Schuyler's dog.

Delighted to discover one of my favorite poems by James Schuyler in The Paris Review archives newsletter today. Sharing it because the “skies of spit” are real, as are the clouds between Frankfurt and Atlanta from the place where the wing meets the body of the airplane.

Speaking of wings, Schuyler’s line, “The sky is pitiless”, meets up later in the poem with those “skies of spit” and yes it seems quite likely that spit, pitted, and pity are consciously playing with each other at this point in the flight.

The Dog Wants His Dinner

        for Clark Coolidge

The sky is pitiless. I beg
your pardon? OK then
the sky is pitted. The yard
is sand and laced with roots
afloat on rock encasing fire.
You think so do you. No.
Yes. Don’t know. Check one.
Forget all you ever knew.
Sorry. Not my romance. What
is? Sorry. We don’t take
in trick questions. You mean?
I do: put down that.
Put that down too. Skies
of spit, seas where whales
piss and die to make a bar
of scented soap, uhm smells
good. She came in like an ex-
cited headline. The deer
they all were starving! To
death, even, perhaps. And
eating people! What to do
with these disordered herds
of words? I said I would
eat my words and do so, now
you see. He eats them, all
up. Greedily. Yesterday the
air was squeaky clean today
it’s dull and lifeless as an
addict’s armpit. Surely you
mean leafless. I have a flea
bite, here, pink, of course
as an eye disease: the cat ,
who brings me fleas dies
like a dog, sleepily, or
an unwatered plant. That
was exciting wasn’t it. It’s
not that I crave. Uh did
you say crave? Some words
are briefly worse than others:
get the Librium gun and point
it and the Kodak at that Kodiak.
You see? No hope. So don’t
hope. Hop, skip, jump or
lie down. Feed your face.
Now feed the dog. He ate his.
He is eating the cat who
objects. Fix the fire. Put
out the light. An ice cold
hand slides in the window
to touch your uncovered head
forehead cheeks lips lobes
and all with worlds of fire
chilled by distance. O night.
Bedclothes loosen. Unseen twigs
erect themselves in air. You
asleep too, O magic root.

by James Schuyler

From Penelope Green’s obit for the fabulous Orien McNeill.

"Again": ibid. 213.

“To press down with one’s own hand whatever ghost of life is left . . . Yours faithfully” — a little more found poetry from Kafka’s diaries, with gratitude to Seth Rogoff and of course Ross Benjamin, whose translations of the diaries provide the source for these poems.

A few excerpts below, peppered with photos from Transylvania, where I am currently wandering . . .

[Music in video below is “Rien à me foutre en l'air” by Claire Denamur feat. Emmanuel Da Silva]

Collage with writing on the wall of Brasov fortress and myself looking into grandmother’s mirror as fascisms old and new surge throughout the world.

Window with flowers in Brasov.

The monumental balls on the king’s horse in the Bucharest plaza

Stork nest in Sibiu

Stork appearing in their Sibiu nest

Elevator in Brasov

Brasov at midnight from elevator

A Bucharest linden

Window wearing a black dress in Sibiu

Cartyatid in Sibiu

Bucurestica.

Self-portrait the mirror that is pictured in the dedication to my grandmother at the beginning of My Heresies— so wonderful to run into it.

Wright and Bly on translating Trakl.

[The extensive excerpt below comes from Twenty Poems by Georg Trakl, translated and chosen by James Wright and Robert Bly.]

“THE SILENCE OF GEORG TRAKL” by Robert Bly

The poems of Georg Trakl have a magnificent silence in them. It is very rare that he himself talks—for the most part he allows the images to speak for him. Most of the images, anyway, are images of silent things.

In a good poem made by Trakl images follow one another in a way that is somehow stately. The images have a mysterious connection with each other. The rhythm is slow and heavy, like the mood of someone in a dream. Wings of dragonflies, toads, the gravestones of cemeteries, leaves, and war helmets give off strange colors, brilliant and sombre colors—they live in too deep a joy to be gay. At the same time they live surrounded by a darkness without roads. Everywhere there is the suggestion of this dark silence:

The yellow flowers
Bend without words over the blue pond

The silence is the silence of things that could speak, but choose not to. The German language has a word for deliberately keeping silence, which English does not have. Trakl uses this word “schweigen” often. When he says “the flowers/Bend without words over the blue pond”, we realise that the flowers have a voice, and that Trakl hears it. They keep their silence in the poems. Since he doesn’t put false speeches into the mouths of plants, nature has more and more confidence in him. As his poems grow, more and more creatures live in his poems—first it was only wild ducks and rats, but then oak trees, deer, decaying wall- paper, ponds, herds of sheep, trumpets, and finally steel helmets, armies, wounded men, battlefield nurses, and the blood that had run from the wounds that day.

Yet a red cloud, in which a furious god,
The spilled blood itself, has its home, silently
Gathers, a moonlike coolness in the willow bottoms

Before he died, he even allowed his own approaching death to appear in the poems, as in the late poem “Mourning“.

Trakl died when he was 27. He was born in Salzburg in 1887, the son of a hardware dealer. The family was partially Czech, but spoke German. He took a degree in Pharmacy in Vienna, and became a corpsman in the army, stationed at Innsbruch. He left the service after a short time, and spent a year writing and visiting friends. In August of 1914, at the outbreak of war, he returned to the army, and served in the field near Galizia. He felt the hopelessness of the badly wounded more than most men, and his work brought him into great depressions. After the battle of Grodek, ninety badly wounded men were left in a barn for him to care for. That night he attempted to kill himself, but was prevented by friends. The last poems in this selection were written during this time, and the sense of his own approaching death is clear, and set down with astonishing courage. His poem called “Grodek”, which is thought to be his last work, is a ferocious poem. It is constructed with great care. A short passage suggesting the whole German Romantic poetry of the nineteenth century will appear, and be followed instantly by a passage evoking the mechanical violence of the German twentieth century. This alternation, so strong that it can even be felt slightly in the translation, gives the poem great strength and fiber.

After the crisis at Grodek, Trakl went on serving in his post for several months, meanwhile using the drugs obtained from his pharmacy supplies. He was transferred to the hospital at Krakow, and assigned, to his surprise, not as a corpsman, but as a patient. There, a few days later, in November of 1914, he committed suicide with an overdose sufficient to be poisonous.

“A NOTE ON TRAKL” by James Wright

In the autumn of 1952, I wandered into the wrong classroom at the University of Vienna. According to my instructions, the professor was supposed to be a German, whose name I forget. I also forget what course I had expected. But the lecturer who actually appeared was a short swarthy man; and he spoke soft, clear German, clinging to his Italian accent. His name was Professor Susini. The only other persons in that unheated room were a few old men, who resembled Bowery bums in America.

He stood still, peering into the dusk where we sat. Then he read a poem called “Verfall”, the first poem in Georg Trakl’s Die Dichtungen. It was as though the sea had entered the class at the last moment. For this poem was not like any poem I had ever recognized: the poet, at a sign from the evening bells, followed the wings of birds that became a train of pious pilgrims who were continually vanishing into the clear autumn of distances; beyond the distances there were black horses leaping in red maple trees, in a world where seeing and hearing are not two actions, but one.

I returned to that darkening room every afternoon for months, through autumn and winter, while Professor Susini summoned every poem out of Trakl’s three volumes. I always went back to that strange room of twilight, where Susini peered for long silences into the darkness until he discovered the poem he sought; and then he spoke it with the voice of a resurrected blackbird.

His entire manner was one of enormous patience, and he read Trakl’s poems very slowly. I believe that patience is the clue to the understanding of Trakl’s poems. One does not so much read them as explore them. They are not objects which he constructed, but quiet places at the edge of a dark forest where one has to sit still for a long time and listen very carefully. Then, after all one’s patience is exhausted, and it seems as though nothing inside the poem will ever make sense in the ways to which one has become accustomed by previous reading, all sorts of images and sounds come out of the trees, or the ponds, or the meadows, or the lonely roads—those places of awful stillness that seem at the centre of nearly every poem Trakl ever wrote.

In the poems which we have translated, there are frequent references to silence and speechlessness. But even where Trakl does not mention these conditions of the spirit by name, they exist as the very nourishment without which one cannot even enter his poems, much less understand them.

We are used to reading poems whose rules of traditional construction we can memorize and quickly apply. Trakl’s poems, on the other hand, though they are shaped with the most beautiful delicacy and care, are molded from within. He did not write according to any “rules of construction”, traditional or other, but rather waited patiently and silently for the worlds of his poems to reveal their own natural laws. The result, in my experience at least, is a poetry from which all shrillness and clutter have been banished. A single red maple leaf in a poem by Trakl is an inexhaustibly rich and wonderful thing, simply because he has had the patience to look at it and the bravery to resist all distraction from it. It is so with all of his small animals, his trees, his human names. Each one contains an interior universe of shapes and sounds that have never been touched or heard before, and before a reader can explore these universes he must do as this courageous and happy poet did: he must learn to open his eyes, to listen, to be silent, and to wait patiently for the inward bodies of things to emerge, for the inward voices to whisper. I cannot imagine any more difficult tasks than these, either for a poet or for a reader of poetry. They are, ultimately, attempts to enter and to recognize one’s very self. To memorize quickly applicable rules is only one more escape into the clutter of the outside world.

Trakl is a supreme example of patience and bravery, and the worlds which these virtues enabled him to explore, and whose inhabitants he so faithfully describes, are places of great fullness and depth. His poems are not objects to be used and then cast aside, but entrances into places where dear silent labors go on.

Josef Sudek, Prichod Noci (1948-1964)

You dark mouth inside me,
You are strong, shape
Composed of autumn cloud,
And golden evening stillness;
In the shadows thrown
By the broken pine trees
A mountain stream turns dark in the green light;
A little town
That piously dies away into brown pictures.

— Trakl, from “The Mood of Depression” (translated by Bly and Wright)

Matvei Yankelevich's small wonders.

This is simply to share a poem from a small poetry book that I have loved recently, namely Matvei Yankelevich’s Dead Winter (Fonograf Editions), which I happened to pick up in New Orleans and have been studying since. Granted, the bird on the wire was glimpsed in Birmingham today, as I walked Radu near the railroad tracks, shortly before I discovered a bird’s nest that had fallen from a tree —- which is another story, a different story, an alternate expanse, incompletely.

