Contents
Caravan
If I, Bartleby,
One cannot
A Natural History of the Throught
Out of the dark
How to converse
How to remember
Waiters –
Shyness,
We begin again
Orientalisme
If I prefer not,
Cloth Music
Mén
Bàba
Māma
Mèimei
Bù
Hăi
Māo
Pictograms for Daphne Marlatt
Scriptorium
If I, scrivener, print a letter,
Scriptorium
How to Write
If I noiselessly …
How to write
Silence
Chow Lung
The Real Fictional House of His Imagined Film Director
Moccasin Box
If I, No Reply, write of Christine Stewart,
Moccasin Box
Notes
Acknowledgements
“Bartleby,” said I, gently calling to him behind his screen.
No reply.
“Bartleby,” said I, in a still gentler tone, “come here; I am not going to ask you to do any thing you would prefer not to do – I simply wish to speak to you.”
Upon this he noiselessly slid into view.
“Will you tell me, Bartleby, where you were born?”
“I would prefer not to.”
Herman Melville
“Bartleby, the Scrivener:
A Story of Wall Street”
Caravan
If I, Bartleby,
am a copyist, what am I copying? Down or over. From what page to what page. The flow of ink through the nose of the pen replicating reptilely the tick of a clock turning into another alleyway of lines or mind running down grammatical streets – ever outward like a river through all the islands and channels of its delta after pitching itself downward from mountains and, even before that, from glaciers that had oozed fingers into high valleys but now are said not to be oozing but rather shrinking away from those mountain crags – those humps and hulks and heaved-up layers of ancient seas, jumbled quixotics, masked tectonic rafts of rock my pen makes into loops and sticks and dots.
They shrink from a hot stove, from an odious task, from drudgery, from admitting they’re no longer wanted – these glaciers – no longer loved by the mountains. No. The mountains have had enough, and these glaciers must leave, must melt away, must sink into sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous fissures, cracks, and fractals of mountainhood and meadowhood. Slowly, ever so slowly pulling away the blankets and sheets – inch by inch sliding back the antimacassars on mountainous couches and chairs once protected from human oil but now gradually subjected to this pulling away of garments, this peeling back of scarves and coats, this drawing down of sweater sleeves and chemises, this relentless baring of mountain flesh despite snatches at collars and cuffs, fringes and hems, despite the pocketing of a sash or a sock, a garter or culottes that nevertheless melt trickle pour and hurl themselves down as if under a truck.
Can mountains think of trucks? Humans think not. Mountains leave the question open, preferring to send it as a wave of photons from a star to the universe. To end on a distant planet, an asteroid, light centuries deep in some far-off galaxy of ideas. Mountain thoughts. Could come to rest on a speck of sand in a camel’s eye – an eye that may not look kindly on the kid it has given birth to. That may not allow the kid to suckle. An I that curls her velvety camel lips and gazes across the steppes while her owner walks five miles to the next yurt and brings back the violinist – the owner and his wife and their five children gathering round the camel in a man-holding- animal-huddle of hoof-stomp and dung and windblown hair, the violinist drawing his bow across his strings until slowly from the eye of the camel seeps a tear.
One cannot
write about Schubert without knowing more. I will just say today is his birthday. I imagine that at age seven it would have been a very important day for him. He was already playing violin and piano. His brothers and sisters were getting born and dying. Father and mother and the ones still alive gathered before soup plates in a room lined with cabinets. Father schoolteacher. Mother mother. He would have cake. He would sing so much that a very important gentleman would give him singing lessons. He would run off to the piano factory owned by the father of his friend and play every instrument in the showroom.
As fast as he could think them, Schubert would write songs and symphonies and sonatas. Scherzos, rondos, adagios, marches. Con brio. Con fuoco. Rallentando. Dolce. Estinto. Fortissimo. Allargando. Mezza voce. Minacciando. Flowed from his fingers. Sesquipedalian motifs. Palindromic crotchets. Acrostic syncopations. Metonymic diphthonged sibilants. Conjugations of rhymed chords and intervals. In the house of a wealthy man where he taught the daughters their piano lessons. For a year. But had to go back to teaching children in his father’s school.
He was arrested with friends for mouthing off to police. One friend banished forever from the city. Schubert set his friend’s poems to music. He wanted to marry a soprano – he wrote songs for her, but couldn’t prove he could support a family. Her family kept bundles of his music for decades. Until perhaps some descendant wanted to throw out these yellowing pages of scribbled notes, so that he could rent out his attic and his basement. To a musician or painter or poet. Lost to les couleurs. Perdu dans l’aubergine, la carotte, le pain grillé, la tomate, la moutarde. They don’t give a damn about charging rent.
Le sang, la violet, le vin, la tourterelle spread out their piazzas free of charge, day and night, for anyone to stroll or caper in. Embracing in their ghostly pavements vibrations of flesh and breath. The soles of the strollers and dancers pummel these agoras and forums filling them like goatskins. They stroke and nudge their diaphanous slates, stretch and rub their paving hugs. Urgence to fluctuating cobbles.
