Little kingdoms in yr chest

The I that speaks puts forth — into the void that desire alone makes habitable — a world I no longer possess.

— Dan Beachy-Quick

You're like a messiah, kid
Little kingdoms in your chest

— Broken Social Scene, “Almost Crimes”

1

In Romanian, sfințită means “holy, blessed, consecrated, sanctified, hallowed, sacred.”

When my mother died, I brought her Eastern Orthodox icons into our home, where they sit in awkward dialogue with paintings, books, sketches, house plants, tennis rackets, and various items belonging to the teens. Some of the icons have a stamp on the back which marks them as “blessed” (sfințită), indicating that they have been officially “blessed” by monks or priests, according to the rules laid out by the relevant Orthodox institution.

I do not know what it means to be blessed—- or to be cursed. To be saved or to be damned. Poetry offers rooms that allow me to nibble on the proximity of these binaries, these couples defined by their complete opposition. Often I find my way into words by playing with images. Play, too, can be a form of profanation. Just as “Bless your heart” is a profanation of the good will inherent to blessing.

2

We are susceptible to the feeling of being trapped in time; we are vulnerable to the awareness of its limits. Time is both an idol and an idol-maker. 

The sin of idolatry, in particular, has been levied against the icon. Idolatry begins where images – paintings, Marilyn Monroe posters, texts, constitutions, crowns, flags – are venerated in common, forming communities around a shared veneration. Appropriateness becomes the measure of good, and decorum creates a code of legible behaviors that are interpreted as respectful, where showing respect may also be a means of asserting social status. A man removes his hat before entering a church. But he doesn’t do this for god: he does this for the audience of others who might see him.

Rituals develop in order to define the appropriate relationships to the icon (i.e. how to fold the stars and bars correctly), but ritual cannot retain meaning if interpretation is relegated to an intermediary authority. One goes through the motions and mistakes the motions for life, for being, for breathing, moving, choosing, deciding. At this point, the icon loses its avenue to the ineffable, becoming, instead, a sort of painted opaqueness which occludes instead of revealing the inspiring experience they gave rise to its form. 

Defacement or disfigurement places the icon in a state of desecration, or one in whose holiness has been removed. 

3

Literature, like life, offers us ways of imagining freedom in relation to duration, where ‘taking up time’ becomes a measure of value. Resignation makes a subconscious pact with fatedness: “This is how things will be, for they can be no other way.” “This is the hand I’ve been dealt, and it was bound to happen to me.” “This is my curse.” “This is the curse of my blood-line.” “This is the fate of my people.” etc. etc. etc.

“The fated man looks for the choice that is choosing him,” wrote Dan Beachy-Quick. The heart of the heroic quest, its epic form, involves being defined by what one has chosen to do. To some degree, writing, or the decision to write, to pursue a life in writing, borrows from this convention. Just as the reader recollects the ocean breeze and the tartness of tangerines when reading Proust, the writer recalls the places, faces, voices, and images that animated her interior landscape when writing the book. The experience of reading makes those worlds available to us again.

4

Rigidity is the root of any religious fundamentalism. And literary criticism, like art, continues to wage the same battle between sincerity (often coded as realism or representationalism or authenticity) and fakeness (often coded as decadence or queerness or disorder). The real, to many of us, is that which has meaning, a position that often commits us, inadvertently, to a facile materialism. The house is real. The car is real. The published book is real. The private or intimate is thus less real or less true, in our calculus.

I realize this sounds conclusive, even though conclusiveness is anathema to me. My mind returns to the icon, the stamp that designates the “blessed”, and the belief structures that underpin ideals of blessedness (as well as ‘greatness’, in the sidereal). Arguing over the meaning of what exists in an image also has this relation to the literalism of the icon. While iconoclasm can be liberating, it may come to resemble reformation or revolutions that try to recapture and restore the idea behind the corrupted form. In other words, there can be a new reach for purity inside that desecration. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Iconoclasm isn’t fated to lionize a new purity.

5

I haven’t laughed often in the past week, but I did laugh this morning when reviewing my notes and remembering that Italian Futurists vowed to “kill the moonlight” in order to rid art of maudlin sentimentality.

6

When a text is consecrated, whether religious or secular, there are very strong limits put on its interpretation. The US Constitution, the Bible, the Koran – these are authoritative documents for certain communities, but circumstances change and a literal interpretation of a text considered authoritative becomes incompatible with peoples' lived reality. 

Oddly, an authority that is literal is one that cannot last.

To last is to withstand the test of time. 

To invoke a test of time is to resort to the authority of metrics and measurements.

7

Part of the iconography of romantic love pulls from the quiver of martyrdom, in that queer space where the arrows of Cupid morph into arrows of the Roman soldiers aiming at St. Sebastian. I’m thinking of T. S. Eliot’s early poem, “The Death of St. Narcissus,” which closes by blurring these arrows at the site of a sacred dance:

First he was sure that he had been a tree,
Twisting its branches among each other
And tangling its roots among each other.
Then he knew that he had been a fish
With slippery white belly held tight in his own fingers,
Writhing in his own clutch, his ancient beauty
Caught fast in the pink tips of his new beauty.

Then he had been a young girl
Caught in the woods by a drunken old man
Knowing at the end the taste of his own whiteness,
The horror of his own smoothness,
And he felt drunken and old.

So he became a dancer to God,
Because his flesh was in love with the burning arrows
He danced on the hot sand
Until the arrows came.
As he embraced them his white skin surrendered itself to the 
redness of blood, and satisfied him.
Now he is green, dry and stained
With the shadow in his mouth.

Eliot didn’t want this poem published. He measured it against his later work and found that it didn’t deserve an eternity, which is another way of saying he feared it would not withstand the test of time.

There is no romance in utopia. There is no need for it. Nothing is lacking. An arrow in utopia can only be a relic of a time prior to the fulfilled time. Maybe this is another way of saying that perfection— the ideal of the absolutely good person— is incompatible with romance, since romance springs from a lack, and this lack has a relationship to desire. To want for nothing, to live in utopia, is to want for desire. To lack desire completely. Characters pass as if through a Proustian soirée, a tableau of sumptuous fabrics and palettes, an impression. But nothing coheres: nothing wants.

I am staring at the iconography of Saint Sebastian across the centuries, and thinking how the form has been shaped by what is excluded — whether it be the executioners, the body hair, etc etc. Any inventory selects what to leave out, if only the way light touches things differently. Any image inventories the objects that can be mentioned, or read.

This absence of how light moves— how light might have looked a moment later, or if standing five steps to the left of a window— remains an absence. 

Telling a story about what happened in the past becomes a record of the past, limited.

The clock doesn't tell time because time is told by what is demanded of us – what we cannot forget, like feeding the goldfish.

Dan Beachy-Quick has said of the speaker, the poet, the writer: “The I that speaks puts forth — into the void that desire alone makes habitable — a world I no longer possess.” And yet— one can be possessed by the worlds one no longer possesses. Metaphysical language allows us to think through the affective mysteries and impossibilities of the human condition without focusing entirely on the “money”, so to speak. All the money in the world won’t satisfy our hungers for heavens or utopias. This is not to suggest in any way that socialism isn’t necessary and needed for humans to continue inhabiting this planet together. It is only to admit that socialism cannot ever fill the lacks and alienations that bring us to poetry or literature. Platonov’s Chevengur touches what theory cannot. As do the paintings of Sebastian. As does the music, whether Scriabin or punk or pop.

We've got love and hate it's the only way
I think it's almost crime
I think it's almost time

*

SAPPHO: I didn’t know it was like this. I thought everything ended with that final jump. I thought the longing and the restlessness and the tumult would all be done with. The sea swallows, the sea annuls, I thought.

— Cesar Pavese, Dialogues with Leuco

Self-portraits with Naseer Shamma environs.

“Surely you haven't lived like that all your life?”

“All my life, Nastenka,” I answered; “all my life, and it seems to me I shall go on so to the end.”

“No, that won't do,” she said uneasily, “that must not be; and so, maybe, I shall spend all my life beside grandmother. Do you know, it is not at all good to live like that?”

“I know, Nastenka, I know!” I cried, unable to restrain my feelings longer. “And I realize now, more than ever, that I have lost all my best years! And now I know it and feel it more painfully from recognizing….

— Dostoevsky, “White Nights”

[2:42]

Alberto Giacometti, Self-Portrait (1921)

An early mirror self-portrait by Alberto Giacometti. An expression somewhere between curiosity and contempt on his face. The turn of his shoe in lower right corner, as if leaning against the ankle at that impossible angle. A bluff in the pose. A direction that wants a silhouette but has to settle for a side-look.

[8:21]

Alberto Giacometti, Self-Portrait (1924)

Full frontal. Head frozen, as if sculpted from stone. Lower arm moving in the lower right half of the image. Something of a “dressed to kill” aura in the pose and presentation.

[11:52]

Alberto Giacometti, Self-Portrait (1935)

[16:05]

[21:20]

[26:18]

[29:17]

[30:35]

And, finally, to close with my favorite of the self-portraits involving reflective surfaces…

[34:46]

In memory of Fanny Howe, a “Someplace” by Fanny Howe.

Lament like a hill.

Love’s body and mouth lie down together
Its hidden parts soft inside
A right triangle
Its mouth is well made
Muscular and wide, I like
Its hands, long shadows in the joints
Both palms lined to show it’s had some lives
All its hair prickles and shines
And its smile
goes upside down. So does the sun.

Fanny Howe

10 tickets.

“The surest, and quickest, way for us to arouse the sense of wonder is to stare, unafraid, at a single object.” (Cesar Pavese, Dialogues with Leuco)

“Something unquenched, something unquenchable, is in me.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)

“Imagine.” (Samuel Beckett)

There is a particular joy in getting to work with poets and writers across the world, across time, touching the parts of language that aspire to eternity and community, and so I share this with that joy tucked in my pocket, invisible to the reader, yet present somehow in the effort of communicating it. This, too, is the labor of poetry: to describe what feels incommunicable, and to imagine a world in which hope and vision are communicated. We of the 21st century are fluent in the art of the take-down but often afraid to express what we value or dream. “Perhaps” is my favorite country, the terrain of my fidelities, and the space from which I extend this invitation made possible by the brilliant Maya Popa —

In the darker moments of the 20th century, writers congregated around a notion conveyed in correspondence, lectures, and poetry—namely, the Flaschenpost, or "message in bottle," described by Paul Celan via Osip Mandelstam, who imagined the poet as “the shipwrecked sailor who throws a sealed bottle into the sea at a critical moment,” leaving the poem as a “testament of the deceased” that would find “its secret addressee." This workshop will explore poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, Pushkin, Pasternak, and Rilke. Poets will be invited to develop their own Flaschenpost.

Ten tickets exist for those who aren’t already members of Maya Popa’s Conscious Writers Collective. One of those tickets imagines your name on it.

Dear humans, may we recognize one another in the clouds and all impossible things.

Ways of thinking with Woodman.

for Jared, who said that words have not visited him in a month — in the hopes that they do so, soon

Francesca Woodman was born on April 3rd, 1958. At the age of thirteen, she began taking photographs of herself, a practice she continued until her death. Looking at Woodman’s photos can be jarring— not so much due to the nudity but because we tend to overhear this dialogue between the girl and the woman defined by shifting embodiments. When a friend mentioned looking for ways into writing about Woodman’s work, my hope for his poetry led to this clumsy scaffold of circuits and alleys into ekphrastic poems.

“I have said many, many times no place is home.”

— Robert Hayden, as quoted by Reginald Dwayne Betts in “Remembering Hayden”

1 ] from Untitled (MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire), 1980

Photographs have time-stamps: they are taken in one shot rather than an extended sitting (as with oil paintings). The photographic medium assumes that the camera fixes time and space, but Woodman rejected this by mixing vintage clothing, ruined interiors, and angles of light that evoked a sense of decay. There is an already-ruined feel to her portraits, even the ones that feature motion.

One could write a poem about time, or an ekphrasis that considers temporal notations. In so doing, one might consider the following questions: What part of the figure is still moving? What archaic object seems pulled out of time? How does the word “heirloom” break across this image, beginning with the hairstyle and ending with the mink stole? What does it mean to be pulled out of? And why does the shadow of the figure against the wall seem to imply an extended arm, or a part that keeps moving outwards from the elbow?

2 ] House # 3, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976

“Sous la nuit” by Alexandra Piznarik

The night is the color of the eyelids of the dead.

I escape all night long. I orchestrate the chase, the fugue. I sing a song to my affliction. Black birds over black shrouds.

I scream in my mind. The demented wind denies me. I have confined myself. I draw back from the tense hand. I don't want to know anything except this clamor, this night panting, this errancy, this not finding.

All night long I make the night.

All night long you abandon me slowly like water falling slowly. All night long I write, to look for the one who looks for me.

Word by word I am writing the night.

Piznarik dedicated this poem as follows: For Y. Yuán Pizarnik de Kolikovski, my father. If one wanted to play with juxtapositions and locutions between works of art, one could perhaps write a poem about Woodman’s “#5 House # 3, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976” that begins and ends with one of the lines from Piznarik’s poem. . . . as in, I have confined myself. The paper peels off the wall near the window frame. Words scamper behind the hearth. The mantle, unglued. Your white shutters are solid, visible only from the exterior. But inside the house of my head, flowers take their last breath on the plaster. It is my arm that cannot stop moving. I write to look for the one who looks for me. (etc. etc)

3] #16 from Angel Series, 1977

For Rainer Maria Rilke, the limits of the lament are always transcribed, and therefore limited by the medium of language. In June 1915, while struggling to draft a poem, Rilke proposed the kingdom of the dead as “a unique, fabulous existence” contra the insignificant brevity of the life we are given, or what he called this “anomaly”. . .  Already, one can see the poet laying out his angels and demons among the audience to which he is beholden. “What weight, what obligation now falls on things that survive a little more…” Rilke muses. The heart is incapable of love, only of “passing things on” – “there is no one who can draw sounds from the air that sweeps through him, not even to lament, – it is a Silence of halted, interrupted hearts.”