Here is Yankelevich in dialogue with the wires I walked along:

And because the book acknowledges that “most of these poems employ the work of others, translated or transformed,” I was reminded of how writing often emerges from dialogues and relationships to the lines of others to the point where it becomes difficult to discern where a thing begins or ends.

The question of how (and when) continuity emerges in a work or composition often comes up in discussions about process. Morton Feldman alludes to continuity and borrowing in his notes from the February 1984 seminar Frankfurt, later published as a gorgeous essay titled “The Future of Local Music,” from which I now quote:

Many times I make my continuity later, which essentially is the way Tolstoy worked. I don't necessarily work in a continuity. Usually my pieces began maybe on the tenth measure, kind of getting into it. And then I would look at it and throw away the first ten measures. And that's why my music has always that opening, you see, because I borrow from all different things. I'll tell you how I get my opening. I got it from Kafka. I read an article once on Kafka, and I was very fond of Kafka. You'll notice Kafka's first sentences: "Someone has been telling lies about Joseph K." You know that's Kafka, you are in the world of Kafka. We were all reading Kafka in New York at about twenty, twenty-one, fantastic thing. I took that idea and I put it into my own music. Kafka definitely influenced my feeling of how to begin a piece.

Immediately in the atmosphere. Not like Bartók, mesto or something, another mesto.

13 with Schubert.

1

The unequivocal beauty of Schubert’s Fantasie in F Minor, D. 940, a piece for 4 hands, in this case, two hands belonging to Murray Perahia and the other two belonging to Radu Lupu.

2

Peter Filkins’ poem, “Soundboard” (from Paris Review archives)—

Soundboard

When Archie told me the incredible story
of Lady Margaret’s piano, an Obermeier plucked
from a forgotten warehouse in bombed-out Berlin,
then secretly carted off, scarfed up by the Allies
and loaded onto a plane, delivered to Ireland
only to end up the elaborate inlaid soundboard
holding Peg’s ashtray, her snooker of gin,

simply amazed, I couldn’t stop thinking
of Pasternak’s piano tossed from a window,
workmen at his dacha deeming it worthless
decades after his death, and the poem he wrote
that warned his lover, “The shivering piano
will discompose you … Death is in the air.
One opens up one’s veins much like a window.”

3

“Self-help discourse has tended to reproduce the split in romance ideology that we have been developing: valorizing the promise of love and the mutual obligations of lovers, it presumes that problems in love must be solved by way of internal adjustment, to make certain that its conventional forms can remain and keep sustaining the signs of utopian intimacy. Individuals are told that: the normative ideolo-gies and institutions of intimacy can work for them, but men and women are different species who will never experience the intimate other’s desire in the same language or with the same intensity; there are ‘rules’ of seduction and for the maintenance of the intimate other which should be followed, but about which it is bad to be explicit; romantic intimacy is an addiction that stimulates weakness and stunts growth, and yet is central to maturity; sex should be central, but not too central to love; the norms of propriety and responsibility that organize conventional lives are right, decent, and possible, but also boring, violent, and incomplete; and, within reason, anyone should get what she wants. This includes conventional norms about sexual practice itself: as discussions about sex have become more publicly available, it would seem that more varied practices have been normalized over the course of the twentieth century. Yet remaining remarkably stable has been the ideology that sex must seem natural: heterosexuality seems to require that any pedagogy between lovers must take place away from the sex itself, so that the image of the sex act as an expressive act of an unambivalent individual can be preserved. This form of hypocrisy is, currently, conventional to sex. Generally this ideology is addressed to women, who are deemed responsible for maintaining the emotional comfort of everyone in their sphere: but the unstated presumption in much self-help culture is that heterosexual intimacy is constantly in crisis and that its survival is crucial for the survival of life as we know it (a claim which is not false, but which of course does not tell the whole story of how desires are served by the reproduction of heterosexuality as a norm that gets called Nature).”

— Lauren Berlant, Desire / Love

4

An excerpt from “How to Seduce a Woman”, as published on the website, Masculine Mindset

5

“Myth is thus the Real of logos: the foreign intruder, impossible to get rid of, impossible to remain fully within. Therein resides the lesson of Adorno's and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment: Enlightenment always already “contaminates” the naive immediacy of the mythical. Enlightenment itself is mythical, i.e. its own grounding gesture repeats the mythical operation. And what is “postmodernity” if not the ultimate defeat of the Enlightenment in its very triumph: when the dialectic of Enlightenment reaches its apogee, the dynamic, rootless postindustrial society directly generates its own myth..”

— Slavoj Žižek, “Love Without Mercy” (2001)

6

I am by essence clean and pure.
I am pure because I am clean.
I am clean because I am pure.

– Antonin Artaud, “I Hate and Renounce as a Coward Every So-Called Sensate Being”

7

A poem about libation that never uses the noun, libation?

Who desired your downfall, o liqueur / I obey perhaps the soothsayer / Buried deep in the heart of my heart
Thinking blood while pouring wine

— Paul Valery, second stanza of “Vin perdu”

8
CATHERINE MALABOU: …. the closing words of Socrates lecture are: ‘Bid farewell to the political arena and its procedures,’ exhorting the young people abandoned by their fathers to withdraw for this very reason from that which caused their abandonment. Cynicism appears to be the most radical form of taking leave. A departure that - I'll say it again - is not a departing from politics, but from its ‘arena.’ A farewell to dynasty, a farewell to arche, to microcosm, caste, oligarchy - in a word, as we shall see, it is a farewell to government.

MICHEL FOUCAULT: What is the relationship between the fact of being subject in a relation of power and a subject through which, for which, and regarding which the truth is manifested? What is this double sense of the word 'subject,' subject in a relation of power, subject in a manifestation of truth?

9

A playful “translation” of John Gower’s summary of the Phyllis and Aristotle as it appears in Book 8 of Gower’s Apollonius of Tyre. The question being posed is whether logic or syllogism can save the wise man from his desires.

Aristotle’s Downward Dog 

There, too, do I see Aristotle
Whom that Grecian queen so
Bridled that he is ridden into
Our own under a syllogism
That forgot its own logic
And made no art of its practice
In the life which excluded
The living. What he concluded
to be was deeded to his downfall.

10

R. Murray Schafer, the firmaments of the soundscape as expressed in the relationship between sound waves and light waves. . . The Doppler effect was first described in Doppler's Liber das Farbige Licht de Doppelsterne, where it was applied to light waves by analogy, after first discovering this effect in sound. The galloping of horses, the flight of a bumblebee: two Doppler effects found in nature, uncreated by humans.

11

[Phyllis near the window, talking to young Alexander the Great about his tutor, Aristotle.]

PHYLLIS: He tells you these things about himself, not me. Watch and you’ll see. Tomorrow I will ride him through the garden of his delight. 

ALEXANDER: Impossible. He is not like the King, who sacrifices wisdom to the necessities of power. The philosopher knows better. 

PHYLLIS: Of course. He knows best, but this will not stop him. Knowing the good has never stopped a mind from chasing the bad. As for me, I want nothing to do with the old sage. What I want is to win the game he’s staged. If I am inferior by nature, I will ride my superior with pleasure.

ALEXANDER: Who should the prince believe? The woman who thinks wisdom is fraudulent—- or the sage who warns me that such a woman can charm the intellect off the throne of the head?

PHYLLIS: If you want to account for the particle, you will see particles. If you prefer to imagine the wave, you will see waves. But the light is the light, regardless.

ALEXANDER: Not regardless.

PHYLLIS: Go ahead then— regard less.

12

“A love plot would, then, represent a desire for a life of unconflictedness, where the aggression inherent in intimacy is not lived as violence and submission to the discipline of institutional propriety or as the disavowals of true love, but as something less congealed into an identity or a promise, perhaps a mix of curiosity, attach- ment, and passion. But as long as the normative narrative and institutionalized forms of sexual life organize identity for people, these longings mainly get lived as a desire for love to obliterate the wildness of the unconscious, confirm the futurity of a known self, and dissolve the enigmas that marks one’s lovers.”

— Lauren Berlant, ibid.

13

Jan Sadeler (after Bartholomeus Spranger,) Phyllis and Aristotle, engraving, 16th century

"The dialectic of the heart" ... and art.

Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art. The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.

— Donald Barthelme, “Not-Knowing”

One of my favorite working photos of a poet is this portrait of Frank O’Hara on rotary phone.

Morton Feldman and Frank O’Hara talking about each other in text

MORTON: I suppose it would have been fitting if Frank and I had met on the train coming to New York, like in a Russian novel. Actually I'm not certain when my personal memories of him begin. Let's just say he was there, waiting for us all.

FRANK: He was not to become an American composer in the historical-reminiscence line, but to find himself free of the conceptualized and self-conscious modernity of the international movement. Paradoxically, it is precisely this freedom which places Feldman in the front rank of the advanced musical art of our time.

MORTON: What I remember is mostly what he said about myself or one of the others. He never talked about his own work; at least, not to me. If ever I complimented him on something he had done he would answer, all smiles, “well - thank you”. That was the end of it. As if he were saying, “Now, you don't have to congratulate me about a thing. Naturally, everything I do is first rate, but it's you who needs looking after.”

FRANK: Structures for String Quartet (1951) is a classical string quartet without sonata development, without serial development, in general without benefit of clergy. Like Emily Dickinson's best poems, it does not seem to be what it is until all questions of ‘seeming’ have disappeared in its own projection. Its form reveals itself after its meaning is revealed, as Dickinson's passion ignores her dazzling technique.

MORTON: He admired my music because its methodology was hidden. Yet he admired other music too, whose method was unashamedly exposed.

FRANK: But differentiation is not Feldman's point, even in the graph music: the structure of the piece is never the image, nor in eschewing precise notation of touch is Feldman leaving the field open for dramatic incident whereby the structure could become an image (as in Boulez). Notation is, then, not so much a rigid exclusion of chance, but the means of preventing the structure from becoming an image in these works, and an indication of the composer's personal preference for where, unpredictability should operate.

MORTON: Nobody I knew resented Frank's love for an irrelevant genius like Rachmaninoff. We all know it was not Rachmaninoff who was our enemy, but the second-rate artist who dictates what art should be.

FRANK: A key work in the development away from serial technique is the Intersection 3 for Piano (1953). A graph piece, it is totally abstract in its every dimension. Feldman here successfully avoids the symbolic aspect of sound which has so plagued the abstract works of his contemporaries by employing unpredictability reinforced by spontaneity - the score indicates "indeterminacy of pitch" as a direction for the performer. . . . Where a virtuoso work places technical demands upon the performer, a Feldman piece seeks to engage his improvisatory collaboration, with its call on musical creativity as well as interpretative understanding.

