For Michelle (A Parousia)
*
A Prelude
Before I begin my response, I'd like to say a little about how the idea of study informed my approach to writing about my reading of Michelle Detorie's poems.
According to a definition, “to study” is to give devotion & attention to X as a means of acquiring knowledge about X. To me, the second part of this definition negates the first.
When I read I study, & to study (for me) has more to do with that first part – giving devotion & attention to – that is not about acquiring or accruing some kind of value in an economic-academic sense. Part of that devotion & attention is based in a listening-practice (though I also have a tendency to “listen with my mouth”)[1], which also means I do not necessarily always adhere to a rigid chrono-logicality.
“A study” as a room designed for this purpose: the earth, a dog, sounds, a friend, a tree, a question – walking around in & with these kinds of study-rooms. The poem, too, as a place for pond-ering, a devotion to the project we're all involved in, which looks & listens, not as a means for grasping (“acquiring knowledge”), but in order to give attention to generative proliferation, questions as a means of (re)thinking with life. That is, to err on the side of “who or what do these poems make me think of/with?” My thoughts about anything have a tendency to stray often & so, in my response, the questions I ask I do not purport to have answers for.
Or, perhaps writing about is a residue of listening to.
*
A Prolong (or, My Brilliant Friend)
Recently, I have been obsessed with particular elements of The Winter's Tale. One of these obsessions is where my looking-thinking hovers precariously around “the gap of time” that occurs in the play & the Paulina-Hermione friendship that must be proliferating within it, but without any explication of it.
But, it is not nothing – it is the appearance of nothing.
In a purportedly posthumous climate that is illegible (they have no scene), perhaps as nothing they are regulated socially. However, behind the appearance of (doing) nothing, they escape social regulation.
It is a back-stage sympathy, a treasonous conversation, a survival-space, a back-talk, a rehearsal of animated hibernation as study session. Lying to live, Paulina-Hermione withdraw to draw-with one another, a parasocial conspiracy that makes them their own deux ex machina event. A hypo/hyper theoretical female friendship as thought –– a karstic space Shakespeare can’t even imagine, but Dickinson can – a “nothing” so full of affection that you cant see any – that’s all.[2]
& not to fill this gap (as readers or writers), but I am wondering if, as in a dream, to look close might be the same side of looking wide, dog-eyed, together + to respond.
(We try to go to sea a kin-ship not a king-ship.
Not even needing a sea – a pond.)
*
A Pre-face (or, “Selfies With Animals”)[3]
Being as if to be with. Some notes.
“Growing up with five women in the house, man, I knew all the signs and gestures and contents, or at least I knew a lot of them that were manifest in women’s conduct. Ways of saying things, ways of reacting, making the world daily. But I didn’t have a clue as to what men did, except literally I was a man. It’s like growing up in the forest attended by wolves or something. It took me a curiously long time to come into man’s estate.”[4]
Approach or run?
“Wolf territories…shrink and advance, blossom and collapse….wolves mark [these territories], but, unlike cartographers, they do so without parameters. They neither own, control, or care about land…[their] obsession is spacing, not space…”[5]
An animal to learn from.
*
“History is sad. All histories are sad.
Ruining the wilderness of language.”
First, I want to ask (& let hover): Does “History” as concept, as a tool of the state, create & then perpetuate as natural an anti-sociality – one that pervades even any “micro” histories – hence ‘sadness?’
The second line has me thinking for a long time. Is “wilderness” not, from the beginning of its conception, a fall-out word? A colonization of/as language that reflects a colonization at large of people, of land, of time (of History) – but does language itself not refuse the meaning of the line? That is, if I go with the constructed definition of “wilderness” as being “uncultivated, uninhabited by the human” – where, exactly would language’s “wilderness” be? Can we say that a wilderness without the inclusion of humanity would be no wilderness at all?
