Freckles.

On rubbing, it’s normal to detect a burning sensation that has no center.

— Andrés Neuman, “Freckles and the Space Between”

1

Gerald, sun-kissed ten thousand times on the nose
and cheeks, didn’t stand a chance,
didn’t even know that the loss of his balls
had been plotted years in advance
by wiser and bigger buzzards than those
who now hover above his track
and at night light upon his back.

— Etheridge Knight, “For Freckle-Faced Gerald”

2

Ode to a Freckle above My Left Breast

Resigned to losing all that was mine
I brace myself before the bathroom mirror
in the hospital room. Afraid to look
at the wreckage where
my breast had been, what joy to see
you survived the assault! You perch above
the carnage where you always sat. Spared from the surgeon’s knife
you are a tiny flag of resistance
claiming territory, protecting a small part
of my chest from razing and reconstruction.
I press my palm over you, feel the heat rise
off my wounds. When the surgeon rounds,
I thrust a bouquet of lavender roses
from the overbed table into her arms,
the only thanks-offering I have for you.

by Amy Haddad,

(featured on The Slowdown)

3

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

— Gerald Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”

4

The section titled “Freckles and the Space Between” by Andrés Neuman, collected in his rousing book, Sensitive Anatomy, a series of textual sketches that caress each part of the human body.

5

I don’t know how long my silence lasted. And I use “silence” perfectly aware that it’s not entirely accurate but that it’ll be easier for you understand that way. You can write in your notes: “Claims to have kept silent.” Or ask the señora: “Did your maid fall silent?” To which the señora will reply: “I don’t recall any silence.” Because I doubt a woman like her would ever recognize a silence like mine.

You might never have given it any thought, but words have a specific order. Cause–outcome. Beginning–ending. You can’t NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION just arrange them any old way. When we speak, each word has to stand apart from the one before, like children lined up at the classroom door. From small to big, short to tall—the words go in a particular order. With silence, on the other hand, all words exist at once: gentle and harsh, warm and cold.

— Alia Trabucco Zerán, CLEAN (translated by Sophie Hughes)

6

From my notebooks, a phrase I copied out as written by Ilya Gutner: Mandelstam’s beloved granite slabs with little freckles of foreign substances inside them…

Elsewhere, a freckle in Michael Hardt’s Documenta pamphlet, “The Procedures of Love”:

7

At the end of the contest, contestants received prizes like cosmetic sets containing gold dust, or soaps touted to eliminate freckles and blemishes.

— Ha Seong-nan, WAFERS (translated by Janet Kong)

And few interesting pieces from The Cabinet, as assembled in “The Portrait Connection” feature from Issue 5. One could argue that these portraits are only interesting because of the role played by the captions in articulating their features and dynamics. The textuality of image is thrilling to consider and think around.

9

10

NATALIE GOLDBERG: Life is not abstract. It is not good or bad. It is. A girl is not pretty. Our mind makes that judgement. The girl has red lips, white teeth, freckles brushed across her nose, eyes that hint at lilacs, and she just lifted her right eyebrow. The reader steps away and says she is pretty. The writer just stays with the eyes, the lips, the chin, and makes no judgements.

RICHARD RUSSO: I’d been told before that writers had to have two identities: their real life one… and the one they become when they sit down to write. This second identity, I now saw, was fluid, as changeable as the weather, as unfixed as our emotions. As readers, we naturally expect novels to introduce us to a new cast of characters and dramatic events, but could it also be that the writer has to reinvent himself for the purpose of telling each new story?… And how is it remotely fair for Steinbeck to possess so many voices when I still didn’t have even one?

LUCY CORIN: The end reads as shock if you are the sort of person who can’t believe a couple of ordinary guys would do such a thing. But if you are the sort of person who does think a consumerist culture that leaves people with no idea what to do with their imaginations is not just a bummer but is dehumanizing and violent—well, then what is surprising is not that the guys kill the girls—the surprise is that you are surprised when it happens. Maybe you are surprised because of what you expect from a story. Maybe you are surprised someone said it. 

ALT-J: I want every other freckle.

Alas, the tent was empty and the heat kept Alabamians from attending the revival. Sometimes the ghosts we create — the ghosts of our petroleum-fueled lifestyles and commodity culture— prevent us from meeting the ghosts we seek. Hauntology’s emphasis on the otherwise and the contingent isn’t simply material but also implicated in what we believe possible. What we dare to hope for or imagine. Not even our gods can meet us in the blazing heat of genocidal economies and obsessive boundary-policing.

Eliot's "Silence".

SILENCE

Along the city streets,
It is still high tide,
Yet the garrulous waves of life
Shrink and divide
With a thousand incidents
Vexed and debated:—
This is the hour for which we waited—

This is the ultimate hour
When life is justified.
The seas of experience
That were so broad and deep,
So immediate and steep,
Are suddenly still.
You may say what you will,
At such peace I am terrified.
There is nothing else beside.

T. S. Eliot

A glissando in the pigeons of Bucharest recurs in waves, and wavers through the simple end-rhymes of Eliot’s “Silence” only to be pulled into language by one of Robert Schumann’s greatest pieces, the Ghost Variations . . .

According to legend, on February 17, 1854, Robert Schumann heard angels dictating a musical theme to him and immediately wrote down this theme. A few days later, on the 22nd or 23rd, Schumann started writing variations on this theme.

Five days later, at 2 pm on February 27, Schumann lept into the iced waters of the Rhine river and attempted to drown himself. He lived because some boatmen spotted him and dragged the composer safely to shore.

No one can say what Schumann was thinking when he climbed out of bed on the following day, having survived his attempted suicide. No one can know what drove him to return to the Ghost Variations in an effort to complete them.

The Geistervariationen (“Ghost Variations”) are Schumann’s last work. The following week, Schumann voluntarily committed himself to an asylum in Endenich, where he would die just a little over 2 years later.

To note, briefly, the way the final three lines of Eliot’s poem refuse to settle into a single meaning:

You may say what you will,
At such peace I am terrified.
There is nothing else beside.

The terror of peace is cinched to the efficiency of ending, and the poem’s speaker resists this, the way the Ghost Variations resist the conclusive peace of the piece’s final passage in Schumann’s Ghost Variations.

Such an exquisite ending. Hand on my heart.

Schumann’s Ghost Variations cling to the ear: their intimacy is audible. And while this intimacy is characteristic of Schumann’s final pieces, he accomplishes it by narrowing the soundscape and adhering closely to original theme, building precariously and elliptically from its resonances, refusing to abandon the original melody entirely.

“There is nothing else beside,” wrote Eliot, lingering near the expectation of a plural “besides” before rejecting it for the intimate spatial proximity of “beside.”

The snake encircling the bodies of the faceless women in a fresco from the chapel in Crete that haunts my imagination for the past week, and an excerpt from Agustín Fernández Mallo’s The Book of All Loves:

Inertia (“there are no doors”) and repetition (“we are the doors”), the he-sees/she-sees seesaw that Mallo works throughout the book of all loves that cannot be exhausted.

Sibiu... with Cioran.

A religion is finished in the moment when it no longer generates heresies.

— Emil Cioran, 29 November 1959

1

Sibiu shutters with gorgeous loopy wiring, where loose wires are necklaces or ornaments for houses that carry sound and vibes in through the ancient walls.

Tuesday afternoon in Sibiu. June 2025.

At one point, while the family ate gelato, I scampered into the Humanitas bookstore and snagged a copy of Emil Cioran’s Caiete: 1957 - 1972, translated from the French into the Romanian by Emanoil Marcu and Vlad Russo. Admittedly, the translation loses a bit of velocity in the movement from one Latinate tongue to another: Cioran’s sparsity depends on the perambulations of syntax and phrasing, precisely what gets tangled in multiple translations. To put it another way, Cioran is intense and biting in the original Romanian; he is gorgeously rich with intonation in French; he is sublimely translated by Richard Howard; and yet middling when I try to revive him from the Marcu and Russo translations.

