“In Greek, noesis and nostos are from the same word route. To think is to regret. To regret is to see what he’s not before our eyes. It is hunger hallucinating what it lacks.”
– Pascal Quignard, Abysses, translated by Chris Turner
“The greater the light in the density of the body, the sharper and clearer the shadow becomes.”
— Giordano Bruno, The Art of Memory
Projected works ghost us a little, and we ghost them in return. Even prior to their material realization, we have relationships to the things we created and destroyed, as well as the things withheld, the things we kept ourselves from creating. The dances we didn’t. The kisses we avoided. The trips we cancelled. The friendships we erased. The letters we never finished.
Some texts converse with the possibility of their existence. I'm thinking of Henri Lefebvre’s The Missing Pieces, a book formulated as an inventory of art that has been lost, destroyed, or left at the threshold. Wayne Koestembaum called it “a mosaic-requiem” in the vein of David Markson's Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Both books are concerned with the holes artists leave behind.
A hole has the aura of a secret, a hidden force that alters the visible self.
I descended into these holes when reading W. S. Merwin’s poetry, since he addresses them directly, and builds sentences with holes for hearts.
Henri Matisse’s last lover, Lydia, shared my mother’s name. The painter placed her in “the Romanian blouse,” but Lydia had her own preferences, or ways of wanting to remain or be remembered. She used turpentine to completely erase eleven versions of this painting.
The bronze tiles in Hadrian's Villa were melted to make canons which then created corpses. The art disappeared to facilitate cannon fodder: to feed the ravenous mouth of war. (Of course, statues become marble instead. You can't shoot marble. How often do we see bronze statues now?)
Unfinished, abandoned in draft form: Pierre Boulez’s “Polyphonies"; Bataille’s My Mother; Fassbinder’s scenario for screening a film version of Pitigrill’s book, Cocaine; Mahler’s 10th symphony; Scriabin’s 10th; the final lecture of Ingeborg Bachmann series on poetics at Frankfurt; Hugh Ball's study of church demonology in the Middle Ages; Berlioz’s opera, The Bloody Nun; the sketches of novels that Victor Hugo left in his journal; Eisenstein's film, L, based on the supposed screenplay by Karl Marx; the journal Krisis und Kritik that Brecht and Benjamin planned to found in 1930; Bruckner’s third symphony; a cine-novel titled Trans-Europe Express by Alain Robbes-Grillet.
Apollinaire claimed to have lost his first novel on a train. The novel was titled The Glory of the Olive. Serge Gainsbourg destroyed his own paintings, but kept a self portrait. Velimir Khlebnikov hid manuscripts inside his pillowcases, and these manuscripts have never been found.
Things missing pieces, or kept in a state of incompletion: Plates two and four are missing from the first edition of Piranesi’s Carceri. The fourth movement of Boulez’s “livre pour quatre for strings” sits in the archives of the Sacher Foundation – the absence of this movement means the piece has never been performed in its entirety. In 1933, Hitler’s ascension to power led Karl Kraus to shutter the journal he had created—Die Fackel.
Kriztina Toth inventoried the things she had lost in a book, titled, The Scribe of Lost Objects. Judith Schlansky did something similar with An Inventory of Losses. Marcel Broodthaer created his first sculpture from the 50 unsold copies of his poetry book titled Fall, Spit, or Think: Or Crazy Thoughts, which is soaked in plaster. Marguerite Duras constructed The Lover around a missing photo.
In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein asked how it is possible “to see an object according to an interpretation.” This is the game that literature presents, and the game does not separate the experience of playing from the conditions of the game itself.
What does the book know? What does the music know? What does the painting know? How does it know it?
Augustine said that Time is the being that lives in an inaccessible light. Was he lying? What did he know about night?
“What is the sound of pain as it is kept in the reserves of memory?"
Self-portrait with toilet spires.
A few questions to ask the poem you are reading or studying, questions pertaining to it’s ‘world’:
1. What changes when the poem is spoken rather than read?
2. Can the poem be whispered, folded into a napkin, hidden amid the quiet hum of surrounding gossip?
3. How do the visual elements translate into audibility and sounds when spoken?
4. What sort of soundscape does the poem offer us?
5. Where is the poem looking?
6. What is the poem touching?
7. What sort of poem would be written if it were possessed by this poem’s text? (This asks for co-creation. Go ahead: be possessed by it. Try it.)
8. What sort of relationship is fashioned between the speaker and the subject, or the poem and its expression?
9. What does the poem attempt to hide, and what rhetoric does it deploy to accomplish this?
An empty metaphor of a metaphor I encountered on my walk through Avondale Park yesterday.
I leave you with Paul Valery’s exhilarating figuration of ‘metaphor’ — and hope for an otherwise in this brutal moment dominated by empire’s violence:
What is a metaphor if not a kind of pirouette performed by an idea, enabling us to assemble its diverse names or images? And what are all the figures we employ, all those instruments, such as rhyme, inversion, antithesis, if not an exercise of all the possibilities of language, which removes us from the practical world and shapes, for us too, a private universe, a privileged abode of the intellectual dance?