Funny Serious: Eileen Myles's Newer Than New Poetics
by Jared White
Eileen Myles is having a moment: a book of poems (2007), a book of critical essays (2009), a rollicking bildungsroman of a poet’s memoir (2010), and now a tight and magisterial new volume of poems from Wave Books, SNOWFLAKE/DIFFERENT STREETS. Zippy, stylish and smart, her new work comes packaged as two book-length manuscripts bound together; “new poems” and “newer poems,” as if to bring writing as close as logistically possible to the present tense now now now. The split-side effect makes the book a kind of playful object, proffering two experiences in separate fonts: SNOWFLAKE in declarative, all-caps titles so bold they look like they might go out of focus, and the DIFFERENT STREETS typeset in a sleeker, curvier lower case that appears to protract the vowels of every word like a sly drawl. These opposing styles suggest two versions of Myles’s writing: intimate day book and friendly, boisterous holler. The dual frame of “new poems” and “newer poems,” a gag on the classic “New and Selected” motif for late-mid-career poets, wonderfully foregrounds the double moment of poetry writing, as in that old adage of Wordsworth about “powerful emotions recollected in tranquility,” now thoughtfully reworked into something more the overlay of spontaneous thoughts and the process in which they are rendered, simulated and revived. Instead of recollecting in tranquility, Myles’s playful innovation in SNOWFLAKE/DIFFERENT STREETS is to collect visceral emotions while literally in the driver’s seat of a moving car. The image of poem-as-vehicle proliferates throughout the book, which includes a travelogue of locations—San Diego, Oakland, Somerville, Missoula, Iceland, the Jay Street Borough Hall subway station in Brooklyn—that index Myles’s travels.
Myles has always been a prolific poet, writing long ticker-tape-ribbon shaped poems whose spitfire energy derives from the contrast between the tight and torqued short-line form and the prosy, voluble style of her I-driven writing. Early on in her career, Myles mastered a strong persona which all her writing emanates from, as if transmuting into the celebrity version of herself she wanted to be: quippy, vulnerable, swaggering and idealistic all at once. Her romantic 1992 write-in campaign for president of the United States following a tenure running the Poetry Project seems part of this same mission, being a poet out there in the culture.
…I am
an American.
I am a
true American
poet. I use
multi-strike
cartridges in
my Smith Corona
word processor &
I bash those
words out like
I’m playing
tennis.
There is a flatness to this presentation, a single stanza of cascading text, but also a flexibility beneath the surface as different speeds and textures emerge from the logic of phrasing. Reading becomes a guided tour of various terrains with a hyper-competent and engaging docent.
I remember hosting a book party in my apartment my first year in New York over a decade ago and being told excitedly that Myles was in attendance. I was utterly starstruck even though I hadn’t read much of her writing at that point; she looked the embodiment of ideal poet fame, like movie actors who don’t so much act as just show up on the screen fabulously as themselves. Myles uses the phrase “carnal intelligence,” and it’s an apt description of the sexiness of thinking in her writing: sexy because it is friendly and mysterious, direct and also stylized. One leans in closer and closer to the words, watching seemingly sedate sentences become more and more provocative.
SNOWFLAKE/DIFFERENT STREETS continues in this vein—poetry as a function of performed intimacy and leveraged personality—but also presents new, experimental directions. Myles plays with further modes of disjuncture, breaking syntax and smash-cutting sentences in unpredictable ways like rapid-shutter or stutter effects, playing on the boundaries of spoken and written modes of poetry, and embedding smaller serial movements within the manuscript, itself a playful framing of books inside books. Yet the poems here seem pitched past intelligence toward a vibe, such that one doesn’t so much interrogate meanings as simply bask.
SNOWFLAKE includes a mini serial project of twelve consecutive “LA/Driving” poems written through dictation into a digital recorder. This process of speaking a poem into being necessarily involves a kind of pre-editing, piecing the poem together in theory and then recording it in a spontaneous overflow: composition as a collection of time in motion. The poems are sometimes collages of inputs—words read on signs, images noticed, mini-jokes and ideas banging around in the head—that become an internal geography:
My need to meet the new technology head on
Tommy’s restaurant
San Clemente State Park
a red car zipping past a lump of cheese
wall they built for some purpose
to look like the houses they built
overhead
peach!
peach!
peach
-from “#3 (Peach…)”
This poem takes on a dreamy west coast American landscape of wild hills, kitsch signage, and disposable architecture but everything zips by so quickly that curated elements like “San Clemente” become less sculptural than sonic, abstracted flavors for the mouth/ear to enjoy. The exclamatory peaches of the ending could be a sudden dive into animal ecstasy (actually eating J. Alfred Prufrock’s peach), or it could be more ironic: a spastic driving game, or a translation of quickly driving past rows of trees in a peach orchard.
Writing while driving is a way of being in the world as a poet and of keeping it new, but Myles cleverly inverts this futurist dynamic by investigating the car as an avatar of the current apocalyptic mania for oil. She builds this theme slowly, beginning in fantasy imagery of the highway as a skein over a chthonic mystery, a metaphor for the aging process or the fragility of life: “some cars seem to erupt from the/ the tar itself/ they seem to pull/ themselves up/ from below the surface of the land/ though I don’t think land. I mean something flat, something/ black/ almost like a water that we’re on/ though a dark water that/ holds us.” Later the writing becomes more explicit about “this thing that’s destroying/ us all,” and provocatively identifies oil as a historical repository of lived emotion: “fluid of everything and everybody/ that ever was here/ we’re draining that/ to just get around” “like we’re driving on our own limited past.” When she writes about “listening to the fossil/ fuel churning/ in my guts” it is incredibly satisfying, a poetry of a changing self that is also a poetry of climate change. The driving poems may be a response to being an urban poet forced by circumstance to deal with highway commuting as a daily practice, but they are also a way of playing with untenable dialectics like Plato’s written versus oral traditions, or Saussure’s abstract language versus objective reality, or even lived experience versus the permanent present tense of recording. Driving becomes a form of poetry, the lanes of traffic like lines of writing: “I don’t know what/ you’re saying// just stay in your/ lines.” By leaning on writing as practice instead of product, the poems are individually smaller, provisional forays like notes-to-self—“car of the day,” Myles writes in one poem—that aggregate into something larger and more satisfying.
Myles is constantly finding different ways to interrogate this existential problem of new writing becoming obsolete and new selves erasing old selves. In “Pencil poem #3”, one of another embedded mini-serial project inside DIFFERENT STREETS, whose numbered titles humorously refer to the stolen pencil used for their production, she writes:
Vacillating
doesn’t help anyone.
It’s a cry for proof
Uncannily the
conditions shift
the late plane moves
everyone and even
though I doubted
now I can’t
I’d like to take the vacillating disk
and drop it in the trash…
The first two lines suggest normative grammar, but by the third line the enjambments have become jagged and syncopated and the syntax shudders apart. This poem ends on a funny off-note, a categorical shrug:
I’m just going to change
my underwear not
my clothes.
I look like a pencil.
This is what I meant.
The last line could so easily end in a colon and go on but instead it simply folds into itself, a permanent suspension. In the same vein, another poem ends similarly by emblazoning the word “Forever” on a line by itself, no period after it; another cuts off humorously with an italicized “oh shut up.”
There are two eponymous “Snowflake” poems in SNOWFLAKE/DIFFERENT STREETS; playfully, one appears in each manuscript. (There is also a poem in SNOWFLAKE with the title of Myles’s previous essay collection THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ICELAND, further entwining Myles various, possibly contemporaneous writing projects.) Oddly, the one in DIFFERENT STREETS recalls more strongly the driving theme in SNOWFLAKE, juxtaposing two words all by themselves on the whole page: “Freeze/ traffic.” Half a joke simply in its brevity in contrast to most of Myles’s poems, these lines wink at the sense that traffic on the highway is often already stopped. Calling this poem “Snowflake”—an image of a beautiful structure that may immediately melt—transforms the joke into a serious appeal for a poetry that could freeze traffic, stop time, record history before it is replaced with more history. A submerged mini-epiphany takes place, like the snowcapped mountains that appear in the distance on clear days in L.A. as a beautiful mirage, wintry stillness set against the summer stillness of urban highway gridlock.
The “Snowflake” poem in SNOWFLAKE is much longer and more complicated. It begins with a series of quizzical non sequiturs, seemingly emanating from different universes but sharing a common syntax and ebullience:
There’s no female
in my position
There’s no man
wow
there’s a raccoon
on the tail
of the plane
and there’s
no one
seeing that now
but me
and there’s no one close
enough right
in here
to see the
further
drawing
stripes or buildings
the bricks
of the world
The scenario remains in constant flux, shifting almost line by line from the symbolic to the imaginary (in the raccoon—a logo? a hallucination?—I read a shade of John Lithgow screaming at the invisible gargoyle on the wing of his airplane in The Twilight Zone Movie) to a zoomed-in God’s perspective on an architectural universe. The connective tissue of the “there is” phrasing implies a kind of continuity, but only in shorthand, building speed out of the column of type so it can later be modulated. The line and stanza breaks are totally irregular, maximizing off-kilterness and torque. The spacey interrupting “wow” is a gesture that Myles frequently resorts to in her poems, an onomatopoetic syllable of overwhelmed emotion as an intervention into language--elsewhere there are “bam”’s and “hwuh”’s and a fanfare of “trumpets”, as if translating thought states into experimental noise like Adam West 60’s style Batman comic explosions.
The poem then shifts gears from the conceptual to the personal:
I wonder what I’ll say about Sadie…
and if they hate
me for moving
her furniture
out and putting
it in storage
I walked past that restaurant
where I was so mad
I could have broke
the glass
I’m the only one in the mood to remember
this me living
There’s a quicksilver quality to this—the sudden inclusion of the name Sadie without a social context, the “they” who arise and subside in small waves. The writing here is driven by overheard anxiety, privacies opened up to become allegorical like incidents watched through the wrong end of binoculars. Details are less important than the impulse behind them, the poignant desire to record a particular moment. The day falls away and the “I” remains, which is where the poem ends, with the dissolution of the present tense into the self—the poem refers to the “year two thousand one/ everything/ transformed”—as time becomes memory like a melting snowflake:
I was so mad
I… lived
for that moment
snowflake
I wasn’t there
not even me
when she put
in they key
and it wouldn’t
turn.
The first poem of SNOWFLAKE takes this idea to its terminus as a poetics: “I hold the day/ I watch the snowflake/ melting.” It could be a sentimental idea, by which each day is a snowflake, unique in its details, in the blizzard of a life. But it is also scary, a reduction of days to their endless ending, life as constant apocalypse. How then is it possible to build a poetic practice out of this outflow? Myles writes, “I know to hold back/ tends to keep the thing/ going but I don’t,” offering a potential strategy—reticence, delay—but then disavowing it, admitting an inability not to keep talking. Instead of “holding back,” then, the poems become overstuffed cornucopias, containing almost too many strands so that the form is built not by development of one idea but by constant churning and turning.
In her memoir-novel INFERNO, Myles interposes autobiographical episodes and memories, dribbling out multiple anecdotes simultaneously in jazzy fragments like cross-cut scenes in a movie. The counterpart technique in her poetry cuts between modes of speech, non sequitur images, and phrases. (Myles titles one poem in SNOWFLAKE “To Weave,” following a fabric metaphor, though her long ribbons of poetry suggest to me more of a braid.) The poem “Smile” in DIFFERENT STREETS begins in a conceptual dark kitchen, cutting into “the peach of/ it” (another Cezanne-y peach!), but “without a good/ light and a sharp knife”. Before we can get comfortable in this kitchen, though, an ambient “drip” like a drippy nose suggests a cold outdoors that then takes over the scenario with the accoutrements of winter: “Today’s cold/ is like the affirmation of the purchase/ of yesterday’s new shirt.” This is the experience of objective correlative, whereby the weather fits itself around human concerns instead of vice versa. But just as it has moved through the wintry streets to arrive at yesterday’s shirt store, the strand of the kitchen returns with the “half-made meal”. This time, though, the cooking while hungry lifts off into literary fantasy, “the incredible possibility/ of hunger on and on like my favorite man/ Frankenstein”. And then the panoply of favorite men multiplies into a digression: “I used to/ think Mark Wahlberg was family.” So now after barely a page the poem contains kitchens, peaches, cold weather, Frankenstein, and Marky Mark as material. Myles then sets about intertwining these motifs, conceptualizing abandonment within family, within home:
So did Tim but close to his death
he told me he was adopted. Every
time he smiled he thought Eileen
is a fool. Or that’s what love looks
like. If I woke and my master was horrified
I would go out into the world with this
enormous hurt. And I have carried mine
for so long I now know it’s nothing special.
It’s just the fall and the sound of her sirens. It’s the agony
of being human. Not a dog who dies maybe six
times in the lives of her masters. Everyone’s phony
and made up. Everyone’s a monster like me.
Now I know everyone.
There are so many plaits woven together: the proximity of death, the fidelity of pets, the invention of the self, seasonal affective disorder and despair and nostalgia and stoicism. The “now” still holds the musing together as a fixed point, but it is the sad-now of hard-won maturity, empowerment tempered by grief. The speaker is simultaneously identified with the dead other, the rejected Frankenstein, and the abandoned master (the word almost identical to “monster”). This monstrosity might be contiguous to the monstrous inhumanity of humans, “not/ the kindest/ of mammals/ with our fucking/ tar…”, but only in a theory of monsters who deserve empathy. The monster is the poet armed with the tool of identification to make life out of words, as Myles writes in another poem:
I am recommending
this as the most
fun I ever
To animate the way
another saw headlights
or sound, to see a pattern
and enter their
body. I’m the galvanizing
I’m the animating
kind. I’m the monster
I shall cry till the
end of my life.
The monster of the “I” is thus partly the monstrosity of the Frankenstein-ed poetry, a sutured product brought from the death of the past “now” back into life. It’s also the monster of the aging self, coming to terms with a body and mind moving always closer to death. The monster is both Frankenstein and the doctor, the poem and the poet, creator and creation. The animating fluid in Myles’s poems is often the names of people; celebrities and acquaintances alike are rendered with first names only—Rae [Armantrout?], Kurt [Cobain?]—as intimates. Beyond the human, there is a profusion of animals (rabbits, birds, dogs, coyotes, raccoons, spiders, fish, cats) always presented eye-to-eye. By engaging relationships, the poems engage loss. The intimacy may begin through a stylized fakeness but it lands somewhere real: “what were/ those lies/ openness/ a picture/ I took/ to show/ the world/ your open/ mouth/ my delight/ in it.”
The poems in SNOWFLAKE and DIFFERENT STREETS can be read as crooked love poems from an alluring older voice toward a younger one: “every woman your/ age/ cute. Every woman/ my age/ wounded &/ glisten.” Yet the last word here is not the expected adjective but a verb, almost an imperative, as if the language of description could force transformation. As an ars poetica, I find this movement into the ungainly totally satisfying. Myles’s off-kilter poem closures are invariably brisk, with flip accelerating rhythms that heave the poems off sudden cliffs. My favorite of these occurs at the end of a “pencil poem” in DIFFERENT STREETS, the poem cut so these words hang in space on a page by themselves, a junky and awesome ars poetica for these new poems that are never new in the first place. It’s worth considering as a mission statement for Myles’s writing over her whole career:
The new poems
are poems of
healing.
But first I’ll
be funny.
Jared White's chapbook This Is What It Is Like To Be Loved By Me will be published by Bloof Books in February 2012. He recently had poems in Sink Review, Esque, and on the Flying Object website, with audio and visual art. He lives in Brooklyn where he is co-owner with Farrah Field of Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop. They just had a baby son named Roman Field White this week.
