The Baudelaire Fractal

by Lisa Robertson

  For the bookish girl, any conventional identification could only be disastrous. Sometimes the identification was inadvertent. What seemed like aesthetic sentiment would be belatedly revealed as the promotion of a spiritual straitening. Within this constraint, always the conjuring of the representation of beauty felt effortful and false. It was a form of service work. Never would I execute the beautiful tasks with the required charitable attitude. Never would I be paid squarely. The currency was all wrong, as well as the amount. Everything mortal about me was off. My sunburn, my swollen appetites, my hunger, my frown lines. Repeatedly the striving to synchronize my desires with the representation brought me no pleasure. Eventually the mortal stain would show. Doggedly I tried to get it right. There would be outbursts and scenes. I came to see that in the literary theology, beauty was associated with immobility, which is to say, my immobility, the conceptual immobility of the girl or thing. Whether with tenderness or with force, beauty was to be acted upon, purchased, sat in its chair in the light. Beauty would incite the purchaser’s beautiful speech. Oh, I could not be that thing for long, although often I did admire it in the literature. I did fail the literary beauty in this way. I did reveal my stain, the ever-movable indelible stain. For wasn’t this girldom I had been assigned a long covert transmission or inheritance of a stain? At first the theft of beauty by the market of the literati didn’t bother me; I was trained into the contract by my habitual reading. But then it did bother me; it saddened me considerably. I felt the sadness thoroughly. I believed it then. I wrote the sadness in my diary, I drank the sadness in my room or in cafés, I fucked the sadness. I almost believed I was the sadness. But I could not go all the way. Sadness did not utterly disappear; transformations aren’t clean. Finally I preferred to have been interpolated by a stain. I discovered that it was not a loss: the stain was a thinking. Because I preferred to survive, I entered the aesthetics of doubt. With the interruption of my identification with beauty by the stain, a philosophy arrived. It was a little tool towards freedom.

  My youthful commitment to the identity of beauty with freedom had been experimental, in the sense that usefully recognizing oneself as a girl was an experiment. I had absorbed the commitment from the literature, trying it on like a rhetoric that I called passion, loving the interior thrill of difference I felt as the tiny identifications operated within me, interpreting the thrill as my own emotion, not recognizing that what this thrill covered over was a worried questioning, not yet linguistic, about the scorn that bordered beauty’s literary description. The man-poets scorned what they desired; their sadistic money was such that the object scorned was endowed with the shimmer of sex. How radiant we were in our gorgeous outfits and our bad moods! Oh, and this ignited poetry. Baudelaire scorned Jeanne Duval and every female he dallied with, or at least did so on paper, Ted Hughes scorned Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound scorned Djuna Barnes, George Baker scorned Elizabeth Smart, everybody scorned Jean Rhys. Proust did not scorn Albertine because Albertine was a man. The she-poets perished beneath the burden of beauty and scorn. This is what I observed. This was the formal sexuality of lyric. Who was I then, what was I, when I, a girl, was their reader, the reader of the beautiful representations? Who was I if I became the describer, and how could I become this thing before perishing? Would I then even recognize myself? Because I saw the perishing everywhere. Daily I read it. The freedom of desiring and its potent transformations seemed not to belong to beauty, just to beauty’s describer. Anyone without a language for desire perishes. Any girl-thing. My questions emerged then as a mute, troubled resistance to the ancient operation that I also craved. Certainly the poem must become something other than this contract. I seemed to have been wrong about most things, except for my will to write and to read. That and the stain. Even so, I did not want to give up on beauty altogether, so gently I set it to the side, and with it the philosophical potency and freedom of the bad mood. Certainly I would return to beauty, I would return to the bad mood. I would arrive at anger.

