Furniture sounds.

There is always a kind of drying out produced by language... For me... there is something prior to language: a sensation, a perception, something in search of its language, which cannot exist without language.

— Nathalie Sarraute in conversation with Alaine Robbe-Grillet at Cerisy, 1971

1 / “BUREAUCRATIC SONATINA”

A Musician's Day

An artist must regulate his life. Here is my precise daily schedule. I rise at 7:18; am inspired from 10:30 to 11:47. I lunch at 12:11 and leave the table at 12:14. A healthy horse-back ride on my property from 1:1g to 2:35. Another round of inspiration from 3:12 to 4:07.

From 5:00 to 6:47 various occupations (fencing, reflection, immobility, visits, contemplation, dex-terity, swimming, etc.).

Dinner is served at 7:16 and finished at 7:20.

Afterward from 8:0g to 9:59 symphonic readings out loud.

I go to bed regularly at 10:37. Once a week I wake up with a start at 3:14 A.M. (Tuesdays.) I eat only white foods: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals, rice, turnips, sausages in camphor, pastry, cheese (the white vari-eties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (skinned).

I boil my wine and drink it cold mixed with fuchsia juice. I have a good appetite but never talk when eating for fear of strangling.

fuchsia juice. I have a good appetite but never talk when eating for fear of strangling.

I breathe carefully (a little at a time) and dance very rarely. When walking I hold my sides and look steadily behind me.

Being of serious demeanor, it is unintentional when I laugh. I always apologize very affably.

I sleep with only one eye closed; I sleep very hard. My bed is round with a hole in it for my head to go through. Every hour a servant takes my temperature and gives me another.

For a long time I have subscribed to a fashion magazine. I wear a white cap, white socks, and a white vest.

My doctor has always told me to smoke. He even explains himself: "Smoke, my friend. Otherwise someone else will smoke in your place."

— Erik Satie, Mémoires d'un amnésique

2 / “FURNITURE MUSIC”

Structured as a Satie-style trinity, Ian Penman’s delightful ode to Satie is titled Erik Satie Three Piece Suite. The book includes a lexicon, a “Satie A-Z” wherein Penman defines “furniture” repeatedly, playing on Satie’s own penchant for reiteration as a formal gesture. In what follows, I mix Penman’s “furnitures” with my own . . .

FURNITURE (1)

Furniture Music or musique d'ameublement is a concept, future or jest dreamed up by Erik Satie circa 1917. In his own words, Satie sought to create "a music ... which will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks at dinner, not dominating them, not imposing itself. It would fill up those heavy silences that sometime fall between friends dining together. It would spare them the trouble of paying attention to their own banal remarks. And at the same time it would neutralize the street noises which so indiscreetly enter into the play of conversation. To make such music would be to respond to a need.

FURNITURE (2)

Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never one but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed.

— William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, as thought by Quentin in italics

FURNITURE (3)

The idea of mingling background and foreground is a characteristic Satie upending of givens, hierarchies, values. He adopts, as he often did, a pragmatic tone to talk about a dreamy thing. Impossible to separate fantasy from thesis, Furniture Music is both a blague and a serious proposal. This is Satie the conceptual artist, long before Conceptual Art. Imagine a music without an audience. If music is not listened to, what is it?

FURNITURE (4)

The founding irony of Furniture Music: he couldn't get people to treat it as such. At the time Satie brought it into the world, when even owning a radio still wasn't that common, his idea could only exist as performed rather than recorded music.

Ornella Volta: “So on 8 March 1920, during the intermission of a play by Max Jacob staged at the Galerie Barbazanges by Pierre Bartin, he launched this ‘utilitarian music’ which was emphatically not to be listened to. At the Galerie Barbazanges ... Satie did not achieve the result he had expected. Although invited to ‘walk about, eat, drink,’ the audience remained respectfully seated. Milhaud recounts: ‘It was no use Satie shouting: Talk, for heaven's sake! Move around! Don't listen! They kept quiet. They listened.’”

FURNITURE (5)

Another irony: Satie himself was the least likely person to use Furniture Music. He had next to no furniture, and did not live in a manner which was at all conducive to throwing dinner parties.

FURNITURE (6)

The poet Léon Paul Fargue, who knew Satie, called it musique maisonnière or “household music.”

FURNITURE (8)

The same thing happens with Satie’s Furniture Music as it does Vexations. John Cage takes the ambiguous jeu d'esprit of Vexations and "elevates" it into the artistic canon; two decades later, Brian Eno takes Furniture Music and repurposes it as Ambient Music. The elevator always goes from low to high.

FURNITURE (9)

Maybe György Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna could be heard as furniture music for infinity.

FURNITURE (10)

T shows me how to paint the sky using watercolors. The horizon is where the sky starts, he says, lifting a pencil. He uses the pencil to draw a horizontal line across the dry paper. The line is closer to the bottom. T says one-third is a good fraction to fall back on for horizons. He then lays the paper to soak in a bin filled with water. He lights a cigarette. Horizon and water. Midway through the cigarette, T lifts the wet paper from the bin with both hands. He uses a flat brush to run a wash of Yellow Ochre over the wet page to warm the stark white. T paints quickly; the cigarette burns, dangling from his lip. T cleans the brush and adds Antwerp Blue to the top corner. He spreads the blue across the page with quick strokes. These are the clouds, he says of the white unpainted patches in the blue. Sky begins as horizon, or a line. Clouds begin as nothing, or negative space, on the page. This is the opposite of how a cloud appears in the sky. T says something elliptical about balance as he grinds the cigarette butt on the table. If we wanted a beach, he says, I would now take time to work Raw Umber into the foreground and shape the dunes. But we don't want a beach. He raises an eyebrow. Right? He paints the clouds fast, brushing a tiny amount of white over the negative spaces. The wetter the page, the softer the clouds. He doesn't blot. He waits. Is this what you wanted to see? He asks me twice.

FURNITURE (11)

More recent elevator music may be computer-generated, with the score being composed entirely via algorithms.

FURNITURE (12)

German artist Gerhard Richter used the word “analogy” when describing his artistic process and method. In an effort to destabilize the East/West, communist/capitalist binaries, those either/or dichotomies which he likened to ideologies, Richter sought analogies with “the smallest possible difference.”

3 / “POEM FOR CHAIRS, TABLES, BENCHES ETC.”

“Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches and unspecified sound sources” by La Monte Young, from Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, Etc. (La Monte Young, 1960). This “chamber opera” involves nothing more than moving tables, benches, and chairs around the stage. As a form, the “chamber opera” exists because Satie collapsed the boundary between the public performance of music and the intimate, bourgeois mode known as the chamber quartet, reserved for drawing rooms and salons.


4 / PICTURESQUE ENFANTILLAGES

Seeking a “suitable designation” for the micro-form that Satie’s music evokes, Roger Shattuck settles on a French phrase— “musique de placard (placard means both closet and poster), in the double sense of extreme intimacy and deliberate publicity.” Satie’s compositions are made for proximity; their ideal setting would involve “two or three friends around a piano who participate in the music as they would to sing a madrigal or a Christmas carol.” This “closet music” is slightly more “private than chamber music” and Shattuck believes that “the intimate works attained a special notoriety, like that of his private religious publication, Le Cartulaire” which gained a reputation through word of mouth.

By throwing “his little closet pieces in the face of traditional concert music,” Satie turned the tiny and private into a potential public, the same public that congregated around street lamps and sought to read posters and manifestos. His musique de placard “assumed the proportions of manifestos: poster music,” working the same “public privacy” as the drawings of Paul Klee or the poetry of Frank O’Hara. To conclude with Shattuck’s own conclusion to a chapter in his mesmerizing The Banquet Years:

With the inanity of furniture music, the intimacy of la musique de placard, and the stripped line of Socrate, Satie challenges us not to be impressed but to be bored. He says in effect: Here are the naked features of our world. If they provoke you or bore, you will have reacted constructively, for either way you will be forced to move. This is the meaning of a staggering sentence contained in one of his late notebooks, a sentence that describes his entire being: “Experience is one of the forms of paralysis.”

The child, like the true Bohemian, has not yet defined his life by excluding alternate ways of behaving. The "lessons" of experience can begin to cripple our freedom. There remains one form of paralysis which is even more devastating. In Satie's world the supreme heresy would have been the honeyed advertising slogan “They satisfy.” If experience is a form of paralysis, satisfaction is a form of death. In his hands music never became an exercise in self-contentment. It was a means of upholding our freedom.

*

I prefer the Chopin that reaches me in the street from an open window to the Chopin served in great style from the concert stage.

– Witold Gombrowicz, Notebooks

They require a new kind of listening, for they are too brief and tenuous for concert performance. One must play them oneself on the piano, murmuring the texts which punctuate the spaces in the staff, watching the visible pattern of notation, and listening to that same pattern become melody. Among these three aspects of the work, one cannot distinguish which is frame and which is framed.

— Roger Shattuck on Satie’s Enfantines and miniature pieces

El Greco's Saint Sebastians.

I have been one acquainted with the spatula,
the slotted, scuffed, Teflon-coated spatula

that lifts a solitary hamburger from pan to plate,
acquainted with the vibrator known as the Pocket Rocket

and the dildo that goes by Tex,   
and I have gone out, a drunken bitch,

in order to ruin   
what love I was given, 

— Kim Addonizio, “The First Line Is the Deepest”

This morning Caserio Santo, the assassin of President Carnot, was executed; the papers are full of phrases such as: Santo died like a coward. But surely he didn't; it is true that he trembled so that he could scarcely walk to the scaffold, and his last words were spoken in so weak a voice as hardly to be audible, but these words were the assertion of his faith: Vive l'Anarchie. He was faithful to his principles to the last; his mind was as free from cowardice and as firm as when he struck the blow which he knew must be expiated by his own death. That he trembled and could scarcely speak are the signs of the physical terror of death, which the bravest may feel, but that he spoke the words he did shows strange courage. The flesh was weak, but the spirit unconquerable.

— W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook

Speaking of the mythos of “strange courage” and “unconquerable spirits,” I return again to the iconography of Saint Sebastian, this time with an eye to El Greco’s depictions, or the three oil paintings attributed to him— the first of which remains my favorite.

1. El Greco, Saint Sebastian, or Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. 1576-79

Oil on canvas, a wash of blues. Unique for the way the clouds part to frame Sebastian’s head with that bright cerulean blue sky. Both the tree and the torso of Sebastian are punctured by arrows, and there is something alarming or eerie about the arrow puncturing the tree’s upper limb. One can almost feel it. Some think El Greco used Titian’s work as a model, since Sebastian is depicted similarly hanging from bonds which tie his elbows to a tree, and El Greco's decision to put his signature on the stone under the saint's left knee resembles Titian’s sign his piece on the stone under his Sebastian's foot. The signature brings the artist into the composition here; it isn’t peripheral.

*

“Dostoevsky reminds me of El Greco, and if El Greco seems the greater artist it is perhaps only because the time at which he lived and his environment were more favorable to the full flowering of the peculiar genius which was common to both. Both had the same faculty for making the unseen visible; both had the same violence of emotion, the same passion. Both give the effect of having walked in unknown ways of the spirit in countries where men do not breathe the air of common day.Both are tortured by the desire to express some tremendous secret, which they divine with some sense other than our five senses and which they struggle in vain to convey by use of them. Both are in anguish as they try to remember a dream which it imports tremendously for them to remember and yet which lingers always just at the rim of consciousness so that they cannot reach it. With Dostoevsky too the persons who people his vast canvases are more than life-size, and they too express themselves with strange and beautiful gestures which seem pregnant of a meaning which constantly escapes you. Both are masters of that great art, the art of significant gesture. Leonardo da Vinci, who knew somewhat of the matter, vowed it was the portrait-painter's greatest gift.”

