New Darkness, Old Dances
My twelve-year-old daughter has discovered a tremendous fear of the dark--not just fear of going to sleep in it, but waking up, discovering it is still dark, and coming into my room, half-awake, asking when the darkness will end.
"Soon," I lie.
Soon is the litany of pandemic, a time we banish by promising things will return to normal on a given time and date. For parents, the struggle becomes identifying this time and date, passing this date as comfort to our children. But perhaps this time of fantastic helplessness requires a different articulation, a commitment to intertextual conversations as a form of company, an infectious friendship. In all the self-help I find to soothe my daughter, it is the danse macabre that is missing.
As an allegorical form, the danse macabre emerged in the Late Middle Ages in visual representations, sermons, and stories where the dead (or a representative of the dead) summons humans from all stations, ages, and status to dance to the grave. Serving as a memento mori, a reminder of life's fragility and material vanity, the danse macabre even earned a mural in a Parisian cemetery.
The seam between a daughter's fear and an old dance which approaches dread appear in an essay by Emil Cioran. "Paleontology" begins in the accident of an afternoon when Cioran wanders into a natural history museum only to find himself altered by the encounter with skeletons, astonished by the bones beneath the vulnerable costume of flesh that hides each human's death. Cioran takes horror as a path towards liberation, admiring the Middle-Aged gaze that "cherished the livid and the fetid," the gruesome. To marvel over "dreadful decrepitude" is to acknowledge our limitations in this time of irregularities and conspiracies, a time when the promise of Progress feels increasingly feeble, or unaffordable, to the underprivileged. The skeleton invites us to contemplate the cadaver, the end.
Isn't melancholy and slight morbidity a normal response to the death and anxiety in which we are living?
What is aberrant about acknowledging the grief woven into current events, the see-saw of rue and regret over masks?
What is flimsier, really, than the Americanist cult of positivity which seeks to downplay the present by articulating new commercial adventures and self-enhancements which foreground "living one's life" as a national past-time.
"Blessed was that age when solitaries could plumb their depths without seeming obsessed, deranged," Cioran continues, since "their imbalance was not yet assigned a negative coefficient." Blessed be the terrified speechless for their insistence on acknowledging the night.
Blessed be the worried and miserable who look at the numbers and understand how a confetti-covered capitalist death cult is the opposite of not fearing death. And isn't there a certain astonishment that animates dread--the disbelief that any of us could ever end?
Small Presses as My Pandemic Abode
There is no more life as usual; what exists is new to all of us, inflected by the fears we may avoid or confront. In pandemic time, the books which inhabit dread have kept me from despair by daring to speak the unspeakable. They have given a way into conversations with my daughter; a way to make skeletons dance.
As pandemic has changed what I want from the page, it is small presses that fill the gaps in what self-help culture can offer a world disoriented by pain, loss, and fear. Because the dance macabre does not occupy a large market presence in a country that hides death, in a country that hates its own ghost-histories so much that it plans their obsolescence with demands for positivity and closure, it is small presses who provide what is necessary to navigate a time we cannot escape, rewind, or awake from.
Life circles back upon itself like a Mobius strip of anxiety; books with an expansive notion of time, and a willingness to address the macabre, have been the best company. All these books excavate interior silences and dread to formulate a language of looking; all are written from a hunger for roots that somehow mingles with reckoning. All are haunted and haunting and intentional in this relationship with the dead.
Brandon Shimoda, The Grave on the Wall , City Lights Books, 2017
Brandon Shimoda's memoir is framed by the discovery of a continuous, nonlinear time after his grandfather’s death. In seeking to inhabit a time that includes the ancestors. Shimoda undertakes a pilgrimage which illuminates the heart of the pilgrim, the desire to be reunited in a meeting with someone greater, someone definitive:
In the seventh or eighth century, a poet sat between beneath the pines and, facing the sea, wrote an ode to the pines, to what he felt to be their perfection. The ode enfolded a lamentation on what the poet felt, by comparison, to be his perilously misshapen life. The pines held the sound of the waves and the poet's silent labor. The poem is one of the many thousands of poems in Man'yoshu (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves) and is inscribed on the face of a large stone that sleeps beneath the pines. The day I arrived, it was raining. The poem and its characters were leaking.
