Speaking Volumes
Page 14
with the rush… Itamar’s moment’s dexterity so of
the
in of it, vulgate bind and re-
doubt
*
Din and redoubt. To speak with Itamar overlooking
the beach was to find an eye or an ear possess-
ing an eye or an ear possessing an eye or an ear,
the
true tumescence of when… Sophia’s delight was
to be of the book he said, his too to be of it, only
not as much. She it was, he said, whose walk lit
the
way, wherefore the book, roost, beauty, recom-
pense insufficient even so. To be lit was to burn
slowly, a blister welling up, the is or the it the
ooze of it, vulgate rub and release… “A vulgarity
of
sorts,” he’d say every now and then. The phrase
came loose from what it was stuck to at first,
an ictic insolence the more he repeated it, the thing
whose name it was if it named anything… “A
vul-
garity of sorts,” he all but spat, consonant with
the waves tumbling in. He went back to the book but
came away from it, back as though the break were
the
book, which it was. Where was it if not in a break
we stood I wondered, herons and egrets lifting up
from the marsh nearby, reeds and the like right at
the
water’s edge, where was it I rhetorically asked…
The low rung of the river lay to our right falling
seaward, no way to be where we were unalloyed.
Bro-
ken water, collapsed hatch. Fallen rung. Sunken
lock. Flank we were shadowed by… Wherefore the
book, there being more than one where, would-be
containment, step fallen out from under. There we
stood
on the next rung down, dust on our feet from the
summer, step we stood abreast of, caroling more
than one when… The tumescence of when was our
book outside the book, a see-thru hymnal we sang
from,
andoumboulouous dust in our throats. The tumes-
cence of when was part Philomena, part filler, a
book we coughed our throats out reading from…
Thus
the ta’wil he worked, sublime substrate, query, quib-
ble, quirk, platonic two-step, a vulgarity of sorts
titrated, sublime sulfate, lexemes lined in a row. He
re-
collected the log he’d sat on hatching balloons to-
ward the back of the beach, the grain of Sophia’s
neck, hand, face, the closing up of when a dry suc-
culent, a pressed ice plant, a stain on the page… To
what
end I wasn’t sure except to say it had hold of him,
Lone Coast recension a kind of pixie dust, breathy
book his wish blew thru. Lit precipitate, something
a
smile brought to light, something the sun, outdone,
backed away from. Lit remnant the new epiphany,
gray day, gray water, gray sky… He said it was the
book
of being there, he called it the book of having been
there, there but for looking on and also by looking
on, there but not all there, no matter where, where-
fore the book… Sophia sat him down he said, her
book
sat him down. Sat him down on the learners’ bench
he said, sat him down on a rotting log… Sat him
down on a smooth, round rock he said, sat him down
on
a rock-hard zazen pillow, sat him down on what felt
like
a throne
*
Itamar was a ghost haunting the spot on the
beach where he’d met Sophia, the house they’d
eaten couscous in, the cliff the capoeira class
prac-
ticed on… They’d lain in the sand one night,
bored but for the book that came after, a lighting
up as latency rose, a lightening up, hot stuffy
room
the world had become… Clothes on, off, on,
platonic either way, knowing what wasn’t might not
suffice, each toward the other’s loins’ bouquet,
there
they’d lain, blasé. This the taunt song running thru
them
as they
lay
*
(slogan)
It wasn’t what he thought it was, no matter
what he thought it was, a ravenous ghost
gorging on crumbs… Sand mixed in, no
mat-
ter. Salt mixed in, good as gold, sweet
savor. It wasn’t what he thought it was… A
swing or a swell, sweet riches not so rich,
all not
lost like-
wise
Letters Inscribed in Snow
Laynie Browne
We are standing in a gallery looking at the floor. Embedded, sunken, is a four-foot-by-four-foot-square slab of ice, opaque white. Around the slab is a rope, officially cordoning off the area. A plaque on the wall upon entering the small room reads “A Book Inscribed in Snow.” The ice is blank, bare. The artist did not show up to the opening. We find out later that the artist used a pseudonym. An agent had installed the piece, and departed. Failed to answer questions. The artist clearly intended an unwritten and therefore open book. Surely the real author or the real artist would come forward. But what does that mean—the real author—of snow, of the found, of letters, of invisibility. Bodies standing on frozen ground in winter. Trying to divine what is written beneath. Upon which inscription do you stand?
*
dear—
I want to be writing my new novel. But I have not begun. Though I’ve taken notes many times, beginning with a series of dream letters, inscribed in snow. My thoughts are still too unformed. When the right fictional story (which I plan to steal) falls in front of me I will begin.
And one of the central questions will be:
Is the writer writing to /obsessed with someone living or dead?
Imagined or real? Or is the one writing the letters the construct?