In the entries dated 14 July 1962, Cioran sits in Paris, looking back at Sibiu:

My feet sound different on every street, I think, comparing the beat of Sibiu’s cobblestone-steps to the asphalt of Bucharest.

2

Sibiu window: Dogwood flowers or orchids glimpsed through a lace curtain.

This date, 14 July 1962, takes Cioran back to his adolescence and childhood in the small village of Rășinari, which was was connected to Sibiu by a 8-km tram line through the Dumbrava Forest. Regular service for this tram line ended in 2011, and much of line was dismantled after 2013. The Rășinari Orthodox bishops' residence was built in the late 18th century. It incorporated pastoral and monastic traditions and provided a locus for the church in Transylvania. And, of course, Cioran’s father was an Orthodox priest, a man esteemed by the village, an esteem that Cioran simultaneously coveted and rejected.

3

Cioran’s putative affection for Karoline Friederike Louise Maximiliane von Günderrode, a German Romantic poet who wrote under the pen name, Tian, was hardly unique. The female poet who dies by suicide due to “mental issues” and literary misogyny has always been fascinating to us, perhaps because these women dare to raise their voices and reveal the chafe-marks of the brindle. Their fury bothers and implicates us. We are torn between pity, chagrin, and contempt. In the confusion of our own affective responses, there is a tendency to lionize their deaths rather than the thing which mattered most to them, namely, their minds as written and felt.

Günderrode’s first poetry collection was published almost two decades after Bettina von Arnim’s epistolary novel, Die Günderode (1840) created the Caroline as a character in the public imagination. Christa Wolf also drew attention to Günderrode with her novel, Kein Ort. Nirgends (1978), imagining a fictional meeting between Günderrode and Heinrich von Kleist, another German author who died by suicide.

To his credit, Cioran never lied about envying the suicides. His early affinity with Stoic philosophers cast a covetous eye on the self-chosen death. “I cannot escape death, but at least I can escape the fear of it,” Epictetus declaimed. But if one can train the self to “escape the fear” of death, one can never entirely free life from the fear of how one’s death will hurt those who love you. Epictetus’ “I” is as solid and stiff as a Greek column: it exists in relation to the object it sustains, whether Parthenon or the ego, and has no truck with being-in-relation to others. But Stoicism wound up ornamental in Cioran’s writing, since he couldn’t entirely abandon the romance of mythology and religion. He never completely gave up the possibility of transcendence that came with releasing the world; he coveted the indescribable passion of the saints and the conviction of the martyrs.

The contradictions that create tension throughout Cioran’s texts are personal, which is to say, drawn from the author’s own obsessions and fears. That is why Cioran’s affection for Günderrode loves her death rather than her life. Certainly, one of the world’s greatest aphorists erases and ignores the poet whose life is given in her own hand, in her words and poetic texts, for the legend created by the novelist. Again, this should not be surprising: Cioran wasn’t a particularly insightful close reader of poetry. His philosophy and theory gravitated around myth and mythology: the eternal persona as sanctified by the meaningful death. His nihilism never stopped lusting for meaning.

As for Günderrode, her first poems were published under a male pseudonym. In her own words, as communicated in a letter to Kunigunde Brentano, she lamented her gender: “Why was I not born a man? I have no sense for feminine virtues, feminine bliss. Only that which is wild, great, radiant appeals to me.”

[These lines are so evocative of Marina Tsvetaeva’s verses and letters that I am tempted to speculate Tsvetaeva read Günderrode or von Arnim at some point while in exile, whether in Prague or Berlin. ]

4

The heretic cares more for the afterlives of ideas than for the human investment in a personal eternity. Each heresy nudges the door to a room open. In one of these rooms, Jacques Derrida sits at a small table in Paris, giving what could be his final interview, the progression of pancreatic cancer marked in the slightly yellow tint of his olive skin. There is no peace for the living, he suggests, for we are constructed from the tensions that animate the founding questions of philosophy, and not even death frees us from the legacy of those questions. Derrida tells the interviewer that the things which construct him are inseparable from the things that give him life. This contradiction which I cannot entirely assume is also what keeps me alive, or creates the conditions for my living, which is irrevocably bound up in thinking with and through the tensions that others will inherit.

5

Our final night in Bucharest required us to find a restaurant capable of seating almost twenty people at a single table with a courtyard. My cousin found a restaurant located in the old home of conductor Sergiu Celibidache. There is a particular void that one encounters in the mirrors that has held the bodies of your poetic subjects prior to their death—- the ghost of a self-encounter or self-critique, depending on one’s relation to reflections. I thought about Günderrode, contempt and Cioran’s sense of security in a language that ripped him from association with his roots.

A kneeling child in plaster, glimpsed between bars on Strada Plopilor (Street of the Poplars).

Little things.

Stefanescu’s mirror is a thing peopled with a loneliness that impregnates everyone twice.

— Barton Smock

Things are going to slide (slide) in all directions
Won't be nothing (won't be)
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold
And it has overturned
The order of the soul
When they said (they said) repent (repent), repent (repent)
I wonder what they meant

— L. Cohen

Today I walked until my legs hurt and felt grateful for it . . .

In a letter to Sunny dated May 5, 1934, Sam Beckett said that he was “fond of this summertime because darkness and all its bad things are at least being postponed thereby.” Then, in a sort of lapse, Beckett added one of the truest comments on his writing, telling Sunny: “I am a Manichaean as far as darkness is concerned.”

No one is made crazy through writing, but rather becomes crazy for the same reasons as those who do not write, namely the denial of their rights, power, naked brutality, the loss of their dignity and the threat to their very existence. And this threat can be found not only in war, not just in times of naked power, or the domineering need to survive, but rather before and after, i.e. in times of peace....

— Ingeborg Bachmann, drafts for acceptance speech for Georg Büchner Prize written in the summer of 1964

Between trumpet vines and the purple kudzu flowers that often go unnoticed, I would love to see you in Tuscaloosa or Atlanta this month, or the next.

You'll see your woman hanging upside down
Her features covered by her fallen gown
And all the lousy little poets coming round
Trying to sound like Charlie Manson
Yeah the white man dancing

Grateful that the Refaat Mobile Library will be in Atlanta— I can’t support their mission enough, and hope that you consider doing the same.

Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
Give me Christ
Or give me Hiroshima

Trumpet vines on my relentless Red Mountain hike today.

The requisite John Ashbery.

“Anyone who has been in love knows better. Love can be quite miserable. It destroys families and conventions and it refuses to be controlled or tamed. This instrumental approach to love where the end-goal is happiness reconstructs love for the industrial age and labor economies. What the sociologist Georges Simmel called “the invasion of the domain of love by the teleological category” is also at play in My Heresies.”

Grateful to Gabriela Denise Frank for a conversation that was a light in my life a few months ago— and to The Rumpus for publishing it.

When you take off yr boots at 3 am while hanging out with friends on the porch— and then discover those boots with a dusting of flowers in the morning.

Everything falls but nothing obliterates the known world as viciously as losing the ability to describe the fall. Speechlessness is hard to describe. I’ve never lost words like this. . . . Never lost the capacity to describe what I see and feel as I fall . . . Never lost my appetite for books. Dear humans, I can’t walk fast enough or far enough. Small things, small comforts, as Ingeborg Bachmann noted in her essay, “What Good Are Poems”: “The playing field is language, and its borders are the borders of what we gaze on without question, that which is divulged and precisely imagined, experienced in pain, and in happiness celebrated and praised — namely the world."

With a burning violin.

Intangible arrows quiver and stick in the skin
And I taste at the root of the tongue the unreal of what is real.

— Wallace Stevens, “Holiday in Reality”

1

“Here I call love a reciprocal torture,” Marcel Proust wrote in The Prisoner, the third volume of Temps Perdu, offering an aside that smarts with tenderness and calls into play the agony’s tortured relation to ecstasy in the matryr’s voice, in the light’s relation to darkness. The martyr’s agony is often described in relation to this extraordinary, overpowering light. 

