"I am light, and heavy. Welcome!"

“A hundred thousand welcomes! I could weep, And I could laugh; I am light, and heavy. Welcome!”

— William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Coriolanus

*

But at least she was not like her nihilist friend, whose recent novel cavorted with a 60-year-old female character that she frequently found in her own dreams, thereby eliciting a sense of déjà vu that mingled with a desire to manhandle her friend's character (or the character her friend had likely stolen from her), if only to see what this older woman be willing to risk in different conditions than those offered to her by the nihilist. 

At least!

Not that!

Unlike her nihilist friend, she would offer the character a Vespa. Unlike him, she enjoyed not wearing her glasses and letting the world return to its natural state of blurriness. Unlike him, she had once traveled on a vessel of touristic agitprop named Maid of the Mist and she could still remember how it felt to feel Niagara Falls in her eyelashes.

Absolutely unlike him in every possible way, she never feared snow melt or melting snow. No question about it. She still enjoyed standing on the porch and throwing her favorite ceramic or porcelain objects (including a tea set) into that magnificent white expanse, abandoning those precious objects to the whiteness, leaving them to be discovered anew after the snow had vanished. Looking slightly defeated. This resurrection and refinding could not occur unless the snow melted, or could only occur once the snow agreed to change forms and transubstantiate back into its liquid spirit. Snow theology was sacred to her. As a result, while staring at the snowless front steps, she nurtures a feeling of fury with the nihilist for mistreating the objects of interest in his novel, whether by greed or fear, relegating the 60-year-old woman and the snowdrift to situation that was frankly unbearable. The only way to deal with such things, of course, is to write them, which she refuses to do. 

However—

After marinating quietly in all six of Liszt's Consolations and irresponsibly regaining a sense of herself from the melodies created by others, she decides to send an email to her nihilist friend, beginning with the observation that there was something on fire in his mouth, a fire that could very well be his father or a wish, since one cannot actually walk into the hotel room where the nihilist already stands without trespassing on the fiction of the building itself.

In this email, she asks a few questions and implies that his novel was very good, even though he is wrong about snow, a fact that Franz Liszt had made abundantly clear centuries ago. 

Signed, A (The Architect) 

Subject: some conflagrations.

While waiting for her nihilist friend to reply, she begins to resent paying taxes to a federal government run by humans so corrupt that she now fantasizes continuously about pushing these spineless assholes into a mud puddle. This particular fantasy is new to her, or the guillotine part is new to her, but she leaves it there, in the mud, intact and unfinished, to pick up a little bit later, since, unlike her friend, she has often dreamt of mud wrestling with world leaders. 

Unlike her friend, she never asked Jesus into her heart, and thus, unlike her friend, never had to host a wake for such an event, nor was her metaphysics contaminated by such invitations and pledges. Since that day in 7th grade when she realized that her hand was positioned atop her heart while addressing a piece of fabric that represented the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she refused to do pledges. Nothing was invited into her heart except blood, and this she left to her arteries. This time in seventh grade corresponded with a different sort of practice that entered her life, a practice not entirely dissimilar from that which her friend had novelized, although in her case, there was no darkness and no dick, but a stuffed lamb with ears that poked up from the side. There was also an afternoon light shining through the window as she took this lamb downstairs into the basement and sat on it. At one point in her basement endeavor, she was astonished to find this pleasure interrupted by a vision, a divine intervention in the figure of a snake moving towards her, hissing very slowly, and she remembers looking the snake in the eye, and saying yes to him, and then closing her eyes, allowing her face to settle into an insane smile that she would later attribute to Rapture and use as justification for saying no to boys that liked her because she was already a saint and the snake was her secret friend and her stake in the game of both life and text was not to kill the bull— no, not to destroy the beast she couldn’t tame, nor to diminish his power— but to study him like medieval monks studied the Mysterium in order to ride the name of her death, better than being ridden by it.

O! She feels horrible for failing to define a word she used earlier. It is never to0 late to make a point of clarification, or to restate a claim with more specificity. Unlike her nihilist friend, nothing was invited into her heart except blood, which was another word for Poetry. And she would pledge any and all to the maw of its obscene, metaphysical mouth.

Writing prompt from a detail.

“Alibi and alias: everyone generates their own, is their own. We have names and some sort of permanence and halos left behind like salt rings in a sauna.”

—Ander Monson,  "Index for X and the Origin of Fires"

*

If you enlarge a detail in a picture, you produce another painting.

This is what Roland Barthes told students in a lecture session dated April 20, 1977, adding that “the whole of Nicolas de Stael springs from 5 centimeters squared of Cezanne.” The prior month, Barthes had focused his lectures on the pictorial space and the role of the line, telling his students that “the horizon is the line that marks the boundaries of my territory," and locating the line in this labor of creating boundaries as well as pictorial perspective. But on this day in late April, Barthes' attention circulated around the frame, and the rectangle – which he suggested as “the basic shape of power". 

Barthes’ ‘basic of shape of power ‘surprised me. When I visualize power, it has the aura of symmetry, completion, complete enclosure, self-sufficiency. Why not the cube or the square as power’s shape?

But thinking about what the horizon does rather than how it looks got me closer to Barthes. A horizon creates a space where action can exceed itself, can mark the page with the possibility of futurity, whether by enlarging detail or by calling the subject into the imaginary.

*

Near the end of his too-short life, Barthes was emphatic about “the right to digress” in text and thought, a right he defended on the basis of how much is happened upon in a digression, how much is accidentally discovered on a discursive path that isn’t entirely sure what it wishes to prove—- a path that doesn’t know its end, a way that doesn’t seek to demonstrate.

The digression, like the road or the trail less traveled, doesn’t appeal to simply because it promises a destination. The appeal of the digression lies in what it may suggest. In taking it, we might see things that we have not yet seen, or things that we did not plan to see. The unexpected. These unplanned things ask us to approach them in a different spirit. A spirit that is curious or perhaps more generous than the spirit that wants to get somewhere. 

We forget that the poet’s job is to taste the world. We forsake our duty of stumbling, fumbling, rolling around in the dirt trying to find words for it.

RB Kitaj, Land of Lakes, 1975. oil on canvas. 152.4 x 152.4 cm. private collection

RB Kitaj’s “Land of Lakes” (1975 to 1977) is a landscape painting of sorts. The artist, RB (Rowland Brooks) Kitaj was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1932. Although born in the US, Kitaj has lived in England for a long time and played a role in the British Pop Art movement, but what fascinates me about him is that he quotes from high art more than pop-culture in his work. There are pieces of various popular symbols—-from religious crosses to the eye on the whitewashed wall—-yet each is perfectly detailed and delicately rendered.

Although Kitaj called this piece an “optimistic one” that envisions “better time to come," I offer it as a prompt because it is inspired by a detail from Ambrosio Lorenzetti’s 14th century fresco, The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, a fresco located in Sienna, Italy. 

*

Now a prompt. Pick a detail from this piece, inspired by a detail and write a poem titled after Kay’s piece on Lorenzetti’s. Use the colors and objects to describe a scene that is being recollected by a speaker in the future. Nothing has to happen, but things must be felt or wished for.

(If you need an additional spirit to move you, take this fragment I cut from a paper and use it as a “message in a bottle” that gives you the following words, as spoken by Debord and Lukacs, to use at some point in your poem. Or just three words. Or the syllable count. Spin the bottle until it tells you how to play a secret game.)

*

As for titling, Chris Hitchens and Martin Amis had a game they played where you replace the word “love” with “hysterical sex” in a song or book title or poem titles or movies. They had another game that played with existing titles called “titles that didn’t quite make it.” Use these games to generate a few titles — or a list poem.

Of strangeness, complexity, and 'scandalous visibility'.

1

There is strangeness at stake in complexity. There is the pleasure of encountering something unknown, the rush of rubbing one’s mind against that weird rock, feeling the sharpness sharpening. What Jean-Luc Nancy called "the imaginary . . . that point the accomplishment of the act is worth infinitely more than the act itself" is inscribed in the motions and gestures of ritual. At that point where the symbolic and the real collide, "the image brings us into its presence."

"Fury is the desire that wants to grow and suck on the source of desire itself… and desire is that or nothing; exacerbated exasperation, " Nancy wrote.

2 

In a wonderful essay for The Paris Review titled “In This Essay I Will: On Distraction”, David Schurman Wallace evokes reaching the point in his writing when the initial spark loses its come-hither glint—the point where distraction courts the mind. Wallace's eyes fall onto his shelves, lingering in the memory of former trysts, former relationships with texts. And there, on the shelf, is Flaubert's final novel, the book left unfinished. There is that temptation courting the mind, looking for an excuse to wander back into it. 

Wallace gives us the paradox of writing as labor, namely, that distraction doubles as blessing and curse. Distraction releases us from desire, or from the intensity of edits and drafts and evidence; desire lets the mind literally wander over the wall, and take a side trail into an elsewhere. Desire opens an Otherwise.

Flaubert's two clerks want to know everything, and this interest in everything keeps them from the labor of attending to something. "Their curiosity has no staying power," as Wallace observes. Their desire lacks commitment or willingness to sweat. 

Writing is not fun in the way that this word is conventionally used. 

Writing is cannibalized by "the possibility of detours"; research leads us to the rabbit hole that seeds new ideas and flirts with different beginnings or projects.

3

"Everything is unique, nothing happens more than once in a lifetime," declared those two choirboys of gossip known as the Goncourt brothers in the year of 1867. We have their notebooks to hold against this presumed uniqueness, for while the instant may differ in details, schadenfreude vibes the same. For the Goncourts, the notebooks existed as places that resisted the vanishing regimes of modernity. The bros. remained “at home in” the words they'd committed to remembering others.

“Home” is a word for the place that is uniquely familiar.

