The Paris Review's Blog, page 179

Sleep and the Dream

Francisco Goya, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, 1797–1798, etching and aquatint, 8 1/4″ x 6″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

—William Shakespeare,The Tempest

Sleep

I once read about someone who had a mirror installed above his bed for use at night. He wanted to see himself while he slept.

The thought is not as absurd as might appear to be at first glance. There is probably not one of us who has not tried at some point or another to catch hold of that exact moment when we fall asleep or to observe ourselves while in the state of sleep. In any event, I myself have attempted both these things many times. More than once I experimented with how I might be able to track the exact process of falling asleep: to accompany myself, as it were, following from behind, watching my own self slowly growing sleepy as I left a state of wakefulness. To watch it slowly lose its contours and turn into something about which I have almost no knowledge. The one thing I can say about this entity is that it certainly cannot refer to itself as “I.” The rest is just a kind of obscure feeling, something that would have a kind of floating, trembling, spongy substance, protruding and then holding back on itself. There were many times when I wished to lie in wait for it.

To observe something in a state of alertness, the essence of which is the absence of alertness. To observe as I slip out of my own self, and I leave myself behind, something which more than anything else creates the impression of a shell or envelope, although it appears to be the most palpable proof of the existence of my state of watchfulness. What exactly is going on? When falling asleep, I begin perceptibly to feel one with my body to a degree that is quite rare during wakefulness. And yet I can hardly claim with a clear conscience that the body has become absolute. But I would not say that in leaving my diurnal self behind the soul has somehow made its way back to itself, even though there is much to support this. For when I am falling asleep, already in a kind of half slumber, I still can sense within myself a kind of impression, as if the soul were beginning to “arrive home”—presuming we are not restricting soul, whatever it may be, to the concept of consciousness. On the contrary, when we fall asleep, the significance of the soul seems to be dwarfed in relation to something else. But in relation to what?

As I fall asleep, I leave my body and my soul behind, all the while palpably returning back to my body and my soul. But what is actually going on here? It is not my body that has changed, or my soul, but rather my relation to both. By day, when I’m awake, I usually observe my body from without, and although I am only capable of imagining myself as a physical body, I don’t identify myself with it. In a similar way, I don’t fully identify with my soul either. If I’m awake, for the most part I think of it, as it were, as someone (or something), which cannot exist without me, and yet is not completely identical to me. I would almost speak of it in the third-person singular. This is Descartes’s final inheritance; not even I can avoid his influence. In the moment when I began to speak about the body or about the soul, I unwittingly behave as if it were possible to distinguish between them. And in doing so I imperceptibly differentiate myself from them. I create a differentiation between the soul and the body. And as I am the victim of an illusion, in the depths of my heart (my soul), I cannot either identify with what I refer to as body or as soul.

As I fall asleep, the force of this inheritance abates. Neither my body nor my soul undergoes any changes, but the misconception that there can be a body without a soul, and a soul without a body, becomes threadbare. And then I finally become identical with them: I will be fully one with my body and my soul. In falling asleep, instead of that diurnal illusion, the validity of that experience—that one cannot be pictured without the other; they cannot even be separated from one another—comes into force. I have become one with both my body and my soul to such a degree that I cannot even speak about either body or soul. For during sleep it is not possible to speak, nor is it possible to give an account of these experiences. This is one of the peculiar traps of the civilization of the modern age—I can only experience what is most natural with no pangs of remorse when I am unconscious of it.

From where do I draw the knowledge of the kinds of new experiences I have during sleep? For this, the mirror hung above the bed may be of use—namely, that state of half slumber, what I experience while falling asleep, when I am no longer capable of speaking or saying anything, or of carrying out any of my wishes, but I am still awake enough to perceive what is happening with me and within me.

Of course, during wakeful states, there are situations, periods, and states of being when this duality ceases as well. These states include joy, happiness, convulsions, catastrophes, ecstasy, repulsion, satisfaction, laughter—one could extend the list. At such times I will feel myself to be almost in an incommunicable state. Not due to the poverty of language, but because I have entered a condition beyond language. In such moments, I am not only unified with my body and my soul, but both of them have located each other. I find myself to be in a particular, dreamlike state. I am not the master of the situation. While asleep I am incapable of inciting myself to accomplish any deed; while within the state of joy, satisfaction, or repulsion, I cannot bring myself to be preoccupied with anything other than that state. I am at the mercy of the situation. But what grows above me and knocks me down does not destroy me. On the contrary: it is precisely this new state that grants contours to my existence. It designates boundaries I cannot reject. In such situations it emerges that my identity stems from an unknown strength. From something infinitely unknown to me. Within me there is a kind of cosmic distance. And yet it is hidden within my innermost being; it is concealed there. It is a part of my own identity, I know nothing about it, but it will never leave me.

