Bob Creeley's LOVE.

The first week they wrote a letter.
He wrote it.
She thought about it.
Peace was in the house like a broken staircase.

— Robert Creeley, “The Interview”

What is the point. That is what must be borne in mind. Sometimes the point is really who wants what. Sometimes the point is what is right or kind. Sometimes the point is a momentum, a fact, a quality, a voice, an intimation, a thing said or unsaid. Sometimes it's who's at fault, or what will happen if you do not move at once. The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you lose the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life.

— Renata Adler, “Brownstone”

1

“Where to begin.”

To quote Renata Adler.

To start with the favorite, or one of the favorites, or the favorite at 2:13 p.m. in the week of Robert Creeley’s For Love: Poems 1950-1960.

To refuse to think about these poems in the order they are given.

To choose, instead, the unscrupulous preferences of one’s own exuberance, one’s own tonalities, one’s own stammering speculations.

To be small, then. Small as this spare poem that spares us nothing.

A creature of three stanzas that reassures the extra line of its role as tiny ruiner. 3-3-4, the extra word.

The Rhyme

There is the sign of
the flower—
to borrow the theme.

But what or where to recover
what is not love
too simply.

I saw her
and behind her there were
flowers, and behind them
nothing.

To move into “The Way,” and notice the way a tone of conclusiveness undercut the speaker’s claims and abrades his putative ego.

To admire the riffing on Shakespeare’s famous sonnet, creating a dialogue with that particular strain of romantic bravado . . .

The Way

My love’s manners in bed
are not to be discussed by me,
as mine by her
I would not credit comment upon gracefully.

Yet I ride by the margin of that lake in
the wood, the castle,
and the excitement of strongholds;
and have a small boy’s notion of doing good.

Oh well, I will say here,
knowing each man,
let you find a good wife too,
and love her as hard as you can.

To go from this difficulty, this impossibility, with its “small boy’s notion of doing good,” back to the lake and the lack and the riffing on emblematic lines from poetry as a way into the poem:

The Bed

She walks in beauty like a lake
and eats her steak
with fork and knife
and proves a proper wife.

Her room and board
he can afford, he has made friends
of common pains
and meets his ends.

Oh god, decry
such common finery as puts the need
before the bed, makes true what is
the lie indeed.

”Laughter releases rancor the quality of mercy is not / strained,” as Creeley reminds in the droll seriousness of “The Crisis” — there is the collective resilience of laughter.

2

To see things differently in a white dress.

To admit the frame in the framing of it.

To move into the openly-sacrificial gesticulations of “A Marriage,” with its sombre tonality, an accomplishment of syntax and declarative hints.

To study the connotations and flexing of this legal word, retainer, even as it develops from the traditional “first time, second time, third time” punchline to the classic storyteller-style joke or else the fable:

A Marriage

The first retainer
he gave to her
was a golden
wedding ring.

The second—late at night
he woke up,
leaned over on an elbow,
and kissed her.

The third and the last—
he died with
and gave up loving
and lived with her.

To consider the trinitarian impulse in triples, and the human belief that magic occurs in numbers.

To be one two three about things.

To speak of pain in relation to form, where eternity is the duration of that see-saw between existence and penitence, as in “The Letter”:

The Letter

I did not expect you
to stay married to
one man all your life,
no matter you were his wife.

I thought the pain was endless—
but the form existent,
as it is form,
and as such I loved it.

I loved you as well
even as you might tell,
giving evidence
as to how much was penitence.

To feel slightly medieval when reading him.

To extend lais-like thought into something lighter. A gist in Creeley’s marriage and courtship poems reaching back loosely towards medieval fabliau (plural: fabliaux), that species of brief and bawdy tale that made use of satire to challenge clergy, women (as femininity), and marriage, wherein humor develops from plot through an intrigue or practical joke told in a rapid succession of events that form a single episode. Narrated in eight-syllable rhyming couplets, fabliaux were very popular in France during the Middle Ages. The effectiveness of the fabliau depends on the recognition of cultural cues and behaviors that point to easily discerned conceptions of human nature and gender. This type of literary form recurs throughout Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio's Decameron, where it is not limited to rhyming couplets. Clearly, Creeley isn’t playing the by the rules of the fabliau in these poems, but he seems familiar with the form, perhaps culling its rhetorical strategies when drafting poems like “A Marriage.”

To stand back from the particulars.

To glance downwards with the eye of the bird, noting how his use of adynaton, the “not possible,” lays bare love’s rhetorical strategies and hyper-magnifications. Say my love burns like a hundred suns. Say heart throws itself into the headlights. Say my superlatives stack up in his “Ballade of the Despairing Husband”:

Oh lovely lady, morning or evening or afternoon.
Oh lovely lady, eating with or without a spoon.
Oh most lovely lady, whether or dressed or undressed or partly.
Oh most lovely lady, getting up or going to bed or sitting only.

Oh loveliest of ladies, than whom none is more fair, more gracious, more beautiful.
Oh loveliest of ladies, whether you are just or unjust, merciful, indifferent, or cruel.
Oh most loveliest of ladies, doing whatever, seeing whatever, being whatever.
Oh most loveliest of ladies, in rain, in shine, in any weather.

Say any working-poet can sympathize with the rhyming couplet that concludes this “Ballade”:

Oh lady grant me time,
please, to finish my rhyme.

3

To consider the way he uses a comma.

Excerpted from Renata Adler’s Pitch Dark.

To push his commas away and look for the sharpened points of his periods.

To say: if you.

To think: if then.

To read “If You” closely as if to resolve whether the repetition can offer closer.

To mean: I’m not sure how I feel about the repeating couplet that book-ends the conditional.

To admire the poem’s construction from a simple conditional, where the marital crisis involves a pet . . . and the bow touches the violin in the second-to-last couplet, with the crisp serial of monosyllabic words:

Dead. Died. Will die. Want.
Morning, midnight. I asked you

if you were going to get a pet
what kind of animal would you get.

To know and not know.

4

To study the material, itself.

To consider Robert Creeley’s intent when he said: “Things continue, but my sense is that I have at best, simply taken place with that fact... So it is that what I feel, in the world, is the one thing I know myself to be, for that instant. I will never know myself otherwise. Intentions are the variability of all these feelings, moments of that possibility. How can I ever assume that they come to this or that substance?”

To be apprehended by the mirror on the stream’s reflective surface in “The Awakening" —like the smallness of the man rubbing the myth from his eyes, reckoning with seeing “his size with his own two eyes” in the dark water.

To move through the locutionary ache of “The Tunnel,” with its variations and degradations of loneliness and echo . . . “time isn’t.”

The Tunnel

Tonight, nothing is long enough—
time isn’t.
Were there a fire,
it would burn now.

Were there a heaven,
I would have gone long ago.
I think that light
is the final image.

But time reoccurs,
love—and an echo.
A time passes
love in the dark.

To note how three returns in the tunnel’s structure: those three stanzas doing the work of completion, not by ordinary standards but through the sleight-of-hand that evokes our inarticulable expectations.

To see these threes in Creeley’s heroes.

To note this three-stanza poem, each quatrain quivering with Creeley’s extraordinary enjambment, the way he imposes rupture within a breath, where imposing plays into “possibility,” and reminds the reader of its kinship with the pose, which is to say, the hero, the poet, the sibyl, the speaker, the meteoric mythos:

Heroes

In all those stories the hero
is beyond himself and into the next
thing, be it those labors
of Hercules or Aeneas going into death.

That was the Cumaean Sibyl speaking.
This is Robert Creeley, and Virgil
is dead now two thousand years, yet Hercules
and the Aeneid, yet all that industrious wis-

dom lives in the way the mountains
and the desert are waiting
for the heroes, and death also
can still propose the old labors.

No heroes can rest without imagining the singular. Even if the singular only exists as a frame for the lack that imagines a partner.

The logic of lack commits “Heroes” to a pseudo-companion, a poem titled “The Hero” — the first stanza smattered with internal slant rhymes that create a beat or sense of motion, as in:

Each voice which was asked
spoke its words, and heard
more than that, the fair question,
the onerous burden of the asking.

And then further, in the same poem, once again, there is the suppleness of Creeley’s enjambment, the fractures of motion he uses to build these discrete stanzas, carriers of framed images:

Go forth, go forth,
saith the grandmother, the fire
of that old form, and turns
away from the form.

To study what form solicitates.

To sit on his simple hill and be aware of its shape:

5

To sit on that hill for hours with my dog, Radu.

To spy another hero in the valley from these heights.

To then descend, headily, into the transposition — or the images recollected, the outlines composed by Wallace Stevens in that extraordinary poem titled “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War” —

It is not an image. It is a feeling.
There is no image of the hero.
There is a feeling as definition.
How could there be an image, an outline, 
A design, a marble soiled by pigeons?
The hero is a feeling, a man seen 
As if the eye was an emotion, 
As if in seeing we saw our feeling 
In the object seen and saved that mystic
Against the sight, the penetrating, 
Pure eye. Instead of allegory, 
We have and are the man, capable 
Of his brave quickenings, the human
Accelerations that seem inhuman.

To wonder (again) about the concept of “innate music” in poetics.

To re-read a letter written by Wallace Stevens in 1936, when he was working on “The Man With the Blue Guitar,” and theorizing the imagination’s influence.

To read the words of Stevens’ letter aloud in the room of this instance, this Now.

“The validity of the poet as a figure of the prestige to which he is entitled, is wholly a matter of this, that he adds to life that without which life cannot be lived, or is not worth living, or is without savor, or in any case, would be altogether different from what it is today,” said Stevens.

To pause and look up at the overwatered house plant.

To return to Stevens’ letter, and resume my chlorophyll-adjacent reading: “Poetry is a passion not a habit. This passion nourishes itself on reality. Imagination has no source except in reality, and ceases to have any value when it departs from reality. Here is a fundamental principle about the imagination; it does not create except as it transforms. There is nothing that exists exclusively by reason of the imagination, or that does not exist in some form in reality. Thus reality = the imagination, and the imagination = reality. Imagination gives, but gives in relation.”

To acknowledge the italics above as my own — just as this relational imaginary, wherein imagination alters the relations we form with experience, and this alteration is what we carry forward as influence, belongs (somehow) to Stevens.

And to end with perhaps a favorite —

6

— followed by a talisman, a mirror, an echo.

A Token

My lady
fair with
soft arms, what

can I say to
you—words, words
as if all
worlds were there.

— Robert Creeley

When it happens you are not there

— W. S. Merwin, “To the Words”

And you my future constellation
climb up in the sky with me

— Morphine, “Like a Mirror”

To Make a Cento of It

“I’m thinking of that charming phrase: what goes around comes around.”

— Robert Creeley to Bruce Comens

i

House. Your hand is an iron
shovel looking down at me.
Night comes. We sleep.
In hell we will tell of it.

ii

The door to the pantry
in Virgil’s plan is a poem

for the ways of water.

All eyes as if talking — taking
always the beat from the
breath it must have been.

Yielding manner as
simply as that syntactic

accident. The moon
is white in the branches
as we climb the hill for our picnic

I see a face appear.

Kenneth Patchen is hunting deer
inside Russia, too far from

me. . . the nightmare.
You on your back with your

Robert Creeley.

iii

Viz: hey.
Nothing for You is untoward.
Tree, speak. I will be a romantic.
I will sell her hands, her hair, her eyes, all things time isn’t—
cruel instrument.

iv

It is a viscous
form of self-
like flowers
thrown under
their colors.

What I took in my
hand: a man,
a direction — I am.
All beggar.

As if all that
surrounds her
as hair be also
today — a double
flute. To
walk
at night.

The trees — goddamn
them, the galloping
collection of greens,
subservience. I am.
All ears.

Be for me
like rain—
a being nothing
and there.

v

At night, there are other things white in the mind of it.
I took in my hand the possibility cut so small in the wall where you spoke to me.
Were there a fire it would burn now for the sake of the tree.