“A voice crying in the wilderness” – does this not unmake as it makes itself (heard)? What I mean, I think, is – is this as weird as it seems? For one, it is “a voice”, the assumption of it being human seemingly coming from it’s written-in-a-book-ness. For another, crying in the wilderness can also be read as crying (mourning-sound) in language, a pointing to “the human” as being (historically) falsely differentiated from wildernesses. Not a tool, but language as critter[6], what we critter with(in) – that generative treason of denying or slipping away from the regulation that the western conception of separation-fantasy-as-Truth is. A place that can also feel like peering over the edge of a cliff – a body-as-thought, leaning, not knowing what it will do.
So that, for me, Detorie’s line “[r]uining the wilderness of language” brings me into a “wilderness.” In this wilderness, perhaps language can be & leave Time – & this thought could therefore be a way of growing-toward a more inclusive sociality?[7]
“Is someone alive at the end
of this sentence?”[8]
*
In the lectures Jack Spicer (JS) gives in Vancouver shortly before his death, he talks about what he sees as the sources for poetry in this wonderfully weird, shape-shifting way:
“JS: You have to keep a kind of lookout for them. You can’t catch them like canaries by putting salt on their tails, but you sort of give them an even chance. I mean, show them there’s a good dinner of blood like in the Odyssey where they dug the trench and slit the throats of the sacrificial animals. And all of that is likely to summon them.
Q: Well, you have to be available and vulnerable, in that case.
JS: Yeah. That’s one of the problems.”[9]
*
Too, I read Detorie’s poem thinking-with my memory of John Berger’s essay “Why Look At Animals?”
I mean, I want to pause (with all that homonymic life) to think about how much animals are present & therefore connected to human-language making. I want to contemplate these continually shifting “territories” of human & animal – I want to speak for a moment about who slits whose throat when any throat is slit & that, literally, if I were to lie bleeding in a ditch all sorts of critters would instantly be involved & composing.
I want to put aside the problematics of “naming” in the story of Adam & Eve (i.e. what it indicates about separation, perhaps) & only look at what feels like reality to me: that when critter-life appears, critter-life compels from us a sound. (“The heartbeat is a house / of sound.”) & in Berger’s essay & Detorie’s work, that the appearance of them often reminds us of the “old, alive heart.”[10]
In that vein I want to ask: Is the supposed possibility of consolation around animal-life found, not necessarily in a conception of animal-life being generally indifferent to us but, rather found (when we think of ourselves as of the earth too) in our own prior indifference to a (possessive) self?
However, the problematics of naming won’t hold off for long. When it is about/has been about an investment in the conception of thought that separates the “sovereign self” from the earth, it seems connected to the terror, the inheritance, of “inhumanity-as-banality” in that (to put it too simply): the fantasy that (primarily) Capitalism calls real – that violence-toward-nature-is-not-true-violence – paves the way for the fantasy that violence-toward-(some other)-each-other-is-not-true-violence. “Might is that which makes a thing of…”[11]
“The terns like a flock of scissors.”
& then (but before that), what a proliferation of thingness wherein “[t]he machines in the sky / look like consonants and vowels.” And they are, but what exactly do they say? & therefore do? & to whom?
(& of course, past(this)oral-ity, “The Woods Are Full of Policemen // And so are we.”)
*
(
“Feral Poppies”[12]
What is “[d]eep with justice. Deep with help.” – the sea?
Or would it (also) be sleep, a dog, a direction, a bitten off head, a shipwreck?
“…I made an atlas with notes from the old self.
That world lost – rotting at the bottom of the sea. Will it come back?”
Because the one makes me think of the other:
“[T]he old self” as “[t]hat world lost…” – Atlantis & fantasy. Or, something that didn’t exist but the desire for it did? & what of that world is worth preserving? & why?
I ask this because the (incomplete) “atlas” seemingly drops out of the rest of the poem & therefore seems to open up a space for the dog-companion that comes in. Too, given the title of this poem (& the resoundings that occur in the other five), I’m also wondering: Not an appropriative “back-to-the-land” (or sea) living, nor a fantasy of a sovereign self that the law uses as pawn, but (in apposition to the earth) could another way to multinatural living be to be feral-ized?
& then, with Atlantis on my mind, I come to the lines:
“Things lie dormant for many years but bloom again. It happens all the time.”
