Lisztiana.

your lips are indeed a disaster of alienated star-knots

— Frank O'Hara, from Second Avenue

Also, he let language have its way with him.

—Frank O'Hara, talking at a Club panel, 1952, as quoted in Brad Gooch's City Poet

Lisztiana, Much Later

I sit in your T shirt
with its spots of paint
as a certain fierceness pours
outside, perhaps, too, on you.

I’m smoking a CAMEL now
and I have a big hole in my
shoulder from washing away
a lot of dirt. Are you there?

there, are you? I am here
and the storm is not enough,
it should crash in and wet,
there should be maelstrom where

a privileged host is smiling.
And naked in debris I there
should be, but, being here, should
bend to you, pick out of rubble

a scrap of painted shirt,
as if it were soiled ivory from
a grand piano, possessed of us
both, and ruined now by storms.

Frank O’Hara

A few letters and an O’Hara translation

John Latta is the only reason I was able to read these letters, and so any confetti must fall on him before going elsewhere. Latta translates a letter from Frank O'Hara to Fairfield Porter dated June 25, 1954, which turned out to be an interesting date, an asterisk date, so to speak, given Latta's thrilling asterisk (“According to a note in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara “Meditations in an Emergency” is “Dated June 25, 1954” with “the earlier title: ‘Meditations on Re-emergent Occasions.’”), all of which cannot diminish the fact that it was an unusually hot late June, as noted in the references to 'dog-days' peppered throughout O'Hara's letter. “I simply, in such a heat, cannot type you René Char’s great long and questionable lyric Exploit du Cylindre à Vapeur but I have collated the promised A*** and hasten to add another gem,” O'Hara writes, excerpting: 

                         L’Amour

                Etre
Le premier venu.                                          

which he translates as:

                         To be
The first comer.

Char “is far more fun to do into English than the loquacious Mallarmé,” O’Hara writes, adding that when they meet again, he “will have a sumptuous divertissement by Jean Genet Un Chant d’Amour (it’s easy to see what’s on our minds these dog-days) which JA has pronounced one of my best works—I hope this doesn’t mean that it’s a terrible translation, but can’t figure out what else it could mean. There you are, he giveth with one hand and taketh with the other.”

His friends saw “an enchanting movie The Holiday of M. Hulot” which Frank has yet to watch, though it comes highly recommended. “I came rather late to the party (back from dinner) but it was fun at Grace’s ne’ertheless; I’m sorry you didn’t either come earlier or stay longer,” he says, spooning in one of those archaic contractions that indicates fondness or sentimentality to Frank, who suspects that John Ashbery will soon have to pass the title that Larry Rivers “assigned” him, namely, “Last of the Gay Blades”, to Frank himself, —”but then John should rest this summer anyway.”

Jesting, playing up that smirk of sadness, Frank says “Baudelaire had the funds to be a dandy but the most I can manage is to be a petit boulevardier.” He pokes Fairfield for impressions of Joan Mitchell, adding his own ambivalence: “I found her rather grumpy that night at Grace’s though she kept announcing how friendly she was feeling. At other times I have found her charming when she was terribly self-announced-depressed and had everyone else fleeing in droves. I guess it’s not her, then.” Maybe it's me, Frank intimates, ruffling the page with his chameleon-like slinkiness, changing his mind about dinner plans mid-sentence, shifting tenses as if in the middle of making plans— “Mike and I are having dinner tonight but it’s so hot I rather think we should forget it.” — and then swooping in with an affectless, casual delivery of the punchline: “Maybe we’ll just eat Ice Cream. I always eat that on Friday because of my upbringing.”

The word upbringing situates itself awkwardly, at the edge of a bed, one shoe on the floor, the other shoe in hand, like a photo I recall seeing of O'Hara himself, with a painting nearby. Speaking of seeing, since the eye often guides his pacing, the following paragraph dives into that space of expressive motion, moving from glimpsing an alumni bulletin and cringing, to firming himself by loosely identifying with a dandy or a cucumber or a cliche:

I saw a copy of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin which John has in the bathroom and I must say it is more disgusting almost than the McCarthy hearings, complete with a photo of Lyon Phelps at Hazens with two Radcliffe admirers. It must be wonderful to be an elder poet at 29, with all of the pretensions and none of the mistakes. (As you see, my spleen is fresh as a daisy and cool as a cucumber.) 

He reports that Ashbery “received a note from Jimmy which was sweet and had that I-really-should-be-working tone common to all us pros so I guess he is digging in without much trouble.” And perhaps this digging calls to a mind a shovel, which is too heavy an instrument to lift or use in the insufferable heat, and so O'Hara returns to the raison at hand, signing off in one of his lofty self-debasements, that scent of Charlie Chaplin tap-dancing across the stage of the page, suited in that painstaking and excruciating earnesty that feels so out of step with the seriousness and insincerity of the surrounding world: “This letter started out of the vain desire to write you a letter, but I don’t dare keep it up having just reread it.” Yes and — “Call when you get in and give my love to Katy,” he adds, attaching “the promised A***”, which Latta notes that O'Hara “campily misattributed” as Franz Liszt, the casanova of composers and performers whose reputation raised flighty wrists and bourgeois fans across Europe.

