Of the air: 10 fragments.

1.

“I come from a place where the hand of the wind gives shape to everything. All plants are in permanent sway and bow to it, trees bent over, all objects necessarily weighed or battened down, stillness nearly unheard of except in those green-­skied moments before the tornados come.”

-Anne Boyer, “The Heavy Air”

2.

Simone Weil uses the expression airless-merry-go-round to describe Rose Luxembourg’s efforts to include female bodies in Communist Party policies and platforms. Weil means to address the CP’s abandonment of female-gendered bodies, and her words bring to mind a carousel in a park with the women falling off horses, smiling, lying like dead flowers in circles for men.

I love Rosa Luxembourg. And Weil. And carousels which are not airless.

3.

In Bucharest, Paul Celan knows his parents are dead; Bukovina holds nothing but ghosts and survivor’s guilt. As for the subject, the survivor does not have time to ask which part of self has been left, or what will continue. He writes a few prose poems which his friend Petre Solomon admires. In one, the narrator describes a gold chandelier with thousands of arms that will save him and his Jewish friend, Rafael:

You will climb up one of its arms so that, once I have lifted it high up in the air, you can fasten it on to the sky. Before the break of dawn, people will be able to save themselves by flying there. I will show them the way, and you will receive them. 

I climbed on one of the arms, Rafael moving from one arm to another, touching them in turn, the chandelier began to rise. A leaf settled on my forehead, right in the space where my friend's gaze had touched me, a maple leaf. I looked around: this cannot be the sky. Hours pass and I find nothing. I know: people gather below me on the ground, Rafael touched them with his slender fingers, and they too rose towards the sky, and I still have not stopped rising. 

Where is the sky? Where?

Something appears in this translation which does not exist in the original Romanian text.

The way air nestles inside despair: a gift of translation.

Elegy of Malik Ibn Ar-Rayb (2010) - Iraqi Artist SADIK KWAISH ALFRAJI (صادق كويش الفراجي)

4.

Do not ridicule yourself if you are incapable of providing proof. Air is air and does not require a certificate of blood. Do not regret! Do not regret what you missed when you took a nap; recording the names of invaders In the book of sand. Ants narrate and the rain erases. When you wake up, do not regret that you were dreaming and asked no one: Are you a pirate?

-Mahmoud Darwish

It is difficult to stop reading Sinan Antoon’s translation of Mahmoud Darwish's In the Presence of Absence (Archipelago Books), first published in Arabic in 2006.

Darwish would die two years later, and the book, itself, was written by a man who sensed this: a poet staring at his end. By this point, Darwish had already come close to dying twice—which he wrote about in his epic poem, Mural— but here, in the presence of his own absence, "the living I bids farewell to its imagined dying other in sustained poetic address divided into twenty untitled sections," each of which addresses a theme from the poet's past.

Drawing on the classical Arabic tradition of self-elegy, Darwish addresses a “You” which is both spiritual and embodied, both placed and displaced, a continuous unsettlement.

But it was Malik Ibn Ar-Rayb, a Muslim Arab poet from Tamim in Al-Basra, who introduced the self-elegy as a poetic form in 676 AD. Returning home from a trip with Saeed Uthman ibn Affan, the 3rd caliph’s son., Ar-Rayb was bitten by poisonous snake. Anticipating his own death, he wrote his own elegy.

Not entirely “a certificate of blood”: a poem as a form of evidence which repudiates the elegy others wish to lay over a body silenced by death.

5.

“What is overhead is not exactly free; it is merely unevenly owned. Nations claim airspace, militaries plot no-­fly zones, and clouds reside without permits. Ideas are the correlate of air. Clouds are air’s objectifications, and, as perspiration and respiration, air is where effort goes once our effort is spent. This crowded air is the stage of everything dematerialized’s abiding dematerialization. Everything solid melts into it.”

-Anne Boyer, “The Heavy Air”

6.

“Ar-Rayb conceives his own death and, under fear that he will inevitably cease to be, starts mourning his own loss. He invokes his poetry to help him visit his far away home to meet his family, kinsfolk, beloved, and people, and he implants into the essence of his verses his happy, honorable, and worth-remembering past. His mind is overloaded with thoughts on unfulfilled desires and dear people, animals, places, deeds, and qualities which his fear of death generates and of which death will deprive him. As he recalls his homeland and beloved, he explains the heroic and religious motives for which he left his sons, fellow people and possessions, while at the same time wishing that news of his dying would be passed back to home. The poem’s varied elements and the poet’s numerous superficially paradoxical thoughts simultaneously coexist, each leading to, and led to by, the other in the sense of Freudian association, as if they are all felt at once. He thinks of past and present altogether, and momentary sensation overlaps and intermingles with recalled elements.” 

-Nayef Ali. Al-Joulan, “Aesthetic Dying: The Arab's Heroic Encounter with Death” (PDF)

7.

In an end-note, Sinan Antoon offers insight on a particular word’s translation. While Mahmoud Darwish used the word "barzakh" (which the translator elects to render as "threshold"), the original word invokes the eschatological word for the boundary between the human world and the spiritual one.

It is a word often used “by mystics.” It is a border of sorts.

8.

Mahmoud Darwish describes his childhood, the magic of discovering words, the beginning of the poet’s fascination with language. As he learns to write words in school, he finds that they establish a relationship:

“The sky, too, becomes one of your personal belongings if you do not misspell it."

And later:

"You become words. ..you do not know the difference between utter and utterance. You will call the sea an overturned sky."

9.

I can’t find an order when trying to compare the sky to the ground. The horizon is an illusion. It is a lie. Sky and earth remain disconnected, never quite touching.

10.

I stood on the bridge in the sky on the bridge between
Two buildings     at the second floor but in
Between the buildings so in neither one

But in the sky      on the second floor in the sky
Barely I had just barely     stepped from the
Nordstrom to cross to the food court barely and I

-Shane McRae, “Between”

You can read this poem in its entirety at Yale Review.

Empathy complexes & crafts in recent readings.

I. Technologies of enchantment

In this video, Ba-Benzélé persons, members of a pygmy tribe in the African Congo, demonstrate the Hindewhu, a style of singing/whistle-playing which announces the return from a hunt. Michael Clayton says the word hindewhu is “an onomatopoeia of the sound of a performer alternately singing pitched syllables and blowing into a single-pitch whistle made from the twig of a papaya tree.”

Anthropologist Jerome Lewis has described the polyphonic, polyrhythmic music of the Ba-Benzélé pygmies as a "technology of enchantment," where one individual voice is lost in awareness of the community, creating a sort of vocal communion.

The term comes from the work of Alfred Gell, a British social anthropologist whose most influential work concerned art, language, symbolism and ritual. Gell’s “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology” linked the spectator’s response to a work of art to their socialization, particularly how the spectator has been condition to perceive the technical processes which produce the artwork:

The moral significance of the work of art arises from the mismatch between the spectator's internal awareness of his own powers as an agent and the conception he forms of the powers possessed by the artist. In reconstructing the processes which brought the work of art into existence, he is obliged to posit a creative agency which transcends his own and, hovering in the background, the power of the collectivity on whose behalf the artist exercised his technical mastery.

At the heart of this mastery is the ability to induce a transcendence, or a state which lifts the individual outside their particular lived experience to partake a shared or cosmic experience. A communion. An eternity tasted inside a bread crumb. A we invoked by a Gregorian chant. A simultaneous sense of at-oneness and nonexistence.

“Just as money is the ideal means of exchange, magic is the ideal means of technical production,” Gell writes, arguing for an expansive understanding of valorizations outside capitalist markets. He notes that “money values pervade the world of commodities, so that it is impossible to think of an object without thinking at the same time of its market price.” In the same way, “magic, as the ideal technology, pervades the technical domain in pre-scientific societies.”

Modernity craves this we profusely—to the point of rabid nationalisms, to the point of hysteria inside stadiums where men kick balls for money—and one must wonder if the exhausting individualistic conception of accountability and agency generated by late Protestant capitalism has only increased the fever for communal ecstasy.

II. Empathy’s industrial complexities

In her Bookforum review of George Saunders’ recent fiction craft book, Russian scholar Jennifer Wilson headlined "The Empathy Industrial Complex" as a facet of American fiction—the belief that fiction can create empathy, and writers are part of an empathy-marketing industry. Wilson doesn’t like it. She thinks the focus on empathy in Saunders undercuts the how Russian writers "enable a critique of Western civilization and English society." In a sense, this maps on the socialist realist critique of literature as a bastion of bourgeois sentimentality that ignores social and structural issues, and sets aside the responsibility to create a new man.

Wilson is correct that Russian critiques of the West in fiction are not "roped off from discourse about race, gender, or empire,"  but her critique of Saunders revolves around the transcendence that we read into Russian writers. For example, she doesn't like that Saunders de-politicizes the anti-feudalist message of Ivan Turgenev's story, "The Singers." The reluctance to pass judgment, for Wilson, places Saunders in the let's-report-on-Trump supporters category of what she calls "the empathy industrial complex." Unfortunately, by failing to define this category, one gets the sense that it could be anything from a chain prayer spam to a nonprofit that reunites undocumented families.

Empathy matters. Fiction structures how we think about the world. Family, love, community, and interpersonal relations are often reflections of how socialization evolves in cultures. Granting Saunders' focus on the skaz tradition as a vehicle for multiple realities, Wilson suspects that the focus on narrative voice leads to a sort of tactical concession--that the fiction writer represents humanity, in all its grotesque banalities.  From here, she jumps to the assertion that Saunders' craft leads to the conclusion that Trumpists aren't racist so much as confused, lost in the loop, over-identifying with the collective We of late-Americanist capitalism.

Wilson's rue is not amoral--she hates seeing white racist as the victims they paint themselves to be. But the question of didacticism in fiction remains fuzzy. How much does the fiction writer owe the world? And what is critic’s role in the denomination of ethical voices?

III. Fiction scripts us

The arguments for the role or duty of fiction often overlook the extent to which fiction already socializes and creates the scripts by which we read and interpret one another’s actions. And I wonder what Gell would say about social media if he had not died in 1997, before the rise of virtual romance and screen-generated interpersonal relations.

In “On love,” Gell noted that conversation plays a critical structural role in modern British love, where “chatting-up” enacts a slow information striptease, a revelation of incremental information in the context of urban spaces and communities where residents hold little in common, or share little of their actual day-to-day lives. It is because modern humans are strangers to one another that how we disclose—and what we choose to convey—remains impactful and significant. In the lovers’ conversation, the “torrent of confidential information” usually occurs in person (and one wonders, again, how social media and email have increased the stakes of disclosure while simultaneously lowering the value of “emotional capital”).

“The effect of love, in modern society, is to reproduce, fictionally, the kind of pre-structured affinities which are taken for granted in a society like Umeda, thus converting the arbitrary into the inevitable,” Gell writes. Because there is no “structural predestination”—no tradition of parents arranging a marriage, no local rituals to rely upon—modern love has to invent itself from scratch, or rather, from the social scripts offered by culture. Hence the “fictionalization of love”:

…. the fact that the confidences that couples exchange are provided for them, structurally, because it is structurally necessary that these confidences by exchanged. Modern love would be unthinkable without fiction, romantic fiction in particular. 

Since the structural exchange of secrets forms the script which couples accept in order to play the game called modern love, one also wonders how “flirting” behavior is misread or misunderstood based on the individual fictions consumed by players. Is it wrong for the female-identifying player to reach towards the first kiss in heteronormative couplings? How has queerness inflected flirtation behavior?

“Each modern couple has to devise for itself a history which will justify its existence as a couple, on the basis of zero personal experience;” each couple makes use of the scripts offered by novels, magazines, television, sitcoms, soap operas, movies, and media; each navigates across the canyon of their chosen templates. “Love-fiction” is not less cool or authentic than lived experience precisely because it informs, shapes, and interprets lived experience. To quote Gell:

Fiction is a giant simulation, an external thought- process, which provides individuals with the scripts they cannot do without and which non-fictional experience cannot supply. This means that we cannot put love-fiction to one side as if it were less authentic than real life. Fiction is, where modern societies are concerned, what genealogy is in those societies which have marriage rules, i.e. the means of producing the relationships on which social life depends. Fiction, re-enacted as real life, produces the histories on which relationships and society at large are grounded.

Noticing how my own ideas of love and amatory relations have changed over decades, I’m inclined to agree with Gell. There’s an article in the current Atlantic Monthly about how the reality TV show Sister Wives inspired other persons to seek and sustain polygynous relationships—no word on polyandrous ones, however (and some theorists would argue that polygamy, itself, is so deeply patriarchal and essentialist that polyandry isn’t compatible with it).

Gell takes arranged marriage as a structural sensibility which exists in tight-knit communities. Westerners, with their love-at-first sight socializations, believe that love generates the relationship, but cultures with arranged marriages believe that the relationship generates love. In Bengal, where arranged marriages were common, access to Western media led youth culture to reject these traditions for the love-scripts they consume on television.

The production of love as knowledge is dynamic—it has social, emotional, structural, and economic repercussions. In cultures where arranged marriages predominate, bisexuality and queerness often remain illegible, secret, and persecuted. For Gell, the future of modern love includes a different form of match-making, a technical replacement of community by science, where couples may be matched according to genetic profiles or information deemed “scientific.” I think we see this in multiple online dating and match-making apps, and I wonder how these have evolved into “technologies of enchantment” and constructed affinities or group affiliations.

* Also, highly recommend Bergita Bugarija’s short fiction, “Summer of Bombs” (Pleiades) for a look at how Russian novels and bourgeois sentiment inflect the lives of those at war, those living in fear of bombs, those struggling to survive and clinging to the most ordinary parts of human existence—the hope of some exalted interpersonal communion.

Alfred Gell puts forward an anthropological theory of visual art seen as a form of instrumental action: the making of things as a means of influencing the thoughts and actions of others. The anthropology of art is here reformulated as the anthropology of a category of action: Gell shows how art objects embody complex intentionalities and mediate social agency. He explores the psychology of patterns and perceptions, art and personhood, the control of knowledge, and the interpretation of meaning, drawing upon a diversity of artistic traditions-European, Indian, Polynesian, Melanesian, and Australian.

Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. With a Foreword by Nicholas Thomas. Publisher Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998.

[Source: Monoskop]

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas: Unreliable narratives (or part 2).

The unreliable narrator

"To the Reader"-- signed by Bras Cubas – says it was written "with the pen of mirth and the ink of melancholy." One of the words that kept circulating in the #APSTogether discussions of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas was “unreliable narrator.”

In fiction, the unreliable narrator conventionally offers a first-person viewpoint whose version of the story cannot be trusted. Since the first-person narrator is our filter—the measure by which we judge the verity of the account—we tend to expect “truth” from this speaker. When we talk about unreliable narrators, we are generally referring to their deceptive account of the truth, and this adds suspense and tension to the story.

I am fascinated by how sincerity can be modulated in narration, especially where unreliable narrators influence our reading. In #APSTogether discussion, the unreliable narrator was assumed—and readers gave their thoughts on how Machado used the narrator, or what he intended to do by using an unreliable narrator.

Translator Flora Thomson-DeVeaux focused on the unreliable narrator as a man watching himself watch a woman, and she noted that something in that part of the translation “went haywire,” as the narrator is showing us his projections on to the woman rather than showing us the woman. On her view, everyone in the novel represents Bras Cubas in some sense, and the narrator is somehow aware of that.

“Sincerity” in context: Slavery and the Dungeon

The narrator knows what he is doing, I think, in digging his own grave. Or, it seems as if Machado helps Bras dig the grave of his meaningless existence with relish, adding to it the philosophical notions of social Darwinism that helped sustain economic hierarchies, including the based on slavery.

When Rohter brought up the word sincerity, I wondered whether (or how) that could be gauged, given the narrator’s commitment to representing the systems of slavery, status, and politics in Rio. Certainly the narrator stays true to his role as a dandy-like caricature of the nobility-aspiring class (Not "dandy," says Thomson-DeVeaux, but "pintolagrete", or man about town, as Grossman translated it.)

In “A Note on on the Calabouço,” Thomson-DeVeux offers insight into her meticulous translation, but also the systemic silences which characterized Machado’s time. She explains the translation of a single word—calabouco—to “Dungeon.” She decided to capitalize the word in order to disrupt the silence around its history—to bring this word forward as a designator of a particular time, place, and social practice.

The word comes up in Cubas’ description of his slave-smuggling brother-in-law, Contrim as a “paragon” of virtue:

People accused him of avarice, and I believe they were right; but avarice is nothing more than the exaggeration of a virtue, and virtues should be like budgets: better a surplus than a deficit. As he had a very dry manner, he had enemies, and they went so far as to accuse him of savagery. The only thing they alleged on this score was that he often sent slaves to the calabouço, from where they came down streaming with blood; but, apart from the fact that he only sent runaways and incorrigibles, it so happens that, having dealt for so long in the smuggling of slaves, he had become somewhat used to the slightly harsher treatment required by that sort of business, and one cannot honestly attribute to a man’s original nature that which is the pure effect of social relations.