*

Arnold Schoenberg, Red Gaze (1910)
Bruce Comens, “A Conversation with Robert Creeley by Bruce Comens” (The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1995)
Edward Burne-Jones’s sketchbook (Harvard Art Museum)
Max Richter, “Psychogeography”
Morphine, “Bo’s Veranda”
Morphine, “Like a Mirror”
Renata Adler, Pitch Dark (NYRB Classics)
Robert Creeley, For Love: Poems 1950 - 1960 (PDF)
Robert Creeley, “To Say It”
W. S. Merwin, “To the Words”
Wallace Stevens, “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War”

How German is it.

The world is everything that is the case.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein’s first statement inTractatus

What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein’s final proposition inTractatus

What can be written down is mere foolishness. Only the ineffable is of any importance.

– Paul Valery, Mon Faust (a play)

1

In 1940, Walter Abish and his parents fled Austria and the Nazis. A few years later, they had to flee Italy. When the Germans took the Ardennes, they fled France. Later they fled China when the Maoists gained control. Finally— if such words can exist in our world — Abish wound up in the US metropolitan of New York City, the place that became his home.

“I lie and I am lied to, but the result of my lie is mental leaps, memory, knowledge,” Abish wrote or remarked — somewhere.

The world is everything that is the case.

But no where is what it seems. Abish’s novels and essays are constructed from texts cobbled together from the memoirs, correspondence, experience, and lives of others. He doesn’t cite his sources or name the humans whose lives he collages. Nor does he guise his own autobiographical presence in what he tells or re-collects.

Across his writing, the use of a collective first-person pulls us back from the autonomous being of the neoliberal subject. Oddly, nothing feels more contemporary to this moment than Abish’s novel, How German Is It (1980) . . .

2

As sovereigns would have it, the child lives under the sign of the name given by the father.

Walter Abish’s protagonist, Ulrich Hargenau, lives in the shadow of his father’s execution by the Nazis for his involvement in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. The father was part of a terrorist conspiracy to invalidate the rule of the sovereign. Worst of all, the planned assassination symbolized a rejection of the Furher principle from within the ethnocentric shelter of what was constructed as the “German family.” There is no foreign Other — no “alien ideology” like Bolshevism, no filthy blood of drawn from Slav minorities, no “contamination” of Jewish or Roma blood— involved in this plot. Which is German.

But what is German about the terrorist.

And what is German about the son who returns to the region of Württemberg, where he was born, in order to find the father.

What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence.

What Hargenau seeks is history, a narrative to structure the frayed threads of his life— the marriage to a woman named Paula who nevertheless remained a mystery, his pseudo-participation in the leftist radical Einzieh Group and the resulting arrests of his friends, the role he played in their judicial trial and subsequent conviction, the novel he didn’t write, the novel he seeks to finish, the lived and unlived lives that haunt his experience.

What part of repetition do we need to remember the lullaby’s texture.

“The purpose of an antiterrorist film” (excerpted below) resembles the language of contemporary global fascism, particularly in the Trump administration’s prosecution of student protesting their government’s support for Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians.

But no matter how great these flaws, the need for the film is self-evident.

Who is the terrorist in the history empire tells.

“At the subconscious level nothing is accidental,” said Luis Buñuel in That Obscure Object of Desire, a film that made use of the flashback form and, coincidentally, was cited by Abish as a personal favorite.

The book ends in an abrupt flurry of ellipses structured to represent the associative possibilities of stream-of-consciousness. Sitting in an office, Ulrich recounts his childhood to a psychoanalyst. He was born in Württemberg in 1945, the year after his father’s execution. At age 7 or 8, Ulrich found this gap, but never discussed it with his (mother who later remarried a former Wehrmacht officer with a high status at a bank).

“I am a bastard,” Ulrich says, “an appropriate role for a writer,” or any man who doesn’t want to know who his father might have been, or what his father did during the war.

What can be written down is mere foolishness. Only the ineffable is of any importance.

Ulrich exhibits a subconscious needs to replay his father. By joining the Einzieh Group, he satisfies the urge to identify with the conspirator in his father. Deploying flashback and dialogue to maintain a discontinuous time, Abish renders a time whose movement forward is arrested by the absence of meaning. The characters relate, openly and covertly, to the national history. Neighbors cut shrubbery and hum over the interior monologues; everyday actions drown the proximity of inherited guilt and salvation complexes in the postwar generation.

On the surface of things, Ulrich believes that he joins the Einzieh Group for a love of a woman whose “real name” he did not know. Her name hid her past and buried her father twicefold: once in the ash of public buildings she bombed and again in the effort to trace her lineage back to a father whose sin may have been unforgivable.

“What she couldn’t have known is that the name I hear is not my real name either,” Ulrich tells the analyst.

Ulrich’s search for his father in Württemberg, where he goes to work on his novel, is also a search for his own heritage, an effort to find his inheritance, a question about what it means to be German after the Holocaust. Each time Ulrich pronounces his own name, Germans recognize him as his father’s son. In these moments, he says, “I am practicing a kind of deceit.”

3

Heidegger appears as the father of German metaphysics, the man who lives in the forest of uncontaminated purity, the gnome whose language refuses to be penetrated or altered by the foreign. A town built on top of a mass grave is named after him. A ‘terrorist’ may have studied under him, as did the protagonist. All of Abish’s character have a connection to Heidegger, however large or pithy, if only as residents of a town developed and built atop the crimes of the past to better honor the future.

4

A few excerpted passages from an essay by Walter Abish titled “What Else”:

79

I keep beginning again. I keep taking a fresh notebook. And each time I hope it will lead to something, that it will be a constructive experiment, that I shall open some door. It never happens. I stop before I get to a door, any door. The same invisible obstacle that stops me. I ought at least to try and keep the same notebook, to get to the last page. That would mean that I have said almost everything.

97

From the past, it is my childhood which fascinates me most; these images alone, upon inspection, fail to make me regret the time which has vanished. For it is not the irreversible I discover in childhood, it is the irreducible: everything which is still in me, by fits and starts; in the child I read quite openly the dark underside of myself-boredom, vulnerability, disposition to despair (in the plural, fortunately), inward excitement, cut off (unfortunately) from all expression. Contemporaries: I was beginning to walk, Proust was still alive, and finishing A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

168

Her apartment: for reasons that are no longer clear to me, a few weeks after that first evening in her apartment, we moved the convertible couch from the north wall of the living room to the west wall. After we parted, but before we were married, the furniture was moved once again, as if to erase my former presence. I can understand the movement of the furniture as well as and as passionately as I understand Schubert's sonatas. The aquarium with its dozen guppies was by now long gone. After we were married but living apart, she once again moved the couch. I often wonder if I avoided sleeping with her after we were married for the sake of the text-to-be? I believe she, had not read The Sun Also Rises but her parting words seemed straight out of that all too familiar exchange in the novel. Am I reading into her parting gift, Malraux's The Voices of Silence, a meaning that wasn't there? Why write?

4I

July 31. One can imagine a face for the void. Then it strikes us how much the void resembles us. Is it myself I am staring at? The dark is checked by the dark, as a hand by a stranger's hand.

I3

Jean Jacques Rousseau confesses himself. It is less a need than an idea.

46

What tense would you choose to live in?

I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle-in the “what ought to be.”

I like to breathe that way. That's what I like. It suggests a kind of mounted, bandit-like equestrian honor...

An epigraph from the second part of Walter Abish’s novel, Eclipse Fever.

*

Arvo Pärt, Silentium
Broken Social Scene, “Hug of Thunder” (2017)
Dennis Cooper on Abish’s How German Is It
Jacek Malczewski, Zesłanie Studentów, or “Student’s Exile” (1891). Black and white reproduction.
Leoš Janáček, Idyll For String Orchestra, V. Adagio, performed by Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra
Walter Abish, How German Is It (New Directions Press, 1980)
Walter Abish, Eclipse Fever (Nonpareil Books, 1993)
Walter Abish, “What Else”

prelude / postlude

Cyril Connolly's critique of the critic.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. ... Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion.

– James Baldwin

…. there is not less, but more in the idea of nonbeing than that of being, in disorder than in order, in the possible than in the real.

— Gilles Deleuze

CREDENTIALS AS FORM

And there it is. Midway through Enemies of Promise, after a stream of eloquent rants (i.e. Proust bad; E. M. Forster divine), the formidable critic named Cyril Connolly turns on himself.

The provocation is titled “Chapter XVII: Credentials,” a single page of text wherein Connolly gets naked, formally and textually, autiobiographically, where the most graphic acts are conducted by professors at Eton:

Up to this point, the function of the work has been entirely critical and performed with those privileges of the critic which allow him to assume equality with those whom he criticizes and to take their books to pieces as if he were their equal in stature. But this equality is a fiction, just as it is a fiction that a juryman is superior to the temptations and stupidities of the prisoner he judges or qualified to convict a company director on a point of corporation law.

And then, Connolly intimates that the illusion of critical neutrality comes at the cost of continuously denying and disavowing the effects of his personal biases, formative experiences, and socialization:

A critic is a product of his time who may affect impartiality but who while claiming authority over the reader projects his doubt and aspiration.

And then:

Every critic writes as if he were infallible, and pretends that he is the embodiment of impartial intellectual sanity, a reasonable though omniscient pontiff. But without his surplice the preacher of the loftiest sermon is only human or subhuman, and now is the moment to step down from the pulpit, to disrobe in the vestry. The autobiography which follows is intended to be such a disrobing; it is meant to be an analysis of the grounding in life and art which the critic received, of the ideas which formed him in youth; the education, the ideals, the disappointments from which are drawn his experience, the fashions he may unwittingly follow and the flaws he may conceal.

And so, the writer presumes herself god; the critic presumes herself the Pope; the costume presumes itself to be of inestimable value. Adorably, Connolly doesn’t prevaricate. He assumes the critic is human; despite pretensions to infallibility, the critic is as much a product of his time as the latest ad-trend. Like any 21st century teen, the critic wants to go viral. The critic watches the linguistic turn in the culture industry and keeps abreast of the most recent breast-related events in the tabloids. The critic is socialized by the dominant media and the desires of the ruling elite. The critic “projects his doubt and aspiration . . . while claiming authority over the reader.” The critic knows bravada, bravado, bavardage.

Notabily, loftiness is a lonely and insecure height — but a lucrative one. The autobiographical critic doesn’t mention this. Instead, Connolly launches (a slightly wobbly analogy): “a critic is an instrument which registers certain observations; before the reader can judge of their value he must know sufficient of the accuracy of the instrument to allow for the margin of error.” And then he zooms in on the shiny surface of the instrument, expanding the mirror:

We grow up among theories and illusions common to our class, our race, our time. We absorb them unawares and their effect is incalculable. What are they? In this case, I am trying to find out, hoping that all I discover, however personal, may prove of use. To do so I have to refer to something which I find intolerable, the early aura of large houses, fallen fortunes and county families common to so many English autobiographers. If the reader can stomach this, I will try to make it up to him.

The apologia is peak Connolly, rubbing his aureole, holding his line, tongue-in-cheek and dead earnest.

What he calls “the autobiography to follow” is memoir of socialization, from the formative ideas of youth to the degrees and fraternities, and then from the fashions he lauds to the “ideals” and “disappointments” that shaped his preferences. Whatever the critic measures depends on how the critic measures themselves. And the critic articulates this measurement in the first line of the autobiographical section:

I have always disliked myself, at any given moment; the total of such moments is my life.

I won’t deny my shock of self-recognition upon reading Connolly’s statement. Nor will I lie by leaving disclaiming the tingling sensation which announces the presence of a kindred spirit: a melancholeric Romantic of the younger years who waves up at her from the page. Like his reader, Connolly whittled away his college days in arbor near the library, where he specialized in “the heresies of anarchists and Albigensians.” Like his reader, he consumed and admired the heretics and the atrocious events of the Middle Ages. To be horribly honest, he loved them all: the courageous Manicheaens, the cosmic love-crimes of the Abelardians, the heroisms of Frederic Stupormundi, the self-mortifications of the Flagellants . . .

