The list of "certain questions of a theological nature" from Molloy.

Matt Seidel said Molloy was Samuel Beckett’s “great road novel,” and I think it is, since every road novel runs the route of the mind traveling back to childhood, encountering himself in the daydreaming child who wanders around the village looking for a bicycle. Even if the father is Penelope and the son is Odysseus.

There is much to be said of the home-going scenes, particularly when the son makes a conscious effort to ignore the sirens of the field, namely the "friends in human shape and the phantoms of the dead that tried to prevent" him from returning. On this long walk, the young son cogitates and comes up with a list of questions. Here is the passage:

But I shall not dwell upon this journey home, its furies and treacheries. And I shall pass over in silence the fiends in human shape and the phantoms of the dead that tried to prevent me from getting home, in obedience to Youdi's command.

But one or two words nevertheless, for my own edification and to prepare my soul to make an end. To begin with my rare thoughts.

Certain questions of a theological nature preoccupied me strangely.

As for example,

1. What value is to be attached to the theory that Eve sprang, not from Adam's rib, but from a tumor in the fat of his leg (arse?)?

2. Did the serpent crawl or, as Comestor affirms, walk upright?

3. Did Mary conceive through the ear, as Augustine and Adobard assert?

4. What is one to think of the Irish oath sworn by the natives with the right hand on the relics of the saints and the left on the virile member?

5. Does nature observe the sabbath?

6. Is it true that the devils do not feel the pains of hell?

7. The algebraic theology of Craig. What is one to think of this?

8. Is it true that the infant Saint-Roch refused suck on Wednesdays and Fridays?

9. What is one to think of the excommunication of vermin in the sixteenth century?

10. Is one to approve of the Italian cobbler Lovat who, having cut off his testicles, crucified himself?

11. What was God doing with himself before the creation?

12. Might not the beatific vision become a source of boredom, in the long run?

13. Is it true that Judas' torments are suspended on Saturdays?

14. What if the mass for the dead were read over the living?

And I recited the pretty quietist Pater, Our Father who art no more in heaven than on earth or in hell, I neither want nor desire that thy name be hallowed, thou knowest best what suits thee. Etc. The middle and the end are very pretty.

It was in this frivolous and charming world that I took refuge, when my cup ran over.

But I asked myself other questions concerning me perhaps more closely. As for example,

1. Why had I not borrowed a few shillings from Gaber?

2. Why had I obeyed the order to go home?

3. What had become of Molloy?

4. Same question for me.

5. What would become of me?

6. Same question for my son.

7. Was his mother in heaven?

8. Same question for my mother.

9. Would I go to heaven?

10. Would we all meet again in heaven one day, I, my mother, my son, his mother, Youdi, Gaber, Molloy, his mother, Yerk, Murphy, Watt, Camier and the rest?

11. What had become of my hens, my bees? Was my grey hen still living?

12. Zulu, the Elsner sisters, were they still living?

13. Was Youdi's business address still 8, Acacia Square? What if I wrote to him? What if I went to see him? I would explain to him. What would I explain to him? I would crave his forgiveness. Forgiveness for what?

14. Was not the winter exceptionally severe?

15. How long had I gone now without either confession or communion?

16. What was the name of the martyr who, being in prison, loaded with chains, covered with wounds and vermin, unable to stir, celebrated the consecration on his stomach and gave himself absolution?

17. What would I do until my death? Was there no means of hastening this, without falling into a state of sin?

Samuel Beckett. "Molloy." The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett: Volume II: 160-162.

A poem and 2 things: Louise Bogan's "Words for Departure"

Only music can create an indestructible complicity between two persons. A passion is perishable, it decays like everything that part takes of life, whereas music is of an essence superior to life and, of course, to death.  

—- Emil Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations

Emil Cioran calls it sublimity. Across decades of words and texts, music shuts him up and pours the ineffable all over his head.

There’s a part in Anathemas and Admirations where Cioran sits inside the stone womb (or the tomb-birthing chapel) of Saint-Severin and listens to an organist playing through Bach's fugues, calling this moment "the refutation of all my anathemas." 

Like music, poetry is composed from sound and silence, two materials which invoke each other and are figured in different ways. Because the resonant sound of a text is subjective, depending on the reader's relationship to sound, the text exists in relationship to the reader's sonic experience. 

"Mute" suggests an inability to speak, or a state of speechlessness which may be imposed from the outside or chosen as a response. But to be muted is to be rendered inaudible, to have one's volume turned down. To say that 'I muted myself' is jarring, since the conventional use of a muted female involves being rendered silent, and then being determined to be complicit in that silence, insinuating that  muteness, as a condition, inscribes the power of the world over the sound one can make. Watching someone go rapt over music is like watching their face during sex, or realizing they love it.

Thelonious Monk and Charlie Rouse playing Epistropy on my wedding dress.

WORDS FOR DEPARTURE

 Louise Bogan

Nothing was remembered, nothing forgotten.
When we awoke, wagons were passing on the warm summer pavements,
The window-sills were wet from rain in the night,
Birds scattered and settled over chimneypots
As among grotesque trees.

Nothing was accepted, nothing looked beyond.
Slight-voiced bells separated hour from hour,
The afternoon sifted coolness
And people drew together in streets becoming deserted.
There was a moon, and light in a shop-front,
And dusk falling like precipitous water.

Hand clasped hand
Forehead still bowed to forehead—
Nothing was lost, nothing possessed
There was no gift nor denial.

2.

I have remembered you.
You were not the town visited once,
Nor the road falling behind running feet.

You were as awkward as flesh
And lighter than frost or ashes.

You were the rind,
And the white-juiced apple,
The song, and the words waiting for music.

3.

You have learned the beginning;
Go from mine to the other.

Be together; eat, dance, despair,
Sleep, be threatened, endure.
You will know the way of that.

But at the end, be insolent;
Be absurd—strike the thing short off;
Be mad—only do not let talk
Wear the bloom from silence.

And go away without fire or lantern
Let there be some uncertainty about your departure.

Anna Karina and Jean-Luc Godard.

Sexexistence, a pseudo-archaelogy.

Paris, 2000. “Pompéi—villa du mystère en trop.”

While visiting Jean-Luc Nancy in the year 2000, François Martin noticed a patch of water damage on his wall. The two men must have chatted briefly about the shape of the damage before Martin picked up some graphite and sketched this figure over the damaged surface. At some point before the wall was re-plastered, Jean-Luc took a photo of François’ drawing and titled it, Pompéi—villa du mystère en trop. This title could refer perhaps to original drawing or its preservation in the photo.

Hamburg, May 2015.

Jean-Luc Nancy gives a lecture that will be titled “Sexistenz”. This title plays on the existenz of existentialism.

“What is made, then, when we make love?” he asks rhetorically. “We make nothing in the sense of production (if a child results, whether or not he or she is considered a production, that child is not love as such, which can very well be completely absent).” What we make is murky.

“We make in the sense of performing an act, but the designated act is not an act; it is a sentiment, a disposition, the arousal of relation that reaches beyond itself toward something that seems destined either to renew it indefinitely or to surpass it in an embrace where it concludes without us knowing how to interpret that sense of concluding,” Jean-Luc continues. The work of performance seems to be accomplished by the statement itself.

Then:

Expression indicates an effectiveness of love that no declaration, no demonstration, no testimony can claim to convey. This is why, in a sense, it is not impossible to make love outside the limited sense of a sexual relation: the exchange of looks, of such and such contact, of words too that can venture into the terrain of this “making.”

For at least one thing is sure: love cannot merely be said; even its saying must be a doing.

He classifies “I love you” as a “performative” that “does what it says.” Under this condition, the statement does all the work. A physical embrace “only adds an excess saying, performing its own limit.” The limit of the limitation is the invisible constraint.

“E. M.” French.

“(Related question: in how many languages does one say, more or less literally, make love?)”

—- Jean-Luc Nancy, “Sexistenz”

Unlike French, Romanian is a minor language. This was unbearable to Emil Cioran. Unbearable to exist in a language that could not contest its own disappearance. Unbearable to be born into this tongue that marked itself insignificant. In a letter to a friend, Emil decided he would only use the Romanian language for cursing.

In Paris, E. M. (formerly Emil) vowed to marry a French woman who lacked any ties to Romania. By adopting a foreign tongue, Cioran planned to distance himself from the homeland-craziness associated with Romanian. "The acceptance of this linguistic discipline has moderated my delirium," he wrote. The voluptuary of exile would be his new belonging, but his point of origin would haunt him and inflect his writings. Fortunately, Simone Boue allowed the notorious pessimist to exert his charms on her, and became his official French wife. It is lovely when love works out that way.

Paris. March 5, 1944.

Georges Bataille reads "The Laughter of Nietzsche" aloud to a group of intellectuals. In this paper, he argues that Zarathustra made laughter sacred. Bataille quotes Nietszche: "to see the shipwreck of tragic figures, and to be able to laugh, in spite of the profound understanding, emotion, and sympathy. One feels, that is divine."

Hamburg, May 2015.

“If it can only be made, performed—which, of course, has nothing to do with what is called “sexual performance” (nothing except perhaps precisely the fact that this representation of performance, of perfection in making [love], and of the capacity to enjoy and to give enjoyment, must be related to this preeminence of making [love])—if, therefore, it can only be made and if perhaps even love with all its values can only be an act and a “work” in the sense that Christianity has given to this term, it is perhaps now necessary for us to try to think and say something about the actuality of this act,” Jean-Luc tells his audience.

This “actuality” — the sex— has been stifled and silenced by modesty in most cultures, an inhibition that Jean-Luc specifies as a “restraint in terms of what could never be shown or what could only be shown between the lovers doing it.” He then shifts to a quote from Emmanuel Levinas’ Eros, littérature et philosophie: Essais romanesques et politiques, notes philosophiques sur le thème d’éros, published two years prior, in 2013.

What is interesting about this book is the fact that its editors include a man and a woman, namely, Danielle Cohen-Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy, himself. The nature of this quotation gives it the aura of an inscription:

As Emmanuel Levinas writes in an isolated note: “Obscene: love that others make.”

Jean-Luc qualifies the note: “This also means that what we make is not obscene. However, in making it, we do not speak about it—or else what we say participates in the obscene, is an exclamation of the obscene.”

Thus, speech (or expression) is what renders the love we make obscene. A notion like this also parses the legal conceptions of pornography. Behind it lies the conception of sex as sacred. But that isn’t quite where Jean-Luc takes this. In fact, he will develop the sacred side in the book titled Sexistence, a title that shifts from the existential implications of that “z” into a longer meditation on embodiment and ecstasy.

1933 - 1947. German.

In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein worked through his earlier view that philosophy should be composed in the manner of a poem. He locates his thinking across time in relation to his own perspective, situating it with respect to past, future, or present thoughts. 

What changed between 1947 and his earlier writings? Alternately, what follows from this line written by Wittgenstein in 1933?

"For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot quite do what I would like to be able to do."

His statement is my question.

Hamburg, May 2015.

“Sex opens up the existent to an abyss and a violence that certainly do not deplete the deviating and exposed traits of existence,” Jean-Luc told his audience. What this abyss and violence do is “bring us to the border of a ‘making’ that essentially touches at the same time the dual beyond of the animal and the divine, two names that articulate nothing but existence as its own dehiscence, a sexistence.”

Dehiscence is “a partial or total separation of previously approximated wound edges, due to a failure of proper wound healing” that usually occurs 5 to 8 days following surgery when healing is still in the early stages. It is a failure to heal: a failure to adhere the edges. As one who lived with transplanted organs, Jean-Luc knew the failure to heal intimately. He knew it as someone knows the “gape” that Roland Barthes used to inscribe the erotic. The hole that needs sutures and seams.

I was thinking about seams today because one of the teens asked why I didn’t get my “scars fixed”. The question interests me in its aesthetic presumptions. "For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot quite do what I would like to be able to do."

Repetitio rerum: a removal and repetition of original founding acts which create the field for their continuation.

Italy. January 5, 1921.

Rainer Maria Rilke sends a letter to Inga Junghanns that speaks to the role names play in our memorial imaginaries:

... Yes, how curiously things do happen in life; were there not a bit of arrogance somewhere in it, one would indeed like very much to stand outside, confronting everything, that is, everything that occurs, so as surely not to lose anything—; one would then still remain fixed, perhaps for the first time really so, in the actual center of life, where everything comes together and has no name;— but then again, the names have bewitched us—the titles, the pretenses of life— because the whole is too infinite, and we recover by calling it for a while by the name of one love, much as it is just this impassioned restriction that puts us in the wrong, makes us guilty, kills us …

I don’t know when Herbert James Draper executed this study for The Lament for Icarus, but I am interested in what kills us. Or the ways time abolishes its possibility, whether through prophecy, apocalypse, or atrocity. There is something about flying that haunts the shape of a body in the air before the moment of impact. The memory of it feels absent, yet the traces are recognizable in my urges. This, too, is a history of the self that is forced to imagine what defines it.

Lived remembrance is never archival: it is discovery. The authentic historian is also a poet of precise imagining.

—- George Steiner

Charles Ives in 33 notes.

Happy birthday to American composer Charles Ives, who was born on this day in 1874, and who shared the career of insurance salesman with another American artist named Wallace Stevens.

Here is Ives' "Central Park in the Dark" from 1906.https://t.co/lgNxst4CPK

— Alina Stefanescu (@aliner) October 20, 2024

1. Cosmology

On October 20th, 1874, Charles Edward Ives entered the world via Danbury, Connecticut. He remained in this world for 79 years, during which he joined Wallace Stevens by turning the insurance salesman an alternate career for the American artist.

2. First memory

Among his first memories, Charles recollected his father, George Ives, standing in the rain outside their house, listening to church bells peal ring through the heavy air, his brow furrowed in concentration as he rushed back inside the house to duplicate the overtone structure on his piano. Again and again, his father went out to listen and came in to try to play what he had heard.

As a military band leader and lover of muses, George snatched melodies from the air and carried them home for experimentation and elucidation. These memories inspired Ives’ compositional practice. Drawing on the soundscapes of his Danbury childhood, Ives frequently snuck popular forms like ragtime, religious hymns, circus parades, folk songs, military marches, and patriotic anthems into his pieces.

3. Two variations on a river scene

In June 1908, the newly-married Charles Ives and Harmony Twichell, went for a hike while vacationing in the Berkshire Hills of New England. Two days later, still meditating on the ethereal landscape, Ives began sketching what would become the final movement of his orchestral tryptic, Three Places in New England (1914). He titled this third movement The Housatonic at Stockbridge, and it stretches from a luminous silence towards voices that shift in and out without announcing themselves, as if riding an eternal current.

Fragments of hymns like Isaac Woodbury’s "Dorrance" waft through the piece, giving it the feel of a sonic collage presaging John Cage’s The Idea of North.

Ives credited that “Sunday morning walk that Mrs. Ives and I took near Stockbridge, [Mass.,] the summer after we were married. We walked in the meadows along the river, and heard the distant singing from the church across the river. The mist had not entirely left the river bed, and the colors, the running water, the banks and elm trees were something that one would always remember.” After describing the scene, Ives added that “Robert Underwood Johnson, in his poem, ‘The Housatonic at Stockbridge,’ paints this scene beautifully.” In actuality, Johnson’s poem was titled “Ode to the Housatonic at Stockbridge,” and Ives returned to it in 1921, when he arranged this movement as a song for voice and piano with Johnson's text. Ives had an excerpt of the poem printed in the score of the original orchestral version. Here’s Housatonic at Stockbridge (1921) with Gilbert Kalish, piano and Jan DeGaetani, mezzo-soprano.

4. “The wrong way”

“Ives blasts in my head, and I can hear Ed’s voice chastising me about my lack of understanding of this great American music,” wrote the great Charles Bowden in what ended up being one of his final published essays, a piece that meets the desert and borders in Edward Abbey’s love for Ives’ compositions.

In a review of Jeremy Denk’s new Ives for NPR, Tom Huizenga says Ives “inherited” his zaniest ideas from his father, that “musical jack-of-all-trades … who instructed his son to sing songs in one key and play the accompaniment in another.” George Ives used to tell his son, “If you know how to write a fugue the right way, then I’m willing to have you try the wrong way.”

5. Motherwell’s monster

Motherwell dedicated the painting to Ives because he felt the composer understood the difficulty of making modern art that moves its audience without explaining why.

— Smithsonian

In 1959, Robert Motherwell painted Monster (for Charles Ives) while listening to Ives’ music. Drawn to the unexpected chords and musical phrasings, Motherwell opened himself to images and impressions inspired by the drifts towards atonality. According to the Smithsonian (where this work is currently held but not exhibited), the monstrous, threatening masses that punctuate Motherwell’s paintings “express his anxieties as an artist and as a witness to a violent century.” A few years earlier, Motherwell said that poets, composers, and artists were "ill at ease in the universe" and their creations intended to parse the ravine between loneliness and the living world.

Robert Motherwell, Monster (for Charles Ives), 1959,

6. String Quartet No. 2

The string quartet right from the beginning was always a... subtle medium for the expression of social relationships... The old image of... four civilized people talking to each other in terms that would not have been unfamiliar to philosophers of the Enlightenment. And whilst that of course is somewhat absurd from the present-day standpoint, and indeed was turned on its head by Charles Ives who had four very irascible characters climbing a mountain and shrieking at each other... It does seem to me there is something about the quartet which is inherently imbricated with what we understand human relationships to be on a highly evolved level.

— Brian Ferneyhough in documentation accompanying a recording of rehearsal of his own Sixth Quartet

It used to come over me — especially after coming from some of those nice Kneisel Quartet concerts—-that music had been, and still was, too much an emasculated art. Too much of what was easy and usual to play and to hear what was called beautiful, etc. — the same old even-vibration, Sybaritic apron-strings, keeping music too much tied to the old ladies. The string quartet music got more and more trite, weak, and effeminate. After one of those Kneisel Quartet concerts in the old Mendelssohn Hall, I started a string quartet score, half mad, half in fun, and half to try out, practice, and have some fun making those men fiddlers get up and do something like men.

—- Charles Ives of String Quartet No. 2 (in Memos)

"S[tring] Q[uartet] for 4 men—-who converse, discuss, argue (in re: 'Politick', fight, shake hands, shut up--then walk up the mountain side to view the firmament!"

—-Charles Ives, beneath the score's title

Supposedly, Ives started composing this string quartet as a 21-year-old student. The first movement, "Discussions," introduces the two violins, viola, and violoncello in a discursive motion.  The second movement, "Arguments," emerged from a 1907 sketch inspired by lively conversations and debates at "Poverty Flat," the apartment Ives shared with friends. The score includes quotations of Tchaikovsky, Brahms, and Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" theme. In these quotations of Romantics, Ives pushed back against the musical establishment who rejected him.  

Ives scores the second violin as a character named "Rollo." With [Andante emasculata / Slowly in an emasculated way],  the second violin, Rollo, steps in with these maudlin tonal candenzas that attempt to establish order among the arguing voices of the quartet by evoking traditional sentimentality. Then, after a few measures, we get [Allegro con fisto / Cheerfully with fist ] where other  instruments respond with a dissonant fff passage recalling the opening of the movement. This is followed by another slow, emasculated cadenza.