Here, the narrator suggests the charge of “savagery” held against Contrim stems from the fact that he sent slaves to the calabouço, but the narrator insists that he only did this with “runaways and incorrigibles;” and Contrim’s experience as a long-time slave owner offered him insight into which slaves most deserved this unfortunate treatment. The systemic evil of slavery—the way Cubas narrates it—creates a mood of factual resignation where virtue, itself, becomes a description of success within the system where one is expected to support the dominant class rather than operating according to personal ethical considerations.

Thomson-DeVeux reveals that slaveowners delegated corporal punishment to the state after the royal decree of November 16, 1693 forbid owners from shackling or imprisoning slaves. A royal decree also established the ”workhouse” or dungeon where slaves could be “humanely” punished by men with whips would be compensated for their efforts. Until then, in 17th century Brazilian prisons, both enslaved persons and citizens were confined in the same prisons for violations of the penal code. The Dungeon was different—it was created expressly for the purpose of punishing “runaway slaves”—it’s role was to somehow civilize the brutality of violence by hiding it behind the walls of a state institution. Contrim could remain a paragon of virtue, or what Thomson-DeVeux calls “a man who outsources bloodletting, keeping his own hands clean and sparing his neighbors’ ears.”

Alongside this, the “whipping system” existed as a state-created tool which served the economic and security needs of a dominant class (and its hierarchy) by using violence to control labor. Only in 1832 did Brazil begin to require that slaveowners specify the alleged “infarction” committed by the enslaved person subject to punishment.

The relationship between the Dungeon and the prison system which replaced it carries into the present, where Thomson-DeVeux says that over one-third of Brazil’s prison population consists of pre-trial detainees. Those who are stigmatized by criminality, or the allegation of criminality, are described as bandido in the media, and the same brush is used to tarnish reputations of those who argue for pre-trial and prison reform in Brazil.

How race “maps”: Brazil and US

In the discussion, Rohter said contemporary American discussion of marginalized persons has helped to make Machado relevant as “a writer of color and a Latino.” He also said it was interesting to compare how race is mapped in Brazil with how it is mapped, or translated, in the US. Thomson-DeVeux noted that this novel experienced a resurgence in the early 1950’s when translator William Grossman published an essay in the NAACP’s paper, The Crisis, which identified Machado de Assis as a “great negro writer.” To this, Rohter added that race classifications in the US and Brazil are very different (though they seem to be moving closer to the US map in Brazil). Grossman's depiction of Machado as a "negro writer" might have been strange to the author, himself, who identified as a "mulatto." A Brazilian translator present for the discussion confirmed that "mulatto" was the more common word to Brazilians, also "moreno" meaning "dark-skinned."

“But the white slave owning mobster that the author has created is not colorblind," added Thomson-DeVeux. Slavery was gratuitous, a sort of background noise that existed as part of the landscape in Brazil at the time. The scene with the whip and the freed slave who buys his own slaves and competes for power by whipping them, is one of the most tragic in the book. For me, it’s tragedy lies in the absolute power of the system to replicate hierarchies that aren't questioned or refuted. For a formerly-enslaved person to whip their own slave does not leave us with an ethics or an out—it leaves us only with the System.

Machado’s appropriate cynicism meets Bras’ sincerity

Rohter thinks the end is “devastating in its cynicism (“I came out even with life,” he avers, because of “the final negative in this chapter of negatives.” No spoiler alert here: let’s just say that his final sentence is devastating in its cynicism”). Since the novel ends without giving any meaning to the narrator's life, Rohter wonders if  this is because the author went straight to writing his best novella, The Psychiatrist, immediately after this.

But Thomson-DeVeaux maintains that the ending is true to the form – the ending will be abrupt when you ride the bumpy hippo.

I would argue that the ending is actually the opposite of cynical. A narrator involved in competing for status in the Brazilian system of enslaved labor should have a meaningless life—there should be no beautiful meaning or continuance after having been compromised to the point of nihilism, after wallowing in a friend’s eugenicist Humanitist survival-of-the-fittest “philosophy”….. Machado does not promise us meaning in this memoir-novel. In fact, he delivers on his promise of showing us how the rich and fabulous die with only the perfume of blood on their hands.

When we speak of unreliable narrators, we assume the narrator is lying or hiding—but I think Machado’s narrator is devastating precisely because he hides none of the moral nihilism at the heart of Brazilian 18th century society. He writes straight into its vanity and puts on its airs. He doesn’t repent or ever see through his own mistakes. He never questions the system in which he wants to succeed.

If honesty is essential to sincerity, then Bras Cubas is both honest and sincere. He is a social striver torn between the duty of leaving an inheritance (through children) and the magic thing/philosophy he hopes to become famous for (thus gaining the status that eludes him). It is because we want Machado to repudiate these things that we hold his narrator, Bras Cubas, to be unreliable.

There are also questions how Victorian or European notions of “sincerity” map onto narrative form. For  example, is Fernando Pessoa an unreliable or insincere narrator? Is he, when writing that mix of poetry and philosophy, being sincere? The standards of the European bildungsroman or confessional doesn’t always map onto the expectations of innovative fiction—and perhaps we narrow the reading (or narrow what we can experience from it) by relying on those constructs.

Because the class system and the focus on status is central to Machado’s novel—and because Machado allows it to exist as “part of life,” as a sort of naturalism—I was intrigued by Brandon Taylor recent his sub stack comments on Zola:

What if the active tension at the heart of most Millennial Novels is between Naturalism and Existentialism, between Zola and Camus. What if the Millennial Novel seeks to answer the question of whether or not a person’s experience is actually unique and individual or whether it is truly just an emanation from the various systems we are subjected to. I think some novels tend to fall on the side of the purely naturalistic—that is, race, gender, sexuality, class, and on are bounding phenomena that determine how people will treat you and what you can expect. And some are more existential. That is, a life is unique, that one’s choices are not predetermined.

Perhaps, in a more extensive sense, the question of sincerity and narrative voice also emerges here.

I wish I had more time to think about it—though I will probably share a brief summary with some themes and points of interest next week. In the meantime, you can cross-reference some of the ways in which Machado uses these words in Thomson-DeVeaux’s translation with this index.

The Brás Cubas index.

I have a habit of adding indexes to my notebooks while reading.

Because I enjoyed this book so much, I decided to type this strange index assembled from personal saliencies in the 2020 version of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, written by Machado de Assis, translated by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux, and published by Penguin.

In my dream, I asked the powerful Penguin perhaps to find a way to format the chapter titles without eliminating so many page numbers (for those of us who take notes by page)—but the Penguin did not respond. In my forthcoming dream, I will ask the hippo to ride me past Eden where I might try to ask the Penguin again. Or, initially.

Per indexing impulse, a precursor. Machado’s innovative use of typography on pages 75, 123-4, 233, 241, 260.

The narrator celebrates a few objects in tonal gestures which resemble the ode, so I added an index for Machado’s narration in ode modes. Several objects prefaced with an “O” enter this small index, but you should read the odes themselves. They are delightful.

Index of odes

paddle: 40-41
tight boots: 91
legs: 145
nose: 112-113
Formality: 244-245
muleteer: 62-62

Some words are used ironically—and I indexed those. Some words are defined in a topsy-turvy way—and I indexed them as well. Other things which made it to this index: unique phrases, philosophies, precepts, intertextual references, abstract states like silence (but only on the pages where one abstraction seemed to resignify another), a few minor characters, estranged metaphors, larger symbols, dances, translator notes, neat words (including Flora Thomson-DeVeaux’s marvelous “smallsword”). I’ve italicized the words that are direct quotations or interesting phrases which recur, almost thematically, in this novel. There’s not really a key, And nothing is exhaustive,

Index of text

Achilles: 20, 247, 301
administrative solution: 165
Africa: 6, 10, 230
alienist: 282-6
American riddle: 64
ambition: 60, 175, 246, 261
Anacreontic panpipe: 226
antiphons: 290
Athenian maniac: 284, 294
avarice: 70, 239
bachelor: 5, 6, 17, 169, 234, 238
Bakbarah the Toothless: 54-5, 306
bibliomaniac: 154-155
blood: 30, 32, 80, 88, 202, 221, 236, 239
Bocage: 36-37, 303
Borba, Quincas: 41, 130-134, 136, 187-8, 214-6, 228-231, 234, 242, 256, 258, 261-5, 270-273, 276-7, 282-3, 285-7
Bras’ father: 10, 73-74, 104-105, 106, 107, 110
cadaver: 58, 59, 67, 83, 84, 106, 152, 196
caliph: 270, 287, 291
capitalist: 289
catafalque: 106
Catumbi: 5, 295
cerebral ventriloquism: 248, 249
childhood: 28, 29-42, 66, 135, 167-169
Claudius: 12, 318
concubine: 160
conscience: 117, 181, 209, 277, 279, 288
clock (see also pocket watch): 98, 122, 134, 135, 141, 188, 207 *
cockfights: 236
colloquy: 186
cynic: 89
cypress tree: 153
Damasceno: 189-190, 191, 197, 235-236, 242-245, 246, 316-7
dandy: 50, 125, 186 *
Dante: 126-7, 311-312
declaration: 274-275
delirium: 18-25, 28, 60, 213, 230
dialogue as form: 123-124, 224
divine pillow: 136
dogfight: 263-264, 266
donkey: 62-64, 277
duodecimos: 65, 307
drug: 177
Dungeon: 239, 320
eclogue: 58, 307
eleven: 5 (friends), 56
ellipsis: 91
embryo: 185-186, 192, 193, 211
envy: 229, 242, 254, 278
epitaph: 241, 242, 280
Erasmus: 277
fate: 126-127
fatal error: 272
fatigue of the idle: 287
fixed idea: 12-13, 14, 55
flag: 13
Flamengo Beach: 201
folly: 26, 277
formality: 31, 243, 244-245
gimlet: 116
gossip: 17, 182, 200
hairpin: 206, 207
Hamlet: 6, 172
Hebe’s cup: 16, 300
hero: 29
hippopotamus: 19-25
Hotel Pharoux: 145, 170, 224
hubbub: 8, 34
Humanitism: 187-188, 214-216, 242-243, 228-231, 234, 261-262, 270-271, 287, 290
hypochondria: 8-9, 70, 79, 170, 291, 297
I stared at the tip of my nose: 110, 111 *
illusion: 16, 23, 230, 284, 290
improvisatore: 38
inheritance: 148-149, 220-221
injustice: 32
inventor of butterflies: 84-84
Job: 24, 301
lamentations: 229
law of the equivalence of windows: 117, 209
Lobo Neves: 103, 110, 119, 114-5, 128-9, 139, 163-4, 166, 175-6, 179-180, 194-5, 199-201, 207, 217, 220-1, 246, 278
Lord Byron: 64
love of glory: 8, 9, 79, 128-129, 198, 232
letters: 212-213, 226-227
Macrobians: 14, 299
manure: 34
masculine indiscretion: 252
maxims: 233
mediocrity: 40, 60, 68, 221
metaphysical: 101, 102, 221
monotony of misfortune: 288
monumental: 188
moral geology: 179-180
mother: 21, 22, 30, 32, 66-67, 80, 208, 289, 303
mysterious parcel: 117, 118, 311
nabob: 282
nanny goats: 270
Napoleon: 35, 36, 40, 50, 261, 303 (see also Ani DiFranco’s “Napoleon”)
Nature: 12, 21, 22, 23, 281
no remorse: 192, 247 *
nostalgia: 16, 168, 226
oblivion: 254
ode: 57
oil lamp: 172
opportune moment: 125, 207
Pascal: 77, 266, 318
perpetual: 179
philosophy of old papers: 226-227
Plaster: 8-9, 11, 13, 14, 52, 79, 232, 291, 296-7, 300, 319
polka: 224, 253
pride: 21, 60, 199
privation: 276, (memory of) 276-277
prologue: 3
Prudencio: 70, 71-2, 107, 148-149
public esteem: 146, 238-9
public opinion: 3, 69, 79, 198, 220-221, 223, 267 (neighbor’s attention)
publicity: 239
Puritanism: 13
rank: 60
Realists: 42
reciprocal deceit: 180
red-haired virgin: 175-6, 316
restitution: 117, 188
rhubarb: 231
Romantics: 42
romanticism: 60, 64
Rossio Grande: 43, 45
Sancho Panza: 45
Saturn (planet): 254
selfishness: 22
servant: 43
Shakespeare: 70
shakos: 256-258
shuttlecock: 215
silence: 20, 47, 59, 81, 101, 238, 245, 260 (see use of typography), 261
sincere: 48, 76, 80, 168, 264, 281 (sincerity)
slave/s: 31, 33, 38, 47, 51, 66, 82, 94, 98, 107, 148-149, 230, 239, 317
sleep: 57
smallsword: 35, 36, 40
snakes: 144
spectacle: 22, 23, 24, 58, 57, 67, 93, 236, 242, 254, 264, 265
Stendhal: 3, 249-250, 294
storks: 6, 15
sub-Greeks: 216
sublime: 22, 57, 117, 230, 253, 270, 276, 287
superstitions: 14, 172-174, 175-176, 201, 217, 316
Suetonius: 12, 226, 318
the grand idea: 7
the little house: 142, 146-147, 151-152, 156, 196
the living condensation of all time: 23
the pure reality: 213, 224
the mystery: 178, 186
theory of human editions: 16, 77, 93-96
thirteen: (see also superstitions) 172-174, 175-176, 201, 217
Tijuca: 70-73, 87, 88, 89, 263, 307
tomb: 5, 20, 244
tragedy: 6, 202, 210, 213
trapeze: 8, 52
Valongo: 148-149, 313
Venice: 64
vertigo: 68, 211 (vertiginous)
Virgil: 68, 75, 171, 308
virumque: 75, 308
Voltaire: 261, 190, 231
voluptuousness of woe: 70-71
waltz: 114-115, 117, 125, 126
wart: 176
weeping willow: 257
widower: 226
women’s indiscretion: 250
worm: 1, 21, 77
yellow fever epidemic: 242-243, 300
youth: 28, 33, 71

*

Machado’s original novel can now be read for free online in Portuguese thanks to Gutenberg.

Borba comparing conscience to why a pretty woman is vain and likes to look in the mirror often: "Conscience..... contemplates itself frequently when it finds itself beautiful. Remorse is nothing but the grimace of a conscience that sees itself to be hideous." 

But remember: “The book’s greatest flaw is you, reader….”

Benjamin & Seghers in transit.

1. Transit papers

We don't talk about papers enough. This is because most Americans genuinely lack personal, lived experience with the absolutely mind-boggling labor, money, risk, and time involved in the procurement of visas and transit papers for stateless persons or refugees. As part of my ongoing commitment to consume every book ever published by NYRB, I read Anna Seghers’ novel, Transit, with great interest in its treatment of refugees and stateless persons.

The translation by Margot Bettauer Dembo—her final work of translation—is intimate, disturbing, and powerful. One feels alienation like a close houseguest, or a lost language, the lip of an inaccessible elsewhere.

Peter Conrad’s introduction ties Segher's novel to her lived experience as a Communist trying to escape Hitler's armies. She was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933; upon release, she fled to Paris, then to Marseilles, one of the few ports available to exit visas. (Seghers was Jewish, which certainly factored into the threat that Nazism posed to her life.) Conrad compares Seghers’ refugees to Kafka's Joseph K, seeking to get his credentials as a land surveyor recognized by the rulers of the castle.

In 1941, Seghers (and her family) procured permits to board a ship for Mexico—and she began to write this book immediately upon arrival. Like Marie, the novel's quasi-heroine, Seghers lived the in-between state of warring borders and expired papers. The novel offers few emotional characterizations to distinguish the characters, many of whom are refugees waiting for papers in Marseilles. In a sense, all details exist only to be demolished by the violence of the occupation, and by the quiet intersecting complicities of French citizens. 

The male narrator of Transit doesn't even inhabit a name. He is among the nondescript nameless, seeking a future in the words of others, the moment by moment navigations. He has no distinguishing beliefs, looks, or ideologies. He begins with describing his time spent in work camps performing "labor service" by unloading British munitions ships, where he felt himself "in the shadow of death." 

Ultimately, he escapes the Vichy regime by passing himself off as Weidel, a dead Jewish author whose suitcase he discovers in a hotel room. Along with Weidel’s papers, the suitcase also contains Weidel’s final manuscript. By some twist of fate, the narrator happens to have fallen in love with the Weidel’s girlfriend, who does not yet know that he is dead—and who is trying to find him so that her transit papers can be finished.

For the narrator to steal a dead’s man identity is hardly a crime in a time when survival depends on anonymity. And the whole novel is retrospective: a confession recounted by the narrator to an American border official for whom such stories are thrilling, museum-like, and incomprehensible. 

2. The Struma and Mihail Sebastian

The first lines of Transit:

"They're saying that the Montreal went down before Dakar and Martinique. That she ran into a mine."

Immediately, I thought of Mihail Sebastian's diary, where he expresses anxiety and concern over what would later be called the Struma disaster. The Struma was a small ship commissioned to carry nearly 800 Jewish refugees from Axis-allied Romania to Palestine. Sebastian attempts to navigate between conflicting media reports: whether the ship carrying Romanian Jewish refugees arrived safely, or whether it had been sunk.