But there is more. (He missed Simone Weil, after all.)

Or maybe less. For up there above the rest, somewhere in the stars of his possible futurisms, the Young Romantic adored his Nomanians, the believers in the religion known as No Man, the minds who heaved to simple credos, including “No Man living hath seen God” and “To No Man is it given to escape Death.”

A personal history implicated by the sensibility of the Young Romantic turns Older Writers into friends. They are bonded by secret affinity and perhaps envy for the passionate beliefs of their younger selves, even as they reproach these prior selves for having actually believed anything. Sensibility never gets over its prior selves. This is why sensibility-based friendships feel closer to ideal kinships, conversations hidden in quiet patches between trees where the cruel world of school and sports cannot find you. Where the judgement of the world lacks significance. Where books matter more than SATs.

Of course, literary preferences and cold apple pie are a matter of taste. And maybe we knew then what we cannot afford to know now, given how much more we know and yet how much less occasion we have to share it and commune with others around it. And there it is again — “the intensity of that gem-like flame,” Walter Pater’s dazzling oxymoron. A spark and a sparkling dissonance.

CREDENTIALS AS CONTENT

A few excerpts from this bouquet of critical writing, beginning with what his British professors taught vis a vis poetry and the arousals of purple prose:

To the description of his thrall to Romanticism, which ends by naming the boy he loved for the entirety of his three years at St. Wulfric’s as Tony Watson:

Irresistible Connolly, bearing “the mark of a willful astigmatism” on his forehead — and studying it. Last but not least, given the myriad other things I should be doing, here is how the critic described his discovery of mortality:

*

Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938)

“Gersaint’s Shopsign” by Jed Perl.

I did look. I saw the object itself. It told its story. No wonder it’s cheap.

— Henry James, The Golden Bowl

Antoine Watteau, Gersaint’s Shopsign

[Unless otherwise indicated, the material below is excerpted from Jed Perl’s book on Watteau, Antoine’s Alphabet.]

Gersaint's Shopsign is the greatest work of art ever devoted to shopping. It is an epic of shopping. It is a poetics of shopping. This panoramic view of an interior where paintings and mirrors and clocks and other luxury objects are for sale is "I shop therefore I am," but reimagined as metaphysics and allegory. Watteau's cast of characters– twelve in all, eight men and four women— move with the semaphore-like gestures of marionettes; they are puppets in a story of desire. The Shopsign, painted in tones of black, gray, and rose, is at once adamantine and airy—a vision that, despite its funny moments, is strangely somber, almost ritualized. At center stage there is a young man, elegant and ardent and maybe even a little grave, standing just inside the shop, offering his hand to a woman who steps in off the sidewalk, her back side, which is what we see of her, a great shimmer of cloth. Each of the dresses in the Shopsign, and this one in particular, has a gleaming, shivering life of its own—they're couture creations that function independently of the bodies they contain, they're lengths of beautifully made and sewn cloth to be played with, petted, adored. The desire for clothes and the desire for flesh melt together, and indeed this is very much a painting about elements that fit into or turn into one another, the nude into the clothed. [....]  but as a container for a painting or for a set of toiletries, the mirror as a framing of the passing parade, the picture frame that frames not only the painting but the people who look at the painting.

Our feelings about things, our perceptions of things are always multiplying, or at least they are always slipping into other feelings, other perceptions this is what Watteau wants to tell us. Nothing is only one thing, even, maybe especially, the visit to the shop where luxury goods are sold.

Jean-Antoine Watteau, L'Enseigne de Gersaint (The Shop Sign of Gersaint), ca. 1732. Etching & engraving on paper by Pierre Aveline after the painting by Watteau.

William Cole, an English visitor to Paris in the 1760s, a generation after the Shopsign was painted, suggests the quotidian experiences that went into Watteau's composition when he describes Madame Dulac's "extravagant and expensive shop; where the Mistress was as tempting as the Things she sold.”

The beauty of the objects and the beauty of the proprietor could not easily be separated in Cole's recollections, and of course this is all tumbled together with the fact that even when an object of desire has no direct relationship with sexual desire— when the luxury is, say, a beautifully bound book, an old master drawing, or an especially elegant clock (like the one in Gersaint's Shopsign) — the pleasure of possession can be so intense as to acquire an erotic dimension. The object that is purchased from Madame Dulac, so Cole explains, is bought not only for myself but “do you remember where you bought it”— and from whom.

Detail of the central coupling viewing the unboxing.

The luxurious bauble can also have symbolic implications, so that the purchase becomes an endorsement or embrace of certain ideas. There are the Northern Renaissance paintings of the married couple making a visit to the jeweler's, where the gold is being weighed, and all sorts of thoughts about love, loyalty, faithfulness hover in the immaculately rendered air. In Titian's portraits, the appearance of one of the newly fashionable clocks on a little table is at once a sign of the subject's great wealth and a memento mori. And then there is the golden bowl, of gilt crystal, after which Henry James named his last completed novel. The secret lovers, Prince Amerigo and Charlotte, are wandering the streets of London and chance upon a "small but interesting dealer in the Bloomsbury street," who shows them the great bowl, with its decoration that is almost Byzantine in its ornamental elaboration. Charlotte, who is considering buying the bowl as a wedding present for the woman the prince is going to marry, falls into a conversation with the Proprietor. "Does crystal then break — when it is crystal?" Charlotte asks. And when she is told that "it splits— if there is a split," she responds, "Ah! If there is a split. There is a split, eh? Crystal does split, eh?" To which the shopkeeper responds, "On lines and by laws of its own." And Charlotte replies, "You mean if there's a weak place?" – at which point we are speaking not about the bowl but about human relationships and human society.

In Gersaint's Shopsign, Watteau keeps moving from the snapshot of everyday life to the allegorical spectacle and back again, and it is the constant shifting between registers that gives the painting its devious power. Watteau painted the Shopsign near the end of his life, for one of his great friends, the art dealer Edme-François Gersaint. It was meant to hang as a sign above the entrance to the shop on the Pont Notre-Dame, Au Grand Monarque, where Gersaint sold paintings and other luxury objects, and it is said to have created a sensation in Paris during the brief time that it actually was displayed out-of-doors. The painting does not represent Gersaint's actual premises in the arcades of the Pont Notre-Dame, which were narrow and dark. And Watteau would probably have said of this shop much what Henry James later said of the Bloomsbury antiques shop in The Golden Bowl, namely that it "was but a shop of the mind, of the author's projected world."

(A mirror of a mirror in the dark space between the two mens’ wigs, that silhouette that resembles a loose shadow portrait…)

The walls of Gersaint's shop are practically papered with paintings in elaborate frames. These are not miniature versions of actual paintings but rather Watteau's imaginative variations on the art of the Baroque, a recapitulation of all the passions, sacred and profane, that have kept the world spinning, A resplendent clock reminds us that youth and love will end. Two large mirrors, each a dark abyss, suggest the impossibility of knowing oneself, even as two young scenes of actual paintings but rather Watteau's imaginative variations on the art of the Baroque, a recapitulation of all the passions, sacred and profane, that have kept the world spinning. A resplendent clock reminds us that youth and love will end. Two large mirrors, each a dark abyss, suggest the impossibility of knowing oneself, even as two young men look lovingly at their own images in another mirror.

And then there is the elegant lacquerwork toilet set. Who can doubt that toiletries, mirrors, and a clock raise certain questions: Who are we? What can we make of ourselves? What will we become? But the answers to these enormous questions are as remote as the empty room that is glimpsed through the doors at the back of the bustling shop, a room at once outside the main action and at the center of the painting, a room where a nacreous green-gray light, evoked with lightly hatched strokes of paint, dances over a world bereft of people and paintings and objets d'art. (At least one scholar has seen in that empty back room a vision of heaven or paradise, which makes a certain amount of sense.)

Within this elaborately appointed interior, Watteau has set a dozen characters as well as a dog. The Shopsign is a world of doublings, maybe even triplings—a painting about the buying and selling of paintings and other precious objects in which the men and women who have come to shop are themselves the most luxurious objects of all. In that quiet way of his, Watteau makes of this dozen delightful figures a geometric game, giving us four men and one woman on one side of the painting and four men and three women on the other side. He plays with couples—a man and a woman, two men whose looks suggest mirror images—but he also gathers his figures in threes and fours and fives, as if he were a choreographer exploring the full range of physical possibilities. And in addition he plays with a range of social classes, from the workmen to the shopkeepers to the customers, who are either aristocrats or wealthy commoners suddenly hungry for luxuries. So we have three or four classes represented, each of which Watteau treats in the same gently comic manner. Each is part of the passing parade, and of course nothing is fixed, as we are reminded by the workman at the side who is packing a portrait of Louis XIV, recently deceased, into a case, the portrait both alluding to the name of Gersaint's shop, Au Grand Monarque, and suggesting, at least in our retrospective gaze, the passing of the Sun King's world. 

And just as history is constantly changing, so are perceptions, as we see in the most playful incident in the Shopsign, which involves the salesman who is showing to a couple a large oval painting of a pastoral landscape with figures. While the woman, a dutiful connoisseur, examines the aunt's handling of the great, feathery trees, the man is busy fuming on the female nudes in the foreground. That the anecdote might be labeled: Two ways to look at a painting. And then there are those who have eyes only for themselves. Even as the young shop woman shows off the fine lacquer toilet set, the two men to whom she may be making her sales pitch appear less interested in looking at the toiletries or, for that matter, at the pretty salesgirl than in admiring themselves in a little mirror.

Legend has it that Watteau painted the Shopsign in eight mornings, as if he were God creating the world. For Watteau it was a great new beginning, a dramatic turn from the pastorals that had preoccupied him for so long. But the Shopsign was also done in the twilight of his career, so that his revolutionary zeal was tinged with nostalgia, as if Watteau were saying, “Yes, this is where I might have gone, this is a whole other sort of thing that I might have done.” It is the painting that inaugurates the work of all the painters whom Baudelaire, a century later, would be thinking of when he dubbed Constantin Guys the Painter of Modern Life, but Gersaint's Shopsign is also the greatest painting of modern life ever done, a premature requiem for the Painter of Modern Life. Some have wanted to see the artist's self-portrait in the lithe young man at the center of the painting, the man who, with his sharp, bright, dark eyes, is looking so longingly and invitingly at the young woman. The story of the self-portrait, like the story of the painting having been completed in eight mornings, may be apocryphal. But it hardly matters. That young man who is not Watteau is surely the spirit of Watteau. And here he is, reaching out his band to this woman who is among the last women in Watteau's art whom we will see from behind. And he invites her to join him in the dance of life, dancing oh so slowly, as the world passes by.

*

Henry James, The Golden Bowl
Jed Perl, Antoine’s Alphabet

Rilke's testament.

From the destroyed notebook:

(At the top margin, the word:) Nightmare -
(then disordered numbers, small, meaningless additions, then:)

— Rainer Maria Rilke’s blue notebook (translated by Mark Karnak)

These days rank among the most difficult....

Rilke realizes that he cannot possibly write, cannot find the necessary separation from life, while in Meline’s presence. So he sets off for Switzerland to stay in a pseudo-chateau and swears off contact for six months. His “Testament” collects straying thoughts as he tries to write, despite the presence of a loud mill nearby.

A poem from what would becomeThe Duino Elegies, written a decade prior, waits to encounter itself in others. “The aversion to what remains unfulfilled corrodes my body like rust, even sleep offers no relief —, half-awake, the blood pounds in my temples like heavy footsteps that refuse to rest,” writes Rilke, before turning to his absent interlocutor, and adding:

“If only I could call you… but that would destroy my last refuge — : this court where I recognize myself. You recently wrote that am not one who can be consoled by love. You were right. After all, what could be more useless to me than a life that allows itself to be consoled?”

