Hesitation and found poems in Ben Lerner.

We mixed in the doll, as if in a test-tube, everything we were experiencing and could not recognize. We watched it change color there and come to the boil. That is, we invented this too. The doll was so utterly devoid of imagination that what we imagined for it was inexhaustible. For hours, for weeks on end, we must have been content to lay the first fine silk of our hearts in folds around this immobile mannequin, but I have to believe there were certain abysmally long afternoons when our twofold inspirations petered out and we suddenly sat in front of it, expecting some response.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Unfortunate Fate of Childhood Dolls”

. . . but I have to believe there were certain abysmally long afternoons when our twofold inspirations petered out and we suddenly sat in front of it, expecting some response.

*

Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Unfortunate Fate of Childhood Dolls” (Paris Review blog)
The Replacements, “Sadly Beautiful” (2008 Remaster)

Anne Carson's towns.

“Introduction” to The Life of Towns

Towns are the illusion that things hang together somehow, my pear, your winter.

I am a scholar of towns, let God commend that. To explain what I do is simple enough. A scholar is someone who takes a position. From which position, certain lines become visible. You will at first think I am painting the lines myself; it's not so. I merely know where to stand to see the lines that are there. And the mysterious thing, it is a very mysterious thing, is how these lines do paint themselves. Before there were any edges or angles or virtue— who was there to ask the questions? Well, let's not get carried away with exegesis. A scholar is someone who knows how to limit himself to the matter at hand.

Matter which has painted itself within lines constitutes a town. Viewed in this way the world is, as we say, an open book. But what about variant readings? For example, consider the town defined for us by Lao Tzu in the twenty-third chapter of the Tao Te Ching:

A man of the way conforms to the way; a man of virtue conforms to virtue; a man of loss conforms to loss. He who conforms to the way is gladly accepted by the way; he who conforms to virtue is gladly accepted by virtue; he who conforms to loss is gladly accepted by loss.

This sounds like a town of some importance, where a person could reach beyond himself, or meet himself, as he chose.

But another scholar (Kao) takes a different position on the Town of Lao Tzu. “The word translated 'loss' throughout this section does not make much sense,” admonishes Kao. “It is possible that it is a graphic error for 'heaven.'” Now, in order for you or me to quit living here and go there-either to the Town of Lao Tzu or to the Town of Kao—we have to get certain details clear, like Kao's tone. Is he impatient or deeply sad or merely droll? The position you take on this may pull you separate from me. Hence, towns. And then, scholars.

I am not being trivial. Your separateness could kill you unless I take it from you as a sickness. What if you get stranded in the town where pears and winter are variants for one another? Can you eat winter? No. Can you live six months inside a frozen pear? No. But there is a place, I know the place, where you will stand and see pear and winter side by side as walls stand by silence. Can you punctuate yourself as silence? You will see the edges cut away from you, back into a world of another kind— back into real emptiness, some would say. Well, we are objects in a wind that stopped, is my view. There are regular towns and irregular towns, there are wounded towns and sober towns and fiercely remembered towns, there are useless but passionate towns that battle on, there are towns where the snow slides from the roofs of the houses with such force that victims are killed, but there are no empty town (just empty scholars) and there is no regret. Now move along.

— Anne Carson

Town of the Sound of a Twig Breaking

Their faces I thought were knives.
The way they pointed them at me.
And waited.
A hunter is someone who listens.
So hard to his prey it pulls the weapon.
Out of his hand and impales.
Itself.

Memory Town

In each one of you I paint.
I find.
A buried site of radioactive material.
You think 8 miles down is enough?
15 miles?
140 miles?

Detail from Rembrandt’sThe Toilet of Bathsheba, 1643.

Town of Bathsheba's Crossing

Inside a room in Amsterdam.
Rembrandt painted a drop of life inside.
The drop he painted Rembrandt's stranger.
Dressed as a woman rippling.
With nakedness she has.
A letter in her hand she is.
Traveling.
Out of a thought toward us.
Her foam arrives.
Before her even when he.
Paints Rembrandt's stranger.
As Rembrandt he shows.
Him bewildered and tousled.
As if just in.
From journeys.
On tracks and side roads.

Lower portion of Rembrandt’s A Woman Bathing in a Stream, 1655.

Pushkin Town

It has rules.
And love.
And the first rule is.
The love of chance.
Some words of yours are very probably ore there.
Or will be by the time our eyes are ember.

Town of the Death of Sin

What is sin?
You asked.
The moon stung past us.
All at once I saw you.
Just drop sin and go.
Black as a wind over the forest.

Hölderlin Town

You are mad to mourn alone.
With the wells gone dry.
Starlight lying at the bottom.
Like a piece of sound.
Props hurtle past you.

Town of Uneven Love
(But All Love Is Uneven)

If he had loved me he would have seen me.
At an upstairs window brow beating against the glass.

Judas Town

Not a late hour not unlit rows.
Not olive trees not locks not heart.
Not moon not dark wood.
Not morsel not I.

*

Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry
Claude Debussy, La plus que lente, L. 121 performed by Daniel Barenboim

Notebooks with green: 25 greens, at least.

I am ready to take the woman with the white scarf
in my arms and stop her moaning,
and I am ready to light the horse's teeth,
and I am ready to stroke the dry leaves.

— Gerald Stern

If rain won't change your mind,
Let it fall.
The rain won't change my heart
At all.

— The Magnetic Fields

1

In Pale Fire, Professor Pnin stands next to a young instructor named Mr. Gerald Emerald, who wears a bow tie and a vivid GREEN VELVET JACKET, in a house. Or a villa. At a party. The way Nabokov binds his characters to a color that grows from an idiom.

2

The GREEN QUEEN who threads the seams of Wallace Stevens’ seemings in the first section of the delirium-inducing marvel titled “Description Without Place”:

The sun is an example. What it seems
It is and in such seeming all things are.

Thus things are like a seeming of the sun
Or like a seeming of the moon or night

Or sleep. It was a queen that made it seem
By the illustrious nothing of her name.

Her green mind made the world around her green.
The queen is an example. . . . This green queen

In the seeming of the summer of her sun
By her own seeming made the summer change.

In the golden vacancy she came, and comes,
And seems to be on the saying of her name.

3

The unappeasable VIRESCENCE and VERDURE of the chlorophyll-infused SIGN OF THE WEED in Bruno Schulz’s “The Republic of Dreams”:

Just now, for example, the yards are drowning in nettles and weeds, tumbledown moss-grown sheds and outbuildings are up to their armpits in enormous bristly burdocks that grow right to the eaves of the shingled roofs. The town lives under the sign of the Weed, of wild, avid, fanatical plant life bursting out in cheap, coarse greenery-toxic, rank, parasitic. That greenery glows under the sun's conjury, the maws of the leaves suck in seething chlorophyll; armies of nettles, rampant, voracious, devour the flower plantings, break into the gardens, spread over the unguarded back walls of houses and barns overnight, run wild in the roadside ditches. It is amazing what insane vitality, feckless and unproductive, lives in this fervid dab of green, this distillate of sun and ground water. From a pinch of chlorophyll it draws out and extrapolates under the blaze of these summer days that luxuriant texture of emptiness, a green pith replicated a hundred times onto millions of leaf surfaces, downy or furred, of veined translucent verdure pulsing with watery plant blood, giving off the pungent herbal smell of the open fields.

In that season the rear window of the shop's storage room overlooking the yard was blinded by a diaphragm of green glitter from leaf reflections, gauzy flutterings, wavy foliated greenery, all the monstrous excesses of this hideous backyard fecundity. Sunk in deep shade, the storeroom riffled through all shades of virescence, green reflections spread in undulating paths through its vaulted length like the sibilant murmur of a forest. The town had fallen into that wild luxuriance as into a sleep raised to the hundredth power, supine in a daze from the summer's heat and glare, in a thick maze of cobwebs and greenery, empty and shallow of breath. In rooms greenly lit to underwater opacity by the morning glory over the windows, platoons of flies struggled on their last wings, imprisoned forever as in the bottom of a forgotten bottle and locked in a dolorous agony that they proclaimed by drawn-out monotonous lamentations or trumpetings of fury and grief. In time, the window became the gathering place of all that lacework of scattered insectdom for one last premortal sojourn: huge crane-flies, which had long bumped against the walls with a subdued drumming of misdirected flight and made a final torpid landing on a pane; whole genealogies of flies and moths, rooted and branching out from this window and spread by slow migration across the glass; pullulating generations of meager winglings, sky-blue, metallic, glassy.

4

The soft chroma of PEA-GREEN WALLS in The Dreamers —

Eva Green with Louis Garrel in The Dreamers

5

The first page of Donald Barthelme’s “Florence Green Is 81” . . . with its lentils, new girls, and geostrategizing of the “strongest possible move” — the TERRE VERTE feel of that muddy, brownish undertone. As if Barthelme was looking at lentils when he wrote:

6

The treacherous GRASSHOPPER among the litany of refusals in Gerald Stern’s “Blue Skies, White Breasts, Green Trees” —

7

On the writing desk of Lev Tolstoy sat the GREEN CRYSTAL PAPERWEIGHT given to him by the workers of a glass factory in Bryansk, engraved with the message: “Let the Pharisees and the Holy Fathers excommunicate you as they wish; the Russian people will always hold you dear.”

8

In a clearing among the darker greens of the surrounding forest, a smattering of grass-green shawled round the mound that marks Tolstoy's grave. This is the spot where he wanted wished to buried, “near a ravine where he and his brothers, when they were youngsters, believed that a GREEN STICK had been buried on which was written the secret of happiness for all human beings,” as Alexander Theroux tells it. No cross, no grave marker: only the stickiness of the green twig from childhood.

9

“. . . a warm trickle of coffee seeps through the cracks onto my forearm, and a constant CHASM OF GREEN owns the air to my right.” A different trip to New Orleans. One that reminds me of the BLISTERED DARK GREEN in Laurie Anderson’s For Instants, a color that catches my eye after she mentions Glenn Gould’s favorite battleship gray because, yes, “It's sunny today” and Laurie is starting to “sand down the four beams that hold up the roof” in her new loft. “The first layer of paint is battleship gray, cracked and flaking. Underneath the gray is a sturdy layer of dark brown, thick and tough as leather. It spews off in tiny hard chunks that ricochet against the walls. Underneath is an even thicker layer-blistered dark green. I sand it away. Underneath is an oozing liver- colored substance, which gums up and breaks the sander. I start to scrape it off but the stuff begins to slither down the beams with a horrifying kind of liveliness.”

10

The site where the green that opens Ana Božičević’s poem, “About Nietzsche” —

Softly, Nietzsche landed on earth. He found
it green. He was alone, save for the horse—
it stood off to the side of a fallen wood
fence. There they had this talk.

— meets the CHROMIUM OXIDE GREEN and the CADMIUM GREEN that tears through the night sky of John Longstaff’s Sirens (1892) —

11

The way Michael Taussig’s suburbs emblazon greenways through my head in the extraordinary turns and torques of his take on the realness of real estate:

The Greeks and Italians left, for the leafy suburbs, I guess, and now those same inner city suburbs, such as Paddington, are among the wealthiest in the world, the vivid colors painted over by ochres, greys, and white or else stripped back to the original brick. You can’t get realer than real estate.

The leafiness of SAP GREEN, with its slightly yellow undertones, and the sign of the dollar in that green as Taussig traces this ‘realness’ — this profit-based, capitalist ‘reality’ — to the life being “sucked out of the blue-and-green mountains in the distance” in the oscillations of staging:

As for the ambiguity tied to color as both deceitful and authentic, take the mural painted by John Pugh as described in the New York Times the other day; his recent work Drain shows “a big rusty drainpipe etched with the letters LADWP, for Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, sucking the color and, metaphorically, the water out of the vista.” Here draining color stands for the belief that for close to a century the evil city of Los Angeles has been stealing western rivers and, as depicted in the film Chinatown, lying about it, while at the same time color in this mural also stands for authenticity, for the lost vitality of nature being sucked out of the blue-and-green mountains in the distance, foregrounded by that nasty, ever so efficient-looking big rusty pipe decoloring ever more parched flatlands.

“For them color is fluid, the medium of all changes,” wrote Benjamin with reference to what he took to be the child’s view of color. Tying color to water as John Pugh has done is useful because, like a river, color is a moving force, and like the world’s water supply under the present climatic regime of politically enhanced global warming driving our planet to destruction, color like heat is now subject to unpredictable oscillations that, in the case of color, amount to oscillations between deceit and authenticity, something that does not seem to have been factored in by Isidore of Seville, when he drew attention to the similarities between calor and color.

It is this oscillation that accounts for color’s magic, thereby attracting that energetic stage magician, conjuror, and trickster, that master of deceit, George Melies. No sooner had he begun to make films in Paris circa 1900, pulling rabbits out of hats thanks to the film editor’s scissors, than he found it hard to resist painting color over the black and white of his films. To the reality-effect of film was added the magic-effect of color. To the truth-effect of film was added the deceit-effect of color. And so it goes. I don’t know how they looked then, but now a century later the color is filmy and faint, like the whisk of a horse’s tail, flourish of the color spirit, not painting by numbers, but that true excess of the heart that can only come across through the untoward hint.

Could it be that in this scheme of fear and desire, truth and deceit, color is the excess that allows forms to come alive and that this is why my Webster’s tells me color is both pretext and sign of the authentic?

Like Davenport, Taussig always reconfigures the possible ways of naming and framing, leaving us (in this case) with an inventory of effects: the magic-effect of color, the truth-effect of film, the deceit-effect of color . . .

12

The vintage texture of GREEN METALLICS that demarcate the hue of Phillip Morris in David Antin’s Three Musics for Two Voices —

13

The vexation of countless theologians who needed answers about eternity. Theologians who needed to know what color angels could inhabit without losing their supernatural distance. The perplexity of poets among them. Tomaž Šalamun being one of them:

14

The SONOROUS SHRUBBERY in John Ashbery’s poem, “Caravaggio and His Followers”:

The song of the shrubbery
can’t drown out the mystery of what we are made of,
or how we go along, first interested by one thing and then another

15

The chorus of yellow-greens in painting. Articulations of VERIDIAN in the final layer of paint on the wall, with streaks of CHARTREUSE beneath it, as in John Hiatt’s album cover for Mystic Pinball — and the hint of iron oxide in the hue of his hat pulling out the CELADON. Or not. The sense in which something keeps moving and pinging, even when frozen.