— W. Someset Maugham in his notebook from 1917, when he went on “a secret mission to Russia”

2. El Greco, Saint Sebastian c.1600-1605 or c.1610-1614

The second Saint Sebastian bears a much stronger resemblance to the final portrait in El Greco’s series— and the date reflects this confusion, naming it as c.1600-1605 (according to Tiziana Frati’s catalogue raisonnés) or c.1610-1614 (according to Harold Wethey’s catalogue raisonnés). Historians surmise that it was originally a rectangular full-length portrait that was cut down into an oval at an unknown date.

A legal battle over the ownership of an El Greco painting withdrawn from a Christie’s New York auction in February is advancing, as Romania has secured a “long-term hold” on the work, Saint Sebastian (ca. 1610–14), claiming it is part of its national collection. Court documents now reveal the painting’s owner is Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who acquired it in 2010 from dealer Yves Bouvier through his offshore company, Accent Delight. The El Greco painting will remain at Christie’s until the dispute is resolved by legal authorities. It had been estimated to sell for between $7 million and $9 million.

— The Art Newspaper, June 2025

In 1898, Romania’s King Carol I acquired the painting and bequeathed it to the Romanian royal collection. El Greco’s oval-cut Sebastian stayed in Romania until 1976, when the art-dealing firm Wildenstein & Company had ownership of the painting transferred to them. In early 2025, the Romanian government claimed that the El Greco had been taken from Romania illegally in 1947 by Carol's descendent, Mihai, who also happened to be the last king of Romania and who fled his homeland after Petre Groza and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej forced him to sign a pre-written abdication letter on December 30, 1947.

*

”Melville. A tall man, with a saturnine countenance, long, dark, curling hair, turning gray, and strongly marked features. He is going to Australia to produce American farces and musical comedies. He has traveled all over the world and talks enthusiastically of Ceylon and Tahiti. He is very affable when spoken to, but naturally silent. He sits reading French novels all day long.”

— W. Somerset Maugham in his 1915 notebook

3. El Greco, Saint Sebastian. 1610-1614

Oil on canvas. The final of El Greco’s three portraits of the saint. It survives in two large fragments, both of which are in the Prado Museum; the top half was donated by the Countess of Mora y Aragón in 1959 and the lower half was acquired in 1987. Frankly, I hate it. The elongated neck and throat of Sebastian plays into the grotesque, but doesn’t play hard enough. The background includes a view of the town of Toledo that places Sebastian in a context that has nothing to do with him, possibly at the request of his patron or to create an artificial association between the saint and the city.

From Atterberg’s score for Suite No. 3

There are times when I look over the various parts of my character with perplexity. I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person which at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real me? All of them or none?

— W. Somerset Maugham, early notebooks

*

Kurt Atterberg, Suite No. 3 for Violin, Viola & String Orchestra, Op. 19, No. 1 (1917)
W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook (1915)

Sonnenizios, paradelles, and American sentences.

MUSIC

Valentin Silvestrov’s Postludium No. 1 (“DSCH”) for Soprano, Violin, Cello and Piano (1981), as performed by Melanie Henley Heyn (soprano), Hee-Soo Yoon (violin), Jeffrey Ho (cello) and Vivian Hornik Weilerstein (piano). A haunting and spare tribute to DSCH (aka Shostakovich) . . . that accompanied my own writing today.

SONNENIZIO

I was reminded of the sonnenizio due to a tweet by Phillip Crymble today, and decided it might be fun to lay that nonce form nearer, and bring two other such creatures into the fray.

In What Is this Thing Called Love, poet Kim Addonizio introduced a new poetic form. Seemingly “lost by history,” the sonnenizio form was introduced with the following explanatory footnote:

The Sonnenizio was invented in Florence in the thirteenth century by Vanni Fucci as an irreverent form whose subject was usually the impossibility of everlasting love. Dante retaliated by putting Fucci into the seventh chasm of the Inferno as a thief. Originally composed of hendecasyllabics, the sonnenizio gradually moved away from metrical constraints and began to tackle a wider variety of subject matter. The sonnenizio is fourteen lines long. It opens with a line from someone else’s sonnet, repeats a word from that line in each succeeding line of the poem, and closes with a rhymed couplet.

So we have the bones of a sonnet with variations and adaptations. Here is Addonizio's first published sonnenizio:

The poem starts with the first line of a sonnet titled “Idea 61…” by the Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton.

Idea 61: Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part

Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me;
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free.
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of Love’s latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies;
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes—
Now, if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might’st him yet recover!

Addonizio repeats the word “part” from the first line of Drayton’s sonnet throughout her own poem, which crosses time by connecting with the speaker of Drayton’s poem. She presses the part, and uses it as fulcrum for the poem’s motion and meaning. As noted by Poets Online, Addonizio” doesn't use any sonnet rhyming pattern, though other sonnenzios online do have rhyme. Some use a 14 line single stanza, some 8 & 6, or 4, 4, 4, and 2.”

The sonnenizio (which Addonizio invented, making splendid use of the footnote to craft a well-collared literary history for her nonceform) is enjoyable to write. Basically:

  1. Take a line from someone else's sonnet and use it as your first line.

  2. Repeat a word from that borrowed line in each of the succeeding 13 lines of the form. 

  3. Finish with a rhymed couplet. 

  4. Identify the original source of your opening line, whether in the epigraph or the title.

  5. Edit with an eye to slight variations in the repeated word.

O, if and if you are looking to read a few more:

“Sonnenizio on a Line from Wendy Cope” by Arlene Ang
"Sonnenizio after a Line from Neruda” by Christine Swint
”Unplotted” by Susan Comninos
”[As nude upon some warm lawn softly turn]” by Michael Schiavo
”Sonnenizio on a Line from Elizabeth Barrett Browning” by Mona Anderson
”Sonnenizio on a Line from Shakespeare” by Clemmie Mendelsohn
”Sonnenizio on a Line from Yeats” by Catherine Rogers

And, tangentially, the form took on a new life when Michael Garrigan and Andrew Jones invented the songenizio, a form “born from the ancient art of making mixtapes”:

Songenizios is a collection of sixteen “sonnets” from Michael Garrigan and Andrew Jones. Each songenizio poem starts with a line from a song (based on playlists they made each other), repeats (in some form) one word from it in the following thirteen lines, and ends in a rhyming couplet. A collaboration between songs and sonnets, poets and musicians, this mixtape chapbook serves as a way to communicate across different mediums during the Covid-19 pandemic. All proceeds from the sale of this chapbook go to helping musicians through the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund.


PARADELLE

The paradelle form also has its own mythos. Originally, Billy Collins introduced his "Paradelle for Susan" with a note claiming that the paradelle originated in 11th century France. Here's the foot-note:

"The paradelle is one of the more demanding French fixed forms, first appearing in the langue d'oclove poetry of the eleventh century. It is a poem of four six-line stanzas in which the first and second lines, as well as the third and fourth lines of the first three stanzas, must be identical. The fifth and sixth lines, which traditionally resolve these stanzas, must use all the words from the preceding lines and only those words. Similarly, the final stanza must use every word from all the preceding stanzas and only these words."

But in the introduction to The Paradelle, a 2015 anthology published by Red Hen Press, Collins added more context:

A few years ago, I wrote a poem that I titled "Paradelle for Susan." It was the only paradelle ever to have been written because I invented the form in order to write the poem. What I set out to do was write an intentionally bad formal poem. Auden said there was nothing funnier than bad poetry, and I thought a horribly mangled attempt at a formal poem might have humorous results. I considered using an already existing form, but I figured enough bad sonnets and bad sestinas are already being written these days without me adding to the pile...The paradelle invites you in with its offer of nursery-rhyme repetition, then suddenly confronts you with an extreme verbal challenge. It lurches from the comfort of repetition to the crossword-puzzle anxiety of fitting a specific vocabulary into a tightly bounded space. While the level of difficulty in most verse forms remains fairly consistent throughout, the paradelle accelerates from kindergarten to college and back to kindergarten several times and ends in a think-tank called the Institute for Advanced Word Play. Thus the jumpy double nature of the paradelle, so unsteady, so schizo, so right for our times. . . .

The paradelle is parodic; it dances around the villanelle, and lifts its skirts for reaction. It pokes fun at the poet's sacrificing of sense on the altar of rigid formalism. But it is essentially parodic. Billy Collins invented this nonce to parody strict forms, particularly the villanelle. “Paradelle for Susan" ends cringely: "Darken the mountain, time and find was my into it was with to to.

A few paradelles, playing with this singy-songy hoax nonce:

Move your sea-warm come to me; will with me; spend
tender sounds, warning me the way of the seas, the seas.

— Annie Finch, “Paravaledellentine”

Round as mutation into the square
It is forcing the art, a sake for its own.

— Aric Gles, “Mutation Verse”


AMERICAN SENTENCE

In the history of strange forms, there is also the "American Sentence," a term coined by Allen Ginsberg to describe his response to the Japanese haiku. An American Sentence is one sentence consisting of 17 syllables.

Ginsberg’s example? 

 “Four skinheads stand in the streetlight rain chatting under an umbrella.

Write seventeen American sentences and see if you can find one to work into a poem. Alternately, write a poem that consists of American sentences and end it in an American question.

Cello and citations.

There is no calculus of the terror that can make a proper calculation without reference to that which resists it.

— Fred Moten, 2017

The most complicated gamble on tomorrow and thereafter — writing.

— Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories

Listening to Valentin Radutiu’s haunting performance of Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances, Sz. 68: No. 4. Buciumeana (Dance from Bucsum) and thinking about how queer temporalities make space for hauntology, where hauntology remains hope-full, or rich with possibility for encountering alterity and thereby confronting “the world of the fathers” than obsessed Critical Theorists in the prior century.

On that note, a few scrambled gatherings from notebooks this week—

“AS USUAL, I’LL BE LATE”

“Lunch”

Even the morning dreams of it

Bent over those torn envelopes or steaming
Papers those Cubist towers
Of paper clips and pink erasures

We think we understand so much but nobody
Ever mentions the secrets of lunch

We plan to meet in some cafe
As the sunlight pours off the buildings
Onto the striped canopies the umbrellas above
The white tables

As usual I’ll be late
Stopping on the way to look at books or scarves
Wondering how you’ll tell me
Finally to go screw myself once and for all

The secretaries leaving their martinis
The executives phoning in from God-knows-where

I even knew a man who ate lunch
In typewriter stores driving all the clerks mad
Leaving cigarettes burning on the display desks
Rye seeds in the immaculately polished keys
Even poems in the carriage

So here we are again bent over
Those inscribed tablets those endless commandments
Of the menu

Where the choice of wine is blood
James Joyce once said or clear electricity

David Saint John

*

FREUD AND THE FATHERS

The world of the fathers is deeply embedded in Freudian psychoanalysis, as Jamieson Webster notes in his essay, “Pulling Rank: The Sins of Freud’s Exiled Son,” one of the many gems in the issue of Parapraxis dedicated to “resistance.” Otto Rank got booted from psychoanalytic circles for challenging the primacy of Freud’s paterfamilias.

“TELEOLOGIES OF LIVING”

Elizabeth Freeman’s “erotohistoriography” of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein made it impossible for me to concentrate on anything else for the duration the day when I encountered it. I am still beholden to — and energized by — her claim than Time Binds would not offer a projective logic for future policy but instead would remain queerly resistant to programmatic urges and focus on the risk of “writing.” In Freeman’s words, “to write after all is only to hazard the possibility that there will be a future of some sort.”

