Yellows on the cutting floor.

Wherein she attempts to dump a bit of her recent obsession with yellow onto a screen—-for you, whoever you are.

To begin with gratitude for other writers, particularly peers in poetry and music, who drew me deeper into this poem last night.

To begin with the shape of it—

The figure of the poem on the field; the way it occupies space.

Four stanzas of different length.

Or: three stanzas and an addendum; a trinity with a scrap left on the cutting floor of creation.

Or: a quintet, a sestet, a septet, and a monostich.

The decision to “grow” each stanza with an additional line is deliberate, and accumulative. I imagine Ruefle tarried a bit in the second stanza, trying to decide where to break for the last line. “For me” settles it, but not cleanly. It draws attention to the “me” in a way I’m not sure the poet intended, which is to say, I can’t know if she meant this. It makes a snapping sound, that break.

The title addresses an unknown interlocutor indirectly, speaking to the “tenor” of (his?) yes. The structure of the sentence tells us that “You” has affirmed something. If the poem is a painting, the title is the caption scribbled beneath it.

The leave-taking of the poem with that final line, that slim thread: “Much like god at the end.”

To stare at that “tenor” for a minute—

The titular word, tenor, is a noun that refers to:

a singing voice between baritone and alto or countertenor, the highest of the ordinary adult male range. A singer with a tenor voice. A part written for a tenor voice.

the course of thought or meaning that runs through something written or spoken; purport; drift. continuous course, progress, or movement.

These are the general uses of tenor, and Ruefle could be said to be playing into both of these meanings, rubbing the duplicity and uncertainty for valences.

But there is another definition of tenor that comes from finance, where tenor refers to “the length of time remaining before a financial contract expires.” This “tenor” is sometimes used interchangeably with “maturity.”

To return and discover two gestures—-

But first, something else: something that is not the figure but the saturation, the poem’s tonal qualities.

What is at stake for the poem? What the poem desires from existence?

Like us, the poem knows itself as an articulation of specific desires in relation to constraints. This tension drives the poem, or shapes its movement and tempo.

The first two stanzas begin in the conditional form. The acquire momentum through a matched construction of syntax:

If you were lonely
and you saw the earth
you’d think here is
the end of loneliness
and

If you were sad
and you saw the kitchen
you’d think here is
the end of sadness
and

The third line in both stanzas is identical, a repetition that isn’t quite a refrain, but does some of the formal work a refrain accomplishes. There is a mirroring motion, a play on possibility, an interest in what could-be the case.

And there are two gestures at play, gestures that may speak to the desiring.

In the third stanza, the poem’s speaker refers to a painting by Joseph William Turner, but she does so in a gesture that refuses proper naming. She gives us a shortened version of the name along with a referent: “Turner painted his own / sea monsters.”

We are given enough to find the painting, but not enough to define it. It is one thing to find and another to define and the order of operations may fall under the purview of epistemology.

First gesture: there is a painting . . .

Second gesture: there is something else . . .

Something else is the classic Ruefle ingredient, the elliptical metaphysical. She does not give us the title of the painting because giving us the title would denude the metaphysical gesture of the poem.

And yet the painting is central to the poem. I’m not certain this poem could exist without the painting.

The look at the painting—-

Turner’s Sunrise with Sea-Monsters (1845) was left unfinished.

Joseph William Turner, "Sunrise with Sea Monsters" (1845)

It is so yellow. How strange that Ruefle’s poem doesn’t feel yellow. How odd that the dominant note of the Turner’s dawn isn’t elicited in the poem at all.

And we are speaking of sunrise— but the yellow is wan. The feeble yellow lacks a certain robustness. There is no fire in it. There is no orange warming the undertones. And I want to risk calling it weak, to risk expressing the absence of a forge-orange in this hue of yellow. It is not worthy of a Prometheus or a Promethean labor.

The effect is softening, like the whisper of pastel paint on a wall; it quiets and soothes me. If this yellow were a song, it would be soporific. A yellow lull. A hum. A lullaby is the song intended to settle the mind that has witnessed the chaos of creation.

The lullaby yellowing the melody—-and the song distinguished by diminishing, its fading out into slow diminuendo.

Diminishment is not dissimilar from incompleteness.

And the monstrosity—

According to the current description offered by Tate Museum:

This is one of Turner’s most mysterious unfinished paintings. The shapes of two or more giant fish can be seen against a yellow sunrise. Dark brown hatched lines to the left of the fish may suggest netting or fish scales. Turner would have read of sightings and stories of mysterious marine creatures by sailors engaged in Britain’s multiplying naval business interests. Despite its bright tonality, this work may relate to Turner’s frequent depictions of the sea as dark place.

Tate reads this painting in relation to the expansion of the British maritime empire, and the absence of the word “colonialism” hovers in the silences of the soft-pedaled historicist description. From this, we can assume that Turner’s painting draws on the thriving community of sailors and fishermen who hung out told stories (or "shanty tales"). Maybe the artist heard lore about sightings of mysterious marine creatures by the men who went out in the water. Tate’s description aligns with the spirit (if not the exact content) of Turner-expert James Hamilton’s reading. Hamilton wanders deeper into the mist and speculates that a paddleboat is being consumed by giant fish or whales inside it. The “steamboat theory” follows the interpretation of Turner's later work as a reflection on the technological changes of the Industrial Revolution.

Although this is a very specific, economic take, it is also conspicuously genteel in its elisions: no one mentions the exploitative nature of maritime economy. The absence of this mention makes it difficult to read Turner as critiquing the change. One wonders why bother with Big Steamboat energy at all—-and one wonders this because the role played by light, the lull of that yellow yellow yellow, feels significant. One might even say that the Sea Monsters of 2023 are unapologetically British in their affect?

The singular monster v. the many—-

What do I see? What can I be certain about in Turner’s painting?

There is the shape of a thing which seems to be fish, or which have fish-like heads. Maybe there is a red and white striped buoy present among the fish. Certainly, there are traces of interesting shapes in the lower right corner. One critic discerned a dog's head to the left of the monster. “A paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine draws a connection between these figures and Turner's possession of acetate of morphia (a drug related to morphine), possibly used for the treatment of a toothache” (Wikipedia).

In thinking of text and descriptions of art as translation, I am thinking with an idea shared on twitter yesterday:

Translation is a form of literature, a literary art. It does not (and *cannot*) replicate the original. It *creates* the poem in a different language. I treasure the sonic voluptuary in these five translations of Rimbaud by Christian Bok.

What is the difference between Turner’s painting and the museum’s textual narration of it? What is the distance?

In a similar vein, I tried to think about what Ruefle’s poem desires from the world, a question that inevitably touches on how one conceives existence? What does the poem risk in relation to that desire?

“If you were lonely / and you saw the earth / you’d think here is / the end of loneliness…”

The final monster—

The language-freak in me reads gallery/museum descriptions as textual relics that reflect the interests and concerns of their time. While the painting remains the same, the words used by humans to describe the painting flutter, bustle, shift. The temptation to take these descriptions as definitive is common to museum-goers.

But a poem that gestures towards metaphysical incompleteness cannot be pinned to a definitive reading. And an unfinished painting exists —-always—in relation to its unfinishedness.

Tate’s 1907 catalogue lists the title as Sunrise, with a Sea Monster. In 1907, there was one “sea monster with a head like a magnified red gurnet” and this sea monster was “floating on the misty waters” which reflected “a yellow sunrise.” In the “distance",” there were “forms suggesting huge icebergs.”

Drawing on Turner’s sketchbook, the Sea Monster of 1907 is related less to maritime trade than to the particular whaling expeditions Turner sketched. It is “as thought Turner was occupied at the time with the wonders of the deep waters related by Arctic voyagers.” The Sea Monster of 1907 resembles a “similar drawing” that hangs with his “exhibited watercolors.”

So much has changed in the interim. So much like god at the end.

Jean-Paul Clébert's Paris.

“A personal investigation”

Jean-Paul Clebert's Paris Vagabond, first published in 1952, has been reissued by NYRB Classics in a translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith, accompanied by Patrice Molinard's  photographs. Positioning itself as a text of notebooks, the book presents Paris as seen from the perspective of a privileged, middle-class Frenchman who dropped out of his bourgeois family life in order to live off the pavement. 

At 17, Clébert ran away from his Jesuit boarding school and joined the French Resistance. The end of World War II is what led him to opt-out of conventional bourgeois life and live on the streets. During his tramp years, he took observational notes and set them aside, just in case he should elect to write them. Preserving these notes is not a small feat when living hand-to-mouth and without a stable residence.

Unsurprisingly, in 1951, Clébert decided to write about it, and his notes happened to survive his tramping. This, too, is part of the book's mise-en-scene, since Clébert apparently drew the notes scraps from his bag, randomly, and wrote in relation to their chance appearance. The method is dada, but the costume is documentary, forming what he called "a personal investigation" into the underground Paris he discovered during the 1940s. 

What emerged is this quasi-anthropological travelog in the key of picaresque following what seems to be a quest-less quest.

Photograph of Paris street life by Patrice Molinard, first included in the 1954 edition of Paris Vagabond.

“I was living, eating, sleeping and dreaming on a heap of sacks of potatoes…”

The narrative leaps from places, moments, encounters, and streets, pulling fragments and odd materials into its spontaneous vortex. Although Clébert reports that he initially hits the streets in search of sex, the city, with its "apartment buildings fit for troglodytes" and "unlikely skyscrapers silhouetted against the void,” seems the greater lure.

In this anti-postcard Paris of abandoned parking lots and occupied, half-gutted buildings, power lines and other city entrails are on full display. Flea markets teem with life and opportunity. Sociality occurs on stoops and sidewalks and cigarette exchanges, and living is the thing that remains a surprise when one finds a safe place to rest at night.

Clebert narrates this from a self-aware “I” that occasionally pauses to form a “We” among other transients that vanishes as quickly as it took shape:

Like all fellows of my calling, which is that of having no trade, that of the good-for-nothing and the ready-for-anything, I once worked in Les Halles: hands freezing cold and eyes stinging, at an hour when ordinary cafés were closing and turfing out their customers, I used to cross the Pont des Arts footbridge or the Pont Neuf (I was living at the time in Rue des Canettes, in a tiny room with a cot for a bed, no window except for a murky transom above the door and not so much as a pitcher for water to wash with), reach the toiling Right Bank, go and drink endless black coffees at the counter of the Pied de Cochon and watch the well-heeled coming in, after parking their cars outside, and climbing the stairs to the second floor with good-time girls in tow to eat steaming crusty onion soup that cost three times as much as it did at sidewalk level where I was, playing the night’s first game of 421 with head washers in stained smocks and aprons who came in to clean off coagulated blood and savor dry white wine before going back to turn powerful jets of water on the bones, still covered with flesh, of animals whose fate it was to become delectable charcuterie.

There is this constant sense of motion, crossing streets, finding places to pause, discovering an opportunity for food or small labor or drink. The reader accompanies Clebert on these circuitous voyages.

He is our guide to Paris' less touristed vistas.

He takes us for stroll along the Seine, with scenic stops at the makeshift places where the bodies of suicides are fished from the river and brought to dry land.

There are moments expressing the stark physicality of poverty:

As for me, I was living, eating, sleeping and dreaming on a heap of sacks of potatoes, having spent my entire fortune on illumination, venturing out only to scavenge and take the air, each time passing the employees and proprietor of the shop, who gave me vegetables or oranges but clapped palm to forehead behind me as I left. It was here too that my friends, who had digs just like mine or were the proud owners of shadowy corners of this providential quarter, came to visit me, slithering like worms through the gaping holes and cracks that rent all the façades of the block.

There are anecdotes and inherited street wisdoms, as well as exhilarating cityspaces consumed by loneliness, moonlight, and the soft orange of a lit cigarette:

Paris by night is a labyrinth where every street opens onto another or onto one of the boulevards so aptly described as arteries – a labyrinth through which I make my way in fits and starts, like a blood clot, jolting down the steepest inclines, emerging from bottlenecks into empty space. And so I go, walking, plunging, flowing – a river hoping somehow to debouch into the sea, haven of peace and freedom from care.

Photo by Patrice Molinard. Source.

Clébert narrates the origins of various topographical features, including the story of  Philippe Lebon, inventor of the gas burner in Paris, the ancestor of the street lamp. He mixes street-lore with gossip and description:

(It was here some time later that a tender-hearted soul named Fradin, most likely a retired shit-sniffer living off his rents, set up a sort of “hotel,” according to the old books, where guests slept all in a row with their backsides on old sacks and their feet sticking out onto the cobblestones and the napes of their necks resting on a cord stretched taut a few inches above the ground, which at the crack of dawn the wily hostel-keeper undid, thus causing a general collapse of heads and putting an abrupt if not too painful end to the dreams of his guests. . . .)

The effect is so rich that one could almost miss the "old books" that sourced this tale.

The affect is smooth, congruous—-all daub with no signs of wattle.

Jean-Paul Clébert in his writing office.

“Like all fellows of my calling, which is that of having no trade, that of the good-for-nothing and the ready-for-anything…”

As Clebert steps into his persona, in accordance with his "calling," I began to wonder how much of our "inherited sin" (i.e. wealth and class privilege) can be abandoned. If reality attends to what is the case, then the case cannot ignore the reality that most transient persons lack an opportunity to publish their notebooks (let alone imagine this publication will be translated and distributed after their death). 

