I can’t concentrate for long—I can’t properly and significantly focus—on a source of
worry or anxiety or fear without moving off mentally, and sometimes physically too,
as one changes position upon waking from a nightmare so as to turn away from the
site of distress. I’m hit by emotional heat—sorrow, shame, fear. I want to kick my
back, my neck. I want to kick you. Be forgettable and be forgotten, you sunk bog-
tromper, soggy runner, unformed rotten women in quicksand! Leave me alone! As
one turns, one asserts one’s autonomy, one distinguishes oneself. But in doing so one
allies oneself with the unhappier forces of irony, utilising irony’s propensity to
deracinate materials from their meanings.One becomes a mere fragment of one’s own
history. Maybe fragmentation is the situation that faces Cordelia when Lear poses his
nightmarish challenge to his daughters. Lear invites his daughters to gain private
autonomy for themselves through sacrifice of the common autonomy, a kingdom. But
Cordelia’s love for her father is bound to that kingdom, as it can’t help but be since it
entails for her the entirety of the known world. No single expression and no amount
of expressing can speak of her world, or of her knowing it, at all. The linearity of
language cannot bear it. Its syntax would shatter. And so Cordelia cannot enter into
the dividing up of the world that Lear demands and that her speaking would bring
about. Nonetheless, tragically, her reserve does so. She refuses to memorialise what
belongs properly to the ever-changing active life of remembering. Out of insolently
casual quotidian living into cautious obligatory history: Cordelia is precipitated into
the situation of a mourner. And so she becomes an historian, bound to an ethical and
emotional imperative to remember. But if, as some argue, aesthetic experience is at
its best when it most closely approximates immediacy—of perception, of response, of
feeling, of that mode of understanding that isn’t cognitive but, rather, transmutes
experience into meaningfulness (sometimes almost bypassing meaning, in the
epistemological sense, altogether), it has to eschew remembering. Lear wants to
arrange conditions for himself that will allow him the leisurely, regressive aesthetic
pleasure of forgetting—hence his desire for a declaration of love from his daughters,
the verbal equivalent of a memorial. Or a list. The semantic temporality (which I’m
inclined to term the paratactic present) of paratactic attention is closely akin to that
of Gertrude Stein’s ‘beginning again and again’: we come to one thing and another in a
moment to moment place to place sequence and series of experiences experienced
without any necessary or determining order, their details appearing in such a way as
to make one conscious of them and to assure that they ‘never,’ as Adorno puts it,
‘merge tracelessly into the totality.’1 This is the syntax of remembering, its units
oddly hinged. Shot of a dry landscape, a small group of people standing on a bluff,
hands clasped and heads turned to the sky, fissured by a bolt of lighting. Shot of a city
at night in rain, dark streets gleaming , some cars, tall buildings. Shot of a great bank
of blue-white ice hissing and crumbling at sea’s edge. Shot of two women fighting,
one holding a knife in her raised hand, with a table under a white tablecloth in the
foreground on which rests a bowl of peaches and blackberries. Shot of a flirtatious
child; he’s pretending to shoot me (with his finger) and I pretend to die, followed by a
second shot in which he revives me by sweeping his arms outward from his chest and
waggling his fingers at me. Beaming child. A plot emerges. This one needs only
another bolt of lightning to become allegorical. The sequence of shots frame the
world. Or do they issue a warning? A propensity for list-making, which is not atypical
of the superstitious, is frightening for the paranoid. It reassures the superstitious that
she can exercise a modicum of control over the phenomenological ceaselessness of
the world; it gives expression to a perceived orderliness without imposing order on
things. But the paranoid reads into the list and finds evidence in it that nefarious
forces have been assembled and are at work in all the reaches of her world. The
allegorical can be viewed either (as in the case of the superstitious) as manifesting
continuity and homogeneity across differences or (as with the paranoid) as
manifesting discontinuity and heterogeneity across similarities. Listing is generally an
evaluative activity, holding life at bay. In that case, it probably doesn’t have any
aesthetic value, despite whatever satisfactions or emotional excitements it brings
about. In the Phaedrus, Socrates warns against writings that supplant memory: ‘If
men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise
memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no
longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have
discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder.’ I dream that I am praised for
my sentences—or, to be more precise, for my evident interest in sentences. The
evidence of your interest, says Nicholas Declan Callahan, is in the sentences. I don’t
know how to respond except vivaciously. Assembling words and phrases is what
poets do, after all; the ideas and images, the representations and messages and
depictions are secondary, regardless of (and sometimes indifferent to) the poet’s
desires and intentions. Suddenly the assemblage becomes a presence, awkward
perhaps but present. This textual-sudden becoming-present bears similarities to an act
of remembering: out of accumulated fragments of perception, something comes
abruptly to mind, whole, as it were. But it is also very likely to be ‘wrong.’ The
absence that marks each memory is not only of the past that is remembered; it also
includes everything that remembering subsumes or lops off. This is the site at which
the lyric ‘I’ pauses to speak to the lyric ‘you.’
O you who are the sum of summits,
You,
Chief, president, boss, chairperson, czar
And admiral of my elbows,
My pilot and navigator, chauffeur
And captain,
You, o receiver of terms of endearment and irritation that I improvise, invent,
and apply to you and to no one else,
O you, ...
And so on. With indexical lyricism the poet begins to pet, and occasionally poke, her
spouse. Such violence is characteristic of the lyric poem—and why? Because feelings
must be powerfully moved, so that they are shaken out of their well-worn grooves. I
have written a twelve-part, twelve-page poem. The lines, of varying length, are placed
at varying distances from the margins; each page becomes a landscape formed by the thoughts/phrases scattered across it. I read over each section one last time, stamping
the pages, as I approve them, with a single word in block caps: DECEASED. We
dream unshared experiences in an unshareable world—no longer in a realm of beings
acting and speaking together. ‘New Yorkers tend to be too provincial,’ says Lei-lei
Wilson Tin to Tamarind Magee. ‘Not that anyone cares,’ says Lily Ball with muted
malice. ‘New York would be chill.’ Commando pinches a slice of pepperoni off the
pizza on the platter in front of them. ‘I’m thinking of writing a graphic biography,’
says Lei-lei. ‘Of whom?’ ‘Of the woman my mother wants me to become.’ ‘Grim,’
says Tamarind Magee. As Charlie Altieri notes, in the course of an eloquent analysis
of the culturally-impotent characters in James Joyce’s Dubliners: ‘we realise in
retrospect why the children in their disappointment become the adults who
disappoint.’2 All that’s left for the disappointed children, whose options are limited
from the very start, is to find an identity that can bolster them enough to allow them
psychically to survive, if not to flourish, in the milieu to which their lives are
consigned. And that identity—the one most readily available and probably the only
one anywhere in sight—is that of the disappointing (disappointer) adults. The child by
now is, in her disappointment, angry, but at herself. She has become not only the
focus of disappointment but an embodiment of disappointment itself. She is a failure
in a world of the failed and failing. ‘My dad’s a creep,’ says Tamarind Magee. ‘Seems
like you get off on hating him,’ says Lily Ball. For months embarrassment has
angered Tamarind Magee, now anger embarrasses her. She shuts up. As a honey bee
circles a clump of sage, it defecates. Something like thought—a polyphonic
awareness—crosses its flight path. In a previous life as a human it was obedient
except when crossed. In its next life, as an azalea—a life it doesn’t foresee—it will no
longer entertain thoughts of revenge.