Notation: "Too hard to play, so it just can't be good music - Rollo."

The second movement shifts into the third movement with a brief, open-string pause designated by [Andante con scratchy (as tuning up) / Slowly like scratchy]  

Allegro con fistiswatto / fff "good place to stop - not end!"

The dissonant chords that open the third movement, "The Call of the Mountains,” don’t move at first. Although the music unfolds slowly, it soon gains momentum as a the furious tremolos intervene. Gradually, the instruments strain to the upper limits of their registers as the four ascend the mountain.

I love how this quartet ends without giving the audience anything except a queer presentiment of metaphysical mystery. It is unsettling and inexplicable, and keyed to Ives’ own disgust for the perfect composure of music society led him to rant against the string quartet’s formal colloquy of bourgeois patronage—- "a whole evening of mellifluous sounds, perfect cadences, perfect ladies, perfect programs, and not a dissonant cuss word to stop the anemia and beauty."

Through the character of Rollo, Ives lambasted the mainstream critics and musical media. In this, his Rollo reminds me a bit of a persona invented by composer Claude Debussy when he found himself in dire need of money and began writing musical critique under the pen name “Monsieur Croche” (i.e. Mr. Quarter-note). After his death, Debussy’s criticism was collected and published as Monsieur Croche, Antidilettante.

I’ve written a whole series of poems based on Ives’ string quartet, but two have been published, thus must I mortify the reader by sharing them.

First published in Air/light, a journal I adore. 

First published in Air/light, a journal I adore, edited by David Ulin whom I deeply admire.

7. Inventory in which each statement begins with Ives:

1. “Was a spikey and outspoken man” who “hated what he called 'pretty music'.”

2. Was obsessed with Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean, sneaking it into his compositions again and again, much as Mahler did with those ghostly parade-trumpet calls.

3. Composed his most well-known works from 1896 to 1921 and had pieces performed as early as 1925.

4. Composed Study No. 21: Some Southpaw Pitching (1918–19) for piano in an effort to put baseball to music.

5. Was not “widely known” until 1939, despite his prodigous output.

6. Wrote four symphonies, the third of which—Symphony No. 3—won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize.

7. Left us with unconventional notation, often omitting key, time signatures, and bar lines.

Charles Ives in his tweed. 

8. Of free dissonance

In 1919 or 1920, Charles first heard Igor Stravinsky's The Firebird, and found it lacking. "The idea of a phrase, usually a small one, was good enough, and interesting in itself, but he kept it going over and over and it got tiresome," Ives said of Stravinsky. "It reminded me of something I had heard of Ravel, whose music is of a kind I cannot stand: weak, morbid and monotonous; pleasing enough, if you want to be pleased."

“He experimented with atonality way before Schoenberg—-and with free dissonance way before Stravinsky—- and with quarter-tones way before Alois Haba—- and with multiple rhythms, even today so complicated they can hardly be performed accurately,” conductor Leonard Bernstein said of Ives. Despite being an insurance salesman, Ives stood apart from other pioneering composers in that his “whole real life was composing music.”

9. Of foot-notes

Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ives scorned footnotes. The 1920 publication of his Essays Before A Sonata includes a total of five in a work built on quotations. However, the book begins with the first and only “Introductory Footnote” I have ever read, authored by Ives himself, informing us, his readers, that:

These prefatory essays were written by the composer for those who can't stand his music—and the music for those who can't stand his essays; to those who can't stand either, the whole is respectfully dedicated.

10. Of property and various local characters buried in Ives’ work

Sam Staples was a Concord "character" who rose from hustler and barkeeper to constable, and later Representative in the General Court. He was Thoreau's jailer in 1846 when Thoreau refused to pay his poll-tax in protest against the war with Mexico, and later, his friend and rodsman on surveying expeditions.

While meditating on the "perversion" occasioned by property, Ives thought of Sam Staples in an essay on Thoreau:

It is conceivable that Thoreau, to the consternation of the richest members of the Bolshevik and Bourgeois, would propose a policy of liberation, a policy of a limited personal property right" on the ground that congestion of personal property tends to limit the progress of the soul (as well as the progress of the stomach) — letting the economic noise thereupon take care of itself — for dissonances are becoming beautiful — and do not the same waters that roar in a storm take care of the eventual calm? This limit of property would be determined not by the voice of the majority but by the brain of the majority under a government limited to no national boundaries. "The government of the world I live in is not framed in after-dinner conversation" around a table in a capital city, for there is no capital— a government of principles not parties; of a few fundamental truths and not of many political expediencies — a government conducted by virtuous leaders, for it will be led by all, for all are virtuous, as then their "innate virtue" will no more be perverted by unnatural institutions. This will not be a millennium but a practical and possible application of uncommon common sense. For is it not sense, common or otherwise, for Nature (to want) to hand back the earth to those to whom it belongs— that is, to those who have to live on it?

You can also get a sense of Ives’ non-existent citation strategy here, as he moves between quoting Thoreau to invoking others while ultimately landing on his lifetime credo, namely, “dissonances are becoming beautiful.”

11. Piano Sonata No.2, Concord, Mass., 1840–60

How far is anyone justified, be he an authority or a layman, in expressing or trying to express in terms of music (in sounds, if you like) the value of anything, material, moral, intellectual, or spiritual, which is usually expressed in terms other than music?

— Charles Ives’ opening salvo in Essays Before a Sonata

The Piano Sonata No.2, Concord, Mass., 1840–60 (commonly known as the Concord Sonata) is one of Ives’ best-known pieces. Although some parts of it were sketched in 1904, Ives didn’t really start working on it until 1911, finally completing the work in 1915. The Concord Sonata was first published in 1919 with a second, revised, edition appearing in 1947 (the one that gets used today).

Just before the original Concord Sonata was published, Ives published a book titled Essays Before a Sonata detailing the scope and reverie of his work. The Sonata was an "impression of the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Massachusetts of over a half century ago,” wrote Ives, and the conveyance of this transcendentalist spirit “is undertaken in impressionistic pictures of Emerson and Thoreau, a sketch of the Alcotts, and a scherzo supposed to reflect a lighter quality which is often found in the fantastic side of Hawthorne."

In 2012, a reprint of the original, uncorrected 1920 edition was published, including Essays before a Sonata and with an added introductory essay by the New England Conservatory's Stephen Drury. It is a gold mine for lovers of Ives. More than anything, one can hear Ives’ fascination with the Concord Transcendentalists intimately inscribed in the score. Each of the four movements represents a particular figure from local history.

0:00 - I. "Emerson" (after Ralph Waldo Emerson)

16:23 - II. "Hawthorne" (after Nathaniel Hawthorne)

29:21 - III. "The Alcotts" (after Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott)

35:29 - IV. "Thoreau" (after Henry David Thoreau)

Ives’ experimental tendencies are on full display, as much Concard Sonata is written without bar lines, despite the advanced harmonic structure.

12. First movement: “Emerson”

“. . it [wisdom] enveloped us in dull, melancholy days, for in days of cheerful labor."

—- Ralph Waldo Emerson, final sentence of "Nature"

To Ives, both Emerson to Beethoven are “invaders of the unknown.” He claims this in Essays just before explaining that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony rouses us with a transcendent call to action “above the relentlessness of fate knocking at the door, above the greater human-message of destiny, and strives to bring it towards the spiritual message of Emerson’s revelations, the Soul of humanity knocking at the door of the Divine mysteries.” This is why the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth are quoted in each of the Concord Sonata’s four movements, serving as quotational anchors that shape harmonies and assert sonic and gestural pivots within the melodic narrative.

Where Ives reads Emerson well is in his commitment to thinking towards truth rather than crowning himself as its inventor. Getting messy on the back roads of the mind requires imagination, and Ives agrees with Emerson’s view that imagination is critical to understanding. “To think hard and deeply and to say what is thought, regardless of consequences, may produce a first impression, either of great translucence, or of great muddiness, but in the latter there may be hidden possibilities,” Ives wrote, continuing:

Some accuse Brahms' orchestration of being muddy. This may be a good name for a first impression of it. But if it should seem less so, he might not be saying what he thought. The mud may be a form of sincerity which demands that the heart be translated, rather than handed around through the pit. A clearer scoring might have lowered the thought.

This line—-a clearer scoring might have lowered the thought— applies to Ives’ compositions— while the reference to mud as a form of sincerity calls to mind how little we know of each other. Both convention and the medium of language often overdetermine our reading of a speaker’s intent. Emerson lingers on this thought as well, lamenting what conversation presumes of sincerity. "How sincere and confidential we can be, saying all that lies in the mind, and yet go away feeling that all is yet unsaid, from the incapacity of the parties to know each other, although they use the same words!” Emerson exclaims. “My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation until all is said which words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption." All the talk in the world won’t bring us closer to understanding one another if our goal is to merely listen rather than engage the labor of fathoming. For Emerson, no friendship could deliver a supernal knowing of the other: humans remained strangers in the land of the friend’s mind.

As an “impressionistic picture” of Emerson, the first movement has patches that feel as if the composer didn’t bother to make them cohere. This, too, seems intentional, since Ives writes in the Essays:

Carlyle told Emerson that some of his paragraphs didn't cohere. Emerson wrote by sentences or phrases, rather than by logical sequence. His underlying plan of work seems based on the large unity of a series of particular aspects of a subject, rather than on the continuity of its expression. As thoughts surge to his mind, he fills the heavens with them, crowds them in, if necessary, but seldom arranges them, along the ground first.

Striking an note that aligns with Emersonian perfectionism, Ives says of composers and writers who try the impossible and fail: “not being perfect, they are perfect examples pointing to that perfection which nothing yet has attained.”

Near the end of the “Emerson” movement, Ives included an optional part for viola—an unusual addition to a piano work. That choice opens the door to expanding the piece’s terrain; it locates a stake in sheer possibility.

13. Aside on Ives’ seeping sonata

Why did Ives leave his Concord Sonata for solo piano unfinished? And “what to do with those ad-lib cameo parts for, during the first movement, solo viola and, at the very end of the piece, solo flute?” wonders Philip Clark. “Should pianists wrap the suggestion of ‘alien’ instrumental voices back into the work’s fantasy? Or take Ives at his word and include them?”

The answer depends on the pianist. But the open-endedness of Ives’ interpretive space feels necessary, given his innovations in form. Like 19th-century novels, the sonata form usually assumes the creation of a musical world contained by the piece. Listening to a sonata allows one to enter and experience that world for the duration. The sonata’s aesthetic success may be judged on the basis of how effectively it transports the listener to the sonic world of its evocation. Alas, Charles Ives’ music specialized in seepage: it leapt over borders with a tin trumpet and introduced ordinary sounds defamiliarized by their insertion into the sonata. Ives was the maestro of wild allusion and quotation.

14. Second movement: “Hawthorne”

The substance of Hawthorne is so dripping wet with the supernatural, the phantasmal, the mystical—so surcharged with adventures, from the deeper picturesque to the illusive fantastic, one unconsciously finds oneself thinking of him as a poet of greater imaginative impulse than Emerson or Thoreau. He was not a greater poet possibly than they—but a greater artist.

— Charles Ives, Essays Before A Sonata

 The pianist performing this “scherzo” is Alexei Lubimov. (Notice what happens at 9:08) For “there is often a pervading melancholy about Hawthorne, as Faguet says of de Musset "without posture, without noise but penetrating,’” Ives writes:

There is at times the mysticism and serenity of the ocean, which Jules Michelet sees in "its horizon rather than in its waters." There is a sensitiveness to supernatural sound waves. Hawthorne feels the mysteries and tries to paint them rather than explain them—and here, some may say that he is wiser in a more practical way and so more artistic than Emerson.

But none of this mystique, according to Ives, enters the 2nd movement. Instead, Ives claims that his “Hawthorne” is just an "extended fragment” aiming to impress the listener with some of Hawthorne’s “wilder, fantastical adventures into the half-childlike, half-fairylike phantasmal realms.” It is the fantastic Hawthorne that Ives fashions into music:

It may have something to do with the children's excitement on that "frosty Berkshire morning, and the frost imagery on the enchanted hall window" or something to do with "Feathertop," the "Scarecrow," and his "Looking Glass" and the little demons dancing around his pipe bowl; or something to do with the old hymn tune that haunts the church and sings only to those in the churchyard, to protect them from secular noises, as when the circus parade comes down Main Street; or something to do with the concert at the Stamford camp meeting; or something to do with the Concord he-nymph, or the "Seven Vagabonds," or "Circe's Palace," or something else in the wonderbook—not something that happens, but the way something happens; or something to do with the "Celestial Railroad," or "Phoebe's Garden," or something personal, which tries to be "national" suddenly at twilight, and universal suddenly at midnight; or something about the ghost of a man who never lived, or about something that never will happen, or something else that is not.

Notably, Ives added to “Hawthorne” a cluster chord created by depressing the piano's keys with a 14 3⁄4-inch (37 cm) piece of wood. 

15. Third movement: “The Alcotts”

All around you, under the Concord sky, there still floats the influence of that human faith melody, transcendent and sentimental enough for the enthusiast or the cynic respectively, reflecting an innate hope—a common interest in common things and common men—a tune the Concord bards are ever playing, while they pound away at the immensities with a Beethovenlike sublimity, and with, may we say, a vehemence and perseverance—for that part of greatness is not so difficult to emulate.

— Charles Ives, Essays Before A Sonata

In Essays, Ives details the proximity of his characters in Concord, pausing at a space by occupied by the Alcotts to describe the partly-fictional “Orchard House,” which he calls “the home of the ‘Marches’", spaces “pervaded with the trials and happiness of the family and telling, in a simple way, the story of ‘the richness of not having.’” Ives continues:

Within the house, on every side, lie remembrances of what imagination can do for the better amusement of fortunate children who have to do for themselves-much-needed lessons in these days of automatic, ready-made, easy entertainment which deaden rather than stimulate the creative faculty. And there sits the little old spinet-piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott children, on which Beth played the old Scotch airs, and played at the Fifth Symphony.

The “musical sketch” won’t focus on the moral grandeur of the Alcotts. Instead, Ives renders “the memory of that home under the elms—the Scotch songs and the family hymns that were sung at the end of each day—though there may be an attempt to catch something of that common sentiment” demonstrated by the Alcotts, namely, “a strength of hope that never gives way to despair—a conviction in the power of the common soul which, when all is said and done, may be as typical as any theme of Concord and its transcendentalists.” No surprise that this movement begins with an instruction to be performed “moderately”.

16. Fourth movement: “Thoreau”

The personal trait that one who has affection for Thoreau may find worst is a combative streak, in which he too often takes refuge. "An obstinate elusiveness," almost a "contrary cussedness," as if he would say, which he didn't: "If a truth about something is not as I think it ought to be, I'll make it what I think, and it WILL be the truth—but if you agree with me, then I begin to think it may not be the truth."

— Charles Ives, Essays Before A Sonata

Briefly, during this fourth and final movement that Ives called an “impressionistic picture” of Thoreau, a flute appears as if to figurate the poet himself, drafting him into the tribute. To Ives, Thoreau was “a great musician, not because he played the flute but because he did not have to go to Boston to hear ‘the Symphony.’” Instead, Thoreau heard music in the forest.

“The rhythm of his prose, were there nothing else, would determine his value as a composer,” Ives wrote of Thoreau. One can hear this rhythm in “Sounds,” which takes off from a perfectly-shaped short statement that could be the first line of an ode: “I love a broad margin to my life.” Here is the delicious excerpt in its entirety:

I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness.... I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. . . . For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished.

In addition to nature, Ives discovered time (and tempo) in Walden. "Throughout Walden, a text that he is always pounding out is Time,” Ives wrote, interspersing his own words with quotes from Thoreau’s:

“Time for inside work out-of-doors; preferably out-of-doors, though "you may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor house." Wherever the place-time there must be. Time to show the unnecessariness of necessities which clog up time. Time to contemplate the value of man to the universe-and of the universe to man-man's excuse for being. Time from the demands of social conventions. Time from too much labor (for some) which means too much to eat, too much to wear, too much material, too much materialism (for others). Time from the "hurry and waste of life." Time in “St. Vitus Dance”.

And Time, of course, is prone to running out. "Who has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever?" Thoreau wonders in the conclusion of Walden.

17. Essays Before A Sonata and Other Writings (Norton)

A deceased author cannot be queried, and one must either print his text exactly as he left it in the last approved version, or risk burdening the reader with the explanations and apparatuses of textual scholarship. The latter treatment would probably have annoyed Ives as it did Emerson, who speaks scornfully of the "Third state" (with the world and the soul) consisting of "the restorers of readings, the emmendators, [and] the bibliomaniacs of all degrees" scripts and the printed book.

An obviously necessary revision of the punctuation in the book could not be undertaken without looking up all the passages in quotation marks, of which there were hundreds. Even if it were decided that bolstering Ives' quotations with reference was unnecessary pedantry, there was no other way to distinguish between real quotations, paraphrases, allusions, or passages placed in quotes to express strong feeling.

—- Howard Boatwright, opening Ives’ Essays with a husky explanation of his edits to the archival manuscript

Howard Boatwright edited and compiled this version of Ives’ Essays Before A Sonata. As he notes in the introduction, the original manuscript was previously thought to have been lost and its discovery “opened the possibility for a new edition of the Essays, which in its privately printed edition of 1920 had not been deemed suitable for literal reprinting by those who had considered it. The manuscript offered the opportunity to consult with the author, as it were, in correcting various lapses which had occurred in the 1920 book.”

While sorting through Ives manuscripts, a lengthy, unpublished essay titled "The Majority" was discovered, alongside numerous versions of “Ives' other political and economic fantasies.” Boatwright mentions that the following were also found: rough drafts of well-known prefaces and program notes for Ives pieces, including the "Postface" to 114 Songs; materials relating to Ives’ one article in the sphere of speculative music theory: "Some Quarter-tone Impressions.”

Ives writing wasn’t directly concerned with music. Instead, it sketched the field of interest that inspired his music. When concerned with music, Ives wrote music. And when he used words, he did so “to provide the general philosophical support for his compositions,” writes Boatwright, since “words were the principal weapon when his idealism led him (around 1918) away from attempting to reform the musical conventions of his youth towards attacking the weaknesses of our national and international life, as he saw them.”

As he saw them, of course, acknowledges that Ives’ views tended to eschew the popular sentiment. He was cantankerous and driven by the dissonances that emerged from complex juxtapositions. What his editor calls “the language of conversation transferred to a book” also marks Ives’ musical compositions. This line comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s description of Montaigne: "It is the language of conversation transferred to a book."

Ives often wove the names of authors, musicians, and public figures into his prose, and Boatwright made an effort to track down the actual quotations as well as the lesser known allusions, finally settling for "a revision of the punctuation, done after collation of the book and manuscript, and the tracing of the quotations." In a sense, Ives punctuated the way he scored music.