And Frank’s translation:          

The generous John Latta also includes his translation of Fairfield Porter’s undated reply, acknowledging the receipt of Frank's letter, correcting (without making of a point of doing so) O'Hara's spelling of Katy's name which should be "Katie", whom Porter walked to the station while reading O'Hara's letter, noting that “At the station a drunk made friendly passes at Kate, showing me that there are always new problems and that little girls must be protected without causing them alarm.” After depositing “Kate” at the station, Porter returned and discovered “a sarcastic note from Anne in the typewriter about the cracker barrel touch system motto in the typewriter, 'It is work that gives flavor to life'.” As for O'Hara's query about Joan Mitchell, Porter responds in kind: “I felt as you did about Joan Mitchell. She seemed unfriendly to me, but then I expect painters often to be mad at me, so I mistakenly took it to myself alone.” He continues to move down O'Hara's letter, responding to his questions and comments, adding “It is typical of JA to give and take at once," and thanking O'Hara “for remembering To ****, which seems a perfect translation, but which I prefer in your English, I suppose that is a compliment to the strength of the original.” As for “L’Amour, it contains the open secret of my feared and attained failures,” Porter tells him, opening the door just wide enough for the air to whistle over the knob. Of course, beautiful notes abound, and thus Porter and Larry received a “beautiful note from Jimmy, whose sweetness follows from the fact that his politeness directly expresses his true feelings, and is never a cover but the outward expression of exactly what he thinks,” and there was a heart-warmer of a missive from Janice, and “the picture of Kitty is done.” 

Porter mentions a slight dissatisfaction with John's portrait, which remains incomplete, unfinished. It’s a decent “likeness” but he hopes “it does not stiffen up. He has to pose again. He seems to have made up his mind to endure a certain amount of boredom. Maybe if he doesn’t come out next weekend, he will come under your chaperonage later.” Signing off professionally, politely, obliquely, like a gentleman dropping a ten dollar bill into the tramp's hat, Fairfield says he'll phone when he comes to Paris, in sum, “I did very much enjoy the other day with you.”

Fast forward 6 years —

O'Hara is no longer in Paris. Now he is in Boston, near the site of the alumni letter publishers, writing from Cambridge, Massachusetts on January 26, 1956, to Anne and Fairfield Porter, including them both in his greeting, and starting off on a complimentary note expressing happiness at receiving a letter from Kitty on the particular day when he received it, since that day coincided with span of time after O'Hara “had been reading her poems the day before and off and on since I got here and was wondering how the prettiest poet in America is.” He is surprised to be back, to “be here,” as he puts it, an experience that is both odd and familiar, so he turns to the weather without turning to the convention invoking the word weather, electing to slide over it instead with his eyes: “There has been snow on the ground and replenishing flurries ever since I arrived, which I like, and I have a room quite large with eaves, on the third floor of Molly Howe’s house.”

Of course my ears itched a bit upon reading this, since Molly Howe may be the mother of poet Marie Howe, and I have recently fallen into the whirlpool surrounding a possible dalliance between Molly and Samuel Beckett, who grew up in the same Irish small town, and who are rumored to have parented a child or else an abortion or perhaps both, unclearly, uncertainly, in a fashion worthy of literature that is rarely the entirety of a life. As for O'Hara, he says that Molly is in “the theatre des poètes and also is the one who adapted Finnegan's Wake for their production.” As a person, she is “nice and amusing and rather Irish and thinks I’m even Irisher than she is (which is doubtful since she acted in the Abbey Theatre and has a great appreciation of the mournful interpretation of trivial things—she compliments people in the following general form, for instance: “Isn’t it a shame! Bunny was so wonderful on stage last night, and she just doesn’t do anything serious with it, she doesn’t act enough!”).” At this point, I catch my breath at this gorgeous O'Hara-style parentheses that twirls so many batons at once and then looks up at us with exclamation points, realizing that hearsay is sure to follow, and when it does, the hearsay nevertheless is as giddying as receiving personal hearsay that makes poetry worthwhile for an instant, however brief, since O'Hara gave a reading with Roger Shattuck and Molly didn't say a thing to him about it even though they live in the same house, O'Hara tells Porter that Molly “told Bunny” … “Frank is the real thing, all right, but he has the terrible affliction of the Irish—he doesn’t trust his heart.” As if preparing to double one of his double-volts in a poem, O'Hara's speaker then mentions a worried response that Molly expresses about a play that hinges on a joke, and holds up this response to the Porters, asking, in jest, “Now don’t you think she’s more pessimistic and therefore more Irish, than I am?”, concluding, in seriousness, “She’s very nice anyhow.”