”Striving & resisting: I am exhausted by it. Where is the heart that never 'insisted' on a stubborn happiness, but allowed me to prepare for it what springs inexhaustibly from me? Yet no consensus exists on this. Ah, if only the struggles would cease! If only we could hear as in the final stanza of Girard de Roussillon: Les guerres sont finies et les œuvres commencent. (The wars are over and the works begin.)”

Rilke is drawn to the gurgles and bubblings of a water fountain in the courtyard. True to form, he courts the inspiring on paper, noting how “the slightest breeze changed it, and when it was completely still around the suddenly isolated jet, cascading upon itself, it sounded quite different from the noise it made in the mirrored surface of the water.”

“Speak, I said to the fountain, & listened. Speak, I said, and my whole being obeyed it. Speak, you pure meeting of lightness and weight, you, the tree of games, you, a parable among the heavy trees of fatigue that fester within its cortex. And with an involuntary & innocent cunning of my heart, so that nothing would be but this, from which I wanted to learn to be, the distant, restrained, silent one.”

“If I did not resist the lover, it was because, among all the powers one can hold over another, hers alone, her unyielding power, appeared justified to me. Vulnerable and exposed as I was, I did not seek to evade her; yet I yearned to pierce her, to cross her boundary! Let it open a window onto the broader realm of existence... (not a mirror.)”

The lover and the writing exist in tension for the poet. Nothing will relieve or alter these intersections in his life— the duress of intimacy and its attendant conflicts. “Vulnerable and exposed” . . . like a man battered by winds on the cliffs near the Duino Castle, where his elegies would be finished.

Elsewhere, in an essay by Dan Beachy-Quick, there is a cliff that recollects the landscape near Trieste, the drift of Rilke’s Duino. Or there is my memory of this year’s cliff, the wind sweeping through rocks, a whistle crossing the surface of water. Yet— “(not a mirror.)”

I do remember a rose-bush growing on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea, and a butterfly deep in a bloom; on the horizon a sailing ship seemed to move slowly from one flower to a next, a distance the butterfly crossed with but a few beats of her wings, while for the ship it took hours; I remember I wrote next to the passage love collapses subjective distances into a single span; but that page is hidden in a book hidden behind another book so that my own thought is a rumor I tell to myself.

I see I have been speaking again about books when I meant to speak about the ocean.

I see I have been speaking again about books when I meant to speak, about the ocean.

I see I have been speaking again about oceans when I meant to speak about sleep.

I see I keep saying you when I mean to say she, and say yours when I mean to say hers.

— Dan Beachy-Quick, from the essay of echoing cliffs

The great William Gass penned an unforgettable essay titled “Rilke and the Requiem” that inventories Rilke’s ghosts through his oeuvre. As an essay, it is immaculate— the sort of sweeping, mind-rattling work that only a devout student of Rilke could muster. We study what we love most: this is what it means to seek knowledge, to pursue its shadows through every syntactical loop and thematic cranny.

Like many such students, Gass translated Rilke’s poems in order to know him better, where better indicates knowing him well enough to risk speculating from that intransigent intimacy that births “my Wittgenstein,” “my Celan,” “my Gass,” “my Tsvetaeva,” etc.

Gass, then:

“Then (in a passage protected by parentheses),” Gass writes, enacting the protection as text, setting his words inside the familiar arms of those half-moon arcs that do not enclose the subject entirely — () — arms that embrace without creating a whole.

I have often mourned the parentheses’ failure to connect completely, or over-read an unassailable loneliness into those gaps —

(O how I . . . ) . . .

Among my three copies of Stephen Mitchell's Selected Rilke translations, there is one filled with color-markings, the text that peeks out from the rainbow of my Rilke readings. Yellow markings made in my 20's. Green arrived my late 30's during the nursing-while-returning-to-Rilke days. Rilke’s "Elegy” for Marina Tvsetaeva is a forever favorite in its form as well as its direction. His preemptive elegy to a friend would be matched by her own New Year’s elegy to Rilke, following the shock of his death.

It hurts to write. It hurts to not-write. This, too, is an unassailable rhythm that rocks the raft of a life.

(New page:)

return loved one diver bird's head cold sweat choker frost
vikuña ring-band trolley Liebknecht Agnese

— from the blue notebook that Rilke destroyed

*

Alfred Schnittke, “Die Geschichte Eines Unbekannten Schauspielers” (Schnittke, Film Music Vol. 1) as performed by the Berlin Symphony Orchestra
Dan Beachy-Quick, “Writing From Memory”
Gidon Kremer, “Oblivion”
Rainer Maria Rilke, “Elegy (for Marina Tsvetaeva-Efron)” as translated by Stephen Mitchell
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Testament & Other Texts (Contra Mundum Press), ed. by Rainer J. Hanshe, tr. by Mark Karnak
William Gass, “Rilke and the Requiem” (Georgia Review)

A triptych for P.: Ponge, Donne, and initial musics.

I found that I liked noises even more than I liked intervals.

— John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing”

Shall we for this vain bubble's shadow pay?

— John Donne, “Love’s Alchemy”

[I]

Stand still, and I will read to thee a lecture, Love, in love's philosophy. These three hours that we have spent, walking here, two shadows went along with us, which we ourselves produced. But, now the sun is just above our head, we do those shadows tread, and to brave clearness all things are reduced. All this being another way of seeing and hearing Donne’s lecture as it falls upon the shadow.

In the same “skein”: to hear Francis Ponge’s pastoral symphony conducted by wind, its beat wired to the cuckoo’s hearts in ours.

Francis Ponge, as translated by Beth Archer

[II]

Newness ignores its lineage. Poetry attempts to seduce, to persuade, as buried in the Greek word, suasoria, referring to a rhetorical device in persuasion. Attempting to sway a stranger with language is foolish (and perhaps even narcissistic, if one pauses to consider it). Nevertheless, Ovid attempted a suasoria of the Dawn. Even the aubade tugs the lover's face back to the bed they just left. Everything sinks into the body and flies out through the head:

Francis Ponge, as translated by Beth Archer

[III]

At first, Kafka’s friends and lovers strolled into his diaries with their names intact: Max, Felice, Milena, etc.

But as the persons in his diaries turned into characters in his stories, Kafka began designating them by the first letter of their given name.

M. F. — this world of beings derived from initial sounds crept into the terms of address in his correspondence.

On January 18th, 1922, his diary introduces a character called S.

“S. crushes me,” Kafka says, “it torments me day and night, I'd have to overcome my fear and shame and probably sadness too in order to satisfy it, but on the other hand I'm certain that if a quick and nearby and willing opportunity were to present itself, I'd take advantage of it right away, without fear or sadness or shame...”

So S. is sex.

Alliteration is a way of associating the initial sound of a word with its kindreds: sex, Ashbery’s sweetness, Ponge’s songs and sky and seemingness, Kafka’s shame and sadness . . . Scylla; sirens; speculation (“What Song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture,” as Sir Thomas Brown stated in his Urn Burial); sibilance (a specific type of alliteration or repetition technique that uses the soft consonants to create hissing sounds); sibyl; sortie; salacious; seek; sacred; serpent; serpentine verses (“Crescit amor nummi, quantum ipsa pecunia crescit,” i.e. Greater grows the love of self, as self itself grows greater); snaking; sensorium; silhouette (the outline of someone or something); slant; soliloquy (a monologue addressed to oneself, thoughts spoken out loud without addressing another); sonata; sonatina; sonnet; sepulchral statues. Surely the slithering soundscape is endless.

The rot remains with us, the men are gone.
But, as dead ash is lifted in a wind
That fans the blackening ember of the mind,
My eyes burned from the ashen prose of Donne.

— Derek Wolcott, “Ruins of a Great House”

*

Abel Korzeniowski, “Clouds” (An Angel in Cracow)
Eunike Tanzil, “Metamorphosis” (The First of Everything)
Derek Wolcott, “Ruins of a Great House”
Francis Ponge, The Voice of Things, edited and translated by Beth Archer (PDF)
John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing”
John Donne, “A Lecture upon the Shadow”
John Donne, “Love’s Alchemy”
John Donne, “The Ecstasy”
Tomaso Antonio Vitali, “Chaconne in G Minor” as performed by Jascha Heifetz and Richard Ellsasser

for P, my ‘little time’ being yours

Commissioned sights: A few points.

...the poor man you let become guilty.

— Goethe

Each thought has its own cell. But each cell can, in an instant, and apparently almost without cause, become a chamber, a legal chamber over which language presides.

— Walter Benjamin in an essay on Karl Kraus

From John Baldessari’s series, The Commissioned Paintings

POINTING.

John Baldessari’s The Commissioned Paintings center the gesture known as “pointing,” which also happens to play a central role in the the developmental tests used to diagnose children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Al Held said that “all conceptual art is just pointing at things.”

It is said that young autists do not point to things that they desire.

It is said that pointing is part of pre-verbal language that begins in the first years of life, prior to the acquisition of words.

At what point does the conceptualization of the gesture becomes the gaze?

John Baldessari, Flying Saucer: Rainbow/Two Cyclists/Dog/Gorilla and Bananas/Chaotic Situation/Couple/Tortoise/Gunman(Fallen), 1992.

POINTLESS.

It is said that a raptor escaped from the NYC zoo and returned home a few weeks later only to due of a pigeon virus acquired in his ramblings outside the safety of the administered cage.

John Baldessari, Wrong, 1968.

THE POINTED FINGER OF JUDGEMENT.

Walter Benjamin said the “judging word expels the first human beings from paradise; they themselves have aroused it in accordance with the immutable law by which the judging word perishes - and expects its own awakening as the only, the deepest guilt.” The judging word returns in the affect of wretchedness: the plunging of guilt to the center of one’s being, leaving the person defined by that judging word. That judgement.

After devoting several notebook pages to a description of his writing desk, Franz Kafka must have paused and walked to the window. Surely two blankets of time passed in black boots. Maybe something involving a dog also happened. According to the next paragraph in his notebook, what he created is wretched:

“Wretched, wretched, and yet well intended. It's midnight after all, but considering that I'm very well rested, that can only serve as an excuse insofar as I wouldn't have written anything at all during the day. The burning lightbulb, the quiet apartment, the darkness outside, the last waking moments entitle me to write, even if it's the most wretched stuff. And I hastily make use of this right. This is just who I am.”

One who identifies with his creation may be damned by its judgement. While “its” may include the judgement of others, the most devastating judgement is that of the raven perched on one’s shoulder, urging you to finish the manuscripts with the help of a blowtorch.

Wretched the feeling of wronging the subject or failing the object.

Grotesque the shame upon encountering the ill-depicted desk.

Miserable the instant when passing the hallway mirror and noting the WRONG writ large on the forehead.

John Baldessari, For Barbara Rose, 1966–68.

POINTING WITH POSTAGE.

Little Ella, whatever do you look like, I've already forgotten you so completely that it's as if I'd never patted you.
Best Regards

Yours, Franz.

— Kafka’s first postcard, addressed to his younger sister

John Baldessari, Goya Series: This, That, or the Other, 1997.

PROJECTED POINT.

What follows is one of the unwritten stories that Kafka told Oskar Baum that “he had no hope, or even intention, of ever carrying out,” as recorded by Baum, who could be therefore be accused of doing something akin to telling it:

A man wants to create the possibility of a social event that tales place without anyone being invited. People see and speak to and and serve one another without knowing each other. It a a banquet where everyone can eat according to his taste without imposing on anyone else. Each person can arrive and leave whenever he pleases, he has no obligations to the host, and yet the host is always genuinely pleased to see him. When the man finally succeeds in executing his absurd idea, the reader recognizes that this attempt to rescue people from their solitude has in the end only produced— the invention of the coffeehouse.

Kafka’s unwritten stories differ from “projected works” in that they are utterly hopeless. They inhabit a timbre of hopelessness unique to Kafka in that they lack the proper ambition towards fruition. The singular instant of their projection is the entire point.

John Baldessari, Emoji Series: INT. BUSCH’S JEWELRY STORE – DAY MICHAEL Lugubrious movies of lost love, 2017.

TURNING POINT.