“While most writers use commas for grammatical clarity, to Ives they are "phrasing," in actual time, functioning like the phrasing slurs of musical notation,” Boatwright observes. “If more time is required to articulate the sibilants at the end of one word and the beginning of another, he puts a comma to indicate the necessary slight pause.”

To reduce the stressfulness of Ives’ syntax, Boatwright made the editorial decision to reduce “the use of commas in this edition … to normalcy, for the most part,” thus freely interchanging Ives’ original pause-markings (i.e.commas, semicolons, colons, and dashes) in order to “make the important clauses stand out as clearly as possible in Ives’ often very long sentences.”

No change has been made without keeping in mind one striking instance of a complete alteration in the meaning caused by the absence in the 1920 book of two commas which were present in the MS. The passages were: (Book) "And unity is too generally conceived of"; (MS) "And unity is, too, generally conceived of."

A special feature of Ives' style is his coinage of new hyphenated combinations. Unnecessary ones such as "late-spring," or "city-man" have been eliminated. But highly characteristic combinations such as "manner-over-insistence," and "image-necessity-stimulants" have been allowed to stand. A few hyphenated combinations present in the MS but not in the 1920 book have been noted.

Ives uses quotation marks for direct quotations, indirect quotations, mere echoes of another author's prose, allusion, and to indicate strong feeling, which is quite frequently sarcasm. (See the dedication of the book, in which his ironical quotation marks have been retained; those which were placed around the title of the book on the title page have been removed.)

With the feeling of most typographers strongly against excessive use of quotation marks because they make the page appear to have broken out in a rash, an attempt was made to remove some of the unnecessary ones in the Essays. 

Ives was brave enough, and absorbed deeply enough in his subject to quote frequently from memory. But, whatever the reason, the fact is that scarcely a quotation in the entire book is exactly like its source. When the differences between Ives' text and the source did not involve changes in meaning, and were only single words or punctuation, the corrections have been made silently in the text, and the source given. If there was an interesting change of meaning (e.g., Thoreau: "They shall live with the license of higher beings"; Ives: "They shall love with the license of higher beings"), or if the whole quotation was drastically altered, the form in the source has been given in a note.

Amused by Boatwright’s fastidiousness, I turn back to the music.

18. Central Park in the Dark

I started with it, and I can’t help returning to this marvel of presence in Ives’ programmatic work. First performed on May 11, 1946, by chamber orchestra students from Juilliard Graduate School as conducted by Theodore Bloomfield, Central Park in the Dark is a masterpiece of layering where orchestral textures meet in the fray of the sidewalks. A haunting playground of polytonality. Ives sets the clashing orchestral sections against each other, refusing to tame them with politeness, suggesting perhaps that extraordinary difference can coexist in public park spaces. Around 3:58, one can hear the ambient strings arguing with the syncopated ragtime pianos as ruptured by a passing brass street band. The rhythms swirl as the trumpets predominate, culminating in a fantastic kerfuffle at 4:51.

19. Co-creators

"One thing I am certain of is that, if I have done anything good in music, it was first, because of my father, and second because of my wife," Ives said.

20. Premiere of Concord Sonata

[Ives] has rewritten his works so many times, adding dissonances and polyrhythms, that it is impossible to tell just at what date the works assumed the surprising form we know now.

—- Elliott Carter wrote in 1939, when reviewing the premiere of Ives Concord Sonata

According to James B. Sinclair's catalogue of Ives' works, the sonata was publicly premiered by John Kirkpatrick on November 28, 1938 in Cos Cob, Connecticut. There had been earlier performances of isolated movements and excerpts. The second performance (given in many sources as the premiere), also given by Kirkpatrick, was given at the Town Hall in New York City on January 20, 1939. Among those present was Elliott Carter, who reviewed the piece in the March–April 1939 edition of the journal Modern Music.

21. Against anxiety of influence

Ives had no truck with Bloom’s anxiety of influence. If anything, his concern was to include as many voices and textures as humanly possibly across the variants of his pieces. Few phrasings were set in stone. And many of us adore him for that. Even Classical Nerd admits: “Ives is my favorite composer.”

22. Nature as companion and teacher

If he will take her as a companion and teacher, and not as a duty or a creed, she will give him greater thrills and teach him greater truths than man can give or teach-she will reveal mysteries that mankind has long concealed. It was the soul of Nature, not natural history, that Thoreau was after. A naturalists mind is one predominantly scientific, more interested in the relation of a flower to other flowers than its relation to any philosophy or anyone's philosophy. A transcendent love of Nature and writing […] doesn't necessarily make a naturalist.

It would seem that, although thorough in observation […] and with a keen perception of the specific, a naturalist—-inherently—-was exactly what Thoreau was not. He seems rather to let Nature put him under her microscope than to hold her under his. He was too fond of Nature to practice vivisection upon her. He would have found that painful, "for was he not a part with her?" But he had this trait of a naturalist, which is usually foreign to poets, even great ones: he observed acutely even things that did not particularly interest him— a useful natural gift rather than a virtue. The study of Nature may tend to make one dogmatic but the love of Nature surely does not.

—- Charles Ives on Thoreau’s Nature

23. Aside on Aeolian harps

For this poet, one of the most sanguine objects that traverses the span of transcendentalisms is the Aeolian harp.

 "He thought the best of music was in single strains; and he found poetic suggestion in the humming of the telegraph wire," Emerson said of his “beautiful enemy,” Henry David Thoreau. Ives quotes Emerson on "the polyphonies and harmonies that come to us through his [Thoreau’s] poetry." Of course, the lyre bears an an ancient association with poetry and Orphism, but Ives’ takes Thoreau's writing as poetry for more immediate reasons, namely, genre-porousness and fluidity characterized Emersonian transcendentalism as well as Ives’ own compositional strategies.

Transcendentalists never refused the existence of poems as such. In his Collected Essays, for example, Emerson framed each essay with a poem that he did not bother to explicate within the text. The poems perch above the doorway of his prose like levitating address markers. What seems blurred is the idea of the lineated poem as a holier form than the prose.

Let’s go back to how Ives’ gets seduced by Thoreau’s fascination with the Aeolian sounds of the telegraph wire in Walden. In Thoreau’s words:

"… like an Aeolian harp, which I immediately suspected to proceed from the cord of the telegraph vibrating in the just awakening morning wind, and applying my ear to one of the posts I was convinced that it was so. It was the telegraph harp singing its message through the country, its message sent not by men, but by Gods."

At one point in “Sounds,” Thoreau mourns the vanishment of background hum. “Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am more alone than ever,” he admits, while feeling his way towards a soundscape of place, and doing what many of us do when wandering through a city to map its soundscape for a poem. Sounds tell time; they are life’s beat, its rhythm-track. Wistfully, Thoreau even goes so far as to naturalize the city sounds from within the woods, writing: “Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness.” This natural melody of the bells is also likened to a harp when Thoreau adds, “at a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept.”

Perhaps the most resonant, vibe-heavy line is the one that follows: “All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.” (italics mine) Human eyes and ears fondle the things carried to us across a great distance. Thoreau’s sentiment calls to mind the musical marking, lontano (from Italian word meaning “at or from a great distance”) often used to describe something intended to be played extremely quietly or very distantly offstage. For example, György Ligeti's 1967 piece, lontano, crafts an ethereal, orchestral dreamscape from tone clusters, shifting colors, and dissolving images.

But faraway sounds are distracting me from Thoreau’s universal lyre, and the relationship it suggests between sound and place, a relationship secured by local acoustics and the conditions by which sound is shaped when moving into different areas. “The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it,” Thoreau wrote, stressing that the echo “is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.”

24. Variations on America

It is easy to understand the doubts of audiences, befuddled by under-rehearsed and under-enthused orchestral performances of Ives's work. It is harder to forgive this neglect in professional musicians. Not long ago, I was in a car with a distinguished British cellist who admitted he knew just one Ives piece: the cheeky satire "Variations on America." When I mentioned the anniversary, he said that Ives was "cute," but that was it. This condescending opinion, offered in near-perfect ignorance, made me want to dump every last ounce of British tea into the nearest harbor.

—- Jeremy Denk, “At 15o, Charles Ives Still Reflects Darkness and Hope” (New York Times)

Ives composed Variations on America in 1891, and it remained unpublished until at least 1949, when E. Power Biggs popularized it. What Denk calls the “near-perfect ignorance” of this British cellist, who knows nothing about Ives except an early organ piece, would certainly have excited Ives enough to let Rollo do the talking.

I’ve included the fabulous Virgil Fox’s performance because Ives, himself, sent this performance to E. Power Biggs when asked if he had a organ composition that he could play on his Sunday morning radio show featuring the organ. Mrs. Ives found the comp and mailed it to Biggs. The instrument is also unique: Fox’s Rodgers organ, “Black Beauty,” was made specifically for his traveling performances. Totally analog, Fox’s “Black Beauty” boasted seventeen speaker cabinets and a console stacked with hundreds of individual oscillators. When played vociferously, the organ’s sound could vibrate the building.

25. “Parallelepipedon”

A child knows a strain of joy from one of sorrow. Those a little older know the dignified from the frivolous— the "Spring Song" from the season in which the "melancholy days have come" (though is there not a glorious hope in autumn!). But where is the definite expression of late spring against early summer—of happiness against optimism? A painter paints a sunset—can he paint the setting sun?

In some century to come, when the school children will whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones— when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as the pentatonic is now— perhaps then these borderland experiences may be both easily expressed and readily recognized. But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be a transcendental language in the most extravagant sense. Possibly the power of literally distinguishing these "shades of abstraction" — these attributes paralleled by "artistic intuitions" (call them what you will) — is ever to be denied man for the same reason that the beginning and end of a circle are to be denied.

A composer may not shrink from having the public hear his "love letter in tones" while a poet may feel sensitive about having everyone read his "letter in words." When the object of the love is mankind, the sensitiveness is changed only in degree. But the message of Thoreau, though his fervency may be inconstant and his human appeal not always direct, is, both in thought and spirit, as universal as that of any man who ever wrote or sang—as universal as it is nontemporaneous—as universal as it is free from the measure of history, as "solitude is free from the measure of the miles of space that intervene between man and his fellows." In spite of the fact that Henry James (who knows almost everything) says that "Thoreau is more than provincial-that he is parochial,"* let us repeat that Henry Thoreau— in respect to thought, sentiment, imag-ination, and soul, in respect to every element except that of place, of physical being, a thing that means so much to some— is as universal as any personality in literature. 

But personally, we prefer to go around in a circle than around in a parallelepipedon, for it seems cleaner and perhaps freer from mathematics; or for the same reason we prefer Whittier to Baudelaire, a poet to a genius, or a healthy to a rotten apple-probably not so much because it is more nutritious, but because we like its taste better: We like the beautiful and don't like the ugly; therefore, what we like is beautiful, and what we don't like is ugly-and hence we are glad the beautiful is not ugly, for if it were we would like something we don't like. So having unsettled what beauty is, let us go on.

— Charles Ives, “Epilogue” to Essays Before A Sonata

26. The Unanswered Question

Leonard Bernstein titled his 1973 Norton Lectures after Ives’ piece, The Unanswered Question, which remains —-to me —- one of the most beautiful and haunting compositions created in New England. The score allows the players to choose between trumpet or oboe or clarinet.

At 2:44, something begins in the background and does not let go.

“All thought depends on the caprice of a key,” wrote Edmond Jabes in The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion.

27. 114 Songs

From “Majority,” the first piece in Charles Ives’ 114 Songs.

Ives printed 114 Songs at his own expense. Some have alleged it to be “the greatest collection of songs written since Brahms, and like Sacre and Pierrot and Wozzeck, one of the aesthetic pivots of the 20th century; a pivot only because of its influence on composers - certainly not on the public who has heard only a few of them.”

Legacy is complicated by the fact that Ives founded no school and left no system for the handful who consider themselves to be his disciples. Improvisation, innovation, polymorphously perverse interpenetration of subjects and quotations: Ives bequeaths them to listeners and students. Song no. 15 is the afore-mentioned “Housatonic at Stockbridge,” and I’ve included an interesting note that Ives added at the bottom of the first page:

Song 31 is titled “Walt Whitman,” and evokes Leaves of Grass starting with the 21st stanza. Ives scores the poet’s song “Fast and in a challenging way.” Song 33 is a “Cradle Song” drawn on the traditional lullaby form. Song 25, “August,” uses lyrics from Rossetti’s Early Italian Poets, and Ives marks the piece “Con grazia,” accordingly. “September” follows as song 26, drawn from the same Italian poems, marked “Presto.” Song 39, “Afterglow",” quotes James Fenimore Cooper “by permission,” and includes the interesting instruction to play the piano “as indistinctly as possible” with “both pedals used almost constantly.” Song 42, a unison chant, is titled “Serenity” and one can hear a universalism in this hymn as well as many of the religious songs Ives included. Songs 76-79 are from a series of French songs, and the lyrics remain in French.

Ives often experimented with orchestration and refiguration of his pieces. Song 44, “Watchman!”, comes from the 2nd Violin Sonata and includes lyrics by John Bowring. Song 45, “At the River”, is drawn from Ives 4th Violin Sonata and supplemented by lyrics from Robert Lowrey. Song 47, “The Camp-Meeting,” comes from a movement of Symphony no. 3 and features lyrics written by Charlotte Elliott.

28. Piano studies

Among his completed piano studies:

— Study No. 2: Andante moderato–Allegro molto (Varied Air and Variations)
— Study No. 5: Moderato con anima
— Study No. 6: Andante
— Study No. 7: Andante cantabile
— Study No. 8: Trio (Allegro moderato–Presto)
— Study No. 22: Andante maestoso–Allegro vivace
— Study No. 9: The Anti-Abolitionist Riots in the 1830s and 1840s
— Study No. 20: March (Slow allegro or Fast andante)
— Study No. 23: Allegro

29. Lost and incomplete manuscripts

In 1927, Ives suddenly found himself unable to write any new music. Even after he retired from his insurance job, he was unable to write, though he spent his time tweaking previous works and arranging performances.

Some of Ives’ choral works (still in manuscript) have been heard for the first time in the past decade. Other manuscripts were thrown out by the church in NYC where Ives served as an organist. These manuscripts have never been found, and Ives’ organ book is among them.

Of his 27 piano studies, 9 have been completely or partially lost, including:

— Study No. 3
— Study No. 10 (mostly lost)
— Study No. 12
— Study No. 13
— Study No. 14
— Study No. 17
— Study No. 24
— Study No. 25
— Study No. 26

His incomplete piano studies include:

— Study No. 1: Allegro
— Study No. 4: Allegro moderato
— Study No. 11: Andante
— Study No. 15: Allegro moderato
— Study No. 16: Andante cantabile
— Study No. 18: Sunrise Cadenza (Adagio)
— Study No. 19
— Study No. 27: Chromâtimelôdtune

30. Gem

A gem of a lecture from Kyle Gann: “How Ives composed.”

31. Violin Sonata No. 1

If I had to choose one piece to represent Ives's most important achievements, it is the slow movement of the First Violin Sonata, a reflection on the Civil War. We begin by musing over a cliché tune of American nostalgia, "The Old Oaken Bucket," filtered through Ives's imagination into a ravishing idyll. But soon a march begins in the piano, drowning out the violin, which is left in the past, quietly remembering while the boys go off to war. A terrifying disconnect, with one violent, overabundant (and somewhat Wagnerian) voice making another impossible to hear. Is there a more powerful image for our current debates about free speech?

Ives loves to rove through time, and to sample an array of voices, so we fast-forward to hear nostalgic veterans, boasting of former military glories. But this devolves into a long argument, with piano and violin talking past each other in unyielding bubbles. In the final pages, you hear flashes of the tender beginning. These fleeting visions of unity are so beautiful, but unsettling to play today.

—- Jeremy Denk, “At 15o, Charles Ives Still Reflects Darkness and Hope” (New York Times)

Ives’ willingness to take on the “sacred cows” of the cocktail parties and chattering classes is part of what Denk calls his “antidote to nationalism.” Every sacred object is forced into the public square, where it must be just another voice among others. That’s not quite what Denk says, but it is a slipshod way of expressing my own relationship to the continuous discord churned by Ives.

Denk also notes that the final movement of the Violin Sonata No. 1 “takes on the march - a handy emblem of national pride and swagger,” leaving listeners with “barely enough of the rhythm to tell us we are marching” before disrupting “it with offbeats and voice-leading collisions, creating a march at war with the idea of a march, an anti-swagger, disintegrating into dark silence.”

“This passage allows for an unusual range of interpretive possibilities: not differences of degree, but absolute opposition,” Denk rightly concludes.

32. On Ives’ desire to find a common language in music

Ives worked on these passages, you sense, not to achieve perfection, but glorious imperfection. Not music as a refined object, to be placed on the shelf, but as a process, something being made in front of us. Once the ragtime finally gets going, its energy is unstoppable. [. . . ] Ives understood that ragtime was not primarily a genre but an act. He approaches it with more respect - even awe — for the power and joy of syncopation unleashed against the square, white tunes of traditional Americana.

—- Jeremy Denk, “At 15o, Charles Ives Still Reflects Darkness and Hope” (New York Times)

When Denk compares Ives’ un-Instagrammable dissonance with the clean poise and ad-friendly texture of Aaron Copland’s compositions, one is reminded of how much hygiene is at stake in our notions of patriotism. As my teen quipped a few months ago, “We treat flags better than we do human beings in this country.”

For me, Ives’ anti-elitist approach is evidenced by his insistence that the edges of his pieces remain frayed, prone to seepage, opening the mind to a porousness that refuses to resolve the discord of layers. Transcendence replaces purity for him, in quotation, punctuation, and musical notation. Ives common language evolved to transcend the parlors, academic corridors, and concert halls in order to take a residence in the public square, where sonic collages came together from voices heard in passing, parades, childhood nostalgia . . . all of these public traces held in common by persons who live in an American town or city.

The Academy maintains its prestige through condescension, an affective register that holds stock in some ideal of aesthetic purity or beauty that those with Great Taste ™ can pride themselves on purchasing, defining, or owning. Ives offends us precisely because he rejects an optimism based in the purity of salons and intellectual elite. Instead, he embraces the cacophony of the streets. Contra the national populism of xenophobia, Ives’ populism is an effort to make salient and tender the local, communal, contingent space formed at the intersection of American childhood and the eventual disappointments of adult life.

Like Denk, I relish the “Ivesian laughter —- his wild, often childlike sense of humor, his willingness to fail.” I find solace in how, to quote Denk again, Ives opens a piece “by trying to begin, limping through a series of false starts,” as at the opening of Violin Sonata No. 3’s ragtime when “the piano plunks down bass notes while the right hand tries out ideas. These riffs slide around, splutter out and seem to lose heart, until, at last, the momentum of inspiration takes over.” This insistence on failing and flailing publicly is perhaps aesthetically nauseating to those who privilege elegance or classical Platonic Beauty.