Over one hundred pages of Sebastian’s diary reference the absolutely abysmal media reporting and propaganda, and the paralyzing effect this had on Jewish persons in determining whether to flee or “wait for it to pass.” The Struma disaster would later be referenced by Romanian Jews as why some chose to flee by foot or stay put, rather than try a boat.

Here’s the Wikipedia version of what happened:

Struma's diesel engine failed several times between her departure from Constanţa on the Black Sea on 12 December 1941 and her arrival in Istanbul on 15 December. She had to be towed by a tug boat to leave Constanţa and to enter Istanbul. On 23 February 1942, with her engine still inoperable and her refugee passengers aboard, Turkish authorities towed Struma from Istanbul through the Bosphorus out to the coast of Şile in North Istanbul. Within hours, in the morning of 24 February, the Soviet submarine Shch-213 torpedoed her, killing an estimated 781 refugees plus 10 crew, making it the Black Sea's largest exclusively civilian naval disaster of World War II. Until recently the number of victims had been estimated at 768, but the current figure is the result of a recent study of six different passenger lists. Only one person aboard, 19-year-old David Stoliar, survived (he died in 2014).

3. Walter Benjamin and Weidel

Weidel's manuscript suitcase, for me, maps upon the missing suitcase of Walter Benjamin—and with it, the possibility that someone used it to publish his text.

I thought about this as I traced relations between Seghers and Benjamin during their Paris days. Both wrote within a climate of rising fascism. Where Benjamin's reproduction of news headlines and local ephemera offered the landmarks of rising fascism, Seghers' narrator speaks from a blurred, distracted distance, evoking a world where moral boundaries have become as fuzzed and non-commital as those of nation-states. 

In 1937 and 1937, Benjamin was seeing more of Seghers (born Netty Reiling, 1900), who was already known as a novelist (her first book was published in 1928) and activist. And he probably knew Seghers through her husband, László Radványi, a Jewish Hungarian writer and poet who had been involved in the revolution which created the Hungarian Soviet Republic—and who was forced to flee when the HSR was disbanded in 1919. Radványi fled to Vienna, where he acquired the pseudonym "Johann Lorenz Schmidt" (from the 18th-century Protestant dissident theologian). In 1923, he got his doctorate in philosophy from Heidelberg University, where his these on Chialism was directed by Karl Jaspers.

In Heidelberg, Radványi/Schmidt met poet Anna Seghers. They married in 1925 and had two children, Pierre and Ruth (pictured in portrait at the top).

Benjamin and Radványi had both been interned at La Varret. This is where they met, in a French internment camp. After Radványi was released from labor camps, he, Seghers, and their two children went to Marseilles, where they became part of the crowds trying to flee Vichy France. She fled via Mexico City to New York City, and returned to the German Democratic Republic in 1947, where she became a prominent figure. 

Benjamin, on the other hand, joined a handful of others fleeing on foot towards the Spanish coast. After being refused transit at the Spanish border, Benjamin took his own life that night in a border hotel. His suitcase is still missing.

4. The Gide aside

In 1936, Andre Gide accepted an invitation to tour the Soviet Union, and his dreams of liberation crumbled like the plaster from Potemkin villages. In Return From the the USSR, Gide recanted his support for the Soviet project as it stood, which he believed to be antithetical to flourishing, human thriving, and queer comrades in general.

Gide was writing as a socialist, as someone committed to liberation—and so he framed his book by criticizing the particulars in the name of a hopeful, more liberated (and socialist) future:

I do not hide from myself the apparent advantage that hostile parties—those for whom "their love of order is indistinguishable from their partiality to tyrants"[1]—will try to derive from my book. And this would have prevented me from publishing it, from writing it, even, were not my conviction still firm and unshaken that, on the one hand, the Soviet Union will end by triumphing over the serious errors that I point out, on the other, and this is more important, that the particular errors of one country cannot suffice to compromise a cause which is international and universal. Falsehood, even that which consists in silence, may appear opportune, as may perseverance in falsehood, but it leaves far too dangerous weapons in the hands of the enemy, and truth, however painful, only wounds in order to cure.

In hindsight, it was a sort of bourgeois naivety that led Gide to believe his speech commemorating the death of Maxim Gorky could have been well-received by those present in Moscow’s Red Square, but we must take it on faith that Gide was idealist enough to celebrate how literature, the province of the leisured and wealthy, now belonged to the worker, or the silent masses:

I could not weary of contemplating the numbers of women, of children, of workers of all kinds for whom Maxim Gorki had been a spokesman and a friend. I reflected with sorrow that these people, in any other country than the U.S.S.R., belonged to those to whom entry of the hall would have been forbidden; to those who, precisely, when they come to the gardens of culture are confronted with a terrible "No admittance. Private property." And tears came to my eyes at the thought that what seemed to them already so natural seemed to me, the Westerner, still so extraordinary.

Gide goes on to contradict himself, claiming that great writers have always been revolutionaries (but also bourgeois, leisured, etc), and that the new problem for writers is being revolutionary while losing their status as rebels:

And it seemed to me that there existed here, in the Soviet Union, a most surprising novelty—up till now, in all the countries of the world, a great writer has always been, more or less, a revolutionary, a fighter. In a way that was more or less conscious and more or less veiled, he thought, he wrote, in opposition to something. He refused to approve. He brought into the minds and into the hearts of people the germs of insubordination, of revolt. Respectable people, public powers, the authorities, tradition, had they been far-seeing enough, would not have hesitated to recognize in him the enemy.

Today, in the U.S.S.R., for the first time, the question is put in a very different manner; while remaining a revolutionary, the writer is no longer a rebel. On the contrary, he responds to the wishes of the greatest number, of the whole people, and what is most remarkable, to those of the rulers. So that there appears to be a sort of fading away of the problem, or rather a transposition so new that at first it disconcerts thought. And it will not be one of the least glories of the U.S.S.R. and of those prodigious days which still continue to shake our old world, to have called up into fresh heavens new stars and unimagined problems.

If one hasn’t read Gide’s pamphlet, it’s a humorous historical dive inflected by Gide’s unique voice. The book caused a huge commotion among the European Left; many tongues clucked, others wagged, some stayed glued to the roofs of their mouths. I wouldn’t be surprised if CIA cash was used to help publish it.

5. Backtracking to 1937 intellectual climate

In continental Europe, political tensions over Madrid's fall to Franco's Nationalists made lip service support for the Republican cause in Spain verboten. It was a tense time. The Popular Front offered the single viable alternative to Nazi occupation.

Thus it comes as a surprise to find Walter Benjamin, in letters to friends, refusing to condemn Gide for throwing shade on the Soviet Union before actually reading the book. In 1937, Walter Benjamin was struggling to get eyeglasses, as his eyesight had worsened to the point where he was afraid to leave home. He was reading—and loving—Carl Juster Jachmann's On Language, which he called "meteoric" for its insight into the collision of language and politics. Jachmann's these that "the regression of poetry is the progress of culture" blamed Germany's failure to move towards a politics of liberation on its obsession with literature. Benjamin wrote an essay on Jachmann which he shared with Theodor Adorno in Paris in the spring of that year.

Also in the spring of 1937, Benjamin attends Anna Segher's speech honoring the work of Georg Büchner. Benjamin appreciates her speech, though he doesn’t say much about her poetry.

In the same month, Benjamin promises himself that he will pen a critique of Jungianism, whose "fascist armor" he swore to "expose." He sees Jung as offering a "clinical nihilism" which may have appealed to Celine, but which heralded a danger to free thought and expression. 

In May 1937, Siegfried Kracauer published Orpheus in Paris: Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time. The book used biography as a lens into the socio-cultural history of Second Empire Paris, aiming to be a "physiognomy" of a cultural era. Both Adorno and Benjamin bonded over their hatred of it, but it was Adorno who sustained a long-standing vendetta which resurfaced in his Minima Moralia, published in the 1950's. One must credit Adorno, perhaps, with a capacity for steadfast, unrelenting intellectual-grudge commitments.

By the summer of 1937, Benjamin expresses dismay in the Popular Front, writing "leftist majority pursues a politics with which the rightists would provoke revolts." The Stalinist show trials continue in Soviet Russia, which Benjamin finds worrisome.

“There is a view onto gloom through whatever window we look,” he wrote to Fritz Lieb, continuing:

“The destructive effect of events in Russia will inevitably continue to spread. And the bad thing about this is not the facile indignation of the staunch fighters for ‘freedom of thought’: what appears to me to be much sadder and much more inevitable at the same time is the silence of thinking individuals who, precisely as thinking individuals, would have difficulty in taking themselves for informed individuals. This is the case with me, and probably also with you.”

Back in Bucharest, Mihail Sebastian is watching the Iron Guard emerge as an ideological competitor. In December 1937, religious scholar Mircea Eliade is not yet teaching in a tenured position at the University of Chicago. He’s just another young intellectual who has fallen for the Legionary, fascist movement. Eliade will celebrate a few weeks later as Jews are forbidden to work in the journalism profession. He will celebrate as the fascists moved to erase Jewish voices from the national press. The silence of Jewish erasure will lack translators. 

Sebastian’s 1938 journal begins with fake news, or its predecessor. The word propaganda hovers over the new uniforms, their ideologies, their apologists. In Bucharest, Sebastian will listen to his charismatic professor, Nae Ionescu, build a case for a mystical “National Greatness” that relies on exclusion of what is foreign. Ethics, for Nae,  isn't a question of whether one should kill the enemy, The Foreigner, the Jew - but rather, whether one does this with relish rather than light regret.

To do the deed with one's mind is different from doing the deed with one's heart.

Sebastian will listen, add this to his notebooks, wondering at which point the illness of ideology will release his friends. And how much harm will be accomplished in the interim?

At a cafe, he and Bellu Zilber will discuss alternatives, or carve out the shadows of rising anti-Semitism in their own flesh. The maps are a question of survival—of what one must be, or become – in order to live. “The People” has become an altar demanding sacrifice; the political is sacralized in national greatness.

Should another People be constructed to oppose it? How many Peoples need to exist? Can Peoples co-exist? At the table, Sebastian sees humans, divided by hyphens, believing the bridge can carry them. Zilber suspects that only communist internationalism can save Jews from death in German camps. Sebastian believes multinationalism and fluidity offer eternal protection. Others believe the hope is in Zionism. Many are trying to get visas, exit permits, passports which enable them to leave the land where they were born, the land of their fathers and mothers.

Decades later, Bellu Zilber will sit in prison during the communist show trials, revisiting his commitments in light of changing allegiances. Now, The People have become The Party; internationalism is Trotskyism, an official crime against the Peoples’ Republics. Nationalist communism emerges to fill the vacuum of Stalinist and Soviet empire.  But who can measure the distance between national interest and anti-Semitism in the dictators mouth? Sebastian will not live long enough to witness his friends’ silence in prison. If he had, one could hardly imagine his response.

* Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, pp. 555-556, 567. Sebastian, 113.

A Review-Museum of Danse Macabre in Shifting Pandemic Time

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”]

Goll, Chaplin, Benjamin, Sebastian, ellipses.

Yvan Goll —

Among the joys of contributor copies, one must include the new avenues of interest and fascination which coincide with current research and readings. I’m thinking of Asheville Poetry Review, and Keith Flynn's review essay, "The Remaining Mystery: A Review of Yvan Goll's Selected Poems," which outlines Goll's life in the context of his oeuvre.

Yvan Goll was born Isaac Lang in the borderland of Alsace-Lorraine, a contested space. Fascinating that Goll used two synonyms with the first name Tristan; it wasn't a popular name at the time, and so, to me, it suggests a sort of limning of Tzara.

He called himself "Jewish by destiny, French-born by chance, and designated German by a stamped piece of paper." He worked across mediums, writing poetry, plays, and even "an emotional surrealist film", Die Chaplinade (1920) which I imagine Mihai Sebastian must have seen or heard about prior to his lecture on Charlie Chaplin for the Criterion group.

Aside on Mihai Sebastian, Chaplin, and Criterion

In his Criterion lecture on Charlie Chaplin, Sebastian was heckled with anti-semitic slurs by young Iron Guardists in the audience - "a Jew speaking about another Jew!" So, Sebastian tore up his speech and elected to discuss what he shared with Chaplin as a Jew, claiming that Chaplin was someone only an Eastern European could understand, comparing the loneliness of chaplains persona to the loneliness of the Jew in the ghetto: "I shall speak as a Jew about the Jew, Charlie Chaplin."

The rise of the nationalist extremists is not separate from the services they provide, and the populism they mobilize while hoarding weapons and guns. It is our smug, exceptionalist bubble that prevents us from seeing, or caring about, the connections around the world. 

The connotations are critical. In 1932, the accusation of being Jewish in Romania implied, or carried, all the wrongs - sovietism, homosexuality, internationalism, greed, money, and conspiracy. It was the undertone of the word globalist. And it was the Criterion event on Andre Gide that opened the floodgates of the end. Crowds of young Cuzists and Legionnaire-affiliated students swarmed the hallways, punching the speakers, resulting in chaos and closure. 

Poets can be loathsome, and perhaps none so loathsome as the court poet. Enter Nichifor Crainic, whose newspaper stoked anti-Gide sentiment by accusing Gide of being a Jew, or implying his sympathy with Judaism, a guilt by blood and association that assumes one places Jewishness over the nation.  Gide was a threat because his ties to Jewishness opened the door to gayness, and Gide was not Jewish, but he was definitely gay, definitely opposed to the binaries of purity constructed by heteronormativity.  

To follow the details, see Cristina Bejan’s book on Bucharest’s interwar Criterion Group (Palgrave).

Goll again

Goll married Claire in 1921; They lived in Paris for a time, and he loved Paris, loved its surrealist circles, though he opposed Andre Breton's reliance on Freud and automatic writing. His own surrealist Manifesto was published to rival Breton's in 1924. Goll's work was blacklisted by the German government, and poet Paula Ludwig posed a challenge to the Golls' marriage. When France went Nazi in 1939, the Golls fled to New York, where they would remain until Gall got sick near the end of his life and went to France for treatment. Optimistic by temperament, the rise in global nationalism bothered goal, and shaped poetry, which moved across borders and countries, bearing witness to greed, which he saw as the primary force of Destruction on the planet.

He is buried in Pere Lachaise, near Chopin--and not too far from Celan, himself. 

In Goll's last years, Celan was frequently at his bedside, donating blood to help him survive leukemia, and trying to help him finish his last manuscript, Dreamweed. After 20 years in the United States, Goll had "returned to the German language" seeking, again,  a relation with unbidden, ineffable things in the key of dread, in the pulse of surrealism, in what Flynn calls " incendiary images" that might uncover something solid and monumental to leave as testament. In a sense, it was a gift for Claire, a reward for the years of companionship and support that she provided, a poem to bind them together after death. Flynn doesn't mention the Goll affair in this review at all, an interesting elision.

Flynn references Walter Benjamin's essay on surrealism, "The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia," which was published in 1929. Here, Benjamin traces the surrealist's edge narratives alongside the tensions inside the artistic movement, noting: "the true creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, 'a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else can give an introductory lesson. (But a dangerous one; and the religious lesson is stricter.) Benjamin rejects the assumption that drugs are required for surrealism, and drops a small bomb at Lenin's feet by suggesting that Lenin brought drugs and religion closer than anyone. 

For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday. The most passionate investigation of telepathic phenomena, for example, will not teach us half as much about reading (which is an eminently telepathic process), as the profane illumination of reading about telepathic phenomena. And the most passionate investigation of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic), as the profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance. The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug, ourselves, which we take in solitude.

On solitude, see Fragments From A Found Notebook, Sebastian’s first book, written while studying in Paris, recently translated by Christina Tudor-Sideri (Sublunary Editions): “A stain, a shadow, an opinion, that is enough for an end.”

Thoughts on an aesthetic of lack.

The aesthetic of lack

In "An Aesthetic of Lack; or Notes on Camps," Katie Kresser argues towards an “aesthetic of lack” to counter the vacuity of modern consumerism. She looks at the “prosthetic mystique” to reveal an affinity for truncations, or a way in which beauty consists of supplementation. The prosthetic serves to fill in, to compensate, and Kresser likens this to drag culture, an “incubator for flagrant artificiality,” wherein the anesthetics of lack rides the neon energy of dissonance, grotesqueness, and various voids.

For Kresser, an "additive mania" is part of the aesthetic of lack, where excess detail and kitsch serve as supplements. This aesthetic is also characterized by the horror vacui, the fear of emptiness filled with whorls, hoardmarks, countless repetitions; a preference for compounds; a hunger for "the radiant and the radiating."

This is why the back road graveyard feels more gorgeous, more inhabited, more alive, than the meticulously planned lines and repetitions of the modern cemetery, whose plots embody what Kresser calls "the aesthetic of sufficiency."

The aesthetic of sufficiency

Kresser’s aesthetic of sufficiency is "galvanic, muscular, godlike," not needing completion. She gives the example of the neo-Doric sanctum, "a marble and affectless and supreme."