In an 1839 sermon on the state of grace, Cardinal Newman said that our eyes can only bear the  “bright and overpowering” light “if we could see it as the Angels do.” Somewhere in Europe, a poet named Rainer Maria Rilke would lure the angels into the poem in order to see the unbearable. And somewhere in Russia, at the same time, Marina Tsvetaeva would correspond with him.

2

Elsewhere, T. S. Eliot would mention light and brightness in letters to Conrad Aiken while traveling through Europe in 1914. In a letter to Aiken dated July 1914, Eliot mentioned a new poem he’d completed and then raved about the “three great St. Sebastians” he’d seen: 

1.“Montegna (a D’Oro)”
2. “Antonello of Messina (Bergamo)”
3. “Memling (Brussels)”

Six days later, Eliot mailed the poem he’d mentioned, “The Love Song of St. Sebastian,” to Aiken, along with a few lyric fragments. The poem sounded “very laboured and conscious,” too conscious of its own sentiment, too close to the surface of feeling. Allegedly, Eliot never published it.

3

“THE LOVE SONG OF SAINT SEBASTIAN” BY T. S. ELIOT

I would come in a shirt of hair
I would come with a lamp in the night
And sit at the foot of your stair;
I would flog myself until I bled,
And after hour on hour of prayer
And torture and delight
Until my blood should ring the lamp
And glisten in the light;
I should arise your neophyte
And then put out the light
To follow where you lead,
To follow where your feet are white
In the darkness toward your bed
And where your gown is white
And against your gown your braided hair.
Then you would take me in
Because I was hideous in your sight
You would take me in without shame
Because I should be dead
And when the morning came
Between your breasts should lie my head.

I would come with a towel in my hand
And bend your head beneath my knees;
Your ears curl back in a certain way
Like no one else in all the world.
When all the world shall melt in the sun,
Melt or freeze,
I shall remember how your ears were curled.
I should for a moment linger
And follow the curve with my finger
And your head beneath my knees —
I think that at last you would understand.
There would be nothing more to say.
You would love me because I should have strangled you
And because of my infamy;
And I should love you the more because I mangled you
And because you were no longer beautiful
To anyone but me.

The only unrhymed word in Eliot’s 1914 poem is “lamp”.

The word that moves between this song and another song written around this time is “infamy,” which appears in the passage from Dante that Eliot placed over the threshold of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

4

Back to Dante, we go. Straight to the Inferno, briefly, where verses 46-49 give us Paolo and Francesca making a long streak of themselves in air: / so I saw the shadows come, uttering wails, / borne by that strife of winds.

Paolo and Francesca, the lovers condemned to an eternity of winded tempest. The problem of course began with literature, as Francesca tells it:

One day, for pastime, we read of Lancelot, how love constrained him; we were alone, and without all suspicion. Several times that reading urged our eyes to meet, and changed the colour of our faces; but one moment alone it was that overcame us. When we read how the fond smile was kissed by such a lover, he, who shall never be divided from me, kissed my mouth all trembling.

A note from one of my 2023 notebooks: “In T. S. Eliot’s copy of the text, he marked the similes that introduce Paolo and Francesca: “And as their wings bear along the starlings, at the cold season, in large and crowded troop” (Inferno V.40-42) but didn’t provide a translation of line 42, ‘così quel fiato gli spiriti mali’: i.e so that blast, the evil spirits.”

Peter Colstee, Illustration 1. 1992

Peter Colstee made this oil-on-canvas painting after watching the film 'Mishima' (1985), and copying down the following part of film text:

The white masters beauty of the youth body,
hung against the dark tree trunk.
His hands tied by thorns.
I trembled with joy.
My loin swelled.
My hand unconsciously began a motion it had never been thought

It isn’t beautiful, per se, but there is something haunting about the expression on Sebastian’s face.

4

The first painting that Eliot listed in his letter to Aiken is one of the three portraits of Saint Sebastian by Andrea Mantegna. It is also Mantegna’s final Saint Sebastian, painted and kept in Venice. But I’m more interested in the first Saint Sebastian— the painting Mantegna completed in 1470, kept in Vienna.

Detail from Andrea Mantegna, Saint Sebastian. 1470 (Vienna)

I keep returning to the traces of heresy in Mantegna‘s first Saint Sebastian. . . the way Mantegna signed his name vertically (rather than horizontally), pulling the signature very close to the right side of the saint, and using Greek lettering to identify himself (rather than his first language, or the Latin used by the Catholic Church). The Byzantine edge in the naming. Forsaking the classical tree or the pole for a stone arch as the object to which Sebastian is bound. Not a tree in nature or a pole in the city’s outskirts but a piece of Rome, itself, an architectural form for which the Roman empire became famous.

In 1457 the painter had been put on trial for "artistic inadequacy" for having put only eight apostles in his fresco of the Assumption. As a reply, he therefore applied Alberti's principles of Classicism in the following pictures. 

A rider can be seen in the clouds of the upper left corner in Mantegna’s Vienna version of Saint Sebastian. The cloud is white and the rider of the white horse is carrying a scythe which he uses to cut the clouds. 

Some have interpreted the rider to be the ancient Roman god, Saturn, who was identified with the Time that passed by and destroyed everything that was left behind him. But Battisti thought the theme referred to the Book of Revelation. Revelations 19:11 gives us the “heaven having been opened” to reveal “a white horse, and he who is sitting upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness doth he judge and war.” This is Christ, announcing the Second Coming. And yes, every thread is torn.

Orphics in the evening.

The thunderstorm as a vehicle of divine power and wrath moved [James] Joyce's imagination so profoundly that to the end of his life he trembled at the sound.

— James Ellman

Now the fateful day had come . . .

— Samuel Beckett, “Love and Lethe”

1

Preparing for a workshop and scattering crumbs of Beckett and Rilke for any who are also studying the holes they have dug for themselves in the dry dirt near a cave with Paul Valery in one hand and a shovel in the other, as Rainer Maria Rilke perhaps mentions in his with these two poems from the first section of Sonnets to Orpheus, translated by Stephen Mitchell:

Those final two lines are gold to my eyes— and perhaps an ars of sorts.

2

Rilke meets Beckett at a slant, in a letter to McGreevy dated September 8, 1934, wherein B tells his friend about revisiting the artworks and (yes) the yellows that fascinate him. The letter is lengthy, chaotic, polylingual, punctuated by B’s characteristic wordplay and punning. Impressions from an exhibition . . .

Then I went to see Goldsmith. La gueule rose et grave à en mourir. [ . . . ] Richard was back at the gears en route for the Loire. I said that when a man had got into the habit, as I would have seemed to, of estimating his life in terms of apprehending (the eyes closed at this first sign of danger & the wary wobble of the jowls) & the motive for living as the impulse to understand perhaps a little improvement on self-justification in the sphere of welfare-working, the only calamity was suspension of the faculty or, worse still, the need, to apprehend & understand. He stood up: Some people apprehend too much, goodbye, know there's no good asking you for dinner, lunch some day, goodbye.

The covey seemed nice after the rest from him & we got going again. I had an appointment yesterday, but had to put him off on account of my eye which has been rather bad but which is all right today more or less, thanks to stupor, eye-shade & optrex. Also one of the more endearing derivatives of impetigo on my lip, where there is quite a little colony of erectile tissue as I discovered during my holiday. I have hopes of analysis going a bit faster now. If I could get it over by Xmas I'd be crowned.

What a relief the Mont Ste. Victoire after all the anthropomorphized landscape - van Goyen, Avercamp, the Ruysdaels, Hobbema, even Claude, Wilson & Crome Yellow Esq., or paranthropomorphised by Watteau so that the Débarquement seems an illustration of "poursuivre ta pente pourvu qu'elle soit en montant", or hyperanthropomorphized by Rubens - Tellus in record travail, or castrated by Corot; after all the landscape "promoted" to the emotions of the hiker, postulated as concerned with the hiker (what an impertinence, worse than Aesop & the animals), alive the way a lap or a fist is alive. Cézanne seems to have been the first to see landscape & state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever. Atomistic landscape with no velleitiés of vitalism, landscape with personality à la rigueur, but personality in its own terms, not in Pelman's, landscapality. Ruysdael's for Rusdael's Entrance to the Forest - there is no entrance anymore nor any commerce with the forest, its dimensions are its secret & it has no communications to make.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld (1861)

And when, abruptly,
the god put out his hand to stop her, saying,
with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around –,
she could not understand, and softly answered
Who?

