Krzhizhanovsky's "physiological sketches" of Moscow.

1

As chronology would have it, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky remained in Moscow during World War II. It was a bleak time on the ground. While fellow Russians navigated the scarcity and destruction of war, Krzhizhanovsky attempted to document the city in a series of what he called “physiological sketches” reminiscent of the forms employed by Belinsky and Turgenev in the 1840s. He planned to collect the sketches in a book titled Wounded Moscow, but the war’s developments snuffed out this plan as he was sent on various assignments to cover the battles. By the time K. was ready to publish the book, the publishers had adjusted themselves to the needs of the year, 1949, in which the only stories told about the war were to be heroic.

In one of these “physiological sketches,” Krzhizhanovsky introduces Moscow’s windows as characters, residents of the city. “Let the street lead on,” he writes, “And let the window speak.” The sketch becomes an ode to fenestrology, noting that the city’s windows were the first to be “on the lookout for war.” Tailors were brought to dress the windows. “Since the day of the war's arrival, all manner of what if’s have sprinkled upon us out of the clear blue sky. Chiromancy has been with us since once upon a time, since the ancient Greeks— and let it stay, if only as pure supposition, and fenestrology too.” Cluelessly gathering sun, the geraniums and butter cups don’t know that war is happening: “They bloom, as though nothing were wrong.” Nor do they know that they are consigned to a particular place and time, “merely annuals,” blessed to lack knowledge of duration.



2

No one refers to themselves as a chiromantic, or a fan of chiromancy. At least not in my recent readings, where people "who have fifty cars" strike Edward Said as incomprehensible. Addressing two interlocuters in conversation, Said tells them that "identity is a set of currents, flowing currents, rather than a fixed place or a stable set of objects," as mentioned in his memoir.



3

In a different sketch, Krzhizhanovsky recounts a series of conversations involving the girls who have gone to fetch water. There is a store, dark as in a painting by the Old Dutch Masters with gestures frozen in various stages of light, illuminated only an oil lamp. It is noted that water is present but not “light.” It is noted that the store is closed. A customer demands to know why the clerk is reading by the light if there is no light. A few faces later, a customer asks the darkness if there is water. And the darkness replies that there is. And the lamp is burned out by "the kerosene."



Egon Schiele, Stylized Flowers in Front of a Decorative Background (1908)

4

In conversation with Daniel Barenboim, Edward Said said:

from Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, edited by Ara Guzelimian

To live with the history that we are part of, one must begin somewhere close to the ground. From where I type, this ground colder than it has been in Birmingham, Alabama since temperature records for coldness were last broken. Colder than ever, they say, as if time can be reconsidered by backshadowing.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky addressed the sketch titled "The July Baby" to the babies born during the July bombs and epidemics— “Incomprehension is your chance at life. Take it. But understanding is your debt.”

Of epistles.

1

Because the number gives me a place to begin— it pronounces something that is not zero. And Cynthia Ozick’s “Voices from the Dead Letter Office” gives me the writer, herself, stalking Lady Caroline Lamb, the novelist whose obsession with Lord Byron elevated the epistle into novel fan-tasms.

Inspired by Lamb, Ozick developed a similar thing for Sidney Morgenbesser, a philosophy professor, “an original,” an electrical storm of intellect “dazzingly endowed,” as Ozick puts it, leaving her “maddened by a hero of imagination, a powerful sprite who could unravel the skeins of logic that braid human cognition.” Building on this poetic logic, she opens her hand: “And so, magnetized and wanting to mystify, I put on a disguise and began my chase: I wrote letters.” Not just letters, but that particular genre known to literary history as the love letter, that species “of enthrallment, of lovesickness” —- Ozick addressed them to the philosopher in his university office, signing them all in “passionately counterfeit handwriting” as “Lady Caroline Lamb.” Thus does the writer forge the sword of her fiction. Let it be noted that writing has never been an art for the feint of heart.

*

Letters are central to fiction, of course, and Ozick brings “the mute and final revelation of Melville’s Bartleby: his origin in the Dead Letter Office,” to bear on the history of the happenstance, as well as the figurations of “horse-faced” ugliness that Henry James observed in George Eliot when redeeming her looks by referencing her spirit in a letter to his father. “To begin with she is magnificently ugly—deliciously hideous,” James writes, before launching into an inventory of warped pieces: “her low forehead”; “dull grey eye”; “a vast pendulous nose”; “a huge mouth, full of uneven teeth”; “a chin”; a “jawbone.” In sum, a “vast ugliness” to which the author admits the usual interior beauty.

Here is where James shifts course: “Yes, behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking . . . an admirable physiognomy—a delightful expression, a voice soft and rich as that of a counseling angel—a mingled sagacity & sweetness—a broad hint of a great underlying world of reserve, knowledge, pride and power.”

Literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking, James confesses, sheepishly pacing the page of a brewing fiction. Ozick’s essay laments the end of the letter, and I can’t agree entirely with the despair, since the the decline of Hallmark’s “ready-made card—that handy surrogate for intimacy” has been a relief, and emails perhaps have stepped into the space of snail mail, albeit differently.

*

The most striking excerpts quoted by Ozick are surely her own—- in the portrait she sketches of a former friend named “O” who sounds wonderfully inventive, or well-invented, or else the well-dressed ghost of pseudo George Steiner . . .


2

“If the writing itself is the event then why can’t I figure it out by writing, P asked, by this point agitated,” Laynie Brown writes in “Periodic Companions”.

“So I tell her, you’ve touched the white space,” Brown writes. You have tarried with the nothing and found the space lacking. “We still live within pages and persons and within our own limited consciousness,” and there is no curative lens or fixative contra the irresolution of images that prefer to remain unsettled; or the amnesias and aporias hidden behind the nouns, shadow or bloom, depending.

Paula Rego, The Artist in Her Studio (1993)

So I end with two more epistles excerpted by Ozick and a piece of poem copied into my own notebook in this freezing January that promises to be a beginning.

April is an unkind month, but perhaps May nowadays is still unkinder: I always find the first burst of spring, and the last glory of autumn, the two moments most troubling to my equilibrium and the most reviving of memories one must subdue. . . . One cannot help coming to the surface at times with a realization of how intense life can be—or how it was—or how it might have been. . . . But I do always feel convinced that every moment matters, and that one is always following a curve either up or down . . . and that the goal is something which cannot be measured at all in terms of “happiness”—whatever “the peace that passeth understanding” is, it is nothing like “happiness,” which will fade into invisibility beside it, so that happiness or unhappiness does not matter.

—- T. S. Eliot to Emily Hale, whom Ozick describes as “(a steady correspondent in a long-standing relationship that she mistakenly believed would culminate in marriage)”, on the date of April 12, 1932

*

What I wish to put on record now is my new invention. . . . My idea is this: Make a scrap book with leaves veneered or coated with gum-stickum of some kind; wet the page with sponge, brush, rag, or tongue, and dab on your scraps like postage stamps. . . . The name of this thing is “Mark Twain’s Self-Pasting Scrap Book.”

— Mark Twain to his brother Orion Clemens, August 11, 1872


*

You are my love after so many years,
My dizziness before so much waiting, 
That nothing can ice-over, obsolesce, 
Not even what waits for our death,
Not even what is alien to us
In my eclipses, in my returns.

— René Char, “To ***”


"I want nothing of"


white hope
hot lead
a banana bandana and your
what the heap said to the eagle
and then the news
I want nothing of

— Frank O’Hara, “Poem”


First it was everything and then it was nothing, though it was the same language we were using.

— Renee Gladman, “Five Things”

“Beyond the intensification of many forms of waged work, the burdens of unwaged domestic and caring work have also increased, both because of the pressures of neoliberal restructuring along with the double day, and because of the increasingly dominant model of intensive parenting presented as what is required to develop the communicative, cognitive, and creative capacities increasingly necessary for reproducing, let alone elevating, the class status of a new generation of workers. Given all the ways that the institution of the family—on which the privatization of reproductive labor has been predicated and sustained— is so clearly not up to the task of assuming so much of the responsibilities for the care of children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled, the refusal of the present organization of reproductive labor may have much to offer contemporary feminism.”

— Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work (bolding is mine)



“Write a letter with nothing but regrets.” —- My notebook says Riley Hanick said this.

Another way of phrasing things might be accretive, namely:

the intensification of many forms of the burdens of caring for the waged work of neoliberal restructuring;
because of the intensive parenting involved in grooming the class status of the new generation
assuming the institution of the family is present in the privatization of the refusal to develop a refusal to develop



Avoid “me” and “my” when you can. In memoir, don’t say, “I remember that in my childhood nothing happened to me.” Say, "In childhood nothing happened."

— Donald Hall


Linda Gregg says her student’s journals “fill up with lovely things like, ‘the mirror with nothing reflected in it.’”

According to my journal, it is cold, the heater is broken, there is no repair to be had, and Dan Beachy-Quick believes a poem “reaches through the little hole in the eye and puts the thing in mind, that realm in which perception and forgetting are simultaneous, where every presence coincides with a corresponding absence, where experience, as in an old iconic painting, holds aside the breast of its garment to reveal not a burning heart, but a nothing that pulses and is on fire."


Nothing is ever resolved, not to a sufficient
degree of accuracy. Not speed or location. Not 
the numinous image of the dead soul ascending the stair.

— Jaswinder Bolina, "You'll See a Sailboat"

But names matter. “Gaustine meant nothing to local people, so they changed his name to Gosho, Downtown Gosho,” according to Grigori Gospodinov.

Not speed or location but something closer to the hue of motion, that smear humans become when chasing a toddler across the sidewalk. You’ll miss the choo-choo! Come back! Screaming like fire-engine red and firmly believing in this strategy, since the only sound that mattered to him was the Choo-Choo and any neighboring words were there to scaffold the Choo-thing, to build context for screaming the train cartoon sound in the swarming vicinity of suited professionals that liked to eat at the bistro near that horrible intersection. My face on his shoulder, picking him up, his finger poking into my ear, beating out a rhythm, ‘choo-choo’ to accompany my steps.



The brown flecks in my mother’s eyes
became my own, my son’s, through adolescence.
The body knows, at most, an octave
of desire that meets the air sometimes
for nothing. Just thinking of your hands
I can go wet, or dreaming, come
in my sleep, and wake to a day
in which all men are liars, wearing clothes.

— Deborah Digges, “To Science”



I could sink to anything. 
I think I could kill.
I think I have killed
for the shape, the sheer 
body of this poem. 
Look how beautiful, 
feel how impossible,
this slender, limned thing 
weighing next to nothing, 
saying next to nothing. 
Saying everything. 
Everything.

— Paul Hostovsky, “Love Poem”



Light clarity avocado salad in the morning
after all the terrible things I do how amazing it is
to find forgiveness and love, not even forgiveness
since what is done is done and forgiveness isn't love
and love is love nothing can ever go wrong
though things can get irritating boring and dispensable
(in the imagination) but not really for love
though a block away you feel distant the mere presence
changes everything like a chemical dropped on a paper
and all thoughts disappear in a strange quiet excitement
I am sure of nothing but this, intensified by breathing

— Frank O’Hara, “Poem” (from 1959)

From "decoherence".

A manuscript that began during pandemic, in dialogue with a text by another writer, a sort of collage that includes words from each section of his book in all caps, building those words into a decoherent attempt at speech that started while I was reading and eating a peach.

Sending love to all the writing that will remain in drawers, and all the writers who believe their words only deserve to exist in a context so muted and plastered in darkness.

Vasily Vereshchagin, The Apotheosis of War (1871)

My Stygian night problem.

Maurice Blanchot wrote somewhere that Nietzsche doesn’t content himself with calling up the Stygian night.

The desire for this thing called a Stygian night distracts me from my reading. Now that the thing has been named, I want the Stygian night so I can know what Niestzsche is forsaking.

Max Ernst. The Marriage of Heaven and Earth (1962)

Why do optical, light-related metaphors predominate when we speak of existence?

"Why this imperialism of light?" Maurice Blanchot asks as he prepares to ignore mythology, science, physics, and human history to focus on the phenomenology of light.

"Light illuminates – this means that light hides itself: this is its malicious trait."

Light discloses things and presents itself as an immediate presence "without disclosing what makes it manifest," in Blanchot’s words.

On a side note—-which may or may not be related, Blanchot does not write particularly well about Bataille. He doesn’t ‘shed light’, so to speak, on Bataille’s thinking. One senses this is because he is writing for him rather than to him; he admires him, they are friends – and it is odd how this turns intimacy into a sort of game that fumbles around not quite getting to a point. Never sharpening the words enough to point anywhere.

"On the RIGHT side of the barricades": Gershom Scholem.

"If the rise of Nazism brought Benjamin to recall the tradition of the oppressed, it moved Scholem toward adopting the very perspective that Benjamin warned against: he accommodated the Jewish perception of time to the triumphal narrative of national redemption," wrote Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin in a 2013 paper titled "'On the Right Side of the Barricades': Walter Benjamin, Scholem, and Zionism” (published in Comparative Literature 65:3. pp. 363-381).  

Raz-Krakotzkin contrasts the diverging perspectives of the two friends who shared a disdain for Enlightenment notions of progress, while noting that Benjamin rejected modern ideals of progress in a way that followed "the traditional Jewish rejection of the Christian perception of grace that was developed in response to the Christian notion of 'progress' from an 'old' to a 'new' testament."

In the 1920's and early 1930's, Scholem was an active member of Brit-Shalom, an organization that viewed "bi-nationalism" as an alternative to the nationalist chauvinism of the right-wing "Sabbatianists." at the time, but they rejected the colonial power for Zionism, and focused on the creation of a buy national state that based community on “the recognition of national and civic equality between Jews and Arabs.” 

When Brit-Shalom was founded, Jews made up 15% of the population in Palestine. By then, nationalism was seen as a means of encouraging Jewish immigration to continue without making the local Palestinians feel defensive. Even so, the national distinction of Jews v. Arabs was central to the idea of the binational state, and to binational thinking in general. Ammon cause this quote, a description of a colonial reality in which Jewish superiority is asserted and exercise, and countless weighs over different groups of the Palestinian people. “As such, it remains a novel claim.

And the mirrors are many, paraphrase Mahmoud Darwish —-

Victor Brauner, Civilizing consciousness, 1961

*

In a 1926 letter to Franz Rosenzweig, Scholem said of Palestine:

Fast forward to 1931, when Scholem published an article (see (“Bemai Ka’Mipalgi” 57–59) responding to attacks against Brit-Shalom group and its attitudes:

This wording—- “And if we do not win once again, and the fire of revolution consumes us, at least we will be among those standing on the right side of the barricades.”—- speaks loudly at present. Scholem would surely find himself located on the extremes of the rising political Right that have consecrated ethno-state nationalism and institutionalized genocide both technologically and politically in a way that the 20th century could never have imagined.

There is no question that Israel is a state bent on the complete annihilation of Palestinians—- for every aspect of Palestinian existence is threatening to the Israeli state, everything. No exceptions can be found.

But by the late 1930s, Scholem had become a vociferous defender of political Zionism and its nationalist aspirations. He and his friend Walter Benjamin argue about this, as Benjamin rejected the idea of progress, cementing his rejection in the Jewish perspective that refused the Christian doctrine of grace, which had redeemed the old testament through the new one. The secularism of Zionism destroyed what was unique about Judaism— and built a teleology into it that did not exist. Hebrew's secular drive collapses “the sacred into the profane – the secularization of the sacred is the sacralization of the secular,” as Raz-Krakotzkin has written. Israel’s current existence is based on the view that “the state is the realization of the expectations and longings of generations.” This is a separatist and nationalist position, and the cost is modeled on the costs of European nationalism, and what power does to the mind went enacting Carl Schmitt‘s political theology. Walter Benjamin rejected Schmitt,  and used Schmitt against himself, rejecting the assumption of historical immanence that sucks Messianic time into the idea of progress. The catch is that Orientalism enables this progressive reading to set Israel apart as western.