4

"Literature is a voracious and anarchist beast," George Steiner declared in an essay that pondered why Tolstoy and Wittgenstein maintained a skepticism of Shakespeare. Both men believed Shakespeare didn’t deserve the cult that surrounded his name. Both reasoned from the Platonic complaint leveraged against tragedy: Shakespeare does not tell us how to live our lives. His words and plays are spectacular, but spectacle does not present us with difficulty. If anything, spectacle is a distraction from the difficult parts of being human. Plato, Tolstoy, and Wittgenstein all share this concern about spectacle, and how aesthetics can destroy ethics.

5

“I wouldn’t say that being trans now is living my truth. I’d say it’s a better fiction,” writes McKenzie Wark in Love and Money, Sex and Death: A Memoir (Verso, 2023).

6

Dave Hickey concluded the Acknowledgements section for one of his books by libating the uncertain nature of their recounting. “Finally, since the experiences recounted in this book have been compressed, elided, collaged, and occasionally disguised to protect the guilty, my apologies to those who remember it differently, or remember it all too well,” Hickey wrote.

7

Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays

8

If we avoid writing the shadows, it is because very few books have time or audience willing to study the angles of light brought to each text. “All lights around the space it illuminates with the shadow it produces.” I’m paraphrasing what I copied from Pascal Quignard’s Abysses (as translated by Chris Turner) into my notebook. The syntax is ragged; I probably miscopied—-but there is something interesting to me about leaving the error as written. And refusing to be corrected in my misapprehension.

Consequentialism is the sword we raise against the abyss, as Quignard tells it. The abyss is simultaneously without consequent and inconsequential: it defies sequence and unbinds temporality. Cocteau’s “scandalous visibility” can be read against this sequencing at the heart of representation: we come to know (or believe that we ‘know’) by virtue of ordering. We recognize a shape and console ourselves in this recognition of form. But the shadows on the walls of the cave haunt us precisely because they are the part of reality that continues to escape us. Even as they invoke, provoke, and lustrate us.

9

At one point in Quignard’s Abysses, he tells us: “I like the shadows cast by shapes, struck by light, like the repercussions one sees in mirrors.” Almost immediately, my mind interferes and poses a question to my demiurge, namely, how did this relationship between human sound (or “percussion”) and punishment (“repercussion”) emerge?

Nonsense.

“I love the sea,” wrote Charles Debussy, responding to critics who chided his piece, La Mer, for breaking with classical traditions. “I have listened to it with the passionate respect one owes it. If I've transcribed badly what it dictated to me, that's no concern of yours or mine. And you'll allow that all ears don't hear in the same way. In the end you love and defend traditions that no longer exist for me, or at least that only exist as representatives of an epoch, in which they weren't all as beautiful or as worthwhile as one might care to say, and the dust of the Past isn't always respectable.”

I have listened to it with the passionate respect one owes it. And so I return to the work of collecting traces and listening to shadows amid ciphers buried inside literature’s scandalous visibilities, holding the ‘possibility of the detour’ close.

My fear of not pleasing you.

Yesterday, while revisiting Paul Valery's notebooks, I returned to the challenge of writing, or existing as a writer, in my own. 

There is nothing 'unique' about this particular insecurity that arises from creating a world in words, knowing that a few people may read it, a knowledge that is paralyzing if one studies it, or begins to worry that you will fail the reader, a failure so rich in its potential and scope that you could spend weeks worrying about the nature of this failure—whether the meaning fails to signify, whether the syntax distracts from the event, whether the world you aimed to convey dies prior to its birth, etc. etc. 

All such worries, concerns, and anxieties are relational, which is to say, they are shaped by the writer's relationship to the audience and its expectations (as well as the writer's understanding of this audience). And so I began thinking about the difference between wanting to impress someone and wanting to please them . . . for, varying levels of vulnerability are at stake in these ways of imagining, or thinking.

Wanting to impress is in some ways a public act that partakes of sociality, and exists in relation to those conventions and structures which negotiate status. 'To make an impression,' as we say, or to be 'impressive' involves making one's self worthy, evidencing the corresponding traits or skills, some of which may have to do with the feeling of inferiority that is part of the writing life. But the desire to please someone seems different, if only because the audience is private, or the scope of that pleasure is grounded in privacy, in that particular knowing that defines itself intimately. To please, is to gratify and surprise in the same instant, to draw a mind somewhere close to happiness, which is a ridiculous thing for a human to want to do, and therefore, partly because it is so ridiculous, perhaps that is why it is kept private, the other part being a sort of loss that occurs when this desire appears.

To please, is also, quite different from satisfying the obligations of a contract, or meeting those conditions in a way that is satisfactory both to the parties and to the nature of the contract itself.

Paul Cruet, Hand of Rodin Holding a Torso (cast 1917)

The desire to impress others is ego-driven: it is, perhaps, the folly of our vanity, the glissando of our jokes, the protective (and often exciting) thrill of the game. We are vulnerable to hurt feelings, where what is hurt is our self-esteem, our carapace, the exterior edifice. 

The desire to please abandons the ego by putting the other first. I cannot argue that one is better or worse, — I am not interested in advancing moral claims or challenging late capitalism’s competitive urges (not here, at least, not in this)—-but I can say, without mincing words, that wanting to please asks us to reckon with emptiness in more visceral and difficult way than wanting to impress.

Yes: We are the first to hear it.

And the first to be abandoned by it—

The first to be hurt, stung by recognition, or repetition. In every writer, there is a child who needs to prove why the path they have chosen is worthwhile, despite the scorn of their parents, adults, and teachers. 

In every writer, there is also a child who cannot find words for how intensely and unbearably the world touches them— how it moves them to tears, hollows out their insides, leaves them mute (and, sometimes, at its worst, numb). And perhaps this child is the one who is hurt when they discover in themselves a desire to please—- if only because this desire assumes an other, and that assumption is specific enough to want the best for that other. In those circumstances, you find yourself not wanting to prove anything—only to share, to delight, to soothe. Being unable to do so becomes a hole, a hyperawareness of distance.

“Literature is the art of language,” wrote Paul Valery, “It is an art concerned with die means of mutual comprehension” — and if I am failing you, it is because there is no way for me to compensate for, or undo, the ways the world failed you, or the grief that attends being failed by words. Finding one’s hands empty. Finding one’s lips parched for verbs. Finding nothing that rouses the spirit from its stupefying sadness.

Yesterday, I recollected squeezing my own hands until they were numb, reminding them, firmly, not to feel things, since feeling too much has always been a problem for me, a problem that my father describes as an “oversensitivity” that “blinds you to reality,” a problem I have spent many years learning to hide or pushing into the problem that is poetry. 

Dear human, please do not forget how much language loved you first.

Félix González-Torres and love's time.

“I thought of that phrase from Freud: we prepare ourselves for our greatest fears in order to weaken them.”

—Félix González-Torres

Queer artist Félix González-Torres died at 38 of AIDS. He was born in Cuba. As a child, he loved cats and watercolor paints. He moved to NYC on an art’s scholarship in the late 1970’s. A few years later, while hanging out at Boy Bar in East Village, he met Ross Laycock.

It’s so simple, isn’t it? A name, an arrow in that flurry of hastening pulses, an opening-into, an other. Love begins world-making and changes what is given. In this new world, love destroys time and alters duration. They had a handful of years together before time was altered again.

In 1988, Ross was diagnosed with HIV. The cruelty of the AIDS crisis rattled queer communities. And Félix did what art does, namely, modified the world love created in order to assure its continuance. He wrote a letter to Ross that that included a rough sketch of a piece — tentatively titled Lovers — that consisted of two clocks touching each other that start in synchronization. This allusion to their heartbeats juxtaposed helplessness (the mechanized tick tick tick of a clock sounds very similar to a bomb) and tenderness (the clocks touched each other with their machine skins).

When Felix developed the idea for Untitled (Perfect Lovers), the two lovers’ hearts were still beating. Slowly, the clocks would fall out of time, caused by both the running out of batteries and the very nature of the mechanics.

When the clocks were installed, they were to touch. The two black-rimmed clocks could be, however, replaced with white store-bought clocks with the same dimensions and design. The two hands, minute and second, were to be set in sync with the awareness that the two hands might eventually go out of sync during display. If one of the clocks required battery replacement, it was to be done, after which the clocks were to be reset at the same time. The clocks were to be exhibited against a wall painted in light blue.

Gonzalez-Torres admitted that the clocks would ultimately fall out of synch, and one sooner or later stopping first:

Time is something that scares me … or used to. This piece made with the two clocks was the scariest thing I have ever done. I wanted to face it. I wanted those two clocks right in front of me, ticking.

Each time the batteries died, they were to be replaced and the clocks could be started again—- the clocks could be reset at the same time.

(This is the part where I try not to cry. This is the unbelievable tenderness in touching, losing, being, continuing. This is the nature of elegies.)

Felix Gonzalez-Torres – Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1991, clocks, paint on wall, overall 35.6 x 71.2 x 7 cm, photo: MoMA

Monsters tick in my mind; the sound of stopwatches or count-downs have always been wired to bombs and death for me. I hear a countdown and see an ending. González-Torres’ clocks know this tick—-they do not avoid time. One might even conjecture that Untitled (Perfect Lovers) destroys time.

Five years before this, González-Torres lost his partner, Ross Laycock, the man he called his “one great love,” to AIDS.

“Who is your public?”

González-Torres speaking about “Untitled (Placebo)” in 1994

As the scandal over NEA funding for Mapplethorpe galvanized anti-queer 'culture warriors, Félix tried to find ways around the censorious political climate. One of these ways involved resisting the label of “gay art.” In his own words:

Two clocks side by side are much more threatening to the powers that be than an image of two guys sucking each other’s dicks because they cannot use me as a rallying point in their battle to erase meaning. It is going to be very difficult for members of Congress to tell their constituents that money is being expended for the promotion of homosexual art when all they have to show are two plugs side by side or two mirrors side by side.