Or the nouveau-smug minimalism with its "heroic proportions," its extensive space and glass, which she takes as "vaguely fascist in their force." 

She mentions Piet Mondrian's calibrated frames, structured around their "own center of gravity," with no need to reach outside further outside themselves—and I think of the Instagram’s minimalist mansions—how all that glass enables its owner to admire themselves in a mirror at every configuration of sunlight. To tell time by how the sun wraps itself around the immaculate body. To sneak the pleasure of looking out at the world of tiny others, seeing oneself reflected back in them.

In my mind, the sufficient implies money, access, and coteries: the independence of high salary, social status, career-lacquered rank. The independence of money, the elegance of big brands and famous bylines.

*

Kresser sees it in corporate logos which are “marvelously scalable in their monumentality.” Ultimately, the aesthetic of self-sufficiency is also an "aesthetic of whiteness" and purity, one which has no nuance or shadow, secure in the knowledge that being completely exposed and empty, is safe. 

*

See also: the urban soccer mom with her expensive athletic clothes, the calibrated leisure time for the development of tiny, particular muscles, this weakness of shiny hair, the immaculate schedules of self-care, the Leni Riefenstahl of her stadiums where she watches little ones learn to win from the casual, half-hearted, beg of the sidelines.

(For the insufficient, see Eric Baus’ description of aphasia, or “communicasick”—how weirdness and Joel Brainerd came to his mind.)

The aesthetic of the accident

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

-J. G. Ballard

The "fascination with the marred and the pathetic" reminds me of X., a friend whose intellectual affinities tangled with mine (he even drew a diagram of our tangles, a visceral, visual disturbance) who couldn’t get over my survival, whose idealizations of me met in confluence of my accident. It’s tempting to lay love over the retrospective gaze, but also inaccurate. Simply, we were fascinated by each other. The intensity of that fascination never simmered, it threatened everything stable in our lives. X gave me a copy of J. G. Ballard's Crash, a peephole into symphorophilia, or sexual fetish related to car crashes. As a book, I savored it in the same key as Fight Club, the frisson of watching humans try to recreate highly-specific situations of pain which arouse and bond them.

The characters in Crash are turned on by staging car-crashes, but what they crave is intimacy at its utmost, at its least accessible moment. Perhaps what we all want, at some point, is knowing we are desirable at the extremities of human experience. To be tangled is to feel one’s self alive, implicated.

I had been there. He hadn’t. There was this wound between us. He wanted to fondle it. For X, each scar was something he wanted to connect to his attraction. As one who comes from the school of dead flowers on tombstones, I sympathized. I had no limits. I preferred to make love on the hard marble cover of the grave itself.

In our shared affinity for the grotesque, the improbable, the unspeakable, X and I were kindred. But the accident, itself, was an abyss. I didn’t recognize myself in the car crash, or read my ruins into the eros of absence. The scars were not mysteries: they were solid facts, secrets between myself and the night.

*

Like Rosanna Arquette, I wore the leg brace with skirts. Unlike Arquette, I wore it through the sophomore year of high school. I could not drive or pump gas. I couldn’t put pressure on a gas pedal.

To inhabit the haute of Cronenberg’s crash, I would have needed a stylist to slip sheer black nylon hose under the brace, and then some ghost with glue to follow me. The wreckage aesthetic of the film runs closer to the aesthetic of sufficiency, its glossy surface, its immaculate presentation.

*

Consider could an aesthetic experience of accident that is wrecked, ravaged, lit with black stitches like the ones I selected for my forehead to match my prom dress.

To note backpacking through Europe with the high school sweetheart, returning to the US for scheduled back surgery, spending that night curled around each other in a hospital bed before heading off the college in opposite parts of the country.

To footnote how we first kissed outside a car where U2 sang: “Dressed up / like a car crash / Your wheels are turning/ but you’re upside down…” Maybe the limbs of what Ballard called his “psychopathic hymn” exist in this.

To endnote the times he looked at me on trains, our bodies covered in backpacks, his eyes reaching to ask the question I refused to answer: Does it hurt?

To shine a penlamp on the frame of what I didn’t speak, how silences infect a text.

The halo and the hipster

When Katie Kresser mentions the halo of old religious statues, and how the halo strains upward, I realize how much the halo undermines the status of the gold crown, whether rhinestoned beauty pageant tiara or Prince Charles etc. The halo substitutes a supernatural head-dressonly granted by the gods, suggesting an incompleteness in what the world can give us.

"Elite culture disdains the aesthetics of lack:" elite culture prefers it as a signal towards being conversant with the avant garde, or engaged by novelty, suffused in a newness that resembles the hipster's. Using Sontag’s definition, Kresser builds on camp as the elite marker for quaint unseriousness-- "tasteless yet amusing." The alleged-camp aesthetic associated with queer and drag culture is not as marginal as we think; Kresser sees it in pop culture, folk culture, and religious culture. the “flagrantly aristocratic” was camp. As was Henry James, Charles Dickens, art nouveau, opera, and velvet.

“Taste and ideology has ever been co-conspirators…” Notions of self-sufficiency are modern for Kresser, not ancient. She gives the example of the Greek Peplos Kore, a white statue once painted and tacky colors. She says the the whiteness is modern; the Kore used to wear garish colors and golds.

*

As a result of her experience with breast cancer, the author situates herself in "camps.” She wears a pink wig, possesses one infinitely perky silicone breast: these props fill in the lack, or supplement the absence of what cancer treatment takes. 

"We all seek gods now; may they not be false ones," Kresser warns. Because we all lack, we are all lacking, all gesturing to fill this lack in various ways. I want to align the aesthetic of the accident with Kresser’s aesthetic of lack while challenging the performance of this aesthetic in visual culture.

*

I want to look down from the brink without holding my breath. To remember my dad describing the horror of seeing me laid on out a stretcher, all the clothes cut from my body with scissors, the blood and glass glimmering from my skin, the folded limbs—and his tears, his words: “God, no one knew if you would live. And it had been years since I’d seen you naked…you were 15…I could not believe how beautiful you were—”

*

Accidents aside, pandemic has increased my appetite for the intensivist agglomerations of literary apocalypse, which supplement the lack of stable vision for the future.

If the world is warming, ending, evaporating, it feels natural to reach outside the frame, seeking apocalyptic texts to imagine new maps, to navigate the melting glaciers. The hotness we want nestles close to the pain we think will connect us. The fondling of the wound is sexier when chosen, when marked by consent and rendered consensual. I am here— and not here—for it.

The infamous topless hostess at Ballard’s Crashed Cars exhibition. Source: The Ballardian.

Ballard’s art works were sourced from a wrecker’s yard and were simply smashed-up cars, claimed as found objects and presented for the audience’s consideration. Yet these objects – long since consigned back to the scrapyard to be melted down – remain radical as an idea because Ballard’s gesture eschewed the trappings of experimental modernity for the cool surface of the contemporary object.

-Andrew Frost, “Crash and the Aesthetics of Disappearance”

*

See also Katie Kresser on “The Real Jeff Koons: Consumer Culture and Grammar of Desire.”

Paranoia, theory, and Zaum in the present.

1. Hag aesthetic

The Old Hag was a spirit that visited in English-speaking folklores, where she sat on a sleeper's chest and sent nightmares to the dreamer. When the subject awoke, he or she would be unable to breathe or even move for a short period of time. When this happened, the person was said to be hagridden. Currently, the clinical term for this is sleep paralysis, but folk cultures still hold it to be a form of possession or paranormal state.

Thus my obsession with Jenny Zhang's “Hags" has led me from hag-rides to hybrid interrogations of immigrant aesthetics of worth and worthiness. Against the performance of goodness and cleanness by immigrant children, Zhang offers a space which deplatforms purity, hygiene, prettiness, likability—all the costumes of performative valuation in the marketplace of images. In this, she resurrects the fucked-up, the hag, the baba as her lineage:

These hags, these great beauties, these mermaids who taunt, who feast, who slash, who steal, these succubae who cannot rest, my mothers, my sisters, my unborn friends, my keepers, my guardians.

Against the testimony of white men, or the dominant narrative, Zhang offers disdain for the lie of logic’s neutrality, or “sound reasoning,” which undermined the testimonies of Hmong persons: “Isn’t sound reasoning partly why American and European scientists and leaders told the Hmong in Vietnam and Laos, who watched their family members die and fall in from the yellow rain that was dropped on them, that they were just “making it up”?  at their firsthand accounts of what they saw, what they felt, what they experienced and lived through were not as convincing as the testimony of white men who were never there, who never watched loved ones die, who never knew what it was like for their lived experiences to be not enough, to not hold up against science, to be constantly under suspicion, subject to review.”

Part of this hag aesthetic is a focus on compulsions, tics, maladaptions, and anti-social behaviors. By raising inappropriate these gestures and aesthetic correlates into iconic status, Zhang challenges positivity, self-help culture, and wellness industry, concluding:

Our compulsions are as heroic as our excesses. Our excesses as heroic as our restraint. Our forgetfulness as necessary as our total attempt to say something.

“paranoia” is an interactive installation by berlin-based artist maansi which explores how an individual is implicated in communally held fears.

2. Paranoia as a “minor reality” (+ apocalypses and angels)

Speaking of likability, Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women remains timely, incandescent, brilliant as the seam ripper repurposed to open knee stitches. Allison Cardon’s review focuses on paranoia as a gendered lens, noting how Boyer probes the relation between truth and illusion, or what Freud termed "delusions of persecution.” What Boyer wants is to understand why some people's external perceptions are assumed to be real while others' are internal, or personal - tainted by illness. Gender, as a category, marks authority over reality. Professions identified with male gender tend to assume more authority and more dominance over others. To quote Boyer, "even the color of the sky is stable only as long as it has a man's proof.”

Cardon points out that paranoia and theory are structurally similar in that both rely on discounting certain perceptions and validating others in order to explain the world. The sun shone out of my earlobes when I learned that Freud’s infamous patient, Dr. Schreber, maintained the deluded belief that the sun shone out of his anus.

The politics of illness and theory share a grain, per Cardon, "each is fundamentally about accounting for the relationship of a particular subject or grouping of subjects to a general, authoritative reality.” When a subject is paranoid, this creates a transgression, an “unauthorized departure from this reality - a minor reality." Building from Eve Sedgwick’s observation, "In world where no one need be delusional to find evidence of systemic oppression, to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naive, pious, or complaisant," Cardon describes how, at critical mass, paranoid views are turned into a form of erudition, noting that Boyer takes the opposite direction, noting that the messengers gender and class determine whether they are prescient or paranoid.

Epics are the dance music of people who love war. Movies are the justice of people who love war. Information is the Poetry of people who love war.

One can hear Theodor Adorno staring at NYC billboards, drafts of Minima Morabilis in hand, finding one million different ways to say that fascism lies at the heart of the culture industry, and drawing close to how this is gendered (though he can’t quite commit to it). Cardon names the spilling of the "open secret" as a sort of slip which Boyer invests in while claiming that "poet, woman, mother" are paranoid positions. In this way, Boyer's poetry allows her to maintain a tenuous relation to the world despite its politicized realities. So the paranoiac has an abnormal relation to loss – to the things lost by opting out, by sewing, by writing poetry, by not entering races, by never fully tribing, by carving out space apart from the reign of the reality principle in attention to small particularities – and this foregrounds the minor reality.

Also in the key of minor realities comes the minor apocalypsos. Pandemic makes reality seem even less stable, even more tipped towards the abrupt endings, which made me think of Tadeusz Konwicki’s A Minor Apocalypse, published by Dalkey and translated by Richard Lourie. The protagonist is named Konwicki, and his task is to set himself on fire—but what stands out in context is the way groans become the shared vehicle for authoritative reality. Please admire the only literary passage I know dedicated to the depiction of groan-choir as universal leitmotif:

But in all that suffering, the most painful suffering of all was the consciousness that it was all banal, had all been discovered a long time ago, and was known to all the generations past, all just a repeated series, stamped out by our genes. That the universe was filled to its edges with groans as alike as two notes, that those particular groans formed one great groan similar to the shrill parliament of the sparrows and that groan became an interstellar roar, the inaudible groan of the aging cosmos.

In my current reading: Antoine Volodine’s Minor Angels, a series of what Volodine calls “narracts” translated by Jordan Stump and published by University of Nebraska Press. I love how the trace of the witnessing angel—the angel who watches rather than intervenes or aids, the Herzogian, Rilkean angel— is a unifying, invisible theme across these apocalyptic vignettes. [And of course I am working on an essay about this…]

Gombrowicz in 1965 with meow.

3. Paranoid attentions to detail

Maybe modernist technique includes a certain paranoid attention to detail? Even Futurism’s promise of a better world seemed tied to the absolute destruction of an existing one. This came to mind while reading Dustin Illingworth's exploration of Witold Gombrowicz's Cosmos, where details are given such close attention that one might expect the material world to assume agency. Each detail waits to be read as signifier or omen. The novel’s texture derives from A constant sense in which an unspoken crime exists, and I think the genocides of the 20th century inflect this.

"Witold describes the life he and the Wojtyes are living as “clowning in the void,” Illingworth writes, and the mind wanders towards Trump or Boscano or Marjorie Taylor Greene, these nouveau-vague white Christian nationalists who are doing nothing if not clowning the nihilistic void created by the fake family values of the Religious Right. 

Illingworth makes a point about Gombrowicz that feels disturbingly present, eerily pandemic-inflected:

"It is as if the totality of matter must be marshalled as obscure evidence for some unnamable crime. Sentences crowd one another, sweating out their anxieties as we read them. The claustrophobia of infinite relation constantly threatens to overwhelm"

I think Illingworth is right to call Cosmos “one of the great novels of thingness in world literature"; right to extol its “near-constant barrage of object and substance”; right to focus on Gombrowicz’s description of material reality as “an overwhelming abundance of connections, associations” and “a myriad of undifferentiated facts”—all of which lend themselves to creating extraordinary suspense in the ominous relationship between events and omens.

If you’ve never read Gombrowicz’s Diary, I highly recommend it—and you can find a few excerpts online at the Paris Review blog. In structuring his writing, he often relied on the discontinuity of dreams and their proximity to fugue states, to extract usable fragments:

The dream upsets the reality of the experienced day and extracts certain fragments from it, strange fragments, and arranges them illogically in an arbitrary pattern. It is exactly this lack of sense that has the profoundest meaning for us: we ask why, in the name of what, is our ordinary sense destroyed.

Karl Bulla, Mikhail Matiushin, Aleksei Kruchenykh, and Kazimir Malevich, 1913. Courtesy of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

4. Disinfo dada no-no

But there is also the strangeness of how propaganda has embraced literary discourse, so that one finds, on February 17th, the EU's disinformation services put out a piece titled "Disinformation Goes Dada," characterizing the use of language in Russian state media as “zaum.” The article actually links and quotes a poem by Aleksei Kruchenykh alongside Marjorie Perloff's 2003 translation, asserting that "Zaum language attempts to liberate poetry from the restrains of denotation of words"—which is, effectively, as meaningless a statement as one could concoct from googling.

The self-described "Stratcom Task Force Dada" stomps into the discourse, calling it a way of "weaponizing the absurd," or abandoning the true/false binaries by which most media information is judged. After referencing the loose-zaum of Mayakovsky's poem, "They don't understand anything," the anonymous Stratcom propaganda task force continues its propaganda wars in the postmodern space of Trumpism and incoherent extremist nationalism. 

But the anonymous Task Force author remains nameless. He or she doesn’t touch on strategies of defamiliarization, perhaps given how odd it would sound alongside the putative disinformation. Against this strange conflation of Dada and zaum, I want to suggest that zaum’s relationship to language be valued in its unique evolution. For zaum poets, language wasn’t a carrier of emotional contagions so much as a deforming agent, an experimental medium for creating new language and sound symbols, a commitment to Futurism’s eschatological vision rather than Dada’s chaotic, anti-teleogical one.

Zaum, which translates as “beyond the mind” in Russian, sought to reduce the connoted aura of words by opening the doors of resonance for sparks, for ways to thicken defamiliarized images. The reliance on wordplay and re-visionary meaning can be seen in the name itself, where “za” translates as “beyond,” or “behind,” and “um” to “mind.” Different scholars have translated it to mean “transreason,” “transration” and “beyonsense.” S

To be fair, Dada and zaum both experimented with absurdism, though Dada erred closer to political incoherence than Russian absurdism, whose proximity and patronage by Leninism gave it a hard stake in the game, drawing it closer to Futurism than Dada. Yes, Russian Futurists valued absurdity as a political strategy, an aesthetic which permitted them to foreground negation in the Russian revolution’s commitment to Progress, and the upending of convention. But an avant-garde with a political platform tends to rise or fall with its ideology, and, contra the world, I’m not sure that Dada is a catch-all for all absurdity and engagement of nonsense as vehicle from communication. To do so leaves out the call for “war against war” which animated early Dada as both a movement and a mode. Zaum can still be absurdist without being Dada.

Ilya Zdanevich in the manifesto for the 41° group, which absorbed zaum into kinetic, Russian futurism.