16

The muted warmth and earth tones of Mahmoud Darwish’s olives linking arms with the OLIVE GREEN that recurs through every memoir of a stolen homeland authored by Palestinians . . .

17

. . . returning in the hue of the OLIVE HARVEST that became a glue in Jean Genet’s self-portrait after living with Palestinian fedayeen, as given in three sentences from The Thief's Journal: “Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flowerbeds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all interrelated, had a meaning: my exile.”

18

The PHTHALO EMERALD brushstrokes that resemble fingertips in Egon Schiele’s Self-Portrait In Green Shirt With Eyes Closed (1914).

And the GHOSTED GREEN of Raoul Ubac’s Fossil of the Eiffel Tower (1939). The possible Eiffel-fossil energy. The desaturated hues that remind me of the fin de siecle’s death portraits.

19

The blue-green orientation sketched by John Updike in his little “Shipbored”:

That line is the horizon line.
The blue above it is divine.
The blue below it is marine.
Sometimes the blue below is green.

20

My goosebumps when happening upon Alexander Theroux’s connection of ALBERTINE-GREEN to LOLITA-GREEN:

Just as Proust tended to see shadows in terms of colored tones, so at times he also often viewed sunlight, not conventionally as white or yellow or orange, but the impressionistic way it happened to appear at specific times and places, as for example in Albertine’s despair, when seen through an open window, above the shimmering Venetian waters of the canal, as weirdly greenish: “le soleil verdâtre.”

 What about a green sun? Nabokov—or Humbert— knew his Proust. Remember the poem in Lolita? 

My Dolly, my folly! Her eyes were vair,
And never closed when I kissed her.
Know an old perfume called Soleil Vert?
Are you from Paris, mister?

21

The FLAT EMERALD FIELD of Pablo Picasso’s Green Still Life, painted as he summered in Avignon in 1914, perhaps in response to Henri Matisse’s Red Studio (1911). The way the pointillist spider web captures the yellow light and links up with the light falling on a surface in Stephen Merritt’s song, “One April Day,” before becoming solid in the fragment of pear-flesh held by the outline of a pear. The green and black circles forming a cork in the bottle. The dots shading the letters J O U, eliciting the French verb for play, jouer, or the shorthand for a toy, jou-jou, or even the sparkle of jewelry in bijou. And the absence of grenadine in the cut-glass vessel that serenades the hand wrapped around a grenade in the lower right corner.

22

The TRANSGRESSIVE APPLE-GREEN evinced by Michael Taussig in the context of modernity, WB, profanity and “the holy,” a category which “can be also impure, evil, and accursed—dependent on continual infusions of transgression—as with [Walter] Benjamin’s observation that ‘the language of color’ was characteristic of the posters that flourished in the shopping arcades of Paris in the early nineteenth century but that these posters were the cousins of ‘obscene graphics’.” WB “recalled an advertising poster that reminded him of opera with Siegfried bathing in dragon’s blood; the cape was crimson, the sylvan solitude green, the flesh, naked.” WB thought ‘falser colors are possible in the arcades’; arcades being the spaces where red and green combs were naturalized. WB said “Snow White’s stepmother had such things, and when the comb did not do its work, the beautiful apple was there to help out—half red, half poison-green, like cheap combs.” WB said — and keeps saying.

23

The moment when a young Hans Richter began going to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum and the National Gallery in Berlin in order to copy the paintings of the Masters: Velázquez, Tintoretto, Rubens . . . Van Dyke. “I learned a lot about art in this way; not only the technique the masters used but also what they were striving for,” Richter later said, adding that he was “especially fascinated by a very unobtrusive painting by Velasquez . . . a huge portrait about two meters high and one and a half wide, a portrait of a court lady, very dark reddish-brown hair, the background green-black, the clothes completely black,” a painting that intrigued him “more than any other painting because of its simplicity.” The young Richter wondered “how Velázquez took himself back behind the painting, so to speak; how he invented a black that was more completely black than you ever saw black before; it lived.” How could Velázquez paint black clothes and a black background and yet land with “two different blacks”?

“The intensity of the color, though there was very little color in it,” mesmerized him. “I felt that I had come in contact with something divine, with something that was above the poetry of the person there in the painting, with something that was being said through this painting by Velasquez,” Richter told his readers. This “very distinct impression” made by this painting marked one of the first steps he traced in his “development” as an artist — “this contact with the spirit of Velázquez not only with his technique.”

I don’t know which painting Richter was referencing? Nevertheless, I imagine the BACKGROUND GREEN-BLACK that Richter never got over in that portrait by Diego Velázquez.

24

The “nacreous green-gray light, evoked with lightly hatched strokes of paint” in the room Jed Perl discovered in L’Enseigne de Gersaint by Antoine Watteau.

25

The GREEN FABRIC SURFACE of Franz Kafka’s desk, as described in the self-portrait of his writing desk, tinged by the same disorder that prevents the writer from focusing on the world in his head. “Now I’ve taken a closer look at my desk and realized that nothing good can be produced on it,” Kafka says. “There's so much lying around here, it creates disorder without regularity, and with none of that agreeableness of disorderly things that otherwise makes every disorder bearable. Whatever disorder is on the green desk-cloth, it is no worse than what might be permitted in the orchestra section of the old theaters. But when papers pour out of the standing room section, out of the open compartment below the raised platform in the back— brochures, old newspapers, catalogs, postcards, letters, all partly torn, partly opened, piled up like a staircase— this undignified state spoils everything. Individual items in the orchestra, enormous by comparison, spring into action, as if the spectators in the theater were suddenly given free rein, the businessman to put his books in order, the carpenter to hammer, the officer to wave his saber, the lovers to cast aside their inhibitions, the priest to speak to the heart, the scholar to the understanding, the politician to the civic spirit, etc. Only the shaving mirror on my desk stands upright, as required for shaving . . .” 

26

THE PERMANENT GREEN LIGHT of the green behind the horses in my head —

Everything beautiful is indeterminate.

We still know how to mark the hours, but no longer how to ring them. The carillon of our clocks is missing.

[. . . ]

The white markings of the snow, here and there, scattered on the greenness in time of thaw.

— Joseph Joubert in a notebook from the early 1800’s

*

Amy Millan, “Hard-hearted (Ode to Thoreau)”
Ana Božičević, “About Nietzsche” (from War on a Lunchbreak)
Bruno Schulz, “The Republic of Dreams” tr. by Walter Arndt
Clem Snide, “Bread”
Clem Snide, “Joan Jett of Arc”
Crooked Fingers, “Atchafalayan Death Waltz”
Crooked Fingers, “You Must Build a Fire”
David Antin, Three Musics for Two Voices
Diego Velázquez, The Lady with a Fan (1638-9)
Donald Barthelme, “Florence Green Is 81” (from Come Back, Dr. Caligari)
Eef Barzelay, “Love the Unknown”
Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait In Green Shirt With Eyes Closed (1914)
Gerald Stern, “Blue Skies, White Breasts, Green Trees”
John Longstaff, Sirens (1982)
John Hiatt, “I Know How to Lose You”
Mark Lanegan Band, “Love Will Tear Us Apart Again” (Live in Belgium, 2017)
Michael Taussig, “What Color Is the Sacred?” (Critical Inquiry, Autumn 2006)
Pablo Picasso, Green Still Life (summer 1914)
Stars, “No One Is Lost”
Stephen Merritt, “One April Day”
The Magnetic Fields, “It’s Only Time”
Tomaž Šalamun, “Are Angels Green?”
Wallace Stevens, “Description Without Place”

Notebooks with red

A hero’s only a lucky fool, you see

— Crooked Fingers

… whose frothy mouth bepainted all with red.

— Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Crimson: the color of 8-year-old Beatrice’s dress when Dante first set eyes upon her.

Watteau’s little red crayon.
Leonardo’s preference for red chalk to do his drawings.
The afterimages of red that haunt the childhood memory of Rilke’s Malte Laureds Brigge.
The reds we use to sketch the imagined, the incomplete, the not-yet….

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second.
Color is seen when a wavelength of light is reflected by an object and all other wavelengths are absorbed.
Each color has a different wavelength, but red has the longest wavelength. 

In maritime space, the rule of “red right returning” means that moving boats must keep the red buoys to their right.

Boats and airplanes always have red lights on their left and green on their right wing or side.

The idea of going somewhere — with its colors, flags, markers, and navigational routes.

The Red God was another name for Priapus.

Maria Callas collected matching shoes and purses in her favorite color, red.

Red salvia.
Red tulips.
Poppies.
Bougainvillea.
Red anemone.
Snakeweed. 

My loathing for red roses —

Shortsightedness is also called “an elongated eye.” It influences color perception, making reds, for example, seem more starkly defined.

WILLIAM GASS:

“Although the sensual is an experience of intense satisfaction and approval, it is not competitive. Things seen or touched or tasted this way are what they are: a red so saturated with its hue it mesmerizes the eye, an insect slowly rubbing together legs as thin as a line, a cottonwood puff lighting on a blade of grass, the trail of a finger across a thigh, the union of two voices through a series of compelling notes. The sensualist treats qualities as terms, not as relations. He gathers up relationships into entireties, not like a handful of straw but like the thatch of a hat.”

The deeper one goes into the benthic ooze of the ocean, the fewer the colors of fish.
Blue is the last color to go and red is the first. 

Say from the Heart, Sire
Dipped my back in it
If the Tune drip too much
Have a tint too Red
Pardon the Cochineal–
Suffer the Vermilion

— Emily Dickinson

Michael Burkard's blue line.

Voice like that of letters eaten by grass.

— Yves Bonnefoy, “Passer-By, These Are Words”

Look at the light in the windowpane. That means it's noon, that means we're inconsolable.

— Richard Siken, “Scheherazade”

A BLUE LINE

for Denis Johnson

Hey, look, when you used to come into my kitchen
I didn’t even know where to stand, it was my kitchen,
but it was yours, that quickly. And the evening had
a metal mouth which was meant to scare us, but we
listened to the desert instead.  You taught us.
Unemployed, fuck the moon.

Years later there’s a dog biting into my book.
I pass the book on before too long. I hear feet
running toward the bank, then back again. It’s
night.  The wives have come home to look at
the husbands who are thinking through
someone from earlier in the blue day.

The blue line.  The blue hat.  The blue Atlantic
and that incredible blue distance to the small
apartment on the other side of the blue continent.
The blue judge, the blue court, the blue copywriter
good enough to say goodbye instead of staying.

Hey, once in the blue rain I was screaming for
you. It was more foreign than a foreign city.
Every time I left the house the rain got bluer,
and I had to turn back. Worse, I felt trapped.
It went on and on. I went nowhere.

I didn’t even know there was still a blue line
from me to you, that if I had just followed it
I would have found you: lonely like me then,
with your mouth to the window, and the stars
blinking but saying write darkly for now.

Write darkly.

by Michael Burkard

Nanos Valaoritis and the “Problems of an Empire”.

We’re stuck with a certain vision of what an essay should be, when in fact its possibilities seem limitless. That’s what attracted me to it⁠⁠—it was this kind of unexplored territory. I do find it dreary that these essayists end up writing about themselves so much. Even if they’re taking documentary information, they add a lot of personal response to it, which seems to be what the new quote, unquote lyric essay is. I have no interest in first-person investigation. Personally, I’ve never found myself an interesting person.

– Eliot Weinberger in conversation with Srinkanth Reddy

NOTE: All of the linked excerpts below refer to Nanos Valaoritis’ “Problems of an Empire,” as published in A Public Space, No. 27.

/

In Dante’s Purgatorio XIX, 7-15, there is femmine balba, the “bubbling siren” or “stammering woman” whose presence exhibits indecency and has been read as a figure of “non-song” by critics.

/ /

“It is said that cripples, amputees, notice a prodigious development of their faculties,” wrote Francis Ponge. “So with plants: their immobility accounts for their self-perfection, their complexity, their gorgeous decorations, their lush fruits.”

/ / /

Nanos Valaoritis . . .

“A metaphysic is a means of orientation in the confusion of the world, a path on the endless expanse of the ocean’s water. An Ariadne’s thread in the twisting labyrinth.”

/ / / /

Nanos Valaoritis . . .

“A metaphysic is an imaginary line dividing an invisible territory. The division enables us to measure the territory and to determine our own position in it. A compass with which human beings are supplied from birth.”

/ / / / /

Nanos again . . .

“A metaphysic is first manifested in dreams, a mysterious language of undeciphered signs whose meaning is obscure, dictating our behavior. Then one by one the signs are unveiled to reveal the familiar forms of our experience. Then one still walks in the same forest but knows the names of the trees.”

/ / / / / /

Francis Ponge on the flora and fauna . . .

“Or rather, and even worse, nothing accidentally monstrous: despite all their efforts “to express themselves,” [the flora] only manage to repeat a million times over the same expression, the same leaf. In the spring, when tired of restraining themselves and no longer able to hold out, they let loose a flood, a vomiting of green, and think they are humming a tuneful hymn, coming out of themselves, spreading out over all of nature, embracing it— they are still only producing in thousands of copies the same note, the same word, the same leaf.

There is no way out for trees by the means of trees.”

/ / / / / / /

Dogberry to Conrade, in William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing . . .

“O that she were here to write me down an ass! But, masters, remember that I am an ass; though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass. No, thou villain, thou art full of piety, as shall be proved upon thee by good witness. I am a wise fellow, and, which is more, an officer, and, which is more, a householder, and, which is more, as pretty a piece of flesh as any is in Messina, and one that knows the law, go to; and a rich fellow enough, go to; and one that hath had losses, and one that hath two gowns and every thing handsome about him. O that I had been writ down an ass!”