Eileen Myles is having a moment: a book of poems (2007), a book of critical essays (2009), a rollicking bildungsroman of a poet’s memoir (2010), and now a tight and magisterial new volume of poems from Wave Books, SNOWFLAKE/DIFFERENT STREETS. Zippy, stylish and smart, her new work comes packaged as two book-length manuscripts bound together; “new poems” and “newer poems,” as if to bring writing as close as logistically possible to the present tense now now now. The split-side effect makes the book a kind of playful object, proffering two experiences in separate fonts: SNOWFLAKE in declarative, all-caps titles so bold they look like they might go out of focus, and the DIFFERENT STREETS typeset in a sleeker, curvier lower case that appears to protract the vowels of every word like a sly drawl. These opposing styles suggest two versions of Myles’s writing: intimate day book and friendly, boisterous holler. The dual frame of “new poems” and “newer poems,” a gag on the classic “New and Selected” motif for late-mid-career poets, wonderfully foregrounds the double moment of poetry writing, as in that old adage of Wordsworth about “powerful emotions recollected in tranquility,” now thoughtfully reworked into something more the overlay of spontaneous thoughts and the process in which they are rendered, simulated and revived. Instead of recollecting in tranquility, Myles’s playful innovation in SNOWFLAKE/DIFFERENT STREETS is to collect visceral emotions while literally in the driver’s seat of a moving car. The image of poem-as-vehicle proliferates throughout the book, which includes a travelogue of locations—San Diego, Oakland, Somerville, Missoula, Iceland, the Jay Street Borough Hall subway station in Brooklyn—that index Myles’s travels.
Myles has always been a prolific poet, writing long ticker-tape-ribbon shaped poems whose spitfire energy derives from the contrast between the tight and torqued short-line form and the prosy, voluble style of her I-driven writing. Early on in her career, Myles mastered a strong persona which all her writing emanates from, as if transmuting into the celebrity version of herself she wanted to be: quippy, vulnerable, swaggering and idealistic all at once. Her romantic 1992 write-in campaign for president of the United States following a tenure running the Poetry Project seems part of this same mission, being a poet out there in the culture.
…I am
an American.
I am a
true American
poet. I use
multi-strike
cartridges in
my Smith Corona
word processor &
I bash those
words out like
I’m playing
tennis.
There is a flatness to this presentation, a single stanza of cascading text, but also a flexibility beneath the surface as different speeds and textures emerge from the logic of phrasing. Reading becomes a guided tour of various terrains with a hyper-competent and engaging docent.
I remember hosting a book party in my apartment my first year in New York over a decade ago and being told excitedly that Myles was in attendance. I was utterly starstruck even though I hadn’t read much of her writing at that point; she looked the embodiment of ideal poet fame, like movie actors who don’t so much act as just show up on the screen fabulously as themselves. Myles uses the phrase “carnal intelligence,” and it’s an apt description of the sexiness of thinking in her writing: sexy because it is friendly and mysterious, direct and also stylized. One leans in closer and closer to the words, watching seemingly sedate sentences become more and more provocative.
SNOWFLAKE/DIFFERENT STREETS continues in this vein—poetry as a function of performed intimacy and leveraged personality—but also presents new, experimental directions. Myles plays with further modes of disjuncture, breaking syntax and smash-cutting sentences in unpredictable ways like rapid-shutter or stutter effects, playing on the boundaries of spoken and written modes of poetry, and embedding smaller serial movements within the manuscript, itself a playful framing of books inside books. Yet the poems here seem pitched past intelligence toward a vibe, such that one doesn’t so much interrogate meanings as simply bask.
SNOWFLAKE includes a mini serial project of twelve consecutive “LA/Driving” poems written through dictation into a digital recorder. This process of speaking a poem into being necessarily involves a kind of pre-editing, piecing the poem together in theory and then recording it in a spontaneous overflow: composition as a collection of time in motion. The poems are sometimes collages of inputs—words read on signs, images noticed, mini-jokes and ideas banging around in the head—that become an internal geography:
My need to meet the new technology head on
Tommy’s restaurant
San Clemente State Park
a red car zipping past a lump of cheese
wall they built for some purpose
to look like the houses they built
overhead
peach!
peach!
peach
-from “#3 (Peach…)”
This poem takes on a dreamy west coast American landscape of wild hills, kitsch signage, and disposable architecture but everything zips by so quickly that curated elements like “San Clemente” become less sculptural than sonic, abstracted flavors for the mouth/ear to enjoy. The exclamatory peaches of the ending could be a sudden dive into animal ecstasy (actually eating J. Alfred Prufrock’s peach), or it could be more ironic: a spastic driving game, or a translation of quickly driving past rows of trees in a peach orchard.
Writing while driving is a way of being in the world as a poet and of keeping it new, but Myles cleverly inverts this futurist dynamic by investigating the car as an avatar of the current apocalyptic mania for oil. She builds this theme slowly, beginning in fantasy imagery of the highway as a skein over a chthonic mystery, a metaphor for the aging process or the fragility of life: “some cars seem to erupt from the/ the tar itself/ they seem to pull/ themselves up/ from below the surface of the land/ though I don’t think land. I mean something flat, something/ black/ almost like a water that we’re on/ though a dark water that/ holds us.” Later the writing becomes more explicit about “this thing that’s destroying/ us all,” and provocatively identifies oil as a historical repository of lived emotion: “fluid of everything and everybody/ that ever was here/ we’re draining that/ to just get around” “like we’re driving on our own limited past.” When she writes about “listening to the fossil/ fuel churning/ in my guts” it is incredibly satisfying, a poetry of a changing self that is also a poetry of climate change. The driving poems may be a response to being an urban poet forced by circumstance to deal with highway commuting as a daily practice, but they are also a way of playing with untenable dialectics like Plato’s written versus oral traditions, or Saussure’s abstract language versus objective reality, or even lived experience versus the permanent present tense of recording. Driving becomes a form of poetry, the lanes of traffic like lines of writing: “I don’t know what/ you’re saying// just stay in your/ lines.” By leaning on writing as practice instead of product, the poems are individually smaller, provisional forays like notes-to-self—“car of the day,” Myles writes in one poem—that aggregate into something larger and more satisfying.
Myles is constantly finding different ways to interrogate this existential problem of new writing becoming obsolete and new selves erasing old selves. In “Pencil poem #3”, one of another embedded mini-serial project inside DIFFERENT STREETS, whose numbered titles humorously refer to the stolen pencil used for their production, she writes:
Vacillating
doesn’t help anyone.
It’s a cry for proof
Uncannily the
conditions shift
the late plane moves
everyone and even
though I doubted
now I can’t
I’d like to take the vacillating disk
and drop it in the trash…
The first two lines suggest normative grammar, but by the third line the enjambments have become jagged and syncopated and the syntax shudders apart. This poem ends on a funny off-note, a categorical shrug:
I’m just going to change
my underwear not
my clothes.
I look like a pencil.
This is what I meant.
The last line could so easily end in a colon and go on but instead it simply folds into itself, a permanent suspension. In the same vein, another poem ends similarly by emblazoning the word “Forever” on a line by itself, no period after it; another cuts off humorously with an italicized “oh shut up.”
There are two eponymous “Snowflake” poems in SNOWFLAKE/DIFFERENT STREETS; playfully, one appears in each manuscript. (There is also a poem in SNOWFLAKE with the title of Myles’s previous essay collection THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ICELAND, further entwining Myles various, possibly contemporaneous writing projects.) Oddly, the one in DIFFERENT STREETS recalls more strongly the driving theme in SNOWFLAKE, juxtaposing two words all by themselves on the whole page: “Freeze/ traffic.” Half a joke simply in its brevity in contrast to most of Myles’s poems, these lines wink at the sense that traffic on the highway is often already stopped. Calling this poem “Snowflake”—an image of a beautiful structure that may immediately melt—transforms the joke into a serious appeal for a poetry that could freeze traffic, stop time, record history before it is replaced with more history. A submerged mini-epiphany takes place, like the snowcapped mountains that appear in the distance on clear days in L.A. as a beautiful mirage, wintry stillness set against the summer stillness of urban highway gridlock.
The “Snowflake” poem in SNOWFLAKE is much longer and more complicated. It begins with a series of quizzical non sequiturs, seemingly emanating from different universes but sharing a common syntax and ebullience:
There’s no female
in my position
There’s no man
wow
there’s a raccoon
on the tail
of the plane
and there’s
no one
seeing that now
but me
and there’s no one close
enough right
in here
to see the
further
drawing
stripes or buildings
the bricks
of the world
The scenario remains in constant flux, shifting almost line by line from the symbolic to the imaginary (in the raccoon—a logo? a hallucination?—I read a shade of John Lithgow screaming at the invisible gargoyle on the wing of his airplane in The Twilight Zone Movie) to a zoomed-in God’s perspective on an architectural universe. The connective tissue of the “there is” phrasing implies a kind of continuity, but only in shorthand, building speed out of the column of type so it can later be modulated. The line and stanza breaks are totally irregular, maximizing off-kilterness and torque. The spacey interrupting “wow” is a gesture that Myles frequently resorts to in her poems, an onomatopoetic syllable of overwhelmed emotion as an intervention into language--elsewhere there are “bam”’s and “hwuh”’s and a fanfare of “trumpets”, as if translating thought states into experimental noise like Adam West 60’s style Batman comic explosions.
The poem then shifts gears from the conceptual to the personal:
I wonder what I’ll say about Sadie…
and if they hate
me for moving
her furniture
out and putting
it in storage
I walked past that restaurant
where I was so mad
I could have broke
the glass
I’m the only one in the mood to remember
this me living
There’s a quicksilver quality to this—the sudden inclusion of the name Sadie without a social context, the “they” who arise and subside in small waves. The writing here is driven by overheard anxiety, privacies opened up to become allegorical like incidents watched through the wrong end of binoculars. Details are less important than the impulse behind them, the poignant desire to record a particular moment. The day falls away and the “I” remains, which is where the poem ends, with the dissolution of the present tense into the self—the poem refers to the “year two thousand one/ everything/ transformed”—as time becomes memory like a melting snowflake:
I was so mad
I… lived
for that moment
snowflake
I wasn’t there
not even me
when she put
in they key
and it wouldn’t
turn.
The first poem of SNOWFLAKE takes this idea to its terminus as a poetics: “I hold the day/ I watch the snowflake/ melting.” It could be a sentimental idea, by which each day is a snowflake, unique in its details, in the blizzard of a life. But it is also scary, a reduction of days to their endless ending, life as constant apocalypse. How then is it possible to build a poetic practice out of this outflow? Myles writes, “I know to hold back/ tends to keep the thing/ going but I don’t,” offering a potential strategy—reticence, delay—but then disavowing it, admitting an inability not to keep talking. Instead of “holding back,” then, the poems become overstuffed cornucopias, containing almost too many strands so that the form is built not by development of one idea but by constant churning and turning.
In her memoir-novel INFERNO, Myles interposes autobiographical episodes and memories, dribbling out multiple anecdotes simultaneously in jazzy fragments like cross-cut scenes in a movie. The counterpart technique in her poetry cuts between modes of speech, non sequitur images, and phrases. (Myles titles one poem in SNOWFLAKE “To Weave,” following a fabric metaphor, though her long ribbons of poetry suggest to me more of a braid.) The poem “Smile” in DIFFERENT STREETS begins in a conceptual dark kitchen, cutting into “the peach of/ it” (another Cezanne-y peach!), but “without a good/ light and a sharp knife”. Before we can get comfortable in this kitchen, though, an ambient “drip” like a drippy nose suggests a cold outdoors that then takes over the scenario with the accoutrements of winter: “Today’s cold/ is like the affirmation of the purchase/ of yesterday’s new shirt.” This is the experience of objective correlative, whereby the weather fits itself around human concerns instead of vice versa. But just as it has moved through the wintry streets to arrive at yesterday’s shirt store, the strand of the kitchen returns with the “half-made meal”. This time, though, the cooking while hungry lifts off into literary fantasy, “the incredible possibility/ of hunger on and on like my favorite man/ Frankenstein”. And then the panoply of favorite men multiplies into a digression: “I used to/ think Mark Wahlberg was family.” So now after barely a page the poem contains kitchens, peaches, cold weather, Frankenstein, and Marky Mark as material. Myles then sets about intertwining these motifs, conceptualizing abandonment within family, within home:
So did Tim but close to his death
he told me he was adopted. Every
time he smiled he thought Eileen
is a fool. Or that’s what love looks
like. If I woke and my master was horrified
I would go out into the world with this
enormous hurt. And I have carried mine
for so long I now know it’s nothing special.
It’s just the fall and the sound of her sirens. It’s the agony
of being human. Not a dog who dies maybe six
times in the lives of her masters. Everyone’s phony
and made up. Everyone’s a monster like me.
Now I know everyone.
There are so many plaits woven together: the proximity of death, the fidelity of pets, the invention of the self, seasonal affective disorder and despair and nostalgia and stoicism. The “now” still holds the musing together as a fixed point, but it is the sad-now of hard-won maturity, empowerment tempered by grief. The speaker is simultaneously identified with the dead other, the rejected Frankenstein, and the abandoned master (the word almost identical to “monster”). This monstrosity might be contiguous to the monstrous inhumanity of humans, “not/ the kindest/ of mammals/ with our fucking/ tar…”, but only in a theory of monsters who deserve empathy. The monster is the poet armed with the tool of identification to make life out of words, as Myles writes in another poem:
I am recommending
this as the most
fun I ever
To animate the way
another saw headlights
or sound, to see a pattern
and enter their
body. I’m the galvanizing
I’m the animating
kind. I’m the monster
I shall cry till the
end of my life.
The monster of the “I” is thus partly the monstrosity of the Frankenstein-ed poetry, a sutured product brought from the death of the past “now” back into life. It’s also the monster of the aging self, coming to terms with a body and mind moving always closer to death. The monster is both Frankenstein and the doctor, the poem and the poet, creator and creation. The animating fluid in Myles’s poems is often the names of people; celebrities and acquaintances alike are rendered with first names only—Rae [Armantrout?], Kurt [Cobain?]—as intimates. Beyond the human, there is a profusion of animals (rabbits, birds, dogs, coyotes, raccoons, spiders, fish, cats) always presented eye-to-eye. By engaging relationships, the poems engage loss. The intimacy may begin through a stylized fakeness but it lands somewhere real: “what were/ those lies/ openness/ a picture/ I took/ to show/ the world/ your open/ mouth/ my delight/ in it.”
The poems in SNOWFLAKE and DIFFERENT STREETS can be read as crooked love poems from an alluring older voice toward a younger one: “every woman your/ age/ cute. Every woman/ my age/ wounded &/ glisten.” Yet the last word here is not the expected adjective but a verb, almost an imperative, as if the language of description could force transformation. As an ars poetica, I find this movement into the ungainly totally satisfying. Myles’s off-kilter poem closures are invariably brisk, with flip accelerating rhythms that heave the poems off sudden cliffs. My favorite of these occurs at the end of a “pencil poem” in DIFFERENT STREETS, the poem cut so these words hang in space on a page by themselves, a junky and awesome ars poetica for these new poems that are never new in the first place. It’s worth considering as a mission statement for Myles’s writing over her whole career:
The new poems
are poems of
healing.
But first I’ll
be funny.
Jared White's chapbook This Is What It Is Like To Be Loved By Me will be published by Bloof Books in February 2012. He recently had poems in Sink Review, Esque, and on the Flying Object website, with audio and visual art. He lives in Brooklyn where he is co-owner with Farrah Field of Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop. They just had a baby son named Roman Field White this week.
a BOOK, containing poems: Erín Moure in Translation
by Jeff T. Johnson
She stands on the threshold of the text in which she is put into play.
Erín Moure, The Unmemntioable
The character E.M., sometimes known as Erín Moure, opens her Moleskine notebook and finds nothing. Her notes have vanished. It could be any Moleskine, a brand rather than a specific object, except for a recognizable dog ear and an artifact enfolded in the back pocket. And a new note:
There is a phantasmal poetry and a poetry of the seeing self. There is a miniaturized poetry and an aggrandizing poetry. And there is the poetry that doesn't want to be found. Stop desiring me! I have nothing to reveal. My withdrawal leaves no hole in the panorama.
