Surface angles.

For my co-creators in the Conscious Writers Collective

“Evaluation is creation,” as Nietzsche noted.

MIRROR IMAGES

The concave mirror, the convex mirror: variations on visibility.

The shadow’s relation the self as a sheer, a texture that speaks to the density of a physical body in relation to light.

A poem by Cole Swensen titled “Connote” . . . in its entirety:

I wonder if you can use words in such a way that only their connotations and not their denotations get activated. To connotate as one might cogitate or contemplate a state chosen for its particular relation to thought so that its not the definition (always restrictive) of the word that comes into play, but its fields of association, its overtones and undertones, those always expansive, radiating zones of suggestion and implication, in the middle of which gapes the strangely blinding blind spot of the impossibility of precise literal meaning, suggesting, in turn, that language, at heart, is always an absence.

An excerpt from Nicholas Delbanco’s short story, “What We Carry”:

The sky is of a bright whiteness, and she wears dark glasses. There is what might be a boat in the background, or a structure that evokes one; water blends with the horizon so that he is not certain if she stands by an inlet, a river, or the sea. There is a brown shingled wall to the left.

It is her smile he examines, however, the mouth both expansive and pinched. She is smiling at Simon— from the pleasure of the occasion, perhaps, or the beauty of place, or because of something someone said. It would not have been Simon, however; this is a smile of assent at something more amusing than a request that she smile. Kenneth grows certain, suddenly, that there was a third party present— someone at the edge of things, beyond the lens or range of his remembrance, some business associate of Simon's with a camera, or someone passing through who made his mother laugh. A gull preens on a railing by the wall.

The photo introduces a third party; a presence is always in dialogue with an absence.

TWO BY NAN GOLDIN

Both images come from her book, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, titled after a song in Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera.  Both photos are held in collections at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.  Both are cibachrome prints.  Both are shot in public spaces and present ways of thinking about spacing and relationality. Both provoke us to consider how dimension implicates its subjects.

The first image places us on Coney Island, likely in the fall or early spring. Two humans on a bench with a large gap between them. Sometimes a gap implies an erotic possibility. In this photo, the sun seems to have set behind the camera— the sky is pink near the horizon where it meets a harder, dark edge, a deep blue that is the ocean, a blue that snags the blue sweater of the woman on the bench. 

The woman, Suzanne, is looking towards the man, Brian, and he seems to be looking downwards, perhaps at his hands— but not up towards the beach or the water, and not diagonally towards the other person. The brightest part of this image is Brian’s white tshirt. We can read the muscles in his back beneath it; Brian is more available to us as a human body than Suzanne. But Suzanne’s face is more available to us as a figuration of feeling. 

If I stand back a bit, I notice the vastness, and how vastness is emphasized by the presence of the horizon. And how the horizons multiply, giving us the metal bars along the walkaway as well as thick horizontal slats of the bench. Three horizons, and one of them is inhabited by two humans sitting. The space between them seems insurmountable. They share the same space but live in different planes, this is what the direction of the gaze suggests.

(What is Brian holding? I can’t stop wondering about this…)

The second image is a park in New York City. (I keep looking for birds— pigeons, the peckpeckpeck of convivial urban life. Entanglement.) A portrait of entanglement: the subjects’ faces held back from us by the angle. Two people on a bench, though the bench is facing us. The park is sparsely populated and yet it feels full; the shadows of the tree leaves ornament the sidewalks and surfaces. A conspiracy of intimacy in which the space colludes with the lovers and seems to hold them close. Their outfits match: both are wearing white shirts and jeans. Trash under his boot, the way sunlight colludes with the shaping of shoulders.

A/SIDE ON CONEY ISLAND

Not a gull or horizon in sight.

Aside on the isle of Coney. What’s in a name? What does Coney Island carry?

Space, this locus of potential in which things can influence each other, is our reality.

TRAIN BETWEEN

Returning to Suzanne and Phillipe as the subjects of a photo by Nan Goldin… the way green smudges the seen.

Afterimages matter. Afterimages are material.

I’m thinking of a moment in Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, that calls upon the images of childhood. In that novel, the afterimages reconnect Malte to the beloved red crayon of his childhood. He remembers seeing the crayon on the table and reaching towards it, watching in dismay as it rolls off the table and falls into the thick fur of the carpet below. Undeterred, with a reading lamp shining straight into his eyes, the young Malte runs his fingers blindly through the carpet looking for the crayon. 

Not looking — the light makes it impossible to see –  but seeking.

Seeking the crayon.

Looking and not looking.

Seeing a strange blur when a series of afterimages appear on his retina. The afterimages dissipate, enabling him to perceive his own hand, its fingers outstretched, its trunk stirring as if disconnected from his body and scurrying quietly across an ocean floor. Then, the wall at the rear of the room secretes a much larger hand —  a hand with long slender fingers also seeking something from the floor. 

Malte watches the two hands move ominously across the carpet as if driven to meet, or driven to encounter each other accidentally. Fascination morphs to fear as Malte wills the hand that he considers his own, the hand he claims and feels responsible for, to withdraw from its search. Still shaken, he sits alone in the armchair, shivering, pallid, estranged from the room's familiar quietude and safety. When his companion looks up from her reading, Malte says nothing. He is white as a ghost. His companion kneels near his knees and begins shaking him desperately, calling out his name. Malte: the most familiar author of all. His lips tremble: he cannot find a single word. 

Perhaps the sole comfort of this nameless event lies in Rilke’s decision to describe it. For, as William Gass observed, “that description will bide its time,” those “ghostwords will wait their moment –  and they will return, forcing him to relive the fall of the crayon, and his vision of two hands blindly searching the carpet for it, as if the color belonged to both crayon and account, and was therefore equally missed.” 

As if the absence of one is tied to the other. 

SPECTRAL “LIKE-NESS”

“These photos, in which the bodies are absent, and the eroticism is only represented by the abandoned clothes, were a reminder of my possible, permanent absence,” Annie Ernaux said the book she co-wrote with her lover, Marc Marie, a book that they titled The Use of Photography.

Hélène Amouzou, Autoportrait (2009)

The layers in Hélène Amouzou’s “Autoportrait” – a term that sidles alongside “autofiction” somehow, as if to suggest the image wants to enact a theory of representation that includes absences. The wallpaper peeling from the wood surface, blurring the line between paper and fabric. The part of the wallpaper visible through the subject’s right calf. This idea of sheerness in a person challenges how I think about “visibility” or what it means to be seen. The suitcase as a story of origin.

The spectral blur in Christina Sharpe’s “Note 139”:

Ghosts are the most faithful beings in the universe: they don’t believe in time or impossibility.

Ghosts don’t give a damn about the conditions we have set on their existence. I admire this a lot in them.

In the sidereal: Marcel Proust’s “spectral” magic lantern in Jean Santeiul.

COSMOLOGIES

“It all begins with a photo I found one day of three men on a roof.”

— Ian Penman, Erik Satie Three Pieces Suite

Penman accounts for the origin of the obsession that turned into a book on Erik Satie.

Larry Rivers, O'Hara Reading, 1967

The story of origins is the light that brings us to the page with the hope of illumination. The cosmology creates the conditions of possibility for the world we are inventing or writing.

“The poet’s metaphorical activity puts him in a contrafactual relation to the world of other people and ordinary speech,” Anne Carson observed in Economy of the Unlost.

Unequivocally.

VARYING TERMS OF ADDRESS

When I listen to music, gardens open out around me, and the melody becomes a flower I hear with my eyes.

— Mahmoud Darwish, as translated by Catherine Cobham

*

Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, The Use of Photography trans. by Alison Strayer (Seven Stories Press)
Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices
Brian Eno and David Byrne, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Cole SwensEn, AND AND AND (Free Poetry Press)
Collin Marshall, “When Erik Satie Took a Picture of Debussy & Stravinsky June 1910” (Open Culture)
Hélène Amouzou, Autoportrait (2009)
Ian Penman, Erik Satie Three Piece Suite (Semiotexte)
Marcel Proust, “Chardin: The Essence of Things”
Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency at MOMA
Nan Goldin, “Suzanne and Brian on the bench, Coney Island, 1982” at MOCA
Nan Goldin, “Suzanne and Philippe on the bench, Tompkins Square Park, New York City, 1983” at MOCA
Nan Goldin, “Suzanne and Philippe on the train, Long Island, 1985” at MOCA
Nicholas Delbanco, Reprise: The Collected Short Stories of Nicholas Delbanco (Dalkey Archive)
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Vivian Maier’s gallery of self-portraits

James Tate

The challenge is always to find the ultimate in the ordinary horseshit.

— James Tate, “South Bend”

People read poems like newspapers, look at paintings as though they were excavations in the City Center, listen to music as if it were rush hour condensed. They don't even know who's invaded whom, what's going to be built there (when, if ever). They get home. That's all that matters to them. They get home. They get home alive.

— James Tate, “Read the Great Poets”

Harold Feinstein, Piano Still Life, 1974.
Vintage gelatin silver print; photo taken by Anne MacDougall.

The titular framing fueled the fire. An unexpected kindling got starred by a spark. I remember being drawn to “The Whole World’s Sadly Talking To Itself”, a poem by James Tate titled (perhaps) after phrasing from a poem by W. B. Yeats. Or by an ekphrastic urge, I’d read poems by Tate prior to this one and felt missed by them; none left a mark until I entered the building Tate assembled beneath Yeats’ awning—

What about this poem reached out to me? Which part of my existence felt apprehended in (or by) its being?

An elegance in the stanzaic construction. An intertextual friskiness in the speaker’s engagement of motifs and phrases hatched while marveling over the work of another. An alluring ghost-presence of images from Yeats’ poem, “The Sorrow of Love”, with its repeated conjunctions:

And then you came with those red mournful lips,
And with you came the whole of the world’s tears
And all the trouble of her labouring ships,
And all the trouble of her myriad years.

Or maybe a gist of Yeats’ “Broken Dreams” — though it seems too dedicated, too intent on cherishing what has aged rather than what was empty.

I can’t remember.

The way I imagine it has nothing to do with its reality, or with Tate’s realization. And I like that in a poem. I value being being strung out on a line, trying to locate my affective response on a range between disappointment and fascination. Two friends chew over edits in their overly-meaningful poems. They go out for drinks and leave each other with words. Riddling words that want definition. Poems excel at riddling the definitive parts of language, and — in my imagination — Tate writes “Two for Charles Simic” in dialogue with the possibility of defining the sky or nothing.

But here’s how it actually happened:

Two for Charles Simic

1.      The Sky

What is the sky?
A week later
I reply: I don't know

why don't you ask 
your only friend. 
Another week passes. 
He doesn't call.

He must be up to something, 
he must know
what the hell it is.

I look at my bankbook,
it's forty-seven below. 
Can you give me a clue?

I blurt at him.
Those few shining masterpieces 
are lost, electric piercing

bouquets
lost in a fantastic fire. 
What is the sky?

What is the sky. 
The sky is a door, 
a very small door

that opens for an inchworm
an inch above his rock,
and keeps his heart from flying off.

2.      Nothing

It is a tiny obscure lighthouse 
for serious travellers of the night 
whose only vocation
is to gradually discover a spot
to root their lonely wardrobes.

It is a dignified fifth columnist 
inspiring unheard of wind 
slightly ajar:
if you haven't got any you'll die.

It's not going to improve your posture. 
Take an overdose and you won't even faint.
It helps you make it through the day.
You can take it with you and that's all.

Notice the thing that happens between the sixth and seventh stanzas of the Sky section in the prior poem. . . I’m highlighting the repetition across the stanza break —

What is the sky?

What is the sky. 

— because this punctuation of a questing statement with a period is precisely how Tate opens “Read the Great Poets.”

“What good is life without music.”

Maybe a species of rhetoric that resembles a musing.

The same being “The Masters. The Thieves.”

Another sameness sluiced from the repetition of phrases — like “They get home” at the close of the fourth stanza — that reinforces the claim at the end of the third stanza: “We are playing the same song and no one has ever heard anything.”

Speaking of actual happenings, Simic interviewed Tate for The Paris Review in 2006. This is where I learned that Tate was four months old when his father’s plane was shot down in Europe, a tragedy that his mother steadfastly refused to believe. Serving his eggs deadpan, Tate plays on the surreality of circumstance:

This is pretty unfair to the very nice man she was married to for the last thirty-four years of her life—but she was always in love with my father. It was a high-school love affair, they married young, and she never got over it. She came to visit me in Spain in 1976 and she was really crazy. She had never been abroad and it just rattled her to the core. Shortly after she got off the plane she said, I’m really hoping I’ll meet your father.

In the same interview, Tate said he loved taking a poem “that starts with something seemingly frivolous or inconsequential and then grows in gravity until by the end it’s something very serious.” And this is visible across his work. You can see it “Very Late, But Not Too Late,” and how it opens on that see-saw of Tate-style scandal:

I was the last one to leave the party. I
said goodnight to Stephanie and Jared. They were
already in bed. In fact, they were making love, but
they stopped and thanked me for coming.

You can also glean it from the first lines of the cheeky portrait titled “The Chaste Stranger”:

All the sexually active people in Westport
look so clean and certain, I wonder
if they’re dead. Their lives are tennis
without end, the avocado-green Mercedes

Frequently, Tate’s titles work against the loom of their promise. Humans who rarely laugh at disappointment may find Tate too glib. But I kept reading him over the years, bonding with his affinity for absurdity, the drift of that “cuppa” pitched in the invitation elaborated at the outset of “You Are My Destination and My Desire, Fading” —

Something wistful in the slope of “our initials rising” after the strenuous obit-reading mingled with the “fissures” and the fossil record. Something suggestive of absence.

Something displaced in the chaos beneath the foggy day that unfurls with “my cockatoo” and continues with the “some poky guy” amid the flourish of alliteration that sounds out the poem Tate tited “Editor.”

Something bluer than midnight in the disorder of “the plump and dusky woman with something on a leash” setting the scene for the absurdity of luck and pennies offered to “The Condemned Man.”

Something resembling a response to the horrible luck of his childhood’s inheritance.

Something Tate said to Simic evokes it:

My mother got married. It was a brief and very unfortunate marriage to a dangerous lunatic who shot holes in our house with a .45 automatic. He slit his wrists—all kinds of stuff. It was only years later, when I happened upon the one and only photograph that I had of him, that I realized that he bore a considerable resemblance to my father. She had married him from the gut—like, oh, he’s like Vincent. And he was. He was a nice-looking man, with the same exact curly hair and very similar features. It was that simple. She married him after knowing him two weeks. I hadn’t even met the guy. She came home and said, We’re moving out of here. I’m married!

The marriage may have been a disaster but Marriage, as an institution, survived its dissolution: Tate’s mother remarried a traveling salesman who sold shock absorbers. Tate’s second stepfather was a man with “a who-knows-how-many-state area, maybe five states” who “was gone pretty much all week, thank God.” In Tate’s words:

I really don’t remember him doing anything to me, but he used to beat the shit out of my mother. Really badly—black-and-blue—and I would be in the house watching. Eventually, toward the end of it, I drew a gun and stuck it to his head. His own gun. He had told me where he hid it. To protect the house, you know? He told me where it was, and I finally went and got it. It really was time to do it. I was probably sixteen.

He left his job as a dishwasher in New York city after being held up at gunpoint. But he knew its nocturnes well enough to compose them “In New York,” where:

you sometimes know the secret, if anything,
not asking for anyone to take you home
you are, for one second, the only one that's not alone and

There is something worth returning for in “the blue-black plumes of the foundation” of “City At Night”.

There is more: the aunt “stroking the back of a standing raccoon” in “Demigoddess”; “this crap about a cougar” in “Half-Eaten”; “Millie, O Millie, do you remember me?” . . .

“Dear Gene, I made it at least this far,” Tate wrote in a 1969 letter addressed to his friend Gene DeGruson — followed by a juicy inventory of details from the “writhing” life:

The infinite details involved in moving from one place to no-place wrought a maniacal kind of SS effiency upon me those last 2 weeks. I sold my car and much of my “furniture,” as it was. And I do have three readings in Pennsylvania before departing the continent; plus one charity reading at Yale.