Walter Benjamin's "On the Concept of History" was written in 1940 from his exile in occupied France. His ongoing dialogue with Gershom Scholem about Judaism hovers in the background, alongside the rising Nazism. Soberly, Benjamin reminds us that "whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate”:

Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

Later in the same piece, Benjamin uses this word, amazement, in a way that resonates and constellates into the present, comprising a presence. I quote again from his “On the Concept of History”:

[Untenable that the genocide of Palestinians by imperial powers continues. Untenable, irredeemable evil.]

"The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible . . . is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable," Benjamin wrote. Raz-Krakotzkin translates this in relation to Scholem's statements, so that Benjamin could also be saying: “the current amazement that an extreme political version of messianism is ‘still’ possible, Benjamin might have said to his friend, ‘is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which [gave] rise to it’—here, the description of the present as the ‘utopian return to Zion’—’is untenable’.”

*

By the 1940's, after Benjamin's death, Gershom Scholem supported "the idea of an exclusive Jewish state." He even went so far as to deny "any Zionist responsibility for the Palestinian catastrophe," arguing that "the Arabs alone were responsible for their misfortune," Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin writes. In a footnote, he adds the following:

In "The Messianic Idea of Judaism" Scholem declares that "the predicament of Israel, then, is not a historical accident but inherent in the world being, and it is in Israel’s power to repair the universal flaw. By amending themselves, the Jewish people can also amend the world, in its visible and invisible aspects alike.” This idea of “utopian return” is what “fully integrates the holocaust into the theological narrative of return.”

(Aside: In my own writing, I tend to use the word Shoah for the same reason I use Nabka, namely, because these words have a meeting held more closely and their language of origin.)

The denial of the Nakba proceeds as the memorialization of the holocaust is mandated across states. Chauvinism has been linked to the preservation of the people and the reliance on colonial power. But Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin notices that Scholem’s list of messianism’s national-political attributes lacks a significant element, namely "the restoration of the Temple, the figure of which was certainly the main component of Jewish messianic expectations, undoubtedly more than the 'resurrection of the nation,' a term that was taken from the modern vocabulary of nationalism." The Temple is the concept that crosses all messianic accounts and visions of redemption; its absence is read as "the most important sign of the state of exile, and its restoration the expression of redemption."

Against this, Raz-Krakotzkin poses the "many Jewish sources" where "Zion" and "Temple" are taken as allegorical concepts referencing "a spiritual ideal" or providing a tutelary "metaphors for a state of human perfection."

But Scholem's Messianic Idea cannot avoid its consequent relationship to the restoration of the Temple. Its literal political project commits it to "the destruction of the mosques and their replacement by a new building." As Raz-Krakotzkin argues:

The extension of this messianism has other logic:

To repeat the clarity of the preceding statements: In Israeli discourse, the question of the refugees is considered an apocalyptic issue, and its very discussion a threat and denial of the existence of the State of Israel. The Palestinian memories of dispossession are the Israelis’ suppressed nightmares.

*

By 1959, Scholem concluded his famous essay "Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea" with the warning:

“Little wonder that overtones of Messianism have accompanied the modern Jewish readiness for irrevocable action in the concrete realm, when it set out on the utopian return to Zion. This readiness no longer allows itself to be fed on hopes. Born out of the horror and destruction that was Jewish history in our own generation, it is bound to history itself and not to meta-history; it has not given itself up totally to Messianism. Whether or not Jewish history will be able to endure this entry into the concrete realm without perishing in the crisis of the Messianic claim, which has virtually been conjured up—that is the question which out of his great and dangerous past the Jew of this age poses to his present and to his future.”

José Luis Cuevas, 𝘓𝘢𝘴 𝘔𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘢𝘴, 1977.

A five-stem corona for Arnold Schoenberg.

First stem

Mourning the loss of Schoenberg’s archives in the ongoing Los Angeles fires by weaving a word-corona—-

beginning with Enrique Vila-Matas’ introduction to Thomas Mann’s correspondence with Adorno over Schoenberg’s fury at Doctor Faustus and the questions of plagiarism.

Second stem

One of my favorite reads during pandemic was Richard Cavell’s Speechsong: The Gould-Schoenberg Dialogues (shout-out to the incredible publisher, Punctum Books), which continues to be a model for the sort of speculative nonfiction I adore, which coincides with the spirit of the manuscript on Scriabin I hope to finish.

Date: 10 April 1964. Schoenberg and Gould are talking in a room with Schoenberg’s portrait on the wall. GG is Glenn Gould and AS is Arnold Schoenberg. They are listening to Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2, op. 10, particularly that point in the fourth movement where the soprano begins singing the words of a poem by Stefan George.

Third stem

Notes on how “Uncle Arnold” treated students in composition class back when he was teaching in Vienna.

Fourth stem

I excerpt the conclusion of Pierre Boulez’s infamous elegy to Schoenberg below, and a link to the document itself will appear if you crave the sort of sorcery involved in clicking on images.

Fifth stem

Thinking of all those facing the loss of residences, homes, life, memories, archives, and so much more in Los Angeles… There are no words for what is ongoing. As for the small corona, five stems suffice to bind it, the final one being a two-minute visit to Schoenberg’s home in West L. A.

Postscript

Pious rapture, to quote Schoenberg quoting George.

"To everyone who gives a damn about poetry": James Wright to James Dickey, 1958.

But he can’t get rid of himself enough
To write poetry.         He keeps thinking Goddamn
I’ve misused myself         I’ve fucked up         I haven’t worked —

…
You bastard, you.
You and the paper should have known it, you and the ink: you write
…
With blackness.         Night.         Why has it taken you all this time?

—- James Dickey, The Zodiac


Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow
Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone
Wholly, into the air.
I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe
Or move.
I listen.
The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.

— James Wright, “Beginning”


When reading through a letter written by James Wright to James Dickey in 1958, I’m not sure if Wright’s audacity or his earnesty touched me more, but certainly, something touched me enough to feel the urge to share it—- and so you will find it below, with gratitude to Jonathan Blunk, who selected it for an issue of American Poetry Review that featured some of Wright’s correspondence.

Minneapolis
July 6, 1958

Dear Mr. Dickey:

I have just completed a book review for Sewanee, and tomorrow morning I will send it off. Mr (Monroe KJ Spears wants it by August 1, so I assume it will appear in the fall issue. Having read your essays with interest and attention for some tire (I realize that you will consider this statement a lie), I have added a discussion of your criticism to my review. I am going to tell Mr. Spears that, if the discussion is too long, he can either out it or remove it altogether. In any case, you have a right to read it beforehand, whether or not you think it is worth answering in print. I wish to say that 1 realize there are several of its points which are inadequately stated and, more often, inadequately developed. For example, I refer to my discussion of your remarks on Eberhart and Bridges. The issue is a major one, but I was cramped for space, having already exceeded the generous limits suggested by the editor. If you care to bother answering, I will try to elucidate the discussion further.

