by Ben Lerner
and even if the hero is a known quantity
there is an open struggle over the meaning of her death. According to the president,
any American who continues her life as if the towers had not collapsed
is a hero. This is to conflate the negative with the counterfactual.
The president’s statement is meaningless
unless to be American means to embrace one’s death,
which is possible.
It is difficult to differentiate between the collapse of the towers
and the image of the towers collapsing.
The influence of images is often stronger than the influence of events,
as the film of Pollock painting is more influential than Pollock’s paintings.
But as it is repeated, the power of an image diminishes,
producing anxiety and a symbolic reinvestment.
The image may then be assigned value where there is none.
Can an image be heroic?
No,
but an image may proclaim its distance from the event it ostensibly depicts;
that is, it may declare itself its own event,
and thereby ban all further investment.
The critic watches the image of the towers collapsing.
She remembers less and less about the towers collapsing
each time she watches the image of the towers collapsing.
The critic feels guilty viewing the image like a work of art,
but guilt here stems from an error of cognition,
as the critic fails to distinguish between an event
and the event of the event’s image.
The image of the towers collapsing is a work of art
and, like all works of art, may be rejected
for soiling that which it ostensibly depicts. As a general rule,
if a representation of the towers collapsing
may be repeated, it is unrealistic.
Formalism is the belief that the eye does violence to the object it apprehends.
All formalisms are therefore sad.
A negative formalism acknowledges the violence intrinsic to its method.
Formalism is therefore a practice, not an essence.
For example, a syllogism subjected to a system of substitutions
allows us to apprehend the experience of logic
at logic’s expense.
Negative formalisms catalyze an experience of structure.
The experience of structure is sad,
but, by revealing the contingency of content,
it authorizes hope.
This is the role of the artwork—to authorize hope,
but the very condition of possibility for this hope is the impossibility of its fulfillment.
The value of hope is that it has no use value.
Hope is the saddest of formalisms.
The critic’s gaze is a polemic without object
and only seeks a surface
upon which to unfold its own internal contradictions.
Conditions permitting, a drawing might then be significant,
but only as a function of her search for significance.
It is not that the significance is mere appearance.
The significance is real but impermanent.
Indeed, the mere appearance of significance is significant.
We call it politics.
The lyric is a stellar condition.
The relation between the lyric I and the lyric poem
is like the relation between a star and starlight.
The poem and the I are never identical and their distance may be measured in time.
Some lyric poems become visible long after their origins have ceased to exist.
The heavens are anachronistic. Similarly, the lyric
lags behind the subjectivity it aspires to express. Expressing this disconnect
is the task of the negative lyric,
which does not exist.
If and when the negative lyric exists, it will be repetitious.
It will be designed to collapse in advance, producing an image
that transmits the impossibility of transmission. This familiar gesture,
like a bold black stroke against a white field,
will emphasize flatness, which is a failure of emphasis.
The critic repeats herself for emphasis.
But, since repetition emphasizes only the failure of sense,
this is a contradiction.
When contradictions are intended they grow lyrical
and the absence of the I is felt as a presence.
If and when the negative lyric exists, it will affect a flatness
to no effect.
The failure of flatness will be an expression of depth.
Towers collapse didactically.
When a tower collapses in practice it also collapses in theory.
Brief dynamic events then carry meanings
that demand memorials,
vertical memorials at peace with negativity.
Should we memorialize the towers or the towers’ collapse?
Can any memorial improve on the elegance of absence?
Or perhaps, in memoriam, we should destroy something else.
I think that we should draw a bold, black line across an otherwise white field
and keep discussion of its meaning to a minimum.
If we can close the event to further interpretation
we can keep the collapse from becoming a masterpiece.
The key is to intend as little as possible in the act of memorialization.
By intending as little as possible we refuse to assign value where there is none.
Violence is not yet modern; it fails to acknowledge the limitations of its medium.
When violence becomes aware of its mediacy and loses its object
it will begin to resemble love.
Love is negative because it dissolves
all particulars into an experience of form.
Refusing to assign meaning to an event is to interpret it lovingly.
The meaninglessness of the drawing is therefore meaningful
and the failure to seek out value is heroic.
Is this all that remains of poetry?
Ignorance that sees itself is elegy.
IV
ANGLE OF YAW
IV
THE DARK CROWD CANNOT BE SEEN DIRECTLY, the dark crowd does not interact with light, but the dark crowd can be detected by measuring its gravitational effects on visible crowds. The visible crowd moves toward the dark crowd, as insects toward a blacklight trap, in the tropism we call history. Riot guns with rubber bullets, tear gas, water cannons, flying wedges of heavily armored police, are not only incapable of dispersing the dark crowd, but, by inciting a phase change in the visible crowd, expand its ranks.