5. A timeline of metalogical futurism, transrational language, and zaum-spliffs

In December 1912, on the cusp of the Era of Manifesting Manifestos, a close-knit group of Moscow-based poets and artists issued their own, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.” Later described the founding document of the Russian Futurism, the authors determined that the “Ship of Modernity” needed to remove the old ballast of traditional formal aesthetic, including Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. ” Four fellows signed this MANifesto—David Burliuk, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Viktor Khlebnikov—arguing that language failed to describe the present, and a new dynamic vocabulary was needed to vessel the dynamic spirit.

In January 1913, Kruchenykh published “Dyr bul shchyl”—a short poem composed of five verses, and the first to be written in the new Futurist language of zaum. Later that year, the absurdist opera, Victory Over the Sun, was performed in St. Petersburg. Also authored by Kruchenykh, the text was pure zaum, using nonsensical words articulated in unconventional rhythms and inflections to challenge conventional meanings. It began with a pair of “Futurist Strongmen” in boxy cardboard armor. As the strongmen stepped into “the future,” they declared:

All’s well that begins well and has no end
The world will perish but there is no end to us!

In 1917, the year of the successful Russian Revolution, Kruchenykh mused on his goals in a letter to his friend, Shemshurin:

-- A riddle ... The reader is curious first of all and convinced that zaum means something, i.e. has some logical meaning. Hence one can sort of catch the reader by a worm-riddle, by mystery. Women and art have to have mystery; to say "I love" is to make a very definite commitment, and person never wants to do that. He is covert, he is greedy, he is a mystifer. And he seeks, instead of I - e [I love], something equal and perhaps special - and this will be: lefanta chiol or raz faz gaz . . . kho - bo - ro mo cho - ro and darkness and zero and new art! Does an artist intentionally hide in the treehole of zaum? - I don't know ...

By the end of the year, Kruchenykh joined up with Ilya Zdanevich and Igor Terentev to form a one-off association called "41°." Associated with an avant-garde cabaret (The Fantastic Little Inn), 41° put out a newspaper, issued a manifesto (as men must do when baptizing a new tree or claiming a space), and declared:

Company 41°, unifies left-wing Futurism, and affirms transreason as the mandatory form for the embodiment of art. The task of 41°, is to make use of all the great discoveries of its collaborators, and to place the world on a new axis.

In 1918, 41° started the Futuruniversity and a series of lectures on various avant-garde themes, including zaum, Futurism, Futurist theater, and avant-garde poetry. At no point is Dada referenced in Kruchenykh’s or 41°’s game plan.

By 1921, Kruchenykh had abandoned the manifesto for the declaration, issuing his “Declaration of Transrational Language,” which aims to provide “a universal poetic language, born organically”—sprung from the soil of Mother Russia herself—rather than a poetic language born “artificially” in the lab of men’s minds (like Esperanto). And where to gather the words for this new, organic lingua poetica than from the mouths of lost primeval Slavic dialects? Clearly, the transrational scope was narrowing to focus on the Slavic and Russian, and the declaration was genuine, rooted in nostalgia for a purer time.

To quote Aron Ouzilevski: “Despite being likened to Dadaists for their disruptive mode of thinking, they lacked the self-irony of Dadaism and their intentions to recover aboriginal tongues were entirely genuine.” The relationship between genuineness and lo-fi, structural nationalism in literary movements continues to fascinate me—and I hope the Stratcom Dada Task Force uses its magnifying instruments to look closer at where zaum ended.

6. Random acts of zaum by others & minor addenda

“A Zaum attack is not just wordplay. It is a whole-body experience Biniashvili diagnosed based on her experiences of living, studying,and working in different countries. During a Zaum attack, the inability to understand the sounds that are heard leads to a feeling of alienation accompanied by physical symptoms— sweating, accelerated pulse, stuttering, frustration and rage due to the loss of comprehension.The incomprehensibility of the local language causes a temporary change in consciousness: words become sounds, speech becomes illogical and letters become abstract signs. During a Zaum attack, language’s formal aspect is emphasized, while the need to understand and be understood, and transform abstract thoughts into sentences that comply with the rules of syntax, are abandoned.”

[ “Zaum attack” by Nino Biniashvili ]

“Yet it is precisely this failure that points to a greater production context within which the poets were operating, that of a multilingual Russian Empire. It was the last major autocratic power of Europe that had just completed a nearly two hundred year expansionist projects; one of the most ambitious and bloody in the history of humanity. It stood as the largest contiguous country in the world. Although its populations were forced to speak Russian, their native tongues ranged from Finish in the north to Georgian in the South, Polish in the West and Mongolian in the East. Russian native speakers of the early twentieth century encountered languages that were completely alien to them (literally hundreds of languages from a staggering variety of language groups) and in many cases this encounter forced them to reflect back upon the sound components of their own language.”

[Dima Strakovsky, “Notes on the Empire of ZAUM”]

*

+ In the Swedish film Marianne (2011), the main character suffers from sleep paralysis or hagridden nocturnal events.

+ As a digital gallery, The International Digital Dada Library is unable to experience paranormal states.

+ Anime fans still mourn the end of Satoshi Khon’s Paranoia Agent; see also digital subculture of installations and art memes devoted to Paranoia Agent.

+ There is an online business course titled “A Minor in Reality,” but really, what’s fascinating is the attempt to position the three workshop leaders as somehow outside the business world in their biographies: “Whether he’s guiding young entrepreneurs, hacking public sector projects, or advising the C-suites of major public and private corporations…” Asking to be collaged, they are.

+ Laura Kolbe’s review of Anne Boyer’s The Undying includes a few phrases I have marked for their evocative brilliance, including “aggro-sentimental soundscape” and “chorus of strenuous optimism” and “To strike a downbeat note is deviant.” I am deeply invested in striking these downbeat notes and staying as deviant as possible.

+ Also enjoyed Heather Green’s translation of Tristan Tzara’s “Villains.”

+ If you haven’t visited the Getty Museum’s online exhibit, “Explodicity,” an interactive companion to Nancy Perloff’s Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art, you unimperatively should. The now is absent, the past is a series of plinths, and the future is whatever shape geese make when fleeing.

Beauty in the Wild: A Birmingham poetic celebration of Ntozake Shange.

Shaunteka LaTrese

In a profile for the New Yorker, Hilton Als describes how Ntozake’s sense of dance, motion, and culture infused her poetics after finishing graduate school in 1973:

Teaching during the day, Shange wrote and performed her pieces at night, slowly developing a multi-genre style that she thought represented the complexity of black American art: Why just recite a poem? Why not support its musicality by having a musician play a piece behind you while you speak? And why not dance to a poem’s music as you go along? That year, Shange had another epiphany. Driving along Highway 101 one morning, she found herself passing beneath the arc of a double rainbow. Seeing the entire rainbow take shape above her, Shange realized that she wanted to live, that she had to live; she had something to say, not only about the fragility of her own existence but about the lives of the other colored girls she knew and loved and imagined. “In that moment of seeing the double rainbow,” she told me, “I felt connected to the delicacy and irrepressible majesty of life.”

All Shaunteka’s readers who gathered to honor Ntozake Shange’s poems.

The poem I read, “ego,” is collected in Ntozake Shange’s nappy edges. I was drawn to the way she enscribed it to June Jordan, drawn to the ongoing dialogue I imagine between two incredible poets who spoke truth to power and spoke truth in power simultaneously.

ego

    (for june jordan)

use of the word
               i
is totally unjustifiable so
we have no way of distinguishin
i from whatever we are unless
somethin else is goin on that
mistakes the dynamic of us
for mine or the treasure of
ours for theirs,
we talkin abt sharin or isn’t
one all encompassin ego enough to
satisfy you/ us is all we got’n
won’t one i ever succeed in
vanquishin we/ the strength
and beauty of whatever we is
will singularly outdo an i/
effortlessly with grace
    an i is clumsiness/ narrow
    sight and sniffin round like
    a hound for where we are/ cuz i
    is lonely and lonely is different
    from the space we allow each other
    for ours/ lonely is close and dark
    and i
have known a solo self
in languishin funny houses long
enough to know that
we is the answer

Abiola Sholanke (photo by Shaunteka LaTrese)

Maria Vargas (photo by Shaunteka LaTrese)

Mimi Latoine (photo by Shaunteka LaTrese)

Priscilla Hancock Cooper (photo by Shaunteka LaTrese)

“ ....the same rhetoric that is used to establish the Black Aesthetic, we must use to establish a women’s aesthetic, which is to say that those parts of reality that are ours, those things about our bodies, the cycles of our lives that have been ignored for centuries in all castes and classes of our people, are to be dealt with now.”

— Ntozake Shange (circa 1979)

You can learn more about Shaunteka LaTrese’s poetry and culture work at Southern Girl Antics.

As for Ntozake Shange, her legacy is extraordinary and multi-faceted:

limbă

leem-buh means
tongue in my native language
the word for language 
is the word for tongue
there is no border
between the vehicle
and wine it carries
the spoken 
is not separate
from the speakable
the speaking
is not severed
from the mouth
which is the limbă 
which is a feminine noun
a mothertongue is a muscle 
inside a mother's language
which limbi is the plural of 
tongue or what most  
un-americans have 
multiples of 
plus limbă vecină 
means neighboring tongue 
or yes language
or yes a fern known as Scolopendrium vulgare
in science's language
which is universal 
which is different from
my own tongue
my rugged individualist
my closet romanian 
which comes from mothers 
but also Latin
the vulgar of

Kapka Kassabova: An actively policed border is always aggressive: it is where power suddenly acquires a body, if not a human face, and an ideology.

I love Kassabova’s Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe. Permission to consider the rise in toxic nationalisms as it intersects across the borders of my own body, the one my parents fled and the New South they adopted.

Context: I spent the summer of 2000 (after my senior year of college) in Romania, collecting research for a comparison of postcommunist transition economies. To my chagrin, the economics only told a portion of the story--a portion popularized by the infamous World Bank Development Reportment that led to catastrophic fast-track capitalism in struggling states.

No surprise: I met toxic nationalism in the form of an aging, pot-bellied man with snow-white hair and elegant suit. The ghosts of communism were alive and well on the faces of Bucharest babas who sat in hallway chairs and took note of human interactions. They were not ashamed to lay their unflinching stares on strangers--the entitlement of their gaze is only comparable to that of fraternity brothers on US college campuses.

My cousin explained that the babas had served as building monitors, Securitate informants paid to peer into the private lives of every Romanian body, feted for offering the most intimate details to secret police. 

[On a side note, one of my current essays aims to reclaim the maligned baba, shadow of all we fear and hate, image of what happens to a woman when she “lets herself go…”]

The Odious Poet: A Warning

Those who expressed shock and outrage that Trump—a raging, nativist white nationalist—had followers who loved him for his promise to do God's work, well, all shocked-and-awed liberals should maybe read a little Corneliu Vadim Tudor….. Maybe exit the echo-chamber of sad Western media and study a little Nicolae Ceausescu to glean how the sacralization of political myths and national greatness always require a commitment to eschatological redemption: the dictator does God's work for the nation. (And yes, some people we know love him for this.)

But let’s no pretend the poet isn’t involved. Poets have been supporting dictators and serving as mouth-pieces for oppression since time began. The poet’s ode can be a measure of his odiousness, especially in modern examples where the court poet compliments his coats to get close to power; it is the poet who writes the myths of national innocence. It is the poet who creates an absolutely pure victim worthy of heroism, self-sacrifice, and death.

In the US, where the poet’s role has been replaced by talking-head, it’s easy to forget how many poets created the myths that sentence fellow humans to death. Corneliu Vadim Tudor served as editor of Romania Mare, a nationalist newspaper, and leader of Romania Mare (“Great/Big Romania”) the political party. Like many former communist functionaries, the post-1989 period left him wealthy enough to pursue social entrepreneurship. And to bankroll those interests. An apostle of rabid xenophobic nationalism, Tudor first rose to fame as, yes, a poet.

Here’s a sampling of the nationalists’ sacralization of language, something the Romanian Communist Party used to punish minority languages, to erase Hungarian from schools, to make Romania great, of course, implying absolute control over word and text. I translated this trash heap poem by Tudor to give you a taste…

MARGE PIERCY: "It is as absurd...to reduce poems to political statements as it is to deny they have a political dimension." 

Poetry is not reducible to one thing. A poet enthralled by a dandelion is actually a human telling a complicated story about plants and longing and ardor and love. A girl fascinated by nationalists is actually a student of how men invent new reasons to kill us. 

When I say politics fascinates me, I mean that reading news lights my brain, hounds my thoughts, riles me up. Headlines and bylines and stock phrases hide a pulse, the old electricity. I scan crowd behavior and surges in ideology the way an internist tracks blood pressure.

I’m obsessed by the ideologization of the ode by the for-profit industry of homage. See also: heritage, inheritance, entitlement, things we believe we deserve, and how this gets marketed to us. The homage industry thrived under Ceausescu. As it thrived under Trump with Fox and his loyal cadres.

Ceausescu modeled his cult of personality after the dynastic communism he saw in the PRC and North Korea. The problem with homage is its fan club, the fans who invest personal identity in the defence of their idol. That sort of relationship is rooted in a do-no-wrong dynamic that encourages and nourishes abuse of power. The opposite of free thought is worship. 

Consider the rise in clapbacks and gym cults. Consider lifestyle brands, or what we make of a writer whom we expect to advise us on every personal, moral, social, aesthetic, and spiritual issue.

I'm drawing an unsubtle line between Ceausescu's rage when watching a TV report in which he looked older and more bloated than the Bulgarian President, and his subsequent coercion of Romanian television to carry alternate footage than the Bulgarian news reel that made him look old and (in his opinion) unattractive.

I'm saying that making the dictator look bad is a crime against the nation when a leader and nation are not separate. Fox News is complicit in the airbrush that if offered our national presidential disgrace.

Per complex, please include the entire publishing industry, its hallowed institutions, its reality-television sprees, the subdivision of the wellness industry, self-help, colonialism, appropriation.

Insofar as Ivanka Trump represents the New Woman--and Melania symbolizes the sexy, silent, available immigrant--Elena Ceausescu represented the national mother whose importance increased after 1973 when demand for labor rose. The mythology of the Ceausescus was rooted in their promise and power to make Romania Great Again. 

I feel the mindlessness of the homage industry when I see a stadium and recall the recipe for Ceausescu's media broadcasts relied on the idiocy of crowds, the presence of massed humans paying homage and waving flags and singing.

On Fridays, Romanians could watch a program titled "Copii canta patria si partidul," or "Children Singing the Homeland and Party."

Misogyny and nationalism often suckle from the same tired teat. What I mean to say is reformed Communist Party apparatchiks in Romania blamed Elena Ceausescu for everything Ceausescu did, including the personality cult.  

When I interviewed Corneliu Vadim Tudor (Ceausescu's former court poet) in the late 90's, he told me I should stop reading books & return to birth Romanian babies. He headed the Greater Romania Party, an anti-Semitic nationalist right-wing nightmare. Like all court poets, he lifted his finger to the wind and tacked wherever the extremist airs were shifting.

The dickator’s tool is always the dickator’s tool—and in my home state, he gets elected to Senate and stays very rich. Keep your eyes on the words men use to pedestal women right now. Dictators exist in every party where men still run the world. What they ask of female-indentifying bodies is the key to the castle.

Conscience, community, purity: Salesses, Hong, Galbraith, and Hamid

Speaking of fan-fic, pandemic, virtual schooling, balancing need for income with all the other attention the world asks of us, I’ve been reading many things I want to share but don’t have time to edit for submission. That is why I love this Five Things trope that Summer Brennan shared on her writer’s blog:

Back in the olden days of writing on the Internet, a group of writers I knew would often write brief essays or nonfiction blog posts structured around a list of “five things.” These “things” were usually observations, thoughts, confessions, referrals, or investigations. Each thing could be many paragraphs, or just one short sentence. I don’t know who originated the form. It might have been adapted from the fanfic trope of the same name, which goes back to the early 1980s, in which five scenes are presented from a story or relationship. It may also have come from LiveJournal blogs of the early 2000s, out of which emerged a popular type of entry called “five things make a post.” Or it may have developed separately, a kind of writerly convergent evolution, a carcinization of words, like how different animals keep independently evolving into the shape of crabs, over and over again in the dark depths of the seas. Creatures forged by the same environmental pressures. Regardless of where it came from, I found it to be a good way of getting thoughts down. There seems to be something about the number five that helps to give a satisfying structure, at least to the writer, if not to the reader. As I find my way back into regular online writing, I’ll be using it again here.

And I’m going to borrow it in the coming weeks… I’m going to leave lots of 5 things related to writing, poetry, intellectual “history,” nostalgia, longing, all the usual obsessions torqued to the key of pandemic-time. Or lack of time. A staggering lack of time even for night owls like me.

Starting with 5 things on conscience, community, and purity, everyone’s favorite afternoon topic, a space where I am working through thoughts and readings rather than constructing a theory or a position or following logic into some fantastic eschatology that mankind can use to justify the disappearance of Others.