& a few thoughts happen simultaneously: I am reminded of something Robert Duncan says – “Resurrection is the most natural thing in the world!!”[13]
& I am reminded of how, out of sight, Paulina-Hermione bear it.
)
*
“I only wanted to know
what I wanted.”[14]
Does the regulatory function (of law, of grammar, of politics, etc.) keep us from knowing what is wanted? Or, just as important, from knowing what is not wanted? i.e. how would an “I” &/or a “we”, wanting to be rid of policemen, know how to be rid of policemen? The woods & ourselves being occupied by them, where does life escape the death of social/political regulation to?
*
“I opened the wolf’s mouth
and put in my head.”[15]
What thought wants to be bitten off?
“’Unforgettable sorrow’…is in each case álaston pénthos, the phrase by which the Greeks referred to a perpetually self-renewing grief (pénthos) abiding in nonoblivion (álaston).”[16]
For some reason, I am thinking of a festival scene in Sans Soleil where the villagers are wearing (primarily) animal masks to sing & move through the street – this kind of parade as a means of requesting that animal-life proliferate after the season of drought.
I want to say that the two scenes in Sans Soleil that involve festivals & parades make me feel like what I want is to live in that – not un-sad, but not un-joyful either – a continual stream of serious play, movement making social with sound. But also, I try to keep in mind “it matters what thoughts think thoughts, what stories tell stories…”[17]
This perpetual grief as a means, too, for a renewal of joy.[18]
*
Relooping to the title of Detorie’s poem, do “selfies” occur at the expense of animal-life? Or, are they a replication of it?
Perpetual grief? A renewal of joy? Or, what is the selfie about? Are we trying to live a kind of multiplicity of self? i.e. who am I now at this restaurant? & now who am I, on the side of this mountain? & will I be able to locate the difference? & will I remember what the difference was if I can’t look back & see those selves? Will others be able to see them? But really, what do I want from the feeling of being seen?
What kind of tool is a “smart” phone? what & who is it for?
On the internet, can the possibility for irregulatory function override the regulatory & seep into being, “real life?”
“The owl made herself in the top
of the tree, waiting for us
to see her. But, no, we couldn’t
take a picture: her wings
pushed shadows across our faces.”[19]
& I want to ask: if the owl is waiting to be seen (as a means of being with?), is there some disjunction here between a possible owl-conception of what that means & the human-conception (mediated through technology)? i.e. the distance remaining between “you” & “we” in any poem despite this pronoun shift.
Is it possible to live a feral life in the face of the sovereign selfie?
Said another way, I want to contemplate for awhile, in all the tones of Berger’s essay, in all the complications of (“nonoblivion”) everyday life, “Why Look At Ourselves?”
*
A Prologue
“What if looking is an accident you pass through in order to get to reading in order to arrive at
looking which is on the other side of reading.”[20]
Another element of The Winter’s Tale I have been obsessing about happens prior to that gap in time. Out at sea, Paulina’s husband dreams of Hermione, their country’s treasonous queen. The dream is interesting & weird for a number of reasons, particularly that it seems to re-think-with what “afterlife” & reading might mean:
“…for ne’er was dream
So like waking. To me comes a creature,
Sometimes her head on one side, some another…”[21]
“…the unforgetting of loss settles into the mourner, then, as if it were a kind of growing being that expands until the mourner…is completely occupied and so identified with it….Such a grief can perpetually gesture toward the loss only if it…turns itself into ‘the oblivion of nonoblivion’”[22]
“So filled and so becoming….”[23]
Is there such a thing as waiting with agency? What or who does it look like? Where & how does it look? & why?
“If you don’t get here soon, I will turn
into a tree
and walk away”[24]
“And, gasping to begin some speech, her eyes
Became two sprouts…”[25]
Somehow, what I mean, is that this feels particular to a reading of Detorie’s poems, re-thinking in trouble, with the trouble: the gasping that Hermione does in this man’s dream, trying to speak while sprouts are coming out of her eyes – i.e. the idea that perhaps the body must be full of earth before the mouth can speak…
Or, a long howl as correspondence to Daphne’s bark, an ode to that gap of time.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[1] Townes Van Zandt, “Two Girls”
[2] Emily Dickinson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Thomas H. Johnson & Theodora Ward, Eds.), Letter 32
[3] In the interest of time, I have limited my response inasmuch as I am using this particular poem to talk about the others, letting the others come in & out of it sometimes in the interest of porosity. Where I have brought in lines from other poems of Detorie’s (or other texts) there will be an endnote to indicate this – all other quotes are from the poem “Selfies With Animals.”