And another will be, what is a letter? Or maybe the book is made up entirely of journal entries, found on the pavement. Or about to be published by one who has died or vanished, or fictional accounts of dying, or dying as an impetus for correspondence.
Yes, I love you.
How will the book begin?
*
Sitting in a café, I put down the chain of dream letters I had been reading. They were published under your name but I was doubtful. You have many names and this was one encoded, an anagram of your enclave, but also a symbol used by a collective of writers who write nothing. You say, in a multiauthored statement, that writing now is lifting, recontextualizing the abundant texts already existent. You say that writing is amplifying, that writers perform as a modern circulatory system. A nervous system, testing impulses up and down avenues, axes, venues of ether, and performative bodies.
*
I was supposed to meet you at the café. I put the chain of dream letters back into my bag and tried to concentrate, my head bent over my laptop and piles of papers. I kept looking up to the plate-glass
window, beaded with rain, each time the door opened. In came many faces covered with water, and coats buttoned tight. But each time I looked up it was not you who entered and after a while I lost track of how long I had been waiting. What an endless chain of persons who are not you. Suddenly when you did appear I closed my eyes for a moment because I disbelieved what I saw. How could it be you? You were smiling and suddenly there was no distance between us but even though I recognized you, what I recognized was not your person. Is that possible? The moment furled and unfurled. I was standing to greet you. Distance closed around us, the enormity of having never before met in person, unless once years ago. Or was that imagined? I’m not sure because in our correspondence once, when I was brave enough to mention it, you behaved as if I had said nothing.
*
Later you sent me a message I did not entirely understand. I had wished for a spectacular meeting and instead I wondered if I had been speaking to a blank composition book. The message relayed an unsolved mathematical problem, which you noted as the most notorious problem in theoretical computer science. You summarized the problem like this: P=NP? You mentioned that the problem would be difficult to paraphrase, but practical applications included cryptography. If the solution to a problem can be verified in polynomial time, can it be inscribed in polynomial time? In order to find a solution, one must first locate a book of exponential time. But your words disorient my meaning. What is your meaning? You try to overcome the difficulty of unsolved problems by breaking down the separation between the body of the known and the unknown. You tell me that this is how you define art. You ask me to join you in this project of decoding the absent book of dream letters. I agree, though I do not entirely grasp your motives.
*
We are standing in a gallery looking at the floor. Embedded, sunken into our memory, a four-foot-by-four-foot-square slab of ice, opaque white. The space is still surrounded in rope. A plaque on the wall upon entering the small room reads: “Here was once installed A Book Inscribed in Snow.” The ice has been removed. You did not show up to the meeting of the enclave. I was surprised that when I looked down into the sunken space, I saw a pile of papers. Who had left them? Whoever it was clearly intended for us to find them. Was it the original artist or someone else? But what does that mean—the real author—of letters, of intent, of anonymity? Bodies trying to determine which hand should reach in and retrieve the letters. Above whose inscription do we stand? The letters were white, opaque, eroding. Around one notion of already published texts, now another set of letters might continually enlarge us. As we stood examining the bundle, once absent, now actual.
*
dear—
What I really want to know is (that is what the character in the book will want to know) why am I writing this fiction when I have a perfectly reliable life? I have a perfectly remarkable problem I cannot solve. A dream is transparent only to me and is the safety of that which cannot be taken. I must reverse. It takes a very potent illusion. Why now, am I addicted to abandonment, hidden to my motives? Where is the one who walks into the light, across a frozen letter wearing only a smile? And that is enough.
*
dear—
I will go and visit my fences now, the ones that keep me sane, such as the borders of any body or book, the borders of time and light, borders of what is said and unsaid. I like to mess with these borders, to know they are in place to some extent but then to stroke or subvert them.
Everything is a lie. There is no separation of bodies. We are less than a myth of ourselves. And aging is another lie, what we look like, how we rely upon ideas of ourselves. Humility comes later, when we work harder to keep ourselves intact.
I try to forget pain through pleasure, through trying to break down any separation between my body and the body of my lover, who is willing and brilliant, but does not entirely grasp my motives.
*
When I ask about the chain of dream letters inscribed in snow you pause from your calculations and look up at me. We are sitting in your studio, on cement floors. All around us are printouts of statistics, long vertical equations. Letters I have sent to you. Poems created by formulas. Exquisite corpse drawings. The bed is unmade, covered in star maps. Texts by Kepler, Einstein, Archimedes, Euclid. You look at me as if some deterministic polynomial time has been thrust between us. You look at me as if to solve for “x” were comparable to violence. You must have known that I was not asking if you or your enclave had written or found the letters. You looked at me as if to say, how could I possibly ask to whom the letters were written? In this moment of nonspeech between us I saw clearly that I was being accused, but of what I was being accused I had no idea. A book of silence instantaneously arose. Did your gaze communicate animosity that I did not know what I should certainly know? Either I was the “you” to whom the letters were addressed, or the mentioned lover, or it was someone else in our small circle I probably knew. Probably it was someone who had been standing around that night at the gallery, looking at the blank slab of snow. This was in fact the real reason why the publication of the letters, their circulation, had gained so much attention. The letters were an endless source of speculation.