Schubert died at thirty-one. Of typhoid or syphilis. On his 214th birthday the trout in his quintet flash their rainbow scales in the streams of my car radio driving past the Holy Rosary Cathedral, where a man twists and lolls, careens out, almost tips his wheelchair as he blindly sweeps an upturned cap this way and that.
A Natural History of the Throught
Violet. Opposite yellow on the colour wheel. Also a flower written about by Robin Blaser. Songs say they are blue, suggesting sky or someone’s mood. Can colour be ironic? A droll black or a meant-to-be-read-two-ways green? If you are a man wearing a pink jacket or, heavens to Betsy, you dress your baby girl in blue? Je pense que tout le monde should be addressed Mister, including baby girls and breastfeeding moms. If everyone wore blue, according to psychologists, our thoughtfulness would be encouraged. We would see a decline in outbursts of verbiage that leave you wondering, What was that all about? Seeing blue on our social associates, we’d be inclined to credit them with having the ability to put two and two together. We’d look before we leapt to conclusions about lack of brain capacity.
I don’t really like where this line of thoughtlessness is going. Because in fact I’ve lost my train of thought. How indeed does one lose a whole train? Entraîner en français: to drag down. My train sunk in a violet pool – no, something far bigger. It’s sunk in a violet sea. A train of camels nose to tail plodding one hoof in front of another dragging my thought across an empty desert of sky and sand. Not to a violet sea but out to the whiteness at the edge of the desert. Whiteness of page already sliced with lines waiting for the train of camels to make pictures in the eye of a beholder through which a thread is needled.
A simple t separates through and a thinking throught, which once rhymed with fruit or newt, but now rhymes wi
th caught and fraught. Halt – the ones at the edge of whiteness. Then seriatim stoppages of camel humps déroulent backward to my throught’s ancestor and the ancestor of that ancestor. It being not so much a throught line with an engine and a caboose as a series of births or reproductions. Camels not actually walking, unless perhaps the desert moves under them, but camel pasting a camel in front of it and that camel in turn pasting one in front of it – the train growing longer pushes apart whiteness at either end and lets the thinker walk up and down her caravan.
Out of the dark
light returns, seeping through cracks in curtains, even ones firmly yanked together. Above and below their bunched skirts, waves of grey grow on ceiling and floor, spinning away streams of photons to land on sleeping cheeks and eyelids. To prick the skin of a limp hand. Wake up, you corpuscles of blood. Run away through your tunnels and chutes. Tell all your friends we’re back. It’s time to jump on the bed and have a pillow fight. Time to row your boats.
Oh, I don’t know about that, say the corpuscles, Our boats are tied up, nosing the weeds of plaid kilts on the men who clean gutters much to the disappointment of crows. There goes our feeding-trough bathtub, say the crows, Get another pine cone, block up the downspout when the men in kilts take away their ladders. It’s enough to remind you of Hitchcock. Watch out. A black wing grazes a kneecap caught out between sock and pleats.
The rowing boats nose into weeds in the subcutaneous tunnels whose branchings and forkings, twigging and budding, await the corpuscles. Who now talk with particles of light, give them a slap on the shoulder. Did you see the Canucks? Five-nothing against the Canadiens. Then they blow it in the third period. Should get a new goalie. Where’s the boss? Reading . . . the inside of her eyelids to download a freighter of REMs into central processing. Please wait. Sixty percent complete.
The photons clear off. Bounce on glass in a wooden square, ricochet off a silver watch and the handle of a trunk made of wainscoting behind which a mongoose had lived that had puzzled, when she was a girl, the sleeping scrivener: how did a furry bird from Mongolia sneak into the wall? Did wainscoting have secret channels where the mongoose ran like a telephone signal? Or was it a friend of the girl in the story? Or something her father had put in the attic she wasn’t to know about – and if I catch you in there, you’ll be . . . Her brother in his diamond box – maybe he was behind the wainscoting.
She squashed her face and arms into the slats and dragged blindly along their ridges and valleys. To a small wet nose poking out of a knothole. In the central processing unit of the sleeping scrivener who thought certainly the girl was that age when she really could fly – just jump off the third step, push the air away with your arms and legs – float over chairs, tables, windowsills – on the simple buoyance of thinking. The corpuscles in their rowing boats drift back and forth moored to their kiltish weeds. Occasionally one or two detach and meander off on the current.
How to converse
How does one do it, with or con – together and deception – then re-versal’s turning back? I gaze into my conversant’s eyes. Around us triads and pairs with glasses of wine – the room bursting with chatter till the walls feel their seams crack – they groan with the pressure of vocalizations, and struggle to hold fast this surging throng of speech – even thinking of themselves as a pressure cooker and hoping that whoever is boiling things up is keeping track of the flame because, if they’re not, the gauge may fly off the top and spew volcanic talkativeness into the night.