To be fair, the angels visited him long before this date, and they appear in his letters. Setting Rilke’s words about angels next to this image from Woodman’s Angel Series, one could consider drafting an ekphrastic “lament” related to angels, or the angelic. Woodman complicates the concept of the “angelic” with the fly paper hanging from the ceiling, and the flypaper dripping from the figure’s fingertips. Dead flies punctuate the left flystrip: small black beads, dead bodies. A single-stanza lament (no longer than ten lines) for whatever you mourn in this. An added constraint: to use the Rilke’s words, “What weight, what obligation now falls on things that survive a little more…” as an epigraph or a question that the lament seeks to address.

4] Self-Deceit # 1, Rome, 1977

In the year prior to this photograph, Francesca Woodman spent time in Providence working on a series that foregrounded hands. Her statement — “Then at one point I did not need to translate the notes; they went directly to my hands” — is often associated with those 1976 Providence photos, and used to title one of them. But “Self-Deceit # 1” from a series shot in Rome in 1977 doubles up on two of Woodman’s overt fascinations, namely the hands and the mirror, while also giving us the archaic bun, the perfectly poised hair above the naked body. The figure seems to be looking at her hands. She approaches the mirror on her knees, crawling around the corner, the contract between skin and rough concrete, hard and soft, impermeable and porous.

I keep returning to the hands— the left hand is ringless, the right hand bearing a silver ring on the forefinger— and the object above her nape that is reflected back from the mirror but invisible to us from our perspective. Since this photo touches me in very personal ways, I would be tempted to warm my way into it by playing with very tight constraints or structures. I might flex my muscles by, for example, making a brief inventory of nouns, adjectives, and verbs that this image elicits. Then I might listen to music while playing a game of Mad Libs with a section from an Anne Sexton poem:

And if you turn away
because there is a/no (noun) on the page,
I will (verb) my (adjective) bowl,
with all its (adjective) stars (adverb that modified ‘stars’)
like a (adjective) lie,
and (verb) a (adjective) (noun) around it
as if (person/pronoun) were (verb) (noun acted upon by prior verb)
or a strange (noun).
Not that it was (abstraction or proper noun that refers to a specific place),
but that I (past tense verb) some (abstraction) there.

Then I would take Radu for a walk and disorder the lines in the Mad Lib and see if any one of them gives me a beginning or creates a motion into the poem that would probably be titled “The First Self-Deceit.”

5] A slideshow of Woodman’s photos + a gesture of aposiopesis

Aposiopesis (derived from the Greek word that means “becoming silent”) is a rhetorical device that can be defined as a figure of speech in which the speaker or writer breaks off abruptly, and leaves the statement incomplete. It is as if the speaker is unwilling or incapable of stating what is present in her mind, due to being overcome by passion, excitement, or fear.

Aposiopesis leaves a statement unfinished, so that the reader can determine his own meanings. One could even say that aposiopesis unfinishes a statement, and draws the reader into a complicity with the poem, a labor of imagining and co-creating the unsaid. Pace silence, I suspect breaking-off can also occur with a repetition of syllables, which is to say: sometimes I hear aposiopesis as a stutter, an unsilence marked by an ellipsis . . . a rendering of sound as jagged and fragmented, unable to continue, caught in the repetition of syllables that cannot quite cohere into the wholeness of words. I leave you with a series of images by Woodman and the possibility of a poem structured by what it withholds through aposiopesis.

#9 Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976

#20 Untitled, Rome, 1977–78

#19 Untitled, Antella, Italy, 1977

#18 from Angel Series, Rome, 1977

#18 from Angel Series, Rome, 1977

#15 Space2, Providence, Rhode Island, 1977

#13 “Self-portrait talking to Vince”, Providence, Rhode Island, 1977

#6 Untitled, 1976-80

If you can’t get started or find an in-road into these images, I’m leaving a few questions/non-questions for you to consider when assembling images and textures for the room of the possible poem:

What falls like a leash from a hand without a glove.
Where all the words are a species of silk.
Why the sky hides a rind at the rim.
Who is yours.
What is not enough.
What is barely.
Whose lips are not ink eventually.
Why light fashions us accidentally.
What does your midnight find necessary.

POSTLUDE

Woodman’s Blueprint for a Temple II, 1980 influenced several poems in My Heresies, particularly in the deconstructions of profanation and use of light. The same could be said of the details and tensions juxtaposed in the objects below, which I reference just in case they are generative for others.

Giacometti's interiors.

“Aussi peu de temps et nous avons marché sous la pluie
Je parlais d'amour et toi tu parlais de ton pays”

— Nino Ferrer, “La rua Madureira”

“Life is real
And the days burn off like leopard print
Nobody, not even the dead can tell me what to do”

— Hera Lindsay Bird, “Keats Is Dead So Fuck Me From Behind”

1

Today: work day. The shafts of burnt Estérel pines came back to me strongly, I tried to make something of it, and then Giacometti's figures appeared to me. I saw a clear relation between the two. I drew, several sheets with more or less precise experiments. After some time, I thought, that's it, that my etching would be born, that I had the right, the opportunity to leave behind paper for copper, but something else came, more imperious every time.

[. . . .] So here I am very alone with my solitary figures.

For the moment, it could be called Movement. At first, it was, almost bizarrely, Hommage to Giacometti and to the Burnt Pines of Estérel! Do I stick with Movement or do I push toward Giacometti and the pines? Not, of course that it will be this title!!?

Maybe I will wait until your return to make an etching! Maybe I must stop and make a different etching in the first direction. I don't know, I don't know. The temptation!!

— Giselle Lestrange to Paul Celan, 9 September 1965

2

Description of a workshop I did for Bending Genres a few years ago… with more coming soon, but different!

3

Alberto Giacometti’s The Palace at 4 am (1932).

4

Giacometti’s studio in my head and drafts today— the spectral possibilities in the sky of it.

5

The table of contents for Michel Leiris’ Brisees — and the “stones for a possible Alberto Giacometti” on page 132.

6

Alberto Giacometti’s Interior (1949).

7

At which point I admit to wandering back through Alberto Giacometti’s “The Dream” (as translated by Barbara Wright) while studying his interiors.

8

At which point I obsess over Giacometti’s efforts, as he keeps knocking his head against lines, and looking for ways to figurate the dream, moving between planes and geometries with his symbolic representations. With dreams, “the time factor” is the most troublesome aspect, precisely because dreams, by definition, are out-of-time, disloyal to temporality, the soft-drug of surrealisms. Boxes and squares may be where we start, as G did:

9

At which point I return to my notebooks on Saul Steinberg, and find the portrait I thought I remembered, which Steinberg captions as follows:

Giacometti’s face was rough creased by deep lines horizontal vertical and diagonal — The color was often unhealthy —
The hairdo was exploding steel wool. In repose he looked angry —
But when he liked something a smile of infinite kindness illuminated and transformed his face
(He had also an unexpected resemblance to Colette)

Saul Steinberg, Giacometti (1983)

10

Interiors move between spaces of apprehending and apprehension . . . places where we are seen, recognized, misunderstood, remembered, and perhaps even implicated in our own demise/s. In the Translator’s Note to Michel Leiris’ Frail Riffs: The Rules of the Game, Vol. 4, Richard Sieburth describes a portrait of the author at the point of being a “recovering corpse”:

Always entranced and terrified by the specter of his own demise— his autobiography should perhaps more properly be labeled an autothanatography– [Michel] Leiris became more and more intrigued by the possibility of his own posthumousness as he advanced in years. In Fibrils, the third (and he believed final) volume of The Rules of the Game, he recounts how at the age of fifty-six he had attempted suicide in the wake of an evening of heavy drinking occasioned by a messy extramarital affair that he could not bring himself to confess (as was his usual cathartic practice) to his wife, Zette. Caught in an impossible double bind of deception and need for punitive forgiveness, he swallowed five grams of phenobarbital in her presence (an act he assured her was mere "literature") and was transported to a local hospital, where he spent three days in a coma, undergoing an emergency tracheotomy just to keep him breathing. Upon his release, still barely able to speak, scarred at the neck (and hence symbolically decapitated), he was sketched by his friend Giacometti in his bed as a recovering corpse — a Lazarus (or perhaps, more accurately, a Scheherazade) rescued from the dead.

Nothing could be more Leiris-pilled than this portrait. Would that each of us could have a friend as reliable as Giacometti to memorialize us at our most unacceptable and unbelievable instances!

11

At which point I leave you with a few more interiors by Giacometti, across time. . . noting the beauty of Giacometti’s decision to populate sketches of his studio with the sculptures and plastics that are in the process of being created, unfinished and yet incredibly alive. Ode to the company of the creatures that have not finished with us yet.

My Studio, 1932

Studio interior, 1940

Figures in an Interior, 1946

The Studio with Sculptures, 1953-1956

"The Studio (Still Life)" 1950

Good, I will come to an end. One would perhaps have to advance on spindly legs, like these Giacometti men of whom you speak so well in your letter, but there again, don't you think, one ends up in the foundations.

— Paul Celan to Giselle Lestrange, 20 August, 1965

Postlude

Wherein I return to his studio just once more — for the last time — to retain an imprint of what his hand have done in the most secret and untouchable part of my mind. How the mind blazes in these studios, whether they belong to artists one has known personally or studied obsessively — friends, lovers, acquaintances, living, dead, “recovering corpses” . . . “I would come in a shirt of hair / I would come with a lamp in the night / And sit at the foot of your stair,” to quote Eliot.

A photo of 5 friends at Gura Diham.

“The hunter, to aim better, closes his left eye for a while. The soldier, the better to kill, closes his left eye. The player, in games of skill, closes his left eye the better to send the ball or arrow into the center of the target . . .  I have forever closed my left eye; I was probably given by chance to see the center of life better.”

— Victor Brauner

EYES AND ORACLES

Surrealist painter VICTOR BRAUNER, whose 1931 Self-Portrait (with an Enucleated Eye) remains one of my favorites in the genre, also had a knack for prophesy. In 1938, Brauner went to a pub with friends and found himself in the middle of a brawl between two artists. Punches were exchanged, chairs were kicked, a wine glass was smashed and one of the shards flew into Brauner’s left eye. Seven years after painting this self-portrait, Brauner’s left eye was destroyed — as if to match the painting.

THE 1944 GURA DIHAM PORTRAIT

Retrospect can turn an image into an omen or a prediction. Sorting through music and archives, sharing what sparkles or strikes me: the portrait of five friends in December 1944, in the Bucegi mountains. The world would never see them together this way, in this place, again. It is a last photo of sorts . . . or a glimpse of what would be lost.

The site of the photo, GURA DIHAM, is a starting pointing for many hikes in the Bucegi mountains, including the peaks of Caraiman, Babele, Omu, etc. All five friends are wearing hiking boots, so I’m guessing that this was a day-hike for them— and a surprisingly warm December day, by the loosening of scarves and the snow absent from trees. Only smudges of slush and ice remained. They weren’t going towards Cabana Malaiesti, which is also the way to Omu (“The Man”), since I think those trails close or become impassable in November? I can’t help wondering, as if knowing the trail they took could uncover traces of their conversation.

As for the friends in this photo, HARRY BRAUNER, on the far left, was Victor Brauner’s brother. More importantly, he was one of the most important archivists of Romanian folkways. His name crossed my path decades ago, when I was studying the doina form and revisiting the extraordinary vocalizations of Maria Tănase (see "Doina de Maramures,” for example). After immersing himself in local lores while serving as secretary of the Composers' Society's so-called Folklore Archives, Brauner ‘discovered’ Tănase in the 1930’s— and became the custodian of her legend as well as her official biographer. It strikes me how light and detached these facts sound from the relational haunting that undergirds them. . .

In the year of the Gura Diham photo, Brauner was appointed to serve as adviser of musical folklore to the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Company. By 1949, Brauner was heading the Folklore Department at the Music Academy in Bucharest. His career as a composer and musical archivist made him a popular name in Bucharest’s social and cultural circles.

One of the greatest Romanian novelists, MIHAI SEBASTIAN, stands in the far right of this portrait. His novel, For Two Thousand Years, was written in 1934, during the war, as Sebastian watched friends like Emil Cioran and Nae Ionescu turn towards political ethnonationalist extremism. There is much I could add here about Sebastian’s critique of ideologies that center religious and ethnic purity, and I am tempted to do so— if only to protect his words from those who would abuse them — a losing battle. A battle that feels more daunting and impossible every single day. In December 1944, when this photo was taken, the extraordinary critic and author who wrote as Mihai Sebastian was still alive. The truck that hit him and killed in Bucharest would come six months later, in May 1945. This photo consigns itself quickly to that searing sense of a “last look”, juxtaposing that relaxed grin on Sebastian’s face against the future stolen from one of Romania’s most incisive intellectuals. I mourn the loss of him more than I can say.