MORTON: It is interesting that a in circle that demanded partisanship above all, he was so totally accepted. I suppose we recognized that his wisdom came from his own “system” - the dialectic of the heart. This was his secret. That was what made it possible for him, without ever being merely eclectic, to write so beautifully about both Pollock and Pasternak, to dedicate a poem to Larry Rivers one day and to Philip Guston the next.

FRANK: Unpredictability is used in a different way still in the Piece for Four Pianos (1957). This work, scored in notation rather than graph, begins simultaneously for all four pianos, after which the following notes may be played to the end by each of the pianists at time intervals of their mutual or individual choice.

MORTON: The repeated notes are not musical pointillism, as in Webern, but they are where the mind rests on an image - the beginning of the piece is like a recognition, not a motif, and by virtue of the repetitions it conditions one to listen.

FRANK: As we proceed to experience the individual time-responses of the four pianists we are moving inexorably toward the final image where the mind can rest, which is the end of the piece. In this particular performance it is as if one were traversing an enormous plain at the opposite ends of which were two huge monoliths, guarding its winds and grasses. . . . In all of Feldman's recent work the paramount image is that of touch.

MORTON: The use of the instrument must be as sensitive as the application of paint on canvas.

FRANK: (Which brings us back to Rachmaninoff, Fournier and Tudor.) In some pieces the entrance into the rhythmic structure is left entirely to the performer, and it is in this area that unpredictability enters and the performer must create the experience with an application of paint on canvas.

MORTON: Though he understood and appreciated my particular position in regard to virtuosity, he did not share it. Frank loved virtuosity, loved the pyrotechnics of it. He was, in fact, able to love and accept more difficult kinds of work than one would have thought possible.

FRANK: In Feldman's work unpredictability involves the performer and the audience much in the same way it does the composer, inviting an increase of sensitivity and intensity. But in much of the extreme vanguard music in America and Europe, particularly that utilizing tape and electronic devices along with elements of unpredictability, the statistical unpredictability has occurred in the traditional manner during the making of the piece; it has been employed preconceptually as a logical outgrowth of serial technique and it is dead by the time you hear it, though the music is alive in the traditional sense of hearing. What Feldman is assuming, and it is a courageous assumption, is that the performer is a sensitive and inspired musician who has the best interests of the work at heart.

MORTON: His intense involvement with so many different levels of work, so many different kinds of artist, naturally created great demands on his personal loyalties. But it was part of O'Hara's genius to be oblivious to these demands, to treat the whole thing as if it were some big, frantic, glamorous movie set. To us he seemed to dance from canvas to canvas, from party to party, from poem to poem - a Fred Astaire with the whole art community as his Ginger Rogers. Yet I know if Frank could give me one message from the grave as I write this remembrance he would say, “Don't tell them the kind of man I was, Morty. Did I do it. Never mind the rest.”

Morton Feldman, rocking his vertical planes.

[All quotes are sourced from the following: Morton Feldman, “After Modernism”; Frank O’Hara, “New Directions in Music—About the Early Work”;]

In the airs.

[a triptyph of sorts, am epigraphatic tri-fold]

1

“The story of my life doesn't exist.
Does not exist. There's never any center
to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces
where you pretend there used to be someone,
but it's not true, there was no one.”

– Marguerite Duras, The Lover

In a few days, I will be thinking aloud about Jacques Derrida and The Politics of Friendship with Charles and Devin, the wonderful polymaths of the Moral Minority podcast, and the near future commits me to thinking about this in that overwrought, unstable category known as ‘the present.’

Derrida, excerpt from The Politics of Friendship

“In all of Feldman’s recent work the paramount image is that of touch – ‘The use of the instrument must be as sensitive as the application of paint on canvas’,” wrote poet Frank O’Hara, perhaps quoting his friend Morton Feldman in the notes on the verso of a music jacket. This is one way of framing the friendship: by allowing its words to seep through the pieces themselves.

2

“We are forever translating ourselves
into and out of
each other.”

2 (a)

In the arts, friendships often develop from sharing a space in a journal, and recognizing a kindred or comrade in their publications or performances. ‘Transavanguardist’ artist Francesco Clemente met composer Morton Feldman through a mutual —Francesco Pellizzi — attached to a journal — Anthropology and Aesthetic.

Feldman dedicated his piano piece, Palais de Mari (1986), to Clemente. Appropriately, the piece made its debut at a intimate concert in Clemente’s studio. In the video below, Aleck Karis performs this piece which turned out to be Feldman’s final solo piano composition.

Palais stands out for its attention to silence: the light that sweeps through it is gentle and elusive, as if mixed with a watercolor brush. Feldman named it after “the ruins of a forgotten Mesopotamian royal palace, of which a photograph is situated in the Louvre Museum.” The photo in the Louvre is listed as the source of inspiration for Feldman’s Palais.

I am quoting from what may be the liner notes (?) for Karis’ performance:

In the beginning, an iconic four note motif fades into being and decays like a specter. The motif materializes and vanishes a few more times, with slight variation in the rhythm, order, and register. Each tone, each chord, each entity is carefully considered by the player. Each idea is not simply developed or repeated, but intermittently exists and persists. This conjures an entire new world separate from the real world, creating a timeless dimension that can be difficult to perceive in a linear fashion.

One form of quotation hopscotch that is frequently practiced in lecture forms runs the following triad: poem —> name —> image. Morton Feldman employed this structure of allusion in the Middelburg lecture by bouncing lines from a Marianne Moore into a reference to Clemente accompanied by the art of Francis Picabia.

2 (b)

Feldman owned a watercolor by Clemente entitled The Magic Wand (1987). My desire to see this piece dominated my morning. Desire and curiosity are not quite interchangeable here, since what I sought was relief (from the urge to see The Magic Wand) that situates itself awkwardly near to my implicit (and frequently disillusioned) belief that art serves as an alternate text into understanding the walls of the mind, or the rooms in which things are written. I wanted too many things from the magic wand, and all of these things could be stated as separate curiosities which, when allowed to converse with each other, reveal themselves to be imbricated in a clump-like structure.

I hunted for image of Clemente’s The Magic Wand online with the help of an internet search engine, the usual machine for finding badly-imagined objects and things.

Like the rooster for a ‘digital commons’, Google AI crowed from the top of the search results, offering its own intervention with the following:

While there isn't a specific artwork titled "The Magic Wand," Clemente's work is frequently described using evocative imagery and themes, including those that might lead to such a title.

Clearly, the corners or crevices are not yet part of AI’s domain. AI is a shitty reader of shadows, and shadows are my preferred sort of portrait.

3

“What
did
I
do?”

As we prepare to attend a local music festival with the teens, I am distracted by my readings and hearings. Cannot stop thinking about Feldman’s continuous shifting between time signatures in Palais. (In no particular order, I quote: 5/8, 3/8, 2/8, 2/2, 9/8, 7/8, 1/2 . . . )

Time-signature: the way time and tempo sign their name to a stave; the way rhythm gets scored.

An oil-on-linen painting by Clemente, “For Morton Feldman,” crosses paths with the time-signatures that mark duration, unfolding a way to think with the complexity that friendship occupies in the imaginary.

Francesco Clemente, For Morton Feldman (2000). Oil on linen.

The subjects of Clemente’s image are two compositions: two texts delivered to paper, each leaving their own shadows on the pinkish-white background.

The crumpled music notation sits next to the crumpled star chart (one can discern the edge of Aries in the upper right corner).

Musical staves and constellations: two cosmologies, two ways of thinking and seeing.

Paper and paper: the flesh of two trees rendered as pulp.

Music and stars: paired infinities.

Linear and constellating: the binary that Critical Theory exposed (and why we cannot forget Walter Benjamin).

Aaron Schuster’s fantastic sidereal excavation, How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science, has been in my mind this week. At one point, Aaron says that “the construction of a work of potential philosophy takes its cue from the skewed way the mind works, how its functioning is undisturbed by a wayward drift.” In this way, the potential (or perhaps even projected) “starts from its own lack, its unsystemacity.”

How long should the resonance last?

I think Feldman presents this question as an opportunity to any pianist who performs his Palais. The rests resist the call of consistency and perfect repetition. Variance emerges within the rests, themselves, creating slight drifts in the duration of each. We are always ‘thinking-through’ the resonances and shadows of others. In a sense, resonances create their own rhythm: the possible may be forsaken for the impossibility that drove that Kafka’s epistemic dread. There is no way out of the present that isn’t a way of playing with the unpredictable and developing in relation to it.

“In some pieces the entrance into the rhythmic structure is left entirely to the performer, and it is in this area that unpredictability enters and the performer must create the experience within the limits of the notation.”

— Frank O’Hara on music jacket for New Directions in Music — 2 [Morton Feldman]

Structures of allusion within structures of elision. Yet, how longingly all non-teleological touches meet in O’Hara’s words on Feldman, which I now repeat: “the paramount image is that of touch…”

Postlude

[“The poem never stops moving, changing, shaped by the one who receives it.”]

[“The poem never stops moving, changing, shaped by the one who receives it.”]

[“The poem never stops moving, changing, shaped by the one who receives it.”]

Of shadows and light.

for Adrian Frandle, who created the conditions for this seeing

On this, the day of May 16th, in the year 1991, Jacques Derrida delivered a lecture titled “A dessein, le dessin.” We know this because Francois Martin recorded this lecture, and preserved the tape— a fact that I myself only encountered due to the thoughtfulness of a friend.

Considering the “authority of the gaze” in history, where ‘to know’ also means ‘to see’ or ‘to look’, Derrida draws the audience’s attention to Memoirs of the Blind (Mémoires d’aveugle), a book that focused on artistic “exhibition or exposition of the gaze.” He describes Memoirs of the Blind as “the log book of a blind man invited to organize an exhibition at the Louvre,” a book whose “first meaning” can be summed in the statement: “Here are the memoirs of the blind man that I am and have been throughout this exhibition of drawings.”

He is speaking of blindness in art— and sight. Of course he is doing violence to himself in this as well, for Derrida always applies the most intense intellectual violence to matters concerning his own subjectivity, or his own “I”. By “exposing the gaze, well, the eye as it is itself is exposed, exposed to the wound.”