[4] Robert Creeley, Tales Out of School (emphasis added)
[5] Jon T. Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America
[6] Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures)
[7] But of course, then there’s always Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall to consider.
[8] Michelle Detorie, “The Woods Are Full of Policemen”
[9] Peter Gizzi, The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer
[10] Michelle Detorie, “Feral Poppies”
[11] Simone Weil, “The Iliad, Poem of Might”
[12] All of the quotes in this section (with the exception of Duncan’s) are from Detorie’s poem “Feral Poppies”
[13] &, given the “double-edged” sword ‘resurrection’ can be (as in, I also hear the use of ‘recrudescence’ in Nathaniel Mackey & Fred Moten’s thought….)
[14] Michelle Detorie, “Poem”
[15] Ibid.
[16] Branka Arsic, Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau
[17] Marilyn Strathern quoted in Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures)
[18] Dear Michelle: After watching Sans Soleil, I noticed that the dog I live with would canter just so from one end of the house to the other, his nails hitting the wood floors producing the exact same sound/rhythm of the music in the Tokyo parade scene. This doesn’t happen with any kind of real regularity, but every time it occurs, it is a wonderful coincidence that jolts me into life. Love, Julia
[19] Michelle Detorie, “The Woods Are Full of Policemen”
[20] Fred Moten, “The Blur and Breathe Books” (NYU/TISCH video of The Department of Performance Studies first annual José Estaban Muñoz Memorial Lecture, February 24, 2016)
[21] William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Act III, Scene III
[22] Branka Arsic, Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (emphasis added)
[23] William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Act III, Scene III
[24] Michelle Detorie, “January”
[25] William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Act III, Scene III
*
A Prelude
Before I begin my response, I'd like to say a little about how the idea of study informed my approach to writing about my reading of Michelle Detorie's poems.
According to a definition, “to study” is to give devotion & attention to X as a means of acquiring knowledge about X. To me, the second part of this definition negates the first.
When I read I study, & to study (for me) has more to do with that first part – giving devotion & attention to – that is not about acquiring or accruing some kind of value in an economic-academic sense. Part of that devotion & attention is based in a listening-practice (though I also have a tendency to “listen with my mouth”)[1], which also means I do not necessarily always adhere to a rigid chrono-logicality.
“A study” as a room designed for this purpose: the earth, a dog, sounds, a friend, a tree, a question – walking around in & with these kinds of study-rooms. The poem, too, as a place for pond-ering, a devotion to the project we're all involved in, which looks & listens, not as a means for grasping (“acquiring knowledge”), but in order to give attention to generative proliferation, questions as a means of (re)thinking with life. That is, to err on the side of “who or what do these poems make me think of/with?” My thoughts about anything have a tendency to stray often & so, in my response, the questions I ask I do not purport to have answers for.
Or, perhaps writing about is a residue of listening to.
*
A Prolong (or, My Brilliant Friend)
Recently, I have been obsessed with particular elements of The Winter's Tale. One of these obsessions is where my looking-thinking hovers precariously around “the gap of time” that occurs in the play & the Paulina-Hermione friendship that must be proliferating within it, but without any explication of it.
But, it is not nothing – it is the appearance of nothing.
In a purportedly posthumous climate that is illegible (they have no scene), perhaps as nothing they are regulated socially. However, behind the appearance of (doing) nothing, they escape social regulation.
It is a back-stage sympathy, a treasonous conversation, a survival-space, a back-talk, a rehearsal of animated hibernation as study session. Lying to live, Paulina-Hermione withdraw to draw-with one another, a parasocial conspiracy that makes them their own deux ex machina event. A hypo/hyper theoretical female friendship as thought –– a karstic space Shakespeare can’t even imagine, but Dickinson can – a “nothing” so full of affection that you cant see any – that’s all.[2]
& not to fill this gap (as readers or writers), but I am wondering if, as in a dream, to look close might be the same side of looking wide, dog-eyed, together + to respond.