33. A final fire

Thus is Emerson always beating down through the crust towards the first fire of life, of death and of eternity.

— Charles Ives, Essays Before A Sonata

Although Ives’ doesn’t depict fire in the Concord Sonata, an auto-da-fe drifted through my mind while absorbed in James Marcus’ Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson this weekend. A treasure for those interested in Emerson’s philosophy of friendship, Marcus’ book also gave me this phrase, “beautiful enemy,” that I used when describing Thoreau.

On July 24, 1872, Ralph Waldo Emerson awoke to the sound of a strange almost crackling music coming from his walls. a fire started in the attic above. It was slow burning, so neighbors came to try and save books, clothing, household, objects, and various materials while Emerson and his wife stood outside, somewhat shocked. At one point, without explanation, Emerson began throwing souvenirs and mementos of his first wife, Ellen (whom he lost to tuberculosis two years into their love) and his son Little Waldo (whom he lost to a sudden, unexpected childhood illness) into the fire.

Marcus describes Emerson’s “assault on his own memories” as if removed from tragedy, as the old fellow stood in stocking shoes and a muddy coat, surveying the destruction of his home quietly. Later, Emerson would tell a friend that he “felt something snap in his brain “during the fire — (Marcus wonders if it might have been a stroke) —- but there were no words for what had snapped, or none that Emerson ever made an effort to articulate.

“House burned”: such is the entirety of Emerson’s journal comments about the fire.

Hundreds of years after this house fire, Marcus elects to make the pilgrimage to Emerson‘s house. He wanders through its musty rooms, seeking a sort of material presence, and discovers that Little Waldo’s leather pool toy had escaped his father‘s memory-pyre. The transcendentalist’s engravings remained on the walls.

In the study, Marcus sees Emerson’s Aeolian harp sitting on the windowsill. I gasped when reading this part. The eye tenders these memories as if they were part of an encounter with inaudible music that touches both the author and the reader who seeks him. Poetry and music, bound in their Aeolian hauntology.

J. A. Boiffard's photos and surrealisms.

MAKING NADJA

From 1924 to 1929, Jacques-André Boiffard worked as an assistant to Man Ray in Paris. Eventually, Boiffard wound up taking the photos of street scenes for Andre Breton’s Nadja. 

James Elkins’ fantastic website, Writing With Images, features a close look at the photos and images in Andre Breton’s Nadja. Elkins frames the enigma of Breton’s photos in the context of developing surrealisms: “Because Breton gives inconclusive signs and signals about how he wants images to interact with the narrative, some readers have preferred to read silent mystery in the abandoned streets, and personal narrative in the prose.”

The variations across publications of Nadja shift the role played by images to the periphery. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to call them ornamental, Breton maintains loose relationship to the images. Elkins expands on this:

Toward the end of Nadja, speaking of the book’s composition, [Breton] says he went back “to look at several of the places” he had mentioned in the narrative, in order “to provide a photographic image of them taken at the special angle from which I myself had looked at them.” This is the first a reader hears about the photographs; in the rest of the book the captions tell readers what passage they illustrate, and nothing in the book refers to the illustrations as photographs rather than as direct representations of places. It is also the only time Breton mentions anything to do with the framing of his photographs.

I don’t think it is possible in most cases to guess what the “special angle” might be, and so I doubt the veracity of his comment; it seems more likely that he told Jacques-André Boiffard (the photographer who took the street scenes for Breton) the locations he wanted photographed, but not the angles, or at least not with any precision.

Mixed feelings have been noted by others. According to Rick Poynor, Breton appeared “to have had mixed feelings about the photographs in Nadja, describing the images soon after publication as “dreary and disillusioning,” while nevertheless dedicating a copy to Boiffard with the encomium (perhaps it was faint praise) that his were ‘the most beautiful photographs in this book.’”

Certainly, Breton lacks the tenderness and close attention central to Roland Barthes’ reading of images. The misogyny of Nadja precludes this. Whatever can be said of Breton, it would be silly to call him cerebral; his relationship to thought resisted close study and oriented itself to proximity to social prowess. Unlike Barthes, Breton wanted to be the executive director of an artistic movement. He identified as avant-garde, and fought to secure his reputation against other emerging schools and movements.

In a way, Breton’s use of photos in this novels feels closer to the way Bataille and Leiris explored the arche of the city, providing an archeology of the present by alienating themselves from it. “The only kind of visual material Breton studies is iconographically dense, or full of writing,” Elkins adds, noting that the author “analyzes a few of Nadja’s symbolic drawings,” revels in symbolic density, “reads broadsheets and posters,” yet “barely looks” at the photographs he included.

Breton offers no close reading of photos here. He does, however, offer a stigmata of romantic fantasy that cannibalizes difference.

THE EYES HAVE IT

“I had never seen such eyes. Without a moment’s hesitation, I spoke to this unknown woman.”

Nadja was created in this chance encounter in October 1926, when Breton observed a bedraggled, delicate woman striding towards him on the avenue. She told him she called herself Nadja, “because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word hope, and because it’s only the beginning.”

The two met repeatedly for several days, and their encounters were marked by uncanny coincidences and inexplicable events. True to form, Breton got bored with Nadja’s erratic behavior and pulled away, waiting until the end of the novel to reveal that he had been warned “Nadja was mad” months ago.

After causing a disturbance in the corridors of her hotel, she was taken to an infirmary.

Breton changed several photographs for the 1963 edition, adding at least three new photographs including the montage of Nadja’s eyes (pictured above). See also “her eyes of fern”; “products of a ‘voluntary banality’”; alleged anticipations of choragraphy.

According to Elkins, Breton’s “narrative isn’t indifferent to details such as particular turns of phrase, nuances of expression, and the verbal compositions of the vignettes involving Nadja; but the street photographs are.” Elkins continues:

This quality of “aesthetic indifference” doesn’t pertain to the photographs of documents or drawings (they are full of legible and meaningful details, and some have carefully chosen compositions or interesting assemblages of objects); and it doesn’t apply to the portraits (which are carefully done according to various portrait conventions of the time). The indifference applies mainly to the street photographs. Can we distinguish between Breton’s intentions and capacities as a photographer and our proclivity to read the photographs as aesthetically indifferent? I wonder this especially in light of his own reference to the photographs as capturing the “special angle” from which he experienced each place.

BOIFFARD V. BRETON

When Boiffard pissed off the kingpin, Breton expelled him the Surrealist group.

He went on to contribute to Un Cadavre, a pamphlet that in no uncertain terms castigated Breton and his leadership of the movement before allying himself with the renegade Surrealists grouped around Georges Bataille. Some of his most fantastic work appeared when Boiffard served as the in-house photographer for Bataille’s Documents. His photographs illustrating Bataille’s article “Big Toe” are freakish and disturbing, as intended.

One of my favorite Boiffard photos from Documents.

13 scenarios.

"I suppose you do love me, in your way," I said to him one night close to dawn when we lay on the narrow bed. "And how else should I love you—in your way?" he asked.

I am still thinking about that.

—Anne Carson, Plainwater

1. Salvador Dalí carried around a little piece of Spanish driftwood to help him to ward off evil spirits.

2. The rise in spatial pathology generates a post-agoraphobic prosperity. The culture industry hides its most powerful smokestacks behind the fast-growing pine forests planted by corporations. Your face looks so tender in the green wash.  The porn bot inquires you hot? want to see? I'm lonely. One bot pairs up with the spectre of Adorno for the Friday BOGO-a-gogo.

3. In order to master “the art of becoming an original writer in three days,” Emmanuel Carrere said you must “take a few sheets of paper and for three days on end write down, without fabrication or hypocrisy, everything that comes into your head. Write down what you think of yourself, of your wife, of the Turkish war, of Goethe, of a trial, of the Last Judgment, of your superiors—and when three days have passed you will be quite out of your senses with astonishment at the new and unheard-of thoughts you have had.”

4. Nervous about poor reception for Ulysses, James Joyce chose his birthday, February 2, 1922, as the day to publish his novel. Two copies of the book arrived in Paris by train on this day, one for Joyce and one for his bookseller, Shakespeare and Company. Somewhere else, a man signed his father's name to his own suicide letter.

5. This is how Ernst Jünger appears to Martin du Gard, who pays him a visit in Berlin in 1933: "A boy of thirty-five, with ascetic face, full of energy and reserve, sporting, dressed for golf, plus fours, a cigarette between his lips." Jünger's disconsolate exclamation follows: "We have lost everything, even honor! The movement of the masses has gone, he tells me, personal valor is imposed in Russia and in Italy. And it must be imposed in Germany. But the socialist ideal is not dead. Social democracy is no longer capable of being the agent of socialism. It is now the turn of the National Socialists." (Roberto Calasso)

6. Charles Dickens bumbled about with a navigational compass on his person at all times and always faced north while he slept in order to optimize his creative spirit and affirm his writing practice.

7. News of continuous suicides greeted Arthur Koestler as he waited in Lisbon in the autumn of 1940: "And more suicides: Otto Pohl, Socialist veteran, Austrian ex-Consul in Moscow, ex-Editor of the 'Moskauer Rundschau.' Walter Benjamin, author and critic, my neighbor in 10, rue Dombasle in Paris, fourth at our Saturday poker parties, and one of the most bizarre and witty persons I have known. Last time I had met him was in Marseilles, together with H., the day before my departure, and he had asked me: 'If anything goes wrong, have you got anything to take?' For in those days we all carried some 'stuff' in our pockets like conspirators in a penny dreadful; only reality was more dreadful. I had none, and he shared what he had with me, sixty-two tablets of a sedative, procured in Berlin during the week which followed the burning of the Reichstag. He did it reluctantly, for he did not know whether the thirty-one tablets left him would be enough. It was enough. A week after my departure he made his way over the Pyrenees to Spain, a man of fifty-five, with heart disease. At Port Bou, the Guardia Civil arrested him. He was told that next morning they would send him back to France. When they came to fetch him for the train, he was dead."

8. Two men watch the ducks peck at each other near the lake created for the nice park. One of them wonders if the ars rhetorica has replaced the quest as the shape of the artistic journey, since language itself frequently sets the terms of the quest and defers to elected authorities for the epistemological solution. The other lets the fire ants bite him in the hopes of discovering a novel discourse.

9. The problematic is articulated as a pre-game advertisement for capitalism's solutions.

10.  "Not everything is a text, but a text is a good image for much of what we know, for everything we know that is beyond the reach of our own immediate experience, and for most of what we imagine is our immediate experience too,” said James Wood. “Literature is practice for, the practice of, such knowledge.”

11. Isabel Allende began writing her first novel on January 8, 1981. What had started as a letter to her grandfather who was dying eventually transformed into her book The House of the Spirits. Allende now begins all of her books on January 8. Initially, it was out of allegiance with her first book, but now she says she does it because she can be in solitude, since everyone knows she is not to be disturbed on that date. (Matt Levin)

12. "The Zone doesn't exist. It's Stalker himself who invented his Zone," Andrei Tarkovsky said once upon a time in the world—and then, again, in a book written by John Wall Barger.

I want to say "I would have waited"?

1. MY MILLIMETRIC MUTENESS

Humans die daily of brain injuries. Inflamed, the gray matter swells towards the skull. That final millimeter of inflammation loads the dice and alters the prognosis. Life, this ongoing condition of embodiment, exists at the behest of the tiniest distinctions. When it comes to the brain, millimeters mark the most importance distance between the body and the corpse.

I get swarmed by the game of it as the news media serves up the latest story about football and traumatic brain injury.

Football season in the US leaves me mute, speechless: there is no frame to collapse the gap that separates me from the majority of Southerners who identify as college football fans. They wear their team as a brand; they pause in the Piggly Wiggly to introduce themselves to strangers who brand themselves of the similar team.

2. “SENZA PAROLE”

I keep returning to an essay by Andrea Marcolongo, “Ancient Family Lexicon, or Words and Loneliness,” where she mentions senza parole, an Italian phrase that appears in various permutations across Latin languages.

To quote Andrea’s exquisite rendering:

Andrea’s speechlessness is declarative, which is to say: her tattoo designates an area of embodied experience that is mute. Or muted. One could read this senza parole as a response to loss, but each reading complicates the boundaries of what Andrea is saying / not-saying.

After her mother’s death, Andrea dyed her hair black. I drowned my black hair in bleach. Both Andrea and myself changed our hair color in order to negotiate the rupture of self that greeted us from the mirror. That reflected image no longer aligned with the inhabited self.

The easiest way to express this is by acknowledging two simultaneous, somewhat contradictory truths about the nature of recognition, namely, 1) both A’s, Andrea and Alina, could not bear to recognize their mothered selves 2) neither A could recognize herself.

3. RE-COGNITION

Speechlessness can be a responsive state, one that communicates without saying (or says what it knows it can no longer say). As with the A’s, a part of this speechless is responding to the experience of recognition.

To recognize, or re-cognize, is to know again. As such, recognition is a form of knowledge that presumes comparison to a prior knowledge: the thing seen and then recovered, the instance lost and returned when walking across a similar terrain, the face on a subway that reappears in the cafe.

When I read about the football player who loses his mind in his 40’s due to a TBI accrued in his 20’s, I am drafted into an uncanny re-recognition, a doubling of the original meaning (to re-cognize)that re-re’s the absolute randomness of life. The sirens intrude and echolocate my body; I close my eyes and imagine hovering above it, untouched, unmolested by physical sensation.

There is nothing a human can do to earn or deserve a brain injury. And there is nothing a human can do to earn or deserve surviving such an injury. Even as the mind loses the self, the brain injury, as a clinical fact in the medical chart, knows what it means to lose one's name – or to lose the connection between the name and the personhood.

4. LOADING THE DICE, GAMING THE OUTCOMES

My partner is amused by what he calls my “Baba superstitiousness.”

I, too, am amused by his amusement, though, to be fair, back in the medical nightmare that was 2023, I brought a bit more of that all-American rigor into my notation of portents. I counted the black cats that crossed my path and then canceled each event with the non-black cat that followed. In trying to stay ahead of the curse, or calling it even, the tally of forthcoming misfortunes refused to balance out to zero.

“Visually, the sum of bad luck is a zigzag,” I told the man.

As a numbers-fiend, the man felt it necessary to respond with a plethora of (unrelated and fairly recent) neuroscience-related statistics, as if to suggest that the numerical data was more protective than reading for signs.

“Statistics lied about the odds of being hit by a car while crossing beneath a red light,” I reminded him.

I didn't know to fear a car's failure to stop. That possibility wasn't on my mental horizon. 

"But what would you have done differently if you'd known to be afraid?" he asked. 

“I would not have crossed.”

I wanted to say: I would have waited until every car that wanted to destroy me passed by. I would have stood there, frozen in time, a statue of the self before the accident. 

Instead, I note that Salman Rushdie said the saddest city in the world is located in Alifbay. It is so sad that it has forgotten its own name and so the sadness floats about without attaching itself to a proper noun. The deepest sadness comes from being nameless.

5. FEAR! DANGER! PROFANATION!

“Fear isn't a story about reality,” my friend says. “Fear is a story about what we find salient in reality.”

She invites me to yoga. I decline: clearing my head sounds like being suctioned.

“Have it your way,” she replies. “You’re the only one that can determine your mental health.”

My friend really doesn’t even know how goofy this purely-psychological construction of mental health sounds to some of us. She has yet to lose a grandparent or parent to Alzheimer’s. She lives in the land of Free To Choose. I don't want to argue, don't want to disprove, don't want to disagree. . . 

Fear is an intensified way of reading. Sometimes it is based on things we’ve imagined; other times it is based on things we’ve experienced. I’m not sure the two are the same, despite the efforts of late capitalism and popular culture to fashion political coalitions defined by shared fears. Identifying ourselves by fear seems like a doomed political project at a time when we desperately need vision.

“So what is danger, then?” the middle teen asks me. It is bewildering to watch to her drive this wretched minivan; bewildering and marvelous to imagine the places she will choose to go on her own. The question of danger comes up as we talk about what to consider when running a yellow light. “You have to weigh various factors,” I admit.

As a concept, danger is obviously contingent, multivariant, and fluid. The feeling of danger can mark unmet aesthetic or social expectations, and these expectations emerge from our daily reading of the world, a reading that —- over time—- can develop into a commitment to read the world we are given in a particular fashion or worldview.

Danger appears when we read it again, in light of context and new information. Or maybe just shifts in syntax and juxtaposition. After all, juxtapositions are central to Walter Benjamin’s respect for surrealism’s profane illuminations. What am I saying?

We know the first number is zero. 

The slipperiest situation in the natural world is black ice, melting ice with a thin layer of ice on top. Black ice forms suddenly, a surprise formed in early evening when the dew point dips below freezing and moisture slickens into a deceptive, invisible ice. Black ice is the deadliest for drivers who don't believe the road needs reading. 

We know the last number is unknown. 

Adrian Piper, Everything Will Be Taken Away No. 2.8

Of Moonstruck.

THE CONDITIONS OF OUR SCREENING

Earlier this summer, while visiting my dad and stepmother, I found myself in a room with three adult men who had never seen Moonstruck (1987). These three—my father, my partner, and my son—have each, at different times and in different locations, described themselves as thoughtful. Suddenly, I wondered what they might think of it. Worse, I wondered what would happen if we thought about it together.

John Patrick Shanley, an Irish-American playwright, wrote the screenplay used by Norman Jewison, a Canadian filmmaker, in the making of the this Italian-Amerian romantic comedy. It was one of my mother's favorite movies, so maybe a ghost nudged me to host a family viewing that included the daughters, the stepmother, the son, the father, the partner, and the valiant king of Dada, my dog Radu. Set in New York City, the film follows the developing courtship between Loretta Castorini (played by Cher) and Johnny Cammareri (played by Danny Aiello). Family conflict and past betrayal becomes a centerpiece to the love triangle between the Cammareri brothers, Johnny and Donny, and Loretta Castorini. That’s the skeleton.

SCENE: JOHNNY ASKS LORETTA TO MARRY HIM AT THE RESTAURANT

Loretta is a widow whose husband died after being hit by a bus while crossing the street. She attributes this horrible accident to pairing: “We had bad luck,” she says, and repeats this phrase several times in the film. Due to her husband’s death, Loretta believes that this bad luck comes from having expected or desired too much. She works as accountant for the family business, dutifully managing and balancing the numbers, living obediently within a very rigid framework she has created to keep herself safe from more “bad luck.” Here’s the scene:

In the opening marriage proposal, Loretta (played by Cher) shares a romantic dinner with her boyfriend, Johnny Cammareri . He asks her to marry him while sitting at the table in the restaurant–but she refuses to consider due to her fear of bad luck. Affectionately, Loretta gives certain conditions for the way in which he asks the question—and all of these conditions are related to her belief that her first husband died because these conditions were not met. So, already, there is a level of 'improvement' involved, and a sort of control that she needs to exert over the situation.

Loretta's conditions are simple:

1. Johnny has to kneel to ask her
2. Johnny has to give her a ring 

The first condition is met when Johnny kneels awkwardly and everyone pauses to look.