  For now I would continue to test the hypothesis of lust. I would test it in bookshops, in museums, and at fountains. I would test it, as I have described, in attic rooms, maid’s rooms as they were called. As unfixed lust, in fact a maid, I would write, I would perambulate and peruse. I would forget not to stare. I would move towards what I desired. I would make myself understood. What I wrote about in my heavy hard-bound diary: about a girl living in a room, getting dressed, buying food, fucking, the goddamned tulips ugly in the dark. These were historical records about things that might never have before existed, if I were to judge by the literature. Before I began to write what I needed to write, an event that, to my considerable dissatisfaction, would not begin for some years (lines such as ‘even the musking tulips’ would assert themselves, unwelcome even at the moment of transcription), I had to set the record straight, establish an archive. This would be my foundation. I had to describe everything, from the perspective of the lust of a maid. I did it altruistically, for the future. It would not be attractive. It would show my unkindness, the banality of my appetites, the small lies I told, the wilful omissions. My descriptions would not be about being seen, nor about the striving for that position within the lyric contract. Being seen by money was a form of incarceration within an enforced aesthetic constraint. Within this contract, aesthetic judgments are the same judgments that assess financial risk. Is the girl productive? Lucrative? Accessible? Against this odious assessment, I began the slow accumulation of the documents of the incommensurable procedures, procedures for which I was not a sign, but an untrained actor, a bad actor, a hack of a sentence writer, an anonymous fuck. If the result seems merely decorative, ornamental, it’s because now realism has become another name for capital.

  If I repeat the word girl very often, it’s for those who, like me, prefer the short monosyllable, its percussive force. I wonder if in repeating I might exhaust the designation that fixed me, flood it with the lugubrious excess it named, and so convert the diminutive syllable to a terrain of the possible. Maybe this would be grace. Maybe. Would it be grace to aesthetically yield to the mystic obscenity of the word girl? She is allegorical, her body both lost and grotesquely multiple. She is estranged in a ruinous nostalgia for decorative immobility, enclosure, muteness. I want to force the category to produce, monstrously, a subjectivity outside subjection.

  The diaries are grubby and worn and release little scraps as I handle them– paper tea-bag wrappings, a pencilled note from Minou on a scrap of torn envelope, receipts and calculations, an unpaid doctor’s bill handwritten in blue ink, amateurish cross-hatched drawings of Michelangelo’s slaves. I’ve brought them across three decades in my motley suitcases, cushioned by woollen coats. I’ve dragged them across odd thresholds, storing them at the back of musty armoires, bringing them out again, moving on. Now that they have become entirely impersonal, stained relics of a departed political economy, I, at the age of fifty-five, shall make of these diaries, here in this penurious retreat, a portrait of my luck.

  The aging dandiacal gigolo in the cream-coloured linen suit whom, after a long evening of Latin Quarter jazz bars, I rejected, by the Fontaine Saint-Michel battling Lucifer. He called himself an architect. Lucifer’s Miltonic handsomeness. Oh, the going-with and the departing, my pantheistic intoxication with the leaflike erotics of number: I wanted the men to yield the obscenity I craved, I wanted the frieze of their bodies to decorate the complete alterity of my ambition. The making of this frieze opened the technology of a gentle heresy. How else could I recognize disorder? Any loving girl could only be heretical. I recognize her heresy here.

  My portrait photograph of Minou in her black bowler hat, sometime companion who in her Southern drawl introduced me to Djuna Barnes, who kept beguilingly anarchic scrapbooks in her tiny top-storey room in the Beat hotel on rue Gît-le-Coeur, who wandered the Marais in search of angels, whether of stone or flesh: she is on a bench with the bell tower of Saint-Sulpice behind, Lucifer dancing on her hat brim. The constellati
on of fine moles on her elegant profile.

  I did not, at that time, enter Saint-Sulpice, the baroque church where Baudelaire had been baptized, to visit the chapel with the Delacroix paintings of the storming of the temple, and Jacob battling the angel, and here too the struggle of Michael and Lucifer, all swirling with chatoyant pastels; I did not then even know of the paintings, described in 1861 by Baudelaire as badly situated, the high chapel window disgorging an oblique, destructive light, though at the time of the black diary with the pebbled black board covers, I lived very close by, on the rue du Cherche-Midi. I had sublet a seventh-storey maid’s room from an Irish actress for a month. It was called a room; it had a window, and also a telephone, very luxurious commodity. But it was little more than the width of the mattress, which I would roll up in the day to sit and write near the window at the foot of the narrow space. The actress’s furnishings included this pallet and its coverings, a low wooden stool on which the telephone sat, near the door a blue dresser on which I kept my minimal kitchen accoutrements – coffee pot, cutting board, bowl, pocket knife – an alcove filled with homemade, bowing shelves, where she had stacked quantities of her colourful clothing, and to the right of the window a small, pink, marble-topped, wax-splattered vanity table upon which leaned a mirror, and a battered and tarnished saxophone draped with a mauve feather boa. I placed my typewriter on this table, and it was here that I would write, sometimes covering the mirror with a paisley silk scarf, sometimes examining my face with an incredulous curiosity, believing that in the oblique light already I could see the marks of age. Undoubtedly, she applied her makeup here. There was a communal, rust-marked sink with cold-water faucet at the end of the corridor, beside the shared toilet. I bought a plastic basin to fill at that sink and bring back to my room, and I washed in cold water that afterwards I poured out into the mansard roof gutters beneath my window. Out on the windowsill I stored my food. I had everything I needed, in a slightly diminished, awkward scale, as if I lived my life reduced by one sixth of the dimensions usually considered necessary. This awkward contraction of domestic necessity was for me utopian. The minor discomfort, unimportant in itself, was a subtle threshold to a different sensing. I poured my nightpiss also into that gutter.