According to Gershom Scholem, the year 1921 marked “a turning point” in Walter Benjamin's life. Part of this turn was political in that “Critique of Violence” drew on Georges Sorel’s work to think about myth, religion, the law, and politics. The Weisse Blätter originally solicited the essay only to turn it down. Nevertheless, “Critique” appeared (awkwardly) in a sociological journal that same year.

Scholem said Benjamin “also tried hard to place his review of Bloch's book, of which he sent me a copy.” Scholem said Benjamin didn’t succeed in getting his review placed “due to the fact that this rather long essay was couched in such esoteric terms that the critic's own views— which were, after all, what mattered to the editors—remained virtually concealed.”

Scholem said the political was personal and the turning point couldn’t escape this imbrication. As Scholem told it:

In April 1921 the disintegration of Walter's and Dora's marriage became evident, and I was confronted with it during my visit. Between July 1919 and April 1921 I had known nothing about its status and had no idea of the extent of the deterioration of their relationship. Only when the explosion was already at hand (and afterward) did I learn about it in conversations with Dora. When Ernst Schoen renewed his amicable relationship with Walter and Dora in the winter months of 1921, Dora fell madly in love with him and for a few months was in an altogether euphoric mood. She discussed this quite openly with Walter. In April, the sister of his school friend Alfred Cohn, Jula Cohn, with whom Walter and Dora were already friends in the Youth Movement and before their departure for Switzerland (though I am not sure how close the friendship was) came to Berlin, and Benjamin saw her again for the first time in five years. He developed a passionate attachment to her and probably plunged her into confusion for some time before she realized that she could not commit herself to him. There developed a situation which, to the extent that I was able to understand it, corresponded to the one in Goethe's novel Elective Affinities.

When I came to Berlin, Walter and Dora let me in on this state of affairs and asked me to counsel and assist them as a friend in a situation in which both were considering marriage to someone else. Neither marriage materialized, but with this crisis the dissolution of Benjamin's marriage had entered an acute stage. That summer was a period of great tension and expectations. Both of them were convinced they had now presenced the love of their lives. The process that began at this time lasted for two years, and during that period Walter and Dora resumed their marital relationship from time to time, until from 1923 on they lived together only as friends, primarily for the sake of Stefan, whose development Walter followed with great interest, but presumably out of financial considerations as well. In the following years, until their divorce, this situation remained unchanged and was interrupted only by Walter's long trips and by periods in which he took a separate room for himself. From then on they went their separate ways, but they discussed with each other everything that affected them.

In the critical months when their marriage was beginning to break up they both, as far as I was able to witness, acted with a touching and loving friendliness toward each other. I never saw either treat the other person with such infinite considerateness and profound understanding as in those April days and the following year. It was as though each was afraid of hurting the other person, as though the demon that occasionally possessed Walter and manifested itself in despotic behavior and claims had completely left him under these somewhat fantastic conditions.  My encounters in those days with them and Ernst Schoen—Dora came to Munich with him for a few days on her way to Breitenstein on the Semmering—are among the most beautiful that I remember.

During my remaining period in Germany, Dora was still greatly attached to Walter, and yet she started speaking about him in a new tone. Not that she doubted his gifts and his genius that meant so much to her, but she began to speak about features that had never before been voiced between us, including her experiences in the marriage. She labeled Walter a person suffering from an obsessive-compulsive neurosis, and this came as a surprise to me, for both of them had great reservations about psychiatric terminology. Later I heard this term from her on a number of other occasions, though I could not really corroborate this diagnosis on the basis of my own experience. Dora, a very sensuous woman, said that Walter's intellectuality impeded his libido. Breaking away from his intellectual sphere, to which she was to remain attached for a long time to come, proved very difficult for her and brought about a radical change in her life.

Later I spoke with several other women who personally knew Walter Benjamin very well, including one to whom he proposed marriage in 1932. They all emphasized that Benjamin was not attractive to them as a man, no matter how impressed or even enchanted they were with his intellect and his conversation. One of his close acquaintances told me that for her and her female friends he had not even existed as a man, that it had never even occurred to them that he had that dimension as well. “Walter was, so to speak, incorporeal.” Was the reason for this some lack of vitality, as it seemed to many, or was it a convolution of his vitality (which often enough burst forth in those years) with his altogether metaphysical orientation that gained him the reputation of being a withdrawn person?

Scholem pointed to Benjamin’s character as the source of his personal failings. This pointing grew more vociferous after his friend’s sudden death. Perhaps it is beside the point to wonder if Scholem envied Benjamin’s inability to commit to ideology, given Scholem’s own tendency to commit himself things that felt like popular movements. Unlike Benjamin, Scholem took himself to be “going somewhere,” and the sheer fact of his goingness enabled him to commit to Zionism without entirely subscribing to its tenets. Like many intellectuals, Scholem wanted to be famous. Unfortunately, Arendt (the woman whom he alleged to be a “self-hating Jew” in diaspora publications) believed Benjamin’s writing deserved be to be read. And she had considered Scholem to be a friend. In a strange turn of events, the man who was going nowhere wound up being translated into English while the man with a pronounced sense of destination lingered on university shelves to emerge, however briefly, at parties and social events during the era I call My Time Among the Straussians.

ONE POINT.

At one point, Benjamin said that "to be in the possession of truth is sufficient justification for one's claim to a living.”

According to Kafka, one of the compartments in his writing desk contained the following: “old papers that I would have thrown away long ago if I had a wastepaper basket, pencils with broken-off points, an empty matchbox, a paperweight from Karlsbad, a ruler with an edge that would be too bumpy even for a country road, a lot of collar buttons, dull razor blades (the world has no place for them), tie clips, and yet another heavy iron paperweight.”

The broken-off points strike me as the most interesting ones.

*

Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds. Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Northwestern Univ. Press, 2011)
Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (NYRB Classics)
Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore,” New German Critique, no. 39 (Fall 1986)
Walter Benjamin, “On language as such and on the language of man”

"Baudelaire" by Delmore Schwartz

“the withness of the body”

— Delmore Schwartz’s epigraph to the poem “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me”

BAUDELAIRE

When I fall asleep, and even during sleep, 
I hear, quite distinctly, voices speaking 
Whole phrases, commonplace and trivial, 
Having no relation to my affairs.

Dear Mother, is any time left to us
In which to be happy? My debts are immense.
My bank account is subject to the court’s judgment. 
I know nothing. I cannot know anything.
I have lost the ability to make an effort.
But now as before my love for you increases.
You are always armed to stone me, always:
It is true. It dates from childhood.

For the first time in my long life
I am almost happy. The book, almost finished, 
Almost seems good. It will endure, a monument 
To my obsessions, my hatred, my disgust.

Debts and inquietude persist and weaken me. 
Satan glides before me, saying sweetly: 
“Rest for a day! You can rest and play today. 
Tonight you will work.” When night comes, 
My mind, terrified by the arrears,
Bored by sadness, paralyzed by impotence, 
Promises: “Tomorrow: I will tomorrow.” 
Tomorrow the same comedy enacts itself
With the same resolution, the same weakness.

I am sick of this life of furnished rooms.
I am sick of having colds and headaches:
You know my strange life. Every day brings
Its quota of wrath. You little know
A poet’s life, dear Mother: I must write poems, 
The most fatiguing of occupations.

I am sad this morning. Do not reproach me.
I write from a café near the post office,
Amid the click of billiard balls, the clatter of dishes, 
The pounding of my heart. I have been asked to write 
“A History of Caricature.” I have been asked to write 
“A History of Sculpture.” Shall I write a history
Of the caricatures of the sculptures of you in my heart?

Although it costs you countless agony,
Although you cannot believe it necessary,
And doubt that the sum is accurate,
Please send me money enough for at least three weeks.

“I think it is the year 1909.” The narrator is sitting in a darkened movie theatre, watching a newsreel of his parents as they stroll on the boardwalk at Coney Island, four years before his own birth. As the film unfolds, Schwartz listens to his father boast of how much money he has made, “exaggerating an amount which need not have been exaggerated,” and starts to weep, overcome by his father’s suspicion that “actualities somehow fall short, no matter how fine they are.” The son, transfixed by the tragedy unfolding before his eyes—his parents’ unhappy marriage, his father’s lost fortune in real estate, his mother’s lonely widowhood—leaps up from his seat in the darkened theatre at the very moment his father is about to propose to his mother and shouts, “Don’t do it! It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.”

— James Atlas recounting Schwartz’s short story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”

It was pleasant to learn that you expected our correspondence to be read in the international salons and boudoirs of the future. Do you think they will be able to distinguish between the obfuscations, mystifications, efforts at humor, and plain statements of fact? Will they recognize my primary feelings as a correspondent—the catacomb from which I write to you, seeking some compassion? Or will they just think that I am nasty, an over-eager clown, gauche, awkward, and bookish? Will they understand that I am always direct, open, friendly, simple and candid to the point of naivete until the ways of the fiendish world infuriate me and I am forced to be devious, suspicious, calculating, not that it does me any good anyway?

— Delmore Schwartz to James Lauglin, 1951

Much of the writing life occurs by chance. Someone knows someone who introduces someone to their agent. Someone works for the publisher of New Directions. Someone’s best friend knows the fiction editor at New Yorker. Being in the right place at the right time (usually NYC). Knowing the right people. Provoking the right editor. The unpredictable route to publication is rarely pure or uninflected by inner circles and networks. Meritocracy is our favorite lie, and we sustain it with a mixture of guilt and the particular sense of entitlement inherited as privilege.

Interviews ask us to consider the writing life, or to speak of our own, and the Archimedean point is a temptation, as the statue of eternity lures us with its smooth surface from the margins. The truth is that writing resembles death in that we never know when it will end the book we haven’t finished. Nor do we know if the book will live beyond us, or whether our unpublished books will fall into the hands of friends that have the time and energy to push them into the world. Luck, friendship, and uncertainty . . . It was Schwartz’s friend, Dwight Macdonald, who preserved the papers and random materials present in Schwartz’s hotel room at the time of his death— and this only occurred because Dwight’s son ran into the owner of a moving van company in a bar who informed him that the hotel room was being cleared.

*

Delmore Schwartz, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” (Partisan Review, Autumn 1937) — read by Lou Reed
Delmore Schwartz, “In the Naked Bed, In Plato’s Cave” (1967)
Delmore Schwartz, “The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me” (1967)
James Atlas, “Delmore Schwartz and the Biographer’s Obsession” (New Yorker, August 2017)
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

"The poet's eye obscenely seeing"

I am not interested in the prick per se. I am interested in prose.

— Wayne Koestenbaum, “Darling’s Prick”

First things first.

— David Shields, “Life Story”

“The ampersand originated as a ligature of the letters of the word et (Latin for ‘and’)”

“A KISSPROOF WORLD OF PLASTIC TOILETSEATS TAMPAX AND TAXIS”

Someone in the apartment to my left applies his drill to the wall in between us, forcing the hard buzz into the drift of my reading, altering the smooth of images, and I am reminded of how perception in poetry depends on pacing, on the rate of movement and the appearance of speed bumps, sirens, pauses.

It is morning. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind drags its “drunk rooftops” into the light. “The poet’s eye obscenely seeing” — tracking, collecting, studying — “hot legs and rosebud breasts”…

The teens are among the sunbathers today, their voices retreating as they move towards the beach; a clump of busy vowels to which no consonant can cling by the time the teens’ shout ascends to where I stand, watching, from the balcony. Ferlinghetti builds from association and accumulation: the images link to each other mnemonically, like the simple dogs and cats on those flashcards once used to teach phonics.