/ / / / / / / /

Nanos Valaoritis . . .

“Two or three days ago I saw F. Tiresias, holding in his hand the light, intricate web that is woven among the families, the glittering surface of their lighter relations to each other, the juxtaposition of their names with their qualities and reactions, creating the dazzling magic of their comic, unexpected encounters as if they were tumbling out of one another and themselves like newborn puppies, in the present the past and the future, brought into focus as F. was speaking, and compressed by the force of his poetic vision in a single, instantaneous medium. Then I saw M. as the youthful Atlas before he had shouldered on his powerful arms the full weight of the sky, bracing his as-yet unused muscles rolling about in the grass like a happy giant, or weighed down already by the mere idea of the weight that he was going to shoulder in the future. The invisible world, which he had already in his imagination assumed the responsibility of holding up.”

/ / / / / / / / /

Francis Ponge on the three shops near the Place Maubert . . .

“Brown, because brown lies between green and black on the way to carbonization, the destiny of wood still holds –  though minimally – the possibility of action, meaning error, blunder . . . and every possible misunderstanding.”

Joseph Brodsky’s “October Tune”

*

Balthus, The Living Room (1942)
Francis Ponge, “Fauna and Flora”
Francis Ponge, “The Three Shops”
Joseph Brodsky, “October Tune” (from To Urania)
Leonard Cohen, “To A Young Nun” (from The Book of Longing)
Nanos Valaoritis, “Problems of an Empire” (A Public Space, No. 27)
The Durutti Column, “Requiem Again” (2024 Remaster)
Yo La Tengo, “Our Way to Fall”

Nick Cave's "soundsuits".

I don’t ever see the Soundsuits as fun. They really are coming from a very dark place. The Soundsuits hide gender, race, class. And they force you to look at the work without judgment. You know, we tend to want to categorize everything. We tend to want to find its place. How do we, sort of, be one on one with something that is unfamiliar?

—Nick Cave, 2016

The best Ashbery poems, I thought, although not in these words, describe what it's like to read an Ashbery poem.

— Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station

Nick Cave was trained as a fiber artist and dancer.

His Soundsuits series is named for the rustling he heard as he moved around in them.

The first such “costume-sculpture” was created as an artistic response to racial profiling and police violence, particularly violence of L. A. police against Rodney King in 1991.

Imagined as protective shields that masked a person's identity and voided notions of race, class, and gender, the Soundsuits provoke us anew, in this hypervigilant present driven by billionaires, neoliberal ruling classes, and “National Greatness” issues.

“My identity is really only protected in the privacy of my own home,” Cave has said, of his own experiences with police as a Black man.

Nick Cave, Soundsuit (2010)

Patches of crocheted doilies. Yarn rainbows for legs. A reference to Barnum and Bailey’s Circus.
A garden of toys and noisemakers blooming from the doily-covered head.

Was does it mean for our universities and local governments to ban “masking” in public places?

Curators have said each Soundsuit creates “a symbolically charged second skin, an imagined means for protection from physical and psychological harm.”

The use of thrifted, upcycled material isn’t coincidental. The material focus of Cave’s Soundsuits alters our relation to time and progress.

Nick Cave, Soundsuit (2009)

With skin grafted from the doilies Nick Cave purchased from thrift stores. The yarn-based testimonies of grandmothers and mothers and aunts dumped in give-away bins by their inheritors. “Junking” stuff is par for the obsession with newness and planned obsolescence that characterizes late capitalism’s accelerated commodity-drives. Elaborate consumption and throwaway plastics. Landfills livid with the excrement of packaging.

“How do we . . . look at things that are devalued, discarded, and bring a different kind of relevancy to them?” Cave asks.

Nick Cave, Soundsuit (2006)

In the caption to the 2006 Soundsuit made of paper, Cave poses the question: “How do I exist in a place that sees me as a threat?” How does a gay Black artist in the US live his joy, nourish his passions, and build communities and forms of being that refuse the ongoing terror of white supremacy?

The suits are performed by Cave and others in choreographed events.

Assembled from diverse materials and fabrics, the Soundsuits “speak” by deploying an aural dimension that must be imagined.

*

Art Beat, “Nick Cave’s Soundsuits,” PBS Newshour
Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station
London Art Roundup, “Soundsuit 2010”
Nicole Burish, “Voice and Resistance in Nick Cave’s Soundsuits,” National Gallery of Canada
Nick Cave, Soundsuit (2006) with paper
Nick Cave, Soundsuit (2009) with doilies
Nick Cave, Soundsuit (2010) with toys
Nick Cave, Soundsuit (2010) with buttons
PJ Harvey, "The Faster I Breathe The Further I Go (4-Track Version)”

Crumpled.

I have been popping corn tonight, which is only a more rapid blossoming of the seed under a greater than July heat. The popped corn is a perfect winter flower, hinting of anemones and houstonias. For this little grace man has, mixed in with the vulgarness of his repast, he may well thank his stars.

— Henry David Thoreau, notebook entry dated 3 January 1842

Poetry as a whole is always directed at a more or less distant, unknown addressee, in whose existence the poet may not doubt, without doubting himself.

— Osip Mandelstam, “About an Interlocutor”

Minneapolis Museum of Art:

In this graphite still life drawing of crumbled sheets of paper, Rosana Castrillo Diaz reveals a mastery of careful and deliberate observation, belying the apparent simplicity of the work. Her choice of subject is deliberate, reflecting her interest in the ordinary objects of daily life. As she explained of this drawing, “In this body of work, there is a direct connection between memory, emotions, and the physical hand at work. Each mark is a feeling, a chord, each drawing a score witness to a moment in time, a mood, a place. In the silence and introspection engendered, the quietest gesture may very well be the loudest.”

/ / / / / / / / / . / / / / / / / / / / . . / / / / / / / / . / / / / / / / . . . / / / / / / / / / . / / . / / / / / . . / / /

”The shipwrecked sailor throws a sealed bottle into the sea at a critical moment”

“A cast iron statue representing the poet was lost, a victim of metal looters”

“The popped corn is a perfect winter flower”

“The city where Osip Mandelstam is said to have died (no one is sure of this)”

“Lost, a victim of metal”

“The indigenous art of all epochs destroyed by missionaries”

“Hinting of anemones”

“All epochs” “sealed”

“Lost, the rope given to Marina Tsvetaeva by Boris Pasternak”

“The sea at a critical moment”

“Is said to have died”

“Corn is a perfect winter”

“A cast iron statue”

*

Henri Lefebvre, The Missing Pieces
Henry David Thoreau, “1842” in The Thoreau Log
Mark Sandman, “The Ring” (Extended version)
Osip Mandelstam, “About an Interlocutor”
Rosana Castrillo Diaz, “Untitled” (2014)

Us has: Lorenzo Thomas' "Inauguration"

Inauguration

The land was there before us
Was the land. Then things
Began happening fast. Because
The bombs us have always work
Sometimes it makes me think
God must be one of us. Because
Us has saved the world. Us gave it
A particular set of regulations
Based on 1) undisputable acumen.
2) carnivorous fortunes, delicately
Referred to here as “bull market”
And (of course) other irrational factors
Deadly smoke thick over the icecaps,
Our man in Saigon   Lima   Tokyo   etc   etc

Lorenzo Thomas

The filiative scheme belongs to the realms of nature and of ‘life’ whereas affiliation belongs exclusively to culture and society.

– Edward Said

In Rilke, the synecdoche constellates.

— William Gass

1 /

The land was there before Us was the land.

The land was the land in the year 1950, when Joseph McCarthy went to West Virginia and gave a speech in which he alleged that the U.S. State Department was filled with Communists, and the Population Registration Act legalized apartheid in South Africa, and the Soviet Union developed an atom bomb. Us was imagining itself in this same year, when genocide was legalized by the Us who looked away and Diners Club International introduced the credit card. 

2 /

Then things began happening fast.

On November 19th in 1913, Franz Kafka recorded the following thoughts and impressions in his diary: “I purposely walk through the streets where the whores are. It excites me to pass by them, that distant but still real possibility of going with one of them. Is that vulgar? But I know of nothing better, and it seems like a basically innocent thing to do, I have almost no regret. I only want the fat older women, their dresses are outdated, but somehow their various ornaments make them seem luxurious. One woman probably knows me already. I ran into her this afternoon, she wasn't dressed for work yet, her hair was still lying flat on her head, she didn't have a hat on, she was wearing a work blouse like a cook's, and carrying some sort of bundle, maybe to the washerwoman. No one but me could have found her exciting. We looked at each other briefly. Now it's evening, It's gotten cold, I saw her in a close-fitting, yellowish-brown coat on the other side of the narrow alley that splits off from the Zeltnergasse, where she promenades. I looked back at her twice, and she caught my Glance, but then I actually ran away from her.”

3 /

Because the bombs Us have always work, there was a ladybug on the strap of my brown sandal, which might have passed unnoticed, if not for the moment when I glanced up after reading the following passage from Adam Phillips’ Missing Out, wherein he considers when human survival “. . . was a function of closeness, and closeness was a function of knowledge (closeness means wanting to be close to those who know, especially to those who seem to know us). Knowledge, Freud tells us, is of absence; it is the way we measure distance. If overinterpretation is the rather frantic desire to be as close as possible, skepticism may be deemed to be, whatever else it is, a wariness, a suspicion, about what we might be up to - what we might be wanting to put out of our minds - through our so-called knowledge of other minds; skepticism being not just a doubting of what we can know about others, but a doubting of the value of such knowledge, and therefore a broached imagining of what knowing might prevent or preclude us from experiencing with each other.”

4 /

Sometimes it makes me think God must be one of us, like a flash of green light in the alcove when James Joyce wrote to his publisher in June 1906: “It is not my fault that the odor of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.”

5 /

Because Us has saved the world, offal remains a word that evokes tenderness in the reader. Just as archaic language evokes the charm of a blessing one no longer believes — we relish the sound of it. The hooves of a fairy tale galloping towards a tower. The idea of rescue. The assumption that boys don’t cry. The way solastalgia infuses our involuntary memories with the scent of dry grass from summers past. The part where Fred Davis looked at the bright side, writing: “If, as I have maintained, nostalgia is a distinctive way, though only one among several ways we have, of relating our past to our present and future, it follows that nostalgia (like long-term memory, like reminiscence, like daydreaming) is deeply implicated in the sense of who we are, what we are about, and (though possibly with much less inner clarity) whither we go. In short, nostalgia is one of the means – or, better, one of the more readily accessible psychological lenses – we employ in the never-ending work of constructing, maintaining, and reconstructing our identities.”

6 /

Us gave it a set of particular regulations based on the blurring of thoughts between private and public, which is why hermits have been tasked with branding their hermitage, as Henry David Thoreau surely knew when he said of a fellow writer that “his critics have for the most part made their contemporaries less that they might make Shakespeare more,” and recorded this saying in his Journal of 1842.

7 /

Undisputable acumen is what Nathaniel Hawthorne noticed in his frenemy, Henry David Thoreau, whom he called “a genuine observer”; Thoreau, whom he saw as the “especial child” of Nature who “shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness”; Thoreau, who remained “on intimate terms with the clouds” as the two men ate watermelon and muskmelon from Hawthorne’s garden; Thoreau, who had written a piece for The Dial containing “passages of cloudy and dreamy metaphysics, and also passages where his thoughts seem to measure and attune themselves into spontaneous verse, as they rightfully may, since there is real poetry in them.” Thoreau, whose words contained “a basis of good sense and of moral truth . . . which also is a reflection of his character.” Thoreau, whom Hawthorne found to be “a healthy and wholesome man to know,” like the granola cereal boxes lining the shelves of the 20th century’s market for good health.

8 /

Carnivorous fortunes, delicately referred to here as “bull market.” Obviously, Hans Richter continued to mourn his unfinished cinepoem, Minotaur, as the heart of the art mourns the unfinished and the unwritten.

“This isn’t what I imagined,” said the active child.

At some point near or around the year 1935, Mary Sully created a portrait that was closer to an evocation than a realism-based representation of celebrity scientist Charles Steinmetz, an electrical engineer who discovered the Steinmetz Curve of electric alternating currents. In Sully’s panel, blue energy waves alternate with arrow-like cross currents which appear and concentrate in the center panel. Loosely resembling a circuit diagram, red diamonds connect with the green ovals, and the bottom panel links the alternating currents with the cosmologies indicated in Dakota and Lakota patterns.

“This isn’t what I had in mind,” the child remembers saying.

What was the heart doing on March 17, 1922, when Rainer Maria Rilke sent a letter to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Coury, announcing the completion of his Duino Elegies, and connecting the lyrics, themselves, to the destruction of Duino Castle during World War I? Where was the heart when Rilke told Countess Sizzo that the elegies felt true— “the more so” — shaped by their form, since the war had destroyed the castle that had inspired them. What carnage of the heart led Rilke, in this same letter, to employ the word “constellation” in a manner that might have reached Walter Benjamin, whose first love was reserved for the idealistic poet friend that died by suicide?

9 /

And (of course) other irrational factors, including the desire to accept the selves we performed in the past— which may be what sat like a toad on Fred Davis’ forehead when he wrote: “The proclivity to cultivate appreciative attitudes toward former selves is closely related to nostalgia’s earlier-noted tendency to eliminate from memory or, at minimum, severely to mute the unpleasant, the unhappy, the abrasive, and, most of all, those lurking shadows of former selves about which we feel shame, guilt, or humiliation.”

9 /

Deadly smoke thick over the icecaps.

Awful — a word that could have rested in its sublime etymological origins, where “awe-” attaches itself to “full” and looks down from the romantic cliff on the ineffable below. But the perspective has changed. Awful, the look on my daughter’s face when she dreams of her grandmother wandering through the icecaps of Antartica. In the nightmare, the glaciers retain that excruciating brightness, the blue-white of so much light encountering itself in millennia of ice. “Dream,” I tell my daughter. The nightmares know water. We move like a bad scene, shot in the dark.

10 /

Our man in Saigon, Lima, Tokyo etc.