As for LENA CONSTANTE, I have written about her across essays. She is the addressee of several published poems (and many unpublished drafts). A treasured icon in my heretical pantheon of ghosts. A bird in the barred window. A reminder that purity only exists as a construction that possibilitizes the heretic and the traitor. Constante maintained a close friendship with Communist Party politician Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu and his wife, Elena Pătrăşcanu. When the Romanian Communist Party leadership turned on its own, Pătrăşcanu was swept into the dust-bin and given the honor of a properly-Stalinist show trial.

In 1954, a decade after this photo was taken, Constante was arrested as part of the Pătrăşcanu Trial, and sentenced to twelve years in prison for “Titoism” and “treason.” Brauner was also implicated and given a twelve-year prison sentence, much of which he spent in solitary confinement at Aiud. Constante’s fate was similar, although in her case, she wrote about her carceral experience and repeated interrogations, beatings, and torture by the Securitate, all of which diminished her resistance. Ultimately, she confessed to being a Titoist and a traitor. Scholars aligned with ‘Western’ archives might take this confession as evidence, but the judges and scholars of ‘Western civilization’ also took the binding of a tongue as evidence of heresy in past juridical trial so it is best to smile, nod, and agree with them. If only to preserve one’s sanity.

In 1962, Brauner was released from Aiud prison and given a sentence of internal exile in a village near Slobozia. Constante was released in the same year, as part of Nicolae Ceausescu’s de-Stalinization campaign which rehabilitated some Party members that had been vanished by the show trials. Two years after their release, Brauner and Constante married. (Again, I am tempted to contextualize the hope and genuine decency in Ceausescu’s early policies, before the inspiring visit to North Korea transformed his vision of socialism into a nest of viperous ruling elites, chosen for skills at flattery and their willingness to sustain a dictatorship’s cult of personality… Again, I bite my tongue.) Suffice it to say that by 1968, both Brauner and Constante had been rehabilitated, which enabled them to seek employment in Romania and to receive a pension.

THE BELOVED LENA POSTCARD

I discovered this postcard — as well as The Gura Diham Portrait— in Bucharest last month, at the Salonul de Proiecte’s exhibit titled “Journeys, Photographs, Friends: Lee Miller, Lena Constante, Elena Patrascanu,” curated by Magda Radu and Alexandru Croitaru. Unfortunately, I went with the entire family so I didn’t have time to take notes so I am going solely by the few photos I managed to snap.

A postcard from Hari (Harry) Brauner to Lena Constante.

Beloved Lenuto,

We are little flowers to whom you have given life and we invite you take us or our sisters who are proud and beautiful and who miss you so much.

For Lena Constante from Brezou

“Brezo” or “Brezou” — lacking reference for whatever Hari Brauner’s nickname might have been. . . But Lenuto is a diminutive that also functions as a hail, a jumbling of words that takes “Hey Little Lena” and makes it into a sound.

The lyrics inscribed beneath the musical notation on the right reads: “Sleeping One! Don’t you hear the night?” But it can also be broken down a bit, since the hailed sleeper is gendered feminine with “Adormito!” and because Harry divides the word for the purposes of the song, so that it reads “A - dor - mi - to” which might also be interpreted as “to dor (longing) me too”.

Leaving flowers inside books to press them is something my mother did. When I went through her library after her death, half the books had flowers in them. There is tenderness towards time in those faded, page-like petals, and I cherish them dumbly. Just as I hope that my own kids will find the flowers I pressed into books on the pages I hope will rise to meet them.

Victor Brauner recorded around 5,000 Romanian folk songs. He died in 1988 in Bucharest. Lena Constante lived to the age of 96, and died in 2005, also in Bucharest.

THE POSSIBLE GRAINS OF THE TEXT

“I have been convicted to 12 years in prison,” wrote Elena Constante in the first part of her carceral memoir. “I have lived alone in my cell for 157,852,800 seconds of loneliness and fear. This is not something you say, but something you cry out! They condemn me to live another 220,838,400 seconds.” These are the facts. This a story in which the terms of the given world are changed beyond recognition.

Nothing about the carceral stories of show trials was special or unique. In fact, the banality is precisely what turned these events into performances of absurdist theatre. Constante alludes to this in her preface to The Silent Escape:

Lena Constante, an excerpt from her preface to The Silent Escape

The only story Constante will tell is personal, embodied, and interior. There is no god, no guru, no method, no maker that can overcome reality. There is no deep meaning to unimaginable terror and suffering. There is simply the struggle to remain human.

When I first read this book in my early 20’s, I was adjusting to life in my post-accident body. All my childhood dreams centered on traveling, leaving, moving, exploring, wandering— and then the car hit me at 15. Surgery upon surgery, medical interventions too tawdry and numerous for description. The girl of Before could never have imagined being trapped in the body of the girl of After. Constante’s words met me in a place that did not exist among my peers: a place where liberty could still exist within the experience of excruciating, mind-altering pain and surgeries. The possibility of freedom within unfreedom. A Silent Escape was my Otherwise, or Otherway, a quietude that permitted the complexity of mortification with no god, no redemptive suffering, and no transcendent lesson.

The conditions of living cannot always be changed. Only a citizen of empire would dare articulate or promote such magical thinking under the auspices of prosperity gospel and self-help. It wasn’t material accumulation or self-affirmation than allowed Constante to “escape” but, rather, something closer to Kkenosis, or self-emptying, the source of resistance during incarceration —- a profound negation.

The body could be humiliated, destroyed, dehumanized, mortified by recognition — but the mind could imagine an elsewhere. The mind could live in the key of as if.

“My body could be nowhere else,” wrote Constante, but “I could be anywhere.”

Resisting absolute power is a continuous practice that asks us to step back from the “self” we prop up in the name of self-esteem and the social-Darwinist hierarchies of our neoliberalism. Constante lived, and wrote, her life “against absolute power.” As Derrida knew/knows, by trace or by sound wave or quantum entanglement, Lena Constante is, and could still be, anywhere.

The archives not only delineate a social terrain in which legacies of the past are intensely fought over in the present, shaping it, but also create a social space in which the present has the power to retrospectively determine the past.

– Florin Poenaru, Contesting Illusions: History and Intellectual Class Struggles in Post-Communist Romania

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ACNSAS, Fond Penal, Dosar P 218, vol. 64, f. 258. For Gura Diham photo.
Alexandra Croitoru, The Cabbage Process (2012).
Cristina Plamadeala, “The Securitate File as a Record of Psuchegraphy,” Biography, Vol. 42, No. 3 (2019).
Florin Poenaru. Contesting Illusions: History and Intellectual Class Struggles in post-communist Romania. Ph.D. Dissertation. Budapest: Central European University (2013).
Irina Dumitrescu, “Poems in Prison: The Survival Strategies of Romanian Political Prisoners”, published in Rumba under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi (Punctum Books, 2016).
Lena Constante, The Silent Escape: Three Thousand Days in Romanian Prisons (University of California Press, 1995.)
Leona Toker, “Toward a Poetics of Documentary Prose from the Perspective of Gulag Testimony”, Poetics Today, (Summer 1998).
Maria Tanase, “Doina din Maramures”, Ciuleandra (Oriente Musik, 2011).
Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Harvard University Press, 1997).
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 1995).
Mihai Sebastian, For Two Thousand Years, translated by Philip Ó Ceallaigh (Pengiun, 2017).
Salonul de Proiecte, “Journeys, Photographs, Friends: Lee Miller, Lena Constante, Elena Patrascanu,” curated by Magda Radu and Alexandra Croitoru, with historical contextualization by Diana Mărgărit and Adrian Cioflâncă (May 2025).
Victor Brauner, Self-Portrait (1931).

"I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each."

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Before June ends, I must spill confetti in honor of the 110th anniversary of Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Imagine Jules Laforgue’s ghost in the margins, noticing his own influence on the poems of the young T.S. Or don’t imagine him at all. Imagine, instead, a yellow notebook — and a bench near a lake where a person took notes in the month of June 2024, at the beginning of her Proustian summer.

Let us go, then — into juxtapositions.

. . . In 1902, while visiting the Hague, Marcel Proust saw Vermeer's View of Delft. It remained, to him, “the most beautiful painting in the world,” as he expressed in a letter to his friend Jean-Louis Vaudoyer twenty years later. Proust carried this painting into his novel, In Search of Lost Time, as a “petit pan de mur jaune” that haunts the final days of the writer, Bergotte.

. . . After his physicians condemned him to bed rest, Bergotte chanced upon a critical review celebrating the magnificent yellow in Vermeer's View of Delft. Was there a yellow wall? Bergotte can't remember seeing it, despite knowing that painting by heart. In a fit of excitement, he decides to go to the museum and glimpse this yellow for himself. Proust's narrator provides an account of Bergotte's adventure— the blue figures appearing, the pink sand swirling, the astonishment of discerning “the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall.” The muttering retreats.

A dizzied Bergotte fixes his gaze on that color “like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch,” and tells Proust: “That’s how I ought to have written.” 

. . . Bergotte condemns his recent books as “too dry” and brittle. He should “have gone over them with a few layers of color” and made his “language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.” The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle along the horizon. The cosmic nature of the ensuing judgement:

 In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow.  He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter.

Suddenly, Bergotte collapses in front of Vermeer's painting.

“He was dead,” Proust wrote of Bergotte. But what does it mean for Bergotte, the writer, to be dead? Neither spiritualism nor religion can prove an afterlife. The soul's continuance cannot be ascertained . . .

Launching into one of his formidable, circuitous sentences, Proust writes: “All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be kind and thoughtful, even to be polite, nor for an atheist artist to consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a pieces of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer.”

There will be time, there will be time. “These obligations” don't apply to the life we are living. If anything, the obligations “belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this one and which we leave in order to be born on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there—those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only—if then!—to fools.” Beneath the music from a farther room.

“The idea that Bergotte was not dead forever is by no means improbable,” Proust concludes. Even at the end of his physical rope, Bergotte's imagination wants to keep writing. I should have been a pair of ragged claws, thinks a ghost. As for Bergotte, he only wished that he had made the language “precious in itself.” Had risked that particular sort of making.

The magic lantern of the Proustian glimmers against the wall. The disenchantment of the world haunts Eliot’s speaker in a way that zombifies living. Those who live are already dead somehow. It is impossible to say just what I mean!

 “A revolutionary thought must reject with indignation any attempt to be closed in a certainty, no matter how fascinating,” said Gherasim Luca. But certainty is the drug of the bourgeoisie, the intoxicant of home-owners and settled persons who have invested their labor in preserving the present, if only to admire their own status in it. Status is the thing so many of us believe we have “earned” —

“The master of light,” Johannes Vermeer, painted this view of the bustling harbor in his hometown, Delft. The angles of light tell us it is morning, a summer morning, sun sifting through clouds. Six figures stand near the water where a boat is moored; a barge, the means of public transportation. The figures bide their wait by talking; baskets hang from their arms. The stillness feels lifeless; the water's surface is placid, protected from winds, it reflects the shape of the buildings with few ripples. 

It is perfectly balanced, Vermeer's composition, structured horizontally as three bands: the sand quay and the water of the Kolk at the bottom, the city in the center, and the top devoted to the sky, which occupies half the space of the piece. The sky is what creates the shadows, and a few of the clouds carry that gray on their undersides, a gray suggestive of thunderstorms and bad weather. The visible light beyond the bridge catches the eye, offering it a golden hue, a beckoning illumination. Marking his hometown, laying claim to the vessel he had used for decades, Vermeer  painted his initials, VM, on the barge's red interior. Vermeer supposedly used calcite, lead white, yellow ochre, natural ultramarine, and madder lake pigments to paint his View. Full of high sentence, a little abstruse.

The diffused highlights painted on the buildings and in the water led art historian Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. to believe that Vermeer used a camera obscura to create View of Delft.

If I believed that my answer was addressed
To one who would never return to the world,
This flame would remain steadfast.
But since no one returns alive from this depth,
If I hear the truth, I can answer you without fear of infamy.

And happiest 110th to all who have measured their lives by the coffee-spoons of their relationship to this Eliot poem across decades!

"It tastes of both."

“To listen, as well as to look or to contemplate, is to touch the work in each part – or else to be touched by it, which comes to the same thing.”

–– Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening

“Wrong, wrong! Wrong is done to Wozzeck, wrong was seriously done to Berg. He is a dramatist of astonishing consequence, of deep truth. Have his say! Let him have his say! Today he is torn to pieces. He suffers. As if he had been cut short. Not a note. And every note of his was soaked in blood!”

— Leos Janáček, defending Alban Berg’s Wozzeck after its “disastrous Prague premiere”

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2

The opening anaphora — “Always” — commits the poem to a time beyond time, a claim of futurity. In the second stanza, the “But” seems to undo this commitment by suggesting we can never really speak to anyone except ourselves. Words, as Bachmann sees them, are useless communicative vessels. Or else: they are things which taste doubly, as sound itself does a thing to the mind.

Reading this poem for sound rather than meaning, I thought of the Greek word diaspon, which is short for diapason chordon (“through all the strings”). Diaspon refers to harmony, or a harmonious combination of notes, and it draws meaning from the Pythagorean system, which holds that the world is a piece of harmony in which man is the full chord.

John Dryden used this word in the first stanza of “A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687”:

From harmony, from Heav'nly harmony
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in man.