The second condition is met when Loretta suggests that he could give her the ring he is wearing (a class ring, perhaps). And so he does.

“We’re talking about women who ask men to marry them,” my father quips. “Women who propose marriage.”

I concede that marriage seems like a ridiculous thing to propose, if one stops to consider it.

“Marriage proposes a thing that can’t be communicated in the proposal,” I tell my father.

SCENE: JOHNNY’S REQUEST

After receiving a phone call that his mother, the family matriarch, is dying, Johnny books a flight to Italy to be at her deathbed. Loretta drives him to the airport and this is when he makes his own request—a condition of sorts, an expression of what Johnny needs in order for their marriage to be blessed. He makes her promise to invite his estranged brother Donny (played by the extraordinary Nicolas Cage) to their wedding. The brothers haven’t spoken in five years. Donny lost his hand in a freak accident in the bakery, which then led him to losing his fiancee: he blames the accident and the loss of his potential happiness on Johnny.

Again, the ghost of ‘bad luck’ frames Loretta’s response to this condition.

SCENE: AS LORETTA WATCHES DONNY’S PLANE TAKE OFF, A STRANGER INTRODUCES BAD BLOOD AND CURSES.

This conversation is interesting because it builds on the curse and bad luck theme. Conversations are opportunities for humans to think through the meaning they ascribe to events.

Elderly lady: You have someone on that plane?

Loretta: Yeah, my fiancé.

Elderly lady: [angry] I put a curse on that plane. My sister is on that plane. I put a curse on that plane that it's gonna explode, burn on fire and fall into the sea. Fifty years ago, she stole a man from me. S'aprese il mio uomo! Today she tells me that she never loved him, that she took him to be strong on me. Now she's going back to Sicily. Ritorna in Sicilia! I cursed her that the green Atlantic water should swallow her up!

Loretta: I don't believe in curses.

Elderly lady: [shrugging] Eh, neither do I.

“This is something Romanians and Italians share,” my father notes. “Curses are a way of accomplishing things.”

SCENE: WHEN LORETTA TELLS HER FATHER SHE IS ENGAGED, HER FATHER REMINDS HER THAT SHE HAS BAD LUCK.

“Isn’t Loretta’s mother articulating the condition for a happy here?” I address my question to the teens, who are valiantly ignoring me and thus increasing my respect for them while also ensuring that Loretta, by dint of fate or circumstance, will not take her mother’s advice seriously.

SCENE: LORETTA GOES TO THE CAMMARERI FAMILY BAKER TO INVITE DONNY TO THE WEDDING

Dutifully, she is fulfilling the promise she made to her fiancee while also meeting the conditions established for a safe marriage.

The meeting presents us with Donny, a character that lives in his grudges and deifies his resentment. The world is to blame for the tragedy Donny sees in his life.

In this first meeting near the blazing ovens, with fury and passion emanating from Donny, Loretta’s tries to keep the peace. We aren’t sure what she is thinking when faced with this resentful, angry man who takes Johnny’s forthcoming marriage personally.

[The discussion with my family centers on whether ‘contempt’ is an appropriate word to describe what Ronny expresses.]

Donny: I ain't no freakin' monument to justice! I lost my hand! I lost my bride! Johnny has his hand! Johnny has his bride! You want me to take my heartache, put it away, and forget?

. . . . Chrissy, over on the wall, bring me the big knife. I want to cut my throat.

Chrissy: [in an aside to Loretta] This is the most tormented man I have ever known. I'm in love with this man, but he doesn't know that, 'cause I never told him, 'cause he could never love anybody since he lost his hand and his girl.

Donny: I looked the wrong way and I lost my hand. He could make you look the wrong way and you could lose your whole head!

“Both are haunted by the failures of love past, but for different reasons,” my father concedes.

We are thinking about the part of the exchange where Donny yells at Loretta, implicating her an expectation that he forget—-“You want me take my heartache, put it away, and forget?!” Loretta doesn’t respond.

SCENE: LORETTA FOLLOWS DONNY UPSTAIRS TO HIS APARTMENT AND TRIES TO CONVINCE HIM TO COME TO HER WEDDING

In her mind, Loretta is still trying to fulfill a promise she made to her fiancee, a promise that involves bringing his family together to bless their union. She needs everything to proceed by the book with this wedding. She needs her family behind her. Their conversation take places in Johnny’s kitchen.

The camera gives us a couple in a kitchen with a significant amount of white space surrounding them. Donny blames his brother for how his fiancee left him after he lost his hand. In an effort to relate to him, Loretta shares her bad luck story.

Her husband wanted a baby and she deferred it.

When he died, she had nothing. We had bad luck.

I want to break it down a bit here.

“How did I know that man was the gift I couldn’t keep, my one chance at happiness?” Loretta asks rhetorically. She is wearing an apron and cooking a meal: the traditional gender roles are framed, and the speakers develop accordingly. From within this matronly costume, Loretta delivers her Wolf Monologue that offers an alternative (and rather fantastic, myth-inflected) theory as to why Johnny lost his hand.

Loretta: That woman didn't leave you, OK. You can't see what you are, and I see everything... You are a wolf!... That woman was a trap for you. She caught you and you couldn't get away. So you, you chewed off your own foot. That was the price you had to pay for your freedom... And now, now you're afraid because you know the big part of you is a wolf that has the courage to bite off its own hand to save itself from the trap of the wrong love. That's why there's been no woman since that wrong woman. OK? You're scared to death of what the wolf would do if you try and make that mistake again!

She is presenting Donny with an alternate imaginary—-an imaginary culled from the long-married couple that owns the bodega. And something shifts between Loretta and Donny in this moment when she tells him a story about his life, a story that fashions him as a wild creature rather than a helpless victim of circumstance.

Donny: What are you doing? [looks away to the left]

Loretta: I’m telling you your life.

Donny: Stop it. [looks back at her, unbarbed]

Loretta: No!

Donny: Why are you marrying Johnny? He’s a bore!

Loretta: [sighing, shaking her head, looking upwards] Because… because I have no luck.

 Donny: A bride without a head!

Loretta: A wolf without a foot!

“Oh,” Loretta sighs, “I don’t care! I don’t care anymore!” She lets Donny take her to bed. It’s not clear yet what she is giving up on.

Loretta: What are you doing?

[Donny lifts Loretta into his arms and begins walking across the room with her]

Donny: Son of a bitch!

Loretta: Where are you taking me?

Donny: To the bed.

Loretta: Oh, God. I don't care. I don't care. Take me to the bed.

As the two climb out of bed the next morning, surrounded by the mess of their clothing, Loretta tells Donny to “snap out of it” as he starts professing his love for her.

At this point, P determines that this movie is "all about family" rather than romantic love. I disagree, but I’m intrigued that he should pick this particular scene as an expression of all-about-family.

For me, Moonstruck is all about the conditions for relating, or relationality, and how the idea of betrayal is configured interpersonally. The film begins with an engagement scene and it ends with an engagement scene. Troths are pledged. Betrothals occur. It could be classed as a double-engagement plot.  

The altered topography of positions and gestures and proximity in the final scene stands in contrast to the opening scene—and the film seems to say something about marriage in that juxtaposition. P responds with a shrug, unconvinced.

SCENE: MONTAGE OF LORETTA PREPARING TO GO TO THE OPERA WITH DONNY

I hate it. Let me swerve along this horizontal axis into an aside. My experience with Sex and the City is limited to the five episodes I watched with a college friend. As my friend told it, Sex and the City taught about ‘the importance of having your own place’ and ‘girls just wanna fun’; it also made her feel ‘validated’ to see Carrie had a dildo. For me, the intellectual take-away was less impressive. After doubling the number of joints smoked before episodes 2 and 3, and keeping my bong loaded between my knees for the duration of the 4th and 5th episodes, I ran out of weed. This is what forced me to accept that I could not possibly continue watching that show with my friend. There was no way I could smoke the amount of weed I required in order to properly appreciate Sex and the City. For all I knew, that amount could be infinite, since I had yet to enjoy a single episode, despite doing my best and going so far as to feed my entire dime bag of KB to the bong in the name of girl talk, sexual lib, and empowerment feminism. The truth is that I had wasted a precious thing, namely, the KB, in the hopes of overcoming my resistance to kitten heels and coyeurism.

“I learned that my dealer isn’t going to New Orleans for another two weeks,” I said to my friend when she asked what I thought about Carrie. I also avoided her next question. One could say I learned that avoiding questions is preferable to answering them when high-femme is on the table. If I mention this at all, it is because there is a part in Moonstruck that reminds me of what would later be groomed into neoliberal femininity and I left the room while my son, father, and partner watched it because I did not have enough or truly any weed.

What am I avoiding?

The extended montage of fashion fantasies and beauty parlors shows Loretta undergoing a vigorous regime of mani-pedi, tip to toe body hoovering and make-overing. Every girl dreams of the perfect dress for her wedding: that’s the conventional assumption being rubbed here. Framing shots and images make much of the scenes in which Loretta splurges on the dress dream, and one could of course speculate that the director is setting up an alternate pre-wedding fantasy. When she wears this dress, Loretta will become a new person. So we are supposed to feel happy as she splurges, elated by the new heels appearing like Cinderella dreams, charmed by the culmination in a disgusting fireside scene with romantic shading and gauzed edges.

She ‘treats herself,’ so to speak, and this could be read as a sign that she is turning over a new leaf. But the problem with turning over a new leaf is that it remains a cliche, a way of gesturing towards a vague thing that means nothing. Since I am being unfair in my description, I will quote from a blog post written by a woman who loves this montage:

And then, it happens. A perfect scene, as far as movies go: Loretta’s mini-makeover-montage as she prepares for a life-changing evening at the opera with Ronny. She spends the entire day caring for herself — paying attention to her desires, to her heart, to herself. It’s a beautiful sequence of scenes, in which we see Loretta alone, deciding to take her life back.

Here’s what happens:

She first heads to the Cinderella salon (hello, metatextuality!) and has the gals dye her frazzled grey to a stunning raven black. She leaves with a full blow-out, her curls voluminous and sexy. The expression on her face is like she has suddenly remembered some long-dormant version of herself and decided to wake back up. Men whistle at her, and despite herself, she likes it.

On her way home, she passes a beautiful red dress in a shop window. She ducks inside, comes back out with bags. She bumps into two nuns. She can barely look at them — their presence compounds her guilt about spending the night with Ronny, but also does not make her feel bad enough to cancel their date.

When she finally arrives back to the multi-generational home she shares with her grandfather and parents, she is blissfully alone. The home is quiet and dark. This is a rare treat. Rather than waste it, spiraling in anxiety, or attempting to cancel, or trying on a million outfits…Loretta indulges herself.

She calmly pours a glass of red wine. Her freshly manicured nails, painted in a fiery red, click on the glass. She puts on a record. She lights a roaring fire.

All the weed in the world is not enough.

SCENE: DONNY AND LORETTA GO THE OPERA IN ORDER TO MEET RONNY’S REQUEST FOR THIS ONE SPECIAL THING.

This, too, is a condition: it is Donny’s condition for the end of their affair. He will go to the wedding and be cool about things if Loretta goes to the opera with him. He wants her to go to La Bohème with him. It is his favorite opera: he knows each twist and turn, each bridge and aria. For Loretta, opera is exciting but strange: it isn’t central to her life the way it is for Donny. She isn’t an opera lover.

[La Bohème inspired contemporary musicals like Rent and Moulin Rouge: all three give us the tragedy of lovers who are doomed by their love, bound by their economic and social conditions, where idealism and a romantic view of art provides an escape from those conditions. Beauty is bound to truth on this view, and beauty is of course complicated by it.]

My father is moved by how Loretta weeps during the opera, and how Donny reaches for her hand and kisses it. “He’s a gentleman,” my father says.

“It’s a tragedy,” the son announces, when Loretta reviews La Bohème, saying: “That was so awful. Beautiful. Sad. She died!”

The words Loretta uses invoke the tropes of Romanticism: Beautiful. Sad. Awful. All co-existing. Ronny knows these tropes well (“She had TB,” he replies with a melancholy shrug); Loretta is discovering them (“I know! She was coughin’ her brains out!” she cries.) Their conceptions of love are being negotiated in their response to the opera, which is precisely what Ronny intended.

SCENE: RONNY WALKS LORETTA HOME AFTER THE OPERA

Of course the moon is full above them. And “Cosmo’s moon” could be read, at this point, as the moon of betrayal.

Loretta tells Ronny her nature is drawn to him, but she doesn’t have to follow it: “A person can see where they’ve messed up in their life, and they can change the way they do things. And they can even change their luck.”

“The currency of love is the kiss, and I don’t see that happening at this point,” my father says.

How do we read a kiss?

In ancient Greece and Rome, the kiss served as gesture of reverent salutation designating affection between friends. It established proximities amid the developing public space.

Inch forward into Christian iconography and one finds the kiss shifting into an indicator of penitence and worship. The pious woman repented by kissing Jesus' feet. “Salute one another with a holy kiss," Paul grumbled in Romans, thus turning the kiss into a sign of membership in the nascent Christian brotherhood.

There is this Catholic kiss, this perfect kiss, hovering in the background of Moonstruck. A salvific kiss.

“I don’t believe in salvific kisses,” I admit.

“Judas betrayed Jesus with one,” a teen adds.

Loretta: You ruined my life!

Ronny: No, I didn't.

Loretta: Oh, yes, you did! Oh, yes, you did! Y'know, you got them bad eyes, like a gypsy, and I don't know why I didn't see it yesterday. Bad luck! That's what it is. Is that all I'm ever gonna have? I should have taken a rock and killed myself years ago!

When playing billiards, a kiss is a very slight touch of one moving ball to another. The ball kissed it and kept moving. But the kiss stops it in its tracks.

No one pays attention to my billiard analogy.

Ronny: Everything seems like nothing to me now, 'cause I want you in my bed. I don't care if I burn in hell. I don't care if you burn in hell. The past and the future is a joke to me now. I see that they're nothing. I see they ain't here. The only thing that's here is you - and me.

What would it mean to restore the scene of this double-engagement comedy?

SCENE: ROSE STROLLS THROUGH THE CITY WITH PERRY, WHO COULD BECOME HER LOVER

Perry: We could go to my apartment. You could see how the other half lives.

Rose: I'm too old for you.

Perry: I'm too old for me; that's my predicament.

Rose: You're a little boy and you like to be bad.

Rose: No, I think the house is empty. I can't invite you in because I'm married. Because I know who I am.

Father and daughter confront each other about their infidelities. “What am I going to tell him?” Loretta asks.

“Tell him the truth,” Cosmo replies. “They find out anyway.”

SCENE: EVERYONE GATHERS IN ROSE’S KITCHEN FOR FINAL RECKONING

But in the final scene, the Kitchen Reckoning, it is daylight. The entire family is gathered in the room. There is no romantic candlelit dinner. Cosmo's moon has no place in the kitchen.

Rose: Have I been a good wife?

Cosmo: Yeah.

Rose: I want you to stop seeing her.

[Cosmo rises, slams the table once, and sits down again]

Cosmo: Okay.

Rose: [pauses] And go to confession.

When Johnny announces that he has to end the engagement because his mother needs him, Loretta returns his ring. 

Then, when Donny asks her to marry him, the two are standing, the window behind them, and she says yes, absolutely - without asking him to kneel. Spontaneously, Donny turns to his brother, the dumped ex-fiance, who is still kneeling, and asks him to give him the ring. So the ring goes back on Loretta's finger - the same ring used for one engagement - but no bad luck is mentioned. 

Bad luck only seems to be a concern when the expectation of marriage includes security and happiness. If love is ruin, as Donny says, a curse is nothing. A curse is petty currency, given the grand scheme of things.

When Loretta agrees to marry Ronny, Rose turns to her and asks: “Do you love him Loretta?”

Loretta replies, "Ma, I love him awful.”

Awful is a strange modifier for love. We read over this because we assume that Loretta is using a cliche, namely, I love him an awful lot, which means—-but that’s not how the phrase is intonated when Cher performs it.

Rose: I just want you to know no matter what you do, you're gonna die, just like everybody else.

Cosmo: Thank you, Rose.

"It's not a comedy," P. insists. "It's a romantic drama."

“It’s a tragedy,” the son repeats.

“It’s life,” my father adds, pouring himself another glass of schnapps.

Coover's projectionist and Phillips' city.

There's always this unbridgeable distance between the eye and its object. If I were to bridge it, what then?

—-Robert Coover, "The Phantom of the Movie Palace" (from A Night at the Movies)

Coover’s projectionist, alone among the reels, considering this idea of distance that feels almost elocutionary to me; the witness and the object fashioned by the projected image.

What Coover called the “filmic syntax” comes to mind when I think of Marguerite Duras’ books, and how much this particular way of seeing or “reelizing” touches the intervals she draws into the field of the page.

A projectionist and a poem this morning—-

—- the poem by Carl Phillips first published in The Paris Review issue no. 148 (Fall 1998) — for the way it moves down the page like a column that collects the words exchanged between strangers and crushed paper cups, and the momentum created by putting pressure on the clean/unclean antimony.

Of That City, the Heart

You lived here once. City—remember?—
of formerly your own, of the forever beloved,
of the dead,

                for some part of you, this part,
is dead, you have said so, and it is fitting:
a city of monuments, monuments to what is

gone, leaving us with our human need always
to impose on memory a body language, some
shape that holds.

                                I can picture you walking
this canal, this park, this predictably steep
gorge through which predictably runs a river,

in which river, earlier today, I saw stranded
a bent hubcap, spent condoms, a cup by
someone crushed, said enough to, tossed …

City in which—what happened? or did not
happen? what chance (of limbs, of spoils)
escaped you?

                      And yet … I have sometimes
imagined you nowhere happier than here, in
that time before me.

                                I can even, from what
little you have told me, imagine your first
coming here, trouble ahead but still far,

you innocent—of disappointment, still
clean. In those historical years preceding
the sufferings

                      of Christ, there were cities
whose precincts no one could enter unclean,
be their stains those of murder, defilement

of the wrong body, or at what was holy some
outrage. There were rituals for cleaning;
behind them, unshakeable laws, or—

they seemed so … But this city is not
ancient. And it is late inside a century
in which clean and unclean,

                                                less and less,
figure. At this hour of sun, in clubs of
light, in broad beams failing, I do not

stop it: I love you. Let us finally, un‐
daunted, slow, with the slowness that a
jaded ease engenders, together

                                                step into
—this hour, this sun: city of trumpets,
noteless now; of tracks whose end is here.

A train, Ada, and recitations in New Orleans.

Real friends boss
the wind around.

A voice. An animal need.
Like if I stink

you do too.
If it’s just the sunlight

again, lie down with me.

—-Jordan Stempleman, “All Actually”

THE BOOKS

The zipless portion of the old black suitcase, the most important space in my packing, is reserved for the selection of books that will accompany me. Clothes are the things forgotten, left behind—I don’t remember what I wore in Seattle, Burlington, Demopolis, New Orleans—- I recall what I read, the shape and feel of the words that accompanied me.