Once, We, Were—

Once we were driven by “homesickness for the past,” Mark Fisher said in 2006, “now, it is the impossibility of the present.”

I go back to the instructions González-Torres gave for how the two clocks should be displayed—- the two clocks were to touch and could be replaced with white plastic commercial clocks of similar dimensions and design. The guidelines continue, the minute and second hands were to be set in sync, with the understanding that eventually they might go out of sync during the exhibition. If one of the clocks needed the batteries replaced, it was to be done, and the clocks were to be reset accordingly; the clocks were to be displayed on a wall painted light blue.

The guidelines consist of an ambiguous statement: with the understanding that eventually they might go out of sync, if you consider the implication of the phrase perfect lovers, generally or as per those words, perfect love should ideally forever stay synchronized.

Letter to Carl George from Félix Gonzalez-Torres (detail), May 12, 1988. © The Félix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.

“When You See This Remember Me” / Robert Storr

“Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ Clocks / Perfect Lovers – What does it mean?” / Martin Schulze

“Félix González-Torres, Vita brevis, ars longa” / Bailey Richardson

Psychocinema and last suppers.

 “To let yourself matter is to acknowledge not merely how it is with you, and hence to acknowledge that you want the other to care, at least care to know. It is equally to acknowledge that your expressions in fact express you, that they are yours, that you are in them. This means allowing yourself to be comprehended, something you can always deny. Not to deny it is, I would like to say, to acknowledge your body, and the body of your expressions, to be yours, you on earth, all there will ever be of you.”

— Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy

*

Although far from what is called a Lacanian, I find myself enjoying the company of Helen Rollins’ Psychocinema (Polity, 2024) as the spectacle of newborn Trumpism unfurls. What follows is simply an excerpt from the section titled “The Tics and Grimaces of the Universe” in Rollins’ book, which focuses on the 90’s dark comedy, The Last Supper.

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Section titled "The Tics and Grimaces of the Universe - The Last Supper" by Helen Rollins

The Last Supper (directed by Stacy Title, 1995) depicts a group of righteous graduate students who invite right-wing guests for dinner. They intend to murder these guests, serving them poisoned wine from a blue decanter—rather than a clear one, which contains the normal drink—unless they come to recant their political beliefs over the course of the meal. After several successful killings, the students invite a famous conservative pundit to dinner. The pundit confuses the group with a range of moderate opinions that they have difficulty refuting. He even admits that the views he presents on television are for ratings and do not represent his true political positions. Over the course of the dinner, the pundit pieces together clues that murders have taken place in this house. The students retreat to the kitchen to decide the pundit's fate, agreeing that his centrist views mean he should be spared. During this time, the pundit has swapped the poisoned wine from the blue decanter to the clear one and serves it to the students, raising a toast. As the film ends, the liberal students collapse on the floor and the conservative pundit speculates about a possible populist presidential bid.

[Here, though the students profess liberal views, they are—as in the Master-Slave dialectic—conservative, acting in accordance with the Master's Discourse. They are unwilling to recognize the dialectical subjectivity of the Other, preferring to retain a frame of logic that sustains the status quo. This logic is unstable and contains within it the beginnings of their own demise. Not only would an embrace of the contradictory subjectivity of the Other allow for the possibility of change that may transform the collective in surprising and emancipatory ways, but also to foreground the Lack that generates this universal contradiction is to challenge the logic of capitalist closure itself, whose symptoms at the level of culture the students might consciously condemn.

The students nullify the possibility of contingency within the Other by casting them as transcendentally belonging to a category of belief, unable to change and not marked by universal Lack. Like the contemporaneous "culture warrior" declaring their opponent to embody a "crypto-fascist" or "crypto-communist position, the students engage in abstraction, claiming an a priori knowledge as to the destination of the chain of signifiers and the possible replication of the signifier "A" in another context. This utopian approach to language and logic necessitates an enemy whose presence explains away its impossibility. It resides within a paranoid-schizoid position, in Kleinian terms, demanding the destruction of the subjectivity of the Other and denying their possible conversion, undermining any opening toward the surprise and novelty of emancipatory politics altogether. It is a position contradicted in the film by the pundit's vacillating position. His adoption of political ideas as a televisual performance demonstrates his discernment or not-at-oneness with himself, a symptom of his marking by Lack and something that could be transformed in the right material and philosophical context.

The Irish comedian Dylan Moran suggests that war isn't conflict; it's the inability to do conflict. If politics is the very act of engaging with the inevitably conflictual desires of the collective, then "culture war" is the end of politics. It pits groups' interests against each other for the benefit of a capitalist class that resists change, even at the cost of the world's inexistence.

To be unrecognized in one's subjectivity is to experience a negation of one's humanity that is experienced as violent. The intransigence of the liberal students and their unwillingness to recognize the Other may be the very reason those they disparage have taken up their reactionary positions in the first place – in their subjective anxiety and material precariousness. The conservative nature of their politics affirms their subjective investment in the logic of capital, which alienates and exploits the collective and casts blame upon them for their suffering in the face of the impossible material conditions it creates.

The final scene of the film, in which the pundit sees himself leading a populist uprising, expresses the way in which this kind of revolt can be motivated by a libidinal ressentiment against the liberal Beautiful Soul, an action that is disastrous for the universal politics that would undermine the cultural phenomena that—consciously at least—the conservative students claim so fervently to stand against, as well as the political economy that generates the material conditions that foment reactive anger in the first place.

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Certainly, there is more, which I leave here in PDF form for those who would like to read it—-while also encouraging you to pay $10 cost that would support Polity’s publications as well as Rollins.

EXCERPTS FROM PSYCHOCINEMA [PDF]

Schiele's final self-portraits in portraits of others.

1

Nothing in the world is astonishing, 
unbelievable or forsworn anymore 
now that Zeus has made night out of moon 
and hidden away the blazing light of the sun.

—Archilochus, 7 BCE

Archilochus’ poem above uses an eclipse, a natural event in which the moon hides the sun, as a sign that the gods disapprove of a daughter’s marriage. We have him in fragments, this poet, we have him in pieces and chunks and quotations, known for his images and forebodings.

Heraclitus quoted Archilochus’ use of natural events to describe war with the Thracians, thus adding this trochaic verse to Archilochus’ legacy: "Look Glaucus! Already waves are disturbing the deep sea and a cloud stands straight round about the heights of Gyrae, a sign of storm; from the unexpected comes fear."

2

From the unexpected comes fear— but from the ordinary comes the unbelievable. A moment that would seem to incur blessings and fruition instead disposes of a couple that has not yet tasted their thirties. I’m thinking of Edith and Egon Schiele in early 20th-century Vienna, and Edith’s pregnancy.

Perhaps nothing is unbelievable or forsworn anymore as the First World War reveals the annihilationist possibility of modern technology. Perhaps the world feels even more impossible now that the gods are no longer controlling the gunpowder or the lightning. In 1918, Schiele drew his pregnant wife’s portrait as she laid on her deathbed, ill with the Spanish flu. The two had just secured a new studio for his work; the baby was expected; life had begun assuming a shape and momentum that bourgeois friends and family considered livable (or at the very least, less scandalous).

Schiele, Edith Schiele on Her Deathbed (1918)

He made two drawings of Edith, both dated October 28, 1918; both signed in a way that presents us with the vertical image seen above.

But Edith was lying down when he sketched these drawings.

Perhaps it wasn’t clear if she would die yet, though the sketch manages to convey the glassy sheen of her eyes.

3

These two portraits, above and below, were Schiele’s final drawings, the last pieces of work to come from his hands.

This is the second drawing, and I am presenting it here as it was drawn rather than as Schiele presented it (with that vertical signature and date that gives us an Edith sitting up).

The positioning of hair curls suggests an invisible or erased pillow. With the image on its side, one can see that her lips are parted and parched by fever. She is looking at him with all the life that remains as her blood pressure drops from dehydration. Her eyes express exhaustion, disbelief, a whirlwind of things one cannot imagine.

I’m not sure which of the two sketches he drew first, though I’m tempted to guess it was the one below, the one that still has energy and presence of mind to include a hand that distracts the eye from the absence of a pillow. Again, I’ve turned it horizontally. . . It feels as if she is still alive in it? Perhaps the black crayon drawing above depicts her after her death.

4

On October 27th, the day prior, a frantic Egon asked Edith to reassure him of her love. To write it down. To say, with paper and pen for eternity (or just then), that she loved him . . . And so she did.

The document is preserved.

That same day, Egon also sent a letter to his mother, informing her of their sudden illness.

Edith's letter to Egon

Egon's letter to his mother

In the note, Edith’s handwriting moves across the squares of the graph paper like hands along a wall in a dark corridor. It is dizzying to read, and vertiginous to recognize the way solidity vanishes with high fever. Surely Egon, himself, was sick at this point. A few days later, he would be lying in bed, a widower. By the following day, Edith is gone.

Egon’s weakness is apparent; the skin of his arm loose, as one dehydrated by high fever. On the day of his death, just after midnight, in that darkness marking the beginning of October 31st, the artist died. His friends were present: Martha Fein took the photograph of him on his deathbed while Anton Sandig made a death mask.

Schiele on his deathbed, as photographed by Martha Fein

On November 3rd, Egon Schiele was buried in Vienna, in the cemetery at Ober-Sankt-Veit. He was twenty-eight years old. Nothing forsworn survives the drawings, the photos, the words.

Krzhizhanovsky's "physiological sketches" of Moscow.

1

As chronology would have it, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky remained in Moscow during World War II. It was a bleak time on the ground. While fellow Russians navigated the scarcity and destruction of war, Krzhizhanovsky attempted to document the city in a series of what he called “physiological sketches” reminiscent of the forms employed by Belinsky and Turgenev in the 1840s. He planned to collect the sketches in a book titled Wounded Moscow, but the war’s developments snuffed out this plan as he was sent on various assignments to cover the battles. By the time K. was ready to publish the book, the publishers had adjusted themselves to the needs of the year, 1949, in which the only stories told about the war were to be heroic.