No stopping now – out it must come. I’ve been reading your book, I tell him, knowing that the same cannot be said on his part about mine, but knowing also that by telling him this I will stop his gaze, at least for a moment, from wandering over to the well-published, politically active speaker surrounded by women, near an abstract canvas of grey, pinkish grey, and bluish grey squares. Oh, out it must spew – the paper I’ve written on innovative language in poetry, and who indeed is making any claims that rearranging words in challenging conniptions thrust cruelly at readers in the way of Artaudian theatre would change the will of government to hand everything over to globalized corporations?
He helps himself to liverwurst though I’m sure he said at George’s party he was a vegetarian. Those poets only write for other poets, he says, making a pumpernickel-and-ham sandwich. Nowadays, he says, I only read to large audiences of analysts. His eye shifts to the female-adored figure against grey canvas. But somehow, I say, shouting over the din, we must live inside this monster – we have to go on – we have to have other parts of ourselves besides loathing and disgust, despair and cynicism. Must somehow see, as Olson did, humans in a universe. After all, we still must love.
Critique is love, he says between mouthfuls of mustard-coated ham. What I love I theorize. I tweak its premises, massage its syntax, arouse its rationale, I ooze into its faults, then freeze till it snaps, so everyone can finger its shards. Why would I not do that for what I love?
How to remember
I who plays I collects worm food in a green bucket. I’m Green, says the bucket, which is plastic and therefore not green. My worms – do they feel owned? – live in a plastic composter – black, cone-shaped like sawdust burners at mills or coiled beehives on honey jars, though I has only ever seen bees living in stacked rectangles or old tree trunks.
This rainy day They who I calls worms crawl up inside the black shell of their beehive to air holes I has punched for bacteria and worm breath. Ones I calls They inch toward the crack of light at the edge of the lid then bumble over beehive rim in higgledy-piggledy knots and tangles unravelling to streaks of pink cursive script in some unimaginable libretto. Writing across the curving ungreen black surface, they clench, unclench, ooze mucus to stick in wriggling ropes of glistening wormskin new as baby lips.
Could there be a human version of this lazy, tangled wormflesh, this skin-melted-to-skin limb-mingled limbo, this moist, gainless breathing togetherness somewhere outside Encyclopedia World where everyone has anatomy, reproduction, taxonomy, and economic benefit – somewhere outside the unreal Reality that writes, Earthworms who eat rotting leaves in temperate forests are invasive species, but Homo sapiens who burn down forests for hamburger farms are creating wealth?
I lifts the wormhouse lid – flash of light – hail the food god – splash and thud rain down from green bucket. I pretends to be They who I calls worm, pretends They make I a god, then thinks, Not food, not god, just tube mouthing apple core, carrot peel, banana skin, radish tops, grass cuttings. I who plays I pretends to be They who I calls worm, swims through potato peels, brown leaves – not leaves, not potato – not names of anything – just writing along surfaces with myriad feet I calls bristles – mouth open, matter outside, matter inside. Tubular chew through tangles of fleshy script and trails of castings for I who plays I in whose comedy? Imagining sex between They who I calls worm, They who make black gold for I. They in naked glistening embrace, each thrusting penis into other, each enfolding, each holding out clitoris to be stroked.
Oh, I thinks, speaking in her play, how biology texts carp on about reproduction, that factory for making life units so valuable to Homo sapiens. What if I, emptying wormhouse, taking worm gold, is to They a giant wormforce, gobbling all and thrashing all to bits? I digs in fork. Pounds of clinging wriggling wormflesh fly light-blinded then world jolt upside down flat flump body daze. I, who plays I in this unserious deadly play, forks and forgets. How They I calls worms now have fork-torn bodies They may slowly regrow the way I who I calls I cannot – if only They who I calls worms are not crushed too badly.
Waiters –
what actors they are – what directors and stage managers and who knows they may well paint a good deal of scenery too – running their razors adroitly along the edges of moustaches and goatees. Calling out orders to a chorus of chefs whose heads and shoulders, all in black, slide back and forth behind the bar. Sometimes bumping into each other in front of an oven or while carrying a skillet of sizzling bratwur
st, which, if it leaps out of the pan, could upset the waiter’s choreography of dinner for two young ladies. A blonde in low-cut black and a dark in equally low-cut sailor stripes with straps running suggestively over creamy bulges.
Which one is prettier? The blonde with perfectly straight dustily gleaming hair swinging over her shoulders? Or the dark with wavy locks beaming away from her face like chocolate rays from a smiling sun? Oh – they are so ripe he could just pluck these bloom-covered plums. The elegance of the blonde with her long lashes and classy lipstick the colour of coho salmon and harvest moon. Then the laughing good-heartedness of the dark with her bright red smile from ear to ear – the way she tosses her head back and giggles and leans over to her friend. To discuss what else but him.
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