It’s good to be away from Kansas City: as you know, I had no real stimulating friends there, just a few drinking partners and a nice girl, which is enough to get by on for a while, but not nine months, for me. I attended a wild party and poetry event last night at Saint Mark’s Church on the Bowery—LSD punch (really!) pot birthday cake, plus 350 joints circulating for the special occasion, plus wine, a small conciliation. I abstained from the punch, but indulged in the cake and joints. The wildest thing was this: good old Ingrid Superstar herself picked me as her evenings entertainmnet, Warhol’s debutante. Cosmic mindlessness! I was absolutely giddy with the whole thing, couldn’t stop beaming at the ridiculousness of it. Since she was the big catch at the event, everyone had their eyes on us to see what would come of it (I think she had vaguely heard of me, though I couldn’t tell for sure, and I made no effort to inform of my literary inclinations because nothing could have been more irrelevant to her designs.) Well, I blew it. It was too much, I walked her to her apartment, listening to her gobbledegook about the eclipse in China that night and how she was a scorpio, and how many pills she had taken that day and her last bad trip and her next movie in Rome, etc etc., and finally stole a big kiss goodnight and slithered back down 10th to the Church where the party was still writhing. All the East Village poets were there—Ron Padgett, Michael Brownstein, Peter Schjeldahl, Anne Waldman, Gerard Malanga, Lewis Warsh, and more, plus a few friends of mine, Charles Simic and Nathan Whiting, both of the latter being very good poets—the former six being extremely suspect though much celebrated in this part of the world, thanks to their dial-a-poem innovation.

There are as always many plays and movies and poetry events buzzing here: and you keep thinking you’ll take them all in but when the clock says it’s time to go you sink deeper in your chair at the thought of three subway transfers and you end up reading a book and drinking a bottle of wine. I don’t know where I’ll live when it’s Columbia teaching time next year.

The City is in a mess in so many ways. Lindsey is in fact a baboon. Norman Mailer is going to be running with Jimmy Breslin as city counsel chairman. He might even win. The schools are hopeless, much money has been cut for all budgets, there is no housing, rents are skyrocketing, etcetera. Aguh. Oh for the prairies. You can’t win.

Let me know what you’re up to, now and in the summer ahead.

“Adieu, Yours, Jim.”

Some He might win but You definitely can’t. Not in a Tate poem. Not in a Tate-world. If you’re patient and willing to watch, you can bard over the terrors in silly-string. Imagine them otherwise. Refuse to be bound by their steam.

In Memory, Dorothea Lasky describes how fear and art linked up for her as a child. “I used to draw a picture of the scariest thing I could think of on a piece of paper and then cover it up,” she writes. “Then I'd test myself to see if I was brave enough to look at it. I'd cover and uncover the page quickly, letting the image wash over me, without really forcing myself to look directly at its hellish stare. Even now I feel scared of finding one of those pages somewhere (or it finding me).”

On that note, “Coda” deserves to be read them. Tate’s descriptive restraint reinforces his refusal to take up horizontal space on the page, pulling the poem down as if compelled by gravity. Here it goes.

Coda

Love is not worth so much;
I regret everything.
Now, on our backs,
in Fayetteville, Arkansas,
the stars are falling
into our cracked eyes.

With my good arm,
I reach for the sky
and let the air out of the moon.
It goes whizzing off
to shrivel and sink
in the ocean.

You cannot weep;
I cannot do anything
that once held an ounce
of meaning for us.
I cover you
with pine needles.

When morning comes,
I will build a cathedral
around our bodies.
And the crickets,
who sing with their knees,
will come there
in the night to be sad
when they can sing no more.

*

Charles Simic, “James Tate, The Art of Poetry No. 92” (Paris Review)
Ferruccio Busoni, Piano Concerto (1878)
Harold Feinstein, Piano Still Life, 1974.
James Tate, “Editor”
James Tate, “Fuck the Astronauts”
James Tate, “Poem to Some of My Recent Poems”
James Tate, “The Condemned Man”
James Tate, “The Expert” (PDF)
Jeffrey Gleaves, “Cosmic Mindlessness” (Paris Review)
W. B. Yeats, “Broken Dreams” (PDF)

PAN.

ARTHUR: But isn’t it necessary to believe a beautiful mask more than reality?

(Arthur Breisky, Střepy zrcadel)

DURTAL: Good God, what a mess! And to think that this nineteenth century of ours gives itself such airs and graces! There is only one word in everyone’s mouth: progress. Progress for what?

(J. K. Huysmans, La-Bas)

CYRIL: Ahem! Another cigarette, please.

(Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”)

Molto meno.

There is a moment in Michael Clune’s unforgettable PAN when the young protagonist Nicholas lifts a copy of Oscar Wilde’s collected works from a library table and finds himself inside Wilde’s Salome, encountering “a third kind of oldness” he can neither describe nor place.

“Under the play’s name was an ornate image of a thin woman holding a man’s head on a plate.”

This image of Salome may be the one drawn by Aubrey Beardsley in the illustrated copy of Wilde’s Salome I purchased at the Salon de Refusees reading in L. A.

The language is anachronistic, psalmodic, like nothing Nicholas has met yet. (In his notebooks, W. Somerset Maugham acknowledged Oscar Wilder's Salome as spurring him towards heavier, more baroque language. Like “an old actor watching a part which he himself had created,” Maugham said, “I look at my past self with astonishment and with a certain contemptuous amusement.”)

By the end of the play’s first page, Nicholas feels “excitement rising” within him, a sensation so consuming that he can’t distinguish it from panic. Nor can he determine if this excitement partakes of the aura prior to panic. Nicholas glimpses “the shadow of [his] thought” in “the warp across the page.” As words combine, the room dissolves. The reader finds himself “inside the book,” a moment that Clune marks by quoting a passage from Wilde’s play:

You are always looking at her. You look at her too much. It is dangerous to look at people in such a fashion. Something terrible may happen.

Now the tingling extremities of panic set in. Nicholas feels as if he understands the book, feels himself implicated by this understanding that appears in a quotation. Unable to resist reading further, he continues. Salome is speaking, lamenting the possible consequences of having kissed Jokanaan (or John the Baptist). She addresses him directly:

“I have kissed thy mouth. There was a bitter taste on thy lips. Is it the taste of blood? But perchance it is the taste of love!”

Time is suspended for Nicholas, who cannot stop reading. By the time he leaves the world of the play, the world of the library is closing. The lights have dimmed. “Feeling could keep the shape these sentences gave them,” he thinks, applying what he discovers in Wilde’s text to his own feelings for Sarah, the girl who believes in thresholds. While Salome’s sentences are “open to feeling,” they are also “closed” — they close behind him, delivering him to the world where time is suspended. This temporal suspense is what good literature does, I think, when it delivers us to a world we can’t resist.

Molto meno mosso.

Salome’s dance, Herod’s demands, the beseeching gazes, “The headless lover”: Nicholas feels as if the play’s secret meaning has been revealed to him. Like actual human encounters, myths lends themselves to multiple interpretations. In Wilde’s play, Herod misreads the scene: jealousy drives him to order Salome’s death when he sees her kiss the decapitated head. The charge of “perversion” (and the implication of necrophilia) makes it easier for Herod to avoid confronting the jealousy that motivates his act. Like many kings, Herod cannot exist within life, among others: he needs to be singular, the monotheos, the one that eliminates the need for any others.

The first page of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, in the Dover Editions version I picked up at a bookstore between readings in Los Angeles earlier this year.

Nicholas’ interpretation reads Wilde against the grain of prominent critics. Salome is not the story of a gorgeous woman and a man who dies when she orders him to be decapitated. Instead, it is “a true story.” It is a “story of the love between a beautiful woman and a living, headless man.” And he, Nicholas, the protagonist (who gives meaning to the “struggle” buried inside this word’s etymology), shares this interpretation with the only person he believes can understand. Sarah, who knows he lives in a continuous struggle with panic and anxiety. Sarah —- who pauses and asks if “the word panic had anything to do with the Greek god Pan.” Sarah — who looks for meaning in his experiences of self-dissolution. Sarah —- who takes him to the high school library during lunch and looks up the word in an encyclopedia: “The word panic is derived from the god Pan, and originally referred to a sudden fear aroused by the presence of a god.”

A book can be an experience, a risk, a damnation that led to the first kiss between Paolo and Francesca. We blame literature for the ruse of being human, and mistake the sap for sop.

— [Alas, I don’t have time to type up all my notes on Pan… so there is a large chunk of 3 pages that should exist here, which I deliver as a blank instead.] —-

… and Nicholas’ performance of critique on Salome “to understand panic” enriches this moment when he sits on the library floor with Sarah, dazzled by temporal correspondence. A nun interrupts them. The two glance up at her:

A camera clicked. Sarah, with her wild smile and open legs. Me, with my round glasses full of blank light, with my face like a mask.

This photographic double-portrait frames the visual to match the textual; we look-back at the moment from his college days with him. Since the image isn’t available, I imagined it as a yearbook picture, located under one of those mortifying sections titled “Comings and Goings” in the later pages of yearbooks, featuring random photos of students “in the classroom setting” with terrible captions like You can’t keep Nicholas and Sarah away from the library!

It staggers into the space of “wildness” which shares resonances with Proust’s involuntary memory as well as the flashback sequence in film that overturns chronological time.

As a literary movement, one might say that Decadence abandoned the possibility of transcendent truth for the ecstasy of immediate sensual experience. Decadent heroes inhabit an aristocracy of the senses, surrounding themselves with sumptuous material objects, blitzing their consciousness with drugs, devoting themselves to accumulation of luxurious excess. Gustave' Flaubert’s Saint Anthony could not resist the Tantalus of horrifying images and agony, as if to indicate that we are consumed by what we consume, and co-created by our darkest desires. “You know, the more I think about it, the more I realize that literature only exists for one reason: it saves writers from being disgusted with life,” Durtal says when asked if he will ever finish his book on Satanism. And perhaps this is true…or just another way in which my words return to me from a long-ago galley:

A long-ago galley

In his passion for the ballet Mr. Lumley once applied to Heinrich Heine for a new work, and the result was that Mephistophela, of which the libretto, written out in great detail, is to be found in Heine's complete works. The temptation of Faust by a female Mephistopheles is the subject of this strange production, which was quite unfitted for the English stage, and which Mr. Lumley, though he duly paid for it, never thought of producing. In one of the principal scenes of Mephistophela the temptress exhibits to her victim the most celebrated danseuses of antiquity, including Salome the daughter of Herodias. King David too dances a pas seul before the [. . .]

— George Grove, Dictionary of Music and Musicians

*

Oscar Wilde. “The Decay of Lying.” (1889)
J. A. “Max Nordau’s Degeneration.” (The Sewanee Review, 1985)
Jane Ford, Kim Edwards Keates, Patricia Pulham, eds. Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Libidinal Lives. (Taylor & Francis, 2015)
Michael Clune, PAN (Penguin Random House)
Peter Bugge. “Naked Masks: Arthur Breisky or How to Be a Czech Decadent.” (2016)
Will Rees. Hypochondria. (Coachhouse Books, March 2025)

“See twelve-tone music where reversal of the pitch looks backward. See Salome holding a man's head on a platter. See me, a little in love with the word itself, it's composured character, but not Lot's wife.” (Retrograde)

"Blue, yellow, beautiful"

The common assumption is that there are real people and there are others who are pretending to be something they're not. There is also an assumption that there's something morally wrong with pretending. My assumptions about culture as a place where you can take psychological risks without incurring physical penalties make me think that pretending is the most important thing we do. It's the way we make our thought experiments, find out what it would be like to be otherwise.

— Brian Eno on being “pretentious”

Memory, as Proust knew, rewrites itself in that involuntary mode, or what Paul Westerberg elicits in his demarcation of “every once in a while, forever.” No art or creation can exist without it. Memory is our meaning-making forge, the metallurgy of being and feeling and living and divining sense from what is given.

“Givenness” gave me pause as I absorbed a poem by Delmore Schwartz — “What Is To Be Given” — superbly wrought from suppleness and the ghosts of the stumbled-upon, whether shells or scallops or the swoop of strange colors. The speaker is indistinguishable from the poem itself, or the act of the poem-ing; he hovers in “spirit, yet animal” holding that “blue, yellow, beautiful” in its hand — and then taking leave of it like magic.

What Is To Be Given

What is to be given,
Is spirit, yet animal,
Colored, like heaven,
Blue, yellow, beautiful.
The blood is checkered by
So many stains and wishes,
Between it and the sky
You could not choose, for riches.
Yet let me now be careful
Not to give too much
To one so shy and fearful
For like a gun is touch.

Delmore Schwartz

. . . and music, too, fills this space of the unchoosable for me. Music inclines the mind to sidereals and fathomless temporalities. It navigates the possibilities of the present by committing the moment to recognition of the buoys past. Being human is not like an ocean but existing as a human being may yet resemble the ways of being and having-been across the boats and vessels of a life.

Hark! I playlist myself.

… and there is always a book in the margins. Yesterday and today, that book testified to its own appendix-issues in the titling. A Year with Swollen Appendices by Brian Eno. A logbook of interiors and impressions recorded in the year of no lords, namely, 1995. Immersed in the details — music, art, distortion, the genocide in Bosnia drumming through the background of Eno’s interiors and motifs — I am looking for “what a difference / a little difference would make” (to quote Fugazi).

A few excerpts from the final month, the first and last breath of that December, in Eno’s telling —- with my brief, contextualizing notes softened by italics.

1 DECEMBER 1995

Note from Elvis C. [Costello] asking if I knew of an artist who worked with glass boxes making tiny theatre sets' with leaves and natural objects. I thought of [Jospeh] Cornell, but when I asked Jenny and Tony at the Todd Gallery they suggested Jane England, who's had several group shows called 'Art in Boxes’. Sent the catalogues to him. Lunch with Jenny.

Working all day on Koan pieces. It's a different kind of work now - since I am trying to replicate Discreet Music as accurately as possible (in order to make a 'Discreet Mutating Music'). This is actually very hard - trying to duplicate the complicated analogue conditions of the original: a synth that never stayed properly in tune, variable waveform mixes and pulse-widths, variable filter frequency and Q, plus probably something like 30 audible generations of long-delay repeat, with all the interesting sonic degradation that introduced. Digital is too deterministic. At the purely electronic level, there are very few molecules involved, and their behaviour is amplified. The closer you get to 'real' instruments - including physical devices such as tapeheads, tape, loudspeaker cones, old echo units, analogue synths - the more molecules are involved, and the closer you get to a 'probabilistic condition. This is an argument for strapping a lot of old junk on to the end of your digital signal path - valves, amplifiers, weird speakers, distortion units, old compressors, EQs, etc. - in the hope that you reintroduce some of the sonic complexity of real' instruments. There's nothing wrong with the pristine formica surfaces of digital: it's just that one would like to be able to use other textures as well. Think Haim Steinbach.

Anyway, my attempts to replicate Discreet Music result in interesting failure after interesting failure. On the route to it I get diverted. What comes out instead is another good piece of music that isn't actually anything like Discreet Music. This is a kind of argument for life-drawing and other academic pursuits: the act of trying to make something in reference to an external standard makes you attempt things with the medium that you wouldn't have thought to otherwise. Perhaps it's also an argument for the trainspotterish Photoshoppers trying to make their glistening photographic daffodils ...

6 DECEMBER

[Eno is thinking about the absence of “harmonic drama” in a recent production experience, and how vocals require something more interesting than a harmonic plateau. He replays a conversation from earlier in the day on this subject…]

I said I thought that we had learned three things from African music. The first was pushed rhythm, which doesn't occur in traditional Western music much; the second was flattened scales; and the third was call-and-response.

Unfortunately people don't recognize the importance of call-and-response. This is because most songs are now written by the people who plan to sing them, and for them the picture is normally complete when they're in it (and uninteresting to them if they're not). But a listener likes more than this. The backing vocals, the response, are the voices of society: whether gossiping (as in ‘Is she really going out with him?’ ‘I don't know - let's ask her!') or affirming (as in ‘Amen!’ and ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah’) or warning (‘Foolish little girl..’). Even songs that are “personal” - where one doesn't want to invoke the conspiracy implied by group singing - can use the voices of conscience or of the various alter-egos. They turn monologue into conversation. Interesting to speculate on what other roles backing vocals could play: the voice of speculation ('what would happen if...)? of precise measurement? of disagreement? of doubt? of alternative ways of saying something (like shadow possibilities, parallel stories)?