In one of these “physiological sketches,” Krzhizhanovsky introduces Moscow’s windows as characters, residents of the city. “Let the street lead on,” he writes, “And let the window speak.” The sketch becomes an ode to fenestrology, noting that the city’s windows were the first to be “on the lookout for war.” Tailors were brought to dress the windows. “Since the day of the war's arrival, all manner of what if’s have sprinkled upon us out of the clear blue sky. Chiromancy has been with us since once upon a time, since the ancient Greeks— and let it stay, if only as pure supposition, and fenestrology too.” Cluelessly gathering sun, the geraniums and butter cups don’t know that war is happening: “They bloom, as though nothing were wrong.” Nor do they know that they are consigned to a particular place and time, “merely annuals,” blessed to lack knowledge of duration.

2

No one refers to themselves as a chiromantic, or a fan of chiromancy. At least not in my recent readings, where people "who have fifty cars" strike Edward Said as incomprehensible. Addressing two interlocuters in conversation, Said tells them that "identity is a set of currents, flowing currents, rather than a fixed place or a stable set of objects," as mentioned in his memoir.

3

In a different sketch, Krzhizhanovsky recounts a series of conversations involving the girls who have gone to fetch water. There is a store, dark as in a painting by the Old Dutch Masters with gestures frozen in various stages of light, illuminated only an oil lamp. It is noted that water is present but not “light.” It is noted that the store is closed. A customer demands to know why the clerk is reading by the light if there is no light. A few faces later, a customer asks the darkness if there is water. And the darkness replies that there is. And the lamp is burned out by "the kerosene."

Egon Schiele, Stylized Flowers in Front of a Decorative Background (1908)

4

In conversation with Daniel Barenboim, Edward Said said:

from Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, edited by Ara Guzelimian

To live with the history that we are part of, one must begin somewhere close to the ground. From where I type, this ground colder than it has been in Birmingham, Alabama since temperature records for coldness were last broken. Colder than ever, they say, as if time can be reconsidered by backshadowing.

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky addressed the sketch titled "The July Baby" to the babies born during the July bombs and epidemics— “Incomprehension is your chance at life. Take it. But understanding is your debt.”

Of epistles.

1

Because the number gives me a place to begin— it pronounces something that is not zero. And Cynthia Ozick’s “Voices from the Dead Letter Office” gives me the writer, herself, stalking Lady Caroline Lamb, the novelist whose obsession with Lord Byron elevated the epistle into novel fan-tasms.

Inspired by Lamb, Ozick developed a similar thing for Sidney Morgenbesser, a philosophy professor, “an original,” an electrical storm of intellect “dazzingly endowed,” as Ozick puts it, leaving her “maddened by a hero of imagination, a powerful sprite who could unravel the skeins of logic that braid human cognition.” Building on this poetic logic, she opens her hand: “And so, magnetized and wanting to mystify, I put on a disguise and began my chase: I wrote letters.” Not just letters, but that particular genre known to literary history as the love letter, that species “of enthrallment, of lovesickness” —- Ozick addressed them to the philosopher in his university office, signing them all in “passionately counterfeit handwriting” as “Lady Caroline Lamb.” Thus does the writer forge the sword of her fiction. Let it be noted that writing has never been an art for the feint of heart.

*

Letters are central to fiction, of course, and Ozick brings “the mute and final revelation of Melville’s Bartleby: his origin in the Dead Letter Office,” to bear on the history of the happenstance, as well as the figurations of “horse-faced” ugliness that Henry James observed in George Eliot when redeeming her looks by referencing her spirit in a letter to his father. “To begin with she is magnificently ugly—deliciously hideous,” James writes, before launching into an inventory of warped pieces: “her low forehead”; “dull grey eye”; “a vast pendulous nose”; “a huge mouth, full of uneven teeth”; “a chin”; a “jawbone.” In sum, a “vast ugliness” to which the author admits the usual interior beauty.

Here is where James shifts course: “Yes, behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking . . . an admirable physiognomy—a delightful expression, a voice soft and rich as that of a counseling angel—a mingled sagacity & sweetness—a broad hint of a great underlying world of reserve, knowledge, pride and power.”

Literally in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking, James confesses, sheepishly pacing the page of a brewing fiction. Ozick’s essay laments the end of the letter, and I can’t agree entirely with the despair, since the the decline of Hallmark’s “ready-made card—that handy surrogate for intimacy” has been a relief, and emails perhaps have stepped into the space of snail mail, albeit differently.

*

The most striking excerpts quoted by Ozick are surely her own—- in the portrait she sketches of a former friend named “O” who sounds wonderfully inventive, or well-invented, or else the well-dressed ghost of pseudo George Steiner . . .

2

“If the writing itself is the event then why can’t I figure it out by writing, P asked, by this point agitated,” Laynie Brown writes in “Periodic Companions”.

“So I tell her, you’ve touched the white space,” Brown writes. You have tarried with the nothing and found the space lacking. “We still live within pages and persons and within our own limited consciousness,” and there is no curative lens or fixative contra the irresolution of images that prefer to remain unsettled; or the amnesias and aporias hidden behind the nouns, shadow or bloom, depending.

Paula Rego, The Artist in Her Studio (1993)

So I end with two more epistles excerpted by Ozick and a piece of poem copied into my own notebook in this freezing January that promises to be a beginning.

April is an unkind month, but perhaps May nowadays is still unkinder: I always find the first burst of spring, and the last glory of autumn, the two moments most troubling to my equilibrium and the most reviving of memories one must subdue. . . . One cannot help coming to the surface at times with a realization of how intense life can be—or how it was—or how it might have been. . . . But I do always feel convinced that every moment matters, and that one is always following a curve either up or down . . . and that the goal is something which cannot be measured at all in terms of “happiness”—whatever “the peace that passeth understanding” is, it is nothing like “happiness,” which will fade into invisibility beside it, so that happiness or unhappiness does not matter.

—- T. S. Eliot to Emily Hale, whom Ozick describes as “(a steady correspondent in a long-standing relationship that she mistakenly believed would culminate in marriage)”, on the date of April 12, 1932

*

What I wish to put on record now is my new invention. . . . My idea is this: Make a scrap book with leaves veneered or coated with gum-stickum of some kind; wet the page with sponge, brush, rag, or tongue, and dab on your scraps like postage stamps. . . . The name of this thing is “Mark Twain’s Self-Pasting Scrap Book.”

— Mark Twain to his brother Orion Clemens, August 11, 1872

*

You are my love after so many years,
My dizziness before so much waiting, 
That nothing can ice-over, obsolesce, 
Not even what waits for our death,
Not even what is alien to us
In my eclipses, in my returns.

— René Char, “To ***”

"I want nothing of"

white hope
hot lead
a banana bandana and your
what the heap said to the eagle
and then the news
I want nothing of

— Frank O’Hara, “Poem”

First it was everything and then it was nothing, though it was the same language we were using.

— Renee Gladman, “Five Things”

“Beyond the intensification of many forms of waged work, the burdens of unwaged domestic and caring work have also increased, both because of the pressures of neoliberal restructuring along with the double day, and because of the increasingly dominant model of intensive parenting presented as what is required to develop the communicative, cognitive, and creative capacities increasingly necessary for reproducing, let alone elevating, the class status of a new generation of workers. Given all the ways that the institution of the family—on which the privatization of reproductive labor has been predicated and sustained— is so clearly not up to the task of assuming so much of the responsibilities for the care of children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled, the refusal of the present organization of reproductive labor may have much to offer contemporary feminism.”

— Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work (bolding is mine)

“Write a letter with nothing but regrets.” —- My notebook says Riley Hanick said this.

Another way of phrasing things might be accretive, namely:

the intensification of many forms of the burdens of caring for the waged work of neoliberal restructuring;
because of the intensive parenting involved in grooming the class status of the new generation
assuming the institution of the family is present in the privatization of the refusal to develop a refusal to develop

Avoid “me” and “my” when you can. In memoir, don’t say, “I remember that in my childhood nothing happened to me.” Say, "In childhood nothing happened."

— Donald Hall

Linda Gregg says her student’s journals “fill up with lovely things like, ‘the mirror with nothing reflected in it.’”

According to my journal, it is cold, the heater is broken, there is no repair to be had, and Dan Beachy-Quick believes a poem “reaches through the little hole in the eye and puts the thing in mind, that realm in which perception and forgetting are simultaneous, where every presence coincides with a corresponding absence, where experience, as in an old iconic painting, holds aside the breast of its garment to reveal not a burning heart, but a nothing that pulses and is on fire."

Nothing is ever resolved, not to a sufficient
degree of accuracy. Not speed or location. Not 
the numinous image of the dead soul ascending the stair.

— Jaswinder Bolina, "You'll See a Sailboat"

But names matter. “Gaustine meant nothing to local people, so they changed his name to Gosho, Downtown Gosho,” according to Grigori Gospodinov.

Not speed or location but something closer to the hue of motion, that smear humans become when chasing a toddler across the sidewalk. You’ll miss the choo-choo! Come back! Screaming like fire-engine red and firmly believing in this strategy, since the only sound that mattered to him was the Choo-Choo and any neighboring words were there to scaffold the Choo-thing, to build context for screaming the train cartoon sound in the swarming vicinity of suited professionals that liked to eat at the bistro near that horrible intersection. My face on his shoulder, picking him up, his finger poking into my ear, beating out a rhythm, ‘choo-choo’ to accompany my steps.

The brown flecks in my mother’s eyes
became my own, my son’s, through adolescence.
The body knows, at most, an octave
of desire that meets the air sometimes
for nothing. Just thinking of your hands
I can go wet, or dreaming, come
in my sleep, and wake to a day
in which all men are liars, wearing clothes.