O'Hara nudges Anne to send her translation (if finished) of Supervielle’s La Belle Au Bois to The Poets’ Theatre for a staging or reading, at least, since the submitted scripts so far have been “heavily formalized, rhetorical, full of verse and empty of poetry, with an insight every 75 lines, as if most of the poets had just gobbled up a History of the English Drama that ended in 1850,” which is why the board of 8 humans would benefit from the Supervielle as both “a beautiful work and as a kind of play which is more poetry than those filled with verse that limps along about incest or the impossibility of communication.”

“Radio”

Frank O'Hara's “Radio” was first published in Poetry, March 1956. The commentary that follows was found in John Latta's exquisite “Stray Notes” . . . and I quote:

In Donald Allen’s note (fromThe Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara:)

Dated December 3, 1955 . . . Kenneth Koch wrote: “RADIO is perfect. I was in the Cedar Tavern last night and Bill de Kooning was there, so I asked him if he’d seen your poem about his picture. He said, Yeah, is that right? He said, Yeah, but how can you be sure it’s about my picture, is it just about a picture? I quoted him ‘I have my beautiful de Kooning / to aspire to. I think it has an orange / bed in it . . .’ He said, ‘It’s a couch. But then it really is my picture, that’s wonderful.’ Then he told me how he had always been interested in mattresses because they were pulled together at certain points and puffed out at others, ‘like the earth.’” (KK to FOH, March 22, 1956.) 

James Schuyler, in a letter dated 27 March 1956 (from The Letters of James Schuyler to Frank O’Hara):

This nonsense is only to tell you I love your poems in Poetry; as always, in that cutting garden of salmon pink gladioli, they’re as fresh as a Norway spruce. Your passion always makes me feel like a cloud the wind detaches (at last) from a mountain so I can finally go sailing over all those valleys with their crazy farms and towns. I always start bouncing up and down in my chair when I read a poem of yours like “Radio,” where you seem to say, “I know you won’t think this is much of a subject for a poem but I just can’t help it: I feel like this,” so that in the end you seem to be the only one who knows what the subject for a poem is.

Brad Gooch, in the O’Hara biography City Poet, quoting a 16 February 1956 letter to Michael Goldberg, seems (wrongly) to suggest that “Radio” was composed in Cambridge during O’Hara’s unhappy few months there with a playwright-in-residence fellowship at the Poets Theatre:

“Some times it seems to me that I’m operating myself by remote control from a broom closet in the Empire State Building but I guess I really am here . . . Before this there were a couple weeks of foul depression, gnashing teeth, pacing and boredom, when I felt that I would never, NEVER (like in those moves about concert pianists who’ve been in an accident) be able to play the typewriter again. But the presence of this Steinway you all gave me has finally asserted itself, and I now stagger from bed, stride to the desk, and begin my scales each morning, or almost each.” O’Hara’s sense of place was ameliorated by pasting to the wall a photograph of James Dean as well as by hanging a small de Kooning painting of a couch lent him by Fairfield Porter that had hung at East Forty-ninth Street. The painting appeared in “Radio,” published in Poetry in March . . .

---

Franz Liszt, Réminiscences de Don Juan, S.418 1849 played by Masaru Okada
Jasper Johns, Skin with O'Hara Poem, 1965
John Latta, “Two O’Hara Letters and a Translation”
Richard Hell, Godlike. NYRB Classics.
Willem de Kooning, Summer Couch, 1943

Cut-up as "inadequacy and tenderness"

CRISWELL THE PSYCHIC:

We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future.

POLICEMAN:

Inspector Clay’s dead… murdered… and somebody’s responsible!

EROS THE ALIEN:

You earthmen are idiots. Stupid! Stupid!

PAULA TRENT (to her husband, who’s an airline pilot):

Don’t worry about me while you’re gone. I have your pillow to keep me company. While you’re up there, I’ll be down here. Now, off to your wild blue yonder!

— Ed Wood, Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)

from Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959) directed by Ed Wood

1

Art as a found object draws on the surrealist attraction to chance. It fondles the frisson of contingency and the startle of accidentals while honing the juxtapositional impulse of collage and sampling. 

2

On September 23, 2006, Mark Fisher spoke to John Foxx about electricity and ghosts. Foxx said he admired the films of Ed Wood, who created films “simply because he was in a place where it could be done.” Reading Wood as “a sort of advanced naive artist,” Foxx credits him with inaugurating the cut-up movie, a form that he built from fragments, including “props he came across in warehouses and stock footage he discovered in the vaults of Hollywood cutting rooms.” Wood's cut-up films are an early exercise in “inadequacy and tenderness” to Foxx.