To meet the ancient poet on his terrain, Shimoda wanders through this ancestral space in Japan, shifting across places and photographs and monuments, in order to recover something about his grandfather's history - and this merely opens the door to a larger space of who is missing....
Midori's death, or departure to another place, opened up a pantheon of ancestors. He had to have gone somewhere. The pantheon of ancestors was the most likely place, because it was intuitional. I felt it. Therefore assumed it. The ancestors formed a place in which no single individual could be truly differentiated from the collectivity of the dead. And yet, the first ancestor who introduced herself to me as an ancestor, was my great-grandmother. Her name is Kawaki Okamoto.
Her name is. Kawaki is. Notice how the presence of the great-grandmother is implied by the narrator's subtle shift into present tense. One almost doesn't realize what has happened (though it becomes clearer as chronology, itself, grows murkier).
Shimoda differentiates between the burial grave, where the body is buried, and the "ritual grave...where the living go to visit the dead." Attaching the picture-bride photo of Kawaki to his bedroom mirror, he creates a space in which he must see her everytime he sees himself, thus changing the nature of time which excludes her, the Americanized time which keeps them separate:
She would not recognize my face, coming in and out of focus, attending, so I think, to her memory, which is synonymous with trying to keep it alive..... A grave is anywhere we leave an unrepeatable part of ourselves. A part that has broken away.
In this hunger to remember the dead hides a hunger to be known by the dead, to be connected to the knowledge of one's ancestors. The role of the photograph as a ritual grave evokes Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, which Shimoda quotes later: "suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it."
Claire Meuschke, Upend, Noemi Press, 2020.
Like Shimoda, Claire Meuschke makes a special place for the photograph or the image in a Barthean sense; she includes the material text of court documents, and juxtaposes official, state-sanctioned language against family ghosts. Where Shimoda occupies the space of lyric memoir, Meuschke reconfigures the poetry collection as a dialogue between discourses and language.
In the Notes, Meuschke acknowledges an incomplete list of info and quotes that serve “after-the-fact, as points of reference and suggested further readings and viewings” rather than inspiration or source for the text itself. Like Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony (where the theory of translation challenges epistemology in its insistence on a deformation zone), Meuschke's Notes serve to destabilize or somehow re-vision the text, opening it to a sort of time which is ongoing, continuous, multiplicitous. Meuschke leans into indigenous concepts of time and place to inhabit the temporal disorientation of texts in a book—to discover her great-grandfather (Hong Ah Wing) as a fevered hallucination in a library book.
Inspired by Layli Long Soldier’s “investigative poetics,” (especially in “to ward”) Meuschke also says she borrowed from CAConrad’s (soma)tic poetry rituals and “recombining writing exercises” initially coined by Farid Matuk to write white settler violence; oriented towards discovering “after-images.” Language and drive of this book informed by immigration trial of her grandfather, Hong On—and includes actual transcripts of questions from “Statement of Applicant”. The next poem, “—oOo—“ ends with: "I don’t have any words for the past question."
“Figurative As Literal” takes the metaphor and destabilizes it:
a figure is real
a number is literate
products like people
come with a number and a name
I would hope that reading this in reverse would
image like a mirror
like history as a way to remember doesn’t image.
Across several poems, the poet uses “like” as a pivot, a sort of root in the ground that stays continuous as the panorama is absorbed. It’s not uprooted. From “To Word”, a long prose poem, ending: "I use the em dash when I can’t bare for the sentence to end. / Here they punctuate the symbol into existence."
Bruno Scultz, Undula, Sublunary Editions, 2020. Translated by Frank Garrett.
"As for myself, I can no longer remember the street where my childhood home was," writes Bruno Scultz in his first published story, "Undula," recently translated by Frank Garrett. Scultz was born in 1892 in Drohobych, Galicia, a place which does not fit any of our current maps, a town which has been translated and retranslated by occupations, has moved from Poland to Ukraine, a space which served as home to a large oil extraction industry that made it possible for Scultz to publish this story in a journal, Dawn: The Journal of Petroleum Officials in Boryslav.