— Rainer Maria Rilke trans. Stephen Mitchell

3

Samuel Beckett to Sunny on 5 May 1934:

 If, for example, I read in the paper that poor Mr. So-and-so is to be executed early in the morning, before I get out of bed, and immediately start to congratulate myself that I do not have to spend such a night, I deceive myself in as much as I compare two circumstances instead of two emotions. And it is highly probable that the man condemned to death is less afraid than I. At least he knows exactly what is at stake and exactly what he has to attend to, and that is a greater comfort than one is generally inclined to believe. So great that many sick people become criminals solely in order to limit their fear and gain that comfort. Only beyond speculation does man reach his Eden, that refuge where there is no more danger, or rather one which is determined and which one can bring into focus.

And here is Edward Snow’s translation of Rilke’s sonnet II.16 to Orpheus:

I'm walking in the city at dark
Remembering, remember light
Thinking of nothing, and the shooting stars

*

Grace Mazur, “What is a Moment? — Two paintings of the wounded Eurydice by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot,” The Arts Fuse.
Ignaz Brüll, Melodie in a minor, Op.53/2
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Silenus (1838)
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld (1861)
Oscar Mantel, “Against Castrated Art”, Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn 1979.
P. J. Harvey, “The Sky Lit Up” (Demo)
P. J. Harvey, “Missed” (Demo)
Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus translated by Stephen Mitchell

"Language is punishment."

It’s been a strange month. Non-head-injury-related aphasia is new to me. Some parts of speechlessness are familiar, or bound to the age of 15, and some are new. Too new.

Wandering through Ingeborg Bachmann’s lectures and nonfiction essays has been a solace, even though reading is strange; I begin a sentence and then lose my grip on it. Not even the most voluptuous syntax holds my attention. It’s as if words have lost their teeth. In her bleak acceptance speech for the Anton Wildgans Prize, Bachmann likened the creative process to a loneliness so heavy that it resembles a curse. I quote:

I’m not sure why this is comforting to me. Perhaps summer, itself, has whisked this gluttony for comfort and silence into my head. But speechlessness gives me time to type old notebooks, which is how I discovered an essay draft from early last year titled “A Eurydice Who Limps: Analogy and Your Orpheus,” a glance at various textual and artistic treatments of the Orphic myth.

After typing up a bit of it today (while groaning over my terribly tiny handwriting), I dug up my copy of Maurice Blanchot's essay, “The Gaze of Orpheus,” which turns Eurydice into an absence of light waves, rendering her the “profoundly dark point towards which art, desire, death, and the night seem to lead,” dragging her silence into what Christian theologians would mark as “the fortunate loss,” a peculiar sort of metaphysical baggage that continues to haunt various religions as well as theory but also, perhaps, the note at the end of Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation, which reads:

Radu and silence on the stairs.

Heaven and earth.

Little people at the amusement park
City people in the dark
Speak to us, send us a sign
Tell us something to keep us trying

Three songs among a scattering of things that move me. Things I touched today, things whose tendrils in turn touched me.

Gravity, the curvature of space-time, said Albert Einstein in 1915. Emily Skillings’ marvelous poetry.

A thought trapped in a box, Schrodinger's box, that left us with a blurred cat, a cat between life and death — but only because we observed it and found ourselves entangled by this observation that renders the cat real and alive to us. Alive is the idea.

Four purple clovers growing near the stairs of the school. The awkwardness of their positions, the way I could almost hear the purple crinkling. The alive idea-ness of light.

When two particles in Einstein's scenario collide, we have the relation that Schrodinger called entanglement. “Entanglement of predictions arises from the fact that the two bodies at some earlier time formed in a true sense one system, that is they were interesting, and have left behind traces on each other.” This theory of traces would infect the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School.  

Memories of the Hoia forest and a clover tied around my wrist.

There is the spin of us. 

There are measurements that show the polarization of entangled light beams. 

But the spin of entangled particles varies. 

What we know ineluctably is that the specific attributes of the photons and particles are indeterminate until measured. Then, one particle's measurement seems to decide or influence the value of the other almost instantly, flying in the face of what relativity says can't happen, namely, move faster than the speed of light.

Celeries.

The incidents arose after the man made a compelling statement one night. “You've written about everything under the sun— everything,” he said, “except celery.”

In an effort to please him, I set out to write about the thing I never mention (celery) as well as the thing he says I mention too often, namely my ex-boyfriends.

The first incident, “Celery in Relation to Not Being Vivian,” was published in Get Bent, a Bending Genres anthology edited by Robert Vaughn and Meg Tuite.

A few of the Celery Sagas are in the summer issue of The Dodge, alongside incredible writing by others, and thus do I name these stalks here, in the hopes that you might go nibble at them elsewhere:

Celery on the Wall, First Variant
Celery in ‘Small Bites’
Celery, Cowboys, and Critique
Celery and Paranoia Prior to Thunderstorm
Celery as Related to Etymology of Romance
Kunstmärchen with Celery
Celery in Problematic Local Contexts

" And even the moonlight is blinding. . ."

Citation performs the social gestures that characterize kinship as a practice . . . in which the doer of the kin function becomes kin by virtue of the act.

– Alex Brostoff, “An Autotheory of Intertextual Kinship” 

I buried my face but it spoke once again
The night to the day we're a bindin',
And now the dark air is like fire on my skin
And even the moonlight is blinding

— Townes van Zandt, “Rake”

1

i hadn't thought about what it was going to be in fort wayne that i should address
or how.

— David Antin

Part of our contemporary emphasis on visibility and “being seen” is commercial— the language of brands and selling, of becoming a desirable product and creating a “buzz.” Nothing kills the buzz of writing more than the humiliation of marketing pressures and the emphasis on “going viral.” Nothing is lonelier and less real, less true to its selves.

Visibility, of course, depends on symbols, on status-markers and various conventions that ‘code’ a human being as good/bad, relatable/weird, exemplary/horrid etc etc etc. We are expected to ‘read the room’, as if reading others is something any of us are actually good at. I’ve often said that I feel more like myself on the page than in person. When I lean against that statement by trying to locate its gist, there is simply the feeling that I would rather be misread in my words than in my body. I would rather be misunderstood by something I’ve written than by something I resemble or represent. But maybe the whirlpools are more complicated.

To ‘read’ is to make sense of what is legible. And legibility overdetermines the author's presence: you read me as mother, wife, citizen, words that authorize me to speak on the basis of socially recognized roles. Each role has its status. I want to contest the narrow throat of the vase in which my availability renders Me legible to You. 

“To recognize another text as ‘kin’ intimates a relation that exceeds influence, one that personifies a textual relationship to flesh-and-blood bodies,” writes Alex Brostoff in “An Autotheory of Intertextual Kinship.” So, the intersection of the song with the poem that inspired it becomes a site where language creates an alterity, an Other that is real under the conditions where those words are read, spoken, inhabited.

What Brostoff calls “representation of ambivalent bodies” pertains to bodies that exist between and around rather firmly ensconced in commitment to their located demographic categories. Queer theorists continue to stand in this space of possibility for me, and the possibility is real. It is, for me, a livable reality.

I drag around the debris of intimate citations and texts just in case a wind should appear to create an unexpected shape from it. The wind might orchestrate a new way of seeing that is pummeled from the pressure of daily life, a pressure that includes being in the world among others and longing to be with them rather than merely among them. 