The words, which are crossed out in the notebook, if not in the text of Erín Moure's The Unmemntioable, are reportedly from E.S., sometimes known as Elisa Sampedrín [a historical specter doing "research on experience" who takes turns seeking and being sought by E.M.; a double and heteronym, an estranged/estranging other]. These words are addressed to E.M., but they also come from Moure and address the reader. Or, they come from poetry [or language] and address all parties. The note takes the place of E.M.'s “musings on the infinite” [e.g., “The infinite is not my-idea-of-the-infinite because it exceeds every object of thought, including its own idea in me”], and can be read as their translation, just as the notebook has been transformed [translated]. Just so, the new note translates itself by legibly negating itself, then re-translates itself [“in a hand not unlike E.S.'s”] as “Je vous avise de brûler la mémoire des cartes et de penser pour vous-même,” which Google translates as “I advise you to burn the memory cards and think for yourself.”
Imagine translation as the placement of one text over another, where the texts necessarily inform one another [touch], as Rosmarie Waldrop describes in A form / of taking / it all: “Would the child know from the start that there are no white pages, that we always write over a text already there?” The animating event [foretold/remembered] of The Unmemntioable is E.M.'s burial of her mother's ashes in Ukraine. The death of her mother is presented as a translation—of her mother, and of herself. Her mother's death translates to her mother's dead body, which is translated to ash, which becomes a relic [or absence; that is, dust and dispersal] in a ritual pilgrimage, a return and taking-leave, a reversal of her mother's emigration as a child from Ukraine. Death is objectified, then the object [death, corpse] is atomized. Her mother's death translates E.M. into a different being, something other than daughter, or even survivor, though her transformation is not without precedent, nor is it unrelated to her birth, which is also a translation. The mother is translated into an other, or a woman is translated into a mother. The daughter, other, makes the mother an other as she differentiates [is born] from her. A process begins at birth, to be completed on the death of the mother. Or, and also, the daughter bears "responsibility for the death of [her] (m)other." This is as close as she [the daughter] can [yet] come to experiencing death. And, as E.S. will write in the "filched" [doubled] notebook: "If experience requires entry into language, then we cannot experience death, for language ceases. There is no remnant." To experience death first-hand, then, is to lose the language to describe it, which, in the only terms we have to use, means we cannot experience death. Perhaps this glitch, this negation, makes the unmentionable The Unmemntioable.
But E.S. continues with another reversal involving the notebook, one that restores [leaves] a remnant. "I left her a new notebook, and I'll fill hers on my own." Depending on how we count, there are anywhere between one and four notebooks. Or there are no notebooks, only a book, or the copy we hold. Perhaps there is one Moleskine, and the rest are imaginary. Or E.S. has simply doubled [replicated] the notebook [or E.M. has done it on her behalf, or Moure has done it for both of them]. If so, there may be two notebooks, as well as their representations in The Unmemntioable: four Moleskines. If we include the "filched Moleskine" inscribed on the cover, that makes five. If the book itself [The Unmemntioable] is [or was] the Moleskine, we add one or double everything. Language itself is replicative, but does it replicate experience [being] or the replication of experience? The answer, of course, is yes: 10 notebooks [and more].
Later in the book, E.S., who has assumed authorship, returns to the glitch that keeps the linguistic slippage in perpetual motion: "That experience itself has its core in the impossibility of experience—a proximity to death—makes me realize that my project can but founder." Off what shore—life or death? Perhaps it is the same shore, which also lies between existence and non-existence.
As she digs a hole for the ashes of her mother [to use Moure's phrasing, which is distinct from mother's ashes, which would not suggest translation as the term is used here], E.M. notes: "[I]n this act ... I enfant mysself [ssic], I enact as I was enacted, infans, I assume the question in the grass for as many and as few years as are left to me." In this way, birth [coming into being] is figured as "the very birth of language." The scene of burial, with its concomitant reflection on origins, further conflates and enmeshes language and the body, both of which carry memory:
When the register burns so does memory as this was passed to writing and the content of a writing burned can no longer be handed back to memory, for writing abolishes memory and as what was written can no longer be passed down, it has no Author in the old sense: no ability to act as proxy to, to verify on behalf of.
The burning of the register registers a transformation of memory in[to] language, just as the body in death is a remembered text that abolishes itself as writing. Language replaces what it represents, and birth is a speaking that eventually replaces the speaker. The death of the Author is gradual, though it takes place in a world in which the Author is always-already dead. As [Moure's] fellow Canadian poet and scholar Rachel Zolf gleans from Moure's Pillage Laud, "The translation always leaves something behind." The language of translation [all language is translative] traces objects and events [people and experience] that are no longer there, or are there under spoken and unspoken [unmemntioable] conditions. "Translation becomes part of the composition and meaning-making processes of gift, receipt, loss; guest, host, hostis," Zolf notes.
This is perhaps a loose sense of translation, which is appropriate in considering Moure's writing. She has theorized and practiced a translation as performance which she calls transelation. This "textual inscription" is necessarily informed by cultural and historical determinations. The translator is a reader and performer of the text who becomes, in the act of transelation, a translated self. Or this is what happened to Erin Mouré, who "was compelled to become Eirin Moure" when she translated a text by Alberto Caeiro, one of Fernando Pessoa's diverse and fully-realized heteronyms. Her essay "The Exhorbitant Body: Translation as Performance" begins: "A practice of reading is always embodied. A translation always translates a reading practice enacted on a text, not simply 'an original text.'" Erín Moure's politics of translation [and I use the current form of her name to indicate the fluency and persistence of her thought] favor "exorbitant language effects" of poetry, which do not smoothly pass from one language to another, but, when taken into account, alter and expand the possibilities of sense-making in the target language. This process calls for strategies that similarly alter and expand the possibilities of translation. Fundamentally [irrevocably], the translator is present in the act of translation [as a cultural mediator and subject position, even a precarious or destabilized one], which may manifest as a literal presence of the translator in the translation itself. Moure finds herself, or her surroundings, in her translations of Pessoa/Caeiro:
As a body, I am, of course, in and of a place; I am sited. ... My own corporeal sitedness inflected my translation of Caeiro/Pessoa, and is visible in the English version. Rural Toronto appears there instead of rural Portugal, and my sitedness let me as "I"-Ego become a Pessoan, or even Caeiroist (second-generation) heteronym, appearing in the work itself.
If Pessoa enfants Caeiro, Caeiro enfants Eirin, "an excessive subjectivity" or "habitation, in and of" Moure. Critics have of course accused Moure [with Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person] of creating a "false translation," though she acknowledges the acknowledgement that the work is a translation. The language, even that of negation, makes it so. [A typed note in place of a plaque on a museum wall in The Unmemntioable: "Even we no longer know what was written here."]
And so does our experience of translation—as placement of one text over another, where the texts necessarily inform one another [touch]--make it so. Moure is responsible for the conveying of that experience; she provides the textual means for our conveyance of the potential sense of the text—that is, the [sensual] experience of the text, which is both our experience and the text's [represented/translated] experience. The text is an embodiment, a vanished register that appears to us in a flickering loop, a signal slippage that must return to terms [to re-place a concept of poetic language from Moure's essay "The Anti-Anæsthetic"]. It [the book, the text, one written over the other] is an impossible object, one that describes itself away: The Unmemntioable.
"Though my mother is gone, her face still claims me," E.M. notes, after she reclaims the book. [Though it may be foolish to read sequence as linear, we can at least speak of before and after in the book]. This resemblance [return] might refute, and certainly complicates, any notion that what is written over disappears, even if it is absorbed. The [textual] mother, then, is replaced perhaps only in the sense that she is re-placed [returned], or her death [as ash] is re-placed, where she was born, and by the one to whom she gave birth [elsewhere]. There is a subtle metaphysical and metalinguistic revision—even a re-translation, if not a resolution. In recognizing her mother's face, presumably in her own, E.M. recognizes the persistence of her mother in her own being. It is a relatively understated way of coming to terms with a surrogate realization earlier delivered by E.S.: "[O]ne of the last things I can do that my living mother wanted: to return her to the soil in Ukraine where she was born." A metaphysical translation ["The transfer of desire between bodies," as E.S. puts it] is embodied in the recognition of a resemblance between E.M. and her mother. Something is left behind in translation, but something vital carries over, which alters and expands the possibilities of sense-making for the character E.M., and for the reader.
There is a note at the bottom of page 27. The main body of the page is in a light-grey [faded] font: a list that is a poem in short lines ending in periods. The note is in a solid black font of a reduced size. It reads, in part, "If I were you, I would turn the page now. There is no more to be gleaned here. What is it that you want to know?" I do you a disservice to continue. Pick up the book and travel on your own.
Works Cited
Moure, Erín. My Beloved Wager: Essays From a Writing Practice. Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest Press, 2009.
Moure, Erín. The Unmemntioable. Toronto, Ontario: Anansi Press, 2012.
Waldrop, Rosmarie. A form / of taking / it all. Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1990.
Zolf, Rachel. "Like plugging into an electric circuit." Canadian Literature 210/211 (2011): 230-41. Print.
JEFF T. JOHNSON'S poetry is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Boston Review, smoking glue gun, dandelion magazine, and The Organism for Poetic Research's PELT. Other writing has appeared in Sink Review, The Rumpus, Coldfront, and elsewhere. With Claire Donato, he collaborates on SPECIAL AMERICA. He lives in Brooklyn, is Editor in Chief at LIT, and edits Dewclaw. He teaches at The New School and St. John's University. For more information, visit jefftjohnson.wordpress.com.
She stands on the threshold of the text in which she is put into play.
Erín Moure, The Unmemntioable
The character E.M., sometimes known as Erín Moure, opens her Moleskine notebook and finds nothing. Her notes have vanished. It could be any Moleskine, a brand rather than a specific object, except for a recognizable dog ear and an artifact enfolded in the back pocket. And a new note:
There is a phantasmal poetry and a poetry of the seeing self. There is a miniaturized poetry and an aggrandizing poetry. And there is the poetry that doesn't want to be found. Stop desiring me! I have nothing to reveal. My withdrawal leaves no hole in the panorama.
The words, which are crossed out in the notebook, if not in the text of Erín Moure's The Unmemntioable, are reportedly from E.S., sometimes known as Elisa Sampedrín [a historical specter doing "research on experience" who takes turns seeking and being sought by E.M.; a double and heteronym, an estranged/estranging other]. These words are addressed to E.M., but they also come from Moure and address the reader. Or, they come from poetry [or language] and address all parties. The note takes the place of E.M.'s “musings on the infinite” [e.g., “The infinite is not my-idea-of-the-infinite because it exceeds every object of thought, including its own idea in me”], and can be read as their translation, just as the notebook has been transformed [translated]. Just so, the new note translates itself by legibly negating itself, then re-translates itself [“in a hand not unlike E.S.'s”] as “Je vous avise de brûler la mémoire des cartes et de penser pour vous-même,” which Google translates as “I advise you to burn the memory cards and think for yourself.”
Imagine translation as the placement of one text over another, where the texts necessarily inform one another [touch], as Rosmarie Waldrop describes in A form / of taking / it all: “Would the child know from the start that there are no white pages, that we always write over a text already there?” The animating event [foretold/remembered] of The Unmemntioable is E.M.'s burial of her mother's ashes in Ukraine. The death of her mother is presented as a translation—of her mother, and of herself. Her mother's death translates to her mother's dead body, which is translated to ash, which becomes a relic [or absence; that is, dust and dispersal] in a ritual pilgrimage, a return and taking-leave, a reversal of her mother's emigration as a child from Ukraine. Death is objectified, then the object [death, corpse] is atomized. Her mother's death translates E.M. into a different being, something other than daughter, or even survivor, though her transformation is not without precedent, nor is it unrelated to her birth, which is also a translation. The mother is translated into an other, or a woman is translated into a mother. The daughter, other, makes the mother an other as she differentiates [is born] from her. A process begins at birth, to be completed on the death of the mother. Or, and also, the daughter bears "responsibility for the death of [her] (m)other." This is as close as she [the daughter] can [yet] come to experiencing death. And, as E.S. will write in the "filched" [doubled] notebook: "If experience requires entry into language, then we cannot experience death, for language ceases. There is no remnant." To experience death first-hand, then, is to lose the language to describe it, which, in the only terms we have to use, means we cannot experience death. Perhaps this glitch, this negation, makes the unmentionable The Unmemntioable.
But E.S. continues with another reversal involving the notebook, one that restores [leaves] a remnant. "I left her a new notebook, and I'll fill hers on my own." Depending on how we count, there are anywhere between one and four notebooks. Or there are no notebooks, only a book, or the copy we hold. Perhaps there is one Moleskine, and the rest are imaginary. Or E.S. has simply doubled [replicated] the notebook [or E.M. has done it on her behalf, or Moure has done it for both of them]. If so, there may be two notebooks, as well as their representations in The Unmemntioable: four Moleskines. If we include the "filched Moleskine" inscribed on the cover, that makes five. If the book itself [The Unmemntioable] is [or was] the Moleskine, we add one or double everything. Language itself is replicative, but does it replicate experience [being] or the replication of experience? The answer, of course, is yes: 10 notebooks [and more].
Later in the book, E.S., who has assumed authorship, returns to the glitch that keeps the linguistic slippage in perpetual motion: "That experience itself has its core in the impossibility of experience—a proximity to death—makes me realize that my project can but founder." Off what shore—life or death? Perhaps it is the same shore, which also lies between existence and non-existence.
As she digs a hole for the ashes of her mother [to use Moure's phrasing, which is distinct from mother's ashes, which would not suggest translation as the term is used here], E.M. notes: "[I]n this act ... I enfant mysself [ssic], I enact as I was enacted, infans, I assume the question in the grass for as many and as few years as are left to me." In this way, birth [coming into being] is figured as "the very birth of language." The scene of burial, with its concomitant reflection on origins, further conflates and enmeshes language and the body, both of which carry memory:
When the register burns so does memory as this was passed to writing and the content of a writing burned can no longer be handed back to memory, for writing abolishes memory and as what was written can no longer be passed down, it has no Author in the old sense: no ability to act as proxy to, to verify on behalf of.
The burning of the register registers a transformation of memory in[to] language, just as the body in death is a remembered text that abolishes itself as writing. Language replaces what it represents, and birth is a speaking that eventually replaces the speaker. The death of the Author is gradual, though it takes place in a world in which the Author is always-already dead. As [Moure's] fellow Canadian poet and scholar Rachel Zolf gleans from Moure's Pillage Laud, "The translation always leaves something behind." The language of translation [all language is translative] traces objects and events [people and experience] that are no longer there, or are there under spoken and unspoken [unmemntioable] conditions. "Translation becomes part of the composition and meaning-making processes of gift, receipt, loss; guest, host, hostis," Zolf notes.
This is perhaps a loose sense of translation, which is appropriate in considering Moure's writing. She has theorized and practiced a translation as performance which she calls transelation. This "textual inscription" is necessarily informed by cultural and historical determinations. The translator is a reader and performer of the text who becomes, in the act of transelation, a translated self. Or this is what happened to Erin Mouré, who "was compelled to become Eirin Moure" when she translated a text by Alberto Caeiro, one of Fernando Pessoa's diverse and fully-realized heteronyms. Her essay "The Exhorbitant Body: Translation as Performance" begins: "A practice of reading is always embodied. A translation always translates a reading practice enacted on a text, not simply 'an original text.'" Erín Moure's politics of translation [and I use the current form of her name to indicate the fluency and persistence of her thought] favor "exorbitant language effects" of poetry, which do not smoothly pass from one language to another, but, when taken into account, alter and expand the possibilities of sense-making in the target language. This process calls for strategies that similarly alter and expand the possibilities of translation. Fundamentally [irrevocably], the translator is present in the act of translation [as a cultural mediator and subject position, even a precarious or destabilized one], which may manifest as a literal presence of the translator in the translation itself. Moure finds herself, or her surroundings, in her translations of Pessoa/Caeiro:
As a body, I am, of course, in and of a place; I am sited. ... My own corporeal sitedness inflected my translation of Caeiro/Pessoa, and is visible in the English version. Rural Toronto appears there instead of rural Portugal, and my sitedness let me as "I"-Ego become a Pessoan, or even Caeiroist (second-generation) heteronym, appearing in the work itself.