3

At one point during his conversation with Foxx, Mark Fisher turns towards the reader, parenthetically, and says that Pop is “virile mongrel . . . capable of effortlessly demonstrating, manifesting, absorbing, remaking any sort of academic intellectual construct” and doing this so effortlessly that prior versions seem diluted, insufficient, or “even redundant.” Rock n' roll can “prefigure avant garde concepts by arriving at them from a totally different direction.” 

4

The two begin discussing citational specters. Fisher asks Foxx why thanked Paul Auster in the sleeve notes for his album, Tiny Colour Movies.

Taken from John Foxx’s album, Tiny Colour Movies (2006)

Foxx says that, back in the 1980's, he wrote “this thing called The Quiet Man . . .in fact, I'm still writing it” — and then, he just so happened to read Paul Auster's New York Trilogy — which “struck so many chimes.” According to Foxx, “it was as if I had written it, or it was the book I should have written. I have to be very careful to find my way around it now.” This “occurrence” was both “rewarding and terrifying”: it suggested that there was “something in the air.” Exhilaration came with a sense of recognition: “it feels as if someone has published first, and therefore registered their claim to where you discovered gold.” And so Foxx thanked Auster in order to “acknowledge the effect, and the odd sort of encouragement of recognized themes, as well as the continuing parallel interest in the idea of lost movies and fragments.”

5

Ballard, Burroughs, Dick: Foxx listed the sci-fi writers who deployed thought experiments in order to think about “the near future.” We have entered the counterfactual space in considering the way “the unrecognized present” may have consequences and result in a world different from what we predict, know, or imagine.

What is unconscious resonance? What can resonate for us without becoming clear? Fisher and Foxx grope for words about the abstracted ‘feelings’ in Foxx’s films. 

FISHER: You often use the word angelic, or angel . . . 

FOXX: Yes,  very perilous territory, especially since those terms have been co-opted by New Agers. [Foxx proceeds to outline a few of his “thought experiments.”] The idea … of parallel evolutions — imagine something that may have evolved alongside us, something we're not quite aware of yet, that we haven't discovered… invisible because of their proximity. 'Hiding in plain sight' . . . could give rise to situations that are tremendously moving, fragile, tender. Metaphorically very resonant. Another one.. .the concept of singularity. An event that only happens once, or once every thousand or million years. There may be rhythms which extend over tens of millions of years and are therefore unrecognizable to us; except as single unconnectable and unexplainable events.

How does resonance play into Walter Benjamin’s eerie evocation of the planetarium at the end of Berlin Childhood, his cosmos, his cosmology, his constellations?

FOXX: Another thought experiment posits the concept of Angels as a connection between things. An entity that only exists between. A sort of web or connection [that arises] . . . purely as an intrinsic, and visible, and unsuspected component of the evolution of the ecology that supports whatever they exist between. They cannot exist on their own. Many of us have these little incidents—everything from coincidences onward— things we can't explain using the references we commonly employ.

FISHER: On the LPs with Harold Budd… you get that sort of aching plateau,  where you slow down so much that any perturbation has a massive effect . . . it allows an alternative ecology to emerge— one based on events that are much less frequent. And that affects their significance. You are drawn to them in a sort of smiling fascination, rather than the usual pop music method of lapel-grabbing bombardment. 

The bombardment of Pop is not Alexander Kluge's angels, but Kluge's angels may nevertheless be present as a material possibility between the bombs and the ruins of the sound, particularly in the language of architecture and ‘new developments’.

FOXX: The lack of jostling allows that sort of elegant notional space to open up. Dreams are a very important component . . . not simply the image you present yourself with in a dream... also the emotional tone of the scene. You can see a cloud, but this will be accompanied by a sense of wonder or by a sense of dread, and it is that accompaniment that determines its meaning. 

How is atmospherics being tied to clouds here? Why do clouds seem to pose this contrafactual role across soundscapes and visual media?

FOXX: When your parents are away for even an hour, it feels as though it goes on forever and you really deeply miss them — and the obstruction, the tone component of that just carries on through life. Gets applied to different situations. These longings . .. join the repertoire of tones we carry and apply. Some moments last forever.

FISHER: There's almost a positive side . . . an enjoyment of longing and ache.

6

At one point in the third book of Nocilla Trilogy, Agustín Fernández Mallo demonstrates his writing practice, namely, sitting down with an intention and then deviating from it. He envisions a projected work, a “cartography of the sounds in a campsite” composed of the campers’ favorite sounds. After asking various campers to share their favorite site-sounds, he would then request that they draw a map identifying the location of that sound on the campground. He would also take photos of these sounds, and caption them (i.e. “Photo of the sound of my tree” etc.). The photos and maps and descriptions would then be assembled into a catalogue.