15 DECEMBER

[Eno musing on shifting relations between culture and temporality, and the role of errancy in discovering new modes or ways of being. There are many sections in his diaries where the importance of just fucking around with sound becomes evident and he works this into his ontology.]

Think of distortion, for instance - all the things that technology does which we didn't want it to do. Think of how we learn to read 'distortion' as resonant with new types of meaning - so the grain of 8mm film comes to mean urgency, amateurishness, the invaluable unrehearsed moment caught. The overload of a guitar comes to connote the idea of breaking the frame of the equipment, doing something that can't be contained - and this adds a whole new side to one's expressive palette, because one can now juxtapose things that can be contained against things that ‘can't’ (inverted commas because of course such a usage is an artifice now - as all these usages become). And the artifice part is another interesting transition - when something moves away from being 'byproduct' or 'spin-off' or 'accidental side-effect' and becomes instead part of the available vocabulary, but still retaining some of the resonances of its accidental origins.

All of these processes add value. In fact they create value by conferring it where it has never been before. This seems to me an essentially human attempt to not take the world for granted - to try to look at everything as though it exists for purposes that we might not yet have discovered or noticed.

My friend Peter Schmidt used to talk about 'not doing the things that nobody had ever thought of not doing, which is an inverse process - where you leave out an assumption that everybody has always made and see what happens (e.g. music has to be made of intentionally produced sounds was the assumption that [John] Cage left out). In that version of this process, you discover a value in the absence of something - in fact you discover that the absence of something is the revelation of something else (Buñuel, the filmmaker, said, 'Every object conceals another' - a message that I often relay in the studio when overdubbing starts).

19 DECEMBER

[This excerpt follows Eno’s rant about the western states’ silence and complacency on the genocide in Bosnia and the obvious efforts to eliminate Muslim communities from Europe. Kosovo looms on the horizon as Eno parses the connection between political action and art in the neoliberal world.]

'CHANGE THE CONVERSATION - LEAVE OUT THE TORIES'

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.

It's the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar is the sound of something too loud for the medium is posed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of a grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

Note to the artist: when the medium fails conspicuously, and especially if it fails in new ways, the listener believes something is happening beyond its limits.

Tim Cole, Jon Pettigrew, Jameos, Anthea, Rob Partridge for meeting about release of Koan. 'GENERATIVE MUSIC' name agreed.

31 DECEMBER

The last day of the year.

Picture frames that have to be switched on to open up - so you choose to see a picture, and it has duration.

Talking with Elvis Costello in the steam-room about the difference between scored and played music. When music is generated by a group of people playing, everyone tends to play most of the time. With scoring, you're likely to use instruments when you need them. No one feels bad about standing round for three-quarters of an hour and then going bong' on a timp if that's what the score demands. This is why scored music is more coloristic and contoured than most pop —- whole sections come and go; the dynamic and timbral ranges are very broad.

Anthea's new unthinkable future: that nuclear radiation, in small doses, will be found to be good for you (this to be discovered when, 30 years hence, the inhabitants of Mururoa atoll are all in outstandingly vigorous good health).

Tomorrow I can go to sleep without having to write this diary.

[…]

“Of such a kind was the only picture that adorned, and then but for a brief space, Jean's room. A spectral picture, composed of shadows; a phantom picture, a picture which did not last for long and, therefore, struck his imagination far more powerfully than would have done a motionless picture hung for him to look at all day long.”

— Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil

*

A Year with Swollen Appendices by Brian Eno (PDF)

"a tangle, my impatience, your wildness"

κλέω/κλείω

. . . meaning “to recount”, “to make famous” or “to celebrate.” The etymology of the name, Clio, comes us to from ancient Greek, just as Clio comes from the ancient Greek culture that named her as the muse of history and storytelling, and held her responsible for preserving memory and our relation to the knowledge of the past.

For the Greeks, history could be preserved and passed along in multiple mediums, as Clio demonstrated across representations, where she holds scrolls, stone tablets, trumpets or lyres. To her, we owe chronology, or the obsession with keeping time and telling stories in chronological order. 

Speaking of devices, in order to ensure that she never “lost track of time,” Clio carried an hourglass with her — beneath her robe.

Clio on an antique fresco from Pompeii, Mount Olympus

“Lustration-water”

According to Simonides’ “Fragment 577”, as recorded by Plutarch, “there was a shrine of the Muses here [south of Apollon's temple at Delphi] where the spring wells up, and that is why they used this water for libation and lustrations, as Simonides says: ‘where the holy water of the lovely-haired Muses is drawn from below for lustration. Overseer of the holy lustration-water, golden Clio, who give the water-drawers from the ambrosial cave the fragrant lovely water sought with many prayers.’”

Pindar mentions Clio in his Nemean Ode 3. 10 & 82, invoking her lyre and supplicating her for guidance over his own writing. “Of song grant, of my skill, full measure,” said Pindar. “Strike, O daughter of the lord of cloud-capped heaven, chords to his honor; mine to wed them with the youthful voices and with the lyre . . . In your honor then, if high-throned Clio wills, for your proud spirit of conquest.”

Aside on lustråtion

Lustration, for me, tends to evoke the politics of Secret Police and surveillance files in former Iron Bloc states, as well as the political purges of former Party members carried out in the 1990’s and early 2000’s by the American “development officials” of what would later become the Hedge Fund Class before burgeoning into the absolutely unforgivable Real-Estate-Development Complex currently investing billions of US tax dollars in the unremitting genocide of Palestinians ….

Clio’s demise

A man, of course. Clio had the misfortune to fall in love with Adonis, the mortal man who also happened to be Aphrodite’s crush. In a fit of perhaps moralism that provided excellent cover to her own self-loathing, Clio openly rebuked the goddess Aphrodite for loving the mortal Adonis and thereby entangling human history in the work of the gods.

And so the fire was set: Aphrodite felt the rage burning outwards from the center of her being, leaving no surface untouched by humiliation. “Dishonor.” “Disrespect.”

The Olympians couldn’t bear the slights of “dis” — and so Aphrodite avenged herself by cursing Clio to fall head over heels for another mortal, a man named Pieros.

And Clio fell. . .

Somewhere between the earth and Olympus, Clio gave birth to two sons, both of whom remained unaware of their fathers. One son was named Hymenaeus. The other son, Hyakinthus, was the fruit of Clio’s love affair with Pieros. Later, Hyakinthus became the lover of Apollo and got killed by a jealous Zephyrus.

"Moreover Clio the Muse fell in love with a man, according to Likymnios, and some think Hymenaeus was her son."

— Licymnius, Fragment 768A (from Philodemus, On Piety)

To the Muse

Dear Cleo, I can’t complain about your absence
Nor excuse my failure to call you sooner
I mistook you for your sister and
Now I thank you both, you one Lady
              who changes before my eyes

           QUEEN LIONESS OF HEAVEN IN THE SUN

              …tangle of a dream, a history
                          waiting while I sleep I grind my teeth
              or waking I watch your closed eyes
              film of gold hair across your cheek
                             a mystery

a tangle, my impatience, your wildness
this persistence of vision centered in my own chest
(the print of your ear on my skin)

Your presence… 
I’m high! My brains foam
I can’t hear what you say
Quietly happily out of my mind

               Madrones blossom on our mountain
               Deer in thicket watch me pass:
               Fawns and does,

Tawny and grey
Bless me as I walk along the fire-road

Who are the brilliance of that day
The glory of this night.

Philip Whalen
 

Pierre Claude François Delorme, Zephyr and Psyche (c. 1820)

“Clio . . . to thee, O Muse, has been vouchsafed the power to know the hearts of the gods and the ways by which things come to be.”

— Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica 3. 15 ff (trans. Mozley) (Roman epic c. 1st A.D.)

“Begin thou, unforgetting Clio, for all the ages are in thy keeping, and all the storied annals of the past.

— Greek lyric from the 5th century BCE offers various glimpses of Clio

*

Clio on an antique fresco from Pompeii, Mount Olympus (Wikipedia)
Pierre Claude François Delorme, Zephyr and Psyche (c. 1820)
Pindar, Nemean Ode 3. 10 & 82
Zephyr carrying Psyche to an enchanted palace, from "The Story of Cupid and Psyche as told by Apuleius" (Met)

For Lynne.

“Poetry is older than skillfully elaborated prose speech. It is the original presentation of the truth, a knowing which does not yet separate the universal from its living existence in the individual ... but which grasps the one only in and through the other.”

— Hegel, Lectures on the Fine Arts

“Poetry protects language from serving any master. One can do it better from the periphery than the center.”

— Anne Lauterbach

speaking of inventories and alphabetical orderings—

A

• Alibi, or different ways of conceiving the poem’s speaker.

• “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”)

• Amaranthine means “immortal” or “undying”; it also refers to a deep purple-red color.

B

• Burning bushes, or “talk about burning bushes,” or the way Frank O’Hara does so in “How Roses Get Black.”

How Roses Get Black

First you took Arthur's porcelain
pony from the mantel and! dashed
it against the radiator! Oh it was

vile! we were listening to Sibelius.
And then with lighter fluid you wet
each pretty pink floored rose, tossed

your leonine head, set them on fire.
Laughing maniacally from the bath-
room. Talk about burning bushes! I, 

who can cut with a word, was quite
amused. Upon reflection I am not.
Send me your head to soak in tallow!

You are no myth unless I choose to 
speak. I breathed those ashes secretly.
Heroes alone destroy, as I destroy

you. Know now that I am the roses
and it is of them I choose to speak.

Frank O’Hara

C

• Complete passenger manifest for the Lusitania.

• Cledonism refers to circumlocution used to avoid speaking unlucky words
  
  

D

• “Deadly cargo” on the Lusitania

• Demean, as in to humiliate or degrade—- and the strange way it links up with this idea of the polished “demeanor,” as if the proper demeanor can be protective against being demeaned.  

• ditchlily (see H)

• Claude Debussy’s Deux Arabesques for Harp, L. 66

• Dualisms, or the what Christian Wiman calls “the little dualisms that define and derange us” (see T)

E

• Ecstasy, or the poem of (as translated by Paul Amrod)

• Erotic and domestic, or “Lust: The Pitfalls of Modern Intimacy,” a conversation between Esther Perel and Laura Kipnis as “instigated” by Paul Holdengraber. Notably, Paul uses this word, instigated, to describe his role in the conversation, and I think that’s a fabulous way of describing the labor of difficult or uncomfortable conversations (especially when the speaker may be lured away from the challenge of speaking by an interior dialogue with socialization and shame).

F

• Fondness in leavetaking, or how to exit a room that hurt us without holding ourselves in a simple relationship to the hurt, a challenge that makes me think of how David Roderick takes leave of the formative suburbs in “Dear Suburb”:

Though you live
inside me, though you laid eggs
in the moisture at the corners
of my eyes, I still dream about
your sinking empire twenty feet above
sea level, and the many things
you never see: beautiful bleached
gas can, tomato posts bent into art,
how half of a butterfly, cut crosswise,
still looks like a butterfly, etc.

G

• “Good for it” — an expression that hinges on one’s ability to pay out, and how this is used in dating discourse as it pertains to women. In this expression, there is also the implication that one (you, me, she, etc.) is the limited condition of its saying.

• “Goods” — as in items on a list. But also the “good” in things.

H

• Hemerocallis fulva, the orange daylily— also called ditch lily, railroad daylily, roadside daylily, outhouse lily, track lily, and wash-house lily. Or fulvous lily. The genius name Hemerocallis means literally, “beautiful [for a] day” in ancient Greek, where it referred to the martagon lily and the daily opening of its flower.

• Haydn and cellos.

• Husband-stitch, or variations on threading.

• Household, per Jim Dine’s “Household Piece” as a mixed-media assemblage that includes mattress stuffing.

I

• Interludes

• “Improv” by Sharon Olds
  
  

J

• Jean Paul mentioned that his “favorite instrument for play” was sand because of all the possibilities it embodies as “the purest of toys,” to quote Paul Fleming: “The Promise of Childhoood…” in Goethe Yearbook 14.

• Jeux, or game in French. The long-J in play.

• Joy and play: words that end in “y”. An upbeat sound? Thinking about how we use the sound of particular to lift sentences or colour the words in proximity to them.

K

• “Katy” (see T)

L

• Language may be working best when language is failing, per Susan Tichy.

• Listings, listing, different ways of naming and ordering the world we are given.

• Love and the art of writing about others. In Delmore Schwartz’s story, “The World Is a Wedding,” there is a moment when the protagonist, Jacob, thinks something during the course of an interior monologue that can be applied to poetry as well as fiction, namely: “You have to love human beings . . .if you want to write stories about them. Or at least you have to want to love them. Or at least you have to imagine the possibility that you might be able to love them.” Drawing that out a bit, I would argue that this pursuit of the imaginary conditions (whether accidental or contrived) for loving others that shapes our choices about speakers in poems.
  
  
  

M

• Maps made by women, or ways of articulating interiority, as with the carte de tendre, a sort of map created by women at a time when they were not permitted to circumnavigate the seas on Spanish galleons and use maps to colonize other places. This alternate geography that maps interior spaces while also gesturing towards the conventions of a “a woman’s place”.

• Manifesto, as in Tristan Tzara’s “Dada Manifesto on Bitter and Feeble Love” or Mary Ann Caws’ century of -isms for a survey of manifesto forms

• Meline is a canary yellow color

• Misdemeanor, in counterpoint to the demeanor I mentioned earlier. Misdemeaning as an error of manners or presentation.

• “the misdemeanor of the mist” in Austin Smith’s poem, “The Witness Tree”

N

• Nate Wooley’s aural experiments with carte de tendre and related forms

• “The Night” by Morphine
  
  
  

O

• “On the Nature of Daylight” by Max Richter, from The Blue Notebooks. With Dinah Washington’s voice carried into the song.
  
  
  

P

• Pearls in poems. “Sometimes, I just place a title at the top of the undisturbed, blank page and that name becomes something like a piece of sand that happened into the delicate flesh of an oyster, blank itself and closed off from the world…. The result, eventually, is a pearl,” said Lucy Brock-Broido in a 2013 interview. Per naming and claiming or disclaiming.

• Parallel poems. A parallel poem is an original poem that uses the same lines structures as another poem, but focuses on a completely different topic. Some words from the original poem are retained, but some words are replaced with new words.

• Picasso’s young ladies or maidens of Avignon, as a figuration

Q

• “Quest” sits quietly inside the “question” or the act of questioning. Thinking about the heroic epic (as challenged by Alice Notley) but also the idea of the journey and the heroic male’s questing.

• “The Quiet World” by Jeffrey McDaniel

R

• Rediscovered things, as mentioned by Rainer Maria Rilke in a passage I quote extensively: “The incomparable value of these rediscovered Things lies in the fact that you can look at them as if they were completely unknown. No one knows what their intention is and (at least for the unscientific) no subject matter is attached to them, no irrelevant voice interrupts the silence of their concentrated reality, and their duration is without retrospect or fear. The masters from whom they originate are nothing; no misunderstood fame colors their pure forms, no history casts a shadow over their naked clarity: they are. That is all. This is how I see ancient art. The little tiger at Rodin's is like that, and the many fragments and broken pieces in the museums (which you pass by many times without paying attention, until one day one of them reveals itself to you, and shines like a first star ...)”

• Reds: that palette. Thinking, too, of how Francis Bacon loved the color of blood. How he savored Antioch-red, paintbox bright red, or cherry red — and hoped to “make the human scream into something which would have the intensity and beauty of a Monet sunset.”

• “Revenge” by Salim Barakat
  
  

S

• “She can take the dark out of the nighttime / And paint the daytime black” — per looking back

• Star, or first star (per Rilke) and final star and stars as places or sites for the poems

• Swallow, or words related to the verb.

T

• Traces as places where themes are held. Rachel Richardson defines a “trace” as “an act of imitation in which you choose your own subject (locale, weather, objects, etc.)” and then apply it to the master poem that you are tracing so that you ultimately rewrite this poem with different objects. In tracing, the poet tries to stay as close as possible to the master poem’s parts of speech, sentence structure, and stylistic elements. What you’re jamming with is the metaphors—the images.

• The tune of things, as written by Christian Wiman.

• Themes make me think of “some day I’ll love” thread in poetics, as started by Frank O’Hara and carried forward by Roger Reeves

by Frank O'Hara

by Roger Reeves

U, V, W

• Understanding as a position in relation to knowledge that announces itself “under” the standing.