(We try to go to sea a kin-ship not a king-ship.
Not even needing a sea – a pond.)
*
A Pre-face (or, “Selfies With Animals”)[3]
Being as if to be with. Some notes.
“Growing up with five women in the house, man, I knew all the signs and gestures and contents, or at least I knew a lot of them that were manifest in women’s conduct. Ways of saying things, ways of reacting, making the world daily. But I didn’t have a clue as to what men did, except literally I was a man. It’s like growing up in the forest attended by wolves or something. It took me a curiously long time to come into man’s estate.”[4]
Approach or run?
“Wolf territories…shrink and advance, blossom and collapse….wolves mark [these territories], but, unlike cartographers, they do so without parameters. They neither own, control, or care about land…[their] obsession is spacing, not space…”[5]
An animal to learn from.
*
“History is sad. All histories are sad.
Ruining the wilderness of language.”
First, I want to ask (& let hover): Does “History” as concept, as a tool of the state, create & then perpetuate as natural an anti-sociality – one that pervades even any “micro” histories – hence ‘sadness?’
The second line has me thinking for a long time. Is “wilderness” not, from the beginning of its conception, a fall-out word? A colonization of/as language that reflects a colonization at large of people, of land, of time (of History) – but does language itself not refuse the meaning of the line? That is, if I go with the constructed definition of “wilderness” as being “uncultivated, uninhabited by the human” – where, exactly would language’s “wilderness” be? Can we say that a wilderness without the inclusion of humanity would be no wilderness at all?
“A voice crying in the wilderness” – does this not unmake as it makes itself (heard)? What I mean, I think, is – is this as weird as it seems? For one, it is “a voice”, the assumption of it being human seemingly coming from it’s written-in-a-book-ness. For another, crying in the wilderness can also be read as crying (mourning-sound) in language, a pointing to “the human” as being (historically) falsely differentiated from wildernesses. Not a tool, but language as critter[6], what we critter with(in) – that generative treason of denying or slipping away from the regulation that the western conception of separation-fantasy-as-Truth is. A place that can also feel like peering over the edge of a cliff – a body-as-thought, leaning, not knowing what it will do.
So that, for me, Detorie’s line “[r]uining the wilderness of language” brings me into a “wilderness.” In this wilderness, perhaps language can be & leave Time – & this thought could therefore be a way of growing-toward a more inclusive sociality?[7]
“Is someone alive at the end
of this sentence?”[8]
*
In the lectures Jack Spicer (JS) gives in Vancouver shortly before his death, he talks about what he sees as the sources for poetry in this wonderfully weird, shape-shifting way:
“JS: You have to keep a kind of lookout for them. You can’t catch them like canaries by putting salt on their tails, but you sort of give them an even chance. I mean, show them there’s a good dinner of blood like in the Odyssey where they dug the trench and slit the throats of the sacrificial animals. And all of that is likely to summon them.
Q: Well, you have to be available and vulnerable, in that case.
JS: Yeah. That’s one of the problems.”[9]
*
Too, I read Detorie’s poem thinking-with my memory of John Berger’s essay “Why Look At Animals?”
I mean, I want to pause (with all that homonymic life) to think about how much animals are present & therefore connected to human-language making. I want to contemplate these continually shifting “territories” of human & animal – I want to speak for a moment about who slits whose throat when any throat is slit & that, literally, if I were to lie bleeding in a ditch all sorts of critters would instantly be involved & composing.
I want to put aside the problematics of “naming” in the story of Adam & Eve (i.e. what it indicates about separation, perhaps) & only look at what feels like reality to me: that when critter-life appears, critter-life compels from us a sound. (“The heartbeat is a house / of sound.”) & in Berger’s essay & Detorie’s work, that the appearance of them often reminds us of the “old, alive heart.”[10]
In that vein I want to ask: Is the supposed possibility of consolation around animal-life found, not necessarily in a conception of animal-life being generally indifferent to us but, rather found (when we think of ourselves as of the earth too) in our own prior indifference to a (possessive) self?
