Félix González-Torres and love's time.

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

—Félix González-Torres

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


“Who is your public?”

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

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

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

Once, We, Were—

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

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

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

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

Psychocinema and last suppers.

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EXCERPTS FROM PSYCHOCINEMA [PDF]

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

1

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

—Archilochus, 7 BCE

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

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

2

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

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

Schiele, Edith Schiele on Her Deathbed (1918)

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

But Edith was lying down when he sketched these drawings.

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

3

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

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

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

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

4

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

The document is preserved.

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

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

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

Schiele on his deathbed, as photographed by Martha Fein

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

Krzhizhanovsky's "physiological sketches" of Moscow.

1

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

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



2

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



3

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



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

4

In conversation with Daniel Barenboim, Edward Said said:

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

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

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

Of epistles.

1

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

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


2

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

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

Paula Rego, The Artist in Her Studio (1993)

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

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

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

*

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

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


*

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

— René Char, “To ***”


"I want nothing of"


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

— Frank O’Hara, “Poem”


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

— Renee Gladman, “Five Things”

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

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



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

Another way of phrasing things might be accretive, namely:

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



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

— Donald Hall


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

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


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

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

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

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



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

— Deborah Digges, “To Science”



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

— Paul Hostovsky, “Love Poem”



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

— Frank O’Hara, “Poem” (from 1959)

From "decoherence".

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

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

Vasily Vereshchagin, The Apotheosis of War (1871)

My Stygian night problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the mirrors are many, paraphrase Mahmoud Darwish —-

Victor Brauner, Civilizing consciousness, 1961

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

The extension of this messianism has other logic:

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

*

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

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

José Luis Cuevas, 𝘓𝘢𝘴 𝘔𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘢𝘴, 1977.

A five-stem corona for Arnold Schoenberg.

First stem

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

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

Second stem

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

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

Third stem

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

Fourth stem

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

Fifth stem

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

Postscript

Pious rapture, to quote Schoenberg quoting George.

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

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

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

—- James Dickey, The Zodiac


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

— James Wright, “Beginning”


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

Minneapolis
July 6, 1958

Dear Mr. Dickey:

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

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

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

Yours,

James Wright

3 things: elegy, owl, and power tool.

1

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

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

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

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

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

2

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


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


3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The prior year in music, with gratitude.

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

1

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

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

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

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

— Leonard Cohen, “Famous Blue Raincoat”

2

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

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

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


3

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

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

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

— The Cowboy Junkies, “Speaking Confidentially”




4

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

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


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

— Spiritualized, “Born Never Asked”


5

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

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


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

— Peter Gabriel, “Fourteen Black Paintings”



6

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

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

Well it's about time

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



7

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

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

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

— REM, “You”

8

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

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


You swim in moon, you left too soon

— Tricky, “We Don’t Die”

9

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

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

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

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

10

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

Farting, breath, and Beckett.

1

Every fart results in the loss of a small patch of the soul, as constituted by the breath, the ruach, the exhalation that goes out through the back door. Pythagoras knew this. And he forbade the eating of beans out of love for the soul.

2

The teens do not understand how anyone could believe the world isn’t circular. “The world is a merry-go-round,” the middle teen tells me. “The world is the sort of circus that has merry-go-rounds on the regular,” the younger teen adds.

3

If the Earth were not spherical, then I would have seen it all while sitting on a rock beside the ocean, or at least glimpsed the entire ship on the horizon rather than seeing its mast move close to me first, spotting that tip so to speak, without the body. Bobbing on the surface like a head without a corpus.

4

For Plato, the spherical shape of the earth meant that the heavens were also spherical: a spherical Universe moved in a circular motion.

5

Following his mentor, Aristotle damned comets to the realm of the spheres, relegating these flying shards of fire to the earth's disorder rather than the perfect harmony and geometry of the celestial sphere. In the earth's upper atmosphere, Earthly exhalations would burst into flame and these bursts would resemble comets. The comet is the thing of this world, profaned by its venturing into the ether between worlds.

6

"The writer is a comet," I explained to my friend, who could not get his novel about southern ghosts published.

7

"Yes, the writer is an engine of profanation fueled by blood until the heart gives up," I told my dog, Radu, after discovering the author, Enrique Vila-Matas, wandering down the streets of Dublin with his character, Riba. These two fellows, the writer and his character, were strolling along when they both spotted an "irate, limping man" on page 106, a man who suddenly became an "irate ethereal man" after stepping into the doorway on page 107, since the doorway is a literary threshold with the power to make a minor god of most verb-carting mammals.

8

The name of the book is Dublinesque.

And —- “What will become of all this misery of ours? In the end, only an old whore walking around in an absurd raincoat, on a lonely dike in the rain.”

This is what Samuel Beckett wrote in Krapp's Last Tape.