SEEN FROM ABOVE, exposition, climax, and denouement all take place at once. God sees the future as we see the past: through a trimetrogon. In the name of the camera, the film, and the view itself. Simultaneous eternities are superimposed to create the illusion of plenitude, but the transposition of planes is a poor substitute for the transmigration of souls. I think Andrei Rublev says, Nothing is as terrible as snow falling in a temple, because without a distinction between inside and outside, there can be no extra-temporal redemption. That, and how anybody can just lie down and make an angel, even a Tartar. Even an angel.
A PERSON IS PHOBIC, that is, mentally imbalanced, when his fears fail to cancel out his other fears. The healthy, too, are terrified of heights, but equally terrified of depths, as terrified of dark as light, open spaces as closed. The phobic are overbold, not overly apprehensive, and must be conditioned to fear the opposite of what they fear. The difficulty of such a treatment lies in finding the counterbalancing terror. What is the opposite of a marketplace? A prime number? Blood? A spider?
TALK ME DOWN, MAN, TALK ME DOWN. Obsessive repetition of meaningless gestures. A
dangerous level of light in the blood. The caller claims to have discovered the imprint of a trilobite embedded in the sky. It’s the kind of thing, he says, that makes you pray to God. That you might live forever. In these several states of shock. At what point in the conversation did you realize her breathing had stopped? When I kissed her. But there’s no time for this. The black helicopters are upon us, our daughters flee from the house, weeping, crazy with joy.
AN IMAGE OF ULTIMACY in an age of polarized light. Will you marry me, skywrites the uncle. A pill to induce awe with a side effect of labor. A lateral inward tilting and the aircraft pushes its envelope. A minor innovation in steering outdates a branch of literature. Envelopes push back. The way a wake turns to ice, then vapor, then paper, uniting our analogues in error, intimacy’s highest form. Jet engines are designed to sublimate stray birds. No appears in the corn.
THE THIRD DIVISION OF A RUMINANT’S STOMACH is called a psalterium because, when slit open, its folds fall apart like the leaves of a book. The fruit is star-shaped when cut in cross section and is therefore called star fruit. Our people often name an object after the manner in which we destroy it.
THE VIEWING PUBLIC DEMANDS an image of itself. The revelation of a telltale trope. The evidence is against us, rubbing. Heat from the right margin reduces the sentence. Light, dry, explosive snow. The pianist is remembered for his influential humming over what is considered a poor rendition. Of radical emotional incapacitation. Of opaque, damp permutation. At what point did you kick away the ladder? In chapter four, where the reader is encouraged to look down from above. Where the author, posing as a question, opens up the floor.
I BELIEVE THERE IS A QUESTION IN THE BACK. Yes, thank you. Do you own Hitler’s upper teeth? If you do own Hitler’s upper teeth, and it seems that you do, would you be able to resist the temptation to try them on? If you’re wearing Hitler’s upper teeth right now, and it seems that you are, how does that effect the validity of your answer? What if you write your answer? If you tell me you love me while wearing Hitler’s upper teeth, should I believe you? Is it wrong to be kissed by a person wearing Hitler’s upper teeth? What if the person wearing the teeth is Jewish, a rabbi even? Can we put a dollar figure on the upper teeth of Hitler? Are the upper teeth of every German in some important sense the upper teeth of Hitler? Would it be a good or bad thing for German children to be forced to try on the upper teeth of Hitler? And if it would be a good thing, and I think we can all agree that it would, is that because they would learn that these teeth are somehow exceptional, maybe even supernatural, or because they would realize that Hitler’s upper teeth are composed of a soft pulp core surrounded by a layer of hard dentin coated with enamel—just plain old teeth? Can Hitler’s upper teeth ever be forgiven? And, if so, all at once?
ONE IF BY LAND, TWO IF BY SEA, sings the canary. Warning: coloration. The very existence of concealed space constitutes an ambush. An abrupt change in sentence structure turns our fire friendly. Our response is calculated to make a false alarm come true, a true alarm come false. There is no describing a weapon that spreads white space.
WOMEN HAVE NO DESIRE to travel in outer space. When men have forced women to travel in outer space, the results have been disastrous. If you mention space travel to a woman, she will say, Don’t even go there, she will say, You can’t go home again, she will say, Been there, done that. That there is more space inside one small woman than in all of heaven has been verified experimentally. She will say, Have I gained weight, she will say, I no longer love you and/or I’m not sure I ever loved you, she will say, Most theorists believe the universe is flat. The first woman in space is still there.
DEAR CYRUS, HE PUTS DOWN, DEAR CYRUS, what you experience as an inconsistency in tone, is, in fact, the Montessori method, in which we practice abstinence during the period of ovulation, in which we move across the plane of fracture, where adjacent surfaces are differentially displaced. Dear Personified Abstraction, he puts down, Dear Counterstain with Safranine, I am writing to describe a perfect circle, the sudden sine curve of a fleeing deer, and to request your absence at my table, with quakes of lesser magnitude to follow. Dear Reader, he puts down, Dear He Puts Down, when the golden parachute failed to decelerate your cousin, the Baron, the first dog in space, the kids fanned out across the field and screamed I’ve got it, mistaking the shower of sparks for bedtime, the luminous obligate parasites for a lecture on film. Dear Lerner, he puts down, Earth to Lerner, throw three damn strikes and get us out of this sentence, but the runner had long since grown into his base.