Drawing comes from blindness, or the “apprehension” of it, as Derrida conjectures (italics mine):

Of the fall in the sense of sin…. ‘Sin’ is densely-connoted word for Derrida to lay (and to leave unexamined) in this context, yet that is precisely what he does.

Jean Baptiste Regnault, Origin of Painting, 1785

Pivoting to the artistic theme of ‘the origin of drawing’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Derrida gestures towards “numerous representations around the character of Dibutatis” before retelling Pliny’s tale in his own words:

This tale “sets us on the path of a kind of increased light or visibility in the very experience of blindness,” he continues, before uttering a somewhat paradoxical claim: “In the night, in the night itself, the most light appears.”

“The condition of sight can’t be seen”: we can’t see visibility. “One might as well say that the eye can’t see itself, that the condition for the eye to see is that it can’t see itself.” This leads Derrida to a “localizable point” in the field of the vision that he calls “the blind spot” or “the blind point.” The thought that guided him in the exhibition was “that the draftman’s intense experience as an intense desire to see and show, and to exhibit and expose, that is to say, to pose here in front, to show what is exposed and to expose it in turn in front, in front of oneself […] cannot but bustle around this blindness, this blind spot or this essential blindness. The draftsman as seer is somebody who, better than anybody else, experiences blindness exemplarily and who endeavors not only to show blind people, all the time, but to show himself, to expose himself as a blind man.” At this point, Derrida recognizes himself in his words, and this act of seeing is what led him to “turn this exhibition of the blind into the exhibition of self-portrait, that is to say, somehow to link the theme of memoirs of the blind to the theme subtitled Self-Portrait.” He continues by noting that, in returning to the book, “the self-portrait in the subtitle is not only the self-portrait of myself telling my story and the stories that I've just told, but also the self-portraits of draftsmen experiencing their own blindness in a sort of hallucinated, vertiginous way, experiencing the fact... that they see insofar as they don't manage to see and don't manage to see themselves.”

The violence of the attempt to see (which is kinned to the attempt to know, as he mentions briefly at the beginning) involves a struggle with recognition:

Joseph Benoit Suvee, Invention of Art of Drawing, 1793

“No internal analysis of a so-called ‘self-portrait’ drawing can prove that it's indeed a self-portrait,” Derrida says. For example, when a person refers to “Egon Schiele’s self-portrait,” they are only quoting the title given by the artist. Schiele is the one who determined which of his pieces were self-portraits and which were speculative fictions, and this determination took place in the act of titling. 

The cliche version of this would mention something about the eye of the beholder— though Derrida doesn’t bother with this English idiom. Why should he, in French? Deconstruction welcomes the kindling of the idiom and cliche, but Derrida is focused on the reflected image: the thing we see when we look in the mirror. There is something lovely and provocative in the way he says “it is we who put out the self-portrait painter’s eyes”:

”Reading, as opposed to seeing drawings, is experiencing blindness,” Derrida concludes.

As for Dibutades—

Francine van Hove, Dibutades, 2007

In the legend as recounted by Pliny (Natural History Book XXXV), the daughter remains unnamed. Pliny tells the story in order to “append some accounts of the plastic art.” According to his account:

“Butades, a potter of Sicyon, was the first who invented, at Corinth, the art of modeling portraits in the earth which he used in his trade. It was through his daughter that he made the discovery; who, being deeply in love with a young man about to depart on a long journey, traced the profile of his face, as thrown upon the wall by the light of the lamp [umbram ex facie eius ad lucernam in pariete lineis circumscripsit]. Upon seeing this, her father filled in the outline, by compressing clay upon the surface, and so made a face in relief, which he then hardened by fire along with other articles of pottery.”

This is the story of sculpture, of the plastic arts—- and plasticity is also a story of materiality, or the materials in which a subject is conceived. In drawing, as in all the paintings above, Dibutades is confronted with her own shadow alongside that of her lover’s. Pliny doesn’t mention whether or not her tracings include herself, or whether a part of her shadow mixes with his so that the final tracing is a composite —- say, her ear and cheek buried in his profile.

So there is the problem of proximity, or the relationship between the shadows on the wall. But there is also the unstable nature of the medium, itself: projection is a very sensitive endeavor. The scale of a shadow can be reduced or enlarged depending on the position, angle, and proximity of the light source. Tracing a portrait from a shadow gives up on precision: the fidelity is to the idea rather than accurate depiction. Dibutades would hardly be able to recognize her lover in the tracings of a shadow, and recognition is what seems to be at stake for the viewer of the portrait, as opposed to its creator?

*

[All Derrida quotations are from Jacques Derrida’s “Drawing by Design,” the transcription of lecture delivered by Derrida on May 16, 1991, titled “A dessein, le dessin, as translated by Laurent Milesi and given to me by Adrian Frandle.]

"My Drawer": writing the scraps.

Song, let them take it
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.

— W. B. Yeats

I wanted to unpack Lopate’s moves in “My Drawer”, a brief and memorable essay bout miscellany, junk drawers, the things we can't (or won’t or don’t) throw away, where the drawer is "a weigh station of things” that seem to have untold significance or potential. Like a god in Eden, the essayist begins by naming what is present.

An urge to sort

Lopate, who plays himself (or, at least, the speaker) begins by acknowledging that he comes to the page after having experienced “an urge to make an inventory of the drawer” in an effort to grasp the hidden “symbolic underpinnings” of his own “character,” where the word ‘character’ refers to the person he is in life as well as the person he reveals on the page.

And so he inventories:

3-d movie glasses
a silver whistle
a combo lock whose combo has long been lost
a strip of extra cuff for his white linen suit
a plastic shoehorn and an aluminum shoe horn 
a button that says BOYCOTT LETTUCE 
an expired pair of eyeglasses
two nail clippers
cufflinks
rusty scissors for child-sized fingers 
a windproof lighter that he won at an amusement park 

The final item on the list calls to mind a souvenir, or a keepsake memorabilia marking a particular time and place.

Here, Lopate pivots away from delving into the nature of souvenirs by diagnosing himself with superstitiousness. Due to his belief that throwing things away will cause “bad things” to happen, he keeps gifts for which he has “no affection,” just in case such gifts have something to reveal in the future. Gifts, after all, should mean something, and the receiver cannot be blamed for thinking he might have missed an important point if the gift falls flat. Such gifts are kept for the potential future significance. Among them, Lopate lists novelty gists like the “pair of cloth finger puppets” intended to give him pleasure alone on his bed at night. Surveying his collection of novelty gifts, he concludes that novelty is difficult to gift, since “each person's definition of cute or campy is such a private affair.” 

Next comes the “jewelry”  collection of items saved from the 1960’s, including an elephant tusk-necklace, multi-colored beads, and various “spiritual amulets.” Then Lopate lists the things he “kept to be on the safe side,” including an official bank card, a wristwatch case, a silk drawstring purse, and other objects that could serve as possible future containers.

These objects “live a hidden life in the back street of my consciousness,” writes Lopate. He muses that the drawer might exist to hold things “that arouse only half-digested desires never fantasized all the way through” . . . fantasies so secret that not even their owner has the courage to name them.

Joseph Cornell, The Journeying Sun for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1963.

The logic

Lopate admits that these objects arouse more guilt than desire for him. The objects have hypnotized him with a “promise” to not toss them; the objects have committed him to protecting them, thus granting them the significance of the keepsake.

“I suppose if I were to examine the derivations of each of these keepsakes, many would call up some road not taken, some rejection of possibility,” Lopate muses. Clearly, there is something these objects want to say. Or, this is the story that the collector tells himself. The objects will speak if one can find the “surrealist logic” of their relation. The answer is thus relational, based on a pattern that close study might study, a pattern that must be particular to these objects and their organization.

To assemble the tale story of his “subconscious mind,” Lopate relies on the relational terrain of the nuclear family. Modern psychoanalysis will be the source of his story of origins, which begins exactly where we might expect: in the top drawer of his long-married parents.

The story of origins

Lopate traces the “original top drawer” template back to his childhood, when he would sneak into his parents’ bedroom to “approach their large, dark mahogany dresser, with its altar top composed of the round reversible mirror, the wedding photograph, the stray hair-curlers, and the Chinese black-lacquered music box where my mother kept her Woolworth jewelry.” This is the scene of the original forbidden: the top drawer of the mahogany dresser with its brass handles and tripartite sectioning.

“What was so fascinating about rifling through their drawer?” he asks himself aloud, inviting us into the question. After all, the drawer was always slightly disappointing, packed with ordinary things. In his father’s section, Lopate found “objects of obscure masculine power . . . my father's leather traveling case, a shaving brush, a pair of suspenders, a wallet with photos of us, the children.” On his mother’s side of the drawer, he visited “her bloomers and her gypsy scarves.”

And then, there is there middle part, the section shared by his parents. . .

Utopia

The middle section is the mish-mash of his and hers, that random space created by marriage where two humans join their junk into what Lopate calls “no-man's-land, with elastic bands, garters, pipe cleaners.”

Ultimately, Lopate faces the question of what he sought as a child when rummaging through his parents’ dresser drawer. This question is not unfamiliar to novelists and poets. And part of what makes this essay shimmer is how Lopate addresses it —- which, I should add, is not the same as answering it, for we can address a question without answering it completely, and thus demonstrate our respect for the questions, themselves, which seems like a far more interesting use of one’s time than attempting to be definitive.

It seems that he found a deck of naked playing cards, but the problem with memory is how much we imagine the thing we are seeking, as if the seeking, itself, can give it life. In Lopate’s words:

The paragraph ends in a rather wonderful, multi-layered figuration: “The drawer recorded without explanation the ordinariness of this miracle that had given birth to me.”

Taboo and psychoanalsysis

Then, Lopate returns to his self-examination, using the story of the origins to pry apart his own ambiguities, initially leaning into Freud (calling himself an “Oedipal child”) and then heading straight for the Freudian forbidden:

Having acknowledged the totem and the taboo, and simultaneously carving an opening within the essay for sexual digression, Lopate lopes into the surprise of his concluding page. He returns to inventorying his own drawer: “I keep a box of prophylactics.”

The back of the drawer also has a small collection of “those ads handed to me in the street for massage parlors: Beautiful Girls - Complete Privacy - One Price. ... Tahitia — Gives You Just What You Ex-pect! and an awful color photo of two women in a bubble bath with a grinning curly-headed man.” Lopate keeps the ads “just in case, to be on the safe side,” though the ‘case’ and the ‘safe side’ have lost their explanatory power at this point, which is what the writer intended.