What Freeman calls the emergent “teleologies of living” that structure the logic of people, family, nation, and group identity rely on this notion of inheritance, which becomes not just a word for the economic passing-along of social and economic status but also “the familial and collective legacy from which a group will draw a properly political future.”

AGAINST MARCHES: AN ARGUMENT FOR THE DANCE OF HISTORY

Derrida’s reading of Marx as theorizing a responsibility to honor the Other across time puts friendship at the center of the cosmos. The dead also call us back to this when we get too obsessed with the march of history. And how awful that history should be militarized in this way, armed with the metaphoric motion of the march rather than the dance. Marches are remorseless and mechanized; dances constellate and make use of the field in spirals and repetitions. The march is fundamentally restrictive and coercive: it only exists in relation to the beat of boot-steps. Imagine the sound of barefoot marches and what you hear is immediately is carceral: the marches of Palestinians being forced to flee their homes, the footsteps of children in Nazi concentration camps, the agony of forced migrations and terror. Time cannot heal the division between the hauntological and the notion of Progress that seeks to hide the bones of its graves.

Isn’t Buciumeana a motion that takes up time?

Isn’t the dance a way of figuring how motion is influenced by its local and immediate surroundings (i.e. music)?

The march limits how we see and read history; it ignores what creates the possibility for collective action and solidarity on the ground; autonomous Marxists and anarchists have long insisted on this non-hierarchical understanding of direct action and radical possibility.

SPEAKING OF DADDY-TIME

There is a temporal aspect to Freud’s view of sexual perversion, as when he defines pleasure as a type of “loitering at the way-station toward the male orgasm.”

SPEAKING OF EROS

. . . it tends to smash time. Unlike longing and desire which proceed from imagining a lack, the erotic “traffics less in belief than in encounter, less in damaged wholes than in intersections of body parts, less in loss than in novel possibility,” writes Freeman. And I think this is generally true, though I would contest Freeman’s emphasis on physicality here, since eros is uninhibited and human bodies remain structures of inhibition and limitation. Leo Bersani argued that sexual relations could not play the role of restoring wholeness, or providing a restorative justice. Instead, his idea of erotic “self-shattering” focuses on the organic rupture of continuity between “selves.” Perhaps most notably, self-shattering also speaks to the humiliation of vulnerability: of being available to be touched, felt, imagined.

“ANEW” AS A DIRECTION AND MOTION

I palpate you as a violin palpates the silk of the faraway time
and around me and you sprouts the grass of an ancient place—anew

— Mahmoud Darwish, “Sonnet V” (translated by Fady Joudah)

Tsvetaeva in the margins.

“Right now, in the heat of the moment, with everything in a fever—my hands and my head and the weather—I still have not sensed it fully. But I know myself, I know what awaits me! I’ll break my neck looking back: at you, at your world, at our world.”

— Marina Tsvetaeva to Anna Tesková, June 7, 1939, five days before Tsvetaeva's final departure from Paris

“Writing cannot bring anything back.”

— Judith Schalansky, An Inventory of Losses

1. “MY PUSHKIN”

A. Naumov, Alexander Pushkin's Duel with Georges d'Anthes (1884)

And ever since then, ever since when Pushkin was killed right in front of me, in Naumov’s picture, daily, hourly, over and over, right through my earliest years, my childhood, my youth, I have divided the world into the poet and all the others, and I have chosen the poet, I have chosen to defend the poet against all the rest, however this ‘all the rest’ is dressed and whatever it hap- pens to be called.

But even before Naumov’s duel, because every memory has its pre-memory, its ancestor-memory, its great-great-great memory, just like a fire escape ladder which you climb down, never knowing whether there will be another rung – and there always is – or the sudden night sky, opening up ever higher and more distant stars to you – but before Naumov’s The Duel there was a different Pushkin, a Pushkin, when I didn’t even know that Pushkin was Pushkin. Pushkin not as a memory, but as a state of being, Pushkin forever and forever-forth, before Naumov’s Duel there was a morning light and rising out of it, and disappearing into it, was a figure, cutting with its shoulders through the light as a swimmer cuts through a river, a black figure, higher than everyone else, and blacker than everyone else, with his head bowed, and a hat in his hand.

— Marina Tsvetaeva, “My Pushkin”


2. THE EPISTOLARY “I”

"Writing cannot bring anything back," warns Judith Schalansky. Writing cannot recreate what is absent, but it can create the conditions for an experience of what is missing. It can make space for the possibility. In letters, we see this often— we feel the way in which the interlocutor stands in for a hope that is not simply local but rather rooted in a form of address, an opening-unto the world. Nowhere is this more apparent perhaps than in the correspondence between Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvateva.

These descriptions and evocations move from Tsvetaeva’s letters to her poems, back and forth, back and forth, she reworks them until she feels them coming to fruit, or fruition. Here is one of her poems published in Milestones, as translated by Christopher Whyte.

The poem marks a date— and the incident described in it could have been written in a letter or a diary. It is a personal event, memorialized, made legible to a public. The turtle dove is the metaphor she is working… trying to touch on the soft coo of the daughter, the infant, this new relationship that defines her being in the world as mother.

3. THE SPEAKER AS SOMETHING YOU DREAMED

The poet Simonides of Caes was the single survivor of the Thessaly house party in 5th century BC. According to legend, Simonides used his memory to relive the seating arrangement, thus identifying the buried dead beneath the rubble. Ancient Greeks took dreams as oracle, pre-visioning what would come, removing "the terror of the unexpected from the future," to quote Judith Schalansky. But dreams don't prepare us for the wind shear of facts. 

Attention to dreams prepares us for the fragmentary, the disconnected, the fantastic, the immaterial. But dreams are not always unconscious— we dream of a world in which we can be whole, or be wholly ourselves without violence and terror. We dream of a world in which our dreams matter, our dreams are material to the conditions of living. In this sense, perfect memory can be a handicap that prevents us from re-membering, or piecing the past back together, by making it impossible to choose among pieces. Like the rich, the house of perfect memory is so big that one feels trapped, one becomes  claustrophobic, in the ordinary, small houses of others. The richness of one's house ruins the ordinary by estranging us from inhabiting it. One can't abide in the chaos of unpruned synapses. So we pare things down; we reduce and highlight; we narrate over the gaps.

But poetry, perhaps more than any other mode, calls our attention to the gaps. The field and lineation makes those gaps visible and tangible. And this is the visionary, the radically-threatening possibility of the poem. We mourn when touched by the vestige of an absence, when startled by the echo of a correspondence.  There is something missing. Everything that exists is a ruin waiting to happen once the curator disappears.

Two more by Tsvetaeva, as translated by Willis Barnstone and Edward J. Brown:

ARS POETICA

I was born with a song in my tongue—but would
not waste it for a phony chasuble or hood.

I dream—not in bed—but in full day, awake,
and can’t live like you with chitchat of a snake.

I come from you, lyre, my lyre, and my voice
and chitchat are your swanlike curve and hiss.

I’m an ally of the laurel, the wind and dawn,
and would rather be happy: I am no nun,

and have a friend who is blond—maybe a rat,
but I stick with him when everything is bad.

I come from you, lyre, my lyre, and my voice
and chitchat are your swanlike curve and hiss.

They say to be a woman is a heavy fate.
I wouldn’t know. I never take my weight.

I freely give—but never sell my goods to you,
and now that my fingernails are turning blue

my death rattle and eagle scream and wheeze,
lyre, my lyre, are your swanlike curve and hiss.

IN MY IMMENSE CITY

In my immense city it is night.
I walk from the house mued tight
in sleep where they say daughter? wife?
but I remember one thing—the night.

Before me a sweeping July wind
and in some window a hint of song.
Tonight the wind will blow till dawn,
blow through my breasts. They are very thin.

A black poplar, and in the window
a lightbulb; chiming on the tower and
a flower in my hand. Shadow
and steps follow no one. There is no

me. Lights! like strings of gold beads.
The taste of a small nocturnal leaf.
Free me from the mouth of day. Friends, please,
try to understand: I am your dream.

The non sequiturs of this post are simply intended to provide additional material to explore for those in the “Flaschenpost” in the Present: Sending Poems Across Language and Time workshop. Obviously, I could ramble on forever since this topic is near and dear to my heart, but instead I will bind my tongue briefly and leave you with the following:

“My Pushkin” by Marina Tsvetaeva (translated by Sasha Dugdale)
”Ars Poetica” and “In My Immense City” (translated by Barnstone and Brown)
An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky (translated by Jackie Smith)
”Limerance” by Yves Tumor
”Je suis le vent” by Working for a Nuclear Free City

Freckles.

On rubbing, it’s normal to detect a burning sensation that has no center.

— Andrés Neuman, “Freckles and the Space Between”


1

Gerald, sun-kissed ten thousand times on the nose
and cheeks, didn’t stand a chance,
didn’t even know that the loss of his balls
had been plotted years in advance
by wiser and bigger buzzards than those
who now hover above his track
and at night light upon his back.

— Etheridge Knight, “For Freckle-Faced Gerald”


2

Ode to a Freckle above My Left Breast

Resigned to losing all that was mine
I brace myself before the bathroom mirror
in the hospital room. Afraid to look
at the wreckage where
my breast had been, what joy to see
you survived the assault! You perch above
the carnage where you always sat. Spared from the surgeon’s knife
you are a tiny flag of resistance
claiming territory, protecting a small part
of my chest from razing and reconstruction.
I press my palm over you, feel the heat rise
off my wounds. When the surgeon rounds,
I thrust a bouquet of lavender roses
from the overbed table into her arms,
the only thanks-offering I have for you.

by Amy Haddad,

(featured on The Slowdown)


3

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

— Gerald Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”



4

The section titled “Freckles and the Space Between” by Andrés Neuman, collected in his rousing book, Sensitive Anatomy, a series of textual sketches that caress each part of the human body.


5

I don’t know how long my silence lasted. And I use “silence” perfectly aware that it’s not entirely accurate but that it’ll be easier for you understand that way. You can write in your notes: “Claims to have kept silent.” Or ask the señora: “Did your maid fall silent?” To which the señora will reply: “I don’t recall any silence.” Because I doubt a woman like her would ever recognize a silence like mine.

You might never have given it any thought, but words have a specific order. Cause–outcome. Beginning–ending. You can’t NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION just arrange them any old way. When we speak, each word has to stand apart from the one before, like children lined up at the classroom door. From small to big, short to tall—the words go in a particular order. With silence, on the other hand, all words exist at once: gentle and harsh, warm and cold.

— Alia Trabucco Zerán, CLEAN (translated by Sophie Hughes)


6

From my notebooks, a phrase I copied out as written by Ilya Gutner: Mandelstam’s beloved granite slabs with little freckles of foreign substances inside them…

Elsewhere, a freckle in Michael Hardt’s Documenta pamphlet, “The Procedures of Love”:


7

At the end of the contest, contestants received prizes like cosmetic sets containing gold dust, or soaps touted to eliminate freckles and blemishes.

— Ha Seong-nan, WAFERS (translated by Janet Kong)

And few interesting pieces from The Cabinet, as assembled in “The Portrait Connection” feature from Issue 5. One could argue that these portraits are only interesting because of the role played by the captions in articulating their features and dynamics. The textuality of image is thrilling to consider and think around.

9



10

NATALIE GOLDBERG: Life is not abstract. It is not good or bad. It is. A girl is not pretty. Our mind makes that judgement. The girl has red lips, white teeth, freckles brushed across her nose, eyes that hint at lilacs, and she just lifted her right eyebrow. The reader steps away and says she is pretty. The writer just stays with the eyes, the lips, the chin, and makes no judgements.