It seems that those most likely to publish their experiences are those who have chosen poverty and opting-out as a way of life for the purpose of making a statement or understanding the world. And there is a world that Clebert navigates, a topography of the secret Paris occupied by those whom the ordinary Parisian prefers not to see or notice.

There is the jouissance of farting as a friend plays the harmonica: "One autumn evening we indulged in an orgy that was quite fabulous, albeit peaceful and indeed devoid of the sensuous pleasures of fornication, for we were all men, with only rats and bats for company."

"Those were the days," Clerbert writes, before slipping back into his tourist guide costume and qualifying his nostalgia with a warning: 

But memories butter no parsnips, and now that I was a citified tramp in quest of the two things essential to the welfare of any honest man, namely food and lodging, it was time to bestir myself.

Nicholson-Smith's translation is fantastic and filled with archaic weirdness; surely no word could suit that last sentence the way "bestir" suits it up, the way "bestir" gestures towards a business suit in the past of the speaker. 

Would I recommend this book? Absolutely. It wears its era well—and wears this era in a way that converses with the present. It anticipates the critiques that will follow, including those of Orientalism, trauma tourism, and neocolonial cosplay. Lucy Sante's introduction provides splendid context for Clerbert's project. She tracks the bop-style prose reminiscent of Jack Kerouac, and intimates that the book was inspired by Henry Miller and Blaise ­Cendrars.

The terrain covered in Paris Vagabond sparkles, trembles, vomits, and raises its opting-out fist against the world of the fathers, with qualification. This qualification is Clebert, himself, or a strange discord between narrative tone and the embodied challenges of transient life. A certain braggadocio saunters forth at the outset, in his claims of having "infiltrated" the dark heart of Paris for 300 days and nights just to deliver a story with style, like a "stuntman." 

Perhaps it should not be surprising that a man who wrote these words in 1951 would also be the reporter in Asia for Paris Match and France Soir before going on to live among various underprivileged groups, authoring studies of these groups, adding novels about the alchemist of King-Sun (L'Alchimiste du Roi-Soleil) and a hermit (L'hermite) to the mix of a legacy that includes publishing a total of 33 books during his long life, among them, biographies of notable families (Les Daudet, une famille bien française), guidebooks to "mysterious" Provence (Guide de la Provence mystérieuse); tour guides to thermal France (Guide de la France thermale); histories of Provence during the time of the first Christians (Provence antique, 3: Aux temps des premiers chrétiens); geological uplift (La Durance. Rivières et vallées de France); even  Dictionnaire du Surréalisme in 1996. 

Searches on Clebert reveal nothing.

“Little is known about his genealogy as he preferred to keep his personal life private.”

Privacy is quite costly for authors, and I wonder how he could afford it.

“There are no public records or information regarding his family background, ancestors, or descendants.”

How did he secure a publisher for so many books while living in legendary precarity?

“Clébert's legacy lies in his written works, which continue to inspire readers and urban explorers around the world.”

Legends are made of so much less.

“And so I go, walking, plunging, flowing – a river hoping somehow to debouch into the sea….”

It is a glamorous life, this guidebooking of the undiscovered other. If Clerbet's legacy is complicated by the gap between his lived experience and his reportage, it is not because he sought the public eye. In many ways, he wrote, traveled, and kept a low profile, retreating to a mountainous region of Provence in 1956, and living among the "abandoned stone villages, and took up residence there without running water or electricity, before moving in 1968 to Oppède-le-Vieux," according to Wikipedia. 

During the war, Oppède-le-Vieux had served as a gathering place and refuge for artists. Clerbert moved there in 1968—and spent the rest of life with Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, the aviator's widow, as a neighbor, whose husband, Saint Exupéry, authored a fictionalized account of the failed artist's commune titled Kingdom of the Rocks (1946).

The quiet terror of the middle class has always been its support of bad government, its conservative tendency to vote for whatever maintains their status. Like the German 1968ers, Clebert's critique of the war – and his role in the resistance — required a severance from one's family and future plans. He wanted to be un-identified by privilege. 

11 thoughts after reading a nocturne by Elizabeth Willis.

1

To begin with the poem I cannot forget, in the shape of this single long stanza given to the reader in Elizabeth Willis’ Alive: New and Selected Poems from NYRB Imprints:


NOCTURNE

I'm thinking of
the heat in the reins
a gear in love with itself
two parts that fit
I'm thinking about your face:
there's nothing to invent
Driven to distraction
or just walking there
The edge of my mind
against the edge of yours
An astrolabe isn't thinking
of a concrete lane
or unconquerable interior
Abiding by its class
and country church, a kitsch picture
is not "sincerity"
though I am native to it
A nation has this sound
of being born      The human
is not its ill-begotten ad
A hemisphere is not your hair
in its Parisian rooms
An astrolabe is not 
a metaphor for love
though love contain the mortal roots
of congress, like a peasant
inside the name you give its ruins


2

O, here we go ‘tis the serrated edge of my mind against the edge of yours who is the edgelord anyway we dice it.


3

An astrolabe may not be a metaphor for love if Dean Young was right and love is the metaphor flexed against itself while it keeps changing the terms of the dance so “all prepositions are hopeful but opaque is the afterlife” of our edging.

4

I’m thinking of the last time I saw your face and how it was altered by the fact of my wearing sunglasses which led you to ask if I had been crying or whether I had a migraine which meant that my final glimpse of you included my lie with that shading.


5

Who is Hans and who is Gretel in the story who is the gear in love with itself when a Sunday is the morning after.


6

As someone else thinks about your face, I am savoring how much I love the word “sloth” and thinking that I will rise from from the floor in a minute or so and do whatever it is that the mammals wants from me, wherein ‘wanting’ is closer to consumption than desiring and ‘whatever’ isn’t a still-life from seven deadly sins in the mouths of french women.


7

“When she was asleep, I no longer had to talk, I knew that I was no longer observed by her, I no longer needed to live on the surface of myself,” Proust wrote. He was driven to distraction by the fact that his characters kept trying to read him.


8

There is the heat in the reins and the horse of the moment who is driven by the idea of the driver but I’m thinking of the metaphor as the wah pedal being pressed to distort in order to make a thing like me sound a lick clearer.


9

And that day after I flew to Chicago when the man to my left told me that he was the King of Lineation and I thought about how it would feel to be a shoe of no expectation, a strange leather thing with a sole from whom no one expects an answer.


10

A kitten does not learn to purr for days but a nation has this sound of being born whenever I read Beckett and find “certain questions of a theological nature” in Molloy, including: “What value is to be attached to the theory that Eve sprang, not from Adam's rib, but from a tumor in the fat of his leg (arse)? Did the serpent crawl or, as Comestor affirms, walk upright? Did Mary conceive through the ear, as Augustine and Adobard assert? What is one to think of the Irish oath sworn by the natives with the right hand on the relics of the saints and the left on the virile member? Does nature observe the sabbath? Is it true that the devils do not feel the pains of hell? The algebraic theology of Craig—what is one to think of this? Is it true that the infant Saint-Roch refused suck on Wednesdays and Fridays? What is one to think of the excommunication of vermin in the sixteenth century? Is one to approve of the Italian cobbler Lovat who, having cut off his testicles, crucified himself? What was God doing with himself before the creation? Might not the beatific vision become a source of boredom, in the long run? Is it true that Judas' torments are suspended on Saturdays? What if the mass for the dead were read over the living?”


11

The best part of that book is what it promises in the ending: “Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.” I have so much to say about yellow yet. Have I mentioned how much pleasure Beckett gives me very personally by putzing about with Pythagoreans? The worst part being that time will not tell the name you give its ruins.

Forbidden music; in variations.

1

It always begins foolishly.

Today, it began with a poem someone posted on twitter. A title taunting me with that old gauntlet, forbidden. A prose poem by Louise Gluck. A brief narration with parabolic energy and the shadow of a riddle inside it.

I read it twice and closed my eyes. Nothing happened.

Then I googled the riddle of Gluck’s “Forbidden Music” yet failed to find any writing that deciphered the riddle. Zero. Obviously, I had imagined this riddle in order to titillate myself on a day of streptococcal-tinged parenting. I accepted my imagining as well as its failure.



2

An hour later, while cursing the rain and arguing over playlists with my daughter, the music came back to me in spheres.

“Plato,” I whispered.

“No,” the daughter added, for the satisfaction of exercising a veto.

I ceded the playlist and set off on the hunt.

“Fucking Plato,” I confirmed to my dog Radu when passing the green chair on my way to the shelf where the ancient Greeks lived. I congratulated myself on having made a bro-cave for them.

"Beware of changing to a new form of music, since it threatens the whole system," Plato wrote in that Republic of thinking men where he set out the distinction between music that produces social order (and contributes to social health) versus music that foments disorder (and must be handled cautiously, limited to a certain audience, prohibited from arousing the masses). For Plato, music shapes character and socializes citizens. Music is political—- it is “of the polis”; of the polis’ business. Being human means (among other things) that our relationship to music precedes our relationship to words, or to language as a way of knowing. The human infant deploys sound in order to intervene upon its environment; the baby develops a vast collection of evolving noises, babbles, coos, wails, and gurgles, and it does so more than other animal infants. Apart from its sound-making capacity, the human infant also recognizes its caregivers through sound. It turns its head and body towards the sound of the mother’s voice. Plato acknowledges how the lullaby, a particular form of music, can soothe an unsettled infant. Where the baby’s tumultuous wail disorders, the mother’s lullaby restores order. And order, in this definition, is the condition of social calm. Harmony reigns.


Remedios Varo, The Flautist (1948)

3

“What’s wrong with harmony?” the man asks.

A painting by Remedios Varos that calls to mind the first musician whose name history records, Enheduanna, standing near the stone disk that celebrated her importance, a disk shattered into pieces by those in power who came later. A poem that reminds me of Plato. A sense in which the forbidden must be the voice one craves most. An instant in which the andante, the scherzo, the poco adagio signify the unsayable. And the voice in my head, complicit in the imagining of this constellation.

There came a passage that was called the forbidden music because it could not, the composer specified, be played.



4

Flutes, then…for the sons of Thebes; they know not how to converse. But we Athenians, as our fathers say, have Athena for foundress and Apollo for patron, one of whom cast the flute away in disgust, and the other flayed the presumptuous flute-player.

- Plutarch, Alcibiades 2.6

In an early warning against the perils of multi-tasking, Plutarch’s Alcibiades forbids symposium participants from playing the flute. One cannot play the flute and speak at the same time because the flute “closed and barricaded the mouth, robbing its master both of voice and speech.” The flute simply wants too much—- and wanting too much, it finds itself capable of the least.

The flute’s relationship to the mouth places it in competition with language. The aulos—- a double-reed instrument usually translated as “flute” although the sound it makes is closer to an oboe-bagpipe— has the capacity to carry on a competing conversation. This language of the aulos amounts to a dialogue in musical notes that threatens to diminish the dialogue of words. This is what Plato is thinking about when he has Socrates banish the flute-girls from the symposium. It is not girls’ physical being that threatens disorder— it is their music. It is the sound that girls make with their mouths, a sound that is not ordered language.

Only when the music made by the girls is gone can the male symposiasts offer their complete attention to thought and conversation.

In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates insinuates that aulos music is only suitable for women—-it is a gendered noise.

But it is also a music for drunkards! The aulos intoxicates without alcohol. Those who listen to it become “quick-tempered, prone to anger, and filled with discontent."

5

 The flute is not an instrument which is expressive of moral character. It is too exciting.

- Aristotle, Politics

Thus do the philosophers stack various arguments to evidence the anti-intellectualism of the flute. Aristotle prohibits the flute from entering classrooms. Auloi “produce a passionate rather than an ethical experience in their auditors and so should be used on those occasions that call for catharsis rather than learning.” (Politics 8.6 1341 17–24) The educated soul does not need the distraction of passion.




6

After listening to the aulos, I text my son with a question.

“You’re not even talking about music here,” my son texts back. “The Greek word for music is not the same thing as ‘music’. Or not the same thing as music as we know it.”

He is referring to the fact that mousiké designated the arts more generally— music, poetry, literature, epics, drama, dancing—-anything that fell under the domain of the Muses.

“The aulos is wild,” I text back. It reminds me of an instrument I heard played in Transylvania, although the name escapes me.

And still it must exist and be passed over, an interval at the discretion of the conductor. 


7

Plato’s concerns about unmanliness led him to the law, or to the erection of legal fences that would protect the male gender from contamination. He described the sort of music most fitting for men in The Laws. The boundary between genders was theorized (and maintained) in relation to music.

8

 In the cultivation of music the ancients respected its dignity, as they did in all other pursuits, while the moderns have rejected its graver parts, and instead of the music of former days, strong, inspired and dear to the gods, introduce into the theaters an effeminate twittering. 

- De Musica, of uncertain authorship but often attributed to Plutarch (bolding mine)

Pseudo-Plutarch attempts to reclaim Roman masculinity from the clutches of the flute-girls. He blames them for the high-strung pitch and lament-like sound of the Lydian mode. The lament, itself, is dangerous because it attaches itself to the mouths of women and makes the mind vulnerable to intense emotions. Lamenting is for weaklings. Grief must conduct itself with poise and dignity. Speaking of poise and dignity, the Dorian mode is "proper for warlike and temperate men.” The Dorian mode doesn’t grovel; it maintains its "grandeur and dignity."