• Vibratiuncle is a tiny vibration. The tiniest sort of vibe.

• Wallpaper, as a site for juxtapositions.

X, Y, Z

• X-ed out. The lines that are visibly erased.

• Yowling and yellows.

• Zither, the instrument of dithering, which is certainly where I find myself when adding these parting words from Rilke’s January 1922 letter to Ilse Blumenthal-Weiss: “And for that matter, even in the experiencing itself, where is the boundary to what is one's own? He who trains his senses to the purest and most inward participation in the world, what, in the end, will he not have been? Isn't it best and richest to see it thus? I obey the page which dictates my closing and make use of its little, last space for many good wishes for you.”

A passage on tinnitus.

Two passages in Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About made me think about a thing I’d rather not think about, namely, the months I spent inside chatrooms for tinnitus, disguised as a man, talking to similarly-afflicted men in the hope of discovering a way to end the ringing in my right ear.

There was so much shame in those veteran-filled chatrooms— self-annihilating shame bridled by the fear of telling loved ones why Iraq kept returning after fireworks or rock shows. Years after erasing my Tinnitus-Chat identity, those comments continue to haunt me. Comments like . . . “I don’t want to keep my son from watching cartoons”: “I don’t want to tell my wife”; “I’m losing my mind and can’t concentrate on anything”; “I feel like I have to protect myself from the world and hold it at a distance”; “I can’t live in my body it makes me crazy”; “Is this my punishment”; “If my wife knew, she’d think I was pathetic”; “I hate myself”; “I don’t want to live if this doesn’t end”; “I can’t keep living like this”; “It’s torture, you know, it is an invisible torture I had to leave the IMAX with my girlfriend”; “I can’t go to a sports bar anymore because it gets worse after all those tvs are screaming at once”; “I feel like I’ve failed my family”. . . etc etc.

What follows is the first passage from Posthuma’s book that led me back to the surreal time when I thought the tinnitus could end— the time when I had hope, as they say, of resuming a life unmarred by the ringing.

The day the ringing started. I know exactly when it was, the day my brother was going to help my mother plant a rosebush. I'd driven him to the village and we were singing along to a Ween song, the one about friends being so close but so far away but then I noticed I was singing alone. I looked over and say my brother pressing his index fingers against his ears. I thought he was playing an old game of ours, the one where he'd quickly press his ears open and closed, making everything sound like a skipping CD, so I continued singing extra loudly. Then I stopped.

My ears are ringing, he said.

He took his hands away from his ears.

I'll stop, I said. At the same moment, he said: It won't stop.

The ringing continued for the entire day. I joked it was because of my singing and he laughed but looked worried. He'd once read something about people whose ears started ringing and continued to ring for the rest of their lives. It can just randomly happen to you, he said. Like cancer.

A few days later, the ringing was still there. It wasn't a comforting sound, he said. It didn't sound like rushing water.

Sometimes it turned into a beeping noise.

I wondered if something in his ears had ruptured and suggested that he should see a doctor. He nodded absently.

Don't complain if you aren't going to do anything about it, I said.

When he went to the doctor she said: There's nothing you can do about it. Sometimes it stops on its own.

See I told you so, I said. 

And there is another passage from the book that recalled some of the veterans I met in those chatrooms— recollections which make me shudder with fury at our socialization. I will never find words to bury my loathing for the normative masculinity that crushes what is human in us, and (in my opinion) cultivates the unfortunate relationship between tinnitus and death by suicide. I will never, ever forgive us.

Here is the passage from Posthuma:

We were standing in front of the highest apartment building in the city, a building many people had thrown themselves off. My brother told me what happened to your body when you jump from a great height and smack onto the pavement. If you want to have any chance of surviving, then it's best to land on the balls of your feet, he said, with your knees slightly bent. And you should fall on your side rather than your back, and if that doesn't work, fall forwards with your arms covering your face. I's just that there are very few people who can survive a fall of more than thirty metres, so it's always better not to fall at all.

Promise me you'll never jump off a building, I said.

He promised.

*

Goran Bregovic featuring Eugene Hütz, “Quantum Utopia”
Jente Posthuma, What I’d Rather Not Think About (translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey)
William Orpen, Blown Up (1917)

A natural history in frottages.

They are, it seems, savage and impenetrable, black and russet, extravagant, secular, swarming, diametrical, negligent, ferocious, fervent, and likeable, without yesterday or tomorrow. . . . Naked, they dress only in their majesty and their mystery.

— Max Ernst on the forests of Oceania (t. by E. Childs)

Frotter, meaning “to rub.”

Ernst’s first frottage, Animal, emerged from rubbing a pencil over the back of a telegram. But frottages didn’t become a systematic part of his work until he executed the Histoire Naturelle series in 1925. This conception of frottage as an archeological practice that creates art/efacts reminds me of rubbing lead over white paper in graveyards, back in the days when I collected epitaphs from tombstones and grave markers. There is a relational aspect to this rubbing— a sort of effort to rub life up from the traces, or to create an image that can’t resist its eternity.

The uneveness of a surface is what makes frottage possible. The lead picks up the traces of dips and blips. I always thought of radio waves as I did it. In a sense, frottage is all about riding the glitch and agreeing to dabble in the hauntological.

Frottage, the art of rubbing an uneven surface for relief.

And how Max Ernst described it:

Ernst’s first frottages came from an interest in grain. He dropped pieces of paper at random on floor boards and rubbed them with pencil or chalk, thus transferring the design of the wood grain to the paper.

Max Ernest, Les coups de fouet ou ficelles de lave (1025)

Number 11 from Ernst’s Natural History series is titled Les coups de fouet ou ficelles de lave (“Whip lashes or lava threads”). It has enchanted me through this vicious little migraine that perches above my right eye and tries to punish every glimmering light ray. I forgive even the migraine for the sake of Ernst’s whip lashes and lava threads.

*

According to Elizabeth Childs, Ernst adapted his frottage technique to oil painting by “scraping paint from prepared canvases laid over materials such as wire mesh, chair caning, leaves, buttons, or twine. His repertory of objects closely parallels that used by Man Ray in his experiments with Rayograms during the same period. Using his grattage (scraping) technique, Ernst covered his canvases completely with pattern and then interpreted the images that emerged, thus allowing texture to suggest composition in a spontaneous fashion.”

Childs suggests that theThe Forest was likely created when Ernst placed the canvas “over a rough surface (perhaps wood), scraped oil paint over the canvas, and then rubbed, scraped, and overpainted the area of the trees.” He returned to these dense, eerie forests as subjects throughout the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, including theThe Quiet Forest (1927), presenting the viewer with “a wall of trees, a solar disk, and an apparition of a bird hovering amid the foliage.”

“Ernst’s attitude toward the forest as the sublime embodiment of both enchantment and terror can be traced to his experiences in the German forest as a child,” says Childs, foraging his essay “Les Mystères de la forêt,” published in Minotaure in 1934, for the artist’s intrigue with forests and trees.

*

Making animals with Max Ernst (a rubbing activity from MOMA)
Max Ernst, The Fugitive (L’Évadé), 1926
Max Ernst, The Forest (La forêt), 1927-1928
“Max Ernst and His Experimental Art Techniques” (Max Ernst Museum)

Max Ernst, Sacra Conversazione, 1921. Photography of a collage. (Source)

Guston and allegory.

Only fiction will accommodate the facts of life...Our choice, insofar as we have one, is not between fiction and fact, but between good and bad fiction…If it's a matter of words, if it's a function of language, if it's concerned with what it's like or not like to be human, it will prove to be some sort of fiction.

—Wright Morris, Time Pieces

1

In 1977, Philip Guston read an essay that changed how he understood his art’s relationship to allegory. This classic Benjaminian moment was described by Guston’s close friend, Ross Feld, one of the three men that the painter selected to perform his posthumous kaddish. Feld admits that “Philip Guston had a nearly limitless appetite for talk.” Their friendship blooms from this loquaciousness:

Once, when I visited him upstate, the first words out of his mouth as he met me on the train platform at Rhinecliff were: “So—about Brancusi..” It wasn't surprising, then, to hear him begin telling me one day over lunch in the Village in 1977 about something he'd been reading a few days before that had excited him greatly. He'd read an essay by Charles Rosen that had appeared in The New York Review of Books, a piece that concerned Walter Benjamin's 1928 book, The Origins of German Tragic Drama. This had been Benjamin's first and only completed longer work, his doctoral thesis (though rejected); and Rosen's discussion of one of Benjamin's signature ideas there—the notion of art as ruin— seemed to have enveloped Guston in a blaze of sparks.

The enthusiasm, coming from a painter whose father had for a time peddled junk— and who himself for forty years had been picturing garbage cans, middens, old pots, and crumbling walls—was understandable. Yet on that 1977 midday Guston seemed to me unusually wound up. His talk leapfrogged here and there. When we hadn't seen each other for a few weeks I tended to be more conversationally correct, spending some time tugging Guston back to earth a little when his kite seemed headed for a tree. But this idea of art as finished not only in a practical, immediate sense but in an elongatedly temporal sense—as something dead and in its very essence decaying—was something Guston clearly responded to on the deepest level, and there was no stopping him.

Not that many months later Guston would bring up Benjamin again, this time at a public “discussion” the two of us had together at Boston University. Guston was a University Professor there during the seventies [...]

After noting the “schmoozing” that characterizes this event, Feld tells us that Guston kept drawing the panel discussion back to Benjamin’s book on the Trauerspiel. “Not fifteen minutes into it, Guston again was back on the Benjamin book, this time recommending as ‘very very interesting’ Benjamin’s analysis of Baroque allegory as outlined in the Roten essay,” Feld noted:

Guston then went on to refer to his own current paintings as allegories, which made me cringe a little. An unusually articulate man, he was hardly someone to use words he didn't mean—-but Allegory? So trampositional. So obvious. Besides, modernity had effectively neutered the whole category. Guston patiently granted that allegory was, yes, all that, modern and certainly obvious. But then, with a small mischievous smile, he said: “That's why I think I like the whole idea.” And more than simply liking it, he reminded me, he also had lately gone ahead and happily used the armature. For what else would I call a painting such as one he'd done a year before, Pit (1976) — a sulfurous sinkhole in Hades abrim with the heads of the grossly (and yet somehow happily) damned – other than an allegory?

I still wasn't convinced. Neither was Joseph Ablow, who was in the audience that night. Between us we came up with lots of reasons why allegory was merely a curiosity, why Guston's interest in the subject was somewhat perverse. Guston was good-naturedly unmoved by all of this. “Well, I still think I'm making allegories.”

2

We spent 8 hours in the car over the past 24 hours, only one of these hours involving any shard of sunlight. I tried to catch up on my reading. Heaven forbid there should be allegory at work in any of this.

3

Ben Lerner describes one of his dreams involving Keith Waldrop. In this dream, Ben is an undergrad “trying to impress Keith by saying something about Olson’s ‘Projective Verse.’ When I finish my little speech Keith is quiet for a moment and then says: “It’s always seemed to me that lines of poetry are broken less by the way a poet breathes than by the way a poet blinks his eyes.”

4

Excerpts from Philip Guston’s letter to Ross Feld, dated September 1978:

Sunday-Sept. '78

Thoughts (or Advice to myself)

Ross,— So it is truly a bitter comedy that is being played out now—A ‘Painting’ which is like ‘real’ life—as it is lived from hour to hour, day to day, cannot be a picture! It is an impossibility! Feelings change—keep shifting— it is a fantasy the mind makes, the attempt to fix—it could be like accepting a dogma of some kind— of belief. But it won't stay still—remains docile. One cannot tame anything into docility with oneself as the master—be a lion tamer?—that is razzle-dazzle, that's circus. Fool the eye.

Sometimes I spread out all over the canvas, the rectangle of action, and try to fix—make the momentary ‘balance & unbalance’ into a form that I can look at— ‘live with’ —and because of its very instability and precarious condition I can. I did this last week. Now, this week, in reverse, I made a huge & TOWERING vast rock with platforms—ledges, for my forms to be on—and to play out their private drama. A Theater— maybe? A STAGE?

This will remain for a while—this series.— Of course they needed platforms— steps—to act it out. But then the rock itself became precarious, shaky and wouldn't stay still-it, too, participates in the changing instability of everything. So even when I want & need to make something solid-just there—like a Pyramid—it starts shaking and the whole thing—-the rock as well as the forms are swarming– moving in all directions at once— As if there were ne possibility of any kind of order— that we know of, or have seen before. If we are weak, we distrust it?

So, if things are moving, changing so rapidly, it is folly to hold—to fix—Yet the attempt must exist—& be made. Why?

If I think of the forms as on a surface, on a flat plane—if I give in to the limitations of the plane, its restrictions, and accept its orders, OBEY, and follow through to a fixation, one inevitably ends with a ‘nothing’—an emptiness, which is similar, I think, to the flatness of a belief. A PURITY. This is a fantasy I cannot believe in, for I then become tedious and boring to myself-reminding myself, remembering what I thought or felt yesterday, what the rules are, or were— Here is where it all tumbles and collapses! The image then becomes ‘a picture’ —a sign—an icon—and even though it can be a "significant" and deeply felt "nothing" (OR A THOUGHT) it does soon pall. 

[...]

What, then, is there to do—where, then, is there to move?

Only the most feared is left. To create a living thing— as it lives–and to see it! Impossible! (It is somehow evil to make a Golem, but to make a living ‘thing?’) That is a far greater evil —(also ‘unnecessary’). So, to abandon yourself to the unknown of the doing— is all that's left, only the reflection of the passing of time—-but sharply visible made so– as this act of making is lived out.— And— then you move into the next, like a strange and new clock, warping Time into becoming a frightening new other place, a land in which there is no rock and no ‘nothing.’ What is there– then? There is only the next doing which leads only to the next doing. A lifetime of doing?

Nerves. The nervousness of the maker is what one has—very little else—— and even the "else" is rancid, —like old G dried seaweed clinging on. 

Advice to myself —
Do not make laws.
Do not form habits.
You do not possess a way.
You do not possess a style.
You have nothing finally but some ‘mysterious’ urge—to use the stuff—-the matter.

5

“The scenery, when it is truly seen, reacts on the life of the seer. How to live. How to get the most life. How to extract its honey from the flower of the world.”

These four sentences were written by Henry David Thoreau long ago.

“This is the religious equivalent of that, especially in music and applied fields, long meadows,” wrote Ben Lerner in “The Media” — which happened to be published in the New Yorker on my birthday a few years ago.

6

Livened by Feld’s depiction of Guston’s reckless relationship to the act of creation, my mind wandered back to passage by Helen Vendler, a passage about poetics which parses Wallace Stevens’ formal feelings within his inchoate hungers:

Since feeling— to use Wordsworthian terms— is the organizing principle of poetry (both narratively, insofar as poetry is a history of feeling, and structurally, insofar as poetry is a science or analysis of feeling), without feeling the world of the poet is a chaos. As we know, as the poet knows, the absence of feeling is itself—since the poet is still alive— a mask for feelings too powerful to make themselves felt: these manifest themselves in this poem (“Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion”) as that paradoxical ‘desire without an object of desire,’ libido unfocused and therefore churning in all directions— like a wind, as the last line of the poem says, ‘that lashes at everything at once.’ Unfocused and chaotic libido does not provide a channel along which thought can move. Once there is an object of desire, the mind can exert all its familiar diversions— decoration, analysis, speculation, fantasy, drama, and so on. But with no beloved object, the mind is at a loss; the hero of the poem has ‘lost the whole in which he was contained.../ He knows he has nothing more to think about!’ The landscape is the objective correlative to this state of mind: ‘There is lightning and the thickest thunder.’

There is also Guston’s The Line, painted in 1978, the year flush with correspondence between himself and Ross Feld. I love how the cloud resembles the frothy lace at the wrist of an 18th-century sleeve . . . . and how the line is drawn by the sun’s shadow rather than a finger in sand. It is as if Guston wished to work an oppositional idiom (contra ‘line in the sand’) and give us the lightning of a god whose stylus arrives by other means. I think this painting in particular demands that allegorical mode.