If you hoped that Lopate’s essayed inventory would clarify the intersection of keepsakes, superstition, taboo, and sentimentality, you will be perfectly disappointed. For: “Here is a squashed-up tube of diaphragm cream, with just enough in it for one more go.” This personal item, dripping its singular potential, belongs to his ex. “Kay must have left it behind, as she did this frayed pair of panties,” Lopate tells us, before addressing the reader directly in the most intimate way.

“Do you know we almost moved in together, before we broke up for the very last time?”

How could you know? And who are you, anyway, to be reading this very private examination of a top drawer in a dresser? Consider the dexterity with which Lopate mobilizes this sudden turn away from the inventory towards the direct, personal address which he will expand in this ending locution.

“And finally,” in case you need indication as to what this excavation of the “drawer” intended to accomplish, Lopate flags it.

The most forbidden thing is thinking about and missing Kay, an act which is provoked by opening the top drawer and writing his way through the objects that “all up some road not taken, some rejection of possibility.” There is that heart-shaped button, and his failure to love Kay in the way she had wanted (the way that risked meaning something to her)— namely, by “advertising my heart on my sleeve,” declaring himself openly to be with so-and-so, agreeing to fantasize that desire all the way through. Obviously, I’m quoting one of Lopate’s statements from the beginning, about those “half-digested desires” he mentions, desires to which he returns here… if only to emphasize the way the essay, itself , becomes the object declaring his heart on his sleeve— and it does so more permanently and irrevocably than any pun in the lover’s top-drawer reliquary.

Nothing could be more public than the page. Lopate’s cleverness comes from the way he enriches (and subverts perhaps) the ordinary heteronormative meaning of fidelity in this decision to honor Kay by essay. “I faithfully continue to wear her pin, in my top drawer,” he writes.

As for this post, to properly fill the circle, here is “A Coat” by Yeats:

On "Take This Longing".

“TAKE THIS LONGING FROM MY TONGUE”

“One of the most beautiful songs in the cosmos is Leonard Cohen’s ‘Take This Longing,’” I announced to the teens this morning, who are still very much in the ‘So Long, Marianne’ trance of their Cohen journey.

Radu watched from a boneless spot on the couch, his eyes absorbing the interplanetary sadness as usual.

“Why is it beautiful?” asked an insouciant teen.

And how else to answer except by noting the perfection of repetition with slight variation, as in:

Oh, take this longing from my tongue
Whatever useless things these hands have done

which returns to the room of longing:

Just take this longing from my tongue
All the lonely things my hands have done

And then there is the shape of the image, the shaping it accomplishes in what is perhaps one of my favorite song lyrics, namely:

Hungry as an archway
Through which the troops have passed
I stand in ruins behind you
With your winter clothes, your broken sandal straps

Since anyone who has walked her sandals to shreds recognizes the longing for them, even as some fellow recalls that moment in which he misses her, what the image evokes is the sadness of losing those sandals, so we can be in two minds at once: his and hers. Both longing for something ruined.

And there is also the distinct pleasure of misapprehended lyrics. For years, I thought the lyric went as follows:

untie for me your high blue gown
like you would do
for one that you loved

Today, when rationalizing my love for this song to the teens, I consulted the lyrics and found “Untie for me your hired blue gown / Like you would do for one that you love.” I missed the kind of dress (in my mind, it was an empire-waisted blue dress, hence the ‘high’) as well as the tense (I took the love as past, Cohen makes it present).

“NOT YET”

In my stacks this past week, I must mention Jeff Allesandrelli’s NOT YET: A Novel About Sex and Shyness (Future Tense Books, 2025), which I devoured in an afternoon, unable to walk away from the text that sent me back to my notes on Cesar Pavese’s heartbreaking notebooks, as well as Ovid, Kierkegaard, Kafka, the usual kindreds. . .

Allesandrelli quotes from The Unquiet Grave (1944), which British literary critic Cyril Connolly wrote under the pen name “Palinarus,” thus immediately eliciting one of my secret meridians. Noting that “a puritan is incomplete because he excludes that half of himself of which he is afraid, and so the deeper he imprisons himself in his fastidiousness,” Connolly adds to the provocation by asking:

“Is it possible to love any human being without being torn limb from limb?” No one was ever made wretched in a brothel; there need be nothing angst-forming about the sexual act. Yet a face seen in the tube can destroy our peace for the rest of the day, and once a mutual attraction develops it is too late; for when sexual emotion increases to passion, then something starts growing which possesses a life of its own and which, easily though it can be destroyed by ignorance and neglect, will die in agony and go on dying after it is dead."

“A face seen in the tube. . .” How many poems and stories begin as a result of just that?

One more quote from A’s book.

“The tragedy of well-meaning people is the tragedy of a little man gathering all the blue he can find by the light of dawn, and then, at dusk, groping about in his collection afraid off picking up red, which may, in any case, turn out to be yellow. Conscience is nothing more than a flair, trying to recognize a color by the feel of it.”

— Cesare Pavese, diary entry for 30th December, 1937

“SKIN WITH . . .”

Jasper Johns, Skin with O'Hara Poem, 1965

And finally, four stunning lines from a poem by Antonella Anedda titled “[Pindar says the poet must guard the apples of the Muses],” as translated by Patrizio Ceccagnoli and Susan Stewart and published in The Paris Review at some point that was not recent:

Clearly, the dragon is irrelevant,
if anything, we need a hen,
the creature that hatches the egg of verses:
white for the void, yellow for the words.

Burning lines.

It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to no longer be obsessed by it.

— Cesar Pavese, 16 October 1938

1

I am sitting on a street curb in New Orleans, drinking coffee and preparing for a panel discussion where my peers will say astonishing, unforgettable things. There is a fake plastic sunflower near my left foot, small enough to have fallen off a hat or a birthday cake. 

The book is open . . .

Artist Manon Bellet selects the most reactive papers for her materials: their volatility is what ensures that they are vulnerable, malleable, capable of expressing relationality.

“There is a direct link to writing, to printed matter, while mere contact with heat blackens the rolls – word monochromes; there is no ink, but the paper is blackened all the same,” Manon Bellet said in an interview. “What I am interested in here is this overturning of meaning, a re-enchantment of the world that is possible and can be built up through serendipitous effects.”

Whether it be paper curling up or slowly disintegrating upon contact with fire, or just a draught causing the translucent pages of a wordless book to quiver under a lamp, there is one thing common to all of Manon Bellet’s work: she keeps the artist’s gesture in the background,” wrote Julie Enkell Julliard, likening Bellet’s work to what Marcel Duchamp called the “infrathin . . . the artistic cultivation of the intangible and invisible to ‘produce intensities through subtractions’.”  

2

William Blake drew “Head of a Damned Soul” 1789 as an illustration for Dante's Inferno. Although based on a drawing by Henry Fuseli, Blake's focus is on a single detail of Fuseli's larger drawing, namely, the agonized face of the damned soul.

There is no color in Blake’s work, and yet there is a sense of fire around the man's head, where fire, itself, also evokes falling. These two ways of death— fire and falling— are not directly conceivable as connected, apart from the horror they inspire, the material of nightmares.

I find myself thinking about burning lines, and what happens when we let a line scorch a bit along the edges.

3

In New Orleans, I am transfixed by Bellet’s cyanotype series, Sous sur face (2012-2013). Using transparent plastic bags, she transposed the ordinary into the ethereal. Plastic bags are cheap, gratuitous, not built to last but created for disposability: their texture is almost tissue-thin and light enough to be carried into tree limbs by wind. They are the one-night-stands of bag-relationality.

Developed in the 1840’s, cyanotype is a printing process that relies on exposure to sunlight to ‘develop’ the image. First, paper is coated in a light-sensitive solution (often Prussian blue) and allowed to dry in darkness. Then, the object that the artist wants to “print” or reproduce is laid atop the paper, which is then exposed to sunlight. The sunlight creates an imprint on the paper which appears as a pale shadow or silhouette on the Prussian blue surface of the paper. 

Bellet’s images in Sous sur face are so soft and sheer that one can mistake them for dropped lingerie. In her hands, the synthetic plastic takes an organic form that is malleable, tender, touched by light, in her own words, “less a thing than the trace of a movement.”

I watch the pages flutter in the wind.

Later, I discover a comment by Bellet on her video work, Vestige. A comment about paper and wind. “There is a slight breeze to generate the movement of the pages, and their transparent quality is enough to bring out the geometrical shapes,” Bellet said, “but the book is not a narrative; we gaze at the void and become aware of how words wear out and time passes... It is as if the forms emerging from haphazard folding were there to structure our imaginations and that of the emptiness of the screen.”

Haphazard folding . . . why have I never stared at this word, “haphazard", until now? The happenstance of hazard. The just-so-happens hazard. But in French, “hasarde” is closer to something like surrealism’s ‘chance’ or happenstance.

4

Then I watch the light move across the plastic lingerie.

Sunlight is fleeting, always carved in relation to time. (It flees duration and fleeces instants.)

Sunlight speaks to the physical object by building a shadow around it.

“Allegories are in the realm of thought what ruins are in the realm of things.”

— Walter Benjamin, “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” Origin of the German Trauerspiel

“Surrealism toppled the images of antiquity from their Platonic heaven. In Max Ernst's work they roam about like phantoms among the late 19th century middle class, for which art, neutralized in the form of a cultural heritage, had in fact become a ghost.”

– Adorno in Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt

The wisps, the loose parts of my hair–the rifts I don't see until I snap the photo.

The unpredictable and unplanned and ungroomed and me reaching towards the composition. 

We are always reading the walls . . . and trying to make sense of the room we are in.

Even when the walls are absent, we know they exist, and we live in relation to that knowledge. There will be walls. And boxes. And rooms. And expectations.

But the book is open . . . the line races the fire to its conclusion.

Michael Hardt, ceremonials, procedurals.

Magician of insecurity, the poet has nothing but adopted satisfactions. Ash always unfinished.

— Rene Char

There’s a passage in Michael Hardt’s Documenta No. 68, “The Procedures of Love,” that has stayed in my mind recently for the way he expounds the “mechanical.” Italics are mine:

To love someone, then, has a kind of mechanical character, in that your multiplicities and my multiplicities are able to form compositions that are always both below and above the level of the individual: the fragile curves of your lips with the calluses of my hands, the sea scents of your breath with the earth tones of my skin, your airy dreams of nomadic flight and my terrestrial domestic habits. Similarity is not the basis of agreement here, but neither are opposites a principle of attraction. We can never know in advance what multiplicities will agree and together form beautiful, lasting relationships. The procedure of love is to explore and experiment with possible compositions among the multiplicities in each of us.”