If Pessoa enfants Caeiro, Caeiro enfants Eirin, "an excessive subjectivity" or "habitation, in and of" Moure. Critics have of course accused Moure [with Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person] of creating a "false translation," though she acknowledges the acknowledgement that the work is a translation. The language, even that of negation, makes it so. [A typed note in place of a plaque on a museum wall in The Unmemntioable: "Even we no longer know what was written here."]
And so does our experience of translation—as placement of one text over another, where the texts necessarily inform one another [touch]--make it so. Moure is responsible for the conveying of that experience; she provides the textual means for our conveyance of the potential sense of the text—that is, the [sensual] experience of the text, which is both our experience and the text's [represented/translated] experience. The text is an embodiment, a vanished register that appears to us in a flickering loop, a signal slippage that must return to terms [to re-place a concept of poetic language from Moure's essay "The Anti-Anæsthetic"]. It [the book, the text, one written over the other] is an impossible object, one that describes itself away: The Unmemntioable.
"Though my mother is gone, her face still claims me," E.M. notes, after she reclaims the book. [Though it may be foolish to read sequence as linear, we can at least speak of before and after in the book]. This resemblance [return] might refute, and certainly complicates, any notion that what is written over disappears, even if it is absorbed. The [textual] mother, then, is replaced perhaps only in the sense that she is re-placed [returned], or her death [as ash] is re-placed, where she was born, and by the one to whom she gave birth [elsewhere]. There is a subtle metaphysical and metalinguistic revision—even a re-translation, if not a resolution. In recognizing her mother's face, presumably in her own, E.M. recognizes the persistence of her mother in her own being. It is a relatively understated way of coming to terms with a surrogate realization earlier delivered by E.S.: "[O]ne of the last things I can do that my living mother wanted: to return her to the soil in Ukraine where she was born." A metaphysical translation ["The transfer of desire between bodies," as E.S. puts it] is embodied in the recognition of a resemblance between E.M. and her mother. Something is left behind in translation, but something vital carries over, which alters and expands the possibilities of sense-making for the character E.M., and for the reader.
There is a note at the bottom of page 27. The main body of the page is in a light-grey [faded] font: a list that is a poem in short lines ending in periods. The note is in a solid black font of a reduced size. It reads, in part, "If I were you, I would turn the page now. There is no more to be gleaned here. What is it that you want to know?" I do you a disservice to continue. Pick up the book and travel on your own.
Works Cited
Moure, Erín. My Beloved Wager: Essays From a Writing Practice. Edmonton, Alberta: NeWest Press, 2009.
Moure, Erín. The Unmemntioable. Toronto, Ontario: Anansi Press, 2012.
Waldrop, Rosmarie. A form / of taking / it all. Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1990.
Zolf, Rachel. "Like plugging into an electric circuit." Canadian Literature 210/211 (2011): 230-41. Print.
JEFF T. JOHNSON'S poetry is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Boston Review, smoking glue gun, dandelion magazine, and The Organism for Poetic Research's PELT. Other writing has appeared in Sink Review, The Rumpus, Coldfront, and elsewhere. With Claire Donato, he collaborates on SPECIAL AMERICA. He lives in Brooklyn, is Editor in Chief at LIT, and edits Dewclaw. He teaches at The New School and St. John's University. For more information, visit jefftjohnson.wordpress.com.
Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson and the Poetry of Four Saints
They were an anomalous pair; Virgil Thomson, an untraveled, mostly unknown composer born in Kansas City and Gertrude Stein, the portentous figure who reigned over the Parisian art scene, twenty two years his senior. During the winter of 1925-26, they met and Stein described their relationship in “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”:
Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein became friends and saw each other a great deal. Virgil Thomson had put a number of Gertrude Stein’s things to music, Susie Asado, Preciosilla and Capital Capitals…He had understood Satie undoubtedly and he had a comprehension of his own prosody. He understood a great deal of Gertrude Stein’s…She delighted in listening to her words framed by his music. They saw a great deal of each other.”[1]
Eight years later their most prominent collaboration would come to fruition. In February 1934 Four Saints in Three Acts, an Opera to be Sung with text by Stein and music by Virgil Thomson premiered at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. The cast, made up solely of black singers, commenced singing the words “To love, to love her so” a peppy, waltz-like ditty, while feathered trees and ornamental arches shone under the dingy stage light. Four Saints then moved to Broadway, sixty performances were performed in six weeks, making it the longest running opera in Broadway history.[2]
That Four Saints enjoyed so much popularity is a testament to the work and also to the sophistication of the audience; it is doubtful that an opera of its kind would elicit such success on Broadway even now, when Stein is even more extolled than she was nearly a century ago. While Stein is considered to be one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, her work is by no means traditionally accessible. Thomson wrote that “The literary consensus is that the music is lovely but the poetry absurd; whereas the music world, at least nine tenths of it, takes the view that Stein’s words are great literature but that the music is infantile.”[3] Wallace Stevens stated that “While this is an elaborate bit of pervisity in every respect: text, settings, choreography, it is most agreeable musically.”[4]
The text of Four Saints begins with this quirky quatrain:
To know to know to love her so
Four saints prepare for saints
It makes it well fish
Four saints it makes it well fish
While the opera is entitled Four Saints in Three Acts, the text soon abolishes the idea that the title describes the work. The most important saints are Saint Therese of Avila and Saint Ignatius of Loyola, but in the opera over sixty other saints are mentioned, many of them invented, some of them perhaps alter egos of Stein herself. Furthermore, the number of the acts is indeterminable; an ACT ONE presents itself, then an ACT TWO, but then another ACT ONE appears, and shortly afterwards, an Act One (no caps). From then onward there materializes an Act II, Act III, another Act III, Act Four and so on, all of the acts interspersed with various scenes which often appear out of order, or repeating themselves.
While it is considered an opera, it fails to contain any of the traditional components; it is devoid of plot, character, development, stage directions, or scenery. The conversations are non-linear, the dialogue rhythmic yet often nonsensical.
Begin suddenly not with sisters.
If a great many people were deceived who would be
by the way.
To mount it up.
Up hill.
Four saints are never three.
Three saints are never four.
Four saints are never left altogether.
Three saints are never idle.
Four saints are leave it to me.
Three saints when this you see.
Begin three saints.
Begin four saints.
Two and two saints.
One and three saints.
In place.
Stein’s text has few relations to a conventional opera libretto and rather resembles an avante-garde poetic work, complete with irregular tabs, prose sections, random lists, frequent repetition and occasional rhymes. Thomson, in his selected writings asserted that “my theory was that if a text is set correctly for the sound of it, the meaning will take care of itself…With meanings already abstracted, or absent, or so multiplied that choice among them was impossible, there was no temptation toward tonal illustration…You could make a setting for sound and syntax only, then add, if needed, an accompaiment equally functional.
True to his word, the music Thomson wrote for Four Saints featured relatively uncomplicated, diatonic harmonies. While Stein’s text seems often impenetrable, the music often sounds elementary, the type found in Protestant hymnals, punctuated by straightforward melodies and plagal cadences. Thomson infiltrated Four Saints with chant-like passages, waltzes, foxtrot, ragtime and even tangos, which seemed to exemplify the sonic existence of mid-century American life. Even his metres were considered conservative; many of the movements sound like waltzes, a pesante oompah-pah that mimed the time signature of marching bands or country dance halls. The music was used as annotation, never overshadowing the text. Unlike Stein, Thomson was not and is not considered a sophisticated artist. Olin Downes, then chief music critic of the New York Times, considered the music of Four Saints inadequate, “resultant upon a lack of technical underpinning and flimsy orchestration and the slapdash way of it all.”[5] Anthony Tomassini, current chief critic at the Times (who penned a biography of Thomson) wrote:
In comparison with composers of equal name recognition, Thomson’s music has been ignored…Thomson was convinced that the qualities he cultivated in his music—clarity, directness, textural simplicity—were the very things held against it by many composers and critics, and by the more cerebral academics…Ours has been an era that placed inordinate value on complexity and methodical rigor in new music.”[6]
Yet Thomson was not attempting to rival Stein’s text in ambiguity or complexity. He wanted rather to emulate the rhythm of the language while remaining ensconced in tonality, adding shape when it was deemed necessary. “Something lovely happened when Thomson’s calculatedly simpliefied music was joined to Stein’s calculatedly obscure images,” Alex Ross writes in his book The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, “Each half of the equation drew out unexpected qualities in the other—sensual strangeness in the music, elegiac warmth in the words.”[7] Thomson suggested Four Saints to be a “a text of great obscurity. Even so, when mated to music, it works.[8]”
Stein’s language in Four Saints is undoubtedly influenced by the significance she places on the general concept of Time and how she (or the audience) is affected by it. She described an experience of being at the theater which made her uneasy because “your emotion concerning the play is always either behind or ahead of the play at which you are looking and to which you are listening. Your emotion as a member of the audience is never going on at the same time as the action of the play.”[9] As a writer, she was particularly sensitive to the relations between visual, auditory and emotional sensations. She was aware that a reader’s or audience’s conceptions were constantly in flux because of the transitory essence of Time, which plows forward as a play set in motion. Stein spoke about the idea of landscape, which helped her grasp this dichotomy:
I felt that if a play was exactly like a landscape then there would be no difficulty about the emotion of the person looking on at the play behind or ahead of the play because the landscape does not have to make acquaintance. You may have to make acquaintance with it, but it does not with you, it is there and so the play being written the relation between you at any time is so exactly that that it is of no importance unless you look at it.[10]
In Four Saints, the landscape which she constructs is language itself, the innate rhythms and leitmotifs of which form an overall cogent architecture. This façade—for it indeed is a façade, as all works of art are in essence—is like a still-life painted with a few colours only. These several tints are like the four saints which Stein introduces in the title, they are never just four saints, just as the several colours blend with each other to create more startling hues. Plot, character development never materialize, yet the landscape of her sentences and syntax appear as a extraordinary backdrop. The landscape that she construes deconstructs language to its most childlike forms: simple descriptions, vernacular, and repetition, repetition, repetition. The illogic and absurdity of the texts results from her simple sentences never belonging to the same semantic fields, yet the stillness is there that allows the audience to “make acquaintance with it.”
Large pigeons in small trees.
Large pigeons in small trees.
Come panic come.
Come close.
Acts three acts.
Come close to croquet.
Four saints.
Rejoice saints rejoin saints recommence some reinvite.
The strange simplicity of Stein’s text become beguilingly comprehensible when joined by Thomson’s music, which sounds as if it may be sung by school children. The odd assemblage that comes about when the alliterated words are put together (pigeons, panic; come, close, croquet) form a type of haiku-like cell which enhances the surreal mental images that such a verse conjures. Yet even with the countless repetitions of sentences and words, no linear pattern becomes evident. According to Franziska Gygax in her book Gender and Genre in Gertrude Stein “Stein seems to explore a certain word or attitude and then all of a sudden it is dismissed and a new word or mini-topic is introduced.”[11] The following lines demonstrate this:
They might in at most not leave out an egg. An egg
and add some. Some and sum. Add sum. Add some.
Let it in around.
With seas.
With knees.
With keys.
With pleases.
Go and know.
In clouded.
Included.
Saint Therese and attachment.
With any one please.
No one to be left behind and enclosure. Suddenly two
see.
Two and ten.
Saint two and ten.
This type of word play contains all the hallmarks of a children’s rhyming game. There is a playfulness that is not contrived, a seemingly effortless flow of ideas. Her use of homophones in the second line uncannily resembles a toddler’s first grapplings with vocabulary. The fourth line introduces the repetition of the word “with” in combination with the rhyming “seas,” “knees,” “keys” and the gerund “pleases.” The next section features the repetition of the syllable “in” (“In clouded”. “Included”). It is made clear that this section is a word plan on the word “within”, a quasi-guessing game akin to the board game Taboo where the contestants are allowed to say any related words except for the one printed on the card, which their team is supposed to determine. “Most not leave out an egg” Stein writes in the first line, akin to a child whose pronunciation has not yet been polished. And in the last section “No one to be left behind and enclosure.” Thus, within. Gygax pointed out that repetition within the play encompasses the spectator without ever “limiting his or her reception in either time or space.” Since Four Saints does not follow a sequential plot line nor a fixed number of characters, more attention is focused on the landscape of Stein’s language.
Virgil Thomson was aware of the natural and almost instinctive rhythm of the text.
“For with meanings jumbled and syntax violated, but with the words themselves all the more shockingly present, I could put those texts to music with a minimum of temptation toward the emotional conventions [and] spend my whole effort on the rhythm of the language and its specific Anglo-American sound.”[12]
Thomson’s setting was the ideal musical realization of Stein’s words, perhaps because it was minus the hermetic and sometimes ungraspable quality of the text. Some of the songs resemble rhythmic exercises, such as in the section Saint Therese Act One which begins with the choir singing “Saint Therese can know the difference between singing and women.” In the following section they never knew about it green beans Thomson alternates a choral-like segment with a rhythmic recitative “Planting it green means that it is protected from the wind and they never knew about it” while the snare drums rolls underneath the tenor’s spoken words.
Much of the libretto of Four Saints sounds like snatches of personal conversation; an intimate tone prevails, often with allusions to sexuality:
Did wish did want did at most agree that it was not
when they had met that they were separated longitudinally.
While it escapes it add to it just as it did when it has
and does with it in that to intend to intensively and sound. Is
there a difference between a sound a hiss a kiss a as well.
(Scene Four)
In “Composition as Explanation” Stein states that she writes what “everybody knows” and “everybody says”. Therefore writing for her is rearranging and collaging of common dialogue in which she weaves her own thought with the vernacular of daily life. Playwright Thornton Wilder wrote about Four Saints that:
One of the aspects of the play that most upsets some readers is what might be called “the irruption of the daily life” into the texture of the work. Miss Stein chooses her illustrations from the life about her. She introduces her friends, her dogs, her neighbors...[13]
Thomson, in his challenge to provide the musical counterpart for such a work, also wrote “what he knew”; before writing Four Saints, he had only been composing for about seven years, and mostly for the church, especially for South Baptist and Episcopalian services, settings for organ and chorus. Four Saints brims with the hymns and folk songs of his Kansas city upbringing. Still, the text of Four Saints seems to be more about Gertrude Stein’s inner thoughts rather than about Saint Therese and Saint Ignatius. However in dealing with this dichotomy between so-called characters and herself as a subject her tone is always playful; her words subtly autobiographical without being self-referential. She wrote that “A saint a real saint never does anything, a martyr does something but a really good saint does nothing, and so I wanted the have the Four Saints who did nothing and I wrote the Four Saints in Three Acts and they did nothing and that was everything.”[14] Stein’s postmodern approach to writing challenged the notion of both opera and autobiography in the sense that she was aware that the dynamic of written text cannot produce one “right” meaning. Therefore multiple notions of the characters and the self are evident.
Four Saints, which combined the creative instincts of two American artists, ultimately becomes not simply a piece of music nor a literary masterwork, but a “performance text” which predates our contemporary society’s penchant for cross-genre or performance art which is now championed by such visionaries as Marina Abramovic, Laurie Anderson and Anne Carson. In an article written by Jane Bouwers she put it this way: “Stein tried to reconcile writing and performance so that her writing could be performed, and so that in performance, the words would be as much a reflection of her mind as they had been when she wrote them down.[15]” For Stein, a lesbian who lived and created many of her works years before the sexual revolution, the aspect of her writing as performance was not just central, but necessary as a way of acting out/through language the challenges of identity. Therefore many of the invented saints in the work and the constant questioning of the main saints (Therese and Ignatius) point to Stein’s perpetual examination of her own identity as a woman and a homosexual. Incidentally, Thomson was also a homosexual, which may shed light on his unquestioning acceptance of the ambiguities of Stein’s libretto.
