and rhythmic diminutions of themes, landing in this multi-layered texture of sound. A musician pointed out to me that double and triple time alternate in this third movement, as do the passage markings which switch between sul ponticello and naturale. Finally, the Vivo sinks into the suspended calm of the Andante, where the mood seems closer to whispering and worry.

12:51 - IV. Con moto - (Adagio) - Più mosso

As if keyed to chorus, the first movement returns in the final movement; the chorale is woven through with a sad, aching melody marked 'jako v sizách' (as if in tears). The lamenting viola returns; the second violin drags us over shattered chords; various themes and their variations wind again into a multi-layered texture of widening intervals with a chromatic melodic line. Flickers and flashes: allusions to the opening theme vanish in the descending octave leaps, which Janacek marked 'zoufale' (in desperation), repeatedly. In desperation. Both themes reappear; the motifs and figurations intermingle until the opening theme of the quartet returns, played fortissimo and 'feroce' (ferociously). The final bars abandon the lament for a marking that reads 'slavnostne, jako varhany' (in a festive manner, like the organ), forcing the tempestuous flow into a climax that evokes the river at the piece’s opening.


8

After watching his sonata rehearsed by the Bohemian Quartet, Janacek wrote to Kamila, raving.  If you had only imagined the piece and then heard it come together. If you saw her black hair moving through the bars of a rhyme. If you fell in love with what she inspired and felt your innermost being embodied in it. 

"I was imagining a poor woman, tormented and run down, just like the one the Russian writer Tolstoy describes in his Kreutzer Sonata", Janácek wrote to Kamila. But where Tolstoy abandoned his heroine to vice and moralistic punishment, Janácek’s Quartet lamented her powerlessness, and revealed the limited options granted to women. 

Surely Janácek's own wife, Zdenka, read Tolstoy's novella. Surely she recognized herself as the woman Tolstoy would have preferred, the angel on the pedestal. Surely it stung to discover that her husband was re-composing a happily-married woman straight into his own arms and fantasies? 

According to archives and scholars, Zdenka did in fact express her rue to Zina Veselá, the wife of the reporter Adolf Veselý. And, many years later, Zina told an interviewer that she looked at the composer and his wife and "thought: poor devils, both of them." At a performance of Káta Kabanová, Janácek told Zina that he'd wanted a persecuted woman to be the subject for Káta. As Zina told the interviewer: 

'He did not have to look far, I thought .  . . I have been pondering why that marriage of his was so unhappy. I think that it was simply out of boredom. Zdenka was a virtuous wife, always the same voice, the same walk; she was insipid, always the same. His heart was aflame with his belated success, and he also longed for success in his personal life.'


9

Although Janácek's seventieth birthday was celebrated with a production of his Taras Bulba in Brno, what he wanted most in 1924 was to lay his eyes upon Kamila. His wish was granted at the end of June, when he first visited the Stössels' home in Pisck, and spent three, shadowless days there, surrounded by laughter and merry-making. Kamila winding through his letters—her 'raven black hair undone', her bare feet moving across the floors of the house, her spontaneous affections and charm, that sense of continuous vitality.


10

— To whom is the poem faithful?

— To itself.

— Who does it serve?

— That flush of emotion that birthed it.

— Who does it betray?

— The world.


11

"Loving, believing in someone or something does not mean accepting dogmas and doctrines as true . . ."

Giorgio Agamben's words punctuate the images as I flip through an album of old photos. Loving, believing is, for Agamben, "rather, like remaining faithful to the emotion that one felt as a child looking up at the starry sky." The sky offers our loves as constellations, the melodies of relationships that shape us, the motifs that become figurations.

"I have tried not to forget them, tried to keep the word I tacitly gave," Agamben writes. But ultimately, it is not the sky that sustains him. His hopes and beliefs are placed elsewhere. If queried about this ‘elsewere,’ Agamben says, "I could only confess in a lowered voice: not in the sky above— but in the grass," in the soil that gives and sustains life:

In the grass— in all its forms, the tufts of slender blades, the soft clover, the lupin, the borage, the snowdrops, the dandelions, the lobelia and the calamint, but also the couch grass and nettles in all their subspecies, and the noble acanthus, which covers part of the garden where I walk every day. The grass, the grass is God. In the grass—in God—are all those whom I have loved. For the grass and in the grass and like the grass I have lived and will live.

A mountain in the mouth: this langue hidden within this language.

They See Dot Com.

A poem by Eugenio de Andrade, from White on White, as translated by A. Levitin.

XXX

It burns you, the memory of the night before
we spoke, burns you, the salt
of the mouth which bit
before it kissed.

You don’t have room to die
with the morning, you only have a hole
in which to hide your tears,
a dry branch for chasing off the flies.

The soul’s task is to unlearn.
Animals are the great marvel,
no memory of having been brother
to the morning star.

Perhaps already quenched or crumbling to dark.


A photo and the final scene from La Boum (1980), a French film directed by Claude Pinoteau.

A few variations on how ad-target algorithms read this photo from La Boum.

Platonov's cow, Bob Dylan's footsteps, and my rage.

Of two minds at once, am I—- of two energies and timbres. Fury and whimsy, Medusa and Orpheus, with barely a gap between.

Nevertheless:

In school that morning they started their first-term tests. The pupils had to write an essay on the subject: "How I will live and work in order to be of service to our Motherland."

Vasya wrote out his answer in his exercise book: "I do not know how I will live, I have not thought yet. We had a cow. While she lived, my mother, my father and I all ate milk from her. Then she had her son—a calf-and he ate milk from her too, there were three of us and he made four, and there was enough milk for us all. The cow also ploughed and carried loads. Then her son was sold for meat, he was killed and eaten. The cow was very unhappy, but she soon died from a train. And she was eaten too, because she was beef. Now there is nothing. The cow gave us everything, that is her milk, her son, her meat, her skin, her innards and her bones, she was kind. I remember our cow and I will not forget." It was twilight when Vasya returned home. His father was already there, he had just come in from the line; he was showing Vasya's mother a hundred rubles-two notes that the driver had thrown down from the engine in a tobacco pouch.

This is how Platonov ends his short story, “The Cow,” likely written in 1938 or possibly 1939, as translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Angela Livingstone.

In their endnotes, the Chandlers mention Soviet literary critic A. Gurvich’s critique of Platonov’s “pity” and his pitiful, unheroic characters. Although Platonov wrote on the appropriate subjects, he got the “tone” wrong. There is no grief in the heroic State: there is simply the death of the useless and underprivileged in the name of teleological fulfillment. The Chandlers read Platonov’s story, “The Cow,” as a “defiant rejoinder” to Gurvich’s pillory. This brief tale “is as saturated with pity as anything he ever wrote,” they note:

The characters do indeed feel pity not only for one another but also for "birds, grasses, winds and machines.' Most moving of all, however, is the compassion—a clear-minded compassion entirely distinct from self-pity —that Platonov directs in this story towards his own self. The subtext here is that Platon, Platonov's fifteen-year-old son, was arrested in 1938 and sent to the Gulag. This may well have been an indirect way of putting pressure on Platonov himself; Lev Gumilev, the son of Anna Akhmatova, was also arrested in 1938, for a second time. It seems likely thar Stalin hoped, through sending their sons to the camps, to be able to bring Platonov and Akhmatova to heel, to exploit them far his own purposes.