Something has happened to his ears, something he has never felt before. His sleep is over.  The fall of Rome was blamed on the effeminate tastes of its leaders. Nero’s curls were too girly.

Anne Carson said it: civilization is based on the walling-out of women and their noises, their wails, their ecstasy and sirens.

Pythagoras gave us harmony, the silencing of desire, by the well-tuned soul. The unconstrained sounds of the infant, the yowling of the women— we wall ourselves against them. But this ordered world has never been enough for us. Desire, like death, eventually wins.

Walter Benjamin was the fool who chased them across borders for another glimpse and one more inch of conversation. Gershom Scholem cringed at Asja Lacis and diaried his disgust for Benjamin’s unmanly weakness. Nothing is less manly than being unable to sustain devotion to imagined community of a nation.

Where am I now, he thinks. 

A nation is the only woman who loves you as you are. A nation is the only woman who can make you a hero. As every married man knows, all the manliness in the world amounts to nothing, for no man can be a hero to a woman while living inside her. 

The flute player is a male Louise Gluck’s poem. But the player is also the man at the end who no longer knows where he is.

The flautist is my head is eternally femme.

The man at the end is Plato on his deathbed, asking for the forbidden music.

Recollecting his life, the dying Plato refused the well-ordered tradition of asking for time with friends and family. Instead, in these final moments, the philosopher asked for music. He did not want the well-tuned lyre of the poet. What Plato requested was Thracian girl playing the aulos. The forbidden flute called him in this moment where truth could be told: there was nothing he desired more than the allure of disorder. And then he repeated it, like an old man lying on the floor instead of in his bed. 

When my daughter puts Ariana Grande on the playlist, it is as if I have imagined all of this. The distance between imagination and fabrication isn’t slight.

Where am I now?



[Postlude wherein speaker resolves to libate Xanthippe later]

I am thinking of drinking—good drinking, bad drinking, drinking music and how sonic softness distracts the mind. Woe to the enfeebled listener who “gives music an opportunity to charm his soul with the flute and pour those sweet, soft, and plaintive tunes we mentioned through his ear. … if he keeps at it unrelentingly and is beguiled by the music, after a time his spirit is melted and dissolved until it vanishes, and the very sinews of his soul are cut out,” Plato warned (Republic 411a–b).

Radu lounges and licks his wounded paw as I return to the second chapter in Plato’s Symposium.

The libation has been poured; the dead ancestors and gods got the first shot of wine; the continuance of the drinking has been blessed by the offering:

When the tables had been removed and the guests had poured a libation and sung a hymn, there entered a man from Syracuse, to give them an evening's merriment. He had with him a fine flute-girl, a dancing-girl—one of those skilled in acrobatic tricks,—and a very handsome boy, who was expert at playing the cither and at dancing; the Syracusan made money by exhibiting their performances as a spectacle. They now played for the assemblage, the flute-girl on the flute, the boy on the cither; and it was agreed that both furnished capital amusement. Thereupon Socrates remarked: “On my word, Callias, you are giving us a perfect dinner; for not only have you set before us a feast that is above criticism, but you are also offering us very delightful sights and sounds.”

“Suppose we go further,” said Callias, “and have some one bring us some perfume, so that we may dine in the midst of pleasant odours, also.”

“No, indeed!” replied Socrates. “For just as one kind of dress looks well on a woman and another kind on a man, so the odours appropriate to men and to women are diverse. No man, surely, ever uses perfume for a man's sake. And as for the women, particularly if they chance to be young brides, like the wives of Niceratus here and Critobulus, how can they want any additional perfume? For that is what they are redolent of, themselves. The odour of the olive oil, on the other hand, that is used in the gymnasium is more delightful when you have it on your flesh than perfume is to women, and when you lack it, the want of it is more keenly felt. Indeed, so far as perfume is concerned, when once a man has anointed himself with it, the scent forthwith is all one whether he be slave or free; but the odours that result from the exertions of freemen demand primarily noble pursuits engaged in for many years if they are to be sweet and suggestive of freedom.”

“That may do for young fellows,” observed Lycon; “but what of us who no longer exercise in the gymnasia? What should be our distinguishing scent?”

“Nobility of soul, surely!” replied Socrates.

“And where may a person get this ointment?”

“Certainly not from the perfumers,” said Socrates.

The men move from discussing their “distinguishing scent” to where one could find an instructor to ennoble the soul.

Socrates intervenes to quash the discussion: “Since this is a debatable matter, let us reserve it for another time; for the present let us finish what we have on hand. For I see that the dancing girl here is standing ready, and that some one is bringing her some hoops.” The dancing girl throws hoops in the air “observing the proper height to throw them so as to catch them in a regular rhythm” while the flute girl accompanies her on the aulos.

Pleased by the dancer’s well-ordered motions, Socrates addresses his friends: “This girl's feat, gentlemen, is only one of many proofs that woman's nature is really not a whit inferior to man's, except in its lack of judgment and physical strength. So if any one of you has a wife, let him confidently set about teaching her whatever he would like to have her know.”

“If that is your view, Socrates,” asked Antisthenes, “how does it come that you don't practise what you preach by yourself educating Xanthippe, but live with a wife who is the hardest to get along with of all the women there are—yes, or all that ever were, I suspect, or ever will be?”

“Because,” he replied, “I observe that men who wish to become expert horsemen do not get the most docile horses but rather those that are high-mettled, believing that if they can manage this kind, they will easily handle any other. My course is similar. Mankind at large is what I wish to deal and associate with; and so I have got her, well assured that if I can endure her, I shall have no difficulty in my relations with all the rest of human kind.”

It is too early in the day for me to take a shot of tuica for Xanthippe, but I resolve to libate her later.

The men express concern for the dancer who has now incorporated swords into her routine. She risks injury. The dancer will hurt herself!

Thus do the men worry, think, and drink.

“Witnesses of this feat, surely, will never again deny . . . that courage, like other things, admits of being taught, when this girl, in spite of her sex, leaps so boldly in among the swords!” Socrates exclaims.

Antisthenes takes this a step further, arguing that the dancer needs to be shown to the Athenians to give them an example of courage.

Philip agrees and says he would “like to see Peisander the politician5 learning to turn somersaults among the knives.”

At this point the boy performs a dance, eliciting from Socrates the remark, “Did you notice that, handsome as the boy is, he appears even handsomer in the poses of the dance than when he is at rest?”

A conversation on dancing follows.

In jest, Philip stands up and says “let me have some flute music, so that I may dance too” as he mimics the girl and boy, making “a burlesque out of the performance by rendering every part of his body that was in motion more grotesque than it naturally was.”

Naturally, after the labor of destroying a dance’s harmony by performing it mockingly, Philip is quite tired and thirsty. “Let the servant fill me up the big goblet,” he says.

Socrates intercedes:

“Well, gentlemen . . . so far as drinking is concerned, you have my hearty approval; for wine does of a truth ‘moisten the soul’ and lull our griefs to sleep just as the mandragora does with men, at the same time awakening kindly feelings as oil quickens a flame. However, I suspect that men's bodies fare the same as those of plants that grow in the ground. When God gives the plants water in floods to drink, they cannot stand up straight or let the breezes blow through them; but when they drink only as much as they enjoy, they grow up very straight and tall and come to full and abundant fruitage. So it is with us. If we pour ourselves immense draughts, it will be no long time before both our bodies and our minds reel, and we shall not be able even to draw breath, much less to speak sensibly; but if the servants frequently ‘besprinkle’ us—if I too may use a Gorgian expression—with small cups, we shall thus not be driven on by the wine to a state of intoxication, but instead shall be brought by its gentle persuasion to a more sportive mood.”

The “small cups” resolution is unanimously approved “with an amendment added by Philip to the effect that the wine-pourers should emulate skillful charioteers by driving the cups around with ever increasing speed.”

And “this the wine-pourers proceeded to do.”

Cheers indeed! In the hope that the very sinews of mens’ flute-ravished souls continue their “gentle persuasion” with small cups.

Celan again.

1

I am watching the wind and wondering if we’ll lose power on this wild weather day in Alabama. Schools are closed. The house is filled with music and the energy of my restless teenagers whose disgruntlement has its own wind—- a wind I fear and respect and know well. A wind that wants something from the mountain.

Distracted by a tweet that drew me back into the vortex of Celan, the mountain is present. I learned yesterday, on twitter, that John Keene had played with translating “Todtnauberg” on his blog, and I quote Keene’s thinking-into that process below:

The entire poem feels this way, almost a bit dizzying, a record of—-what?—-a visit, but also a revisiting, a trip to the Death Mountain ("Todtnauberg") which leaves its grief-mark like the burst of the beautiful and haunting healing flowers'' names, "Arnika, Augentrost," or those ominous "star-dice" on the well's head—-in part, as this poem.

A wind gust just knocked a small stone statue off a table on the porch. The sound of it shattering vacates a brightness, a sonic star-shape that represents an absence. Irresistible: the shiny music glass makes when we break it.

“The wind is not to be underestimated,” I tell the teens who are making weird sandwiches in an effort to outdo one another in weirdness. The point at which the weird morphs into the grotesque is the narrative suspense-engine of weird-making. The point differs with each medium, each material, each subject. The weirding-game must be played for effect repeatedly.

2

I’m thinking about Anne Carson’s poem, “Todtnauberg”, featured in the current issue of Poetry Review.

Despite the absence of Celanian language and its collaged form, I’m tempted to read it as a translation of Celan’s own “Todtnauberg”. After all, Carson has used translation to rewrite and destabilize various classical texts.

3

I’m going to leave the failed encounter between Heidegger and Celan to the poem. Come with me, as it rains, to a different mountain. A different encounter that failed to transpire.

In July 1959, Celan went with Gisele (his wife) and Eric (his son) to Sils-Maria in the Swiss Alps. Theodor Adorno was supposed to be visiting at the same time, and Celan hoped to meet him and speak with him.

For reasons that remain unclear, Celan returned to Paris early and missed encountering Adorno.

One month later, in 1958, he wrote his only (?) German prose fiction, "Conversation in the Mountains," addressing Adorno's refusal of poetry after Auschwitz. It also drew on Kafka's story, "Excursion into the mountains," written in 1904, which Celan had translated into Romanian after the war.

John Felstiner thinks the story owes most to Martin Buber's "Conversation in the Mountains", with its focus on the I-Thou encounter and relationship. A prototype was the novella, Lenz, by George Buchner, which Celan also referenced in his Meridian speech for the Buchner prize in the following year:

On the 20th of January Lenz went walking through the mountains, where he wanders in search of something, wrestles with lightning like Jacob, and hears a voice in the mountains until madness overcomes him.

Lenz declares himself the "Wandering Jew, and asks if people don't hear "the horrible voice" that we "customarily call silence". Celan remembers Len and his story with "its roundabout paths from thou to thou... paths on which language gets a voice, these are encounters." Ultimately, these encounters with Others, these conversations with ghosts in the mountains, provoke self-encounters for Celan. Much as he encounters himself in Mandelstam's poems and the act of translation, inspired by Mandelstam's essay "On the Interlocutor."

Few have ventured to go to the mountains and translate the burning bush. Not to receive the burning bush but to translate it on its terrain, into a presence that risks blasphemy, as Celan does after the Shoah in his relentless questions, revisitings, interrupings, on the way to the self that arises in the encounter itself. And here is how it begins:

One evening the Sun, and not only that, had gone down, then their went walking, stepping out of his Cottage went the Jew, the Jew and Son of a Jew, and him  went his name, unspeakable, went and came, came shuffling along, made himself heard, came with his stick, came over the stone, do you hear me, you hear me, I'm the one, I, I and the one that you hear, that you think you here, I and the other one – so he walked, you could hear it.....

With the symbols of stone and the crypt—-the way the cryptic actually refers to crypts in Celan:

So the stone was silent too, and it was quiet in the mountains where they walked, himself and that one. 

Celan wrote another poem after the trip to the mountains that prompted his prose piece. It is one of his first untitled poems, and it begins what would later be his next collection. It is titled "There Was Earth Inside Them" —- and I will return to it elsewhere, or it will return to me perhaps.

4

In a letter to Celan on August 5, 1959, Ingeborg Bachmann wrote:

I really only see a danger in the ‘hearable’ Frankfurt, for it is in such cases, where the suspicious elements are not so obvious that one becomes entangled with them.

She is referring, among other things, to her dissertation, Heidegger’s festschrift. Martin Heidegger, who was turning 70 that year, had requested that a few of Celan’s poems be included in his honorary festschrift. Celan’s response to Bachmann came 5 days later: he said that his work had been anthology honoring Heidegger without his consent, therefore he did not want to be a part of it.

Out of loyalty (and perhaps love), Bachmann would eventually follow suit. Heidegger’s failure to condemn Nazism— his refusal to denounce the mass killings of the state apparatus which paid his salary—was untenable. Writers were divided on this: Rene Char, for example, allowed his own writing to appear in Heidegger’s honor.

An increasingly embittered and harrowed Celan indicted his disloyal friends. The Goll affair had alienated him from community. More than ever, friendship meant loyalty, and loyalty demanded refusing to associate with persons who maintained the edifice of silent anti-Semitism. Heidegger’s “Hutte” maintained itself in relation to the silence of not-saying.