After providing his song with seven stanzas, Dryden concludes it with a “Grand Chorus” that binds heaven and earth, or the visible and invisible, through chorale. The poem dresses up as religiosity but I think what it does is closer to the spiritual, or that metaphysical plane Dryden occupied. The “Grand Chorus” allows sounds to interpenetrate one another, diluting the sensed distance between one and “an other” in that “last and dreadful hour,” when time itself (that “hour”) “shall devour” “this crumbling pageant”:

The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And music shall untune the sky.

Italic mine. How are we “tuned” towards making music that separates the seen from the felt? How is a poem “tuned”, so to speak, in order to articulate particular images or structure its desires through the deployment of rhetoric?

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Ingeborg Bachmann’s elliptical dalliance with sound and resonance remind me of a book Michel Leiris wrote later in his life, namely, The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat, which takes Manet’s famous nude for the fragments evoked when studying it. In MIT Press’ description, Leiris’ Ribbon is “a coda to his autobiographical masterwork, The Rules of the Game, taking the form of both shorter fragments (poems, memory scraps, notes) that are as formally disarming as the fetishistic experiences they describe, and longer essays, more exhaustive critical meditations on writing, apprehension, and the nature of the modern.” Like all of Leiris’ work, Ribbon is “rooted in remembrance” and proceeds through wordplay intended to “crystallize” an unstable imaginary as a reality, a truth about the world.

I have always admired the way Leiris complicates the (rather epistolary) text by including an unsent letter that is nevertheless sent by the book’s publication. The letter plays itself as a mask— in a manner similar to Bachmann’s “both”:

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On that note, two incredible books are entering the world this week— one as a return, the reprint of Montano’s Malady by Enrique Vila-Matas from Dalkey Archive (which I celebrated last year) and the other as a first, Pan by Michael Clune (which I hope to celebrate here next week, if time permits). Both books touch on the difficulty of representation; both eschew representation for experience in their own way; both struggle with correspondences and the interstices between self-recognition and interpretation; both continue to fascinate and provoke me.

Mirrors and contingent surfaces.

[Earlier this week, I rummaged through old notebooks looking for “contingency,” a theme that intersects with a sharp angle in a book I’m reviewing, a fabulous book about history and family and stories of origin. Knock on wood, I get this draft turned in soon. It was uncanny to discover that my notes were structured by lyrics from a PJ Harvey song — yes, me and my music issues— at a time when I was also writing the poems that would become my heresies. In the interest of breaking mirrors, I leave the typed notes alongside a collage that allows me to stand next to my grandfather’s outdoor shaving mirror, located on the green door that leads to the kitchen from the back porch of the family house in Bran, Transylvania.]

NOTEBOOKS, JUNE 2023:

The slow drug. Mirroring and mirror-rings. On revolutionary time in Buchner; various constructions of labor; the paradox of boredom; thinking in time and about time; terms of address in personal correspondence; Auden and Isherwood; the cost of business; oppositional aesthetics; prescribed happiness in Adorno's MM; the speech acts of billboards; prophetic voice; suicide and Benjamin; Keats' early death; "the book of what happened" . . .

See this winged boy falling
Falling out of something

Buchner’s play, Danton's Death, holds death in its title. But perhaps it is not a eulogy. One could argue that Buchner resists the elegiac mode by playing into the limit of revolutionary time. This occurs, paradoxically, when Danton is overtaken by BOREDOM in the middle of revolutionary events. Self-determination and resolute action don't result in ‘freedom’; the fireworks of Events become monotonous, predictable, devoid of meaning. It takes more and more dynamite to light up the night. Unlike giving birth to a child, birthing a revolution is a condition in which one's body is used without creating something that one expects to be independent of one's body. 

A child is a radical unknown; the revolution is the absolute measuring chart penciled in on the wall, a form of measurement which foregrounds physicality rather than mental development. The labor created by caring for children is often ignored by scholars; this absence asks us to imagine it rather than find excuses for refusing to consider it. There are different forms of labor, and different ways in which this labor acquires meaning over time, across the span of one's relation to the labor, where time is defined simply as the description of events. Revolutionists could calculate and act but they were not free to think, if thinking is a mental state characterized by discontinuity, recursion, marvel, and absence of linear progression. Calculation is located in the linear – it can be slowed, sped up, charted – but thinking (as distinct from argument) meanders; it cannot demand or ascertain its end-point in advance. It isn’t in it to ‘win’.

Calculation is a skill that grows into a way of being: to be “competent” under late capitalism is to be “calculating,” to assess relationships and actions transactionally, to bring the cold quid pro quo to the fore.

Childhood is gutted on the day when one realizes “winning” and “losing” are the only terms by which the game is played among adults. Then, on that day, you realize you have no one to “play” with. Only the page.

[Objections —Argument that revolutionist has a relationship to transcendence, in this characterization, or at least an elevated sense of time that hovers above things?]

Transcendence. Now the terrain has changed. Now the angle is the term of address within time, the tempo, so to speak. The epistolary form comes to mind because it crosses time without knowing its outcome in advance. The speakers write themselves through intimate address to the person the other is being, a person that sometimes coincides with becoming or changing.

Speaking of address, the boundaries of the public and private are often delineated in personal correspondence through naming and titles. Only W. H. Auden's closest friends called him Wystan. And he used Wynstan when signing letters to intimates. Politics publicizes what friendship keeps secret. The terms of address swivel between these expectations—- and yes, Theodor often becomes “Teddie” to us after we have immersed ourselves in his papers, publications, and private correspondence. The author feels close to us: that’s the pleasure of intertextual encounter. Nothing compares to it.

[Ellipsis: The Who is the interlocutor, and what does the act of locution expect in the context of that relationship? What can it claim to know?]

“Locute” and “locate” are near-homophones.

In February 1939, Christopher Isherwood was living with W. H. Auden in New York, among the bohemians and artists. But Isherwood took stock of the scene provided by culture and media. In a letter addressed to his mother, Isherwood complained that Americans wanted "everything canned": "They want digests of books, selections of music, bits of plays. Their interest is hard to hold for long... Everybody is constantly being reconsidered... There is a lot of cruelty in the public's attitude to has-beens."

Despite the refugees arriving from Nazi Germany, Hitler's embassy in the US remained open for business. Bohemianism assumed that the ethical could be defined by what the bourgeois didn't do: it was an oppositional aesthetic with a reactionary political tail. 

Watching out the windows
Watch the way the wind blows

Contingency gets read out of the stories we tell about the past. I want to imagine Buchner's play was written in a time outside of time, just to see if it possible. If my brain can even do that. By 1944, other refugees had arrived from Europe. Theodor Adorno was one of them. He was disturbed by the anti-intellectualism that he blamed (in part) on commodity culture. Perhaps his longing for the German language and his intellectual community accounted for his disdain? I don't know. I'm not sure a dispositive claim can be made about the relationship between longing and contempt. Adorno in exile differed from Hannah Arendt in exile. No two exiles are the same. No exile can be read as an example of exile without mutilating reality. No reality can be mutilated without making it more difficult to understand the thing one purports to be examining. 

Nevertheless, in the US, Adorno glared at the social good called "happiness." He scowled at the happy face it valorized; he railed against the pathologization of unhappiness, trauma, and dread. Against the emerging social conventions of happiness, Adorno posed inappropriateness and imbecility. 

“Billboards speak to prosperity,” the self-regarding billboard tells us. (See also the sense in which billboards call prosperity into being, as an aspiration, an expectation, an amorphous goal.) Should we challenge this assertion? If so, at what level of consciousness can we challenge it? How close can we get to the object we want to study, given the nature of the mirrors that ask us to study it? 

“Adorno is said to have started his mirror selfie by taking inspiration from Ernst Bloch's photos showing Bloch and his friend Hans Meyer in the mirror. In any case, he carefully prepared himself before taking each selfie, so it probably looked funny because he was a clumsy person.” (Synekura Audio)

Since Adorno couldn't have imagined the future entirely, we can help him by looking back at him from inside this future, by laying his words next to each billboard which promised fulfillment. I'm going to quote from the marked passage in Adorno's Minima Moralia:

The admonitions to be happy, voiced in concert by the scientifically epicurean sanatorium-director and the highly-strung propaganda chiefs of the entertainment industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs when he comes home irritable from his office. It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our own countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain. That is the model of an unhampered capacity for happiness.

This relationship between happiness and consumption worried Adorno. Happiness had become the rallying behind the consumption of certain things, the foundation beneath the erection and metrics of happiness-events. 

The word fun is money.

It carves out a site where fun must be had.

An outraged Adorno leaned into the oracular (or prophetic) voice when addressing the reader. The prophetic voice is aspirational: it wants to earn its stature, or to exist in relation to having merited it. The prophetic voice believes that it has risked enough — popularity, community, status, humiliation, abjection, etc.— to be memorable. But the prophetic voice is interesting because it makes a claim about the future, and draws authority from the possibility of being seen as having predicted events and warned others about them. 

Back in Germany, in continental Europe, in France, in Spain, there is a silent interlocutor who can no longer hear Adorno. Walter Benjamin died by suicide on the French-Spanish border when his papers were rejected. Benjamin offers the past as a book which we can read in order to find similarities or traces across time and, in so doing, change the past's "character" by waking the dead, offering them victory over defeat. 

The look matters—and the looking— matters. Benjamin believed things retain some of the looks which have come to rest on them. This reparative aspect in looking back has been loosely described as the Angel of History; it's a common figure in poetry, cinematography, and art, a way of describing time that focuses on teleology. 

"The genuine conception of historical time rests entirely on the image of redemption," per Benjamin. Assuming his work is familiar to you, I want to preempt a question by facing it: Was Benjamin "suicidal"? This question is complicated its robust silences. What does it mean to be suicidal? Is it the description of a moment in time, a climate, or a personality? For example, is it suicidal to overstay one's welcome in a foreign land? Is it suicidal to remain in a homeland that has classified you as an internal enemy or security threat? 

These are questions that writers must ask themselves continuously. We tend to believe that dying young is a tragedy, but this assumes the value of living. It assumes there is something to be done, or something worth continuing.

With the headlights burning

My man Sigfried Kracauer in 1930.

Looking up for something

John Keats was 21 when he asked for a decade to "overwhelm" himself in poetry, but the cosmos gave him three years. Seeking the intensity of poetry, Keats didn't live long enough to see that hunger diminished, corralled into complacency, silenced by shame, effaced by interpersonal duty. His short life was devoted to learning, feeling, studying, and — like the autodidact — he did not know what it meant to be read outside a dialogue form, outside the intimacy of epistolary. The screams of pain were present; the emotions generated by verse were taken by Keats as sacred connections, part of his apprenticeship to "the religion of Joy." He wrote from his reading—Ovid, Shakespeare, myths—and from art (see "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles"). 

"I never cease to wonder at all that incarnate delight," Keats told his friend, the painter Joseph Severn. When he wrote this, Keats could not yet have known that Severn would be the one near him, sketching the room of his final breaths, abiding in the womb of his death.

It is not my intention to encourage those living in human bodies to focus on death. Nor do I wish to romanticize it. Happiness is inseparable from the reified hierophanies of consumption. I’m not even sure happiness is a legible concept under late capitalism.

Write these words on the cover of this notebook in permanent marker: "The expression book of nature indicates that one can read the real like a text. And that is how the 19th century will be treated here. We open the book of what happened."

The day when the family photo fell from the wall.

Collage made in the year of my heresies.

Variations on reflective surfaces.

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“. . . adopting realism as the de facto orthodoxy does little to reinvigorate art or criticism. The desire to do our part in making the world a better place simply does not transform every movie into a reactionary confession or a revolutionary manifesto.”

— Jarek Paul Ervin, “Critical Cul de Sac” (Damage Magazine, Nov. 2023)

"hourless on the edge"

“In Greek, noesis and nostos are from the same word route. To think is to regret. To regret is to see what he’s not before our eyes. It is hunger hallucinating what it lacks.”

– Pascal Quignard, Abysses, translated by Chris Turner

“The greater the light in the density of the body, the sharper and clearer the shadow becomes.”

— Giordano Bruno, The Art of Memory

Projected works ghost us a little, and we ghost them in return. Even prior to their material realization, we have relationships to the things we created and destroyed, as well as the things withheld, the things we kept ourselves from creating. The dances we didn’t. The kisses we avoided. The trips we cancelled. The friendships we erased. The letters we never finished.

Some texts converse with the possibility of their existence. I'm thinking of Henri Lefebvre’s The Missing Pieces, a book formulated as an inventory of art that has been lost, destroyed, or left at the threshold. Wayne Koestembaum called it “a mosaic-requiem” in the vein of David Markson's Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Both books are concerned with the holes artists leave behind.

A hole has the aura of a secret, a hidden force that alters the visible self. 

I descended into these holes when reading W. S. Merwin’s poetry, since he addresses them directly, and builds sentences with holes for hearts.

Henri Matisse’s last lover, Lydia, shared my mother’s name. The painter placed her in “the Romanian blouse,” but Lydia had her own preferences, or ways of wanting to remain or be remembered. She used turpentine to completely erase eleven versions of this painting.

The bronze tiles in Hadrian's Villa were melted to make canons which then created corpses. The art disappeared to facilitate cannon fodder: to feed the ravenous mouth of war. (Of course, statues become marble instead. You can't shoot marble. How often do we see bronze statues now?)