For some reason, Bob Dylan’s “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” has been looping through my head at this time when I am sure of how much life matters, and more sure of how horrible it is to identify with one’s government, as if any armed behemoth with bombs can speak of what it means to live and believe in life. . .

Let me drink from the waters where the mountain streams flood
Let the smell of wildflowers flow free through my blood
Let me sleep in your meadows with the green grassy leaves
Let me walk down the highway with my brother in peace

Alternately:

I raise my arm against it all and I catch the bride’s bouquet. This is the darkness, this is the flood—-Your name pressed against my temple. It is what I thought and not what I thought: It’s past one o’clock. You must be fast asleep. It is a light that goes out in my mouth. And there is no man or woman that can’t be touched / in my eclipses, in my returns. I wanted those two clocks right in front of me, ticking. Light clarity avocado salad in the morning the world is not my world, the human body concealed my cipher beneath images of scandalous visibility. Philosopher! The body knows, at most, an octave—-Take it.

[Leonard Cohen; Marina Tsvetaeva; Vladimir Mayakovsky; Louise Gluck; Georg Trakl; Leonard Cohen; René Char; Félix González-Torres; Frank O’Hara; Louise Gluck; Jean Cocteau; Deborah Digges; Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky; Daniil Kharms]

Ailleurs

Five hours on the road yesterday.

Five hours to listen to music and think about the intersection of poetry, portraiture, and what language creates or dis-establishes.

Five hours to miss the feeling of my eyes running down a page rather than a roadway.

Five hours, of course, ruptured by my intransigence, when the urge to read made me pull over for 20 minutes somewhere in a town with no stoplight in Mississippi, where I returned to Platonov’s Soul and wandered through John Berger’s beautiful afterwords, written in October 2004—-and yet present, somehow.

Meditating on a passage from one of Platonov’s short stories, a passage about leavetaking, as P’s couples are perpetually taking leave of one another, and to love Platonov is to know this leavetaking intimately, to study how leavetaking becomes leavemaking in his syntax, Berger writes:

Here the future's unique gift is desire. The future induces the spurt of desire towards itself. The young are more flagrantly young than on the other side of the wall. The gift appears as a gift of nature in all its urgency and supreme assurance. Religious and community laws still apply. Indeed, amongst the chaos, which is more apparent than real, these laws become real. Yet the silent desire for procreation is incontestable and overwhelming. It is the same desire that will forage for food for the children and then seek, sooner or later, (best sooner), the consolation of fucking again. This is the future's gift.

And then, while taking notes, I flipped back through my notebook and kicked myself softly for one again failing to properly attribute what I copied, a bad habit that frequently makes it difficult to discern whether I thought a thing after reading a thing or whether the thing I read was copied verbatim, an experience much like the act of writing, itself, in dialogue with other writers, both ghostly and living, to which I add this particular fragment in case someone recognizes it:

GUIDO: Love is commentary: it creates its subject. Love puts a name to a face, and then sets about ‘knowing’ it. Knowing is conquering.

Four things, between mile markers, on the road.

1

“Our belief that a person takes part in an unknown life which his or her love would allow us to enter is, of all that love demands in order to come into being, what it prizes the most, and what makes it care little for the rest.”

— Marcel Proust (tr. Lydia Davis)

2

An end-note from Platonov’s beloved translators, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, as found in the NYRB publication of Soul.

Locomotives and trains appear frequently in Platonov's work, and are often connected to the theme of revolution. In 1922, in a letter to his wife, Platonov described an experience from the time of the Civil War: "Even though I had not yet completed technical school, I was hurriedly put on a locomotive to help the driver. The remark about the revolution being the locomotive of history was transformed inside me into a feeling that was strange and good: remembering this sentence, I worked very diligently on the locomotive..."

The sentence the young Platonov remembers is from Karl Marx: "Revolutions are the locomotives of history." " By 1927, however, Platonov had grown disenchanted: towards the end of Chevengur, Sasha Dvanov remarks, "I used to think that the revolution was a locomotive, but now I can see that it isn't." Earlier in the novel, there is a head-on collision between two trains. And several of Platonov's heroes, including Sasha Dvanov in Chevengur and Nazar Chagataev in "Soul," descend from trains and choose instead to walk long distances, apparently renouncing their belief in any quick and easy journey to a new world. By the mid-1930s the struggles of the Revolution were in the past, and utopia—according to the official Soviet position–was in the present.

3

A. Gurvich’s political denunciation of Platonov was based on his being anti-narodny (against the people). In an article, G. argued that Platonov's worldview had not changed since the late 1920s and that he had learned nothing from his many mistakes. Tremendous scorn was reserved for Platonov's indulgence in the un-Bolshevik emotion of pity or sympathy for the downtrodden. What G. calls Platonov's "pity-intoxicated heart" served as a warning to writers who believed that ‘realism’ should include any sense or sensibility of the Other. There was no Other in Stalin’s Russia: there was only the Enemy.

To quote G’s (fairly accurate) denunciation of Platonov (as found in the Chandlers’ endnotes):

4

And finally: "Dream of Lust" by Louise Glück, as published in The Kenyon Review, New Series, Winter 2001, Vol. XXIII, No. 1:

After one of those nights, a day:
the mind dutiful, waking, putting on its slippers,
and the spirit restive, muttering
I’d rather, I’d rather—

Where did it come from,
so sudden, so fierce,
an unexpected animal? Who
was the mysterious figure? You are ridiculously young, I told him.

The day tranquil, beautiful, expecting attention.
The night distracting and barred—
and I cannot return
not even for information.

Roses in bloom, penstemon, the squirrels
preoccupied for the moment.
And suddenly I don’t live here, I live in a mystery.

He had an odd lumbering gaucheness
that became erotic grace.

It is what I thought and not what I thought:
the world is not my world, the human body
makes an impasse, an obstacle.

Clumsy, in jeans, then suddenly
doing the most amazing things
as though they were entirely his idea—

But the afterward at the end of the timeless:
coffee, dark bread, the sustaining rituals
going on now so far away—

the human body a compulsion, a magnet,
the dream itself obstinately
clinging, the spirit
helpless to let it go—

it is still not worth losing the world.

Self-fashioning in the for-your-eyes-only.


I.

The eye-miniature entered the lexicon of love in the late 1790’s, as a subset of painted portraits depicting the left eye or the right, alone. Intended to be set in lockets, brooches, rings, and other ornamental objects, eye-minis (a.k.a. “lovers’ eyes”) were painted with watercolor atop a thin sheet of ivory—-a proper medium for aspirational jewelry.

According to “The Lens of Desire: Eye Miniatures”: “Luminous, exquisite, and fragile (a drop of water might wash away the tiny brushstrokes), lovers’ eyes did not mean, as it might seem, ‘I have my eye on you’, but rather, ‘You have my heart, and here’s my eye to prove it’.”

An eye for an eye, in essence. Though the eye functions as a gift rather than a subliminal surveillance device, it is hard to escape the presence of the gaze. It’s difficult to not feel somehow bound or seen by it.

II.

Cold metal walks on my forehead.
Spiders search for my heart.
It is a light that goes out in my mouth.

At night, I found myself on a pasture,
Covered with rubbish and the dust of stars.
In a hazel thicket
Angels of crystal rang out once more.

— George Trakl, “De Profundis” (translated by James Wright and Robert Bly)

Sarah Goodridge, Beauty Revealed (Self-Portrait), 1828

 “…poetry loses itself to stay lost. There's something about what's unsayable, what can only be gotten at in these spaces between, in these things placed together and the juxtaposition that somehow sparks something for us.”

