Inauguration
The land was there before us
Was the land. Then things
Began happening fast. Because
The bombs us have always work
Sometimes it makes me think
God must be one of us. Because
Us has saved the world. Us gave it
A particular set of regulations
Based on 1) undisputable acumen.
2) carnivorous fortunes, delicately
Referred to here as “bull market”
And (of course) other irrational factors
Deadly smoke thick over the icecaps,
Our man in Saigon Lima Tokyo etc etc
Lorenzo Thomas
The filiative scheme belongs to the realms of nature and of ‘life’ whereas affiliation belongs exclusively to culture and society.
– Edward Said
In Rilke, the synecdoche constellates.
— William Gass
1 /
The land was there before Us was the land.
The land was the land in the year 1950, when Joseph McCarthy went to West Virginia and gave a speech in which he alleged that the U.S. State Department was filled with Communists, and the Population Registration Act legalized apartheid in South Africa, and the Soviet Union developed an atom bomb. Us was imagining itself in this same year, when genocide was legalized by the Us who looked away and Diners Club International introduced the credit card.
2 /
Then things began happening fast.
On November 19th in 1913, Franz Kafka recorded the following thoughts and impressions in his diary: “I purposely walk through the streets where the whores are. It excites me to pass by them, that distant but still real possibility of going with one of them. Is that vulgar? But I know of nothing better, and it seems like a basically innocent thing to do, I have almost no regret. I only want the fat older women, their dresses are outdated, but somehow their various ornaments make them seem luxurious. One woman probably knows me already. I ran into her this afternoon, she wasn't dressed for work yet, her hair was still lying flat on her head, she didn't have a hat on, she was wearing a work blouse like a cook's, and carrying some sort of bundle, maybe to the washerwoman. No one but me could have found her exciting. We looked at each other briefly. Now it's evening, It's gotten cold, I saw her in a close-fitting, yellowish-brown coat on the other side of the narrow alley that splits off from the Zeltnergasse, where she promenades. I looked back at her twice, and she caught my Glance, but then I actually ran away from her.”
3 /
Because the bombs Us have always work, there was a ladybug on the strap of my brown sandal, which might have passed unnoticed, if not for the moment when I glanced up after reading the following passage from Adam Phillips’ Missing Out, wherein he considers when human survival “. . . was a function of closeness, and closeness was a function of knowledge (closeness means wanting to be close to those who know, especially to those who seem to know us). Knowledge, Freud tells us, is of absence; it is the way we measure distance. If overinterpretation is the rather frantic desire to be as close as possible, skepticism may be deemed to be, whatever else it is, a wariness, a suspicion, about what we might be up to - what we might be wanting to put out of our minds - through our so-called knowledge of other minds; skepticism being not just a doubting of what we can know about others, but a doubting of the value of such knowledge, and therefore a broached imagining of what knowing might prevent or preclude us from experiencing with each other.”
4 /
Sometimes it makes me think God must be one of us, like a flash of green light in the alcove when James Joyce wrote to his publisher in June 1906: “It is not my fault that the odor of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.”
5 /
Because Us has saved the world, offal remains a word that evokes tenderness in the reader. Just as archaic language evokes the charm of a blessing one no longer believes — we relish the sound of it. The hooves of a fairy tale galloping towards a tower. The idea of rescue. The assumption that boys don’t cry. The way solastalgia infuses our involuntary memories with the scent of dry grass from summers past. The part where Fred Davis looked at the bright side, writing: “If, as I have maintained, nostalgia is a distinctive way, though only one among several ways we have, of relating our past to our present and future, it follows that nostalgia (like long-term memory, like reminiscence, like daydreaming) is deeply implicated in the sense of who we are, what we are about, and (though possibly with much less inner clarity) whither we go. In short, nostalgia is one of the means – or, better, one of the more readily accessible psychological lenses – we employ in the never-ending work of constructing, maintaining, and reconstructing our identities.”
6 /
Us gave it a set of particular regulations based on the blurring of thoughts between private and public, which is why hermits have been tasked with branding their hermitage, as Henry David Thoreau surely knew when he said of a fellow writer that “his critics have for the most part made their contemporaries less that they might make Shakespeare more,” and recorded this saying in his Journal of 1842.
7 /
Undisputable acumen is what Nathaniel Hawthorne noticed in his frenemy, Henry David Thoreau, whom he called “a genuine observer”; Thoreau, whom he saw as the “especial child” of Nature who “shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness”; Thoreau, who remained “on intimate terms with the clouds” as the two men ate watermelon and muskmelon from Hawthorne’s garden; Thoreau, who had written a piece for The Dial containing “passages of cloudy and dreamy metaphysics, and also passages where his thoughts seem to measure and attune themselves into spontaneous verse, as they rightfully may, since there is real poetry in them.” Thoreau, whose words contained “a basis of good sense and of moral truth . . . which also is a reflection of his character.” Thoreau, whom Hawthorne found to be “a healthy and wholesome man to know,” like the granola cereal boxes lining the shelves of the 20th century’s market for good health.
