Poetics of time: Dates, calendars, metrics.

A house where I alone go calling
A name that silence and the walls give back to me
A strange house contained in my voice
Inhabited by the wind
I invent it, my hands draw a cloud
A heaven-bound ship above the forests

- Pierre Seghers

1.

My great-grandfather waits with my daughter for birds to sip water from a small iron bowl in the ruins of the Romanian Republic of Alabama.

The Republic is currently colonized by a cowboy stepfather from Texas and my mother’s outrageous ghost. I say outrageous because “outrage” is still uncomfortable when attached to female-gendered spirits in the South. Alabama’s ghosts are sad, unhappy, religious, hungry for statues and memorial plaques.

But the ghost of my mother just wants to live—to be alive for the flood of azaleas, the honeysuckle seasons, the hora-hungry dusk which crawls across porches at certain angles of light.

2.

The childhood home—the house or apartment—the site where first memories attach to sound and color—the land of daydreams and origins. This is the mind's first inhabitation, often the source of habits which estrange us from others, or which create a sense of family identity. 

Everything begins in that house: the one who raised us, the one where we first discovered that what adults said did not correspond with what we read in books, or heard from the chorus on floorboards.

You have probably guessed what I’m reading from the timbre of my nostalgia. Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space explores the "value of inhabited space, the non-I that protects the I;" the most inhabited spaces being those which evoke "the notion of home," or which connect us to the child in a world of mysterious objects alongside the idyll of safety. For Bachelard,  the "land of motionless childhood, motionless the way all immemorial things are" which offers us access to the child mind, or the mind that lacks the options of moving, doing, and being independent in the world. 

"Our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost," Bachelard says, referring to time, or to the mind that experienced it before success and hierarchies intervened.

Childhood's time is unique in that it cannot be memorialized: it precedes memorialization.

Childhood time is the time outside time as we come to know it in the world. 

As for the home, it remains precious as a place for this peculiar temporality. The home protects and provides shelter for daydreaming. In the house, unlike the classroom, daydreaming is acceptable.

3.

The awkwardness of injuctions during National Poetry Month: to “make time” for poetry. As if time can be so easily stolen or created. And yet—on the page—it can.

I thought about the social constructions of time after receiving a poetry prompt from Kimberly Ann Southwick: "Repackage time--repackage decades or weeks or years--find a way to view time that is not standard or that is personal, that is a different way in."

"The calendars of our lives can only be established in its imagery...." Gaston Bachelard writes.  There is a prompt in this: an opportunity to list the images that formulate the calendars of your life—it’s seasons, scents, sounds, recipes. Not the football calendar or the external divisions of time — I don't want to know the commercial or public as it was absorbed by the home—I am interested in the private, unique, and unusual. 

And how time is lineated in poetry, when considering the first home, or what it wants from us in its unique relations to time. And how Rene Char dreams in "a room that grew buoyant and, little by little, expanded into the vast stretches of travel." And how the room becomes the space which allows us to access all the loose tendrils in a mind, to bring them together somehow – not in study – but in amazement of simultaneity.  

That I sat inside the same stone chapel as Joan of Arc in a town named after fleas--and that I can sit there, alone, now, in the unsettlings of my head.

That Bachelard speaks to how localization nearly defies the precision of calendar dates and chronologies:

"Memory does not record concrete duration, in the Bergsonian sense of the word. We are unable to relive duration that has been destroyed. We can only think of it, in the line of an abstract time that is deprived of all thickness..... To localize a memory in time is merely a matter for the biographer and only corresponds to a sort of external history, for external use, to be communicated to others. But hermeneutics, which is more profound than biography, must determine the centers of fate by ridding  history of its conjunctive temporal tissue, which has no action on our fates. For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates." 

That thing one must study and write in this….

4.

“In our daydreams, the house is large cradle,” Bachelard suggests. And this cradle cuts both ways—the cradle is also the poetic object tended by a mother, as in Jill Bialosky’s poem.

Daylight Savings

There was the hour
when raging with fever
they thrashed. The hour
when they called out in fright.
The hour when they fell asleep
against our bodies, the hour
when without us they might die.
The hour before school
and the hour after.
The hour when we buttered their toast
and made them meals
from the four important food groups—
what else could we do to insure they’d get strong and grow?
There was the hour where we were the spectators
at a recital, baseball game,
when they debuted in the school play.
There was the silent hour in the car
when they were angry. The hour
when they broke curfew. The hour
when we waited for the turn of the lock
knowing they were safe and we could finally
close our eyes and sleep. The hour
when they were hurt
or betrayed and there was nothing we could do
to ease the pain.
There was the hour
when we stood by their bedsides with ginger-ale
or juice until the fever broke. The hour
when we lost our temper and the hour
we were filled with regret. The hour
when we slapped their cheeks and held
our hand in wonder.
The hour when we wished for more.
The hour when their tall and strong bodies,
their newly formed curves and angles in their faces
and Adam’s apple surprised us—
who had they become?
Hours when we waited and waited.
When we rushed home from the office
or sat in their teacher’s classroom
awaiting the report of where they stumbled
and where they excelled, the hours
when they were without us, the precious hour
we did not want to lose each year
even if it meant another hour of daylight.

Here, Jill Bialosky uses the poem to recuperate time, leveraging that lost hour which occurs in the ordinary changing of clocks, and asking that hour to carry the velocity of intimacy, the private hours of watching children grow, nursing them through midnights, witnessing their individuality detach from the nest.

Bialosky accomplishes this in a two-page poem that builds momentum in one single long stanza, a refrain built around "the hours": The hour when....The hour before.... There was the hour... etc."

In this mundane recitation of particular effaced hours, time, itself, is rendered precious, a treasury of particular hours consumed by love for one's children. 

An hour is merely three twenty minute episodes and when you’ve recently been sucked into a new series, many hours will be divided up this way and lost in a haze of blue light and meaningless noise. Hours tend to creep away into the internet…

- Sarah Shabet on Bialosky’s “Daylight Savings”

5.

For Bachelard, the daydream is an inherently poetic mode which autovalorizes - "it derives direct pleasure from its own being." The sites which birthed daydreams are tinged with the hue of uncertainty, the vast plausibility of nostalgia, the strange resonances and mysteries. B. again:

Topoanalysis, then, would be the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives. In the theater of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant roles. At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the beings' stability -a being who does not want to melt away, and who, even in the past, when he sets out in search of things past, wants time to 'suspend' its flight.

The house is "a geometry of echoes," and each room holds sound, light, smell, and color differently. To recapture the slant of light in that room. To recover the scents which linger on couches or curtains. To note how shelves increase or decrease echoes depending on what they hold. (Books muffle sound.)

Bachelard seeks the "timbre of voices" and "the resonance in each room" of what he calls the "sound house." In the old house, where we learned to listen, or first became aware of sound, the geometry of echoes abides as a music.  The house we are born in is "physically inscribed in us" through unconscious habits and beliefs; "The feel of the tiniest latch has remained in our hands."

I wonder about the latch in my daughter’s hand—what she will remember from the house on the borders of the Romanian Republic of Alabama, where she inhabited a margin between a language and an intense, 100-foot magnolia.

"But if a house is a living value, it must integrate an element of unreality,” Bachelard reminds. “All values must remain vulnerable, and those that do not are dead."

So I bring the great-grandfather into her bird-dream… One day, when she is grown, when she is adult enough to repudiate everything I have given her, I hope she finds this photo on this website and wonders about the man whom her mother added to her reverie. A portrait which includes the invisible: the only witness I know to the Romanian Republic of Alabama.

Using Diane Williams' lines as writing prompts any damned day of the week.

I think you can read any line from piece by Diane Williams and use it as a starting point for something—poem, essay, fiction, hybrid, Girl Scout cookie slogan, empowerment-feminism speech delivered in a garden of heirloom roses…. But I also think studying her lines is instructive. So I did.

*

Example 1: “He had dragged me along to this refined filth of a hotel, which aroused my truest false feelings.”

This line from “Speech” does the magic thing twice! Williams lays opposites side by side in a description, so the “refined filth” makes the hotel feel even filthier, like the afterbirth of a Stanislaw Lem story on the linoleum. And then “my truest false feelings” make the feelings feel even faker. When coupling opposites, it appears that the subject sinks beneath the lowest common denominator.

Example 2: “…the redness and the whiteness of a fine radish.”

This brief image appears in “Gods of the Earth At Home,” where it sticks to the mind and shimmers. Williams does this suffixing often, adding a -ness to an adjective to make it a noun, to wrap the object in a condition or quality rather than a simple description. So the red and white radish becomes redness itself, whiteness itself, two separate, divided conditions. Notice how red and white evokes the colors of objects while the redness and the whiteness evokes their condition, their aura. Hence luminosity, shimmering.

Example 3: “I say yes yes. I say my excitement is so great, so huge.”

Again, from “Gods of the Earth At Home,” Williams reveals how a series of enthusiastic superlatives actually makes the enthusiasm, itself, incredible, and suspect.

Example 4: “I am the dark one, the short one, the thick one, the coarse one, who is so unsatisfied with all of my suggestions.”

This is the second paragraph in “Desperately Trying to Lie Down.” I love how one can watch the narrative voice distance itself from the intimacy of the “I” as if by striptease; each additional qualification tells us less and less about the speaker. And each “one” moves us further away from the single person we are trying to understand. What if taking off all our clothes made us invisible rather than naked? Is nakedness and earnesty, itself, a facet of invisibility? Sometimes Williams seems to suggest this in “I” statements.

Example 5: “Rather, it is from the blather, rather I am made. I parade around plenty, which means I do have the globular breasts. Yet, I am watched.”

The final two paragraphs of “Her Hair Is Red”—and so many Williams’ in these sentences. I will focus on the use of rhyme to bind lines and create motion forward through sonic effects rather than plot. Rather/blather rhymes, and then repeats. Then made/parade link arms across the punctuation mark. Notice how the “t” sounds accumulate and only really prick up their eats in the last sentence, where the rather/blather/plenty/breasts rub against the “Yet”. I kept hearing the “Yet” as “Yes”—and I suspect the purpose of this short story lies in the unlatched friction between Yet/Yes right there. Yet, I suspect because I am suspicious. And wow.

Example 6: “There is a slim chance that anything is unable to be unmoved.”

The last line of “Actual People Whose Behavior I Was Able to Observe,” a destabilization accomplished by attaching the prefix -un to two verbs, and then using one to define the other. Williams could have written this as: Everything can be moved a little, but that’s not quite what she means. What she means is that negation is related to motion, and the prefixes render the sentence prismatic, the promise that “There is” complicated by the double -un.

Just because bars are fascinating. And prompts are bars, re-visioned. So do whatever with the iron below. I just used to it to free-write.

Prompt 1: “How about the deity responsible for me?—why should it not move me through the realm, escort me to the other side of the predicament?” (from “Upright Pearl”)

Prompt 2: “Get myself endeared I should, endorsed with a day in mind. This day in Wednesday.” (from “Madder Lake”)

Prompt 3: “An entire formula for feeling good….”

She was jealous of people with sea green or lavender scooters who had grown up in small towns with singular traffic lights. The arrogance of rural intimacy was the highest emotional connection she imagined when trimming her hair with nail clippers over the expired Confederate gravestones.

Where had the nail clippers come from, anyway?

It was Long Rod who urged the clandestine. He had family in Uruguay he couldn’t talk about at all. Or under any condition. But no children. “I love knives too much to be a father,” he had announced. They met at a sword conference by mistakes.

Both had similar, variant deficits in their peripheral attention spans, which caused them to see sword when what happened was a Swordfish Convention. Neither had ever fished. Failure felt like bondage when he touched her arm with his mind and she used the word swords and love in the same unbuckled sentence.

“Believe in the extended metaphor of us,” he had whispered the following morning in the hallway of her apartment near the poster of the Dalai Lama she’d inherited from a professor, disgraced. Sacked, shamed, and gone—all his stuff left to scald the walls of his large university office.

“I have come to collect his spiritual influence,” she told the secretary who shrugged. Just take it. Take it all. Like a 90’s indie record song lyric.

She dreamt taxis had wings hidden beneath their yellow hoods.

But they did not develop eyes and entire formula of flight was useless.

“Believe in the extension rod,” the professor once said while holding white chalk. She lost the nail clippers after pitching a multi-modal review essay to an editor she knew from grad school. But he was married and not interested.

You think it’s easy to be noisy and quiet, but the pillow in the taxi’s backseat was put there on purpose. Someone made plans.

"A infinitude of catastrophes...apace": On Diane Williams.

“It is one of those lovely times when crisis does not come as a surprise,” writes Diane Williams in what could be a keynote on tonal effects rather than a line from a short fiction titled “An Opening Chat.” Nothing is more surprising than discovering that The Collected Short Stories of Diane Williams (Soho Press, 2018) still scorches my eyes when I read it. The tips of my fingers still tingle when I crack its three-Bible-stack-thick spine. O, I’d leave a copy on every hotel nightstand if I had the time, money, patience, and institutional relevance.

But I have none of these things. What I have: thoughts about Stupefication, the novella tucked near the center of the collection, with the following epigraph attributed to Several of My Neighbors:

Is it necessary to state a guarantee of my goodwill?

If they come in, they go right back out again.

The narrator signals they will be adapting a village omniscience to the material and emotional demands of American suburbia. As with other titles by Williams, the chapter titles stage the stories, if by stage one means an abandoned basement and by story one means miraculous alienation.

The first chapter, “Oh, I Hope You Like Everything I Say!,” turns out to be attributed to no one, if by no one means divinity. The omniscient narrator describes a male and a female as they navigate the stakes of a relationship, which is to say: what they want from another while also wanting nondescript things from the world. And so it begins….

Williams drops qualifiers like raw confetti at a church bingo party in order to elicit the excitable vagueness, the sense of something important happening, while also marking it as typical, ordinary, the usual scissored paper someone will later sweep from the floor.

The distance between the female character’s thoughts and words are magniloquent. For example, she has “her own ideas” when spotting old water and forsaken hills, but what she says aloud is: “This is the nicest part of the trip!” Speaking isn’t a form of communication among characters so much as a conversation between the narrator and the strange humans she lays on the page. The male doesn’t respond to the nicest part of the trip; we remain inside the female’s head, the frisson of her private thoughts.

Then, on the second page, the narrator peeks in with an “I” that isn’t tied to the male or female characters. In this weird intrusion, the narrator compares itself to the female: “If she is not much different than I am, she was hoping I would like everything she would say.”

The reader scratches her head, distracted from the male-female relationship. And Williams pokes her pen a little deeper into the reader’s unprotected eye by letting the female make an “I” statement in the next line. This is how the first chapter of the novella closes.

In the second chapter, we have the same structure: a fascinating title (one could populate whole zines with theories on Williams’ use of titling to subvert conventional narration) + a fact about a character which creates the possibility of action + fragmented, discontinuous descriptions which don’t develop into the intimacy of conflict + extraordinary chunks of awkward syntax.

The narrator steps in to declaim the title in the third line, and Williams tucks in the edges of the statement like dough on a perfect pig-in-a-blanket. It feels like part of the story. It feels like the narrator doesn’t want to intrude so much as to perform a sort of intrusiveness, which is to say suburban neighborliness.

There is the miracle of not getting lost, despite the absence of a magic ornament. And there is the way in which “that” dangles over the last line, suggesting it could go either way: that it could bring them good luck, or that it being lost could bring them good luck.

The initial problem of urinating is still present. She pees near a tree. “The squirrels are so fidgety.” The animals and objects are asked to carry the inappropriate feelings of the characters, a classic Williams narrative effect.

Notice how the memory of her dog intrudes on the squirrels’ violent illness—and how intensely the dog interacts with the pear. Each of these mental meanders feels more real, more actual, than the events of the story. And the reader is left in suspense, hanging between two breasts and the possibility of freedom, which may involve small objects.

The third chapter is titled IT WAS A JOYFUL TIME.

One is inclined to change it, to leave the overwrought marvel between the breasts and notice the joyful scene. His hand in the tent, zipping and unzipping.

“You sound sexed-up!” she exclaimed.

The dog died and she did not miss it—missed no part of its frisking, its wet nose on her cheek at dusk, its demands for bones or begonias, depending.

The campsite had been waiting for them to arrive. He found a receipt for vodka near the charcoal grill. But no charcoal. A wet sock crushed into the dirt.

“All of these vines—” she said, waving her hand, listening to her bracelets argue and jangle. The whole vine-ness of the scene. And the yellow tent, lying there, gilded by sunset.

He kept zipping and unzipping, putting things in and exiting. She didn’t know where to sit, really. There was nowhere to watch from.

Except for the stump.

He bounced his flashlight over the lower portions of the pine trees. An unlikely bullfrog, pinned against bark. The zippering, again.

The fourth chapter: FREEDOM IS LIKE BLUEGRASS!

She couldn’t sleep. What did you expect? Neither could he. Peas in a pod. The squirrels were atrocious.

“They are omnivorous,” he said of the bears in the news. Some animals eat anything, and one should not trust them with entire hearts or emotional openness.

Nearby, the younger guys had a radio and a fire and someone kept giggling. Freedom is like bluegrass.

“They must have appeared after darkness,” she said.

The tent was so dark it swallowed the flashlight. An old piece of tinsel lay in the corner from Christmas. A retiree.

“It’s been so long since then,” he said. Dusk could take aeons. Inside the endless, they had already eaten a hot dog with mustard she found in the glove compartment. The mustard waited inside a white envelope. It waited for them, and this.

His hands made rabbits appear on the nylon walls. She added a parrot. By then, he smelled naked, that moistness attaching itself to old sleeping bags.

They had all been young, once—young once or twice—stupid with fire and music. Ach, the giggling.

“Let me see your eyes,” he said, in the dark wet.

*

Amazingly, here is the actual third chapter of the novella as penned by the insatiable Diane Williams for your reading pleasure and disturbance. Clean bedding—everything!

As for the fourth chapter, it is actually titled “Cautiously, She Looked Around,” which has nothing to do with bluegrass. It does, however, feature a jar of red jam, gold embroidery, soft light, and full-fledged cocoa bread pudding which you taste in The Collected Short Stories of Diane Williams.

As for Williams, herself, the author, maybe she tweets. Certainly she spoke to Michael Silverblatt in the Bookworm podcast which deserves credit for the photo I borrowed.

Ultimately, like a hard-boiled omelette, truth boils down to what the narrator elects, specifically, in “The Power of Performance,” where we are assured: “Customary noise can occur in thick clumps, all of which can be turned sideways.” As all ending depends on positioning, an imp’s posture becomes an imposture if one lingers in clumps too long. Tarry on, interior monologue, carry those tons along.

Robert Musil's final notebook entry.

1.

The final entry of Robert Musil’s diaries was found in 1980, stitched inside the lining of a coat belonging to Marthe Musil. Here it is, in its translated entirety by Philip Payne.

2.

“I love something” contains as much of the subjectivity of the “I” as of the objectivity of the “something”!” Musil writes. In this particular intensity, I suspect love and hate are allied.

I hate something contains this subjectivity as well. Objective hatred is often established (and represented) in carceral systems, but we confuse the fact of the system for the fate of the feeling.

3.

Reading Herve Guibert’s journals, The Mausoleum of Lovers, and discovering that he read Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities in tandem with Musil’s Notebooks. He dialogues between them.

"(The Man Without Qualities: the dream of the great work.)"

But he also adds context that the endnotes in Musil’s translated notebooks does not include, particularly Martha’s role in censoring the last entry:

"The pages of Musil's journal cut out by his wife, Martha, because they concerned their intimacy, and that are found again by chance after her death by unstitching the sleeve of the coat she had bequeathed to the costume museum."

4.

More from Musil’s diaries: the armchair analogy.

It is said that a thing is the sum of its qualities, or some such statement. But there are instances of relationships that contradict this. Perhaps in all things that pertain to sympathy. 

I have had an old armchair for years. I cut a notch into its armrest, or I rip one of its cushions. In other words I take something away from it. And yet it doesn't seem new to me at all; rather it only really becomes that which I feel my old armchair to be, when I take something away from it. 