— Mary Hickman

III.

FOURTEEN SUBJECTS FOR A THEORY OF MINIATURES

  1. A red box painted as a secret gift. Red to invoke a scarlet letter. Red because the flag is striped with it. Red because bloodshed is continuous in the game of democracy, and he is its elected representative.

  2. “The ruins of thought itself . . . in terms of the possibilities that only the impossible may still offer.”

  3. A small ethics. A minima. A sketch. Nothing so grand as a Maxi-Min principle. Nothing so practical and American. A red box with an image of her breasts painted on a slip of white ivory.

  4. The family portrait a politician needs to present after winning an election to the House of Representatives. The role of representation: the people, the publics, the portrait, the self-fashioning, the perceptual drift. She will be its author. She will never marry.

  5. A representational self-portrait with no head. A voiceless image. Eyeless but for nipples. An upset of the eye-miniature tradition.

  6. “True are only those thoughts that do not understand themselves.”

  7. She titles it Beauty Revealed (Self-Portait). The artist knows the game she is playing and decides to play the hand she has not been given. The purpose of art begins to resemble the purpose of the culture industry: to fabricate a self that can be traded, offered, transacted on the basis of ‘value.’

  8. The addressable catastrophe must be undressed.

  9. White gauze surrounding the bare chest, as if the clouds had decapitated the subject. The veiling and unveiling of dialectic.

  10. Self-representation reveals “the point of encounter between an authority and an alien.”

  11. By the time Daniel receives Sarah’s letter and the little red box she painted for him, its author has been alienated from it. The reader does the work of interpretation alone, at his desk. His take overrides her intent.

  12. The Graeculi or “little Greeks” teach the Roman ruling classes in the 1st century. Does the little box teach the Congressman a little ethics inflected by irony?

  13. The 10 a.m. of it all, continuously.

  14. The morning’s machine in me, and the dream of Walter B.’s letter to Gretel where he expresses his refusal of psychology, holding it out on a limb like astrology. He wants to keep the stars, I think, so he rejects the system for the constellation, or the story we make of figurations. Any space of potential irrationality can ruin the machine.

[Quotations: Gerhard Richter; Adorno MM 192; Stephen Greenblatt]

Sarah Goodridge, Beauty Revealed (Self-Portrait), 1828

IV.

“For love is ever filled with fear,” Penelope wrote to Odysseus in Ovid’s Heroides.

A vacuole is the void that holds the hole in the thing’s thingness.

“The poet has an obligation to dissect his own corpse and reveal the symptoms of its illness to the world,” said Natsume Sosaki.

“Speaking of ephemera, I read that Wagner’s home in Bayreuth has the composer’s copy of Henrich von Kleist’s Broken Pitcher on its shelves, with Wagner’s metrical marking scribbled inside it. Perhaps I am also speaking of modernity’s anxiety of influence,” wrote Michael Maar in “Deadly Poison: Kliest and Wagner”.

Ah, but “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination,” said Samuel Taylor Coleridge after staring at a blackbird.

"I am light, and heavy. Welcome!"


“A hundred thousand welcomes! I could weep, And I could laugh; I am light, and heavy. Welcome!”

— William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Coriolanus

*

But at least she was not like her nihilist friend, whose recent novel cavorted with a 60-year-old female character that she frequently found in her own dreams, thereby eliciting a sense of déjà vu that mingled with a desire to manhandle her friend's character (or the character her friend had likely stolen from her), if only to see what this older woman be willing to risk in different conditions than those offered to her by the nihilist. 

At least!

Not that!

Unlike her nihilist friend, she would offer the character a Vespa. Unlike him, she enjoyed not wearing her glasses and letting the world return to its natural state of blurriness. Unlike him, she had once traveled on a vessel of touristic agitprop named Maid of the Mist and she could still remember how it felt to feel Niagara Falls in her eyelashes.

Absolutely unlike him in every possible way, she never feared snow melt or melting snow. No question about it. She still enjoyed standing on the porch and throwing her favorite ceramic or porcelain objects (including a tea set) into that magnificent white expanse, abandoning those precious objects to the whiteness, leaving them to be discovered anew after the snow had vanished. Looking slightly defeated. This resurrection and refinding could not occur unless the snow melted, or could only occur once the snow agreed to change forms and transubstantiate back into its liquid spirit. Snow theology was sacred to her. As a result, while staring at the snowless front steps, she nurtures a feeling of fury with the nihilist for mistreating the objects of interest in his novel, whether by greed or fear, relegating the 60-year-old woman and the snowdrift to situation that was frankly unbearable. The only way to deal with such things, of course, is to write them, which she refuses to do. 

However—

After marinating quietly in all six of Liszt's Consolations and irresponsibly regaining a sense of herself from the melodies created by others, she decides to send an email to her nihilist friend, beginning with the observation that there was something on fire in his mouth, a fire that could very well be his father or a wish, since one cannot actually walk into the hotel room where the nihilist already stands without trespassing on the fiction of the building itself.

In this email, she asks a few questions and implies that his novel was very good, even though he is wrong about snow, a fact that Franz Liszt had made abundantly clear centuries ago. 

Signed, A (The Architect) 

Subject: some conflagrations.

While waiting for her nihilist friend to reply, she begins to resent paying taxes to a federal government run by humans so corrupt that she now fantasizes continuously about pushing these spineless assholes into a mud puddle. This particular fantasy is new to her, or the guillotine part is new to her, but she leaves it there, in the mud, intact and unfinished, to pick up a little bit later, since, unlike her friend, she has often dreamt of mud wrestling with world leaders. 

Unlike her friend, she never asked Jesus into her heart, and thus, unlike her friend, never had to host a wake for such an event, nor was her metaphysics contaminated by such invitations and pledges. Since that day in 7th grade when she realized that her hand was positioned atop her heart while addressing a piece of fabric that represented the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she refused to do pledges. Nothing was invited into her heart except blood, and this she left to her arteries. This time in seventh grade corresponded with a different sort of practice that entered her life, a practice not entirely dissimilar from that which her friend had novelized, although in her case, there was no darkness and no dick, but a stuffed lamb with ears that poked up from the side. There was also an afternoon light shining through the window as she took this lamb downstairs into the basement and sat on it. At one point in her basement endeavor, she was astonished to find this pleasure interrupted by a vision, a divine intervention in the figure of a snake moving towards her, hissing very slowly, and she remembers looking the snake in the eye, and saying yes to him, and then closing her eyes, allowing her face to settle into an insane smile that she would later attribute to Rapture and use as justification for saying no to boys that liked her because she was already a saint and the snake was her secret friend and her stake in the game of both life and text was not to kill the bull— no, not to destroy the beast she couldn’t tame, nor to diminish his power— but to study him like medieval monks studied the Mysterium in order to ride the name of her death, better than being ridden by it.

O! She feels horrible for failing to define a word she used earlier. It is never to0 late to make a point of clarification, or to restate a claim with more specificity. Unlike her nihilist friend, nothing was invited into her heart except blood, which was another word for Poetry. And she would pledge any and all to the maw of its obscene, metaphysical mouth.

Writing prompt from a detail.

“Alibi and alias: everyone generates their own, is their own. We have names and some sort of permanence and halos left behind like salt rings in a sauna.”

—Ander Monson,  "Index for X and the Origin of Fires"

*

If you enlarge a detail in a picture, you produce another painting.