Before I quote the section of the review. I understand perfectly well that, as far as you are concerned, I am a bad poet, probably not a poet at all in any sense that you would care about or believe in. My reason for writing you this note-in addition to my recognizing your right to see a discus. sion of your ideas before it appears in print, so that you can answer it as you see fit—is that, unless I utterly misunderstand your writings, the sense in which you care about poetry and believe in it is very similar to the sense in which I care about it and believe in it myself. This is another statement which you will probably consider a lie. However that may be, I would not argue against your adverse judgment of my own work even if it were possible to do so. Since you both think and feel that my verses stink, it is your responsibility as well as your privilege to say so in print. But even if my poems are bad, and even if you do not believe that I care about poetry in the same way that you do. I am asking you to believe, purely on faith, that I do indeed care about it in some sense. There is something else that I want to say: in my discussion of your writings, I refer to Mr. Philip Booth. Perhaps you will immediately conclude that I am merely being protective about one of my friends. I have never met Mr. Booth. I have had a brief correspondence with him about editorial and other business matters; I told him that I enjoyed his book, especially the poem "First Lesson"; and I wrote him a note to thank him for his review of my book, a review which, though sober and courteous, was hardly drunken with enthusiasm. As a matter of fact, I am friends with very, very few current poets, and most of them are students who have never had anything published. I think, however, that generosity is not only a moral virtue. I think that it is also an act of intelligence. Sometimes students have cautiously and tentatively brought verses to me, under that somewhat silly impression of very young people that my having had something in print made me a valid judge; when their verses were sentimental and inept, I believe that I have criticized them honestly and severely, however, I have never greeted a student by telling her to go fuck herself and shove her hideous poems up her ass because they have blotched my soul and insulted the names of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. I believe your attack on Mr. Booth's verses amounted to something similar. I did not like it. It was destructive not only to Booth, but to you, and indeed to everybody who gives a damn about poetry, and who realizes that its best ally right now would be a courteous and judicious criticism. I think the relation of hatred to criticism is the same relation that exists between life and poetry. A good man will not necessarily thereby become a good poet; a good poet, on the other hand, is, I believe, by definition a good man. Sometimes a man tries to write poems and fails. I think the critic has fulfilled his responsibility when he says so and explains what he means. Sometimes good critics explain the standard by which they judge (I said explain, not merely state), and sometimes they go so far as to admit that there may possibly be, somewhere in the universe and in human history, standards different from their own. But if the versifier (like myself, as you well know) fails to achieve a poem, l don't see why the critic has to kick him in the balls.

Nothing that I've said about hatred can in the slightest way disqualify what I've said about my belief in the importance of your writings in Sewanee, but of course this is just one more belief in which you will not believe. The relevant section of my review is enclosed.

Yours,

James Wright

3 things: elegy, owl, and power tool.

1

The poem is titled “Poem for Witold Gombrowicz,” as found in Matthew Zapruder’s most recent collection, I Love Hearing Your Dreams: Poems (which, in my opinion, is his most moving and tender offering yet in ways that are best left to the reader to discover after purchasing the book and consuming it between the winter’s midnights).

It’s a kind of discipline, Matthew writes, to not remember the persons we abandoned in the relationships that shaped us, whether inherited or invented for the purposes of time and place. But it is the irreverence of the closing act that testifies to the speaker’s respect for the poem’s addressee, namely Gombrowicz, whose tone of total disrespect for modern humankind punctuates his fictions as well as his diaries.

The fork intrigues me: where the speaker honors by peeing on the very old tree, this peeing still feels like the sort of melancholic irreverence that Matthew is known for. In other words, Matthew pees on the tree in order to honor by communing with his subject, but his subject, Gombrowicz, took irreverence much further, past the point of laughter and straight into the acreage of contempt.

'Of all artists, poets are people who fall to their knees most persistently,' Gombrowicz said, naming us as the worthiest of contempt. But, as Matthew keenly culls, the act of pissing on a tree is how the poet earns the respect of the surly shade known as Gombrowicz, for it is this carnal, a-lyrical fleshiness that the dead writer admired.

To make him laugh is to libate Gombrowicz, and the splendor of this poem lies in precisely the gentle, lyrical way in which Matthew Zapruder accomplishes this.

2

And now for an owl that engraved itself upon my imagination.


Bernard Childs engraved this owl with a power tool. It is the second owl in a series. The yellow feels surprising or insecure in this context, perhaps because clashing colors often inject a bit of insecurity into a scene. And something is perhaps unsettled.


3

“Salvation through laughter,” Charles Simic called it, that spittle in Gombrowicz’s writing which reached from Argentina back to his Polish homeland across translations and correspondence.

Born in a Polish city close to the Austrian border, Gombrowicz’s experience of World War I turned him a lifelong pacifist and an atheist. Although he went on to study law, he earned a reputation for himself as a man about town, frequenting “literary cafés where he began to acquire a reputation as a character, taking potshots at his contemporaries,” Simic noted. Gombrowicz’s “humor and impudence stood out”. The stake of writing was existential to him: he existed “to make a character like Hamlet or Don Quixote out of a man called Gombrowicz,” in Simic’s words. Here, the writer’s job is to seduce and provoke the reader towards recognition of the author’s existence.

The logic of their bourgeois fathers failed this generation. Many would devote their theory and literature to battling the father within, drawing legalistic logic and absurdism in the two-front interior war that Franz Kafka and Frankfurt School theorists waged against their atrocious inheritance.

For close readers of Witkacy and Bruno Schulz, Gombrowicz’s Pornografia trolls familiar esoteric terrain (one might even call this turf the Zakopane school of literature, for lack of another word). In the introduction, he describes the novel as follows:

The hero of the novel, Frederick, is a Christopher Columbus who departs in search of unknown continents. What is he searching for? This new beauty, this new poetry, hidden between the adult and the young man. He is the poet of an awareness carried to the extreme or, at least, that’s how I wanted him to be. But it is difficult to understand one another nowadays! Certain critics saw him as Satan, no more, no less, while others, mainly Anglo-Saxons, were content with a more trivial definition—a voyeur. My Frederick is neither Satan nor a voyeur: he is more like a theatrical producer, or even a chemist, trying to obtain a new and magical alcohol by various combinations between individuals.

Trying to obtain a new and magical alcohol by various combinations certainly draws on the alchemical portions of Witkacy’s work, as the homoerotic parts draw on Bruno Schulz’s illustrations and pornografias, but Simic finds himself disappointed by it and mistrustful of the Gombrowicz’s description. He reads the author as one trained in the American empire of close reading where what stands out is the power of a “few scenes”.

Noting that Frederick’s loathing for churches doesn’t prevent him from going to a church, falling upon his knees, and praying, an act which is the penultimate “act of negation” to him, Simic even excerpts a large portion from this scene:

What exactly had happened? Strictly speaking: nothing, strictly speaking it was as though a hand had withdrawn the substance and content from the Mass—and the priest continued—and the priest continued to move, to kneel, to go from one end of the altar to the other, and the acolytes rang the bells and the smoke from the censers rose in spirals, but the whole content was evaporating like gas out of a balloon, and the Mass collapsed in its appalling impotence—limp and sagging—unable to procreate!

It is hard not to read Pornografia as an intimate portrait of Witkacy or Pierre Klossowski. It is, for me, very (very) hard. In an effort to distract myself from the ‘bad reading’, and to parse the latent connection between the honor of pissing on a tree and the Polish world of literature destroyed by the Shoah, I leave you with Correspondence between Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz, 1936.

The prior year in music, with gratitude.

I enter this year, 2025, limply, minus gusto— which is not to say that I enter it without gratitude. Perhaps something has shifted in the way I understand the operative medium, this context called ‘language’ which has always been so closely tied to music in my mind. Let me begin in that digression, winding back to the year 1872, when Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music shattered the conventional understanding of music that had emerged with the rise of literacy. “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts,” he wrote, after staring at his typewriter and feeling that this use of this tool actively altered his words, placed his words in another medium, which mediated them.

Mediums radiate. And Nietzsche’s eyes were beginning to fail; the typewriter enabled him to contrive writing after he could no longer see his own words on paper. He could still see the typewriter keys a little, but he had memorized them, and it was this muscle memory that permitted him to feel where the letters waited to be touched by his fingers. This use of the typewriter coincided with Nietzsche’s perception that Wagner’s operas had changed “the medium of the music,” thus irrevocably altering  what humans expected of music and how they perceived it. 