During the state of sleep, this unknown strength asserts itself. Indeed, what happens to us from one night to the next can be termed a miracle. And it is just as much of a miracle that that which occupies a full third of our lives retreats in daytime, as we wake up. At least during the past centuries of the development of the modern age, we have definitively eliminated any inquisitiveness about this miracle from the sphere of our interests. Not only are there no reassuring answers as to why we need sleep or why the state of wakefulness is not enough, there are also no answers as to why, while sleeping, amid the greatest tranquillity, we are laid siege to by dreams. And there are no answers about what is happening above our heads, precisely within our heads while we sleep, at the period when we are the least preoccupied with our heads.

While we sleep we are initiated into a kind of secret; we acquire a kind of enigmatic knowledge, of which, however, we can give no account because all the while we are asleep. And while we are awake, then we do nothing but forget about this secret—continuously, even when, mustering together all our knowledge, we try to reflect upon it. The question arises: Does this mean that wakefulness is the state of forgetting, of dispersion, and sleep is the state of knowledge, of collectedness?

I would not go that far, and yet I would still presume to state that during sleep some kind of harmony comes into being and the fatal legacy of Descartes—the bifurcation of body and soul—loses its validity. When I am awake, I am preoccupied with my body or my soul, although I could not care less about who exactly is “preoccupied” with them. When I become drowsy, this “preoccupation” slowly begins to diminish; my interest toward the body or the soul begins to die out. But this lessening does not mean that I have become voided. On the contrary—something is beginning to grow within me. The more sleepy I am, the more insistent it becomes. And by the time I have fallen asleep, this something has completely replenished me. What this unknown laying claim to me is, I don’t know. I don’t even know if it is something that arrives from the outside and then conquers me, or if it enters from within, from somewhere where it was hiding, and for as long as I was awake left me in peace. For this is just as much of a mystery today as it has been for millennia.

*

The Dream

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. The sleep of reason produces monsters. The title of Goya’s etching, from 1797–98, is more enigmatic than what is depicted in the etching itself. And what we see there is connected to the iconographic traditions with strong threads. A man has laid his head on his crossed arms on top of a table (or a stone bench), his legs crossed; it seems he is sleeping. Behind his back, many animals can be seen: a cat, owls, bats. We can almost hear their wings rustling. The theme is hardly new. In European visual arts, ever since the time of Giotto, there have been numerous renditions of sleeping persons with their dreams depicted behind (or above) them. Giotto painted the dreams of Pope Innocent III; El Greco painted the dreams of Philip II, and Jusepe de Ribera those of Jacob. In every case we see the dreamer and above him the projected dream, whose reality is given as that of the sleeping person. These narrative paintings are imbued with the spirit of Greek tradition, according to which one does not have a dream, one sees a dream. At the end of the eighteenth century, with the conquest by secularization, this trope became favored not only among painters but among caricaturists as well. Around the same time as Goya, in 1797 George Woodward of England prepared an engraving titled “A Monkish Vision,” which depicts a rotund priest in the middle of a nap, while in the background lounge lascivious women and floridly laid tables. This depiction—as in the case of Goya’s etching as well—presages the procedures of the twentieth-century comic strip, in which the reader is told what the figures are thinking by small insertions of text above their heads.

The theme of Goya’s etching is, accordingly, not new. What is new about it is its title—more precisely, the ambiguity of the title. For it can be interpreted in two ways: in one reading it gives us to understand that the monsters come forth when reason is asleep and no longer supervises its environs. Or it can be interpreted to mean that the monsters, which otherwise peacefully hide away in the darkness, come forth when reason has been made vertiginous by its own pride, considering that it can solve everything on its own. This is what William Blake might have been thinking when he wrote, nine years before Goya created his etching, “Thought alone can make monsters, but the affections cannot.” The monsters accordingly break out as reason’s compensation, or, contrarily, when reason itself falls asleep, it dreams them, or, to use a more modern term, it projects them.

The interpretation one accepts will depend on one’s own appraisal of the historical circumstances, and within those, the Enlightenment’s. During the nineteenth century, Goya’s etching was interpreted within an Enlightenment context (the expression of the triumph of reason); at the time of Freud’s study “Das Unheimliche” (“The Uncanny”), however, an opposing analysis began to emerge. Each interpretation accords a central significance to light: in the first case, it is the “luminescence” of reason; in the second, it is the act of “bringing something into the light.” Either reason unveils something or reason itself must be unveiled. Goya’s own stance toward these matters allows for both explanations. His strong connections to his contemporary Spanish thinkers of the Enlightenment are well known; but so, too, is his passionate interest in the “irrational.”

