by B W Powe
She had once visited the few who were receptive. Masses were opening.
She had much to do.
More messages were on the way.
•
One day a university student opened the screen on his laptop and found messaging tags. You have mail. He looked at the news from Abyssinia. He saw images of starving children and drought. His heart pounded. He had to travel, become someone else. His university life seemed irrelevant. He tapped out a collective message to everyone he knew and pressed Send. Tapping he found a voice. He was inside light, the beams off this mobile surface. PC... PC... PC... PC... he chanted, as if the letters were a drug or an abracadabra.
In his message to all he’d tapped: “I’m Rimbaud.” To himself he muttered: “I’ve become an other.”
•
Once a young woman who worked for Canada Trust, a bank in Toronto, opened her screen and trolled websites. She was dissatisfied with her career and her current relationship. Something was missing. She had to search. She pressed enter and enter. What was she entering? She couldn’t say exactly. But she went on entering. What beautiful words, she said to herself: Enter, Entrance.
She started reading about waves and a lighthouse. Why this, she wondered. She was accustomed to reading about Angelina Jolie. She liked her sass. Then she read about a great house and a hero who changed sexes: Orlando. From male to female: she wondered what it would be like to go the other way, from female to male. She loved looking at women, and did so with an attentive sensual eye. Then she read how angels were often hermaphrodites, which meant they contained both sexes in them, neither male nor female but both. She thought, this means they’d be crazy good fun at a free-for-all party.
She started an avatar identity on line. She called herself Orlando. And she pressed Send.
She’d entered another realm.
How she loved these words, too: Sending, Send.
•
The angel of inspiration looked on, impressed. She had many names. Sophia, Aphrodite, Erato, Calliope, Clio, Thalia, Terpsichore, Shekinah, Euterpe, Carmenta, Athena, Medusa, Isda, Israfel, Beatrice, Matilda, Psyche: a multitude of masks and forms for one identity. She was always waiting to be welcomed. You only had to honour her and she’d come. But now she was perplexed. In fact she was confused. These shifts were occurring rapidly. They were happening so fast not even an etheric being, created elsewhere, could keep up. She had a lot to learn from these beings who had found a source for their own recreation. She’d have to consult elsewhere about what to do in the next phase of earthly transformation.
•
The angel mused between stars. She hovered, floating, swaying, eyes opening closing, listening to the world’s communiqués. Serenely, she followed the voices. What a magnificent jumble, she thought.
A streak of light raced by. It startled her. The light was travelling faster than her angel brethren.
In a stunning realization she felt how the streak of light was human, tearing past the earth’s gravitational pull, darting outwards, streaking towards her, dashing beyond, onward to the stars.
A new form, without a name –
It was racing at a speed that made the angel shudder.
Re-Readings
1.
If you’re about to be shackled off to prison, shipped to the stormy ice jails of the Gulag, about to be shot or tortured, shoved off into exile – if you were to spend time in solitary confinement, in isolation for a long period of punitive time – if you were bereaved, mourning the loss of the love of your life, or left desolated on a cruel night by fateful medical news – then what poetry would you take with you? What poetry would you turn to for company or solace?
I wonder if you would choose the avant-garde verse of the Concrete Poets or the playful LANGUAGE artists, or the prose of a writer for whom a theory of literature (accomplished though this could be) transcends the experience of literature. Maybe the playfulness would be what you need under such circumstances.
2.
Still I know I’d open Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (the 1855 edition), a selection of Emily Dickinson’s verses (fragments 460 to 800 especially, though I couldn’t live without 320 through to 410), Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell,” Rimbaud’s Illuminations (taking his Season in Hell would be redundant), Eliot’s Four Quartets, Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” and “The Idea of Order at Key West”, a selection of poems by Pessoa and Neruda, and Lorca – lots of Lorca, Suites in particular.
If I were permitted novels, I would bring the collected works of the Brontë sisters, Ulysses, Across the River and Into the Trees, The Old Man and the Sea, The Great Gatsby, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, The Border Trilogy, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Love in the Time of Cholera.
If plays – The Tempest, A Streetcar Named Desire, Camino Real, Buried Child, The Stonemason.
3.
If I was going into the riptides of hell (or if I thought that I was about to do so), then it’s likely I’d choose to carry with me Paul Celan’s Breathturns, or Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes (or maybe just the so-called Blue Octavo Notebooks), a selection of Mandelstam’s verses and poems by Akhmatova. Maybe some lines and poems by Leopardi, too.
4.
I’d need ache and eloquence: those for whom the truest audience was the soul, or readers who hadn’t come to be yet.
5.