So there is the heap of books, the detritus of junk my brain collects and consecrates through memory, and there is also the internal friction generated by temporality, or the harassment of differing tenses. I can’t reconcile that. I can’t amend or fix or bridge those essential (and essentialized) distances. But I can study what just may happen if they interpellate each other accidentally. 

To prevaricate and intervene by conducting a close reading which admits its debt to uncertainty, and its construction as a reading, developed under pressure and in relation to circumstance, which seeks to uncover a body in the traces or imprints left by others. A body may be a photo, a text, an object, a place, a scent—any trace, any sensory clue . . .

2

Yesterday was very difficult. That may or may not be legible from photos. That may or may not have a legible context to the reader. It depends on how much we think we know— and how terrible we are at admitting that knowing others is difficult precisely because no human is a settled object, a knowable thing, a finished product.

3

When Jeff Buckley said “I love everything that haunts me and never leaves…” — he was speaking of this intertextual kinship, of muses and musings which happen to be the gift and the curse of those who create art, the books and authors that have been kinder than kin to us, the young writers who at this very minute is sitting on a bench somewhere, grappling with their inability to forget the ways the world touched them. I hear, in Buckley’s words, the way I am haunted by Paul Celan, Benjamin Fondane, and Gherasim Luca— the way I am haunted appears in my words, my texts, my efforts to free myself from the shadows who raised me. It is simpler to admit that I abide in Them. My eye for their eyes; my first-person pronoun for Theirs. We are all creatures of influence; no one is ‘self-made’. That’s just the lie commodity culture sells us in order to further alienate language from the complexity of its relational nature. But it’s also the lie we buy and sell. It is the most American lie of all, a poison rich on the lips of neoliberals.

Truly, now the dark air is like fire on my skin
And even the moonlight is blinding

An abgrund trio.

“The Geist has been known to gather up unwary authors somewhat as Zeus used to do with fleeing maidens and plump them with proper thoughts and attitudes. If writers were not the instruments of history, as often princes and politicians were, they were at least a showcase, a display of the spirit, like a museum's costumed effigies, if not one of its principal actors. Historical forces of this sort are as crudely imaginary as deities have always been, although probably not nearly as harmful since they cannot capture the imagination of millions the way divinities do. But of course the Geist can go behind a curtain and come back out as the Volk or the Reich instead of the Zeit.”

— William Gass, “The Death of the Author”

1. LETTER FROM BRUNO SCHULZ TO ANIA, DATED 19 JUNE 1941

Dear Ania:

I am still under the spell of your charming metamorphoses. I believe the reason they are so touching is that they exist so independent of your will, so automatic and unconscious. It's as though somebody substituted another person to take your place on the sly, and you, as it were, accepted this new person, took her for your own, and continued playing your part on the new instrument, unaware that someone else was acting onstage. Of course I am exaggerating the situation toward the paradoxical. Do not take me for naive. I know what happens is not altogether unconscious, but you don't realize how much of it is the action of more profound forces, how much is the doing of a metaphysical puppetry in you.

Add to this the fact that you are incredibly reactive, transforming yourself instantly into a complementary form, a wondrous accompaniment.... All this goes on outside the intellect, as it were, by some shorter and simpler circuit than thought, simply like a physical reflex. It is the first time in my experience that I have come across such natural riches that don't have enough space, you might say, within the dimensions of a single person and therefore mobilize ancillary personae, improvising pseudo personalities ad hoc for the duration of a brief role you are compelled to play. This is how I explain your protean nature to myself. You may think that I'm allowing myself to be taken in, that I'm pinning a deep interpretation on the playfulness of ordinary coquetry. Let me assure you that coquetry is something very profound and mysterious, and incomprehensible even to you. It is plain that you cannot see this mystery and that to you it must present itself as something ordinary and uncomplicated. But this is a delusion. You underestimate your possibilities and spoil the magnificent demonism of your nature by the ingenuous snobbery of saintliness. It isn't enough for you to be a demon; you want to be in addition and on the side—a saint, as if it were all that easy to combine these traits. You, with your fine nose for kitsch in art, lose your taste and instinct when it comes to the moral sphere and cultivate an unconscious dilettantism of holiness with a clear conscience. No—holiness is a thing of toil and blood that cannot be grafted onto a full and rich life like some pretty ornament. This dilettantism, by the way, is very charming and touching on the part of a soul who communicates with the pit from a yard away. With the Pit, capital P. I don't know how it happens, but you are playing with the keys to the Pit. I don't know if you are familiar with everyone's abyss of perdition or only with mine. In any case, you are moving with light, somnambulist ease on that cliff's edge I avoid in myself with fear and trembling, where the gravel shifts underfoot. I have to assume that you yourself are probably safe. You detach yourself lightly and delicately from the one who has lost his footing and let him slide into the abyss by himself. For a few steps you may actually pretend you are losing the ground under your feet, confident that at a certain point the parachute will open and carry you off to safety. With all this, you remain genuinely innocent and, as it were, unconscious of what you are doing. You are truly the victim, and truly all the guilt falls upon him who bears within him that abyss whose rim you carelessly set foot on. I know all the guilt is on my side, because the abyss is mine and you are only a sylph who has strayed into my garden, where it becomes my duty to keep your foot from sliding. That is why you should feel no self-reproach. You are always innocent whatever you do, and here a new perspective opens on your holiness. Your holiness in fact costs you nothing, for you are a sylph, and we are dealing not with dilettantism but with the superhuman elfin virtuosity of an entity that is not subject to moral categories.

Please come, secure and unthreatened as always, and don't spare me. Whatever happens, I endorse you in all your metamorphoses. If you are Circe, I will be Ulysses and I know the herb that will make you powerless. Of course, I may be just bragging, just being provocative.

Every day I wait till 6 P.M. I have a project for Sunday: let's meet in Truskawiec. I have a morning train there and an evening one back; we could spend the whole day there. Are you game?

Fond greetings, and thank you for coming. 

Bruno Schulz

[The Sunday meeting Schulz suggested in the letter above fell on the day of Hitler's assault on the U.S.S.R., June 22. The next letter, written in September, is the first of Schulz's surviving letters written after the Nazi occupation of Drohobycz.]

Antonin Artaud's sketch from October 1945. “The gallows for the abyss / is his being and not / his soul / and it is his body.”

2. CSZESLAW MILOSZ AND “THE ABYSS OF EXILE”

Translator Simon Leys’ essay, “In the Light of Simone Weil: Milosz and the Friendship of Camus,” trace Simone Weil's influence through the lives of two very disparate intellectuals. Czeslaw Milosz's own experience fighting against the Nazis in the underground altered his view of what was possible. "Naked horror" imprinted itself on his understanding of reality. As Leys writes: "The everyday order of our lives may seem to us natural and permanent, but it is in fact as fragile and illusory as the cardboard props on a theatrical stage. It can collapse in a flash and turn at once into black chaos. Our condition is precarious; even basic human decency can shatter and vanish in an instant," says Leys, before quoting a passage from Milosz’s The Captive Mind:

The nearness of death destroys shame. Men and women change as soon as they know that the date of their execution has been fixed by a fat little man with shiny boots and a riding crop. They copulate in public, on a small bit of ground surrounded by barbed wire - their last home on Earth.

Leys continues with Milosz's biography, noting that in the period following the war, like many Polish intellectuals who hoped that, by collaborating with the Communist regime, they might help it to reform itself, Milosz became a diplomat and was sent as cultural attaché, first to Washington and then to Paris." There, Milosz quickly learned that "serving a Stalinist regime" would cost him—would demand both moral and intellectual compromise—and, worst of all, would cultivate a deep sense of self-repugnance and cynicism. 

