by Carole Maso
As for the larger motions within the pieces, desire has been the inspiration and guide there as well. Many attempts have been made to try and get closer to that yearning, that longing through narrative decisions. In “Sappho Sings” I have tried to ride the crests and swells of delirious language-making, the excess of it, the surfeit of language, visions, ideas, wishes. To simply get lost in the sensuousness of language, just to enjoy it, feel it in one’s mouth—to relish its gorgeousness. Insatiable. To enjoy the fluidity of one getting lost in the other. I have tried to stay near to the kinds of audacities and recklessness and strange rigors that desire creates—the dizziness. As if hurling myself off a precipice. In “Exquisite Hour” waywardness, disorientation becomes the narrative imperative. I am extremely interested in the incoherencies of desire, and this piece is incoherent, it wanders off—going far afield, shifting point of view and place without preparation. Images are strange and heightened; lines drop off or melt into one another to produce a lapsed, dissipated quality. There is an eerie and for me heartbreaking holding on and letting go simultaneously. I stumble here in this blizzard of language and narrative unable to know exactly what’s going on in the blur—“Is that you snow ghost? Is that you candy gram? Strange visitations.” This I am certain of: desire does not make a well-made short story. It makes you rethink closure, that’s for sure.
In “Dreaming Steven” erotic fantasy informs the motions. Quick changes of position: physical position, language positions, positions of the mind are the given. The constant need for novelty, replacement, substitution, multiplicity, simultaneity, the desperate lust for more or different images, the loopy, idiosyncratic needs: “fish in their mouths.” The dark hilarity I have only begun to explore that often inadvertently exists in sexual fantasy. The elaborate and often comedic stagings in the theater of the mind. The artifice: the props, the funny colored lights, the costumes, the makeup. The flirtations with death, the jovial rehearsals for it—its seductive proximity and our desire for it. The thousand resurrections and reinventions. The demented jingles—its sweet, sweet music. Replenishments. Reinforcements. The refreshment. The courage afforded.
I love the insistence and tenacity of desire, the reiterations and rephrasings, the eternal returnings. The obsessiveness of the erotic imagination. The press and relentlessness of the vision: “the pier collapsing.” The aching dissonances. The constant pushing of the voice up a notch, forcing the tone, changing the pitch, forcing the repetitions in a kind of extraordinary need, want, desperation. I am thinking specifically here of the “You Were Dazzle” pieces. And the shift in the construction of the recurring phrase “You were flowers in a barrel” to “You were flower petals floating in a barrel” which signals the move away, through the linguistic gesture as much as anything that is understood on the literal level. In fact, to my ear the literal statements, “you were never again,” etc., sound like the kind of grand statement indicating that the obsession is far from over. But in the quieter “you were flower petals floating,” the subtle shift carries a message and makes me think that just perhaps… A slight letting go of the obsession in a line like that begins to happen. The unconscious shift there tells me that just maybe… Not to say on another day the lover will not have returned at the height of the obsession one more time. In a way the two “Dazzle” pieces are meant to be read on a kind of eternal loop. And in “Her Ink-Stained Hands” what interests me is the holding back, the taking away, the terrible truncated shapes left without any real means to complete or resolve themselves. The fear that has calcified and assumes a kind of permanent stance.
Time as conventionally conceived in much fiction loses its meaning when placed in desire’s crucible. Desire’s temporality is not that generally of development, direction, or movement. Often, the erotic stops or suppresses time, and this is one of the notions I try to explore. Sometimes it warps time, sexual consciousness seeming to inhabit an odd hanging space. “In the passage between day and night. The transition. In the uncertain hour. In the time, you who are French speak, and I am able to attach a meaning to what you’ve whispered, as you approach me for the first time at the airport.” That odd kind of tripped-up time where threads of thought, memory, sensation are all combined, dissolving the ordinary distinctions and boundaries in a kind of perceptual synesthesia. Only later can things be sorted out—and it is at this later point I believe that most writing, with its sense making, begins. But narrative here is far more diffuse; it’s an altogether different kind of energy field. I have tried to enter the continuous present of the erotic experience—a present which is constantly unfolding and includes past and future in its fluid hold. Time is experienced, to borrow from Heidegger, as a “sequence of nows.” That the past or future is autonomous seems not quite believable in this hanging, eroticized state. How to distinguish where the past leaves off and a present begins? When have we begun the future? In “Make Me Dazzle” there is the intermingling of time that allows the longing woman on the beach to converse in two time periods simultaneously to two different people in the simple: “you’re right here.” Other questions arise. Where do the lovers leave off and I, the writer, begin? Where does the life begin and the writing stop? But I am getting a little ahead of myself. What seems evident to me when thinking about time—and sexual desire pushes the issue—is that the now-routine way of calling up the past through the use of the flashback is disassembled here and rejected as an unviable and untruthful strategy. All formulas are suspect. Desire is not formulaic, lust is not formulaic, only pornography is. For me, many highly accepted and completely integrated and “cherished” devices, including the flashback, resemble nothing as much as themselves: accepted and recognizable storytelling devices of literary fiction and now staples as well of mainstream filmmaking. An agreed-upon way to shape reality. It reminds me of those traveling players in “Anju Flying Streamers After” who try to cobble together a bit of a scaffolding, jerry-build a clunky, makeshift structure so as to impose a bit of order on the disorderly, uncontrollable erotic life and death force.