The point in words where mind and nerve-ends meet – so we may breathe across dark plains – across death – to the light beyond grief –
6.
The fascinating exception to the playfulness of the LANGUAGE poets is Anne Carson, a poet of pastiche and enigmas. She combines scholarship, wit, parody, linguistic
experimentation, and the poignant depths of lyricism and grieving: white space, quiet music, bafflement, farewells. She reached her apex in the limited edition of Nox. The book unwinds and spreads out in your hands, becoming an art object, a meditation on words, a searching poem of loss, a series of elegiac fragments that are both transcendent and wounded. Erudition and poetry meet in her highly original visions. She makes autumns in rooms. Her mourning is curiously contemplative and comforting. Her addresses to No One draw me. She keeps the wilderness within. The white spaces are also her frontier.
Marginalia I
1.
Jack Kerouac: his heart seemed to beat faster than the others of the movement he named and represented. Hence his life had to be short. The blessings on his work and life were that much more intense.
William S. Burroughs: wanted revenge on reality. Re- reading him is to live in his tenacious long suicide and in his broken murderousness. His words were meant to tattoo us with curses.
Allen Ginsberg: so generous he abandoned poetry on the page for the circle of oral communication. Everyone could participate. Performance became enwombing for him.
2.
On Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, and Paul Celan:
How far can you fall and outdo the others who have fallen, who have crashed?
Burroughs: Naked Lunch is a voluntary descent into hell, initiated and perpetuated by his visionary hallucination- inducing addiction. He wills madness. Dante trusted that his Hell had an exit point: the ascending narratives of Purgatory and Paradise would follow the descent. Burroughs abandons this trust and that narrative sequence. For him there’s only hell.
Plath: the formidable Ariel Poems are a voluntary descent into the aesthetics of hell. She creates beautiful performances out of madness and genocide. The exquisite poise of her crash in “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”: Plath’s
words dance on the edge of the void. The nothingness that surrounds her spectacular verse is death. It’s emptiness with a gloss.
Celan: his Death-Fugue and Psalm are descents into the hell created by the Nazis. He witnessed organized perdition, and had no desire to be in its throe. All Celan co
uld do was mark the way down into the inferno with choked lines: he speaks in sputters, spasms –
... Is Celan’s poetic voice the most authentic resistance to 20th century totalitarian-Nazi hell? His gentle resistance comes in the breath between gasps, convulsive lines that reach out to nothing, no one. His no-thing is cabalic: it is the ultimate unknowable, the no name that can’t be spoken and yet breathes into dust. Celan and Plath are visionary extremists – but the difference in their vision, essential and poignant, must be this: Celan wished to be elsewhere.
Signs
1.
Letters written on the wall that faded before I could read them.
2.
Letters written on the wall that appeared to be beamed in from outside, but when you looked – there didn’t seem to be a source.
3.
The trees rustle in the wind, the trees whispering what seems to be the word, “yes.” The trees have letters, too.
4.
I take signs from many places. A tree, the forest, the rivers, the creeks, the waterfalls, the feel of the wind on my cheek, the clouds and the sky, the communication towers, the stadiums, the domes, the bank buildings, the neon, books, CDs, Blu-rays, radios, cinema, YouTube – from wherever they come, from wherever I read them or sense them or think them through or simply receive them.
5.
If we were placed in a cosmos created by love, if nature is part of the language of the universal soul, then we honour that creation by acknowledging that, when we make languages (buildings, alphabets, numbers, and
digits), love and wisdom are potentially present in them, too. They’re part of the speech of the greater cosmos.
6.
The communiqués of the stars. The communions of cities. Everything speaking.
Marginalia II
1.
The Story-Seller: the gift-shop where a storyteller sells stories to people who need a tale to tell. Parables for sale, anecdotes on bargain tables. He mail-orders plots. Fables are 10% off, if you purchase two or more.
2.
Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s Wife: a novel on the robust woman and her young poet lover. It would be the story of the mother of Shakespeare’s twins, and of the fading of a marriage. What happened to her when the bard returned from London, during his retirement from the stage? Did she welcome the errant Will back?
3.
Shakespeare Out of Love: the women in King Lear, Othello, Macbeth
4.
A History of the Angels: the Fallen and Unfallen
5.
Investigations of the Wind: A History of the Forms of the Wind
6.
The Conversations of Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman
7.
Roulin: The Story of the Postman Who Cared for Vincent van Gogh
8.
Illuminating 1860: Imagined Encounters in New England between Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson
9.
Conversations in Père Lachaise: What the Ghosts Say. Dialogues between Jim Morrison, Paul Éluard, Sarah Bernhardt, Max Ernst, Molière, Balzac, Oscar Wilde, Yves Montand, Proust and the Members of the Paris Commune.