Excerpt from Pierre Joris’ translation notes on the poem.

5

On January 26, 1949, Paul Celan sent a letter to Ingeborg Bachmann apologizing for his silence, asking her to write "to him who always thinks of you and who locked in your medallion the leaf you have now lost." Celan refers to his "brother," a second "him," the one she knows, an underlined "him" he hopes she will not keep waiting.

It calls to mind a lover’s discourse — i.e. if I were a different man, if I were my brother, I would ask you to move here and be close, but I am this man and not the other. There is a splitting, a division within the speaker, that Celan acknowledges. Bachmann picks up this thread in her response to him on April 12, 1949:

I am not speaking only to your brother; today I am speaking almost entirely to you, or through your brother I am fond of you, and you must not think that I have passed over you........  I am trying not to think of myself, to close my eyes and cross over to what is really meant. We are surely all under the greatest suspense, cannot break free and take many indirect paths. But it sometimes makes me so ill that I fear it might one day be impossible to go on. Let me end by telling you - the leaf that you placed in my Medallion is not lost, even if it has long ceased to be inside it; I think of you, and I am still listening to you.

(Italics mine.)

The poet wants to be heard more than seen somehow. There is a certain level of attentiveness that Celan asks of the encounter between the poem and the reader, as well as the poem and its ghosts.

5

Earlier, I quoted from the Meridian speech of 1960. Now we are going back in time by two years. The Celan who is speaking has not attempted to meet Adorno on the mountain. The Celan who is speaking defines attentiveness by quoting Nicolas Malebranche from Walter Benjamin's essay on Kafka, noting that attentiveness is the natural prayer of the Soul. *

In his 1958 Bremen speech (as translated by Rosmarie Waldrop), Celan mentioned Martin Buber by name. He continued referencing authors and texts, continuing his conversations with them. In speaking between quotations,  Celan enacted the intertextual relationship of the 'encounter'. As late as 1964, Celan was still thinking about attention. That year, in a letter to a friend (as translated by Pierre Joris), Celan wrote: “Attention is, according to a phrase by Malebranche that you will also find quoted by W. Benjamin, the natural piety of the soul.”

But, back to Bremen: Celan recalled Buchner, the visionary 18th century poet who wound up going mad, and whose novella, Lenz, begins:

On the 20th of January Lenz walked through the mountains... only it sometimes troubled him that he could not walk on his head....

Celan added, "Whoever walks on his head, ladies and gentlemen, has heaven in an abyss beneath him." He said that heaven's abyss accounts for the poem's obscurity.  

In what may be a veiled reference to the Wannsee Conference breakfast of January 20, 1942, where the Nazi leaders decided to implement the Final Solution, Celan also said:

Perhaps one may say that every poem has its 20th of January inscribed? Perhaps what's new for poems written today is just this: that here the attempt is clearest to remain mindful of such dates?

Celan’s Bremen-based definition of poetry is "that which can signify a breath-turn"— a breathrun made visible in the poem, "Psalm," which Celan wrote shortly thereafter. "Psalm" is an anti-psalm, or a benediction, a doxology, a prayer written over an abyss. I wish I had time to write more about it, but life leaves so little between things.

Another interesting thing about Bremen is that Celan, perhaps for the first time, speaks about the way “homelands” enter his poetics:

The region from which I come to you – with what detours! but then, is there such a thing as a detour? - will be unfamiliar to most of you. It is the home of many of the Hasidic stories which Martin Buber has retold in German. It was - if I may flesh out this topographical sketch with a few details which are coming back to me from a great distance - it was a landscape where both people and books lived. There, in this former province of the Habsburg monarchy, now dropped from history, I first encountered the name of Rudolph's Alexander Schroder while reading Rudolf Borchardt's 'Ode With Pomegranate'......Within reach, though far enough, what I could aim to reach, was Vienna. You know what happened, in the years to come, even to this nearness.

The dead are those who have not lived long enough to betray the poet.

Celan’s poetry reconfigures the turbulence of what we call “the retrospective gaze"—- a gaze that pretends one can look back without altering the subject being seen. The before/after of therapy often rides on this saddle, this linguistic apparel that tames the past and makes it “examinable.” One senses that Celan cannot forget the chaos in European Jewish communities as information about the concentration camps seeped to the surface. Each attempted to navigate the crevasse between hope and despair: the horrific new information coexisted with the polite denial and surprise of their friends. (“Germans are civilized: they would never do anything so barbaric.”) This is the story of power and ethno-states: we cannot believe them. We cannot believe that people who look like us and sound like us would do such things. We cannot believe we didn’t see what was happening as it happened.

6

Bernard Welt PARODY: This is a big theme in Wim Wenders’ documentary about Anselm Kiefer, with film of Heidegger and Paul Celan’s voice reading his poetry.

Ewen Cameron: Yeah Arendt's book doesn't apply well to Eichmann, but rather Heidegger, as Tuchman posited. He is the banality of evil. Arendt was enamoured with him and wrote a sideways apologia. Eichmann was many things but not banal.

Christopher Satoor: Reading this made my heart drop ..." Heidegger lacked all civil courage" for me his silence on the horrors of the holocaust attest to his guilt, he may not have killed anyone but he used his prestige as philosopher to allow the NSDAP to poison the students at Frieburg.

Jeffrey Gross: It’s speech acts all the way down

Postdrillardian Infra-Scholar: pierre joris’ ‘translation at the mountain of death’ is invaluable

7

And so I return to 1959, the year of Heidegger’s festschrift, the year of the failed mountain encounter with Adorno, the year of deepening alienation from Gisele and Eric, which also happens to be the year that Celan’s German translations of Mandelstam were published in Frankfurt.

The book was prefaced by a note on Mandelstam’s poetry. I quote it and leave the rest for another space and time (italics mine):

.. for Osip Mandelshtam, born in 1891, a poem is the place where what can be perceived and attained through language gathers around that core from which it gains form and truth: around this individual’s very being, which challenges his own hour and the world’s, his heartbeat and his aeon. All this is to say how much a Mandelshtam poem, a ruined man’s poem now brought to light again out of is ruins, concerns us today.

Necropolitics in the margins.

1

J.-A. Mbembé's "Necropolitcs" in the margins of images and repetitions. Mbembe quotes Fanon extensively when describing how necropower operates:

The town belonging to the colonized people . . . is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how. It is a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees.

2

Sovereignty began with the divine right of kings, in the relationship invoked by the elite to emphasize their privilege of access.

[“I am the one appointed to do God’s will. I am the recipient of the revelation. My body deciphers this will.”]

Loyalty to the sovereign demonstrates loyalty to God.

An imaginary with a Jade Emperor.

Mbembé' on the European legal imaginary:

Under the wikipedia section on names and forms of address for the Emperor of China, there is a subheading which reads: “To see naming conventions in detail, please refer to Chinese sovereign”

Beneath this subheading, one finds:

As the emperor had, by law, an absolute position not to be challenged by anyone else, his or her subjects were to show the utmost respect in his or her presence, whether in direct conversation or otherwise. When approaching the Imperial throne, one was expected to kowtow before the emperor. In a conversation with the emperor, it was considered a crime to compare oneself to the emperor in any way. It was taboo to refer to the emperor by his or her given name, even for the emperor's own mother, who instead was to use Huángdì (皇帝), or simply Ér (儿; 兒, "son", for male emperor). The given names of all the emperor's deceased male ancestors were forbidden from being written, and could be avoided (避諱) by using synonymous characters, homophonous characters, or simply leaving out the final stroke of the tabboo word. This linguistic feature can sometimes be used to date historical texts, by noting which words in parallel texts are altered.

 

Jacob Bryant, “Orphic Egg” (1774)

3

Any serious imaginary grounds itself in a physical claim that is tied to a cosmos. The territorial sanctifies the urge for conquest and ownership esoterically. Here is how wikipedia does cosmology:

Religious or mythological cosmology is a body of beliefs based on mythological, religious, and esoteric literature and traditions of creation and eschatology. Creation myths are found in most religions, and are typically split into five different classifications, based on a system created by Mircea Eliade and his colleague Charles Long.

Types of Creation Myths based on similar motifs:

  • Creation ex nihilo in which the creation is through the thought, word, dream or bodily secretions of a divine being.

  • Earth diver creation in which a diver, usually a bird or amphibian sent by a creator, plunges to the seabed through a primordial ocean to bring up sand or mud which develops into a terrestrial world.

  • Emergence myths in which progenitors pass through a series of worlds and metamorphoses until reaching the present world.

  • Creation by the dismemberment of a primordial being.

  • Creation by the splitting or ordering of a primordial unity such as the cracking of a cosmic egg or a bringing order from chaos.

The preferred cosmology of modern empires is the promise to bring order from chaos—- to tame and civilize; to make productive; to modernize and develop; to de-barbarize.

The preferred costume of 21st century empire is neoliberal democracy.

I mourn the decline of the orphic egg and the sexy, cave-dwelling oracle that refused to do the bidding of kings, empires, and state governments. My imaginary works this out in my own imagi-nation.

4

"In this case, sovereignty means the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not," Mbembe adds. 

Late-modern colonial occupation differs in many ways from early-modern occupation, particularly in its combining of the disciplinary, the biopolitical, and the necropolitical. The most accomplished form of necropower is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine. Here, the colonial state derives its fundamental claim of sovereignty and legitimacy from the authority of its own particular narrative of history and identity. This narrative is itself underpinned by the idea that the state has a divine right to exist; the narrative competes with another for the same sacred space. Because the two narratives are incompatible and the two populations are inextricably intertwined, any demarcation of the territory on the basis of pure identity is quasi-impossible. Violence and sovereignty, in this case, claim a divine foundation: peoplehood itself is forged by the worship of one deity, and national identity is imagined as an identity against the Other, other deities. 

History, geography, cartography, and archaeology are supposed to back these claims, thereby closely binding identity and topography. As a consequence, colonial violence and occupation are profoundly underwritten by the sacred terror of truth and exclusivity (mass expulsions, resettlement of “stateless” people in refugee camps, settlement of new colonies). Lying beneath the terror of the sacred is the constant excavation of missing bones; the permanent remembrance of a torn body hewn in a thousand pieces and never self-same; the limits, or better, the impossibility of representing for oneself an “original crime,” an unspeakable death: the terror of the Holocaust.


5

Mbembe appends the following foot-note to the paragraph quoted above:

See Lydia Flem, L’Art et la mémoire des camps: Représenter exterminer, ed. Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Seuil, 2001).

Thus does Jean-Luc Nancy enter the room through the sidereal. "I don't want to venture into the silence of the outside that surrounds the thing itself as soon as it emerges," Nancy wrote in The Fragile Skin of the World.

The book opens with an “Overture,” a formal gesture that draws on the symphonic mode to introduce his exploration of space-time's fragility, and how this fragility counterposes the possibility of an all-encompassing skin:

“We can no longer count on anything —- this is the situation.”

We can longer count our way through the exclusions of all the elsewheres.

As for the situation, it inscribes the I’s relationship to the site. The situational gaze is sited.


6

What gives the colonial government unlimited power over an occupied territory?

The state of siege is itself a military institution. It allows a modality of killing that does not distinguish between the external and the internal enemy. Entire populations are the target of the sovereign. The besieged villages and towns are sealed off and cut off from the world. Daily life is militarized. Freedom is given to local military commanders to use their discretion as to when and whom to shoot. Movement between the territorial cells requires formal permits. Local civil institutions are systematically destroyed. The besieged population is deprived of their means of income. Invisible killing is added to outright executions.

Even when rendered visible, “invisible killing” remains unseeable at present.

To see is to have a body that may be attached to a hand: to see is to see one’s hand in it.

Small things.

1

The seasonal darkness—-like the narrowing shaft when one descends into a coal mine, and the way claustrophobia surprised me by tightening my shoulders and increasing my heart-rate before I recognized it. (“But I am not scared of small places?”) The way the “I” is modified by the particular. The way darkness surprises when it arrives.

2

A game I play in the dark with a treasure: The Compendium of Lost Words. Treating each word as character, re-inscribing their epitaph, mourning an intangible that has vanished from the world. Looking for its cousins in other languages. Fiddling with words.

Amarulence (n). Born in 1731 and died in 1755. Meaning "bitterness; spite." As in: The airgonaut could not avoid the particular amarulence that arrived when his feet touched the ground. Amarulence has a Romanian cousin in Amar, who is alive and thriving, and means "bitter."

3

Notebook, April.

My father phones from Korea to wish me a happy birthday because he is ahead of me in time. He calls from a future in which I am already 45 years old. In this future present, I am his morning as he is my afternoon. 

His voice bumps against the grass beneath my notebook. "You were the happiest baby," he says, "You brought so much joy." 

I can feel his mind reaching backward into time, fondling memories, and how strange that this baby is me in a memory I cannot share.

At the gas station, a lady is speaking to another lady while filling her tank. She mentions adoption, and how much she loves her children: how grateful she is to the woman who got pregnant and then "chose another family to raise this baby" for whom she has chosen life. I wonder what it means to choose life. Did that birthmother have what could be called "a choice"? If she lived in a state where abortion was illegal, no one can properly say that the birth mother "chooses" to birth a child for others to raise.