— Deborah Digges, “To Science”

I could sink to anything. 
I think I could kill.
I think I have killed
for the shape, the sheer 
body of this poem. 
Look how beautiful, 
feel how impossible,
this slender, limned thing 
weighing next to nothing, 
saying next to nothing. 
Saying everything. 
Everything.

— Paul Hostovsky, “Love Poem”

Light clarity avocado salad in the morning
after all the terrible things I do how amazing it is
to find forgiveness and love, not even forgiveness
since what is done is done and forgiveness isn't love
and love is love nothing can ever go wrong
though things can get irritating boring and dispensable
(in the imagination) but not really for love
though a block away you feel distant the mere presence
changes everything like a chemical dropped on a paper
and all thoughts disappear in a strange quiet excitement
I am sure of nothing but this, intensified by breathing

— Frank O’Hara, “Poem” (from 1959)

Bolaño on "the best gang."

From "decoherence".

A manuscript that began during pandemic, in dialogue with a text by another writer, a sort of collage that includes words from each section of his book in all caps, building those words into a decoherent attempt at speech that started while I was reading and eating a peach.

Sending love to all the writing that will remain in drawers, and all the writers who believe their words only deserve to exist in a context so muted and plastered in darkness.

Vasily Vereshchagin, The Apotheosis of War (1871)

My Stygian night problem.

Maurice Blanchot wrote somewhere that Nietzsche doesn’t content himself with calling up the Stygian night.

The desire for this thing called a Stygian night distracts me from my reading. Now that the thing has been named, I want the Stygian night so I can know what Niestzsche is forsaking.

Max Ernst. The Marriage of Heaven and Earth (1962)

Why do optical, light-related metaphors predominate when we speak of existence?

"Why this imperialism of light?" Maurice Blanchot asks as he prepares to ignore mythology, science, physics, and human history to focus on the phenomenology of light.

"Light illuminates – this means that light hides itself: this is its malicious trait."

Light discloses things and presents itself as an immediate presence "without disclosing what makes it manifest," in Blanchot’s words.

On a side note—-which may or may not be related, Blanchot does not write particularly well about Bataille. He doesn’t ‘shed light’, so to speak, on Bataille’s thinking. One senses this is because he is writing for him rather than to him; he admires him, they are friends – and it is odd how this turns intimacy into a sort of game that fumbles around not quite getting to a point. Never sharpening the words enough to point anywhere.

"On the RIGHT side of the barricades": Gershom Scholem.

"If the rise of Nazism brought Benjamin to recall the tradition of the oppressed, it moved Scholem toward adopting the very perspective that Benjamin warned against: he accommodated the Jewish perception of time to the triumphal narrative of national redemption," wrote Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin in a 2013 paper titled "'On the Right Side of the Barricades': Walter Benjamin, Scholem, and Zionism” (published in Comparative Literature 65:3. pp. 363-381).  

Raz-Krakotzkin contrasts the diverging perspectives of the two friends who shared a disdain for Enlightenment notions of progress, while noting that Benjamin rejected modern ideals of progress in a way that followed "the traditional Jewish rejection of the Christian perception of grace that was developed in response to the Christian notion of 'progress' from an 'old' to a 'new' testament."

In the 1920's and early 1930's, Scholem was an active member of Brit-Shalom, an organization that viewed "bi-nationalism" as an alternative to the nationalist chauvinism of the right-wing "Sabbatianists." at the time, but they rejected the colonial power for Zionism, and focused on the creation of a buy national state that based community on “the recognition of national and civic equality between Jews and Arabs.” 

When Brit-Shalom was founded, Jews made up 15% of the population in Palestine. By then, nationalism was seen as a means of encouraging Jewish immigration to continue without making the local Palestinians feel defensive. Even so, the national distinction of Jews v. Arabs was central to the idea of the binational state, and to binational thinking in general. Ammon cause this quote, a description of a colonial reality in which Jewish superiority is asserted and exercise, and countless weighs over different groups of the Palestinian people. “As such, it remains a novel claim.

And the mirrors are many, paraphrase Mahmoud Darwish —-

Victor Brauner, Civilizing consciousness, 1961

*

In a 1926 letter to Franz Rosenzweig, Scholem said of Palestine:

Fast forward to 1931, when Scholem published an article (see (“Bemai Ka’Mipalgi” 57–59) responding to attacks against Brit-Shalom group and its attitudes:

This wording—- “And if we do not win once again, and the fire of revolution consumes us, at least we will be among those standing on the right side of the barricades.”—- speaks loudly at present. Scholem would surely find himself located on the extremes of the rising political Right that have consecrated ethno-state nationalism and institutionalized genocide both technologically and politically in a way that the 20th century could never have imagined.

There is no question that Israel is a state bent on the complete annihilation of Palestinians—- for every aspect of Palestinian existence is threatening to the Israeli state, everything. No exceptions can be found.

But by the late 1930s, Scholem had become a vociferous defender of political Zionism and its nationalist aspirations. He and his friend Walter Benjamin argue about this, as Benjamin rejected the idea of progress, cementing his rejection in the Jewish perspective that refused the Christian doctrine of grace, which had redeemed the old testament through the new one. The secularism of Zionism destroyed what was unique about Judaism— and built a teleology into it that did not exist. Hebrew's secular drive collapses “the sacred into the profane – the secularization of the sacred is the sacralization of the secular,” as Raz-Krakotzkin has written. Israel’s current existence is based on the view that “the state is the realization of the expectations and longings of generations.” This is a separatist and nationalist position, and the cost is modeled on the costs of European nationalism, and what power does to the mind went enacting Carl Schmitt‘s political theology. Walter Benjamin rejected Schmitt,  and used Schmitt against himself, rejecting the assumption of historical immanence that sucks Messianic time into the idea of progress. The catch is that Orientalism enables this progressive reading to set Israel apart as western.

Walter Benjamin's "On the Concept of History" was written in 1940 from his exile in occupied France. His ongoing dialogue with Gershom Scholem about Judaism hovers in the background, alongside the rising Nazism. Soberly, Benjamin reminds us that "whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate”:

Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

Later in the same piece, Benjamin uses this word, amazement, in a way that resonates and constellates into the present, comprising a presence. I quote again from his “On the Concept of History”:

[Untenable that the genocide of Palestinians by imperial powers continues. Untenable, irredeemable evil.]

"The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible . . . is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable," Benjamin wrote. Raz-Krakotzkin translates this in relation to Scholem's statements, so that Benjamin could also be saying: “the current amazement that an extreme political version of messianism is ‘still’ possible, Benjamin might have said to his friend, ‘is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which [gave] rise to it’—here, the description of the present as the ‘utopian return to Zion’—’is untenable’.”

*

By the 1940's, after Benjamin's death, Gershom Scholem supported "the idea of an exclusive Jewish state." He even went so far as to deny "any Zionist responsibility for the Palestinian catastrophe," arguing that "the Arabs alone were responsible for their misfortune," Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin writes. In a footnote, he adds the following:

In "The Messianic Idea of Judaism" Scholem declares that "the predicament of Israel, then, is not a historical accident but inherent in the world being, and it is in Israel’s power to repair the universal flaw. By amending themselves, the Jewish people can also amend the world, in its visible and invisible aspects alike.” This idea of “utopian return” is what “fully integrates the holocaust into the theological narrative of return.”

(Aside: In my own writing, I tend to use the word Shoah for the same reason I use Nabka, namely, because these words have a meeting held more closely and their language of origin.)

The denial of the Nakba proceeds as the memorialization of the holocaust is mandated across states. Chauvinism has been linked to the preservation of the people and the reliance on colonial power. But Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin notices that Scholem’s list of messianism’s national-political attributes lacks a significant element, namely "the restoration of the Temple, the figure of which was certainly the main component of Jewish messianic expectations, undoubtedly more than the 'resurrection of the nation,' a term that was taken from the modern vocabulary of nationalism." The Temple is the concept that crosses all messianic accounts and visions of redemption; its absence is read as "the most important sign of the state of exile, and its restoration the expression of redemption."

Against this, Raz-Krakotzkin poses the "many Jewish sources" where "Zion" and "Temple" are taken as allegorical concepts referencing "a spiritual ideal" or providing a tutelary "metaphors for a state of human perfection."

But Scholem's Messianic Idea cannot avoid its consequent relationship to the restoration of the Temple. Its literal political project commits it to "the destruction of the mosques and their replacement by a new building." As Raz-Krakotzkin argues:

The extension of this messianism has other logic:

To repeat the clarity of the preceding statements: In Israeli discourse, the question of the refugees is considered an apocalyptic issue, and its very discussion a threat and denial of the existence of the State of Israel. The Palestinian memories of dispossession are the Israelis’ suppressed nightmares.

*

By 1959, Scholem concluded his famous essay "Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea" with the warning:

“Little wonder that overtones of Messianism have accompanied the modern Jewish readiness for irrevocable action in the concrete realm, when it set out on the utopian return to Zion. This readiness no longer allows itself to be fed on hopes. Born out of the horror and destruction that was Jewish history in our own generation, it is bound to history itself and not to meta-history; it has not given itself up totally to Messianism. Whether or not Jewish history will be able to endure this entry into the concrete realm without perishing in the crisis of the Messianic claim, which has virtually been conjured up—that is the question which out of his great and dangerous past the Jew of this age poses to his present and to his future.”

José Luis Cuevas, 𝘓𝘢𝘴 𝘔𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘢𝘴, 1977.

A five-stem corona for Arnold Schoenberg.

First stem

Mourning the loss of Schoenberg’s archives in the ongoing Los Angeles fires by weaving a word-corona—-

beginning with Enrique Vila-Matas’ introduction to Thomas Mann’s correspondence with Adorno over Schoenberg’s fury at Doctor Faustus and the questions of plagiarism.