I don’t know if phonics gets taught anymore in this land where lifestyle has become a religion. The joggers return from their runs, sweat laureling their foreheads as if to regale a moment of glory before they reenter the world of their ordinary lives, and the chaotic routines of family. These joggers whom I will never understand— (What is there to understand about humans who run in circles, after having already admitted to themselves that they want to leave, and going so far as to purchase uniforms and expensive gear in pursuit of this goal but then refusing to commit to the continuance of that gesture, electing for a ‘daily run’ over the uncertain marvel of running away completely?) — wear that halo of sweat with its undertones of labor and industry alongside “all the other fatal shorn-up fragments”

and its trees full of mysteries
and its Sunday parks and speechless statues
and its America

And this anaphora of “ands” turned into ampersands at sunset when I read a poem by Lucy Brock-Broido tweeted by a a fellow ‘American’ on a day when many Americans had planned their Labor Day weekends to coincide with the strenuous accomplishments of Self-Care alongside Family-Time, and the dash attempted to join unlike objects made poetry feel imperative to me, despite the distracting Ameri-can, the beat of that Ameri-can-can, the cancan of demands associated with national holidays in late capitalism.

“& ALREADY I’M ALONE”

Maybe I was relieved to find Brock-Broido’s speaker announcing her condition of aloneness at the outset of the poem, telling us that she is alone

Listening to the lovers next door
Like Patsy Cline & her Man
Throwing barebacked wooden furniture
Like the real-life bicker of true love.

Two similes shoved up against each other violently, like a scene being remembered from a movie, a superposition insisting on similarity, investing in repetition, indulging the interpretive muscle known as loneliness, a muscle that works itself into a frenzy and then begins to hurt. Humans are the creatures for which that hurt signifies development, or the making of new muscles through repetitive motions, all this labor being the ride involved in fantasizing, that imaginative bench-pressing of other possibilities, taking us directly to the poem’s next moment:

I love that hands-on
Die-while-you’re-dark-haired-still
& young, fists curled to desire,
Take Me kind of love.

The emblems & stereotypes & associations are freely given here: her Man, the one that Loretta Lynn might stand by in a different song that has its own movie, rubs shoulders with the expression of abandon that communicates a demand, namely, Take Me. And an entire line linked up by that stitchmark of dashes which ties the urgency of temporality to not having grey hair, or not yet — then pausing at the line break which is (maybe) startled by that “still” — since it could insinuate a still-life, a genre of painted objects frozen in their domestic scenes like pears on a kitchen table . Or else a film still, ripped from the motion of moments galloping forward on a screen until the speaker freezes a frame and frees it from time’s ineluctable Progress in order to apply a Future, which is to say, a wild guess about else’s, in thrall to the Otherwise, wherein what comes next — “They’ll make love without apology”— leaves the knots unresolved between them. And it is precisely this irresolution which the poem presses (where to press is to apply pressure) across the cultural referents, building its stride from the discord between images and the sputters of mind remembering — recognizing the syntax of lovers as a series of sounds that require reading — and requiring the speaker to build from association, layering the lines with anaphora of ampersands, the & and & and & like soft pleas whispered into a phone receiver at midnight, a plea that reminds me of precisely what the motorist in Italo Calvino’s short story, “The Adventure of the Motorist,” sought to avoid when barreling down the highway to reach his lover’s home after an argument, speaking only the language of speed and momentum, the pure directionality of driving towards a destination unimpeded by the details of hurt feelings and recriminations that mobilize the plea, that particularly desperate form of desire given to language and lovers and midnight.

Where does that leave the speaker of Brock-Broido’s “Autobiography”?

& I’ll be left to the afternoon
& the autoerotic sound of my American voice
Getting it all down.

The ampersand’s logogram (&) looks nearly unrecognizable in italics (&,) — a reminder that signs depend on one’s familiarity with typeface and font and script, all of which begs the condition of recognition in semiotics.

“The only situation I can accept is this transformation of ourselves into the message of ourselves,” says Calvino’s motorist, intent on narrating the rain on the windshield as he careens down the dark highway towards the furious and wounded beloved or the “bicker” of thrown furniture and naked bodies collapsing into one another between invectives, moral claims, objections, fatal shorn-up fragments, and brilliant scenes they remember from screens.

*

Alessandro Sbordoni, “Anti-Hauntology & the Semiotics of the End” (&&&)
John Berger, Understanding a Photograph (Penguin Books)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind (New Directions)
Lucy Brock-Broido, “Autobiography”
Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves (New Directions)
Phil Collins, “A Groovy Kind of Love” (alternately, see Brock-Broido’s “Take Me kind of love”)

Rilke and Van Etten: Uncanny killings.

In India, they write the title of a book at the end.

— Eliot Weinberger, “Dream of India”

1

A golden oldie of sorts, this song by Sharon Van Etten titled “Your Love Is Killing Me”— with its demands that double as supplications. As in “Break my legs so I won't walk to you” and “Cut my tongue so I can't talk to you” and “Burn my skin so I can't feel you” and “Stab my eyes so I can't see'.” The end rhymes are gratuitous; the long vowels extended through vocals.

Van Etten’s voice rises and falls but goes nowhere, for there is nowhere to go: the song, itself, stipulates the field. She sings it hauntingly: “You tell me that you like it / Your love is killing me.” The extension of the long-i sound in “like” pulls its bow across the lyrics that follow. These two lines — a morsel, merely, with so much happening in the breath between them, a fingertip touching the keys differently, pressing down on the pronouns with varying emphases, first the it then the your then the me, before going back to play the monosyllabic verbs: tell, like, love, kill.

2

“Rainer Maria Rilke hesitates whether to abandon a bar of soap in a hotel room,” Dennis Silk recollects in “The Marionette Theater.” He leaves this fragment tucked between the abandonment of animism and Gilles de Rais’ confession, which leads the Bishop of Nantes to cover the crucifix with a protective piece of cloth.

3

In 1895, Oscar Wilde was on trial for “lewd and immoral behavior.” At one point in the interrogation, the Court accused him of writing ‘homosexual’ ‘nonfiction’; one of his letters to Lord Alfred Douglas was submitted as evidence. A snapshot of that moment in time, as preserved in archives:

COURT: Where was Lord Alfred Douglas staying when you wrote that letter to him?

WILDE: At the Savoy, and I was at the Babbacombe.

COURT: It was a letter in answer to something he had sent you?

WILDE: Yes, a poem.

COURT: Mr. Wilde, why should a man your age address a boy nearly twenty years younger as ‘My Own Boy’?

WILDE: I was fond of him; I have always been fond of him.

COURT: Do you adore him?

WILDE: No, but I have always liked him. I think it is a beautiful letter. It is a poem. I was not writing an ordinary letter. You might as well cross-examine me as to whether a sonnet of Shakespeare were proper.

COURT: Apart from art, Mr. Wilde?

WILDE: I cannot answer apart from art.

4

“It is you who know how to hear it in the music so late in the night,” Theresa Hak Kyung Cha wrote in the ‘Erato: Love Poetry’ section of Dictee/Diptych.

“Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth,” Philip Larkin admitted to John Haffenden.

Gerald Manley Hopkins only published a single poem during his life. Ralph Ellison’s follow-up novel to Invisible Man burnt up in a fire and was never brought back to life. Joan Mitchell painted La Vie En Rose (1979) to mark the end of her long, amorous relationship with Jean-Peal Riopelle, who absconded with their dogsitter.

5

6

In a notebook entry dated 1783, Joseph Joubert said those who want to know “how thought functions” should “read the poets,” for poets are the types of humans who formed language and it is “up to philosophers to reform them.”

A poem by Emily Skillings titled “Emily”; a line that struck me: “I do the things I have chosen in the lack.”

“What will we do to disappear?” said Maurice Blanchot, reading aloud the essay he’d written about how writing creates the author while also destroying him.

J. L. Austin adjusted his trousers and trolled himself in the mirror of the library restroom. Look, he said: “When you say ‘It’s real’ — what exactly are you saying it isn’t?”

7

Joking about alliterative poop and pigeons with Radu only to pause at the end of “Throw the Emptiness Out of Your Arms: Rilke’s Doctrine of Nonposessive Love,” an essay by William Gass that concludes by quoting a poem sent by Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salome:

Put my eyes out: I can still see;
slam my ears shut: I can still hear,
walk without feet to where you were,
and tongueless, speak you into being.
Snap off my arms: I’ll hold you hard
in my heart’s longing like a fist;
halt that, my brain will do its beating,
and if you set this mind of mine aflame,
then on my blood I’ll carry you away.

And so, to quote Alexander Pope: “the sound must seem an echo to the sense.”

*

Emily Skillings, “Emily”
J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia
Joan Mitchell, La Vie En Rose (1979)
Sharon Van Etten, “Your Love Is Killing Me”
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee/Diptych
William Gass, “Throw the Emptiness Out of Your Arms: Rilke’s Doctrine of Nonposessive Love”

Rilke, as seen by Harry Kessler.

How sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self defense to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things that are not?
— John Keats, 7 July 1818

Freud said one of the reasons we laugh at jokes is because we need to experience again and again hiding and finding. Our love of being fooled is a vital need to recover first recognitions, to make if only for a moment our recognition innocent.
— Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness

Berlin. December 8, 1894. It is the secret of love that man and woman can never completely understand each other and therefore the desire persists.
— Harry Kessler, Journey to the Abyss

And wild is the wind
— David Bowie

[Poem in image above comes from Christian Morgenstern’s The Gallows Songs, a fantastic collection that revisits the 15th century ballades and forms fashioned by the French poet-troubadour Francois Villon, particularly his immortal Ballade des pendus.]

Count Harry Kessler knew everyone in early 19th century Europe— and we have his diaries to evidence it. I’ve excerpted his entries on Rainer Maria Rilke from 1907 to 1909; Rilke grapples with the role of relationships and families for the writer. He critiques the way Rodin made use of women rather than apprehending them as autonomous persons, artists, humans. Certainly I could raise a large mirror to Rilke here, if I had time, but I leave that to my betters and share, instead, these journal entries from Kessler, who also became Rilke’s correspondent in letters.

Bremen. December 21, 1907. Saturday.

In the evening the Rilkes came to dinner. She [presumably Clara Westoff] has something great and simple, willful, almost masculine. He appears to be the more feminine of the two. When he sits, while speaking, crunched up in his chair, his legs and arms crossed, you get the impression from his thin body and his soft voice, that sounds as if it were pleading, of an ugly young girl. He spoke of Prague, Russia, Paris, always in quite long, soft, somewhat precious sentences. He goes only unwillingly to Prague. For him it's still too reminiscent of a very confused childhood, in which the mystery of the great palaces, the strange, old princesses or young countesses who disappeared in their coaches through the briefly opened gates of great courtyards, heightened by the fact that the lower classes in this city spoke a tongue he didn't understand and even was not permitted to understand. In his parents' house the servants had been Czech, but this fact was ignored as much as possible and the children were only permitted to speak a pair of the most unavoidable words for making themselves understood.

And yet he had had already a half-unconscious but deep sympathy for the Slavic. He only came to a clear awareness of this sympathy when he accompanied, completely unprepared, a friend on a trip to Moscow. “When I awoke in the morning in the large hotel, I suddenly felt: This is my home! I had always felt homeless and had never really believed that I would find a home anywhere. But suddenly everything here made sense. The feeling may have been strengthened by the fact that my window was across from the entrance to the Kremlin, exactly opposite a small chapel into which one could see from my window. Everything in it was completely silvery, with silvery icons, before which eternal flames burned night and day. Pilgrims came constantly and fell on their knees, and the carriages, racing at a gallop through the streets, always stopped for a moment so that a gentleman or some high officer would jump out, cross himself, and then depart again at a full gallop. There was such a connection between the primeval and the completely modern, between mysticism and the life of a large commercial city, that I was deeply moved. On that trip I only visited Moscow. Later I traveled through Russia for three-quarters of a year everywhere: in cities, in villages, on estates in the country. I traveled the entire length of the upper Volga then. And confirmed what I had felt the first time, the deep connection between these things and something in myself.” 

I asked Rilke about Paris, how his deep relation to Paris related to his love for Russia.