This is what Roland Barthes told students in a lecture session dated April 20, 1977, adding that “the whole of Nicolas de Stael springs from 5 centimeters squared of Cezanne.” The prior month, Barthes had focused his lectures on the pictorial space and the role of the line, telling his students that “the horizon is the line that marks the boundaries of my territory," and locating the line in this labor of creating boundaries as well as pictorial perspective. But on this day in late April, Barthes' attention circulated around the frame, and the rectangle – which he suggested as “the basic shape of power". 

Barthes’ ‘basic of shape of power ‘surprised me. When I visualize power, it has the aura of symmetry, completion, complete enclosure, self-sufficiency. Why not the cube or the square as power’s shape?

But thinking about what the horizon does rather than how it looks got me closer to Barthes. A horizon creates a space where action can exceed itself, can mark the page with the possibility of futurity, whether by enlarging detail or by calling the subject into the imaginary.

*

Near the end of his too-short life, Barthes was emphatic about “the right to digress” in text and thought, a right he defended on the basis of how much is happened upon in a digression, how much is accidentally discovered on a discursive path that isn’t entirely sure what it wishes to prove—- a path that doesn’t know its end, a way that doesn’t seek to demonstrate.

The digression, like the road or the trail less traveled, doesn’t appeal to simply because it promises a destination. The appeal of the digression lies in what it may suggest. In taking it, we might see things that we have not yet seen, or things that we did not plan to see. The unexpected. These unplanned things ask us to approach them in a different spirit. A spirit that is curious or perhaps more generous than the spirit that wants to get somewhere. 

We forget that the poet’s job is to taste the world. We forsake our duty of stumbling, fumbling, rolling around in the dirt trying to find words for it.

RB Kitaj, Land of Lakes, 1975. oil on canvas. 152.4 x 152.4 cm. private collection

RB Kitaj’s “Land of Lakes” (1975 to 1977) is a landscape painting of sorts. The artist, RB (Rowland Brooks) Kitaj was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1932. Although born in the US, Kitaj has lived in England for a long time and played a role in the British Pop Art movement, but what fascinates me about him is that he quotes from high art more than pop-culture in his work. There are pieces of various popular symbols—-from religious crosses to the eye on the whitewashed wall—-yet each is perfectly detailed and delicately rendered.

Although Kitaj called this piece an “optimistic one” that envisions “better time to come," I offer it as a prompt because it is inspired by a detail from Ambrosio Lorenzetti’s 14th century fresco, The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, a fresco located in Sienna, Italy. 

*

Now a prompt. Pick a detail from this piece, inspired by a detail and write a poem titled after Kay’s piece on Lorenzetti’s. Use the colors and objects to describe a scene that is being recollected by a speaker in the future. Nothing has to happen, but things must be felt or wished for.

(If you need an additional spirit to move you, take this fragment I cut from a paper and use it as a “message in a bottle” that gives you the following words, as spoken by Debord and Lukacs, to use at some point in your poem. Or just three words. Or the syllable count. Spin the bottle until it tells you how to play a secret game.)

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As for titling, Chris Hitchens and Martin Amis had a game they played where you replace the word “love” with “hysterical sex” in a song or book title or poem titles or movies. They had another game that played with existing titles called “titles that didn’t quite make it.” Use these games to generate a few titles — or a list poem.

Of strangeness, complexity, and 'scandalous visibility'.

 

1

There is strangeness at stake in complexity. There is the pleasure of encountering something unknown, the rush of rubbing one’s mind against that weird rock, feeling the sharpness sharpening. What Jean-Luc Nancy called "the imaginary . . . that point the accomplishment of the act is worth infinitely more than the act itself" is inscribed in the motions and gestures of ritual. At that point where the symbolic and the real collide, "the image brings us into its presence."

"Fury is the desire that wants to grow and suck on the source of desire itself… and desire is that or nothing; exacerbated exasperation, " Nancy wrote.

2 

In a wonderful essay for The Paris Review titled “In This Essay I Will: On Distraction”, David Schurman Wallace evokes reaching the point in his writing when the initial spark loses its come-hither glint—the point where distraction courts the mind. Wallace's eyes fall onto his shelves, lingering in the memory of former trysts, former relationships with texts. And there, on the shelf, is Flaubert's final novel, the book left unfinished. There is that temptation courting the mind, looking for an excuse to wander back into it. 

Wallace gives us the paradox of writing as labor, namely, that distraction doubles as blessing and curse. Distraction releases us from desire, or from the intensity of edits and drafts and evidence; desire lets the mind literally wander over the wall, and take a side trail into an elsewhere. Desire opens an Otherwise.

Flaubert's two clerks want to know everything, and this interest in everything keeps them from the labor of attending to something. "Their curiosity has no staying power," as Wallace observes. Their desire lacks commitment or willingness to sweat. 

Writing is not fun in the way that this word is conventionally used. 

Writing is cannibalized by "the possibility of detours"; research leads us to the rabbit hole that seeds new ideas and flirts with different beginnings or projects.

3

"Everything is unique, nothing happens more than once in a lifetime," declared those two choirboys of gossip known as the Goncourt brothers in the year of 1867. We have their notebooks to hold against this presumed uniqueness, for while the instant may differ in details, schadenfreude vibes the same. For the Goncourts, the notebooks existed as places that resisted the vanishing regimes of modernity. The bros. remained “at home in” the words they'd committed to remembering others.

“Home” is a word for the place that is uniquely familiar.

4

"Literature is a voracious and anarchist beast," George Steiner declared in an essay that pondered why Tolstoy and Wittgenstein maintained a skepticism of Shakespeare. Both men believed Shakespeare didn’t deserve the cult that surrounded his name. Both reasoned from the Platonic complaint leveraged against tragedy: Shakespeare does not tell us how to live our lives. His words and plays are spectacular, but spectacle does not present us with difficulty. If anything, spectacle is a distraction from the difficult parts of being human. Plato, Tolstoy, and Wittgenstein all share this concern about spectacle, and how aesthetics can destroy ethics.

5

“I wouldn’t say that being trans now is living my truth. I’d say it’s a better fiction,” writes McKenzie Wark in Love and Money, Sex and Death: A Memoir (Verso, 2023).

6

Dave Hickey concluded the Acknowledgements section for one of his books by libating the uncertain nature of their recounting. “Finally, since the experiences recounted in this book have been compressed, elided, collaged, and occasionally disguised to protect the guilty, my apologies to those who remember it differently, or remember it all too well,” Hickey wrote.

7

8

If we avoid writing the shadows, it is because very few books have time or audience willing to study the angles of light brought to each text. “All lights around the space it illuminates with the shadow it produces.” I’m paraphrasing what I copied from Pascal Quignard’s Abysses (as translated by Chris Turner) into my notebook. The syntax is ragged; I probably miscopied—-but there is something interesting to me about leaving the error as written. And refusing to be corrected in my misapprehension.

Consequentialism is the sword we raise against the abyss, as Quignard tells it. The abyss is simultaneously without consequent and inconsequential: it defies sequence and unbinds temporality. Cocteau’s “scandalous visibility” can be read against this sequencing at the heart of representation: we come to know (or believe that we ‘know’) by virtue of ordering. We recognize a shape and console ourselves in this recognition of form. But the shadows on the walls of the cave haunt us precisely because they are the part of reality that continues to escape us. Even as they invoke, provoke, and lustrate us.