This often happens with love as well.

5.

Currently fascinated by translator Genese Grill’s blog on Musil, which I cannot stop reading—and which is also the source for the sketch of Robert Musil by his wife, Marthe.

Can't touch this: The voice of Barbara Comyns.

1.

For every Comyns-lover, there is a coming-to-Comyns story.

Mine is recent. I lost my Barbara-Comyns-virginity last month because Richard Mirabella tweeted about hosting a zoom book club—and I will read anything to crawl into a small digital room with fellow bibliomaniacs and talk about a book they love, in this case, Our Spoons Came From Woolworths.

2.

Barbara Comyns was British. She grew up in large house, among a large family with dwindling economic means and status. Her father died in her teens, and the family house was sold off. While attending art school in London, Comyns married fellow artist John Pemberton. Four years later, in 1934, the two exhibited their work together. Between exhibits and marriage, Comyns birthed two children, Julian and Caroline. The marriage ended in 1935.

At some point in the late 1930’s, Comyns started a relationship with Arthur Price, a “black marketeer,” and she took her two kids to live with Price at various places in London, where Comyns made money by modeling, flipping apartments, breeding poodles, renovating pianos, dealing in furniture and cars, and drawing for ads.  

When World War II began, money grew tighter and the threat of bombing increased. Comyns’ relationship with Price ended, at which point she took the kids to the countryside and “became a cook in a Hertfordshire country house, where she wrote a series of vignettes about her childhood.” This is when Comyns wrote Sisters by a River, which was initially released in serialized form.

More than a decade ago, Emily Gould (who introduces the New York Review Books edition) described Comyns’ first novel, Sisters by a River, as “a barely fictionalized account of her strange childhood” created to entertain and amuse her own kids while living in London and “working as a cook on a country estate to escape the Blitz.” In her introduction to Virago’s 1984 edition, Ursula Holden emphatically asserts: “The events in the book are true.” So we know Comyns’ early work emerged from lived experience: we take it she used her own life as a muse. At least, at the beginning.

3.

Her second novel, Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, was published around the same time as her first, and it continues the mining of personal life as fictional muse. In this, Comyns turns from her childhood to adulthood, carrying the reader through a series of ordinary remarkable things, including childbirth, child loss, marital drudgery, peak misogyny, and pets (from newts to foxes). 

The book begins in the voice of the narrator, Sophia: “I told Helen my story and she went home and cried.”

From here, Sophia narrates her life at twenty-one in 1930’s London, after marrying a fellow painter named Charles. They are very poor. Charles’ family doesn’t support his marriage to an artist, a woman without pedigree, status, money, or extended family. Sophia narrates this rejection with fatalism-tinged humor: things are the way they are because this is how things go and here we are going along with them. Obviously, the novel explores the author’s relationship to John Pemberton, and I derived cream-cakes of pleasure imagining his initial response upon reading it.

While Charles paints and works on his art, Sophia struggles to make money for rent, heating, and food. She supports his art career and puts her own on hold. Again, this is what one does, and therefore one must do it. They go to various places which inspire Charles to paint, and the narrator’s voice wanders between her own experience and that which is appropriate, as determined by Charles reaction’s. Here they are at the fair:

Fair music always had excited me and given me a kind of lump in my throat, but Charles did not get this feeling, so he said I was being even more stupid than usual, and if I felt like that I had better go home.

Sophia poses nude for artists and sculptors and eventually gives birth to a baby—which horrifies Charles—and then struggles to feed and nurture the baby alongside her pet newt while also wondering what she is doing, and suspecting that her husband is cheating.

The childbirth scene is disorienting; Sophia has no context or background knowledge for what is happening. The hospital seems like a stadium of continuous humiliations where women go to be delivered of their autonomy and humanity. Sophia describes the healthy birth as follows:

I suddenly felt so interested in what was happening. The baby was really coming now and there it was between my legs. I could feel it moving and there was a great tugging in my tummy where it was still attached to me.

........ I couldn't help crying when I heard it was a boy, because I knew there wasn't much chance of Charles liking it, now it was a boy. He particularly disliked little boys. I longed to see the baby, but they said I couldn't yet. It had stopped crying and I was worried in case it was dead. So I cried about that, too.

The humor comes from the narrator’s deadpan delivery of absurdities, often voiced by men or figures of power and authority. Comyns lets them make fools of themselves—she doesn’t try to explain or excuse or label their hypocrisies. Instead, she lays on the table near spoons, napkins, and gloves. Again, a scene from the hospital:

Charles said he had borrowed some money to send telegrams to his relations saying we had a boy of six oz. I told him it was 6 pounds not ounces, but he said a few pounds either way wouldn't make any difference. But Charles' telegrams caused a huge sensation, and his family was most disappointed when in due course they discovered we had quite a normal baby.

Eventually, after Sandro’s birth, Sophia slips into a nonsexual flirtatious friendship with an elderly art critic named Peregrine (and what a fantastic name for this man one imagines repeatedly as a sort of sad loafing penguin, an exhausting succubus)!

When Peregrine isn’t complaining about his estranged wife, he is “a charming companion” and Sophia begins to enjoy his attention. At this point, she gets pregnant again:

I went home and told Charles and he looked quite terrified and said he wouldn't give up his painting for beastly babies and ran out of the house. I felt all frightened, as if I'd done something wicked. I did wish it was the men sometimes that had babies. I would be awfully kind to Charles if he had one, although I would hate to see him looking all fat.

He didn't come back till late in the night, but I was still awake. He said he was sorry he had been so angry with me, but I must promise to get rid of this extra child. So I cried a bit and said I would, as long as I didn't have to do anything too alarming.

Sophia learns Peregrine is going to be away for business, and she expresses relief: “I was pleased he was going to be away now I felt so unhappy, because I knew men hate women when they are unhappy.”

To keep the men in her life happy, Sophia pays for an illegal abortion. She describes the experience and the accompanying emotions without elucidation: simply lays them side by side as facts.

I don't feel much like writing about the actual operation. It was horrible and did not work at all as it should. I couldn't go to hospital, because we would have all gone to prison if I had. Even the doctor did his best to help me recover, although he was scared stiff to come near me when he saw it had all gone wrong, but eventually I became better. But my mind didn't recover at all. I felt all discussed it and that I had been cheated from having my baby. Now it had gone I wanted it more than ever; I felt I had been weak. I should have left Charles and had the baby somewhere. If I'd just become a tramp with Sandro surely someone would have taken us in….

One is struck by how few options Sophia has—to become a “tramp” or to have an abortion—what a strange choice for a mammal to be forced to make. Thank goodness no male-identifying mammals are being forced to make these choices on a daily basis.

Fortunately, Pegerine returns from his business trip and Sophia begins a sexual affair with him. I say “fortunately” because good fortune and bad fortune seem indiscernible in this story where all fortune is there, grinding forward, without time to consider its intent or duration.

4.

Throughout this novel, Comyns uses narrative voice to destabilize knowledge and convention. She does this discreetly, humorously, painfully, continuously pressing Sophia’s voice against the world’s received wisdoms, and making authority and status seem ridiculous.

The problem of pregnancy, and the challenges with avoiding it, are clearly demarcated as a women’s labor, a sub-heading of knowledge inaccessible to the narrator. Notice the juxtaposition of physical pain with supernaturalism and a slight absurdity in this scene where Sophia is trying to tell her husband labor has begun:

Then I saw my mother's ghost sitting in the rocking chair, and it was rocking in quite a normal way, so I did wake Charles and said, "Look there is my mother's ghost! She must have come to tell me it's time to go to the nursing home. I do feel a bit queer." Then Charles saw her, too, but he didn't like her much. He jumped out of bed and put the light on, and she wasn't in the chair anymore, but it still rocked. We got dressed because I was quite sure she wanted me to go to the nursing home, but seeing a ghost had made Charles a bit grumpy.

In this section, Sophia manages to express that no one existed to usher her into motherhood, no living person cared enough to know when she should go to the hospital, and so the ghost of the mother appeared. We don’t question the verity of this ghost because, I think, we sense a true need for it. As readers, we are relieved for the rocking chair, relieved for anything that gets Charles off his navel-gazing ass where Sophia’s existence is concerned. Sometimes it takes a mother’s ghost to make a man listen.

And this is just the beginning of the sad times. For after the abortion, Sophia gets pregnant again. She gives birth to a little girl named Fanny. Then, she leaves Charles—who informs her that she needs to move on—and decides to go live with Peregrine. After discovering that her lover—and the father of her baby girl, Fanny—is, in fact, married to the woman whose money and home-labor sustains him, Sophia finds herself on the streets of London with a baby, homeless. She catches scarlet fever and almost dies. Fanny, the baby, does die. The string of losses sharpens but does not relent. There is more. There is more. You should read it.

5.

Our Spoons Came From Woolworths ends with Sophia sitting in her garden, happily married, financially-stable, beginning to tell her friend, Helen, this story. In this sense, it returns us to the moment before the first line: “I told Helen my story and she went home and cried.”

The circle is complete. It is an uncomfortably happy ending because it ends in marriage, or because marriage to a decent, middle-class man gives Sophia a space from which to begin to write the book. That is one way to look at it.

Another way might be to consider why, despite its use of postmodern destabilizing techniques, juxtapositions, distancing syntax, and absurdity, Comyns’ novel is not meta-fictional. It’s not a story about telling a story—it is a story told very, very well, a story that is conscious of telling a story and committed to it. The way this story is told is unique to Comyns. “She reminds you what a pleasure it is to be told a story,” Richard Mirabella said. “There is very little staging,” Kyle Winkler noted, “very little use of direct dialogue to scaffold scene and plot.” Sophia tells us the story rather than showing it.

Kyle also pointed out the use of strong modifiers throughout the text, so that one finds a feeling or experience framed at a distance, or a certain remove:

We enjoyed the drive so much at first, but gradually we became bored. It was such a long journey and the car was small and old and didn't go very fast and was very bumpy, too.

The such and so and very and very would not survive a modern workshopping, and yet it is integral to deployment of voice. To me, it is this constant self-qualification, this navigating between expectation and convention in language, that renders Sophia endearing and fascinating. Another example:

Peregrine was a good driver, but he sat rather forward and crouched over the wheel and talked a lot about driving as if he wasn't really used to it. This seemed rather waddy to me. Then I felt unkind to criticize him after all his kindness.

“Waddy” keeps this from feeling traumatic. “Rather forward” keeps Peregrine from feeling threatening. These small dislocations and modifications keep us, as readers, from being drawn into the sadness of what the narrator describes.

I found myself smiling during some of the most tragic parts of this novel, and I think Comyns intended this.

6.

In our discussion, we pounced about the zoom room, trying to find words to pin down the narrative voice. Naive? (No, because she knows the world is a wreck.) Stoic? (No, because she expresses dissatisfaction and hurt; she isn’t ashamed of expressing these things to the reader, only to the men she is sleeping with.) Passive? (No, because she actively makes choices to leave men, to start a new, to adopt a Fox, to raise her child…)

We couldn’t settle on a word for this voice. Lucy Scholes describes it as “fortitude of spirit” and “youthful enthusiasm.” Emily Gould evokes its “childlike qualities; she looks at everything in the world as though seeing it for the first time.” Ultimately, for me, I think the best word is “innocent”—not in the Puritan sense, not in sense which posits a relationship between chastity, purity, and virtue—in the sense of acknowledging the world’s impossible unfairness without judgement.

There are no moral lessons to be drawn from Sophia’s story—no redemptive salvations or purifications. The narrator remains the same person in better circumstances. Perhaps this is why the circumstantial feels so powerful and terrifying—everything happens without us. What keeps the traumatic themes from descending into melodrama is the use of voice, the shifting between reportage of trauma alongside a new recipe—the lack of inflection or change in tone when describing personal pain.

Sophia expects to suffer: it is part of how she knows the world, and this expectation renders suffering ordinary, common, mundane. Comyns’ stylization of unremarkable, extraordinary suffering is not redemptive in the sense that the narrator “learns a lesson”—it simply passes, seamlessly, from tragedy to country manor. There are no bootstraps. There is genuinely nothing to learn and no take-away.

Reading her in the present feels quaint like a blood clot is quaint: the threat is part of the landscape of the life. There is little self-pity or psychologizing. There is scant self-reflection on what she could have done better—the plot is driven by the narrator’s random attempts to respond to unpredictable reality. And it is reality which remains unstable in Our Spoons Were From Woolworths—it is the world’s change that serves as an antagonist—a feat all the more extraordinary for the technique the author uses to enchant us.

7.

To speak of Comyns’ style and voice is to enter the destabilized landscape with a narrator whose knowledge we trust for being so unknowing, so innocent, so blameless in many ways. By reporting artifice from the perspective of innocence, or the viewpoint of one who might believe it, the narrator exposes the artifice without raising her voice to didacticism. She makes innocence seem enviable. It is easy to confuse the art of writing from innocence with a formal innocence—an absence of experience in higher education.

“Comyns was 40 years old when she started publishing books,” Nathan Scott McNamara wrote. She had studied art, been a mother, managed a business, but she never studied literature in school, “where culturally inherited notions of how to construct a story might have guided her.” McNamara sees this absence of schooling as influential in Comyn’s voice.

But I’m not so sure more art-school would have changed her writing any more than it would have made her go easier on the bohemian set.I suspect Comyns read a fair bit. As Emily Gould has written, Comyns marked her time in London with libraries:

“[I] read until I was almost drunk on books, but my own writing became imitative and self-conscious. In the end, with great strength of mind, I destroyed all the stories and half-written novels I’d written over the years.”

So I suspect Comyns loved telling stories, and weaving new jingles from the gargoyles passed around bohemian circles. I suspect she wanted to blow dandelion fluff all over the stodgy, peer-reviewed desks, and this blowing, this seemingly-casual disruption of eloquent Bloomsburyesque language, was part of her aesthetic and formal commitment. And while McNamara is right that Comyns didn’t get “interviewed or profiled while she was alive,” I suspect she was well-connected enough to get interviews if she wanted them.

Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she wanted to write and to continue poking tiny newts into the eyes of literati and bohemian art circles.

8.

Which leaves me with how much I want to read Comyns into the novel. She enchants with authenticity, with gross social error, with misunderstanding, with quiet determination to the continue the unlikely story. I want to know what Comyns was like in real life—and the absence of interviews makes this elusive quest more intriguing.

Author Jane Gardam decided to find out for herself, in person. After learning Comyns had lived next door to her, Gardam starts trying to track Comyns down, finding “her movements as hard to track as those of her heroines and in some ways very like them: the adolescent marriages and escapes, the curious jobs, the poverty, the rescues, the bundled-up babies, the messy art school bohemianism, the fecklessness and the bravery. And the innocence.”

And the brilliant, fascinating innocence—yes.

Anyway, Gardam finally phoned Comyns, and was surprised by the invitation to come over that very afternoon and hang out. For Gardam, “the impetuous certainty” resembled Comyn’s early heroines:

“Even in the depths of loneliness and rejection they make lightning and often very unwise decisions. They seem to stem from a perpetual curiosity, an inner observing eye that even death — and there are horrible deaths — can’t conquer.”

“When I met Barbara Comyns for tea that day in her cheerful house in Twickenham the sun was pouring in through all its bright windows,” Gardam continues. There is no stockpile of skulls, no macabre undertone. When Gardam describes the end of her meeting with Comyns—and one can almost hear Sophia’s voice speaking in Comyns, asserting its amused, marveling tone:

As I was leaving, she said, ‘I expect you’ve heard that my husband was a spy? He worked in Whitehall with Kim Philby. Oh, Kim was a delightful man. So funny. Always here playing cards. Neither of us had a notion! When he disappeared — to Moscow, you know — they sacked my husband. They said that either he must have known and therefore was a traitor, or that he hadn’t spotted it and therefore must have been a fool.’

One imagines a scene from a novel, narrated in droll horror, the suspense emerging from the lightness by which horror dances from the narrator’s mouth. One imagines poor Jane Gardam, scouring the flowerpots for Barbara, and accidentally seeing Sophia. One imagines the upside-down novel which could have come from this—even this.

Last-page blues.

1.

I felt emptied this weekend when finishing Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory (translated by Sasha Dugdale). I always feel this way at the end of something incredible.

The last-past blues: that horrible, narrowing dread which signals the finitude of a book’s world, the cessation of a voyage, the reentry into everyday life.

I renounce it.

I grind my teeth and refusenik the ending with a pen. Sometimes I dash off a review, but mostly I save it for the room of the notebook, the particular room of endings where last lines and final images are collected, treasured, preserved—and revisited as thresholds for reentry.

2.

Backwards can be a way into things. I thought of this when reading Robert Walser this weekend, and reconsidering The Walk in light of one of my favorite book-musers, Joseph Schreiber, who summarizes the feel and texture so well:

The narrator is a writer and a self-styled flâneur whose environment is not the bustling metropolis, but a semi-rural/semi-suburban setting featuring bucolic scenery and peopled with eccentric characters. The novella opens with our hero leaving the gloomy isolation of his daily confrontation with the empty page, to set off on a series of errands. He is in a jaunty, positive mood. It’s evident that being out on the street is where he feels most free, confident, and at ease. Opinionated, observant, and self-conscious, the narrative that unfolds is marked by an excessive chattiness. Whether he is addressing the reader or someone he encounters, a certain manic energy drives the perambulator’s account….

The walk, itself, is deeply significant for Walser—who acknowledges the important of walking to his own writing. The walk is where one collects the details which turn into words—the impressions which become images, the clothing which signals social status, the world.

Maira Kalman’s “Thoughts on Robert Walser” (included in New Directions’ Christine Burgin series-version of Microscripts) is an ending that feels like a beginning, or a bouquet which gathers Walser without burying him, without marking a grave.

It is not wrong to begin without knowing where one is going.

Many of us follow the footprints which fascinate us into the forest of impossible things and emerge with our own story—a story that doesn’t replicate the feet which led us there.

What do I mean by any of this?

How is this connected?

What is connection when it feels most palpable with the dead?

“Did I pick flowers to lay them upon my sorrow?” I asked myself, and the flowers fell out of my hand.

This is second-to-last line of Robert Walser’s The Walk (translated by Susan Bernofsky and Christopher Middleton).

But it is also the beginning of an essay or a story. The flowers fell on a flagstone, the place where he asked me to meet him. His grandfather’s name chiseled across the top. And a new message written in black Sharpie which the rain had mostly washed-off.

My endings notebook is filled with these, and for me, they are writing prompts. The endings are the best beginnings, the most luscious counterpoints already keyed on the metronome, ready to be subverted, destabilized, stirred into stew or marble.

If you find yourself looking for a way into something, pick up your favorite books—the ones you love in unfathomable ways—and scour the last page for a line that feels like a gauntlet. A line that wants to become a bone in a necklace.

Don’t continue the book or create a serial (that’s a different prompt, a different way of dealing with loss, a different relationship to temporality). Instead, start something from that line in the key of X…. Start in the unforgettable key and see what happens.

"Autism Screening Questionnaire--Speech and Language Delay"

A National Poetry Month morning exercise inspired entirely by Oliver de la Paz’s "Autism Screening Questionnaire--Speech and Language Delay" (which you can also hear read by the poet at the link)—and by my incredible, gorgeous, brilliant son.

Getting ready for work and preparing to drop him off at the Montessori preschool which eventually became untenable to his thriving.

*

1. Did your child lose acquired speech?

He has always been polylingual. I mean: he learned the language of puppies, cats, eagles, furred creatures he admired. The march of the penguins—his tears when the daddy penguin dropped the egg. The words moved from his mouth to his fingers, shimmering, twinkling, circling the brown curls of his head.

2. Did your child produce unusual noises or infantile squeals?

He laughs with his whole body: it is as if the laugh lives inside him, inseparable from every nerve ending. A full-bodied laughter. He doesn’t point to things. Is this the question? What am I answering? He likes quiet. Unusual noises scare him. Football and fireworks scare him a lot. We try to leave town on those weekends.