RICHARD RUSSO: I’d been told before that writers had to have two identities: their real life one… and the one they become when they sit down to write. This second identity, I now saw, was fluid, as changeable as the weather, as unfixed as our emotions. As readers, we naturally expect novels to introduce us to a new cast of characters and dramatic events, but could it also be that the writer has to reinvent himself for the purpose of telling each new story?… And how is it remotely fair for Steinbeck to possess so many voices when I still didn’t have even one?

LUCY CORIN: The end reads as shock if you are the sort of person who can’t believe a couple of ordinary guys would do such a thing. But if you are the sort of person who does think a consumerist culture that leaves people with no idea what to do with their imaginations is not just a bummer but is dehumanizing and violent—well, then what is surprising is not that the guys kill the girls—the surprise is that you are surprised when it happens. Maybe you are surprised because of what you expect from a story. Maybe you are surprised someone said it. 

ALT-J: I want every other freckle.


Alas, the tent was empty and the heat kept Alabamians from attending the revival. Sometimes the ghosts we create — the ghosts of our petroleum-fueled lifestyles and commodity culture— prevent us from meeting the ghosts we seek. Hauntology’s emphasis on the otherwise and the contingent isn’t simply material but also implicated in what we believe possible. What we dare to hope for or imagine. Not even our gods can meet us in the blazing heat of genocidal economies and obsessive boundary-policing.

Eliot's "Silence".

SILENCE

Along the city streets,
It is still high tide,
Yet the garrulous waves of life
Shrink and divide
With a thousand incidents
Vexed and debated:—
This is the hour for which we waited—

This is the ultimate hour
When life is justified.
The seas of experience
That were so broad and deep,
So immediate and steep,
Are suddenly still.
You may say what you will,
At such peace I am terrified.
There is nothing else beside.

T. S. Eliot

A glissando in the pigeons of Bucharest recurs in waves, and wavers through the simple end-rhymes of Eliot’s “Silence” only to be pulled into language by one of Robert Schumann’s greatest pieces, the Ghost Variations . . .

According to legend, on February 17, 1854, Robert Schumann heard angels dictating a musical theme to him and immediately wrote down this theme. A few days later, on the 22nd or 23rd, Schumann started writing variations on this theme.

Five days later, at 2 pm on February 27, Schumann lept into the iced waters of the Rhine river and attempted to drown himself. He lived because some boatmen spotted him and dragged the composer safely to shore.

No one can say what Schumann was thinking when he climbed out of bed on the following day, having survived his attempted suicide. No one can know what drove him to return to the Ghost Variations in an effort to complete them.

The Geistervariationen (“Ghost Variations”) are Schumann’s last work. The following week, Schumann voluntarily committed himself to an asylum in Endenich, where he would die just a little over 2 years later.

To note, briefly, the way the final three lines of Eliot’s poem refuse to settle into a single meaning:

You may say what you will,
At such peace I am terrified.
There is nothing else beside.

The terror of peace is cinched to the efficiency of ending, and the poem’s speaker resists this, the way the Ghost Variations resist the conclusive peace of the piece’s final passage in Schumann’s Ghost Variations.

Such an exquisite ending. Hand on my heart.


Schumann’s Ghost Variations cling to the ear: their intimacy is audible. And while this intimacy is characteristic of Schumann’s final pieces, he accomplishes it by narrowing the soundscape and adhering closely to original theme, building precariously and elliptically from its resonances, refusing to abandon the original melody entirely.

“There is nothing else beside,” wrote Eliot, lingering near the expectation of a plural “besides” before rejecting it for the intimate spatial proximity of “beside.”

The snake encircling the bodies of the faceless women in a fresco from the chapel in Crete that haunts my imagination for the past week, and an excerpt from Agustín Fernández Mallo’s The Book of All Loves:

Inertia (“there are no doors”) and repetition (“we are the doors”), the he-sees/she-sees seesaw that Mallo works throughout the book of all loves that cannot be exhausted.

Sibiu... with Cioran.

A religion is finished in the moment when it no longer generates heresies.

— Emil Cioran, 29 November 1959

1

Sibiu shutters with gorgeous loopy wiring, where loose wires are necklaces or ornaments for houses that carry sound and vibes in through the ancient walls.

Tuesday afternoon in Sibiu. June 2025.

At one point, while the family ate gelato, I scampered into the Humanitas bookstore and snagged a copy of Emil Cioran’s Caiete: 1957 - 1972, translated from the French into the Romanian by Emanoil Marcu and Vlad Russo. Admittedly, the translation loses a bit of velocity in the movement from one Latinate tongue to another: Cioran’s sparsity depends on the perambulations of syntax and phrasing, precisely what gets tangled in multiple translations. To put it another way, Cioran is intense and biting in the original Romanian; he is gorgeously rich with intonation in French; he is sublimely translated by Richard Howard; and yet middling when I try to revive him from the Marcu and Russo translations.

In the entries dated 14 July 1962, Cioran sits in Paris, looking back at Sibiu:

My feet sound different on every street, I think, comparing the beat of Sibiu’s cobblestone-steps to the asphalt of Bucharest.

2

Sibiu window: Dogwood flowers or orchids glimpsed through a lace curtain.

This date, 14 July 1962, takes Cioran back to his adolescence and childhood in the small village of Rășinari, which was was connected to Sibiu by a 8-km tram line through the Dumbrava Forest. Regular service for this tram line ended in 2011, and much of line was dismantled after 2013. The Rășinari Orthodox bishops' residence was built in the late 18th century. It incorporated pastoral and monastic traditions and provided a locus for the church in Transylvania. And, of course, Cioran’s father was an Orthodox priest, a man esteemed by the village, an esteem that Cioran simultaneously coveted and rejected.

3

Cioran’s putative affection for Karoline Friederike Louise Maximiliane von Günderrode, a German Romantic poet who wrote under the pen name, Tian, was hardly unique. The female poet who dies by suicide due to “mental issues” and literary misogyny has always been fascinating to us, perhaps because these women dare to raise their voices and reveal the chafe-marks of the brindle. Their fury bothers and implicates us. We are torn between pity, chagrin, and contempt. In the confusion of our own affective responses, there is a tendency to lionize their deaths rather than the thing which mattered most to them, namely, their minds as written and felt.

Günderrode’s first poetry collection was published almost two decades after Bettina von Arnim’s epistolary novel, Die Günderode (1840) created the Caroline as a character in the public imagination. Christa Wolf also drew attention to Günderrode with her novel, Kein Ort. Nirgends (1978), imagining a fictional meeting between Günderrode and Heinrich von Kleist, another German author who died by suicide.

To his credit, Cioran never lied about envying the suicides. His early affinity with Stoic philosophers cast a covetous eye on the self-chosen death. “I cannot escape death, but at least I can escape the fear of it,” Epictetus declaimed. But if one can train the self to “escape the fear” of death, one can never entirely free life from the fear of how one’s death will hurt those who love you. Epictetus’ “I” is as solid and stiff as a Greek column: it exists in relation to the object it sustains, whether Parthenon or the ego, and has no truck with being-in-relation to others. But Stoicism wound up ornamental in Cioran’s writing, since he couldn’t entirely abandon the romance of mythology and religion. He never completely gave up the possibility of transcendence that came with releasing the world; he coveted the indescribable passion of the saints and the conviction of the martyrs.

The contradictions that create tension throughout Cioran’s texts are personal, which is to say, drawn from the author’s own obsessions and fears. That is why Cioran’s affection for Günderrode loves her death rather than her life. Certainly, one of the world’s greatest aphorists erases and ignores the poet whose life is given in her own hand, in her words and poetic texts, for the legend created by the novelist. Again, this should not be surprising: Cioran wasn’t a particularly insightful close reader of poetry. His philosophy and theory gravitated around myth and mythology: the eternal persona as sanctified by the meaningful death. His nihilism never stopped lusting for meaning.

As for Günderrode, her first poems were published under a male pseudonym. In her own words, as communicated in a letter to Kunigunde Brentano, she lamented her gender: “Why was I not born a man? I have no sense for feminine virtues, feminine bliss. Only that which is wild, great, radiant appeals to me.”

[These lines are so evocative of Marina Tsvetaeva’s verses and letters that I am tempted to speculate Tsvetaeva read Günderrode or von Arnim at some point while in exile, whether in Prague or Berlin. ]

4

The heretic cares more for the afterlives of ideas than for the human investment in a personal eternity. Each heresy nudges the door to a room open. In one of these rooms, Jacques Derrida sits at a small table in Paris, giving what could be his final interview, the progression of pancreatic cancer marked in the slightly yellow tint of his olive skin. There is no peace for the living, he suggests, for we are constructed from the tensions that animate the founding questions of philosophy, and not even death frees us from the legacy of those questions. Derrida tells the interviewer that the things which construct him are inseparable from the things that give him life. This contradiction which I cannot entirely assume is also what keeps me alive, or creates the conditions for my living, which is irrevocably bound up in thinking with and through the tensions that others will inherit.

5

Our final night in Bucharest required us to find a restaurant capable of seating almost twenty people at a single table with a courtyard. My cousin found a restaurant located in the old home of conductor Sergiu Celibidache. There is a particular void that one encounters in the mirrors that has held the bodies of your poetic subjects prior to their death—- the ghost of a self-encounter or self-critique, depending on one’s relation to reflections. I thought about Günderrode, contempt and Cioran’s sense of security in a language that ripped him from association with his roots.

A kneeling child in plaster, glimpsed between bars on Strada Plopilor (Street of the Poplars).

Little things.

Stefanescu’s mirror is a thing peopled with a loneliness that impregnates everyone twice.

— Barton Smock

Things are going to slide (slide) in all directions
Won't be nothing (won't be)
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold
And it has overturned
The order of the soul
When they said (they said) repent (repent), repent (repent)
I wonder what they meant

— L. Cohen

Today I walked until my legs hurt and felt grateful for it . . .

In a letter to Sunny dated May 5, 1934, Sam Beckett said that he was “fond of this summertime because darkness and all its bad things are at least being postponed thereby.” Then, in a sort of lapse, Beckett added one of the truest comments on his writing, telling Sunny: “I am a Manichaean as far as darkness is concerned.”

No one is made crazy through writing, but rather becomes crazy for the same reasons as those who do not write, namely the denial of their rights, power, naked brutality, the loss of their dignity and the threat to their very existence. And this threat can be found not only in war, not just in times of naked power, or the domineering need to survive, but rather before and after, i.e. in times of peace....

— Ingeborg Bachmann, drafts for acceptance speech for Georg Büchner Prize written in the summer of 1964

Between trumpet vines and the purple kudzu flowers that often go unnoticed, I would love to see you in Tuscaloosa or Atlanta this month, or the next.

You'll see your woman hanging upside down
Her features covered by her fallen gown
And all the lousy little poets coming round
Trying to sound like Charlie Manson
Yeah the white man dancing

Grateful that the Refaat Mobile Library will be in Atlanta— I can’t support their mission enough, and hope that you consider doing the same.

Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
Give me Christ
Or give me Hiroshima

Trumpet vines on my relentless Red Mountain hike today.

The requisite John Ashbery.

“Anyone who has been in love knows better. Love can be quite miserable. It destroys families and conventions and it refuses to be controlled or tamed. This instrumental approach to love where the end-goal is happiness reconstructs love for the industrial age and labor economies. What the sociologist Georges Simmel called “the invasion of the domain of love by the teleological category” is also at play in My Heresies.”

Grateful to Gabriela Denise Frank for a conversation that was a light in my life a few months ago— and to The Rumpus for publishing it.