The poet ignores our man and keeps her eye on the bottle.

She thinks of Mandelstam and all those Egypts — all those possibilities of place and homeland tucked into the correspondence of the writers she can’t forget.

11 /

Etc etc., or the way the umbrella moves through John McGahern’s short fiction, “My Love, My Umbrella”

It was the rain, the constant weather of this city, made my love inseparable from the umbrella, a black umbrella, white stitching on the seams of the imitation leather over the handle, the metal point bent where it was caught in Mooney’s grating as we raced for the last bus out of Abbey Street.

[...]

We went to cinemas or sat in pubs, it was the course of our love, and as it always rained we made love under the umbrella beneath the same trees in the same way. They say the continuance of sexuality is due to the penis having no memory, and mine each evening spilt its seed into the mud and decomposing leaves as if it was always for the first time. 

[..]

‘Would you think we should ever get married?’ ‘Kiss me.’ She leaned across the steel between us. ‘Do you think we should?’ I repeated. ‘What would it mean to you?’ she asked.

What I had were longings or fears rather than any meanings.

Umbrellas protect us from getting wet. The umbrella is also slang for condoms, I think?

Perhaps protection is the “constant weather” of failed love. I mean, “imitation leather” never handles the dead animal; it never risks the unprotected part of it.

Looking forward to thinking aloud with other writers this week, while also thinking on paper, in notebooks, on screens, about filiative schemes, inaugurations, synecdoches, constellations, decomposing leaves — and the Kierkegaardian repetition in the “always for the first time.”

*

Active Child, “Diamond Heart”
Chelsea Wolfe and Mark Lanegan, “Flatlands”
Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press, 1979.
Henry David Thoreau, “1842”, The Thoreau Log.
John McGahern, “My Love, My Umbrella”
Junior Wells, “In the Wee Hours”
Lorenzo Thomas, “Inauguration”
Man Ray, Gift, 1921.
Mary Sully, Steinmetz, c. 1935.
Paul Bogard, ed. Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World. University of Virginia Press, 2023.

Bob Creeley's LOVE.

The first week they wrote a letter.
He wrote it.
She thought about it.
Peace was in the house like a broken staircase.

— Robert Creeley, “The Interview”

What is the point. That is what must be borne in mind. Sometimes the point is really who wants what. Sometimes the point is what is right or kind. Sometimes the point is a momentum, a fact, a quality, a voice, an intimation, a thing said or unsaid. Sometimes it's who's at fault, or what will happen if you do not move at once. The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you lose the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life.

— Renata Adler, “Brownstone”

1

“Where to begin.”

To quote Renata Adler.

To start with the favorite, or one of the favorites, or the favorite at 2:13 p.m. in the week of Robert Creeley’s For Love: Poems 1950-1960.

To refuse to think about these poems in the order they are given.

To choose, instead, the unscrupulous preferences of one’s own exuberance, one’s own tonalities, one’s own stammering speculations.

To be small, then. Small as this spare poem that spares us nothing.

A creature of three stanzas that reassures the extra line of its role as tiny ruiner. 3-3-4, the extra word.

The Rhyme

There is the sign of
the flower—
to borrow the theme.

But what or where to recover
what is not love
too simply.

I saw her
and behind her there were
flowers, and behind them
nothing.

To move into “The Way,” and notice the way a tone of conclusiveness undercut the speaker’s claims and abrades his putative ego.

To admire the riffing on Shakespeare’s famous sonnet, creating a dialogue with that particular strain of romantic bravado . . .

The Way

My love’s manners in bed
are not to be discussed by me,
as mine by her
I would not credit comment upon gracefully.

Yet I ride by the margin of that lake in
the wood, the castle,
and the excitement of strongholds;
and have a small boy’s notion of doing good.

Oh well, I will say here,
knowing each man,
let you find a good wife too,
and love her as hard as you can.

To go from this difficulty, this impossibility, with its “small boy’s notion of doing good,” back to the lake and the lack and the riffing on emblematic lines from poetry as a way into the poem:

The Bed

She walks in beauty like a lake
and eats her steak
with fork and knife
and proves a proper wife.

Her room and board
he can afford, he has made friends
of common pains
and meets his ends.

Oh god, decry
such common finery as puts the need
before the bed, makes true what is
the lie indeed.

”Laughter releases rancor the quality of mercy is not / strained,” as Creeley reminds in the droll seriousness of “The Crisis” — there is the collective resilience of laughter.

2

To see things differently in a white dress.

To admit the frame in the framing of it.

To move into the openly-sacrificial gesticulations of “A Marriage,” with its sombre tonality, an accomplishment of syntax and declarative hints.

To study the connotations and flexing of this legal word, retainer, even as it develops from the traditional “first time, second time, third time” punchline to the classic storyteller-style joke or else the fable:

A Marriage

The first retainer
he gave to her
was a golden
wedding ring.

The second—late at night
he woke up,
leaned over on an elbow,
and kissed her.

The third and the last—
he died with
and gave up loving
and lived with her.

To consider the trinitarian impulse in triples, and the human belief that magic occurs in numbers.

To be one two three about things.

To speak of pain in relation to form, where eternity is the duration of that see-saw between existence and penitence, as in “The Letter”:

The Letter

I did not expect you
to stay married to
one man all your life,
no matter you were his wife.

I thought the pain was endless—
but the form existent,
as it is form,
and as such I loved it.

I loved you as well
even as you might tell,
giving evidence
as to how much was penitence.

To feel slightly medieval when reading him.

To extend lais-like thought into something lighter. A gist in Creeley’s marriage and courtship poems reaching back loosely towards medieval fabliau (plural: fabliaux), that species of brief and bawdy tale that made use of satire to challenge clergy, women (as femininity), and marriage, wherein humor develops from plot through an intrigue or practical joke told in a rapid succession of events that form a single episode. Narrated in eight-syllable rhyming couplets, fabliaux were very popular in France during the Middle Ages. The effectiveness of the fabliau depends on the recognition of cultural cues and behaviors that point to easily discerned conceptions of human nature and gender. This type of literary form recurs throughout Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio's Decameron, where it is not limited to rhyming couplets. Clearly, Creeley isn’t playing the by the rules of the fabliau in these poems, but he seems familiar with the form, perhaps culling its rhetorical strategies when drafting poems like “A Marriage.”

To stand back from the particulars.

To glance downwards with the eye of the bird, noting how his use of adynaton, the “not possible,” lays bare love’s rhetorical strategies and hyper-magnifications. Say my love burns like a hundred suns. Say heart throws itself into the headlights. Say my superlatives stack up in his “Ballade of the Despairing Husband”:

Oh lovely lady, morning or evening or afternoon.
Oh lovely lady, eating with or without a spoon.
Oh most lovely lady, whether or dressed or undressed or partly.
Oh most lovely lady, getting up or going to bed or sitting only.

Oh loveliest of ladies, than whom none is more fair, more gracious, more beautiful.
Oh loveliest of ladies, whether you are just or unjust, merciful, indifferent, or cruel.
Oh most loveliest of ladies, doing whatever, seeing whatever, being whatever.
Oh most loveliest of ladies, in rain, in shine, in any weather.

Say any working-poet can sympathize with the rhyming couplet that concludes this “Ballade”:

Oh lady grant me time,
please, to finish my rhyme.

3

To consider the way he uses a comma.

Excerpted from Renata Adler’s Pitch Dark.

To push his commas away and look for the sharpened points of his periods.

To say: if you.

To think: if then.

To read “If You” closely as if to resolve whether the repetition can offer closer.

To mean: I’m not sure how I feel about the repeating couplet that book-ends the conditional.

To admire the poem’s construction from a simple conditional, where the marital crisis involves a pet . . . and the bow touches the violin in the second-to-last couplet, with the crisp serial of monosyllabic words:

Dead. Died. Will die. Want.
Morning, midnight. I asked you

if you were going to get a pet
what kind of animal would you get.

To know and not know.

4

To study the material, itself.

To consider Robert Creeley’s intent when he said: “Things continue, but my sense is that I have at best, simply taken place with that fact... So it is that what I feel, in the world, is the one thing I know myself to be, for that instant. I will never know myself otherwise. Intentions are the variability of all these feelings, moments of that possibility. How can I ever assume that they come to this or that substance?”

To be apprehended by the mirror on the stream’s reflective surface in “The Awakening" —like the smallness of the man rubbing the myth from his eyes, reckoning with seeing “his size with his own two eyes” in the dark water.

To move through the locutionary ache of “The Tunnel,” with its variations and degradations of loneliness and echo . . . “time isn’t.”

The Tunnel

Tonight, nothing is long enough—
time isn’t.
Were there a fire,
it would burn now.

Were there a heaven,
I would have gone long ago.
I think that light
is the final image.

But time reoccurs,
love—and an echo.
A time passes
love in the dark.

To note how three returns in the tunnel’s structure: those three stanzas doing the work of completion, not by ordinary standards but through the sleight-of-hand that evokes our inarticulable expectations.

To see these threes in Creeley’s heroes.

To note this three-stanza poem, each quatrain quivering with Creeley’s extraordinary enjambment, the way he imposes rupture within a breath, where imposing plays into “possibility,” and reminds the reader of its kinship with the pose, which is to say, the hero, the poet, the sibyl, the speaker, the meteoric mythos:

Heroes

In all those stories the hero
is beyond himself and into the next
thing, be it those labors
of Hercules or Aeneas going into death.

That was the Cumaean Sibyl speaking.
This is Robert Creeley, and Virgil
is dead now two thousand years, yet Hercules
and the Aeneid, yet all that industrious wis-

dom lives in the way the mountains
and the desert are waiting
for the heroes, and death also
can still propose the old labors.

No heroes can rest without imagining the singular. Even if the singular only exists as a frame for the lack that imagines a partner.

The logic of lack commits “Heroes” to a pseudo-companion, a poem titled “The Hero” — the first stanza smattered with internal slant rhymes that create a beat or sense of motion, as in:

Each voice which was asked
spoke its words, and heard
more than that, the fair question,
the onerous burden of the asking.

And then further, in the same poem, once again, there is the suppleness of Creeley’s enjambment, the fractures of motion he uses to build these discrete stanzas, carriers of framed images:

Go forth, go forth,
saith the grandmother, the fire
of that old form, and turns
away from the form.

To study what form solicitates.

To sit on his simple hill and be aware of its shape:

5

To sit on that hill for hours with my dog, Radu.

To spy another hero in the valley from these heights.

To then descend, headily, into the transposition — or the images recollected, the outlines composed by Wallace Stevens in that extraordinary poem titled “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War” —

It is not an image. It is a feeling.
There is no image of the hero.
There is a feeling as definition.
How could there be an image, an outline, 
A design, a marble soiled by pigeons?
The hero is a feeling, a man seen 
As if the eye was an emotion, 
As if in seeing we saw our feeling 
In the object seen and saved that mystic
Against the sight, the penetrating, 
Pure eye. Instead of allegory, 
We have and are the man, capable 
Of his brave quickenings, the human
Accelerations that seem inhuman.

To wonder (again) about the concept of “innate music” in poetics.

To re-read a letter written by Wallace Stevens in 1936, when he was working on “The Man With the Blue Guitar,” and theorizing the imagination’s influence.

To read the words of Stevens’ letter aloud in the room of this instance, this Now.

“The validity of the poet as a figure of the prestige to which he is entitled, is wholly a matter of this, that he adds to life that without which life cannot be lived, or is not worth living, or is without savor, or in any case, would be altogether different from what it is today,” said Stevens.

To pause and look up at the overwatered house plant.

To return to Stevens’ letter, and resume my chlorophyll-adjacent reading: “Poetry is a passion not a habit. This passion nourishes itself on reality. Imagination has no source except in reality, and ceases to have any value when it departs from reality. Here is a fundamental principle about the imagination; it does not create except as it transforms. There is nothing that exists exclusively by reason of the imagination, or that does not exist in some form in reality. Thus reality = the imagination, and the imagination = reality. Imagination gives, but gives in relation.”

To acknowledge the italics above as my own — just as this relational imaginary, wherein imagination alters the relations we form with experience, and this alteration is what we carry forward as influence, belongs (somehow) to Stevens.

And to end with perhaps a favorite —

6

— followed by a talisman, a mirror, an echo.

A Token

My lady
fair with
soft arms, what

can I say to
you—words, words
as if all
worlds were there.

— Robert Creeley

When it happens you are not there

— W. S. Merwin, “To the Words”

And you my future constellation
climb up in the sky with me

— Morphine, “Like a Mirror”

To Make a Cento of It

“I’m thinking of that charming phrase: what goes around comes around.”

— Robert Creeley to Bruce Comens

i

House. Your hand is an iron
shovel looking down at me.
Night comes. We sleep.
In hell we will tell of it.

ii

The door to the pantry
in Virgil’s plan is a poem

for the ways of water.

All eyes as if talking — taking
always the beat from the
breath it must have been.

Yielding manner as
simply as that syntactic

accident. The moon
is white in the branches
as we climb the hill for our picnic

I see a face appear.

Kenneth Patchen is hunting deer
inside Russia, too far from

me. . . the nightmare.
You on your back with your

Robert Creeley.

iii

Viz: hey.
Nothing for You is untoward.
Tree, speak. I will be a romantic.
I will sell her hands, her hair, her eyes, all things time isn’t—
cruel instrument.

iv

It is a viscous
form of self-
like flowers
thrown under
their colors.

What I took in my
hand: a man,
a direction — I am.
All beggar.

As if all that
surrounds her
as hair be also
today — a double
flute. To
walk
at night.

The trees — goddamn
them, the galloping
collection of greens,
subservience. I am.
All ears.

Be for me
like rain—
a being nothing
and there.

v

At night, there are other things white in the mind of it.
I took in my hand the possibility cut so small in the wall where you spoke to me.
Were there a fire it would burn now for the sake of the tree.