Second stem

One of my favorite reads during pandemic was Richard Cavell’s Speechsong: The Gould-Schoenberg Dialogues (shout-out to the incredible publisher, Punctum Books), which continues to be a model for the sort of speculative nonfiction I adore, which coincides with the spirit of the manuscript on Scriabin I hope to finish.

Date: 10 April 1964. Schoenberg and Gould are talking in a room with Schoenberg’s portrait on the wall. GG is Glenn Gould and AS is Arnold Schoenberg. They are listening to Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2, op. 10, particularly that point in the fourth movement where the soprano begins singing the words of a poem by Stefan George.

Third stem

Notes on how “Uncle Arnold” treated students in composition class back when he was teaching in Vienna.

Fourth stem

I excerpt the conclusion of Pierre Boulez’s infamous elegy to Schoenberg below, and a link to the document itself will appear if you crave the sort of sorcery involved in clicking on images.

Fifth stem

Thinking of all those facing the loss of residences, homes, life, memories, archives, and so much more in Los Angeles… There are no words for what is ongoing. As for the small corona, five stems suffice to bind it, the final one being a two-minute visit to Schoenberg’s home in West L. A.

Postscript

Pious rapture, to quote Schoenberg quoting George.

"To everyone who gives a damn about poetry": James Wright to James Dickey, 1958.

But he can’t get rid of himself enough
To write poetry.         He keeps thinking Goddamn
I’ve misused myself         I’ve fucked up         I haven’t worked —

…
You bastard, you.
You and the paper should have known it, you and the ink: you write
…
With blackness.         Night.         Why has it taken you all this time?

—- James Dickey, The Zodiac

Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow
Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone
Wholly, into the air.
I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe
Or move.
I listen.
The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.

— James Wright, “Beginning”

When reading through a letter written by James Wright to James Dickey in 1958, I’m not sure if Wright’s audacity or his earnesty touched me more, but certainly, something touched me enough to feel the urge to share it—- and so you will find it below, with gratitude to Jonathan Blunk, who selected it for an issue of American Poetry Review that featured some of Wright’s correspondence.

Minneapolis
July 6, 1958

Dear Mr. Dickey:

I have just completed a book review for Sewanee, and tomorrow morning I will send it off. Mr (Monroe KJ Spears wants it by August 1, so I assume it will appear in the fall issue. Having read your essays with interest and attention for some tire (I realize that you will consider this statement a lie), I have added a discussion of your criticism to my review. I am going to tell Mr. Spears that, if the discussion is too long, he can either out it or remove it altogether. In any case, you have a right to read it beforehand, whether or not you think it is worth answering in print. I wish to say that 1 realize there are several of its points which are inadequately stated and, more often, inadequately developed. For example, I refer to my discussion of your remarks on Eberhart and Bridges. The issue is a major one, but I was cramped for space, having already exceeded the generous limits suggested by the editor. If you care to bother answering, I will try to elucidate the discussion further.

Before I quote the section of the review. I understand perfectly well that, as far as you are concerned, I am a bad poet, probably not a poet at all in any sense that you would care about or believe in. My reason for writing you this note-in addition to my recognizing your right to see a discus. sion of your ideas before it appears in print, so that you can answer it as you see fit—is that, unless I utterly misunderstand your writings, the sense in which you care about poetry and believe in it is very similar to the sense in which I care about it and believe in it myself. This is another statement which you will probably consider a lie. However that may be, I would not argue against your adverse judgment of my own work even if it were possible to do so. Since you both think and feel that my verses stink, it is your responsibility as well as your privilege to say so in print. But even if my poems are bad, and even if you do not believe that I care about poetry in the same way that you do. I am asking you to believe, purely on faith, that I do indeed care about it in some sense. There is something else that I want to say: in my discussion of your writings, I refer to Mr. Philip Booth. Perhaps you will immediately conclude that I am merely being protective about one of my friends. I have never met Mr. Booth. I have had a brief correspondence with him about editorial and other business matters; I told him that I enjoyed his book, especially the poem "First Lesson"; and I wrote him a note to thank him for his review of my book, a review which, though sober and courteous, was hardly drunken with enthusiasm. As a matter of fact, I am friends with very, very few current poets, and most of them are students who have never had anything published. I think, however, that generosity is not only a moral virtue. I think that it is also an act of intelligence. Sometimes students have cautiously and tentatively brought verses to me, under that somewhat silly impression of very young people that my having had something in print made me a valid judge; when their verses were sentimental and inept, I believe that I have criticized them honestly and severely, however, I have never greeted a student by telling her to go fuck herself and shove her hideous poems up her ass because they have blotched my soul and insulted the names of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. I believe your attack on Mr. Booth's verses amounted to something similar. I did not like it. It was destructive not only to Booth, but to you, and indeed to everybody who gives a damn about poetry, and who realizes that its best ally right now would be a courteous and judicious criticism. I think the relation of hatred to criticism is the same relation that exists between life and poetry. A good man will not necessarily thereby become a good poet; a good poet, on the other hand, is, I believe, by definition a good man. Sometimes a man tries to write poems and fails. I think the critic has fulfilled his responsibility when he says so and explains what he means. Sometimes good critics explain the standard by which they judge (I said explain, not merely state), and sometimes they go so far as to admit that there may possibly be, somewhere in the universe and in human history, standards different from their own. But if the versifier (like myself, as you well know) fails to achieve a poem, l don't see why the critic has to kick him in the balls.

Nothing that I've said about hatred can in the slightest way disqualify what I've said about my belief in the importance of your writings in Sewanee, but of course this is just one more belief in which you will not believe. The relevant section of my review is enclosed.

Yours,

James Wright

3 things: elegy, owl, and power tool.

1

The poem is titled “Poem for Witold Gombrowicz,” as found in Matthew Zapruder’s most recent collection, I Love Hearing Your Dreams: Poems (which, in my opinion, is his most moving and tender offering yet in ways that are best left to the reader to discover after purchasing the book and consuming it between the winter’s midnights).

It’s a kind of discipline, Matthew writes, to not remember the persons we abandoned in the relationships that shaped us, whether inherited or invented for the purposes of time and place. But it is the irreverence of the closing act that testifies to the speaker’s respect for the poem’s addressee, namely Gombrowicz, whose tone of total disrespect for modern humankind punctuates his fictions as well as his diaries.

The fork intrigues me: where the speaker honors by peeing on the very old tree, this peeing still feels like the sort of melancholic irreverence that Matthew is known for. In other words, Matthew pees on the tree in order to honor by communing with his subject, but his subject, Gombrowicz, took irreverence much further, past the point of laughter and straight into the acreage of contempt.

'Of all artists, poets are people who fall to their knees most persistently,' Gombrowicz said, naming us as the worthiest of contempt. But, as Matthew keenly culls, the act of pissing on a tree is how the poet earns the respect of the surly shade known as Gombrowicz, for it is this carnal, a-lyrical fleshiness that the dead writer admired.

To make him laugh is to libate Gombrowicz, and the splendor of this poem lies in precisely the gentle, lyrical way in which Matthew Zapruder accomplishes this.

2

And now for an owl that engraved itself upon my imagination.

Bernard Childs engraved this owl with a power tool. It is the second owl in a series. The yellow feels surprising or insecure in this context, perhaps because clashing colors often inject a bit of insecurity into a scene. And something is perhaps unsettled.

3

“Salvation through laughter,” Charles Simic called it, that spittle in Gombrowicz’s writing which reached from Argentina back to his Polish homeland across translations and correspondence.

Born in a Polish city close to the Austrian border, Gombrowicz’s experience of World War I turned him a lifelong pacifist and an atheist. Although he went on to study law, he earned a reputation for himself as a man about town, frequenting “literary cafés where he began to acquire a reputation as a character, taking potshots at his contemporaries,” Simic noted. Gombrowicz’s “humor and impudence stood out”. The stake of writing was existential to him: he existed “to make a character like Hamlet or Don Quixote out of a man called Gombrowicz,” in Simic’s words. Here, the writer’s job is to seduce and provoke the reader towards recognition of the author’s existence.

The logic of their bourgeois fathers failed this generation. Many would devote their theory and literature to battling the father within, drawing legalistic logic and absurdism in the two-front interior war that Franz Kafka and Frankfurt School theorists waged against their atrocious inheritance.

For close readers of Witkacy and Bruno Schulz, Gombrowicz’s Pornografia trolls familiar esoteric terrain (one might even call this turf the Zakopane school of literature, for lack of another word). In the introduction, he describes the novel as follows:

The hero of the novel, Frederick, is a Christopher Columbus who departs in search of unknown continents. What is he searching for? This new beauty, this new poetry, hidden between the adult and the young man. He is the poet of an awareness carried to the extreme or, at least, that’s how I wanted him to be. But it is difficult to understand one another nowadays! Certain critics saw him as Satan, no more, no less, while others, mainly Anglo-Saxons, were content with a more trivial definition—a voyeur. My Frederick is neither Satan nor a voyeur: he is more like a theatrical producer, or even a chemist, trying to obtain a new and magical alcohol by various combinations between individuals.

Trying to obtain a new and magical alcohol by various combinations certainly draws on the alchemical portions of Witkacy’s work, as the homoerotic parts draw on Bruno Schulz’s illustrations and pornografias, but Simic finds himself disappointed by it and mistrustful of the Gombrowicz’s description. He reads the author as one trained in the American empire of close reading where what stands out is the power of a “few scenes”.

Noting that Frederick’s loathing for churches doesn’t prevent him from going to a church, falling upon his knees, and praying, an act which is the penultimate “act of negation” to him, Simic even excerpts a large portion from this scene:

What exactly had happened? Strictly speaking: nothing, strictly speaking it was as though a hand had withdrawn the substance and content from the Mass—and the priest continued—and the priest continued to move, to kneel, to go from one end of the altar to the other, and the acolytes rang the bells and the smoke from the censers rose in spirals, but the whole content was evaporating like gas out of a balloon, and the Mass collapsed in its appalling impotence—limp and sagging—unable to procreate!