When you take off yr boots at 3 am while hanging out with friends on the porch— and then discover those boots with a dusting of flowers in the morning.

Everything falls but nothing obliterates the known world as viciously as losing the ability to describe the fall. Speechlessness is hard to describe. I’ve never lost words like this. . . . Never lost the capacity to describe what I see and feel as I fall . . . Never lost my appetite for books. Dear humans, I can’t walk fast enough or far enough. Small things, small comforts, as Ingeborg Bachmann noted in her essay, “What Good Are Poems”: “The playing field is language, and its borders are the borders of what we gaze on without question, that which is divulged and precisely imagined, experienced in pain, and in happiness celebrated and praised — namely the world."

With a burning violin.

Intangible arrows quiver and stick in the skin
And I taste at the root of the tongue the unreal of what is real.

— Wallace Stevens, “Holiday in Reality”

1

“Here I call love a reciprocal torture,” Marcel Proust wrote in The Prisoner, the third volume of Temps Perdu, offering an aside that smarts with tenderness and calls into play the agony’s tortured relation to ecstasy in the matryr’s voice, in the light’s relation to darkness. The martyr’s agony is often described in relation to this extraordinary, overpowering light. 

In an 1839 sermon on the state of grace, Cardinal Newman said that our eyes can only bear the  “bright and overpowering” light “if we could see it as the Angels do.” Somewhere in Europe, a poet named Rainer Maria Rilke would lure the angels into the poem in order to see the unbearable. And somewhere in Russia, at the same time, Marina Tsvetaeva would correspond with him.

2

Elsewhere, T. S. Eliot would mention light and brightness in letters to Conrad Aiken while traveling through Europe in 1914. In a letter to Aiken dated July 1914, Eliot mentioned a new poem he’d completed and then raved about the “three great St. Sebastians” he’d seen: 

1.“Montegna (a D’Oro)”
2. “Antonello of Messina (Bergamo)”
3. “Memling (Brussels)”

Six days later, Eliot mailed the poem he’d mentioned, “The Love Song of St. Sebastian,” to Aiken, along with a few lyric fragments. The poem sounded “very laboured and conscious,” too conscious of its own sentiment, too close to the surface of feeling. Allegedly, Eliot never published it.

3

“THE LOVE SONG OF SAINT SEBASTIAN” BY T. S. ELIOT

I would come in a shirt of hair
I would come with a lamp in the night
And sit at the foot of your stair;
I would flog myself until I bled,
And after hour on hour of prayer
And torture and delight
Until my blood should ring the lamp
And glisten in the light;
I should arise your neophyte
And then put out the light
To follow where you lead,
To follow where your feet are white
In the darkness toward your bed
And where your gown is white
And against your gown your braided hair.
Then you would take me in
Because I was hideous in your sight
You would take me in without shame
Because I should be dead
And when the morning came
Between your breasts should lie my head.

I would come with a towel in my hand
And bend your head beneath my knees;
Your ears curl back in a certain way
Like no one else in all the world.
When all the world shall melt in the sun,
Melt or freeze,
I shall remember how your ears were curled.
I should for a moment linger
And follow the curve with my finger
And your head beneath my knees —
I think that at last you would understand.
There would be nothing more to say.
You would love me because I should have strangled you
And because of my infamy;
And I should love you the more because I mangled you
And because you were no longer beautiful
To anyone but me.

The only unrhymed word in Eliot’s 1914 poem is “lamp”.

The word that moves between this song and another song written around this time is “infamy,” which appears in the passage from Dante that Eliot placed over the threshold of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

4

Back to Dante, we go. Straight to the Inferno, briefly, where verses 46-49 give us Paolo and Francesca making a long streak of themselves in air: / so I saw the shadows come, uttering wails, / borne by that strife of winds.

Paolo and Francesca, the lovers condemned to an eternity of winded tempest. The problem of course began with literature, as Francesca tells it:

One day, for pastime, we read of Lancelot, how love constrained him; we were alone, and without all suspicion. Several times that reading urged our eyes to meet, and changed the colour of our faces; but one moment alone it was that overcame us. When we read how the fond smile was kissed by such a lover, he, who shall never be divided from me, kissed my mouth all trembling.

A note from one of my 2023 notebooks: “In T. S. Eliot’s copy of the text, he marked the similes that introduce Paolo and Francesca: “And as their wings bear along the starlings, at the cold season, in large and crowded troop” (Inferno V.40-42) but didn’t provide a translation of line 42, ‘così quel fiato gli spiriti mali’: i.e so that blast, the evil spirits.”

Peter Colstee, Illustration 1. 1992

Peter Colstee made this oil-on-canvas painting after watching the film 'Mishima' (1985), and copying down the following part of film text:

The white masters beauty of the youth body,
hung against the dark tree trunk.
His hands tied by thorns.
I trembled with joy.
My loin swelled.
My hand unconsciously began a motion it had never been thought

It isn’t beautiful, per se, but there is something haunting about the expression on Sebastian’s face.


4

The first painting that Eliot listed in his letter to Aiken is one of the three portraits of Saint Sebastian by Andrea Mantegna. It is also Mantegna’s final Saint Sebastian, painted and kept in Venice. But I’m more interested in the first Saint Sebastian— the painting Mantegna completed in 1470, kept in Vienna.

Detail from Andrea Mantegna, Saint Sebastian. 1470 (Vienna)

I keep returning to the traces of heresy in Mantegna‘s first Saint Sebastian. . . the way Mantegna signed his name vertically (rather than horizontally), pulling the signature very close to the right side of the saint, and using Greek lettering to identify himself (rather than his first language, or the Latin used by the Catholic Church). The Byzantine edge in the naming. Forsaking the classical tree or the pole for a stone arch as the object to which Sebastian is bound. Not a tree in nature or a pole in the city’s outskirts but a piece of Rome, itself, an architectural form for which the Roman empire became famous.

In 1457 the painter had been put on trial for "artistic inadequacy" for having put only eight apostles in his fresco of the Assumption. As a reply, he therefore applied Alberti's principles of Classicism in the following pictures. 

A rider can be seen in the clouds of the upper left corner in Mantegna’s Vienna version of Saint Sebastian. The cloud is white and the rider of the white horse is carrying a scythe which he uses to cut the clouds. 

Some have interpreted the rider to be the ancient Roman god, Saturn, who was identified with the Time that passed by and destroyed everything that was left behind him. But Battisti thought the theme referred to the Book of Revelation. Revelations 19:11 gives us the “heaven having been opened” to reveal “a white horse, and he who is sitting upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness doth he judge and war.” This is Christ, announcing the Second Coming. And yes, every thread is torn.

Orphics in the evening.

The thunderstorm as a vehicle of divine power and wrath moved [James] Joyce's imagination so profoundly that to the end of his life he trembled at the sound.

— James Ellman

Now the fateful day had come . . .

— Samuel Beckett, “Love and Lethe”

1

Preparing for a workshop and scattering crumbs of Beckett and Rilke for any who are also studying the holes they have dug for themselves in the dry dirt near a cave with Paul Valery in one hand and a shovel in the other, as Rainer Maria Rilke perhaps mentions in his with these two poems from the first section of Sonnets to Orpheus, translated by Stephen Mitchell:

Those final two lines are gold to my eyes— and perhaps an ars of sorts.


2

Rilke meets Beckett at a slant, in a letter to McGreevy dated September 8, 1934, wherein B tells his friend about revisiting the artworks and (yes) the yellows that fascinate him. The letter is lengthy, chaotic, polylingual, punctuated by B’s characteristic wordplay and punning. Impressions from an exhibition . . .

Then I went to see Goldsmith. La gueule rose et grave à en mourir. [ . . . ] Richard was back at the gears en route for the Loire. I said that when a man had got into the habit, as I would have seemed to, of estimating his life in terms of apprehending (the eyes closed at this first sign of danger & the wary wobble of the jowls) & the motive for living as the impulse to understand perhaps a little improvement on self-justification in the sphere of welfare-working, the only calamity was suspension of the faculty or, worse still, the need, to apprehend & understand. He stood up: Some people apprehend too much, goodbye, know there's no good asking you for dinner, lunch some day, goodbye.

The covey seemed nice after the rest from him & we got going again. I had an appointment yesterday, but had to put him off on account of my eye which has been rather bad but which is all right today more or less, thanks to stupor, eye-shade & optrex. Also one of the more endearing derivatives of impetigo on my lip, where there is quite a little colony of erectile tissue as I discovered during my holiday. I have hopes of analysis going a bit faster now. If I could get it over by Xmas I'd be crowned.

What a relief the Mont Ste. Victoire after all the anthropomorphized landscape - van Goyen, Avercamp, the Ruysdaels, Hobbema, even Claude, Wilson & Crome Yellow Esq., or paranthropomorphised by Watteau so that the Débarquement seems an illustration of "poursuivre ta pente pourvu qu'elle soit en montant", or hyperanthropomorphized by Rubens - Tellus in record travail, or castrated by Corot; after all the landscape "promoted" to the emotions of the hiker, postulated as concerned with the hiker (what an impertinence, worse than Aesop & the animals), alive the way a lap or a fist is alive. Cézanne seems to have been the first to see landscape & state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever. Atomistic landscape with no velleitiés of vitalism, landscape with personality à la rigueur, but personality in its own terms, not in Pelman's, landscapality. Ruysdael's for Rusdael's Entrance to the Forest - there is no entrance anymore nor any commerce with the forest, its dimensions are its secret & it has no communications to make.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld (1861)

And when, abruptly,
the god put out his hand to stop her, saying,
with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around –,
she could not understand, and softly answered
Who?

— Rainer Maria Rilke trans. Stephen Mitchell

3

Samuel Beckett to Sunny on 5 May 1934:

 If, for example, I read in the paper that poor Mr. So-and-so is to be executed early in the morning, before I get out of bed, and immediately start to congratulate myself that I do not have to spend such a night, I deceive myself in as much as I compare two circumstances instead of two emotions. And it is highly probable that the man condemned to death is less afraid than I. At least he knows exactly what is at stake and exactly what he has to attend to, and that is a greater comfort than one is generally inclined to believe. So great that many sick people become criminals solely in order to limit their fear and gain that comfort. Only beyond speculation does man reach his Eden, that refuge where there is no more danger, or rather one which is determined and which one can bring into focus.

And here is Edward Snow’s translation of Rilke’s sonnet II.16 to Orpheus:

I'm walking in the city at dark
Remembering, remember light
Thinking of nothing, and the shooting stars

*

Grace Mazur, “What is a Moment? — Two paintings of the wounded Eurydice by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot,” The Arts Fuse.
Ignaz Brüll, Melodie in a minor, Op.53/2
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Silenus (1838)
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld (1861)
Oscar Mantel, “Against Castrated Art”, Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn 1979.
P. J. Harvey, “The Sky Lit Up” (Demo)
P. J. Harvey, “Missed” (Demo)
Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus translated by Stephen Mitchell

"Language is punishment."

It’s been a strange month. Non-head-injury-related aphasia is new to me. Some parts of speechlessness are familiar, or bound to the age of 15, and some are new. Too new.

Wandering through Ingeborg Bachmann’s lectures and nonfiction essays has been a solace, even though reading is strange; I begin a sentence and then lose my grip on it. Not even the most voluptuous syntax holds my attention. It’s as if words have lost their teeth. In her bleak acceptance speech for the Anton Wildgans Prize, Bachmann likened the creative process to a loneliness so heavy that it resembles a curse. I quote:

I’m not sure why this is comforting to me. Perhaps summer, itself, has whisked this gluttony for comfort and silence into my head. But speechlessness gives me time to type old notebooks, which is how I discovered an essay draft from early last year titled “A Eurydice Who Limps: Analogy and Your Orpheus,” a glance at various textual and artistic treatments of the Orphic myth.