Coerced birth is such an unthinkably vicious punishment. How will we tell children that they were born as a punishment,* as a permanent scar against the mother, whose body was forced to carry them? What illustrated books will descend like gumdrops to cover the image of a woman imprisoned in her growing body?

Note to self: you are an idiot. The theocrats believe that birth is God's way of punishing Eve. It is a Divine Punishment. They are doing "God's work" in the post-Edenic plutocracy.

Chevengur: Waiting for the miracle with Platonov.

Chevengur by Andrei Platonov (NYRB Classics) Translated from the Russian by Elizabeth Chandler and Robert Chandler.


1 — The son

In May 1938, Andrei Platonov’s 15 year-old-son, Platon, was arrested by the Soviet secret police (KGB) as a terrorist and a spy. Sentenced to ten years in the Siberian gulag, Platon contracted tuberculosis. Although released in October 1940, eight years earlier than his sentence, Platon died of tuberculosis in January 1943. His father, Andrei, died of tuberculosis (supposedly contracted from his son) in January 1951, eight years later. There are two eights, two ways of measuring the gape between life and death, and countless intersections between what must die and what living entails in relation to the god named Freedom.

Acronyms change but the carceral content remains the same. The Soviet secret police was called Cheka from 1917 to 1922, GPU from 1922 to 1924, and NKVD from 1934 to 1943. Until 1953 the designation was MGB and from then to the fairly-recent present, KGB.


2 — My obsession

This book has obsessed me for months. It has distracted me from projects and family. It has manhandled my attention like the first reckless months of new love. My lips are raw from reading it. My notebooks and digital space are covered in Chevengur crumbs.

To get Chevengur out of my system—to “move on,” so to speak—demands a certain discipline, a reckoning with what is given as well as how the given situates itself in time, in relation to temporality. Now is not Then; Here is not There. One commences by stripping off the residual neoliberal subjectification; one tries to read in the light of the room the author presents.

Of Here, or the present US, authors often complain that biography gets over-read into their fiction. This complaint befouls itself when applied to novels written from geographic spaces where the novel plays a double-role of saying what cannot be officially “said.” I began with a biographical detail from Platonov’s life because those details perfume the book; they scent the bones and cling to his strange shifts in tense. In a sense, they also explain the decade of labor involved in the Chandlers translation. The “archive” version of Chevengur wasn’t published in Russian until 2022; the translators worked from archives rather than a published text; the presence of Platonov’s manuscript notes reveals the painstaking effort to provide readers with the definitive translation.

If definitive translations exist, then the Chandlers’ Chevengur will be listed among them. There is no way for me to link all the symbols and evocations—the accordion; the mystical moment; the spiritualism; the barracks culture, etc.—-Platonov weaves into the novel. Proceeding with for what gets left out, I self-soothe with the hope that this book inaugurates a flurry of conversations and events, a virtual cavalcade celebrating 2024 as the Year Chevengur Obsessed Us.

"The prelude to organization is always catastrophe," a younger Platonov wrote an essay titled "The New Gospel." The suffering of the "drought" and famine would be rewarded by Communism's arrival. Early Platonov analogizes communism to the Second Coming of a Messiah. Let it be noted that the formal requirement in the genre of Second Comings is how it begins in fantastic, world-destroying apocalypse.

Like all Messiahs and apocalypses, Platonov’s revolutionary scene is hounded by the challenges posed by its unrecognizability. The characters struggle with discerning the arrival of Communism from its betrayal. How does revelation differ from recognition? Who is positioned to recognize? If ‘apocalypse’ existed—-if it took place in time as an event— would there be such a thing as recognition, retrospectively? The narrative of the illuminated moment is created in the backwards glance that acknowledges it. In this sense, the moment gets lit by being written. We illuminate sacred manuscripts differently, and theory’s delight is implicated in our consciousness of doing so. Critically, the Russian Orthodox sectarians and religious schismatics who believed heaven and the kingdom of God would be established on earth were central to the 19th century zeitgeist that fueled anarchism and apocalyptic thinking. Platanov plays the zeitgeist contrapuntally in Chevengur. He links the extraordinary salvation-hunger to the abject misery produced by famine and war in Russia. Reform is no resolution.



3 — The horse the dude is riding into the sunset

"What interested me now was the transformation of thoughts into an event," Platonov wrote in an autobiographical early passage concerning the death of his mother and siblings, a passage he later removed. These deaths are not peripheral to the novel. Platonov’s mother died between 1927 and 1929, as he was writing Chevengur. We know this due to the splendid and prodigIous end-notes assembled by translators Robert and Elizabeth Chandler.

One endnote tells us that Platonov's handwritten manuscript page for chapter 25, when "Chepurny lay down in the straw," includes an unpublished note by the author: "Help me, mother, to remember and to keep living." Invocations to his dead mother's spirit ripple through Platonov's notebooks; he struggles to justify or accept the death of loved ones by imputing their value as ersatz guardian angels who offer counsel to the living. For Platonov, to know one's dead is to remain in conversation with them. "They are important," he whispers to his notebook.

Like their author, Chevengur’s characters also regularly invoke the dead as both partners and lovers. Each of the revolutionists lives alone with the ghosts in his head. The jubilant, man-hunting veteran warrior, Stepan Kopionkin, rides about on the horse named Strength of the Proletariat like a statue looking for a plinth to mount. He is the Vanguard riding the animal labor. I wept at Platonov’s genius upon realizing the symbolism of that horse named after the virtue of the exploited class’, a horse the Vanguard is riding relentlessly, riding and extolling in monologues at sunset, toasting and celebrating, theorizing ad infinitum with such profound and committed thoughtlessness that they are unable to recognize the Other they are riding when encountering it in the flesh, rather than they symbol.

Vanguard machismo aside, most of Kopionkin’s interpersonal conversations are dialogues and monologues directed to his dead love, Rosa— "He loved the dead, since Rosa Luxembourg was among them” — or his dead mother. I will be forced to return to this thread. (And I wish I had time to defend Rosa from Kopionkin’s patriarchal maw.)

4 — Aside on alter egos

According to Robert Chandler’s afterword (which deserves an its own essay), the adoptee, Sasha Dvanov, represents the idealistic Platonov of the past-revolutionary period while Scribinov represents the "somewhat disillusioned Platonov of the 1920’s.”

5 —- Digression involving another obsession whose name is Vera Figner

In 1825, the Decembrists stormed Tsar Alexander II’s winter palace, opening what some have called ‘the age of revolution’. It is indisputable that the Decembrists’ attempted insurrection altered what was considered possible. Revolutionists were born, raised, and complicated by the churn of these events. The revolutions that followed owed their gesture to the Decembrists.

In 1861, the Tsar (who had been ruling since 1818) was forced to finally liberate the serfs. This created a large class of peasantry who found themselves “property-owners” overnight. Serfs were given small plots of land that they worked for centuries. The landowning nobility and feudal class retreated to their salons and smothered themselves in luxury to quiet their alarm. Nevertheless, the salon, itself, drew reading into the spaces of power. Books containing radical ideas circulated among the children of the landowning nobility. One of these children, Vera Figner, became a revolutionist.

Figner’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Northwestern University Press, 1991) interposes itself against the archival imprint of revolutionary journals that foreground the labor and vision of men. Figner was 75 years old when the book was published in 1927. In the introduction, she says that one must write because "the dead do not rise but there is resurrection in books." Figner also recalls a warning from Eleanor Duse, when they met abroad: "Write: you must write; your experience must not be lost." 

What Figner brings to the revolutionary memoir is intentionally gendered. She frames her intellectual journey as a series of relational epiphanies: the knowledge of self in relation to others, the ecologies of affect and signification, etc, where feelings signify. Lived experience socializes us for the roles we’re expected to play. Figner’s resistance to these roles begins early. She was fussy, hot-tempered, and spirited. She fought with her siblings until the nurse pulled her away. Then, Vera would "mop the floor," which is how the nurse described her graphic, physical, floor-writhing rage.

Her first experience of shame as a child— something revolving around a broken lock— led her to adopt her first principle. The experience of shame taught her "to take the blame on yourself." Punishment is preferable to guilt. And guilt may have nothing to do with innocence. 

Class expectations loomed over her future. She loathed her time at the Smolny Institute, an exclusive boarding school for the daughters of the nobility (which would become the Bolshevik headquarters in 1917). At Smolny, she was taught to believe that she had no duty or responsibility for peasants or Russians or the masses: her sole responsibility was to those of her class.a lack of duty or sense of responsibility towards others.

Where school gave her despair, novels gave her the world. Figner insists that she learned more about life and humanity from the idealistic heroes in the literature given to her by her mother. At the same time, her early bildungsromanism included an "an abundance of joy," which Figner believed needed to be shared and rendered in common. Joy connected her to others; it created brothers, sisters, a family. And joy was not indistinct from the revolutionary character Figner acquired from literature.

N. A. Nekrasov's poem, "Saša," taught her "how to live" as a revolutionist: "To make my words coincide with my actions; to demand this consistency from myself and others. And this became the watchword of my life." (It still gives me goosebumps.) The logic of her character, in her own words: "It was incomprehensible for me not to act upon that which I had acknowledged as true.” Her soul “crystallized”, or came into itself in that Byronic key, on the day when she asked her father for advice with a difficult decision and realized he had no fucking clue. "One must make his great decisions for himself," Figner resolved. So she moved to Zurich and pursued a medical degree that would permit her to heal others. While in Zurich, she got married. But her views on healing shifted from individual cases of healthcare to the structural lack of economic conditions. For Vera, the problems of healthcare and social suffering she witnessed were inseparable. Poverty and healthcare went together.  The decision to leave her medical degree behind was, to her, a choice towards life and against status. "I decided to go, in order that my deeds might not disprove my words," she wrote. And so deciding, she acted without looking back. 

Around this time, Alexander Ulyanov, Vladimir Lenin's brother, was executed for being involved in a failed conspiracy to assassinate Alexander III. Theory was being negotiated in the field, on the ground, between barricades where nihilism met communism. Questions about direct action played out in prison sentences. Prison formed new solidarities between revolutionists.

Figner’s arrest introduced her to Vladimir Nabokov's father and Lev Tolstoy, both of whom occupied positions of power in the tsarist prison system. Tolstoy didn't reproach the struggle she fought for the peasants; he only asked why she had to kill the tsar, since a new one would pop up behind him. "The desire to be silent" descended upon Vera. Imprisoned for decades in a tsarist prison, Vera wore a gray prison coat with a yellow diamond patch on the back. Her co-prisoners called her "queen." 

The carceral society has been called kazarmnyy kommunizm ("barracks communism") or Nechaevshchina ("Nechayevism") after Segrey Nechayaev, the Russian revolutionary whose 1869 book, The Catechism of a Revolutionary, is best known for its slogan: "the ends justify the means." Nechayev’s first article of faith is critical reading:

- The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, affairs, feelings, attachments, property, or even a name. Everything in him is consumed by a unique, exclusive interest, a single idea, a single passion: revolution.

- In the depths of his being, not only in his words, but also in his deeds, he has severed every link with the civil order, with the whole of the civilized world, with all the laws, propriety, conventions and morals of this world. He is its implacable enemy, and if he continues to live in it, it is only in order that he might destroy it. 

[Nechayev inspired the nihilist revolutionist's character in Dostoevsky's The Possessed. Dostoevsky also based the brutal murder of Shatov, a member of the clandestine cell, on the November 1869 assassination of Ivanov, an apostate from Nechayev's revolutionary band of brothers.]

What Figner brings to history is a first-person account foregrounding women. It is indisputable that the abysmal, relentless suffering of Russian mothers created many women revolutionists, as Figner reveals. Her anarchist chafes against the imposition of teleology, a mode she associates with authoritarian Russian Orthodox leaders. No, things did not have to be this way, Figner insists. Russians did not have to suffer miserably for a god or a tsar or a notion of national greatness. Dissent didn’t have to culminate in purges and the assertion of omnipotent dictatorial power. Figner posits a sort of counterfactual hope, a relentless optimism in progress and social change. Those evil novels can be indicted for wild hopefulness as well as revolutionary character.

I mention Figner because a lot rode on the "one-spark theory" and the activist belief that Russian peasants were ready for revolution: all they needed was an intellectual spark. (Platonov circles this point in Chevyngur)….  Like American Baptist missionaries bumbling through Romania in the early 1990’s, the revolutionists brought books and lessons to their target audience. Unlike Baptist missionaries in Iron Bloc countries, Figner’s comrades actually relocated to the villages, providing medical assistance and education, and made their lives among the peasants.

Refusing the given world, building from the radical re-visioning such refusal permits, missionaries and revolutionists proselytized and sought teachable moments between the poverty, grief, flood, loss. The promised deliverance. They outlined the actions which led to salvation. They guaranteed a world greater than suffering alone, and being abandoned to reckon with it.

6 —- Foundations

While typing just now, my thoughts bumped into Zura’s, who was reading Platonov’s Foundation Pit at 12:29 am today in Turkey. (The Platonovmania is global, as it should be.) Zura’s quote it touches on the exhaustion of the mothers—-and the way Platonov dragged this obsession across various novels.