3. Is your child’s voice louder than required?

I think I mentioned it is loud where we live. I never realized how loud lawnmowers and leafblowers could be, the endless screaming of inhuman machines. Given the surrounding sounds, his voice is very loud—his teachers say disruptive. My friends say: shouting. It is loud enough so he can hear himself speak over the noises in his head. My child’s voice is as loud as required. He could be a sportscaster, really.

He presses his invisible volume button when he needs to lower his voice in public spaces. The button is located right above his heart. Sometimes he presses it so intensely that he mutes himself.

4. Does your child speak frequent gibberish or jargon?

He loves to sing. He sing-songs. He uses his voice to untangle the sounds inside a word from their shell. Did you realize each word has a shell around it? He opens each one carefully, slowly, with his mouth. And then he repacks it. He puts the soft sounds back into the hard shell. He will do this for hours. Often he uses his fingers and hands to help.

5. Does your child have difficulty understanding basic things (“just can’t get it”)?

The toilet is connected to a series of underground pipes that swallow things. He has shown me this with a drawing. He puts toilet paper into the bowl and flushes with one hand over his ear, the other ear laying against his shoulder. It is true that the toilet paper disappears.

He started kindergarten late as a result. He was only fully potty-trained at six, and he will not use the school restroom. At home, he goes into the backyard, crouches near a tree to use the bathroom, the sparrows chairing overhead.

He cries and covers his ears when toilets flush. Always.

He says animals are his best friends. He trusts dogs and looks deep into their eyes. He does this even after one bites him on the ear and draws blood. I worry so much when people walk their dogs and he runs up to touch them. I worry those people don’t understand dogs are his best friends. I worry the dogs will hurt him again.

6. Does your child pull you around when he wants something?

He takes my hand to show me the ice cream. He stares at the freezer door until I open it. Then he looks directly at the ice cream and waits. The connection between our fingers which becomes a connected gaze is actually a blanket. We wrap ourselves in the blanket and eat birthday cake ice cream on the couch. Oh no—is that bad?

7. Does your child have difficulty expressing his needs and desires using gestures?

He takes my hand. He looks at things and waits. He crumples up on the floor when he is frustrated. After aligning all the ketchup and condiment bottles on the kitchen floor, he dances around them. Fingers twinkling. His eyes twinkle when his fingers twinkle in the air. The joy on his face is incredible—he knows what he needs to assemble it. He knows his joy’s patterns. The bottles, the trains arranged by color and size along the edge of a rug. His hands dancing, dancing.

8. Is there no spontaneous imitation of speech or communication from your child?

I don’t know what you mean. I know what he means. I know others don’t know what he means as I do not know what you mean by this question. Is this an answer? It feels like we aren’t communicating.

9. Does your child repeat words, parts of words, or tv commercials?

He repeats everything sing-songy. He loves vowels and fricatives. He repeats everything and takes it apart with such tenderness. Like a tiny monk studying the matins, the motion of music toward song. He chants a lot.

10. Does your child use repetitive language (same word or phrase over and over)?

Yes! Yes! He’s been doing this more and I read in a book that repetition is how kids learn new words so I’m excited and hopeful about his vocabulary. He loves repeating alphabet flashcards. He does it by himself. He sits in his teddy chair and repeats flashcards for hours. And train words. And “Outside.” He says “Outside” thirteen times in a row when he wants to go swing. He sings it. He sings it and stares at the window.

11. Does your child have difficulty sustaining a conversation?

Not with himself. He has monologues. He meanders into new places with them. Twinkling places. But he won’t answer questions unless they are related to trains. Or bottles. Or whatever is fascinating him at that moment.

12. Does your child use monotonous speech or wrong pauses?

I don’t know. I mean, yes. I mean he recites what is happening in his mind as if I am not there. When he is finished, he crawls into my lap and repeats the word mommy. I mean a word is an island that protects him from all the other words and mean kids at school.

13. Does your child speak the same to kids, adults, or objects (can’t differentiate)?

Yes. He was born egalitarian—he doesn’t he see status or authority or prestige or charisma. He loves puppies and penguins.

Last week, I had to leave work and get him from school because the principal said he was acting hysterically. In that office, he was so tiny, sitting in a large leather chair, his cheeks reddened, his eyes rimmed by tears. The principal said he disrespected a teacher and refused to apologize. He looked up at me, his lower lip trembling: “No, mommy, no. No no no. The teacher said dinosaurs were 2,000 years old. No no no mommy. The teacher lied. Lied lied lied.”

I took him home. He wouldn’t apologize until the teacher took back what she said. The teacher would not take it back. I’m not sure what will happen with school. I can’t differentiate between respect, apology, and fact.

14. Does your child use language inappropriately (wrong words or phrases)?

He said I love you for the first time recently. He said it to a tiger at the zoo. He stared through the bars and said, “Tiger, I love you.” He was so happy. His fingers danced around his eyes.

A conversation with Susana H. Case.

ALINA STEFANESCU: At a time when the poetry of place and locale is popular, your work remains conversant with art and popular culture, with a vast commercial world rather than a single place. The first section of this book, "Living Dolls," centers women, girls, and gendered female bodies.

I loved your off-ode to Maria Callas in "Diva (After Maria Callas)", and the way it courts controversy by suggesting that marriage reduces a woman's status. The poem is composed of two long stanzas, and the second stanza begins with a conditional turn:

But if you've abdicated your power,
agreeing to be the lesser "wife,"
you don't have the only thing
a man obsessed with power wants.
It doesn't matter that you feel 
like a woman--he will disappear for weeks,
forget to phone, call you
a cunt with a whistle in her throat.

I am so curious about the backstory to this, and whether this is a quotation--and if so, tell me everything. 

SUSANA CASE: Maria Callas was a classic “living doll,” objectified and emotionally abused. The “Diva” poem references the triangle that existed between Callas, Aristotle Onassis, and Jackie Kennedy. Although Callas was married to someone else, she fell in love with Onassis and began an affair, expecting that they would marry as soon as Onassis got his divorce, which was what he had promised. Of course, this is an old story in terms of how affairs with married men often unfold. Onassis ended up marrying Jackie Kennedy (whom he also objectified) instead.

There continued to be an off-on relationship between Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis—making her in essence “the lesser wife,” though they did not marry—and it was not a kind relationship. He was emotionally abusive, denigrating her looks and her voice. He said the usual abusive things: she had a big nose, she had fat legs, she was stupid—the things that spoke to her vulnerabilities, to women’s vulnerabilities in general. But above all, he denigrated her voice, and so, yes, that is a quote, and an ironic one, considering that in the larger world outside of their relationship, she was considered the greatest female opera singer ever, with hoards of adoring fans. The full sentence he said to her, according to Callas’s autobiography was: “You are just a cunt with a whistle in her throat, who is only good for fucking.” 

I don’t think marriage necessarily reduces a woman’s status, but I don’t think either Jackie Kennedy, who was the official wife, or Maria Callas, who was a sort of unofficial, lesser wife, gained in status by their association with Onassis, who seemed brutal and crude, enjoying humiliating Callas. I do think there is a type of man whom it is dangerous to be involved with for that reason, the type who does not view women as full human beings, the kind who want “Living Dolls." I do not feel that is true of all men, but entrenched power imbalances do make certain men dangerous.

“The Unpublished Poems of Marilyn Monroe” is another poem in the “Living Dolls” section that focuses on the discrepancy between a woman’s interior life and her public persona. Onassis never physically beat Callas, as far as I know, perhaps because this would have brought the private into the public sphere.

ALINA: This mixing of the public and private sphere seems central to voice in this section. I love how the first person voice is irreverent, iconoclastic, firmly femme, ready to roar or dance or wade through anything. There is the open eros of "Radiance" and the retrospective bemusement of "Skunk," which recounts a "tent-year" of cross-country travel with a fellow "wannabe hipster." And there is, as you mentioned, "The Unpublished Poems of Marilyn Monroe," and its poignant finale:

The public knew only the lines
of her cupid's bow,
but no silly woman would stand by Arthur Miller
as he refused to name Communists.

Marilyn, surrounded by 430 books
with penciled notes, writes to herself:
ah life they have cheated you.

And there is "Stress Test," a poem about the body and growing older, the worries of "congenital curse," which ends in that flirtatious thought about the young male doctor administering the test. How has time changed the way you inhabit your gender, both in the flesh and on the page? Have you noticed a change in your voice or in themes and subjects? What permissions--or retractions--did you find in this new collection?

SUSANA: Ah, a very perceptive question. This is my first collection in which I have two poems about doctor visits and the (my) body’s possible failings: “Stress Test,” which you mention, and “Metal.” I have always written about the body, it’s erotic potential, how that aligns or misaligns with love, as it does in “Radiance” when I say, “Lie with me, lie to me / until your tongue burns.” But I am aware of no longer being the very very young woman on the clothes-optional “Bonny Doon Beach.” So this dilemma exists, though I am aware of its social construction, of the way I’m affected by larger social views of gender and age.

I teach a course on gender at the university where I work, so I can pull out theories and constructs. But in my poems, I am still very interested in writing about eros, and I am still writing in a decidedly femme voice. Yet, as I draw upon my own experience—not solely, but life does offer material for art and poetry—my own experience is changing. So I give myself now permission to write about the effect of time upon my body. On the other hand, I am the woman who doesn’t leave my apartment without her eyeliner/lipstick on, even under my pandemic face shield/mask, so it’s clear I’m not yet down for the count and not going down without the fight of my life. I have given myself permission to start to write about this. 

On the other hand, in both “Stress Test” and “Metal,” there’s an underlying attempt at humor, as if I still can’t believe fully that this is the position I’m in, and so I’ll veer into thinking of the young male doctor as a possible, though clearly improbable, date, or shift from an MRI to thinking about a fashionable jacket. These are a defense mechanism turned into poems. I give myself permission to continue to be a disruptive force in my writing, despite the passage of time. I continue to be interested in the experiences of young girls on the threshold of becoming (hopefully) strong women, though, sadly, that doesn’t always happen.

One of Frances Glessner Lee’s “uncanny crime scene dioramas.” (Source)

ALINA: The "Crime Scenes" section focuses on the art of Frances Glessner Lee, who created the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, a series of small 3d crime scene dioramas used in the 1940's and 1950's as teaching tools for criminal investigation. As teaching tools, each Nutshell is what William L. Hamilton called a "a whodunit without a who" (in his 2018 NYT pieces), and each scene includes a cornucopia of possible evidentiary materials, motives, and suspects. 

I was riveted by the speculative form of these poems and the way in which they  expanded the ekphrastic form while interrogating traditional gender roles. I also loved the prose poem forms which complicate the crime scene interpretations inserting Glessner into the tableaus. For example, Glessner's "Three-Room Dwelling" is interpreted in the lineated poem, "No Sign of Activity," yet on the back of this page, there is a three-stanza prose poem that implicates Glessner, herself:

Examine the tableau. She's stuck in a time when a lady didn't go to school. 
Glessner Lee is that lady. Instead of making lace, she makes miniature crime-scene models, dollhouses
full of bloodstains, grime, five- to six-inch corpses--female, mostly--stuffed, dressed, and painted.

Why did you decide to include these additional meditations on Glessner? Are they part of the poems on the previous page or something else? How did you decide on the formal contrasts in this section? Are there other writers who have inspired you in this mode? If so, who? 

SUSANA: The prose poems on the life of Frances Glessner Lee are separate, but untitled on the page. They’re titled in the Table of Contents as Frances 1 to Frances 5. They are, indeed, meditations on the life of Glessner Lee, except for Frances 5, which contains a recipe for a cocktail named in her honor. If you like cocktails it’s a good one! The prose poems are on even-numbered pages more as a layout device than for any other reason, as this section also includes some images of the “Nutshells,” and those are also on even-numbered pages, designed to face the ekphrastic poems they inspired. I became intrigued with her dioramas after they went on exhibition a few years ago at the Renwick (Smithsonian American Art Museum). She created 20, but one has been lost. All but one of the rest are owned by Harvard and on loan to the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, where they are still actively used as forensic training tools.

I became interested in the woman behind the art. Though she never intended them as artworks, they are meticulous, aesthetic constructions, created by what, then and now, are viewed as traditional female crafts, sewing, knitting, etc., i.e., something “lesser” than painting and sculpture. I see her as someone who turned a socially-defined weakness into a strength, and, as such, I became interested in the woman behind the works. I wanted to weave back and forth between the ekphrastic imagery and speculative looks at the life at Glessner Lee.

So much of early twentieth century women’s lives has not been well-documented, and this is true of Glessner-Lee’s life as well, but there is some material in the record. That her family nicknamed her “Tarantula,” because she wore all black intrigued me. What kind of family does that? As someone who lives in New York City, I’d say 90% of my wardrobe is black, but I can’t imagine anyone in my own family nicknaming me “Tarantula” for that reason. I feel for her words, “This has been a lonely and rather terrifying life I have lived." I felt she needed to be a part of the series on the dioramas, though I bring her into the ekphrastic poems only a couple of times, there to shift perspective, and otherwise keep details about her life in the interwoven prose poems. 

Carol Guess wrote a series of prose pieces inspired by the dioramas, and she’s quoted at the beginning of this section of my book. We interpret the personae in the crime scenes differently and invent stories about the works in variant ways, which is interesting. I have more that’s explicitly about Glessner Lee and the interweaving of the two forms is my own invention, as far as I know. 

In terms of other poets who have inspired me here, I don’t mean to compare myself to Wislawa Szymborska, a superlative poet, one of my favorites, but my mind goes to a poem of hers, “Two Monkeys by Bruegel.”

Two Monkeys by Brueghel
(by Wislawa Szymborska, trans. from the Polish by Magnus Kryski)

I keep dreaming of my graduation exam:
in a window sit two chained monkeys,
beyond the window floats the sky,
and the sea splashes.

I am taking an exam on the history of mankind:
I stammer and flounder.

One monkey, eyes fixed upon me, listens ironically,
the other seems to be dozing--
and when silence follows a question,
he prompts me
with a soft jingling of the chain.

She’s writing about the painting, but she’s also writing about the human condition. For me, the crime scene are objective correlatives of human relationships, tragic as they may be, and Glessner Lee’s life tells us something as well about gender and human relationships. Of course, all ekphrastic work needs to go beyond the art that inspires it.

Frances Glessner Lee, making dioramas.

ALINA: In "Laundry Line" (which interprets Glessner's "Attic" scene), we see how the tools of homemaking are used to end lives. 

Is this what happens when you go to grey?
Wrapped in her shawl, she's roped
to a rafter with white laundry line.

And then, the prose meditation seems to implicate Glessner in a similar masculinist gaze:

Glessner Lee notes the correct amount of bloating among those in her 
down-at-heel homes and rooms, victims led astray by desire and vice. The 
inherent vice of materials: degradation over time.

There are multiple layers of objectification in this sequence, and they seem to pivot on aging and degradation, as contrasted with youth and, somehow, purity. How do traditional constructions of gender indict women for aging? And how has this changed, if at all, since Glessner's time? And what does objectification mean when a gender-identifying woman, like Glessner, is involved? Is victimhood, itself, a form of objectification when it comes to violent crimes? I'm interested in your thoughts on this, including the questions that inspire you.

SUSANA: I meant to play with the notion of degradation (noun) and degrading (adjective and verb) with respect to vice in the prose component. Does women’s invisibility as they age leads to a body among various household objects—spinning wheel, old lamp, abandoned childhood doll, etc.—as if she is just another object in the attic, one expected to go away quietly (suicide)? Or was this an act of murder made to look like a suicide, taking advantage of our expectations of the undesirability of an older women? 

I don’t think women are as severely constricted as they were in Glessner’s Lee’s time. We are hopefully going to have a female vice president, and she may very well be an older woman. But already, the media is talking about ambition, as if it’s a bad thing. Glessner was bright, wealthy enough to attend college in that period, but her brother got sent off to Harvard, while she stayed home (not her choice). There are more choices now. Yet, age continues to lead to invisibility. 

Remember Yann Moix, the French author, a fifty-year-old man who said last year in a Marie-Claire interview that women over fifty were too old to love? Maybe it was for publicity, but there was quite a reaction. He was called an imbecile and worse—by women. Where were the men speaking up in defense of older women? Of course, there have been some, but then somehow the men end up sounding fetishistic, so once again, the woman is objectified. 

Victimhood as a form of objectification in violent crime is an interesting concept. The victim meets the criteria: inert, lacking autonomy, treated as owned, subjectivity denied, silenced, etc.) Now how about the women who uses those objectified bodies to construct dioramas and how about the writer (the poet) who uses those objectified bodies to make poems? Glessner Lee uses the objectification to aid in the investigation of violent crimes, often against women. And the poet, too, may be guilty of using these objectified bodies, except that she gives voice to the silenced victim, attempts to infer each one's experiences and feelings. I think that might be the difference. 

I also think that female victims are often looked at as having triggered their own destruction. Victim-precipitated homicide is the technical term, and it can be used to reduce the offense. Notions of lost innocence, impurity, impact interpretations of violence. As I write in “Body in the Closet,” another of the poems based upon Frances Glessner Lee’s dioramas, “Female sexuality / begets violence; the hooker / always gets it in the end." On the other hand, the virginal teenager in “Bite Marks” is violated as well. 

ALINA: Growing up, for me, involves feeling grateful for the words of female-identifying persons who have stumbled these streets before me. It's hard to get outside the present context—to interrogate the lines between the past and present without feeling somehow complicit in replicating them—and I suspect that remains an issue and a challenge for many poets writing trauma and sexual violence, whether personal or social, so it's helpful to hear how other poets navigate that complexity.

You have been a vibrant presence in Zoom readings lately--how do you feel about the ways pandemic has changed the literary landscape? Are you working on any current projects? And who should we be reading right now?

SUSANA: My interests in gender and power imbalances are long-standing, though I don’t mean to suggest that all power imbalances are gender-based. The world changes so rapidly, and yet we are witness to a kind of repetition of events, the smaller and larger incursions upon the self that result from human relationships, even, and maybe even especially human relationships grounded in love.

People can have the best of intentions and still mess things up. But because not everyone has the same humanity, and because, particularly in the United States, we are an ahistorical culture, we have negotiated the same power imbalances over and over again. It’s a challenge to avoid repetition, and yet, witness is inevitably repetitive in these circumstances. 

There’s some support in the research for the idea that trauma leaves a chemical trace on a person’s genes, making it inheritable, an epigenetic alteration of the expression of one's genes. Although it’s not yet clear if this is plausible, the idea of it—and maybe the idea of it is a kind of poetry more than it is a science—is that how stress from trauma is handled passes down through generations in this way. So maybe replication of past inequities, and their resultant stressors, in the present is inevitable as we all replicate our traumatized selves.

I know that many poets hunger for the time when we are back in small rooms with our audiences. Poets do spend a lot of time in small rooms. For me, Zoom, and the various other vehicles for virtual readings I have done events on—Crowdcast, Facebook Live, Gotomeeting, and Streamyard—have enlarged my reach geographically. Within six months of Dead Shark on the N Train’s release, I’m slated to do the number of events that took place over a two year period after my book, Drugstore Blue was released in 2017, and that’s without leaving my apartment. I’ve also had access to readings I would otherwise not have the opportunity to attend because of lack of proximity. So I rather like it. I do, however, miss seeing some of my poet friends in person. I wonder if hug-greetings will ever return?

In terms of what I’m working on now, I continue to write poems about girlhood, and I have been writing poems as well about the sixties, through which Charles Manson, and rock music from that period are threaded. Until recently, I thought these were separate projects, but I’ve come to realize that the two themes converge and that really what I am writing about is a loss of innocence. I have been reading Alexis Rhone Fancher, who writes with the kind of assertiveness as a woman I relate to—Junkie Wife and also The Dead Kid Poems. Jennifer Franklin is one of the strongest women I know and I would read her book No Small Gift, if you haven’t already. And I’d strongly recommend the male poet, Mervyn Taylor, a friend and fellow press-mate, who has News of the Living forthcoming soon from Broadstone Books, and also has just had his book Country of Warm Snow released by Shearsman Books. He is the best writer of narrative poetry of his generation. 