*

Arnold Schoenberg, Red Gaze (1910)
Bruce Comens, “A Conversation with Robert Creeley by Bruce Comens” (The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1995)
Edward Burne-Jones’s sketchbook (Harvard Art Museum)
Max Richter, “Psychogeography”
Morphine, “Bo’s Veranda”
Morphine, “Like a Mirror”
Renata Adler, Pitch Dark (NYRB Classics)
Robert Creeley, For Love: Poems 1950 - 1960 (PDF)
Robert Creeley, “To Say It”
W. S. Merwin, “To the Words”
Wallace Stevens, “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War”

How German is it.

The world is everything that is the case.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein’s first statement inTractatus

What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein’s final proposition inTractatus

What can be written down is mere foolishness. Only the ineffable is of any importance.

– Paul Valery, Mon Faust (a play)

1

In 1940, Walter Abish and his parents fled Austria and the Nazis. A few years later, they had to flee Italy. When the Germans took the Ardennes, they fled France. Later they fled China when the Maoists gained control. Finally— if such words can exist in our world — Abish wound up in the US metropolitan of New York City, the place that became his home.

“I lie and I am lied to, but the result of my lie is mental leaps, memory, knowledge,” Abish wrote or remarked — somewhere.

The world is everything that is the case.

But no where is what it seems. Abish’s novels and essays are constructed from texts cobbled together from the memoirs, correspondence, experience, and lives of others. He doesn’t cite his sources or name the humans whose lives he collages. Nor does he guise his own autobiographical presence in what he tells or re-collects.

Across his writing, the use of a collective first-person pulls us back from the autonomous being of the neoliberal subject. Oddly, nothing feels more contemporary to this moment than Abish’s novel, How German Is It (1980) . . .

2

As sovereigns would have it, the child lives under the sign of the name given by the father.

Walter Abish’s protagonist, Ulrich Hargenau, lives in the shadow of his father’s execution by the Nazis for his involvement in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. The father was part of a terrorist conspiracy to invalidate the rule of the sovereign. Worst of all, the planned assassination symbolized a rejection of the Furher principle from within the ethnocentric shelter of what was constructed as the “German family.” There is no foreign Other — no “alien ideology” like Bolshevism, no filthy blood of drawn from Slav minorities, no “contamination” of Jewish or Roma blood— involved in this plot. Which is German.

But what is German about the terrorist.

And what is German about the son who returns to the region of Württemberg, where he was born, in order to find the father.

What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence.

What Hargenau seeks is history, a narrative to structure the frayed threads of his life— the marriage to a woman named Paula who nevertheless remained a mystery, his pseudo-participation in the leftist radical Einzieh Group and the resulting arrests of his friends, the role he played in their judicial trial and subsequent conviction, the novel he didn’t write, the novel he seeks to finish, the lived and unlived lives that haunt his experience.

What part of repetition do we need to remember the lullaby’s texture.

“The purpose of an antiterrorist film” (excerpted below) resembles the language of contemporary global fascism, particularly in the Trump administration’s prosecution of student protesting their government’s support for Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians.

But no matter how great these flaws, the need for the film is self-evident.

Who is the terrorist in the history empire tells.

“At the subconscious level nothing is accidental,” said Luis Buñuel in That Obscure Object of Desire, a film that made use of the flashback form and, coincidentally, was cited by Abish as a personal favorite.

The book ends in an abrupt flurry of ellipses structured to represent the associative possibilities of stream-of-consciousness. Sitting in an office, Ulrich recounts his childhood to a psychoanalyst. He was born in Württemberg in 1945, the year after his father’s execution. At age 7 or 8, Ulrich found this gap, but never discussed it with his (mother who later remarried a former Wehrmacht officer with a high status at a bank).

“I am a bastard,” Ulrich says, “an appropriate role for a writer,” or any man who doesn’t want to know who his father might have been, or what his father did during the war.

What can be written down is mere foolishness. Only the ineffable is of any importance.

Ulrich exhibits a subconscious needs to replay his father. By joining the Einzieh Group, he satisfies the urge to identify with the conspirator in his father. Deploying flashback and dialogue to maintain a discontinuous time, Abish renders a time whose movement forward is arrested by the absence of meaning. The characters relate, openly and covertly, to the national history. Neighbors cut shrubbery and hum over the interior monologues; everyday actions drown the proximity of inherited guilt and salvation complexes in the postwar generation.

On the surface of things, Ulrich believes that he joins the Einzieh Group for a love of a woman whose “real name” he did not know. Her name hid her past and buried her father twicefold: once in the ash of public buildings she bombed and again in the effort to trace her lineage back to a father whose sin may have been unforgivable.

“What she couldn’t have known is that the name I hear is not my real name either,” Ulrich tells the analyst.

Ulrich’s search for his father in Württemberg, where he goes to work on his novel, is also a search for his own heritage, an effort to find his inheritance, a question about what it means to be German after the Holocaust. Each time Ulrich pronounces his own name, Germans recognize him as his father’s son. In these moments, he says, “I am practicing a kind of deceit.”

3

Heidegger appears as the father of German metaphysics, the man who lives in the forest of uncontaminated purity, the gnome whose language refuses to be penetrated or altered by the foreign. A town built on top of a mass grave is named after him. A ‘terrorist’ may have studied under him, as did the protagonist. All of Abish’s character have a connection to Heidegger, however large or pithy, if only as residents of a town developed and built atop the crimes of the past to better honor the future.

4

A few excerpted passages from an essay by Walter Abish titled “What Else”:

79

I keep beginning again. I keep taking a fresh notebook. And each time I hope it will lead to something, that it will be a constructive experiment, that I shall open some door. It never happens. I stop before I get to a door, any door. The same invisible obstacle that stops me. I ought at least to try and keep the same notebook, to get to the last page. That would mean that I have said almost everything.

97

From the past, it is my childhood which fascinates me most; these images alone, upon inspection, fail to make me regret the time which has vanished. For it is not the irreversible I discover in childhood, it is the irreducible: everything which is still in me, by fits and starts; in the child I read quite openly the dark underside of myself-boredom, vulnerability, disposition to despair (in the plural, fortunately), inward excitement, cut off (unfortunately) from all expression. Contemporaries: I was beginning to walk, Proust was still alive, and finishing A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

168

Her apartment: for reasons that are no longer clear to me, a few weeks after that first evening in her apartment, we moved the convertible couch from the north wall of the living room to the west wall. After we parted, but before we were married, the furniture was moved once again, as if to erase my former presence. I can understand the movement of the furniture as well as and as passionately as I understand Schubert's sonatas. The aquarium with its dozen guppies was by now long gone. After we were married but living apart, she once again moved the couch. I often wonder if I avoided sleeping with her after we were married for the sake of the text-to-be? I believe she, had not read The Sun Also Rises but her parting words seemed straight out of that all too familiar exchange in the novel. Am I reading into her parting gift, Malraux's The Voices of Silence, a meaning that wasn't there? Why write?

4I

July 31. One can imagine a face for the void. Then it strikes us how much the void resembles us. Is it myself I am staring at? The dark is checked by the dark, as a hand by a stranger's hand.

I3

Jean Jacques Rousseau confesses himself. It is less a need than an idea.

46

What tense would you choose to live in?

I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle-in the “what ought to be.”

I like to breathe that way. That's what I like. It suggests a kind of mounted, bandit-like equestrian honor...

An epigraph from the second part of Walter Abish’s novel, Eclipse Fever.

*

Arvo Pärt, Silentium
Broken Social Scene, “Hug of Thunder” (2017)
Dennis Cooper on Abish’s How German Is It
Jacek Malczewski, Zesłanie Studentów, or “Student’s Exile” (1891). Black and white reproduction.
Leoš Janáček, Idyll For String Orchestra, V. Adagio, performed by Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra
Walter Abish, How German Is It (New Directions Press, 1980)
Walter Abish, Eclipse Fever (Nonpareil Books, 1993)
Walter Abish, “What Else”

prelude / postlude

Cyril Connolly's critique of the critic.

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. ... Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion.

– James Baldwin

…. there is not less, but more in the idea of nonbeing than that of being, in disorder than in order, in the possible than in the real.

— Gilles Deleuze

CREDENTIALS AS FORM

And there it is. Midway through Enemies of Promise, after a stream of eloquent rants (i.e. Proust bad; E. M. Forster divine), the formidable critic named Cyril Connolly turns on himself.

The provocation is titled “Chapter XVII: Credentials,” a single page of text wherein Connolly gets naked, formally and textually, autiobiographically, where the most graphic acts are conducted by professors at Eton:

Up to this point, the function of the work has been entirely critical and performed with those privileges of the critic which allow him to assume equality with those whom he criticizes and to take their books to pieces as if he were their equal in stature. But this equality is a fiction, just as it is a fiction that a juryman is superior to the temptations and stupidities of the prisoner he judges or qualified to convict a company director on a point of corporation law.

And then, Connolly intimates that the illusion of critical neutrality comes at the cost of continuously denying and disavowing the effects of his personal biases, formative experiences, and socialization:

A critic is a product of his time who may affect impartiality but who while claiming authority over the reader projects his doubt and aspiration.

And then:

Every critic writes as if he were infallible, and pretends that he is the embodiment of impartial intellectual sanity, a reasonable though omniscient pontiff. But without his surplice the preacher of the loftiest sermon is only human or subhuman, and now is the moment to step down from the pulpit, to disrobe in the vestry. The autobiography which follows is intended to be such a disrobing; it is meant to be an analysis of the grounding in life and art which the critic received, of the ideas which formed him in youth; the education, the ideals, the disappointments from which are drawn his experience, the fashions he may unwittingly follow and the flaws he may conceal.

And so, the writer presumes herself god; the critic presumes herself the Pope; the costume presumes itself to be of inestimable value. Adorably, Connolly doesn’t prevaricate. He assumes the critic is human; despite pretensions to infallibility, the critic is as much a product of his time as the latest ad-trend. Like any 21st century teen, the critic wants to go viral. The critic watches the linguistic turn in the culture industry and keeps abreast of the most recent breast-related events in the tabloids. The critic is socialized by the dominant media and the desires of the ruling elite. The critic “projects his doubt and aspiration . . . while claiming authority over the reader.” The critic knows bravada, bravado, bavardage.

Notabily, loftiness is a lonely and insecure height — but a lucrative one. The autobiographical critic doesn’t mention this. Instead, Connolly launches (a slightly wobbly analogy): “a critic is an instrument which registers certain observations; before the reader can judge of their value he must know sufficient of the accuracy of the instrument to allow for the margin of error.” And then he zooms in on the shiny surface of the instrument, expanding the mirror:

We grow up among theories and illusions common to our class, our race, our time. We absorb them unawares and their effect is incalculable. What are they? In this case, I am trying to find out, hoping that all I discover, however personal, may prove of use. To do so I have to refer to something which I find intolerable, the early aura of large houses, fallen fortunes and county families common to so many English autobiographers. If the reader can stomach this, I will try to make it up to him.

The apologia is peak Connolly, rubbing his aureole, holding his line, tongue-in-cheek and dead earnest.

What he calls “the autobiography to follow” is memoir of socialization, from the formative ideas of youth to the degrees and fraternities, and then from the fashions he lauds to the “ideals” and “disappointments” that shaped his preferences. Whatever the critic measures depends on how the critic measures themselves. And the critic articulates this measurement in the first line of the autobiographical section:

I have always disliked myself, at any given moment; the total of such moments is my life.

I won’t deny my shock of self-recognition upon reading Connolly’s statement. Nor will I lie by leaving disclaiming the tingling sensation which announces the presence of a kindred spirit: a melancholeric Romantic of the younger years who waves up at her from the page. Like his reader, Connolly whittled away his college days in arbor near the library, where he specialized in “the heresies of anarchists and Albigensians.” Like his reader, he consumed and admired the heretics and the atrocious events of the Middle Ages. To be horribly honest, he loved them all: the courageous Manicheaens, the cosmic love-crimes of the Abelardians, the heroisms of Frederic Stupormundi, the self-mortifications of the Flagellants . . .

But there is more. (He missed Simone Weil, after all.)

Or maybe less. For up there above the rest, somewhere in the stars of his possible futurisms, the Young Romantic adored his Nomanians, the believers in the religion known as No Man, the minds who heaved to simple credos, including “No Man living hath seen God” and “To No Man is it given to escape Death.”

A personal history implicated by the sensibility of the Young Romantic turns Older Writers into friends. They are bonded by secret affinity and perhaps envy for the passionate beliefs of their younger selves, even as they reproach these prior selves for having actually believed anything. Sensibility never gets over its prior selves. This is why sensibility-based friendships feel closer to ideal kinships, conversations hidden in quiet patches between trees where the cruel world of school and sports cannot find you. Where the judgement of the world lacks significance. Where books matter more than SATs.

Of course, literary preferences and cold apple pie are a matter of taste. And maybe we knew then what we cannot afford to know now, given how much more we know and yet how much less occasion we have to share it and commune with others around it. And there it is again — “the intensity of that gem-like flame,” Walter Pater’s dazzling oxymoron. A spark and a sparkling dissonance.

CREDENTIALS AS CONTENT

A few excerpts from this bouquet of critical writing, beginning with what his British professors taught vis a vis poetry and the arousals of purple prose:

To the description of his thrall to Romanticism, which ends by naming the boy he loved for the entirety of his three years at St. Wulfric’s as Tony Watson:

Irresistible Connolly, bearing “the mark of a willful astigmatism” on his forehead — and studying it. Last but not least, given the myriad other things I should be doing, here is how the critic described his discovery of mortality:

*

Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938)

“Gersaint’s Shopsign” by Jed Perl.

I did look. I saw the object itself. It told its story. No wonder it’s cheap.

— Henry James, The Golden Bowl

Antoine Watteau, Gersaint’s Shopsign

[Unless otherwise indicated, the material below is excerpted from Jed Perl’s book on Watteau, Antoine’s Alphabet.]