9

At one point in Quignard’s Abysses, he tells us: “I like the shadows cast by shapes, struck by light, like the repercussions one sees in mirrors.” Almost immediately, my mind interferes and poses a question to my demiurge, namely, how did this relationship between human sound (or “percussion”) and punishment (“repercussion”) emerge?

Nonsense.

“I love the sea,” wrote Charles Debussy, responding to critics who chided his piece, La Mer, for breaking with classical traditions. “I have listened to it with the passionate respect one owes it. If I've transcribed badly what it dictated to me, that's no concern of yours or mine. And you'll allow that all ears don't hear in the same way. In the end you love and defend traditions that no longer exist for me, or at least that only exist as representatives of an epoch, in which they weren't all as beautiful or as worthwhile as one might care to say, and the dust of the Past isn't always respectable.”

I have listened to it with the passionate respect one owes it. And so I return to the work of collecting traces and listening to shadows amid ciphers buried inside literature’s scandalous visibilities, holding the ‘possibility of the detour’ close.

My fear of not pleasing you.



Yesterday, while revisiting Paul Valery's notebooks, I returned to the challenge of writing, or existing as a writer, in my own. 

There is nothing 'unique' about this particular insecurity that arises from creating a world in words, knowing that a few people may read it, a knowledge that is paralyzing if one studies it, or begins to worry that you will fail the reader, a failure so rich in its potential and scope that you could spend weeks worrying about the nature of this failure—whether the meaning fails to signify, whether the syntax distracts from the event, whether the world you aimed to convey dies prior to its birth, etc. etc. 

All such worries, concerns, and anxieties are relational, which is to say, they are shaped by the writer's relationship to the audience and its expectations (as well as the writer's understanding of this audience). And so I began thinking about the difference between wanting to impress someone and wanting to please them . . . for, varying levels of vulnerability are at stake in these ways of imagining, or thinking.

Wanting to impress is in some ways a public act that partakes of sociality, and exists in relation to those conventions and structures which negotiate status. 'To make an impression,' as we say, or to be 'impressive' involves making one's self worthy, evidencing the corresponding traits or skills, some of which may have to do with the feeling of inferiority that is part of the writing life. But the desire to please someone seems different, if only because the audience is private, or the scope of that pleasure is grounded in privacy, in that particular knowing that defines itself intimately. To please, is to gratify and surprise in the same instant, to draw a mind somewhere close to happiness, which is a ridiculous thing for a human to want to do, and therefore, partly because it is so ridiculous, perhaps that is why it is kept private, the other part being a sort of loss that occurs when this desire appears.

To please, is also, quite different from satisfying the obligations of a contract, or meeting those conditions in a way that is satisfactory both to the parties and to the nature of the contract itself.

Paul Cruet, Hand of Rodin Holding a Torso (cast 1917)

The desire to impress others is ego-driven: it is, perhaps, the folly of our vanity, the glissando of our jokes, the protective (and often exciting) thrill of the game. We are vulnerable to hurt feelings, where what is hurt is our self-esteem, our carapace, the exterior edifice. 

The desire to please abandons the ego by putting the other first. I cannot argue that one is better or worse, — I am not interested in advancing moral claims or challenging late capitalism’s competitive urges (not here, at least, not in this)—-but I can say, without mincing words, that wanting to please asks us to reckon with emptiness in more visceral and difficult way than wanting to impress.

Yes: We are the first to hear it.

And the first to be abandoned by it—

The first to be hurt, stung by recognition, or repetition. In every writer, there is a child who needs to prove why the path they have chosen is worthwhile, despite the scorn of their parents, adults, and teachers. 

In every writer, there is also a child who cannot find words for how intensely and unbearably the world touches them— how it moves them to tears, hollows out their insides, leaves them mute (and, sometimes, at its worst, numb). And perhaps this child is the one who is hurt when they discover in themselves a desire to please—- if only because this desire assumes an other, and that assumption is specific enough to want the best for that other. In those circumstances, you find yourself not wanting to prove anything—only to share, to delight, to soothe. Being unable to do so becomes a hole, a hyperawareness of distance.

“Literature is the art of language,” wrote Paul Valery, “It is an art concerned with die means of mutual comprehension” — and if I am failing you, it is because there is no way for me to compensate for, or undo, the ways the world failed you, or the grief that attends being failed by words. Finding one’s hands empty. Finding one’s lips parched for verbs. Finding nothing that rouses the spirit from its stupefying sadness.

Yesterday, I recollected squeezing my own hands until they were numb, reminding them, firmly, not to feel things, since feeling too much has always been a problem for me, a problem that my father describes as an “oversensitivity” that “blinds you to reality,” a problem I have spent many years learning to hide or pushing into the problem that is poetry. 

Dear human, please do not forget how much language loved you first.

Félix González-Torres and love's time.

“I thought of that phrase from Freud: we prepare ourselves for our greatest fears in order to weaken them.”

—Félix González-Torres

Queer artist Félix González-Torres died at 38 of AIDS. He was born in Cuba. As a child, he loved cats and watercolor paints. He moved to NYC on an art’s scholarship in the late 1970’s. A few years later, while hanging out at Boy Bar in East Village, he met Ross Laycock.

It’s so simple, isn’t it? A name, an arrow in that flurry of hastening pulses, an opening-into, an other. Love begins world-making and changes what is given. In this new world, love destroys time and alters duration. They had a handful of years together before time was altered again.

In 1988, Ross was diagnosed with HIV. The cruelty of the AIDS crisis rattled queer communities. And Félix did what art does, namely, modified the world love created in order to assure its continuance. He wrote a letter to Ross that that included a rough sketch of a piece — tentatively titled Lovers — that consisted of two clocks touching each other that start in synchronization. This allusion to their heartbeats juxtaposed helplessness (the mechanized tick tick tick of a clock sounds very similar to a bomb) and tenderness (the clocks touched each other with their machine skins).

When Felix developed the idea for Untitled (Perfect Lovers), the two lovers’ hearts were still beating. Slowly, the clocks would fall out of time, caused by both the running out of batteries and the very nature of the mechanics.

When the clocks were installed, they were to touch. The two black-rimmed clocks could be, however, replaced with white store-bought clocks with the same dimensions and design. The two hands, minute and second, were to be set in sync with the awareness that the two hands might eventually go out of sync during display. If one of the clocks required battery replacement, it was to be done, after which the clocks were to be reset at the same time. The clocks were to be exhibited against a wall painted in light blue.

Gonzalez-Torres admitted that the clocks would ultimately fall out of synch, and one sooner or later stopping first:

Time is something that scares me … or used to. This piece made with the two clocks was the scariest thing I have ever done. I wanted to face it. I wanted those two clocks right in front of me, ticking.

Each time the batteries died, they were to be replaced and the clocks could be started again—- the clocks could be reset at the same time.

(This is the part where I try not to cry. This is the unbelievable tenderness in touching, losing, being, continuing. This is the nature of elegies.)

Felix Gonzalez-Torres – Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1991, clocks, paint on wall, overall 35.6 x 71.2 x 7 cm, photo: MoMA

Monsters tick in my mind; the sound of stopwatches or count-downs have always been wired to bombs and death for me. I hear a countdown and see an ending. González-Torres’ clocks know this tick—-they do not avoid time. One might even conjecture that Untitled (Perfect Lovers) destroys time.

Five years before this, González-Torres lost his partner, Ross Laycock, the man he called his “one great love,” to AIDS.


“Who is your public?”