After typing up a bit of it today (while groaning over my terribly tiny handwriting), I dug up my copy of Maurice Blanchot's essay, “The Gaze of Orpheus,” which turns Eurydice into an absence of light waves, rendering her the “profoundly dark point towards which art, desire, death, and the night seem to lead,” dragging her silence into what Christian theologians would mark as “the fortunate loss,” a peculiar sort of metaphysical baggage that continues to haunt various religions as well as theory but also, perhaps, the note at the end of Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation, which reads:

Radu and silence on the stairs.

Heaven and earth.

Little people at the amusement park
City people in the dark
Speak to us, send us a sign
Tell us something to keep us trying

Three songs among a scattering of things that move me. Things I touched today, things whose tendrils in turn touched me.

Gravity, the curvature of space-time, said Albert Einstein in 1915. Emily Skillings’ marvelous poetry.

A thought trapped in a box, Schrodinger's box, that left us with a blurred cat, a cat between life and death — but only because we observed it and found ourselves entangled by this observation that renders the cat real and alive to us. Alive is the idea.

Four purple clovers growing near the stairs of the school. The awkwardness of their positions, the way I could almost hear the purple crinkling. The alive idea-ness of light.

When two particles in Einstein's scenario collide, we have the relation that Schrodinger called entanglement. “Entanglement of predictions arises from the fact that the two bodies at some earlier time formed in a true sense one system, that is they were interesting, and have left behind traces on each other.” This theory of traces would infect the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School.  

Memories of the Hoia forest and a clover tied around my wrist.

There is the spin of us. 

There are measurements that show the polarization of entangled light beams. 

But the spin of entangled particles varies. 

What we know ineluctably is that the specific attributes of the photons and particles are indeterminate until measured. Then, one particle's measurement seems to decide or influence the value of the other almost instantly, flying in the face of what relativity says can't happen, namely, move faster than the speed of light.

Celeries.



The incidents arose after the man made a compelling statement one night. “You've written about everything under the sun— everything,” he said, “except celery.”

In an effort to please him, I set out to write about the thing I never mention (celery) as well as the thing he says I mention too often, namely my ex-boyfriends.

The first incident, “Celery in Relation to Not Being Vivian,” was published in Get Bent, a Bending Genres anthology edited by Robert Vaughn and Meg Tuite.

A few of the Celery Sagas are in the summer issue of The Dodge, alongside incredible writing by others, and thus do I name these stalks here, in the hopes that you might go nibble at them elsewhere:

Celery on the Wall, First Variant
Celery in ‘Small Bites’
Celery, Cowboys, and Critique
Celery and Paranoia Prior to Thunderstorm
Celery as Related to Etymology of Romance
Kunstmärchen with Celery
Celery in Problematic Local Contexts

" And even the moonlight is blinding. . ."

Citation performs the social gestures that characterize kinship as a practice . . . in which the doer of the kin function becomes kin by virtue of the act.

– Alex Brostoff, “An Autotheory of Intertextual Kinship” 

I buried my face but it spoke once again
The night to the day we're a bindin',
And now the dark air is like fire on my skin
And even the moonlight is blinding

— Townes van Zandt, “Rake”

1

i hadn't thought about what it was going to be in fort wayne that i should address
or how.

— David Antin

Part of our contemporary emphasis on visibility and “being seen” is commercial— the language of brands and selling, of becoming a desirable product and creating a “buzz.” Nothing kills the buzz of writing more than the humiliation of marketing pressures and the emphasis on “going viral.” Nothing is lonelier and less real, less true to its selves.

Visibility, of course, depends on symbols, on status-markers and various conventions that ‘code’ a human being as good/bad, relatable/weird, exemplary/horrid etc etc etc. We are expected to ‘read the room’, as if reading others is something any of us are actually good at. I’ve often said that I feel more like myself on the page than in person. When I lean against that statement by trying to locate its gist, there is simply the feeling that I would rather be misread in my words than in my body. I would rather be misunderstood by something I’ve written than by something I resemble or represent. But maybe the whirlpools are more complicated.

To ‘read’ is to make sense of what is legible. And legibility overdetermines the author's presence: you read me as mother, wife, citizen, words that authorize me to speak on the basis of socially recognized roles. Each role has its status. I want to contest the narrow throat of the vase in which my availability renders Me legible to You. 

“To recognize another text as ‘kin’ intimates a relation that exceeds influence, one that personifies a textual relationship to flesh-and-blood bodies,” writes Alex Brostoff in “An Autotheory of Intertextual Kinship.” So, the intersection of the song with the poem that inspired it becomes a site where language creates an alterity, an Other that is real under the conditions where those words are read, spoken, inhabited.

What Brostoff calls “representation of ambivalent bodies” pertains to bodies that exist between and around rather firmly ensconced in commitment to their located demographic categories. Queer theorists continue to stand in this space of possibility for me, and the possibility is real. It is, for me, a livable reality.

I drag around the debris of intimate citations and texts just in case a wind should appear to create an unexpected shape from it. The wind might orchestrate a new way of seeing that is pummeled from the pressure of daily life, a pressure that includes being in the world among others and longing to be with them rather than merely among them. 

So there is the heap of books, the detritus of junk my brain collects and consecrates through memory, and there is also the internal friction generated by temporality, or the harassment of differing tenses. I can’t reconcile that. I can’t amend or fix or bridge those essential (and essentialized) distances. But I can study what just may happen if they interpellate each other accidentally. 

To prevaricate and intervene by conducting a close reading which admits its debt to uncertainty, and its construction as a reading, developed under pressure and in relation to circumstance, which seeks to uncover a body in the traces or imprints left by others. A body may be a photo, a text, an object, a place, a scent—any trace, any sensory clue . . .


2

Yesterday was very difficult. That may or may not be legible from photos. That may or may not have a legible context to the reader. It depends on how much we think we know— and how terrible we are at admitting that knowing others is difficult precisely because no human is a settled object, a knowable thing, a finished product.

3

When Jeff Buckley said “I love everything that haunts me and never leaves…” — he was speaking of this intertextual kinship, of muses and musings which happen to be the gift and the curse of those who create art, the books and authors that have been kinder than kin to us, the young writers who at this very minute is sitting on a bench somewhere, grappling with their inability to forget the ways the world touched them. I hear, in Buckley’s words, the way I am haunted by Paul Celan, Benjamin Fondane, and Gherasim Luca— the way I am haunted appears in my words, my texts, my efforts to free myself from the shadows who raised me. It is simpler to admit that I abide in Them. My eye for their eyes; my first-person pronoun for Theirs. We are all creatures of influence; no one is ‘self-made’. That’s just the lie commodity culture sells us in order to further alienate language from the complexity of its relational nature. But it’s also the lie we buy and sell. It is the most American lie of all, a poison rich on the lips of neoliberals.

Truly, now the dark air is like fire on my skin
And even the moonlight is blinding

An abgrund trio.

“The Geist has been known to gather up unwary authors somewhat as Zeus used to do with fleeing maidens and plump them with proper thoughts and attitudes. If writers were not the instruments of history, as often princes and politicians were, they were at least a showcase, a display of the spirit, like a museum's costumed effigies, if not one of its principal actors. Historical forces of this sort are as crudely imaginary as deities have always been, although probably not nearly as harmful since they cannot capture the imagination of millions the way divinities do. But of course the Geist can go behind a curtain and come back out as the Volk or the Reich instead of the Zeit.”

— William Gass, “The Death of the Author”

1. LETTER FROM BRUNO SCHULZ TO ANIA, DATED 19 JUNE 1941

Dear Ania:

I am still under the spell of your charming metamorphoses. I believe the reason they are so touching is that they exist so independent of your will, so automatic and unconscious. It's as though somebody substituted another person to take your place on the sly, and you, as it were, accepted this new person, took her for your own, and continued playing your part on the new instrument, unaware that someone else was acting onstage. Of course I am exaggerating the situation toward the paradoxical. Do not take me for naive. I know what happens is not altogether unconscious, but you don't realize how much of it is the action of more profound forces, how much is the doing of a metaphysical puppetry in you.

Add to this the fact that you are incredibly reactive, transforming yourself instantly into a complementary form, a wondrous accompaniment.... All this goes on outside the intellect, as it were, by some shorter and simpler circuit than thought, simply like a physical reflex. It is the first time in my experience that I have come across such natural riches that don't have enough space, you might say, within the dimensions of a single person and therefore mobilize ancillary personae, improvising pseudo personalities ad hoc for the duration of a brief role you are compelled to play. This is how I explain your protean nature to myself. You may think that I'm allowing myself to be taken in, that I'm pinning a deep interpretation on the playfulness of ordinary coquetry. Let me assure you that coquetry is something very profound and mysterious, and incomprehensible even to you. It is plain that you cannot see this mystery and that to you it must present itself as something ordinary and uncomplicated. But this is a delusion. You underestimate your possibilities and spoil the magnificent demonism of your nature by the ingenuous snobbery of saintliness. It isn't enough for you to be a demon; you want to be in addition and on the side—a saint, as if it were all that easy to combine these traits. You, with your fine nose for kitsch in art, lose your taste and instinct when it comes to the moral sphere and cultivate an unconscious dilettantism of holiness with a clear conscience. No—holiness is a thing of toil and blood that cannot be grafted onto a full and rich life like some pretty ornament. This dilettantism, by the way, is very charming and touching on the part of a soul who communicates with the pit from a yard away. With the Pit, capital P. I don't know how it happens, but you are playing with the keys to the Pit. I don't know if you are familiar with everyone's abyss of perdition or only with mine. In any case, you are moving with light, somnambulist ease on that cliff's edge I avoid in myself with fear and trembling, where the gravel shifts underfoot. I have to assume that you yourself are probably safe. You detach yourself lightly and delicately from the one who has lost his footing and let him slide into the abyss by himself. For a few steps you may actually pretend you are losing the ground under your feet, confident that at a certain point the parachute will open and carry you off to safety. With all this, you remain genuinely innocent and, as it were, unconscious of what you are doing. You are truly the victim, and truly all the guilt falls upon him who bears within him that abyss whose rim you carelessly set foot on. I know all the guilt is on my side, because the abyss is mine and you are only a sylph who has strayed into my garden, where it becomes my duty to keep your foot from sliding. That is why you should feel no self-reproach. You are always innocent whatever you do, and here a new perspective opens on your holiness. Your holiness in fact costs you nothing, for you are a sylph, and we are dealing not with dilettantism but with the superhuman elfin virtuosity of an entity that is not subject to moral categories.

Please come, secure and unthreatened as always, and don't spare me. Whatever happens, I endorse you in all your metamorphoses. If you are Circe, I will be Ulysses and I know the herb that will make you powerless. Of course, I may be just bragging, just being provocative.

Every day I wait till 6 P.M. I have a project for Sunday: let's meet in Truskawiec. I have a morning train there and an evening one back; we could spend the whole day there. Are you game?

Fond greetings, and thank you for coming. 

Bruno Schulz

[The Sunday meeting Schulz suggested in the letter above fell on the day of Hitler's assault on the U.S.S.R., June 22. The next letter, written in September, is the first of Schulz's surviving letters written after the Nazi occupation of Drohobycz.]

Antonin Artaud's sketch from October 1945. “The gallows for the abyss / is his being and not / his soul / and it is his body.”