  These upper-storey rooms belonged to the bourgeois inhabitants of the lower floors, and unlike the curved marble steps and wrought-iron railings leading to those apartments, the upper rooms were accessed by a different, narrow back stairway. Georges Perec, in Life: A User’s Manual, his byzantine biography of a Paris apartment house, begins his story by describing the building’s stairway, which he characterizes as a neutral space, belonging to all and to none. ‘All that passes,’ he says, ‘passes by the stairs, and all that comes, comes by the stairs.’ But each apartment house has two sets of stairs, and they are not equal. All do not pass by the same stairs. There are the ritually ornate stairs of the bourgeoisie, decked with curlicues that dignify their ascent or demise, and there are the more dour, neutral stairs of service. Ours were the service stairs. This humbler approach was overseen scrupulously by the concierge in her glassed-in observation post. For maids need surveillance. Without the constant gaze of the concierge to monitor her guests, any maid could at any moment make the turn to prostitution. Since a maid is essentially a slut, as far as the bourgeoisie is concerned. As for the artists who occupied the upper rooms, like maids and sluts they too served the middle classes. They would never cease to be dependent on middle-class need, Perec says, so they also required surveillance.

  Poetry, too, I would later learn, has its concierges. Poetry, too, I would enter by the dowdy back stair. When I had seemingly left my life of service, and had found what at first seemed like grander, or at least more autonomous, rooms to frequent, I would learn that I was well prepared for literature. Having fled domestic labour, I began my literary service with commercial freelance work, as an art critic and book reviewer, rather than by observing the then-normative academic protocols. I had already attended the academy of sentence writing, within my diaries; this training was thorough enough. Of the two modes of entry, it is very likely that the back stair is the more pleasurable, and the company more varied. I had experience with the service stair.

  Our attic rooms had once lodged the domestic servants employed by each bourgeois household to care for their children, cook their meals, clean their flats, but now these bare chambers were cheaply let out by the apartment owners to those of us who tried to live outside money. Many of us were what you could call foreign, or women, or writers. Some of us were not legal. There being then no bylaws or rules regarding the supply of plumbing, heating, or the other hygienic improvements of the twentieth century within casually rented quarters, I suppose it had become slightly more profitable to rent the spartan rooms for cash to girls in fugue than to lodge the help there. It was to me a strangely inverted living arrangement: we moneyless ones floated above the wealth, with access to the sky, entertained by their upwards-drifting piano scales and cello practice, their domestic spats about money, whereas in the New World cities I knew, we occupied damp basements, as the ancestors would, or pagan gods. Up there in our maid’s rooms we coolly and disinterestedly skimmed and carried on, above the fiscal dramas of the bourgeois strivings. Time above was baroque, contrapuntal; we relived a dream of the time of some other long century, unsure if it was the time of the future, or of the past. It wove through the present, where it was cited, in fragments, but retained an aesthetic autonomy. We called this poetry. Maybe it was a kind of heaven. We found these anachronistic rooms by word of mouth, in bookshops or on church bulletin boards, and fibbed a little to the owners in order to procure their heavy skeleton keys: phantom jobs or pretended stipends supplemented our unspeakable economies. Also, we shared – Dutch Peter, the skinny, stooped, floppy-haired novelist who lived down the corridor, would let me heat my coffee pot on his little camping burner sometimes, and as I waited for the pot to boil, he would, from his desk at the window, tell me in his soft voice about the difficulty of writing. Thank you, Peter. He seemed to me to be a person entirely outside of age. He could have been twenty-seven or he could have been fifty. He had recently seen a man shot dead on the street, on a busy afternoon on the rue de Rivoli. Was it political or personal? We would never know. The newspapers never mentioned it. He was haunted by this brutal assassination, and soon afterward went back to Amsterdam.