John Rockwell, who reviewed Four Saints for the New York Times thought that Four Saints was seriously flawed musically but wrote that “from today's postmodernist perspective, it takes on a timeless charm, with a gently knowing profundity and an elegance of musical craft that make it a masterpiece, no qualifications necessary.”[16] Almost all the commentary on Thomson’s music—though emphasizing his lack of sophisticated composition skills—points out the perfection of his musical settings for Stein’s spoken text. Even today, nearly a century after the premiere of Four Saints, Thomson’s deceptivelysimple musical vernacular finds an ideal mutuality in the prismatic and unjaded complexities of Stein’s language.
[1] Gertude Stein. Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933) 227,228
[2] Steven Watson. Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) 3-4
[3] Virgil Thomson. Virgil Thomson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 242.
[4] Holly Stevens. Letters of Wallace Stevens (New York; Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 267.
[5] Anthony Tomassini, Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 261.
[6] Tomassini., 6.
[7] Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2007), 140.
[8] Virgil Thomson, Music with Words: A Composer’s View, 52.
[9] Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 93.
[10] Stein, 122
[11] Franzisca Gygax. Gender and Genre in Gertrude Stein (Wesport: Greenwood Press, 1998), 40.
[12] Thomson. Music with Words: A Composer’s View, 52.
[13] Thornton Wilder. Introduction to Gertrude Stein’s The Geographical History of America (New York: Random House, 1936),11-12.
[14] Gertrude Stein. Everybody’s Autobiography (New York: Random House,1937), 112.
[15] Jane Bowers. “The Writer in the Theater: Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts” in Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein ed. Michael J. Hoffman (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1986) 212.
[16] John Rockwell. The New York Times, November 14, 1986.
Cosmology at the Glass: Ambiguity in Tree of Life, Melancholia and Another Earth
by Richard Scheiwe
“Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me.”
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
We sit in the movie theater, quietly, having watched a nearly two-and-a-half-hour epic—credits rolling, sound of a breeze fanning. Then, a piano solo. In Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, a movie thirty years in the making, a flame is lit at the beginning and a voice-over asks, “What are we to you?” In the movie’s stern epigraph, God asks of Job, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?” After being introduced to this overture of grief, and 13.7 billion years of history—the gestation and evolution of the universe and the birth of the child character, Jack—we are on our way through a loose and nonlinear narrative. Such is the art of Malick in Tree of Life.
Romantics settle themselves with the apropos impulse to represent the transcendental; worldly matters—whatever it is we experience sensually—are means to a metaphysical end. But more and more the metaphysical is submitting to the empirical with the ever-expanding field of cosmology and the anti-instinctual world of the physics-of-the-small, the quantum world. Our worldview is changing at an exponentially quickening pace. There’s too much information, and discerning what’s worthwhile versus what’s dross is becoming more complex. These three films arrest the viewer with the grand questions of life: What are we doing here? Where did we come from? Where are we going? But all three cast these queries in the light of knowledge and understanding that we as a society could not have been privy to just a decade ago. What if simple contradictions have governed life from the beginning? What if the universe is, in fact, a multiverse? Mirror-image universes that suddenly appear, confronting us with our “doubles”? What if time should cease to exist?
Questions will yield more questions, and ambiguity leads to a beautifully dysteleological view of the universe. In these films, events stall Time and human travelers in their life dramas; living becomes secondary to the questioning of place in the grand scheme of things. For Tree of Life, the concern is whether to live a life of grace or of nature, each idea represented subtly by the main child’s mother and father, creating slow-moving tensions that mature their young boy, Jack. But this is not a conventional story about progenitor and offspring; it is a story about a boy and his father. The adult Jack (Sean Penn) has regrettably assimilated his father’s rough beliefs and downward glances into his adult self; his father (Brad Pitt), a beleaguered inventor and engineer, plays Bach and Brahms on the organ and blasts symphonies throughout the house, hinting at a life that could have been. Late in the movie, his sense of personal failure becomes clear; he narrates in voice-over with a simple non-diegetic etude playing: “I wanted to be loved because I was great; a big man. Now I’m nothin’. Love. The glory around us: trees, birds. I lived in shame. I dishonored it all and didn’t know it was the glory. A foolish man.” And subsequently the child, whose subconscious speaks, “Father. Mother. Always you wrestle inside me.” As in many cases, the ills of the father spill over into the son.
Lar’s von Trier’s Melancholia and Mike Cahill’s Another Earth are considered here because they share a similar impulse with Malick’s Tree of Life; the close proximity of their release dates (all within a few months of each other) belies an acceptance of the reality-shifting tropes offered by cosmology: in order for our reality to make sense, there must exist multiple, parallel universes, and at the very least, other planets just like ours.
Melancholia foregrounds a bride’s (Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst) mental illness against the backdrop of her opulent wedding reception. Purposeful attention is given to the use of the word “melancholia” (melancholy, of course) over that of “depression”. Whereas melancholy is now an outdated word for the affliction, it also supposes a more metaphysical design rather than a purely scientific/biological/chemical one. This distinction, of the spiritual versus the physical, dominates Melancholia. The primary opening scene reveals the newly married couple en route to the reception, which is being held at a sprawling estate. On the way there the car in which they are being chauffeured gets stuck in the mud; they each take turns attempting to extricate the vehicle. They are going to be late, very late, for their own reception, but the laughter and amusement they share over this incident is the film’s one and only lighthearted moment. Once they arrive at the reception, everything—mostly due to the bride’s mood—elides into the grey. Like a typical upper-class drama, familial discord and non-sympathies simmer beneath the superficial blanket of celebration. Obviously, the riches of life are no match for the senselessness of unattended depression, and life turns irrevocably for the couple.
“Melancholia,” we will discover, is not only the affliction of the self; a “super-earth,” named Melancholia, which until recently had been hiding behind the sun, appears to be on a collision course with Earth. The stakes have increased and however severe Justine’s illness, it no longer sustains the focus, as the inhabitants of earth are faced now with their Doomsday scenario. Prior to the opening scene between the bride and groom, von Trier added an overture of his own, much like Malick in Tree of Life. In von Trier’s overture, a complicated visual allegory plays out. Justine stares past us looking emptied as the charred bodies of doves fall from the sky in the background; she stands on the mansion’s estate in a matted silver light. The whole scene looks childlike, as if it were in the yard of a dollhouse. Faux leaves fall against what looks to be a Breughel. Then earth, then Melancholia. It is all in the slowest of motion: a mother “running” with child in arms, a horse falling to the grass. Dragonflies and butterflies swarm. Gravity seems to fail. A tree on fire. Justine, in her bridal gown, much like Ophelia, floats down a river teeming with lily pads. Now, clothes changed, her “other” self runs toward a boy who’s innocently whittling. They look up, and planets collide.
In Another Earth a similar narrative of exo-planetary encountering occurs, but unlike in Melancholia, the new earth-like planet is benign and actually inhabited by “doubles” of those inhabiting “old” earth (our earth). Written and directed by newcomer Cahill, the premise is narratively simple yet as allegorically replete as Melancholia. A new earth comes to represent another chance for the protagonist, Rhoda (Brit Marling) who had a promising future destroyed by an accident in which she killed two women. This occurred one night as she was driving, distracted by her admiring of the other earth. Whereas before she was to study physics at MIT, post-accident she works as a janitor at the high school from which she recently graduated. A little ways into the narrative, a contest is announced that will allow the winner to travel to the other earth, (communication having been established by this point, and an understanding reached that everyone who exists on Earth-1 also exists, to varying degrees, on the other earth). Therefore, those who she killed in the accident may still be alive.
Creation doesn’t factor into the schemes of Melancholia or Another Earth, insofar as the sudden appearance of exo-planets similar to our earth forces humankind to question preconceived understandings. And whereas it may seem that Tree of Life is a film about God and the presence of a Creator at the Beginning, also supposing design and purpose, it is not. Grand questions are directed to a “who,” but whoever “who” is is anyone’s guess, and the ambiguity behind the uncertainty is the complex layering of Malick’s preternatural world. The birth of the universe scene in Tree of Life overwhelms us with what appears to be a great ball of fire and is, in reality, the birth of a star—stardust being the grains of matter from which everything we know to be physical evolved. At this moment, the film covers us and our sense of Time vanishes, though we are to understand that we’re watching billions of years of evolution in a promised buildup towards a resolution of alluded familial tensions and dynamics. Unanswerable questions of place and presence—the “where were you” and the “who are you”—silently repeat themselves at the grandeur of this gestation.
Structurally, we may think “this cannot be happening,” and this scene is in fact the main point of dissent among critics and viewers alike. But immediately following the twenty minutes or so of cosmic and earthly development, a child is born. It is Jack, whose childhood perception sets the overall tone of the film, promulgating the nonlinear attachment to this reality. Everything—the overture, the loss of the brother/son, the universe and earth’s naissance—leading up to Jack’s birth serves a simple purpose: all of this is what has gone into the making this child, who is justly an archetypal representation of all children, of all of us who come into being. This is what it takes—and has taken—for us to be alive: the universe had to be born, and each of us embodies it.
A sudden loss binds these stories together—the loss of an other which inevitably precipitates the loss of self—and the stories unfold against a complicated fabric of the cosmos. We may suppose that the necessary loss of childhood innocence (of Eden) and thus the integration of the knowledgeable self into a fallen world, happened for Jack long before he lost his brother, (as well as for Rhoda before her accident) which is the overture of grief and loss that pulses through the film. The loss of Eden, represented by adult Jack, mostly alone and living/working in cold, bright places, displays Malick’s belief in nature rather than grace, and is not to be confused with didacticism or proselytizing. Neither the state of grace nor nature was present at the birth of the universe in this sense; the universe simply existed, in that dysteleological sense. Both states act out a tug-of-war and are necessary for our equilibrium. It would appear neither may be fully embodied by any one individual, and each protagonist in these films will slide one way or the other. Nevertheless, ideally we’ll all end up at the same place, wherever and whatever that is. For Malick, it is a less symbolic and a more real vanishing of time, as if this world were only a hint at what it is to exist in a place where the past, present, and future occur in tandem. If only we could comprehend such an idea.
What these three films attempt to reach is the nature of a reality unproven and unsustained, the hypothetical quandaries of metaphysical searching. At this point in time, we can’t answer the big questions or prove what science adamantly says must be there, but the answers and the empirical data approach us, and the films appeal to the fear we may encounter with such a dramatic change in our view of the universe. What they make us think is as integral to the message as how they make us think, and the dialogue of beauty veers back and forth between subtlety and critical mass, exasperating the viewer to a point of excitement or deflation, none more so than Tree of Life. The glory and the exhaustion, as Robert Lowell defined art.
At the film’s end, we sat there, silent and confused, but feeling (as it comes from the instinctual level) the votive of the sublime. No one seemed to notice the theater’s lights had risen, that the movie had ended. No one acknowledged the impact of an easy breeze, which was anything but benign. Who are we to one another in times of trauma and change? Where will we end up? “Without love,” the unnamed mother whispers confidently in Tree of Life, “Life merely flashes by.” A thought easily applied to all three films. “It had been like being in church when everything’s quiet,” my companion would later say, “when no one knows exactly whether to move or stop thinking, or to further question what they had just been tested with.” Everyone fell solemn, teased out of possible security in the face of ambiguity. Comprehension, at least in that moment, in no way possible. The flame had gone out on the screen; the fluorescent lights of a man-made reality came up. Our own uncertainties expanding, we stood a few moments later, exiting without a word. And all I had in my head were the words of Emily Dickinson:
After great pain a formal feeling comes--
The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs.
RICHARD SCHEIWE received his MFA from The New School. His poetry and criticism have been published in Poet Lore, Verse, Octopus, et al., and his chapbook, The Dry Moon Dialogue, was published in 2008. In 2008 and 2009, Richard was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He is co-editor/publisher of Fields Press. Aside from writing poetry, Richard has 2 plays under consideration for performances in New York City, and he is completing a work of nonfiction entitled Forwarding Desire, Casually: a Memoir. Scheiwe teaches writing and English Literature at CUNY. He is founder and executive director of Borough Writing Workshops in New York City.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
We sit in the movie theater, quietly, having watched a nearly two-and-a-half-hour epic—credits rolling, sound of a breeze fanning. Then, a piano solo. In Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, a movie thirty years in the making, a flame is lit at the beginning and a voice-over asks, “What are we to you?” In the movie’s stern epigraph, God asks of Job, “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?” After being introduced to this overture of grief, and 13.7 billion years of history—the gestation and evolution of the universe and the birth of the child character, Jack—we are on our way through a loose and nonlinear narrative. Such is the art of Malick in Tree of Life.
Romantics settle themselves with the apropos impulse to represent the transcendental; worldly matters—whatever it is we experience sensually—are means to a metaphysical end. But more and more the metaphysical is submitting to the empirical with the ever-expanding field of cosmology and the anti-instinctual world of the physics-of-the-small, the quantum world. Our worldview is changing at an exponentially quickening pace. There’s too much information, and discerning what’s worthwhile versus what’s dross is becoming more complex. These three films arrest the viewer with the grand questions of life: What are we doing here? Where did we come from? Where are we going? But all three cast these queries in the light of knowledge and understanding that we as a society could not have been privy to just a decade ago. What if simple contradictions have governed life from the beginning? What if the universe is, in fact, a multiverse? Mirror-image universes that suddenly appear, confronting us with our “doubles”? What if time should cease to exist?
Questions will yield more questions, and ambiguity leads to a beautifully dysteleological view of the universe. In these films, events stall Time and human travelers in their life dramas; living becomes secondary to the questioning of place in the grand scheme of things. For Tree of Life, the concern is whether to live a life of grace or of nature, each idea represented subtly by the main child’s mother and father, creating slow-moving tensions that mature their young boy, Jack. But this is not a conventional story about progenitor and offspring; it is a story about a boy and his father. The adult Jack (Sean Penn) has regrettably assimilated his father’s rough beliefs and downward glances into his adult self; his father (Brad Pitt), a beleaguered inventor and engineer, plays Bach and Brahms on the organ and blasts symphonies throughout the house, hinting at a life that could have been. Late in the movie, his sense of personal failure becomes clear; he narrates in voice-over with a simple non-diegetic etude playing: “I wanted to be loved because I was great; a big man. Now I’m nothin’. Love. The glory around us: trees, birds. I lived in shame. I dishonored it all and didn’t know it was the glory. A foolish man.” And subsequently the child, whose subconscious speaks, “Father. Mother. Always you wrestle inside me.” As in many cases, the ills of the father spill over into the son.
Lar’s von Trier’s Melancholia and Mike Cahill’s Another Earth are considered here because they share a similar impulse with Malick’s Tree of Life; the close proximity of their release dates (all within a few months of each other) belies an acceptance of the reality-shifting tropes offered by cosmology: in order for our reality to make sense, there must exist multiple, parallel universes, and at the very least, other planets just like ours.
Melancholia foregrounds a bride’s (Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst) mental illness against the backdrop of her opulent wedding reception. Purposeful attention is given to the use of the word “melancholia” (melancholy, of course) over that of “depression”. Whereas melancholy is now an outdated word for the affliction, it also supposes a more metaphysical design rather than a purely scientific/biological/chemical one. This distinction, of the spiritual versus the physical, dominates Melancholia. The primary opening scene reveals the newly married couple en route to the reception, which is being held at a sprawling estate. On the way there the car in which they are being chauffeured gets stuck in the mud; they each take turns attempting to extricate the vehicle. They are going to be late, very late, for their own reception, but the laughter and amusement they share over this incident is the film’s one and only lighthearted moment. Once they arrive at the reception, everything—mostly due to the bride’s mood—elides into the grey. Like a typical upper-class drama, familial discord and non-sympathies simmer beneath the superficial blanket of celebration. Obviously, the riches of life are no match for the senselessness of unattended depression, and life turns irrevocably for the couple.