However, the problematics of naming won’t hold off for long. When it is about/has been about an investment in the conception of thought that separates the “sovereign self” from the earth, it seems connected to the terror, the inheritance, of “inhumanity-as-banality” in that (to put it too simply): the fantasy that (primarily) Capitalism calls real – that violence-toward-nature-is-not-true-violence – paves the way for the fantasy that violence-toward-(some other)-each-other-is-not-true-violence. “Might is that which makes a thing of…”[11]
“The terns like a flock of scissors.”
& then (but before that), what a proliferation of thingness wherein “[t]he machines in the sky / look like consonants and vowels.” And they are, but what exactly do they say? & therefore do? & to whom?
(& of course, past(this)oral-ity, “The Woods Are Full of Policemen // And so are we.”)
*
(
“Feral Poppies”[12]
What is “[d]eep with justice. Deep with help.” – the sea?
Or would it (also) be sleep, a dog, a direction, a bitten off head, a shipwreck?
“…I made an atlas with notes from the old self.
That world lost – rotting at the bottom of the sea. Will it come back?”
Because the one makes me think of the other:
“[T]he old self” as “[t]hat world lost…” – Atlantis & fantasy. Or, something that didn’t exist but the desire for it did? & what of that world is worth preserving? & why?
I ask this because the (incomplete) “atlas” seemingly drops out of the rest of the poem & therefore seems to open up a space for the dog-companion that comes in. Too, given the title of this poem (& the resoundings that occur in the other five), I’m also wondering: Not an appropriative “back-to-the-land” (or sea) living, nor a fantasy of a sovereign self that the law uses as pawn, but (in apposition to the earth) could another way to multinatural living be to be feral-ized?
& then, with Atlantis on my mind, I come to the lines:
“Things lie dormant for many years but bloom again. It happens all the time.”
& a few thoughts happen simultaneously: I am reminded of something Robert Duncan says – “Resurrection is the most natural thing in the world!!”[13]
& I am reminded of how, out of sight, Paulina-Hermione bear it.
)
*
“I only wanted to know
what I wanted.”[14]
Does the regulatory function (of law, of grammar, of politics, etc.) keep us from knowing what is wanted? Or, just as important, from knowing what is not wanted? i.e. how would an “I” &/or a “we”, wanting to be rid of policemen, know how to be rid of policemen? The woods & ourselves being occupied by them, where does life escape the death of social/political regulation to?
*
“I opened the wolf’s mouth
and put in my head.”[15]
What thought wants to be bitten off?
“’Unforgettable sorrow’…is in each case álaston pénthos, the phrase by which the Greeks referred to a perpetually self-renewing grief (pénthos) abiding in nonoblivion (álaston).”[16]
For some reason, I am thinking of a festival scene in Sans Soleil where the villagers are wearing (primarily) animal masks to sing & move through the street – this kind of parade as a means of requesting that animal-life proliferate after the season of drought.
I want to say that the two scenes in Sans Soleil that involve festivals & parades make me feel like what I want is to live in that – not un-sad, but not un-joyful either – a continual stream of serious play, movement making social with sound. But also, I try to keep in mind “it matters what thoughts think thoughts, what stories tell stories…”[17]
This perpetual grief as a means, too, for a renewal of joy.[18]
*
Relooping to the title of Detorie’s poem, do “selfies” occur at the expense of animal-life? Or, are they a replication of it?
Perpetual grief? A renewal of joy? Or, what is the selfie about? Are we trying to live a kind of multiplicity of self? i.e. who am I now at this restaurant? & now who am I, on the side of this mountain? & will I be able to locate the difference? & will I remember what the difference was if I can’t look back & see those selves? Will others be able to see them? But really, what do I want from the feeling of being seen?
What kind of tool is a “smart” phone? what & who is it for?
On the internet, can the possibility for irregulatory function override the regulatory & seep into being, “real life?”