This procedural description of love builds upon the writing of Jean Genet, particularly the various ceremonial structures in his writings where relationships are explored and developed.

“In a poem, ordinary words are shifted around in such a way that their usual meaning is enriched by another: the poetic import,” Genet wrote The Miracle of the Rose. “Each of the things, each of the objects that recur to my mind composed a poem.” And the poem takes it meanings from the place where it is enacted, as Genet notes, in the prison “at Mettray, each object was a sign that meant grief.”

Hardt draws directly on Genet’s love “ceremonials” as a possibility for creating livable political institutions bound in —and by— love. So “love is a kind of ritual by which we continually return to those people and things with whom our multiplicities create expansive relations,” he writes:  

But this return is not mere repetition. Think of the way we have sex with a familiar lover: I touch you there, then you touch me here, then we do this, and so on until we are done. It is a ritual, a series of habits, but if it were mere repetition the magic would fail. Each return, each encounter, in a ceremonial carries with it the power and mystery of the event. That’s what makes it live. Love conceived of as a ceremonial is thus an institution in the sense that it allows you to return to, prolong, and link together in sequence the encounters you desire.

Or, to quote Genet again: “I refer everything to my system, in which things have an internal signification, and even when I read a novel, the facts without being distorted, lose the meaning which has been given them by the author and which they have for you, and take on another so as to enter smoothly the otherworldly universe in which I live.”

In a sense, Hardt imagines the part Hegel and Marx couldn't (or didn’t) amply theorize, namely, the relationality of the event. In this sense, the unlivability of revolutionary events shouldn't “lead us to close the revolutionary process in the fixed structures of a constituted power, even one aimed at providing 'public happiness' as Condorcet and his revolutionary comrades intended.” Hardt concludes that “love compositions and love ceremonials” are strategies for finding love and making it political and livable.

On his deathbed, he said of a vase of flowers that they were like him: simultaneously alive and dead.

— Guy Davenport on Franz Kafka

Eros and pop culture: the borderlines.

“…as happened for me with Vinteuil’s sonata—it’s the least remarkable parts we notice first. […] Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not start out by giving us the best they have.”

— Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom (tr. Charlotte Mandell)

for Jael, who asked me a question about music, poetry, and eros that I could not answer without sprawling a bit

THE “BEST OF ME” . . .

At the beginning of “Borderline,” Madonna is hanging out, loitering on the street with some guys while the instrumental intro shapes the beat. Then, randomly, she begins dancing with one of them. From 0:14 to 0:20, we watch this awkward dance. Everything that follows begins in that four-second flirtation with the possibility of tandem motion.

To break down those four seconds: the He and the She move around each other, almost as if they are sniffing each other out, introducing their rhythms … And yes, it is cheesy. It is tacky as hell, both visually and figuratively, this depiction of two strangers trying to match each other’s movements, to meet in that motion.

Despite the short duration, something could begin in this asynchronous encounter, and the could appears in this fragmentation and distance. The movements of an Other that provides the frame for what is to come.

The vocals begin by articulating a problem: Something in the way you love me won't let me be. The first word, “something,” suggests that part of the problem is finding words for the thing. The limits of language are given to us at the outset. And then there is also that side-by-side rhyme of “me” and “be,” a positioning that calls to mind the abandoned dance steps. I find my ear drawn to the simplicity of the pronouns, where an intonation that stresses the me, the you, and the be draw closer to the imagining of a we.

I don't want to be your prisoner
So baby, won't you set me free?

Notice how the statement closes in another the monosyllabic, side-by-side rhyme with “set me free” (as with earlier “let me be”)? I think the rhyme works against the implications of being freed by love, because, of course, the prison is the desire itself. The prison is the prism of possibility, which is why the next two lines work magic:

Stop playing with my heart
Finish what you start

Heart/start: an end-rhyme. The side-by-side rhymes abandoned for the material. And one can already sense the disaster, where to “stop playing” is to abandon the game, and to “finish,” here, would indicate an end to exactly what Madonna (or the speaker) is pursuing. The whole song is filled with lyrics that play on the game itself, asking for an end to the game while begging the game to continue:

Baby, let it show
Honey, don't you fool around 

Who is the “fool” in this fooling-around? How to evade the circle evoked by this word, “around,” in the idiomatic context where fooling-around also insinuates itself back into that opening dance and its gyrations? 

The fool “hooks up with” the foolishness of those four seconds, in figuration.

Madonna is building on the romantic trope that stages desire as a crossing of class and social boundaries. This, too, is at play in the song. And the video depicts it by alternating back and forth between scenes with the wealthy, glamorous photographer (in black and white) and the street-dancing guy (in color). Elegance vs. messiness. Artifice vs. authenticity. Status vs. friskiness. Of course none of these dichotomies are stable, and part of the fun lies in comparing the varying sort of artifice in the performance of street-guy and fancy-man.

Performing one’s self vs. being one’s self: another romantic opposition that is (too) easily resolved in the juxtaposition of images. While her relationship with the photographer takes place within rooms, where the pleasure involves making an art of the bounded space.

The reasonable speaker intervenes:

Just try to understand
I’ve given all I can
'Cause you got the best of me.

That third is brilliant in its multiple readings. “You got the best of me,” as in, you won, you beat me at the game, and maybe one only realizes the game is being played when faced with having lost it. Maybe that’s part of this strange synergy. 

“You got the best of me,” as in, I gave you the best part of myself, or you managed to get it somehow, and so this dance is one that feels like a losing of one’s best self, a shadow or a possibility.

“You got the best of me,” as in, now I am forced to reconcile the boundaries of my selfhood, that line “of me” which wants to be dissolved in the “You.” But—

Something in your eyes is making such a fool of me.

Clearly her sense of me is at risk in this encounter where the gaze of the other becomes a mirror. And so, to continue with this stanza:

When you hold me in your arms
You love me 'til I just can't see

— and seeing allows me to be rather be defined by the act of seeing the “self” in that bounded pronoun, me. That is the erotic pact: to be simultaneously present and absent, freed from subjectivity and convention, a freedom that becomes its own chain. 

In the stills above, fancy-man puts a hat on her; she rips it off and rejects it. Then she goes to look for street-guy and tries to get his attention. He rejects her for a different game, namely, pool. When she stands in the doorway as he lines up a shot, he looks up at her and then back at the pool table.

Nevertheless, all of this begins with (and returns to) those brief gyrations at the beginning, in that encounter with strangeness that elicits interest. Everything revolves around the glitches and barriers. Ecstasy unbounds us. This is how eros moves, on the page, in the room, on the street corner, in the meadow, anywhere humans wander or breath.

“Borderline” ends with that pressure against the “me,” in that repetition — Keep pushing me, Keep pushing me, Keep pushing my love. And then, because Madonna wants to show she can play the game, she ends with that C’mon baby.

TO “GET INTO” . . .

Madonna also mobilizes this relationship between rhythm, embodiment, and ecstasy in “Get Into the Groove.”

The structure is similar. Ignoring the plot of the film and focusing on the images in the video, the romantic dichotomy of wild boy vs. groomed boy, with all the usual connotations, appears. As in “Borderline,” it’s her move: she dares the man to meet her in the might be, in that unknown possibility.

If we read the video without drawing on the plot of Desperately Seeking Susan, then we have a series of images, of stills, if you will:

The playing cards indicate that the speaker knows she is playing a game, and it may be a new game, or a variation on an old game. The photo in her hand brings an Other to the table, something particular to this game and its performance. “Desperately Seeking Susan": an ad which she takes as an opportunity. Perhaps she’s trying to meet a different possible self in the act of imitation—which we do in poetry, when we write poems “after” a writer or a different poem that moved us. Although Madonna’s persona is clearly trying to game a pre-existing situation, the fact of the con doesn’t prevent the con from escaping her plans.

Dance, or dancing, feels like a labyrinth in this song. I could over-read it for hours.

Scenes are ruptured by flashes that return us to the dance floor, repeatedly, as if something is being resolved or worked out in that mass of bodies beneath the red lights. There are glances, rejections, rapprochements, dalliances, a constant sense of flux, a grinding sculpture of silhouettes that cannot settle definitively.

And you can dance (beat) For inspiration (breath) Come on (beat) I’m waiting (breath).

So, there is movement within and between sound, as guarded by the beat, or embodied by breath, but there is also a structure of repetition central to the pop song itself. Since several verses are repeated, I won’t talk about a refrain but focus on the pattern of repetitions, which is as follows:

Intro, as quoted in the four phrases above, followed by 12 verses arranged in the following pattern:

A / B / C / D / C / A / E / A / C / E / E variation / A

This command to get in the groove, which occurs in Verse A, names dance as the means of “getting to” a relational knowledge or experience. And there is the gauntlet, scaffolded as an invitation to meet her in the beat:

Step to the beat
Boy what will it be

She enjoins him to “step to” it; to risk entering the music:

Music can be such a revelation
Dancing around you feel the sweet sensation

Notice that word “around” again? Round and round we go, trying to find the ‘groove.” Lyric-wise, we’ve moved from “inspiration” to “revelation,” but what these terms share is a religious or spiritual association. Both words refer to acts that ordinarily relegated to religious epiphany, or the ecstasy of the saints. Using this sacred language immediately introduces the possibility of profanation.

Step to it, see what happens: a rhyming word hovers in the background. Call it “temptation”:

We might be lovers if the rhythm’s right
I hope this feeling never ends tonight

The end-rhymes continue building momentum forward, creating musicality, linking sound to sound in those long vowels.

The refrain turns again to the particular knowledge mentioned at the beginning of the song, that “getting to” know (Gonna get to know you in a special way) that is unique, set apart from the ordinary (This doesn't happen to me every day), as the end-rhymes propel us forward, creating order within the saying—-

Don't try to hide it love wears no disguise
I see the fire burning in your eyes

— but end-rhymes also provide a space for slippage, where words lose meaning and become closer to sheer sound. And humans respond to both: the meaning and the sound. Our ears and our minds process these stimuli at the same time.