Also, I’ve co-edited, with Margo Taft Stever, the anthology I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, forthcoming in 2022 from Milk and Cake Press.

*

SUSANA H. CASE is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Dead Shark on the N Train in 2020 from Broadstone Books. Drugstore Blue (Five Oaks Press) won an IPPY Award in 2019. She is also the author of five chapbooks, two of which won poetry prizes. Her first collection, The Scottish Café, from Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press. Poems by Case have appeared in Calyx, Catamaran, The Cortland Review, Portland Review, Potomac Review, Rattle, RHINO and many other journals. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology in New York City. She can be reached at www.susanahcase.com. Dead Shark on the N Train can be purchased  directly from the publisher here. 

Susana H. Case. Dead Shark on the N Train. Frankfurt, KY: Broadstone Books, 2020. 85 pages.

Of the air: 10 fragments.

1.

“I come from a place where the hand of the wind gives shape to everything. All plants are in permanent sway and bow to it, trees bent over, all objects necessarily weighed or battened down, stillness nearly unheard of except in those green-­skied moments before the tornados come.”

-Anne Boyer, “The Heavy Air”

2.

Simone Weil uses the expression airless-merry-go-round to describe Rose Luxembourg’s efforts to include female bodies in Communist Party policies and platforms. Weil means to address the CP’s abandonment of female-gendered bodies, and her words bring to mind a carousel in a park with the women falling off horses, smiling, lying like dead flowers in circles for men.

I love Rosa Luxembourg. And Weil. And carousels which are not airless.

3.

In Bucharest, Paul Celan knows his parents are dead; Bukovina holds nothing but ghosts and survivor’s guilt. As for the subject, the survivor does not have time to ask which part of self has been left, or what will continue. He writes a few prose poems which his friend Petre Solomon admires. In one, the narrator describes a gold chandelier with thousands of arms that will save him and his Jewish friend, Rafael:

You will climb up one of its arms so that, once I have lifted it high up in the air, you can fasten it on to the sky. Before the break of dawn, people will be able to save themselves by flying there. I will show them the way, and you will receive them. 

I climbed on one of the arms, Rafael moving from one arm to another, touching them in turn, the chandelier began to rise. A leaf settled on my forehead, right in the space where my friend's gaze had touched me, a maple leaf. I looked around: this cannot be the sky. Hours pass and I find nothing. I know: people gather below me on the ground, Rafael touched them with his slender fingers, and they too rose towards the sky, and I still have not stopped rising. 

Where is the sky? Where?

Something appears in this translation which does not exist in the original Romanian text.

The way air nestles inside despair: a gift of translation.

Elegy of Malik Ibn Ar-Rayb (2010) - Iraqi Artist SADIK KWAISH ALFRAJI (صادق كويش الفراجي)

4.

Do not ridicule yourself if you are incapable of providing proof. Air is air and does not require a certificate of blood. Do not regret! Do not regret what you missed when you took a nap; recording the names of invaders In the book of sand. Ants narrate and the rain erases. When you wake up, do not regret that you were dreaming and asked no one: Are you a pirate?

-Mahmoud Darwish

It is difficult to stop reading Sinan Antoon’s translation of Mahmoud Darwish's In the Presence of Absence (Archipelago Books), first published in Arabic in 2006.

Darwish would die two years later, and the book, itself, was written by a man who sensed this: a poet staring at his end. By this point, Darwish had already come close to dying twice—which he wrote about in his epic poem, Mural— but here, in the presence of his own absence, "the living I bids farewell to its imagined dying other in sustained poetic address divided into twenty untitled sections," each of which addresses a theme from the poet's past.

Drawing on the classical Arabic tradition of self-elegy, Darwish addresses a “You” which is both spiritual and embodied, both placed and displaced, a continuous unsettlement.

But it was Malik Ibn Ar-Rayb, a Muslim Arab poet from Tamim in Al-Basra, who introduced the self-elegy as a poetic form in 676 AD. Returning home from a trip with Saeed Uthman ibn Affan, the 3rd caliph’s son., Ar-Rayb was bitten by poisonous snake. Anticipating his own death, he wrote his own elegy.

Not entirely “a certificate of blood”: a poem as a form of evidence which repudiates the elegy others wish to lay over a body silenced by death.

5.

“What is overhead is not exactly free; it is merely unevenly owned. Nations claim airspace, militaries plot no-­fly zones, and clouds reside without permits. Ideas are the correlate of air. Clouds are air’s objectifications, and, as perspiration and respiration, air is where effort goes once our effort is spent. This crowded air is the stage of everything dematerialized’s abiding dematerialization. Everything solid melts into it.”

-Anne Boyer, “The Heavy Air”

6.

“Ar-Rayb conceives his own death and, under fear that he will inevitably cease to be, starts mourning his own loss. He invokes his poetry to help him visit his far away home to meet his family, kinsfolk, beloved, and people, and he implants into the essence of his verses his happy, honorable, and worth-remembering past. His mind is overloaded with thoughts on unfulfilled desires and dear people, animals, places, deeds, and qualities which his fear of death generates and of which death will deprive him. As he recalls his homeland and beloved, he explains the heroic and religious motives for which he left his sons, fellow people and possessions, while at the same time wishing that news of his dying would be passed back to home. The poem’s varied elements and the poet’s numerous superficially paradoxical thoughts simultaneously coexist, each leading to, and led to by, the other in the sense of Freudian association, as if they are all felt at once. He thinks of past and present altogether, and momentary sensation overlaps and intermingles with recalled elements.” 

-Nayef Ali. Al-Joulan, “Aesthetic Dying: The Arab's Heroic Encounter with Death” (PDF)

7.

In an end-note, Sinan Antoon offers insight on a particular word’s translation. While Mahmoud Darwish used the word "barzakh" (which the translator elects to render as "threshold"), the original word invokes the eschatological word for the boundary between the human world and the spiritual one.

It is a word often used “by mystics.” It is a border of sorts.

8.

Mahmoud Darwish describes his childhood, the magic of discovering words, the beginning of the poet’s fascination with language. As he learns to write words in school, he finds that they establish a relationship:

“The sky, too, becomes one of your personal belongings if you do not misspell it."

And later:

"You become words. ..you do not know the difference between utter and utterance. You will call the sea an overturned sky."

9.

I can’t find an order when trying to compare the sky to the ground. The horizon is an illusion. It is a lie. Sky and earth remain disconnected, never quite touching.

10.

I stood on the bridge in the sky on the bridge between
Two buildings     at the second floor but in
Between the buildings so in neither one

But in the sky      on the second floor in the sky
Barely I had just barely     stepped from the
Nordstrom to cross to the food court barely and I

-Shane McRae, “Between”

You can read this poem in its entirety at Yale Review.

Empathy complexes & crafts in recent readings.

I. Technologies of enchantment

In this video, Ba-Benzélé persons, members of a pygmy tribe in the African Congo, demonstrate the Hindewhu, a style of singing/whistle-playing which announces the return from a hunt. Michael Clayton says the word hindewhu is “an onomatopoeia of the sound of a performer alternately singing pitched syllables and blowing into a single-pitch whistle made from the twig of a papaya tree.”

Anthropologist Jerome Lewis has described the polyphonic, polyrhythmic music of the Ba-Benzélé pygmies as a "technology of enchantment," where one individual voice is lost in awareness of the community, creating a sort of vocal communion.

The term comes from the work of Alfred Gell, a British social anthropologist whose most influential work concerned art, language, symbolism and ritual. Gell’s “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology” linked the spectator’s response to a work of art to their socialization, particularly how the spectator has been condition to perceive the technical processes which produce the artwork:

The moral significance of the work of art arises from the mismatch between the spectator's internal awareness of his own powers as an agent and the conception he forms of the powers possessed by the artist. In reconstructing the processes which brought the work of art into existence, he is obliged to posit a creative agency which transcends his own and, hovering in the background, the power of the collectivity on whose behalf the artist exercised his technical mastery.

At the heart of this mastery is the ability to induce a transcendence, or a state which lifts the individual outside their particular lived experience to partake a shared or cosmic experience. A communion. An eternity tasted inside a bread crumb. A we invoked by a Gregorian chant. A simultaneous sense of at-oneness and nonexistence.

“Just as money is the ideal means of exchange, magic is the ideal means of technical production,” Gell writes, arguing for an expansive understanding of valorizations outside capitalist markets. He notes that “money values pervade the world of commodities, so that it is impossible to think of an object without thinking at the same time of its market price.” In the same way, “magic, as the ideal technology, pervades the technical domain in pre-scientific societies.”

Modernity craves this we profusely—to the point of rabid nationalisms, to the point of hysteria inside stadiums where men kick balls for money—and one must wonder if the exhausting individualistic conception of accountability and agency generated by late Protestant capitalism has only increased the fever for communal ecstasy.

II. Empathy’s industrial complexities

In her Bookforum review of George Saunders’ recent fiction craft book, Russian scholar Jennifer Wilson headlined "The Empathy Industrial Complex" as a facet of American fiction—the belief that fiction can create empathy, and writers are part of an empathy-marketing industry. Wilson doesn’t like it. She thinks the focus on empathy in Saunders undercuts the how Russian writers "enable a critique of Western civilization and English society." In a sense, this maps on the socialist realist critique of literature as a bastion of bourgeois sentimentality that ignores social and structural issues, and sets aside the responsibility to create a new man.

Wilson is correct that Russian critiques of the West in fiction are not "roped off from discourse about race, gender, or empire,"  but her critique of Saunders revolves around the transcendence that we read into Russian writers. For example, she doesn't like that Saunders de-politicizes the anti-feudalist message of Ivan Turgenev's story, "The Singers." The reluctance to pass judgment, for Wilson, places Saunders in the let's-report-on-Trump supporters category of what she calls "the empathy industrial complex." Unfortunately, by failing to define this category, one gets the sense that it could be anything from a chain prayer spam to a nonprofit that reunites undocumented families.

Empathy matters. Fiction structures how we think about the world. Family, love, community, and interpersonal relations are often reflections of how socialization evolves in cultures. Granting Saunders' focus on the skaz tradition as a vehicle for multiple realities, Wilson suspects that the focus on narrative voice leads to a sort of tactical concession--that the fiction writer represents humanity, in all its grotesque banalities.  From here, she jumps to the assertion that Saunders' craft leads to the conclusion that Trumpists aren't racist so much as confused, lost in the loop, over-identifying with the collective We of late-Americanist capitalism.

Wilson's rue is not amoral--she hates seeing white racist as the victims they paint themselves to be. But the question of didacticism in fiction remains fuzzy. How much does the fiction writer owe the world? And what is critic’s role in the denomination of ethical voices?

III. Fiction scripts us

The arguments for the role or duty of fiction often overlook the extent to which fiction already socializes and creates the scripts by which we read and interpret one another’s actions. And I wonder what Gell would say about social media if he had not died in 1997, before the rise of virtual romance and screen-generated interpersonal relations.

In “On love,” Gell noted that conversation plays a critical structural role in modern British love, where “chatting-up” enacts a slow information striptease, a revelation of incremental information in the context of urban spaces and communities where residents hold little in common, or share little of their actual day-to-day lives. It is because modern humans are strangers to one another that how we disclose—and what we choose to convey—remains impactful and significant. In the lovers’ conversation, the “torrent of confidential information” usually occurs in person (and one wonders, again, how social media and email have increased the stakes of disclosure while simultaneously lowering the value of “emotional capital”).

“The effect of love, in modern society, is to reproduce, fictionally, the kind of pre-structured affinities which are taken for granted in a society like Umeda, thus converting the arbitrary into the inevitable,” Gell writes. Because there is no “structural predestination”—no tradition of parents arranging a marriage, no local rituals to rely upon—modern love has to invent itself from scratch, or rather, from the social scripts offered by culture. Hence the “fictionalization of love”:

…. the fact that the confidences that couples exchange are provided for them, structurally, because it is structurally necessary that these confidences by exchanged. Modern love would be unthinkable without fiction, romantic fiction in particular. 

Since the structural exchange of secrets forms the script which couples accept in order to play the game called modern love, one also wonders how “flirting” behavior is misread or misunderstood based on the individual fictions consumed by players. Is it wrong for the female-identifying player to reach towards the first kiss in heteronormative couplings? How has queerness inflected flirtation behavior?

“Each modern couple has to devise for itself a history which will justify its existence as a couple, on the basis of zero personal experience;” each couple makes use of the scripts offered by novels, magazines, television, sitcoms, soap operas, movies, and media; each navigates across the canyon of their chosen templates. “Love-fiction” is not less cool or authentic than lived experience precisely because it informs, shapes, and interprets lived experience. To quote Gell:

Fiction is a giant simulation, an external thought- process, which provides individuals with the scripts they cannot do without and which non-fictional experience cannot supply. This means that we cannot put love-fiction to one side as if it were less authentic than real life. Fiction is, where modern societies are concerned, what genealogy is in those societies which have marriage rules, i.e. the means of producing the relationships on which social life depends. Fiction, re-enacted as real life, produces the histories on which relationships and society at large are grounded.

Noticing how my own ideas of love and amatory relations have changed over decades, I’m inclined to agree with Gell. There’s an article in the current Atlantic Monthly about how the reality TV show Sister Wives inspired other persons to seek and sustain polygynous relationships—no word on polyandrous ones, however (and some theorists would argue that polygamy, itself, is so deeply patriarchal and essentialist that polyandry isn’t compatible with it).

Gell takes arranged marriage as a structural sensibility which exists in tight-knit communities. Westerners, with their love-at-first sight socializations, believe that love generates the relationship, but cultures with arranged marriages believe that the relationship generates love. In Bengal, where arranged marriages were common, access to Western media led youth culture to reject these traditions for the love-scripts they consume on television.

The production of love as knowledge is dynamic—it has social, emotional, structural, and economic repercussions. In cultures where arranged marriages predominate, bisexuality and queerness often remain illegible, secret, and persecuted. For Gell, the future of modern love includes a different form of match-making, a technical replacement of community by science, where couples may be matched according to genetic profiles or information deemed “scientific.” I think we see this in multiple online dating and match-making apps, and I wonder how these have evolved into “technologies of enchantment” and constructed affinities or group affiliations.

* Also, highly recommend Bergita Bugarija’s short fiction, “Summer of Bombs” (Pleiades) for a look at how Russian novels and bourgeois sentiment inflect the lives of those at war, those living in fear of bombs, those struggling to survive and clinging to the most ordinary parts of human existence—the hope of some exalted interpersonal communion.

Alfred Gell puts forward an anthropological theory of visual art seen as a form of instrumental action: the making of things as a means of influencing the thoughts and actions of others. The anthropology of art is here reformulated as the anthropology of a category of action: Gell shows how art objects embody complex intentionalities and mediate social agency. He explores the psychology of patterns and perceptions, art and personhood, the control of knowledge, and the interpretation of meaning, drawing upon a diversity of artistic traditions-European, Indian, Polynesian, Melanesian, and Australian.

Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. With a Foreword by Nicholas Thomas. Publisher Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998.

[Source: Monoskop]

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas: Unreliable narratives (or part 2).

The unreliable narrator

"To the Reader"-- signed by Bras Cubas – says it was written "with the pen of mirth and the ink of melancholy." One of the words that kept circulating in the #APSTogether discussions of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas was “unreliable narrator.”

In fiction, the unreliable narrator conventionally offers a first-person viewpoint whose version of the story cannot be trusted. Since the first-person narrator is our filter—the measure by which we judge the verity of the account—we tend to expect “truth” from this speaker. When we talk about unreliable narrators, we are generally referring to their deceptive account of the truth, and this adds suspense and tension to the story.

I am fascinated by how sincerity can be modulated in narration, especially where unreliable narrators influence our reading. In #APSTogether discussion, the unreliable narrator was assumed—and readers gave their thoughts on how Machado used the narrator, or what he intended to do by using an unreliable narrator.

Translator Flora Thomson-DeVeaux focused on the unreliable narrator as a man watching himself watch a woman, and she noted that something in that part of the translation “went haywire,” as the narrator is showing us his projections on to the woman rather than showing us the woman. On her view, everyone in the novel represents Bras Cubas in some sense, and the narrator is somehow aware of that.

“Sincerity” in context: Slavery and the Dungeon

The narrator knows what he is doing, I think, in digging his own grave. Or, it seems as if Machado helps Bras dig the grave of his meaningless existence with relish, adding to it the philosophical notions of social Darwinism that helped sustain economic hierarchies, including the based on slavery.

When Rohter brought up the word sincerity, I wondered whether (or how) that could be gauged, given the narrator’s commitment to representing the systems of slavery, status, and politics in Rio. Certainly the narrator stays true to his role as a dandy-like caricature of the nobility-aspiring class (Not "dandy," says Thomson-DeVeaux, but "pintolagrete", or man about town, as Grossman translated it.)

In “A Note on on the Calabouço,” Thomson-DeVeux offers insight into her meticulous translation, but also the systemic silences which characterized Machado’s time. She explains the translation of a single word—calabouco—to “Dungeon.” She decided to capitalize the word in order to disrupt the silence around its history—to bring this word forward as a designator of a particular time, place, and social practice.

The word comes up in Cubas’ description of his slave-smuggling brother-in-law, Contrim as a “paragon” of virtue:

People accused him of avarice, and I believe they were right; but avarice is nothing more than the exaggeration of a virtue, and virtues should be like budgets: better a surplus than a deficit. As he had a very dry manner, he had enemies, and they went so far as to accuse him of savagery. The only thing they alleged on this score was that he often sent slaves to the calabouço, from where they came down streaming with blood; but, apart from the fact that he only sent runaways and incorrigibles, it so happens that, having dealt for so long in the smuggling of slaves, he had become somewhat used to the slightly harsher treatment required by that sort of business, and one cannot honestly attribute to a man’s original nature that which is the pure effect of social relations.

Here, the narrator suggests the charge of “savagery” held against Contrim stems from the fact that he sent slaves to the calabouço, but the narrator insists that he only did this with “runaways and incorrigibles;” and Contrim’s experience as a long-time slave owner offered him insight into which slaves most deserved this unfortunate treatment. The systemic evil of slavery—the way Cubas narrates it—creates a mood of factual resignation where virtue, itself, becomes a description of success within the system where one is expected to support the dominant class rather than operating according to personal ethical considerations.

Thomson-DeVeux reveals that slaveowners delegated corporal punishment to the state after the royal decree of November 16, 1693 forbid owners from shackling or imprisoning slaves. A royal decree also established the ”workhouse” or dungeon where slaves could be “humanely” punished by men with whips would be compensated for their efforts. Until then, in 17th century Brazilian prisons, both enslaved persons and citizens were confined in the same prisons for violations of the penal code. The Dungeon was different—it was created expressly for the purpose of punishing “runaway slaves”—it’s role was to somehow civilize the brutality of violence by hiding it behind the walls of a state institution. Contrim could remain a paragon of virtue, or what Thomson-DeVeux calls “a man who outsources bloodletting, keeping his own hands clean and sparing his neighbors’ ears.”

Alongside this, the “whipping system” existed as a state-created tool which served the economic and security needs of a dominant class (and its hierarchy) by using violence to control labor. Only in 1832 did Brazil begin to require that slaveowners specify the alleged “infarction” committed by the enslaved person subject to punishment.

The relationship between the Dungeon and the prison system which replaced it carries into the present, where Thomson-DeVeux says that over one-third of Brazil’s prison population consists of pre-trial detainees. Those who are stigmatized by criminality, or the allegation of criminality, are described as bandido in the media, and the same brush is used to tarnish reputations of those who argue for pre-trial and prison reform in Brazil.

How race “maps”: Brazil and US

In the discussion, Rohter said contemporary American discussion of marginalized persons has helped to make Machado relevant as “a writer of color and a Latino.” He also said it was interesting to compare how race is mapped in Brazil with how it is mapped, or translated, in the US. Thomson-DeVeux noted that this novel experienced a resurgence in the early 1950’s when translator William Grossman published an essay in the NAACP’s paper, The Crisis, which identified Machado de Assis as a “great negro writer.” To this, Rohter added that race classifications in the US and Brazil are very different (though they seem to be moving closer to the US map in Brazil). Grossman's depiction of Machado as a "negro writer" might have been strange to the author, himself, who identified as a "mulatto." A Brazilian translator present for the discussion confirmed that "mulatto" was the more common word to Brazilians, also "moreno" meaning "dark-skinned."

