Dear Samira and Scout,
Strong surfers in the ocean, I saw them last Sunday. I was in San Francisco. The part of the ocean that was producing clouds, that was sending clouds over the city: it was a giant blank, a churning, original cloud. The center of all clouds, clouds generated from it. The surfers emerged, walking barefoot through the city, everywhere we walked, they were ordering sandwiches. I was eavesdropping on their conversations about the conditions of the ocean. They had tumbled through strong waves, and they were drying off, needing lunch. The fabulous rhythms of their surfing days.
In the beginning of October, I dreamed I had a double, but we couldn’t be awake at the same time. She would be unconscious when I was awake, or I would be unconscious if she was awake. If I got too hot or too cold, we would switch places, and I would fall from life into unconsciousness again, waking her up. I had to keep my temperature in a precarious balance, so that I wouldn’t faint into that coma. But there was this ambivalence: I was keeping her dead if I kept myself awake. This exchange between life and death. It sounds a little bit like the ending of Benjamin Krusling’s poem “a surge of desperation”:
look , there I was , being followed
by a man all the way home
shirtless , with a drill , and he’s yelling
about acetone acetone acetone , but his life
seems almost over
This yelling man who follows him home, he seems to me like a double of the poet, one who shadows his steps. As “his life” intersects with our poet’s life, he exposes the poem to an explosive mechanism, a menacing drill. He introduces the poem to death. The entanglement of the speaker with this man casts doubt over the opening line of the poem: “I am a total person today with a single life.” The speaker has emerged from singularity into an entangled relationship, one characterized not by the “single” but by repetition, the triply manifest “acetone.” Two voices collide as the man’s chant takes over the poem: “acetone acetone acetone,” a chemical song that, vibrating like his drill, both interrupts the poem and produces it. “don’t let me be radically individual,” Krusling writes, in “prayer.” These poems are multiple. They tell of lives intertwined, “knotted like a double helix.” This knotted helix erupts from “the rot of the world,” and from the chiasmus of a common insanity: “I know there are crazy people / and people too crazy to live.”
In “poetry in the 21st century” the poet’s address to the “you” is a vehicle through which the reader is drawn into proximity to the poem and its entanglements, drawn in “close to me,” the poet and his family.
[...] close to me you were like
my brother sister mother father
close to me you were like my dream of water
that rose up and cleared economy away
All these family members collide into proximity with one another, compressed into one line: “brother sister mother father.” This address to the “you” doesn’t move in one direction, like a private transaction, but quadruples outward, dispersing into four integrated figures. This multiply directed movement ushers a wave that rises up and “cleared economy away.” That wave seems to me an apt figure for the movement of Krusling’s poetry, which envisions a clearing space that displaces the violence of capital, making room for love. As in “poem,” his poems fulfill a wish for a world in which our eyes are smiling, and “love was coming true .. . !”
Love comes true in the poem. In “ON THE “TRANSMITTED INTO”: The receptive poetics of Joan Mitchell, Jack Spicer, and H.D.,” Tom Jeep Carlson writes of love as a dispersed force, rather than a rational transaction. He theorizes a form of poetry keyed into the sympathetic reverberations of love:
I realize now that love is something like a force or spirit, always hovering above us, sometimes attaching itself to bodies when the conditions, when the emotional and aesthetic chemistries, are ideal... Love moves by sympathetic pitches, is transmitted into bodies that are keyed to it.
The poet is a medium for love: love’s spirit moves through the receptive poet like a wave. It rises up, like Krusling’s dream of water. Love is indecipherable, opaque: the poet channels love into an irrational form, adequate to its dispersed motions. “The love feeling directs me, as a Martian directs a poem,” Carlson writes. Love is the poem’s maestro, its intelligent director.
I will say goodbye with another “dream of water,” this time from September. A girl brought me one of my old diaries that had been lost for years. “We’ve been waiting for you to come here. Someone mailed this here knowing you would come and find it.” The diary explained the past. I read my writing and realized I had been where I was before. I said, “I’ve been here before. Are we near Lake Champlain?” I felt I was in proximity to a great lake, and to those people in the past who would bring me back, who wanted me to be there. Those people were like the force of poetry, the spirit of love that hovers over us. It draws me into a dream of absent water.
Love,
Hannah
Dear Samira and Hannah,
It really feels like fall now, and I remember summer, but not as well as I'd like to. I say this mostly because during this most recent summer, I moved. And so that season went away, passing on into the next one.
I live in Chicago now. You know this. It's been a slower move than I thought it would be. I have been slow to adjust. When I first arrived in Massachusetts from California, four summers ago, I felt scared, but not really. I was to live in the “hamlet” of Florence in a house with a porch and in a room with two windows. From one of these windows I observed the neighbor’s house and cat through the winter, each routinely hidden by snow. Through this same window the sun would rise too. In the other window, just trees.
It was very easy to write from that place and in that house. In a room increasingly pink as the weather cooled off and down, summer to fall and spring again, the animals returning, creeping back to us through the muddy snow.