Rilke: “That's something completely different. Paris is for me a school. I learn so much there. I departed from nature and have always felt things very deeply, almost too deeply. But, however that may be, I was less interested in people. People always seemed to me to be too confused inwardly. But in Paris it is as if every single person has a clearly recognizable voice, expressing his inward being. The people there are like birds. You listen and say to yourself, Aha, that is the voice of this bird who wants this, and this is the voice of a different bird who wants this other thing. When I first came to Paris it was only because of Rodin. I rode out every day to Meudon and concentrated entirely on my task, my book. But when I finished the book, I became aware suddenly that along the way, without noticing, I had absorbed all these other impressions and now they were coming to the fore and with such force and so painfully that I suddenly couldn't stand it any longer and fled in a hurry to a small part of Italy where I had retired several times before when the outer impressions had become too strong. My only thought was, 'Never go back to Paris.' But then it wouldn't let me go. I said to myself, 'I must try again and see if I can stand it.' And when I arrived the second time I was able to stand it and now I never work so much as in Paris. Paris is for me a school, which teaches me to endure what is frightful and heart-wrenching about modern life because people there are so sharply delineated from each other. There is so little confusion. The beggar on the street is just a beggar and nothing else, and the street boy and the old maid. With us a beggar is ashamed to be a beggar.”

Paris. October 12, 1909. Tuesday.

Visited Rilke in the afternoon in his beautiful, princely rooms in the Hotel de Biron, next to Rodin. Through the large casement windows you saw the garden in the autumn light. Rilke sat there, weak and shivering, despite the warm autumn sun. He wants to give these rooms up. They have collected so many sad memories for him, he's been sick in them so often, and so often unable to work, that now it's as if spider webs covered him. The previous winter here was so bad for him, in part physically, in part psychically. So many things that he thought he knew had shown him another side that his entire world had been rocked, so to speak.

As one of the things that changed for him, he named Rodin.

I: “In what way?”

Rilke: “Yes, so much that I had thought to have discovered in him proved to be false. I see so much now about him in a completely different light.”

I: “His art?”

Rilke: “Yes, even his art.”

I: “So, his life?”

Rilke: “Yes, things in his life. You see, when I was around him so much several years ago, then he seemed to me to be a living example for how an artist growing old could be beautiful. I knew that, or believed to know it, from the example of Leonardo, Titian, etc., but Rodin for me was the living proof. I said to myself, So I too would like to become old in beauty. And then it suddenly turned out that growing old is something terrible for him, exactly as terrible as for your average person. He is bored. Now when he cannot fill his entire dow with his enormous works, he's bored. One day he came here to me in the studio and said to me, 'I am bored.' And how he said it, I saw how he observed me, how he peeked secretly – almost frightened—to see what kind of impression this confession would make on me. He was bored and seemed not to be able to understand it himself. And this boredom had something frightening, because now, due to it, other things became important for him, which up to then had vanished before his enormous appetite for work. And he took these things, not as one would expect from Rodin, but exactly as one would expect from any other old Frenchman.”

I: “The women?”

Rilke: “Yes, the women and other things as well, which I had always assumed he had somehow taken care of in his life a long time ago, given them a certain fixed place. Now it suddenly turned out that he had not even thought about these things before. So he came running to me here one day, seized by a nameless fear of death. Death, he had never even thought of death! Things that I had assumed he had made his peace with thirty years ago have now seized him for the first time, when he's old and no longer has the energy to be rid of them. And so he looked to me, the young person, for help with his nameless fear of the idea of death! Some years ago it was still different. The first time he spoke to me about death was in Meudon. We stood leaning on a balustrade and looking at the valley below. Then he said he couldn't grasp it that now when he had finally learned how to work, that this work would suddenly stop one day. That didn't seem possible to him. Then it was still the sorrow for his work that must be interrupted, so something noble, that moved him. Now, however, it is the pale, naked fear of death, without anything consoling about it. His entire immense work, in which he, as I believed, had come to terms with all things, now represents just the opposite, an obstacle, something that leaves him no time to think seriously about these things, about death, about women, without the time to find some kind of firm relation to sensuality. These things so overwhelm him now when he can no longer work so hard, when he suddenly has free time, and so everything has become for him a horror.”

Paris. November 16, 1908. Monday.

Visited Rilke, who lives in the Sacré-Coeur cloister, the former Biron Palace, 77, rue de Varennes. He has a tall, round corner room on the ground floor, looking out toward the garden, where he works, and next to it, or, more precisely, in front of it, for you walk through this room, his bedroom.

In its somewhat majestic elegance and isolation the study is a space in which you can imagine Hofmannsthal's Death and the Fool. Rilke has a few Empire chairs and a large old baroque table set up as his desk. Some consoles as well, upon which beautiful ripe fruits and flowers are placed. A bust of his wife stands in front of the garden window. Otherwise everything is empty, but not cold because of the beautiful proportions and light.

He read to me his requiem for Wolf Kalckreuth. While reading his profile was outlined against the mighty baroque window and I noticed for the first time the energy in his traits. A very curious profile: the long slanting forehead, the long slanting nose, almost in a line with the forehead, both springing forward like a beak, and then, almost in contrast to this sharp line, the heavy thick lips, the heavy eyelids. He reads somewhat like a pastor but with a clearly defined pronunciation. In conversation afterward he spoke repeatedly of his "writing poetry according to nature."

Rodin said to him, "Why don't you sit before the landscape and do what you see?" I asked him what he meant with this "writing poetry according to nature."

He: To write into things instead of away from them. Not to latch onto some— perhaps only fleeting – impression in order to attach feelings or observations so that the poem would arise out of the beautiful beginning, but rather to amalgamate the feeling with the things themselves, to fill them with it, so to speak.

Ever since he has forced himself to do this, a new epoch has begun for him. At first he thought he would never learn it. But he felt that now it's either bend or break, and he broke through. Now he's gone so far that it's easy for him to "write according to nature."

*

Leaving Rilke in the margins for a moment, there is one particular diary entry that made me love Harry Kessler, or at the very least, begin to fathom why he collected art and kept notebooks. I share the entry in full below, for the spark of recognition that occurs early in a man’s life, and gives rise to Montano’s malady:

"... what pleasure wants is the site of a loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss.”

– Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

“I don't believe in perfection or perfectibility (although the shark sure comes close).”

— Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness

*

An earlier version of Kessler’s diaries was published as Berlin In Lights, and introduced by Ian Buruma. For more on Kessler and his multivariate life . . .

Alex Ross, “Diary of an Aesthete,” New Yorker, April 23, 2012.
Jonathan Steinberg, “The Man Who Knew Everybody,” London Review of Books, 23 May 2013.
Peter Gay, “The Right Man to Keep a Diary,” New York Times, August 22, 1971.
”Dined with the Einsteins,” The Diary Review, November 30, 2017.

"The profound organic disorder"

“If you look attentively at an animal, you get the feeling that a man is hidden inside and is making fun of you.”

— Elias Canetti, as quoted in Jean Baudrillard’s Fatal Strategies

“But I do know what I want here: I want the inconclusive. I want the profound organic disorder that nevertheless hints at an underlying order. The great potency of potentiality.”

— Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

1

Oh draw at my heart, love,
Draw till I'm gone,
That, fallen asleep, I
Still may love on.
I feel the flow of
Death's youth-giving flood
To balsam and ether
Transform my blood --
I live all the daytime
In faith and in might
And in holy fire
I die every night.

— Novalis, Hymns to the Night

In 1797, a few months after tuberculosis killed his beloved fiancee, Sophie von Kühn, Novalis added the following words to his diary: The lover must feel this gap eternally and keep the wound open always. God grant me to feel eternally this indescribable pain of love – the melancholic remembrance – this courageous longing – the manly resolution and the firm and fast belief. Without my Sophie I am absolutely nothing – With her, everything.

Four years later, Novalis also succumbed to tuberculosis.

2

In 1888, Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling committed their thoughts on theory and poetry to paper. As Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor was in a position to relay her father’s opinions on the Romantic poets who’d nfluenced his own poetry-writing days. And relay them she did, writing, The true difference between Byron and Shelley consists in this, that those who understand and love them consider it fortunate that Byron died in his 36th year, for he would have become a reactionary bourgeois had he lived longer; conversely, they regret Shelley’s death at the age of 29, because he was a revolutionary through and through and would consistently have stood with the vanguard of socialism.

This “true difference” jangles formula rather than resonance. In this, it resembles Karl Marx’s love-addled poems to the woman who would become Eleanor’s mother.

Perhaps no difference is true, though some differences are more compelling than others. I’m thinking of a sentence in which Heather Love compares the two revolutionists who find themselves dying at the end of Sylvia Warner Townsend’s After the Death of Don Juan (1938) to Walter Benjamin’s soothsayers who “can promise nothing; all they have to offer is the depth of their longing.”

3

“By ‘I’, I mean an unknown number of individuals,” wrote Kathy Acker in I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac.

The dedication of Jeff Alessandrelli’s novel, And Yet, reads: “For my selves.”

Like poetry, And Yet is barely autobiographical and yet wholly true, a dialogue between sexual ideals and the constructions of selfhood. The speaker self identifies as a prude, and this identification suffers against the uses of erotic capital in the 21st century. The first three pages repeatedly mentioned the “lack”, the lacking, the not-having of this capital that seems to be abundant. 

“Love is an anxious fear,” Allesandrelli admits, quoting Ovid, and thereby calling into play the lover's obsession with his “many different selves,” all of which make it inevitable that the beloved, too, has other selves. Unlike the lover, however, the beloved cannot be trusted. The beloved must be one self: and that self is created by the lover. Fucking is part of prudery here: “as hypersexual so as not to have to deal directly with what one actually feels, who one actually is.”

Another definition of prudery: “the daimon haunting one's life being mistaken for the person living it.”

4

When Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 was incinerated in the 2004 Momart warehouse fire, she responded to the loss of her artwork by saying, “The news comes between Iraqi weddings being bombed and people dying in the Dominican Republic in flash floods, so we have to get it into perspective.”

As Hera Lindsay Bird puts it in a poem titled “Jealousy”: “imagine dating someone worse than yourself on purpose / that’s the kind of fucked up thing only everyone I’ve ever loved would do”.

Arnold Schönberg, Walking Self-Portrait (1911)

5

I pause near a portion of Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal that was crucial to Walter Benjamin’s formulation of aura:

Nature is a temple whose living pillars
Sometimes give forth a babel of words;
Man wends his way through a forest of symbols
Which look at him with their familiar glances.

As long-resounding echoes from afar
Are mingling in a deep, dark unity,
Vast as the night or as the orb of day,
Perfumes, colors, and sounds commingle.

Despite all this commingling, despite the correspondence between hearing and smelling in Proustian time, there is little “scented music” in life. Taste relies on smell, a fact I know well from having lost both for a year after a head injury.

An English chemist named George William Septimus Piesse discovered the “notes” in scents. His The Art of Perfumery, and Method of Obtaining Odors from Plants was published the year after musical scales were first standardized. Drawing on the correspondences between sounds and smells, Piesse introduced what he called a “scent scale” which paired each of 24 musical notes with a scent. This “octave of odors” resembled the octave in music.

Piesse thought that citron, lemon, orange peel, and verbena formed “a higher octave of smells, which blend in a similar manner.” 

6

Smound is defined as “a perception or sense experience created from the convergence of scents and sounds in the brain.” A portmanteau of ‘smell’ and ‘sound’, the smound was first approached in 1862 by Piesse, who wrote that “scents, like sounds, appear to influence the olfactory nerve in certain definite degrees.” Symbols look back at man with their familiar glances and smounds, to append Baudelaire.

Elsewhere, in Ashbery’s “Syringa”: The different weights of the things.

7

In a 1989 production of Prokofiev’s opera, Love for Three Oranges, scratch-and-sniff cards were distributed to audience members, but the act of scratching disrupted the flow of the performance.

8

“Affective ventriloquism” occurs when the brain associates sensations and transfers these effects across perceptual media. According to a study in 1978, where Steve Reich's Piano Phase was played at 40% versus 80% original tempo as the low and high arousal musical stimulus, vulnerable subjects can be made “to believe that they have perceived assent simply by presenting a sound,” as seen when a few listeners “repeated olfactory sensations when an ultrasonic tone (actually silence) was played across the airwaves.”