Gersaint's Shopsign is the greatest work of art ever devoted to shopping. It is an epic of shopping. It is a poetics of shopping. This panoramic view of an interior where paintings and mirrors and clocks and other luxury objects are for sale is "I shop therefore I am," but reimagined as metaphysics and allegory. Watteau's cast of characters– twelve in all, eight men and four women— move with the semaphore-like gestures of marionettes; they are puppets in a story of desire. The Shopsign, painted in tones of black, gray, and rose, is at once adamantine and airy—a vision that, despite its funny moments, is strangely somber, almost ritualized. At center stage there is a young man, elegant and ardent and maybe even a little grave, standing just inside the shop, offering his hand to a woman who steps in off the sidewalk, her back side, which is what we see of her, a great shimmer of cloth. Each of the dresses in the Shopsign, and this one in particular, has a gleaming, shivering life of its own—they're couture creations that function independently of the bodies they contain, they're lengths of beautifully made and sewn cloth to be played with, petted, adored. The desire for clothes and the desire for flesh melt together, and indeed this is very much a painting about elements that fit into or turn into one another, the nude into the clothed. [....]  but as a container for a painting or for a set of toiletries, the mirror as a framing of the passing parade, the picture frame that frames not only the painting but the people who look at the painting.

Our feelings about things, our perceptions of things are always multiplying, or at least they are always slipping into other feelings, other perceptions this is what Watteau wants to tell us. Nothing is only one thing, even, maybe especially, the visit to the shop where luxury goods are sold.

Jean-Antoine Watteau, L'Enseigne de Gersaint (The Shop Sign of Gersaint), ca. 1732. Etching & engraving on paper by Pierre Aveline after the painting by Watteau.

William Cole, an English visitor to Paris in the 1760s, a generation after the Shopsign was painted, suggests the quotidian experiences that went into Watteau's composition when he describes Madame Dulac's "extravagant and expensive shop; where the Mistress was as tempting as the Things she sold.”

The beauty of the objects and the beauty of the proprietor could not easily be separated in Cole's recollections, and of course this is all tumbled together with the fact that even when an object of desire has no direct relationship with sexual desire— when the luxury is, say, a beautifully bound book, an old master drawing, or an especially elegant clock (like the one in Gersaint's Shopsign) — the pleasure of possession can be so intense as to acquire an erotic dimension. The object that is purchased from Madame Dulac, so Cole explains, is bought not only for myself but “do you remember where you bought it”— and from whom.

Detail of the central coupling viewing the unboxing.

The luxurious bauble can also have symbolic implications, so that the purchase becomes an endorsement or embrace of certain ideas. There are the Northern Renaissance paintings of the married couple making a visit to the jeweler's, where the gold is being weighed, and all sorts of thoughts about love, loyalty, faithfulness hover in the immaculately rendered air. In Titian's portraits, the appearance of one of the newly fashionable clocks on a little table is at once a sign of the subject's great wealth and a memento mori. And then there is the golden bowl, of gilt crystal, after which Henry James named his last completed novel. The secret lovers, Prince Amerigo and Charlotte, are wandering the streets of London and chance upon a "small but interesting dealer in the Bloomsbury street," who shows them the great bowl, with its decoration that is almost Byzantine in its ornamental elaboration. Charlotte, who is considering buying the bowl as a wedding present for the woman the prince is going to marry, falls into a conversation with the Proprietor. "Does crystal then break — when it is crystal?" Charlotte asks. And when she is told that "it splits— if there is a split," she responds, "Ah! If there is a split. There is a split, eh? Crystal does split, eh?" To which the shopkeeper responds, "On lines and by laws of its own." And Charlotte replies, "You mean if there's a weak place?" – at which point we are speaking not about the bowl but about human relationships and human society.

In Gersaint's Shopsign, Watteau keeps moving from the snapshot of everyday life to the allegorical spectacle and back again, and it is the constant shifting between registers that gives the painting its devious power. Watteau painted the Shopsign near the end of his life, for one of his great friends, the art dealer Edme-François Gersaint. It was meant to hang as a sign above the entrance to the shop on the Pont Notre-Dame, Au Grand Monarque, where Gersaint sold paintings and other luxury objects, and it is said to have created a sensation in Paris during the brief time that it actually was displayed out-of-doors. The painting does not represent Gersaint's actual premises in the arcades of the Pont Notre-Dame, which were narrow and dark. And Watteau would probably have said of this shop much what Henry James later said of the Bloomsbury antiques shop in The Golden Bowl, namely that it "was but a shop of the mind, of the author's projected world."

(A mirror of a mirror in the dark space between the two mens’ wigs, that silhouette that resembles a loose shadow portrait…)

The walls of Gersaint's shop are practically papered with paintings in elaborate frames. These are not miniature versions of actual paintings but rather Watteau's imaginative variations on the art of the Baroque, a recapitulation of all the passions, sacred and profane, that have kept the world spinning, A resplendent clock reminds us that youth and love will end. Two large mirrors, each a dark abyss, suggest the impossibility of knowing oneself, even as two young scenes of actual paintings but rather Watteau's imaginative variations on the art of the Baroque, a recapitulation of all the passions, sacred and profane, that have kept the world spinning. A resplendent clock reminds us that youth and love will end. Two large mirrors, each a dark abyss, suggest the impossibility of knowing oneself, even as two young men look lovingly at their own images in another mirror.

And then there is the elegant lacquerwork toilet set. Who can doubt that toiletries, mirrors, and a clock raise certain questions: Who are we? What can we make of ourselves? What will we become? But the answers to these enormous questions are as remote as the empty room that is glimpsed through the doors at the back of the bustling shop, a room at once outside the main action and at the center of the painting, a room where a nacreous green-gray light, evoked with lightly hatched strokes of paint, dances over a world bereft of people and paintings and objets d'art. (At least one scholar has seen in that empty back room a vision of heaven or paradise, which makes a certain amount of sense.)

Within this elaborately appointed interior, Watteau has set a dozen characters as well as a dog. The Shopsign is a world of doublings, maybe even triplings—a painting about the buying and selling of paintings and other precious objects in which the men and women who have come to shop are themselves the most luxurious objects of all. In that quiet way of his, Watteau makes of this dozen delightful figures a geometric game, giving us four men and one woman on one side of the painting and four men and three women on the other side. He plays with couples—a man and a woman, two men whose looks suggest mirror images—but he also gathers his figures in threes and fours and fives, as if he were a choreographer exploring the full range of physical possibilities. And in addition he plays with a range of social classes, from the workmen to the shopkeepers to the customers, who are either aristocrats or wealthy commoners suddenly hungry for luxuries. So we have three or four classes represented, each of which Watteau treats in the same gently comic manner. Each is part of the passing parade, and of course nothing is fixed, as we are reminded by the workman at the side who is packing a portrait of Louis XIV, recently deceased, into a case, the portrait both alluding to the name of Gersaint's shop, Au Grand Monarque, and suggesting, at least in our retrospective gaze, the passing of the Sun King's world. 

And just as history is constantly changing, so are perceptions, as we see in the most playful incident in the Shopsign, which involves the salesman who is showing to a couple a large oval painting of a pastoral landscape with figures. While the woman, a dutiful connoisseur, examines the aunt's handling of the great, feathery trees, the man is busy fuming on the female nudes in the foreground. That the anecdote might be labeled: Two ways to look at a painting. And then there are those who have eyes only for themselves. Even as the young shop woman shows off the fine lacquer toilet set, the two men to whom she may be making her sales pitch appear less interested in looking at the toiletries or, for that matter, at the pretty salesgirl than in admiring themselves in a little mirror.

Legend has it that Watteau painted the Shopsign in eight mornings, as if he were God creating the world. For Watteau it was a great new beginning, a dramatic turn from the pastorals that had preoccupied him for so long. But the Shopsign was also done in the twilight of his career, so that his revolutionary zeal was tinged with nostalgia, as if Watteau were saying, “Yes, this is where I might have gone, this is a whole other sort of thing that I might have done.” It is the painting that inaugurates the work of all the painters whom Baudelaire, a century later, would be thinking of when he dubbed Constantin Guys the Painter of Modern Life, but Gersaint's Shopsign is also the greatest painting of modern life ever done, a premature requiem for the Painter of Modern Life. Some have wanted to see the artist's self-portrait in the lithe young man at the center of the painting, the man who, with his sharp, bright, dark eyes, is looking so longingly and invitingly at the young woman. The story of the self-portrait, like the story of the painting having been completed in eight mornings, may be apocryphal. But it hardly matters. That young man who is not Watteau is surely the spirit of Watteau. And here he is, reaching out his band to this woman who is among the last women in Watteau's art whom we will see from behind. And he invites her to join him in the dance of life, dancing oh so slowly, as the world passes by.

*

Henry James, The Golden Bowl
Jed Perl, Antoine’s Alphabet

Rilke's testament.

From the destroyed notebook:

(At the top margin, the word:) Nightmare -
(then disordered numbers, small, meaningless additions, then:)

— Rainer Maria Rilke’s blue notebook (translated by Mark Karnak)

These days rank among the most difficult....

Rilke realizes that he cannot possibly write, cannot find the necessary separation from life, while in Meline’s presence. So he sets off for Switzerland to stay in a pseudo-chateau and swears off contact for six months. His “Testament” collects straying thoughts as he tries to write, despite the presence of a loud mill nearby.

A poem from what would becomeThe Duino Elegies, written a decade prior, waits to encounter itself in others. “The aversion to what remains unfulfilled corrodes my body like rust, even sleep offers no relief —, half-awake, the blood pounds in my temples like heavy footsteps that refuse to rest,” writes Rilke, before turning to his absent interlocutor, and adding:

“If only I could call you… but that would destroy my last refuge — : this court where I recognize myself. You recently wrote that am not one who can be consoled by love. You were right. After all, what could be more useless to me than a life that allows itself to be consoled?”

”Striving & resisting: I am exhausted by it. Where is the heart that never 'insisted' on a stubborn happiness, but allowed me to prepare for it what springs inexhaustibly from me? Yet no consensus exists on this. Ah, if only the struggles would cease! If only we could hear as in the final stanza of Girard de Roussillon: Les guerres sont finies et les œuvres commencent. (The wars are over and the works begin.)”

Rilke is drawn to the gurgles and bubblings of a water fountain in the courtyard. True to form, he courts the inspiring on paper, noting how “the slightest breeze changed it, and when it was completely still around the suddenly isolated jet, cascading upon itself, it sounded quite different from the noise it made in the mirrored surface of the water.”

“Speak, I said to the fountain, & listened. Speak, I said, and my whole being obeyed it. Speak, you pure meeting of lightness and weight, you, the tree of games, you, a parable among the heavy trees of fatigue that fester within its cortex. And with an involuntary & innocent cunning of my heart, so that nothing would be but this, from which I wanted to learn to be, the distant, restrained, silent one.”

“If I did not resist the lover, it was because, among all the powers one can hold over another, hers alone, her unyielding power, appeared justified to me. Vulnerable and exposed as I was, I did not seek to evade her; yet I yearned to pierce her, to cross her boundary! Let it open a window onto the broader realm of existence... (not a mirror.)”

The lover and the writing exist in tension for the poet. Nothing will relieve or alter these intersections in his life— the duress of intimacy and its attendant conflicts. “Vulnerable and exposed” . . . like a man battered by winds on the cliffs near the Duino Castle, where his elegies would be finished.

Elsewhere, in an essay by Dan Beachy-Quick, there is a cliff that recollects the landscape near Trieste, the drift of Rilke’s Duino. Or there is my memory of this year’s cliff, the wind sweeping through rocks, a whistle crossing the surface of water. Yet— “(not a mirror.)”

I do remember a rose-bush growing on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea, and a butterfly deep in a bloom; on the horizon a sailing ship seemed to move slowly from one flower to a next, a distance the butterfly crossed with but a few beats of her wings, while for the ship it took hours; I remember I wrote next to the passage love collapses subjective distances into a single span; but that page is hidden in a book hidden behind another book so that my own thought is a rumor I tell to myself.

I see I have been speaking again about books when I meant to speak about the ocean.

I see I have been speaking again about books when I meant to speak, about the ocean.

I see I have been speaking again about oceans when I meant to speak about sleep.

I see I keep saying you when I mean to say she, and say yours when I mean to say hers.

— Dan Beachy-Quick, from the essay of echoing cliffs

The great William Gass penned an unforgettable essay titled “Rilke and the Requiem” that inventories Rilke’s ghosts through his oeuvre. As an essay, it is immaculate— the sort of sweeping, mind-rattling work that only a devout student of Rilke could muster. We study what we love most: this is what it means to seek knowledge, to pursue its shadows through every syntactical loop and thematic cranny.

Like many such students, Gass translated Rilke’s poems in order to know him better, where better indicates knowing him well enough to risk speculating from that intransigent intimacy that births “my Wittgenstein,” “my Celan,” “my Gass,” “my Tsvetaeva,” etc.

Gass, then:

“Then (in a passage protected by parentheses),” Gass writes, enacting the protection as text, setting his words inside the familiar arms of those half-moon arcs that do not enclose the subject entirely — () — arms that embrace without creating a whole.

I have often mourned the parentheses’ failure to connect completely, or over-read an unassailable loneliness into those gaps —

(O how I . . . ) . . .

Among my three copies of Stephen Mitchell's Selected Rilke translations, there is one filled with color-markings, the text that peeks out from the rainbow of my Rilke readings. Yellow markings made in my 20's. Green arrived my late 30's during the nursing-while-returning-to-Rilke days. Rilke’s "Elegy” for Marina Tvsetaeva is a forever favorite in its form as well as its direction. His preemptive elegy to a friend would be matched by her own New Year’s elegy to Rilke, following the shock of his death.

It hurts to write. It hurts to not-write. This, too, is an unassailable rhythm that rocks the raft of a life.

(New page:)

return loved one diver bird's head cold sweat choker frost
vikuña ring-band trolley Liebknecht Agnese

— from the blue notebook that Rilke destroyed

*

Alfred Schnittke, “Die Geschichte Eines Unbekannten Schauspielers” (Schnittke, Film Music Vol. 1) as performed by the Berlin Symphony Orchestra
Dan Beachy-Quick, “Writing From Memory”
Gidon Kremer, “Oblivion”
Rainer Maria Rilke, “Elegy (for Marina Tsvetaeva-Efron)” as translated by Stephen Mitchell
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Testament & Other Texts (Contra Mundum Press), ed. by Rainer J. Hanshe, tr. by Mark Karnak
William Gass, “Rilke and the Requiem” (Georgia Review)

A triptych for P.: Ponge, Donne, and initial musics.