A few pages later, the speaker meets himself, or his writing persona, who introduces himself as “Mallo” and hands him a stack of papers from a dresser drawer. The papers are titled “Our Project”; the pronoun attaches a plurality of authors to the the project. While flipping through these papers at random, the narrator finds “the same obsession that, we then found out, had its inception in Las Vegas, on those nights of mineral silence in which we had read a book called The Music of Chance by someone called Paul Auster before sparking up a Lucky Strike and listening to the sounds of thousands of waiters mixing cocktails . . .”

7

Speaking of speculative strategies, when Ed Wood had trouble financing a film titled Grave Robbers From Outer Space, he reached out to the Southern Baptist Convention and persuaded them that a successful science fiction film could provide them with a substantial cash flow. If Plan 9 did well, the money could used to finance another film that would segue with their own interests. namely, a film about the Twelve Apostles. The Baptists liked the idea of projecting the Bible onto cinema screens, but they were offended by the title Wood had originally selected for the film. So Grave Robbers From Outer Space became Plan 9 From Outer Space. The Baptists also insisted that the film entire crew be baptized before working on the project. Desperate for cash, Wood agreed. The crew took part in a baptismal ceremony. The film itself was made in five days for $20,000.

*

Agustín Fernández Mallo, Nocilla Trilogy. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2002.
John Foxx, Tiny Colour Movies, 2006.
Mark Fisher. "Electricity and Ghosts: Interview with John Foxx." Ghosts of My Life. Zero Books: Winchester UK, 2014. pp. 160-170.

Emanations of elapsed time.

An echo is a trace of an event that reverberates through time.

— Stephen Frailey

The trilling wire in the blood sings below inveterate scars.

—T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”

Language of Echoes (1987) by Adam Fuss. At first I thought it was a fabric, the surface of a textile spattered with self-circling stitches. I noticed the dimpling of the surface material near the larger circles — marks of impact. Tears and rumpled bedsheets. The minimalist music of rain dripping from the porch eaves into the small portion of dented cement that collects water. A series of variations in visual resonance.

*

“I work a lot in a territory which I feel is not invisible, but on the edge of perception,” said Adam Fuss.

*

In the novel, a man walks into the room carrying his wife’s notebook. His clothing is clean-cut, his figure symmetric, but face above the white shirt is blank. Something develops as he stands between the gray armchair and coffee-table, a stack of books at its feet. She is trying to read him. She is silent when he says that there is no point, he already knows what she is thinking. Her notebook in his hand, motionless. He has read it. He doesn’t look at it as he drops the notebook on the table. I’m leaving, he tells her. It is finished.

*

First impressions failed me in my reading of Language of Echoes. This became apparent as soon as the room of the book grew audible. The room of the novel and the room of the photogram are not entirely dissimilar. The distance between the faces and hands and eyes of the figures, the density of the furniture, the sonic possibilities of what is spoken, and what may be felt yet unsaid. Like the surface of that puddle in the porch corner, each word and motion falls upon given material, creating a particular circle which emanates from the points of impact. Each point has its own.

*

I imagine a slender line of small circles at the lower left edge of the image, where each circle is one of the husband’s footsteps, pausing a third of the way into the room. There is solidity and symmetry in the shapes, but even this seems accidental rather than purposive. A contour of chance and contingencies, the room creates itself from the relatings of the bodies within it. The room recreates itself continuously. Sounds and circles overlap at points of high impact. This is the set-up for a short story; so much of fiction’s staging depends on the ways sounds and gestures mingle, interact, and overlap.

*

Larger, less distinct ripples from earlier droplets are barely visible against the image’s gray background. The presence of these points of near-invisibility turns Fuss’ photogram into a record of duration in dialogue with elapsed time. Time lapses and elapses.

*

Language of Echoes is a gelatin silver print (or “photogram”) created by Adam Fuss without the use of a camera. Rather than asserting the artist’s gaze through the lens, Fuss relinquished his own perspective and laid the piece open to chance by placing a piece of photographic paper in the bottom of a tray filled with water and setting this tray in darkness, or under a safe light, while dripping water onto the still layer of water in the tray. As various droplets hit the surface, Fuss flashed a light to expose the paper and capture the shadows of the emerging wave patterns.

*

Fuss has described the faint imprints on his photograms as a “visual echo of the real object.” It is figuratively compelling, this language of echoes rippling across a medium’s surface. To “develop” the droplet . . . To see what develops from the conditions set by the process.

*

Echoes are sounds that exist in relation to their origins. An echo locates the originary sound in time-space. In a parallel fashion, Fuss’ flash-frozen droplets develop from the experimental conditions he created for their emergence. We invent games to devise ways of seeing how things play out, or how they shape the behaviors of the players.