8 /
Carnivorous fortunes, delicately referred to here as “bull market.” Obviously, Hans Richter continued to mourn his unfinished cinepoem, Minotaur, as the heart of the art mourns the unfinished and the unwritten.
“This isn’t what I imagined,” said the active child.
At some point near or around the year 1935, Mary Sully created a portrait that was closer to an evocation than a realism-based representation of celebrity scientist Charles Steinmetz, an electrical engineer who discovered the Steinmetz Curve of electric alternating currents. In Sully’s panel, blue energy waves alternate with arrow-like cross currents which appear and concentrate in the center panel. Loosely resembling a circuit diagram, red diamonds connect with the green ovals, and the bottom panel links the alternating currents with the cosmologies indicated in Dakota and Lakota patterns.
“This isn’t what I had in mind,” the child remembers saying.
What was the heart doing on March 17, 1922, when Rainer Maria Rilke sent a letter to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Coury, announcing the completion of his Duino Elegies, and connecting the lyrics, themselves, to the destruction of Duino Castle during World War I? Where was the heart when Rilke told Countess Sizzo that the elegies felt true— “the more so” — shaped by their form, since the war had destroyed the castle that had inspired them. What carnage of the heart led Rilke, in this same letter, to employ the word “constellation” in a manner that might have reached Walter Benjamin, whose first love was reserved for the idealistic poet friend that died by suicide?
9 /
And (of course) other irrational factors, including the desire to accept the selves we performed in the past— which may be what sat like a toad on Fred Davis’ forehead when he wrote: “The proclivity to cultivate appreciative attitudes toward former selves is closely related to nostalgia’s earlier-noted tendency to eliminate from memory or, at minimum, severely to mute the unpleasant, the unhappy, the abrasive, and, most of all, those lurking shadows of former selves about which we feel shame, guilt, or humiliation.”
9 /
Deadly smoke thick over the icecaps.
Awful — a word that could have rested in its sublime etymological origins, where “awe-” attaches itself to “full” and looks down from the romantic cliff on the ineffable below. But the perspective has changed. Awful, the look on my daughter’s face when she dreams of her grandmother wandering through the icecaps of Antartica. In the nightmare, the glaciers retain that excruciating brightness, the blue-white of so much light encountering itself in millennia of ice. “Dream,” I tell my daughter. The nightmares know water. We move like a bad scene, shot in the dark.
10 /
Our man in Saigon, Lima, Tokyo etc.
The poet ignores our man and keeps her eye on the bottle.
She thinks of Mandelstam and all those Egypts — all those possibilities of place and homeland tucked into the correspondence of the writers she can’t forget.
11 /
Etc etc., or the way the umbrella moves through John McGahern’s short fiction, “My Love, My Umbrella”
It was the rain, the constant weather of this city, made my love inseparable from the umbrella, a black umbrella, white stitching on the seams of the imitation leather over the handle, the metal point bent where it was caught in Mooney’s grating as we raced for the last bus out of Abbey Street.
[...]
We went to cinemas or sat in pubs, it was the course of our love, and as it always rained we made love under the umbrella beneath the same trees in the same way. They say the continuance of sexuality is due to the penis having no memory, and mine each evening spilt its seed into the mud and decomposing leaves as if it was always for the first time.
[..]
‘Would you think we should ever get married?’ ‘Kiss me.’ She leaned across the steel between us. ‘Do you think we should?’ I repeated. ‘What would it mean to you?’ she asked.
What I had were longings or fears rather than any meanings.
Umbrellas protect us from getting wet. The umbrella is also slang for condoms, I think?
Perhaps protection is the “constant weather” of failed love. I mean, “imitation leather” never handles the dead animal; it never risks the unprotected part of it.
Looking forward to thinking aloud with other writers this week, while also thinking on paper, in notebooks, on screens, about filiative schemes, inaugurations, synecdoches, constellations, decomposing leaves — and the Kierkegaardian repetition in the “always for the first time.”
*
Active Child, “Diamond Heart”
Chelsea Wolfe and Mark Lanegan, “Flatlands”
Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press, 1979.
Henry David Thoreau, “1842”, The Thoreau Log.
John McGahern, “My Love, My Umbrella”
Junior Wells, “In the Wee Hours”
Lorenzo Thomas, “Inauguration”
Man Ray, Gift, 1921.
Mary Sully, Steinmetz, c. 1935.
Paul Bogard, ed. Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World. University of Virginia Press, 2023.