I found that I liked noises even more than I liked intervals.

— John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing”

Shall we for this vain bubble's shadow pay?

— John Donne, “Love’s Alchemy”

[I]

Stand still, and I will read to thee a lecture, Love, in love's philosophy. These three hours that we have spent, walking here, two shadows went along with us, which we ourselves produced. But, now the sun is just above our head, we do those shadows tread, and to brave clearness all things are reduced. All this being another way of seeing and hearing Donne’s lecture as it falls upon the shadow.

In the same “skein”: to hear Francis Ponge’s pastoral symphony conducted by wind, its beat wired to the cuckoo’s hearts in ours.

Francis Ponge, as translated by Beth Archer

[II]

Newness ignores its lineage. Poetry attempts to seduce, to persuade, as buried in the Greek word, suasoria, referring to a rhetorical device in persuasion. Attempting to sway a stranger with language is foolish (and perhaps even narcissistic, if one pauses to consider it). Nevertheless, Ovid attempted a suasoria of the Dawn. Even the aubade tugs the lover's face back to the bed they just left. Everything sinks into the body and flies out through the head:

Francis Ponge, as translated by Beth Archer

[III]

At first, Kafka’s friends and lovers strolled into his diaries with their names intact: Max, Felice, Milena, etc.

But as the persons in his diaries turned into characters in his stories, Kafka began designating them by the first letter of their given name.

M. F. — this world of beings derived from initial sounds crept into the terms of address in his correspondence.

On January 18th, 1922, his diary introduces a character called S.

“S. crushes me,” Kafka says, “it torments me day and night, I'd have to overcome my fear and shame and probably sadness too in order to satisfy it, but on the other hand I'm certain that if a quick and nearby and willing opportunity were to present itself, I'd take advantage of it right away, without fear or sadness or shame...”

So S. is sex.

Alliteration is a way of associating the initial sound of a word with its kindreds: sex, Ashbery’s sweetness, Ponge’s songs and sky and seemingness, Kafka’s shame and sadness . . . Scylla; sirens; speculation (“What Song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture,” as Sir Thomas Brown stated in his Urn Burial); sibilance (a specific type of alliteration or repetition technique that uses the soft consonants to create hissing sounds); sibyl; sortie; salacious; seek; sacred; serpent; serpentine verses (“Crescit amor nummi, quantum ipsa pecunia crescit,” i.e. Greater grows the love of self, as self itself grows greater); snaking; sensorium; silhouette (the outline of someone or something); slant; soliloquy (a monologue addressed to oneself, thoughts spoken out loud without addressing another); sonata; sonatina; sonnet; sepulchral statues. Surely the slithering soundscape is endless.

The rot remains with us, the men are gone.
But, as dead ash is lifted in a wind
That fans the blackening ember of the mind,
My eyes burned from the ashen prose of Donne.

— Derek Wolcott, “Ruins of a Great House”

*

Abel Korzeniowski, “Clouds” (An Angel in Cracow)
Eunike Tanzil, “Metamorphosis” (The First of Everything)
Derek Wolcott, “Ruins of a Great House”
Francis Ponge, The Voice of Things, edited and translated by Beth Archer (PDF)
John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing”
John Donne, “A Lecture upon the Shadow”
John Donne, “Love’s Alchemy”
John Donne, “The Ecstasy”
Tomaso Antonio Vitali, “Chaconne in G Minor” as performed by Jascha Heifetz and Richard Ellsasser

for P, my ‘little time’ being yours

Commissioned sights: A few points.

...the poor man you let become guilty.

— Goethe

Each thought has its own cell. But each cell can, in an instant, and apparently almost without cause, become a chamber, a legal chamber over which language presides.

— Walter Benjamin in an essay on Karl Kraus

From John Baldessari’s series, The Commissioned Paintings

POINTING.

John Baldessari’s The Commissioned Paintings center the gesture known as “pointing,” which also happens to play a central role in the the developmental tests used to diagnose children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Al Held said that “all conceptual art is just pointing at things.”

It is said that young autists do not point to things that they desire.

It is said that pointing is part of pre-verbal language that begins in the first years of life, prior to the acquisition of words.

At what point does the conceptualization of the gesture becomes the gaze?

John Baldessari, Flying Saucer: Rainbow/Two Cyclists/Dog/Gorilla and Bananas/Chaotic Situation/Couple/Tortoise/Gunman(Fallen), 1992.

POINTLESS.

It is said that a raptor escaped from the NYC zoo and returned home a few weeks later only to due of a pigeon virus acquired in his ramblings outside the safety of the administered cage.

John Baldessari, Wrong, 1968.

THE POINTED FINGER OF JUDGEMENT.

Walter Benjamin said the “judging word expels the first human beings from paradise; they themselves have aroused it in accordance with the immutable law by which the judging word perishes - and expects its own awakening as the only, the deepest guilt.” The judging word returns in the affect of wretchedness: the plunging of guilt to the center of one’s being, leaving the person defined by that judging word. That judgement.

After devoting several notebook pages to a description of his writing desk, Franz Kafka must have paused and walked to the window. Surely two blankets of time passed in black boots. Maybe something involving a dog also happened. According to the next paragraph in his notebook, what he created is wretched:

“Wretched, wretched, and yet well intended. It's midnight after all, but considering that I'm very well rested, that can only serve as an excuse insofar as I wouldn't have written anything at all during the day. The burning lightbulb, the quiet apartment, the darkness outside, the last waking moments entitle me to write, even if it's the most wretched stuff. And I hastily make use of this right. This is just who I am.”

One who identifies with his creation may be damned by its judgement. While “its” may include the judgement of others, the most devastating judgement is that of the raven perched on one’s shoulder, urging you to finish the manuscripts with the help of a blowtorch.

Wretched the feeling of wronging the subject or failing the object.

Grotesque the shame upon encountering the ill-depicted desk.

Miserable the instant when passing the hallway mirror and noting the WRONG writ large on the forehead.

John Baldessari, For Barbara Rose, 1966–68.

POINTING WITH POSTAGE.

Little Ella, whatever do you look like, I've already forgotten you so completely that it's as if I'd never patted you.
Best Regards

Yours, Franz.

— Kafka’s first postcard, addressed to his younger sister

John Baldessari, Goya Series: This, That, or the Other, 1997.

PROJECTED POINT.

What follows is one of the unwritten stories that Kafka told Oskar Baum that “he had no hope, or even intention, of ever carrying out,” as recorded by Baum, who could be therefore be accused of doing something akin to telling it:

A man wants to create the possibility of a social event that tales place without anyone being invited. People see and speak to and and serve one another without knowing each other. It a a banquet where everyone can eat according to his taste without imposing on anyone else. Each person can arrive and leave whenever he pleases, he has no obligations to the host, and yet the host is always genuinely pleased to see him. When the man finally succeeds in executing his absurd idea, the reader recognizes that this attempt to rescue people from their solitude has in the end only produced— the invention of the coffeehouse.

Kafka’s unwritten stories differ from “projected works” in that they are utterly hopeless. They inhabit a timbre of hopelessness unique to Kafka in that they lack the proper ambition towards fruition. The singular instant of their projection is the entire point.

John Baldessari, Emoji Series: INT. BUSCH’S JEWELRY STORE – DAY MICHAEL Lugubrious movies of lost love, 2017.

TURNING POINT.

According to Gershom Scholem, the year 1921 marked “a turning point” in Walter Benjamin's life. Part of this turn was political in that “Critique of Violence” drew on Georges Sorel’s work to think about myth, religion, the law, and politics. The Weisse Blätter originally solicited the essay only to turn it down. Nevertheless, “Critique” appeared (awkwardly) in a sociological journal that same year.

Scholem said Benjamin “also tried hard to place his review of Bloch's book, of which he sent me a copy.” Scholem said Benjamin didn’t succeed in getting his review placed “due to the fact that this rather long essay was couched in such esoteric terms that the critic's own views— which were, after all, what mattered to the editors—remained virtually concealed.”

Scholem said the political was personal and the turning point couldn’t escape this imbrication. As Scholem told it:

In April 1921 the disintegration of Walter's and Dora's marriage became evident, and I was confronted with it during my visit. Between July 1919 and April 1921 I had known nothing about its status and had no idea of the extent of the deterioration of their relationship. Only when the explosion was already at hand (and afterward) did I learn about it in conversations with Dora. When Ernst Schoen renewed his amicable relationship with Walter and Dora in the winter months of 1921, Dora fell madly in love with him and for a few months was in an altogether euphoric mood. She discussed this quite openly with Walter. In April, the sister of his school friend Alfred Cohn, Jula Cohn, with whom Walter and Dora were already friends in the Youth Movement and before their departure for Switzerland (though I am not sure how close the friendship was) came to Berlin, and Benjamin saw her again for the first time in five years. He developed a passionate attachment to her and probably plunged her into confusion for some time before she realized that she could not commit herself to him. There developed a situation which, to the extent that I was able to understand it, corresponded to the one in Goethe's novel Elective Affinities.

When I came to Berlin, Walter and Dora let me in on this state of affairs and asked me to counsel and assist them as a friend in a situation in which both were considering marriage to someone else. Neither marriage materialized, but with this crisis the dissolution of Benjamin's marriage had entered an acute stage. That summer was a period of great tension and expectations. Both of them were convinced they had now presenced the love of their lives. The process that began at this time lasted for two years, and during that period Walter and Dora resumed their marital relationship from time to time, until from 1923 on they lived together only as friends, primarily for the sake of Stefan, whose development Walter followed with great interest, but presumably out of financial considerations as well. In the following years, until their divorce, this situation remained unchanged and was interrupted only by Walter's long trips and by periods in which he took a separate room for himself. From then on they went their separate ways, but they discussed with each other everything that affected them.

In the critical months when their marriage was beginning to break up they both, as far as I was able to witness, acted with a touching and loving friendliness toward each other. I never saw either treat the other person with such infinite considerateness and profound understanding as in those April days and the following year. It was as though each was afraid of hurting the other person, as though the demon that occasionally possessed Walter and manifested itself in despotic behavior and claims had completely left him under these somewhat fantastic conditions.  My encounters in those days with them and Ernst Schoen—Dora came to Munich with him for a few days on her way to Breitenstein on the Semmering—are among the most beautiful that I remember.

During my remaining period in Germany, Dora was still greatly attached to Walter, and yet she started speaking about him in a new tone. Not that she doubted his gifts and his genius that meant so much to her, but she began to speak about features that had never before been voiced between us, including her experiences in the marriage. She labeled Walter a person suffering from an obsessive-compulsive neurosis, and this came as a surprise to me, for both of them had great reservations about psychiatric terminology. Later I heard this term from her on a number of other occasions, though I could not really corroborate this diagnosis on the basis of my own experience. Dora, a very sensuous woman, said that Walter's intellectuality impeded his libido. Breaking away from his intellectual sphere, to which she was to remain attached for a long time to come, proved very difficult for her and brought about a radical change in her life.

Later I spoke with several other women who personally knew Walter Benjamin very well, including one to whom he proposed marriage in 1932. They all emphasized that Benjamin was not attractive to them as a man, no matter how impressed or even enchanted they were with his intellect and his conversation. One of his close acquaintances told me that for her and her female friends he had not even existed as a man, that it had never even occurred to them that he had that dimension as well. “Walter was, so to speak, incorporeal.” Was the reason for this some lack of vitality, as it seemed to many, or was it a convolution of his vitality (which often enough burst forth in those years) with his altogether metaphysical orientation that gained him the reputation of being a withdrawn person?

Scholem pointed to Benjamin’s character as the source of his personal failings. This pointing grew more vociferous after his friend’s sudden death. Perhaps it is beside the point to wonder if Scholem envied Benjamin’s inability to commit to ideology, given Scholem’s own tendency to commit himself things that felt like popular movements. Unlike Benjamin, Scholem took himself to be “going somewhere,” and the sheer fact of his goingness enabled him to commit to Zionism without entirely subscribing to its tenets. Like many intellectuals, Scholem wanted to be famous. Unfortunately, Arendt (the woman whom he alleged to be a “self-hating Jew” in diaspora publications) believed Benjamin’s writing deserved be to be read. And she had considered Scholem to be a friend. In a strange turn of events, the man who was going nowhere wound up being translated into English while the man with a pronounced sense of destination lingered on university shelves to emerge, however briefly, at parties and social events during the era I call My Time Among the Straussians.

ONE POINT.

At one point, Benjamin said that "to be in the possession of truth is sufficient justification for one's claim to a living.”

According to Kafka, one of the compartments in his writing desk contained the following: “old papers that I would have thrown away long ago if I had a wastepaper basket, pencils with broken-off points, an empty matchbox, a paperweight from Karlsbad, a ruler with an edge that would be too bumpy even for a country road, a lot of collar buttons, dull razor blades (the world has no place for them), tie clips, and yet another heavy iron paperweight.”

The broken-off points strike me as the most interesting ones.

*

Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds. Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Northwestern Univ. Press, 2011)
Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (NYRB Classics)
Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore,” New German Critique, no. 39 (Fall 1986)
Walter Benjamin, “On language as such and on the language of man”

"Baudelaire" by Delmore Schwartz

“the withness of the body”

— Delmore Schwartz’s epigraph to the poem “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me”

BAUDELAIRE

When I fall asleep, and even during sleep, 
I hear, quite distinctly, voices speaking 
Whole phrases, commonplace and trivial, 
Having no relation to my affairs.

Dear Mother, is any time left to us
In which to be happy? My debts are immense.
My bank account is subject to the court’s judgment. 
I know nothing. I cannot know anything.
I have lost the ability to make an effort.
But now as before my love for you increases.
You are always armed to stone me, always:
It is true. It dates from childhood.