Adam Fuss, Untitled (2007) gelatin silver photogram

An echo represents a trace of an event that reverberates through time. The echo cannot carry the entire sound but instead offers a slice of it, a reduced fragment, a wisp or a trace that points us to its existence. We recognize that a larger (or louder) version must have existed in order for this insufficient copy to evoke it. Echoic traces are like tiny testaments to the unseen.

*

“Less representational than percussive, certain photographs suggest sound—a plucked string or a minute fluttering of the vocal chords, emerging from the throat in a wordless hum,” wrote Stephen Frailey of Fuss’ photograms.

*

“A nineteenth-century child's dress is carefully laid out for our viewing. Perhaps, because we are aware that it is a part of lost time, our thoughts go to its missing inhabitant—an ethereal presence, intricate to the weave of the fabric before us. And then there are the birds, scattering in a grey photographic dusk, soundless. Now, the mirrored surfaces of the daguerreotypes flicker before us, never completely giving up their secrets. In this body of work the artist essays loss and its attendant ghosts.”

These are the words Neville Wakefield used to describe Adam Fuss’ My Ghosts, a book published in 2002 by Twin Palms Publishers.

*

Of his ghosts, Fuss has said that they are “not some external phenomenon but rather an emotional state or an unconscious state that acts as an intruder in the mundane or ordinary, frequently manifesting as the presence of an absence.” By nature of its being, “the ghost is neither fully physically and materially present nor completely nonexistent but in a state of ‘in between’.” 

*

A few questions I posed to the language of echoes: Where are the areas of relative intensity? How do the areas of impact relate to one another? How do they interfere with the ripples’ physical tendency to move outwards? What sort of drive or urge is configured in the physics of ripple and flashbulb?

*

Svetlana Cemin made a film about Adam Fuss’ work. She titled it A Landscape of Imagination. A hybrid resonance or intersection of wave forms led me to think of John Cage’s “In a Landscape,” and musical figurations of landscape more generally.

*

All of this attaches itself to recent readings on unconscious resonance, as explored in conversations about cinema between Mark Fisher and John Foxx, which I may share later this week, unless spring fever and life gets the better of me.

*

“Adam Fuss: Visual Resonance”. April 25, 2025 - September 29, 2025, Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
Adam Fuss’ profile for Frankael Gallery.
Adam Fuss, “Two Photographs”. Bomb Magazine.
Adam Fuss, My Ghost. Twin Palms Publishers, March 2002. Currently out-of-print.
John Cage, “In a Landscape” performed by Alexei Lubimov
Max Richter, “Love Song (After JE)”
Stephen Frailey, “Thin Air: The Photograms of Adam Fuss”. Artforum.
Svetlana Cemin, dir. Adam Fuss: A Landscape of Imagination

Social hygiene and shadows.

The demon, like the painter of dreams, is an artificer. Yet for the would-be skeptic, possession by a genio maligno overcomes the drawbacks of mere sleep in its total separability from reality. In this perfect nightmare, all that belongs to us— our bodies, our sensory apparatuses, as well as the colored, figured worlds they take in– can be reduced to the "mockeries of dreams." The condition of true skepticism is the condition of complete painting. Both in its total invention and in its pure illusion, possession promises to be an artifice with nothing behind it. Possession is an art of absolute fiction.

— Rene Descartes

Hey I’ve been thinking!
I been thinking about nothing, yeah . . .

— The Dandy Warhols, “Smoke It”

Maya Popa opened the envelope of my dreams this year. This is the only explanation I can devise for the fact that I am giving a lecture each month on prose-related topics that fascinate me.

The official version involves serving as the first Writer-in-Residence for the Conscious Writers Collective . . . and I keep pinching myself to see if I am real, or possibly just to amuse Radu, whose consternation and notebook-envy remains unparalleled in the Kingdom of Mammals.

As result of Maya’s nudge, many untyped notebook entries have returned to the table of my thinking— a combination of music, images, and textual encounters which have shaped (and continue shaping) themselves into one of my favorite literary forms, namely, the “lecture.” How does one thank a fellow writer for the opportunity to revisit readings and theories that sat, undeveloped, like tadpoles in an ice-cube? I don’t have an answer to that. Nor do I know what I will eventually do with these “lectures,” apart from savoring the pleasure involved in writing them and living (however briefly) in that state of co-presence with language and being that admits and explores its entanglement with the world.

Radu says I have wasted my life. “There is too much material! What is the point of collecting and saving more material than you need?” His eyes are darker than Goya’s untold secrets. One must listen to such darkness, if only to dismiss it with exculpating nouns like research. Or statements including these nouns, as with “Research, dear Radu, as you should know, given the number of pillows and cushions you have sniffed before hiding your bones in the most random corners of our home.”