González-Torres speaking about “Untitled (Placebo)” in 1994

As the scandal over NEA funding for Mapplethorpe galvanized anti-queer 'culture warriors, Félix tried to find ways around the censorious political climate. One of these ways involved resisting the label of “gay art.” In his own words:

Two clocks side by side are much more threatening to the powers that be than an image of two guys sucking each other’s dicks because they cannot use me as a rallying point in their battle to erase meaning. It is going to be very difficult for members of Congress to tell their constituents that money is being expended for the promotion of homosexual art when all they have to show are two plugs side by side or two mirrors side by side.

Once, We, Were—

Once we were driven by “homesickness for the past,” Mark Fisher said in 2006, “now, it is the impossibility of the present.”

I go back to the instructions González-Torres gave for how the two clocks should be displayed—- the two clocks were to touch and could be replaced with white plastic commercial clocks of similar dimensions and design. The guidelines continue, the minute and second hands were to be set in sync, with the understanding that eventually they might go out of sync during the exhibition. If one of the clocks needed the batteries replaced, it was to be done, and the clocks were to be reset accordingly; the clocks were to be displayed on a wall painted light blue.

The guidelines consist of an ambiguous statement: with the understanding that eventually they might go out of sync, if you consider the implication of the phrase perfect lovers, generally or as per those words, perfect love should ideally forever stay synchronized.

Letter to Carl George from Félix Gonzalez-Torres (detail), May 12, 1988. © The Félix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.

Psychocinema and last suppers.

 “To let yourself matter is to acknowledge not merely how it is with you, and hence to acknowledge that you want the other to care, at least care to know. It is equally to acknowledge that your expressions in fact express you, that they are yours, that you are in them. This means allowing yourself to be comprehended, something you can always deny. Not to deny it is, I would like to say, to acknowledge your body, and the body of your expressions, to be yours, you on earth, all there will ever be of you.”

— Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy

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Although far from what is called a Lacanian, I find myself enjoying the company of Helen Rollins’ Psychocinema (Polity, 2024) as the spectacle of newborn Trumpism unfurls. What follows is simply an excerpt from the section titled “The Tics and Grimaces of the Universe” in Rollins’ book, which focuses on the 90’s dark comedy, The Last Supper.

Section titled "The Tics and Grimaces of the Universe - The Last Supper" by Helen Rollins

The Last Supper (directed by Stacy Title, 1995) depicts a group of righteous graduate students who invite right-wing guests for dinner. They intend to murder these guests, serving them poisoned wine from a blue decanter—rather than a clear one, which contains the normal drink—unless they come to recant their political beliefs over the course of the meal. After several successful killings, the students invite a famous conservative pundit to dinner. The pundit confuses the group with a range of moderate opinions that they have difficulty refuting. He even admits that the views he presents on television are for ratings and do not represent his true political positions. Over the course of the dinner, the pundit pieces together clues that murders have taken place in this house. The students retreat to the kitchen to decide the pundit's fate, agreeing that his centrist views mean he should be spared. During this time, the pundit has swapped the poisoned wine from the blue decanter to the clear one and serves it to the students, raising a toast. As the film ends, the liberal students collapse on the floor and the conservative pundit speculates about a possible populist presidential bid.

[Here, though the students profess liberal views, they are—as in the Master-Slave dialectic—conservative, acting in accordance with the Master's Discourse. They are unwilling to recognize the dialectical subjectivity of the Other, preferring to retain a frame of logic that sustains the status quo. This logic is unstable and contains within it the beginnings of their own demise. Not only would an embrace of the contradictory subjectivity of the Other allow for the possibility of change that may transform the collective in surprising and emancipatory ways, but also to foreground the Lack that generates this universal contradiction is to challenge the logic of capitalist closure itself, whose symptoms at the level of culture the students might consciously condemn.

The students nullify the possibility of contingency within the Other by casting them as transcendentally belonging to a category of belief, unable to change and not marked by universal Lack. Like the contemporaneous "culture warrior" declaring their opponent to embody a "crypto-fascist" or "crypto-communist position, the students engage in abstraction, claiming an a priori knowledge as to the destination of the chain of signifiers and the possible replication of the signifier "A" in another context. This utopian approach to language and logic necessitates an enemy whose presence explains away its impossibility. It resides within a paranoid-schizoid position, in Kleinian terms, demanding the destruction of the subjectivity of the Other and denying their possible conversion, undermining any opening toward the surprise and novelty of emancipatory politics altogether. It is a position contradicted in the film by the pundit's vacillating position. His adoption of political ideas as a televisual performance demonstrates his discernment or not-at-oneness with himself, a symptom of his marking by Lack and something that could be transformed in the right material and philosophical context.

The Irish comedian Dylan Moran suggests that war isn't conflict; it's the inability to do conflict. If politics is the very act of engaging with the inevitably conflictual desires of the collective, then "culture war" is the end of politics. It pits groups' interests against each other for the benefit of a capitalist class that resists change, even at the cost of the world's inexistence.

To be unrecognized in one's subjectivity is to experience a negation of one's humanity that is experienced as violent. The intransigence of the liberal students and their unwillingness to recognize the Other may be the very reason those they disparage have taken up their reactionary positions in the first place – in their subjective anxiety and material precariousness. The conservative nature of their politics affirms their subjective investment in the logic of capital, which alienates and exploits the collective and casts blame upon them for their suffering in the face of the impossible material conditions it creates.

The final scene of the film, in which the pundit sees himself leading a populist uprising, expresses the way in which this kind of revolt can be motivated by a libidinal ressentiment against the liberal Beautiful Soul, an action that is disastrous for the universal politics that would undermine the cultural phenomena that—consciously at least—the conservative students claim so fervently to stand against, as well as the political economy that generates the material conditions that foment reactive anger in the first place.

Certainly, there is more, which I leave here in PDF form for those who would like to read it—-while also encouraging you to pay $10 cost that would support Polity’s publications as well as Rollins.

EXCERPTS FROM PSYCHOCINEMA [PDF]

Schiele's final self-portraits in portraits of others.

1

Nothing in the world is astonishing, 
unbelievable or forsworn anymore 
now that Zeus has made night out of moon 
and hidden away the blazing light of the sun.

—Archilochus, 7 BCE

Archilochus’ poem above uses an eclipse, a natural event in which the moon hides the sun, as a sign that the gods disapprove of a daughter’s marriage. We have him in fragments, this poet, we have him in pieces and chunks and quotations, known for his images and forebodings.

Heraclitus quoted Archilochus’ use of natural events to describe war with the Thracians, thus adding this trochaic verse to Archilochus’ legacy: "Look Glaucus! Already waves are disturbing the deep sea and a cloud stands straight round about the heights of Gyrae, a sign of storm; from the unexpected comes fear."

2

From the unexpected comes fear— but from the ordinary comes the unbelievable. A moment that would seem to incur blessings and fruition instead disposes of a couple that has not yet tasted their thirties. I’m thinking of Edith and Egon Schiele in early 20th-century Vienna, and Edith’s pregnancy.

Perhaps nothing is unbelievable or forsworn anymore as the First World War reveals the annihilationist possibility of modern technology. Perhaps the world feels even more impossible now that the gods are no longer controlling the gunpowder or the lightning. In 1918, Schiele drew his pregnant wife’s portrait as she laid on her deathbed, ill with the Spanish flu. The two had just secured a new studio for his work; the baby was expected; life had begun assuming a shape and momentum that bourgeois friends and family considered livable (or at the very least, less scandalous).