While screenshotting, I noticed the slightly Lynchian flavor that lingers on the cusp of materiality, in that space between fade-ins and fade-outs, when things are shifting from one frame to another. Maybe there is a way in which this very slippage, this motion between, maps onto Madonna’s character, who shifts between roles and selves as smoothly as she does hair colors.

In these multiple dances with an Other, it is her own strangeness that is being courted or played upon. Here, recognition occurs in the dance, or the matching of the beat: what she recognizes in the Other is a possible self, a dance, a trick, a con, an opportunity. But there is another kind of recognition that meanders through this video, and I turn to it now.

TO “MOVE IN TIME” . . .

It is true that skipped over the recognitions of the self-similar in this video. And I’d like to try and think about this type of recognition without abandoning the music where the lyrics left off. Maybe both can be laid side by side? Hell, it’s worth a try.

Leaving the movie plot aside, looking only the images in the video, there is a fellow who returns without introduction. Madonna’s character is always delighted to see him: she abandons her roles and performances in his presence. This fellow is the man who meets her where she is, so to speak, in her aloneness. Our knowledge of him is limited to the relief (or maybe happiness) on her face when she sees him.

In my evasions of the self-similar counterpart, I also neglected to mention Verse E, which occurs twice, and also happens to be the only verse that gets repeated in a variation.

One might even venture to say that the unmentioned Verse E sits at the edge of the song’s dissolution, which is preceded by the turn of that headlong repetition loosely named as an “E variation.”

I give you Verse E:

Live out your fantasy here with me
Just let the music set you free
Touch my body, and move in time
Now I know you're mine

The stakes are explicit, despite their uncertainty: live in the now, in this here, with me, in this fantasy where the music gives us a moment to imagine each other. Touch my body—- and move in time — where time is both the motion in tandem as well as the temporality of Now. Here. This. A mutual recognition accompanied by knowledge: you are mine for the duration, where “mine” could mean anything. Or nothing.

Yet there is a difference in this type of recognition between strangers, a recognition that lacks the temporality claimed by self-similar recognitions. The repetition is that of the game, itself, not the actual selves implicated in desiring each other.

I don’t know if that means the games are different, or self-similar eros occurs without the scaffolding of a game. Games have rules, after all, and we play them to learn the rules or test ourselves within them.

But what do we know about love and eros? Recognition, rhythm, repetition: a recipe.

I leave you with the “E variation,” that shimmering texture of repetition that alters the valence of what is repeated*:

Now I know you're mine,
now I know you're mine
Now I know you're mine,
now I know you're mine

* Whether in sonnet form or in scenario, variations, by nature, are endless.

"The disordered and passionate application" of the non sequitur image.

A handful of sights and sounds during my five nights in NYC, in no particular order, sans any revelation apart from the joy of hearing other poets and admiring their work.

“Like diamond rain”

alive this springtime
is the birdsong
that like a sweeping mesh has captured me
like diamond rain I can’t
hear it enough said the tulip

— Alicia Ostriker, “Song” (like my daimon, rain)

“The vice known as Surrealism consists of the disordered and passionate application of the stupefying image.” (Louis Aragon, Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism)

Savored . . . Cadence. Noona Noodles. Danubias. Çka ka Qëllue. Bowery Poetry.

“The sung-so”

“What is a poem but the management of silence and babble?” asks Dean Young.

[Later, Young says that if the tragedy of every poem is that nothing changes or is healed, the hope is that “being finds its shape in the sung-so.”]

So I sent her back an empty box
A big mistake, sent back an empty box

— Morphine

“The absence of a thing is not merely that, it is not simply a partial lack, it is a disruption of everything else, it is a new state which one cannot foresee in the old.” (Marcel Proust)

Half in the shadows, half in the husky moonlight
And half insane just a sound

— Morphine

Oscar Wilde's "Salome"

The N train

“The Great Game”

“It is not to belittle Surrealist activity — as it has unfolded from 1924 to the present day — to consider it as a game, in fact as The Great Game, whose prizes in the eyes of those who played and lived it, can be calculated in promises of freedom, love, revolution, and in anything else that intransigent desire can aspire to.” (Phillipe Audouin)

His body is a golden string / That your body is hanging from (Leonard Cohen, “The Master Song”)

“Everything is covered in blood related to sound” (Pascal Quignard)

Pascal Quignard organized the International Festival of Baroque Opera and Theatre at Versailles in the early 1990s. However, in 1994, Quignard suddenly renounced all his musical activities. No more music, he declared. He was finished. What followed was the publication of a book, The Hatred of Music, on the power of music and what history reveals about the dangers it poses. These ten treatises about the danger in listening aim “to convey to what point music can become an object of hatred to someone who once adored it beyond measure.”

Quignard's beef is actually with the omnipresence of sound, a sonic super-profusion that has metastasized into a force of death more than of life. “Rhythm holds man and attaches him like a skin on a drum,” he wrote. Q mines a pet peeve of Glenn Gould’s when he concludes that “concert halls are inveterate caves whose god is time.” Ultimately, it is an irresistible book about how we hear, and how what we hear can destroy it.

“Individual —- but not personal”

In The Pleasure of the Text, quoting Nietzsche on interpretation as an exercise of the will-to-power, Roland Barthes wrote:

Then perhaps the subject returns, not as illusion, but as fiction. A certain pleasure is derived from a way of imagining oneself as individual, of inventing a final, rarest fiction: the fictive identity. This fiction is no longer the illusion of a unity; on the contrary, it is the theater of society in which we stage our plural: our pleasure is individual—but not personal.

Denis Donoghue’s reply to Barthes has been on my mind lately. Thus do I leave it here, with an acknowledgement that Levinas’ theories have also been complicated by the present:

I wouldn't mind inventing myself in this way, creating a fiction and calling it for the moment me. It may be that we lose very little by thinking of a self in literature as a grammatical subject, textual rather than ontological; though it would seem odd to refer to Leopold Bloom or Falstaff Isabel Archer as grammatical subjects. It would impede conversation if that were the only way we were permitted to speak of them. Besides, as a reader of Levinas, I would feel squeamish about thinking of other people—even imagined people—as fictive or notional: it's a habit I wouldn't like to take up.

Speaking of habits, what follows is a smattering of the books that brought joy to my time in NYC, with links provided . . . in case your stacks are dwindling.

And mean to ask an angel      why we can see

Everything but Earth     from Heaven

But I don’t ask     I don’t think I could stand to not

Be answered     but I don’t think I could stand the answer  

— Shane McCrae, “From Life”

Desnos forever.

1

Sheer joy upon finding World Poetry Review’s “The Desnos Dossier” and burning the hours in this textual garden of translators, translations, and intimate translation notes devoted to Robert Desnos’ unforgettable peom, “J'ai tant rêvé de toi.” Randomly, as if from a top hat, I give you this translation by Alexander Dickow:

Dickow’s Desnos meets others, as “J'ai tant rêvé de toi” is carried into English by each translator, in this single issue, enabling readers to discern the shape of each breath.

The poem’s title is translated as “I’ve Dreamt So Much of You,” with slight variations in verb tense. But there are two exceptions. Laura Marris added a note on the poem, set in a parentheses above the title: “(to the mystery girl, 1926)”. A similar contextualizing gesture comes from Mark Polizzoti, who referenced history in his own way by appending the following above the title: “She, Mysterious”. Both additions introduce the ghost, herself, while varying the temporality of the addressee. Where Laura places her within time, in 1926, Mark leaves her suspended outside of time, occupying a particular silhouette made by memory, a “She” that stays mysterious, unlimited by temporality. Perhaps Mark’s “She” is constructed by this act of remembering and I’m not sure a word exists for the persons constructed by dreaming, despite how real they feel to us?

2

Convention has it that Desnos wrote this poem about music-hall singer, Yvonne George, whom he met in 1924. In this story, she haunts his dreams here and returns in the poems of Ténèbres. It was a case of unrequited love, unsuccessful love, or unrealized love, depending on the narrator. By ordinary standards, it was a ‘failed love’— though writers must amongst themselves as to whether the poems realize a love that is perhaps more ‘real’ than a romantic relationship.

Desnos’ poem gives life to the dream, an eternity of life. Yvonne is also said to be the person invoked by Desnos’ haunting final poem (though I’m inclined to suspect Louki deserves consideration).

Yvonne George in 1923, around when Desnos met her.

Yvonne George, circa I-don't-know.

Born in Brussels in 1896 as Yvonne de Knops, George began her career on stage, where she met Jean Cocteau. In 1922, after being discovered by the influential Paul Franck, Yvonne George moved into a nice apartment in Neuilly that became a hub for meeting artists and writers. Last FM offers a brief history of George’s life, including the following statement: “In 1924, well-known in Parisian intellectual circles as a charming singer, George became the subject of a passionate love affair with the French poet Robert Desnos, who wrote her numerous poems including the famous J'ai tant rêvé de toi (I have dreamed so much about you).”

It is well known that Desnos introduced George to opium, or that opium was in the background of their encounters, as written in Desnos’ novel, La Liberté ou l’Amour (Freedom or Love), a book that received the honor of being condemned for obscenity by the tribunal de la Seine.

Styled as an emancipated woman by her peers, George died of tuberculosis in a hotel room in Genoa on May 16, 1930. Like Jesus of Nazareth, she was 33 years old. “Weakened by her the excesses of her lifestyle, George fell ill with tuberculosis,” says Last FM, leaving us with exemplary palaver of the sort slung at artists and bohemians who died young from tuberculosis or Spanish flu. Ode to the heavy lifting done by “excesses of her lifestyle” here! I say this with sarcasm dripping from my fangs.

Last year, I had the pleasure of being consumed by Desnos’ novella, The Die Is Cast (1943), published by Wakefield Press in Jesse Lee Anderson’s translation, and I cannot recommend it enough to anyone who is interested in Desnos’ relationship with Yvonne George and the perfusion of deliriums wrought by opium. Desnos published the book in occupied Paris a year before the Gestapo arrested him for his Resistance activities. The Die marks “a shift from his earlier frenetic surrealist prose to a social realism that borrowed as much from his life experience as from his career as a journalist,” a realism that happens to include his opium experimentation “and his doomed relationship with the chanteuse Yvonne George” in the 1920’s. It may be “junkie literature.” Certainly, Desnos marks an end to utopias “in a distinct break from the ‘artificial paradises’ explored by his predecessors, moving towards "a new era of ‘artificial hells.”