9

And maybe the intellectual was correct to note that Beckett’s ‘old whore’ was likely Celia —- who had been an innocent, young whore when she appeared in Murphy, and who coincidentally shared a name with Riba's Buddhism-exploring wife, a name which Riba immediately grasped after catching an eyeful of Catherine Deneuve’s trench coat and that barely-cocked hat she wore in Cherbourg, the coat and the hat and her flesh certainly naked underneath all that, as rain would suggest, was Literature itself, or all the desires and erotic gropings were books in which what began as fantasy bloomed into fruit, or fruited and got plucked and tasted on Bloomsday, as it was known.

10

This day of penultimate blooming happens again every year. 

11

Riba ran into Beckett wearing a trench coat on page 193, and recognized Beckett immediately on the basis of small, insignificant details, which is to say: literature. Vila-Matos’ character knew it was Beckett from the way he stared directly at him with "his bird-like face" clearly traced from the drawings of bird-men in the room known as the Dead Man's Shaft in the caves of Lascaux.

12

I swore I would not write a single word collaborating in that literary trope known as Lascaux Cave Aside-ism today.

13

Alas. It is the first day of a new year, and this is my thirteenth thought to date. Under such conditions, the thought is beholden to none, least of all, to its author. In reality, the Lascaux caves include over 600 paintings staggered across the walls and the ceilings. In the Hall of the Bulls, there is a 17-foot bull that prides himself on being the largest animal yet discovered in cave art. In the Shaft of the Dead Man, there are some stars and astronomical figures, but what I noticed first was the wall that includes a bull, a bird, and a bird-man.

O, lest I forget, happy new year to all friends and enemies, for as long as this life gives us!

"Corresponding Foreignly" by Frank O'Hara

A treasure in this daily email from The Paris Review that feeds you a poem from its archives at some point in the morning so one can savor the poem with coffee and frame the day in its traces, if such urges strike. As one who has appreciated this treasure for several years, and who recommends it to others regularly, I encourage you to visit this page and put a check-mark next to the daily poem newsletter.

And here is the poem that appeared in my inbox on December 31, 2024, which is to say, yesterday, the final breath of the year prior, the last gasp of said annum.

Corresponding Foreignly

by Frank O’Hara

1
You may flaunt my looseness, you know
that I go whole weeks without, so, I
get depressed because I’m so easily distracted
from sex. It’s not something you can keep
your mind on without losing it.

2
Certain eases appeal to me more than the flowering quinces
and your black pear branches dripping white petals.
I’m not a pastoral type any more, I take the subway
back and forth from beds to days or bed-in-the-day-time
and if pleased am a dirty flower at the end of ragtagging
it. “I hear you were downtown last night. It was just like
old times.’’ What a thing to say in an elevator. I’d feel
rather more assured, though, if we were rolling in a field
screaming above the records and the Japanese lanterns.
I hate the country and its bells and its photographs.

3
When he went west we thought he’d be big in the movies
with his humanity kick. The others went off to another party
but we went home and forgot each other in a good talk.
Then the radiators cracked and puffed and it did get warmer
but I dreamt of an anxiety the size of a public building,
something to race your car in and waken echoes. Did
you mention that you saw me dancing with a sculpture last week
in the Bowery? It was an audition and we called ourselves “The Bananas.”

4
Four little rats came into the house
because it had grown so cold out,
and they knew they’d be allowed the run
of our lives in the winter
when the weather doesn’t favor them.

5
I met him in Los Angeles
and after weeks of feverish love
couldn’t remember what he looked like
if he was farther away than the john.
I wondered what he had done
to me. He was like a shrike.
I don’t know if it was really love
and he’s left Los Angeles.

6
I have a tic of thinking about it, if
they can really fine you for paying the rent
late. His photograph would have to be moved
to a new building, and by now it’s the size
of a mural. It would take weeks. I won’t.

The bad mommies of literature.

Without even a morsel of irony, in the year 2025, various thinkers and authors continue to indict the mothers of Rainer Maria Rilke and Oscar Wilde for ‘traumatically’ dressing their sons in 'effeminate clothing' a bit longer than was conventional, thus causing untold 'gender issues' and/or sexual 'confusions'.

It is said that poetess and Irish activist Lady Wilde dressed Oscar like a girl because she had wanted a daughter rather than another son.

It is said that Rilke's mother completely destroyed his masculinity.

It is said that the mothers damn the sons to be 'pansies' if they kiss them too often in those formative early years.

It is said that Beckett said all this misery of ours will wind up as 'an old whore walking around in an absurd raincoat, on a lonely dike in the rain'. 

Source: Victorian Web. Oscar Wilde as a child being irrevocably tormented by his mother.

Rainer Maria Rilke as a child, being destroyed by his mother.

"Walter Benjamin's Warning"

An old poem at the beginning of what may be a ‘new’ year—with all the strange feelings such newness promises.

And the context for the poem’s composition back in 2020—- this short crumb by Kafka, shadow puppets, the colored pencils of the youngest imagining her rivers.