“Melancholia,” we will discover, is not only the affliction of the self; a “super-earth,” named Melancholia, which until recently had been hiding behind the sun, appears to be on a collision course with Earth. The stakes have increased and however severe Justine’s illness, it no longer sustains the focus, as the inhabitants of earth are faced now with their Doomsday scenario. Prior to the opening scene between the bride and groom, von Trier added an overture of his own, much like Malick in Tree of Life. In von Trier’s overture, a complicated visual allegory plays out. Justine stares past us looking emptied as the charred bodies of doves fall from the sky in the background; she stands on the mansion’s estate in a matted silver light. The whole scene looks childlike, as if it were in the yard of a dollhouse. Faux leaves fall against what looks to be a Breughel. Then earth, then Melancholia. It is all in the slowest of motion: a mother “running” with child in arms, a horse falling to the grass. Dragonflies and butterflies swarm. Gravity seems to fail. A tree on fire. Justine, in her bridal gown, much like Ophelia, floats down a river teeming with lily pads. Now, clothes changed, her “other” self runs toward a boy who’s innocently whittling. They look up, and planets collide.
In Another Earth a similar narrative of exo-planetary encountering occurs, but unlike in Melancholia, the new earth-like planet is benign and actually inhabited by “doubles” of those inhabiting “old” earth (our earth). Written and directed by newcomer Cahill, the premise is narratively simple yet as allegorically replete as Melancholia. A new earth comes to represent another chance for the protagonist, Rhoda (Brit Marling) who had a promising future destroyed by an accident in which she killed two women. This occurred one night as she was driving, distracted by her admiring of the other earth. Whereas before she was to study physics at MIT, post-accident she works as a janitor at the high school from which she recently graduated. A little ways into the narrative, a contest is announced that will allow the winner to travel to the other earth, (communication having been established by this point, and an understanding reached that everyone who exists on Earth-1 also exists, to varying degrees, on the other earth). Therefore, those who she killed in the accident may still be alive.
Creation doesn’t factor into the schemes of Melancholia or Another Earth, insofar as the sudden appearance of exo-planets similar to our earth forces humankind to question preconceived understandings. And whereas it may seem that Tree of Life is a film about God and the presence of a Creator at the Beginning, also supposing design and purpose, it is not. Grand questions are directed to a “who,” but whoever “who” is is anyone’s guess, and the ambiguity behind the uncertainty is the complex layering of Malick’s preternatural world. The birth of the universe scene in Tree of Life overwhelms us with what appears to be a great ball of fire and is, in reality, the birth of a star—stardust being the grains of matter from which everything we know to be physical evolved. At this moment, the film covers us and our sense of Time vanishes, though we are to understand that we’re watching billions of years of evolution in a promised buildup towards a resolution of alluded familial tensions and dynamics. Unanswerable questions of place and presence—the “where were you” and the “who are you”—silently repeat themselves at the grandeur of this gestation.
Structurally, we may think “this cannot be happening,” and this scene is in fact the main point of dissent among critics and viewers alike. But immediately following the twenty minutes or so of cosmic and earthly development, a child is born. It is Jack, whose childhood perception sets the overall tone of the film, promulgating the nonlinear attachment to this reality. Everything—the overture, the loss of the brother/son, the universe and earth’s naissance—leading up to Jack’s birth serves a simple purpose: all of this is what has gone into the making this child, who is justly an archetypal representation of all children, of all of us who come into being. This is what it takes—and has taken—for us to be alive: the universe had to be born, and each of us embodies it.
A sudden loss binds these stories together—the loss of an other which inevitably precipitates the loss of self—and the stories unfold against a complicated fabric of the cosmos. We may suppose that the necessary loss of childhood innocence (of Eden) and thus the integration of the knowledgeable self into a fallen world, happened for Jack long before he lost his brother, (as well as for Rhoda before her accident) which is the overture of grief and loss that pulses through the film. The loss of Eden, represented by adult Jack, mostly alone and living/working in cold, bright places, displays Malick’s belief in nature rather than grace, and is not to be confused with didacticism or proselytizing. Neither the state of grace nor nature was present at the birth of the universe in this sense; the universe simply existed, in that dysteleological sense. Both states act out a tug-of-war and are necessary for our equilibrium. It would appear neither may be fully embodied by any one individual, and each protagonist in these films will slide one way or the other. Nevertheless, ideally we’ll all end up at the same place, wherever and whatever that is. For Malick, it is a less symbolic and a more real vanishing of time, as if this world were only a hint at what it is to exist in a place where the past, present, and future occur in tandem. If only we could comprehend such an idea.
What these three films attempt to reach is the nature of a reality unproven and unsustained, the hypothetical quandaries of metaphysical searching. At this point in time, we can’t answer the big questions or prove what science adamantly says must be there, but the answers and the empirical data approach us, and the films appeal to the fear we may encounter with such a dramatic change in our view of the universe. What they make us think is as integral to the message as how they make us think, and the dialogue of beauty veers back and forth between subtlety and critical mass, exasperating the viewer to a point of excitement or deflation, none more so than Tree of Life. The glory and the exhaustion, as Robert Lowell defined art.
At the film’s end, we sat there, silent and confused, but feeling (as it comes from the instinctual level) the votive of the sublime. No one seemed to notice the theater’s lights had risen, that the movie had ended. No one acknowledged the impact of an easy breeze, which was anything but benign. Who are we to one another in times of trauma and change? Where will we end up? “Without love,” the unnamed mother whispers confidently in Tree of Life, “Life merely flashes by.” A thought easily applied to all three films. “It had been like being in church when everything’s quiet,” my companion would later say, “when no one knows exactly whether to move or stop thinking, or to further question what they had just been tested with.” Everyone fell solemn, teased out of possible security in the face of ambiguity. Comprehension, at least in that moment, in no way possible. The flame had gone out on the screen; the fluorescent lights of a man-made reality came up. Our own uncertainties expanding, we stood a few moments later, exiting without a word. And all I had in my head were the words of Emily Dickinson:
After great pain a formal feeling comes--
The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs.
RICHARD SCHEIWE received his MFA from The New School. His poetry and criticism have been published in Poet Lore, Verse, Octopus, et al., and his chapbook, The Dry Moon Dialogue, was published in 2008. In 2008 and 2009, Richard was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He is co-editor/publisher of Fields Press. Aside from writing poetry, Richard has 2 plays under consideration for performances in New York City, and he is completing a work of nonfiction entitled Forwarding Desire, Casually: a Memoir. Scheiwe teaches writing and English Literature at CUNY. He is founder and executive director of Borough Writing Workshops in New York City.
In Place of Memory: Austerlitz and Architecture
by Leslie Maslow
One need to be a Chamber – to be Haunted –
One need not be a House –
The Brain – has Corridors surpassing
Material Place
-Emily Dickinson
Prithee, go in thyself: seek thine own ease: this tempest will not give me leave to ponder on things would hurt me more.
But I’ll go in.
-Shakespeare, King Lear
In W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, the eponymous main character represses the trauma of separation from his parents and the journey from Prague to London, one among the thousands of Jewish children saved by the British Kindertransport of 1939. Only in his late middle-age does Austerlitz begin to look at the historical facts of his life directly, through reading H.G. Adler’s book on the Theriesenstadt Ghetto, and traveling to Prague to find traces of his family. Until he remembers his past life, he pursues his fascination with the “architectural style of the capitalist era” and admits his amateur scholarship is a kind of obsession, what he calls a “compensatory memory” for his total amnesia.
Gaston Bachelard, in his 1958 book The Poetics of Space, describes the house as a “tool for analysis of the human soul.” Bachelard’s vision of the house as a soul encompasses both darkness and light, but home is ultimately a place of refuge. Austerlitz has been so utterly torn from his childhood home that psychically, he’s permanently homeless. He’s drawn to structures that are unheimlich, or uncanny. A common definition of the uncanny, taken from the essays of Ernest Jentsch and, later, Freud, is the idea of the familiar, having been repressed, returning to us as strange. The buildings Austerlitz studies have sunk into the earth over time; they’ve been excavated, re-compartmentalized, frozen into mausolea. They’ve experienced identity crises as their functions changed. Austerlitz observes buildings suffering from egomania, emptiness, loss of purpose, and loss of memory.
Ultimately, Austertliz does “go in,” in Lear’s brave sense. It would be easier for him to wander across England and Europe continuing to look at the monstrous monuments to modernity and commerce--decaying grand hotels and forgotten graveyards--but finally, he goes home to Prague. We never know what happens to him, he is still “going in” when the narrator last meets him in Paris.
Before I get into the varieties of Austerlitz’s architectural obsessions, I want to look at one space that demonstrates several of them, and is the site of the turning point in the novel: the Ladies’ Waiting Room at the Liverpool Street Station. This is the place where repression and memory intersect. The fool leads Lear into his hovel. In Austerlitz, the turbaned sweeper at the Liverpool Street Station darts into a low door frame that leads to the first place where the grief-stricken child arrived in London on the transport. He meets his emotionally distant adoptive mother in that waiting room and begins a lifetime of repression of the memory of Agata and Max, his real parents. Almost sixty years later, in that same room, he finally feels his grief and loss directly.
Austerlitz calls the station a “vortex of past time" through which people had walked for thousands of years, from the Little Ice Age to the burial of corpses in the overflow of Bedlam to the moment he happens on the Ladies’ waiting room, soon to be destroyed. With typical Sebaldian coincidence at work, it’s a fluke that he has even discovered the room. The sight of the waiting area triggers Austerlitz’s nervous breakdown and the subsequent resolve to remember his past, after his year of institutionalization.
The Liverpool Street Station attains practically all of Austerlitz’s recurring architectural obsessions, metaphors for the psyche. It’s a place of transience and transport, which evokes feelings of uprootedness, loss and evasion, but it is also freeing. Train stations are the antithesis of insularity, such as Austerlitz perceived in the well-dressed citizens of Nuremberg or in the small town in Wales where he was raised. The Liverpool Street station is not at all intimate, like a hovel. It’s awe-inspiring, hallucination-inducing. This is counterbalanced by the fact that, upon his release from his stays in two different mental asylums, he ends up in comforting and unconventionally home-like spaces. After his recovery in Salpêtrière, his lover, Marie, takes him inside a little star spangled tent belonging to the Bastiani traveling circus. After his institutionalization at St. Clements, he finds himself in an intimate, tiny bookstore run by one Penelope Peacefull. While browsing, he hears a radio program about the Kindertransport and finally gains the key to his entire past. He decides to face it, to go head-on, not repress it.
It’s possible to read into the novel the pattern of progressive "anti-repression" or remembrance. Early on, the narrator reflects on one of the most defended types of spaces that exist, military fortresses. He uses the guarded but vulnerable example of the Belgian fortress of Breedonk. Just as a defended psyche is brittle and illogical, these star-shaped places, so focused on repelling attack, instill constant discomfort and anxiety in their human inhabitants. The novel will end with the narrator back at Breedonk, sitting on the bank of the moat surrounding the fortress. In the later scene, his reflections are no longer metaphorical, but literal. He thinks directly about the fact that many fortresses in Europe were turned into concentration camps.
Austerlitz seeks out not only the architecture of defense, but also those spaces which have been compartmentalized after the fact of their construction. Just as he walls off his past, he’s drawn to walled-off spaces where the life within has been frozen. Some are domestic spaces, like the decaying mansion, Iver Grove. Ashman, the owner, tells Austerlitz and André Hilary how he boarded up the billiard and children’s rooms to protect them from the Germans during World War II. Some compartmentalized spaces exist in government institutions like the Palais of Justice in Antwerp, with its dead end hallways and stairways to nowhere. The Ladies’ Waiting Room itself had been sealed off from the rest of the Liverpool Street Station. Even before World War II, Iver Grove’s billiard room had been frozen and undisturbed for a hundred years, with an ancestor’s solitary game against himself, “Ashman versus Ashman” still written in chalk on the board. There need not be a literal wall for a sense of stagnation and isolation.
Another way architecture can mimic the human psyche is through having insight or blindness. Gaston Bachelard compares the lamp-lit windows of a house to eyes. Sebald, likewise, animates his inanimate structures, but instead of having sight, his houses are blind: Iver Grove’s windows are boarded up, the houses of Terezin are more memorable for their empty windows and forbidding doorways that block off the interiors. The notion of a building’s blindness is mentioned several times in the novel. It’s clear that Sebald echoes much of Bachelard in terms of space being outside of linear time, of de-conditioning, of avoiding the rehashed anecdotes of memory, of being interested in the anima over the animus, but where Bachelard views the house as a largely benevolent entity, Sebald looks at the total structure more like Bachelard sees the basement: uncanny, dark, unconscious and repressed. It’s a horror to Sebald that these once-inhabited places are now functionless and blind. Domesticity has been taken away. In the modern era, comfort and security have been annihilated.
Without their traditional function, these buildings have identity crises. A recurring architectural theme in the novel is the notion of hybridized spaces, spaces being used for things they weren’t made for. Iver Grove, a great mansion for generations, is used as a granary during World War II. Andromeda Lodge becomes a cabinet of curiosities, a battleground between science and religion. Great Uncle Alphonse tends his wonderful gardens while Uncle Evelyn prays to God on the top floor and walks his torturous loop around the perimeter of his room. The main hall of Andromeda Lodge now holds a badminton court. The Palais of Justice is such an obtuse and ill-conceived piece of architecture that little organic pockets of life grow from its neglected corners, like barber shops and newsstands nestled in its convoluted hallways. Whether domestic or institutional, the identity crisis of these hybrid spaces prompts a feeling of discomfort and anxiety. One is not at home in Iver Grove or even the magical Andromeda Lodge. They are unheimlich. Austerlitz never owned a home. His parents’ home and belongings were taken from them. It’s fitting, then, that most domestic settings don’t have domesticity. I’m reminded of the fact that one of Sebald’s literary influences, Nabokov, never owned a home.
Austerlitz is closest to having an identity in the most identity-shattering place of all, a mental hospital. Austerlitz’s individuality is subsumed by the company of three thousand patients. Yet in both Salpêtrière and St. Clements, one feels the author’s tenderness toward his character. In both cases, there’s a person who picks up on Austerlitz’s uniqueness, who looks out for him, and is responsible, in some way, for saving him. There’s poignancy to seeing Austerlitz shuffling along a row of a hundred beds. It’s a terrible echo of the concentration camps where his parents died. But I feel that he’s more at home in these places than in any domestic setting because they’re the only places in the entire novel that are not described. We see nothing of their architecture. He strictly inhabits them. We only see him, towards the end of his year in St. Clements, looking out at foxes playing in a graveyard nearby.
Both a concentration camp and a mental hospital are “total institutions,” a phrase coined by the sociologist Erving Goffman to describe completely self-sufficient places. They’re frightening, institutional echoes of what a home should be. They have all the needs of life under one roof: food, medicine, laundry, shops, industry and graveyards. Austerlitz is fascinated with prisons, fortresses, monasteries, mental institutions, and even imagines the state archives in Prague as being like another total institution: a cruise ship. Nowhere else is identity more in danger of being erased than in a total institution, but it’s inverted here. Austerlitz belongs there. There is no home where he belongs. This is first raised when he leaves his adoptive parents' lonely, sterile home for boarding school, Stower Grange. While most boys are traumatized by the school, Austerlitz is relieved.
But really, it’s a bit of a stretch to say he finds home in these places of suffering. There’s only one place in the entire novel that is unambiguously a source of happiness, and that is under the tent of the Bastiani Traveling Circus. And it’s no accident, I think, that for a single paragraph, Austerlitz is characterized in a way that’s personal instead of through the filter of "out-looking", towards places and objects. Instead, it’s his own aesthetic experience he speaks of when he hears the music and is touched by it. He’s moved by the gypsy family who live a life of transience. One even gets the sense he’s relieved by their existence. Most of all, I see Austerlitz in the image of the white goose, straining its neck upward and looking around at its companions, in the midst of the beautiful music and under the stars painted on the ceiling of the tent. He will forever be a different species than those around him. He will forever be alone, but he comes close enough, for a moment.