I am writing to you now from within my nostalgia. But I do associate that time, my last move before this one, with the certain arrival of poetry into my daily world. It was not when I “became” a poet. But it was when I first put poetry at the very center of life, as a way of mediating or transfiguring experience and inventing thought. I wrote and wrote. And so inconceivable change was to be conceived. I didn't feel better. But I saw it all.
Poetry is not always the most appropriate tool for such adjustments. Though the act of choosing poetry, for me, tends to be equally about choosing it when it’s no help at all. When it cannot “touch down,” remaining no service at all to this life. Poetry did not make me at home in Massachusetts. But poetry was available to me in the absence of any certain knowledge about my arrival in a newer world. I had to make it all up. The truth of that confusion was there in verse. Poems fake it, like we do. Inventing a secret way of existing in the world we do not know of. In “A Variation on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” Hajri Aga writes:
The world is everything that is the case
The world makes real the sound of things
That means there is a world and things speak it
But all of their speaking is done in secret
Because sound is sense, and real is hidden
The mouth is the thing for our speaking secret
I love this secret mouth: the domain of people and of things, made secret by its transmission of a hidden speech. The final proposal of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus — from which this poem borrows its title, declarative form, and opening line — famously asserts: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” What cannot find itself represented in language must not be put into speech. Aga’s poem picks up in this moment, electing to perform Wittgenstein’s cautioned error. What would it look like (sound like, feel like) to lend language to that which we do not understand? What if we don’t have all the facts, if “hardly anything is realized,” and still stumble into speech? “That means there is a world and things speak it / But all of their speaking is done in secret.” The speaking mouth of the person in the dark, uttering not the real as we know it to be, but as it is hidden from us.
In trying to describe what we do not know, we turn to secrets and lies. Uncertain kinds of speech fall out of sight, into secrecy. In much of the poetry I love, I sense this state of desperation. The unending desire to speak with success about “life” and its opposite, and finding (again and again) the impossibility of successful communicative speech, operating instead through a series of errors. Lyric poetry presses toward understanding where there is none, giving voice to this secret. Riley Jones, in “Between the Necessary and the Good,” writes:
On the phone she’d said
She wanted to use my dreams
Without specifying if for
Or against me
There is a choice
To place yourself below a shield
She must assume I’m always lying
I’d said I hoped to tell the truth
As I hoped for a bouquet
Of daffodils to appear
On my nightstand with a note
Saying ‘for you’
Here, truth is the thing we hope to achieve, what we aim our speech toward, but ultimately, what we cannot guarantee. The issue is not that such a confession would be impossible, but that it might be as rare as the appearance of daffodils on the nightstand. And if we were to “tell the truth,” what might happen? “There is a choice / to place yourself below a shield / She must assume I'm always lying[.]” The image of the shield is here reduced to its literal function; to shield. The poem withholds from us the colloquial assumption that to be shielded is to be safe. It is also to be cut off from the world. I think of Aga's work again: “We lose our minds in peace.” This too is the danger of the shield. Alone and at a distance from danger, we lose our minds.
Our incidental lies — lies told in pursuit of impossible truths — represent the mechanism by which we reach each other. The comfort of the shield is also its great threat, looming over a world we'd like to fill with notes and flowers. To open ourselves to receptive messages (from one another, from the universe) we must give up some of our defenses:
I hoped you would have understood
My quiet amidst the radio waves
Where I could have no shield
Having never once spoken
“Amidst the radio waves...” I am made to think, here, of Carlson's writing on Spicer. Jones' verse seems to ask: how do we make ourselves vulnerable to the “radio waves” of the world? Of love? Of the Martians? The poem's closing line turns with sublime irony. Of course, the “speaker” has spoken; the poem proves this, offering an artifact of action. But I believe in this silence, too. Speech that feels quiet. Aga again: “I swore I could stare at the shadow without shame / But it hurts to beg for an afternoon of voice.” The secret mouth garbles speech, begging for “voice,” and yet, has it anyway.
I miss you both. And I miss my friends. I guess I'm homesick. For knowledge, too. Of what things used to look like, instructing my mind. For “an afternoon of voice.” What do I know now — and what could I manage to say — about what will happen to my character in this new place I am supposed to live? My apartment looks out into a playground where children laugh, run around, throw toys, and cry all day. I feel I know these children, but of course, we are strangers to each other. I am not writing much but I sense that, if I could, I might find accuracy in the lies I tell myself about these children and our proximity. That I am a part of their world as they are in mine, connected by this window.