“But the white slave owning mobster that the author has created is not colorblind," added Thomson-DeVeux. Slavery was gratuitous, a sort of background noise that existed as part of the landscape in Brazil at the time. The scene with the whip and the freed slave who buys his own slaves and competes for power by whipping them, is one of the most tragic in the book. For me, it’s tragedy lies in the absolute power of the system to replicate hierarchies that aren't questioned or refuted. For a formerly-enslaved person to whip their own slave does not leave us with an ethics or an out—it leaves us only with the System.

Machado’s appropriate cynicism meets Bras’ sincerity

Rohter thinks the end is “devastating in its cynicism (“I came out even with life,” he avers, because of “the final negative in this chapter of negatives.” No spoiler alert here: let’s just say that his final sentence is devastating in its cynicism”). Since the novel ends without giving any meaning to the narrator's life, Rohter wonders if  this is because the author went straight to writing his best novella, The Psychiatrist, immediately after this.

But Thomson-DeVeaux maintains that the ending is true to the form – the ending will be abrupt when you ride the bumpy hippo.

I would argue that the ending is actually the opposite of cynical. A narrator involved in competing for status in the Brazilian system of enslaved labor should have a meaningless life—there should be no beautiful meaning or continuance after having been compromised to the point of nihilism, after wallowing in a friend’s eugenicist Humanitist survival-of-the-fittest “philosophy”….. Machado does not promise us meaning in this memoir-novel. In fact, he delivers on his promise of showing us how the rich and fabulous die with only the perfume of blood on their hands.

When we speak of unreliable narrators, we assume the narrator is lying or hiding—but I think Machado’s narrator is devastating precisely because he hides none of the moral nihilism at the heart of Brazilian 18th century society. He writes straight into its vanity and puts on its airs. He doesn’t repent or ever see through his own mistakes. He never questions the system in which he wants to succeed.

If honesty is essential to sincerity, then Bras Cubas is both honest and sincere. He is a social striver torn between the duty of leaving an inheritance (through children) and the magic thing/philosophy he hopes to become famous for (thus gaining the status that eludes him). It is because we want Machado to repudiate these things that we hold his narrator, Bras Cubas, to be unreliable.

There are also questions how Victorian or European notions of “sincerity” map onto narrative form. For  example, is Fernando Pessoa an unreliable or insincere narrator? Is he, when writing that mix of poetry and philosophy, being sincere? The standards of the European bildungsroman or confessional doesn’t always map onto the expectations of innovative fiction—and perhaps we narrow the reading (or narrow what we can experience from it) by relying on those constructs.

Because the class system and the focus on status is central to Machado’s novel—and because Machado allows it to exist as “part of life,” as a sort of naturalism—I was intrigued by Brandon Taylor recent his sub stack comments on Zola:

What if the active tension at the heart of most Millennial Novels is between Naturalism and Existentialism, between Zola and Camus. What if the Millennial Novel seeks to answer the question of whether or not a person’s experience is actually unique and individual or whether it is truly just an emanation from the various systems we are subjected to. I think some novels tend to fall on the side of the purely naturalistic—that is, race, gender, sexuality, class, and on are bounding phenomena that determine how people will treat you and what you can expect. And some are more existential. That is, a life is unique, that one’s choices are not predetermined.

Perhaps, in a more extensive sense, the question of sincerity and narrative voice also emerges here.

I wish I had more time to think about it—though I will probably share a brief summary with some themes and points of interest next week. In the meantime, you can cross-reference some of the ways in which Machado uses these words in Thomson-DeVeaux’s translation with this index.

The Brás Cubas index.

I have a habit of adding indexes to my notebooks while reading.

Because I enjoyed this book so much, I decided to type this strange index assembled from personal saliencies in the 2020 version of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, written by Machado de Assis, translated by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux, and published by Penguin.

In my dream, I asked the powerful Penguin perhaps to find a way to format the chapter titles without eliminating so many page numbers (for those of us who take notes by page)—but the Penguin did not respond. In my forthcoming dream, I will ask the hippo to ride me past Eden where I might try to ask the Penguin again. Or, initially.

Per indexing impulse, a precursor. Machado’s innovative use of typography on pages 75, 123-4, 233, 241, 260.

The narrator celebrates a few objects in tonal gestures which resemble the ode, so I added an index for Machado’s narration in ode modes. Several objects prefaced with an “O” enter this small index, but you should read the odes themselves. They are delightful.

Index of odes

paddle: 40-41
tight boots: 91
legs: 145
nose: 112-113
Formality: 244-245
muleteer: 62-62

Some words are used ironically—and I indexed those. Some words are defined in a topsy-turvy way—and I indexed them as well. Other things which made it to this index: unique phrases, philosophies, precepts, intertextual references, abstract states like silence (but only on the pages where one abstraction seemed to resignify another), a few minor characters, estranged metaphors, larger symbols, dances, translator notes, neat words (including Flora Thomson-DeVeaux’s marvelous “smallsword”). I’ve italicized the words that are direct quotations or interesting phrases which recur, almost thematically, in this novel. There’s not really a key, And nothing is exhaustive,

Index of text

Achilles: 20, 247, 301
administrative solution: 165
Africa: 6, 10, 230
alienist: 282-6
American riddle: 64
ambition: 60, 175, 246, 261
Anacreontic panpipe: 226
antiphons: 290
Athenian maniac: 284, 294
avarice: 70, 239
bachelor: 5, 6, 17, 169, 234, 238
Bakbarah the Toothless: 54-5, 306
bibliomaniac: 154-155
blood: 30, 32, 80, 88, 202, 221, 236, 239
Bocage: 36-37, 303
Borba, Quincas: 41, 130-134, 136, 187-8, 214-6, 228-231, 234, 242, 256, 258, 261-5, 270-273, 276-7, 282-3, 285-7
Bras’ father: 10, 73-74, 104-105, 106, 107, 110
cadaver: 58, 59, 67, 83, 84, 106, 152, 196
caliph: 270, 287, 291
capitalist: 289
catafalque: 106
Catumbi: 5, 295
cerebral ventriloquism: 248, 249
childhood: 28, 29-42, 66, 135, 167-169
Claudius: 12, 318
concubine: 160
conscience: 117, 181, 209, 277, 279, 288
clock (see also pocket watch): 98, 122, 134, 135, 141, 188, 207 *
cockfights: 236
colloquy: 186
cynic: 89
cypress tree: 153
Damasceno: 189-190, 191, 197, 235-236, 242-245, 246, 316-7
dandy: 50, 125, 186 *
Dante: 126-7, 311-312
declaration: 274-275
delirium: 18-25, 28, 60, 213, 230
dialogue as form: 123-124, 224
divine pillow: 136
dogfight: 263-264, 266
donkey: 62-64, 277
duodecimos: 65, 307
drug: 177
Dungeon: 239, 320
eclogue: 58, 307
eleven: 5 (friends), 56
ellipsis: 91
embryo: 185-186, 192, 193, 211
envy: 229, 242, 254, 278
epitaph: 241, 242, 280
Erasmus: 277
fate: 126-127
fatal error: 272
fatigue of the idle: 287
fixed idea: 12-13, 14, 55
flag: 13
Flamengo Beach: 201
folly: 26, 277
formality: 31, 243, 244-245
gimlet: 116
gossip: 17, 182, 200
hairpin: 206, 207
Hamlet: 6, 172
Hebe’s cup: 16, 300
hero: 29
hippopotamus: 19-25
Hotel Pharoux: 145, 170, 224
hubbub: 8, 34
Humanitism: 187-188, 214-216, 242-243, 228-231, 234, 261-262, 270-271, 287, 290
hypochondria: 8-9, 70, 79, 170, 291, 297
I stared at the tip of my nose: 110, 111 *
illusion: 16, 23, 230, 284, 290
improvisatore: 38
inheritance: 148-149, 220-221
injustice: 32
inventor of butterflies: 84-84
Job: 24, 301
lamentations: 229
law of the equivalence of windows: 117, 209
Lobo Neves: 103, 110, 119, 114-5, 128-9, 139, 163-4, 166, 175-6, 179-180, 194-5, 199-201, 207, 217, 220-1, 246, 278
Lord Byron: 64
love of glory: 8, 9, 79, 128-129, 198, 232
letters: 212-213, 226-227
Macrobians: 14, 299
manure: 34
masculine indiscretion: 252
maxims: 233
mediocrity: 40, 60, 68, 221
metaphysical: 101, 102, 221
monotony of misfortune: 288
monumental: 188
moral geology: 179-180
mother: 21, 22, 30, 32, 66-67, 80, 208, 289, 303
mysterious parcel: 117, 118, 311
nabob: 282
nanny goats: 270
Napoleon: 35, 36, 40, 50, 261, 303 (see also Ani DiFranco’s “Napoleon”)
Nature: 12, 21, 22, 23, 281
no remorse: 192, 247 *
nostalgia: 16, 168, 226
oblivion: 254
ode: 57
oil lamp: 172
opportune moment: 125, 207
Pascal: 77, 266, 318
perpetual: 179
philosophy of old papers: 226-227
Plaster: 8-9, 11, 13, 14, 52, 79, 232, 291, 296-7, 300, 319
polka: 224, 253
pride: 21, 60, 199
privation: 276, (memory of) 276-277
prologue: 3
Prudencio: 70, 71-2, 107, 148-149
public esteem: 146, 238-9
public opinion: 3, 69, 79, 198, 220-221, 223, 267 (neighbor’s attention)
publicity: 239
Puritanism: 13
rank: 60
Realists: 42
reciprocal deceit: 180
red-haired virgin: 175-6, 316
restitution: 117, 188
rhubarb: 231
Romantics: 42
romanticism: 60, 64
Rossio Grande: 43, 45
Sancho Panza: 45
Saturn (planet): 254
selfishness: 22
servant: 43
Shakespeare: 70
shakos: 256-258
shuttlecock: 215
silence: 20, 47, 59, 81, 101, 238, 245, 260 (see use of typography), 261
sincere: 48, 76, 80, 168, 264, 281 (sincerity)
slave/s: 31, 33, 38, 47, 51, 66, 82, 94, 98, 107, 148-149, 230, 239, 317
sleep: 57
smallsword: 35, 36, 40
snakes: 144
spectacle: 22, 23, 24, 58, 57, 67, 93, 236, 242, 254, 264, 265
Stendhal: 3, 249-250, 294
storks: 6, 15
sub-Greeks: 216
sublime: 22, 57, 117, 230, 253, 270, 276, 287
superstitions: 14, 172-174, 175-176, 201, 217, 316
Suetonius: 12, 226, 318
the grand idea: 7
the little house: 142, 146-147, 151-152, 156, 196
the living condensation of all time: 23
the pure reality: 213, 224
the mystery: 178, 186
theory of human editions: 16, 77, 93-96
thirteen: (see also superstitions) 172-174, 175-176, 201, 217
Tijuca: 70-73, 87, 88, 89, 263, 307
tomb: 5, 20, 244
tragedy: 6, 202, 210, 213
trapeze: 8, 52
Valongo: 148-149, 313
Venice: 64
vertigo: 68, 211 (vertiginous)
Virgil: 68, 75, 171, 308
virumque: 75, 308
Voltaire: 261, 190, 231
voluptuousness of woe: 70-71
waltz: 114-115, 117, 125, 126
wart: 176
weeping willow: 257
widower: 226
women’s indiscretion: 250
worm: 1, 21, 77
yellow fever epidemic: 242-243, 300
youth: 28, 33, 71

*

Machado’s original novel can now be read for free online in Portuguese thanks to Gutenberg.

Borba comparing conscience to why a pretty woman is vain and likes to look in the mirror often: "Conscience..... contemplates itself frequently when it finds itself beautiful. Remorse is nothing but the grimace of a conscience that sees itself to be hideous." 

But remember: “The book’s greatest flaw is you, reader….”

Benjamin & Seghers in transit.

1. Transit papers

We don't talk about papers enough. This is because most Americans genuinely lack personal, lived experience with the absolutely mind-boggling labor, money, risk, and time involved in the procurement of visas and transit papers for stateless persons or refugees. As part of my ongoing commitment to consume every book ever published by NYRB, I read Anna Seghers’ novel, Transit, with great interest in its treatment of refugees and stateless persons.

The translation by Margot Bettauer Dembo—her final work of translation—is intimate, disturbing, and powerful. One feels alienation like a close houseguest, or a lost language, the lip of an inaccessible elsewhere.

Peter Conrad’s introduction ties Segher's novel to her lived experience as a Communist trying to escape Hitler's armies. She was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933; upon release, she fled to Paris, then to Marseilles, one of the few ports available to exit visas. (Seghers was Jewish, which certainly factored into the threat that Nazism posed to her life.) Conrad compares Seghers’ refugees to Kafka's Joseph K, seeking to get his credentials as a land surveyor recognized by the rulers of the castle.

In 1941, Seghers (and her family) procured permits to board a ship for Mexico—and she began to write this book immediately upon arrival. Like Marie, the novel's quasi-heroine, Seghers lived the in-between state of warring borders and expired papers. The novel offers few emotional characterizations to distinguish the characters, many of whom are refugees waiting for papers in Marseilles. In a sense, all details exist only to be demolished by the violence of the occupation, and by the quiet intersecting complicities of French citizens. 

The male narrator of Transit doesn't even inhabit a name. He is among the nondescript nameless, seeking a future in the words of others, the moment by moment navigations. He has no distinguishing beliefs, looks, or ideologies. He begins with describing his time spent in work camps performing "labor service" by unloading British munitions ships, where he felt himself "in the shadow of death." 

Ultimately, he escapes the Vichy regime by passing himself off as Weidel, a dead Jewish author whose suitcase he discovers in a hotel room. Along with Weidel’s papers, the suitcase also contains Weidel’s final manuscript. By some twist of fate, the narrator happens to have fallen in love with the Weidel’s girlfriend, who does not yet know that he is dead—and who is trying to find him so that her transit papers can be finished.

For the narrator to steal a dead’s man identity is hardly a crime in a time when survival depends on anonymity. And the whole novel is retrospective: a confession recounted by the narrator to an American border official for whom such stories are thrilling, museum-like, and incomprehensible. 

2. The Struma and Mihail Sebastian

The first lines of Transit:

"They're saying that the Montreal went down before Dakar and Martinique. That she ran into a mine."

Immediately, I thought of Mihail Sebastian's diary, where he expresses anxiety and concern over what would later be called the Struma disaster. The Struma was a small ship commissioned to carry nearly 800 Jewish refugees from Axis-allied Romania to Palestine. Sebastian attempts to navigate between conflicting media reports: whether the ship carrying Romanian Jewish refugees arrived safely, or whether it had been sunk.

Over one hundred pages of Sebastian’s diary reference the absolutely abysmal media reporting and propaganda, and the paralyzing effect this had on Jewish persons in determining whether to flee or “wait for it to pass.” The Struma disaster would later be referenced by Romanian Jews as why some chose to flee by foot or stay put, rather than try a boat.

Here’s the Wikipedia version of what happened:

Struma's diesel engine failed several times between her departure from Constanţa on the Black Sea on 12 December 1941 and her arrival in Istanbul on 15 December. She had to be towed by a tug boat to leave Constanţa and to enter Istanbul. On 23 February 1942, with her engine still inoperable and her refugee passengers aboard, Turkish authorities towed Struma from Istanbul through the Bosphorus out to the coast of Şile in North Istanbul. Within hours, in the morning of 24 February, the Soviet submarine Shch-213 torpedoed her, killing an estimated 781 refugees plus 10 crew, making it the Black Sea's largest exclusively civilian naval disaster of World War II. Until recently the number of victims had been estimated at 768, but the current figure is the result of a recent study of six different passenger lists. Only one person aboard, 19-year-old David Stoliar, survived (he died in 2014).

3. Walter Benjamin and Weidel

Weidel's manuscript suitcase, for me, maps upon the missing suitcase of Walter Benjamin—and with it, the possibility that someone used it to publish his text.

I thought about this as I traced relations between Seghers and Benjamin during their Paris days. Both wrote within a climate of rising fascism. Where Benjamin's reproduction of news headlines and local ephemera offered the landmarks of rising fascism, Seghers' narrator speaks from a blurred, distracted distance, evoking a world where moral boundaries have become as fuzzed and non-commital as those of nation-states. 

In 1937 and 1937, Benjamin was seeing more of Seghers (born Netty Reiling, 1900), who was already known as a novelist (her first book was published in 1928) and activist. And he probably knew Seghers through her husband, László Radványi, a Jewish Hungarian writer and poet who had been involved in the revolution which created the Hungarian Soviet Republic—and who was forced to flee when the HSR was disbanded in 1919. Radványi fled to Vienna, where he acquired the pseudonym "Johann Lorenz Schmidt" (from the 18th-century Protestant dissident theologian). In 1923, he got his doctorate in philosophy from Heidelberg University, where his these on Chialism was directed by Karl Jaspers.

In Heidelberg, Radványi/Schmidt met poet Anna Seghers. They married in 1925 and had two children, Pierre and Ruth (pictured in portrait at the top).

Benjamin and Radványi had both been interned at La Varret. This is where they met, in a French internment camp. After Radványi was released from labor camps, he, Seghers, and their two children went to Marseilles, where they became part of the crowds trying to flee Vichy France. She fled via Mexico City to New York City, and returned to the German Democratic Republic in 1947, where she became a prominent figure. 

Benjamin, on the other hand, joined a handful of others fleeing on foot towards the Spanish coast. After being refused transit at the Spanish border, Benjamin took his own life that night in a border hotel. His suitcase is still missing.

4. The Gide aside

In 1936, Andre Gide accepted an invitation to tour the Soviet Union, and his dreams of liberation crumbled like the plaster from Potemkin villages. In Return From the the USSR, Gide recanted his support for the Soviet project as it stood, which he believed to be antithetical to flourishing, human thriving, and queer comrades in general.

Gide was writing as a socialist, as someone committed to liberation—and so he framed his book by criticizing the particulars in the name of a hopeful, more liberated (and socialist) future:

I do not hide from myself the apparent advantage that hostile parties—those for whom "their love of order is indistinguishable from their partiality to tyrants"[1]—will try to derive from my book. And this would have prevented me from publishing it, from writing it, even, were not my conviction still firm and unshaken that, on the one hand, the Soviet Union will end by triumphing over the serious errors that I point out, on the other, and this is more important, that the particular errors of one country cannot suffice to compromise a cause which is international and universal. Falsehood, even that which consists in silence, may appear opportune, as may perseverance in falsehood, but it leaves far too dangerous weapons in the hands of the enemy, and truth, however painful, only wounds in order to cure.

In hindsight, it was a sort of bourgeois naivety that led Gide to believe his speech commemorating the death of Maxim Gorky could have been well-received by those present in Moscow’s Red Square, but we must take it on faith that Gide was idealist enough to celebrate how literature, the province of the leisured and wealthy, now belonged to the worker, or the silent masses:

I could not weary of contemplating the numbers of women, of children, of workers of all kinds for whom Maxim Gorki had been a spokesman and a friend. I reflected with sorrow that these people, in any other country than the U.S.S.R., belonged to those to whom entry of the hall would have been forbidden; to those who, precisely, when they come to the gardens of culture are confronted with a terrible "No admittance. Private property." And tears came to my eyes at the thought that what seemed to them already so natural seemed to me, the Westerner, still so extraordinary.

Gide goes on to contradict himself, claiming that great writers have always been revolutionaries (but also bourgeois, leisured, etc), and that the new problem for writers is being revolutionary while losing their status as rebels:

And it seemed to me that there existed here, in the Soviet Union, a most surprising novelty—up till now, in all the countries of the world, a great writer has always been, more or less, a revolutionary, a fighter. In a way that was more or less conscious and more or less veiled, he thought, he wrote, in opposition to something. He refused to approve. He brought into the minds and into the hearts of people the germs of insubordination, of revolt. Respectable people, public powers, the authorities, tradition, had they been far-seeing enough, would not have hesitated to recognize in him the enemy.