In this story, Undula is the object of the narrator's desire, a fascinating, impure, and complicated muse which keeps his company in his dark imaginings--in the "monotonous, pointless dialogues" with unspecified pain. According to Garrett's extensive translation notes, "undula" means "little wave or wavelet," which also sees the "Dunajew" as a nod towards the Danube, which means "something like born of dew." There is no map which can hold the precise place where Bruno Sculz was shot and killed by a Gestapo officer while returning to the Drohobych ghetto carrying a loaf of bread. The unfathomable exists with the fathom, the measurement of how far arms can reach.
Maria Negroni. Dark Museum. Translated by Michelle Gil-Montero, Action Books, 2015.
Macabre is punctuated by anxiety, the silence which shrouds a pandemic body, and there is a certain flowing syntax, an extension of corpuscent, winding sentences, which works against fear while handling corpses. For no one dances the macabre as diligently as Maria Negroni:
Against all Utopias, against the wounds of failure, against the last strongholds of dissent and protest, against all the answers in politics (whether visionary, dogmatic, silencing, repressive, or even just), poetry sketches for us yet again that giant nocturnal bird stalking the most elusive, irrevocable terror.
In rejecting purist utopias, Negroni takes us into the gothic Castle, where there are no strongholds. The lyric is born and spent there, as in unstable places where the only sure way is the detour. For her, melancholy and poems speak together "like a fatal illness, they corrupt language in order to amplify what is eternal in what is ephemeral, what is illusory in what is true." The writer aims for an aesthetics which rejects essences or essentialisms in favor of "monographs that encrypt mysteries, a bit of treachery, a useless voluptuosity, a cabinet of marvels where a child might become lost...."
And there is a childness in this desire for decadence, petulance, the pout without magnitude, the playing alone with one's disappointment by the world created by adults: there is a formal excess in the intensity of this disappointment.
Negroni is looking for a special word, "the word....in which natural sound is decanted to the pure sound of feeling." She is correct that the sound must be excessive, messy - but she is wrong, or setting up another perfectism, to use the word pure. For it is purity and hygiene which serve as epistemological foundation for the cult of anti-melancholy, the cult of mature stoicism and fake smiles. Again in the idea of a "stellar cradle, protected from corruption and the passage of time by cold and pulchritude..."
Negroni celebrates the fascination of the alien, the "intergalactic evil," the alien is a "pre-verbal mother," one which animates silence: "Silence that utters atrocious, fascinating things." And between all the tales of monsters, the virus we dread inside us, the anxiety becoming "a space made up only of surrogates," and architecture of intimate terrors, the drawing-in of the dark museum.
Pierre Senges, Falstaff: Apotheosis. Translated by Jacob Siefrig. Sublunary Editions, 2020.
Pierre Senges, Studies of Silhouettes. Translated by Jacob Siefrig. Sublunary Editions, 2020.
How can we orient ourselves in pandemic time, when all the usual maps are marked by social distance and an invisible six-foot diameter around each body? Like Morya Davey, cemeteries have been safe, empty spaces, sites of pilgrimage with the kids at a time when playgrounds are complicated by the presence of others. Seeking to find new ways to do creative work after a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, Davey documents her efforts in "Index Cards," which makes a map of remembered necropolises, and creates an impetus forward as a map into three cemeteries.
Pierre Senges makes a similar use of maps in Geometry In The Dust, a series of map-elegies which acknowledge the decrepitude of the modern metropolis. As JM Schreiber notes, Senges' exploration of maps and cities and spaces emerge from the tension of the artefact itself--and Senges addresses the danse macabre directly, calling it by name, comparing the city, itself, to "a danse macabre every day of the week... a scraping of nail on bone, as well as a gnashing of teeth." The geometry in the dust carries us into the circle, or what Senges calls "the city’s circular nature," referring to how cities were once "contained within wooden circles, like certain soft-rind cheeses; although they tried hard to emancipate themselves and go over the walls, they still retain a bit of this roundness."