  Each of us would innovate little methods for survival. I would take to my narrow bed in the cold room and write lists as if they could scaffold me. Room, 350 francs; coffee pot, 50 francs; electric burner, 150 francs (for I had to buy one after Dutch Peter left); face cloths, 28 francs; a little coffee at a café, 5 francs; and that bloody whisky that was 23 francs. Read Boethius, Olson, Proust, Rhys, Berger, Nabokov, Durrell, Plath. I wonder now who reads Durrell with the breathlessness he then commanded? Read Rilke, Barthes, and Dante. Read Heidegger. Read Woolf and Levertov. I navigated amongst books by an uneven mixture of gut and chance, and so my choices were mostly conventional. I mention them here as a portrait of a style of readerly ardour in 1985. Being itinerant, I had no access yet to libraries. It was the year before I read Arendt and Mallarmé. I had stumbled curiously within Wittgenstein without becoming committed, experiencing his thought as a style of retreat, and I had hovered over the surface of Our Lady of the Flowers in a stunned pre-masturbatory glaze. In Proust I lingered on the dress descriptions, with a flame of astonishment. Who was Fortuny? In reading I continuously discovered the extent my own incomprehension; it was so varied and complicated that it became my wealth.

  Reading, listing, I wanted to escape the violent sociology of beauty to experience aesthetics as an even redistribution of the senses across the most banal parts of dailiness. I wanted to write it all down, everything inchoate: light, dust, textile, pigment, sentences. Beauty would be the lust for the complex, unspoken surface of the present. I sought a sense-textile, which would flourish outside the humiliating economy of servitude that names us. Within any day
there is a hidden dimension both occult and common. The senses might operate on several temporal levels simultaneously, remaining partly in the hidden dimension, as they also eased outwards in the way that, for example, if one had made love all afternoon in the room, one later carried a different thinking into the evening streets and also into books. Perception opened, and surface became epistemology. Each category of experience continuously transformed into another. Describing was a way of trying to understand anything about freedom. I believed that there would always be kinds of time that escaped sociology. I made an invisible art of describing, to get to the core of how it works. When I say ‘art,’ I mean the quotidian commitment to a set of techniques, some received, some by necessity invented. I wanted this art to be unrecognizable, to keep it for my own pleasure, and so I read and I walked; I became part of images. Images did exist, but differently than I had first believed, and I couldn’t contain them or quantify them. They were borderless and moved between sensations. John Berger, in an essay on Caravaggio, once spoke of the universe on the other side of the skin, a phrase that lodged itself in my imaginary for years. Were there kinds of images that were not part of the dire contract of beauty and scorn? How did one comprehend this other universe? I pondered in my diary whether one could ever become an image for oneself, an image to live from, or at least to write from, confounding something Charles Olson had said in one of the excitingly opaque essays in a pale grey paperback from New Directions. This image would not be a means of appearing to a social given; rather, it would be the self-given permission to not disappear to oneself. When I recognize afresh the courage it takes for any girl to not disappear to herself, I am still shocked. Could the image of my own self-appearance open a possible world? This query sometimes felt false, because in my experience then it was without category, so worked on the plane of intuition, but I trained myself to embrace its falsity. I wanted the image to be kinetic and tactile, an undulant elsewhere, not the predetermined fixture of a gaze, not the token of a bordered exchange. I wanted it to be rhythmic, in the way that Benveniste spoke about rhythm: not a measure, not a temporal phenomena of Nature, but ‘the form in the instant that it is assumed by what is moving, mobile and fluid, the form of what does not have organic consistency.’ A girl has no organic consistency. In this invented discipline of images, I gradually lost all fear of distortion. I perhaps oozed, rather than thought. What united and separated things? An imperceptible membrane, stretchy, spangled, gauzelike, of total vitality, which included laziness. A crystalline gel. An alphabet. Laziness in fact was my main form of vitality. It was my portal to the truth of artifice. Artifice was to become my calling.