It is hard not to read Pornografia as an intimate portrait of Witkacy or Pierre Klossowski. It is, for me, very (very) hard. In an effort to distract myself from the ‘bad reading’, and to parse the latent connection between the honor of pissing on a tree and the Polish world of literature destroyed by the Shoah, I leave you with Correspondence between Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz, 1936.

The prior year in music, with gratitude.

I enter this year, 2025, limply, minus gusto— which is not to say that I enter it without gratitude. Perhaps something has shifted in the way I understand the operative medium, this context called ‘language’ which has always been so closely tied to music in my mind. Let me begin in that digression, winding back to the year 1872, when Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music shattered the conventional understanding of music that had emerged with the rise of literacy. “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts,” he wrote, after staring at his typewriter and feeling that this use of this tool actively altered his words, placed his words in another medium, which mediated them.

Mediums radiate. And Nietzsche’s eyes were beginning to fail; the typewriter enabled him to contrive writing after he could no longer see his own words on paper. He could still see the typewriter keys a little, but he had memorized them, and it was this muscle memory that permitted him to feel where the letters waited to be touched by his fingers. This use of the typewriter coincided with Nietzsche’s perception that Wagner’s operas had changed “the medium of the music,” thus irrevocably altering  what humans expected of music and how they perceived it. 

In 1845, about forty years prior to Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, the OED expanded the definition of “mediation” in English to include “that part of plainsong that lies between two reciting notes.”

Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, like the Jonas-mask of theatre, had two faces. The first version was an effusive celebration of Wagner–or so Nietzsche said–although it was later re-issued as anti-Wagner polemic. The words and text weren't altered significantly. Instead, Nietzsche indicated in the preface a new way of reading the dynamics, a different way of playing the same notes with a different notation. From effusive to furioso. Now the tone would be played vehemently, furioso, and the reader was indicated that this would be the performance in the introduction.

Introduction

But I cannot play it vehemently, this gratitude mingling with the perpetual disquiet that visits when it comes to speaking about what I have written. Unlike Nietzsche, my mask is not Janus-faced but closer to the frozen scream of the Gorgon whose face disappears into the faces it sees. And there are so many faces in those screams. So many faces and fevers, gathered, gathering, like music to my mind. For that is the other side of words, the sole of the shoes I trod, the part that makes contact with the ground—- has always been music, music, sound. Thus do I introduce a small snippet of various conversations that this year, and place these conversations in relation to my favorite language, folding gratitude into the ruinscapes of another calendar while holding the faces of my interlocutors, fondly. Fondly. The pleasure of that is mine.

1

I’ll begin with “The Fallacy of Literary Citizenship”: A conversation with Karan Kapoor” for the Only Poems newsletter, because Karan invited me to consider questions that feel critical to existence and language right now, and so I excerpt part of an answer to a question that he posed, with gratitude to him for the brief moments in which life allows us to behold one another outside, however dimly:

“In the U.S., a fetus has a “right to life” without a corresponding “right” to healthcare. From the minute an American fetus is born, or gains an existence apart from its parent's body, it  has fewer rights than it did in the womb. What Lauren Berlant called “the contradiction between the sovereignty of abstract citizens and the everyday lives of embodied subjects” is structured by these financial and physical inequalities that normalized, and made to seem natural to the human condition. Legally, citizenship administrates class hierarchies and legitimizes them as collective goods. For example, a corporation ‘needs’ a tax break in order to provide ‘jobs’ so that the economy won't ‘fail;’ or, the defense industry ‘needs’ a new war in order to keep that lottery known as ‘retirement accounts’ functioning. Neoliberalism ensures that certain individuals or groups will be excluded from the literary community for the reasons you mention. The economic aspects of ‘literary citizenship’ can't be separated from the social and cultural ones.”

(And, because I know how much Karan shares my love for Leonard Cohen, it is of course a Cohen song that wafts through the room of a conversation about belonging, and not-belonging, and failing to imagine one another in a way that opens the world.)

And what can I tell you my brother, my killer
What can I possibly say?

— Leonard Cohen, “Famous Blue Raincoat”

2

“The self on reel reminds me that embodiment's relation to the nowness of things isn't a whole picture. We're not seeing each other completely. We aren't permitted to appear in our complicated fullness to one another.”

— Lynn Emmanuel in “The Privilege and Responsibility of Disagreeing for Eternity", published in Identity Theory

— Ólafur Arnalds & Nils Frahm, “20:17”

3

“I think periods and punctuation are most noticeably absent in the title series. That’s because those poems reckon with eternities—love and war and suffering and child-rearing and violence and planetary movements and climate crisis and history and mortality. These eternities have always been with us, and they always will be. They’ll never stop talking.”

— Molly Spencer, in A Conversation with Molly Spencer, published in The Adroit Journal

Speaking kind of cryptically
The sea that raged beside the tree
Burning bright for all to see
It just might mean the most to me

— The Cowboy Junkies, “Speaking Confidentially”

4

“You look at the membrane of what reading is and you zoom in on it and all these other world(ing)s spring up or are concomitantly created with your own noticing; you are always this station through which the noumena passes into signal. This would be true of even the crudest things—if you polish the mirror enough you can see just about anything in it. I’m sure there’s someone out there who has understood the entire universe by rewatching the same reality tv show over and over. The work I’m involved with aspires to open out the encounter in widening spirals . . . “

— Garett Strickland, “You are always this station through which the noumena passes into signal”: A conversation with Garett Strickland, published in Minor Literature[s]

And they had all arrived at the same buidling at more or less the same time.
And they were all free.
And they were all asking themselves the same question:
What is behind that curtain?

— Spiritualized, “Born Never Asked”

5

“I kept thinking about Jabès’s notion that each of us lives with an unsayable word that can’t be shared, only sacrificed. What happens to that unsayable word in the mind of a person who is dying? Might it shape a person’s last thoughts, their vision of an afterlife, what sacrifice of themselves might outlast them? I see that closing poem as a subtle response to the epigraphs from Levinas and Jabès that open the book, inviting readers to think about the absences that shape our perceptions when we step out the door, whether it’s in a place we can go barefoot, or have to wear shoes and get in an elevator.”

— Idra Novey, “Our Good Ghosts: A Conversation with Idra Novey”, published in Orion

From the pain come the dream
From the dream come the vision

— Peter Gabriel, “Fourteen Black Paintings”

6

“Repetition often has an incantatory effect. Nursery rhymes use repetition, rhythm, and rhyme to grant the wish laid upon the first star. Despite this magical aura of naming and claiming, wishing evokes passivity. Wishes are childhood’s epistemological firmament, they are part of the structures of intimacy available to children in a world controlled and administered by adults.”

— “What Sparks Poetry: Alina Stefanescu on Uljana Wolf’s my cadastre”, published in Poetry Daily

Well it's about time

— Depeche Mode, “Useless” from the Kruder & Dorfmeister Session

7

“The nylon scent of the sleeping bag in which they make love, the languorous card games interrupted by strolls in the forest, the eros of reading aloud to each other— ‘it was the tenderest time of their lives together.’ György photographs Paul as they sprawl naked, feasting on canned beans. With the colors of the campfire playing across his face, Paul reads a poem to György—a poem that George describes to the narrator as ‘the most beautiful poem he’d ever heard,’ a poem that resembles love in the ‘mutual recklessness’ of creating a common world.”

— “Utopia Is Not a State; It Is a Compass: On Patrick Nathan’s ‘The Future Was Color’”, as published in Los Angeles Review of Books

Did I dream you were a tourist
In the Arizona sun?
I can see you there with lunar moths
And watermelon gum

— REM, “You”

8

“Memory fondles the sensual excess of first love and seeks to articulate the world that exists between two people whose language stays secret, even as they speak it. The writer fashions an icon of that first lover, immortalizing him with talismans and symbolic offerings, seeking his eternal approval, pouring a monument onto the page that preserves his magic for others.”

— The Telling Makes It True: On Robert Glück’s About Ed, as published in Cleveland Review of Books

You swim in moon, you left too soon

— Tricky, “We Don’t Die”

9

“Apocalyptic violence trolls the stage of the aubade, but the interim is lined with emptied outfits: ‘this arrangement born of desire and accident,’ sculptures ‘doomed to disappear’ unless preserved by a photo. A. knows her ploy will fail; it is ‘impossible to represent […] the unreality of sex in the reality of what it leaves behind.’ The problem of representation plagues both photo and text. No one can prove Jesus’s material resurrection from the presence of an empty shroud. Still, they testify.”

— “Every Abyss Is a Matter of Time" published in Los Angeles Review of Books (with a note to how much I owe Ellie Eberlee for thinking through this piece with me)

The night has come and left me
Just the light that you allow
Come speak my name
Fill my head with all such foolish dreams
My flesh and blood is no more real to me
Than what it seems

— Joe Henry, “Flesh and Blood” as covered by Solomon Burke

10

And one for the conversations I had on paper that have not been published, some of which mean the world to me. If worlds could matter. If words could carry my gratitude to the friendships that met me in those moments when language abandoned me. If worlds and words could recognize themselves in the loneliness of finishing the book.

March and April 1914: Kafka's letters.

[Note: I used Kafka’s Letters to Felice as diligently translated James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth for this post.]

March 4, 1914. 

This is the name and the date where the story begins to masticate its conflict. In order to appease the tenderhearted, I should add that the letter sent on this date by Franz Kafka to Grete Bloch, Felice Bauer’s close friend, does nauseate me, if only because its motions are recognizable. Perhaps they are recognizable to anyone who has been engaged, or consigned by promise to marry a person whom they would ultimately fail.