1. The untenability of individual choice

“...the word conscience had gone out of ordinary use--it was not carried in newspapers, books, or in the schools, since its function had been taken over...by 'class feeling'. Kindness became something to be ashamed of..."
- Nazdheza Mandelstam's memoir, Hope Against Hope

Sometimes power looks like writing a poem that speaks into the space of damning others while ignoring how we live with the blood on our own hands. In Solzhenitsyn's Gulag, each prisoner confronts the choice of survival--how far will you go to preserve your own life? Often the choice is posed between losing one's life and losing one's conscience.

But we are all guilty. As women of the Confederacy were guilty, though they could not vote or exercise political power, we are all guilty of the crimes the US commits in the world. No nostalgia releases us from that. What I’m interested in, however, is the site where guilt and notions of purity converge.

2. Matt Salesses’ doppelganger

I had been trapped by language ever since I thought it could save me.
- Matthew Salesses, Disappear, Doppelganger, Disappear

I think we hear the confluence of purity-trangressions in the voices of many cross-national adoptions, in differing pitches, valences, and degrees. In this novel, we see the disinheritances of assimilationist. The narrator reflects on the early death of his parents which led him to be adopted. Communication remains the most difficult thing for a Korean adopted by American parents. The narrator mixes their ashes together and throws them off a hill, remembering how they tried to fit in with local Chinese. His parents had been sure they would start life again with a triumphant return to their homeland but they died instead. We were as restless as regret.

And: I wanted us to get free of what we wanted-- his parents wanting a return and yet being thrown off a hill in a way they wouldn't have wanted.

Salesses refers to Korean belief that sleeping with a fan can kill you, and how this shocked is American daughter. How our homeland beliefs can be seen as ignorance. It is the alienation—the part where I remember being mocked for putting a hat over my toddler’s ears—of how traditions (read superstitions) are rendered impure, or situate one outside the shared knowledge of magic America.

To feel present, I think, is to experience other people sharing your experience.

And the narrator’s daughter, saying “ I envy you for feeling nostalgic about yourself when you were never that great to begin with.” The link between envy and nostalgia. Or, more broadly:

How memory fools desire. You slowly forget what is gone but never stop feeling its absence.

In one of several interviews with Megan Galbraith (whose own The Guild of the Infant Savior: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book is coming out this summer, which I anticipate) , Salesses mentions the English language's structural role in -isms, how "English grammar prioritizes subject and action over object and description (read: observation) - the idea that writers shouldn't use adjectives or write a 'passive sentence'." He uses jokes, puns, wordplay to subvert these priorities. Borrowed from Murakami how the protagonist has a very particular view of reality that others find outrageous, and conflict comes from reconciling existence. 

The value we put on speaking up, on being heard and seen, can become a way of disapproving of the margins of the margins....The value of visibility depends on how we are visible and to whom and why.

This feels like a good argument against tokenism. The Iowa-style workshop functions best for poets who are writing into popular spaces, or accessible ones that rely on majority cultures and language. We believe that everything is political - that the poem is political – and yet our workshops assume that silence is respect and good sportsmanship rather than time wasted as people try to figure out the meaning of a word they could never have encountered. Beth Nyugen: "..a  system that relies on silencing and skewed power and endurance is a terrible system." Or just a capitalist one.

3. Traitor to what, per when

I needed to write this book because as a mongrelized person, I feel personally threatened when everybody around me is seeking purity and certainty. I wrote the book I needed. The same impulse has guided me in these twenty odd years of writing; the audience has always been secondary. So many of us become writers because we need for certain books to exist that no one else is writing; especially, those of us who have migrated or have been dislocated. If you need a book to exist badly enough, you’ll write it. People who talk about writing, but never do, are not literally dying for that book’s existence; if they did, they would have written it.

- Mohsin Hamid in an interview about “denuding purity” with Guernica

For Mohsin Hamid, fiction exists as an imperative which makes space for his own existence; it is a vehicle for "denuding false myths of national purity," a realm outside the ordinary tropes of migration, the false linearity of journeys, the subtexts of "fake purity." 

Is there such a thing as true purity? Isn't all purity a performance of a posture evoking something? 

Posture is a pose that suits the clothes. We select based on what we plan to feel, perform. Anything on Sunday might turn opera—baroque, roccoco—whatever it takes to appear suitable, depending on the day's construction of what it means to be authentically american or romanian or southern or southwestern or post-soviet etc.

To the extent that identity aims towards certainty - towards the security of belonging - it constructs itself in hope of the unattainable. Jiayong Fan's essay, "How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda", reveals how the use of one's voice, the effort to speak oneself true, is complicated by the uses of others. She describes a "Jiyang Fan" created by Chinese trolls and nationalists who rebuked her American citizenship, "even though her body flows with Chinese blood-- the blood of the descendants of the yellow Emperor.." Fan's crime is that of turning her back on her motherland - of rejecting her primary loyalty by leaving and seeking a new mother. 

The entire notion of a traitor is a crime based on impurity and infidelity. The traitor is one who lacks loyalty, maintains multiple allegiances, refuses to choose one side in the stadium or spectacle of nationalisms. But betrayal is also intimate: Fan's mother calls her a "traitor" at fifteen, after reading her diary, discovering that her betrayal involved repudiating her Mother's rage, her fury at living a second-hand life, her exhaustion. "It's reductive to compare a mother with a motherland" -  and yet the immigrant mother embodies the motherland, it's customs and ways, it's recipes, it's superstition, it's language, it's folklore, its history, it's great mystery, its promise of safety.

4. Cathy Park Hong’s minor feelings

"Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way whites see you...."
- Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings

Trauma in the Asian-American diaspora is related both to sites of rupture and sites of erasure. Reading Cathy Park Hong, thinking how Asianness is related to the Eastern desire to be seen as European, to be made Western. The tension between being colonized by Russia or by.... Asian Americans who have assimilated often forsake the connection to the actual nation or country that created them. Asian is default racial marker, per US needs, an americanist construction. This guilt I feel when reaching towards my Romanianness, or mentioning that Russia, too, is a colonizer of nations, and communism swallowed countries and languages. But the ignorance of dominant american ideologies relies on the privilege of using immigrants as agitprop, positioning them against the countries they fled, celebrating each individual as a triumph of assimilationist bootstrap rubrics. O america: where we cannot conceive a trauma that doesn't resemble our own.

Poet Prageeta Sharma said Americans have no expiration date on race the way they do for grief, and they expect you to get over it. Hong cites then in her discussion of the publishers' low tolerance for ethnic stories that aren't americanzied by trauma. For Hong, to grade looks on "a pain scale" automatically creates a market for pain which quickly evolves into an edifice, a hierarchy, a structure of ascendance. Competing over pain is the americanist in a country where we still cringe if others glimpse our scars. 

I keep thinking of the Pixies song and how they tame us, how they cookie us, how the cutting part is shaped as part of the baking process, and then ask us to sell the tool of our submission. To be a beautiful cookie on the empire’s plate.

5. The never-fumble pose of founding fathers

To exonerate Mao, much of the violence was blamed on his wife, Jiang Qing, and three other radicals, who came to be known as the Gang of Four.
- Barbara Demick, "China's Rebel Historians"

While I’m not certain about the totality of Demick’s review, I suspect that many dictatorships have something in common, namely the stake placed on the purity of the founding father, in this case, Mao Zedong, whose Cultural Revolution changed what patriarchy permitted to so many men, starting in 1966 and ending with Mao's death in 1976. About 1.5 million humans died during this event – and this is only negligible if one subscribes to a racism which believes Chinese lives are somehow smaller and less significant or real than other lives, somehow acculturated to this loss.

A tinny leitmotif of founding-father-worship exists across many nations, including the US, where teachers regularly use the words “Declaration of Independence” without irony to describe the founding of a state built from the lives of slaves and erasure of Native tribes and First Peoples. Perhaps one must Jefferson the halls. One must Che the men and blame the women. One must Mao the national landscape. One must put a bullet in Rosa Luxembourg to make space for Stalin. One must subscribe to the power articulated and institutionalized by cults of personality that center men.

Alternately, one may find an Elena Ceausescu to blame for the actions of the Nicolae Ceausescu—a fairly popular take in the Romanian emigre community, where women are easier to demolish, easier to indict for the lack of nurture, the heartache, the messy house, the cold soup, the failed coup.

In "The Art of Being Guilty in the Politics of Resistance: Depoliticizing Trangression”, Boris Buden notes that any firm opposition of us/them must be constructed, since it is hard to create distances under capitalism. Post-colonial world is saturated with diasporas – and post-colonial hybridity is read different ways, by liberals as positive multiculturalism and by others as a force of emancipatory subversion. There is no happy fusion because hybridization "prevents identity's attempt to constitute itself essentially" and be established without contradictions.

The goal is for "transgressive transculturation" to alter the binary nature of cultural power relations by melting the borders, for it is these borderlands between established identities which create the "lines of exclusion and subjugation". But "hybrid resistance must not become a secure space of retreat for those in revolt, an illusionary space of an original innocence". 

If you have a car you aren't innocent, I repeat to all friends who have buried the ghosts of what their ancestors did to others in distant lands—if you are alive, your past is haunted by what others have done in your name, which is to say your gas-guzzling lifestyle, your cheap revolutionary t-shirt (a product of capitalist branding), your national self-esteem and exceptionalist billboard.

One must reckon with this presence—in the present—on the page.

Or else find a wife to blame for the whole edifice….

Poetry and music: The dialogue

The sense of the line

Listening to my son practice piano has changed my sense of the poetic line. I think the ear and the mind can both discover poetry techniques from music composition. 

In a 1931 lecture, composer Arnold Schoenberg credited Mozart with teaching him "the art of unequal phrase lengths," or "the art of creating secondary ideas." From Bach, he learned "the art of inventing groups of notes such that they provide their own accompaniment" and "the art of creating the whole from a single kernel," namely the 12-tone revolution that develops from a single kernel that is both melody and accompaniment. 

Musical forms enacting structural return and improv

And once again it was June—mild, long, slowly fading evenings, evenings promising so much that no matter what you do with them, you always receive the impression of defeat, of wasted time. Nobody knows the best way to get through them. March straight ahead or maybe sit at home before a wide-open window so that the warm air, saturated in the sounds of summer, may permeate the room and mingle with books, ideas, metaphors, with our breath. No, but that’s not right either, it’s not possible. You can only mourn them, those unending evenings, mourn them when they pass, as the days grow shorter. They can’t be seized. Perhaps these long June evenings can only be perceived by way of regret, remembrance, nostalgia. They can’t be plumbed: you’d need to head for the park, one foot in front of the other, while sitting simultaneously on the terrace and listening to the voices of the city fall still as the last blackbirds sing … But that won’t do either. Birdsong has no form, no adagio, no allegro. In a detailed study of music, a certain philosopher once observed that “nightingales don’t listen to other nightingales sing,” only somewhat exalted people do. Hence you can only tear yourself away when you get bored (let’s be honest here). Whereas a musical composition, subject to the discipline of form, forestalls the moment of our boredom.

Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration

Music is described as a form enacting return—structural return that relies on reprise, repetition, patterns, memory of earlier notes and melodies. A piece often begins with a statement and then returns later as ‘recapitulation,’ but with a different texture—the texture of evoking what has come before it. The bridge, or transition, mediates—to quote Daniel Berenbeim—the transition determines not only itself but what comes after it. 

This repetition and accumulation are made possible by hearing—where poetic language amplifies the valences through connotation and poetic language. To repeat a word in a poem is to attract others, to collect the dust a word gathers across time and line. I am thinking of the way mom said my name….. and how this changes on the page across stanzas.

In “Singing With the Taxi Driver: From Bollywood to Babylon,” Jay Prosser describes using music as “ a channel for returning forgotten pasts” as he writes the memoir of his mother’s family. Producing the memoir replicates Berenbeim’s composition strategy as Prosser begins with mother’s statement and then recapitulates it, which can reconfigure her self-concept and mediate “what comes after.” Where the eye distinguishes and discerns, the ear blends and connects—but what makes music so hard to express in words is what makes it such a fantastic vehicle for emotional life.  

Black poet Michael S. Harper borrows "black jazz man's improvisational worldview" and assumption that what he creates in the particular could be an accident, an improv, a reaction. See his poem "Corrected Review." Harper takes the artist's responsibility as activating, listening for the shifts and energizing the line through improvisation, thus moving the music forward. The improvisational worldview centers contingency while also building upon prior lines and riffs—it upcycles fragments.

First music & memories of displacement: From Teju Cole to Transtromer

The satisfaction, the pleasure, the comfort one takes in these poems comes from the way they seem to have preëxisted us. Or perhaps, to put it another way, the magic lies in their ability to present aspects of our selves long buried under manners, culture, and language. The poems remember us and, if we are perfectly still, give us a chance to catch sight of ourselves.

Teju Cole, “Miracle Speech: The Poetry of Tomas Transtromer”

The ear has a 7 month advance on the eye in fetal development. The oceanic rolling of a womb is the first lull. The first music is always a memory of displacement. Music has a way of reinhabiting the lost homeland, the songs they carried: doinas.

As we begin in a womb, my thoughts on music and poetry return to an essay by Teju Cole—an essay which incubates, still, in my mind—where he describes his affinities, the lyres to which he returns, again and again, in fascination: Bach, Arvo Part and Tomas Transtromer.

In "C Major", Tomas Transtromer's narrator leaves his lover with the first snow:

Winter had come
while they were making love.

And the streets are altered by the joy: "All things around him on the way toward the note C."

In "Allegro", the narrator ends a "black day" by playing Haydn. And the sound changes the mind as the player shoves his hands into his "hadynpockets" and raises his "haydnflag" and language expands to hold the transformative power of music.

In notes to The Great Enigma, translator Robin Fulton approaches Transtromer's "lifelong interest in poems whose growth parallels musical development", and how this works as theme and variation in his poetry. Transtromer himself points to "The Journey's Formulae" as a "bagatelle, five lines perhaps.... terribly important." 

“Symmetry with deviation”

I see plants as slow-motion spontaneous gestures. They’re working according to a pattern, but they also have some spontaneity in how they grow. People who write about beauty often talk about symmetry being hardwired into our preferences. That’s not wrong, but symmetry by itself gets boring. What’s exciting, what’s pleasurable, is symmetry with deviation. And the fractal development of plants is endlessly attractive to me—the way they repeat themselves on different scales. It’s like music.

Rae Armantrout. Interview with Brian Reed, "The Art of Poetry, No. 106" Paris Review, Issue 231, Winter 2019

Jim Whiteside's fugues held loss together, or borrow the formal repetition of the fugue to recreate a sort of dialogue in motion. I thought about Mahler’s 5th Symphony played on a blade of grass when I reviewed Whiteside’s chapbook last year, and how he begins the book with a fugue.

In Latin (and in my homeland), the verb fuga means to run. Whiteside’s poems use running as a form of poetic motion, a movement that is both lyrical and essential to the questions of queer identity in many southern states.

Sometimes, the memory of him playing
runs backwards. The notes leave the room, return
to the end of his instrument, back to his body.

I also thought about Paul Celan's disruption of the fugue as a form, or rekindling of its nature in running to reconstruct the inability to run, the helplessness of Jews during the Shoah. The death fugue is one that cannot run. It begins, tries again, and falters. In Romania, it wasn’t even a fugue—it was titled as a “Tango”….

My forthcoming collection, Dor, uses the traditional music form of the doina to score dor for the voice, to render it as cross-temporal vocalization, an intimate localization.

The refrain and the lyric’s infinite “I”

Of feeling unattached to tense or personhood, Mark Strand says "it exists in an overriding infinity, out of time but responsive to time." I’m thinking of the word "Now" at the beginning of a line. And the lyric poem as one which "manifests musical properties, but one intended to be read or spoken, not sung." The tension in the lyric form links itself to musicality while holding it away, refusing it. 

Lorrie Moore suggested that "every marriage needs a refrain" when written. I think marriage is one of the most dangerous thickets to enter in a poem. A refrain can be ice or flame or countless spaces on the spectrum between two dissimilar states of matter, two separate objects. But maybe we aren't quite objects--maybe the poem exists to reveal how each of us is their own epiphany.

And passion is impossible to sustain as refrain. Someone has to die. Someone must Juliet the scene. On passion, I am mute. Only grief is as intense and consuming as sexual passion. Only grief can match the desperate pitch of that emotional climate. Since both love and loss occupied epics as well as elegies—since these forms are some of the earliest vessels for poetry—the role of the chorus and refrain tangles in questions of what our species needs from sound. The lullaby that soothes a child to sleep.

The planned obsolescence of American grief.

Planned obsolescence

Defining grief is an American industry. Each culture has its codes and conventions for mourning. American culture invokes a planned obsolescence when it comes to grief. We are expected to move on quickly and get back to work, back to shopping, back to life. But for the human, a definition of grief is nothing more than an external limit of what is expressed. 