I dress in books as if each trip is another wedding, feet feeling their way down an aisle with the sounds of strangers rising from the space around me, the silence of not turning to them and saying: "We are here for different reasons. This means something different to each of us.”

The formula disciplines my tendency towards overlarge desirousness; it tames my book frenzy. After decades of travels, I limit myself to the bridal idiom: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. And so I packed for the wedding of New Orleans with the following:

The old was Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor.

The new was Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful.

The borrowed was Kenneth Burke’s Counterstatement.

The blue was Osip Mandelstam’s Noises of Time.

[Always, there is the music.]

M.’s hand, the Amtrak Crescent at night: “Map of the Falling Sky” by Songs Ohia.

THE PARTICULAR MOTION OF THE ARDOR-TRAIN

Notes from a station in Mississippi. The ghost of Captain Badass.

Seriousness, as a tone, works against sincerity in the poem. We can ‘speak’ of ardor, for example, in a way that takes itself seriously, and this act of taking seriously brackets ardor, and sets it apart formally. All that starched, buttoned-up ardor like a sad groom waiting at the head of that aisle for an idiom that trains wrong.

(As lovers we did not fail)

M. pours drinks as the night rolls past our train window.

(Brown eyes your pulse is getting hotter)

I feel most myself when moving, walking down a city sidewalk, whirring over old tracks, recognizing the music (and the muses) pushing me forward. Arduously. Stay in my head, I say to the rhythm. Linger longer, I say to the feeling. Don’t finish with me yet, I mutter to this beast that settles by the train window with M. on the other side of the table and Osip Mandelstam’s “Journey to Armenia” beside me.

Wheels on steel, rural houses and trees blurring together, sensation inflected by the velocity of Mandelstam's enthusiasm as he describes voice . . . What does it mean to “explode with ardor” for the minutes between one place and another? How does one notate the width of the instant, or measure the breadth of each tinny tick tick tick? All that white silk behind me, shredded by gravel and metal teeth.

GEARLESS IN THE GREEN CHASM

Tame the unruly with a list that instantiates the line moving towards a destination. Write this as if you will get somewhere. And then see where ‘it’ ends.

1. I crave coffee but we lack the appropriate gear.

2. Miriam pours into a small paper cup discovered near the sink. A post-toothbrushing cup for swizzling water. I shoot it quickly, racing the collapse of the paper, surprised that I lost this game I knew I was playing, this game I prepared for, the hot brown liquid seeping onto my forearm—-

3. —- and a constant chasm of green owns the air to my right.

4. Without announcement, the train halts abruptly amid the knees of various trees submerged in a swamp near Fosters, Alabama. Something nondescript prevents us from moving further. The trees are clear.

5. The blur has paused and now the view is a postcard. The red dirt roads of my youth are visible behind a tree grove and a bluster of white privet; their scent reaches me through the glass.

6. Not even glass can inoculate me, I say to my notebook. I speak in black ink to it.

7. What color is my voice when speaking to M.?

8. The way I know this swamp is all five senses, zero language.

9. M. and I chug soda and recollect wandering through Anais Nin’s words. When the train begins moving again, nothing is perturbed, nothing is ruined, nothing is jostled. The green blurs into a long seam beside us, a stitch on a map. A pattern emerges—-thirty breaths of tall pine forest followed by five breaths of massacred tree trunks, stacked in piles, denuded of branches and greenery, the bark flayed off. The tree slaughter is visible by train, though not from the highway.

10. “What are you thinking about?” The clouds are low in the sky, keeping the air humid. The red dirt rests like the rural’s handprint on the seat of a memory's pants. 

Night in New Orleans; statues and shadows; “Steve Albini’s Blues” by Songs Ohio and Jason Molina.

THE FIRST PANEL OF THE MORNING

At the NOLA Poetry Festival, the first panel of the morning is titled "Poetry Recitation: Exploring the Intersection of Memory, Adaptation, and Place." Zach Savich talks about how reciting a poem removes the word from the technology of the page and draws it into presence, rendering the body part of the annunciation and intonation. The responsibility of speaking blends with the feeling of saying, and the annihilation of the intermediary involved, in reading rather than reciting.

“I’m with you in the recitation,” Savich says slowly, looking at the audience. 

How to describe the feeling that eyes are trying to catch their breath?

I find myself italicizing Zach’s words when bringing them into text. Or using punctuation to intonate the intimacy of his statement, describing a moment that was revolutionary to him. He calls it a responsibility that the poet should “step into form” to inhabit it.

How does visuality on the page translate into audibility and sound in recitation? What sort of soundscape does each poem offer to us? 

“The mass, the thousand masses”: the epigraph to Zach’s book. Sarah said she would recite it to herself, these little phrases that got stuck in her head and later became poems, “snippets.”

Jordan Stempleton recollects memorization as a traumatic experience similar to his bar mitzvah, in that he couldn't understand in that moment how he was being changed by it. “To be possessed by the text" is how possession differs. 

“The narcissism of eye contact”: Nick Malone talks about where the poet’s gaze rests as he recites. Where is the poet looking? Where is the gaze located? Malone is interested in the moments where the recitation fails; he scavenges for the exact locations where the memory is lost. “Not about the place, but because of the page: harmonic with another, that cares.”

The act of reciting a poem posits a different relationship between the speaker and the subject, the poem and the expression, the saying and the being. 

Someone mentions a recording of all the air and silences in John Ashbery's readings, and my pulse speeds up, thrilled by this possibility implicating an archive of breath alongside the impossibility of holding these breaths in place. The risk of vulnerability becomes less performative in this idea of presence.

Each recitation is different in that it exists in relation to the space and the audience: a queer relationality emerges in the poem as a saying shaped by the relationships emerging from sound. Being aware of those people around us, looking up at them from a sheet of paper, permits a more defensive sort of being-with, one where the performance gives us an excuse for not dissolving: the body “knows" what it will say so nothing is created anew in that space. Under those conditions, the way we measure a reading's success depends on assessing whether we performed it correctly, rather than how we were changed by it.

How does recitation alter one's relation to the poem itself? How is a word like full (which hovers close to fool when spoken) enunciated differently? How does it sound more fully when the "ll" is drawn out?

Carolina Ebeid's poems moved me to complete silence. I had to hold my own hand because there was so emotion flowing, pulsing, dancing through that space.

I sit found for adoption
by slightness and by light.

- Jordan Stempleman, “Unmoved”

You said I am an empty page to you
I once had all the words
I forgot all the words
The body burns away

- Jason Molina, “The Body Burns Away”

Two fakes: the child and the monumental.

SARTRE’S FAKE CHILD

“I WAS A FAKE CHILD,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his autobiography, titled The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre. Here is the quote in its entirety:

"I adapted myself to their intentions with a virtuous eagerness that kept me from sharing their purposes,” the elder says of his younger self.

In Sartre’s telling, childhood's "I" figures itself in relationship to knowledge of hypocrisy. The child, here, is helpless; adults rule the world. Comparing this child with my favorite teenage-ing mammals, I am relieved to see this knowledge expressed. What the child knows without saying, the teen articulates as a claim towards their own autonomy. According to the teens, the world is still owned by idiotic adults—and they are absolutely correct. The teens resent this. The teens taste the edge of adulthood on the horizon and they want none of it. Their concept of power is still hitched to exploring the relationship to judgement and guilt. Like Sartre, they exercise their autonomy through the assignation of blame.

As an adult who resents what adulthood has wrought, I’m intrigued by the way in which resentment (my own, the rue I share with the teens) complicates the retrospective gaze. Can we blame our parents for wars, for being veterans, for being survivors of domestic violence, for letting the television run full-time and filling the rooms of our childhood minds whity shitty television sitcoms that socialized us into consumerism?

MONUMENTAL APOLOGIAS

RETURNING TO MY NOTES on Corey Van Landingham's essay, "Apologia," on the apology's elision of sorry-not-sorry. How the 'we' in past tense is always wrong—"And the multiplicity of future I's thus destabilizes every utterance, every word on the page."

Apologia, in Greek, refers to a speech in defense. As a genre, the apologia doesn't admit regret or guilt but "desires, instead, to make one's position clear, to offer an explanation in the face of accusation, to justify one's belief." Van Landingham considers how any public apology in the context of social media becomes an apologia, a mode of constant defense. Thus, monuments are an apologia, or "war's apology" – and I'm fascinated by how monumental apologias maintain a dialogue with the future anterior of the event they make common and perpetuate. Every statue of a man on a horse writes war into the future of human events. 

In Birmingham, three children feed pigeons beneath the boot of a war monument. They are forming an unconscious landscape which kins the monument to the innocence of childhood, restless pigeons, sun-lit sidewalks, the ice cream truck's choired bells. The monuments center meaningfulness as guarantee of timelessness: the single everlasting act of significance is human sacrifice. And publicity forever.

THE TAYLOR SWIFT CASE STUDY

DURING THE PANDEMIC LOCKDOWN, the two teens who were pre-teens and middle-schoolers at the time loved Taylor Swift.

(Although soft pop annoys me, I supported their emerging love for a particular music that felt inhabitable to them. Even now, we discuss and debate our preferences and tastes often but I don’t condemn their newfound affections at the risk of foreclosing those conversations where I learn more about the teens’ world. Imposing my own monuments, my studied likes and incorrigible appetite for the difficult, on humans who are already buckling beneath the absence of agency that characterizes 21st century late capitalism, seems like an ego-driven use of force. If adults need teens to reify their preferences, the nuclear family is even sicker than I thought.)

A few years ago, the teens removed every trace of Taylor Swift from their rooms, conversations, playlists, and clothing. The Swift imaginary was dead to them. When I queried the end of Swiftmania, one of the teens declared, simply: “She’s a fake.” Thus do I find myself thinking about the politics of betrayal.

We use the word 'betrayal' to refer to a violation of trust. As such, it is a statement about a relationship, a social form articulated on the basis of trust. Whether someone has been betrayed depends on the conditions of that relationship, the soil of that trust, and how loyalty is defined by both the betrayer and the betrayed. One could say, for example, that the President of the United States betrayed the people he was elected to represent if that President committed American citizens to a war after running on a platform that promised not to do so. In this case, he betrayed his constituency, or those who brought him to power. Alternately, one could say the President betrayed his country if he engaged in activity that is prohibited by the Constitution or federal law. The President may betray his wife if they have agreed to a monogamous relationship and he solicits an intern, whom he is also betraying in his function as a public servant. Again, betrayal depends on the particular relationship as well as the conditions that comprise 'trust' in that relationship. 

For betrayal to occur, a relationship must risk having something at stake: it must have something valuable that can be lost. If I am thinking about stakes and betrayal, it is because I am fascinated by the role parasocial relationships play in the political imaginary. Our super-screened world enables us to identify with the people we want to be seen with, and the imaginary unfolds from that space of visibility, of having seen and being seen as or with. Feeling betrayed by the fact that Taylor Swift couldn't care less about the Palestinian children being murdered by US bombs in Gaza is a sentiment based on a willing delusion about the nature of the relationship between fans and their idol. 

Parasocial relationships, more generally, indulge fantasy and delusion to the point of world-making. Because these relationships originate in the fan's imagination rather than the trust of an intersubjective relationship, it strikes me as a sort of masturbatory betrayal that mistakes its object for a subject. It makes sense to be disappointed in the discovery that Swift doesn't use her social power to defend the lives of the most vulnerable.

Enough with the Swiftie lamentations of betrayal! As a writer, the characters I invent cannot properly be said to betray me—even if they disappoint me. 

One might also wonder what sort of fantasy facilitates the belief that Swift would speak for the lives of Arab children. Activism hardly rises to anything like a priority in her career. Her fans may be global but her platform remains pinned to the emotional landscape of American girliness. Like other limousine liberals, Swift waves a flag of affirmation alongside her peers—but only when it suits her, and under very particular conditions that generate publicity for her public persona. 

Taylor Swift is the sort of poet that is more interested in creating ambiance than revealing a difficult truth. Her poetry is indistinguishable from a GAP ad for cute boyfriend pajamas. But the tastes and preferences expressed in these final two sentences are not dicta for utopia. I don’t want my preferences to become rules or laws. My interest is economic: the law I want guts the entire possibility of the American dream that wants to be billionaire. Taxing Taylor down to a few million would be good for almost everyone.

Ernaux and Duras: A comparison.

[From my 2023 notebook entries attempting to compare what it is that Duras and Ernaux do differently.]

Marguerite Duras and Annie Ernaux both control the narratives carefully by narrowing staging and circumscribing the temporality of the event. Each book has a distinct, particular time signature… Other books return to the same scene or event but alter the stage and time signature. 

• Absence of a controlled focus, the ripped-from-the-mind feel of the narration, the recursion and repetition make beginning and ending less central to the shape of the novel. This is different from realism, where the beginning and ending are part of the arc, and a way in which success is referenced.

• Suspense is built in the voice’s relation to self through others. Voice – or the sound of their own — is central to style for both writers.

• The interlocutor is rarely described at the outset, or, if they are, the shift occurs inside the You with transitional movements from interior world to exterior.

• Techniques used by both include: rhythm, tempo, use of silence and pauses in a way that resembles music theory, recursive repetition, modulation, use of refrain rather than flashback, ongoing rupture, continuous interruption, contrapuntal alterations between descriptions or inventories and dialogue or address, recurrence, leitmotif, disclosure without psychologizing,  and the centrality of human relationships as a site in which meaning is created.

• Things overheard become part of the speaker's life – the porous self, the unfinished, is often portrayed through non sequiturs and open ended statements or thoughts. The ellipsis, the open dash, the unfinished quotation… 

Both Annie Ernaux and Marguerite Duras write love as a compulsive and destructive power which involves a loss of self; this loss is gendered by the margins, and the presence of motherhood and children. Both write parenting as an emotional and physical commitment carried primarily by the mother's body and mind.* So: motherhood and romantic love threaten the solitary self that both writers embody. There are no happy or well functioning couples. Therapy doesn't fix or prevent foolishness; therapy doesn't resolve harm. Boundaries are trespassed, selves are modified without being redeemed or improved. Shame persists, in time, in tone, in the grief over utopia, and the refusal of linear time (which is also therapeutic time) or progress.

From the individual memory privileged in Proustian literature, Ernaux attempts a horizontal move into cultural memory, the base of modernity's Memory Studies. This is her structural shift (Duras focuses on landscapes and cinematography instead). I keep trying to find a way to write this without feeling as if I have abandoned my protagonist.

* (Part of me wonders if I could appreciate Ernaux or Duras in the same way without this awareness of how much the cost of mothering is factored into their words. That is the shadow looming behind their stoic silences. The unmentionable, unsexy part. So many of us are bludgeoned by it. How funny that it is gauche to say so. I laugh and look back at the knife or pen in my hand.)

Annie Ernaux and the "oblong perturbance".

1.

Revising a draft essay and thinking about Annie Ernaux’s writing, cutting thousands of words (as usual), I return to her commitment to indeterminacy and its refusal to grant absolution. Her texts never elide the affect of shame and abjection on narrative form. Shame touches everything. Overcoming, in Ernaux, is the arc of narrative bullshit. There is no redemption, no salvation: only the dead statues that surround her in the cathedral she revisited after her abortion.

As an artistic mode, the pieta hovers over the speaker’s assertion of "fearless insight" which arises "from the arid patch of facts." Secular epiphany and hagiographic-femme feels distant from what the author intends to give us. But I use my "we" loosely: I use it and lose it the way a loose woman loses her voice. 

What is at stake for Annie Ernaux as a writer? I ask this dull, unshattering question in order to procure permission for writing about my own Annie, rather than presenting the definitive one. The request for permission here is merely rhetorical, since I will write my own Annie regardless in the hopes that this Annie will enable me to answer other questions presented by her writing. Among these questions: What is at stake for Annie as a character in each of her novelizations? And what is at stake for her readers, particularly the women she hoped would be part of her audience?

2.

Can the verb "transcend" be applied in any shape or formality to this labor, this writing, this life. Should I punctuate myself appropriately by posturing this as a question.

And if I don’t . . .

3.

There are so many Annies, I think again, as dusk descends on Birmingham, Alabama; the horizon pukes up the viscous pinks of its pollution. A friend with three cars tells me he loves Annie Ernaux for her sparsity. "She reminds me of a female Hemingway," he ventures. And I can see how this might be true for him. Just as I can see how Tobi Haslett’s brilliant, deBordian Annie might give us a reading in which each of Ernaux's books presents "the charge" to see and do something, to "rifle through the particulars so you can synthesize and thus transcend them." 

I can visualize the transcendent scenario. I can imagine there is a sense in which the male-identifying critics have, so to speak, nailed it. 

The pink horizon shrieks idiotically, loosening its skirts near the coal-fired power plant. It remains at the periphery of my vision when marveling over the way criticism has enabled readers to believe we can ‘read the same’ book, or live in the same world. Being that shadow of a shade who is less sure of the ground she is standing on, less certain of her "position" on the literary terrain, so to speak, I note the shame of this Birmingham skylines that passes for sunset—- a shame that often takes refuge behind soporifics that purport to overcome or rise above what exists. 

But the sky cannot rise above the coal-power that poisons it. There is no overcoming. No greenwash can scrub this enough for a redemption.

4.

In 1995, four years after the publication of Simple Passion, French author Alain Gerard published Madame, C’est A Vous Que J’Ecris, a novel that responded to Ernaux's from the perspective of the mysterious, married lover. Gerard chronicles the affair as he saw it. 

Where Ernaux's speaker applies "ecriture plat" or the flat affect in writing, the stylistic tone borrowed from reportage, Gerard's speaker emerges from indignation, and a sense of having been wrong. To Eranux's refusal of moral judgment, Gerard brings moralization, emasculation, and betrayal of romantic love.

Simple Passion focuses on the writing subject, the woman’s hunger for the absent lover, and the lover, who has made all the more interesting in his absence. Annie knows this. And by protecting the identity of her married lover, she is also protecting the reader from the other banality of his personality. By devoting so much space to describing the waiting, providing us with a phenomenology of washing herself wait for this man, Annie writes into desire. The anticipation of the lover is superior to the Love. 

As for Betrayal, I think of it as the moment when we discover that we don't ‘know’ the Other. The one we love is a stranger to us. Only the stranger remains fascinating. The stranger is the part we want to keep as well as the part we can't believe. While desire craves a stranger, the relational parameters require maintaining a firm boundary between the ordinary portions of our life.

Ernaux keeps her affair secret from her sons and friends. As an event, her relationship with A. never locates itself in the mundane. A. appears powerful because his life and career determine when they can meet, but that is his only power, really. He is a sexual object. And a sexual object is, ultimately, an asexual one. 

The nineteenth century epistolary novel emphasized the formal conventions of a polite, Victorian femininity. In this form, how much a woman knew was constantly renegotiated with respect to how well she knew her place, and how well she performed obsequiousness. The feminine epistle spoke earnestly, prioritizing feelings and aesthetic responses over claims to intellectual discovery.  In a brilliant, embittered move, Gerard deploys the gender-coded femininity of the epistolary genre to complicate A.'s character while also challenging gender’s connection in the form of the letter. In comparison to Gerard’s entreaties, Ernaux's reportage seems evasive, overly neutral, and possibly spiked by guile. 