Unfinished, abandoned in draft form: Pierre Boulez’s “Polyphonies"; Bataille’s My Mother; Fassbinder’s scenario for screening a film version of Pitigrill’s book, Cocaine; Mahler’s 10th symphony; Scriabin’s 10th; the final lecture of Ingeborg Bachmann series on poetics at Frankfurt; Hugh Ball's study of church demonology in the Middle Ages; Berlioz’s opera, The Bloody Nun;  the sketches of novels that Victor Hugo left in his journal; Eisenstein's film, L, based on the supposed screenplay by Karl Marx; the journal Krisis und Kritik that Brecht and Benjamin planned to found in 1930; Bruckner’s third symphony; a cine-novel titled Trans-Europe Express by Alain Robbes-Grillet. 

Apollinaire claimed to have lost his first novel on a train. The novel was titled The Glory of the Olive. Serge Gainsbourg destroyed his own paintings, but kept a self portrait. Velimir Khlebnikov hid manuscripts inside his pillowcases, and these manuscripts have never been found. 

Things missing pieces, or kept in a state of incompletion: Plates two and four are missing from the first edition of Piranesi’s Carceri. The fourth movement of Boulez’s “livre pour quatre for strings” sits in the archives of the Sacher Foundation – the absence of this movement means the piece has never been performed in its entirety. In 1933, Hitler’s ascension to power led Karl Kraus to shutter the journal he had created—Die Fackel. 

Kriztina Toth inventoried the things she had lost in a book, titled, The Scribe of Lost Objects. Judith Schlansky did something similar with An Inventory of Losses. Marcel Broodthaer created his first sculpture from the 50 unsold copies of his poetry book titled Fall, Spit, or Think: Or Crazy Thoughts, which is soaked in plaster. Marguerite Duras constructed The Lover around a missing photo.

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein asked how it is possible “to see an object according to an interpretation.” This is the game that literature presents, and the game does not separate the experience of playing from the conditions of the game itself.

What does the book know? What does the music know? What does the painting know? How does it know it?

Augustine said that Time is the being that lives in an inaccessible light. Was he lying? What did he know about night?

“What is the sound of pain as it is kept in the reserves of memory?"

Self-portrait with toilet spires.

A few questions to ask the poem you are reading or studying, questions pertaining to it’s ‘world’:

1. What changes when the poem is spoken rather than read?

2. Can the poem be whispered, folded into a napkin, hidden amid the quiet hum of surrounding gossip?

3. How do the visual elements translate into audibility and sounds when spoken? 

4. What sort of soundscape does the poem offer us?

5. Where is the poem looking?

6. What is the poem touching?

7. What sort of poem would be written if it were possessed by this poem’s text? (This asks for co-creation. Go ahead: be possessed by it. Try it.)

8. What sort of relationship is fashioned between the speaker and the subject, or the poem and its expression?

9. What does the poem attempt to hide, and what rhetoric does it deploy to accomplish this?

An empty metaphor of a metaphor I encountered on my walk through Avondale Park yesterday.

I leave you with Paul Valery’s exhilarating figuration of ‘metaphor’ — and hope for an otherwise in this brutal moment dominated by empire’s violence:

What is a metaphor if not a kind of pirouette performed by an idea, enabling us to assemble its diverse names or images? And what are all the figures we employ, all those instruments, such as rhyme, inversion, antithesis, if not an exercise of all the possibilities of language, which removes us from the practical world and shapes, for us too, a private universe, a privileged abode of the intellectual dance?

Skateaway.

At extremes of human experience, the habitual reflective syntax of language breaks, just as reflective consciousness breaks, opening to the catastrophe of a present that recalls no precedent and anticipates no aftermath.

— Donald Revell, “Better Unsaid: On Poetic Fragments”

Last night, after texting back and forth with the teens about whether they would return before midnight— whether they should return before midnight —- whether midnight, itself, can be asked to stand for a line that my partner likes to call a “curfew” — whether boundaries make us safer or just protect us from imagining how one day’s feelings spill over into the next day’s not-quite light yet.

. . . No fear alone at night she’s sailing through the crowd . . . . .

In 1980, The Dire Straits released their album, Making Movies. To this day, any bar from its rhymes drags my mind back to the age of 17, the signifiers and psychogeographies of that terrain. Whiplash. Skateaway careening from the kitchen speakers, calling me elsewhere, mid-text. The realistic mom-mask falls from the face. The tongue finds the fork in its path.

An intersection captions the crossroads:

“Your mom remembering what she was doing at 11 pm on a Friday night at your age.”

Hell, it’s an anthem for me. Why not read the corniness closely?

In this case, the unpacking must begin with the titular luggage. “Skateaway” is that particular form of neologism known as a portmanteau word. Beloved by Surrealists and OULIPO, portmanteau words erase the spatial gap between two words, in this case, cramming “skate” (a verb) and “away” (an adverb that modifies skate), rendering an action that also alludes to a state. Skateaway is given as a way of being precipitated by a certain type of action which the song’s subject— a girl on skates— creates.

Aside: One of my favorite portmanteau words, Barococo, or “excessively ornate in style,” combines baroque and rococo. Baroque is a borrowing from French that originates in the older Portuguese barroco or Spanish barrueco, “irregularly shaped pearl,” though linguists have also connected it to the Spanish berruca, “wart” (from Latin verrūca). Rococo is also borrowed from French and derives from Medieval Latin rocca, “rock,” which may come from a Celtic source or, alternatively, Latin rūpēs, “cliff.” In music, Barococo refers to a certain type of “impersonal” background music that originated in the Baroque and pre-Classic periods and was popularized in the early 20th century by technology that permitted longer-playing records and allowed listeners to demote music to ambiance rather than active listening.

“Skateaway” is recognizably Knopfleresque in its snappy refrain, guitar bridges, and extended guitar solo rounding out the end. The song opens with a view: the speaker sees a girl breaking the rules of traffic by skating against the flow. “I seen a girl on a one-way corridor / Stealing down a wrong-way street.” She is stealing, as he puts it, though we don’t know yet if this is an accusation or reason for admiration.

The misheard lyric is a convention of my listening practices. Accordingly, I spent most of my life believing the lyrics to be:

For all the world like an urban toreador
She had wings on, on her feet

when in fact the lyrics did not include wings, or any other allusion to flying. My wings are Knopfler’s wheels, which is a more sensible thing for a skater to have on her feet. The difference between wings and wheels is that the former has little connection to the ground while the latter allows one to move over the ground quickly. Wheels are eminently grounded.

The first allusion to dance comes with the cars: “Well, the cars do the usual dances / Same old cruise and the curbside crawl.” At this point, we have an “urban toreador” (an image I adore) inserted into a scene where cars are doing the sort of dance that has rules, conventions, an ordinary. The girl disrupts the dances doubly: first she disrupts them by going the wrong way, or breaking the rules, and then she disrupts them by jamming the familiar aesthetic with the provocation of bullfighting.

It is the ambivalence of the car’s drivers that creates excitement. Bullfighting is a bloodsport: one of the lives in the ring will end. But this tone of this song is light, frisky, ____ (ambi-valent). The cars are doing their usual dances “But the roller girl, she's taking chances” and “They just love to see her take them all.”

A breakdown of the song’s verse structure:

• All the verses (stanzas) have 4 lines, excepting my favorite verse, which has 5 lines.

• If your gander involves refrains, there are many ways to combine the verses and study what gets amplified (and maybe altered) through repetition. My gander doesn’t know what it wants, and proceeds accordingly.

• Briefly, taking the verses as stanzas, we have the following structure (with no eye to end-rhyme): A / B / C / D / E / C / F / G / H / I / C / F / G / J / K, where C is the first refrain and G is (loosely, loosely) something like a second refrain.

The first refrain elucidates the affective conditions of the skateaway: headphones, night, crowds, city streets.

No fear alone at night
She's sailing through the crowd
In her ears the phones are tight
And the music's playing loud

The next verse is simply a casual exchange that sets the terms of communication between the speaker the girl: “Halle-LU-jah, here SHE comes / Queen ROLLerball / And ENchanté, what can I SAY? / Don't care at all.”

No pressure. No worries. She’s not looking for conversation or attention. If she gets it, she may laugh but she won’t stop skating, and skating is her purpose. The gaze (what they “love to see”) is part of the background scenery when you are moving too quickly to be apprehended by it. In a way, interpellation loses it power in the skateaway realm.

What’s different about the skateaway is that it puts an end to the waiting: “You know, she used to have to wait around.” She used to depend on things that came to her. “She used to be the lonely one.” Skateaway shifts agency. “But now that she can skate around town / She's the only, only one.” She can tell her own story rather than waiting to be told or defined by adults, parents, experts, priests . . .

The refrain returns here, reminding us that she isn’t afraid when skating through the crowd at night because she is wearing her headphones, drowning out her surroundings with loud music, lost in the world of her head which happens to correspond with the radio song. “She gets rock 'n' roll and a rock 'n' roll station / And a rock 'n' roll dream.” She tunes in to the frequency of her own reveries, her own dreams. “She's making movies on location / She don't know what it means.” Each place she moves through becomes part of the movie generated by the music and motion. She doesn’t have to know what this ‘means’: her only commitment is to feel it, to move with it.

Narrativity enchants from the margins of movement. “And the music make her wanna be the story / And the story was whatever was the song, what it was.” The song is the story and she is part of it, part of this story told by the music and yet retold, re-made, by her relationship to it, just as a good book draws us into its spine, enabling us to recognize familiar traces and spaces that resonate and refract. Proust is summer’s king of that. Time is suspended: “Roller girl, don't worry / D.J. play the movies / All night long, all night long.” The girl isn’t choosing specific tunes or songs; she is just going along with the radio songs. She experiences agency or autonomy (she can go where she wants and listen to music and make a ‘movie’) with limitations (she can’t pick the song, she can only make a movie from the song that is given).

The next verse delights me because it crosses again into that ambivalence. “She tortures taxi drivers just for fun” — so she gets pleasure from provoking or upsetting taxi drivers; “She likes to read their lips” — so she engages them in some form of conversation that elicits a response; She “Says, ‘Toro, toro, taxi, see ya tomorrow, my son’” — so she calls to them with the classic call a toreador makes when trying to lure a bull closer and capture his interest for the purpose of wounding him — “I swear, she let a big truck graze her hip” — so she puts herself at risk, which is consistent with the toreador’s practice in bullfight, but also doesn’t seem to put the taxi drivers at risk. This “torture” isn’t physical but flirtatious. There is no risk to anyone apart from herself, the girl on the skates.

And this reminds me of Paul Valery’s essay on dance, where he studies the dancer as an exercise in philosophy. “For the dancer is in another world; no longer the world that draws color from our gaze, but one that she weaves with her steps and with her gestures,” writes Valery. “And in that world acts have no outward aim; there is no object to grasp, to attain, to repulse or run away from, no one which puts a precise end to an action and gives movements firm outward direction and coordination.”

Do the actions of the girl on skates have a purpose, apart from moving across the streets and through the city? Does she have an outward aim, apart from listening to music and living in that skateaway dreamworld?

There are similarities between the girl and Valery’s description of the dancer, even if those similarities are most striking in the quality of absorption both seem to involve. The dancer is “in another world,” a word “she weaves with her steps and with her gestures”; the skater . . .

“Aw, she got her own world in the city, yeah / You can't intrude on her, no, no, no, no / She got her own world in the city / The city's been so rude to her.”

Now the first refrain is repeated and followed immediately by the two verses of the song refrain, moving towards the song’s diminishment through repetition and repositioning, the result being a snowman-shaped refrain-combo:

No fears alone at night
Sailing through the crowd
In her ears those phones so tight
And the music's playing loud

She gets rock 'n' roll and a rock 'n' roll station
And a rock 'n' roll dream
She's making movies on location
She don't know what it means

But the music make her wanna be the story
And the story was whatever was the song, what it was
Roller girl, don't worry
D.J. play the movies
All night long, all night long

A slight shift: “No fear alone at night” becomes “No fears alone at night” in this repetition. The girl moves from the repudiating the condition of one fear (the fear of being alone at night in the city) to repudiating the condition of many fears (all the fears that emerge after being alone at night in the city long enough to see the city, to taste life, to witness the possibilities of hurt and harm).

Au fin: the repetition, humming. The phased out humming and sound-making — “Slippin' and a-slidin' / Yeah, life's a rollerball / Slippin' and a-slidin' / Skateaway, that's all” — sums up life in a “rollerball,” or a skating disco scene where couples move past each other on wheels, and coordinate their actions into steps and slow dances. But the girl of Skateaway never dances in the lyrics: she skates against the grain and plays with danger. She listens to her own music on headphones. There is no sense in which she is dancing to the same music as those around her. If this is a rollerball, then she imagines it and remains its single knowing attendee.

In the ending, Knopfler repeats the titular world, invoking the “Skateaway” space, while vocalizing the skater’s imaginary (as he perceives it) and quoting this imaginary in “Sha-la sha-lay, hey, hey / Skateaway Now, sha-la sha-lay, hey, hey / She's singing sha-la sha-lay, hey, hey…”

—- And there is seepage in the SHA-la, sha-LAY stresses of the skateaway, a soft interpenetration that reminds me of what Beatrice Douvre evoked in (a line from her poem, “She Who Goes Beyond”) “the fascinated distance that bleeds,” which is to say, music has always pulled me from myself: it is better at doing so than any human voice or conversation. Perhaps this is due to the nature of its invitation, for music unfurls the texture of dreams, drawing us towards the imaginary, insinuating through beats, tempo markings, instrumentation the possibility of motion into and away. The body climbs the steps while discovering them. The imaginary holds sway, unimpeded by hyper-consciousness. And yes, there is sublime pleasure in this.