Emily Rapp devotes a chapter of her memoirs to a grief list, a simple listing of things that "Grief is:", including "Sudden clatter of sunlight everywhere." Rapp observes there is no hierarchy of suffering in grief or love, no floor or no ceiling, since "loss is not quantifiable." There is no measure and therefore no appropriate form in which to box grief. Loss is imminent in its immanence. Loss has no teleology, no goal or end point. 

Complicated grief & camellias

When one's longing for the dead lasts longer than a calendar year, the therapist may consider a diagnosis of complicated grief. I learned this from a therapist.

For a few months, in the second year of my mother's death, I paid $120 for each hour spent in the Febreze-inflected office of a highly-recommended therapist. I paid this money in order to talk about dying, losing, the gray bird, the ring, the terrible fuschia of camellia petals swallowing the stairs. 

"This is a classic case of complicated grief," she announced.

When I asked her, quite wondrously, what uncomplicated grief looked like, the therapist replied: "Oh that's just the word we use for medical coding so we can prescribe medications and make sure the patient doesn't continue any habits of self-harm."

But what are habits of self-harm?

The therapist smiled and assured me I wasn't quite there yet, although "not being happy can be a form of self-harm."

This struck me as a very americanist perspective.

She said it wasn't American; it was science; it was the cutting-edge of new diagnoses in grief-adjacent maladaptations.

Still worried about the bird, I told the therapist that the pressure to perform happiness was like a bulldozer clear-cutting the soul and smothering the sun. I told her the cult of positivity was brutish, beastly, and overly focused on consumption. I told her what I believe--and what poets have helped me to inhabit--namely, that happiness is happenstance. It is a happening. It is a surprise rather than a goal or achievement. Chen-Chen said Sara Ahmed said that--and I believe them. 

The therapist repeated her assertion that being sad is "maladaptive" and "not a good example for your children, who need very much for their mother to be mature about the loss of a mother." 

I asked if her mother was living. She said yes but--

I opened my eyes very wide to increase the effect of rolling them. I expressed the un-science of opinion in that her words seemed intolerant, unfortunate, and bland. Maybe the pressure to fake happiness is a form of living death. It's no coincidence zombie dreams are on the rise. Faking happiness is not innocent or generous--it is not innocuous--those are merely the looping justifications parroted by insta-culture and self-help studs. 

[Of course—during all this—I kept worrying if I was upsetting my therapist, or if I was inconveniencing her by being unlikable and not responding to treatment or being compliant or….. Each time these thoughts wandered through my head, I remembered how much money had between transacted between us, how much money she received to listen, smile, and pick a sticker to paste on my face. Was my job to affirm her? Was my job to make her feel good about doing her job, even though the work she was doing felt harmful? Everything from the You Can Climb This Mountain posters to the coffee mug rimmed with images of laughing children felt so flimsy in that room, in that office of therapeutic amaze-balls.

And isn't it amazing--if you stop to think--how incredibly reckless and loathsome we can be in our performance of Happy? It's a status symbol in the emotion economy. The bleached smile as a means of keeping up with the Joneses.' And isn't it terrible how the performance of happiness cuts you off from yourself, and makes it more difficult to experience or recognize authentic happiness when it arrives?

I told my therapist that faking happiness was like faking an orgasm--after a while, you can't tell the real thing from the performance of it. After a while, you can't tell the feeling apart from its objectification as a product one delivers to others. 

My therapist's face stiffened into an uncomfortable smile. She insisted that faking orgasms was a sensible strategy when a woman didn't really feel like having sex. 

I stopped seeing this therapist because the poet in me knows what the human in me hopes, and that is: not having sex is the most sensible thing to do when you don't feel like having sex. 

And grieving is what you do for a long time after death.

*

I forgive myself—in advance in continuum—the failure to score progress marks in therapy.

I forgive myself, as I forgive my therapist her insularity, her narrow vision, her overwrought posters.

Anna Akhmatova once said to Joseph Brodsky, "You do not know just what you've been forgiven," and he treasured these words like a talisman.

I, too, know so little about the distance between the roof and the nimbus named Death.

Notes on erasures

(inspired by Jason Myer’s tweet)

Erasure | əˈrāSHər |: a form wherein a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or otherwise obscures a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new work from what remains

I’m posting the links to the craft essays, reviews, and articles without citing them because time is a limited resource, and also, because there is something formally interesting in setting writers’ thoughts on a form in conversation.

SOLMAZ SHARIF: “Erasure means obliteration.
The Latin root of obliteration (ob- against and lit(t)era letter) means the striking out of text.
Poetic erasure means the striking out of text.
Poetic erasure has yet to advance historically.
Historically, the striking out of text is the root of obliterating peoples.”

WILL CORDEIRO: “Kenneth Goldsmith argues that we don't need writers anymore, we need information processors (whether people or machines) who can navigate, rearrange, and index the overflowing cache of digital bits that already exists. For Goldsmith, there's a surfeit in the textual economy, with clickbait and automated systems generating hordes of new gobbledygook on auto-pilot. His solution is for us literati to switch focus from content to context. What matters isn't what a piece says but what we can say about it, he claims. The process of composition is more important than its results. Documents don't need to be glossed and interpreted; they need only to be interpolated and glazed.”

KATY DIDDEN: “I have worked on other erasures—in all cases, like this current project, they were collaborations with visual artists. I worked with my cousin, erasing texts about land in New York, from passages about the Algonquin tribe, to Whitman on the early Dutch presence in Brooklyn, to articles advocating for establishing tent cities on vacant land. These are also meant to reveal forgotten or violent histories in the settling of land and claiming of territory.”

NICK LANTZ: “I realized that the poem would itself be an interrogation, an almost abusive litany of questions. Though the poem of course reads against the backdrop our recent torture scandals and debates, its surreal turns free it of any particular time and place. The interrogator-protagonist who took shape ultimately interested me not for reasons of political ideology but for the way in which he exemplifies how even when we are privy to the most clandestine recesses of human behavior, we are still fundamentally shut out of true knowledge. No matter how many "questions" we ask, we cannot know everything.”

CECILY PARKS: “In an act of ultimate erasure, Dickinson asked that her poems be burned when she died. If you believe that Dickinson’s effacements were a noncompulsory, though not uncomplicated, choice, then the fact that her request was not granted—the poems were published—can seem like a further effacement, an excision made with a very sharp blade.”

SRIKANTH REDDY: “I then deleted language from the book, like a government censor blacking out words in a letter from an internal dissident.”

ISOBEL O’HARE: “I don't conceal the original words and allow them to sit beside the ones I've chosen to highlight, in greyed-out text.”

M. NOURBESE PHILIP: “Physically manipulating the text helped me in the process over the long run: the very fact of physically mutilating the text broke the spell that the completed text has on us. I use the word “mutilate” with great deliberation here since I was deeply aware at the time I worked on Zong! that the intent of the transatlantic slave trade was to mutilate—languages, cultures, people, communities and histories—in the effort of a great capitalist enterprise. And I would argue that erasure is intrinsic to colonial and imperial projects. It’s an erasure that continues up to the present.”

SRIKANTH REDDY: “Erasure is really, to me, a technique that orients one toward questions of word order. You have to find a sequence of words in the source text that works as a sentence of your own. So I’ve come to pay a lot more attention to grammatical construction, as a result of my work with erasure.”

TRAVIS MACDONALD: “The anarchist in me says: there are no rules or boundaries that should not be broken on principle. The author in me, admittedly, bristles at that notion and insists, intuitively, that there is no form without rules to define it. In any case, it is clear to me that if there are rules to this game, they are still being written. That being the case, I would say that the need for attribution lies entirely within the judgment of each erasurist’s individual moral code. In fact, the only rule I can think of worth following would be that the work should understand it’s own code/form and abide by it at all costs.”

DAVID DODD LEE: “….linearly, left to right, though on occasion I broke my own rules, and in such cases I might find a letter I needed to create a word in the line above the one I had just appropriated. This sometimes happened subconsciously. But I failed the erasure test. This became partly what Sky Booths is all about. I wanted so badly to create poems that would stand on their own I cheated.”

SRIKANTH REDDY: “I decided to close up the spaces between words in my erasure as a way of “covering my tracks.” I wanted to erasure the traces of my own erasure, I suppose. On one level, this was just a kind of Borgesian game—I wanted my reader to slowly discover that he or she was reading an erasure as they made their way through the book. But on another level I think there’s a politics behind those sorts of decisions.”

JANET HOLMES: “When my second book came out, appropriating portions of a diary my father wrote in the 1920s, an elder poet came up to me and dismissively said, “I suppose all we need to do now to write poems is to steal someone else’s writing.” It was an expression of the same kind of feeling: real poetry has no sources. That elder poet’s work is largely dependent upon classical mythology, but somehow that does not, in his mind, diminish it. Erasure work brings up questions like this and gives us a perspective from which to discuss them.”

ANGEL GARCIA: “Unlike erasing and black redaction, erasure using blank space allows us to create and converse with our own experiences. Around and inside those blank spaces we can reclaim and reappropriate. In the seemingly simple act of taking back the language of harm, from the language of harm, poets of color are able to make and insert new narra- tives of resilience. In this way, erasure too, becomes a form of code-switching with all its historical connotations. Erasure is language translated and retranslated. It makes meaning new. In this new language—code-switched (but not coded)—we are allowed to resist by expressing dissent. We are able to dismantle and deconstruct the official language. From the legacies of trauma, we can find power. Erasure is an assertion of that power. Erasure is recovery. Erasure is resistance. Erasure is resilience.”

JEANNIE VANASCO: “Why erase the works of other writers? The philosophical answer is that poets, as Wordsworth defines them, are “affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present.” The more practical answer: compared to writing, erasing feels easy.
But I am here to convince you: to erase is to write, style is the consequence of a writer’s omissions, and the writer is always plural. 
To erase is to leave something else behind.”

Erasures

“Reaching Guantamo” by Solmaz Sharif”

“The Dickinson Composites Series” by Jen Bervin

“Misdirection” by David Dodd Lee

“Declaration” by Tracy K. Smith

“Watershed” by Tracy K. Smith

“Archaeology, p. 28” by Vanessa Place

“Self-Portrait as the Bootblack in Daguerre’s Boulevard du Temple” by Robin Coste Lewis

“Lesson VIII: Map of North America” by Elizabeth Bradfield

“St. Mary’s Home for Unwed Mothers in Otahuhu, Auckland” by Chloe Honum

by Nicole Sealey

“Poem In Which Words Have Been Left Out” by Charles Jensen

“Lines on a skull” by Ravi Shankar

Nonce erasure of Wikipedia English page by Wikipedia

Videos + Lectures

Mary Ruefle “On Erasure: Visual and Textual”

Robin Coste Lewis “The Race Within Erasure”

Erasure Prompts + Exercises

1. “Erasure & Revision Exercise: Dear __________” from Emilia Phillips

2. “Erasure & Revision Exercise: Love Poem Lost” from Emilia Phillips

3. “Illuminated Erasure Exercise” from B.J. Best and C. Cobusta

Writers on the legacy of Walt Whitman

At some point, most American kids will read a poem by Walt Whitman. For some, especially those living in small, rural towns, reading Whitman will open new doors, enabling them to inhabit their queerness, to repudiate heteronormativity in this country’s history.

Countless poets will discover their line, their formal permission, in Whitman’s odes. In 1961, James Wright will note that his poetry is drawing closer to Walt Whitman's - "using parallelism not as device of repetition but as an occasion for development" of vision, images proliferating from the one. Which is to say the song-like preacher voice of Whitman is being challenged or reconceived as a different sort of development, something other than a sonic device.

But anyone who reads and loves Whitman will eventually grapple with his legacy, or wander into his correspondence (available online). What follows is a brief (ongoing) compendium of brilliant writers who approach this in their own words, from their own angles.

Abdel-Moneim Ramadan, “Walt Whitman and Me: Notes on a Poetic Education”

Alexandre Ferrere, “Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg: A Story of Influences”

Alicia Ostriker, “Loving America and the Problem of Walt Whitman” (PDF)

Allen Ginsburg, “Taking a Walk Through Leaves of Grass”

Andrew Lawson, Walt Whitman & the Class Struggle (PDF)

Ann Waldman, “The I Is Another”

Bethany Schneider, “Whitman’s Cane: Disability, Prosthesis, and Whitman’s Leaning Pose”

D. Graham Burnett, “Out From Behind This Mask”

D. H. Lawrence, “Whitman” chapter from Studies in Classical American Literature

David Baker, “Elegy and Eros: Configuring Grief”

David Eberly, “A Serpent In the Grass: Reading Walt Whitman and Frank O’Hara” (PDF)

David S. Wallace, “Why Should I Venerate?’ Walt Whitman at 200”

Don James McLaughlin, “Walt Whitman’s Gift”

CAConrad, “From Whitman to Walmart”

Eddie S. Glaude Jr., “The Magician’s Serpent: Race and the Tragedy of American Democracy” (PDF)

Eric Savoy, “Reading Gay America: Walt Whitman, Henry James, and the Politics of Reception” (PDF)

Galway Kinnell, “Strong is your hold: My Encounters with Walt Whitman” (PDF)

Gay Wilson Allen & Ed Folsom, ed. Walt Whitman & the World (PDF) excellent resource on how non-american author have read Whitman in their own words & essays

George B. Hutchinson, “Langston Hughes and the ‘Other’ Whitman” (PDF)

George Santayana, “Walt Whitman: A Dialogue”

Gregory Woods, “Still On My Lips: Walt Whitman in Britain” (PDF)

Jeremy Lybarger, “Walt Whitman’s Boys”

Jericho Brown, “If God Is Love”

Joann P. Krieg, A Whitman Chronology (PDF)

Jose Marti, “El Poeta Walt Whitman” (PDF in Spanish)

Jorge Luis Borges, “Walt Whitman, Poet of Democracy”

June Jordan, “For the Sake of People’s Poetry”

Kazim Ali, “Reflections on Walt Whitman at 200”

Kenneth M. Price, “Love, War, and Revision in Whitman’s Blue Book” (PDF)

Kenneth M. Price, “Whitman in Blackface”

Kenneth M. Price, “Edith Wharton and the Problem of Whitmanian Comradeship”

Kenneth M. Price, “Transatlantic Homoerotic Whitman”

Kenneth M. Price, “Xenophobia, Religious Intolerance, and Whitman's Storybook Democracy”

Kenneth M. Price, “Passing, Fluidity, and American Identities”

Khaled Mattawa, “Whitman’s Democratic Vistas”

Langston Hughes, “The Ceaseless Rings of Walt Whitman”

Lavelle Porter, “Should Walt Whitman Be #Cancelled?”

Lina Gregerson, “The Self in the Poem: Walt Whitman in Washington”

Marina Irena Ramalho de Sousa Santos, “Atlantic Poets: ‘Discovery’ As Metaphor & Ideology” (PDF)

Mark Doty, “Our Sly Progenitor: Revisiting Walt Whitman”

Mark Edmondson, “Walt Whitman’s Guide to a Thriving Democracy”

Mary Oliver, “My Friend, Walt Whitman” (PDF)

Matthew Zapruder, “Poem From Harm”

Michael Moon, “Rereading Whitman Under Pressure of AIDS: His Sex Radicalism and Ours” (PDF)

Nathanael O’Reilly, “Imagined America: Walt Whitman’s Nationalism in the First Edition of Leaves of Grass”

Nina Murray, “Walt Whitman in Russia: Three Love Affairs”

Peter O’Leary, “It Looks Quite Curious: Oppen’s Whitman”

Robert K. Martin, “Fetishizing America: David Hockney and Thom Gunn” (PDF)

Ronald Johnson, “Letters to Walt Whitman” (PDF)

Sahar Elmougy, “Towards A New Master Narrative of Trauma” (PDF)

Stanley Bill, “Translation As Talking to Oneself: Milosz Makes Whitman Speak” (PDF)

Susan Margaret Brown, “Pessoa and Whitman: Brothers in the Universe” (PDF)

Thom Gunn, “Forays Against the Republic” (PDF)

Tom Sleigh, “One Way of Caring: The Limits of Whitman’s Vision”

Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” (PDF)

Prompts inspired by Lewis Hyde's primer for forgetting

Lately, I have been obsessed with memory, absence, keepsakes, monuments, transgressive translation theories—and David Naimon’s remarkable podcast, Between the Covers. Enter Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past (Picador, 2019), a book structured as an episodic notebook, a collage form that juxtaposes “not just free association but free forgetting.”

Towards the end, Hyde explains that random leaping across time and nation-states, political mythologies and spiritual myths, is an intentional strategy that declines “to declare a train of thought.” He refuses to interpret the gaps, as “interpretation too readily declared dims the lights of things” while “holding off allows the elements to glow.”

And it is true that these elements glow, glow—grow to near glowering. Hyde is fine with this. He intends that the spaces between entries “foreground what happens with any book we read”—what happens with the act of reading, itself, wherein we absorb certain images while abandoning others. [Aside to Ionesco’s rhinoceros: I am tempted to argue for interesting extensions to current critique/ literary theory in americanist academic spaces but that would be a different thing, an alternate direction, a strip mall with lonelier parking lots and standardized, ticket-incurring gaps.]