In 1845, about forty years prior to Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, the OED expanded the definition of “mediation” in English to include “that part of plainsong that lies between two reciting notes.”

Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, like the Jonas-mask of theatre, had two faces. The first version was an effusive celebration of Wagner–or so Nietzsche said–although it was later re-issued as anti-Wagner polemic. The words and text weren't altered significantly. Instead, Nietzsche indicated in the preface a new way of reading the dynamics, a different way of playing the same notes with a different notation. From effusive to furioso. Now the tone would be played vehemently, furioso, and the reader was indicated that this would be the performance in the introduction.

Introduction

But I cannot play it vehemently, this gratitude mingling with the perpetual disquiet that visits when it comes to speaking about what I have written. Unlike Nietzsche, my mask is not Janus-faced but closer to the frozen scream of the Gorgon whose face disappears into the faces it sees. And there are so many faces in those screams. So many faces and fevers, gathered, gathering, like music to my mind. For that is the other side of words, the sole of the shoes I trod, the part that makes contact with the ground—- has always been music, music, sound. Thus do I introduce a small snippet of various conversations that this year, and place these conversations in relation to my favorite language, folding gratitude into the ruinscapes of another calendar while holding the faces of my interlocutors, fondly. Fondly. The pleasure of that is mine.

1

I’ll begin with “The Fallacy of Literary Citizenship”: A conversation with Karan Kapoor” for the Only Poems newsletter, because Karan invited me to consider questions that feel critical to existence and language right now, and so I excerpt part of an answer to a question that he posed, with gratitude to him for the brief moments in which life allows us to behold one another outside, however dimly:

“In the U.S., a fetus has a “right to life” without a corresponding “right” to healthcare. From the minute an American fetus is born, or gains an existence apart from its parent's body, it  has fewer rights than it did in the womb. What Lauren Berlant called “the contradiction between the sovereignty of abstract citizens and the everyday lives of embodied subjects” is structured by these financial and physical inequalities that normalized, and made to seem natural to the human condition. Legally, citizenship administrates class hierarchies and legitimizes them as collective goods. For example, a corporation ‘needs’ a tax break in order to provide ‘jobs’ so that the economy won't ‘fail;’ or, the defense industry ‘needs’ a new war in order to keep that lottery known as ‘retirement accounts’ functioning. Neoliberalism ensures that certain individuals or groups will be excluded from the literary community for the reasons you mention. The economic aspects of ‘literary citizenship’ can't be separated from the social and cultural ones.”

(And, because I know how much Karan shares my love for Leonard Cohen, it is of course a Cohen song that wafts through the room of a conversation about belonging, and not-belonging, and failing to imagine one another in a way that opens the world.)

And what can I tell you my brother, my killer
What can I possibly say?

— Leonard Cohen, “Famous Blue Raincoat”

2

“The self on reel reminds me that embodiment's relation to the nowness of things isn't a whole picture. We're not seeing each other completely. We aren't permitted to appear in our complicated fullness to one another.”

— Lynn Emmanuel in “The Privilege and Responsibility of Disagreeing for Eternity", published in Identity Theory

— Ólafur Arnalds & Nils Frahm, “20:17”


3

“I think periods and punctuation are most noticeably absent in the title series. That’s because those poems reckon with eternities—love and war and suffering and child-rearing and violence and planetary movements and climate crisis and history and mortality. These eternities have always been with us, and they always will be. They’ll never stop talking.”

— Molly Spencer, in A Conversation with Molly Spencer, published in The Adroit Journal

Speaking kind of cryptically
The sea that raged beside the tree
Burning bright for all to see
It just might mean the most to me

— The Cowboy Junkies, “Speaking Confidentially”




4

“You look at the membrane of what reading is and you zoom in on it and all these other world(ing)s spring up or are concomitantly created with your own noticing; you are always this station through which the noumena passes into signal. This would be true of even the crudest things—if you polish the mirror enough you can see just about anything in it. I’m sure there’s someone out there who has understood the entire universe by rewatching the same reality tv show over and over. The work I’m involved with aspires to open out the encounter in widening spirals . . . “

— Garett Strickland, “You are always this station through which the noumena passes into signal”: A conversation with Garett Strickland, published in Minor Literature[s]


And they had all arrived at the same buidling at more or less the same time.
And they were all free.
And they were all asking themselves the same question:
What is behind that curtain?

— Spiritualized, “Born Never Asked”


5

“I kept thinking about Jabès’s notion that each of us lives with an unsayable word that can’t be shared, only sacrificed. What happens to that unsayable word in the mind of a person who is dying? Might it shape a person’s last thoughts, their vision of an afterlife, what sacrifice of themselves might outlast them? I see that closing poem as a subtle response to the epigraphs from Levinas and Jabès that open the book, inviting readers to think about the absences that shape our perceptions when we step out the door, whether it’s in a place we can go barefoot, or have to wear shoes and get in an elevator.”

— Idra Novey, “Our Good Ghosts: A Conversation with Idra Novey”, published in Orion


From the pain come the dream
From the dream come the vision

— Peter Gabriel, “Fourteen Black Paintings”



6

“Repetition often has an incantatory effect. Nursery rhymes use repetition, rhythm, and rhyme to grant the wish laid upon the first star. Despite this magical aura of naming and claiming, wishing evokes passivity. Wishes are childhood’s epistemological firmament, they are part of the structures of intimacy available to children in a world controlled and administered by adults.”

— “What Sparks Poetry: Alina Stefanescu on Uljana Wolf’s my cadastre”, published in Poetry Daily

Well it's about time

— Depeche Mode, “Useless” from the Kruder & Dorfmeister Session



7

“The nylon scent of the sleeping bag in which they make love, the languorous card games interrupted by strolls in the forest, the eros of reading aloud to each other— ‘it was the tenderest time of their lives together.’ György photographs Paul as they sprawl naked, feasting on canned beans. With the colors of the campfire playing across his face, Paul reads a poem to György—a poem that George describes to the narrator as ‘the most beautiful poem he’d ever heard,’ a poem that resembles love in the ‘mutual recklessness’ of creating a common world.”

— “Utopia Is Not a State; It Is a Compass: On Patrick Nathan’s ‘The Future Was Color’”, as published in Los Angeles Review of Books

Did I dream you were a tourist
In the Arizona sun?
I can see you there with lunar moths
And watermelon gum

— REM, “You”

8

“Memory fondles the sensual excess of first love and seeks to articulate the world that exists between two people whose language stays secret, even as they speak it. The writer fashions an icon of that first lover, immortalizing him with talismans and symbolic offerings, seeking his eternal approval, pouring a monument onto the page that preserves his magic for others.”

— The Telling Makes It True: On Robert Glück’s About Ed, as published in Cleveland Review of Books


You swim in moon, you left too soon

— Tricky, “We Don’t Die”

9

“Apocalyptic violence trolls the stage of the aubade, but the interim is lined with emptied outfits: ‘this arrangement born of desire and accident,’ sculptures ‘doomed to disappear’ unless preserved by a photo. A. knows her ploy will fail; it is ‘impossible to represent […] the unreality of sex in the reality of what it leaves behind.’ The problem of representation plagues both photo and text. No one can prove Jesus’s material resurrection from the presence of an empty shroud. Still, they testify.”

— “Every Abyss Is a Matter of Time" published in Los Angeles Review of Books (with a note to how much I owe Ellie Eberlee for thinking through this piece with me)

The night has come and left me
Just the light that you allow
Come speak my name
Fill my head with all such foolish dreams
My flesh and blood is no more real to me
Than what it seems

— Joe Henry, “Flesh and Blood” as covered by Solomon Burke

10

And one for the conversations I had on paper that have not been published, some of which mean the world to me. If worlds could matter. If words could carry my gratitude to the friendships that met me in those moments when language abandoned me. If worlds and words could recognize themselves in the loneliness of finishing the book.