I think of Lautréamont and his radical project in Maldoror, as he tried to expose and destroy simile and analogy. I think of his flagrant parodying of the novel at the end of that work. His irreverence. His dark joy. I take courage there.
I have given up any conventional notions of the novel in Aureole. I have tried to respect and indeed encourage the longing and the genuine mystery which exist between the discrete pieces. The hope is that this desire might augment, echo, and speak to the other motions of longing in this work. The figures from piece to piece are connected peripherally. An erotic consciousness of abundance and allowance, a kind of promiscuity, seems to allow them to move back and forth between space and time more readily than might otherwise be the case. Linguistic relationships seem freely transferable as well—floating through texts more as light comes and goes with its gleaming and ephemeral touch. As in electronic writing, which I find a highly charged and essentially erotic space, I have, from time to time, here attempted the splitting off of narrative or linguistic instants to both accentuate and dramatize the nearness and the farness of the various language and narrative constructions, with the hope of refining those proximities and creating new forms of yearning. Desires I was not even aware I had surfaced during the writing of these pieces. The true miracle of form.
I have chosen with some deliberateness the moments at which to hold each piece on the page. I have thought it most effective to allow them to exist in the hovering place—“in the night and glisten and holy water basin.” In moments of arousal and suspension and vulnerability. Open. That Tantric state when the intertwined couple captures the moment right before jouissance and extends it into forever. To my mind, this work is a novel at the very moment of its forming, before the ordinary assignments are made, and with those assignments a necessary imposition of design, authority, dissimulation, and distance. I have tried, not entirely successfully I think, to keep the material nearest to its longing. At the place wh
ere there is no fixed central figure, no plot in the ordinary sense, temporality without chronology; the place of all potential. The book is in a state of ravel and unravel to me, forming before our eyes, grouping and regrouping, gathering and dissolving. At the periphery of the more expected book lies this one, at the edge of the more obvious and stable book. On the horizon of story, before the shapes are made manifest, and the connections lose their tenuous, mysterious, human hold. I have tried to leave this work at the most erotic moment, the most vulnerable and open. Aureole for me exists forever on the verge, on the edge of a slightly heightened and unhinged world, just before the narrative strands coalesce. Ordinary story seems rather false, and indeed a bit preposterous under the circumstances. It is derailed, detonated, overwhelmed by the intensity of sexual desire. Plot cannot be contained given the subversiveness and potential extremity of the subject. Content insists on its form here. It is my hope that at the book’s threshold the reader and the writer might be allowed to inhabit an extended moment of suspended sexuality where anything might occur. In the moment “before the woman in Paris becomes anything she wants to be yet.” In the moment before “whatever will happen next will happen.” In “the liminal space, in the gap….” To float like the couple in the changing room, that unreal, crystalline chamber, “in some of their clothes,” “in the just March.”
Who has conjured whom here? One more time I begin to question my notions of the real. Some part of me is still in Paris and I look up to the beautiful floating window written in wrought iron, the astounding calligraphy of its balcony, to where the woman, when she is French, opens The Fourth Book of Desire or The Book of Good-bye once more. Set into a delirious language motion, sex motion, in the hovering, luminous afternoon. Today it seems from her all else has been spun. On another day, based on my reading, or my mood, or my desire for the text, it might be Sappho, beached on that lilting nymph who dreams the rest of Aureole’s cast into creation. What do we know of what she wrote or saw in the place where the papyrus tore? Or perhaps it is the woman who writes on the sheets. Who has conjured little Anna, trembling in the fire garden—walking away from almost everything—and then finally from everything…. Are these aspects of the unfolding self? Shall they ever find each other? Or is that not it at all? Where do I, Carole, exist in all of this? I cannot tell you the longing these figures bring up in me—each of us rising out of the other’s want, each in dialogue with the other—as I attempt to live a little more through the openness and fluidity of the form. Do the women on the winter beach dream Steven? Or has he in his solitude and need created them? Will he ever know the opium addict who has left her bleary snow globe on his mantle? And Anju through veils… Stay awhile. A woman holds a child in her arms. Where has she come from? Where has she gone?
“…streamers flying after.”
True, there is no central character moving through conflict making its more or less linear journey here; but rather a spectrum of consciousness, refracted, escaping and elusive, casting light and shadow in all directions. The potential in us, and the extraordinary, awesome potentials still asleep in the language. Aureole to my mind is the story of a woman who wants. A woman, free, before the author’s final prescriptions. In the erotic, the notion of a stable, static being developing in the traditional ways makes little sense except as some kind of agreed-upon convention of legibility. I have only begun in this book to look for the places in the text where passion might yield another kind of logic, offer a different way of proceeding. Aureole remains a mysterious book to me. And the woman.