Towards the end of his essay on dance, Valery shows his hand in a sprawling and marvelous sentence (italics mine):

I wanted to show you how this art, far from being a futile amusement, far from being a specialty confined to putting on a show now and then for the amusement of the eyes that contemplate it or the bodies that take part in it, is quite simply a poetry that encompasses the action of living creatures in its entirety: it isolates and develops, distinguishes and deploys the essential characteristics of this action, and makes the dancer's body into an object whose transformations and successive aspects, whose striving to attain the limits that each instant sets upon the powers of being, inevitably remind us of the task the poet imposes on his mind, the difficulties he sets before it, the metamorphoses he obtains from it, the flights he expects of it— flights which remove him, sometimes too far, from the ground, from reason, from the average notion of logic and common sense.

I don’t know when the girls will wander in tonight, or what the proper ceiling for their wanders should be. I hope they find their skateaway, ride their unknowns, tarry near their fascinations, carry only what frees them, make movies whose meaning eludes them.

The restless, tempestuous, eternally-hungry physical part of me can’t resist the invitation, the beat of it, the thrill of feeling the body lose and find, lose and find, SHA-la, sha-LAY . . . rollERgirl, don’t WERE-ry, dj play the MOVE-ies all NIGHT long . . .

Playing on the cutting room floor.

I do not profess that writing may not and does not in fact play this role [man’s exploitation by man], but from that to attribute to writing the specificity of this role and to conclude that speech is exempt from it, is an abyss that one must not leap over ... lightly.

– Catherine Malabou

What was left on the cutting room floor?

— Gabriela Denise Frank, in a line left on the cutting room floor of an interview draft

FALLEN NESTS

While meandering up and down the street with Radu, pausing at his usual pee-mail stops, even venturing to add a new box to the map of his scent-relations, a Carolina wren chirped my name and the world shimmered, froze, melted, became momentarily Otherwise. On the day before leaving for Romania last month, on a similar walk with Radu, I

I thought about a nest I’d come across a few weeks ago, on a similar walk, the day before we left for Romania— and feeling the world’s axis tilt into the eerie. Had I taken a photo of that fallen nest? Flipping through the images on my phone . . . green, the walk, the tree, the nest, the small blue egg crushed within it. The egg’s shell struck me multiply, but also figuratively, as the broken skin of a curved origins. Not a surface so much as the absence of roundness, the not-whole of a thing that breaks when a life hatches from it or, breaks too early, falling into a story of accidents.

The persistence of this image inflamed my curiosity, much as the “abyss” did on in 2021, when pandemic consigned us to the house. In this case, what emerged wasn’t a word but the process of wording, itself, situated in an restless urge to animate the scraps and remnants —- to make an alternate nest from the shadows of things that got cut from my conversation with Gabriela Denise Frank (which will be published in The Rumpus next week). In that interview, when Gabriela queried my writing process, I spoke of juxtaposing fragments and pieces of sound, but there is, perhaps, another way of ‘saying’ the same thing, which is by enacting it.

From my fever for lost and fallen things: two fallen nests. Two structures arose the cuttings of wood chips at the base of the interview’s final draft. The first nest is self-conscious: the speakers are set apart by/in quotation marks. As these quoted words (the “cuttings”) have not or will not be published in an official journal, there is a thrill in according them the status of words that were scored and prepared for performance. The second nest is composed entirely from my own words, the ones looking up at me from the draft’s cutting floor, asking to be placed in an un-synced relation that is not quite a conversation.

Both nests have their own lullabies, though what lulling might sound like for occupants of fallen nests remains unclear. Nevertheless.

Fallen Nest 1: Cracker, “Big Dipper” (1996)

“FALLEN NEST 1”

Gabriela’s kindness and brilliance rises from the screen immediately. Moved by her demeanor, I visit her website and marvel at her art. Now, I want to tack the boat and focus the questions on the provocative asynchronies in her work rather than consider the meh of my own. But Gabriela asks. “How and where does this message find you? What is giving you pleasure these days?”

And I reply. “Dear Gabriela, this message finds me at home in Birmingham, at 12:14 a.m., feeling grateful to you, while also paring down a draft essay, which, in my case, involves cutting hundreds of words at an hour when letting go of words is less onerous. Pleasures: bright crimson azaleas, the overwrought aroma of wisteria, archives of e-flux index, making collages from stills in old family films, Charlotte Mandell’s translation of Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, recent encounters with poets like K. Iver, the unsayables that drive the having-said, a year with no surgeries, the splendid critique of my teens, the birdsongs that spring lays near my window.”

Gabriela turns towards the furred one. “And (importantly!) how is the wonderful, terrible Radu?”

I reply. I am conscious of being the one who is replying. “Radu is as wonderful and terrible as the poems he courts on the front porch. He has turned his melancholic heart away from books and invested in birdwatching and barking at bumblebees. I could not be more proud—or more embarrassed. Love does this to us, I think. Love impels us to recognize how the beloved is seen by others, which is often much less appealing than we care to admit.”

Gabriela mentions the poem “Alternative Index Discovered in Franz Kafka’s Notebooks.” She wonders how I “came to the index as a scaffolding” for it. “How did the poem start, develop, and evolve with this form? What was left on the cutting room floor?”

I tell her a truth. “Those poems were lifted from the cutting room floor of my notebooks, where I indulged in cross-annotation of Kafka’s correspondence, published fiction, and diaries. An index is a lovely apparatus for shaping: it presumes to know without acknowledging its bias. I wanted to mess with that way of knowing implied by structure. In the sidereal, I hear Svetlana Boym whispering, yes, yes, ‘nostalgic manifestations are side effects of the teleology of progress.’ The structure creates the conditions under which the sidereal develops. The poem listens and attempts to depict this.”

At this point, Gabriela’s insight gives me goosebumps. She says, “My Heresies ends with alliterative epiphanies in “Epiphania”—a closure that opens. (It makes me think of Hélène Cixous: “A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending. There’s no clo­sure, it doesn’t stop.”) Why and/or how did brightness become an end for this poem and this book? How does brightness here (different from redemption) maintain the distance between the room of the poem and the world it imagines?”

[Since Gabriela links the essay on closure in her email, I have elected to leave that link and set it apart with an italicized quote-link of her works, to be distinguished from various and sundry links peppered by yours truly/untruly throughout these nests.]

I fumble with hauntology. I struggle to articulate an apposition that continues to trouble and excite me. I reply. “Since you mention Cixous, I confess that I found myself thinking of her interviews and conversations when reading your questions. There is a similar discursivity alongside an extraordinary close attention that you bring to the art of the ask. Disclosure interests me more than closure; dialectic, for me, doesn’t aim to conclude. The poem risks inclusiveness by expanding the scope of knowledge, and, in so doing, asks how we know what we claim to know. Or believe.”

Photo album of shavings, coincidentals, and the zombie of a manuscript related to the conversation about my heresies

Fallen Nest 2: The Afghan Whigs, “I Am Fire” (2014)

“FALLEN NEST 2”

But the first passport — “Untitled” (Passport), 1991 — the original passport in Gonzalez-Torres’ series . . .

. . . is one of my personal favorites, my backup, my gauntlet . . .

. . . This “(passport)” contains a homeland in my head, the papers for a country worth claiming, a space to which I would willingly belong, which drove the prefatory poem, “Byline, Be Sky,” and its longing for a byline that moves like wind rather than grounding itself in status. One part of the writer is always . . .

— writing.

. . . Memorials conspire with eternity to make something permanent. Where do we go after we die? Gonzales-Torres’ long-term lover, Ross Laycock, died of AIDS in 1991. When do we stop moving through one another? What does eternity look like? A stack of blank white paper could be anything, anyone, anyplace, anytime. A poet in Alabama meets the spirit of Cuban-American queer conceptual artist in that indeterminacy. 

When writing to a friend the other day, I found myself trying to describe why . . .

Certainly . . .

Speaking of materiality . . .

. . . Hannah Zeavin’s Mother Media offers a brilliant look at the evolving technology in mediated forms of modern parenting.

Performing ‘civilization’ seemed silly in context. I mean . . .

Your questions delight me.

I treated billboards as profit-seeking entities who want something more than money from me. “What are you missing?” I asked that woman with very white teeth on the billboard near my house. “And what do you need me to normalize in order for you to feel big enough, or strong enough, or great enough?”

While living in Paris and trying to write what would become The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggs, Rilke sat in on courses by sociologist Georges Simmel (as did Robert Musil and Walter Benjamin). Simmel’s influence on Rilke was tremendous; he wrangles with his theories on love and affinity throughout Malte. We don’t study Simmel enough. His writing is still difficult to find in translation. In thinking through socialization and modernity, Simmel noted that our utilitarian, role-based conceptions assume that love can and should lead to “happiness.”

. . . Like Johannes Kepler’s mother who took him to the peak of a hill as a young boy so he could watch the great Comet of 1577 shoot across the sky, my mother exposed me to things I could not forget — everything from catacombs to honeysuckle-naps. Unlike Kepler's mother, my mom was never accused of witchcraft by a well-connected girl named Ursula who invented a witch in order to disguise her own abortion from the religious leaders. Catherine Kepler spent the winter of her seventy-fifth year in a German prison. She died shortly after her release on April 13, 1622. I was born on April 13th, the day Kepler's mother died. As a writer, coincidence is material.

On our walk home last night, the man told me to stand in the green gap. And so I did.

“The masses are rushing, running, charging through the age. They think they are advancing, but they are simply running on the spot and falling into the void, that is all.”

— Franz Kafka, prefiguring the 21st century

*

Adrian Sobol, Hair Shirt (Malarkey Books, 2025)
Alina Stefanescu, “ABYSS: pandemic diary, 2021” (in pdf, since the original website is gone)
Brad, “Buttercup” (1993)
Cracker, “Big Dipper” (1996)
Gabriela Denise Frank.
Hannah Zeavin, Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century (MIT Press, 2025)
K. Iver.
Paul Valéry, Monsieur Teste translated by Charlotte Mandell (NYRB, 2024)
The Afghan Whigs, “I Am Fire” (2014)
The Flaming Lips, “Always There, In Our Hearts” (2013)

Ode to the hundreds.

We write to be in the reverb of word and world.

— Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, “In it”

RECTO

Why the Daniel Lafore song?

Because gender, like genre, still blurs “me”, and juxtaposition within the titular still thrills me . . . as does the friction generated within the binary of “Un baiser, une bombe,” which automates the association between a kiss (gendered masculine) and a bomb (gendered feminine).

I am always looking for thing within the thingness of what we construct. What we assume. What we call holy and bundle as ‘true’. What Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart called the “reverb of word and world.” Whether studying the machine of what we mean in language or seeking the bloops in the operative games, there is the pleasure of playing and being played.

And, in that vein, there is a little game I play with myself that involves chasing the overheated energy deposited in the number 69 through any poetry book I happen to read, where opening the book to page 69, beginning in the scandalous energy of taboo and totem, ushers me into the text differently.

Over the years, a chorus of 69’s has gathered itself from the voices composed of these page-69-poems and today is as good a day as never to share the 69-song found in The Hundreds by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart.

“We write to invite and to goad, to bring the weight of scenes home; not to model,” Berlant and Stewart say in the hundred of parsing the phrase, “In it.”

In the spirit of unforseen innings, please take these additional in-roads to theory and speculative poetics from The Hundreds, accompanied by images that struck me—- and are present in relation to these texts for no other reason apart from interior lightnings, which may or may not be a provocation to your own writing and thoughts:

The dread of another virtue breakfast was superseded by politics, a painful twist of need and interest and vigilant bad reading. There was an online Punch and Judy show with all the thrill and erotic boredom of your average stalker rom-com. When fools fuck up, one faction calls the other retro, a mole, a vampire, a baby. A mob of tweeting lurkers converges on every speculative heart. The mix of disgust and love keeps me quiet.

(from “The Week in Shakes,” on the day designated as “Tuesday”)

4. I have loved me so many assholes. The one who loved calling other people stupid, the one who insulted secretaries, the ones who puffed themselves up so big that the rest of us became minor characters, the ones who secured their charisma by shitting on lost and current beloveds, the ones who were so intentionally good there was no room to breathe, the others who blamed the world for their angst and every hiccup, the ones who thought they were all that and the opposite too, plus the ones I was related to.

(from the inventory piece titled “Friendhating”)

Excerpted from the hundred titled ““Friendhating”

Harder's not always the same thing as worse. In the chronicles of disappointing touch there's a lifetime of accommodation and the throat wedges, trying not to suffer from the wrong wants again. Against that wind, the question asks itself: what is it to be naked among men?

(from what may be “What is like to be naked among men,” although I have misplaced my copy of the book and can’t looking for it to confirm this right now so I leave it with the felt title, infused with tentativity)

Fantasy stains the approaching air like the eddy of a fuck-you said out of love, so warm you don't savor it: it savors you. This genre of the world jolt makes episodes possible.

(from “Everyday Life in Early Spring”)

VERSO

“Style is another matter-no new thought without new style (Nietzsche). Here you go, Fred. Style is a test. Any objections? (Sort them all out, and you have a totally sick objectivity—Latour.) Yes, it is fictocriticism: The ficto- side of fictocriticism follows the twists and turns of animated language as it finds new pathways. The -criticism part comes in the risky leap of taking the story to a different “world,” where it might be tested by an unexpected public.”