Today, in the U.S.S.R., for the first time, the question is put in a very different manner; while remaining a revolutionary, the writer is no longer a rebel. On the contrary, he responds to the wishes of the greatest number, of the whole people, and what is most remarkable, to those of the rulers. So that there appears to be a sort of fading away of the problem, or rather a transposition so new that at first it disconcerts thought. And it will not be one of the least glories of the U.S.S.R. and of those prodigious days which still continue to shake our old world, to have called up into fresh heavens new stars and unimagined problems.

If one hasn’t read Gide’s pamphlet, it’s a humorous historical dive inflected by Gide’s unique voice. The book caused a huge commotion among the European Left; many tongues clucked, others wagged, some stayed glued to the roofs of their mouths. I wouldn’t be surprised if CIA cash was used to help publish it.

5. Backtracking to 1937 intellectual climate

In continental Europe, political tensions over Madrid's fall to Franco's Nationalists made lip service support for the Republican cause in Spain verboten. It was a tense time. The Popular Front offered the single viable alternative to Nazi occupation.

Thus it comes as a surprise to find Walter Benjamin, in letters to friends, refusing to condemn Gide for throwing shade on the Soviet Union before actually reading the book. In 1937, Walter Benjamin was struggling to get eyeglasses, as his eyesight had worsened to the point where he was afraid to leave home. He was reading—and loving—Carl Juster Jachmann's On Language, which he called "meteoric" for its insight into the collision of language and politics. Jachmann's these that "the regression of poetry is the progress of culture" blamed Germany's failure to move towards a politics of liberation on its obsession with literature. Benjamin wrote an essay on Jachmann which he shared with Theodor Adorno in Paris in the spring of that year.

Also in the spring of 1937, Benjamin attends Anna Segher's speech honoring the work of Georg Büchner. Benjamin appreciates her speech, though he doesn’t say much about her poetry.

In the same month, Benjamin promises himself that he will pen a critique of Jungianism, whose "fascist armor" he swore to "expose." He sees Jung as offering a "clinical nihilism" which may have appealed to Celine, but which heralded a danger to free thought and expression. 

In May 1937, Siegfried Kracauer published Orpheus in Paris: Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time. The book used biography as a lens into the socio-cultural history of Second Empire Paris, aiming to be a "physiognomy" of a cultural era. Both Adorno and Benjamin bonded over their hatred of it, but it was Adorno who sustained a long-standing vendetta which resurfaced in his Minima Moralia, published in the 1950's. One must credit Adorno, perhaps, with a capacity for steadfast, unrelenting intellectual-grudge commitments.

By the summer of 1937, Benjamin expresses dismay in the Popular Front, writing "leftist majority pursues a politics with which the rightists would provoke revolts." The Stalinist show trials continue in Soviet Russia, which Benjamin finds worrisome.

“There is a view onto gloom through whatever window we look,” he wrote to Fritz Lieb, continuing:

“The destructive effect of events in Russia will inevitably continue to spread. And the bad thing about this is not the facile indignation of the staunch fighters for ‘freedom of thought’: what appears to me to be much sadder and much more inevitable at the same time is the silence of thinking individuals who, precisely as thinking individuals, would have difficulty in taking themselves for informed individuals. This is the case with me, and probably also with you.”

Back in Bucharest, Mihail Sebastian is watching the Iron Guard emerge as an ideological competitor. In December 1937, religious scholar Mircea Eliade is not yet teaching in a tenured position at the University of Chicago. He’s just another young intellectual who has fallen for the Legionary, fascist movement. Eliade will celebrate a few weeks later as Jews are forbidden to work in the journalism profession. He will celebrate as the fascists moved to erase Jewish voices from the national press. The silence of Jewish erasure will lack translators. 

Sebastian’s 1938 journal begins with fake news, or its predecessor. The word propaganda hovers over the new uniforms, their ideologies, their apologists. In Bucharest, Sebastian will listen to his charismatic professor, Nae Ionescu, build a case for a mystical “National Greatness” that relies on exclusion of what is foreign. Ethics, for Nae,  isn't a question of whether one should kill the enemy, The Foreigner, the Jew - but rather, whether one does this with relish rather than light regret.

To do the deed with one's mind is different from doing the deed with one's heart.

Sebastian will listen, add this to his notebooks, wondering at which point the illness of ideology will release his friends. And how much harm will be accomplished in the interim?

At a cafe, he and Bellu Zilber will discuss alternatives, or carve out the shadows of rising anti-Semitism in their own flesh. The maps are a question of survival—of what one must be, or become – in order to live. “The People” has become an altar demanding sacrifice; the political is sacralized in national greatness.

Should another People be constructed to oppose it? How many Peoples need to exist? Can Peoples co-exist? At the table, Sebastian sees humans, divided by hyphens, believing the bridge can carry them. Zilber suspects that only communist internationalism can save Jews from death in German camps. Sebastian believes multinationalism and fluidity offer eternal protection. Others believe the hope is in Zionism. Many are trying to get visas, exit permits, passports which enable them to leave the land where they were born, the land of their fathers and mothers.

Decades later, Bellu Zilber will sit in prison during the communist show trials, revisiting his commitments in light of changing allegiances. Now, The People have become The Party; internationalism is Trotskyism, an official crime against the Peoples’ Republics. Nationalist communism emerges to fill the vacuum of Stalinist and Soviet empire.  But who can measure the distance between national interest and anti-Semitism in the dictators mouth? Sebastian will not live long enough to witness his friends’ silence in prison. If he had, one could hardly imagine his response.

* Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, pp. 555-556, 567. Sebastian, 113.

A Review-Museum of Danse Macabre in Shifting Pandemic Time

New Darkness, Old Dances

My twelve-year-old daughter has discovered a tremendous fear of the dark--not just fear of going to sleep in it, but waking up, discovering it is still dark, and coming into my room, half-awake, asking when the darkness will end. 

"Soon," I lie.

Soon is the litany of pandemic, a time we banish by promising things will return to normal on a given time and date. For parents, the struggle becomes identifying this time and date, passing this date as comfort to our children. But perhaps this time of fantastic helplessness requires a different articulation, a commitment to intertextual conversations as a form of company, an infectious friendship. In all the self-help I find to soothe my daughter, it is the danse macabre that is missing. 

As an allegorical form, the danse macabre emerged in the Late Middle Ages in visual representations, sermons, and stories where the dead (or a representative of the dead) summons humans from all stations, ages, and status to dance to the grave. Serving as a memento mori, a reminder of life's fragility and material vanity, the danse macabre even earned a mural in a Parisian cemetery.

The seam between a daughter's fear and an old dance which approaches dread appear in an essay by Emil Cioran. "Paleontology" begins in the accident of an afternoon when Cioran wanders into a natural history museum only to find himself altered by the encounter with skeletons, astonished by the bones beneath the vulnerable costume of flesh that hides each human's death. Cioran takes horror as a path towards liberation, admiring the Middle-Aged gaze that "cherished the livid and the fetid," the gruesome. To marvel over "dreadful decrepitude" is to acknowledge our limitations in this time of irregularities and conspiracies, a time when the promise of Progress feels increasingly feeble, or unaffordable, to the underprivileged. The skeleton invites us to contemplate the cadaver, the end. 

Isn't melancholy and slight morbidity a normal response to the death and anxiety in which we are living?

What is aberrant about acknowledging the grief woven into current events, the see-saw of rue and regret over masks?

What is flimsier, really, than the Americanist cult of positivity which seeks to downplay the present by articulating new commercial adventures and self-enhancements which foreground "living one's life" as a national past-time. 

"Blessed was that age when solitaries could plumb their depths without seeming obsessed, deranged," Cioran continues, since "their imbalance was not yet assigned a negative coefficient." Blessed be the terrified speechless for their insistence on acknowledging the night.

Blessed be the worried and miserable who look at the numbers and understand how a confetti-covered capitalist death cult is the opposite of not fearing death. And isn't there a certain astonishment that animates dread--the disbelief that any of us could ever end?

Small Presses as My Pandemic Abode

There is no more life as usual; what exists is new to all of us, inflected by the fears we may avoid or confront. In pandemic time, the books which inhabit dread have kept me from despair by daring to speak the unspeakable. They have given a way into conversations with my daughter; a way to make skeletons dance.

As pandemic has changed what I want from the page, it is small presses that fill the gaps in what self-help culture can offer a world disoriented by pain, loss, and fear. Because the dance macabre does not occupy a large market presence in a country that hides death, in a country that hates its own ghost-histories so much that it plans their obsolescence with demands for positivity and closure,  it is small presses who provide what is necessary to navigate a time we cannot escape, rewind, or awake from.

Life circles back upon itself like a Mobius strip of anxiety; books with an expansive notion of time, and a willingness to address the macabre, have been the best company.  All these books excavate interior silences and dread to formulate a language of looking; all are written from a hunger for roots that somehow mingles with reckoning. All are haunted and haunting and intentional in this relationship with the dead.

Brandon Shimoda, The Grave on the Wall , City Lights Books, 2017

Brandon Shimoda's memoir is framed by the discovery of a continuous, nonlinear time after his grandfather’s death. In seeking to inhabit a time that includes the ancestors. Shimoda undertakes a pilgrimage which illuminates the heart of the pilgrim, the desire to be reunited in a meeting with someone greater, someone definitive: 

In the seventh or eighth century, a poet sat between beneath the pines and, facing the sea, wrote an ode to the pines, to what he felt to be their perfection. The ode enfolded a lamentation on what the poet felt, by comparison, to be his perilously misshapen life. The pines held the sound of the waves and the poet's silent labor. The poem is one of the many thousands of poems in Man'yoshu (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves) and is inscribed on the face of a large stone that sleeps beneath the pines. The day I arrived, it was raining. The poem and its characters were leaking.

To meet the ancient poet on his terrain, Shimoda wanders through this ancestral space in Japan, shifting across places and photographs and monuments, in order to recover something about his grandfather's history - and this merely opens the door to a larger space of who is missing....

Midori's death, or departure to another place, opened up a pantheon of ancestors. He had to have gone somewhere. The pantheon of ancestors was the most likely place, because it was intuitional. I felt it. Therefore assumed it. The ancestors formed a place in which no single individual could be truly differentiated from the collectivity of the dead. And yet, the first ancestor who introduced herself to me as an ancestor, was my great-grandmother. Her name is Kawaki Okamoto.

Her name is. Kawaki is. Notice how the presence of the great-grandmother is implied by the narrator's subtle shift into present tense. One almost doesn't realize what has happened (though it becomes clearer as chronology, itself, grows murkier).

Shimoda differentiates between the burial grave, where the body is buried, and the "ritual grave...where the living go to visit the dead." Attaching the picture-bride photo of Kawaki to his bedroom mirror, he creates a space in which he must see her everytime he sees himself, thus changing the nature of time which excludes her, the Americanized time which keeps them separate: 

She would not recognize my face, coming in and out of focus, attending, so I think, to her memory, which is synonymous with trying to keep it alive..... A grave is anywhere we leave an unrepeatable part of ourselves. A part that has broken away. 

In this hunger to remember the dead hides a hunger to be known by the dead, to be connected to the knowledge of one's ancestors. The role of the photograph as a ritual grave evokes Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, which Shimoda quotes later: "suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it." 

Claire Meuschke, Upend, Noemi Press, 2020.

Like Shimoda, Claire Meuschke makes a special place for the photograph or the image in a Barthean sense; she includes the material text of court documents, and juxtaposes official, state-sanctioned language against family ghosts. Where Shimoda occupies the space of lyric memoir, Meuschke reconfigures the poetry collection as a dialogue between discourses and language. 

In the Notes, Meuschke acknowledges an incomplete list of info and quotes that serve “after-the-fact, as points of reference and suggested further readings and viewings” rather than inspiration or source for the text itself. Like Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony (where the theory of translation challenges epistemology in its insistence on a deformation zone), Meuschke's Notes serve to destabilize or somehow re-vision the text, opening it to a sort of time which is ongoing, continuous, multiplicitous.  Meuschke leans into indigenous concepts of time and place to inhabit the temporal disorientation of texts in a book—to discover her great-grandfather (Hong Ah Wing) as a fevered hallucination in a library book. 

Inspired by Layli Long Soldier’s “investigative poetics,” (especially in “to ward”) Meuschke also says she borrowed from CAConrad’s (soma)tic poetry rituals and “recombining writing exercises” initially coined by Farid Matuk to write white settler violence; oriented towards discovering “after-images.” Language and drive of this book informed by immigration trial of her grandfather, Hong On—and includes actual transcripts of questions from “Statement of Applicant”. The next poem, “—oOo—“ ends with: "I don’t have any words for the past question." 

“Figurative As Literal” takes the metaphor and destabilizes it:

a figure is real
a number is literate
products like people
come with a number and a name

I would hope that reading this in reverse would
image like a mirror
like history as a way to remember doesn’t image.

Across several poems, the poet uses “like” as a pivot, a sort of root in the ground that stays continuous as the panorama is absorbed. It’s not uprooted. From “To Word”, a long prose poem, ending: "I use the em dash when I can’t bare for the sentence to end. / Here they punctuate the symbol into existence."

Bruno Scultz, Undula, Sublunary Editions, 2020. Translated by Frank Garrett.

"As for myself, I can no longer remember the street where my childhood home was," writes Bruno Scultz in his first published story, "Undula," recently translated by Frank Garrett. Scultz was born in 1892 in Drohobych, Galicia, a place which does not fit any of our current maps, a town which has been translated and retranslated by occupations, has moved from Poland to Ukraine, a space which served as home to a large oil extraction industry that made it possible for Scultz to publish this story in a journal, Dawn: The Journal of Petroleum Officials in Boryslav. 

In this story, Undula is the object of the narrator's desire, a fascinating, impure, and complicated muse which keeps his company in his dark imaginings--in the "monotonous, pointless dialogues" with unspecified pain. According to Garrett's extensive translation notes, "undula" means "little wave or wavelet," which also sees the "Dunajew" as a nod towards the Danube, which means "something like born of dew." There is no map which can hold the precise place where Bruno Sculz was shot and killed by a Gestapo officer while returning to the Drohobych ghetto carrying a loaf of bread. The unfathomable exists with the fathom, the measurement of how far arms can reach.

Maria Negroni. Dark Museum. Translated by Michelle Gil-Montero, Action Books, 2015.

Macabre is punctuated by anxiety, the silence which shrouds a pandemic body, and there is a certain flowing syntax, an extension of corpuscent, winding sentences, which works against fear while handling corpses. For no one dances the macabre as diligently as Maria Negroni:

Against all Utopias, against the wounds of failure, against the last strongholds of dissent and protest, against all the answers in politics (whether visionary, dogmatic, silencing, repressive, or even just), poetry sketches for us yet again that giant nocturnal bird stalking the most elusive, irrevocable terror. 

In rejecting purist utopias, Negroni takes us into the gothic Castle, where there are no strongholds. The lyric is born and spent there, as in unstable places where the only sure way is the detour. For her, melancholy and poems speak together "like a fatal illness, they corrupt language in order to amplify what is eternal in what is ephemeral, what is illusory in what is true." The writer aims for an aesthetics which rejects essences or essentialisms in favor of "monographs that encrypt mysteries, a bit of treachery, a useless voluptuosity, a cabinet of marvels where a child might become lost...."

And there is a childness in this desire for decadence, petulance, the pout without magnitude, the playing alone with one's disappointment by the world created by adults: there is a formal excess in the intensity of this disappointment.

Negroni is looking for a special word, "the word....in which natural sound is decanted to the pure sound of feeling." She is correct that the sound must be excessive, messy - but she is wrong, or setting up another perfectism, to use the word pure. For it is purity and hygiene which serve as epistemological foundation for the cult of anti-melancholy, the cult of mature stoicism and fake smiles. Again in the idea of a "stellar cradle, protected from corruption and the passage of time by cold and pulchritude..."

Negroni celebrates the fascination of the alien, the "intergalactic evil," the alien is a "pre-verbal mother," one which animates silence: "Silence that utters atrocious, fascinating things." And between all the tales of monsters, the virus we dread inside us, the anxiety becoming "a space made up only of surrogates," and architecture of intimate terrors, the drawing-in of the dark museum.

Pierre Senges, Falstaff: Apotheosis. Translated by Jacob Siefrig. Sublunary Editions, 2020.

Pierre Senges, Studies of Silhouettes. Translated by Jacob Siefrig. Sublunary Editions, 2020.

How can we orient ourselves in pandemic time, when all the usual maps are marked by social distance and an invisible six-foot diameter around each body? Like Morya Davey, cemeteries have been safe, empty spaces, sites of pilgrimage with the kids at a time when playgrounds are complicated by the presence of others. Seeking to find new ways to do creative work after a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, Davey documents her efforts in "Index Cards," which makes a map of remembered necropolises, and creates an impetus forward as a map into three cemeteries. 

Pierre Senges makes a similar use of maps in Geometry In The Dust, a series of map-elegies which acknowledge the decrepitude of the modern metropolis. As JM Schreiber notes, Senges' exploration of maps and cities and spaces emerge from the tension of the artefact itself--and Senges addresses the danse macabre directly, calling it by name, comparing the city, itself, to "a danse macabre every day of the week... a scraping of nail on bone, as well as a gnashing of teeth." The geometry in the dust carries us into the circle, or what Senges calls "the city’s circular nature," referring to how cities were once "contained within wooden circles, like certain soft-rind cheeses; although they tried hard to emancipate themselves and go over the walls, they still retain a bit of this roundness." 

In Falstaff: Apotheosis, we witness an apotheosis of Shakespeare's minor character, Falstaff, in the hands of a literary canon-rattler. Jacob Siefrig's translations are accompanied by excellent notes on Senges' oeuvre. Studies of Silhouettes is a model for pandemic modes, an intertexual addendum which takes lines from Kafka and writes an alternate version in the most intimate voice, nudging, prodding, inquiring, asking if that's really what Kafka meant. And then writing into it. 

There are also moments in which the fragment is extended into a diagnosis or clarification of Kafka's text: 

This would appear to be a complaint, the beginning of the life of a bureaucrat from the 60th Bureau written in this vein, the lamentation contained in a precisely reconstituted setting.....  no one would ever believe, from reading these first lines, that in fact a great adventure novel has just begun, the great Epic Novel, with horses and stirrups, sand dunes, mountains, arms of giants and sales of windmills, the tilting of the sinking ship...

In the silhouettes, one feels the presence of an alienated child-gaze, a human on the brink of discovering that the world does not match the linearity of history but instead unfolds in circles and spirals, where the narrator, the "I" who intended to be the hero...kicking off a 600-page-tale with that story of a faceless stranger tugging at my sleeve" finds his voice undone by disorientation and displacement. Senges focuses on the mystique of the story that begins with Someone, as "someone is the most appropriate name under such conditions, it at once designates the totality of the protagonist, all of them someone to one other, all from their earliest childhood shorn of the greater part of their identity." 

[Since a review on this book is forthcoming in a journal, I will stop here and let the review doing the speaking.]

Christina Tudor-Sideri, Under the Sign of the Labyrinth. Sublunary Editions, 2020.

Christina Tudor-Sideri's fragmented memoir approaches the darkness of embodied trauma and melancholia by harnessing the power of ghost horses, village rituals, and enchanted forests. "I take the shape of a doorbell for a memory of earth trembling," she writes, noting that what happened in the world of her native Romania occurred inside her body. This lack of boundaries is emphatically anti-Western and a relief. I find myself in dialogue with the ghosts who survived the Bucharest earthquake as passed from the mouths of my parents, the legends of homeland which animate a quaking space. For Tudor-Sideri, magic is a sort of "experimental metaphysics"; her writing explores the non-linearity memory's residence in the mind and body, how memory lays its hands on what it touches, giving rise to a relationship that makes its own claims.  