"A man may persuade himself by the most logical reasoning that he will greatly benefit his health by swallowing live frogs; and thus rationally convinced, he may swallow a first frog, then a second, but at the third his stomach will revolt," Milosz wrote of this revulsion. In 1951, he abandoned his assignation and publicly broke with the Polish regime, taking that particular leap of no return into what Milsosz called “the abyss of exile, the worst of all misfortunes, for it meant sterility and inaction.” But he refused to relinquish the Polish language, his mother tongue, the speculative soil of a homeland he would cultivate in exile. Leys confirms that Milosz did all his writing in Polish, “with the exception of his private correspondence” which he conducted in French and in English, until his death. The first ten years of his exile were spent in France. There, “the prestigious title of an official representative of 'Democratic Poland, the French progressive' intelligentsia (under the pontificate of Sartre-Beauvoir), had warmly welcomed him; but as soon as it became known that he had defected, he was treated as a leper." In 1953, Milosz “made his situation even worse by publishing what was to become his most influential work, The Captive Mind, written not for a Western audience, but against it' - against its obtuse and willful blindness; the purpose was indeed to remind his readers that 'if something exists in one place, it will exist everywhere.” It was a self-indictment, though Americans who lacked background in the context of Iron Bloc dictatorships would easily misread it. 

3. BEETHOVEN’S ABYSS

In conversation with Edward Said, Daniel Barenboim argued that music creates a greater sense of understanding about the world—it actively teaches rather than promoting escapism. "The Fourth Symphony of Beethoven is not only a means of escaping from the world,” said Barenboim. "There is a sense of total abyss when it starts, with one sustained note, a B-flat, one flute, the bassoons, the horns, and the pizzicato, the strings... and then nothing happens. There's this feeling of emptiness, only one note sticking there alone, and then the strings come in with another note, a G-flat, and at that moment, the listener is displaced.” He takes "this sense of displacement” to be “unique” in its capacity to alter the mind's relationship to itself:

When you hear the first note, you think, "Well, maybe this is going to be in B-flat." In the end it really is in B-flat, but by the second note you don't know where you are anymore because it's G-flat. From that moment alone you can understand so many things about human nature. You understand that things are not necessarily what they seem at first sight. B-flat is perhaps the key, but the G-flat introduces other possibilities.

There's a static, immovable, claustrophobic feeling. Why? Because of the long, sustained notes. Followed by notes that are as long as the silences between them. The music reaches a low point from which Beethoven builds up the music all over again and finally affirms the key. You might call this the road from chaos to order, or from desolation to happiness. I'm not going to linger on these poetic descriptions, because the music means different things to different people. But one thing is clear. If you have a sense of belonging, a feeling of home, harmonically speaking—and if you're able to establish that as a composer, and establish it as a musician—then you will always get this feeling of being in no-man's-land, of being displaced yet always finding a way home. 

This is what Wagner cultivated, and what other composers reproached him for. Wagner's intuition for acoustics changed how we hear music, and how we hear is always relational, or pitched towards the sense of expectation. Barenboim credits Wagner as being the first with such a sense, though he adds a caveat for “Berlioz, and in a certain way Liszt, although Liszt was more limited to the piano.” He continues speaking to Edward Said:

By acoustics I mean the presence of sound in a room, the concept of time and space. Wagner really developed that concept musically. Which means that a lot of his criticism of performances of his own time, conducted by Mendelssohn and other people, was directed at what he considered a very superficial kind of interpretation of music, namely, one that took no risks, that didn't go to the abyss, that tried to find a golden path without having the extremes. Of course, this kind of performance leads to superficiality. This also affected the speed at which the music was performed, because if the content was poor, the speed has to be greater.

Therefore Wagner complains bitterly about Mendelssohn's tempi. How did he propose to fight that superficiality? In two ways. One, by developing the idea of a certain necessary flexibility of tempo, of certain imperceptible changes within the classical movements. 

Here, Barenboim is talking about how Wagner saw Beethoven rather than how he conceived of his own music. But this idea of flexibility of tempo, for Wagner, put more emphasis on performance and affect. "Every sequence—every paragraph if you want to speak in literary terms—had its own melos and therefore required an imperceptible change of speed in order to be able to express the inherent content of that paragraph," Barenboim said. To quote him at length:

What Wagner really maintains is that unless you have the ability to guide the music in this way, you are not able to express all that is in it, and therefore you remain on the surface. He was diametrically opposed to a metronomic way of interpreting music. He had this idea of Zeit und Raum, time and space. Obviously tempo is not an independent factor: in order to sustain a slower tempo, which Wagner considered necessary for certain movements (not everything had to be slow, only certain movements and certain passages), he considered it an absolute necessity to slow down imperceptibly the second subject in a classical symphony where the first subject was dramatic—masculine, or whatever you want to call it—and the second was a contrast to that. But in order to make the slightly slower speed not only workable, but to allow it to express the content of the paragraph and to keep it within the context of the movement, there has to be, of course, some tonal compensation, and this is how he came to the concept of the continuity of sound: that sound tends to go to silence, unless it is sustained. From this came the whole concept not only of the color of sound—which is what so many people talk about today and which has led to (to my mindi superficial ideas about the "international sound of orchestras" — but of the weight of sound. And Wagner was more interested in the weight of the sound.

The weight of sound v. the weight of the sound.

*

the name Osip comes toward you, you tell him what he already knows,
he takes it, he takes it off you with hands,
you detach his arms from their shoulder, the right, the left

— Paul Celan (see translation as dismemberment), as translated by Pierre Joris

the name, the name, the hand, the hand, 
there, take them as your pledge, 
he takes that too, and you have 
again what's yours, what was his

— Celan from same poem, I think he was translating Mandelstam at the time, and in dialogue with him

Ruins.

It has been a week of waiting, the sort of unbearable waiting that puts every breath on hold. And it continues, bubbles over into the ‘weekend’ . . . Radu rises to every occasion that provides opportunities for sniffing.

And there have been comforts amid the unbearable, including but not limited to Gabrielle Tinti’s Ruins, sketches of spiders and cicada shells, fireflies doing their thing in the evening grass, ebullient sunshine, delicious sandwiches, discovering that tears grow less salty the more they flow so that, finally, one gets to a point near freshwater trees (which is quite stunning).

Speaking of ruins, here is Tinti’s “Icarus”:

And the ruins of an Icarus in each of us. . . Wings destroyed. Only a block of feathers on the left, and the broken strap pulled across his chest. The direction of his gaze, downwards, lips nearly parted, a sort of fascination in the mouth’s expression as if to acknowledge what is absent in the place where he stands, frozen by fear and the desire to please those who love him.

Ta-ka-ta-ka-ta-ka-ta-ka-ta-ka-ta, j'entends mon coeur qui bat . . .

Every reading occurs within a structure (however multiple, however open), and not in the allegedly free space of an alleged spontaneity: there is no ‘natural,’ ‘wild’ reading: reading does not overflow structure; it is subject to it: it needs structure, it respects structure.

— Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (t. by Richard Howard)

Desire to replace ordinary reading (in which you have to go from section to section) with the spectacle of a simultaneous speech where everything would be said all at once, without confusion, in ‘a total, peaceful, intimate and ultimately uniform flash.’

— Maurice Blanchot, “Joubert and Space” (t. by Charlotte Mandell)

1.

Sibiu, June 2025. I went to the Este Film Festival to catch a screening of Albert Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude (2024). Serra’s reputation as an enfant terrible of European cinema rests on his refusal to clarify boundaries between documentary forms and fictional ones, among other things, of course. The film is a repetitive loop of sheer brutality: the performance of masculinity set against the ‘natural’ animality of the bull, no commentary on bullfighting itself, just the visceral presentation, partly inspired by Francisco Goya’s paintings. There are 14 bullfights in total, and it is a testament to Serra’s enervating cinematography that one manages to sit through all of them.

The beginning: no sound, an austere red in the opening credits, an expectancy. Cut into a scene saturated in darkness: a black night, sown wheat in the wild, and a single bull, breathing, just breathing— his fur glistening in patches, the silver hue of moonlight, a fusion of power and vulnerability —

2.