“The owl made herself in the top
of the tree, waiting for us
to see her. But, no, we couldn’t
take a picture: her wings
pushed shadows across our faces.”[19]
& I want to ask: if the owl is waiting to be seen (as a means of being with?), is there some disjunction here between a possible owl-conception of what that means & the human-conception (mediated through technology)? i.e. the distance remaining between “you” & “we” in any poem despite this pronoun shift.
Is it possible to live a feral life in the face of the sovereign selfie?
Said another way, I want to contemplate for awhile, in all the tones of Berger’s essay, in all the complications of (“nonoblivion”) everyday life, “Why Look At Ourselves?”
*
A Prologue
“What if looking is an accident you pass through in order to get to reading in order to arrive at
looking which is on the other side of reading.”[20]
Another element of The Winter’s Tale I have been obsessing about happens prior to that gap in time. Out at sea, Paulina’s husband dreams of Hermione, their country’s treasonous queen. The dream is interesting & weird for a number of reasons, particularly that it seems to re-think-with what “afterlife” & reading might mean:
“…for ne’er was dream
So like waking. To me comes a creature,
Sometimes her head on one side, some another…”[21]
“…the unforgetting of loss settles into the mourner, then, as if it were a kind of growing being that expands until the mourner…is completely occupied and so identified with it….Such a grief can perpetually gesture toward the loss only if it…turns itself into ‘the oblivion of nonoblivion’”[22]
“So filled and so becoming….”[23]
Is there such a thing as waiting with agency? What or who does it look like? Where & how does it look? & why?
“If you don’t get here soon, I will turn
into a tree
and walk away”[24]
“And, gasping to begin some speech, her eyes
Became two sprouts…”[25]
Somehow, what I mean, is that this feels particular to a reading of Detorie’s poems, re-thinking in trouble, with the trouble: the gasping that Hermione does in this man’s dream, trying to speak while sprouts are coming out of her eyes – i.e. the idea that perhaps the body must be full of earth before the mouth can speak…
Or, a long howl as correspondence to Daphne’s bark, an ode to that gap of time.
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[1] Townes Van Zandt, “Two Girls”
[2] Emily Dickinson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Thomas H. Johnson & Theodora Ward, Eds.), Letter 32
[3] In the interest of time, I have limited my response inasmuch as I am using this particular poem to talk about the others, letting the others come in & out of it sometimes in the interest of porosity. Where I have brought in lines from other poems of Detorie’s (or other texts) there will be an endnote to indicate this – all other quotes are from the poem “Selfies With Animals.”
[4] Robert Creeley, Tales Out of School (emphasis added)
[5] Jon T. Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America
[6] Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures)
[7] But of course, then there’s always Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall to consider.
[8] Michelle Detorie, “The Woods Are Full of Policemen”
[9] Peter Gizzi, The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer
[10] Michelle Detorie, “Feral Poppies”
[11] Simone Weil, “The Iliad, Poem of Might”
[12] All of the quotes in this section (with the exception of Duncan’s) are from Detorie’s poem “Feral Poppies”
[13] &, given the “double-edged” sword ‘resurrection’ can be (as in, I also hear the use of ‘recrudescence’ in Nathaniel Mackey & Fred Moten’s thought….)
[14] Michelle Detorie, “Poem”
[15] Ibid.
[16] Branka Arsic, Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau
[17] Marilyn Strathern quoted in Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures)
[18] Dear Michelle: After watching Sans Soleil, I noticed that the dog I live with would canter just so from one end of the house to the other, his nails hitting the wood floors producing the exact same sound/rhythm of the music in the Tokyo parade scene. This doesn’t happen with any kind of real regularity, but every time it occurs, it is a wonderful coincidence that jolts me into life. Love, Julia
[19] Michelle Detorie, “The Woods Are Full of Policemen”
[20] Fred Moten, “The Blur and Breathe Books” (NYU/TISCH video of The Department of Performance Studies first annual José Estaban Muñoz Memorial Lecture, February 24, 2016)
[21] William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Act III, Scene III
[22] Branka Arsic, Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (emphasis added)
[23] William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Act III, Scene III
[24] Michelle Detorie, “January”
[25] William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Act III, Scene III