Schiele, Edith Schiele on Her Deathbed (1918)

He made two drawings of Edith, both dated October 28, 1918; both signed in a way that presents us with the vertical image seen above.

But Edith was lying down when he sketched these drawings.

Perhaps it wasn’t clear if she would die yet, though the sketch manages to convey the glassy sheen of her eyes.

3

These two portraits, above and below, were Schiele’s final drawings, the last pieces of work to come from his hands.

This is the second drawing, and I am presenting it here as it was drawn rather than as Schiele presented it (with that vertical signature and date that gives us an Edith sitting up).

The positioning of hair curls suggests an invisible or erased pillow. With the image on its side, one can see that her lips are parted and parched by fever. She is looking at him with all the life that remains as her blood pressure drops from dehydration. Her eyes express exhaustion, disbelief, a whirlwind of things one cannot imagine.

I’m not sure which of the two sketches he drew first, though I’m tempted to guess it was the one below, the one that still has energy and presence of mind to include a hand that distracts the eye from the absence of a pillow. Again, I’ve turned it horizontally. . . It feels as if she is still alive in it? Perhaps the black crayon drawing above depicts her after her death.

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On October 27th, the day prior, a frantic Egon asked Edith to reassure him of her love. To write it down. To say, with paper and pen for eternity (or just then), that she loved him . . . And so she did.

The document is preserved.

That same day, Egon also sent a letter to his mother, informing her of their sudden illness.

In the note, Edith’s handwriting moves across the squares of the graph paper like hands along a wall in a dark corridor. It is dizzying to read, and vertiginous to recognize the way solidity vanishes with high fever. Surely Egon, himself, was sick at this point. A few days later, he would be lying in bed, a widower. By the following day, Edith is gone.

Egon’s weakness is apparent; the skin of his arm loose, as one dehydrated by high fever. On the day of his death, just after midnight, in that darkness marking the beginning of October 31st, the artist died. His friends were present: Martha Fein took the photograph of him on his deathbed while Anton Sandig made a death mask.

Schiele on his deathbed, as photographed by Martha Fein

On November 3rd, Egon Schiele was buried in Vienna, in the cemetery at Ober-Sankt-Veit. He was twenty-eight years old. Nothing forsworn survives the drawings, the photos, the words.

Krzhizhanovsky's "physiological sketches" of Moscow.

1

As chronology would have it, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky remained in Moscow during World War II. It was a bleak time on the ground. While fellow Russians navigated the scarcity and destruction of war, Krzhizhanovsky attempted to document the city in a series of what he called “physiological sketches” reminiscent of the forms employed by Belinsky and Turgenev in the 1840s. He planned to collect the sketches in a book titled Wounded Moscow, but the war’s developments snuffed out this plan as he was sent on various assignments to cover the battles. By the time K. was ready to publish the book, the publishers had adjusted themselves to the needs of the year, 1949, in which the only stories told about the war were to be heroic.

In one of these “physiological sketches,” Krzhizhanovsky introduces Moscow’s windows as characters, residents of the city. “Let the street lead on,” he writes, “And let the window speak.” The sketch becomes an ode to fenestrology, noting that the city’s windows were the first to be “on the lookout for war.” Tailors were brought to dress the windows. “Since the day of the war's arrival, all manner of what if’s have sprinkled upon us out of the clear blue sky. Chiromancy has been with us since once upon a time, since the ancient Greeks— and let it stay, if only as pure supposition, and fenestrology too.” Cluelessly gathering sun, the geraniums and butter cups don’t know that war is happening: “They bloom, as though nothing were wrong.” Nor do they know that they are consigned to a particular place and time, “merely annuals,” blessed to lack knowledge of duration.



2

No one refers to themselves as a chiromantic, or a fan of chiromancy. At least not in my recent readings, where people "who have fifty cars" strike Edward Said as incomprehensible. Addressing two interlocuters in conversation, Said tells them that "identity is a set of currents, flowing currents, rather than a fixed place or a stable set of objects," as mentioned in his memoir.



3

In a different sketch, Krzhizhanovsky recounts a series of conversations involving the girls who have gone to fetch water. There is a store, dark as in a painting by the Old Dutch Masters with gestures frozen in various stages of light, illuminated only an oil lamp. It is noted that water is present but not “light.” It is noted that the store is closed. A customer demands to know why the clerk is reading by the light if there is no light. A few faces later, a customer asks the darkness if there is water. And the darkness replies that there is. And the lamp is burned out by "the kerosene."



Egon Schiele, Stylized Flowers in Front of a Decorative Background (1908)

4

In conversation with Daniel Barenboim, Edward Said said:

from Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, edited by Ara Guzelimian

To live with the history that we are part of, one must begin somewhere close to the ground. From where I type, this ground colder than it has been in Birmingham, Alabama since temperature records for coldness were last broken. Colder than ever, they say, as if time can be reconsidered by backshadowing.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky addressed the sketch titled "The July Baby" to the babies born during the July bombs and epidemics— “Incomprehension is your chance at life. Take it. But understanding is your debt.”

Of epistles.

1

Because the number gives me a place to begin— it pronounces something that is not zero. And Cynthia Ozick’s “Voices from the Dead Letter Office” gives me the writer, herself, stalking Lady Caroline Lamb, the novelist whose obsession with Lord Byron elevated the epistle into novel fan-tasms.

Inspired by Lamb, Ozick developed a similar thing for Sidney Morgenbesser, a philosophy professor, “an original,” an electrical storm of intellect “dazzingly endowed,” as Ozick puts it, leaving her “maddened by a hero of imagination, a powerful sprite who could unravel the skeins of logic that braid human cognition.” Building on this poetic logic, she opens her hand: “And so, magnetized and wanting to mystify, I put on a disguise and began my chase: I wrote letters.” Not just letters, but that particular genre known to literary history as the love letter, that species “of enthrallment, of lovesickness” —- Ozick addressed them to the philosopher in his university office, signing them all in “passionately counterfeit handwriting” as “Lady Caroline Lamb.” Thus does the writer forge the sword of her fiction. Let it be noted that writing has never been an art for the feint of heart.

*

Letters are central to fiction, of course, and Ozick brings “the mute and final revelation of Melville’s Bartleby: his origin in the Dead Letter Office,” to bear on the history of the happenstance, as well as the figurations of “horse-faced” ugliness that Henry James observed in George Eliot when redeeming her looks by referencing her spirit in a letter to his father. “To begin with she is magnificently ugly—deliciously hideous,” James writes, before launching into an inventory of warped pieces: “her low forehead”; “dull grey eye”; “a vast pendulous nose”; “a huge mouth, full of uneven teeth”; “a chin”; a “jawbone.” In sum, a “vast ugliness” to which the author admits the usual interior beauty.

Here is where James shifts course: “Yes, behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking . . . an admirable physiognomy—a delightful expression, a voice soft and rich as that of a counseling angel—a mingled sagacity & sweetness—a broad hint of a great underlying world of reserve, knowledge, pride and power.”

Literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking, James confesses, sheepishly pacing the page of a brewing fiction. Ozick’s essay laments the end of the letter, and I can’t agree entirely with the despair, since the the decline of Hallmark’s “ready-made card—that handy surrogate for intimacy” has been a relief, and emails perhaps have stepped into the space of snail mail, albeit differently.

*

The most striking excerpts quoted by Ozick are surely her own—- in the portrait she sketches of a former friend named “O” who sounds wonderfully inventive, or well-invented, or else the well-dressed ghost of pseudo George Steiner . . .