Novella aside, in Desnos’ poetry, the dreaming continues. The poem gives us a world in which the dream, alone, is an honest or decent guide to what could possible. The world is a wreck, a failure; the dream reimagines what it cannot rescue.

3

The first time I tried to translate Desnos’ “J'ai tant rêvé de toi” into English, I was wandering through France, desperate to share it with my hiking companion (who did not read or speak French). This was prior to cell phones and internet life.

I remember feeling defeated by the poem’s tense, by the coexistence of present and past in that futurity Desnos creates. It inspires wonder to read it, to be called into the timelessness of his invocation. And the challenge is apparent in the very first line: “J'ai tellement rêvé de toi que tu n'es plus réel.” This dream-tense, for lack of a better word, resists taming: it is as elusive as it is allusive.

Scanning the translations of this first line in “The Desnos Dossier” gives you a sense of how writers grapple with motion and temporality. For that critical opening clause, all are variations on “I have dreamt” or “I have dreamed,” give or take contractions.

I’ve dreamt of you so often that you’re losing your reality.  (Guy Bennett)

I have dreamed of you so long now your realness does wane. (Dawson Ford Campbell)

I've dreamt of you so often that you become unreal. (Mary Ann Caws)

I’ve dreamed of you so many times that you don’t seem real anymore (Chris Clarke)

I’ve dreamed so much of you that you lose your reality. (Kate Deimling)

I’ve dreamt so much of you that you lose your reality. (Alexander Dickow)

I have dreamed of you so much you’ve begun to seem unreal (Heather Green)

I have dreamt of you so often you’ve lost your reality (C. Francis Fisher)

I have dreamed of you so much that you are losing reality (Charlotte Mandell)

I dreamed of you so much that you became unreal. (Laura Marris)

I’ve dreamed of you so much that you’ve become unreal. (Ian Monk)

I’ve dreamed of you so much that you lose your reality. (Erin Moure)

I’ve dreamed of you so much that your reality slips away (Mark Polizotti)

I’ve dreamed of you so many times that you’ve stopped being real. (Damion Searls)

Heather Green, Chris Clarke, C. Francis Fisher, Charlotte Mandell, and Mark Polizzoti elected not to punctuate the statement with a period, leaving it open.

Among the different formulations of n'es plus réel — “lose your reality”; “become unreal”; “don’t seem real anymore”; “begun to seem unreal”; “lost your reality”; “are losing reality”; “became unreal”: “your reality slips away”; “stopped being real.”

This word, “seem,” is part of what translations dance around, precisely because the pitch of the portrait is a dreamscape which feels real — and must feel real for the poem to work. I use “work” loosely here, for each poem has its labor, each poem has its secret imaginary, which beckons the reader as a horizon rather than a completed scene.

And now, for one more comparison, this time looking at the translations of that single phrase which marks a shift in the poem: “Ô échelles de sentiments.”

O balances of feeling. (Laura Marris)

O balancing act of feelings! (Charlotte Mandell)

O feelings held in the balance. (Erin Moure)

Sentimental swings and balances. (Ian Monk)

Alas, the balancing act of the heart. (Damion Searls)

Cruel emotional balance (Mark Polizotti)

Oh, sentimental scales. (C. Francis Fisher)

O sentimental scales (Heather Green)

Oh sentimental scales. (Alexander Dickow)

O sentimental scales. (Guy Bennett)

O scales of sentiment. (Kate Deimling)

O scales of sentimentality (Chris Clarke)

Oh the shifts of feeling. (Mary Ann Caws)

O passional scales. (Dawson Ford Campbell)

4

This is Desnos’ poem, as it appears in the original French, with no breathing room between the lines/stanzas:

I’m still not sure how I would translate this poem… there are so many versions, so many variants, which is perhaps due to the music in it. But there’s something about the breath and pauses that made me wonder about em dashes today.

I can no longer touch —- your face and your lips, which grace the visage of a passing stranger. 

I dreamt you so frequently, I walk and talk and sleep with your phantom, since perhaps the only way that remains possible is to become a phantom among the phantoms, a shade one hundred times darker than the shadow that moves and continues moving — wildly – across the sundial of your life.

5

When hunting for Coleridge on the shelves a few weeks ago, I ran across an old Everyman’s Library collection small enough to fit in a coat pocket or a backpack. I recognized it immediately, the way one recognizes one of the first poetry books ever gifted to you. It is true: poets never forget, and surely this is more true of the poems we’ve been given than the bracelets and flowers.

Never RIP, Pinka.

This is merely to acknowledge the spectral presence of our dog, Pinka, whose spirit accompanies us on ghoulish shenanigans every October 31st, and whose life and untimely death are the subject of a poem titled “Two Years After Our Dog, Pinka, Got Hit by a Car on Halloween and Died Before Our Eyes as the Kids Howled in Ghost Costumes on the Front Lawn,” first published in Salamander and now collected in My Heresies.

Even in this photograph, Pinka was protesting the imbecility of the humans who did not take her everywhere with them, who could not, for example, bring her along on errands to the dentist, the county courthouse, the Friends of the Library bookstore, the thrift store, etc. etc. To be loved by Pinka was to be hounded by affection and attention. Even now, I am haunted by her habit of sitting on my feet when I used the restroom. May Pinka’s spectre continue to open the back door of the house at midnight so that she might sneak out and bark at squirrels, as she did tonight, valiantly.

/

An unfortunate case of insomnia.

My flight leaves in 5 hours, which doesn’t explain why I’m awake, obsessing over a missing notebook. More than a decade ago, the Krakow notebook was stolen during a sojourn in New York City. “The memory of that notebook, or what it held, is useless – it serves no purpose – offers no way into life,” a therapy book would warn. “Bury it.”

But there is no way to bury an absent corpse. That is the problem. How can we bury the thing that does not belong to us? 

In Virgil’s Aeneid, while traveling to the underworld to retrieve his father, Aeneas asks Sybil, his guide, what will happen to those whom Charon refuses to carry across the river. Sybil tells him those who are not allowed to pass to the underworld are the "helpless and graveless" souls, marked by the absence of a permanent resting place. Only when their bones are buried, can they be admitted. Otherwise, they will haunt the shore for a century before Charon is allowed to ferry them over.

The memory of my stolen notebook is a zombie that returns to unsettle my nights. There is a shadow of it and everything I write. An abortion metaphor.

Cellos.

Tonight, I sat on the grey sofa with a freshly-shorn Radu and listened to Damien Rice with the teens. During Rice’s more cinematic pieces, the teens kept quiet, listening, toying with Radu’s bone. I let myself drift through the rooms and places in which some of those songs first met me. We all drifted a bit. This tandem drifting continued until the youngest noticed the prevalence of cellos, those angles of bows and elbows bent over the wooden curves. “They sort of just wait and hide inside the song and come out when the music curves,” she said very seriously, “—- when it gets sadder.”

Cellos have an extraordinary capacity to take the violin’s lament and deepen it. I said this (or something similar) to the teen, only to find my own mind turning to something I’d read earlier this week.

It behooves mortals
To speak with restraint of the gods.
If, between day and night,
One time a truth should appear to you,
In a triple metamorphosis transcribe it;
Though always unexpressed, as it is,
O innocent, so it must remain.

—  Friedrich Hölderlin

In this passage (which Maurice Blanchot used as an epigraph to The Work of Fire), Hölderlin seems to suggest that the “always unexpressed” remains “innocent” by virtue of never having existed in the world. Never having been subject to its economies of purity and profanation. And I mention it because I find myself resisting this idea of purity associated with the ideal, the never-incarnate, the utterly absent.

Isn’t poetry borne from courting a loosening of binds and divisions? Doesn’t the poem sit down quietly and pluck the tiny pins from its bun in order to feel the world more closely— in the midst of hair falling, in the mist of that half-finished self where language becomes porous?

The Rilkean in me prefers to be rung by a thing, open to its music.

To be rung by. To be wrung. . . .

The poems opens as would a letter to the “quiet friend” named in the first two words. There, at the beginning, he tells us to “feel” how our breath, our “breathing,” creates space around us. “More space,” he says of that interior motion that resembles silence to those who might share a room with us.

Human breath tends to be muted, heard only in the sharp inhalations and exhalations of fear, panic, or excitement. Most of the time, we breath inconspicuously, inaudibly.

Rilke addresses the reader directly, asking them how it feels to be rung by emotion. “Move back and forth into the change,” he says, “What is it like, such intensity of pain?” What is the shape and the detail of this ringing?

“If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine,” Rilke said. (“I make wine from your tears,” sang INXS.) In the darkness that cannot be bound, “in this uncontainable night,” a night so vast that it cannot be held within a single person, subject, or body. There, where the night is too big to hold:

be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

The "crossroads” of our senses call for a certain imaginary that permits recognition. While reviewing stills from a home movie made by my father before he and my mother fled Ceausescu’s Romania, I recognized a pattern. This strange combination of boxes and lines on a blanket covered my mother’s legs in Bran, as she sat beneath a tree, using her foot to move a sleeping baby’s stroller back and forth.

That sleeping baby— clueless of what was to come in the years without parents— was me. When glancing at the black and white image, the mind misses the pattern in the colored blanket that sits on the chair as I type. The mind almost misses this connection at the crossroads of the senses…

Poetry is the bell that wrings us. And this demands nothing less than our complete attention. There is music in the waiting, and music in the despair of finding wounds one cannot suture. It is always too late, somehow. And yet, the cello suite teaches us how to phrase such things, as William Bronk notes in the poem below, where feeling is among the things we might never have dared on our own.

The brunette parts.

In a recent, rather wonderful interview, I was asked about “The Krakow Nude,” a poem in My Heresies . . . a poem about the portrait that used to hang in my DC apartment. Although the “nude” isn’t one I’d share online, the first image from the Krakow photo series is less provocative. It is, for better or worse, a moment in time that shaped other moments in time. But I loved those photos and they partake of an “almost” that animates our political, social, and cultural discourses about what it means to be, and to be free. To quote Joe Henry’s portrait of Richard Pryor in an entirely different context, almost like I was free…

Lights shine above me, they're like your eyes above the street
Lights shine below me, they're like stars beneath my feet
I stood on your shoulders
And I walked on my hands
You watched me while I tried to fall
You can't bear to watch me land

— Joe Henry, “Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation”

I’ll see some of you in New York on Friday, which means the world to me, as I stand in a place I’ve always dreamed of entering— and read poems about the ones I cannot see.