DC, early 2000’s. G and I stood outside the nonspecific Middle Eastern restaurant in DC that would later be buried beneath a strip mall. — But we could not have imagined that yet. Instead, in that particular moment, G described his summer experience, eyes narrowing as he looked into the near distance, a Merit menthol in his right hand.  “I was in Pamplona, studying abroad,” G said. “My girlfriend of two years had dumped me in a phone call. And that's how it happened, during the Fiesta de San Fermín, the city was possessed. I joined strangers in the street, running between alleys . . . the encierro swallowed me. I'm saving up to go again, to be part of the running of the bulls.”

At the time, what I knew of Spain was limited to the rocky coastal areas, and the pink jelly shoes I wore to protect my bare feet from the sea urchins on the rocks. But G. was going back to run with the bulls. His passion for this sadistic ritual astonished me.

3.

In what was to be his final book, The Tears of Eros, Georges Bataille curated an arche of the erotic from images made by humans. He pauses near the Lascaux cave, trying to decipher them:

In the deepest crevice of this cave, the deepest and also the most inaccessible (today, however, a vertical iron ladder allows access to a small number of people at a time, so that most of the visitors do not know about it, or at best know it through photographic reproductions), at the bottom of a crevice so awkward to get to that it now goes under the name of the "pit," we find ourselves before the most striking and the most strange of evocations.

A man, dead as far as one can tell, is stretched out, prostrate in front of a heavy, immobile, threatening animal. This animal is a bison, and the threat it poses is all the more grave because it is dying: it is wounded, and under its open belly its entrails are spilling out. Apparently it is this outstretched man who struck down the dying animal with his spear. But the man is not quite a man; his head, a bird's head, ends in a beak. Nothing in this whole image justifies the paradoxical fact that the man's sex is erect. 

And there we have it: a man standing over a dead bull with an erection.

Nonsense, scoffs Bataille, refusing my hasty reading, dragging me, instead, into the darker caves of his his head. There is a veil here, Bataille insists, a paradox:

But in these closed depths a paradoxical accord is signed, an accord all the more grave in that it is signed in this inaccessible obscurity. This essential and paradoxical accord is between death and eroticism. Its truth no doubt continues to assert itself. However, no matter how it asserts itself, it still remains hidden. Such is the nature of both death and eroticism. The one and the other in fact conceal themselves: they conceal themselves at the very moment they reveal themselves.

We cannot imagine a more obscure contradiction.

4.

There is a season for death. The Spanish bullfighting season, la temporada, starts at the end of March and continues until early October. When the season ends, top matadors travel to Lima for the month-long Peruvian season before heading to Mexico City in December and January. Aspiring bullfighters, los novilleros, perform in Mexico only in the summer, whereas in Spain they perform from March to October.

5.

Sibiu, June 2025. [From the “Notes” document P kept on his iphone as we watched Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude.]

HE: I’m assuming the bulls are trained to respond to the calls being made by toreadors?

ME: Not really. This is supposed to be an amor fati scenario where neither bull nor matador see each other until the ring. And bulls are selected early on their lives: a bull that chosen for bullfighting is never allowed to see a human on foot, face to face, eye to eye, grounded so to speak until the corrida. The bullfighting bulls are raised separately, and field-hands only approach them on horses. They are raised totally wild in the field . . . as compared to their peers who are fattened in stalls for slaughter so that we can eat them.

HE: Why is he doing this?

ME: Most bulls favor one side so on the first cape run the matador attempts to feel out the bull’s weakness and preferences.

HE: Def machismo cult—you got balls, they’ll suck you off etc, locker room talk over nothing. The idea of this “as it is” presentation is obvi bullshit.  No director does something like this without a clear point, imho.

ME: Probably true. For me the bullfight is what we do to men in some ways: epic masculinity meets its peak in this intensity, with the cheers of the audience and death at stake. But it is also not man to me, see, not men as I know them— just the cult of masculinity. The same man who is vulnerable and powerful and alone in his nakedness is different creature when trying to impress other men and prove his manliness. Masculinity isn’t real or sexy to me.

HE: But it is real. You say men egg it on, and that’s true, but women play a huge part in that cult. Women lionize this kind of man. Why do you want to watch this sort of movie? Why are we here? What part of this needs seeing?

ME: I want to understand what we do to men. I want to understand how gender is constituted by and from fear. Why is fear so central to relationality vis a vis gender?

6.

Birmingham, 2025. To raise money for his trip to Spain, G was giving tango lessons to retirees in L. A. I think of G again when looking at a photo of my parents dancing the tango; my mother’s hip glued to my father’s leg, as if lightning had seared them together. There is a splendid moment in Pedro Almodovar’s film, Volver, when our expectations are subverted— and we, the audience, are given to recognize or admit what we expected in the instance of disappointment. Almodovar prepares us for an Argentine tango of the sort that Carlos Gardel made famous in the 1930s, but what he delivers, instead, is Penelope Cruz performing the same song as a soulful flamenco.

In the margins of the corrida, flamenco reaches towards duende. Where the matador seeks to channel the spirit of his opponent, the bull, in order to anticipate his next move, the flamenco dancer seeks to connect with the dead and the absent. When duende is present, the dance is overcome; the dancer’s ecstasy fills the room. It is captivating. One becomes captive to it.

7.

On the island of Crete, archaeological excavations revealed ancient Minoan frescoes (c. 1500 BCE) painted in relief on stucco. To create these frescoes, artists had to negotiate the height of the panel while simultaneously molding and painting the fresh stucco. The colors employed date the frescoes in late Minoan period: the skills for creating such art had already been shaped into methods, making them examples of "mature art" for the Minoans.

To speak of mature art in a civilization implies the end of that civilization as a known point. 

Late Minoan art used the polychrome hues – white, pale red, dark red, blue, black – visible in the Taureador Frescoes. In the scenes, young men and women play games with bulls, grabbing their horns and vaulting over them.  Gender is identified by color, according to Minoan conventions that painted women with pale skin and men with dark skin. Social status is indicated in clothing and jewelry. 

The frescoes appear as decorative motifs adorning a wall above a ceremonial bull-ring. It is speculated that an earthquake in the Late Minoan period destroyed the palace, causing flakes from the destroyed panels to fall to the ground from the upper story, landing near the east stairwell, which was already ruinous and likely unused.

The Taureador Frescoes don't depict events that occurred in actuality so much as celebrate a conventional trope known as  "bull-leaping," a term scholars say continues to lack a viable definition. (“Although it vaguely brings to mind the act of jumping over bulls, the technique and the reasons for doing that remain obscure, a century after the discovery of the frescos,” writes Jeremy McInnerny.)

8.

Macedonian coins depict Artemis Tauropolos (“Artemis Bullrider”) mounted on a charging bull. The Boegia (or "Bull Driving") was held in Miletus, and included a bull-grappling contest. In my copy of Michel Leiris' Manhood, the novel is preceded by an essay titled “The Autobiographer as Torero.”

9.

In The Book of Imaginary Beings, Jorge Luis Borges closes his eyes and burrows into the Minotaur's labyrinth. “It is fitting that in the center of a monstrous house there be a monstrous inhabitant,” Borges writes, for:

Human forms with bull heads figured, to judge by wall paintings, in the demonology of Crete. Most likely the Greek fable of the Minotaur is a late and clumsy version of far older myths, the shadow of other dreams still more full of horror.

Harking back to the Minotaur’s cameo appearance at the start of Dante’s Inferno, in Canto 12, Borges suggests — in a disputed interpretation — that Dante draws on the depiction from the Middle Ages of the beast as a bull’s body with a man’s head.

Upon the summit of the rugged slope
There lay outstretched the infamy of Crete
Conceived by guile within a wooden cow;
And when he saw us come, he bit himself,
Like one whom frenzy has deprived of reason.

Just as a bull, when stricken unto death,
Will break his halter, and will toss about
From side to side, unable to go on:
Thus did I see the Minotaur behave.

10.

The early Christian church found its most potent rival in the cult of Mithra, a pagan god of Persian mythology that was widely worshiped in ancient Rome. Central to the cult of Mithra was the Mithraic ceremony that sacrificed a bull to honor Mithra’s legendary slaying of a bull, which was depicted in art throughout the Roman Empire.

