Bumped into some Lucy Sante excerpts on masks today. And was reminded of how well some writers describe the tension of images. For example:
The wig isn’t a cheap one, and its slippage might be deliberate. It serves in combination with the mask to give her a passingly eighteenth-century aspect: a debauchee airlifted from a painting by Fragonard and deposited, a bit the worse for wear, in the pages of Juliette. The photograph is a circular riddle that causes the viewer’s eye to travel, back and forth, from south to north pole and back again, always somehow expecting a resolution that is locked away forever.
Here is what Sante says of “the panto-mask” pictured above:
“The mask that is no a concealment but an enhancement”— what a supple metaphor for writing in form, or slipping into a formal constraint invented by others. The mask reveals according to the mask’s conventions. And those conventions are limitations, or boundaries, on how exposition takes place.
I’m fascinated by the way photographs and texts aim towards a similar preservation-through-presentation of selves and selfhood. Reading a lot of Bhanu Kapil lately, immersing myself in her Cixousian borders and syntax, and (of course) browsing Kapil’s reading lists and invocations of possible literary lineage. In an interview with Laynie Browne, Kapil listed the following novels written by poets which inspired her: “Gail Scott's My Paris and The Obituary; Sina Queryas’ Autobiography of Childhood; Melissa Buzzeo’s What Began Us and The Devastation; Laynie Browne’s The Ivory Hour (a future memoir); Laura Mullen’s Murmur.; Juliana Spahr and David Buuck's Army of Lovers collaboration; Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail; Renee Gladman’s Juice; Laura Moriarty’s Ultravioleta; Douglas Martin’s Your Body Figured and Elena Georgiou’s unpublished novel on the Crimean war.”
The mask reveals according to the mask’s conventions. The moth dangles vertically as it develops. I learned this from watching things my children have nurtured and monitored through glass windows, in a way that approximates our own most “civilized” notions of parenting and education.
It is easy to pretend the glass isn’t there, or that something objective is occurring—something that doesn’t partake of subjectivity. This ease should should make us suspicious, for nothing true is characterized by ease, and no gaze lacks the bias of its origins and socialization.
Back to Kapil—to language and questions and masks and vertical approaches. Her prose poetry collection, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers is arranged using a series of twelve repeated questions, and integrates the answers of various women alongside her own.
Ranging across maps and locations, including Punjab, Central America, England, Arizona, and the US, the speaker meditates on the "interrogations" in fragmented form, in apostrophe, in aside, in dramatic monologue, in repetition of sensual images (candles, baths, skin, etc) without settling, or providing a settled image of the speaker. I read this nomadic texture of female selfhood as a soft dismissal of modernity’s sessile, fully-realized selfhood. But one can read Kapil many ways, I think; her work aims towards that multiplicity and fracture.
Kapil’s 12 Questions for the Vertical Interrogation of Strangers
1. Who are you and whom do you love?
2. Where did you come from / how did you arrive?
3. How will you begin?
4. How will you live now?
5. What is the shape of your body?
6. Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?
7. What do you remember about the earth?
8. What are the consequences of silence?
9. Tell me what you know about dismemberment.
10. Describe a morning you woke without fear.
11. How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death?
12. And what would you say if you could?
There is a poem in this… or a writing exercise, a way of restricting one’s self to fragments as responses, and answering each of Kapil’s questions in a line, in something like a vertical interrogation poem. To illustrate by riffing:
A porch with no ontology loves the lie of sunshine.
Maybe a sperm met an egg and then fled on an airplane.
Convene in a language where no one knows his name means “longing.”
Milliseconds don’t exist in an hourglass figure.
When they opened the hotel room door, she was dead on the bed.
Already en route to dust.
Quiet decomposes. Sonatas die if no one hears them.
Maybe the unsung never existed.
….. (and so on and so on…. just filling in elliptical answers to difficult questions, and riffing into the emergent terrain of ideas)
A vertical interrogation sonnet would answer each of these 12 questions in fragments or statements, and then work those 12 lines into 14 lines by experimenting with lineation, enjambment, and substitution.
Iamb if you want. I am seeing sonnet prompts everywhere now it seems.