Where Vera Figner dialogued with her absent mother in the prison cell, Platonov dialogued with his dead mother ("and the “Others”) in Chevengur. One could even venture to say he builds conflict between fathers and mothers into theory, through literature. In Platonov's telling, it is the fatherlessness of "the others" (the mysterious group of displaced refugees wandering through Russia) that makes them malleable and hungry for leadership. The search for a father may lead mankind to god, nation, or political ideal. Their accomplishment consisted in surviving and living despite their orphanhood. 

The mother is missing, friends. The mother is always dead or bent over in the pieta posture. Hers is the body invoked for apology and penance.



7 — Language tasked to order

Platonov plays with the way official language (see also academic lingo, specialized lingos, lexicons rendered salient by their capacity to estrange peasants and workers) intrudes on the mysterious and attempts to establish order, to provide a language in which things can be known: "Red as the circulars!"  "A man’s skin and nails are Soviet power. How come you can’t formulate that for yourself?" "None of this can be formulated in a resolution."

The verbs "expend" and "extract" impinge upon the present moment. I hear climate change as the unimagined horizon that empires, including the US, the Soviet, and the Chinese, would normalize for maximum resource extraction during that industrialist’s wet-dream commonly called the Cold War.

The men attempt to theorize a future ("The sun gets by without any Bolsheviks–and a correct attitude to the sun is part of our consciousness"),  but theory, like god, transcends the plane of life. The men on the field wrangle with their ghosts —-ghosts, by the way, are radically heretical for the Russian revolutionists; one could even take Platonov’s ghosts to be the ‘real’ sabotage indulged by the Vanguard who was waiting for Communism to appear. Forget the dead, for it is the dead who distract us from building the future. In Chevengur, however, the men wait and wait with guns in their arms and death surrounding them. The ornamental nature of their cliff-notes-Marxism lends it a supra-natural feel that remains external to the famines and basic needs of the peasants. It is as if Platonov’s vanguardists read the catechism, take their first Communion, and wait for the unrecognizable miracle.


8 —- The others & their others

Inspired by Don Quixote, Platonov’s novel plays into the epic form. This is immediately visible in the character of the horse named Strength of the Proletariat. But the attempt to spoof chivalric romances is prismatic and multi-faceted. Sure, Platonov wryly and cheekedly condemns the lover to continue romancing his dead revolutionary idol, Rosa, into the corpse and maggots phase of tenderness. But he also condemns himself. He condemns the vanguard, the village, the Russian people, civilization, modernity, religion; only the landscape escapes condemnation.

How to describe the Platonovian mix of playfulness, absurdity, affection, disorientation, and despair? Epically, everything (and it’s mother) is at stake in Chevengur. One might read it as a love letter to the first love, the one whose failure implicates all the “others”. And “others” are tremendous in this book. The unidentified mass of impoverished refugees who may or may not constitute the Proletariat remain a mystery. Characters discuss them and try to find a place for them in Marx’s theory. Platonov’s brilliance extends to the use of capitalization, showing how the masses flip flop between the others and the Others and even “comrade other,” as seen in the dialogue excerpted below.

End-notes attend to idioms. The "Bolshevik foxtrot”, for example, is an oxymoron based on statements by 19s0’s Bolsheviks of the foxtrot as a bourgeois decadence likely to corrupt and rot the proletarian soul.

It seems fair to drag my mother’s ghost into space where the ghosts of the mothers are never quite buried.

“Men who can’t dance are dangerous,” my mom used to say. “Men who can’t dance seek their ecstasy from guns.”

[May she never Rest in Peace. May the mothers continue to rail from beyond the grave at the stupidity involved in our hunger for exemplarity and our desire to be the latest exceptional gumdrop in the pageant of personal branding.']

Once, when I was a boy, I shaved a kitten and buried it in the snow. I didn’t understand whether or not it was human. And then the kitten caught a fever and died. —- Impossible to resist astonishment at what is happening here, inside these conversations, in these words so meticulously and lovingly translated by the Chandlers.

Platonov brings theory to literature; every theme that would preoccupy the Soviets is given to the reader. One finds the tension between urban and rural, the trope of technocracy’s failure to provide for those whom it objectifies, the stereotype of the technocrat as a frivolous, lazy armchair-dweller who commands serfs on paper while pretending to liberate them, the mistrust of ‘outsiders’ that will turn into the mistrust of ‘foreigners’ that will evolve into the fear of free-thinking intellectuals.

9 — The lice in the heart of the heart of the village

The village lacks phones or means to communicate with the outer world.

In lieu of books, the men exchange incoherent interjections among themselves: "We are comrades! Comrades to the oppressed countries of the world!" When alone, they repeat these things to the sky, as if sending missives to the missing proletariat.

History meets us in events on the ground, where the lice make their appearance. After the first world war (and during the Russian civil war), a typhus epidemic carried by lice killed between two and three million people. Vladimir Lenin held a meeting in 1919 to strategize around the epidemic. "All attention to this problem, comrades," Lenin announced. "Either lice will conquer socialism or socialism will conquer lice." (The significance of lice carrying a disease that travels on foreign bodies and is brought into the heart of the nation or village is an image that xenophobes and propagandists will not relinquish.)

When a refugee-cum-proletariat child gets sick with typhus, the vanguardists employ every measure in their power to care for and save this child. But the child dies of typhus anyway. The mother calmly accepts this death, and mourns. The vanguardists, however, cannot process their grief, given what death of an innocent, possibly proletariat child signifies for Communism. Stunned, the men discuss the dead child as an "alienated body" that had been failed by both Tsarism and communism.

Irreality pervades Cepurny’s musings as he lays in tall grass and wonders how suffering can continue under communism. Is this extraordinary present suffering (which seems to resemble the extraordinary prior suffering) evidence that Communism isn’t here?

"And what are we to do about the horses, and the cows, and the sparrows?" he wonders before soothing himself with theory. The Proletariat will be here soon to solve it. The Petty Bourgeoisie is finished, buried, dispossessed—and yet, they must still exist somewhere. The refugees take residence in the village, replacing the small-land owning farmers.

But “somewhere on the outskirts of . . . an accordion began to play.” Kopionkin is “unsettled” by the mystery of this instrument. He is perturbed by its failure to declare its interest, and rankled by the invitation it extends, an invitation that is not resolved when man goes to meet the accordion.

Chepurny remains tormented by "conscience" because "the smallest child Chevengur had died from communism and he was unable to formulate any justification to himself." One could read this as a self-interrogating critique of Marxism’s reliance on structure to explain everything. One could read it as hole in the machinery of Proletkult. One could speculate that Platonov the older is addressing Platonov the younger, who has not yet watched his son be sentenced to prison. One might even worry that over-focus on the abstract enables us to erase the living.

Theory’s power comes from its ideological rigor. The vanguardists left grasping for explanation opens into that mystical space Platonov courts, or makes visible. Perhaps this is where explanation is rejected for mythology and propaganda, for telling a story that will defend the theory and conquer other minds with its narration.

The death of one child from typhus is a blight on the village–it "snatched the whole town from the road of revolution." 



10 — Avowals and disavowals

And so the Vanguard wait for the Proletariat to save them.

The famished, alienated Proletariat is tasked with accomplishing this critical step in the coming of Communism.

The Peasants float in a sort of limbo between the communal ideal of village life and the Petty Bourgeois landowners who have come from the city.

The Proletariat must be imported, since they aren’t indigenous to the village. Or maybe they are being treated like the horse beneath the statue of the self-mythologizing warrior in the plaza. Or maybe the men haven’t read enough literature to distinguish the humans from the legend. Or else a theory must be written that makes for what exists in that There, in that particular Russia . . .

As for the Peasants, no one knows what on earth to do with them. Their theoretical role is missing from the script.

What is significant when everything is a sign and justification?

Beckett’s Godot came to mind as the vanguard waited for the proletariat to emerge from peasants who were waiting for God.

And we wait, too. As American statesmen issue balmy statements that cosplay “red lines,” the Neo-Nice (liberal) intellectuals build a case for ethnic cleansing from their gargantuan silences. The fear of being mis-read continues to define our cowardice. As armchair warriors shift their investment portfolios to reflect an increased demand for weapons and drones, President Biden reassures himself that the US economy will be saved by the war on Palestinians. The Christian Evangelical Zionists titillate themselves publicly with promises of second comings on the horizon and Jesus-rule in our lifetime. Forms, shapes, and intellectual prevarications assemble themselves in the pageant of optics with the expectation of saving something in a war that cannot be justified on the basis of security. It is a dream-war, a scene from a mythological dream being scripted for the eschatological social imaginary. It stains every surface with its bombs. It marks no justice and no peace: simply death of tens of thousands of Palestinians.

Intoxicated by novels, Figner imagined a different world. She lived her life as if this world were possible. Any world is possible. What is impossible is the perversity of accepting a world as loud, deadly, dedicated to economic inequality, vicious (and exultant in its viciousness), and meaningless as the one that has been given to us.

Perhaps Morbid Swither said it best—- the nothing else matters book changes everything. May the curse of its beauty damn your plans, radicalize your tended silences, and vacate the slumber of your nights.





A lover's discourse and the subject.

1

Where to begin with Richard Howard’s translation of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse?

Before the mirror, with cold coffee and a willingness to reconsider fidelity. One must meet Barthes there, with uncombed hair and a certain intellectual piety, a willingness.

His arguments undress themselves continuously before the mind’s mirror. Open the book anywhere and you will catch a flash of something falling off, a shoe being abandoned, a necklace being admired and laid aside.

Stripteases are linear: no performance has a clearer narrative arc. The narrative shape associated with the Iowa workshop is the striptease par exemplar. Rising action, climax, falling action— everything lands in that resolution, that happy ending. I take happy ending, here, to indicate closure—- it doesn’t have to be happy so much as it needs to give the illusion of ending. Thus is the reader satisfied by the experience of the book.

There is no single striptease in Barthes’ Discourse. There are countless undressings and stripteases occurring simultaneously. Even the visual layout does its own dance for the head of the John the Baptist. Given this multiplicity, the book lacks a crescendo. It situates its dimensional dynamics on the page rather than the entirety.

2

No discursive regime can exist without its lexicon.

The table of contents is its own poem, a visual painting dressed up as a lexicon of loved-over words. The loose links and connections between these words serve to order and disorder what is to come.

3

Conversationally:

BARTHES: What is proposed, then, is a portrait but not a psychological portrait; instead, a structural one which offers the reader a discursive site: the site of someone speaking within himself, amorously, confronting the other (the loved object), who does not speak.

ME: So, the lover is not a subject so much as the object—the loved object, the material altered by idealization? And the lover whose entire discourse is “woven of languorous desire, of the image-repertoire, of declarations” speaks in a way that will be challenged by epistemology, or by what he cannot know about the love in relation to meaning, which is the narrative that will emerge as a story later.

BARTHES: But he who utters this discourse and shapes its episodes does not know that a book is to be made of them…

ME: Two things are happening. One is the claim that situates the beloved and the lover in the text-to-come. The text-to-come occupies the eternity of possibility. Once the book is made, the beloved and the lover occupy a material terrain, and there is a compensatory aspect to this. He says he will love you forever. He meant he would write a book about it.

The other thing happening is that hallowing of the utterance as action. The role accorded to utterance creates an interesting dialogue with J.L. Austin’s ‘speech acts’ in the margins. Although this is not what you are doing, it is what I do when reading you. This is why the margins of my Lover’s Discourse is filled with speech bubbles. Perhaps no striptease declares itself as explicitly as the comic strip.

4

To be engulfed feels presumptive; it courts a certain notion of solidity and separate selfhood that exists in relation to not-feeling surrounded. a certain destructive relationship with desire—and to be failed by love if the pitch doesn’t reach a level that requires succumbing.

I hear suck my thumb, numbing, and dumbing in this succumbing. I visualize the mysterious succubus.

And all this —- “this” being a digression from the things I owe the world, the words I am supposed to be writing—began, really, with the moment I realized what you had done to futility.

[The work Barthes demands of "sometimes" here ... not to mention the way he makes the parentheses work against themselves. Would the futility be as poignant without those visual hands cupping the word? He *arrests* us with it.]

5

What was it that you said in The Preparation of the Novel?

The part where you asked the question you have always avoided, and then distracted yourself from answering it:

“What do I believe in?”

Wanting to write is to be suddenly and violently confronted with that question from the outset, and that sudden violence is a trial you have to overcome.

Slap me with your ought, Barthes.

Look: I cannot.

Polyphony and counterpoint in Edward Said's legacy.

1

A leukemia diagnosis (and a lifelong fascination with Proust) motivated Edward Said to begin writing his memoir, Out of Place. The book embodies the self-spectating gaze of exile to articulate the critical division between the Edward he performs and the Edward who studies the performance.