Feeling threatened by idolatry and rituals of Mithraism, the Roman church opposed them. The Council of Toledo in 447 drew a line straight from the bull to Satan: “a large, black, monstrous apparition with horns on his head, cloven hoofs, hair, ass’s ears, claws, fiery eyes, gnashing teeth, and huge phallus, and sulphurous smell.”

11.

For ancient Greeks, the bull symbolized fertility and priapism. Zeus (or Jupiter) is depicted riding a bull while holding a phallic scepter in his hand. At some point in time, Zeus trades the scepter for a labrys, or double-bitted ax, so he can throw thunderbolts at those who displeased him. (To please a god—particularly an angry and jealous god who aspires to monotheism, eventually complicated enough to require clerics.) 

After acquiring his thunderbolt, Zeus visited his lover, Semele, disguised as lightning. It should be noted that the Thracians held Semele to be the goddess of the Earth who sometimes went by the name, Gaia.  In the Albertine museum in Vienna, you can find an etching from the 16th century by master LD which depicts her meeting the thunderbolts, receiving her lover, looking, obviously orgasmic and reminiscent of the ecstatic expression on the face of the ecstatic saints.

Human beings believe things. All humans live in relation to the expectations generated by those beliefs. We believe the sun will rise tomorrow, etc. Faith, as developed by religious institutions, is rational to the degree that it is structured by belief, and given mass through credos, rituals, and affirming slogans. Faith apprehends through recognition, and this is essentially rational, it isn’t thoughtful, but it is still rational. It has a system.

The problem for rationalism and faith is ecstasy. Rationalism cannot touch the sacred or be permitted to reconfigure thought. Ecstasy makes the inarticulate physical, palpable, immediate. The absence of words underscores the absence of divinity. The sound that does not signify points beyond signification, and meets us in what Bataille called the sacred moment, or the instance in which existence is ruptured and lacks transition or explanation.

12.

A sigh, a shudder, a moan, the cry of grief, the veil of the world rent open by the wail. The Kaddish attempts to organize grief by taming it, and making it pleasing to God. The lament orders grief, and prevents it from becoming eternally unfinished  like the fragments. God doesn’t want the universe to be riven apart by the pain of humans. Priests want the Divine to remain articulable, ritualized, available for social transaction and accounting. Priests are careerists  of the established religion. They are not seekers of the divine so much as hired representatives of the divine timing. And that is the primary difference between monks and priests.

Lazlo Foldenyi says in articulate sounds are “manifestations of ‘God’ turned audible, but also a form of Echo..” his is the sound that John Cage encountered in the anhedonic chamber, where the labor of the heart became the music of silence.

Orphic cosmogony picks up from Hesiod’s Theogeny, after the clash of the titans, when the first human emerged from the ashes and cinder left behind after the Titans, were struck by lightning. The Titans birth, like that of the Dionysus, whom they killed, is born from the devastation rot by lightning. The Christian and Jewish  god creates from dirt and language, while the Orphic God creates from ash, from the remnants of burnt materials, from the fragments of what lived, from the poetry manuscript. Lightning, for the ancient Greeks gave the soul to the human body, just as it unifies the sky  and the earth. When Asclepius had the audacity to resurrect the dead, Zeus murdered him with lightning, a thunderbolt. In the battle of the Titans, Hesiod tells us that Zeus came from heaven and Olympus in the form of lightning. The heavens themselves hide Zeus‘s name: “ from Heaven and Olympus come forth with, hurling his lightning: the bold, flu, sick and fast from his hand together with thunder and lightning.” This destruction is summed up: “Astounding heat seized Chaos.”

13.

To return to Bataille and the ancients differently, with my head upside down, paraphrasing myself as well as the position from which some things are best glimpsed: seals and sealstones from the middle and late Minoan periods depict identical bull-leaping scenes where the leaper goes over the bull upside down. It’s not clear if the leaper is diving from above, leaping up from below, or being helped by another human or a pole. These scenes are taken as evidence of the Mycenaean Flying Leap, which occurred at full gallop. The bull’s legs are extended to show that he is motion while the woman stands in the front, holding his horns, preparing to leap over the bull or to land.

Today, Birmingham. Flashback of the opening scene from Serra’s Afternoons of Solitude: the redolent darkness filled by the heavy soundings of the bull’s breath, the freedom of that breath before being civilized .. . now I see Serra’s corrida bulls completely tied to the performance, just as the matadors and men are subject to the norms of masculinity, that brutish contestation of cajones and herms. . . . But how gorgeous and powerful, that naked man alone in the darkness, the air around him filled by his breath, the tempo of his concern and vulnerability, the animal who escapes, however briefly, the performances of convention in masculinity.

As to the question of how many more times . . .

To express the point in almost Heraclitean terms, we are dealing here with the difference between performing an action in the universe and ‘repeating’ it, that is, performing it ‘again’ in a universe already changed by the ‘first’ occurrence. Whereas classical arithmetic can assign no sense to the quote marks here, non-Euclidean arithmetic erases them by internalizing the distinctions they notate.

— Brian Rotman, Mathematics as Sign

*

Brian Rotman, Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting (Stanford University Press, 2000).
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Lawrence Grant White (Pantheon Books, 1948).
Jay Wright, Presentable Art of Reading Absence (Dalkey Archive, 2008).
Joe Dassin, “Taka takata (La femme du toréro)”.
Jorge Luis Borges with Margarita Guerrero, The Book of Imaginary Beings, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni (E.P. Dutton, 1978).
Maurice Blanchot, “Joubert and Space,” The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford University Press, 2003).
Reginald Dwayne Betts, “Remembering Hayden”.
Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (University of California Press, 1986).
Suzanne Dracuis. “The Macho's Marathon, the Major's Martyrology, and the Conqueror's Cavalry”, collected in Elektrik: Caribbean Writing. Calico Translation Series. Two Lines Press, 2023.

Little kingdoms in yr chest

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

— Dan Beachy-Quick

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

— Broken Social Scene, “Almost Crimes”

1

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

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

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

2

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

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

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

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

3

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

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

4

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

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

5

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

6

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

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

To last is to withstand the test of time. 

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

7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

— Cesar Pavese, Dialogues with Leuco

Self-portraits with Naseer Shamma environs.

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

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

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

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

— Dostoevsky, “White Nights”

[2:42]

Alberto Giacometti, Self-Portrait (1921)

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

[8:21]

Alberto Giacometti, Self-Portrait (1924)

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

[11:52]

Alberto Giacometti, Self-Portrait (1935)

[16:05]

[21:20]

[26:18]

[29:17]

[30:35]

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

[34:46]

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

Lament like a hill.

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

Fanny Howe

10 tickets.

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

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

“Imagine.” (Samuel Beckett)

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

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

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

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

Ways of thinking with Woodman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sous la nuit” by Alexandra Piznarik

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

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

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

All night long I make the night.

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

Word by word I am writing the night.

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

3] #16 from Angel Series, 1977

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

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

4] Self-Deceit # 1, Rome, 1977

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#9 Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976

#20 Untitled, Rome, 1977–78

#19 Untitled, Antella, Italy, 1977

#18 from Angel Series, Rome, 1977

#18 from Angel Series, Rome, 1977

#15 Space2, Providence, Rhode Island, 1977

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

#6 Untitled, 1976-80

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

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

POSTLUDE

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

Giacometti's interiors.

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

— Nino Ferrer, “La rua Madureira”

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

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

1

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

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

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

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

— Giselle Lestrange to Paul Celan, 9 September 1965

2

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

3

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

4

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

5

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

6

Alberto Giacometti’s Interior (1949).

7

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

8

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

9

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

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

Saul Steinberg, Giacometti (1983)

10

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

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

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

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

My Studio, 1932

Studio interior, 1940

Figures in an Interior, 1946

The Studio with Sculptures, 1953-1956

"The Studio (Still Life)" 1950

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

— Paul Celan to Giselle Lestrange, 20 August, 1965

Postlude

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