Gerard’s A. begins by contesting Ernaux's claim that the novel is not a betrayal. "Nous nous étions promis de ne jamais rien livrer de notre secret," he writes. (We promised ourselves that we would never book anything of our secret.) After portraying her lover as a sex object, Ernaux insults his manhood by narrowing it to his dangling organ. "Choosing to forget that a man isn’t reduced, even if he sometimes fears it, to that oblong protuberance that adorns statues, silencing the crudest part of our nature, you weakened it," A. accuses. 

The charge of emasculation brings to mind the Hermes— those roadside gods associated with Roman decadence—and the dream I keep having of a small classroom with pegs along a wall intended for coats and backpacks, except that each peg is a wooden penis, and the girls are aware that their clothing, their school bags, their lunch, sacks, all hang from this oblong protuberance on the wall.

It goes without saying that the fear of emasculation is closely related to the sort of cultural sensitivity the penis has come to expect. Girls are socialized to protect the penis from knees, elbows, sharp bumps, teeth, insults, withering words, insecurity, disapproval, and the wiles of the cocktease. What the penis expects, the penis must get. Surely there is nothing more serious than a disappointed penis given the power its owner exercises.

Gerard's A. wanted "a story" but what he got was a cheap, pornographic voyeurism with no emotional depth and no spiritual entanglement. He refuses to accept that this is her version of desire: she is either lying or trying to hurt him. He cannot imagine that the book about him is finished. It would have been more feminine if she'd revealed him and exposed the truth of his marriage, rather than foreground her own salacious diddling in the feminine imaginary.

5.

Now I digress in Paris, where Roland Barthes introduced Michel Foucault to Pierre Klossowski around 1963. Barthes observed that both men had a thing for Nietszche's eternal return.

In 1947, Pierre Klossowski married Denise Marie Roberte Morin Sinclaire, a war widow who had been deported to Ravensbrück as a result of her Resistance activities. Setting the suspended vocation aside, all of his future work was to be "dominated by and dedicated to her haunting beauty," as David Macey wrote in The Lives of Michel Foucault (Verso Books).

Denise is the Roberte of Klossowski's drawings and novels. Denise is the one who led his hand to the large-scale drawing graphite and color-pencil sketches executed painstakingly on paper. In Macey’s words: 

Klossowski's novels and drawings make up an imaginary world in which erotic, religious and philosophical themes merge, and, being a self-confessed monomaniac, he has little interest in anything outside that world. Although his work — and especially the trilogy known as Les Lois de l'hospitalité — is sometimes dismissed as misogynist and even pornographic, he insists that it has a mystical content and belongs to a gnostic tradition. Maurice Blanchot endorsed Klossowski's claims when he described his writings as "a mixture of erotic austerity and theological debauchery". Both the novels and the drawings are sequences of scenes, understood in the theatrical sense of that term, and of humiliating encounters between Roberte and characters from a threatening commedia dell'arte. Roberte becomes an object of exchange, circulating endlessly in an erotic economy. She is raped and assaulted, is seduced and seduces, and takes on many different identities but remains unpossessed, inviolable, it being the author's conviction that the deepest level of individuality is a core which is both non-communicable and non-exchangeable. Like the tableaux vivants imagined and staged by de Sade's libertines, Klossowski's words and images betray an obsession with representation itself: representations of plays, of drawings, of drawings of scenes from plays, books about books. They are a theater of simulacra in which everything is represented, and nothing is real. The theatrical scenes that make up the trilogy, in particular, originated in planned drawings that were not actually executed.

Klossowski locates his "theater of simulacra" in the era of ancient Roman decadence, where so-called "simulacra" and simulated effigies of the gods lined the avenues. The presence of the gods on the streets testified to their material existence but also served as a reminder to citizens that worship was required. This was the time of the roadside Herms. What drew Klossowski to these simulacra was their capacity to "sexually determine the divinities they represented, as David Macey explains in his biography of Foucault: "The indeterminacy of their essence was replaced by a materialization, which was that of a sexuality. Gradually, the classical reference became combined with a meditation upon the nature of icons, and the simulacrum is finally defined as constituting the sign of an instantaneous state and cannot establish an exchange between one mind and another, nor permit the transmission of one thought to another... The simulacrum has the advantage of not purporting to fix what it represents or says of an experience; far from precluding it, it implies contradiction."

Michel Foucault’s interest in hermeneutics should be mentioned here, for Foucault discovered a link between the simulacrum and the demon stalking Nietzsche's Gay Science in one of Klossowski's essays. “This is the demon who says that everything in your life... will return to you, all in the same succession and sequence',” Macey observes:

Nietzsche then asks: 'Would you not throw yourself down and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine"?

The ambiguity of the demon-god is also that of the sign-simulacrum known as Roberte. For Klossowski, language is an unstable medium in which startling transformations can occur. It is also closely related to the body: Roberte is a word made flesh and her body is of a flesh made of words. 

The body-language relationship generates texts which must have appealed greatly to Foucault's own enjoyment of wordplay. In Roberte ce soir, for example, erotic encounters can be couched in the language of Thomist theology, as when Roberte is penetrated by the sed contra of a colossus while she stimulates her own quid est to orgasm.

In addition to a shared obsession with Nietzsche, Foucault and Klossowski also shared a fascination with de Sade. Apart from Blanchot's Sade et Lautréamont, Klossowski's Sade, My Neighbor was one of the first devoted studies of the Marquis. Klossowski read Histoire de la folie intently (it’s not clear that Foucault had read it prior to reading Klossowski’s essay). Gilles Deleuze, who was Klossowski's friend, intimated that Klossowski's work was compelling for a man who resisted the lure of self-definition. All of Klossowski's writing “strives towards a single goal: ensuring the loss of personal identity, dissolving the ego; that is the splendid trophy that Klossowski's characters bring back from a journey to the edge of madness," to quote Deleuze via Macey.

Walking through the tunnel of Danielle Dutton's dresses.

for Daniel Dutton’s dresses

Kiki Smith, “Butterfly” (2000)

i

Danielle Dutton’s “Sixty-Six Dresses I Have Read” moves like a mix between a quotation-collage and a spec-fi installation that gathers dresses from readings into a collaborative space called the page. The speculative quality demands a certain kind of engagement from the reader, namely, a creative one. Imaginations are invited to bear on what emerges, or is made to happen, in those interactions. One loves it so much that one pines away in its lineaments.

ii

—One of Dutton’s dresses.

“Biography of a Dress” by Jamaica Kincaid.

iii

Why do these dresses elicit a feeling of recognition for me? What does it mean to “identify with” a dress one has read? Which dresses have I read that did not make Dutton’s list?

Three different narrative approaches come to mind. Three ways of thinking about dresses:

a) a quotation-collage of my dresses modeled on Dutton’s

b) a description of my own experiences with Dutton’s dresses

c) a lyrical enumeration of my dresses in relation to each other, and what they picked out from the world, or what they rendered salient

Obviously, the end should be an appendix that names the dress-makers, themselves.

iv

——A few of Dutton’s dresses that I have worn, with the acknowledgment that the sites where I read them must be designated as spaces in which I, too, was worn by them. Or various loci wherein the book became part of the lived experience.

I read dress 60 in the emergency room of the children's hospital as my youngest mammal lifted each wire attached to her body and demanded to know what it meant. What each line was for. Where it was going. How did this line tell the men in white coats what they wanted to know. Sometimes the syntax got so intense that I had to lay the book near her feet and walk to the door, back and forth preparing a riddle. “Why are the mother and child at the ER at 3 a.m.?” My daughter loves riddles. “To give the vampires who live in the basement eight tubes of blood so that the hospital's electricity doesn't go out.” Leaning to kiss her forehead, I whispered a secret to the stories growing inside it: stay lit, I told them. There was more blood to come. And gawd’s heaven knows life is a cartography of places where you learned how to read that shit. 

I read dress 51 through the Romanian summer with seventeen years attached to my name and limp dragging my right leg slightly behind my body. The limp had its own labor; it met prior surgeries at the negotiating table and made bids on the future. I wasn't part of those negotiations. And there was a limp in Rilke's Paris that hounded my steps each time I wore this dress again, each year I could not resist zipping my aging flesh into its strictures. The balm of familiar cuts, the good whir of elliptical anxiety. I would never be a writer, the dress whispered. Dresses know what they know of the best of it.

Late last year, while reading dress 211, I dreamt in orange. And paused at the point when the speaker mentions how Celia Paul ate when her husband was away on business trips: "No candles. No meat. At dinner she'd read Goethe with rice pudding. 'Half of me is still Paul Becker,' she wrote, 'and the other half is acting as if it were.'“ Celia Paul's 'as if' felt like a hinge zipper in dress 21, or maybe it cast a different angle of light on Paul’s interlocutor in dress 31. which remains a complicated and fantastic dress in the epistolary style. The book is addressed to artist Gwen John, or to her ghost. "You and I have often painted self-portraits by proxy," Paul says.

I read dress 31 in the week that repudiated the persistent imbecility of my idealisms.

v

218 The buttons run like rivets down the front.

220 Wednesday: White dress or what?

237 Tonight men stride like elegant scissors across the lawn / to the women arrayed there, petals waiting to loosen.

280 the douce campagna of that thing!

281 a coat in the barbaric style

289 His white gown and the beige blanket of his bed were wet, scarlet and livid.

290 a gown with a hoop skirt, with a hem of gold

311 causing faint alterations of the status quo

312 liberally and light-heartedly [ . . . ] poeticized at a dainty table

313 swathed in greatcoat

888. I stick a knife in my head

vi

Unnumbered, buried in their beginnings. The others have been worn long enough to develop palettes, textures, and images dangling from their verbs like porn-bots from tweets or beer cans from bumpers carrying away the newly-married. The expectations of luminous whiteness. The first one hangs next to a poem I started and never wanted to finish. A poem I did not want to wear. I left it there. —- The second demands attention; it gives rise to duties. Time is structured by it. Poems get written and hidden, and the white dress participates in this game of being. To be or not be that infamous paraphrase. — I wore the third through so many mornings of breast milk that memories curdle when I permit myself to inhabit it, however briefly. The men are the tools capable of cutting the fabric and shape for the girl’s party dress, and they intrude on tthe dress she is reading until the third dress gets overshadowed by the scissors of fourth, and how their elegant whiskerings destroy me. — I have done abominable things when wearing the fifth; have used this dress to excuse the things I did in it. I would do them again for the pleasure of being so damned.

vii

vix

In a celebrated biography of Proust (Tadié) is a small poorly reproduced 1907 photo of Proust and Alfred Agostinelli seated in their motor vehicle, dressed for a journey. Proust, swathed in a greatcoat, one leg crossed over the other, looks puffy and already bored with wherever they are going.

—- Anne Carson, The Albertine Workout

211. Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other by Danielle Dutton
218. ”The White Dress” by Lynn Emanuel
220. “Emily Dickinson’s To-Do List” by Andrea Carlisle
237. "Party Dress for a First-Born" by Rita Dove
280. “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard” by Wallace Stevens
281. “To a Madonna, Ex-Voto in the Spanish Style” by Anthony Hecht
289. “The Unspoken” by David Hayden
290. “The Scissors and Their Fathers” by Paul Eluard
311. “Sentence” by Donald Barthelme
312. “Walk in the Park” by Robert Walser
313. The Albertine Workout by Anne Carson
888. “100%” by Sonic Youth

Excerpts from 'my X's'

A project with UNA last year, a collaboration in publishing with a class taught by the incredible Jason McCall at UNA: the experience of rapidly typing up my notebooks to try and make sense of them, while playing on the interview as a form that has been so highly professionalized and desaturated that our bodies rarely make an appearance in it. My X’s.

A few excerpts . . .

1.

Imagine if every interview started with epigraphs.

The one who merely flees is not yet free. In fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees.

― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

We can say any truth and any falsehood. We can affirm and negate in the same breath. We can construe material impossibility at will; in the Hegelian dialectic man ‘falls up’. Thus language itself possesses and is possessed by the dynamics of fiction. To speak, either to oneself or to another, is in the most naked, rigorous sense of that unfathomable beauty, to invent, and to reinvent being and the world.

— George Steiner, Real Presences

What was passed is present, what will be future is past, and what can never be might return time and time again.

— André Aciman

Creative minds know how slight can be the line between flying and falling, between a failure and a co-creation with human fallibility.

— Svetlana Boym

2

This is a book, a text, a way of speaking inside a designated context. But texts are not separate from the world in which they are written. Unlike the borders of nation-states or the fences announced by private property, the mind is continuously permeated by the world. Thinking, itself, is an act that involves being altered by thought.

Maybe “this” also refers to the conditions under which this book originated, particularly the coincidence of its proposal in the week following October 7, 2023, as well as the conditions under which it was written. To begin under these conditions is to admit the instability in our ways of knowing so as to inhabit the particular contingencies of authorship. To admit is not a negative thing. Admitting permits us to think into the difficult and to ask hard questions about boundaries, borders, and ethics. In this sense, to admit gives us permission to transgress the facile line between “right” and “wrong” and explore what is destroyed by such lines. We can ask who stands to benefit from administering them. We can use mirrors for something besides self-affirmation. A mirror can reveal the gaps between the way we imagine ourselves and actuality. “Co-creation” turns a monologue into a dialogue that makes creative use of discord and misunderstanding. I make the book as the book makes me; we make each other with every encounter and conversation; we make the world in relation to the ways we know others have made it. The hardest part for humans is that there is no way to know (or control) what others will make of us. Or: what Others will make of Us.

Saying nothing concisely: Macedonio Fernandez.

"Saying nothing is here concise for the first time: until now it always required volumes".

—Macedonio Fernandez, The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (1925-1952)

1

Mount Parnassus, near Delphi, Greece, has two summits. Back in the ancient days, when the gods still roamed the earth seeking sexual partners among humans, one summit of Mount Parnassus was consecrated to Apollo and the Muses, while the other belonged to Bacchus.

The mountain acquired its name from Parnassus, a son of Neptune. Allegedly, Deucalion's ark came to rest there after the flood. Owing to its connexion with the Muses, Parnassus came to be regarded as the seat of poetry and music; hence To climb Parnassus is "to write poetry".

I’ve been musing about muses, great and small, worshipped or banished. Gratuitously, a “muse” is one who inspires art. Given the gender hierarchy elicited by this word (the Muses served the men’s creations), ‘muse’ has been read as a trope for male supremacy in art. The man needs his muse to make art; the woman is responsible for keeping him inspired and excited. She is whatever he makes her, as Alberto Moravia demonstrated across various fictions.

2

Anna Akhmatova’s poem “The Muse,” was written or published in 1924. It is given to us below in English as translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward.

She answers: “Yes.”

I want to leave the riddle of this poem aside for a minute and read it against its grain, as a framing device for the muse.

If you stand near the left side and look at the ellipsis in the center, “she” is there. She is the one whom the speaker attends. She is “her whom no one can command.” She is, obviously, also known as Inspiration. But as you stand here, peering at the poem from the left, following the ellipsis down to the definitive and final yes, there is something else you notice about the muse, apart from her gender.

By closing this poem with a confirmation from the muse, Akhmatova (perhaps unintentionally) plays into emptiness of that affirmation. For, she remains nameless. She is simply the titular whose yes issues from a cloud of fury, flute in hand, “serene and pitiless,” but still anonymous and unknowable. We can’t grasp or hold Akhmatova’s muse. We can supplicate and placate her, but we cannot control her. This romanticized notion of the Muse as female spirit informed even the Surrealist conception of gender: Breton’s novel could not exist without its Nadja.

3

To scat a bit, or to follow the sonic thread into its less ‘intelligible’ modulations, amusement is an affective response to an encounter with the muse, whether real or imagined. A museum is where the muses are collected for others to admire. A curator is the boss who elects what gets preserved and displayed for posterity; the curator is the cleric of reigning muses. Author Macedonio Fernández engaged these varying velocities with his anti-novel, The Museum of Eterna's Novel, that imagined itself as a museum for nostalgia. Make no mistake: it is the imagining that matters to Macedonio, who began writing the book in 1925, and continued wandering through his imaginary museum until his death in 1952.

The novel or museum or nostalgia is a thing that he never entirely finished, and so Museum was published posthumously, 15 years after the death of the author in Argentina (a decade or so before the death of the author in continental philosophy). 

Jorge Luis Borges named Macedonio as one of his muses. But, unlike other modernists, Macedonio had no intent of founding a school or a manifesto party. His refusal of chronology and linear progression was necessitated by his own neo-Pythagorean talismans against hypochondria and constant worry. Where other modernists used stream-of-consciousness as an ornamental facade that guised how the plot was ‘getting to the point’ and drawing us along the arc that peaks in the usual climax, Macedonio diverted, discoursed, meandered, dreamt, reconsidered, and shifted through the ether plotlessly. He made sure to preface this plotlessness with more than 50 potential prologues, preambles, prolegomena, and provocations served to the reader prior to the main course of the text.

Georges Perec, Michel Leiris, 'projected novels', and George Steiner's 'unfinished books' bobbed through my mind like ducks in a bathtub mind when I returned to the Museum of Eterna this weekend (particularly since Joycean stream-of-consciousness has returned to the discourse). 

My marginalia from prior readers included questions (What happens to time and duration in the present? What is time in the museum where one's relationship to time is transformed by conversation with objects? Who is the speaker of the book the author ghosted? ) as well as a note about a character that I snuck into a short fiction that I never submitted for publication, partly because the reference felt too obscure, but mostly for the usual reason known as self-doubt. The character note —- use her song in that story that plays with Eliade — is scribbled next to this passage by Macedonio:

A Romanian woman once sang me a phrase of folk music and I have since found it tens of times in different works from different composers of the past four hundred years. Indubitably: things do not begin; or they don’t begin when they are created. Or the world was created old.

One could say I, too, have mused Macedonio. The way he literally imagines his characters as separate from him, as shadows released into the world by the author’s imagination, was a formative fictional influence for me. What do characters do when the author is sleeping or failing to submit his draft on time? How do they deal with our extraordinary self-doubt that translates into a penchant for fiddling which refuses to commit the text to closure, just in case another character should pop in and make sense of the madness?

Macedonio says of the characters:

It’ll be necessary that some of them have altercations and even become enemies, as is obvious, considering the close quarters they share, living in the same novel: characters destined to be permanent rivals, or those who are so only for a moment, must both conduct themselves as people who nevertheless share the same death, at the same place and time: the end of the book.

The text is a museum but also a novel, which Macedonio defines as a formal expression of the imaginary. “Author: I shouldn’t say to the reader, ‘Come into my novel,’ but rather save him from life indirectly,” he writes. “My quest is that every reader should enter my novel and lose himself in it; the novel will take him in, bewitch him, empty him out.”