Farting, breath, and Beckett.

1

Every fart results in the loss of a small patch of the soul, as constituted by the breath, the ruach, the exhalation that goes out through the back door. Pythagoras knew this. And he forbade the eating of beans out of love for the soul.

2

The teens do not understand how anyone could believe the world isn’t circular. “The world is a merry-go-round,” the middle teen tells me. “The world is the sort of circus that has merry-go-rounds on the regular,” the younger teen adds.

3

If the Earth were not spherical, then I would have seen it all while sitting on a rock beside the ocean, or at least glimpsed the entire ship on the horizon rather than seeing its mast move close to me first, spotting that tip so to speak, without the body. Bobbing on the surface like a head without a corpus.

4

For Plato, the spherical shape of the earth meant that the heavens were also spherical: a spherical Universe moved in a circular motion.

5

Following his mentor, Aristotle damned comets to the realm of the spheres, relegating these flying shards of fire to the earth's disorder rather than the perfect harmony and geometry of the celestial sphere. In the earth's upper atmosphere, Earthly exhalations would burst into flame and these bursts would resemble comets. The comet is the thing of this world, profaned by its venturing into the ether between worlds.

6

"The writer is a comet," I explained to my friend, who could not get his novel about southern ghosts published.

7

"Yes, the writer is an engine of profanation fueled by blood until the heart gives up," I told my dog, Radu, after discovering the author, Enrique Vila-Matas, wandering down the streets of Dublin with his character, Riba. These two fellows, the writer and his character, were strolling along when they both spotted an "irate, limping man" on page 106, a man who suddenly became an "irate ethereal man" after stepping into the doorway on page 107, since the doorway is a literary threshold with the power to make a minor god of most verb-carting mammals.

8

The name of the book is Dublinesque.

And —- “What will become of all this misery of ours? In the end, only an old whore walking around in an absurd raincoat, on a lonely dike in the rain.”

This is what Samuel Beckett wrote in Krapp's Last Tape.

9

And maybe the intellectual was correct to note that Beckett’s ‘old whore’ was likely Celia —- who had been an innocent, young whore when she appeared in Murphy, and who coincidentally shared a name with Riba's Buddhism-exploring wife, a name which Riba immediately grasped after catching an eyeful of Catherine Deneuve’s trench coat and that barely-cocked hat she wore in Cherbourg, the coat and the hat and her flesh certainly naked underneath all that, as rain would suggest, was Literature itself, or all the desires and erotic gropings were books in which what began as fantasy bloomed into fruit, or fruited and got plucked and tasted on Bloomsday, as it was known.

10

This day of penultimate blooming happens again every year. 

11

Riba ran into Beckett wearing a trench coat on page 193, and recognized Beckett immediately on the basis of small, insignificant details, which is to say: literature. Vila-Matos’ character knew it was Beckett from the way he stared directly at him with "his bird-like face" clearly traced from the drawings of bird-men in the room known as the Dead Man's Shaft in the caves of Lascaux.

12

I swore I would not write a single word collaborating in that literary trope known as Lascaux Cave Aside-ism today.

13

Alas. It is the first day of a new year, and this is my thirteenth thought to date. Under such conditions, the thought is beholden to none, least of all, to its author. In reality, the Lascaux caves include over 600 paintings staggered across the walls and the ceilings. In the Hall of the Bulls, there is a 17-foot bull that prides himself on being the largest animal yet discovered in cave art. In the Shaft of the Dead Man, there are some stars and astronomical figures, but what I noticed first was the wall that includes a bull, a bird, and a bird-man.

O, lest I forget, happy new year to all friends and enemies, for as long as this life gives us!

"Corresponding Foreignly" by Frank O'Hara

A treasure in this daily email from The Paris Review that feeds you a poem from its archives at some point in the morning so one can savor the poem with coffee and frame the day in its traces, if such urges strike. As one who has appreciated this treasure for several years, and who recommends it to others regularly, I encourage you to visit this page and put a check-mark next to the daily poem newsletter.

And here is the poem that appeared in my inbox on December 31, 2024, which is to say, yesterday, the final breath of the year prior, the last gasp of said annum.

Corresponding Foreignly

by Frank O’Hara

1
You may flaunt my looseness, you know
that I go whole weeks without, so, I
get depressed because I’m so easily distracted
from sex. It’s not something you can keep
your mind on without losing it.

2
Certain eases appeal to me more than the flowering quinces
and your black pear branches dripping white petals.
I’m not a pastoral type any more, I take the subway
back and forth from beds to days or bed-in-the-day-time
and if pleased am a dirty flower at the end of ragtagging
it. “I hear you were downtown last night. It was just like
old times.’’ What a thing to say in an elevator. I’d feel
rather more assured, though, if we were rolling in a field
screaming above the records and the Japanese lanterns.
I hate the country and its bells and its photographs.

3
When he went west we thought he’d be big in the movies
with his humanity kick. The others went off to another party
but we went home and forgot each other in a good talk.
Then the radiators cracked and puffed and it did get warmer
but I dreamt of an anxiety the size of a public building,
something to race your car in and waken echoes. Did
you mention that you saw me dancing with a sculpture last week
in the Bowery? It was an audition and we called ourselves “The Bananas.”

4
Four little rats came into the house
because it had grown so cold out,
and they knew they’d be allowed the run
of our lives in the winter
when the weather doesn’t favor them.

5
I met him in Los Angeles
and after weeks of feverish love
couldn’t remember what he looked like
if he was farther away than the john.
I wondered what he had done
to me. He was like a shrike.
I don’t know if it was really love
and he’s left Los Angeles.

6
I have a tic of thinking about it, if
they can really fine you for paying the rent
late. His photograph would have to be moved
to a new building, and by now it’s the size
of a mural. It would take weeks. I won’t.

The bad mommies of literature.

Without even a morsel of irony, in the year 2025, various thinkers and authors continue to indict the mothers of Rainer Maria Rilke and Oscar Wilde for ‘traumatically’ dressing their sons in 'effeminate clothing' a bit longer than was conventional, thus causing untold 'gender issues' and/or sexual 'confusions'.

It is said that poetess and Irish activist Lady Wilde dressed Oscar like a girl because she had wanted a daughter rather than another son.

It is said that Rilke's mother completely destroyed his masculinity.

It is said that the mothers damn the sons to be 'pansies' if they kiss them too often in those formative early years.

It is said that Beckett said all this misery of ours will wind up as 'an old whore walking around in an absurd raincoat, on a lonely dike in the rain'. 

Source: Victorian Web. Oscar Wilde as a child being irrevocably tormented by his mother.

Rainer Maria Rilke as a child, being destroyed by his mother.

"Walter Benjamin's Warning"

An old poem at the beginning of what may be a ‘new’ year—with all the strange feelings such newness promises.

And the context for the poem’s composition back in 2020—- this short crumb by Kafka, shadow puppets, the colored pencils of the youngest imagining her rivers.

"In an entirely indefinite fear of the indefinite": Franz to Milena.



“The original sin, the ancient wrong that man has committed, consists in the accusation, which man makes, and from which he does not desist, that a wrong has been done to him, that the original sin was committed against him.”

—  Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena, trans. Philip Boehm

Milena Jesenská was the second great love of Kafka’s life, according to the Kafka Museum, which also posits that she went on "to achieve world fame due to the letters they exchanged" — a statement that is precisely what one might expect of an institution devoted to maintaining the Kafka Industry.