How will I find her—without a recognizable plot? How will I find her—as she changes shape and place, without warning? How will I recognize her as she wanders through every genre—that passionate terrain? Where will I garner enough trust, enough faith? How will I ever locate her without the usual landmarks? How will I find her as she blithely moves in and out of obscurity, of shadow and light? Again, the writing asks me to be a better, a braver person than the one I know how to be. None of the usual markers to hold onto. I am interested in how different as a process this work has been from the way I once worked. In my earliest novel, Ghost Dance, I followed a vision of an utterly mysterious woman into a kind of comprehensibility. But in Aureole the tables have turned. Who is that woman on the bridge who in different places and guises continually reappears? In the beginning of this project, I thought I knew; by the end I have no idea. A woman moving along the relentless trajectory of her desire, transformed over and over by it. I see works that will be called novels in the future with a notion of character that is much more mutable. I believe notions of plot as well will be radically reimagined—and become much more open again. This is what art does for me: It opens new places; it affords glimpses not glimpsed before. Without it I not only fail to live fully, but I begin to die. All too aware of the loss, I become a mourning thing.
I have tried to create a vibrant, spacious landscape where I might live. A space that is generous in its allowances. A room of my own—part prose fiction, part prose poem, part journal, part notebook, part memoir, part song, sometimes part biography. None of these forms alone quite meets the dimensions or urgencies I have begun to feel. No one shape quite meets the requirements of my desire. I have needed, I have wanted everything—probably too much. Desire has forced me into odd contortions, new constructions, a more unarticulated and primal space, filled with primitive recollections—notions of light and dark, hot and cold, birth and death, danger, fire, flood—memories of clearings, of harbors, tremor, convulsions as they press their way into language. Tracks in the snow…. When you came to visit me that night you left your enormous footprint in the ice. By the morning it had dissolved—and you. Shapes and forms that far from constricting or defining will be evocative, calling up the history of this ancient place, the memory of survival, the immediacy of hand, pulse of blood, the heat of the intellect, all that is beautiful, all that is still possible (intimations more and more often now of the South of France that sun-drenched…).
Without apology, I have tried to create something of a feminine space. New kinds of intimacies. I do not believe in the myth of ungendered writing. Luce Irigaray is much better than I am on this. She says: “Only those who are still in a state of verbal automatism or mimic already existing meaning can maintain such a scission or split between she who is a woman and she who writes. The whole of my body is sexuate. My sexuality isn’t restricted to my sex and the sexual act (in a narrow sense). I think the effects of repression and especially the lack of sexual culture—civil and religious—are still so powerful that they enable such strange statements to be upheld as ‘I am a woman’ and ‘I do not write as a woman.’ In these protestations there’s a secret allegiance to the between-men cultures.” It is essential, I believe, for women to make their own shapes and sounds, to enact in prose and poetry and all other genres and in all other mediums, their own desire, and not just mimic the dominant forms. We must refuse to emerge already constructed. “The master mouthing masterpiece.” Obviously this is a lot easier said than done. First, because it is difficult and still largely theoretical, and second, because it asks us once again to marginalize ourselves, return to the periphery, just as we are acquiring a recognizable speaking voice (theirs) and being rewarded for doing it so well. Just as we are being embraced—even if it is a conditional embrace. And yet… I like to think of Hélène Cixous at times like this. She writes: “We must work. The earth of writing. To the point of becoming the earth. Humble work. Without reward. Except joy.”
Except joy.
I have tried to make a place where pleasures and arousals spread in a lateral radiance, in a kind of prolonged ecstatic. In an aureole of desire. At once diffuse, specific, and inclusive. A place where what is often discarded as unusable will be kept. A place at once interested in the abstract, distant, and also the utterly urgent, personal, even confessional. A place where we do not have to apologize. A place of forgiveness. I have incorporated, taken into the body of this book, my own p
ast work. That there might be a place where we wouldn’t have to disown ourselves, loathe ourselves in that mild, insidious way, feel ashamed of who we are, or who we were—ashamed by the one who was younger, played it more safely perhaps, made even more mistakes. To embrace our own texts, our written texts, and the texts of our lives. To risk the things they love to call us most: self-indulgent, histrionic, irrational. Indulgent, excessive, pleasure texts—unconcerned with getting to the point. In love with freedom. To walk out of the constraints of perfection, or modesty, or approval, or taste, or integrity as integrity has too often been defined. To escape the burden of the already-constructed and received forms—like the props and scaffolding those traveling players cobble together in hopes of staging the story of the bursting, uncontainable Anju—their efforts, slightly funny, kind of wonderful, a little pathetic, sweet, naive, creaking, and ultimately useless. And this is how I regard the old fictions. I want something else. I want there to be space enough for all sorts of accidents of beauty, revelations, kindnesses, small surprises. A space that encourages new identity constructions for the reader as well as the writer. New patterns of thought and ways of perceiving. New visions of world, renewed hope.