In childhood, Said studied his father’s refusal to express emotion alongside his mother’s disdain for physical touch as a means of comforting her children. From these two inhibitions, he became aware of his own “sensitivity”, a hyperawareness that he monitored like a vulture preying on its carcass. Mired by shame, the young Edward feared the public disgrace of being legible in his feelings. It was the possibility of being recognized by others as an Edward that felt foreign to him, a possibility that materialized in the power of teachers and peers to write the foreign, the weird, the unusual, the less comprehensible:

2

"Princeton in the fifties was unpolitical, self-satisfied, and oblivious.” It prepared Said to be a manager of elite machines—- and he knew this. He resented the facility of the superficial gestures that kept American appearances intact. He loathed and feared the aura of complacency, which might explain why he found it difficult to make friends at Princeton. “I felt that there was no depth, no ease, to the Americans, only the surface jokiness and anecdotal high spirits of teammates, which never satisfied me,” Said wrote. Uneasiness inflected his bilingual existence:

There was always the feeling that what I missed with my American contemporaries was other languages, Arabic mainly, in which I lived and thought and felt along with English. They seemed less emotional, with little interest in articulating their attitudes and reactions. This was the extraordinary homogenizing power of American life, in which the same TV, clothes, ideological uniformity, in films, newspapers, comics, etc., seemed to limit the complex intercourse of daily life to an unreflective minimum in which memory has no role.

“Immersion in reading and writing was the only antidote to Princeton's poisonous social atmosphere,” he wrote of Princeton’s fraternity-boy feel:

Like Walker Percy’s alien anthropologist, Said conducted a close reading of the environment in which he had been placed, and found only two professors who inspired him to think critically, the first of which was literary critic R. P. Blackmur. What Said loved about Blackmur is what he would come to celebrate in his formulations of the “amateur” critic. Lacking a doctorate or “even a high school diploma,” Blackmur had become an English professor, at Princeton. “A lonely, difficult-to-follow writer and lecturer, whose sheer genius in uncovering layer after layer of meaning in modern poetry and fiction (despite his gnarled and frequently incomprehensible language),” Blackmur, to Said, was “utterly challenging.” And the challenge is precisely what Said craved:

[Blackmur’s] example for me opened the secret delight of interpretation as something more than paraphrase or explanation. I never took a course with him or met him, but apart from reading him avidly I intermittently used to go to his lectures on poetics and modern fiction. He was one of the two readers of my senior thesis on André Gide and Graham Greene, a tortured affair …

The “other figure of distinction” was Professor of Philosophy Arthur Szathmary: “a spritely, energetic little figure who was everyone's gadfly, whether student, colleague, or great writer.” To the jaded students and “disaffected outsiders,” Said says that “Szathmary came to represent, and even embody, the intellectual life”:

He was intensely skeptical, asked irreverent questions, and generally made one feel that the accurate articulation of objections and flaws were activities of the highest order. There was nothing of the Princeton "tweedy" ethos about him or anything that suggested careerism and worldly success.


3

"Manipulated seriality is the heart of fascist politics", Jairus Banaji wrote in "Trajectories of Fascism: Extreme-Right Movements in India and Elsewhere" (2013). Banaji predicted Modi could function as a figurehead around which to build a cult of national greatness, a cult complicated by the polyvocality of Hinduism that doesn't automatically privilege a male god. [Note also a lack of "political culture" willing to do battle against burgeoning national greatness mythos on the left.]

“At the heart of fascist politics lies a manipulated seriality”: a refrain that continues touching the world, a leitmotif that exile admonishes against and often, unintentionally, prevents. By virtue of never belonging, one is given to know that belonging is illusory, a temporal construction that cannot persist across time in a globalized world. But one one mourns it nonetheless. One mourns this beautiful monster named Belonging; one samples its unrealizable iconographies. This is the marrow of Svetlana Boym's theories on nostalgia, and her call for off-modern nostalgia that settles no place, that requires no drawing of boundaries or war to map it. A nostalgia that subverts the sacralized nation for the daydream: this appears in Said’s writings as well.

The gradual evolution towards religious extremism among friends and family disoriented Said. Listening to political discussions in Washington, Said found his own unsettledness:

… the inherent irreconcilability between intellectual belief and passionate loyalty to tribe, sect, and country first opened up in me, and have remained open. I have never felt the need to close the gap but have kept them apart as opposites, and have always felt the priority of intellectual, rather than national or tribal, consciousness, no matter how solitary that made one.


4

The final paragraph of Said’s memoir also locates his life and mind in this contrapuntal motion:

Although Said never really goes after the therapy industry or takes the pedagogies of self-esteem to task, his criticism continuously challenged the “solid self” reaches toward certainty. Like the nation-state or the Virgin Mary, the solid self is a fragile construction that lives on the defensive. The solid self (again, like the ethno-state) invents new rules and boundaries that prevent it from being violated by reality.

Edward Said knew that the price of purity was an immaculate, fossilized stupidity, an ignorance so solid that not even millions of tons of bombs dropped on innocent children could move it.

"The Music Itself: Glenn Gould's Contrapuntal Vision" by Edward Said (PDF)

"Glenn Gould, the Virtuous as Intellectual" by Edward Said (PDF)

Mark Sandman and his "Super Sex" tritar.

“Super Sex” comes from Morphine’s 1995 album, Yes. Alongside his usual baritone vocals, Sandman played 2-string slide bass, piano, Chamberlin, tritar, and electric guitar on Yes—-and “Super Sex” is the song where Sandman happens to play the Chamberlin as well as the tritar.

There’s a brief flash to Dana Colley playing the alto and tenor saxophone simultaneously in the video.

Dana Colley playing double sax.

Morphine’s album, The Night, was posthumously released by Sandman's bandmates after his passing. On that note, Jean-Luc Nancy wrote something that holds my attention in The Fragile Skin of the World. I leave it here for future reckoning: “The idea of an authentic man or an authentic life can only be spoken of from a point of view that is neither human nor living, which is precisely what we lack. It is impossible for us to decide in favor of an authenticity whose content is not indicated to us.”

"I made him promise he'd piss on my grave," said Edmund White.

 

“I made him promise he'd piss on my grave,” Edmund White wrote of the lover who broke his heart.

The week bumped over the hump that was Tom Waits’ birthday, and certainly the lyric “Who are you this time?” came to mind as I let Edmund White’s memoir, My Lives, devour me.

The conceit of White’s “lives” is that he inventories them.

If the table of contents enumerates the ten lives that Edmund White lived, the text refuses any assumption that these lives are separate from the one he is living as he writes about the Others, as he welcomes his Others into the fold of selfhood.

Oddly, like the writers associated with New Narrative, White wants to reclaim “realism” rather than abandon it.

He wants a shift in how we describe “reality”.

Ideally, maybe really, such a shift shift would enable us to acknowledge the way reality differs from our discursive approaches to representation.

I made him promise he’d piss on my grave seems like the perfect vow to exchange with a human one has loved when leaving. It is an alternative eternity, an intimate and forbidden homage, a vow closer to standing outside time than trying to tame it.

“This is realism, I thought with grim satisfaction.”

Identifying as a “mystical atheist,” White recounts the spiritual seeking of his adolescence (encouraged by vaguely Christian Scientist mother). Already, he holds realism in high regard as the measure of value.

I'd gone every afternoon for weeks to the neo-Gothic library at Northwestern to read Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East. I'd dipped into the Torah, the Koran and the Upanishads. But Id been gripped by the Buddhist sutras. No matter how pessimistic I might become, I could never begin to approach the extent of Gotama's nihilism. He saw the self as an illusion, desire as the root of all evil, rebirth as the worst of fates and extinction as the only goal. In this world the most and the least one could expect was sickness, old age and death. Whereas the Hindus posited an irreducible soul, the atman, the Buddha preached the doctrine of 'no soul,' anatta. In an unpeopled universe full of nothing but illusion and suffering, not a single entity existed, certainly no deity.

This is realism, I thought with grim satisfaction. No interceding ranks of angels, no accountancy of sins and good deeds, no heaven nor hell, no nosy-parkering into other people's bedroom hijinks. The opposite of hateful, intolerant Christianity.

And all is divine until White and his mother get to the Chicago Buddhist Church in a rundown South Side neighborhood nearly thirty miles away. There, in that Church, they “encountered a group of smiling, waving Japanese men, women and children worshiping Amida, the Lord of the Western Paradise, a personage very much like a Catholic saint.”

He was a bodhisattva in the (to my eyes at least) 'degraded' form of Mahayana Buddhism, someone pledged to stave off the horrors of rebirth and the bleak solitude of nirvana by spiriting his followers away to a paradise where they could struggle toward enlightenment in comfort and in the busy, bustling society of likeminded souls.

“I was bitterly disappointed - by the organ and hymns that sounded suspiciously Methodist, by the flutter of arriving parishioners in big hats exchanging kisses, by the depressingly secular announcements of upcoming bingo games and covered dish suppers,” White says. Bitterly disappointed, he fled the scene.

Disappointment being the gap between what one expects and what is delivered, White inventories his losses:

Where I'd expected a bald abbot stony with meditation, a trickle of sandalwood smoke and a superb indifference to all forms of striving, I'd found a congregation of ordinary folks besotted in the ordinary way with the little pains and little rewards of everyday life.

'I thought it was nice, Mother said, puzzled by my contempt.

You liked it because it was just like some dismal Christian service,' I said nastily.

Contempt, nastiness, spiritual disappointment, aesthetic disaster: the affective expressions clamber over the material disenchantment in White’s telling.

“Even these humiliating occasions when I was robbed could be used as material. Life was a field trip. My writing would turn all this evil into flowers.”

White writes his hustlers gorgeously, engorgedly, edging close to the realism of New Narrative. 

“I was always reading novels, and I knowingly chuckled when a character was described as 'foolish' or 'naïve' but here I was: I was naive, I was foolish, which until this moment I'd never suspected,” he acknowledges, before pivoting to muse on craft:

The reader considers himself to be all-knowing, superior, but now I had to push this conventional flattery aside and recognize that cleverness is not a question of perspective but of accumulated experience in the world. I was slowly putting together my own fund of lived worldliness, more modest but more real than the reader's omniscience.

I was duped again in Cincinnati that summer when I was eighteen. I gave a hustler forty dollars to buy us both one-way Greyhound bus tickets to New York. Our plan was to meet on the corner near my father's new house in Watch Hill, an area of big estates and no sidewalks where any pedestrian, especially a teenage boy with a suitcase, would have attracted attention if anyone had been awake and driving past. I spent a sleepless night imagining how I'd become a blond with the bottle of peroxide I'd put in my bag; I'd be so transformed that my father would never be able to find me, neither he nor his private detectives. Kay, my stepmother, would go to awaken me and find my room empty. No note. A missing suitcase. A drained tub and a wisp of winking foam from my dawn bubble bath.

The guy never came. The hot, steamy Cincinnati sun rose and became more intense, like an alcohol lab burner concentrating and flaming whiter and whiter. I felt so foolish. I was grateful I hadn't already dyed my hair. Then for a second I'd become hopeful again and imagine he'd been held up and would appear in another minute or two if I would just be patient. Then I would remember how uninterested he'd been in the directions to this exact corner - at the time I'd thought it was proof of his quickness that he'd been able to grasp the baffling directions so easily. At last it came to me with pitiless clarity that he was a con man. He'd conned me. He'd tolen wow money and run. How he must have laughed at my naivety. When I saw him on the Square, a few nights later, he waved merrily.

One could learn about life from literature - one could learn to spot a confidence man - but only if one woke up from the smug, dreamlike superiority of the reader, which blinded one to the actual slippery manifestations of vice and dishonesty in the shadowy world of reality. In the novel, at least the reassuring nineteenth-century novel, one was always privy to everyone's well-lit motives and alerted to even the first sign of corruption. But in life - how could one navigate in an unnarrated world? Of course I was always narrating my life to myself but unfortunately I had no access to the private thoughts of the other characters around me. Even my own mind was too prolific to be comprehensible. It was certainly true that I was fashioning the book of my life at all times, trying out sentences, sketching out plot lines, hoarding impressions, restaging the scenes I'd just lived through. I'd already written and typed two novels in boarding school, one about me and the other (my senior thesis) about my mother or some more driven version of my mother to whom I attributed my own sexual obsessions. At every moment convinced myself that I was gathering material for the novel of my life - all experienced from the philosophical distance of the author.

Yes, White confirms: “Even these humiliating occasions when I was robbed could be used as material.”

For: “Life was a field trip. My writing would turn all this evil into flowers.”

And his “sexual obsessions” were not merely obsessive; they also partook of curiosity. “All these encounters with hustlers were as much an expression of fear as of desire, and above all they were animated by curiosity,” he writes. It is a feast, a communion, a religion to replace the failed spiritualities:

I was swallowing the sperm of strangers and this feast convinced me I was possessing all these men. I was like one of those nearly insane saints who must take communion several times a day, who are driven by a desire to eat the body and drink the blood of a long-dead historical human being. That man may also have been a god, but the saint longs for the pulse and crunch of a thirty-three-year-old Jew nailed to crossed boards. In the same way I had this permanent, gnawing hunger for all these street-corner Hanks or Orvilles, for their penises fat or thin, crooked or straight, eager or reluctant.

Impossible not to think of Robert Gluck’s descriptions of cruising the bath-houses here. Hopefully that Gluck review will get published soon, but who knows?

“My Roberto (my hustler and my character) was quiveringly and richly fleshed, his smile soft and unfocused, his body instinct with laughter.”

His first muse was a hustler who went by the name Roberto:

The room was big and clean and the wide window looked out on the square below, and afforded enough illumination so that we didn't need to turn on the overhead light. In the half-darkness his white shirt glowed. He let me unbutton it as we kissed. As soon as we began to touch, Roberto had the sort of gleeful, complicitous smile that says, "Look how wicked we're being." Never before had associated irony with sex between men. For a moment I even suspected that Roberto might be gay or bisexual and surprisingly! still found him attractive. He held my naked body against his and quaked with silent laughter, then moved without transition into long, languorous kisses, letting his eyes rise and wander along the line between the ceiling and the wall.