*

Ben Lerner, “I don’t want to go to Heaven, I want to go where Keith goes” (Poetry Project Newsletter, Summer 2023)
Helen Vendler, Poets Thinking: Words Chosen Out of Desire
Henning Kraggerund, La melancolie (arranged by H. Kraggerud for Razumovsky Symphony Orchestra)
Maurice Ravel, Miroirs: II. Oiseaux tristes (performed by André Laplante)
Philip Guston, The Pit (1976)
Philip Guston, Departure (1963)
Philip Guston, The Line (1978)
Ross Feld, Guston in Time: Remembering Philip Guston (NYRB Classics)

Hands.

Among all possible things that could happen - the myths, the worlds not “created,” the plenitudes undisplaced - the poem, like the person of which it is inferential, is the one actual thing (one of the actual things) that did happen in the situation at hand. The poem is not the unconstrained child of preterition, of the experiential esprit d'escalier; nor does it consist of experimental counterfactuals with respect to a given state of affairs (the poetic imagination, that which comes to mind as image, is the defeat of the heterocosmic theoretical intelligence; it is the one thing that could be done. It is the one thing that was done, and its excellence derives from its retrospective inevitability - its cosmic “fitness.” Consequently, poetry is a hostage in the one world where finally and unexchangeably the thing that happens, the very thing, comes to reside.

— Allen Grossman

Victor Serge’s final poem, “Hands,” was published in a special issue of Témoins, no. 21 in February 1959.

It is an ekphrasis of sorts, a dialogue with a work the writer had seen in London.

Another time and place: a world prior to his exile in Mexico.

The poem is lengthy— and I have given only the first two pages of James Brook’s translation.

Serge’s son, Vlady, later had the poem published in a bilingual edition, Mains/Manos: Un Poema de Victor Serge, that includes an engraving from Vlady's sketch of his father's hands. It is the son’s sketch of his father’s hands that moves me so deeply, and makes me think of my own father, whose hands I inherited.

Vlady’s sketch of Serge’s hands is reproduced on the cover of A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems, edited and translated by James Brook, appended by an illuminating afterword by Richard Greeman. This book is the blaze from which the two pages of “Hands” have been excerpted.

Serge died in Mexico in November 1947, the same month in which he wrote this poem. His idea of being “alone together” is a continuous touchstone in the correspondence between writers, artists, and revolutionists across modernity.

Some have noticed parallels between Serge’s “Hands” and Arthur Rimbaud's “Les mains de Jeanne-Marie.” In an end-note, Brooks writes: “As translated by Paul Schmidt, Rimbaud's poem, with its Communard heroine, begins ‘Jeanne-Marie has powerful hands, / Dark hands summertime has tanned, / Hands pale as a dead man's hands’.” The note continues:

Jean-Luc Steinmetz tied “Jeanne-Marie” to Rimbaud's reading of Théophile Gautier's “Étude de mains,” the first part of which interrogates the sculpture of a beautiful woman's hand, and the second part of which describes the severed hand of the criminal dandy Lacenaire after his execution.

In this sense, Serge’s “Hands” reached towards other hands, as part of a literary lineage and the families we forge across texts in order to balance the disenchantments of ideas like “home”.

Victor Serge was not a surrealist. But some of his closest friends were surrealists— closer to the internationalism of the Bucharest surrealists than to that of Breton.

L’éclat de ces mains amoureuses
Tourne le crâne des brebis !
Dans leurs phalanges savoureuses
Le grand soleil met un rubis !

— Rimbaud, from “Les mains de Jeanne-Marie”

*

Arthur Rimbaud, “Les mains de Jeanne-Marie”
Arthur Rimbaud, “The Hands of Jeanne Marie”
Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Surrealism Beyond Borders” Visiting Guide
”Michelangelo’s Hand” (probably 1580) author unknown
Théophile Gautier, “Étude de mains” (Poésies, Paris: Flammarion, 2004)
Victor Serge, A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems (PM Press, 2017)
Victor Serge, Mains/Manos: Un Poema de Victor Serge, trans. by Verónica Volkow (Mexico: Carta al Lector y El Taller Martín Pescador, 1978)

Rant.

You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology
a cosmogony
laid out, before all eyes

— Diane di Prima, “Revolutionary Letter #75 (Rant)”

And so we watch the sun come up
From the edge of the deep green sea
And she listens like her head's on fire

— The Cure

Greens again.

Saplings and offshoots.

Absinthe and boots.

The layer of green in Konrad Magi’s Maasik, painted between 1908 and 1910.

The hue where green angles towards blue, or the navy of star-rich midnights, the terrain Diane di Prima touched in “Revolutionary Letter #75 (Rant)”:

it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole
you do not ‘make’ it so
there is nothing to integrate, you are a presence
you are an appendage of the work, the work stems from
hangs from the heaven you create

every man / every woman carries a firmament inside
& the stars in it are not the stars in the sky

w/out imagination there is no memory
w/out imagination there is no sensation
w/out imagination there is no will, desire

The timbre of green of Haydn in Tomas Transtromer’s “Allegro” (translated by Ingar Palmlund):

I play Haydn after a dark day
and sense an honest warmth in my hands.

The keys are willing. Mild hammers strike.
The tone is green, lively and still.

The tone says that freedom exists
and that someone does not pay the emperor tribute.

I push the hands deep into my haydnpockets,
mimicking one who quietly watches the world.

The green zone of Transtromer’s “Prelude” (translated by Rika Lesser):

Waking up is a jump, a skydive from the dream.
Free of the smothering whirl the traveler
sinks toward morning’s green zone.

The exhortation towards imagining green, as in Elizabeth Alexander’s “Fugue”:

Picture everyone’s edges
smudged. Picture everyone
a green as delicate
as a Ming celadon.

The way green gushes towards an absolute turquoise in Thomas Wilmer Dewing’s The White Birch (circa 1899):

Thomas Wilmer Dewing, The White Birch (circa 1899)

The way even the most absolute hue does not absolve— cannot absolve — as Marcel Duchamp surely knew in his Bride — and the corresponding texts he wrote to make “sense” of it, including The Green Box — whose title only depicts the surface of the work, or its container. Duchamp used the word “green” less than five times whose container named its color as green…

The green that light picks out of a moonlit scene by the ocean, or a moment imagined by Ralph Waldo Emerson when he asked: “Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in contact?Well, souls never touch their objects. An unnavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with.”

Arkhip Kuindzhi, Fishing at the Black Sea (1900)

And Di Prima’s rant (again):

the taste in all our mouths is the taste of our power
and it is bitter as death

bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden
the guy at the gate w/the flaming sword is yrself

G is for grass, green, glue, gawd, and good.

Green as the grotesque slimeballs of horror films.

Green as part of the structures of belief, as expressed in Gerald Stern’s “Blue Skies, White Breasts, Green Trees”:

I used to believe the brain did its work
through faithful charges and I lived in sweet surroundings for the brain,
I thought it needed blue skies, white breasts, green trees,
to excite and absorb it,
and I wandered through the golf courses dreaming of pleasure
and struggled through the pool dreaming of happiness.

One of the primary hues of my childhood: the evergreen kudzu-green that grew near the houses and hide-outs and imaginary wolds that felt like home to me.

There is a poem by Tomaz Salamun titled “Are Angels Green?”

There is a my father wearing a cowboy hat amid the kudzu while my mother swings above his head in Bucharest.

There is a meadow across from our subdivision which does not belong to anyone. There are no lawnmowers on this meadow where a coterie of crows conduct their general assembly each morning. There is a four-way stop sign but the stop looks ashamed and some say there is  a ghost that haunts the meadow and what the stop sign feels is akin to dread. There is a crow whom the other crows caw around and he is likely the lead crow likely his name is Frank. There are parents who will not let their children play in the meadow because it is full of weeds and buttercups and fire ant mound.s The parents want someone to own the meadow and develop it. There are many ways to say develop without meaning to but there are no ways to say develop that do not involve the destruction of something else. There is a child developing their interpersonal skills which means she learns to stop imagining the crows conversing in the meadow. The child will develop beyond freeze-tag, and when she has developed appropriately this child-part will be dead. There is a distinct tinge of ache she will feel when passing the meadow but the pain will be located in a phantom limb. There is no way to discuss the pain we feel in parts of us that don’t exist anymore. There is a meadow and crows and fire ants. There is a place waiting to die. There will be cupcakes and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. There are people who will call the cupcakes an improvement.

There is “the war that matters is the war against the imagination all other wars are subsumed in it,” to quote Di Prima again.

And further down the street, there is a poem by Michael Palmer addressed to the reader; one stanza eyeing a figure and trying to make sense of its birds and berries and “her hair alight and so on,” a mesmerizing meadow with its photograph of “nothing but pigeons” “by the shadow of a fountain” which I offer to you in its entirety:

Dearest Reader

He painted the mountain over and over again
from his place in the cave, agape
at the light, its absence, the mantled
skull with blue-tinted hollows, wren-
like bird plucking berries from the fire
her hair alight and so on lemon grass in cafe in clear glass.
Dearest reader there were trees
formed of wire, broad entryways
beneath balconies beneath spires
youthful head come to rest in meadow
beside bend in gravel road, still
body of milky liquid her hair alight and so on
successive halls, flowered carpets and doors
or the photograph of nothing but pigeons
and grackles by the shadow of a fountain.

Michael Palmer

I want the light to strike me, air
I want everyone to breathe, mouse, shit.

— Salamun, ibid.

*

Arkhip Kuindzhi, Fishing at the Black Sea (1900)
Diane di Prima, “Rant, From a Cool Place”
Diane di Prima, “Revolutionary Letter #75 (Rant)”
Dorothea Lasky, “On Poetry, Peership, and Imagination: A Love Letter to Diane di Prima”
Michael Palmer, “Dearest Reader”
”Revolutionary Letter #75 (Rant)” read by Diane di Prima, April 28, 1988 (Binghamton University)
The Cure, “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea”

2025 in 99 books.

Regardez-moi bien! Je suis idiot, je suis un farceur, je suis un fumiste. Regardez-moi bien! Je suis laid, mon visage n’a pas d’expression, je suis petit. Je suis comme vous tous!’

— Tristan Tzara, February 1920 at the Universite ́Populaire de Faubourg Saint-Antoine

99 bottles of books et al.

The ones staggered with marginalia, ordered alphabetically — acknowledging that I finally gave up on providing links to all of them, but promising to do so “eventually,” as they say — acknowledging that I did not get to add much of the poetry I adored but promising to do so in the New Year, as they say, or in a few weeks — admitting that 99 was the numerical cut-off I set for myself in order to finish others and prevent the list from growing too noisy — acknowledging that noisy is my middle name — acknowledging, too, that asterisks mark the texts I continue to sleep with.

O! Pray for me, saints. Mais
oui, dance with me, demons.

A. G. Valentine, The Apoptotic Era (Thirty West Publishing House)

A. S. Hamrah, Last Week in End Times Cinema (Semiotext(e) / Active Agents)

Aaron Schuster, How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science (MIT Press)

Alvin Lu, Daydreamers (FC2)

Amit Chauhari, Incompleteness: New and Selected Essays, 1999 - 2023 (NYRB)

Anaïs Duplan, I Need Music (Action Books)

Anna Moschovakis, An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth (Soft Skull Press)

Anne Berest & Claire Berest, Gabriële trans. by Tina Kover (Europa Editions) *

Antonio Di Benedetto, The Suicides trans. by Esther Allen (NYRB Classics)

Ben Libman, The Third Solitude: A Memoir Against History (Dundurn Press)

Ben Peek, The Red Labyrinth (Snuggly Books)

Bill Peel, Against Ambition (Repeater Books)

Bruno Dario, Lantana, or The Indissoluble Exhalation trans. by Kit Schluter (Ugly Ducking Press)

César Aira, The Famous Magician trans. by Chris Andrews (New Directions)

Christian Lehnert, Wickerwork, trans. by Richard Sieburth (Archipelago Books)

Claire Bateman, The Pillow Museum (FC2)

Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today (Verso)

Clark Coolidge &Tom Clark, Rock Notes (Lithic Press)

Conner Bouchard-Roberts, A Field Guide for Wandering 9th edition (Winter Texts)

Dan Elkind, Dr Chizhevsky’s Chandelier: The Decline of the USSR and Other Heresies of the Twentieth Century (Repeater Books)

Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant, eds. Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press)

Daniel A. Hoyt, Shit List (Whiskey Tit)

Dao Strom, Yellow Songs 4: Motherwound (The 3rd Thing)

David Biespiel, The Education of a Young Poet (Counterpoint Press)

David Collard, A Crumpled Swan: Fifty Essays about Abigail Parry's 'In the Dream of the Cold Restaurant' (Sagging Meniscus Press)

David Dark, Everyday Apocalypse: Art, Empire, and the End of the World (Vanderbilt Press)

Deborah Thomas, Exorbitance: A Speculative Ethnography of Inheritance (Duke University Press)

Dodie Bellamy, Cunt Norton (Tender Buttons Press)

Dorothea Lasky, Memory (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

Emily Skillings, Tantrums in Air (The Song Cave)

Erin Dorney, Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering (Auto Focus Books)

Fatima Bhutto & Sonia Faleiro, eds. Gaza: The Story of a Genocide (Verso)

Federica Marzi, My Home Somewhere Else trans. by Jim Hicks (Sandorf Passage)

Garielle Lutz, Backwardness: From Letters and Notebooks, 1973–2023 (Calamari Archive)

George Seferis, Book of Exercises II trans. by Jennifer Kellogg (World Poetry)

Gerhard Rühm, The Folded Clock: 100 Number Poems trans. by Alexander Booth (Twisted Spoon Press)

Grace Byron, Herucline (Simon & Schuster)

Hannah Zeavin, Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century (MIT Press)

Hans Blumenberg, The Readability of the World trans. by Robert Savage & David Roberts (Cornell Univeristy Press)

Hayim Nahman Bialik, On the Slaughter trans. by Peter Cole (NYRB Poets)

Héctor Abad, Aside from My Heart, All is Well, trans. by Anne McLean (Archipelago Books)

Helen DeWitt & Ilya Gridneff, Your Name Here (Dalkey Archive Press)

Ian Penman, Erik Satie: Three Piece Suite (Semiotext(e)

Inès Cagnati, Crazy Genie trans. by Liesl Schillinger (NYRB Classics)

Jacob Wren, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (Book*Hug Press)

Jarrod Shanahan, Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help: A Decade of Rebellion, Reaction, and Morbid Symptoms (PM Press)

Jean D’Amérique, Workshop of Silence: Poems trans. by Conor Bracken (Vanderbilt Press)

Jeff Alesandrelli, And Yet: A Novel About Sex and Shyness and Society (Future Tense Books)

Joanna Pocock, Greyhound: A Memoir (Soft Skull Press)

Joanna Walsh, Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why it Matters (Verso)

Jonathan Howard, Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness (Duke University Press)

Jules Laforgue, Moral Tales trans. by William Jay Smith (New Directions)

Julie Carr, The Garden (Essay Press)

Julio Cortázar, A Certain Lucas trans. by Gregory Rabassa (New Directions)

Justin Perez, Queer Emergent: Scandalous Stories from the Twilight of AIDS in Peru (Duke University Press)

Kate Colby, Paradoxx (Essay Press)

Katrina Roberts, ed. Because You Asked (Lost Horse Press)

Katrine Øgaard Jensen, Ancient Algorithms (Sarabande Books)

Kim Farrar, The Impossible Physics of the Hummingbird (Unsolicited Press)

Krisztina Tóth, Eye of the Monkey: A Novel trans. by Ottilie Mulzet (Seven Stories Press)

Lauren Cook, Sex Goblin (Nightboat Books)

Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital (Verso)

Logan Berry, Doom is the House Without a Door (Inside the Castle)

Liliana Corobca, Too Great A Sky: A Novel trans. by Monica Cure (Seven Stories Press)

Lisa Olstein, Distinguished Office of Echoes (Copper Canyon Press)

Lucy Sante, Six Sermons for Bob Dylan (Tenement Press)

Macedonio Fernández, The Complete Poems of Macedonio Fernández trans. by Jessica Sequeira (Sublunary Editions)

Marguerite Duras, Six Films trans. by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan (The MIT Press)

Maša Kolanović, Underground Barbie trans. by Ena Selimović (Sandorf Passage)

Markus Werner, The Frog in the Throat trans. by Michael Hofmann (NYRB Classics)

McKenzie Wark, Love and Money, Sex and Death: A Memoir (Verso Books)

Michael Clune, PAN (Penguin Random House)