“There’s no salvation without the immediate, but man is it being who no longer knows the immediate,” Emil Cioran wrote in Pe culmile disperării. Man, for Cioran, “is an indirect animal.”

*

Ivo Perelman,The Passion According to G.H. (2012)
Jeff Alessandrelli, And Yet (Future Tense Books, 2024)
John Ashbery, “Syringa”
Michael Sappol, ed. Personal Injury Magazine (1975)
Valentin Radutiu and Marcus Rieck, “Interlude” (2015)

James Schuyler et al.

a freedom which excludes is less than free

— James Schuyler, “Immediacy is the Message”

I could go on. I go on.
This is why I love James Schuyler.
He doesn’t care
that “the plants against the light
which shines in”
is a dull observation. Or that
”Trees, and trees, more trees”
is just the layered visual experience
we all have in the forest, waiting
to let ourselves take in the sign
to turn back, go home
and really hate someone.

— Emily Skillings, “The Duke’s Forest”

*

In celebration of Emily Skillings’ delightfully-furious new collection, Tantrums in the Air, I returned to James Schuyler’s sharply-chiseled lines this week, admiring his inventorying eye, his corduroy-smooth syntax, and how closely he hewed to the syllabic texture of sound, particularly in his Letter Poem series.

LETTER POEM #3

The night is quiet 
as a kettle drum 
the bullfrog basses 
tuning up. After 
swimming, after sup-
per, a Tarzan movie, 
dishes, a smoke. One 
planet and I 
wish. No need 
of words. Just 
you, or rather, 
us. The stars tonight 
in pale dark space 
are clover flowers
in a lawn the expanding 
universe in which 
we love it is 
our home. So many 
galaxies and you my 
bright particular, 
my star, my sun, my 
other self, my bet-
ter half, my one

A series of small things make this poem a marvel. For instance, enjambing that 5th line in order to set up a beat on the rhyme between “up” and “sup” — since “supper” swallows the sound with that purling “per”. The way “we love it is” dangles in the center, detached, quasi-cosmic, supernal and yet simply grounded by the monosyllables. And no period to punctuate the ending of this single-stanza skyscraper. Schuyler certainly wasn’t shy at punctuating his poems with periods. To me, all of his periods are audible, indicative of pauses between steps, like the hollow sound that rises from the ground when someone is pacing and the foot hovers above the floorboards. There is an expectancy of sorts to his pauses, and you can hear it in “Sleep” . . .

SLEEP

The friends who come to see you
and the friends who don’t.
The weather in the window.
A pierced ear.
The mounting tension and the spasm.
A paper-lace doily on a small plate.
Tangerines.
A day in February: heart-
shaped cookies on St. Valentine’s.
Like Christopher, a discarded saint.
A tough woman with black hair.
”I got to set my wig straight.”
A gold and silver day begins to wane.
A crescent moon.
Ice on the window.
Give my love to, oh, anybody.

I cherish this final line with the mute intensity reserved for unexpected sunshine opening in the middle of a thunderstorm — all those “o”s bumping into each other and trying to disentangle themselves from the forward motion of the declarative command: “Give my love to, oh, anybody.” Noting, too, the way “body” alters how the poem’s mouth closes— not with the matching “o” of “anyone” (that could so easily attach itself to “love” and thus vanish in the self-same sounding) but with the gallop of any-bod-ee, and the bump of that d.

Schuyler played with forms of address; he appreciated Frank O’Hara’s roving interlocutions that alternated between moving like arrows and bouncing like plastic balls at a fun fair, seeking a willing conspirator. This friskiness comes out in “Address,” where an ancient appears as an apogee.

ADDRESS

Right hand graced with writing,
my left arm my secondhand new
suit bestrode, from the auto I
say, “Antinous, perched like a
parakeet cracking sunflower seeds
in a hot ice cave or cage,
you’re an apogee. Acid pennies
will fill your mouth, your head
bowl at a soldiers’ revel. Fly
the safety you despise and seek,
a butcher with a butcher’s knife
peers. The lice are fast. Ta ta.”

One can even imagine some of these words coming from a list of A-words in the poet’s notebook. Address; Antinous; apogee; acid; and that final “ta, ta” — a bit of badinage that culminates in “ah”s. . .

Photo of James Schuyler taken by Joe Brainard, sourced from the The Estate of Joe Brainard.

THE TRASH BOOK

for Joe Brainard

Though I do not know what
to past next in the
Trash Book: grass, pretending
to be a smear maybe or
that stump there that knows
now it will never grow
up to be some pencils or
a yacht even. A piece of
voice saying (it sounds like)
the hum that hangs in only
my left ear. Or “Beer” not
beer, all wet, the quiver
of the word one night in
1942 looking at a cardboard
girl sitting on a moon in
West Virginia. She smiled
and sipped her Miller’s.

Albert Pinkham Ryder, The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse), c. 1896-1908

OVERTAKELESSNESS

after Albert Pinkham Ryder

To speak inaudibly, the outside,
its blurred sentence foreshadowed,
indistinguishable as shining brass.
The room, empty sky, beautiful
or golden bands burn because it is empty.
Without depth of field birds become primitive again.
Unstuck weeds float downstream
completing representation.
A thick green complicating light.
Now face the horizon is silence.
Come down while gladness unbinds sleep
unlike silt. This quiet speech feels right
and will be imitated. To turn away,
to speak fondly without a history.
Come down and rediscover this ancient province
as persons exchange smiles like wind instruments.
There, unlike any road you travel,
are small tidings that awakening,
are pleasing. No history is clear.

(If you hear Schuyler dialoguing with Ashbery, your nose is excellent.) Towards the end of his life, artist Arthur Pinkham Ryder lost interest in exhibiting his art and was said to live “in a decrepit home coated in dust, the floors littered with unwashed dinner plates, and obsessively reworked his existing paintings.” In my imagination, to rework a piece obsessively summons something of Schuyler’s title, that loosely-coined word, “overtakelessness.”

”When I say the ghost has begun / you understand what is being said,” Schuyler says in the first lines of “True Discourse on Power.” Compare the loquaciousness of this poem to the sparsity of “A Ghosting Floral”.

Schuyler also wrote many poems with lengthier lines, and “Revival” (a poem dedicated to Gregory Corso) is one of them. “It’s good to not break in America,” the poet tells his friend. Lament and comraderie is the backdrop, and that surface is also recognizable in “Beginning with a Phrase from Simone Weil”:

THE PRESENT IS CONSTANT ELEGY

Those years when I was alive, I lived the era of the fast car.

There were silhouettes in gold and royal blue, a half-light
in tire marks across a field — Times when the hollyhocks
spoke.

There were weeds in a hopescape as in a painted back-
drop there is also a face.

And then I found myself when the poem wanted me in
pain writing this.

The sky was always there but useless— And what of the
blue phlox, onstage and morphing.

Chance blossoms so quickly, it’s a wonder we recognize
anything, wanting one love to walk out of the ground.

Passion comes from a difficult world — I’m sick of twi-
light, when the light is crushed, time unravels its string.

Along the way I discovered a voice, a sun-stroked path
choked with light, a ray already blown.

Look at the world, its veil.

. . . And a little Schuyler cento for the moon in West Virginia—

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 varieties), 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.

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

"Lyric research and adamant digression."

/

Artistodemus did not hear the beginning of the discourse, and he was only half awake, but the chief thing which he remembered was …

— Plato, The Symposium

How might we fashion
the pace of chance?

– Sam Kerbel, “Broken Record”

“Broken Record” is from Sam Kerbel’s chapbook, Can’t Beat the Price, a series of poems that riddle, poems that inhabit the riddling, poems engrossed in the unconscious communication between instances and objects. Words are played into their sonic shadows, or their near-homophones, as with “Romance,” which finishes:

Yes royalty is our golden ample
But we’re never quite finished with things
Are we?

The plural pronoun of the last line asks both if “we” are and what “we” is under conditions too thin and skimpy to imagine the events of tomorrow. The conditions, as they stand, are not enough. And yet there is a confirmation  — “Yes” –  followed by that play on sound and idiom which gives us the “golden ample” rather than the golden apple. The ample is not an apple. 

/ /

Come, be my camera.
Let’s photograph the ant heap

— Claribel Alegría, “Documentary” (t. by Alegría and Darwin J. Flakoll)

And it is an overstepping that he obeys.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, “Sonnets to Orpheus I, 5” (t. by Mitchell)

Emanating from my speakers this week: a return to the unforgettable collaboration between David Byrne and Brian Eno that changed my life, namely, My Life in The Bush of Ghosts.

/ / /

A for alcoholism,
B for battalions,
C for corruption,
D for dictatorship,
E for exploitation,
F for the feudal power
of fourteen families
and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
My etcetera country,
my wounded country,
my child,
my tears,
my obsession.

— Claribel Alegría, “Documentary” (t. by Alegría and Darwin J. Flakoll)

Per the intertextual intimacy of literary friendships that emerges in tributes and dedications . . . in an introduction to Gerald Stern’s poetry book, I., Ross Gay recollects his days as Stern’s student, where learning involved more than studying assigned texts but also moving through the world with his mentor. Ross and Gerald went to the East River one day because Gerald “needed to properly describe a scene he was imagining in the poem sections XX/IXXVish, to describe some shores and mucks and signage and such—it's called lyric research: get up there about (often up thereabouts is in your head, or your soul and start sniffing around. Also known as adamant digression.)

Lyric research and adamant digression: emphatic pleasures in the writing life. Along the course of his discursive introduction, Ross Gay also shares his experience of a poetry reading with Stern— a few big names out in a field:

Maybe there was a creaky foldout stage. By the time the reading started-about ten minutes after the time on the flyer, which is a little early for my tastes, but not terrible; to be clear: poetry readings should not start on time; it is violence upon poetry, upon the lyric—there were about ten people there. At most fifteen.

At a different point, Ross recalls a wild poetry party which culminated in a metro ride: 

Anyhow, as the three of us were riding home on the NJ Transit, somehow the singer Bjork came up— it's possible we got there first by talking about Lars von Trier's movies, the most recent of which, Dancer in the Dark, Björk had starred in and made the soundtrack for-and because it happened that I had the CD in my Sony CDman in my backpack, and Jerry was curious, I gave him the CDman, Jerry put on the headphones (small ordeal this, I pressed play for him, he closed his eyes, and listened so hard that Brooke— herself a young theater artist at the time who earlier that day had been rehearsing in a church basement in Greenpoint); it was with Brooke that I first went to Greenpoint actually noticed it. Look how he's listening, she elbowed me and whispered. Then we tried to watch him listen.

Which you can't exactly do, though a poem, reading someone's poem is a pretty good technology for trying. Which is maybe a meandery way of wondering what “I.” is listening to.

What’s “I,” listening to? The most obvious answer, though I don't think the most 'important" one (those “most important” and “best of” lists, well, you know... stupid), is what Jerry himself alerts us to in the introduction— this is a kind of midrashic poem, or a poem that is dallying with a primary text, which in this case (the text primarily dealt with) is called The Bible. (That is as lit-critty as this is going to get, don't worry.) And the character I. is a version (this, too, from the intro— also, a lovely generosity, don't you think, the introduction to a poem by the poet?) of Isaiah, who, full disclosure, I am less familiar with than some of the other “I.” characters, particularly Ishmael . . .

Idioms rely on familiarity with prior reference and context: a moment in which the image ‘made sense’ becomes an expression that makes sense of the moment. To half-encircle myself, I return to what Plato said that Aristodemus “remembered”:

/ / / /

Elsewhere, on Mount Olympus, the gods argue amongst themselves.

When representing her dark aspect, Hecate wears a necklace made of testicles; the hair on her head composed of writhing snakes which petrify those who look at them, much like those in the myth of Medusa.

Mikko Harvey

Found my old shorts!

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