My day opened into Dada, or the gist of it. Going back through the archives of Documents, marking the correspondences between Michel Leiris’ writing and that of Georges Bataille— the unsaid vibrates throughout.
Dusk of a few days prior. A phone call from C., who insists that the existentialist relationship to absurdity is acknowledgment followed by a continuance of life. Dada positions itself in a similar relationship to meaninglessness, but occupies a different aesthetic practice, namely, a sort of clowning that seeks to fill out the contours of absurdity and creates awakening.
Tristan Tzara’s “Simultaneous poems for four voices plus simultaneous with 300 definitive idiocies” brought about a special dimension to text that foregrounded sound, or perhaps it moved the poem towards music, or maybe it expanded the field of the poem to the point of meeting the intersection between the infinite in the void.
Simultaneous poetry, invented by Tristan Tzara and Richard Hulsenbeck, was intended to deconstruct the text by its simultaneous reading in several different languages. Hans Richter a friend and collaborater of Dadaists, defined simultaneous poetry as a "contrapuntal recitative in which three or more voices speak, sing, whistle, etc.. simultaneously, in such a way that the resulting combinations account for the total effect of the work, elegiac, funny or bizzare.”
—-Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-art quoted in Subversive Body in Performance Art
Dada didn’t hold the literal reading against the language. What Dada reproached was language's presumed connection to the rational, a presumption that permitted the construction of systems.
The condition of the “not yet sayable”
At which point is expression abolished?
In French, de faire express means to do some thing on purpose, and I always hear that when the word expression inches into conversations about abstract expressionism or representation.
Andre Masson, Armchair for Pauline Borghese
Packing an overnight bag and pausing near the stack of books I am currently reading, pausing and leaning over to kiss them: “I’ll be back,” and hoping the teens don’t catch me whispering tenderly to the books. The absurdity—-and yet, I mean it.
Radu’s food and his bone and the t-shirt I keep in the car, for nights that descend without pajamas. Harried.
The hustle and the harry, briefly interrupted by pleasure of conversing with Idra Novey, and lacking time to do justice to the breadth of her poetics, the intersections with her translation practice, the role of images in the textual encounter with the dead . . . “Our Good Ghosts” exists, with gratitude to Orion, but there is always something missing. Always an absence in my obsession with being exhaustive, an obsession whose impossibility I recognize, and perhaps require as a suspending void beneath the tightrope one walks when writing about the writing of others.
Soon and Wholly running the ramparts in my head. Poems that move with the suppleness of a hand in a sepia photo, watering roses—-the face absented, the hand’s owner abstracted from the motion of tending and close attention.
Idra Novey opens "Letters to C.", her series of poems addressed to Clarice Lispector, with a roman numeral, "I.", and then shifts into the epistolary address:
Dear C, I'm turning from.
The end-stopped line refers obliquely to the turn in the epigraph, a quotation from Clarice Lispector's letter to Fernando Sabino, dated 1946:
At three in the afternoon, I'm the most demanding woman in the world . . . When it's over, six in the afternoon comes, also indescribable, in which I turn blind.
A conversation that picks up from one thread of the unsaid leads into a new unsaying:
I made a mess of page twenty-two,
couldn't resurrect what you left unsaid
into words that wouldn't.
This one-stanza poem shapes itself as a letter that crawls down the page rather than across it. The shape does not give us that horizon.
It leaves us in a single line: "I. N." The unidentified. The translator.
Unsaid: The dreams that follow me into the kitchen, the ghosts that grab my chin and force me to look at them, the way the world whirls away mid-conversation when unsaid things run their goosebumps over my arms, my legs, the whorl of their Listen.
"Continue to speak this dialect, now that the house is burning," Giorgio Agamben says of poetry in When the House Burns Down.
And there is something lucid hewn from the possibility preserved by the unsaid. The best way to describe it is by looking at how much is said, how much is spoken and communicated across alienating mediums and disguises.
Agamben urges us to trust that moment when we look at one another without posing words, screens, and Beauty between us.
Trust the unsaid that doesn't fear being read in simultaneity, amid the absurdity of dailiness—- the demands of those roses.
Trust a stone to keep the whole story carved into it.
Trust the bark of a tree in Tuscaloosa.