10.
Fearful Symphony: Heart of Darkness told from a native’s point of view, from Kurtz’s point of view, from the Harlequin’s point of view, from Kurtz’s fiancée’s point of view. Joseph Conrad’s story told again in multiple perspectives.
11.
Lou: A Novel about Lou Andreas-Salomé. A story told about the gifted woman who loved Nietzsche and Rilke.
12.
Children of Fire: a novella about the child of Jane Eyre and Rochester. What did their son become? Speculation: perhaps he grew up to be Dorian Gray. Premise: Bertha (the madwoman in the attic) gave birth to a child, a daughter (another of Rochester’s secrets). What happened to her? Did she eventually meet Jane’s son? Perhaps together they become the gamekeeper and the governess, the uncanny duo who haunt Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, the greatest ghost story ever written.
13.
To Kill Céline: a novella about an Allied plot during World War Two to assassinate Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the novelist who collaborated with the Vichy government. What happens when the allied officer who is parachuted into France confronts the gifted writer who was a vicious anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer? Later: Céline wandering lost, in the ruins of France after the allied invasion and the fall of Vichy. Céline adrift with his cat: monologues to an animal.
14.
Cassady: a montage-collage stringing together depictions of Neal Cassady from Kerouac’s On the Road and Big Sur to Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, to Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
15.
Madness: the meetings of James Joyce and Carl Jung, their arguments concerning the schizophrenia of Lucia Joyce (Joyce’s daughter). The cross-purpose dialogues about fiction and the interpretation of dreams – and ultimately, the rejection by Joyce of Jungian psychiatry.
16.
Guardian: Samuel Beckett’s care for Lucia Joyce in a Zurich asylum. It’s been said that Lucia fell in love with Beckett when he became her father’s secretary while he worked on Finnegans Wake. And it’s been said Beckett’s rebuff provoked Lucia’s descent into madness. Yet Beckett became the executor of her estate and visited her in the asylum after James Joyce died. Monologues by Lucia and by Beckett. Moment: Beckett and James Joyce sitting in silence during their work together. Madness in love, obsessive art: fragments from Beckett’s last plays hint that he was remembering Lucia’s voice, Joyce’s silence.
Virtue
(A free translation from Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen.)
•
“I can resist everything except for temptation.” – Oscar Wilde
•
Paul was a devout young man. Every day he went to the church in his neighbourhood to pray. He was in his last year of university where he specialized in theology. He’d spent the majority of his time studying. His grades were excellent, and he was preparing to go on to graduate school. He was thinking about becoming a minister. When he went to church he obeyed the injunction that was written in the plaque on the wall: The greatest place to be is on your knees.
He prayed passionately. It was his solace, his inspiration. He was known for his piety on his street. Even his parents, who weren’t religious, were impressed.
In all his actions he tried to be righteous and obedient. One day when he was about to enter his church he encountered a man slouching by the door, smoking a Gitane cigarette. He wore a stylish fedora, and his clothes were dark and immaculate. Curiously, the man looked like Johnny Depp in the Roman Polanski movie The Ninth Gate.
Paul knew who it was right away.
The man was the devil.
He said: “Young man, if you follow me, I’ll make you a promise.”
“What is that?” Paul asked.
“I promise all the sex you can handle, all the drugs your system can take, all the money your bank account can hold, all the power in the world that you can use in any way you see fit. You can party non-stop without sleep. You can attract beautiful women from every race and culture. You can hold onto your youth. You can be an advisor to presidents and prime ministers. Travelling will become second nature to you. You will have beautiful homes in exotic locations, apartments in the great cities of the world. Your image will appear on the front of magazines and on billboards. You will be called for your opinion. You will go to the head of every line-up. Pictures of you will hang in the rooms of women and men who crave pleasures that they have yet to experience. You will be in every Who’s Who. Your Wikipedia biographical entry will scroll down and down and down and down. You will be world-renowned and notorious.”
“What do I have to do for all this?”
“Do?”
&nbs
p; “Yes, what would I owe you?”
“Why your soul, of course... your obedience to me.”
Paul was terrified. He tore away from the devil and lunged for home. There he barricaded himself in his room behind a wall of books (all commentaries on the Gospels). He stayed away from the church for days. He fasted and slept very little.
One Friday he cautiously emerged from his room and went to church.
The devil wasn’t lingering at the door. There was no sign of him anywhere.
Paul opened the door and entered. He walked uneasily, hesitantly, down the aisle towards the altar, nervously glancing from left to right, carefully listening for other steps and voices. The church was empty. He couldn’t see a priest.