What Hyde wants is for the book’s form to resemble the neurological experience of remembering, forgetting, self-mythologizing, and collating tiny scraps of monuments into selfhood, its scatterings:

The episodic form acknowledges the collaged afterlife of anything we read—or of any life, for that matter, for we we too are discontinuous creatures, scattered in time, the meaning of our existence something we can only imagine.

This book inspired me to write, to remember, to forget, to hold world history against the world and its historians, to wrestle the self-loathing of oppositional identities as I have experienced (and embodied) them in both the South and the Romanian emigre community. In the spirit of this love, complicity, horror, hope, and fascination, I leave you with a few notebooking avenues directly inspired by Hyde’s collage.

1.

Forgetting is the shears with which you cut away what you cannot use, doing it under the supreme discretion of memory….When we say that we consign something to oblivion, we suggest simultaneously that it is to be forgotten and yet also remembered.

- Soren Kierkegaard

For Lewis, there is a paradoxical nature to consigning a memory for forgetting. If the etymology of consigning comes from a Latin word meaning “to mark with a seal,” what does it mean to consign to forgetting? And my mind meandered into consignment stores, where one encounters the difference between consigning and giving away. Or what we keep so close that we cannot give away, choosing instead to re-sell it through a third party, imagining a value to the memory, something others might pay to keep.

Maybe this requires sketching, a notebook, a pen, your head formulating words to loosely describe shelf or a table or a rack in the Consignment Boutique of Forgetting—the objects on this shelf, the memories attached to them, marked for sale. Maybe this is the beginning of a short fiction about disputed value, and the voices in dispute, the varied valorizations of individual memories and experience. Maybe it’s a list poem. Maybe it’s an essay. Maybe it’s a notebook entry that kills time by underestimating it.

2.

Things we remember for their artifice. Lewis recollects two incidents from childhood: being seven, choosing the bun he thinks Mrs. Brown wants him to select (i.e. the moral bun) in a bakeshop and, later, being ten in a kitchen agreeing with his mom that she should get a haircut because he thinks that’s what she wants him to say. He wonders:

But why do I remember these events? Because in them I am performing someone else’s script. When I perform myself, that’s forgettable, and rightly so, the actions of the unself-conscious self leaving no necessary marks on memory.

O the injurious heart, how it collects and recollects the ways in which one’s behavior aimed to please or conform with social scripts. Recollect five such events from any point in your life. Write them down as lists, including details. Then pick one to poem with an eye to the strangest estrangement.

3.

In describing Slobodan Milosevic’s celebrations of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, Lewis explores the way this date, June 28th, was weaponized for ethnic war and genocide. To ignite a sense of grievance, Milosevic’s speech declaimed shattered national dignity and humiliation, the violation of motherland, the idea of treason, the counterpoint of courage and heroism in dying for an abstract cause. It was an evocation of lost causes. In Hyde’s words: “Thus does a lost cause’s causes apparent humiliation get turned on its head and become proof of the highest ideals.”

Psychiatrist Vamik Volkan coined the term “chosen trauma” to describe “an identity-forming ancestral calamity whose memory mixes actual history with passionate feeling and fantasized grieving and hope.” He spoke from the ground of his own loss:

“..the idea that [the Serbs] could change their minds and choose a kingdom on earth was not articulated until the awakening of nationalism in Europe in the nineteenth century.”

For the notebook: pick an identity group in which you are a participant or communicant (i.e. Catholic Church, Southerner, Russian, Ukranian, Uighur, academic, etc.) and take notes on the potential events or loci of chosen trauma, the words used as descriptors, the lexicon of humiliation, the allusion to eschatological fulfillment or what might bring change). Alternately, write a brief sketch of a Civil War reenactment from the point of view of a Confederate-identifying participant. Research news articles and features reports for particular lexicons, note any references to transcendent experience and/or descriptions of rootedness, of feeling part of something bigger. Consider writing a fictional interview with this participant.

4.

In 1882, Ernest Renan published his paper, “What Is A Nation?”. It warned against confusing nationality and ethnicity—since this confusion could lead to irresolvable military conflict. On Renan’s view, “ethnographic politics” was destabilized by the metaphysical nature of its claims, and how those claims evolved over time, how those claims depended on the exclusion of others in the name of ethnic purity. Renan believed it was better to forget ethnic claims and rigid ethnic identities which could no exist in multilingual spaces: “…the essence of a nation is that all its individuals have many things in common, and also that everyone has forgotten many things.”

Hyde argues that “all group identity, all abstract knowing, has such origins", and even “families know themselves by their recollection and elision..” For your notebook, sketch what recollections constitute your family identity. Start nuclear and then move to include extended family. Climb as high in the family tree as you wish. Or, just circle the trunk. Then sketch the elisions, the things no one discusses, the forgetting which prevents conflict—who is asked to sacrifice most to maintain these elisions? Who is the beneficiary? Play with the words collision, collusion, and elision.

5.

Mythological memory applies the logic of myth to the unstable narratives of the personal or public. It offers an easy way of divining meaning from inexplicable human tangles. I think of Orpheus, how he calls the poet—to do a Brodsky or Rilke and change Orpheus’ myth in a way that encapsulates personal fears of rejection or loss. Or Oscar Wilde’s Salome as the spurned lover, seeking the kiss of John the Baptist, the conquest.

“It’s an American ending, a Lone Star ending with the kind of individualist forgetting that cannot possibly scale. We get private romance but no model of how to study the nation to forget the nation.”

Thus does Hyde frame “Forget the Alamo!”, the final line of John Sayles’ movie Lone Star, as spoken by the Chicanx history teacher, Pilar (in contrast to “Remember the Alamo!" that bit of memorabilia on the postcards and t-shirts of American boyhoods). A diptych perhaps, a two-sided image of remembering and forgetting on the same page.

6.

“Man does not die in a ditch like a dog—but at home in history,” wrote Boris Pasternak. Hyde elucidates “state-transition amnesia,” the struggle of the newly-bereaved. It could be the loss of a pet or the loss of a homeland. How does the end of Yugoslavia define what it means to be born as a Yugoslavian? What stories fill the narrative gap?

I keep thinking of how accommodating one’s self to loss requires forgetting, burying the past, forgetting my mother’s voice so that other humans can feel less haunted—and how this amounts to a betrayal.

Forgetting is the only form of forgiveness; it’s the only vengeance and the only punishment too. Because if my counterparts see that I’m still thinking about them, in some ways I become their servant, and if I forget them I don’t. I think that forgiveness and venegeance are two words for the same substance, which is oblivion.

- Jorge Luis Borges in the last interview before his death, when asked if he had forgiven the Peronists

Write a list poem or outline a curriculum for an ars oblivionis, or what Hyde calls “an art for loosening the hand of collective thought.” I say list but I also mean an incantation, a curse, an injunction, a recipe, an instructional, a collect, a liturgy…..

Although Hyde doesn’t touch on this, I kept thinking of haunted houses as both signifiers and narrative modes in pop culture and mythology. The entertainment of haunting, it’s consumption as a form of estrangement during Halloween. Some of us want to be haunted by what has been lost. Some of us settle for hauntedness generated as play, as distance rather than proximity.

7.

What gaps feel like open wounds? What faces exist in the gaps? What books from childhood carried a sense of something left undone that might be mistaken for nostalgia? How does duty taste when you are alone in a room saturated by its enormous disquietude?

In this same key, there is Eugenia Ginzburg writing from inside Soviet prison, notes the fears and worries and internalized trauma of family culture; no family culture leaves its children unmarked. What did yours do that makes it hard to trust the world to believe it's kindness to accept its kisses? How did school culture support or subvert family culture? Think about the tribalism of school, the scars, the risk of speaking out against friends who are bullying others. The sadism of unthinking, regurgitative nostalgia, a portrait of a politician or history teacher.

8.

Repetition as a formal mechanism for re-membering. A mode for piecing back together, gathering as verb form of togethering, or calling as summons for memory—calling my mama’s name again and again in the hopes of retrieving her scent, the brisk kindling of her laughter lighting the hallway, the illuminated manuscript of her voice, her mouth, her flesh.

9.

On the syntax of amnesia—the unreliable narrator repeating the memory back—and how vulnerable we are to being brainwashed. To being fooled. To having a memory of delight transformed by the retrospective gaze of others.

Thinking about how this plays out in national myths or even college sports fanning—to forget or step back from these myths is seen as treason. To question these myths is to be “a bad sport” at best. To stare at the worship of football coaches critically is to see Tommy Tuberville rising to power in Alabama, riding the coattails and power of that inviolable mythos.

How does this syntax play out in commercial events and valorizations? Our lives are buyable. We shop for churches. The market will provide newer and better forms. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to more suspense; to melodrama. I think there is so much to write in this ephemera, and I feel like Walter Benjamin’s Arcade Projects attempted to give form to the juxtapositions of public ennui and distraction during times of social crisis. One could arcade this pandemic, this neo-fascist moment, this pressure to continue “working” and normalize a daily mass-death from a virus so that later experts can say “it was inevitable.” (To note how many experts say things are inevitable is to note, perhaps, that experts have conflicts of interest between saving lives and sustaining capitalist systems.)

10.

Psychologist Pierre Janet’s study of dissociative amnesia led him to propose that we think of memory not as a fixed record of the past but as a fluid event, an ongoingness: “Memory …. is an action; essentially, it is the action of telling a story.” One of Janet’s patient could not incorporate the shock of her mother’s death into the rest of her personal life-story. She could not make it part of a living narrative. For Janet, this patient could not really “be said to have a memory…it is only for convenience that we speak of it as a traumatic memory,” since the act of re-membering was absent.

Tomas Transtromer’s poem, “About History” (translated by Alice Fulton):

Every problem cries in its own language.
Go like a bloodhound to where the truth has trampled.

And, from my notebook: "Poetry is the language the dead use to help us forget they are dead," said Valzhnya Mort (whose surname means death in multiple Latin languages.)

[Addendum]

And so I end with the words of others, the ways in which they read Hyde’s collage, the virtual community of readers and thinkers in the world who encounter a book with the urge to speak of it to paper…

Hyde’s “associative collage” of fragmentary stories, meditations and recollections turns on this paradoxical relation between memory and forgetting. Perhaps the most intriguing and original argument of the book is that forgetting is an essential condition for imaginative as well as political freedom. Imaginative freedom has been Hyde’s abiding theme since the publication of his now classic 1983 study The Gift, which made the case for the infinite generosity of a “gift economy” of art against the pinched rivalries of a market economy. [Josh Cohen’s review]

Hyde describes A Primer for Forgetting as “a thought experiment seeking out places where forgetting is more useful than memory,” so the deployment of this hijacked historical memory might seem curious, as it militates against Hyde’s thesis. But Hyde is always an honest broker of ideas. An open-hearted interdisciplinarian who traces arguments across anthropology, history, poetry, and other fields… [Sebastian Stockman’s review]

Devin Gael Kelly's "walking poem"

Here I am fondling the particular mode of a poem 
that feels like a walking poem, feeling Devin
Gael Kelly's "Self Care in the Land Of A Thousand 
Horses", wherein what holds us or creates 
stillness is pace, gait, the pitch of the step-breath, 
precise pauses signaled by syntax so that  
I may be walking and thinking about onions
until fire hydrants remind me of lace – of that slip 
I must have left or else lost in the year I was losing 
everything, or else using a dash to press 
my face against the glass of a bakery 
where two women argue over cupcakes, 
using their hands, raising their hands to 
push away words, and how hands always 
fall into birds when one cannot hear 
them, when this one woman catches a bird 
in the air & kisses the less expressive 
lips & everything stops for this moment's
raw reconciliation, the scent of later sex
& cupcakes—though I am still moving.
I am haunted by break-ups, faking, lost
cats & earthquakes who keep secrets
if only to surprise or deflate us
like this thing in my ex said about forgetting, 
or how I'd already done it, before the 
chicken and the egg scenario nothing 
came first, he said he couldn't imagine 
me ever having children & this is when 
I knew his imagination was suffering 
or gutted by performance anxiety & 
I can imagine him now taking off shoes 
in a room with big windows and rising 
to greet a woman who can't imagine him 
not imagining her in stilettos. And 
I am using these sharp shoes to bring you 
back to the street, back to the surface 
of asphalt where we are walking and 
thinking about one thousand horses.

Addendum: I think the ampersand makes it move faster?

On "Every Atom" by Erin Coughlin Hollowell

1. The loss of memory in poetic subjects

There are many ways to lose a mother. Alzheimer’s is a particularly difficult journey of loss, a grief that begins before the death of the body—a loss that demands reconciliatory gestures from the poet, as James Meetze’s Phantom Hour has demonstrated.

Erin Coughlin Hollowell’s Every Atom begins in relation to those ghosts, or to the empty, unremembered spaces. Dan Branch notes that Hollowell’s mom’s mental capacities were declining as Hollowell wrote this book. And she did not write it from a distance—instead, Hollowell gave up a writer’s residency in Washington State to assist her father in caring for her mother. The book is dedicated: “In memory of my parents, Leonard James Coughlin and Mary Louise Coughlin".”

Although the poems place the mother in landscape, or navigate her absence by landscape metaphors, the tone often wanders into the ethereal, which is to say that ethereality might be a coping mechanism in poetry: how language of presence is displaced by language of absence.

Most interesting to me was the role played by metaphor, imperatives, and conditionals across the breath of this collection.

From the outset, we know the narrator is trying to relate to ghosts, or finding a space for them in ordinary life. See “The last scud of day”:

I brush away the hours
like the smear skids of eraser
left over from a project that went
from unwell to undone. Words
scrawled over the ghosts of others
and then rubbed away again.

We suspect the work of finding meaning requires a relation to hieroglyphs, to reading the signs in surrounding objects, as in "Night of the few, large stars," which ends with the poet trying to make sense of constellations:

Three stars:
a king, a shadow queen,
a child who is lost on purpose.

It is images and metaphors—rather than people, loved ones, stories—that provide mooring in these poems. And Hollowell’s images are powerful; they are hinges for the poem, spaces at the threshold of something opening or closing. I held my breath midway through "The palpable in its place and the impalpable in its place" when I came across this image:

The window blank with light.

And because I find complicity more compelling than innocence, I valued the way the poet unpacks (or carries) guilt in these poems. It is a complicated guilt—a human one. "Waits by the hole in the frozen surface" begins with waiting for a memory, evoking the absence of both memory by implying a sort of loose complicity in the narrator's inability to remember. O reader, you must remember this book is about a mother losing her memory and dying—but we are also standing on a frozen lake, somehow, waiting for something to explain the hole in the ice:

I remember kneeling before my brother's coffin
but of my mother's grief there is a hole, as if

I've taken scissors and neatly cut her from the day.

Hollowell returns to this metaphor, to this hole in the ice of the lake often, as in "Life whenever moving":

Imagine your mother
was a turtle. Her great
three-chambered heart

beating between two
hardnesses. Her legacy
a sandy hole or a shade

on a riverbank. And you,
left in a leather purse
of an egg.

This poem moves through imperatives to imagine--to imagine the mother as turtle, oyster, cicada, to fill in the whole with an image---and then to relate to it, to find meaning about the daughter in relation to that image. And I keep thinking how the imperative can, in poetry, serve as a vehicle for incantation, a spell the poet wants in order to inhabit the raiment of liminal space.

3. The poetry of titles

So many questions lately in the poetry community about titling poems—and how titles work best in a collection— Hollowell’s titling is haunting; the titles can be read on their own, as a poetic mode. Titling does the work of conveying tone in this book. Notice how she does this rare thing, namely, enjambing the titles, allowing them to stretch across the page and then break, as in:

“For the fourth-month moon showers have, 
and the mica on the side of the rock has”

which begins with a powerful image, and it’s relation to imperative:

shine, glisten like that sleek lick
of damp left behind by a snail. 

These titles are conversant with the poems, rather than nominative—they do not name what will happen so much as present the conditions under something could occur. They describe a mode rather than a theme.

4. Hollowell’s conditional mode

Also: this sense in which the metaphors, themselves, are imperatives for the poet.

And how close these metaphor-imperatives come to the conditional form, or how the conditional, itself, is implied in them—though also evoked directly, as in “Perpetual payment,” which begins:

If you could unlock the box
within the box within the fist
of meat that beats to its mechanized
meter, you would find my father.

The poem progresses through six quatrains to end in a reversal, a resistance to both the father’s explanations and, in a sense, the stories themselves:

My father’s stories built the house
we set on fire and fled from. My father’s

stories built a plucky woman on a train
that none of us have ever met. Somewhere
the bear is still bleeding. Somewhere
that mother is still riding the train.

Maybe stories are not helpful. Certainly metaphors and conditionals seem like more significant terrain for this particular grief, this attempt to live with a loss. Rather than construct a new mythology to assuage grief, Hollowell remains restless, eyeing the hole In the ice, the moon, every atom—eying them loosely, tenuously, as possibilities rather than explanations.

I love this. I could say more—o I could burn the day with details—instead I rest in this interesting approach to what is not quite elegy, or what edges lament without settling for the narrative that allows lament to grow its iconographies. What if mom was an oyster? Who would her daughter be, then?