In Falstaff: Apotheosis, we witness an apotheosis of Shakespeare's minor character, Falstaff, in the hands of a literary canon-rattler. Jacob Siefrig's translations are accompanied by excellent notes on Senges' oeuvre. Studies of Silhouettes is a model for pandemic modes, an intertexual addendum which takes lines from Kafka and writes an alternate version in the most intimate voice, nudging, prodding, inquiring, asking if that's really what Kafka meant. And then writing into it.
There are also moments in which the fragment is extended into a diagnosis or clarification of Kafka's text:
This would appear to be a complaint, the beginning of the life of a bureaucrat from the 60th Bureau written in this vein, the lamentation contained in a precisely reconstituted setting..... no one would ever believe, from reading these first lines, that in fact a great adventure novel has just begun, the great Epic Novel, with horses and stirrups, sand dunes, mountains, arms of giants and sales of windmills, the tilting of the sinking ship...
In the silhouettes, one feels the presence of an alienated child-gaze, a human on the brink of discovering that the world does not match the linearity of history but instead unfolds in circles and spirals, where the narrator, the "I" who intended to be the hero...kicking off a 600-page-tale with that story of a faceless stranger tugging at my sleeve" finds his voice undone by disorientation and displacement. Senges focuses on the mystique of the story that begins with Someone, as "someone is the most appropriate name under such conditions, it at once designates the totality of the protagonist, all of them someone to one other, all from their earliest childhood shorn of the greater part of their identity."
[Since a review on this book is forthcoming in a journal, I will stop here and let the review doing the speaking.]
Christina Tudor-Sideri, Under the Sign of the Labyrinth. Sublunary Editions, 2020.
Christina Tudor-Sideri's fragmented memoir approaches the darkness of embodied trauma and melancholia by harnessing the power of ghost horses, village rituals, and enchanted forests. "I take the shape of a doorbell for a memory of earth trembling," she writes, noting that what happened in the world of her native Romania occurred inside her body. This lack of boundaries is emphatically anti-Western and a relief. I find myself in dialogue with the ghosts who survived the Bucharest earthquake as passed from the mouths of my parents, the legends of homeland which animate a quaking space. For Tudor-Sideri, magic is a sort of "experimental metaphysics"; her writing explores the non-linearity memory's residence in the mind and body, how memory lays its hands on what it touches, giving rise to a relationship that makes its own claims.
Her thoughts are structured by anamnesis, itself. And her body: "the site of voices brought together after death".. There is this "ille tempore" of leaving her mother tongue, its ties to the village, and writing "interrupted manuscripts" in broken dialogue with the voices inside her. Tudor-Sideri takes writing trauma as a way of devouring one's self- becoming one's "own sin-eater" surviving on hunger for wounds. The "mad forest" is the space outside the village community, a descent into the animal of one's own mind. She mentions the custom of dressing a tree's wounds as a forbidden practice. She introduces a space, the preventorium, which borrows from the healing powers of the forest - something we lack in pandemic present.
For Tudor-Sideri, village culture develops the soul differently. Causality is complicated by a temporality in which the dead nestle close to the living. Where the idea of destiny invokes a sense of inevitability, we are given an agency that shapeshifts, moving from inanimate objects to trees to liminal dates. Voice is altered by this scattered time and the supranatural village narrator. The village and its surrounding forests emerge as characters.
When the narrator wants to recall a car accident, she locates it on St John's Day, aiming towards auspiciousness. We read about the mussel hunt undertaken in the shadow of the fathers, the relationship between lunar protection spells and the blood moon, the "violence of being taken out of time," the significance of a burning house in a village.
Tudor-Sideri describes the "plaque of the dead" on each house to locate it in time, to lay claim to lineage, which she finds in history and the practice of burning one's home, or dominthanasia. Only those who remember can rest in paradise. "I have always traveled with one hand on my shoulder," she writes.
And I think of my mother, of how much I miss Romania, of how little of me exists in the limbo between lands and languages—and the absolute absence of mom’s life. The darkness and dread is there, I tell my daughter. Let us find some way to dance it.
[To note: György Ligeti’s “Mysteries of the Macabre”]