Leave-taking is everything; and I shall die on this hill while taking my leave of it, and pausing at Franz’s signature, for it is here that the game appears most clearly, the glimmer of a ball in the air as he tells her that he is tired and will continue the letter tomorrow— I recognize he is saying that she is now part of his writing, as marked by a promise of continuance, before signing off—

Farewell, and please go on being a good friend to your (how shall I put it) 

Franz K.

who in recognition of the sun has but the icy coldness of his room, which he prefers to keep to himself.

A few weeks later, on March 20, at the cusp of locus where the ides of March open into the season of Aries, Franz tells Grete that he wrote a "long letter to F. — possibly, probably my last," the italics being my own. And he places her in the same category as Felice, telling her that she is "the best,  kindest and sweetest creature," a statement he acknowledges as risky, which he prefaces by saying that he is "about to say something immensely stupid", not the said thing but the fact that he says it. Surely no more stupid than the opening of his letter to his Grete on March 22nd, with its carefree ode: "Dear Fraulein Grete and Child of Spring, out on the Ring a huge, never-ending funeral procession is passing . . . " He tries to convince her to move to Berlin, or stay in Berlin, where he and Felice have found their apartment. 

On April 9, a few weeks later, Franz writes to Felice— she wants to meet Max Brod and his wife, but Franz is embarrassed, and he looks for words to explain this, or to excuse it— and signs his letter with the following: 

No, Fraulein Bloch is not coming. I like her very much.

Franz

On April 13, 1914, Franz's mother brushes off a gushing letter to Felice's mother, referring to Felice as "Daughter," and celebrating her engagement to Franz. 

A day later, Franz begins his letter to Felice: "Dear Fraulein Grete, it would be nicer if instead of the telegram I were holding your hand." And now I excerpt the letter in full because it is so jarring, given his engagement to Felice ("F."), and the labor being done to begin their lives together at that point.

One day later, on April 15, 1914, the author steps into the world he is creating… Italics, once again, are mine—as they will be for the duration of this post.

Another letter to Grete, on the following day, which refers to her letter, and which seems to indicate a guilty feeling that Grete has vis-a-vis her friend, Felice, a guilt that locates itself within letters, or correspondence:

Meanwhile, to Felice, on the following day, Franz writes a brief note that seems comradely more than intimate, his signature does not include "yours", makes no claim to being known in a special way by her, and the use of the initial in lieu of proper name carries Felice differently, as if to demarcate a distance or difference between the person she was in his early letters and the character she has now become in something like a novel, where he uses an initial to designate a character, particularly K. in The Castle.

My italics pick out the way Franz indicates to his fiancee that he wishes she would hasten the "appointed date" which may refer to the date that she leaves her job in Prague, or it may refer to the date of their meeting—- but it could also refer, perhaps, to the fantasied elocutionary effects of the judgement to come.

"I have this perception, F., which is why my confidence in our future is great," he writes, insinuating something like a desire for understanding— a desire that the author knows is elusive, dishonest, mired by ghosts, but which drives the plot of his life. 

And so perhaps it is significant that he sends a letter to Grete on the very same day. He is, after all, pleased with Grete, for she answers his letters immediately, and she provides pieces of herself, her life, her days, for his imaginary, which he has asked of Felice for years now, in his desperate demands that she write more to him, and more often, and more constantly, and more completely—

And then, on the following day, another letter to Grete, a letter that speaks of Felice and her friendship to Grete, a letter that seems to hold no loyalty to anyone except the story Franz is trying to discover.

What intrigues me is the loyalty he feels to their correspondence, or to the letters themselves, which he begs Grete not to "burn", despite his coming marriage to Felice. One could revisit Kafka’s statements to Max Brod in his final will and testament here, noting that Brod might have known his friend very well, a position that Kafka iterates himself across his epistles to Brod over the years.

The writer in me shudders at her inability to recognize whether Franz is playing his cards in order to force life to a point that makes writing possible, or whether he is unconsciously setting the stage for the judgement — because it is spring, it is the month of April, and for some reason, this month brings uncanny urges for self-destruction, despite the blooms and the greens and the beauty showered upon the world.

Certainly, one can only wonder what Franz was thinking when he sent a letter to Felice Bauer's mother the next day, a letter which (again) I reproduce in full, if only to clarify the extent to which the correspondence, itself, is a novel, a fiction, a story about other things . . .

In the same vein, in the same tenor of joy, Franz sends a letter to Felice on the day that he sends a letter to her mother, reassuring her of his love for her daughter, and asking for her assistance in nudging Felice to cut all ties to Prague and invest in Berlin.

This letter opens with a sentence that echoes….

I pause here, and stop the excerpt, because nothing else happens and nothing of significance is uttered beyond this point. But cordiality proceeds apace… as it must, since Kafka will pillory nothing quite as ruthlessly as he pillories the conventions of manners and grace.

Two days later, Franz sends a letter to Grete:

It is no secret that Grete appears The Metamorphosis, and Franz anticipates her response by pivoting away from it, emphasizing that she doesn't ‘like’ his writing, and planting a seed that can inform her dismay when she finally reads it and feels as if she is recognizing herself within the horror of an imputed betrayal. 

What does it mean to create tension in a novel or short story? Isn't the creation of tension dependent precisely on the lies or excuses we tell ourselves in order to justify decisions that resemble tragedy, or partake of that resonant timbre? I am not asking. Ignore my question marks. This is how writing works. And how it fails. 

Listen, imagining is half the labor. So imagine a calendar sitting on a desk, with dates colored for F, and dates colored for G, and then you understand why the following day Franz devotes his correspondence to his fiancee.

As I mentioned before, so much of the future can be read in Kafka's signatures, in the valences of his signing-off, and there is no 'yours' in this note to Felice— such personal notations have been absent for a while now— despite the speaker’s urging that they marry sooner.

Fast forward to the next F-colored date, three days later, where "the man from Breslau" enters the picture:

He has staked out this act of being in his room— "I, too, must be free to be in my room" — as the space of the fantasy and the imaginary desire for another. The man from Breslau gives Franz the right to play with Grete, and perhaps a part of the author genuinely believes that this trade in fantasies is appropriate. Certainly I would not in stand in judgement of such belief.

What I cannot answer (and maybe the ghost himself cannot answer this) is a question that would be formulated as follows: Does Franz believe that Felice is doing with others what he is doing with Grete, and — if so — does it bother him?

On the same day, he mentions to Felice that he is "receiving plenty of congratulations, though certainly not as many as you", and he urges her towards the encounter he also planned with Felice: "You wouldn't like to go to Gmünd for a day? I should like to very much.  Send me your sister Elsa's address! Was your mother satisfied with my letter? And have [Brod's) Petticoat Government and the Werfel arrived?"

But April 26th is a long day for Franz, a day of devoted correspondence, as he turns towards Grete, mixing the colors on his calendar dates in a suite of frenzy, and issues the following:

This is one of my favorite passages from his letters to Grete, the portion of about ‘pseudo-relationships’ and insignificance, which is to say, it is where the author tells us what letters mean to him, and why nothing can last between humans who exist just to be written.

As for the man from Breslau, Felice responds to Franz's letter and attempts, perhaps, to reassure him. I cannot imagine how she phrases this reassurance, or what lines she draws in order to separate her fiancee’s fantasies from her own lived experience. Nor can any of us know this exactly, since Felice Bauer's decision to trash all her correspondence with Franz Kafka makes sense in a way that way isn't literary so much as realistic.

Nevertheless, Franz opens his response to this (burnt) letter by Felice with a reference to misunderstanding:

I stop the excerpt here, if only to observe that the description of the apartment is evocative and wonderful in the way that only Kafka can be wonderful, particularly when he is not playing the character known as Franz who has been written into a novel about the failed engagements of a couple named Franz and Felice. 

As the month of April draws to a close, Franz reassures Grete, and draws her closer in order to insist on her virtue, to chase away her pangs of conscience for betraying her friend.

This time, I stop the excerpt here in order to inaugurate a memorial silence—-

A silence in which it makes sense to restate Kafka's commitment to self-destruction, in his own words, which I read (or misread) as a testimony of loyalty to the purity of his writing, and the instances forged from life that become a text: I who, in my relations with you, always have the feeling that there are only two kinds of pure, tearless happiness, touching the very limits of our strength: to have a person who is true to one, to whom one is true; and secondly to be true to oneself and spend oneself utterly, burn oneself up without leaving any ashes.

From one silence to another, as it were:

I cut off the narrator, in the fury of his dread—- for the sake of music, and to assuage my own fury at Kafka for failing me, personally, by never truly liking Bach, which might be his most aberrant opinion, as judged by the subjective legislator known as my own opinion.

How comforting to know what we must fail each other where it matters most, and, in that vein, here is Leoš Janáček’s Suite for String Orchestra (1877), that speaks in counterpoint to heartbreaking machinations the author has contrived in order to imagine the book he must write:

And now, I let the author conclude, in his own words, with the note left in the margin of the letter he has written while living in his parents’ home, where noise and family life keep him from writing the book, and where the scene is so perfectly set for a judgement— although such a scene could be quickly ruined if the mother who is thrilled for her son’s marriage to Felice should happen to chance upon the letters moving between him and Grete Bloch.

But, before allowing him this conclusion, I reiterate the words that he assembles with the last pounding of the heart, and the meaningless rules or conventions that bind the restless body to a chair in a room where the author must imagine the book that destroys him.

Because so far I have achieved everything I set out to achieve, not at once, never without detours, in fact usually on the return journey, always with the utmost effort, and, as far as one could judge, almost at the last moment. Not too late, but very nearly too late, invariably with the last pounding of the heart. Nor have I ever achieved the whole of what I aimed at; in fact, the whole was usually no longer there; and even if it had been, I couldn't have coped with all of it; nevertheless, I did acquire a large part of it and usually the most important part. These rules that one discovers for oneself are quite meaningless in themselves, of course; yet they are not without meaning for understanding the character of the person who has found them, especially since once found they assume over him a kind of physical dominance.