As for shadows — and shadowgraphia —-

“Five o’clock shadows: a whispering campaign”: a razor blade ad

As found in Time Magazine (October 1937), the platform of Henry Luce’s New American Century as well as the medium of communication for empire’s Exceptionalism issues. The target audience for this ad is men and the women who love them. Women, here, are subtly encouraged to shame men into purchasing Gem razors that work more efficiently at reducing the grime of the five o’clock shadow.

The danger of the gendered “whispering campaign” is stated at the outset: women might think “that things aren’t good with you!” O how I love studying this bladed whisper as a set piece in the construction of gender that was central to cultural notions of “family values” propagandized by the US government after World War II.

. . . And there is a similar play on notions of social hygiene deployed by S. D. Chrowstowska in her doppelganger-dandying “Shadows”, a short story originally published in her collection, A Cage for Every Cage (Sublunary Editions).

. . . And there is the awkwardness of wanting to share the contents of my thoughts, both present and forthcoming, by tying these to the workshop titled “Shadowgraphia: The Uses of Shadow in Fiction,” that will happen at the end of this month.

. . . And there is a ceaseless stimmung of birdsong that surrounds me as I type in shadow of Radu’s critical eye— an eye which wants walking rather desperately.

. . . And there will be flowers and pollen stains on this walk, which is now my excuse for leaving, but not without adding, awkwardly, that if by some wild, April-stung perchance you are interested in this chiaroscuro (or others) here is the relevant link.

. . . And there is the official part, prior to the unofficial parting.

Shadowgraphia: The Uses of Shadows in Fiction (April 25, 12-2 EDT) “Possession is an art of absolute fiction,” declared Rene Descartes as he considered the relationship between art and demonic possession. Despite the demonic associations, fiction has always made use of shadows to develop, characterize, and complicate narrative. Lucifer was an angel whose maleficent spirit got the best of him. Witches are dangerous because they make use of “dark magic” to meet their ends. The artist who fashions his work as godlike enters the realm of “deception.” God was the first Creator, and Satan was the first actor to zealously imagine himself in God’s place. In this generative workshop, we’ll examine how authors use shadows to tell stories, from Peter Pan to Marcel Proust. Then, we’ll use shadows to tell our own stories. 

Sophie Calle, Self-Framing, and Writing Through Imagined Encounters (May 23, 12-2 EDT) This session will explore how artists and writers construct intimacy, perspective, and narrative through imagined encounters. Using the work of French artist and writer Sophie Calle—known for projects that blend photography, storytelling, surveillance, and performance—we will examine how creative constraints can generate unexpected narratives. Calle often creates elaborate situations in which people unknowingly become part of a story, following strangers through cities, inviting others to interpret personal artifacts, and inventing fictional frameworks that blur the boundary between fact and imagination. These unusual narrative strategies have inspired writers such as Paul Auster, Grégoire Bouillier, and Enrique Vila-Matas, who have incorporated Calle-like devices into their own work. In this workshop, we will look closely at how intimacy is created in writing—through voice, pronouns, address, and narrative framing. We will also examine several of Calle’s staged scenarios, which rely on collaboration, chance, and invented rules, before writing our own short pieces inspired by Calle’s methods.

New Worlds On the Page: Imagining the Painting’s Infinities (June 20, 12-2 EDT)  

​HE: Why do you write?

​ME: To trick myself into being satisfied with what exists. Writing releases me from my fear of running away. The imaginary holds me in place, pinned to the scene for an instant. 

​HE: But isn't it real, then? Aren’t you bringing these characters into the world of your reckoning in order to give yourself a false sense of company? I mean, do you believe in them?

​ME: I do. That’s the worst part of it. I believe in them.

​HE: How?

​In A Treatise on Painting, Leonardo da Vinci described a new method for “awakening the mind to a series of inventions…by looking attentively at old and smeared walls, or stones and veined marbles of various colors, you may fancy that you see in them several compositions, landscapes...with an infinity of other objects.” And, so, we will look attentively at three paintings and invent worlds for them. This workshop dives into the untamed parts of our imaginations and honors the possibilities that hold us in place.

"Love Letters Mostly" by Deborah Digges.

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

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

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

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

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

What do we reveal when we ask? 

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

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

How did punctuation alter the atmosphere of the prior sentences? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the writers,
unrequited, walked toward home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What knows to do so dives deep as it can.

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

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

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

*

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

Milena; or M no. 7

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

— Maria Loh, Still Lives (2015)

The story of an M.

Her name was Milena Jesenská.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Nevertheless appears, as Kierkegaard hums in the margins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Milena Jesenská, 1939, arrest

Grigory Zinoviev, 1920 (Bulla Studio)

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

"These masses were made of fire."

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

Living out its other life
while she considers this one.

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

1

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

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

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

2

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

3

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

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

4

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

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

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

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

5

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

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

6

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

7

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

8

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

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

9

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

10

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

Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire c.1905

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

11

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

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

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

Marginalia on the self’s “composition”

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

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

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

— The Sirens

*

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

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

Zarathustra's laughter.

