Notes on Reading Archives

Artifact

And drift.

A body gets to asking of itself sometimes, what am I? And what can I say of this other, before me? Scents offer one set of answers, measurements offer others. There are those that reject measurements as crude in favor of the more nuanced explanation, but their explanations tend to point consistently to the calendar which selects and arranges into chronological order––defaulting, in the end, to measurement by another name.

This raises more questions. Such as, what about duration? Types of this quality will vary according to kind and not all kinds translate easily into the common currency of solar time. Consider the range of gravitational fields in the cosmos, how time varies according to mass. Then there are the varying life intervals between species. And what of souls, which are characterized as having beginnings but not ends?

As a questioning body, I am naturally pulled to return to the known pattern of my form even as I am drawn to fly from it. I feel like an old something, newborn. I do not quite cohere to myself always and have often felt the nearness of evaporation of my assembled matter into some wider vastness I dare not name.

I have been grateful to discover that certain rituals have adhesive properties, so I try to use these when I practice flight and grounding, so as not to lose or shatter myself completely. Without them, who knows what I could get myself into? To be sure, the unknowing persists just as thoroughly with ritual. But there are sticking places for the edges of a body, to hold.

***

These are some odd notes made while reading George Kubler’s The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962, Yale University Press).

Veiled Life in Five Acts

For Ophelia.

It was said of the jailer’s daughter that she sought the flood, that she might be saved by the man who came calling, before she returned in her trembling weakness to the river to sing a song whose words she mostly forgot.

No, it was not deliberate, her fall from the branch of the willow where she sat. Neither was it abrupt, after long schooling in the art of locking her in, to study what will shapeshift and erupt in the steam of her laughter over the prize they would have lauded her for becoming, if she kept on. With these men who cry at her breast while wondering what to do with themselves. To be? Or not? Me?

A mind unbalanced by grief, her physician decreed––for the father, no doubt, they declared. Or Laertes on his high horse, tossing advice to the ground, or Hamlet so eager to seed her that he burst into her space, who then complained it would not cost her a groaning to take off his edge, his constant edge.

And always the question of what to do with it but remind her back to his need, singing?

And he sings. O sister when I come to knock at your door, may you be no stranger to knowing where the cuts are meant to happen. To her, but for himself: O sister, o daughter, o mother, o wife––it is your breath, your blood, your only life.

To the Well

From the lighthouse.

––And then, an invitation. To reread certain silences in the context of a long tradition of expression among the artists whose work was protection. The practice demanded resistance of revelation, to cloak certain as-yet-unknowns in protective veils to keep them from the probing instruments and hungry hands of the doctors of discourse. Serious students of the art learn to absent themselves in certain company. Once fluent in silence, they can breach the perimeters of the well-trodden and overgrazed pastures in which they would be kept, to run wild through unsayable fields. Here is where the well of patience nurtures an impetuous and vibrant life in abiding resistance.

Suggestion and Syntax

And the figurative flirt.

Around here, no one asks why you associate with some books. They just look at you, if they look at all, like you are carrying a blowtorch: A quick nod. Ah, that’s interesting. You must be up to something. Carry on! This is ideal for me, because if anyone did ask, I might be compelled to reply with the sort of explanation that allowed someone to think that I was engaged in a bout of serious study, letting them imagine me to be a woman of great ideas. Instead, I am most often ogling the body of the sentence, its curves dancing across a page, watching it turn soft pirouettes, caring little to translate. I like the ones that move in slow glissades, in delicious sashays, suggesting by their winking flirts, that there is much to be understood beyond what they are saying, whose movements keep time with a roaring whisper not unlike the sound of the falls that have been known to draw the passing wanderer inexplicably close to the velocity of their aqueous gravity, seeming to whisper, Come closer, Come here.

Why Poetry

Unsatisfying answers to an impossible and enduring question.

For the world-renewing potential of an imagined response. Because the imagination is violent in its impulse to press back against the killing from without. To tilt the scales on the side of the near erased. To disobey the given order. To honor some dimension of collective soul only glimpsed. Because a pressure accumulates. Because of this abiding anxiety. Because the capacity for making transcends those of judgement and knowing. Because joy in language, thrill in meetings. At arrivals that morph into futures. In awe over the burden of experience. To push against a form that seems to demand submission and imagine not a win but an encounter with that which sings behind the fight. Because longing is endless, and music, and unknowing so complete except for a small, insistent certainty that there is a sense around this somehow, to be near it even if I have none.

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Notes while reading Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures.

Sound of a Sentence

At reunions.

Note the irregular pattern of the veins running to and from the mother tongue in jubilant slide of dream-substrates––to read a world through glass in fog of morning, the edge of bliss so sharp it cuts the taste of iron in the mouth––the bite of dying life to living ends, running to sudden thunder, the wicked warmth of hot irreverence, its backslap pummeling affection.

Is that you? When were we?
Are we the only two here?
Hello, friend. It is so good.
To read you again.

Another Contour

Text as body of bliss.

To hear the text as living, breathing being, not to be measured against the normative strictures of the machine, and know its will to bliss. To find a text on which you can never comment, because you may only speak inside it. As, whispering, you might say into it: mysterious stranger, remove me from my common notions; remember me back into elsweheres that I may be lost in the constant introduction to what may never be written.

***

Notes while reading Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (trans. Richard Miller).

O Valiant Now

Remember the ancient tragedies.

Careful, hero. You are sometimes too sure. It may be said that your ancient predecessors, the ones you often mock for their backwardness, were in fact possessed of virtues you have yet to learn to recognize, glutted as you are on delusions of progress. These knew at least––or learned to see (sometimes after the eyes were gone) in the (tragic) end––the danger of confusing what would save with what would destroy. They understood that they were understudies to passions, the lead actors preceding their entrances and following their exits––and how none of the worst crimes could have happened unless they were believed to be good. To go on acting anyway, without becoming paralyzed, in full knowledge of blindness, leaning into doubt well enough to hold loves close. For protection, and to protect.

Attentions

Notes on how to read.

There is a mind that keeps close watch on the dew-slick grass, hopping low, head turned to hear what crawls, to find what fuels the next flight. After this, a watcher in the window, low chirps from whiskered mouth, the fine hairs of the tail feather-tuned with exquisite precision. Another eye will notice how that which manages to still be finely tuned to details in their liquid form while retaining the soft pliancy of a chest-sleeper is enough to swell some subcutaneous expanse behind the ribcage, preparing to soar from what seems to contain its swell. There is temporal awareness, temporary sight. And there is space, breathing enough of nothing to make room for the next renewal.

Raft

Reach and anchor.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet each knew: to float on a raft made of words chosen out of desire, it was necessary to decreate the old world first. The flood repeats itself, and the dove.

So, the weaving and unweaving of the shroud by Penelope’s hand. She is buying time for the impossible return of an impossible life, long lost at sea.

Longing and despair are long partners, dancing together. Only the living are so bound.

***

Adapted from Helen Vendler’s essay on Wallace Stevens, which borrows a phrase of Stevens’ for its title, “Words Chosen Out of Desire.”