..a snow white goose, standing motionless and steadfast among the musicians as long as they played. Neck craning forward slightly, pale eyelids slightly lowered, it listened there in the tent beneath that shimmering firmament of painted stars until the last notes had died away, as if it knew its own future and the fate of its present companions.
Works Cited
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, (originally published 1958).
Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003, (originally published 1919).
Goffman, Erving. Asylums. New York: Anchor Books, 1961.
Jentsch, Ernest. On the Psychology of the Uncanny. 1906.
Sebald, WG. Austerlitz. New York: Random House, 2001.
Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992.
Wood, James. The Broken Estate. New York: Picador, 1999.
Photo credit: Leslie Maslow. Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, PA.
LESLIE MASLOW'S work has been published in Open City, Tin House and Anderbo. She is currently enrolled in the MFA program at Bennington College.
One need not be a House –
The Brain – has Corridors surpassing
Material Place
-Emily Dickinson
Prithee, go in thyself: seek thine own ease: this tempest will not give me leave to ponder on things would hurt me more.
But I’ll go in.
-Shakespeare, King Lear
In W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, the eponymous main character represses the trauma of separation from his parents and the journey from Prague to London, one among the thousands of Jewish children saved by the British Kindertransport of 1939. Only in his late middle-age does Austerlitz begin to look at the historical facts of his life directly, through reading H.G. Adler’s book on the Theriesenstadt Ghetto, and traveling to Prague to find traces of his family. Until he remembers his past life, he pursues his fascination with the “architectural style of the capitalist era” and admits his amateur scholarship is a kind of obsession, what he calls a “compensatory memory” for his total amnesia.
Gaston Bachelard, in his 1958 book The Poetics of Space, describes the house as a “tool for analysis of the human soul.” Bachelard’s vision of the house as a soul encompasses both darkness and light, but home is ultimately a place of refuge. Austerlitz has been so utterly torn from his childhood home that psychically, he’s permanently homeless. He’s drawn to structures that are unheimlich, or uncanny. A common definition of the uncanny, taken from the essays of Ernest Jentsch and, later, Freud, is the idea of the familiar, having been repressed, returning to us as strange. The buildings Austerlitz studies have sunk into the earth over time; they’ve been excavated, re-compartmentalized, frozen into mausolea. They’ve experienced identity crises as their functions changed. Austerlitz observes buildings suffering from egomania, emptiness, loss of purpose, and loss of memory.
Ultimately, Austertliz does “go in,” in Lear’s brave sense. It would be easier for him to wander across England and Europe continuing to look at the monstrous monuments to modernity and commerce--decaying grand hotels and forgotten graveyards--but finally, he goes home to Prague. We never know what happens to him, he is still “going in” when the narrator last meets him in Paris.
Before I get into the varieties of Austerlitz’s architectural obsessions, I want to look at one space that demonstrates several of them, and is the site of the turning point in the novel: the Ladies’ Waiting Room at the Liverpool Street Station. This is the place where repression and memory intersect. The fool leads Lear into his hovel. In Austerlitz, the turbaned sweeper at the Liverpool Street Station darts into a low door frame that leads to the first place where the grief-stricken child arrived in London on the transport. He meets his emotionally distant adoptive mother in that waiting room and begins a lifetime of repression of the memory of Agata and Max, his real parents. Almost sixty years later, in that same room, he finally feels his grief and loss directly.
Austerlitz calls the station a “vortex of past time" through which people had walked for thousands of years, from the Little Ice Age to the burial of corpses in the overflow of Bedlam to the moment he happens on the Ladies’ waiting room, soon to be destroyed. With typical Sebaldian coincidence at work, it’s a fluke that he has even discovered the room. The sight of the waiting area triggers Austerlitz’s nervous breakdown and the subsequent resolve to remember his past, after his year of institutionalization.
The Liverpool Street Station attains practically all of Austerlitz’s recurring architectural obsessions, metaphors for the psyche. It’s a place of transience and transport, which evokes feelings of uprootedness, loss and evasion, but it is also freeing. Train stations are the antithesis of insularity, such as Austerlitz perceived in the well-dressed citizens of Nuremberg or in the small town in Wales where he was raised. The Liverpool Street station is not at all intimate, like a hovel. It’s awe-inspiring, hallucination-inducing. This is counterbalanced by the fact that, upon his release from his stays in two different mental asylums, he ends up in comforting and unconventionally home-like spaces. After his recovery in Salpêtrière, his lover, Marie, takes him inside a little star spangled tent belonging to the Bastiani traveling circus. After his institutionalization at St. Clements, he finds himself in an intimate, tiny bookstore run by one Penelope Peacefull. While browsing, he hears a radio program about the Kindertransport and finally gains the key to his entire past. He decides to face it, to go head-on, not repress it.
It’s possible to read into the novel the pattern of progressive "anti-repression" or remembrance. Early on, the narrator reflects on one of the most defended types of spaces that exist, military fortresses. He uses the guarded but vulnerable example of the Belgian fortress of Breedonk. Just as a defended psyche is brittle and illogical, these star-shaped places, so focused on repelling attack, instill constant discomfort and anxiety in their human inhabitants. The novel will end with the narrator back at Breedonk, sitting on the bank of the moat surrounding the fortress. In the later scene, his reflections are no longer metaphorical, but literal. He thinks directly about the fact that many fortresses in Europe were turned into concentration camps.
Austerlitz seeks out not only the architecture of defense, but also those spaces which have been compartmentalized after the fact of their construction. Just as he walls off his past, he’s drawn to walled-off spaces where the life within has been frozen. Some are domestic spaces, like the decaying mansion, Iver Grove. Ashman, the owner, tells Austerlitz and André Hilary how he boarded up the billiard and children’s rooms to protect them from the Germans during World War II. Some compartmentalized spaces exist in government institutions like the Palais of Justice in Antwerp, with its dead end hallways and stairways to nowhere. The Ladies’ Waiting Room itself had been sealed off from the rest of the Liverpool Street Station. Even before World War II, Iver Grove’s billiard room had been frozen and undisturbed for a hundred years, with an ancestor’s solitary game against himself, “Ashman versus Ashman” still written in chalk on the board. There need not be a literal wall for a sense of stagnation and isolation.
Another way architecture can mimic the human psyche is through having insight or blindness. Gaston Bachelard compares the lamp-lit windows of a house to eyes. Sebald, likewise, animates his inanimate structures, but instead of having sight, his houses are blind: Iver Grove’s windows are boarded up, the houses of Terezin are more memorable for their empty windows and forbidding doorways that block off the interiors. The notion of a building’s blindness is mentioned several times in the novel. It’s clear that Sebald echoes much of Bachelard in terms of space being outside of linear time, of de-conditioning, of avoiding the rehashed anecdotes of memory, of being interested in the anima over the animus, but where Bachelard views the house as a largely benevolent entity, Sebald looks at the total structure more like Bachelard sees the basement: uncanny, dark, unconscious and repressed. It’s a horror to Sebald that these once-inhabited places are now functionless and blind. Domesticity has been taken away. In the modern era, comfort and security have been annihilated.
Without their traditional function, these buildings have identity crises. A recurring architectural theme in the novel is the notion of hybridized spaces, spaces being used for things they weren’t made for. Iver Grove, a great mansion for generations, is used as a granary during World War II. Andromeda Lodge becomes a cabinet of curiosities, a battleground between science and religion. Great Uncle Alphonse tends his wonderful gardens while Uncle Evelyn prays to God on the top floor and walks his torturous loop around the perimeter of his room. The main hall of Andromeda Lodge now holds a badminton court. The Palais of Justice is such an obtuse and ill-conceived piece of architecture that little organic pockets of life grow from its neglected corners, like barber shops and newsstands nestled in its convoluted hallways. Whether domestic or institutional, the identity crisis of these hybrid spaces prompts a feeling of discomfort and anxiety. One is not at home in Iver Grove or even the magical Andromeda Lodge. They are unheimlich. Austerlitz never owned a home. His parents’ home and belongings were taken from them. It’s fitting, then, that most domestic settings don’t have domesticity. I’m reminded of the fact that one of Sebald’s literary influences, Nabokov, never owned a home.
Austerlitz is closest to having an identity in the most identity-shattering place of all, a mental hospital. Austerlitz’s individuality is subsumed by the company of three thousand patients. Yet in both Salpêtrière and St. Clements, one feels the author’s tenderness toward his character. In both cases, there’s a person who picks up on Austerlitz’s uniqueness, who looks out for him, and is responsible, in some way, for saving him. There’s poignancy to seeing Austerlitz shuffling along a row of a hundred beds. It’s a terrible echo of the concentration camps where his parents died. But I feel that he’s more at home in these places than in any domestic setting because they’re the only places in the entire novel that are not described. We see nothing of their architecture. He strictly inhabits them. We only see him, towards the end of his year in St. Clements, looking out at foxes playing in a graveyard nearby.
Both a concentration camp and a mental hospital are “total institutions,” a phrase coined by the sociologist Erving Goffman to describe completely self-sufficient places. They’re frightening, institutional echoes of what a home should be. They have all the needs of life under one roof: food, medicine, laundry, shops, industry and graveyards. Austerlitz is fascinated with prisons, fortresses, monasteries, mental institutions, and even imagines the state archives in Prague as being like another total institution: a cruise ship. Nowhere else is identity more in danger of being erased than in a total institution, but it’s inverted here. Austerlitz belongs there. There is no home where he belongs. This is first raised when he leaves his adoptive parents' lonely, sterile home for boarding school, Stower Grange. While most boys are traumatized by the school, Austerlitz is relieved.
But really, it’s a bit of a stretch to say he finds home in these places of suffering. There’s only one place in the entire novel that is unambiguously a source of happiness, and that is under the tent of the Bastiani Traveling Circus. And it’s no accident, I think, that for a single paragraph, Austerlitz is characterized in a way that’s personal instead of through the filter of "out-looking", towards places and objects. Instead, it’s his own aesthetic experience he speaks of when he hears the music and is touched by it. He’s moved by the gypsy family who live a life of transience. One even gets the sense he’s relieved by their existence. Most of all, I see Austerlitz in the image of the white goose, straining its neck upward and looking around at its companions, in the midst of the beautiful music and under the stars painted on the ceiling of the tent. He will forever be a different species than those around him. He will forever be alone, but he comes close enough, for a moment.
..a snow white goose, standing motionless and steadfast among the musicians as long as they played. Neck craning forward slightly, pale eyelids slightly lowered, it listened there in the tent beneath that shimmering firmament of painted stars until the last notes had died away, as if it knew its own future and the fate of its present companions.
Works Cited
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, (originally published 1958).
Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003, (originally published 1919).
Goffman, Erving. Asylums. New York: Anchor Books, 1961.
Jentsch, Ernest. On the Psychology of the Uncanny. 1906.
Sebald, WG. Austerlitz. New York: Random House, 2001.
Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992.
Wood, James. The Broken Estate. New York: Picador, 1999.
Photo credit: Leslie Maslow. Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, PA.
LESLIE MASLOW'S work has been published in Open City, Tin House and Anderbo. She is currently enrolled in the MFA program at Bennington College.
Coltrane, Deleuze and the Logic of Sensation
by J. Mae Barizo
Rhythm contains within its bounds a certain lawlessness. John Coltrane must have intuited this as he recorded his 1965 album Ascension. Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of Francis Bacon’s paintings in The Logic of Sensation demonstrate his particular fixation on rhythm as it relates to visual art. Yet the concept is impossible for Deleuze to educe without first eliciting the human body: “Everything is divided into diastole and systole…The systole, which contracts the body…while the diastole, extends and dissipates…the body is contracted in order to escape from itself;…The coexistence of all these movements in painting…is rhythm.” The body is the first source, and music is the art with the nearest proximity to the body. “It [music] is lodged on lines of flight that pass through bodies, whereas painting is lodged farther up, where the body escapes from itself.” This escape, or the urge or movement towards escape is paramount, for it propels the art (or the rhythm within the art) towards chaos, or as Immanuel Kant would describe it, towards the sublime, which surpasses form and is not purposive, yet linked to a higher purposiveness. Kant, in Critique of Judgment asserts that it is “in its chaos that nature most arouses our ideas of the sublime, or in its wildest and most ruleless disarray and devastation”. There is, beneath this chaos, a constant. Deleuze calls it a “a germ of order or rhythm”; For Kant, it is the unit of measure used to apprehend the magnitude of an object. Coltrane was conscious of this “germ of order” as he wrote; beneath the elaborate structure of Ascension is the stark skeleton of melody and metre.
Ascension begins rather subdued in the key of b flat minor. The germ or melodic motif is short, only seven notes which is introduced by the tenor saxophone and rapidly mimicked by the trumpet. Within seconds, the other instruments have made unruly entrances. They may or not start on the b flat which launched the piece; they may or may not wait until another player is finished with the motif before interrupting with their own version of it. Within thirty beats (or twenty three seconds) the motif has been introduced, imitated, severed, sliced in half and spoken by a majority of the wind instruments. During this time, a second subject has emerged seamlessly out of the texture: an ascending scale—swift and euphoric—which materializes from the notes of the motif and climbs to a higher b flat, an octave or sometimes two octaves above the original starting range of the melody. These melodic subjects are constituted of melody and rhythm; rarely are these two separated from one another. Melody cannot present itself without rhythm, yet rhythm can sustain itself; it needs neither pitch nor tune to exist.
Rhythm, when discerned through the lens of Deleuze, is not as straightforward as the musical denotation. In The Logic of Sensation Deleuze likens Kant’s aesthetic comprehension of the units of measure as a perception of rhythm. According to Deleuze, a unity of the senses is only possible if the visible sensation “is in direct contact with a vital power that exceeds every domain and traverses them all. This power is Rhythm…Rhythm appears as music when it invests the auditory level, and as painting when it invests the visual level.” This excerpt does little to illuminate the reader exactly as to what rhythm is. In order to discuss this, one must first understand music’s primary unit of measurement. Most Western music contains measures (also called bars), which are units of time defined by the number of equal beats in the given duration. For example, if the time signature of the music is 4/4, this indicates that there are four equal beats in one measure. In regular cases, a listener can count 1,2,3,4 at even time intervals repeatedly throughout the whole piece of music. Ascension, however, contains constant measures only intermittently; other times it is unmeasured with a fluctuating beat, or contains a shifting metre (i.e. one measure will have 4 beats, while another will contain 5 or 6 beats). The music always contains units of measurement, but these are not invariable.
In his translator’s introduction of The Logic of Sensation, Daniel W. Smith elucidates the concept of rhythm as it relates to units of measurement: “Beneath both the measure and the units, there is rhythm.” Concepts are related to beats; beneath the concepts “one always finds rhythmic blocks…ways of being in space and in time.” In a similar vein, the beat in Ascension varies from measure to measure, yet beneath it, rhythm remains. Rhythm is the variable arrangement of musical sound; the movement of notes—either long or short, stressed or non-stressed—as they each take their own space and duration within the measure. A complicated rhythm, musically speaking, would be an irregular pattern composed of a multiple number of sounds (20 or 30 perhaps) all with different time values, and diverging from beat. A simple one would be four sounds, all played at regular intervals, and corresponding simultaneously with the beat. Coltrane’s Ascension is a distinctive departure from traditional rhythms and melodic structure. Not only does the drum part (played by Elvin Jones) feature complex cross rhythms, the solo instruments also syncopate and distort the time values in a way that suggest both prolonged trance-like moments and sudden flashes of brazen hysteria. In the book Ascension, author Eric Nisenson writes that “by permitting Elvin to play without restrictions, louder and with more rhythmic complexity than had ever been heard before in a jazz group, to the extent that Jones often seemed the center of musical activity whatever the soloist was playing, Coltrane acknowledged the African creed of the primacy of rhythm.”