Jan Jesenský, Milena’s father, was an established professor of dentistry in Prague, where he was known as a member of high society. Since Milena’s mother died when she was thirteen, her father played a large role in her upbringing, and enrolled her in the first private Czech high school for girls, the Minerva School, that is credited with shaping the “the first emancipated women intellectuals championing a new, freethinking lifestyle.” According to the Kafka Museum:

Erratic family circumstances and the emancipatory views of the Czech-German Prague intelligentsia brought this vivacious, energetic and flighty young woman who had a taste for risk into open conflict with society. In 1917, as a result of her lax behaviour and moral misconduct, her father had her confined for nine months in the Veleslavín insane asylum on the grounds of ‘moral insanity’. At the time she was having an affair with Ernst Pollak, a bank clerk from the provincial town of Jičín, well-versed in music and literature, whom she married when she came of age at 21 and left with him for Vienna. 

According to the Kafka Museum:

Ernst Pollak, dubbed ‘Kenner (wise guy) Pollak’ was a member of Franz Werfel’s circle at the Arco Café in Prague that Kafka would occasionally join. It was most likely there that Kafka first met Milena, although it was only a passing acquaintance. In Vienna, Pollak dominated the table of the regular clients at the Herrenhof Café, where even leading Austrian literati such as Hermann Broch sought him out for advice and assistance. In Vienna, Pollak also publicized the work of the then little-known Prague writer, Franz Kafka. It was he who brought Kafka to the attention of Milena Jesenská. By then her German was good enough for her to try her hand at translating shorter German texts and German translations of non-German authors into Czech. She started to send her translations to Czech newspapers and magazines, where a number of her friend worked as journalists.

Kafka’s story The Stoker was not the first work by a German author she had tried translating. As she was wont to do, she made written contact with the author about the translation of The Stoker, and their correspondence developed into an ‘epistolary novel’. Kafka also had marital designs on Milena.

Throughout 1920 letters streamed back and forth between the north Italian spa of Merano, where Kafka was convalescing, and Vienna, where Milena was living in a less than happy marriage. On two occasions they met in person. Their first meeting, in Vienna, was happy and full of promise, their second, in the frontier town of Gmünd, culminated with a lapse on Kafka’s part and marked a hiatus in their relationship. On the one hand, they were poorly matched temperamentally, and on the other, Milena was unwilling to abandon Ernst Pollak, whom she loved in spite of their marital difficulties. Kafka’s relationship with Milena ended like the two previous ones. Out of it came Kafka’s Letters to Milena, an outstanding feat of letter writing, and Milena’s translations of Kafka, the first ever into a foreign language.



AUGUST 26, 1920: ‘THE SONG OF ANGELS IN THEIR MUSIC’

On August 26, 1920, Franz Kafka writes to Milena from Prague, expressing relief that her letters "provide irrefutable proof for your being the you I carry sealed in my innermost self." Insisting that this You is true— that this You he holds of her on paper is reliable— Kafka says he will be loyal to it, even "if it should testify against me to the highest authorities." He continues: 

"I am dirty, Milena, infinitely dirty, this is why I scream so much about purity. No one sings as purely as those who inhabit the deepest hell – what we take to be the song of angels in their music."

The writer is lost in his encounter of Milena on paper, lost in her words and worlds, standing upon the threshold she symbolizes.

In another letter written on the same day, Kafka tells her that he did nothing except listen to “a very late pain working in the temples" as he pondered her letters “in agony, and love, and worry, and in an entirely indefinite fear of the indefinite," which he described as the thing “infinitely beyond” his own strength. He reads her letters in pieces, responding feverishly, feeling an affinity to her “silent laments," the the ones she doesn’t commit to paper, the ones which resemble his own. "It’s the strangest thing that even here in the darkness, we are so much of one mind,” he muses.

Kafka describes feeling enervated, raw, stung by the constant awareness of being alive. This aliveness, for him, is accompanied by dread, or the awareness that feeling alive—like being alive—ends. And he ends this train of thought by posing a question to himself, and to her: "Why can’t we accept the fact that the right thing to do is live inside this very special tension which keeps suicide suspended?"



AUGUST 30, 1920: ‘REDEEM THE WORLD’

On August 30, Kafka asks Milena (again) not to write to him every day – he fears her letters, he fears being lost and tossed on the sea of them. Yet, he cannot abstain from writing to her the next day, elucidating his belief that all humans are good, lamenting how his body refuses to accept what his mind believes, straining against his flesh which "would rather crawl slowly up the wall, then await this trial, which really would— in the sense— redeem the world."



SEPTEMBER 2 & 4 1920: ‘A WORM’

"Treating the problem of guilt seriously is one of the most senseless things on the planet," Kafka tells Milena on 2 September 1920, revisiting the reproaches her husband could hold against her, or the reproaches that others in their circle of friends might sense. 

"Even the most beautiful ones always contain a worm," Kafka says correspondence on September 4, 1920, as the correspondence with Milena thickens. 


SEPTEMBER 5, 1920: ‘NOT EVEN MY NAME’

On September 5th of 1920, Franz Kafka lays out his Kierkegaardian either/or, comparing himself to Robinson Crusoe, who signed on to the voyage that cost him everything, who undertook the journey that ended in shipwreck, yet retained a few things, namely, his island, his Friday, his fantasy of a world, and his name. Although Crusoe had his fictional name, Franz would have nothing. "I wouldn’t have a thing, not even my name, since I have given that to you as well," he writes, in the throes of his Kierkegaardian trance, unable to imagine an independence in relation to this "dependency [that] transcends all bounds." 

One can almost hear Franz look at up the window, and draw in his breath while writing the following words to Milena: 


SEPTEMBER 10-20, 1920: ‘YOU ARE THE KNIFE’

On September 10, 1920, Kafka writes to Milena: 

Nothing else is possible, for we are living in misunderstandings; our questions are rendered worthless by our replies. Now we have to stop writing one another, and leave the future to the future.

Sept. 14, 1920, Kafka to Milena again:

Aren’t our eyes made to be torn out, and our hearts for the same purpose? …everything is an exaggeration, the only truth is longing, which cannot be exaggerated. But even the truth of longing is not as much it, our truth; it’s really an expression of everything else, which is a lie.

Moreover, perhaps it isn’t love when I say you are what I love the most - you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love.

On Sept. 18, 1920, Kafka condemns himself for making things too hard, acknowledges that his fear made it difficult to keep from catastrophizing - “I was living off your gaze,” he tells her. Milena sees him as he wants to be seen. There is no “solid ground” beneath a divine gaze. One cannot live on earth at the same time.

They had Vienna, and then the failure of the next meeting. Kafka is ill — he lists symptoms, sanatoriums, and exhaustion simmers on the surface of those letters that seem as resigned to death as they are to loss.

Believing yourself loved is not the same as living or inhabiting the difficulty of love, Kafka suggests on the evening of Sept. 20, 1920, when he looks at the speech acts of lovers, adding: “But those aren’t really lovers, they’re just grammarians.”

He dreams that she is on fire and he cannot save her: he is no fireman, and so he waits for the fireman to come and save her, because he cannot do it himself. But the Milena that survives is a wan, lifeless, sort of shadow of the self.

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



JANUARY 18, 1923: ‘THE DEVIL AT THE HEARTH’

No pseudonym; no mask: Milena published “The Devil at The Hearth” as Milena Jesenská on 18 January 1923.

And Franz replied to her —-and to the devil — with a letter dated “January-February 1923,” a long letter which ends:

The evil magic of letter writing is setting in and destroying my nights, even more than they are already destroying themselves. I have to stop, I can no longer write. Oh, your insomnia is different from mine. Please let’s not write anymore.

After this —- and until his death in June 1924 —- Kafka sent only two curt postcards (one mentioning his forthcoming death) and two about notes which seem to struggle for breath, for oxygen, for life.


‘NEVERTHELESS’

In her devil piece, Milena argues that marrying for happiness is selfish, frivolous, and stupid. It is the same as marrying for money, for title, for luxury goods. “The only good reason for two people to get married is if it is impossible for them not to. If they simply cannot live without each other. No remorse, sentimentality, tragedy: it happens.”

Pollack cheated on her constantly, despite her having given him her “nevertheless” — her partnership —- that unconditionality that measured what Kafka most craved and refused of the world.