Morten Høi Jensen, The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of "The Magic Mountain" (Yale University Press)

Nazareth Hassan, Slow Mania (Future Poems)

Nebojša Lujanović, Cloud the Color of Skin trans. by Ena Selimović (Fraktura)

Oke Fijal, Marina Gržinić, Sen Reyes and Melina Vesely, Sexual Dissidences: Frau Diamanda’s Catalan Scenes, the Travesti Politics of Resistance, and Anti-canonical Knowledge (Sternberg Press)

Olga Ravn, The Wax Child trans. by Martin Aitken (New Directions)

Omar Sakr & Safdar Ahmed, The Nightmare Sequence (Nightboat Books)

Orchid Tierney, this abattoir is a college (Calamari Archive)

Paul Valéry, Monsieur Teste trans. by Charlotte Mandell (NYRB Classics)

Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance: Volume III trans. by Joel Bloom (Duke University Press)

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting (Verso Books)

Pierre Guyotat, Idiocy trans. by Peter Behrman de Sinéty (NYRB Classics)

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Testament trans. by Mark Kanak, ed. by Rainer J. Hanshe (Contra Mundum Press)

Robert Gluck, Jack the Modernist (NYRB Classics)

Roger Shattuck, The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (NYRB Classics)

Ronald M. Schernikau, SMALLTOWNNOVELLA trans. by Lucy Jones (Ugly Duckling Presse)

Ryan Ruby, Context Collapse: A Poem Containing a History of Poetry (Seven Stories Press)

Sam Kunkel and Jessica Gossling, eds. The Decadent Bestiary (MIT Press)

Shane Kowalski, Are There People Out There (Future Tense Press)

Shira Dentz, Sisyphusina (Astrophil Press)

Sigfried Kracauer, Ginster: Written By Himself trans. by Carl Skoggard (NYRB Classics) *

Srikanth Reddy, The Unsignificant: Three Talks on Poetry and Pictures (Wave Books)

Stephanie Wambagu, Lonely Crowds (Little Brown)

Stephen Rodefer, Four Lectures (NYRB Poets)

Thomas Walton, Unsavory Thoughts (Sagging Meniscus Press)

Todd Macgowan, Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn’t Try to Find Ourselves (Repeater Books)

Victor Serge, A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems, trans. by James Brook (PM Press) *

Vigdis Hjorth — three of them (hoping to finish edits on this draft essay that has gained the girth of a novella due to my recklessness in thinking and writing yes please knock on all yr woods for me)

Viktor Shklovsky, Zoo, or Letters Not About Love trans. by Richard Seldon (Dalkey Archive Press)

Will Rees, Hypchondria (Coachhouse Books)

Witold Wirpsza, Apotheosis of Music trans. by Frank L. Vigoda (World Poetry)

Yoko Tawada, Exophony (New Directions)

Zuzana Brabcová, Ceilings trans. by Tereza Novická (Twisted Spoon Press)

[It will take one more list to finish off my brain in the past year, so please count on it next month…]

An open letter.

If the Marne throws itself in the Seine
it’s because I won the Marne
If there’s wine in Champagne
it’s because I pissed there

I threw my gun in the air
but the bullets spit in my face
that’ show I was decorated
Vive la republique

— Benjamin Péret, “Hymn of the Patriotic Old Soldier”

Natalia Sedova, Leon Trotsky and Lev Sedov

1. An open letter

A few excerpts from the 1947 “Open Letter to the International Communist Party, French Section of the Fourth International,” signed by Natalia Sedova-Trotsky, Benjamin Peret, and G. Munis:

The world labor movement ought to have triumphed over the old capitalist world and the Russian counter-revolution during the imperialist war or immediately afterward. The war was simultan­eously a result of the crisis of the world labor movement and the opportunity for its recovery and definitive victory. The ideolog­ical causes of the crisis and with them the organizations respon­sible for it should have been destroyed. But a reverse phenomenon has been produced. The organizations which caused and heightened the crisis have increased their organic power over the working class, binding it more strongly than before to the general system of the world counter-revolution. We, on the other hand, have nowhere attained the organic force, the ideological authority and the combative prestige which give a revolutionary party its qual­ ification as such. This result cannot be in any way accidental and still less a product of the objective circumstances. The crisis of the world labor movement acquired official status in 1914, when the Second International deserted to the capitalist camp. The Russian Revolution, in 1917 vigorously started the re­cuperation. But shortly afterward the Stalinist Thermidor arrived to add its own factors of ideological crisis to the old reformist factor. Since then Stalinism has been continually deepening its degeneration, getting prestige from the country of the revolution and money and stringent orders from the caste which has destroyed that same revolution. The social-democratic desertion was serious, very serious, and costly to the proletariat, but the intransigence of the Bolsheviks diminished its importance and the triumph of the Russian proletariat doomed it to a certain and early defeat. By turning against tho Russian Revolution and chaining to itself the Third International, the Stalinist Thermidor coincided with the social-democratic desertion, obstructed the complete recuperation of the workers movement and immediately itself deepened the crisis.

[…]

With deep distress, because the world leadership is a part of our organization, a part of ourselves, we cannot refrain from saying that the International Secretariat failed in its most ele­mental duties by not bringing up for discussion on the day follow­ ing its constitution the question of whether the “unconditional defense of the USSR” continued to be favorable to the world revolu­ tion or whether it seemed incompatible with it in the light of the tremendous supervening events.

[…]

Without doing anything here besides making assertions, we repeat, we declare to you, comrades of the French party, comrades of the International, that the “unconditional de­fense of the USSR” has revealed itself to be incompatible with the defense of the world revolution. Abandonment of the defense of Russia is of utmost urgency because it is fettering all of our movements, blunting our theoretical progress and giving us in the eyes of the masses a stalinoid physiognomy. It is impossible to defend Russia and the world revolution at the same time. Either one or the other. We pronounce ourselves for the world revolution, against the defense of Russia, and we ask you to pronounce your­selves in the same way. Be careful, above all, of those tendencies which hide their opportunism towards the imperialist war and the present situation by boasting about their fidelity to the program of the Fourth International on the Russian question! A fidelity of this kind is a destructive fidelity, similar to that of the “old Bolsheviks” in 1917 in respect to the old theory, completely bol­shevik of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry toward which Lenin appeared as a revisionist. . . . . In order to be faithful to the revolutionary tradition of the Fourth International, we must abandon the Trotskyist theory of the defense of the USSR; we shall thus bring about in the International an ideological revolution indispensable for the success of the world revolution.

[…]

Stalinism is today a thousand times more dangerous for the revolution because it represents the ideas and interests of a tri­umphant counter-revolution in Russia which offers the world and more immediately Europe, its experience, its power and its partic­ular solution against the proletariat on the march toward social­ism. The Stalinist parties are today mere representatives and disciples of the counter-revolution installed in the Kremlin . . . The slogans of united front and government of the workers’ leaders constituted in Russia a whole at once inseparable from and derived from the forms of proletarian democracy existing in the soviets, which — this is of the utmost importance — were created and main­ tained with the collaboration of Mensheviks and revolutionary so­cialists, Stalinism is today absolutely incompatible with any proletarian democracy. Wherever organs of revolutionary power
have emerged, from Spain to Warsaw, Paris and Milan, it has hast­ened to destroy them. Stalinism cannot allow the revolutionaries to speak.

[…]

To sum up, the slogan of a CP-SP-CGT government such as has been used in France, the call for a Stalinist-reformist government, in general, is today entirely false and will serve only to hold back the masses where they are, and also — it is painful but nec­essary to say it —- develop the new potentially reformist tenden­cies existing in the Fourth International. We cannot refrain from telling you, comrades of the International Communist Party of France, that the crisis of your party in particular and that of the Inter­ nation in general will not be solved positively by supporting the Frank faction against the Craipeau faction, but rather by support­ing the two factions which are against the defense of Russia and against the slogan of a CP-SP-CGT government. Fidelity to Trotsky­ism is not fidelity to the written word, but to the revolutionary spirit of Trotskyism. Between the two factions which today appear the strongest in France, the least bad will be that which offers the party a more democratic regime allowing it to carry out the political changes indispensable today through the widest and most democratic discussion.

[…]

Fidelity to Trotskyism is the firm, sincere, and courageous rectification of some of the assertions it made yesterday. The revolution also is revolution­ary; it requires shifts, modifications and radical negations of its own former assertions. Yes, the revolution is also revolutionary!

---

2. The rifts “sur” “realisme”

Many friendships were broken by Surrealism.

I quote: “Yves Tanguy severed ties with singer Jacques Prévert (whom he had met in the navy), and writers Raymond Queneau and Georges Duhamel for it. This did give him a decent career as a Surrealist, and Surrealism undoubtedly allowed Tanguy to penetrate the core of his art. Tanguy, a painter of portraits, animals and landscapes in gouache and other techniques, was never abstract, according to one of his contemporaries; everything he painted, was observed; his paintings are landscapes of the soul. Not only did he discard his friends, he also destroyed much of his pre-Surrealist work. Although he co-signed many of the Surrealist manifestos and followed the politics of leader André Breton, he remained nearly invisible within the group, an outsider who chose to follow his own path and finally departed to America in 1939.”

Speaking of Jacques Prevert, Benjamin Peret dedicated the following poem to him; the translation is by Marylin Kallet.

MY HAND IN THE BEER

To Jacques Prévert

The hanged man is a pirate
who had teeth
who had bones
with water inside

Then he ran like a serpent
his mustache drooped
his tongue climbed up on his eye
Then the grasshoppers and the onions
bananas and necklaces
left his pocket one by one
Happiness Happiness they said
his mouth is the sister of my mouth
and it feels good to walk in the street of She-Asses

Tanguy made 15 pen drawings for his press partner, Benjamin Péret, in 1927. One of those poems (see below) has been a comfort to me in recent weeks.

To remember my ribbon of honor
I’ve painted my nose red
and put parsley up my nostrils
for the Military Cross

— Benjamin Péret, “Hymn of the Patriotic Old Soldier”

*
André Breton, Max Morise, Jeannette Ducrocq Tanguy, Pierre Naville, Benjamin Péret, Yves Tanguy, Jacques Prévert, Cadavre Exquis with Figure c. 1927
Benjamin Péret, Letterhead from 1920’s (MOMA)
Benjamin Péret, “Dormir, dormir dans les pierres : poème” (KB Nationale Biblioteek)
Cahiers des amis Panait Istrati, 14 May 1979
”Expansive Poetics: Benjamin Peret” (The Allen Ginsberg Project)
Grandizo Munis (Marxist’s Internet Archive)
Grandizo Munis and Benjamin Peret, “The Unions Against Revolution”
”Nathalia Sedova” (Spartacus International)
Rachmaninov, Elegie, Op. 3 No. 1
Rachmaninov, By the Grave, Op. 21 No. 2
Socialist Workers Party, Internal Bulletin Vol. X, No. 1, February 1948

André Breton, Max Morise, Jeannette Ducrocq Tanguy, Pierre Naville, Benjamin Péret, Yves Tanguy, Jacques Prévert, Cadavre Exquis with Figure c. 1927 (Source: MOMA)

"The silence of the state"

Yes I miss the kiss of treachery

— The Cure, “Disintegration”

Then the cock crowed
This morning
They dared to murder you.

In the fortress of our bodies 
May our ideal live on
Mingled with your blood
So that tomorrow they won’t dare,
They won't dare to murder us.

— Poem enclosed in Fernand’s unfinished letter to Helène

For betraying his “patria” and abandoning his role as a French soldier, Pierre Guyotat served out his prison term in solitary confinement during the Algerian war. His description of that experience is calm, untrammeled by affect. I recalled it while reading another book this week.

I don’t know where to start.

The poem I cited was culled from the ending of Joseph Andras’ book, where it is preceded by the following passage:

Helène folds the letter in half. Then in four. Anonymous. Only a postscript, in which she learns that the author of this poem, written in memory of Fernand, is a European-Algerian woman, a militant for independence sentenced to five years in prison.

I realize this offers little context— only the curve of what we like to call an ending. So I will try again, and open a different fold from a part of the story with fewer masks. A part that begins in a small French village, where a French Algerian who has come there to recuperate from a lung infection. Amid this efflorescence of chickens and birds and flowers, Fernand Iveton meets Hélène Ksiazeka, a single mother from Poland whose mother runs the boarding-house. The two exchange greetings; her eyes catch the light like “little frosted pearls.” His eyes follow her to the door.

Something begins.

He swallows a blue pill, a pill. . .

“the kind of wolf-dog blue which rummages around your heart, never asking for permission or wiping its feet on the doormat—- for this blue would not fail to make a doormat out of you, one day, if it could ever come to blame or love you. He had used indecision as an excuse, at a meal last week (the choice was caramel-cider tartlet or strawberry crème brûlée), to incite their first exchange. She was partial to caramel and asked him where his accent was from: from Algeria, ma'am, it's my first time in France, well, yes, they say Algeria's in France, sure, but still it's not the same, you have to admit that . . .”

They sit together in a restaurant.

“Hélène is wearing a light gray dress with a white collar; Fernand, for his part, has taken this opportunity to bring out the only tie in his possession.”

Two menus before them. And something begins— again.

Yet here she is now, in front of him, noticeably more at ease than he is. He could touch her if he reached out, but this very idea is, already, sacrilegious. And is he even thinking of touching her? Bodies are seldom thought of when this thing is born in the belly's depths. This unnamed thing no word can approximate or identify, this thing (the most appropriate term, in the end, for those first times out of time). A vague, crazy thing of vapors, fumaroles, ether, routing every attempt at rationality. A thing we know to be soaked in illusions, fineries, gildings and sands of an instant, but which we fasten onto and give it everything headlong, that thing, yes.

Fernand looks at her as others might contemplate a statue or a painting: he lacks the linguistic precision to formalize his thoughts, but he looks at the contours and shadows of her skin, the reflections, the more or less visible pores, the hands (it all seeme to concentrate on this point — thou hands, that gilt or slap, that one might hold or that pull away, the hands of woman loved, or desired, bear the same heartrending charge, the same sacred fever, as the mouth which one day, without warning, will draw near or withhold itself forever), that foreign smile and those eyes that a had poet would promptly compare to the sea without fearing to offend her (Helène is not for commonplaces, doggerel).

He doesn't know much about her, but what he knows is ample enough.

No need to ballast a beating heart.

She has a passion for dance, she tells him. She got that from her father. . .

Some things begin as others continue, and they meet in the spaces that have never imagined the other, or made provisions to accommodate the emergence of new things.

There is the FLN, the death of a dear friend, the sense of “History” asking Fernand to act in a way that pushes the French CP out of its complacency on the Algerian cause.

He tries to plant a bomb in an abandoned shed. Someone betrays him.

The bomb is defused and the man who has become Helène’s husband is arrested.

He is told, in his cell, that he will be tried in a military court. The trial is in four days. Attempt to destroy, with an explosive substance, a building that is inhabited or used for habitation. The officer reads out the charges without looking up. He has fat cheeks and bad skin. Fernand is sitting on an iron bench, his feet still in chains. Articles 434 and 435 of the Penal Code. Risk of incurring maximum penalty. In other words—he specifies, as if it needed to be any clearer - death. Fernand is surprised not to find himself blinking at the sound of the word. Torture must've fried my brain, he thinks. Since yesterday, a nerve has been throbbing continually near the bicep in his right arm. The communist leadership, the other continues, refuses to get involved: the Party hasn't sent a lawyer. They are wary of that troublemaker Iveton: isn't he an anarchist, anyway?

Smells like sulfur, like bombs rolled under Tsarist carriages, explosives chucked in parliament or at a barracks, the pennants black and proud . . .

There are memories that replay in the mind of the man who is now incarcerated, cut off from contact with his friends and family, held in an undisclosed location, tortured according to the orders of a modern democracy.

These memories are events in themselves: they are what life becomes to the man who can no longer describe his relationship to it.

What does Fernand dare to imagine of his future?

He believes he will be exonerated. What is happening cannot be possible. He is living a bad dream that will soon end.

Immobilized, he brings other dreams into dialogue with the gray banality of the nightmare.

A man dreams to keep his grip on the existence that is left.