This primacy can be compared to Deleuze’s concept of sensation, which he defines as the “vital power of rhythm”. It goes beyond the melody and appeals not only intellectually, but physically. Like the sublime, it is not compatible merely with charm. A listener only comes into contact with sensation when experiencing a piece of music through the body, just as the sensation is created through the body, emanating from it. This sensation, in Coltrane’s music, is comprised of both germ of rhythm and the melodic germ, which unite in varying degrees of intimacy throughout the work. This coming together and apart is not narrative in any way; it is affect rather than effect, the viscerality of existing rather than the consequence of it. Therefore sensation is not merely produced or comprised of a singular thing, but of a plurality of sounds and rhythms (the combination of the metric undulation of the piano chords underlying the frenetic solo of the trumpet, or the tenor and alto saxophones, both trilling at dissonant intervals during the crescendo of a drum roll).
In Ascension (conceived for eleven players: three tenor saxophones, two trumpets, two alto saxophones, two upright basses and rhythm section) heady bouts of ensemble playing are juxtaposed with unfettered and often virtuosic solo passages for forty consecutive minutes. It is easy to consider this free jazz; on a first encounter with the album, the music can sound thematically ambiguous. Some would not even consider it music at all, but rather some genre of utter cacophony. Rhythm is omnipresent throughout the work, but the metre shifts are unpredictable; one feels akin to a man given a set of legs he has no authority over. One moment the pace is uniform, the next moment something propels the legs to travel at breakneck speed. A fall seems inevitable when suddenly the muscles halt of their own accord, lurching the man towards the ground…This is akin to the agitation that Kant writes about in the Critique of Judgment upon judging the sublime. The unit of measure is inconceivable and “gives rise to that emotion which no mathematical estimation of magnitude by means of numbers can produce.” The sublime prevails when the senses are assaulted by unrecognizable stimuli that are beyond its capacities for comprehension. The prodigious variability of the unit of measure in Ascension coupled with the polyrhythmic complexity have the listener teetering on the brink of chaos. Deleuze lingers on this idea of chaos, quoting Bacon that chaos “unlocks areas of sensation.” Coltrane as well must have attached significance to chaos; perhaps he labeled it artistic bedlam, or perhaps he didn’t think it chaotic at all. Chaos, like the sublime, stops one in his tracks, like a deer stunned by a headlight’s blinding glare. But according to Kant, the sublime, even with its seeming unboundedness, harmonizes with the power of concepts (i.e. understanding and reason). Kant’s example of Savary’s experience in Egypt is a case in point. He writes:
"In order to get the full emotional effect from the magnitude of the pyramids one must neither get too close to them nor stay too far away. For if one stays too far away, then the apprehended parts…are presented only obscurely and hence their presentation has no effect on the subject’s aesthetic judgment; and if one gets too close, then the eye needs some time to complete the apprehension…hence the comprehension is never complete."
Cezanne, on the other hand, wanted the painter to paint at close range…“to be too close to it, to lose oneself in the landscape, without landmarks, to the point where one no longer sees forms or even matters, but only forces, densities, intensities.” What it comes down to, it seems, is merely a dilemma of perspective. One must not submerge oneself fully in the art, nor view it from too far a distance so that its details become ungraspable, blurred.
It is significant to note that the ensemble sections in Ascension (when all the instruments are playing in what seems like unbridled lawlessness) are the sections where Coltrane actually set down structural parameters. During the solos, which seem comparatively docile compared to the ensemble passages, Coltrane gave more or less free rein to the performers, except for the direction that they were to end their solo in a crescendo. The ensemble parts, where the term chaos seems most aptly to apply, were the sections where there was a predetermined structure over which improvisation took place. Todd S. Jenkins writes in his book Free Jazz and Free Improvisation, “Ascension seemed to wallow in chaos but was actually grounded in a different kind of musical logic.” A extraordinary departure from traditional jazz harmony, Ascension is organized for the most part modally (though chordal harmony still appears, such as in the beginning, where the first two minutes are primarily in the key of b flat minor). Modal jazz is characterized by use of modal scales, and features pitch structures and intervals which are common in non-Western musical cultures such as Arab cultures, Greece, and India. Previously, jazz musicians would base melodies on chordal progressions, and would only utilize notes that were compatible with the given chords. In modal harmony, the musicians can use any note in the mode being used, which results in a wider sound palette, but also contributes overall to a more dissonant quality. As in the case of Savary and the pyramids, technical aspects are often overlooked by audiences wowed by the unfamiliar scale of a work of art or music. They often react immediately to the incongruous attribute if they view it with preconceived notions of normality. The ensemble sections, which seem to stagger on the edge of an atonal abyss, were actually choreographed structurally by Coltrane, who signaled the mode changes, along with the pianist McCoy Tyner and the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard.
Therefore one can say indubitably that rhythm, within its bounds, possesses a certain lawlessness. The notable clause is “within its bounds.” Do those bounds refer to Kant’s unit of measure, Coltrane’s Lydian mode or solely in our ideas, where Kant says that the sublime must be sought? Deleuze asserts that “it is at the point closest to catastrophe, in absolute proximity, that modern man discovers rhythm.” Earlier in The Logic of Sensation he states it differently, that the “abyss will give way to rhythm.” Perhaps in Deleuze’s reassignation of the word rhythm in relation to visual art the denotation was distorted to some degree, or perhaps he simply modified the musical definition to cater to his own notions of art and the movements within. But I believe—in music at least, and most definitely in Coltrane’s Ascension—that rhythm presents itself independent of the existence of either chaos or catastrophe. Like the systole-diastole flow in the human body, such movements carry on, with or without our knowledge. The rhythm of the cardiac muscle persists, sometimes consistent in its regularity or altered in its tempo and grace. That fact that chaos or catastrophe can make us more aware of its rhythm is not a flaw of rhythm but rather a oversight of our own unreliable cognitive faculties, which, in the words of Kant, “can become conscious of our superiority to nature within us, and thereby also to nature outside us.”
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon The Logic of Sensation. London: Continuum, 2003.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987.
Nisenson, Eric. Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995.
Jenkins, Todd S. Free Jazz and Free Improvisation. Greenwood Press, 2004.
Ascension (album)”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(album)
J. MAE BARIZO is a Canadian poet and performer. In 2010 she was the recipient of the Jane Kenyon award for poetry at Bennington College. A champion of cross-genre work and performative poetics, Barizo has performed poetry collaborations with various musicians, including the renowned American String Quartet. Her critical writing has been published in Tarpaulin Sky, Sink Review, H_NGM_N, and other journals. New poetry appears in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Zoland Poetry, and Bellingham Review.
Ascension begins rather subdued in the key of b flat minor. The germ or melodic motif is short, only seven notes which is introduced by the tenor saxophone and rapidly mimicked by the trumpet. Within seconds, the other instruments have made unruly entrances. They may or not start on the b flat which launched the piece; they may or may not wait until another player is finished with the motif before interrupting with their own version of it. Within thirty beats (or twenty three seconds) the motif has been introduced, imitated, severed, sliced in half and spoken by a majority of the wind instruments. During this time, a second subject has emerged seamlessly out of the texture: an ascending scale—swift and euphoric—which materializes from the notes of the motif and climbs to a higher b flat, an octave or sometimes two octaves above the original starting range of the melody. These melodic subjects are constituted of melody and rhythm; rarely are these two separated from one another. Melody cannot present itself without rhythm, yet rhythm can sustain itself; it needs neither pitch nor tune to exist.
Rhythm, when discerned through the lens of Deleuze, is not as straightforward as the musical denotation. In The Logic of Sensation Deleuze likens Kant’s aesthetic comprehension of the units of measure as a perception of rhythm. According to Deleuze, a unity of the senses is only possible if the visible sensation “is in direct contact with a vital power that exceeds every domain and traverses them all. This power is Rhythm…Rhythm appears as music when it invests the auditory level, and as painting when it invests the visual level.” This excerpt does little to illuminate the reader exactly as to what rhythm is. In order to discuss this, one must first understand music’s primary unit of measurement. Most Western music contains measures (also called bars), which are units of time defined by the number of equal beats in the given duration. For example, if the time signature of the music is 4/4, this indicates that there are four equal beats in one measure. In regular cases, a listener can count 1,2,3,4 at even time intervals repeatedly throughout the whole piece of music. Ascension, however, contains constant measures only intermittently; other times it is unmeasured with a fluctuating beat, or contains a shifting metre (i.e. one measure will have 4 beats, while another will contain 5 or 6 beats). The music always contains units of measurement, but these are not invariable.
In his translator’s introduction of The Logic of Sensation, Daniel W. Smith elucidates the concept of rhythm as it relates to units of measurement: “Beneath both the measure and the units, there is rhythm.” Concepts are related to beats; beneath the concepts “one always finds rhythmic blocks…ways of being in space and in time.” In a similar vein, the beat in Ascension varies from measure to measure, yet beneath it, rhythm remains. Rhythm is the variable arrangement of musical sound; the movement of notes—either long or short, stressed or non-stressed—as they each take their own space and duration within the measure. A complicated rhythm, musically speaking, would be an irregular pattern composed of a multiple number of sounds (20 or 30 perhaps) all with different time values, and diverging from beat. A simple one would be four sounds, all played at regular intervals, and corresponding simultaneously with the beat. Coltrane’s Ascension is a distinctive departure from traditional rhythms and melodic structure. Not only does the drum part (played by Elvin Jones) feature complex cross rhythms, the solo instruments also syncopate and distort the time values in a way that suggest both prolonged trance-like moments and sudden flashes of brazen hysteria. In the book Ascension, author Eric Nisenson writes that “by permitting Elvin to play without restrictions, louder and with more rhythmic complexity than had ever been heard before in a jazz group, to the extent that Jones often seemed the center of musical activity whatever the soloist was playing, Coltrane acknowledged the African creed of the primacy of rhythm.”
This primacy can be compared to Deleuze’s concept of sensation, which he defines as the “vital power of rhythm”. It goes beyond the melody and appeals not only intellectually, but physically. Like the sublime, it is not compatible merely with charm. A listener only comes into contact with sensation when experiencing a piece of music through the body, just as the sensation is created through the body, emanating from it. This sensation, in Coltrane’s music, is comprised of both germ of rhythm and the melodic germ, which unite in varying degrees of intimacy throughout the work. This coming together and apart is not narrative in any way; it is affect rather than effect, the viscerality of existing rather than the consequence of it. Therefore sensation is not merely produced or comprised of a singular thing, but of a plurality of sounds and rhythms (the combination of the metric undulation of the piano chords underlying the frenetic solo of the trumpet, or the tenor and alto saxophones, both trilling at dissonant intervals during the crescendo of a drum roll).
In Ascension (conceived for eleven players: three tenor saxophones, two trumpets, two alto saxophones, two upright basses and rhythm section) heady bouts of ensemble playing are juxtaposed with unfettered and often virtuosic solo passages for forty consecutive minutes. It is easy to consider this free jazz; on a first encounter with the album, the music can sound thematically ambiguous. Some would not even consider it music at all, but rather some genre of utter cacophony. Rhythm is omnipresent throughout the work, but the metre shifts are unpredictable; one feels akin to a man given a set of legs he has no authority over. One moment the pace is uniform, the next moment something propels the legs to travel at breakneck speed. A fall seems inevitable when suddenly the muscles halt of their own accord, lurching the man towards the ground…This is akin to the agitation that Kant writes about in the Critique of Judgment upon judging the sublime. The unit of measure is inconceivable and “gives rise to that emotion which no mathematical estimation of magnitude by means of numbers can produce.” The sublime prevails when the senses are assaulted by unrecognizable stimuli that are beyond its capacities for comprehension. The prodigious variability of the unit of measure in Ascension coupled with the polyrhythmic complexity have the listener teetering on the brink of chaos. Deleuze lingers on this idea of chaos, quoting Bacon that chaos “unlocks areas of sensation.” Coltrane as well must have attached significance to chaos; perhaps he labeled it artistic bedlam, or perhaps he didn’t think it chaotic at all. Chaos, like the sublime, stops one in his tracks, like a deer stunned by a headlight’s blinding glare. But according to Kant, the sublime, even with its seeming unboundedness, harmonizes with the power of concepts (i.e. understanding and reason). Kant’s example of Savary’s experience in Egypt is a case in point. He writes:
"In order to get the full emotional effect from the magnitude of the pyramids one must neither get too close to them nor stay too far away. For if one stays too far away, then the apprehended parts…are presented only obscurely and hence their presentation has no effect on the subject’s aesthetic judgment; and if one gets too close, then the eye needs some time to complete the apprehension…hence the comprehension is never complete."
Cezanne, on the other hand, wanted the painter to paint at close range…“to be too close to it, to lose oneself in the landscape, without landmarks, to the point where one no longer sees forms or even matters, but only forces, densities, intensities.” What it comes down to, it seems, is merely a dilemma of perspective. One must not submerge oneself fully in the art, nor view it from too far a distance so that its details become ungraspable, blurred.
It is significant to note that the ensemble sections in Ascension (when all the instruments are playing in what seems like unbridled lawlessness) are the sections where Coltrane actually set down structural parameters. During the solos, which seem comparatively docile compared to the ensemble passages, Coltrane gave more or less free rein to the performers, except for the direction that they were to end their solo in a crescendo. The ensemble parts, where the term chaos seems most aptly to apply, were the sections where there was a predetermined structure over which improvisation took place. Todd S. Jenkins writes in his book Free Jazz and Free Improvisation, “Ascension seemed to wallow in chaos but was actually grounded in a different kind of musical logic.” A extraordinary departure from traditional jazz harmony, Ascension is organized for the most part modally (though chordal harmony still appears, such as in the beginning, where the first two minutes are primarily in the key of b flat minor). Modal jazz is characterized by use of modal scales, and features pitch structures and intervals which are common in non-Western musical cultures such as Arab cultures, Greece, and India. Previously, jazz musicians would base melodies on chordal progressions, and would only utilize notes that were compatible with the given chords. In modal harmony, the musicians can use any note in the mode being used, which results in a wider sound palette, but also contributes overall to a more dissonant quality. As in the case of Savary and the pyramids, technical aspects are often overlooked by audiences wowed by the unfamiliar scale of a work of art or music. They often react immediately to the incongruous attribute if they view it with preconceived notions of normality. The ensemble sections, which seem to stagger on the edge of an atonal abyss, were actually choreographed structurally by Coltrane, who signaled the mode changes, along with the pianist McCoy Tyner and the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard.
Therefore one can say indubitably that rhythm, within its bounds, possesses a certain lawlessness. The notable clause is “within its bounds.” Do those bounds refer to Kant’s unit of measure, Coltrane’s Lydian mode or solely in our ideas, where Kant says that the sublime must be sought? Deleuze asserts that “it is at the point closest to catastrophe, in absolute proximity, that modern man discovers rhythm.” Earlier in The Logic of Sensation he states it differently, that the “abyss will give way to rhythm.” Perhaps in Deleuze’s reassignation of the word rhythm in relation to visual art the denotation was distorted to some degree, or perhaps he simply modified the musical definition to cater to his own notions of art and the movements within. But I believe—in music at least, and most definitely in Coltrane’s Ascension—that rhythm presents itself independent of the existence of either chaos or catastrophe. Like the systole-diastole flow in the human body, such movements carry on, with or without our knowledge. The rhythm of the cardiac muscle persists, sometimes consistent in its regularity or altered in its tempo and grace. That fact that chaos or catastrophe can make us more aware of its rhythm is not a flaw of rhythm but rather a oversight of our own unreliable cognitive faculties, which, in the words of Kant, “can become conscious of our superiority to nature within us, and thereby also to nature outside us.”
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon The Logic of Sensation. London: Continuum, 2003.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987.
Nisenson, Eric. Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995.
Jenkins, Todd S. Free Jazz and Free Improvisation. Greenwood Press, 2004.
Ascension (album)”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(album)
J. MAE BARIZO is a Canadian poet and performer. In 2010 she was the recipient of the Jane Kenyon award for poetry at Bennington College. A champion of cross-genre work and performative poetics, Barizo has performed poetry collaborations with various musicians, including the renowned American String Quartet. Her critical writing has been published in Tarpaulin Sky, Sink Review, H_NGM_N, and other journals. New poetry appears in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Zoland Poetry, and Bellingham Review.