2. CSZESLAW MILOSZ AND “THE ABYSS OF EXILE”

Translator Simon Leys’ essay, “In the Light of Simone Weil: Milosz and the Friendship of Camus,” trace Simone Weil's influence through the lives of two very disparate intellectuals. Czeslaw Milosz's own experience fighting against the Nazis in the underground altered his view of what was possible. "Naked horror" imprinted itself on his understanding of reality. As Leys writes: "The everyday order of our lives may seem to us natural and permanent, but it is in fact as fragile and illusory as the cardboard props on a theatrical stage. It can collapse in a flash and turn at once into black chaos. Our condition is precarious; even basic human decency can shatter and vanish in an instant," says Leys, before quoting a passage from Milosz’s The Captive Mind:

The nearness of death destroys shame. Men and women change as soon as they know that the date of their execution has been fixed by a fat little man with shiny boots and a riding crop. They copulate in public, on a small bit of ground surrounded by barbed wire - their last home on Earth.

Leys continues with Milosz's biography, noting that in the period following the war, like many Polish intellectuals who hoped that, by collaborating with the Communist regime, they might help it to reform itself, Milosz became a diplomat and was sent as cultural attaché, first to Washington and then to Paris." There, Milosz quickly learned that "serving a Stalinist regime" would cost him—would demand both moral and intellectual compromise—and, worst of all, would cultivate a deep sense of self-repugnance and cynicism. 

"A man may persuade himself by the most logical reasoning that he will greatly benefit his health by swallowing live frogs; and thus rationally convinced, he may swallow a first frog, then a second, but at the third his stomach will revolt," Milosz wrote of this revulsion. In 1951, he abandoned his assignation and publicly broke with the Polish regime, taking that particular leap of no return into what Milsosz called “the abyss of exile, the worst of all misfortunes, for it meant sterility and inaction.” But he refused to relinquish the Polish language, his mother tongue, the speculative soil of a homeland he would cultivate in exile. Leys confirms that Milosz did all his writing in Polish, “with the exception of his private correspondence” which he conducted in French and in English, until his death. The first ten years of his exile were spent in France. There, “the prestigious title of an official representative of 'Democratic Poland, the French progressive' intelligentsia (under the pontificate of Sartre-Beauvoir), had warmly welcomed him; but as soon as it became known that he had defected, he was treated as a leper." In 1953, Milosz “made his situation even worse by publishing what was to become his most influential work, The Captive Mind, written not for a Western audience, but against it' - against its obtuse and willful blindness; the purpose was indeed to remind his readers that 'if something exists in one place, it will exist everywhere.” It was a self-indictment, though Americans who lacked background in the context of Iron Bloc dictatorships would easily misread it. 

3. BEETHOVEN’S ABYSS

In conversation with Edward Said, Daniel Barenboim argued that music creates a greater sense of understanding about the world—it actively teaches rather than promoting escapism. "The Fourth Symphony of Beethoven is not only a means of escaping from the world,” said Barenboim. "There is a sense of total abyss when it starts, with one sustained note, a B-flat, one flute, the bassoons, the horns, and the pizzicato, the strings... and then nothing happens. There's this feeling of emptiness, only one note sticking there alone, and then the strings come in with another note, a G-flat, and at that moment, the listener is displaced.” He takes "this sense of displacement” to be “unique” in its capacity to alter the mind's relationship to itself:

When you hear the first note, you think, "Well, maybe this is going to be in B-flat." In the end it really is in B-flat, but by the second note you don't know where you are anymore because it's G-flat. From that moment alone you can understand so many things about human nature. You understand that things are not necessarily what they seem at first sight. B-flat is perhaps the key, but the G-flat introduces other possibilities.

There's a static, immovable, claustrophobic feeling. Why? Because of the long, sustained notes. Followed by notes that are as long as the silences between them. The music reaches a low point from which Beethoven builds up the music all over again and finally affirms the key. You might call this the road from chaos to order, or from desolation to happiness. I'm not going to linger on these poetic descriptions, because the music means different things to different people. But one thing is clear. If you have a sense of belonging, a feeling of home, harmonically speaking—and if you're able to establish that as a composer, and establish it as a musician—then you will always get this feeling of being in no-man's-land, of being displaced yet always finding a way home. 

This is what Wagner cultivated, and what other composers reproached him for. Wagner's intuition for acoustics changed how we hear music, and how we hear is always relational, or pitched towards the sense of expectation. Barenboim credits Wagner as being the first with such a sense, though he adds a caveat for “Berlioz, and in a certain way Liszt, although Liszt was more limited to the piano.” He continues speaking to Edward Said:

By acoustics I mean the presence of sound in a room, the concept of time and space. Wagner really developed that concept musically. Which means that a lot of his criticism of performances of his own time, conducted by Mendelssohn and other people, was directed at what he considered a very superficial kind of interpretation of music, namely, one that took no risks, that didn't go to the abyss, that tried to find a golden path without having the extremes. Of course, this kind of performance leads to superficiality. This also affected the speed at which the music was performed, because if the content was poor, the speed has to be greater.

Therefore Wagner complains bitterly about Mendelssohn's tempi. How did he propose to fight that superficiality? In two ways. One, by developing the idea of a certain necessary flexibility of tempo, of certain imperceptible changes within the classical movements. 

Here, Barenboim is talking about how Wagner saw Beethoven rather than how he conceived of his own music. But this idea of flexibility of tempo, for Wagner, put more emphasis on performance and affect. "Every sequence—every paragraph if you want to speak in literary terms—had its own melos and therefore required an imperceptible change of speed in order to be able to express the inherent content of that paragraph," Barenboim said. To quote him at length:

What Wagner really maintains is that unless you have the ability to guide the music in this way, you are not able to express all that is in it, and therefore you remain on the surface. He was diametrically opposed to a metronomic way of interpreting music. He had this idea of Zeit und Raum, time and space. Obviously tempo is not an independent factor: in order to sustain a slower tempo, which Wagner considered necessary for certain movements (not everything had to be slow, only certain movements and certain passages), he considered it an absolute necessity to slow down imperceptibly the second subject in a classical symphony where the first subject was dramatic—masculine, or whatever you want to call it—and the second was a contrast to that. But in order to make the slightly slower speed not only workable, but to allow it to express the content of the paragraph and to keep it within the context of the movement, there has to be, of course, some tonal compensation, and this is how he came to the concept of the continuity of sound: that sound tends to go to silence, unless it is sustained. From this came the whole concept not only of the color of sound—which is what so many people talk about today and which has led to (to my mindi superficial ideas about the "international sound of orchestras" — but of the weight of sound. And Wagner was more interested in the weight of the sound.

The weight of sound v. the weight of the sound.

*

the name Osip comes toward you, you tell him what he already knows,
he takes it, he takes it off you with hands,
you detach his arms from their shoulder, the right, the left

— Paul Celan (see translation as dismemberment), as translated by Pierre Joris

the name, the name, the hand, the hand, 
there, take them as your pledge, 
he takes that too, and you have 
again what's yours, what was his

— Celan from same poem, I think he was translating Mandelstam at the time, and in dialogue with him

Ruins.

It has been a week of waiting, the sort of unbearable waiting that puts every breath on hold. And it continues, bubbles over into the ‘weekend’ . . . Radu rises to every occasion that provides opportunities for sniffing.

And there have been comforts amid the unbearable, including but not limited to Gabrielle Tinti’s Ruins, sketches of spiders and cicada shells, fireflies doing their thing in the evening grass, ebullient sunshine, delicious sandwiches, discovering that tears grow less salty the more they flow so that, finally, one gets to a point near freshwater trees (which is quite stunning).

Speaking of ruins, here is Tinti’s “Icarus”:

And the ruins of an Icarus in each of us. . . Wings destroyed. Only a block of feathers on the left, and the broken strap pulled across his chest. The direction of his gaze, downwards, lips nearly parted, a sort of fascination in the mouth’s expression as if to acknowledge what is absent in the place where he stands, frozen by fear and the desire to please those who love him.

Ta-ka-ta-ka-ta-ka-ta-ka-ta-ka-ta, j'entends mon coeur qui bat . . .

Every reading occurs within a structure (however multiple, however open), and not in the allegedly free space of an alleged spontaneity: there is no ‘natural,’ ‘wild’ reading: reading does not overflow structure; it is subject to it: it needs structure, it respects structure.

— Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (t. by Richard Howard)

Desire to replace ordinary reading (in which you have to go from section to section) with the spectacle of a simultaneous speech where everything would be said all at once, without confusion, in ‘a total, peaceful, intimate and ultimately uniform flash.’

— Maurice Blanchot, “Joubert and Space” (t. by Charlotte Mandell)

1.

Sibiu, June 2025. I went to the Este Film Festival to catch a screening of Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude (2024). Serra’s reputation as an enfant terrible of European cinema rests on his refusal to clarify boundaries between documentary forms and fictional ones, among other things, of course. The film is a repetitive loop of sheer brutality: the performance of masculinity set against the ‘natural’ animality of the bull, no commentary on bullfighting itself, just the visceral presentation, partly inspired by Francisco Goya’s paintings. There are 14 bullfights in total, and it is a testament to Serra’s enervating cinematography that one manages to sit through all of them.

The beginning: no sound, an austere red in the opening credits, an expectancy. Cut into a scene saturated in darkness: a black night, sown wheat in the wild, and a single bull, breathing, just breathing— his fur glistening in patches, the silver hue of moonlight, a fusion of power and vulnerability —


2.

DC, early 2000’s. G and I stood outside the nonspecific Middle Eastern restaurant in DC that would later be buried beneath a strip mall. — But we could not have imagined that yet. Instead, in that particular moment, G described his summer experience, eyes narrowing as he looked into the near distance, a Merit menthol in his right hand.  “I was in Pamplona, studying abroad,” G said. “My girlfriend of two years had dumped me in a phone call. And that's how it happened, during the Fiesta de San Fermín, the city was possessed. I joined strangers in the street, running between alleys . . . the encierro swallowed me. I'm saving up to go again, to be part of the running of the bulls.”

At the time, what I knew of Spain was limited to the rocky coastal areas, and the pink jelly shoes I wore to protect my bare feet from the sea urchins on the rocks. But G. was going back to run with the bulls. His passion for this sadistic ritual astonished me.


3.

In what was to be his final book, The Tears of Eros, Georges Bataille curated an arche of the erotic from images made by humans. He pauses near the Lascaux cave, trying to decipher them:

In the deepest crevice of this cave, the deepest and also the most inaccessible (today, however, a vertical iron ladder allows access to a small number of people at a time, so that most of the visitors do not know about it, or at best know it through photographic reproductions), at the bottom of a crevice so awkward to get to that it now goes under the name of the "pit," we find ourselves before the most striking and the most strange of evocations.

A man, dead as far as one can tell, is stretched out, prostrate in front of a heavy, immobile, threatening animal. This animal is a bison, and the threat it poses is all the more grave because it is dying: it is wounded, and under its open belly its entrails are spilling out. Apparently it is this outstretched man who struck down the dying animal with his spear. But the man is not quite a man; his head, a bird's head, ends in a beak. Nothing in this whole image justifies the paradoxical fact that the man's sex is erect. 

And there we have it: a man standing over a dead bull with an erection.

Nonsense, scoffs Bataille, refusing my hasty reading, dragging me, instead, into the darker caves of his his head. There is a veil here, Bataille insists, a paradox:

But in these closed depths a paradoxical accord is signed, an accord all the more grave in that it is signed in this inaccessible obscurity. This essential and paradoxical accord is between death and eroticism. Its truth no doubt continues to assert itself. However, no matter how it asserts itself, it still remains hidden. Such is the nature of both death and eroticism. The one and the other in fact conceal themselves: they conceal themselves at the very moment they reveal themselves.