CHILD ACTORS are not children, that much we know. Their reputation for viciousness is, by all accounts, deserved. Napoleon and Liszt were child actors. In situation comedies, child actors are black. Some child actors have never been off-camera. If you build a set and start filming, a child actor will come downstairs. Some doctors believe it is the constant surveillance that stunts the growth of the child actor, the pressure of the viewing public’s gaze, while in fact a child actor off-camera is like a fish out of water. He cannot breathe.
WE HAVE ASSEMBLED for the athletic contest in tiered seats. Once, we assembled in a central core with mobile spiral arms. Or, lying on our backs, we formed a radiating cluster, imposing animal figures and names upon the stars. Now we watch heavily armored professionals assume formations on a grid of artificial grass. Wishbone. Shotgun. Power I.
WE CAN FEEL THE CHANGING of the tense. The sky distends six inches. Like a parachute opening inside the body. If you don’t secure your own mask first, you’ll just sit there stroking the child’s hair. In the dream you form part of the wreckage you pick through: an allegory of reading. Who knows how many hijackers have been foiled by an engrossing in-flight movie. This one seems to be about symmetry, about getting yours. Its simplified geometrical forms recall the landscapes of our simulators. It’s not just the pilots who have to be trained. When you ask the stewardess for another tiny bottle, she says, This is neither a time nor a place.
PHOTOGRAPHED FROM ABOVE, the shadows of the soldiers seem to stand upright, casting bodies. Birds are rarely depicted from a bird’s-eye view. From this angle, she doesn’t love me. Half light, half ideology. Each of us is impressed as pixels into an ad for democracy. Give the people what they want, says the TV. A powerful suction effect? Extraextra-cheese? The sixth sense, the sense with which we read, is the ability to perceive the loss of other senses; we have lost this sense.
THE SMUGNESS MASKS A HIGHER SADNESS. We are unaware of the patterns we generate. In the carpet grass, the snow crust. When we don’t know a word, we say, Look it up. Up? And the Lord withdrew his thumb, trailing delicate, rootlike filaments, leaving a hole in my chest the size of a polis. From which I address you, Hamsun. If you dig deep enough, you hit water, then hell, then China. So why not fly? Getting there is half the fun; the other half: not getting there.
A SUDDEN EXPERIENCE OF STRUCTURE and the heart gives out. He checks himself in. Lies on the window and looks out the bed. The sense of having said it before keeps him, again and again, from beginning. As the belief that the respirator is powered by the rain keeps him breathing. The outlet is inhabited by a family of mice who also regard their home as a source of power. He shuts his eyes to see himself from above. He shuts his eyes so tightly they recoil. To be forced to drink water is an ancient form of torture, older than being denied water. That the body eats itself is neither here nor there. With what exceeds description we busy ourselves.
THIS IS NOT YOUR FATHER’S BOREDOM. 1986: the year in pictures, the year in tears. Out of the ordinary emerged the first, doomed shoots. In my honor they will one day name and electrify a chair. Wind in my hair, windshield in my teeth. A grammar derived for an early death. Mere wit is the new wailing; black, the new black. My best friend went to Mexico and all I got was this lousy elegy. As easy as taking context from a baby. I’d like to say a few words in memory of Memory, an all-state wrestler who left teeth-marks on the median. I can’t help feeling that it should have been me. It was
, whispers the priest.
AS LONG AS THE BREATH LASTS, the vowel can be prolonged. The name refers both to the field of play and the game itself, in which you can utilize any part of the body save the brain. A flat, affected tone is sweeping the nation. We sincerely hope we will never have to use the cables strung to the scenery, but it’s nice to know they’re there.
A STUDY OF A CHILD [ERASED], a study of erasure [Child], the swiftness of pencils repeating a theme until it achieves the illusion of enterable space. Rake me, she said, with a moral light, but the luster of her ostrich-feather fan had dimmed her eyes. For the purposes of study, we have removed those figures attributed to disciples, yielding a string of visual commas and the inscription Turn away. We work with a found vocabulary, working backwards from the detail to the richly textured blindness of Parmigianino’s gaze. Anyway, as a child, I was thrown from my Powell Peralta, and when I came to, my left-brain had been erased. No street, no land, no sky—just scape.
WE ARE PLEASED TO OFFER A LAMP that turns on and off when you clap, when you clap your eyes. A lamp that lets you see in the dark without disturbing the dark. A lamp producing natural light. A lamp that when you clap turns on and on.