— Stephen Muecke, “Untitled”

“You remind me to point sideways, to the shapeless thing I want to name, the thing that hangs around. It shifts its shape. A shifter's only meaning is the object it happens to point to. The little girls pose with one hand bent from the wrist as if once in some other place or time this was the way a princess stood. Melodramas of mixed ontological status hit swells of feeling and the force of things colliding. You opened the window to get rid of the atmosphere; but the air just swelled.”

— Susan Lepselter, “The Index”

Kiki Smith’s Moons

Ars for the fragment.

Enter the “POSTLUDIC” . . . to borrow a schemata from Berlant and Stewart, or to inscribe a repetition to admire its shift in velocity vis a vis its own shadow:

So I sit down again to write. The mark of history on my back turns my front to the wind, like Adorno said. He's on my mind this morning, writing a wrecked world back into endurable form. He's on my mind this morning, waiting in a lonely place for his collaborator, without whom there's only loose scrolling through a life built carefully just beyond the nose.

"Et ma sirène à la peau lisse qui lorgne..."

“At some crisis times like this one, politics is defined by a collectively held sense that a glitch has appeared in the reproduction of life.”

— Lauren Berlant, “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times”

“It’s mere scenery, but under the light, through the glitch of history,
Its enchantments are plenty.”

— Caridad Svich, Minotaur

[APOLOGIA]

Back on my Biolay bullshit.

I blame the green surging around me.

I blame my tendency to respond to moments of glitch with anxiety rather than engaging what glitches reveal about failing systems.

I blame, too, the seductions of expectation for making glitches sound ‘wrong’ to me rather than relevant.

Certainly, I blame the earphones that allow me to listen to music when tromping through the park near our home.

And I hold dubstep personally responsible for all the bullshit of an overly-close reading that hovers at the threshold of the glitches and skipped stitches in Morcheeba’s “Paris sur Mer” . . .

[BRIEF SKETCH OF MY INTEREST]

Leaving the siren/sirenes to the side, at 0:44 in the song, the reverb overtakes Benjamin Biolay’s voice, lifting the lyric (La pluie lâche lâche un fil) into a mirroring of its repetition. I can see it shimmering, sending off sparks, especially since the beat is now recognizably peripatetic, sensibly so as the reverb of the lâche moves alongside the beat, like a wee eddy of wind swirling through an ensemble of trash on the sidewalk.

But the wind doesn’t just swirl the trash — it also creates the ensemble. It puts the candy wrapper and lost receipt in dialogue. Or that’s what I hear/see in Un ciel de traine défile. The accidental eddy ensemble sharpens the peripatetic beat.

Re-entering the piece at 0:55, where the reverb comes back to inflect — lightly, lightly — the repetition La nuit, la nuit je sors, so that the combination — La pluie lâche lâche un fil / Un ciel de traîne défile — reminds me of something that happens with sound in poetry as well, when the moment being depicted uncouples itself sonically from representation of the immediate and interposes a condition of possibility in the polymorphous perversion of temporality.

[UNNECESSARY DIGRESSION]

One could take this down to the level of sound art. The level of sound, the syllable has its own arc that plays out in ADSR envelope. Usually, our ears attend to the point of attack in a sound. Recording artists play with the stickiness of sound that comes in decay. (Sometimes I amuse myself by imagining an echo as evidence of a sound’s relationship to its own decline rather than a mirroring of sound.)

A visual of the ADSR envelope used in sound art. The Attack parameter determines the time it takes for a sound to reach its maximum amplitude from silence. Decay sets the time it takes for the sound to decrease from its peak amplitude to the sustain level. Sustain determines the level at which the sound will remain as long as the note is held. Release is the time it takes for a sound to fade away after the note is released.

[”CHANGING GENRES”]

We are verses out of rhythm
Couplets out of rhyme . . .

– Simon and Garfunkel, “The Dangling Conversation”

To pick up a different thread, Dean Young’s poem, “Changing Genres,” seems to acknowledge something like an uncoupling of pace or step in both its title and the direction ventured by the first line: “I was satisfied with haiku until I met you . . . “

What drew me back towards this poem after listening to “Paris Sur Mer” occurs midway through this headlong single-stanza, a stanza whose pacing races forward with few pauses or recapitulations, and no breath to mark “time in gulps as glitches / passing, squibs of threnody, a fallen nest,” the images similarly gathered into an accidental (or uncanny) ensemble.

Young’s title, “Changing Genres,” is a literary reference: it indicates shifting from the short, bright, uncluttered images of haiku to the expansive ornamentation of “a Russian novel.” Young makes this clear in the first few lines. The speaker desires all the extraneous and decidedly unsimple artifice of the “glittering ball,” the elaborate staging devised just for “a kiss at the end of a dark hall.” The change in genre here indicates a desire for rapid pacing, a beat of flushed cheeks and scrolling fans.

I was satisfied with haiku until I met you also duplicates the long-u sound within a line, doing the thing we call rhyme. One could argue that this particular rhyme is what sets the whole poem in motion, or gives it wind, hands it a spool to unwind. Although Young’s poem situates itself in a heteronormative couple, that particular step-pair that is most interesting in its mis-steps and articulations of difference, one can also consider the Russian novel as a glitchier affective environment for the staging of romance. The more material on the sidewalk, the easier it is for the wind to ensemble it.

Writing about the affective reverb of Ed Atkinson’s Pianowork 2 in “The Pain Artist”, Ben Lerner employed a spell-binding parentheses: “(our breath glitches from emotion)”. Lerner hears this in Pianowork 2, as I hear it in “Paris sur Mer” — or the topos that Paris-sur-Mer has taken up in my imagination. The glitches conspire to open language at the point of mismatch, or the instant when the shadow separates from the object.

La pluie lâche lâche un fil
Un ciel de traîne défile

“And yet I cannot shake the question mark. It is as if, by way of a cosmological glitch, the typographical certainty by which we would normally stamp time with a date was obstructed. Maybe we retain the mark, not only here but everywhere we see an image. Maybe we refuse the imperative to find its answer and insist instead on its fundamental ambiguity, on its being and remaining a question.”

— Ben Libman, The Third Solitude

Attempting to illustrate how the speaker uncouples atop a swing, with a drawing by Lenora Carrington in the boughs.

Bloomdaze.

O happiest of Bloomsdays to the boss who watches over our bed and serves as guardian of the threshold to the window!

Happy, too, the veil I laid over Joyce’s face after having worn this veil at the protest against genocide and empire which took place at the New Orleans Poetry Festival earlier this year! For what is a veil if not a gaze that commits to seeing through hue?

"As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be.”

Like Dante, Joyce created a streetside universe of caricatures and persons from the town in which he was raised, a world to hold that woman he saw on the street, or that Beatrice that he imagined into eternity. Her name was Nora. She was what Steve Earle would serenade as a Galway Girl. Joyce noticed her "sauntering" down the street in Dublin and asked her out immediately. Nora agreed, but then failed to show up.

Happy Bloomsday to sauntering, itself— and to the literary saunter that gives rise to characters we chase through the crannies and alleyways at night!

Undaunted, Joyce pursued Nora with a note that led to an actual date on June 16, 1904, a first encounter realized in a casual stroll along the banks of the Liffey. As the two walked towards Ringsend, Nora reached into his pants and masturbated him. Their first date became the setting for Joyce's Ulysses. Anyone celebrating Bloomsday is "celebrating that first masturbation," in Louis Menand's words, or perhaps that profane moment made sacred by literature and memory. In Joyce's words, as offered to Nora in a letter two months later, what happened on that date was "a kind of a sacrament, and the recollection of it fills me with amazed joy." 

Amazed joy might be how Bach described his greatest choral pieces when performed in a cathedral, but Joyce's awe was more intimate. He felt no shame, no weight, and no transaction in relation to Nora. Five years later, on a trip to Dublin, he writes to her in Trieste: "It was not I who first touched you long ago down at Ringsend. It was you who slid your hand down down inside my trousers . . . and frigged me slowly until I came off through your fingers, all the time bending over me and gazing at me out of your quiet saintlike eyes." That night "made me a man," he told Nora in a different letter.

Happy Bloomsday to being so made and unmade!

After a date, Joyce took one of Nora’s gloves home with him, and he writes to her to say that he has slept with it: “Your glove lay beside me all night—unbuttoned—but otherwise conducted itself very properly—like Nora.” 

James Joyce and Nora Barnacle raised their children, Giorgio and Lucia, in countless apartments across Paris and Europe. He relished telling stories, filling bar stools, being generous whenever money appeared, and living at full nerve, although only two things ultimately matter to him namely his writing and his family.

“A man of small virtue, inclined to extravagance and alcoholism”:  this is how James Joyce described himself to Carl Jung.

After two of Nora’s boyfriends died when she was dating them; the girls at the convent where she boarded in Galway called her the “man-killer.”

Happy Bloomsday to all “man-killers” and to the stelle, or stars, with which Dante ends all three books of his Comedy!

Happy Bloomsday, too, to the consecration of a sacrificial religious event by Stephen and Bloom, who honor such an occasion by urinating together in the garden!

Happiest of Bloomdays to you!

The first house.

“What we have is everything around us, and it is sufficiently creative and weird all by itself.”

— Jairus Grove

George Enescu’s Piano Suite No. 2 in D Major, Op. 10 “Des cloches sonores": II. Sarabande: Noblement . . .

The sarabande held my attention last night, due to my appetite for bells, or sounds associated with pigeons on landscapes. I stared at the photos of my “first house,” so to speak, the apartment in Bucharest where I lived out my earliest years in the care of my grandparents.

The dreariness, to me, is charming; it aligns with the feeling of lost time, a sense of lateness within the future anterior itself, a motion that shapes this “Late Blazon” by Christina Davis—

Metronomes help musicians “keep time” when preparing for a performance. Our own metronome abandoned his space on the black piano to seek the markings of college, as pianists and humans and pigeons must do. But Man Ray was onto something when he clipped the woman’s eye to the “Object of Destruction” —

A Wasteland Sonnet

I am saved by love the way the fisherman
In the myth is cured by that knowledgeable knight
Who step by step and counter to his ban
Works a unique and superstitious rite
That frees the waters, and suddenly they run
Through the fisherman’s country and the silver blight
Quits his wheat, and his dry herds begin
To calve, and the king himself to govern right.
This is the way throughout my sick estate
Where love effects its ruthless cure of will; 
The will restored restores the whole to health.
Finish the working of your arcane rite,
Stay with me just this lifetime, or until
None can maim me, even I myself.

William Meredith

Bunicu, addressing my father from the balcony of the home where I would spend the first few years of my life in Bucharest.

“Writing or saying the truth is equivalent to death, since we cannot tell the truth. It is in every way forbidden because it hurts everyone. We never say the truth, we must lie, mostly as a result of two needs: our need for love and cowardice. The cowardice of love but also love's courage. Cowardice and courage are so close that they are often exchanged. Cowardice is probably the strange, tortuous path of courage.

Love is tortuous. So it is only at the very last page of a book that we perhaps get a chance to say what we have never said, write what we have never written all our lives, i.e., the most precarious, the best, in other words, the worst. I have respect and admiration for those writers who, in their lifetime, have approached that point where cowardice and courage are so close to each other they might fly into the flames if they were to say one word more. This is what Tsvetaeva describes, the point that I call the truth and which she calls the magical words in writing.”

— Helene Cixous, Steps Up the Ladder of Writing

Long live the post horn!

“I’m afraid that then dialectics in its total abstrusity is only good for totally sick, ill, and mad people.”

— Goethe to Hegel, 1827

“It was unusable. However, what mattered was my passion and commitment”

— Vigdis Hjorth, Long Live the Post Horn! (translated by Charlotte Barslund)

[All unindented text below is taken directly from Vigdis Hjorth’s Long Live the Post Horn!, as translated by Charlotte Barslund. All indented objects are yours, truly.]

1

HE: Why are you pouting?

ME: "Because she does not express herself in theoretical language, no one expects too much from her and she is used to tripping out on layers of complexity in total silence." I’m quoting Chris Kraus in I Love Dick.

HE: Do you, though?

ME: She did.

 I didn’t believe in ghosts so who was in the corner whispering? Dag, I said out loud. Then it grew deathly quiet. I looked across the fjord where the fog was descending and spreading out, hiding the tops of tall buildings and the masts of the biggest boats, then the smaller ones until finally everything was covered in grey. It wasn't nature screaming, nature was cool and numb, remote and inaccessible, it was me screaming a non-scream, me who was in the process of evaporating from lack of sustenance, I was completely beside myself, yet I'd never been inside myself. How to make the leap from screaming to writing, I wrote. To achieve in my language something I couldn't achieve in my life, I wrote, then I got up, went to the toilet and looked in the mirror, I was ill, I had been out too late that night in Paris, if I had really been there, what did the homeless do when they fell ill? I've nudged you, someone whispered, now you'll have to fall and hurt yourself. Despair, the voice said.

HE: You have your bed back. You escaped COVID contamination. You are now free from the no-place of the sofa.

SHE: I’m not so sure.

HE: What’s on your mind?

SHE: I’m thinking about Smithson’s use of mirrors in his “non-sites.” The making of spaces that reflect the viewer while throwing into shadow the factual world behind them. Wherever you look, the unflinching landscape looks back.

HE: What does the landscape have that you lack?

SHE: It has all the time in the world. All the time as we know it to show how Nothing reflects Nothing back.