We cannot imagine a more obscure contradiction.


4.

There is a season for death. The Spanish bullfighting season, la temporada, starts at the end of March and continues until early October. When the season ends, top matadors travel to Lima for the month-long Peruvian season before heading to Mexico City in December and January. Aspiring bullfighters, los novilleros, perform in Mexico only in the summer, whereas in Spain they perform from March to October.

5.

Sibiu, June 2025. [From the “Notes” document P kept on his iphone as we watched Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude.]

HE: I’m assuming the bulls are trained to respond to the calls being made by toreadors?

ME: Not really. This is supposed to be an amor fati scenario where neither bull nor matador see each other until the ring. And bulls are selected early on their lives: a bull that chosen for bullfighting is never allowed to see a human on foot, face to face, eye to eye, grounded so to speak until the corrida. The bullfighting bulls are raised separately, and field-hands only approach them on horses. They are raised totally wild in the field . . . as compared to their peers who are fattened in stalls for slaughter so that we can eat them.

HE: Why is he doing this?

ME: Most bulls favor one side so on the first cape run the matador attempts to feel out the bull’s weakness and preferences.

HE: Def machismo cult—you got balls, they’ll suck you off etc, locker room talk over nothing. The idea of this “as it is” presentation is obvi bullshit.  No director does something like this without a clear point, imho.

ME: Probably true. For me the bullfight is what we do to men in some ways: epic masculinity meets its peak in this intensity, with the cheers of the audience and death at stake. But it is also not man to me, see, not men as I know them— just the cult of masculinity. The same man who is vulnerable and powerful and alone in his nakedness is different creature when trying to impress other men and prove his manliness. Masculinity isn’t real or sexy to me.

HE: But it is real. You say men egg it on, and that’s true, but women play a huge part in that cult. Women lionize this kind of man. Why do you want to watch this sort of movie? Why are we here? What part of this needs seeing?

ME: I want to understand what we do to men. I want to understand how gender is constituted by and from fear. Why is fear so central to relationality vis a vis gender?


6.

Birmingham, 2025. To raise money for his trip to Spain, G was giving tango lessons to retirees in L. A. I think of G again when looking at a photo of my parents dancing the tango; my mother’s hip glued to my father’s leg, as if lightning had seared them together. There is a splendid moment in Pedro Almodovar’s film, Volver, when our expectations are subverted— and we, the audience, are given to recognize or admit what we expected in the instance of disappointment. Almodovar prepares us for an Argentine tango of the sort that Carlos Gardel made famous in the 1930s, but what he delivers, instead, is Penelope Cruz performing the same song as a soulful flamenco.

In the margins of the corrida, flamenco reaches towards duende. Where the matador seeks to channel the spirit of his opponent, the bull, in order to anticipate his next move, the flamenco dancer seeks to connect with the dead and the absent. When duende is present, the dance is overcome; the dancer’s ecstasy fills the room. It is captivating. One becomes captive to it.


7.

On the island of Crete, archaeological excavations revealed ancient Minoan frescoes (c. 1500 BCE) painted in relief on stucco. To create these frescoes, artists had to negotiate the height of the panel while simultaneously molding and painting the fresh stucco. The colors employed date the frescoes in late Minoan period: the skills for creating such art had already been shaped into methods, making them examples of "mature art" for the Minoans.

To speak of mature art in a civilization implies the end of that civilization as a known point. 

Late Minoan art used the polychrome hues – white, pale red, dark red, blue, black – visible in the Taureador Frescoes. In the scenes, young men and women play games with bulls, grabbing their horns and vaulting over them.  Gender is identified by color, according to Minoan conventions that painted women with pale skin and men with dark skin. Social status is indicated in clothing and jewelry. 

The frescoes appear as decorative motifs adorning a wall above a ceremonial bull-ring. It is speculated that an earthquake in the Late Minoan period destroyed the palace, causing flakes from the destroyed panels to fall to the ground from the upper story, landing near the east stairwell, which was already ruinous and likely unused.

The Taureador Frescoes don't depict events that occurred in actuality so much as celebrate a conventional trope known as  "bull-leaping," a term scholars say continues to lack a viable definition. (“Although it vaguely brings to mind the act of jumping over bulls, the technique and the reasons for doing that remain obscure, a century after the discovery of the frescos,” writes Jeremy McInnerny.)

8.

Macedonian coins depict Artemis Tauropolos (“Artemis Bullrider”) mounted on a charging bull. The Boegia (or "Bull Driving") was held in Miletus, and included a bull-grappling contest. In my copy of Michel Leiris' Manhood, the novel is preceded by an essay titled “The Autobiographer as Torero.”

9.

In The Book of Imaginary Beings, Jorge Luis Borges closes his eyes and burrows into the Minotaur's labyrinth. “It is fitting that in the center of a monstrous house there be a monstrous inhabitant,” Borges writes, for:

Human forms with bull heads figured, to judge by wall paintings, in the demonology of Crete. Most likely the Greek fable of the Minotaur is a late and clumsy version of far older myths, the shadow of other dreams still more full of horror.

Harking back to the Minotaur’s cameo appearance at the start of Dante’s Inferno, in Canto 12, Borges suggests — in a disputed interpretation — that Dante draws on the depiction from the Middle Ages of the beast as a bull’s body with a man’s head.

Upon the summit of the rugged slope
There lay outstretched the infamy of Crete
Conceived by guile within a wooden cow;
And when he saw us come, he bit himself,
Like one whom frenzy has deprived of reason.

Just as a bull, when stricken unto death,
Will break his halter, and will toss about
From side to side, unable to go on:
Thus did I see the Minotaur behave.

10.

The early Christian church found its most potent rival in the cult of Mithra, a pagan god of Persian mythology that was widely worshiped in ancient Rome. Central to the cult of Mithra was the Mithraic ceremony that sacrificed a bull to honor Mithra’s legendary slaying of a bull, which was depicted in art throughout the Roman Empire.

Feeling threatened by idolatry and rituals of Mithraism, the Roman church opposed them. The Council of Toledo in 447 drew a line straight from the bull to Satan: “a large, black, monstrous apparition with horns on his head, cloven hoofs, hair, ass’s ears, claws, fiery eyes, gnashing teeth, and huge phallus, and sulphurous smell.”

11.

For ancient Greeks, the bull symbolized fertility and priapism. Zeus (or Jupiter) is depicted riding a bull while holding a phallic scepter in his hand. At some point in time, Zeus trades the scepter for a labrys, or double-bitted ax, so he can throw thunderbolts at those who displeased him. (To please a god—particularly an angry and jealous god who aspires to monotheism, eventually complicated enough to require clerics.) 

After acquiring his thunderbolt, Zeus visited his lover, Semele, disguised as lightning. It should be noted that the Thracians held Semele to be the goddess of the Earth who sometimes went by the name, Gaia.  In the Albertine museum in Vienna, you can find an etching from the 16th century by master LD which depicts her meeting the thunderbolts, receiving her lover, looking, obviously orgasmic and reminiscent of the ecstatic expression on the face of the ecstatic saints.

Human beings believe things. All humans live in relation to the expectations generated by those beliefs. We believe the sun will rise tomorrow, etc. Faith, as developed by religious institutions, is rational to the degree that it is structured by belief, and given mass through credos, rituals, and affirming slogans. Faith apprehends through recognition, and this is essentially rational, it isn’t thoughtful, but it is still rational. It has a system.

The problem for rationalism and faith is ecstasy. Rationalism cannot touch the sacred or be permitted to reconfigure thought. Ecstasy makes the inarticulate physical, palpable, immediate. The absence of words underscores the absence of divinity. The sound that does not signify points beyond signification, and meets us in what Bataille called the sacred moment, or the instance in which existence is ruptured and lacks transition or explanation.

12.

A sigh, a shudder, a moan, the cry of grief, the veil of the world rent open by the wail. The Kaddish attempts to organize grief by taming it, and making it pleasing to God. The lament orders grief, and prevents it from becoming eternally unfinished  like the fragments. God doesn’t want the universe to be riven apart by the pain of humans. Priests want the Divine to remain articulable, ritualized, available for social transaction and accounting. Priests are careerists  of the established religion. They are not seekers of the divine so much as hired representatives of the divine timing. And that is the primary difference between monks and priests.

Lazlo Foldenyi says in articulate sounds are “manifestations of ‘God’ turned audible, but also a form of Echo..” his is the sound that John Cage encountered in the anhedonic chamber, where the labor of the heart became the music of silence.

Orphic cosmogony picks up from Hesiod’s Theogeny, after the clash of the titans, when the first human emerged from the ashes and cinder left behind after the Titans, were struck by lightning. The Titans birth, like that of the Dionysus, whom they killed, is born from the devastation rot by lightning. The Christian and Jewish  god creates from dirt and language, while the Orphic God creates from ash, from the remnants of burnt materials, from the fragments of what lived, from the poetry manuscript. Lightning, for the ancient Greeks gave the soul to the human body, just as it unifies the sky  and the earth. When Asclepius had the audacity to resurrect the dead, Zeus murdered him with lightning, a thunderbolt. In the battle of the Titans, Hesiod tells us that Zeus came from heaven and Olympus in the form of lightning. The heavens themselves hide Zeus‘s name: “ from Heaven and Olympus come forth with, hurling his lightning: the bold, flu, sick and fast from his hand together with thunder and lightning.” This destruction is summed up: “Astounding heat seized Chaos.”

13.

To return to Bataille and the ancients differently, with my head upside down, paraphrasing myself as well as the position from which some things are best glimpsed: seals and sealstones from the middle and late Minoan periods depict identical bull-leaping scenes where the leaper goes over the bull upside down. It’s not clear if the leaper is diving from above, leaping up from below, or being helped by another human or a pole. These scenes are taken as evidence of the Mycenaean Flying Leap, which occurred at full gallop. The bull’s legs are extended to show that he is motion while the woman stands in the front, holding his horns, preparing to leap over the bull or to land.

Today, Birmingham. Flashback of the opening scene from Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude: the redolent darkness filled by the heavy soundings of the bull’s breath, the freedom of that breath before being civilized .. . now I see Serra’s corrida bulls completely tied to the performance, just as the matadors and men are subject to the norms of masculinity, that brutish contestation of cajones and herms. . . . But how gorgeous and powerful, that naked man alone in the darkness, the air around him filled by his breath, the tempo of his concern and vulnerability, the animal who escapes, however briefly, the performances of convention in masculinity.

As to the question of how many more times . . .

To express the point in almost Heraclitean terms, we are dealing here with the difference between performing an action in the universe and ‘repeating’ it, that is, performing it ‘again’ in a universe already changed by the ‘first’ occurrence. Whereas classical arithmetic can assign no sense to the quote marks here, non-Euclidean arithmetic erases them by internalizing the distinctions they notate.

— Brian Rotman, Mathematics as Sign

*

Brian Rotman, Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting (Stanford University Press, 2000).
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Lawrence Grant White (Pantheon Books, 1948).
Jay Wright, Presentable Art of Reading Absence (Dalkey Archive, 2008).
Joe Dassin, “Taka takata (La femme du toréro)”.
Jorge Luis Borges with Margarita Guerrero, The Book of Imaginary Beings, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (E.P. Dutton, 1978).
Maurice Blanchot, “Joubert and Space,” The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford University Press, 2003).
Reginald Dwayne Betts, “Remembering Hayden”.
Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (University of California Press, 1986).
Suzanne Dracuis. “The Macho's Marathon, the Major's Martyrology, and the Conqueror's Cavalry”, collected in Elektrik: Caribbean Writing. Calico Translation Series. Two Lines Press, 2023.