Her thoughts are structured by anamnesis, itself. And her body: "the site of voices brought together after death".. There is this "ille tempore" of leaving her mother tongue, its ties to the village, and writing "interrupted manuscripts" in broken dialogue with the voices inside her.  Tudor-Sideri takes writing trauma as a way of devouring one's self- becoming one's "own sin-eater" surviving on hunger for wounds. The "mad forest" is the space outside the village community, a descent into the animal of one's own mind. She mentions the custom of dressing a tree's wounds as a forbidden practice. She introduces a space, the preventorium, which borrows from the healing powers of the forest - something we lack in pandemic present. 

For Tudor-Sideri, village culture develops the soul differently. Causality is complicated by a temporality in which the dead nestle close to the living. Where the idea of destiny invokes a sense of inevitability, we are given an agency that shapeshifts, moving from inanimate objects to trees to liminal dates. Voice is altered by this scattered time and the supranatural village narrator. The village and its surrounding forests emerge as characters.

When the narrator wants to recall a car accident, she locates it on St John's Day, aiming towards auspiciousness. We read about the mussel hunt undertaken in the shadow of the fathers, the relationship between lunar protection spells and the blood moon, the "violence of being taken out of time," the significance of a burning house in a village. 

Tudor-Sideri describes the "plaque of the dead" on each house to locate it in time, to lay claim to lineage, which she finds in history and the practice of burning one's home, or dominthanasia.  Only those who remember can rest in paradise. "I have always traveled with one hand on my shoulder," she writes. 

And I think of my mother, of how much I miss Romania, of how little of me exists in the limbo between lands and languages—and the absolute absence of mom’s life. The darkness and dread is there, I tell my daughter. Let us find some way to dance it.

[To note: György Ligeti’s “Mysteries of the Macabre”]

Goll, Chaplin, Benjamin, Sebastian, ellipses.

Yvan Goll —

Among the joys of contributor copies, one must include the new avenues of interest and fascination which coincide with current research and readings. I’m thinking of Asheville Poetry Review, and Keith Flynn's review essay, "The Remaining Mystery: A Review of Yvan Goll's Selected Poems," which outlines Goll's life in the context of his oeuvre.

Yvan Goll was born Isaac Lang in the borderland of Alsace-Lorraine, a contested space. Fascinating that Goll used two synonyms with the first name Tristan; it wasn't a popular name at the time, and so, to me, it suggests a sort of limning of Tzara.

He called himself "Jewish by destiny, French-born by chance, and designated German by a stamped piece of paper." He worked across mediums, writing poetry, plays, and even "an emotional surrealist film", Die Chaplinade (1920) which I imagine Mihai Sebastian must have seen or heard about prior to his lecture on Charlie Chaplin for the Criterion group.

Aside on Mihai Sebastian, Chaplin, and Criterion

In his Criterion lecture on Charlie Chaplin, Sebastian was heckled with anti-semitic slurs by young Iron Guardists in the audience - "a Jew speaking about another Jew!" So, Sebastian tore up his speech and elected to discuss what he shared with Chaplin as a Jew, claiming that Chaplin was someone only an Eastern European could understand, comparing the loneliness of chaplains persona to the loneliness of the Jew in the ghetto: "I shall speak as a Jew about the Jew, Charlie Chaplin."

The rise of the nationalist extremists is not separate from the services they provide, and the populism they mobilize while hoarding weapons and guns. It is our smug, exceptionalist bubble that prevents us from seeing, or caring about, the connections around the world. 

The connotations are critical. In 1932, the accusation of being Jewish in Romania implied, or carried, all the wrongs - sovietism, homosexuality, internationalism, greed, money, and conspiracy. It was the undertone of the word globalist. And it was the Criterion event on Andre Gide that opened the floodgates of the end. Crowds of young Cuzists and Legionnaire-affiliated students swarmed the hallways, punching the speakers, resulting in chaos and closure. 

Poets can be loathsome, and perhaps none so loathsome as the court poet. Enter Nichifor Crainic, whose newspaper stoked anti-Gide sentiment by accusing Gide of being a Jew, or implying his sympathy with Judaism, a guilt by blood and association that assumes one places Jewishness over the nation.  Gide was a threat because his ties to Jewishness opened the door to gayness, and Gide was not Jewish, but he was definitely gay, definitely opposed to the binaries of purity constructed by heteronormativity.  

To follow the details, see Cristina Bejan’s book on Bucharest’s interwar Criterion Group (Palgrave).

Goll again

Goll married Claire in 1921; They lived in Paris for a time, and he loved Paris, loved its surrealist circles, though he opposed Andre Breton's reliance on Freud and automatic writing. His own surrealist Manifesto was published to rival Breton's in 1924. Goll's work was blacklisted by the German government, and poet Paula Ludwig posed a challenge to the Golls' marriage. When France went Nazi in 1939, the Golls fled to New York, where they would remain until Gall got sick near the end of his life and went to France for treatment. Optimistic by temperament, the rise in global nationalism bothered goal, and shaped poetry, which moved across borders and countries, bearing witness to greed, which he saw as the primary force of Destruction on the planet.

He is buried in Pere Lachaise, near Chopin--and not too far from Celan, himself. 

In Goll's last years, Celan was frequently at his bedside, donating blood to help him survive leukemia, and trying to help him finish his last manuscript, Dreamweed. After 20 years in the United States, Goll had "returned to the German language" seeking, again,  a relation with unbidden, ineffable things in the key of dread, in the pulse of surrealism, in what Flynn calls " incendiary images" that might uncover something solid and monumental to leave as testament. In a sense, it was a gift for Claire, a reward for the years of companionship and support that she provided, a poem to bind them together after death. Flynn doesn't mention the Goll affair in this review at all, an interesting elision.

Flynn references Walter Benjamin's essay on surrealism, "The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia," which was published in 1929. Here, Benjamin traces the surrealist's edge narratives alongside the tensions inside the artistic movement, noting: "the true creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, 'a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else can give an introductory lesson. (But a dangerous one; and the religious lesson is stricter.) Benjamin rejects the assumption that drugs are required for surrealism, and drops a small bomb at Lenin's feet by suggesting that Lenin brought drugs and religion closer than anyone. 

For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday. The most passionate investigation of telepathic phenomena, for example, will not teach us half as much about reading (which is an eminently telepathic process), as the profane illumination of reading about telepathic phenomena. And the most passionate investigation of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic), as the profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance. The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug, ourselves, which we take in solitude.

On solitude, see Fragments From A Found Notebook, Sebastian’s first book, written while studying in Paris, recently translated by Christina Tudor-Sideri (Sublunary Editions): “A stain, a shadow, an opinion, that is enough for an end.”

Thoughts on an aesthetic of lack.

The aesthetic of lack

In "An Aesthetic of Lack; or Notes on Camps," Katie Kresser argues towards an “aesthetic of lack” to counter the vacuity of modern consumerism. She looks at the “prosthetic mystique” to reveal an affinity for truncations, or a way in which beauty consists of supplementation. The prosthetic serves to fill in, to compensate, and Kresser likens this to drag culture, an “incubator for flagrant artificiality,” wherein the anesthetics of lack rides the neon energy of dissonance, grotesqueness, and various voids.

For Kresser, an "additive mania" is part of the aesthetic of lack, where excess detail and kitsch serve as supplements. This aesthetic is also characterized by the horror vacui, the fear of emptiness filled with whorls, hoardmarks, countless repetitions; a preference for compounds; a hunger for "the radiant and the radiating."

This is why the back road graveyard feels more gorgeous, more inhabited, more alive, than the meticulously planned lines and repetitions of the modern cemetery, whose plots embody what Kresser calls "the aesthetic of sufficiency."

The aesthetic of sufficiency

Kresser’s aesthetic of sufficiency is "galvanic, muscular, godlike," not needing completion. She gives the example of the neo-Doric sanctum, "a marble and affectless and supreme."

Or the nouveau-smug minimalism with its "heroic proportions," its extensive space and glass, which she takes as "vaguely fascist in their force." 

She mentions Piet Mondrian's calibrated frames, structured around their "own center of gravity," with no need to reach outside further outside themselves—and I think of the Instagram’s minimalist mansions—how all that glass enables its owner to admire themselves in a mirror at every configuration of sunlight. To tell time by how the sun wraps itself around the immaculate body. To sneak the pleasure of looking out at the world of tiny others, seeing oneself reflected back in them.

In my mind, the sufficient implies money, access, and coteries: the independence of high salary, social status, career-lacquered rank. The independence of money, the elegance of big brands and famous bylines.

*

Kresser sees it in corporate logos which are “marvelously scalable in their monumentality.” Ultimately, the aesthetic of self-sufficiency is also an "aesthetic of whiteness" and purity, one which has no nuance or shadow, secure in the knowledge that being completely exposed and empty, is safe. 

*

See also: the urban soccer mom with her expensive athletic clothes, the calibrated leisure time for the development of tiny, particular muscles, this weakness of shiny hair, the immaculate schedules of self-care, the Leni Riefenstahl of her stadiums where she watches little ones learn to win from the casual, half-hearted, beg of the sidelines.

(For the insufficient, see Eric Baus’ description of aphasia, or “communicasick”—how weirdness and Joel Brainerd came to his mind.)

The aesthetic of the accident

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

-J. G. Ballard

The "fascination with the marred and the pathetic" reminds me of X., a friend whose intellectual affinities tangled with mine (he even drew a diagram of our tangles, a visceral, visual disturbance) who couldn’t get over my survival, whose idealizations of me met in confluence of my accident. It’s tempting to lay love over the retrospective gaze, but also inaccurate. Simply, we were fascinated by each other. The intensity of that fascination never simmered, it threatened everything stable in our lives. X gave me a copy of J. G. Ballard's Crash, a peephole into symphorophilia, or sexual fetish related to car crashes. As a book, I savored it in the same key as Fight Club, the frisson of watching humans try to recreate highly-specific situations of pain which arouse and bond them.

The characters in Crash are turned on by staging car-crashes, but what they crave is intimacy at its utmost, at its least accessible moment. Perhaps what we all want, at some point, is knowing we are desirable at the extremities of human experience. To be tangled is to feel one’s self alive, implicated.

I had been there. He hadn’t. There was this wound between us. He wanted to fondle it. For X, each scar was something he wanted to connect to his attraction. As one who comes from the school of dead flowers on tombstones, I sympathized. I had no limits. I preferred to make love on the hard marble cover of the grave itself.

In our shared affinity for the grotesque, the improbable, the unspeakable, X and I were kindred. But the accident, itself, was an abyss. I didn’t recognize myself in the car crash, or read my ruins into the eros of absence. The scars were not mysteries: they were solid facts, secrets between myself and the night.

*

Like Rosanna Arquette, I wore the leg brace with skirts. Unlike Arquette, I wore it through the sophomore year of high school. I could not drive or pump gas. I couldn’t put pressure on a gas pedal.

To inhabit the haute of Cronenberg’s crash, I would have needed a stylist to slip sheer black nylon hose under the brace, and then some ghost with glue to follow me. The wreckage aesthetic of the film runs closer to the aesthetic of sufficiency, its glossy surface, its immaculate presentation.

*

Consider could an aesthetic experience of accident that is wrecked, ravaged, lit with black stitches like the ones I selected for my forehead to match my prom dress.

To note backpacking through Europe with the high school sweetheart, returning to the US for scheduled back surgery, spending that night curled around each other in a hospital bed before heading off the college in opposite parts of the country.

To footnote how we first kissed outside a car where U2 sang: “Dressed up / like a car crash / Your wheels are turning/ but you’re upside down…” Maybe the limbs of what Ballard called his “psychopathic hymn” exist in this.

To endnote the times he looked at me on trains, our bodies covered in backpacks, his eyes reaching to ask the question I refused to answer: Does it hurt?

To shine a penlamp on the frame of what I didn’t speak, how silences infect a text.

The halo and the hipster

When Katie Kresser mentions the halo of old religious statues, and how the halo strains upward, I realize how much the halo undermines the status of the gold crown, whether rhinestoned beauty pageant tiara or Prince Charles etc. The halo substitutes a supernatural head-dressonly granted by the gods, suggesting an incompleteness in what the world can give us.

"Elite culture disdains the aesthetics of lack:" elite culture prefers it as a signal towards being conversant with the avant garde, or engaged by novelty, suffused in a newness that resembles the hipster's. Using Sontag’s definition, Kresser builds on camp as the elite marker for quaint unseriousness-- "tasteless yet amusing." The alleged-camp aesthetic associated with queer and drag culture is not as marginal as we think; Kresser sees it in pop culture, folk culture, and religious culture. the “flagrantly aristocratic” was camp. As was Henry James, Charles Dickens, art nouveau, opera, and velvet.

“Taste and ideology has ever been co-conspirators…” Notions of self-sufficiency are modern for Kresser, not ancient. She gives the example of the Greek Peplos Kore, a white statue once painted and tacky colors. She says the the whiteness is modern; the Kore used to wear garish colors and golds.

*

As a result of her experience with breast cancer, the author situates herself in "camps.” She wears a pink wig, possesses one infinitely perky silicone breast: these props fill in the lack, or supplement the absence of what cancer treatment takes. 

"We all seek gods now; may they not be false ones," Kresser warns. Because we all lack, we are all lacking, all gesturing to fill this lack in various ways. I want to align the aesthetic of the accident with Kresser’s aesthetic of lack while challenging the performance of this aesthetic in visual culture.

*

I want to look down from the brink without holding my breath. To remember my dad describing the horror of seeing me laid on out a stretcher, all the clothes cut from my body with scissors, the blood and glass glimmering from my skin, the folded limbs—and his tears, his words: “God, no one knew if you would live. And it had been years since I’d seen you naked…you were 15…I could not believe how beautiful you were—”

*

Accidents aside, pandemic has increased my appetite for the intensivist agglomerations of literary apocalypse, which supplement the lack of stable vision for the future.

If the world is warming, ending, evaporating, it feels natural to reach outside the frame, seeking apocalyptic texts to imagine new maps, to navigate the melting glaciers. The hotness we want nestles close to the pain we think will connect us. The fondling of the wound is sexier when chosen, when marked by consent and rendered consensual. I am here— and not here—for it.

The infamous topless hostess at Ballard’s Crashed Cars exhibition. Source: The Ballardian.

Ballard’s art works were sourced from a wrecker’s yard and were simply smashed-up cars, claimed as found objects and presented for the audience’s consideration. Yet these objects – long since consigned back to the scrapyard to be melted down – remain radical as an idea because Ballard’s gesture eschewed the trappings of experimental modernity for the cool surface of the contemporary object.

-Andrew Frost, “Crash and the Aesthetics of Disappearance”

*

See also Katie Kresser on “The Real Jeff Koons: Consumer Culture and Grammar of Desire.”

Paranoia, theory, and Zaum in the present.

1. Hag aesthetic

The Old Hag was a spirit that visited in English-speaking folklores, where she sat on a sleeper's chest and sent nightmares to the dreamer. When the subject awoke, he or she would be unable to breathe or even move for a short period of time. When this happened, the person was said to be hagridden. Currently, the clinical term for this is sleep paralysis, but folk cultures still hold it to be a form of possession or paranormal state.

Thus my obsession with Jenny Zhang's “Hags" has led me from hag-rides to hybrid interrogations of immigrant aesthetics of worth and worthiness. Against the performance of goodness and cleanness by immigrant children, Zhang offers a space which deplatforms purity, hygiene, prettiness, likability—all the costumes of performative valuation in the marketplace of images. In this, she resurrects the fucked-up, the hag, the baba as her lineage:

These hags, these great beauties, these mermaids who taunt, who feast, who slash, who steal, these succubae who cannot rest, my mothers, my sisters, my unborn friends, my keepers, my guardians.

Against the testimony of white men, or the dominant narrative, Zhang offers disdain for the lie of logic’s neutrality, or “sound reasoning,” which undermined the testimonies of Hmong persons: “Isn’t sound reasoning partly why American and European scientists and leaders told the Hmong in Vietnam and Laos, who watched their family members die and fall in from the yellow rain that was dropped on them, that they were just “making it up”?  at their firsthand accounts of what they saw, what they felt, what they experienced and lived through were not as convincing as the testimony of white men who were never there, who never watched loved ones die, who never knew what it was like for their lived experiences to be not enough, to not hold up against science, to be constantly under suspicion, subject to review.”

Part of this hag aesthetic is a focus on compulsions, tics, maladaptions, and anti-social behaviors. By raising inappropriate these gestures and aesthetic correlates into iconic status, Zhang challenges positivity, self-help culture, and wellness industry, concluding:

Our compulsions are as heroic as our excesses. Our excesses as heroic as our restraint. Our forgetfulness as necessary as our total attempt to say something.

“paranoia” is an interactive installation by berlin-based artist maansi which explores how an individual is implicated in communally held fears.

2. Paranoia as a “minor reality” (+ apocalypses and angels)

Speaking of likability, Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women remains timely, incandescent, brilliant as the seam ripper repurposed to open knee stitches. Allison Cardon’s review focuses on paranoia as a gendered lens, noting how Boyer probes the relation between truth and illusion, or what Freud termed "delusions of persecution.” What Boyer wants is to understand why some people's external perceptions are assumed to be real while others' are internal, or personal - tainted by illness. Gender, as a category, marks authority over reality. Professions identified with male gender tend to assume more authority and more dominance over others. To quote Boyer, "even the color of the sky is stable only as long as it has a man's proof.”

Cardon points out that paranoia and theory are structurally similar in that both rely on discounting certain perceptions and validating others in order to explain the world. The sun shone out of my earlobes when I learned that Freud’s infamous patient, Dr. Schreber, maintained the deluded belief that the sun shone out of his anus.

The politics of illness and theory share a grain, per Cardon, "each is fundamentally about accounting for the relationship of a particular subject or grouping of subjects to a general, authoritative reality.” When a subject is paranoid, this creates a transgression, an “unauthorized departure from this reality - a minor reality." Building from Eve Sedgwick’s observation, "In world where no one need be delusional to find evidence of systemic oppression, to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naive, pious, or complaisant," Cardon describes how, at critical mass, paranoid views are turned into a form of erudition, noting that Boyer takes the opposite direction, noting that the messengers gender and class determine whether they are prescient or paranoid.

Epics are the dance music of people who love war. Movies are the justice of people who love war. Information is the Poetry of people who love war.

One can hear Theodor Adorno staring at NYC billboards, drafts of Minima Morabilis in hand, finding one million different ways to say that fascism lies at the heart of the culture industry, and drawing close to how this is gendered (though he can’t quite commit to it). Cardon names the spilling of the "open secret" as a sort of slip which Boyer invests in while claiming that "poet, woman, mother" are paranoid positions. In this way, Boyer's poetry allows her to maintain a tenuous relation to the world despite its politicized realities. So the paranoiac has an abnormal relation to loss – to the things lost by opting out, by sewing, by writing poetry, by not entering races, by never fully tribing, by carving out space apart from the reign of the reality principle in attention to small particularities – and this foregrounds the minor reality.

Also in the key of minor realities comes the minor apocalypsos. Pandemic makes reality seem even less stable, even more tipped towards the abrupt endings, which made me think of Tadeusz Konwicki’s A Minor Apocalypse, published by Dalkey and translated by Richard Lourie. The protagonist is named Konwicki, and his task is to set himself on fire—but what stands out in context is the way groans become the shared vehicle for authoritative reality. Please admire the only literary passage I know dedicated to the depiction of groan-choir as universal leitmotif:

But in all that suffering, the most painful suffering of all was the consciousness that it was all banal, had all been discovered a long time ago, and was known to all the generations past, all just a repeated series, stamped out by our genes. That the universe was filled to its edges with groans as alike as two notes, that those particular groans formed one great groan similar to the shrill parliament of the sparrows and that groan became an interstellar roar, the inaudible groan of the aging cosmos.