 . . . before switching on the light, he went to the kitchen, picked up a letter from the table and stuffed it into his coat pocket. Then he turned on the tap, bent down and drank straight from it as if he was very thirsty, as if that explained why he had rushed into the darkness. If I hadn't been paying attention, I wouldn't have noticed the business with the letter. It was small and square, not rectangular like an official brown envelope. He returned to the hall, turned on the light, took off his shoes and hung his coat on a hanger. The letter didn't stick out of the pocket. I decided not to get up in the night and sneak into the hall to read it. I wanted to preserve the curiosity I felt at that moment. So I'm capable of feeling something, I thought, I touched his arm, he jumped. Was it a love letter? An old flame he couldn't forget who had suddenly got in touch? We didn't have sex, the letter had come between us.

SHE: (writing in her notebook) When painting people close to him, Francis Bacon used photographs rather than sitting models. “I don’t want to practice before them the injury that I do to them in my work,” Bacon told critic David Sylvester.

[Tracey Emin’s tent installation titled “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 “ (1995), which burned up in a warehouse fire and has never been recreated]

Don't let them knock you off balance! Don't let them get to you. Then repeat what you've decided to say and add nothing else. Articulate in advance what you want to say in three or four different ways, same content, different wrapping.

[The needles, threads, and hands involved in stitching “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 “ (1995), which burned up in a warehouse fire and has never been recreated]

The secretive gap of the letterbox, I wrote. Two narrow for the biggest items, which must be collected with a delivery card, goods ordered online from the great abroad. 

2

“Survival is a matter of avowing the trace of loss that inaugurates one’s own emergence.”

– Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power

“Flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented.”

– Willem de Kooning

The shrill whistle of the steamer and the hoarse screeching of the seagulls, both reassuring sounds that everything is as it should be, amid repetition and the rhythms of nature, the whispering of the waves and the chirping of the birds, he was setting the scene just like we had done during the media training course.

A pair of portraits leaned side by side against a wall. . . . to vigorously mark the heads with lines as vividly yellow and blue and orange .. . underpainting . . . influenced by her research into the Greek myth in which the princess Danaë is impregnated by Zeus, who takes the form of a shower of gold. . . . several paintings by Titian. . . . . exploring ways to visually capture the moment of conception. Under the influence of religious imagery from the early Renaissance, she had incorporated cerulean and gold lines into depictions of several female figures . . . recalled Byzantine iconography, and a blue line piercing the subject’s cheekbone and emerging from her nostril evoked the way that, in some devotional paintings of the Annunciation from the fifteenth century, the Virgin is struck by a heavenly beam of light that enters through her window or doorway.

– excerpts from Rebecca Mead, “Jenny Saville, The Body Artist”

Then I was reminded of the letter, because we were eating at the kitchen table where it had been lying. So had his fairy tale found him after all in the form of a letter? A tale of unrequited love? His beloved had declared her love, but was tied to another and so he had to make do with me? Yet still he hoped? Had this been a Hollywood movie, I thought, and had the audience known the contents of the letter, they would pity him because he couldn't get the one he loved, but also pity me because I believed myself to be loved while my boyfriend loved another? Should I be pitied?

[The photograph of a young Roland Barthes in his mothers’ arms, captioned: “The demand for love.”]

The love letter, I wrote once I was back home, when it arrives with its declaration and everything is explained and out in the open. When it says black on white: I love you. I had never said those words, but now I had written them, bursting with unknown passion, with hitherto unknown hope. When the course has been set and the aim is clear, then no hesitation is necessary, I hammered away on the keyboard, my new secret love. No distractions in the form of responsibilities and unpaid bills, Christmas presents as yet unbought and time ticking away at the parking meter, forget all of that and remember this: that the button to be pushed is inside me and remember to push the button and climb the mountain of enlightenment and shout it out loud from the bottom of my heart, at that point I ran out of steam, but it was a start . . . 

3

Once we have burned our brains out, we can plunge 
to Hell or Heaven—any abyss will do—
deep in the Unknown to find the new!

—Charles Baudelaire

'Any letter without a clear name or address is put in a box labelled "addressee unknown" or in a box on which the postmaster has written "address incomplete", unless the sender has written their address on the back in which case the letter is returned to sender, but this is rare. Letters with no sender are junked when the boxes are full.’

Again there was nodding in the back rows.

'Thrown in the bin with trash and junk mail and that day's big, fat, lying newspapers, lost for all time!' Glum nodding ensued.

'But what if', Rudolf Karena Hansen said in a more solemn tone of voice, 'dead letters could be turned into living ones?'

'How?'

HE: Not everything needs to remembered.

ME: There is no recording of Walter Smetak’s 1970 production of Macbeth for which he recorded the instruments playing underwater.

HE: And why do you need that?

ME: I don’t think I need it…

A shadow fell across me, I looked around to see what had caused it, but there were no windows, the shelves were stuffed with toys in every colour right up to the ceiling and there were toys hanging from the ceiling, but there were no windows, I rushed outside. In the street I got my breath back and I went to a bookshop instead.

4

Speculative work cannot predetermine what actors or relations will matter until we follow, carefully and slowly, emergent entanglements in specific scenes. What we discover in that following may very well serve the interests of those in power - especially when those entanglements solidify into stable structures protecting elite interests - but then again, they may not. The open-ended, turbulent and bumpy nature of all entanglements means that they cannot be preemptively yoked to a priori categories of usefulness'. In this tempestuous intellectual landscape, we will find what we will find, regardless of what the university managers, funders and governments desire.

— Debbie Lisle, “A Speculative Lexicon of Entanglement”

Ah, philatelists, I thought, they’ll be on our side. Philatelists will support us, there are lots of them and most have the right to vote, the power to influence and a driving passion for stamps along with sentimentality, why has no one thought of them before? Philatelists of Norway unite against the EU's postal directive! Save the Post Office and Stamps for the People, I wrote once I got home, with the new king in profile, I added, because it was important to get the monarchists on board as well. Once again I was reminded of my childhood excitement at steaming stamps over the kettle and bashed the keyboard with renewed vigour. Long live the King and the royal family, I wrote, bursting with exuberance. Our quaint ambassadors for fjords and mountains and stamps. Our dogged and occasionally well-dressed champions, our timorous heartbeat's chosen ones, a source of comfort in times of hardship, leading actors in our anxious minds. We hail your blurred royalty! We celebrate our ageing Monarch, so lacking in pretension, and his cultured Queen with poems, paintings and presumably stamps, our unimpeachable Crown Prince so seemingly tender-hearted, our film star Crown Princess, our penitent Cinderella who gave a face to single mothers, the image of her naked body lives inside the heads of men of all ages in towns and villages, our whore and Madonna. We celebrate their duality and their duplicity, and our angelic Princess who talks to horses, dogs, daughters and the dead. In prison and in times of distress we want tiny squares of our better betters glued to our most important messages and tentative greetings and our Christmas cards because what would we do without them and their castle that stands full square like a stamp in the middle of a dangerous park guarded by men in horsehair helmets and holding shiny bayonets. Oh, royal family, royal ancestry of blue blood, older than the red post office, its high protectors, let yourselves be depicted so that you can be licked by our wet and willing tongues and thus ensure our missives reach their destination.

[Various images from the post album my grandfather taught me to keep, a history of Romanian stamps from the year of my birth until 1989, when everything shifted]

Once I got home, I opened my laptop to begin writing the Real Thing pitch, not because I wanted to but because I had to, to get it over and done with so I could devote myself to the postal directive. I wrote that the Real Thing was likely to be a success. There was a big market for all things real and genuine since many people felt themselves to be fake and imposters, I wrote, myself included, I added, but deleted it, it might be heartfelt and true but it was unprofessional. Then I hit a wall. What exactly did 'real' mean? 

“Noli me tangere,” Jesus of Nazareth said to Mary Magdalene, as they stood inside the tomb negotiating relationality post-resurrection.

Was the man behind the Real Thing himself the real thing, I wondered? I googled him; he looks like every other capitalist.

[Photograph of Donald Trump wearing a suit and holding an adult female’s hand as a crowd moves out of a church and a child tries to find the word that would communicate the feeling of watching a yellow balloon drift from his hand up into the sky and vanish completely.]

'That I a strange experience in Alta,’ I said.

'Yes?'

But where should I begin?

Yes?' he said again, and then I remembered that he was on the edge and if I didn't get it right, I might get it badly wrong, and I said that the right words were proving hard to find and that I couldn't articulate what I wanted to say. He said he knew what I meant because he often felt that way, then he said that he was going on a winter holiday with his mother and Truls. He paused and then he said that he had missed me.

ME: Speaking of the two revolutionists who find themselves dying at the end of Sylvia Warner Townsend’s After the Death of Don Juan (1938), Heather Love compares them to Walter Benjamin’s soothsayers who “can promise nothing; all they have to offer is the depth of their longing.”

VIGDIS: …. you might as well stop swimming today as tomorrow or the day after, except that the water was colder here than in France, and my feet were already cold. And yet there was something I couldn't dismiss with my logic; a restless yearning in my body like an unrequited love I couldn't get over.

RADU: Long live the post horn!

*

“When someone asks what is your writing process, I think it must be to try and try and then finally, in the gap between the limits of my body and the possibility of pulling something through, somewhere in that gap—"

― Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Touching the Art

"Speak of the devil, the devil appears..."

“Speak of the devil, the devil appears . . .”

In celebration of minor keys, I must confess that only Moral Minority could convince me to compose myself for a 7 a.m. discussion of Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship.

To free my mind for lesser things, I will dump a few (disordered) notes here, with due regard for the strange objects that hovered above the table during our trialogue, including the (disorderly) angels and (disordering) demons of discourse.

1

Derrida sets the stage with the quoted apostrophe, that rhetorical gesture which invokes the absent friend, or calls them into being. Is this the posthumous being-with that recurs in his elegies? We hear the idea that quotations, or references to the words of friends, realizes (makes real, creates) a legend of “the two of them,” a “twosome that is kept in memory” and archived and preserved in Derrida’s writing on “the phantom friend returning.”

“Send me an angel,” to quote The Scorpions. Or: develop an expectancy capacious enough to handle Walter Benjamin’s Angelus Novus. Time, teleology, eschatology: this is the threshold where angel-angles enter. And so we must take seriously the unanswerable questions as part of theory.

What is an angel? So then, who is an angel?

2

When we speak of the devil, we construct him, or call the devil into being through myth, but we still have to reckon with our hunger for this myth, and our need to identify a diablo.

Theologists would say that identifying the devil enables us to protect our spirits, ourselves, and our loved ones from his influence; Carl Schmitt might say that the devil is the enemy we need for a working political theology where the friend or the beloved matters less than the construction of the enemy.

But naming is an act of intimacy: it binds us in relation to the named. To quote Derrida: “Everything in the political question of friendship seems to be suspended on the secret of a name. Will this name be published?” Surely Jacques/Jackie circled this question on tip-toe in Envois, which reminds me of the fantastic deconstruction of naming/claiming that occurs in I, Daniel: An Illegitimate Reading of Jacques Derrida's «Envois», by Jeremy Stewart, excerpted at Minor Literatures.

3

Inheritances aside, apostrophes in neon, it is hard not to feel for Lucifer, the promising star, the Icarus in each of us, the name of the being intended to fill the abstract container of “devil.” The devil is an Other, of course, so how do we recognize him? What are the structures, syntaxes, and shapes in which the devil apprehends us? Lot’s wife looked back: she sinned against the law of the Law-speaking God. Maybe she just wanted a moment to miss what she was abandoning: a community, a place, an ecology of relationships and meaning.

Enter the problematics of non-teleological intellections and gestures: it is impractical and lazy and useless to yearn. We are socialized to accept this at a young age, and poetry is a space where I have tried however fruitlessly to reckon with the radical, revolutionary potential of longing. Longing has always been dangerous precisely because it doesn’t know exactly what it wants: it feels-into wanting. It fumbles. What if longing, itself, is diabolically structured in relation to the possibility of the Fall? I mean: falling is the shape longing takes when it lets go. No monotheistic God ever “fell” in such a fashion. Falling, itself, is stigmatized by Lucifer’s fall. Don’t we follow the devil in our desires for questioning the patriarchal dominance of the law?

4

Deconstructionism offers another angle into the animating questions of philosophy. If this angle — this edge where light troubles linearity— feels generative for me, it is because the questions we can now remain political in their difference — political in their relation to the structures of sociality as administered by governments and discourses in the post-industrial era, political in their presentist challenges, political in their scale and grappling with duration, political in their poetics and rhetorical contracts, political in their election of who is included and who is deemed threatening.

5

Oath and promise are claims about the future self, but how much can we know about the self of tomorrow once we accept identity is fluid and complex?

What is a “promise” between friends? What can the between-ness “promise” outside itself, apart from the terrain it creates?

How is the construction of loyalty cross-cut by tensions between subjectivity (required to make a promise or give consent) and fidelity (which often refuses to exercise or make a subjective choice in the name of that very promise)?

The heartbeat or pulse of any claim is an ethical tension, a struggle, a contradiction. This is what it means to live the questions, to paraphrase Rainer Maria Rilke. Philosophy cannot live without poetry, and poetry cannot be without philosophy.

6

The last word should belong to the hauntologue himself, and so I quote from Derrida’s (I think) final interview, given as his pancreatic cancer was progressing, and published in Learning to Live Finally, where the titular “finally” hovers about the page:

Postscript: Charles took these screen-shots of our hand gestures which appear as a sort of paratextual visual triptych to our conversation — either an addenda to the original text or perhaps even the sort of footnote that becomes its own book, the sort of provocation that Derridada could never resist.