What are you reading? Ah, soccer again! Fernand demurs: there's L'Humanite right there, at the foot of the bed. I don't know if that's much better. She laughs. Then Fernand asks himself if he prefers her laughing, like this, head thrown back to leave her throat exposed, yet not offering it, either: a playful swan, a fair ribbon of spring, with those small white stubs beating their wings and that high-pitched trill, thin and frail (Fernand is getting lost). Or perhaps he prefers her serious, severe, as she often is, the wrinkle between her two eyebrows more pronounced, a delicate furrow, and that tragic look, a Slavic stare straight out of Dostoevsky (or at least that's the image that comes to his mind, again; he gave up on Crime and Punishment after the third chapter. He only remembers one sentence, very beautiful really, he had thought to himself: the hero's mother, the one whose name is impossible to remember, had written her son a letter that ended with I kiss you with a thousand thou-sund kisses, yours until the grave—that's lovely, that is, he told himself). Dumb question. There is no need to choose, he loves her both cheerful and serious: two colors of the same future.

There are welts on his chest, his arms, his legs. The prison cell is cold. The men in uniform flaunt their power and status.

Hélene. . . A name like an itch. A wound in the roof of his mouth that he cannot forget.

He thinks of her every day. He cannot keep from doing it. Cannot keep from picking up the scattered pieces of their story, as if he had to put them in order between these walls, give them a meaning in this gray shithole, bulb on the ceiling, bunk stained by former inmates, one toilet between three. Give them a direction, a solid outline, thick, drawn in chalk or charcoal. Three and a half years together: one with the other, one through and for the other. Fernand collects whatever pieces his memory more or less readily restores to him, to form a brick—a cinder-block of love alone capable, in the face of an uncertain future, to break the bones and jaws of his tormentors.

Helene. Her blonde hair, the wonder of the neighborhood. . .

There is an attorney who attempts to defend Fernand as a French citizen, or one who should benefit from the rights accorded to citizens.

Civilization puffs its chest, brandishing rod and tag Marianne trades in her tricolor nights-swapping pennies for chimeras.

There are moments thick with official symbols of justice, as when the state commissioner declares that whatever Fernand's intentions may have been, whether “to kill or not to kill innocent people—- the crime remains the same.”

The medical report is read out: the accused has "superficial scars on his tor and his limbs" but, due to their age, "the exact cause of all these marks is impossible to ascertain." Fernand asks to speak, permission is refused, and the commissioner continues; in the name of those little children who were sacrificed in cafés, it is important to punish criminals. Solemn, and with History ensconced on the tip of his tongue, he concludes: “You must also think of France, whose prestige and influence in the world are blemished by these monstrous acts.” The death penalty is therefore, in his view, required.

The momentum is built into the ticking of modern time.

Smadja protests against the little time— and that's an understatement, your honors!— the court lawyers had to prepare their client's defense, The pernicious atmosphere, he continues, this cold atmosphere, drunk on resentment and fury, is not conducive to a proper review of the cases we must judge Iveton not for attacks committed by others but for his personal actions, and those alone.

Is Fernand alone? He calls his loved ones into their absences, and holds them close.

There is Fernand’s friend and comrade, Henri, who was killed by French soldiers for his role in Algerian resistance.

I am not Muslim, Henri had written shortly before, but I am a European Algerian. I consider Algeria to be my country. I must fulfill toward it the same duties as all of its sons. As soon as the Algerian people rose up to free their land from under the colonial yoke, I knew my place was alongside those engaged in the fight for liberation. The colonial press shouts treason, while at the same time it publishes and endorses the separatist calls of Boyer and Banse. It also cried treason when, under Vichy, French officers joined the Resistance, while it was serving Hitler and fascism. In truth. the traitors to France are those who, to serve their own selfish interests, pervert in the eyes of Algerians the true face of France and of its people, whose traditions are generous, revolutionary, and anticolonial. What's more, every progressive man in France and in the world recognizes the legitimacy and justice of our national claims. The Algerian people long thwarted and humiliated, have taken their resolute place in the great historic movement of colonial liberation, movement which has set Africa and Asia ablaze. Its victory is certain. And this is not, as the biggest owners of wealth this country would have us believe, a racial conflict. . .

Henri Maillot’s desertion stunned France. He was known to be a sweetheart, a laid-back and generous fellow who identified with France, a man who risked his life to fight for his country. He was “a pied-noir member of the Algerian Communist Party and participated in the Algerian War.” He was a French soldier who “deserted” his military unit in 1956, and crossed the lines of loyalty, carrying a critical stash of funs and ammo to the Algerian opposition. He was a “traitor.” He was a man who died for a country that did not exist.

— And who was Henri Mariaini?

There are other letters that bleed through Fernand’s memories.

For you my love, he writes at the bottom of the letter he just finished.

— And who or what is History?

Helène will fold the letter in half. Then in four. “Anonymous.” “Only a postscript —”

Fernand will stare at the pasta and beef on his prison tray, just as he does every Sunday. Lukewarm. Its sauce “uncertain”.

He is reading Victor Hugo — again. This French novel is his companion, his friend, his surreal mirror.

Fernand bolts the meal, eager to return to his reading. Jean Valjean was not dead. When he fell into the sea, or rather when he threw himself into it, he was not ironed, as we have seen. He swam under water until he reached a vessel at anchor, to which a boat was moored. He found means of hiding himself in this boat until night. At night he swam off again, and reached the shore a little way from Cape Brun... Two bombs tear into the afternoon in the Algiers stadiums of El-Biar and Ruisseau. Ten dead, thirty or so injured, blood everywhere, wounds and mutilations. Two random passersby, unlucky enough to be Arabs, were lynched by an angry mob. Night slips over the city, a thick veil of silent mourning. Jean Valjean watches Cosette as she sleeps, feeds her, protects her, teaches her to read. He has come to see the world and mankind differently since loving Cosette. Fernand bids his two companions good-night. His tired eyes have trouble following the slack, wavering lines, but he means to keep on reading. Just a little more. Two or three pages. Jean Valjean knew no more where he was going than did Cosette. He trusted in God, as she trusted in him. It seemed as though he was also clinging to the hand of some one greater than himself; he thought he felt a being leading him, though invisible. However, he had no settled idea, no plan, no project. He was not even absolutely sure that it was Javert, and then it might have been Javert, without Javert knowing that he was Jean Valjean. Was not he disguised? Was not he believed to be dead? His eyelids won't stay open. He puts the work down after bookmarking his page with a canteen coupon, then turns on his side, in the fetal position, since he never could (and always wondered how others did) fall asleep on his back, flat out, staring at the ceiling. He sinks after a few minutes, without even realizing it. And suddenly noise, lights. The adverb, in truth, does little more than conceal the confusion that seizes Fernand: he opens his eyes, not sure where he is, what time is it, what's all this noise, is he dreaming or what? He turns his head, what time is it, I was sleeping, guards, guards, shit, what's all this noise? Guards are standing over him, sure enough, against the light of a white guards, guards, shit, what's all this noise? Guards are standing over him, sure enough, against the light of a white bulb. They tell him to get up immediately. Fernand does not understand. Abdelaziz is up, frowning: he understands everything. This way, Iveton. Your pardon was denied. Get up, now. Fernand complies. Stunned. Astounded. The brain still heavy with sleep. He is in his underwear and asks to put his pants on: one of the guards refuses, curtly. He is pushed. On the threshold he turns around and looks at Achouar and Abdelaziz. The first seems lost, haggard, perhaps even more so than Fernand; the second is grave, immovable, an ancient statue: his black eyes have severed at a stroke the fumes of sleep. Those sharp black eyes, beyond doubt, compel the convict to open his own, for good, this time. Brothers... says Fernand, but a hand is instantly clapped over his mouth, yanks him backwards. Panicking, Achouar asks what's going on; Abdelaziz does not answer. He is looking at the ceiling, lying down on his bunk. Fernand is hustled through the corridor. Dawn stirs, shakes its yellow folds. It is almost five. Headlights outside, the sound of a moving gate, of vehicles... The prisoners of Rarberousse sense that something unusual is afoot. As he makes his way, Fernand slowly begins, from scattered fragments, to piece it all together. Coty, Mitterrand, and the rest denied his pardon, his head will fall. He thinks of Helene. Of Henri. Stand tall, like them. He hollers into the passageways. Tahia El Diazair (Long Live Algeria)! Once. He hollers so as not to collapse or cry. A second tame. Tahia El Djazair. A guard tells him to shut it and holds a baton to his waist. Voices answer him already, voices which understand it all.

There is a moment when he is asked to speak. His death stands before him. The words a man is asked to deliver as he is forced to let go of the world. Last words, we call them.

“The life of a man, my life, matters little. What matters is Algeria, its future. And tomorrow Algeria will be free. I am convinced that the friendship between the French and the Algerians will be mended." That is all. The registrar thanks him. He is given a pair of pants and canvas shoes. He is putting them on when two Arab men enter, escorted by a few guards. Mohamed Lakhnèche, also known as Ali Chaflala, and Mohamed Ouenouri, alias P'tit Maroc. Fernand realizes that they are to be executed with him. The prisoners are hitting the walls of their cells with metal bowls and spoons. The prison's lungs fill up, inhale, exhale. In the surrounding streets, women are now shouting from their windows, supporting the combatants. Ululations, patriotic chants, and nachids. ينادينا للاستقلال، لالات Sit e e e se تضحيتنا للوطن خير من الحياة t looms proudly on the cement foor. There is the slanted blade, odious, there is the hole, round hole, perfectly أضحي بحياتي وبمالي عليك oa oa overflow and saturate the area. Smadja, Laînné and Father Declercq are present. They were waiting. Fernand is surprised to see them— he does not know, in fact, that his lawyers were told the previous afternoon, by telephone. The air is not cold; it is even rather mild. يابلادي يا بلادي، أنا لالأي وa ia ia

Someone embraces Fernand and tries to console him.

Be strong, he whispers, it's because of public opinion. You are French, you placed a bomb somewhere, to them that's unforgivable: you are to die because of public opinion. Fernand's stomach feels as if it is being lacerated, clawed, pierced by a thousand lead pellets. Fernand's stomach feels as if it is being lacerated, clawed, pierced by a thousand lead pellets. قد سلا الدنيا فؤادي وتفانلي لي Fernand repeats it three times, public opinion public opinion public opinion. He finds it hard to breathe. The Casbah calls the sky to itself in screams and ululations, an unbroken thread of sound. He is brought to the executioner, who wears a hood. Fernand does not know that this masked man, nicknamed "Monsieur d'Alger," is also called Fernand. The executioner, hearing the convict's name uttered by the chaplain, catches himself flinching. As if death were finally embodied— after all the heads he's dispatched with a most professional hand—in the sound of a first name which returns him, brutally, to their common humanity.

The tick tick tick sound carried across an entire paragraph in the beginning of the book returns at this point— even though Andras doesn’t record it. I hear the tick tick tick as Fernand walks to his death. It is unbearable to me— like a wail buried inside the propulsive rhythm, my only desire is to freeze the frame, to stop this march forward, to silence the machinery of the state’s violence and plead, argue, nothing nothing — the tick doesn’t stop.

Declereq asks him whether he requires the succor of religion; Fernand looks at him, tries to smile, fails, and answers no... no ... freethinker... his hands behind his back. I am going to die, he murmurs, but Algeria will be independent... Fernand goes first: custom dictates that the least "guilty" convict opens the proceedings, so that he need not witness others being put to death. His two lawyers withdraw to one of the corridors leading off the yard. Laînné kneels, bows his head, joins his hands together toward his Lord. Smadja stands, in tears, forehead against the wall. They do not want to look, they cannot. It is 05:10 when the head of Fernand Iveton, prisoner number 6101, thirty years old.

Two days after Iveton was guillotined, his lawyer, Albert Smadja, was arrested by French police and taken to the Lodi internment camp set up to “silence those who may denounce the repression, gel in contact with arrested militants, support their families and friends, or hamper the prosecution during their trials,” as described by Nathalie Funes. Two years later, at the end of 1958, Smadja was released from the camp.

In March of 1958, Jean-Paul Sartre published a text to the memory of Iveton in Les Temps modernes. By this point, the existentialist thinking that had driven the Resistance gained more adherents. Waiting around for consensus before taking action smacked of the bourgeouis reformism that had hampered anti-fascist groups. The Algerian cause led to a pronounced shift in how some revolutionists related to the Party. Like most political parties, the French CP groomed and limited the sort of action that could be undertaken in the struggle against French colonialism. Existentialism combined with an emphasis on praxis as fuel for concerted direct action campaigns.

Pierre Guyotat in conversation with Noura Wedell.

In the afterword to his novel, Andras acknowledges his collaborators. The book would not exist without the investigative work of Jean-Luc Einaudi. “He has left us, but I thank him here,” says Andras of the man who “reported that throughout his investigation he was met with nothing but ‘the silence of the State.’”

What happened to Iveton’s loved ones and comrades?

André Abbou, author of Albert Camus, entre les lignes,' claims that the novelist "intervened" to try to save him.' The Guerroudi couple was pardoned by de Gaulle— Jacqueline died in Algiers at the age of ninety-five (a few weeks before the start of the writing of this book). Hélène Iveton and Fernand's father left Algeria without delay, she died on Sunday, May 10, 1998 in Arcueil. Joe Nordmann discussed the case in his memoir, Aux vents de l'histoire.'

Who was Fernand Iveton?

Guillotined on February 11, 1957, Fernand Iveton is the only "European" to have been executed by France during the Algerian War. In its coverage of his death, France-Soir, a leading newspaper, described him as a "killer.' Paris-Presse, another mainstream organ, called him a "terrorist."

In the fortress of our bodies 
May our ideal live on
Mingled with your blood

*

Joseph Andras, Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us, tr. by Simon Leser (Verso Books)
Noura Wedell, “Pierre Guyotat: Interview” (BOMB Magazine)
Pierre Guyotat, Idiocy tr. by Peter Behrman de Sinéty (NYRB Classics)
The Cure, “Disintegration”

“But it is too late, and all that is left to do is either repent or forget. Of course, we forget. Society, however, is no less affected. Unpunished chines. according to the Greeks, infected the city-state.”

— Albert Camus on Iveton, in “Reflexions sur la guillotine,” Nouvelle Review francaise, June-July 1957

13 things I keep re-reading.

Saw her in the theatre. Heart raced. Went home alone and angry.

— Schopenhauer, 1816

Life may be in color, but it’s much more real in black-and-white.

— Wim Wenders, The State of Things (1982)

Words from the pens of others that returned me to my own writings in the past week, and offered me branches of anise to chew while thinking:

1. Lucy Schiller’s “This and Thats: Toward an Ethics of Digression” (Cleveland Review)

2. Anahid Nersessian, “When Does a Divorce Begin?” (The Yale Review)

3. Stuart Hall and Jordan T. Camp, “When We Are All Enemies of the State” (Boston Review)

4. Leo Robson, “John Carey: The last public critic” (New Statesman)

5. Yasmin El-Rifae, “On Restlessness: Diaspora’s Nervous Energies” (Parapraxis)

6. Drew Basile, “The Robinsonade in the Age of Reality TV” (LARB)

7. Charlotte E. Rosen, “The End of Resistance History” (Protean)

8. Mark Iosifescu, “Using the Night: Thomas Pynchon’s evolving populisms” (n + 1)

9. Robert Lucas Scott, “What Gillian Rose Saw in Auschwitz” (New Statesman)

10. Jess Bergman, “A Firm Sense of Resolve” (The Nation)

11. Lily Scherlis, “Group Relations” (n+1)

12. Ben Libman, “By Its Bad Side” (3:AM)

13. Eric Dean Wilson, “Cruising for Normal” (Baffler)

14. “Open Letter on The New School’s ‘Restructuring’ Plans” (e-flux notes)

Elsewhere, it was a delight to spent time with Lisa Olstein’s glimmering mind.

"The blurred and imperfect image".

The marvelous Barbara Johnson led me back to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, and the challenges posed by ruins to representation, particularly in the Protestant disparagement of images and iconography. Hawthorne wrote the novel directly from the notebooks kept while serving a diplomatic post in Italy, accompanied by his wife, a sculptor.

In the scene that held my attention last night, the sculptor named Kenyon asks his friend, Hilda (the painter who specializes in copying details from the works of Old Masters) for her thoughts on his attempt to sculpt Cleopatra. Hilda responds to Kenyon’s expressive, complicated, and moody Cleopatra with admiration, for it is indeed is spectacular; the statue openly inhabits classicism while pushing the affective range closer to the intensity of the Vatican’s Laocoön (which Kenyon coveted). And it is Kenyon’s response to Hilda’s complimentary tone that interests me.