Roberto's white shirt and tanned skin, his compact body with the sensual ass, his sense of irony and romantic air - all these properties came together to inspire me. That fall I wrote a novel about him while I was in my junior year at the University of Michigan. Like many novels by young people it was derived more from my reading than from my experience, but the character of the younger brother 'Roberto' was based on my very own Lafcadio, my own Tancredi, my own Felix Krull, my own Fabrizio. I had in mind a synthesis of all these gallant young men from Continental literature, plucky characters who had as strong a sense of personal style as my hustler, who were as romantic and long-lashed as a silent movie star and as streetwise as a Neapolitan shoeshine boy.

My Roberto (my hustler and my character) was quiveringly and richly fleshed, his smile soft and unfocused, his body instinct with laughter. I knew almost nothing about him but I could keep returning to my memory of having held him in my arms for a moment, and having rented an hour of his time and leased on short term the use of his torso and hips and lightly downed legs and tan arms flung back to reveal his soft, creased, axial paleness. I liked the notion behind the English term rent boy more than our hustler, since the American word suggested something dishonest and on the make.

Roberto was my first male muse, a mental snapshot I worked up into a full-dress portrait in oil. I wanted to recapture that moment I bought and present him with a portrait in words. I wanted to convey to the reader as well my fascination with the boy. I was like Caravaggio, who paints in a saint's halo behind the curly head of a street urchin with a farmer's tan and a cynical smile. In my novel an older, richer, blonder brother hires a darker, smaller kid - and discovers they are half-brothers, the offspring of the same father but of different mothers, one fair and legitimate, the other an Italian mistress.

That the book, itself, did not rise to the level of Roberto’s mystique doesn’t matter. In the novel White calls his “failed fantasy,” the fact that the narrator’s first encounter with Roberto was commerical didn’t prevent it from being rapidly “elevated to brotherhood and, finally, impossibly, to an almost marital love.”

“The title of the book was The Amorous History of Our Youth, a pedantic fusion of Lermontov's Byronic parody, A Hero of Our Times, and of The Amorous History of the Gauls, a seventeenth-century satire of the court by Roger de Rabutin, Count de Bussy, which caused this sharp-tongued cousin of Madame de Sévigné to be banished to his comely little château in Burgundy,” White confesses in that wry (and very precise) whisper that gives away the snob.

“The most poignant moment in Lady Chatterley's Lover occurs when, unannounced, her ladyship visits the gamekeeper's cottage and sees him, all unawares, washing himself in an outdoor shower.”

Like a lover worthy of his novel, White looked for Roberto on the streets the following summer—-and every other time he wound up in Chicago—but he never found him again. All that remains of Roberto is the whiff of a hot ghost in White’s convoluted, breathless, Brodkey-tuned sentence structure: “Pedantry, satire, literary ostentation, an irritating lack of sincerity - none of these faults could conceal from my eye, at least, that I was quite humbly and gratefully in love with an Italian boy I had met once who had a strangely low and almost strangled way of whispering his words into the big ear of a bespectacled American geek, his awestruck client.”

Roberto’s “awestruck client” quickly pivots into one of the self-lacerating statements that characterize his essays when White adds, “If in my novel inappropriate emotions kept firing off, all these missteps just revealed how inadequate I was to the occasion.”

True to life, true to literature, White admits the men he picked up on Times Square weren’t quite sublime. Nor were the tricks erotic. The reality lacked the heat of his fantasies because “some of these boys were too perfect”:

I liked a flaw, a wound, which acted as an opening to the communion of shared humanity. For instance, a guy named Hal lived upstairs from me and sometimes he'd drop by for sex. He had a badly mended harelip which made his taut, muscled torso and hairy chest and pale, narrow loins seem vulnerable, touching.

The most poignant moment in Lady Chatterley's Lover occurs when, unannounced, her ladyship visits the gamekeeper's cottage and sees him, all unawares, washing himself in an outdoor shower. She glances at his white, narrow hips and his thin back and he never realizes she is there. His back, so pale and thin, is wholly male and vulnerable. If, instead, a big blond showboat, perfect with a blinding smile, an ever-ready penis, came bounding up my steps, his very perfection made me feel somehow . .. orphaned.

“Young and attractive," in his thirties, White frequented the gym thrice a week, hoping to make a good impression on the johns. But the johns had other affinities, which the author analogizes to figures in a passion play or religious iconography:

That “suitable vague” St. Theresa: abject.


“Now, I'd say to myself, I'm going to write a good page.”

While employed by NYU’s New York Institute for the Humanities, White sat in a windowless cubicle and attempted to write his “novel, A Boy's Own Story, fighting the anxiety I usually felt when I wrote.” He details the writing process, the craft, if you will:

The heat and my hangover tempted me to put my head down on my desk and fall asleep. I was so sleepy I would write portmanteau words, which collapsed the syllables of two or three words I'd already sounded in my head. I even started to spell phonetically. My clothes would stick to me. I'd sigh and shift in my chair from one side to the other. One more trip to the water cooler. I'd come back and read through my latest pages and make microscopic changes. I'd sprawl on my desk. Then I'd get fed up with myself, sit up straight, as tall as possible in the chair, and I'd hold my pen as if it were a scalpel. Now, I'd say to myself, I'm going to write a good page. Usually my head was so fuzzy with the morning-after effects of wine and marijuana that I was pleased if I could form real sentences, nothing more.

"I would be horny, if that meant lonely, and anxious to such a degree that only sex could lift me out of this mire with enough immediacy and absoluteness," White says of the intervals between thinking, imagining, and writing.


“ . . . I had no notion that some people were more popular than others, much less that there were acquirable techniques to insure popularity.”

Adolescence introduced him to social scripts and revealed the strange theatre of American dating and gender performance to White. “In that paradise before I bit into the apple of social awareness, I had no idea that one could be ingratiating, seductive or even more or less likable,” he writes. He lacks the MBA techniques that teach humans how to fashion life.

I hadn't yet learned to ask flattering questions, to lead people out, to express sympathy for their pain and encouragement for their pleasures, to exonerate their failings as 'normal and declare their modest successes to be triumphs.? I am sure I was a nice enough guy and even projected a low wattage charm, but whatever glow I gave off was just the crumbling half-life of my sluggish existence. In the same way that I had no idea what I looked like and managed to stumble around ill-shod, badly dressed, unkempt and often dirty, I had no notion that some people were more popular than others, much less that there were acquirable techniques to insure popularity. Boys and girls alike were for me something like human furniture filling up rooms and corridors, as featureless as the real furniture we lived among. Just as we didn't notice the faded flowered slipcovers on sagging couches or the armchairs on which the green plush was worn down in browning patches, so we didn't see this kid or that as magnetic or repulsive. To be sure, I did fall under the physical spell of a Buster or Howie or Cam, but it seemed like a miracle if one of them liked me back.

“It never occurred to me that friendship was biddable,” White concludes.


“We revered Brecht, not Marx; Mayakovsky, not Lenin; Lotte Lenya, not La Pasionaria; both Ingmar and Ingrid Bergman; Elizabeth Taylor the actress and Elizabeth Taylor the reserved English novelist.”

He recollects the tanginess of his early New York friendships. “We arty types, especially the theater queens, were in the middle room, as if we were the intermediate sex,” White writes:

We were neither scrubbed and perky like the Greeks, nor alienated and uncombed like the Beats. We drank but didn't smoke pot, we had nothing resembling a credo beyond a faith in the permanent avant-garde. We revered Brecht, not Marx; Mayakovsky, not Lenin; Lotte Lenya, not La Pasionaria; both Ingmar and Ingrid Bergman; Elizabeth Taylor the actress and Elizabeth Taylor the reserved English novelist. Ten years later and the idea of High Culture would begin to crumble, battered by the American cult of success and the distinction-dissolving ironies of Pop Art. But in the late fifties we still believed in honorable poverty. We still thought that beauty should be difficult, that incomprehension was a first necessary step toward initiation and that time would determine irrefutably which of our current artistic developments had been the one, the only, the inevitable next one.


“I wanted to immerse myself in him, just him, his ideal essence, just as a tomb sculpture in Renaissance France always shows its subject at an ideal age, thirty-three…”

Recollecting his adoration of Stan during his senior year in college, White describes his singular project as "Stanley, seeing Stan, courting him.” For love keeps us riveted, busy, anticipatory.  “Love gives us something to do,” he writes. “It ties our days together, as if a composer had linked all the elements of the score with lightly curving legato marks, swooping from note to note like telephone wires.”

The image of Stan dressed in white on that stage never leaves White's imagination. Stan remains in that "slow-paced, deeply internal performance," animated by his own mesmerization, "as if he were slowly fermenting his own essence and getting drunk on it."

I, too, felt a bit drunk upon reading White’s tomb-analogy, burying my brain in this possibility of memory as a formal gesture that entombs while also provides the image for the iconography. “I didn't want him to be someone else, to impersonate a character,” White says of his Stan on the stage, “I wanted to immerse myself in him, just him, his ideal essence, just as a tomb sculpture in Renaissance France always shows its subject at an ideal age, thirty-three, and whether the subject died much older or younger, he must be presented as he will appear in his perfect form at the Resurrection.”


“You should hold my hand and go through this with me.”

One of his masters was also the man who broke his heart. Like the BDSM wired into their relationship, the breakup leaves White in the masochistic position. He has never felt so powerless. He weeps in his university office. He tells other professors that he doesn’t know if he can get over this. Eventually, he meets up with T, the lover, again:

It was April 12, 2004. He had on my favorite cerulean blue T-shirt. We sat knee to knee and ate beside the bar. The waiter was so solicitous, I could almost say tender, that I felt he knew this was a reconciliation. I told T Pat sarted seeing a middle-class shrink who was 'sure" T must have fet degraded and objectified' by being paid.

T: I didn't mind being paid for something I wanted to do, that was hot, earning money like a hustler, but then when I stopped wanting to do it, I resented the money."

T: I knew I wanted you to fall in love with me because I wanted to be part of your life. And, admit it, if I hadn't slept with you, you never would have thought about me twice.'

T said: 'I didn't want to feel I had to go to bed with you just to please you. That's too much like when I was a kid with my mother. I felt that if I didn't please her my whole life would fall apart and I'd lose everything. I don't want to have sex or do anything just to please someone else.'

In dialogue with T, White gives offers himself as abject, feminized self —- apologetic (I said I was sorry I was being so neurotic, crying all the time and plaguing him with my neediness.); cautious and ego-affirming (Well, the good thing is how we're talking.); critical; wounded (I noticed that my love for him had gone from being "flattering to 'a pain in the ass.'); wistful and unrealistic (I wondered if people still fell in love this way, my way. ); comparative; prone to self-diagnosis (Was it a period piece, my love for I, something akin to Sarah Bernhardt's wooden leg?); redemptive (We never talked about this honestly before, not when we were having sex); looking for a route back into a relationship ('It's like you're so strong, such a bully, you can just say matter-of-factly, "No, we won't ever have sex again" - you can say that and I nod, then I go home and suffer and why should I suffer all alone?); indignant; pathetic; (You should hold my hand and go through this with me.); bossy; controlling; pathetic; crumbly; on the edge of a stool that keeps tipping towards tears.

White envies his students who “bumped shoulders, wore each other's clothes, slept in the same bed for weeks without having sex until one drunken night it half-happened, then the next morning it took place fully.” Their casual fatalism had its own momentum: “they drifted away, cried a bit, hooked up one more time and it was over.” A brisk genre. A formal figuration vastly superior to his own “art nouveau passion.”


"Yes," he said, "that's what I believe."

“I had a small but faithful readership, and I had always placed the overall longevity of my talent, such as it was, above the success of any one book,” White says, locating himself among the minor writers.

Reflecting on the value of his own books and the question of whether he will be read, his compares his belief in the “readers in the future” to an “act of blind faith.” [“Of course people would always read things (captions, e-mails), but would they want to read long imaginative or confessional works written by writers in the past, even the recent past?”]

Following this question further, White inadvertently speaks to what it means to "be read", or how the writer approaches the imagined interlocutor by recollecting an interview with “a trendy English critic.” This critic loathed Jean Genet's novels. White’s love for Genet finally wrenched him out politeness.

"Let me get this straight,” White said to the critic, “Do you think works of art wear out? That one generation can't read the books of an earlier one? That Shakespeare has nothing to tell us now?" 

The dialogue continued:

"Yes," he said, "that's what I believe."

Suddenly all the pretensions of 'universal and 'eternal' art were called into question. I, who'd long since doubted that a 'canon' of white European male books should be read and studied by everyone, was now being asked to frame a more radical question about the relevance of a work by one generation to the next. We still hailed writers for being as original and profound and lasting as Hemingway or Flaubert, but maybe it was an empty rhetorical gesture. Maybe even libraries had a short shelf life.

No matter. I thought you, the reader of the future, the solitary twenty-year-old in Kansas, might be able to hear my voice, scratchy and bleating as it may be, as we can still hear Caruso's. Like Walt Whitman I want to excite at least one young man not yet born; the kid in Singapore or Salt Lake City who gets an erection at the thought of humiliating his teacher.