In my current reading: Antoine Volodine’s Minor Angels, a series of what Volodine calls “narracts” translated by Jordan Stump and published by University of Nebraska Press. I love how the trace of the witnessing angel—the angel who watches rather than intervenes or aids, the Herzogian, Rilkean angel— is a unifying, invisible theme across these apocalyptic vignettes. [And of course I am working on an essay about this…]

Gombrowicz in 1965 with meow.

3. Paranoid attentions to detail

Maybe modernist technique includes a certain paranoid attention to detail? Even Futurism’s promise of a better world seemed tied to the absolute destruction of an existing one. This came to mind while reading Dustin Illingworth's exploration of Witold Gombrowicz's Cosmos, where details are given such close attention that one might expect the material world to assume agency. Each detail waits to be read as signifier or omen. The novel’s texture derives from A constant sense in which an unspoken crime exists, and I think the genocides of the 20th century inflect this.

"Witold describes the life he and the Wojtyes are living as “clowning in the void,” Illingworth writes, and the mind wanders towards Trump or Boscano or Marjorie Taylor Greene, these nouveau-vague white Christian nationalists who are doing nothing if not clowning the nihilistic void created by the fake family values of the Religious Right. 

Illingworth makes a point about Gombrowicz that feels disturbingly present, eerily pandemic-inflected:

"It is as if the totality of matter must be marshalled as obscure evidence for some unnamable crime. Sentences crowd one another, sweating out their anxieties as we read them. The claustrophobia of infinite relation constantly threatens to overwhelm"

I think Illingworth is right to call Cosmos “one of the great novels of thingness in world literature"; right to extol its “near-constant barrage of object and substance”; right to focus on Gombrowicz’s description of material reality as “an overwhelming abundance of connections, associations” and “a myriad of undifferentiated facts”—all of which lend themselves to creating extraordinary suspense in the ominous relationship between events and omens.

If you’ve never read Gombrowicz’s Diary, I highly recommend it—and you can find a few excerpts online at the Paris Review blog. In structuring his writing, he often relied on the discontinuity of dreams and their proximity to fugue states, to extract usable fragments:

The dream upsets the reality of the experienced day and extracts certain fragments from it, strange fragments, and arranges them illogically in an arbitrary pattern. It is exactly this lack of sense that has the profoundest meaning for us: we ask why, in the name of what, is our ordinary sense destroyed.

Karl Bulla, Mikhail Matiushin, Aleksei Kruchenykh, and Kazimir Malevich, 1913. Courtesy of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

4. Disinfo dada no-no

But there is also the strangeness of how propaganda has embraced literary discourse, so that one finds, on February 17th, the EU's disinformation services put out a piece titled "Disinformation Goes Dada," characterizing the use of language in Russian state media as “zaum.” The article actually links and quotes a poem by Aleksei Kruchenykh alongside Marjorie Perloff's 2003 translation, asserting that "Zaum language attempts to liberate poetry from the restrains of denotation of words"—which is, effectively, as meaningless a statement as one could concoct from googling.

The self-described "Stratcom Task Force Dada" stomps into the discourse, calling it a way of "weaponizing the absurd," or abandoning the true/false binaries by which most media information is judged. After referencing the loose-zaum of Mayakovsky's poem, "They don't understand anything," the anonymous Stratcom propaganda task force continues its propaganda wars in the postmodern space of Trumpism and incoherent extremist nationalism. 

But the anonymous Task Force author remains nameless. He or she doesn’t touch on strategies of defamiliarization, perhaps given how odd it would sound alongside the putative disinformation. Against this strange conflation of Dada and zaum, I want to suggest that zaum’s relationship to language be valued in its unique evolution. For zaum poets, language wasn’t a carrier of emotional contagions so much as a deforming agent, an experimental medium for creating new language and sound symbols, a commitment to Futurism’s eschatological vision rather than Dada’s chaotic, anti-teleogical one.

Zaum, which translates as “beyond the mind” in Russian, sought to reduce the connoted aura of words by opening the doors of resonance for sparks, for ways to thicken defamiliarized images. The reliance on wordplay and re-visionary meaning can be seen in the name itself, where “za” translates as “beyond,” or “behind,” and “um” to “mind.” Different scholars have translated it to mean “transreason,” “transration” and “beyonsense.” S

To be fair, Dada and zaum both experimented with absurdism, though Dada erred closer to political incoherence than Russian absurdism, whose proximity and patronage by Leninism gave it a hard stake in the game, drawing it closer to Futurism than Dada. Yes, Russian Futurists valued absurdity as a political strategy, an aesthetic which permitted them to foreground negation in the Russian revolution’s commitment to Progress, and the upending of convention. But an avant-garde with a political platform tends to rise or fall with its ideology, and, contra the world, I’m not sure that Dada is a catch-all for all absurdity and engagement of nonsense as vehicle from communication. To do so leaves out the call for “war against war” which animated early Dada as both a movement and a mode. Zaum can still be absurdist without being Dada.

Ilya Zdanevich in the manifesto for the 41° group, which absorbed zaum into kinetic, Russian futurism.

5. A timeline of metalogical futurism, transrational language, and zaum-spliffs

In December 1912, on the cusp of the Era of Manifesting Manifestos, a close-knit group of Moscow-based poets and artists issued their own, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.” Later described the founding document of the Russian Futurism, the authors determined that the “Ship of Modernity” needed to remove the old ballast of traditional formal aesthetic, including Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. ” Four fellows signed this MANifesto—David Burliuk, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Viktor Khlebnikov—arguing that language failed to describe the present, and a new dynamic vocabulary was needed to vessel the dynamic spirit.

In January 1913, Kruchenykh published “Dyr bul shchyl”—a short poem composed of five verses, and the first to be written in the new Futurist language of zaum. Later that year, the absurdist opera, Victory Over the Sun, was performed in St. Petersburg. Also authored by Kruchenykh, the text was pure zaum, using nonsensical words articulated in unconventional rhythms and inflections to challenge conventional meanings. It began with a pair of “Futurist Strongmen” in boxy cardboard armor. As the strongmen stepped into “the future,” they declared:

All’s well that begins well and has no end
The world will perish but there is no end to us!

In 1917, the year of the successful Russian Revolution, Kruchenykh mused on his goals in a letter to his friend, Shemshurin:

-- A riddle ... The reader is curious first of all and convinced that zaum means something, i.e. has some logical meaning. Hence one can sort of catch the reader by a worm-riddle, by mystery. Women and art have to have mystery; to say "I love" is to make a very definite commitment, and person never wants to do that. He is covert, he is greedy, he is a mystifer. And he seeks, instead of I - e [I love], something equal and perhaps special - and this will be: lefanta chiol or raz faz gaz . . . kho - bo - ro mo cho - ro and darkness and zero and new art! Does an artist intentionally hide in the treehole of zaum? - I don't know ...

By the end of the year, Kruchenykh joined up with Ilya Zdanevich and Igor Terentev to form a one-off association called "41°." Associated with an avant-garde cabaret (The Fantastic Little Inn), 41° put out a newspaper, issued a manifesto (as men must do when baptizing a new tree or claiming a space), and declared:

Company 41°, unifies left-wing Futurism, and affirms transreason as the mandatory form for the embodiment of art. The task of 41°, is to make use of all the great discoveries of its collaborators, and to place the world on a new axis.

In 1918, 41° started the Futuruniversity and a series of lectures on various avant-garde themes, including zaum, Futurism, Futurist theater, and avant-garde poetry. At no point is Dada referenced in Kruchenykh’s or 41°’s game plan.

By 1921, Kruchenykh had abandoned the manifesto for the declaration, issuing his “Declaration of Transrational Language,” which aims to provide “a universal poetic language, born organically”—sprung from the soil of Mother Russia herself—rather than a poetic language born “artificially” in the lab of men’s minds (like Esperanto). And where to gather the words for this new, organic lingua poetica than from the mouths of lost primeval Slavic dialects? Clearly, the transrational scope was narrowing to focus on the Slavic and Russian, and the declaration was genuine, rooted in nostalgia for a purer time.

To quote Aron Ouzilevski: “Despite being likened to Dadaists for their disruptive mode of thinking, they lacked the self-irony of Dadaism and their intentions to recover aboriginal tongues were entirely genuine.” The relationship between genuineness and lo-fi, structural nationalism in literary movements continues to fascinate me—and I hope the Stratcom Dada Task Force uses its magnifying instruments to look closer at where zaum ended.

6. Random acts of zaum by others & minor addenda

“A Zaum attack is not just wordplay. It is a whole-body experience Biniashvili diagnosed based on her experiences of living, studying,and working in different countries. During a Zaum attack, the inability to understand the sounds that are heard leads to a feeling of alienation accompanied by physical symptoms— sweating, accelerated pulse, stuttering, frustration and rage due to the loss of comprehension.The incomprehensibility of the local language causes a temporary change in consciousness: words become sounds, speech becomes illogical and letters become abstract signs. During a Zaum attack, language’s formal aspect is emphasized, while the need to understand and be understood, and transform abstract thoughts into sentences that comply with the rules of syntax, are abandoned.”

[ “Zaum attack” by Nino Biniashvili ]

“Yet it is precisely this failure that points to a greater production context within which the poets were operating, that of a multilingual Russian Empire. It was the last major autocratic power of Europe that had just completed a nearly two hundred year expansionist projects; one of the most ambitious and bloody in the history of humanity. It stood as the largest contiguous country in the world. Although its populations were forced to speak Russian, their native tongues ranged from Finish in the north to Georgian in the South, Polish in the West and Mongolian in the East. Russian native speakers of the early twentieth century encountered languages that were completely alien to them (literally hundreds of languages from a staggering variety of language groups) and in many cases this encounter forced them to reflect back upon the sound components of their own language.”

[Dima Strakovsky, “Notes on the Empire of ZAUM”]

*

+ In the Swedish film Marianne (2011), the main character suffers from sleep paralysis or hagridden nocturnal events.

+ As a digital gallery, The International Digital Dada Library is unable to experience paranormal states.

+ Anime fans still mourn the end of Satoshi Khon’s Paranoia Agent; see also digital subculture of installations and art memes devoted to Paranoia Agent.

+ There is an online business course titled “A Minor in Reality,” but really, what’s fascinating is the attempt to position the three workshop leaders as somehow outside the business world in their biographies: “Whether he’s guiding young entrepreneurs, hacking public sector projects, or advising the C-suites of major public and private corporations…” Asking to be collaged, they are.

+ Laura Kolbe’s review of Anne Boyer’s The Undying includes a few phrases I have marked for their evocative brilliance, including “aggro-sentimental soundscape” and “chorus of strenuous optimism” and “To strike a downbeat note is deviant.” I am deeply invested in striking these downbeat notes and staying as deviant as possible.

+ Also enjoyed Heather Green’s translation of Tristan Tzara’s “Villains.”

+ If you haven’t visited the Getty Museum’s online exhibit, “Explodicity,” an interactive companion to Nancy Perloff’s Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art, you unimperatively should. The now is absent, the past is a series of plinths, and the future is whatever shape geese make when fleeing.

Beauty in the Wild: A Birmingham poetic celebration of Ntozake Shange.

Shaunteka LaTrese

In a profile for the New Yorker, Hilton Als describes how Ntozake’s sense of dance, motion, and culture infused her poetics after finishing graduate school in 1973:

Teaching during the day, Shange wrote and performed her pieces at night, slowly developing a multi-genre style that she thought represented the complexity of black American art: Why just recite a poem? Why not support its musicality by having a musician play a piece behind you while you speak? And why not dance to a poem’s music as you go along? That year, Shange had another epiphany. Driving along Highway 101 one morning, she found herself passing beneath the arc of a double rainbow. Seeing the entire rainbow take shape above her, Shange realized that she wanted to live, that she had to live; she had something to say, not only about the fragility of her own existence but about the lives of the other colored girls she knew and loved and imagined. “In that moment of seeing the double rainbow,” she told me, “I felt connected to the delicacy and irrepressible majesty of life.”

All Shaunteka’s readers who gathered to honor Ntozake Shange’s poems.

The poem I read, “ego,” is collected in Ntozake Shange’s nappy edges. I was drawn to the way she enscribed it to June Jordan, drawn to the ongoing dialogue I imagine between two incredible poets who spoke truth to power and spoke truth in power simultaneously.

ego

    (for june jordan)

use of the word
               i
is totally unjustifiable so
we have no way of distinguishin
i from whatever we are unless
somethin else is goin on that
mistakes the dynamic of us
for mine or the treasure of
ours for theirs,
we talkin abt sharin or isn’t
one all encompassin ego enough to
satisfy you/ us is all we got’n
won’t one i ever succeed in
vanquishin we/ the strength
and beauty of whatever we is
will singularly outdo an i/
effortlessly with grace
    an i is clumsiness/ narrow
    sight and sniffin round like
    a hound for where we are/ cuz i
    is lonely and lonely is different
    from the space we allow each other
    for ours/ lonely is close and dark
    and i
have known a solo self
in languishin funny houses long
enough to know that
we is the answer

Abiola Sholanke (photo by Shaunteka LaTrese)

Maria Vargas (photo by Shaunteka LaTrese)

Mimi Latoine (photo by Shaunteka LaTrese)

Priscilla Hancock Cooper (photo by Shaunteka LaTrese)

“ ....the same rhetoric that is used to establish the Black Aesthetic, we must use to establish a women’s aesthetic, which is to say that those parts of reality that are ours, those things about our bodies, the cycles of our lives that have been ignored for centuries in all castes and classes of our people, are to be dealt with now.”

— Ntozake Shange (circa 1979)

You can learn more about Shaunteka LaTrese’s poetry and culture work at Southern Girl Antics.

As for Ntozake Shange, her legacy is extraordinary and multi-faceted:

limbă

leem-buh means
tongue in my native language
the word for language 
is the word for tongue
there is no border
between the vehicle
and wine it carries
the spoken 
is not separate
from the speakable
the speaking
is not severed
from the mouth
which is the limbă 
which is a feminine noun
a mothertongue is a muscle 
inside a mother's language
which limbi is the plural of 
tongue or what most  
un-americans have 
multiples of 
plus limbă vecină 
means neighboring tongue 
or yes language
or yes a fern known as Scolopendrium vulgare
in science's language
which is universal 
which is different from
my own tongue
my rugged individualist
my closet romanian 
which comes from mothers 
but also Latin
the vulgar of

Kapka Kassabova: An actively policed border is always aggressive: it is where power suddenly acquires a body, if not a human face, and an ideology.

I love Kassabova’s Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe. Permission to consider the rise in toxic nationalisms as it intersects across the borders of my own body, the one my parents fled and the New South they adopted.

Context: I spent the summer of 2000 (after my senior year of college) in Romania, collecting research for a comparison of postcommunist transition economies. To my chagrin, the economics only told a portion of the story--a portion popularized by the infamous World Bank Development Reportment that led to catastrophic fast-track capitalism in struggling states.

No surprise: I met toxic nationalism in the form of an aging, pot-bellied man with snow-white hair and elegant suit. The ghosts of communism were alive and well on the faces of Bucharest babas who sat in hallway chairs and took note of human interactions. They were not ashamed to lay their unflinching stares on strangers--the entitlement of their gaze is only comparable to that of fraternity brothers on US college campuses.

My cousin explained that the babas had served as building monitors, Securitate informants paid to peer into the private lives of every Romanian body, feted for offering the most intimate details to secret police. 

[On a side note, one of my current essays aims to reclaim the maligned baba, shadow of all we fear and hate, image of what happens to a woman when she “lets herself go…”]

The Odious Poet: A Warning

Those who expressed shock and outrage that Trump—a raging, nativist white nationalist—had followers who loved him for his promise to do God's work, well, all shocked-and-awed liberals should maybe read a little Corneliu Vadim Tudor….. Maybe exit the echo-chamber of sad Western media and study a little Nicolae Ceausescu to glean how the sacralization of political myths and national greatness always require a commitment to eschatological redemption: the dictator does God's work for the nation. (And yes, some people we know love him for this.)

But let’s no pretend the poet isn’t involved. Poets have been supporting dictators and serving as mouth-pieces for oppression since time began. The poet’s ode can be a measure of his odiousness, especially in modern examples where the court poet compliments his coats to get close to power; it is the poet who writes the myths of national innocence. It is the poet who creates an absolutely pure victim worthy of heroism, self-sacrifice, and death.

In the US, where the poet’s role has been replaced by talking-head, it’s easy to forget how many poets created the myths that sentence fellow humans to death. Corneliu Vadim Tudor served as editor of Romania Mare, a nationalist newspaper, and leader of Romania Mare (“Great/Big Romania”) the political party. Like many former communist functionaries, the post-1989 period left him wealthy enough to pursue social entrepreneurship. And to bankroll those interests. An apostle of rabid xenophobic nationalism, Tudor first rose to fame as, yes, a poet.

Here’s a sampling of the nationalists’ sacralization of language, something the Romanian Communist Party used to punish minority languages, to erase Hungarian from schools, to make Romania great, of course, implying absolute control over word and text. I translated this trash heap poem by Tudor to give you a taste…

MARGE PIERCY: "It is as absurd...to reduce poems to political statements as it is to deny they have a political dimension." 

Poetry is not reducible to one thing. A poet enthralled by a dandelion is actually a human telling a complicated story about plants and longing and ardor and love. A girl fascinated by nationalists is actually a student of how men invent new reasons to kill us. 

When I say politics fascinates me, I mean that reading news lights my brain, hounds my thoughts, riles me up. Headlines and bylines and stock phrases hide a pulse, the old electricity. I scan crowd behavior and surges in ideology the way an internist tracks blood pressure.

I’m obsessed by the ideologization of the ode by the for-profit industry of homage. See also: heritage, inheritance, entitlement, things we believe we deserve, and how this gets marketed to us. The homage industry thrived under Ceausescu. As it thrived under Trump with Fox and his loyal cadres.

Ceausescu modeled his cult of personality after the dynastic communism he saw in the PRC and North Korea. The problem with homage is its fan club, the fans who invest personal identity in the defence of their idol. That sort of relationship is rooted in a do-no-wrong dynamic that encourages and nourishes abuse of power. The opposite of free thought is worship. 

Consider the rise in clapbacks and gym cults. Consider lifestyle brands, or what we make of a writer whom we expect to advise us on every personal, moral, social, aesthetic, and spiritual issue.

I'm drawing an unsubtle line between Ceausescu's rage when watching a TV report in which he looked older and more bloated than the Bulgarian President, and his subsequent coercion of Romanian television to carry alternate footage than the Bulgarian news reel that made him look old and (in his opinion) unattractive.

I'm saying that making the dictator look bad is a crime against the nation when a leader and nation are not separate. Fox News is complicit in the airbrush that if offered our national presidential disgrace.

Per complex, please include the entire publishing industry, its hallowed institutions, its reality-television sprees, the subdivision of the wellness industry, self-help, colonialism, appropriation.

Insofar as Ivanka Trump represents the New Woman--and Melania symbolizes the sexy, silent, available immigrant--Elena Ceausescu represented the national mother whose importance increased after 1973 when demand for labor rose. The mythology of the Ceausescus was rooted in their promise and power to make Romania Great Again. 

I feel the mindlessness of the homage industry when I see a stadium and recall the recipe for Ceausescu's media broadcasts relied on the idiocy of crowds, the presence of massed humans paying homage and waving flags and singing.

On Fridays, Romanians could watch a program titled "Copii canta patria si partidul," or "Children Singing the Homeland and Party."

Misogyny and nationalism often suckle from the same tired teat. What I mean to say is reformed Communist Party apparatchiks in Romania blamed Elena Ceausescu for everything Ceausescu did, including the personality cult.  

When I interviewed Corneliu Vadim Tudor (Ceausescu's former court poet) in the late 90's, he told me I should stop reading books & return to birth Romanian babies. He headed the Greater Romania Party, an anti-Semitic nationalist right-wing nightmare. Like all court poets, he lifted his finger to the wind and tacked wherever the extremist airs were shifting.

The dickator’s tool is always the dickator’s tool—and in my home state, he gets elected to Senate and stays very rich. Keep your eyes on the words men use to pedestal women right now. Dictators exist in every party where men still run the world. What they ask of female-indentifying bodies is the key to the castle.