Love,
Scout
Dear Hannah and Scout,
When I think about your dream, Hannah, it reminds me of this Simone Weil quote I’ve been pondering in this transformative season of fall in Iowa City. Weil writes that Christ acknowledges the ease of an intimate language between two or three people — as opposed to a public language — in relaying God’s will to humanity: “As soon as there are six or seven, collective language begins to dominate… Christ did not say two hundred, or fifty, or ten. He said two or three.” 1
Although your dream about the double may more obviously ‘be’ about the ‘dark’ and ‘light’ self within all of us (especially active and real for ‘the dreamers,’ beings submerged in the subconscious) I wonder more and more about how the presence of 2s (and 3s) confirm our relationship to God. And by God of course, I mean intimacy. Love.
There is something magical about love and companionship as a form of reflection. When we are seen by our lover in the emotional nude state there exists a passing of meaning between the two that goes beyond the language of words. I knew there was love but I could not speak it or see it. But because it existed beyond the language of words, could it ever be confirmed in the language of words?
I find myself currently pulled between the advances of two very different lovers. Each brings out a different quality of ‘here-ness’ for me. By ‘here-ness’ I refer to a kind of relaxation of my spirit and self that allows me to feel both comfortable and close to my ‘other.’ One allows me to feel very rooted. I find myself speaking more about my childhood, my family. It’s very easy for me to look at their face and feel the warmth of their expression. The other is enigmatic to me. I find myself laughing and joking more, wanting to lean more into free-ness, ‘airy-ness.’
But because these two with whom I find myself entangled are so different from each other, sometimes I worry about the quality of myself being expressed. I worry about what is genuine and what is rehearsed; what is misunderstood. I’ve decided these are the near-misses of the neurotic, American self. Someone hyper-fixated on analysis and de-coding. And that true intimacy requires an acceptance of an unspeakable knowing.
In Carlson’s essay, I puzzled over what similar bed-fellows intimacy, language, and cognition seem to make for the two of us. Carlson writes:
There is a reciprocal relationship between what is cognized and what is legible—communicable, what is moldable to the rigid templates we call words. Language lends to cognition feelings that may otherwise have always remained obscure. Language can, at least in the most approximate sense, give expression to a feeling, hold a feeling inside it.I don’t think “reciprocal,” as Carlson uses it, means equal. What can be surmised in the clunky blocks of some human language in some country on some website can be interesting, important, and useful. It can even be the most important and special thing to happen to a person. A string of words connected together to impart an intended meaning. In turn, in “reciprocity,” understanding the importance of some words lends ‘vitality’ to them, and pushes language into a “new territory.” But Carlson also proposes that human cognition of a thing’s language (which, in Carlson’s language, could be anything from a painting’s brushstrokes to an ocean’s wave) is not nearly as important as the language itself. Carlson writes,“I am opposed to a narrow selectivity that only allows into cognition that which is amenable to History, to what Blanchot calls ‘the overall human undertaking.’” What I find especially moving is the demand this places on the receiver of another’s language to become inundated with the spirit of the giver. To feel it very simply. To allow it to enter one’s self and not demand that it has an immediate use. To not search for a meaning that makes a special kind of sense to the receiver. To not interpret messages unduly or unfairly.
Because there’s no point! There is something powerful brewing beneath everything producing language in Carlson’s imagination. Our interpretation of what can be shared in language will only give feelings “expression… in the most approximate sense.” Thus while a being’s initial language will always be more interesting than our understanding of it, the language itself will never actually be enough. We can interpret all we want, we can study the languages of others, pour over their expressions, but after a while there must be an unspeakable force that ties the string of fate between two people.
Carlson’s writing calls me further back in time to the conductive language of the English poet George Herbert (coincidentally the poet whose work inspired Weil to convert to Catholicism). In his poem “Love (III),” Herbert writes about a “Love” wanting to bring the speaker into its home, despite the speaker’s feeling of unworthiness. “Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back / Guilty of dust and sin.” The speaker details in the poem how they are unworthy, being too “unkind, ungrateful” to even look at the figure of “Love.” By the end however, “Love,” acknowledged also as “Lord,” insists that the speaker receive Love’s gift, and the speaker finally obliges. “You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: / So I did sit and eat.”
Here, what the speaker understands is unimportant with regard to their final action. He does what “Love” commands while his disagreement with Love’s language remains unresolved. He does eat of Love’s tender meat, trusting finally what the dually anthropomorphized feelings of Love and God are communicating: a need for the speaker to just receive. An acceptance of the power of the ‘other,’ to give in words and language what the speaker does not fully understand.
I find my feelings on this poem beautifully encapsulated in a line toward the end of Carlson’s piece: “I bet the more room I make for love to transmit itself into me, the more I partake in sensations that will never expire.” Scout, when I sleep in my bed I think how incredible it is to be a mere three hours away from you. That you’ve moved closer, I send my love to surround you. I am grateful to live in this world and to have the brilliant friendships that transmit so much into me. Ones that my mind is not grateful, graceful, or loving enough to fully understand or appreciate. I trust, and hope, that knowledge, that Herbert’s “quick-eyed Love,” is making itself into me, someway somehow.
Love,
Samira
❧
1 Weil, Simone. Waiting on God. New edition. London: Routledge, 2009. First published 1951.