There we were at all hours of the night, groping on hands on knees, with pencils and pages, tall glasses of tea. We were turn machines, binary representations, working on this question of completeness, nakedness, on conditions, positions that might satisfy a question. We had become the question in episodic wanderings. We knew nothing about integers or time, but we became an architecture about the mathematics of nondeterministic futures.
Two Essays
Adam Weinstein
BRIEFLY CONSIDERED: SUB-PLOTS
Then there were the sub-plots, being pleasant things, which dreamt below four of the six gardens of the parish. Mr. Tyros and the elders, however, preached against the plots with such effect that their manufacture was abandoned.
—The White Rose of Chayleigh
1.
Before constructing the garden, the sub-plot is considered. It is never spaded, dug, or trenched, but caved using dynamite, or any such potassium lumen. The charge is laced along the bare ground and exploded downward until the correct depth is confronted. Thus the process is also called lumination: from Latin, “light,” but also “opening.” When installing a new garden, the boom indicates that the process has begun—the boom, the first language of the garden space, its pneumaphon: breath + sound. This is a holy sound:
Again a dart, the Wind-God’s own,
Upon his string he laid,
And all the demons were o’erthrown,
The saints no more afraid.
—Canto XXXII of the Ramayana
2.
In his treatise on lumination, Viollet-le-Duc notes that the sub-plot “is the artificial foundation on which the garden will rest” (C’est sur ce roc-factice que repose l’immense cathédrale).1 In his original French, factice (“artificial,” but also “dummy”) plays on both the creation of an a-physical space—a hollow upon which the garden rests—and its dumbness, or silence. The insistence on the garden as cathédrale suggests the sub-plot as crypt. Yet here is an empty crypt, loss without origin:
What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities gnaw upon all Faith.
—Ishmael
Its phon, the primordial sound, is an impossibility: a body that never was, which simultaneously calls from within the coffin, “But I am here.” It is a silence (σιγάω) that lusters.
3.
For every six shovelfuls of dirt, exploded by lumination and collected in a barrow, one shovelful of ripe manure or humus is mixed in. Water is added until the resulting mash is the consistency of heavy mortar, and enough mortar is pasted along the newly plumbed walls until they are completely resurfaced, preventing them from crum
bling. A light raft of branches or sticks is braided over the dig, and then shoveled over with dirt.
In his commentaries on lumination, Origen indicates that the branches for the roof of the sub-plot should be those of the palm tree, “instead of branches cut from the trees or stubble brought from the fields and strewed on the road.” In the Greek, Origen uses the word poi (φοι), denoting branches from the date palm (φοῖν), which also suggests the particular color of the branches: purple or crimson. Origen also plays on the etymology of Phoenix (Φοίνιξ):
When this bird completes a full five centuries of life straightway with talons and with shining beak he builds a nest among palm branches, where they join to form the palm tree’s waving top. As soon as he has strewn in this new nest the cassia bark and ears of sweet spikenard, and some bruised cinnamon with yellow myrrh, he lies down on it and refuses life among those dreamful odors.
Poi is both the Phoenix’s feathers and the color of its death. It is the nest it builds in the top of the tree, poin, and also the Phoenix itself. Poi is a tapestry of contradictory notions, which both affirm and deny that the Phoenix did, or will ever, exist. When one points to the bird at any particular moment, one has only a slur of colors, states of being, textures, ontologies, and irregular spaces. It is fitting, then, that poi seals the sub-plot. This is the perplexing beauty of the non space, the hidden heart that refuses to be defined. Once its roof is broken open, for instance.
4.
The history of gardens is a history of order. Consider the Persian chahãr bãgh, which is divided into four quadrangles to represent the four corners of the earth. Here the garden’s order is an analogue to pure, universal geometry. Or the Japanese kaiyū-shiki-teien, which uses miegakure to guide the visitor along a carefully chosen path. And finally the Victorian garden, whose special order is that of imperialism and conquest.
The garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection.
—Foucault
The sub-plot, on the other hand, refuses order. Once the space is constructed, it signs an impossible ontology. Thus the sub-plot is marked with the image of the obolus (ὀβολός), which carries a double meaning. On the one hand, the obolus is the shell of a clam. Although the lines of the shell are drawn in radiating concentric circles, they end at the crustacean’s lip. Yet here begins the clam’s double, its second half, where the radiating turns back toward its source, from the largest circle to its most minute at the hinge—and again, and again. It is fitting, then, that the obol is also the coin given over to Charon. We cross the river Styx clutching empty space, a shape that mirrors itself in hollows of calcite. We return to the place from which we perpetually depart.