“Ah; your kind word makes me very happy,” he says to Hilda, “and I need it, just now, on behalf of my Cleopatra. That inevitable period has come, (for I have found it inevitable, in regard to all my works,) when I look at what I fancied to be a statue, lacking only breath to make it live, and find it a mere lump of senseless stone, into which I have not really succeeded in moulding the spiritual part of my idea. I should like, now —only it would be such shameful treatment for a discrowned queen, and my own offspring, too—I should like to hit poor Cleopatra a bitter blow on her Egyptian nose, with this mallet!”

Hilda laughs and tells Kenyon, “That is a blow which all statues seem doomed to receive, sooner or later, though seldom from the hand that sculptured them.” Then she attempts to address the underlying issue, namely, Kenyon’s feeling that he has failed to create the object he imagined. “You must not let yourself be too much disheartened by the decay of your faith in what you produce,” Hilda says. She continues:

I have heard a poet express similar distaste for his own most exquisite poems; and I am afraid that this final despair, and sense of short-coming, must always be the reward and punishment of those who try to grapple with a great or beautiful idea. It only proves that you have been able to imagine things too rich for mortal faculties to execute. been able to imagine things too high for mortar faculties to execute. The Idea leaves you an imperfect image of itself, which you at first mistake for the ethereal reality, but soon find that the latter has escaped out of your closest embrace.

To which Kenyon replies, “And the only consolation is that the blurred and imperfect image may still make a very respectable appearance in the eyes of those who have not seen the original.”

Can the imperfect be a consolation? Well, it depends on the character. Hilda’s moralism and desire for purity confounds the notion of “goodness” in The Marble Faun, with the irony being that her dedication to copying the works of Old Masters positions itself as a repetition or recollection of perfection and purity. How is this recollection more innocent than daring to imagine and invent one’s own way of being or seeing?

Where Kenyon grants the “consolation” of achieving his art achieving a “respectable appearance” in the eyes of those who can’t compare Kenyon’s statue to the “original” in his mind, Hilda pushes past this and insists that:

“. . . there is a class of spectators whose sympathy will help them to see the Perfect, through a mist of imperfection. Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.”

“You, Hilda, are yourself the only critic in whom I have much faith,” said Kenyon. “Had you condemned Cleopatra, nothing should have saved her.”

“You invest me with such an awful responsibility,” she replied, “that I shall not dare to say a single word about your other works.”

For Hilda, this merited “suggestiveness” can only be pedagogical, or instructive in living the virtuous life. In many ways, she represents the belief that what we consume determines the moral value of what we create, think, imagine, and live. By reproducing the works of Old Masters, she risks nothing. She overpopulates her imagination with the conventional standards of beauty and goodness, only to find herself incapable of recognizing morality that looks different. For the Hildas of the world, the moral realm is accessed through beauty, through a sort of aestheticism that disclaims personal preference in the name of the Greater Good, the Formal Perfection, the Beautiful. It is lonely in Hilda’s tower, since anything foreign or strange poses a threat to its simple rubric. How can we feel alongside a world in which having pink heresy would be heretical? How do our boxes and categories that specialize in recognition (or make recognition authoritative) limit the possibilities of the prefigurative?

In the sidereal, an excerpt from Herman Melville’s letter to Hawthorne in June 1851:

“The ancient poets thought of the publication of a poem as the time of saying it, and the time of saying it is also the time of it being heard, and that's the time when there's an exchange of that action, that verb, whatever the verb is that's being described,” Anne Carson said to Kevin McNeilly in an interview, adding— “The verb happens.” Unfinish it.

*

Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz, Portrait of Sculptor George Grey Barnard in his Atelier (1890)
Crooked Fingers, Cover of Prince’s “When U Were Mine”
Herman Melville, “Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, June 1851”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun
William Orpen, Woman Dressing (sketch)

Cephalophores and serpentines.

The chasm was merely one of the orifices of that pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere. The firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm. A footstep, a little heavier than ordinary, will serve; and we must step very daintily, not to break through the crust, at any moment.

— Hawthorne

J'attendais en vain

- Biolay

“. . . the story of Trémeur who was beheaded by his step-father, Conmore”

In this version, as retold by Plastic Ekphrastic, “Conmore was totally against the Catholic Church and its proselytizing in the area.” Like many fellows of his time, Conmore was married. His wife floated through life with the unusual name of Trephine, and maybe this name is what led her to become interested in this novel religion known as Christianity, administered by the Catholic Church. Or maybe she was bored. Maybe the daily had dulled her to the point of unfeeling things.

When Conmore discovered that Trephine had become interested in this new religion, he did what husbands do when their wives step away from the usual roles, which is to say, Conmore killed her. He murdered his wife because he could not tolerate her new interests and affections.

Heresy begins in the home; revelation begins in the child’s play:

“Years passed, when one day as Conmore was walking in the woods he came to the very spot where he had slain Trephine. There he found children playing, one of whom was called by his companions Tremeur. The name attracted his attention. He looked at the child and asked him his age.”

“‘I shall soon be nine’, he replied.”

“Conmore thought for a moment. He had the intuition, soon the certainty, that this child before him was the son of himself and Trephine. Quick as a flash he drew his sword and struck the child’s head off, as he had struck off the head of his mother, and then hastened away.”

“The little martyr, says the legend, when the tyrant was gone, took his head in his hands and carried it to the side of his mother’s tomb where she was sleeping. In the cemetery of St. Trephine is a chapel, of modern construction, covering the tomb of Tremeur, which is not far from that of his mother. Inside the church, five round stones emerge. The people declare they are the stones with which Tremeur was playing when he was struck down by his father.”

The way that “shall soon be nine” curls in the ear, making a landscape of what will be lost. All sound— and sounding — in the alliterative pluck of it.

SpeaKing of sounds, there is the beck of homophones in the hagiography’s naming. Take Tremeur for instance (tremor or tres morte or tre meure) leaps in imagination that may or may not get evoked subliminally when we read a name. In yesterday’s writing workshop, we spoke briefly about homophones, words that sound the same but mean different things. K’s are a personal favorite…. I love the K in bike where it meets up with sidewalk and kickstand. A heap of fallen k’s.

Cockle forever. Cockle is a purrfect word. It has a K for a heart. I want to roll it around like a tennis ball and admire it from every angle. The way it prickles and sticks, the velocity of that stickiness and its coherence, the associative tug that drags its prickle into the subconscious. A cockle is kissing cousins to a cocklebur. A cackle is what a cockle becomes when left out in the midday sun of Naples. The dice of audibility are creaking, thickening, and broadening the field of the piece, which is using the "K" sound to establish itself. There is a soundscape at hand.  

And there are other associations clamoring in the corridor, where those prickles and pricks slide down the throat like a husked mollusk. Samuel Beckett paces a perfect square near the water fountain, More Pricks Than Kicks at hand. Cockles couple on a plate or backstage. They navigate using a single yellow foot that moves forward by thrusting itself into the sand. 

The homophone is two-faced: it plays between the salt on a cheek or the ocean on a face. A cockle and cackle color that carries this piece in its teeth. (The key of D major shudders in neon.) On a funny note, speaking of two faces, Beckett’s short story collection, More Pricks Than Kicks, was published in 1934 and then promptly banned for religious reasons by his birthland country of Ireland under the stipulations of the Censorship Act of 1929. Beckett took the title of the book from a verse in the Acts of the Apostles, when the apostle Paul is admonished by Jesus of Nazareth prior to his conversion on the road to Damascus. In this verse, Paul is told: “I am Jesus whom thou persecutes; it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.”

The photograph cuts across time and discloses a cross-section of the event or events which were developing at that instant. We have seen that the instantaneous tends to make meaning ambiguous. But the cross-section, if it is wide enough, and can be studied at leisure, allows us to see the interconnectedness and related coexistence of events. Correspondences, which ultimately derive from the unity of appearances, then compensate for the lack of sequence.

This may become clearer if I express it in a diagrammatic, but necessarily highly schematic, way. In life it is an event's development in time, its duration, which allows its meaning to be perceived and felt. If one states this actively, one can say that the event moves towards or through meaning. This movement can be represented by an arrow.

— John Berger, Understanding a Photograph

Brechtian. See a flat rat escape that one-dimensional skull.
  And then, and then, what whispers there.
        Your agony, mine, in the fully consensual design

of this play of light—you crowd of missing ones,
  return the ball to me! whispers, whispers and her voice
        (she never arrives) froze on the knock.

Flat thunder, all my heart, you might use Brahms behind it.
  Dull, whitish, deadly as a carpenter’s chalkline.
        Not Beethoven—Beethoven I cannot flatten.

— Anne Carson, “My Show”

They juice me, seduce me
Dress me up in Stussy

— Tricky

Tonight’s schedule is all singsong and soundsame. As I prepare for it, Frank O’Hara stands near a kitchen wall and look downs, offering his irrepressible smile to the floor, those wonderful questions from “Personism” animating my own. I mean: “. . . how can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether they eat or not.”

Can’t help thinking the chasm was merely one of the orifices in that word with K for a heart.

*

Anne Carson, “My Show”
Anonymous, “Saint Trémeur” at Chapelle Saint-Trémeur in Bury, France (XVIIe century)
Benjamin Biolay, “Padam”
John Berger, Understanding a Photograph
”Cephalophores: Headless Saints and Martyrs in France” (Plastic Ekphrastic)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun
Paul Westerberg, “First Glimmer”
Tricky, “Hell Is Around the Corner”

My Life as a Notebook.

For cosmology of the asterisk, see under/ground press.

"A Matisse" by William Carlos Williams.

A woman spreads her fingers around in an object that no longer exists: The Invisible Object, a structure by Alberto Giacometti.

— Henri Lefebvre, The Missing Pieces

*

A statement on process and “copying” by Alberto Giacometti, as recorded in his Sketchbook of Interpretive Drawings —

I began to copy long before even asking myself why I did it, probably in order to give reality to my predilections, much rather this painting here than that one there, but for many years I have known that copying is the best means for making me aware of what I see, the way it happens with my own work; I can know a little about the world there, a head, a cup, or a landscape, only by copying it.

*

— intersected with my readings of Anne Carson this week. . . particularly a passage from her lecture on corners, where she mentions Giacometti’s tree right after noting that “there is something cozy” in a play by Harold Pinter, despite its “repression and menace and horrible emotions”:

Compare a Beckett play, say, Waiting for Godot. What is so immediately desolate about Waiting for Godot as soon as the curtain rises? Maybe simply the fact that it has no house. Pinter plays generally take place in a house. Each character starts out in their little corner of the world, however ruined, psychotic, or hopeless. The stage set for the opening act of Waiting for Godot is given as an undefined place with tree. Bachelard says a house is a psychic state. Waiting for Godot offers no state. Here is no inside or outside, no structure that might open up to reveal something else. If the play contains a knowledge or opposes a riddle, it is a riddle distributed everywhere structurelessly. I wonder why he added the tree. Beckett wondered this too, eventually. In 1961, when the play was revived in Paris, he hired Giacometti to make the tree. One can see the attraction.

(audience laughing)

Well, not just the desolation and gashed surfaces and primordial manner of Giacometti's figures, there was also a sense of self-consciousness, almost despair about the limitations of their art that Beckett and Giacometti shared. Beckett wanted a tree that cried out as Giacometti did once in an interview, "I don't know if I work in order to do something "or in order to know what I can't do "when I want to do it." It's a lot to ask of a tree.

(audience laughing)

Beckett did not, at first, like the tree Giacometti made. It was reconsidered, redesigned, and remade, ending up as a straight, spindly white plaster thing that one spectator likened to a drain pipe. The tree had six leaves. In the end, Beckett called it superb. Looking at pictures of this stage set and this tree, I was reminded of something told me by a friend who is a child psychologist. When children get therapy, they're often asked to draw a picture of their house, as this is believed to be revelatory of life in the home and life in the mind. Most every kid draws the same house: a square building with central doorway, pointy roof, and chimney exuding smoke. Children of happy families draw the smoke as billowing, cloudy curves. Children of broken or difficult homes are inclined to make straight, thin smoke. Straight, thin smoke is regarded as worse, more depressing than no smoke at all or refusing to draw one's house.

(audience laughing)

When the Swiss novelist, Max Frisch, was dying, he gave a final interview in which he described a dream he kept having. In the dream, he sees Max Frisch balanced on the curve of the earth, but starting to slide off. An empty stage with white plaster tree gives just enough curve to the earth, just enough boundary to the unbounded to suggest the beginning of real terror. The unbounded, in Greek, apeiron, a word formed by adding the negative prefix alpha to the noun peirar, which is thought to mean rope end. Unboundedness is a rope not tied off at the end to prevent its unraveling. The first person to use this word as a metaphysical value, the philosopher, Anaximander, described to apeiron as the arche of all things. Arche meaning origin, first cause, first principle or beginning. And in Aristotle's account, the unbounded is abhorrent because it is nothing but beginning. Aristotle says, “Nature flees from the unbounded.” The unbounded is imperfect or incomplete, “and nature always seek completion.” Corners, part three. So on the one hand, we might regard corners as shelter, comfort, containment, completion, what Stevie Smith calls four walls and a pot of jam, something valued for their boundaries and useful in their form. On the other hand, the phrase to be cornered can signify a wish to escape or dissolve or deny the threat of angles closing.

*

— which then rubbed up against an ekphrasis by William Carlos Williams:

A Matisse

On the french grass, in that room on Fifth Ave., lay that woman who had never seen my own poor land. The dust and noise of Paris had fallen from her with the dress and underwear and shoes and stockings which she had just put aside to lie bathing in the sun. So too she lay in the sunlight of the man's easy attention. His eye and the sun had made day over her. She gave herself to them both for there was nothing to be told. Nothing is to be told to the sun at noonday. A violet clump before her belly mentioned that it was spring. A locomotive could be heard whistling beyond the hill.

There was nothing to be told. Her body was neither classic nor whatever it might be supposed. There she lay and her curving torso and thighs were close upon the grass and violets.

So he painted her. The sun had entered his head in the color of sprays of flaming palm leaves. They had been walking for an hour or so after leaving the train. They were hot. She had chosen the place to rest and he had painted her resting, with interest in the place she had chosen.

It had been a lovely day in the air.—What pleasant women are these girls of ours! When they have worn clothes and take them off it is with an effect of having performed a small duty. They return to the sun with a gesture of accomplishment.—Here she lay in this spot today not like Diana or Aphrodite but with better proof than they of regard for the place she was in. She rested and he painted her.

It was the first of summer. Bare as was his mind of interest in anything save the fullness of his knowledge, into which her simple body entered as into the eye of the sun himself, so he painted her. So she came to America.

No man in my country has seen a woman naked and painted her as if he knew anything except that she was naked. No woman in my country is naked except at night.

In the french sun, on the french grass, in a room on Fifth Ave., a french girl lies and smiles at the sun without seeing us.

*

— which resisted the image of his infamous plums, or made me consider a counterpoint to this image, also authored by William Carlos Williams:

*

— which carried the final ellipsis into a structure resembling an ear, where the lobe had to be a hand, as imagined by Meret Oppenheim in this portrait of Giacometti’s ear:

Meret Oppenheim, The ear of Giacometti (1970-1979)

*

— which then wiggled into an “experience” written by Alberto Giacometti, himself, in “The Dream, the Sphinx, and the Death of T,” translated by Barbara Wright:

I had just experienced, in reverse, what I had felt a few months earlier about living people. At that time I was beginning to see heads in the void, in the space surrounding them. The first time I became aware that as I looked at a head it became fixed, immobilized forever in that single instant, I trembled with fear as I had never trembled in my whole life, and a cold sweat ran down my back.

*

— which then ushered me back, in a cool sweat, to the woman spreading her fingers around in an object that no longer exists, an object named The Invisible Object, a structure that relates in its absence to Giacometti.

*

Alberto Giacometti, “The Dream, the Sphinx, and the Death of T” t. by Barbara Wright (Grand Street)
Anne Carson, “On Corners” (lecture transcript)
Eric Dolphy, “Feathers”
Meret Oppenheim, The ear of Giacometti (1970-1979)
William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909-1939 (New Directions)

Alberto Giacometti, Small bust on a double pedestal, 1940-45