For the first time in my long life
I am almost happy. The book, almost finished, 
Almost seems good. It will endure, a monument 
To my obsessions, my hatred, my disgust.

Debts and inquietude persist and weaken me. 
Satan glides before me, saying sweetly: 
“Rest for a day! You can rest and play today. 
Tonight you will work.” When night comes, 
My mind, terrified by the arrears,
Bored by sadness, paralyzed by impotence, 
Promises: “Tomorrow: I will tomorrow.” 
Tomorrow the same comedy enacts itself
With the same resolution, the same weakness.

I am sick of this life of furnished rooms.
I am sick of having colds and headaches:
You know my strange life. Every day brings
Its quota of wrath. You little know
A poet’s life, dear Mother: I must write poems, 
The most fatiguing of occupations.

I am sad this morning. Do not reproach me.
I write from a café near the post office,
Amid the click of billiard balls, the clatter of dishes, 
The pounding of my heart. I have been asked to write 
“A History of Caricature.” I have been asked to write 
“A History of Sculpture.” Shall I write a history
Of the caricatures of the sculptures of you in my heart?

Although it costs you countless agony,
Although you cannot believe it necessary,
And doubt that the sum is accurate,
Please send me money enough for at least three weeks.

“I think it is the year 1909.” The narrator is sitting in a darkened movie theatre, watching a newsreel of his parents as they stroll on the boardwalk at Coney Island, four years before his own birth. As the film unfolds, Schwartz listens to his father boast of how much money he has made, “exaggerating an amount which need not have been exaggerated,” and starts to weep, overcome by his father’s suspicion that “actualities somehow fall short, no matter how fine they are.” The son, transfixed by the tragedy unfolding before his eyes—his parents’ unhappy marriage, his father’s lost fortune in real estate, his mother’s lonely widowhood—leaps up from his seat in the darkened theatre at the very moment his father is about to propose to his mother and shouts, “Don’t do it! It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.”

— James Atlas recounting Schwartz’s short story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”

It was pleasant to learn that you expected our correspondence to be read in the international salons and boudoirs of the future. Do you think they will be able to distinguish between the obfuscations, mystifications, efforts at humor, and plain statements of fact? Will they recognize my primary feelings as a correspondent—the catacomb from which I write to you, seeking some compassion? Or will they just think that I am nasty, an over-eager clown, gauche, awkward, and bookish? Will they understand that I am always direct, open, friendly, simple and candid to the point of naivete until the ways of the fiendish world infuriate me and I am forced to be devious, suspicious, calculating, not that it does me any good anyway?

— Delmore Schwartz to James Lauglin, 1951

Much of the writing life occurs by chance. Someone knows someone who introduces someone to their agent. Someone works for the publisher of New Directions. Someone’s best friend knows the fiction editor at New Yorker. Being in the right place at the right time (usually NYC). Knowing the right people. Provoking the right editor. The unpredictable route to publication is rarely pure or uninflected by inner circles and networks. Meritocracy is our favorite lie, and we sustain it with a mixture of guilt and the particular sense of entitlement inherited as privilege.

Interviews ask us to consider the writing life, or to speak of our own, and the Archimedean point is a temptation, as the statue of eternity lures us with its smooth surface from the margins. The truth is that writing resembles death in that we never know when it will end the book we haven’t finished. Nor do we know if the book will live beyond us, or whether our unpublished books will fall into the hands of friends that have the time and energy to push them into the world. Luck, friendship, and uncertainty . . . It was Schwartz’s friend, Dwight Macdonald, who preserved the papers and random materials present in Schwartz’s hotel room at the time of his death— and this only occurred because Dwight’s son ran into the owner of a moving van company in a bar who informed him that the hotel room was being cleared.

*

Delmore Schwartz, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” (Partisan Review, Autumn 1937) — read by Lou Reed
Delmore Schwartz, “In the Naked Bed, In Plato’s Cave” (1967)
Delmore Schwartz, “The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me” (1967)
James Atlas, “Delmore Schwartz and the Biographer’s Obsession” (New Yorker, August 2017)
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

"The poet's eye obscenely seeing"

I am not interested in the prick per se. I am interested in prose.

— Wayne Koestenbaum, “Darling’s Prick”

First things first.

— David Shields, “Life Story”

“The ampersand originated as a ligature of the letters of the word et (Latin for ‘and’)”

“A KISSPROOF WORLD OF PLASTIC TOILETSEATS TAMPAX AND TAXIS”

Someone in the apartment to my left applies his drill to the wall in between us, forcing the hard buzz into the drift of my reading, altering the smooth of images, and I am reminded of how perception in poetry depends on pacing, on the rate of movement and the appearance of speed bumps, sirens, pauses.

It is morning. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind drags its “drunk rooftops” into the light. “The poet’s eye obscenely seeing” — tracking, collecting, studying — “hot legs and rosebud breasts”…

The teens are among the sunbathers today, their voices retreating as they move towards the beach; a clump of busy vowels to which no consonant can cling by the time the teens’ shout ascends to where I stand, watching, from the balcony. Ferlinghetti builds from association and accumulation: the images link to each other mnemonically, like the simple dogs and cats on those flashcards once used to teach phonics.

I don’t know if phonics gets taught anymore in this land where lifestyle has become a religion. The joggers return from their runs, sweat laureling their foreheads as if to regale a moment of glory before they reenter the world of their ordinary lives, and the chaotic routines of family. These joggers whom I will never understand— (What is there to understand about humans who run in circles, after having already admitted to themselves that they want to leave, and going so far as to purchase uniforms and expensive gear in pursuit of this goal but then refusing to commit to the continuance of that gesture, electing for a ‘daily run’ over the uncertain marvel of running away completely?) — wear that halo of sweat with its undertones of labor and industry alongside “all the other fatal shorn-up fragments”

and its trees full of mysteries
and its Sunday parks and speechless statues
and its America

And this anaphora of “ands” turned into ampersands at sunset when I read a poem by Lucy Brock-Broido tweeted by a a fellow ‘American’ on a day when many Americans had planned their Labor Day weekends to coincide with the strenuous accomplishments of Self-Care alongside Family-Time, and the dash attempted to join unlike objects made poetry feel imperative to me, despite the distracting Ameri-can, the beat of that Ameri-can-can, the cancan of demands associated with national holidays in late capitalism.

“& ALREADY I’M ALONE”

Maybe I was relieved to find Brock-Broido’s speaker announcing her condition of aloneness at the outset of the poem, telling us that she is alone

Listening to the lovers next door
Like Patsy Cline & her Man
Throwing barebacked wooden furniture
Like the real-life bicker of true love.

Two similes shoved up against each other violently, like a scene being remembered from a movie, a superposition insisting on similarity, investing in repetition, indulging the interpretive muscle known as loneliness, a muscle that works itself into a frenzy and then begins to hurt. Humans are the creatures for which that hurt signifies development, or the making of new muscles through repetitive motions, all this labor being the ride involved in fantasizing, that imaginative bench-pressing of other possibilities, taking us directly to the poem’s next moment:

I love that hands-on
Die-while-you’re-dark-haired-still
& young, fists curled to desire,
Take Me kind of love.

The emblems & stereotypes & associations are freely given here: her Man, the one that Loretta Lynn might stand by in a different song that has its own movie, rubs shoulders with the expression of abandon that communicates a demand, namely, Take Me. And an entire line linked up by that stitchmark of dashes which ties the urgency of temporality to not having grey hair, or not yet — then pausing at the line break which is (maybe) startled by that “still” — since it could insinuate a still-life, a genre of painted objects frozen in their domestic scenes like pears on a kitchen table . Or else a film still, ripped from the motion of moments galloping forward on a screen until the speaker freezes a frame and frees it from time’s ineluctable Progress in order to apply a Future, which is to say, a wild guess about else’s, in thrall to the Otherwise, wherein what comes next — “They’ll make love without apology”— leaves the knots unresolved between them. And it is precisely this irresolution which the poem presses (where to press is to apply pressure) across the cultural referents, building its stride from the discord between images and the sputters of mind remembering — recognizing the syntax of lovers as a series of sounds that require reading — and requiring the speaker to build from association, layering the lines with anaphora of ampersands, the & and & and & like soft pleas whispered into a phone receiver at midnight, a plea that reminds me of precisely what the motorist in Italo Calvino’s short story, “The Adventure of the Motorist,” sought to avoid when barreling down the highway to reach his lover’s home after an argument, speaking only the language of speed and momentum, the pure directionality of driving towards a destination unimpeded by the details of hurt feelings and recriminations that mobilize the plea, that particularly desperate form of desire given to language and lovers and midnight.

Where does that leave the speaker of Brock-Broido’s “Autobiography”?

& I’ll be left to the afternoon
& the autoerotic sound of my American voice
Getting it all down.

The ampersand’s logogram (&) looks nearly unrecognizable in italics (&,) — a reminder that signs depend on one’s familiarity with typeface and font and script, all of which begs the condition of recognition in semiotics.

“The only situation I can accept is this transformation of ourselves into the message of ourselves,” says Calvino’s motorist, intent on narrating the rain on the windshield as he careens down the dark highway towards the furious and wounded beloved or the “bicker” of thrown furniture and naked bodies collapsing into one another between invectives, moral claims, objections, fatal shorn-up fragments, and brilliant scenes they remember from screens.

*

Alessandro Sbordoni, “Anti-Hauntology & the Semiotics of the End” (&&&)
John Berger, Understanding a Photograph (Penguin Books)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind (New Directions)
Lucy Brock-Broido, “Autobiography”
Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves (New Directions)
Phil Collins, “A Groovy Kind of Love” (alternately, see Brock-Broido’s “Take Me kind of love”)

Rilke and Van Etten: Uncanny killings.

In India, they write the title of a book at the end.

— Eliot Weinberger, “Dream of India”

1

A golden oldie of sorts, this song by Sharon Van Etten titled “Your Love Is Killing Me”— with its demands that double as supplications. As in “Break my legs so I won't walk to you” and “Cut my tongue so I can't talk to you” and “Burn my skin so I can't feel you” and “Stab my eyes so I can't see'.” The end rhymes are gratuitous; the long vowels extended through vocals.

Van Etten’s voice rises and falls but goes nowhere, for there is nowhere to go: the song, itself, stipulates the field. She sings it hauntingly: “You tell me that you like it / Your love is killing me.” The extension of the long-i sound in “like” pulls its bow across the lyrics that follow. These two lines — a morsel, merely, with so much happening in the breath between them, a fingertip touching the keys differently, pressing down on the pronouns with varying emphases, first the it then the your then the me, before going back to play the monosyllabic verbs: tell, like, love, kill.

2

“Rainer Maria Rilke hesitates whether to abandon a bar of soap in a hotel room,” Dennis Silk recollects in “The Marionette Theater.” He leaves this fragment tucked between the abandonment of animism and Gilles de Rais’ confession, which leads the Bishop of Nantes to cover the crucifix with a protective piece of cloth.

3

In 1895, Oscar Wilde was on trial for “lewd and immoral behavior.” At one point in the interrogation, the Court accused him of writing ‘homosexual’ ‘nonfiction’; one of his letters to Lord Alfred Douglas was submitted as evidence. A snapshot of that moment in time, as preserved in archives:

COURT: Where was Lord Alfred Douglas staying when you wrote that letter to him?

WILDE: At the Savoy, and I was at the Babbacombe.

COURT: It was a letter in answer to something he had sent you?

WILDE: Yes, a poem.

COURT: Mr. Wilde, why should a man your age address a boy nearly twenty years younger as ‘My Own Boy’?

WILDE: I was fond of him; I have always been fond of him.

COURT: Do you adore him?

WILDE: No, but I have always liked him. I think it is a beautiful letter. It is a poem. I was not writing an ordinary letter. You might as well cross-examine me as to whether a sonnet of Shakespeare were proper.

COURT: Apart from art, Mr. Wilde?

WILDE: I cannot answer apart from art.

4

“It is you who know how to hear it in the music so late in the night,” Theresa Hak Kyung Cha wrote in the ‘Erato: Love Poetry’ section of Dictee/Diptych.

“Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth,” Philip Larkin admitted to John Haffenden.

Gerald Manley Hopkins only published a single poem during his life. Ralph Ellison’s follow-up novel to Invisible Man burnt up in a fire and was never brought back to life. Joan Mitchell painted La Vie En Rose (1979) to mark the end of her long, amorous relationship with Jean-Peal Riopelle, who absconded with their dogsitter.

5

6

In a notebook entry dated 1783, Joseph Joubert said those who want to know “how thought functions” should “read the poets,” for poets are the types of humans who formed language and it is “up to philosophers to reform them.”

A poem by Emily Skillings titled “Emily”; a line that struck me: “I do the things I have chosen in the lack.”

“What will we do to disappear?” said Maurice Blanchot, reading aloud the essay he’d written about how writing creates the author while also destroying him.

J. L. Austin adjusted his trousers and trolled himself in the mirror of the library restroom. Look, he said: “When you say ‘It’s real’ — what exactly are you saying it isn’t?”

7

Joking about alliterative poop and pigeons with Radu only to pause at the end of “Throw the Emptiness Out of Your Arms: Rilke’s Doctrine of Nonposessive Love,” an essay by William Gass that concludes by quoting a poem sent by Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salome:

Put my eyes out: I can still see;
slam my ears shut: I can still hear,
walk without feet to where you were,
and tongueless, speak you into being.
Snap off my arms: I’ll hold you hard
in my heart’s longing like a fist;
halt that, my brain will do its beating,
and if you set this mind of mine aflame,
then on my blood I’ll carry you away.

And so, to quote Alexander Pope: “the sound must seem an echo to the sense.”

*

Emily Skillings, “Emily”
J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia
Joan Mitchell, La Vie En Rose (1979)
Sharon Van Etten, “Your Love Is Killing Me”
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee/Diptych
William Gass, “Throw the Emptiness Out of Your Arms: Rilke’s Doctrine of Nonposessive Love”