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

— Agustín Fernández Mallo

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

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

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

“a surprisingly lively intercourse of angels”

BATAILLE:

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

HYPPOLITE:

It's Zarathustra's laughter.

BATAILLE:

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

HYPPOLITE:

Not bitter.

MARCEL:

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

BATAILLE:

And?

MARCEL:

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

BATAILLE:

On the contrary, I believe he was laughing then.

DE GANDILLAC:

We are not speaking about the laughter in Turin.

BATAILLE:

What does anything mean at that moment?

*

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

Mouths.

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

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

Mouth as Sentinel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Goodman, Suspicion (2014–2017)

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

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

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

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

— Sandra Kohler, “Litany”

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

— T. S. Eliot

*

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

Saints of hysteria.

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

— Joe Ross & Rod Smith, “Interlacktual Za”

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

— Norma Cole & Michael Palmer, from A Library Book

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

Waves of Particles

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Radu with snow.

*

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

Postscript

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

Céret.

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

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

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

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

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

“Chaïm Soutine: Reeling Trees” by Cole Swenson

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

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

we a product of wind? Everything here is

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

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

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

trees full of wind that we can see — warm wind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which he translated as:

Paysage avec Personage or The White Road 1918-1919

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

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

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

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

that the wind had made his hands

the wind of his hands

and what the wind had made of his hands

was not said

it was not that the wind

was the face of his hands

nor that his hands were faced in wind

but that his hands made faces

of the wind and faced them.

To wit:

Paysage à Céret, 1920

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Interpolations.

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

Cassavetes' Faces (and a psychogeography)

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

— Fugazi

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

— John Cassavetes

“— love. And the lack of it.”

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

“You kill me.”

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

“I have been seduced.”

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

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

Simon Hsu nails it:

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

A few sites in John Cassavetes’ psychogeography

THE SAND-PITS ON LONG ISLAND

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

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

HEIGHT

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

ROUTE ONE

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

TALKING GAME

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

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

DINING ROOM TABLE

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

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

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

DRIVEWAY

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

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

*

Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes

*

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

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

Untimely meditations.

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

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

*

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

“hasten slowly and you shall soon arrive”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Labyrinthitis.

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

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

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

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

An inflamed labyrinth.

A hidden snail snell with oval handles.

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

---

Inexistance.

A fellow named Skeffington died.

This fellow’s death gave birth to a widow.

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

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

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

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

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

And a poem by Franz Wright thanking the leaves:

Leave Me Hidden

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

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

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

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

*

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

Mojave Ghost.

Poetry is the language of intensity.

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

— C. D. Wright, “Collaborating”

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

Approximately Forever

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

The new syntax of love
both sucked and burned

The secret clung around them
She took in the smell

Walking down a road to nowhere
every sound was relevant

The sun fell behind them now
he seemed strangely moved

She would take her clothes off
for the camera

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Each is charged by the charge in the other.

Each summoned to what
if not a sacred assimilation.

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

And her ass, like two cloves of garlic.

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

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

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

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

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

Imaginary Morning Glory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did he keep his word, or only his skepticism?

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

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

Lake Echo, Dear

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

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

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

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

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

From Mojave Ghost:

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

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

No one bears tragedy. It holds you in place.

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

To reach for a world
that is out of reach.

What seest thou else in the dark backward?

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

Morning Star

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

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

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

To reach for a world
that is out of reach.

What seest thou else in the dark backward?

Though no one calls, I look back again.

Which is when. Which is when I see you.

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

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

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

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

Your voice, a rapture of silence. Incessant
immanence.

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

Like a moth hitting the windshield.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WRIGHT

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

GANDER

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

Globolo.

Gift of the Book

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

C. D. Wright

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

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

A poem for the year of the horse.

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

Larry Levis: For love of immanence.

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

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

WOUND

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

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

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

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

… and for the inflammatory, unforgettable scherzo:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“One.”

Either you will or you won’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And what does the poet know?

How does he know it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

Rancourt expresses the beauty of Levis’ ampersand perfectly.

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

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

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

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

Until all of Kansas dies inside her stare...

Edward Hopper, Hotel Room (1931)

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

Light touches both.

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

The shadow is a being created entirely by light. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

City.

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

GOSSIP IN THE VILLAGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Larry Levis, from The Gazer Within

*

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

Szilárd Borbély's Berlin-Hamlet.

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

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

o crowd of my lived life

— Bin Ramke

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

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

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

39. [Fragment VIll]

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

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

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

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

43. [Allegory VIl]

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

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

49. [Epilogue II]

[i]

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

[ii]

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

[iii]

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

George Grosz, The Upheaval of Nothingness (1948)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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