2

“If the writing itself is the event then why can’t I figure it out by writing, P asked, by this point agitated,” Laynie Brown writes in “Periodic Companions”.

“So I tell her, you’ve touched the white space,” Brown writes. You have tarried with the nothing and found the space lacking. “We still live within pages and persons and within our own limited consciousness,” and there is no curative lens or fixative contra the irresolution of images that prefer to remain unsettled; or the amnesias and aporias hidden behind the nouns, shadow or bloom, depending.

Paula Rego, The Artist in Her Studio (1993)

So I end with two more epistles excerpted by Ozick and a piece of poem copied into my own notebook in this freezing January that promises to be a beginning.

April is an unkind month, but perhaps May nowadays is still unkinder: I always find the first burst of spring, and the last glory of autumn, the two moments most troubling to my equilibrium and the most reviving of memories one must subdue. . . . One cannot help coming to the surface at times with a realization of how intense life can be—or how it was—or how it might have been. . . . But I do always feel convinced that every moment matters, and that one is always following a curve either up or down . . . and that the goal is something which cannot be measured at all in terms of “happiness”—whatever “the peace that passeth understanding” is, it is nothing like “happiness,” which will fade into invisibility beside it, so that happiness or unhappiness does not matter.

—- T. S. Eliot to Emily Hale, whom Ozick describes as “(a steady correspondent in a long-standing relationship that she mistakenly believed would culminate in marriage)”, on the date of April 12, 1932

*

What I wish to put on record now is my new invention. . . . My idea is this: Make a scrap book with leaves veneered or coated with gum-stickum of some kind; wet the page with sponge, brush, rag, or tongue, and dab on your scraps like postage stamps. . . . The name of this thing is “Mark Twain’s Self-Pasting Scrap Book.”

— Mark Twain to his brother Orion Clemens, August 11, 1872


*

You are my love after so many years,
My dizziness before so much waiting, 
That nothing can ice-over, obsolesce, 
Not even what waits for our death,
Not even what is alien to us
In my eclipses, in my returns.

— René Char, “To ***”


"I want nothing of"


white hope
hot lead
a banana bandana and your
what the heap said to the eagle
and then the news
I want nothing of

— Frank O’Hara, “Poem”


First it was everything and then it was nothing, though it was the same language we were using.

— Renee Gladman, “Five Things”

“Beyond the intensification of many forms of waged work, the burdens of unwaged domestic and caring work have also increased, both because of the pressures of neoliberal restructuring along with the double day, and because of the increasingly dominant model of intensive parenting presented as what is required to develop the communicative, cognitive, and creative capacities increasingly necessary for reproducing, let alone elevating, the class status of a new generation of workers. Given all the ways that the institution of the family—on which the privatization of reproductive labor has been predicated and sustained— is so clearly not up to the task of assuming so much of the responsibilities for the care of children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled, the refusal of the present organization of reproductive labor may have much to offer contemporary feminism.”

— Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work (bolding is mine)



“Write a letter with nothing but regrets.” —- My notebook says Riley Hanick said this.

Another way of phrasing things might be accretive, namely:

the intensification of many forms of the burdens of caring for the waged work of neoliberal restructuring;
because of the intensive parenting involved in grooming the class status of the new generation
assuming the institution of the family is present in the privatization of the refusal to develop a refusal to develop



Avoid “me” and “my” when you can. In memoir, don’t say, “I remember that in my childhood nothing happened to me.” Say, "In childhood nothing happened."

— Donald Hall


Linda Gregg says her student’s journals “fill up with lovely things like, ‘the mirror with nothing reflected in it.’”

According to my journal, it is cold, the heater is broken, there is no repair to be had, and Dan Beachy-Quick believes a poem “reaches through the little hole in the eye and puts the thing in mind, that realm in which perception and forgetting are simultaneous, where every presence coincides with a corresponding absence, where experience, as in an old iconic painting, holds aside the breast of its garment to reveal not a burning heart, but a nothing that pulses and is on fire."


Nothing is ever resolved, not to a sufficient
degree of accuracy. Not speed or location. Not 
the numinous image of the dead soul ascending the stair.

— Jaswinder Bolina, "You'll See a Sailboat"

But names matter. “Gaustine meant nothing to local people, so they changed his name to Gosho, Downtown Gosho,” according to Grigori Gospodinov.

Not speed or location but something closer to the hue of motion, that smear humans become when chasing a toddler across the sidewalk. You’ll miss the choo-choo! Come back! Screaming like fire-engine red and firmly believing in this strategy, since the only sound that mattered to him was the Choo-Choo and any neighboring words were there to scaffold the Choo-thing, to build context for screaming the train cartoon sound in the swarming vicinity of suited professionals that liked to eat at the bistro near that horrible intersection. My face on his shoulder, picking him up, his finger poking into my ear, beating out a rhythm, ‘choo-choo’ to accompany my steps.



The brown flecks in my mother’s eyes
became my own, my son’s, through adolescence.
The body knows, at most, an octave
of desire that meets the air sometimes
for nothing. Just thinking of your hands
I can go wet, or dreaming, come
in my sleep, and wake to a day
in which all men are liars, wearing clothes.

— Deborah Digges, “To Science”



I could sink to anything. 
I think I could kill.
I think I have killed
for the shape, the sheer 
body of this poem. 
Look how beautiful, 
feel how impossible,
this slender, limned thing 
weighing next to nothing, 
saying next to nothing. 
Saying everything. 
Everything.

— Paul Hostovsky, “Love Poem”



Light clarity avocado salad in the morning
after all the terrible things I do how amazing it is
to find forgiveness and love, not even forgiveness
since what is done is done and forgiveness isn't love
and love is love nothing can ever go wrong
though things can get irritating boring and dispensable
(in the imagination) but not really for love
though a block away you feel distant the mere presence
changes everything like a chemical dropped on a paper
and all thoughts disappear in a strange quiet excitement
I am sure of nothing but this, intensified by breathing

— Frank O’Hara, “Poem” (from 1959)

From "decoherence".

A manuscript that began during pandemic, in dialogue with a text by another writer, a sort of collage that includes words from each section of his book in all caps, building those words into a decoherent attempt at speech that started while I was reading and eating a peach.

Sending love to all the writing that will remain in drawers, and all the writers who believe their words only deserve to exist in a context so muted and plastered in darkness.

Vasily Vereshchagin, The Apotheosis of War (1871)

My Stygian night problem.

Maurice Blanchot wrote somewhere that Nietzsche doesn’t content himself with calling up the Stygian night.

The desire for this thing called a Stygian night distracts me from my reading. Now that the thing has been named, I want the Stygian night so I can know what Niestzsche is forsaking.

Max Ernst. The Marriage of Heaven and Earth (1962)

Why do optical, light-related metaphors predominate when we speak of existence?

"Why this imperialism of light?" Maurice Blanchot asks as he prepares to ignore mythology, science, physics, and human history to focus on the phenomenology of light.

"Light illuminates – this means that light hides itself: this is its malicious trait."

Light discloses things and presents itself as an immediate presence "without disclosing what makes it manifest," in Blanchot’s words.

On a side note—-which may or may not be related, Blanchot does not write particularly well about Bataille. He doesn’t ‘shed light’, so to speak, on Bataille’s thinking. One senses this is because he is writing for him rather than to him; he admires him, they are friends – and it is odd how this turns intimacy into a sort of game that fumbles around not quite getting to a point. Never sharpening the words enough to point anywhere.