In its layers of frenzied avowals, the novel vacates the reader. We read to become nothing, or to relish the author’s preference for a gnostic plenitude of nada. Subtitled "the first good novel", the Museum makes deploys injunctions until the syntax, itself, begins to resemble a literary manifesto. Macedonio demands "constant fantasy" of his words, a stream of half-conscious phantastes that protect the reader from the horror of embodied reality, a horror that the author refuses the status of reality. The pages must “avoid the hallucination of reality, which is a blemish on the face of art.” 

Borges lost faith in his muse as his own fame grew. In this, Borges meets the countless writers and thinkers who abandoned viscosity for a more respectable, orderly cosmogony in their later years. To Borges' chagrin, Macedonio never really changed his tune on relativism: the only real world was the one in our heads. His commitment to modernism refused the industrialized Progress implied by GNP and GDP. He lived his aversion to productivism as praxis rather than theory. Perhaps most notably, he managed not to avoid modernism's tendencies to indulge in literary neocolonialism. 

Modeling our plethoras of swank and messianic pragmatism, American authors have disavowed most of that relativist namby-pamby, which is to say, we have privatized it as a locus of magic that only exists between the patient and their therapist. But Macedonio looks up from his hermetic cave and points to the indescribable images on the wall. He cannot remember drawing them. Is he the author or the interpreter? Who will explain what he imagines?

Privileging the act of thinking and imagining over existing inside the terms defined by others, Macedonio's commitment to the imaginary can be read alongside critical theory's focus on literature as a space where the world of the future might (and must) appear.

On a funnier note, rumor has it that Macedonio was a descendant of the Macedonio family of Naples, Italy who claimed descent from the Macedonian dynasty of Eastern Rome and Philip II of ancient Macedonia. “Saying nothing is here concise for the first time: until now it always required volumes,” as Macedonia wrote.

Turning directly to the reader with his cavernous You, Macedonio promises: "You will be the one who changes Thought to Love and I will be the pause or the anticipation during which time cannot change things.” One is undone by such preposterous, metaphysical intimacy.

Richter's lustrated photographs.

1

I’m think of archives, photographs, and alterity in the reading of the ordinary. Susan Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives deploys the chance encounter and temporal to place archives in conversation with one another. In these telepathic archives, the image serves as a sort of communicative interlocutor who instructs the reader on what to make of it. Howe locates a "visionary spirit, a deposit from a future yet to come," in the domain of research libraries and special collections. This "mystic documentary telepathy" arrives suddenly, pressing "things-in-themselves" against "things-as-they-were-for-us."

Here, the poet centers the "insignificant" material details: "quotations, thought-fragments, rhymes, syllables, anagrams, graphemes, endangered phonemes, in soils and cross-out." Howe rewrote William Carlos Williams' Paterson — an archival study of the scholar's relationship to the text.

This playful engagement of archives lends itself to poesis. But archives are more complicated where I come from. . . archives are expected to provide a sort of justice. I should begin with a word, lustration, that hangs over European history as well as art. The etymology draws on the ancient Latin word, lustratio, meaning “purification by sacrifice”:

“Purification by sacrifice” is an action undertaken to restore lost purity, and that is certainly the way many politicians have attempted to efface the past crimes of governments: name the dirty ones and ask them to stand as scapegoats for the things ordinary citizens did at a time when their governments funded and sustained genocide, war crimes, and pageants perfumed by patriotism.

Baptism, itself, is a form of lustrating ritual. For context, however, here is an excerpt from Wikipedia’s entry on the lustrations of the 1990’s in Central and Eastern Europe:

Lustration in Central and Eastern Europe is the official public procedure of scrutinizing a public official or a candidate for public office in terms of their history as a witting confidential collaborator (informant) of relevant former communist secret police, an activity widely condemned by the public opinion of those states as morally corrupt due to its essential role in suppressing political opposition and enabling persecution of dissidents. Surfacing of evidence for such a past activity typically inflicts severe reputation damage to the person concerned. It should not be confused with decommunization which is the process of barring former communist regular officials from public offices as well as eliminating communist symbols.

The principle of non-retroactivity means that a past role of a confidential collaborator (informant) is alone as such inadmissible from the beginning for criminal prosecution or conviction, thus, lustration allows at least to bring such past collaborators to moral responsibility by making the public opinion aware of the established outcomes through their free dissemination. Another motivation was the fear that undisclosed past confidential collaboration could be used to blackmail public officials by foreign intelligence services of other former Warsaw Pact allies, in particular Russia.

Depending on jurisdiction, either every positive result or only the one obtained regarding a person who falsely declared otherwise, may trigger consequences varying greatly among jurisdictions, ranging from mere infamy to purging the person from office and a 10-year exclusion from holding public offices. Various forms of lustration were employed in post-communist Europe.

In the curation of historical memory, the interest of the nation-state and empire often diverges from that of the scholar. Public memory, after genocide and war, demands recollection, or re-collecting.

2

Horst Richter was a school teacher, a father, a community member known for his staunch, traditional valorization of family life. He was also a member of the Nazi Socialist Party, a war veteran, an owner of faded Nazi uniforms. 

When the postwar lustration of German Nazis began, Horst lost his teaching license. His son, Gerhard Richter, spent his childhood in the Third Reich. Many years later, Gerhard vaguely recalled the attractions of militarism as a young member of the Hitler Youth. Childhood marks its weather on the basis of sunniness, and how close the next son is to the rays of the father. 

Gerhard Richter's photographs lustrate themselves by over-exposing the image. I am staring at a photograph of his aunt, Marianne, who was committed to an asylum for schizophrenia at the age of 18.  By the war's end, 3,272 patients of the state mental institution had been murdered as part of the Nazi program to exterminate the mentally ill or socially unstable. Aunt Marianne was among them.

Richter implies that his uncle worked at the hospital where Aunt Marianne was interned. 

Werner Heyde was one of the psychiatrists who organized Nazi Germany's T-4 Euthanasia Program. When the war ended, Heyde was imprisoned along with other Nazi officials. In 1947, Heyde escaped. Hidden behind the alias Fritz Sawade, Heyde practiced sports medicine and psychiatry in the town of Flensburg. He shopped at the grocery store. He served as an expert witness in local court cases. For 13 years, Mr. Sawade lived as an ordinary, upper-middle-class German until a falling-out with a friend led to his identity being betrayed. 

On November 12, 1959, Werner Heyde turned himself in to police in Frankfurt, ending 13 years as a fugitive. The picture below was taken at his arrest.

In 1964, a few days before he was put on trial for his war crimes, Heyde knotted a noose and ended his own life.

Gerhard Richter painted "Herr Heyde" in 1965 based on Heyde's arrest photo. It is no longer on display anywhere. The painted caption reads: "Werner Heyde in November 1959, turning himself in to the authorities." Richter described this painting as an effort to evoke the paranoia of realizing that one’s neighbors served as functionaries in the state apparatus of genocide. 

In 2002, Richter still claimed that there was no conscious link between his aunt's deaths and the juxtaposition of these early family portraits. Childhood is when the family portrait is strange but not yet evil: it hasn’t been developed in a darkroom yet.

3

There is a poem by Phillis Wheatley that speaks to recollection here, in the US: it is a brilliant poem and I find myself leaning along its edges and rhyme schemes, noting how formal rules often served as tests for demonstrating poetic competence. In 1761, a slave ship brought the poet from West Africa to Boston, where she was purchased by a rich tailor and his wife. Six years later, Wheatley’s first poem was published in Newport, Rhode Island’s local newspaper.

In 1773, Wheatley published her only collection of books, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, with a press in London. It was the first published book by what historians called “African-Americans,” at a time, of course, when that moniker referred to Black persons enslaved by white men. Wheatley, herself, was still enslaved when this groundbreaking book was published. She was officially ‘freed’ in 1778 and she went on to marry another freedman, John Peters. But Peters abandoned her and their children in Boston. This city, Boston, is where Phillis lived in poverty, losing two children and nursing a mortally ill child when she died and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Here is one of the thirty-six poems published in Phillis Wheatley’s book:

After purchasing his slave, John Wheatley ‘gave her’ an American name. He re-baptized her. He purified her of all connections to what she calls her “Pagan land” in first line of “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” The relationship between colonialism and Messianism continues to haunt US policy. Whenever an ethnic group or nationality is described as ancestrally related to Cain, I cringe with disgust. There is nothing harmless or innocent in colonialism’s sick and vicious gods.

The Thought-Piece That Can't Think It's Self

Literary criticism is, to me, a literary form: a type of writing that uses language to reveal the mind at work in reading and interpreting a text. George Steiner, William Gass, Kenneth Burke, Susan Sontag, and Robert Boyers, among others, strung together stunning combinations of words in order to describe their response to books. Perhaps that’s why I’m surprised by the complaints about an absence of rigorousness in contemporary critique? How we measure rigor, or what constitutes rigor, is often evaded in these complaints, many of which emerge as “thought-pieces” laden by a rigorous vapidity calculated to solicit the viral attention of the hot-take.

If rigor reflects the satisfaction of certain intellectual form, we should remember that an episteme is desirous: it tells us about what a mind wants to know as well as the way in which it wants to know such things. Epistemic desire is satisfied differently and what is interesting is not being convinced of one’s desire—not being convicted (the judge), condemned (the priest), or sold (salesman)—but being expanded to fathom the possibility.

Rigor is close attention to the shape of possibility, a shape that is frequently foreclosed by policing the boundaries of how thought should look. A critic whose focus is policing the borders loses the opportunity to think about how borders are constituted, and what it means to be constitutive. There is more intellectual labor at play in tracing the entrails of one’s personal misogyny through a New Critical reading than in denying such a thing could be possible. Or tucking one’s shirt into neutrality. Denial is easy but it isn't interesting or difficult, though templates abound.

According to proponents of the liberal arts, literature produces empathy in the reader. How can we, as writers, evaluate a book while speaking as if the critic is not, herself, another reader whose emotional experience and socialization determine her interpretive dance?

While trying to find words for the difference between studying the self and inhabiting the implicated subject, I came across a 2016 article that reads as if written in the present. In the year when the final videocassette recorder was manufactured, writer and editor Jason Guriel howled his lament against nefarious tendencies in contemporary criticism from the pages of the Canadian Walrus, bringing nothing short of his full-throated, first-person pronoun to bear on the excessive indulgence of what he calls “confessional criticism.” Launching his argument from the titular claim “I Don’t Care About Your Life”, Guriel immediately offers us a glimpse of his own in the first sentence:

Browsing the arts and culture pages of various websites recently, I kept running smack into it: the first-person pronoun, as conspicuous as a Corinthian column.

To note, that's an "I" in the title and an "I" in the introductory sentence. 

"Surely he's attempting to poke fun at his own title," I thought. An "I" for an "I" leaves a cool (if slightly hysterical) ripple on the surface of the opening, and ripples are not uncommon in preludes, but then, while re-reading the tail end of that big-engine yacht: I kept running smack into it: the first-person pronoun, as conspicuous as a Corinthian column.  

One could blame the Corinthian column’s splendor for Guriel’s fumbling of this opening. One could blame me for writing any of this as I sit on hold with our health insurance company to find out if the medication my child needs to live will be covered this year. One could accuse me of ruining the effect of an serious essay by mentioning the personal conditions under which thinking, or the act of surveying possibility in relation to logic, is conducted. I would not deny it; ruins and their ruinscapes fascinate me.

Giovanni B. Piranesi, Seven columns of the Temple of Juturna with Corinthian capitals . . . (18th century)

What I appreciate about Guriel's essai is the fact that he articulates it from behind the very first-person he derides. What I depreciate is Guriel’s failure to acknowledge that the essay reads like that of one who assumes his own authority and reliability can be proven as a subject where he glides above the “messily human” like a god in one of those temples with Corinthian columns and whatnot.

Readers more luminous than I have celebrated the shift towards epistemic exposure where the critic doesn’t hide behind the presumption of neutral scholarship. If we like something, we speak to the liking self. A preference is always personal, even if it is popular, even if it becomes canonical and adored by infinity. 

At present, the human condition is still relational. One can imagine a day when this will not be the case, but as yet, in the moment, the writer addresses an audience while  expressing their relation to a text. Meaning is negotiated between the text, the audience, and the speaker. Thus, interpretation depends on what is claimed in relation to what has been read. (And if this claim changes in relation to what has been "said" or elocuted.) 

The "I" is always there, however hidden: the critic is neither ghost nor godhead. What Guriel holds against this visible 'I' is that it doesn’t "guarantee more honest criticism." Surely carrying this thought directly to you, his readers, would involve defining “honest." For there are many ways of being honest, and the insurance salesman believes he is giving me the honest truth when he barters his wares. 

"What do you think this editor means by honesty?" I asked my friend Radu.

To his credit, Radu gnaws his bone and pretends as if I do not exist. As for Guriel, he takes issue with "first-person pronouns, micro-doses of memoir, brief hits of biography," critics who "wrestle with themselves" rather than sticking to "their assigned cultural object," critics who "embrace sincerity and locate cultural objects in relation to their own lives," critics involved with the Internet, critics with high "regard for pop culture," critics that exhibit a  "declining belief in tradition or canon" and "David Foster Wallace," in general. 

What Guriel likes is unclear–he doesn’t name names–and the closest he comes to expressing favor is when he nods towards Virginia Woolf in order to warn us that "the confessional voice is dangerously attractive." This dangerous attractiveness stems from a moral issue, namely, it enables the writer to 'indulge' their "egoism to the full." 

Immediately, I began to suspect that such a dangerously attractive voice, such an indulgent and limitlessly-egotistical voice, would refuse to define the terms upon which it based its argument. Such a voice might assume, instead, that the emphatic tone of communication validates the emotion and frees the speaker from the labor of developing an argument. 

But is it unreliable? Apparently, it cannot be because "the unreliable narrator is a cliche, and such confessions have long since become codified and suspect," Guriel adds. Codified, suspect, confessions, cliche: the words begin to smack of a courtroom drama with its stacks of legalistic cliches and evasive hyperboles. But Guriel is just getting started with the legal undertone, for soon he demands "a temporary moratorium on the memoir" in order to protect readers from his own disdain for the fabulous Geoff Dyer.

"Good criticism, like good films, will always give the impression of depth, of a presiding, trustworthy personality," Guriel concludes. To be fair, the Cambridge Dictionary defines the adjective 'trustworthy' to mean "able to be trusted"; "reliable"; "honest"; "straight"; "sincere"; "truthful". 

Fortunately, after being on hold for 38 minutes, the insurance specialist has appeared on the phone. She is ready to discuss payment plans. Having exhausted my time on hold, I return to the work at hand. But not without noticing that Guriel's ideal trustworthy personality seems oddly unsettled by its own sincerity. In the "depth" of that "presiding" persona on the page, the critic fails to notice his own I lumbering grumpily across the page. The chastising tone and the argument from personal feeling  makes Guriel sound a tad cliche, a bit like that unreliable narrator he chides— a mistake that the brilliant Geoff Dyer would never make. 

Unsaids.

My day opened into Dada, or the gist of it. Going back through the archives of Documents, marking the correspondences between Michel Leiris’ writing and that of Georges Bataille— the unsaid vibrates throughout.

Dusk of a few days prior. A phone call from C., who insists that the existentialist relationship to absurdity is acknowledgment followed by a continuance of life. Dada positions itself in a similar relationship to meaninglessness, but occupies a different aesthetic practice, namely, a sort of clowning that seeks to fill out the contours of absurdity and creates awakening.

Tristan Tzara’s “Simultaneous poems for four voices plus simultaneous with 300 definitive idiocies” brought about a special dimension to text that foregrounded sound, or perhaps it moved the poem towards music, or maybe it expanded the field of the poem to the point of meeting the intersection between the infinite in the void.

Simultaneous poetry, invented by Tristan Tzara and Richard Hulsenbeck, was intended to deconstruct the text by its simultaneous reading in several different languages. Hans Richter a friend and collaborater of Dadaists, defined simultaneous poetry as a "contrapuntal recitative in which three or more voices speak, sing, whistle, etc.. simultaneously, in such a way that the resulting combinations account for the total effect of the work, elegiac, funny or bizzare.”

—-Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-art quoted in Subversive Body in Performance Art

Dada didn’t hold the literal reading against the language. What Dada reproached was language's presumed connection to the rational, a presumption that permitted the construction of systems.

The condition of the “not yet sayable”

At which point is expression abolished?

In French, de faire express means to do some thing on purpose, and I always hear that when the word expression inches into conversations about abstract expressionism or representation.

Andre Masson, Armchair for Pauline Borghese

Packing an overnight bag and pausing near the stack of books I am currently reading, pausing and leaning over to kiss them: “I’ll be back,” and hoping the teens don’t catch me whispering tenderly to the books. The absurdity—-and yet, I mean it.

Radu’s food and his bone and the t-shirt I keep in the car, for nights that descend without pajamas. Harried.

The hustle and the harry, briefly interrupted by pleasure of conversing with Idra Novey, and lacking time to do justice to the breadth of her poetics, the intersections with her translation practice, the role of images in the textual encounter with the dead . . . “Our Good Ghosts” exists, with gratitude to Orion, but there is always something missing. Always an absence in my obsession with being exhaustive, an obsession whose impossibility I recognize, and perhaps require as a suspending void beneath the tightrope one walks when writing about the writing of others.

Soon and Wholly running the ramparts in my head. Poems that move with the suppleness of a hand in a sepia photo, watering roses—-the face absented, the hand’s owner abstracted from the motion of tending and close attention.

Idra Novey opens "Letters to C.", her series of poems addressed to Clarice Lispector, with a roman numeral, "I.", and then shifts into the epistolary address:

Dear C, I'm turning from.

The end-stopped line refers obliquely to the turn in the epigraph, a quotation from Clarice Lispector's letter to Fernando Sabino, dated 1946:

At three in the afternoon, I'm the most demanding woman in the world . . . When it's over, six in the afternoon comes, also indescribable, in which I turn blind. 

A conversation that picks up from one thread of the unsaid leads into a new unsaying:

I made a mess of page twenty-two,
couldn't resurrect what you left unsaid
into words that wouldn't. 

This one-stanza poem shapes itself as a letter that crawls down the page rather than across it. The shape does not give us that horizon. 

It leaves us in a single line: "I. N." The unidentified. The translator. 

Unsaid: The dreams that follow me into the kitchen, the ghosts that grab my chin and force me to look at them, the way the world whirls away mid-conversation when unsaid things run their goosebumps over my arms, my legs, the whorl of their Listen. 

"Continue to speak this dialect, now that the house is burning," Giorgio Agamben says of poetry in When the House Burns Down.

And there is something lucid hewn from the possibility preserved by the unsaid. The best way to describe it is by looking at how much is said, how much is spoken and communicated across alienating mediums and disguises. 

Agamben urges us to trust that moment when we look at one another without posing words, screens, and Beauty between us. 

Trust the unsaid that doesn't fear being read in simultaneity, amid the absurdity of dailiness—- the demands of those roses.

Trust a stone to keep the whole story carved into it.

Trust the bark of a tree in Tuscaloosa.