There is no way to know the person one is marrying, Milena argues. The “risks of disappointment” are endemic to the nature of marriage, and accepting them is critical to relationships. Against “the modern hysteria a la Anna Karenina,” she says, we should see each human as a world unto themselves and accept each other in order to affirm “feeling justified in being” one’s truest, least performative self. “Proof that he is loved ‘nevertheless’” - a promise not to let someone go - is more ethical and precise than the vow of romantic love until death.

Milena mocks the “miserable, shabby happiness” of the marriages in which partners sacrifice everything and have every good fortune and still can’t be happy. The vow itself amounts to the “accepting a promise that can’t be kept” and then acting victimized a year later. Because there is “a talent for being happy,” and because some find happiness in less, there is no guarantee of conditions to produce this inexplicable state. “Longing for happiness” is the cupcake of a relationship, and the rot of all teeth.


POSTSCRIPT

By the time of Kafka’s death on June 3, 1924, Milena had broken up with Ernst Pollack.

In 1925, she returned to Prague, and married Jaromir Krejeor a few years later. She joined the CP and wrote for them until 1936 when she broke with the Party after the execution of Zinowiec and Komenev in 1936. She worked to help Jews escape to Poland and was arrested in November 1939, where she was interred among others who “consorted with Jews” and shipped to Ravensbruck. She died there on May 17, 1944.

According to the Kafka Museum, “Milena went on to make her name as a journalist and led a very eventful life alongside a number of remarkable men. . . . “

Fear maps.

A few things that gathered near the shores of my mind between bird-prints, migrations, Pat Steir’s ‘fear maps", and the terror cartographies of the invisible present.

Starting with salted tail feathers and idioms, as poemed by Albert Goldbarth in four stanzas that query what it means to be stationed.

“STATIONED”, a poem by Albert Goldbarth

It's the other ones, who soon enough return
to being happy after the funeral, that are nearest
to their own deaths—in their gaiety
and everyday distraction, they're so open

and unguarded . . . anything could enter them;
could claim them. It's the ones who weep
incessantly that are saved for now, the ones
who have taken a little of it

into their systems: this is how
inoculation works. And sorrow is difficult,
a job: it requires time to complete.
And the tears?—the salt

of the folk saying,
that gets sprinkled over the tail feathers
and keeps a bird from flying;
keeps it stationed in this world.

To be kept inside the salt // of the folk saying, and Goldbarth’s marvelous enjambments, in the unguarded openness that a map forestalls. For nothing could be worse than getting lost in the land that is fear, located in each mind, differently distributed. Enter this series of fear maps by Pat Steir, or a few that caught my eye.

Here is Pat Steir’s Fear Map III (1971)— inscribed in pencil throughout drawing: "Strangespace"; "Dog"; "Back"; "Line". Steir uses all caps for these words.

Pat Steir. Fear Map III (1971)

Why the dog?

To rephrase the question: if maps are orienting devices, then does the naming serve to acknowledge the threatening creature without recognizing it? Fear is always about a particular mental relationship which may or may not be conscious. Like the part of Shawnie Morris’ poem, “Clothespins on the Line”, where clothespins are rendered better than birds because they ‘excrete’ nothing. Clothespins waste nothing.

But here is a different part of the same poem—- “Clothespins on the Line”:

I love how Morris lets the words separate, break apart, letters drifting away from each other like the “it” in the parentheses, calling the mind to consider how an apostrophe may be tucked into a parentheses, or bracketed, or italicized, and what it means to apostrophize the closed space of the mind.

Pat Steir’s Fear Map IV (1971), with “Empty” inscribed near a set; “Fear” at the bottom, along a red line.

Pat Steir, "Fear Map IV" (1971)

The black box is so eminently fear-full, so full of its own dark enclosure.

The first stanza of May Sarton’s poem, “A Parrot”, with that reversal sharpening the incline into the next stanza:

My parrot is emerald green,
His tail feathers, marine.
He bears an orange half-moon
Over his ivory beak.
He must be believed to be seen,
This bird from a Rousseau wood.
When the urge is on him to speak,
He becomes too true to be good.

And the whitening urges and contrasts of Pat Steir’s "Fear Map V" (1971)— composed with graphite, colored pencils, pastel, watercolor, and pink and black ink on paper. Inscribed in pencil in lower center of recto: "Fear Map V"; in upper left in pencil: "Fear More Happy".

Pat Steir’s "Fear Map V" (1971)

The use of superlatives in this fear map: more happy. And that tiny patch in the bottom left corner that resembles a ghosted sun barge by Twombly.

I keep thinking of how cirrus means ‘curl’ in any cloudscape, and how Steir’s use of white clouds without evoking clouds here, which may be one of the signature markings of an erasure, namely, the cloudedness that cannot be condensed into clouds, the beclouding without condensation.

*

A mixture of fear and feathers in this poem titled “Tail Feathers” (that I saved on my phone and which remains unattributed because I can’t find it by searching online) — and which opens so exquisitely . . . I arrived by rain.

Orientation for birds is accomplished by tail feathers. Usually, birds have six pairs of feathers on the tail, with each pair displaying increasing levels of asymmetry towards the outer pair, all of which are arranged in a fan shape that supports precision steering in flight. In some birds like the peacock, tail feathers have evolved into showy ornaments that are useless in flight.

Moist.
Like flames.

The tension in that implausible and totally possible image that evokes the world of school, disabling the tail feathers from accomplishing their purpose. All means of escape are ornamental in the classroom or the school corridor. The game is rotten, to mischaracterize a quote from a Concrete Blonde cover of a Leonard Cohen song. The board limits the choices that can be made. On that note, Cezanne had multiple peach-heaps that could be hiding the skull, this Still life: Assiette de pêches among them.

Keeping It Simple

by Mary Ruefle

I take the bird on the woodpile,
separate it from its function, feather
by feather. I blow up its scale.
I make a whole life out of it:
everywhere I am, its sense of loitering
lights on my shoulder.

This poem is from Mary Ruefle’s collection memling’s veil (University of Alabama Press, 1982), which happens to be the first poetry book I owned by Ruefle, and perhaps this book predisposed me to think of her as an ekphrastic poet, or one that writes in dialogue with images. I always wonder what art or illustration Mary Ruefle is studying as the poem comes together. She reminds me of Samuel Beckett in this way; or else, my suspicion that an image is being assimilated into the language. There is a magic in that—- a magic, too, in Pat Steir’s More Magical Fear Map - Map VI (1971). A mage, perhaps?

Pat Steir. More Magical Fear Map - Map VI (1971)

Mage or not, this 'more magical’ map wants arcades and tunnels somehow, and for some reason, the shape of the human-like figures linked up with a few lines by Dino Buzatti in the incredible collection of short stories, The Bewitched Bourgeois, translated by Lawrence Venuti and coming out from NYRB Classis in January 2025:

Contrary to what you supposed, we—l repeat—are happy. Happy! Happy! Drowning in an ocean of bliss! The curse that divides me! Hell! Working hard and finding oneself always with hands full of ashes. Going mad for a woman, and when you've possessed her, feeling like an empty worm. Fighting for glory, for money, for whatever demon happens to possess me, and when I've reached it, a black shadow awaits me, and all this only to die. Even marvelous vices, even poetry, even music are converted into putrefaction and poison and this is one of the fortunate talking to you, one of the very fortunate, because for the most part the others are also condemned to illness, poverty, physical hardship, stink, ugliness, vulgarity, and they too must leave even if they forget they must leave, for them too the shadow waits in the corner, behind the door, inside the wardrobe, along with nocturnal anguish and anguish in the morning, which is even worse.

The morning-after anguish is the worst. The morning after anguish is worsted from its superlatives.

[If you know who wrote “Tail Feathers”, please find me on twitter or bluesky or ruffle my feathers so that I can give this poet the credit they deserve for this marvelous poem!]