The interpretation of this title is, therefore, open, and instead of offering a point of reference to the viewer, it forces one to make a choice. Goya was probably aware of this ambiguity. Considering his attraction to sensitive situations, including political ones, it can be presumed that he deliberately chose a title with which he could justify himself in either sense.

The openness of the title also allows for a third explanation. This, however, is “programmed” a priori into its indeterminacy. For no matter how we explain it, in either case the question of the unclear and troubled relation between reason and intellect—and the unknown that cannot be delimited by either reason or intellect—is raised. These are characteristic problems of the Enlightenment. A title like this would never have occurred to anyone before Goya. For Giotto, El Greco, or Ribera, dreams had an unequivocally transcendent dimension. Heraclitus maintained that for those who are awake there is a common world, whereas those who are asleep live in their own world with its own peculiar entrance; the sleeper, nonetheless, steps into a kind of world that offers trust along with all its unknowns. The precondition of this trust is the existence of a kind of power to which people can entrust themselves. Even the most nightmarish of dreams, which, according to surviving accounts, the great mystics suffered, can be viewed in the light of certain divine connections to which the sleeper can entrust himself upon awakening.

With Goya, this situation has radically changed. The ambiguity of the title of his etching signifies the shattering of this trust. That which earlier had been “external” (demons, monsters, devils, but equally angels, as well as helpful spirits), with secularization’s ascendance became “internal,” bereft of its transcendental connections, and thus transformed into inner thoughts. The place of holistic explications was taken over by those of psychology. And, of course, the enigma of torturous dreams remains as unsolved as it had been previously. The situation—as the soul became separated from its transcendental roots—became ever more problematic. If the soul and reason can rely only on their own selves, then one may be filled with pride and the consciousness of one’s omnipotence, just as, in the case of misfortune, one is filled with despair, or even torturous self-hatred. Instead of the “external” unknown, humanity now was confronted with an “internal” unknown—either appearing up ahead like a heavenly ladder, a replacement for the divine guarantee, or yawning open like an abyss.

Goya’s etching is not first and foremost about reason, nor is it about monsters; it is about that ambiguity with which European culture was faced at the end of the eighteenth century. When the young Hegel worked on his Phenomenology of Spirit, for a while he believed that he had gone insane. In writing about reason, his mode of thought had become unbridled. He must have felt like Goya’s sleeping figure, for he, too, was threatened by demons and monsters. He might have been frightened by the recognition that what creates the greatest uncertainty in a human being is also what grants him his greatest strength: the mind. It is, accordingly, a secondary concern as to whether the monsters are occurring within the confines of one’s mind or they appear externally to it. The decisive issue is that mind, while creating a sense of unboundedness, is itself hardly unbounded. If, however, it does have boundaries, these are not designated by mind but by something that is beyond its limitations. In the twentieth century, Georges Bataille designated the experience of the unknown beyond these boundaries the divine: “God isn’t humanity’s limit-point, though humanity’s limit-point is divine. Or put it this way—humanity is divine when experiencing limits.” I believe Goya was more cautious. As he became entangled in the question of boundaries of the mind, he did not trust himself to the “divine.” He was much too committed to the Enlightenment for that. He did not undertake to find a home for himself within “intoxication” or the “divine” while turning his back on reason.

With Goya, it is not the human and the divine that meet up on that border, but rather that which inspires trust—and dread. According to the visual evidence furnished by El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, it is during sleep that a human being locates himself on this boundary. This boundary is the inner unknown. The true enigma that must be faced during sleep is not the army of monsters, not even the omnipotence or, conversely, the limitations of the mind, but the inner unknown creating an impression of infinity and all the while doing nothing but delimiting man and forcing him to confront his own boundaries. The man in Goya’s etching, seated, his head resting on the stone bench, is not filled with the experience of the freedom of infinity—as is the case for the sleepers of Giotto, El Greco, or de Ribera—but rather with its confusion.

The man we see in Goya’s etching dreams of this confusion. If, in earlier decades, the dream prepared the awakener for great acts and decisive resolutions, then the figure in Goya’s etching is already subjugated to a completely different kind of inspiration. It is possible that upon awakening he would grab pen or brush in order do battle with these monsters. But it is just as likely that he would proceed like Gregor Samsa, who “woke one morning from troubled dreams, [and] found himself transformed in his bed into some sort of monstrous insect.

—Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet

 

László F. Földényi is professor and chair in the theory of art at the University of Theatre, Film, and Television, Budapest, and a member of the German Academy. He has written numerous award-winning books and lives in Budapest, Hungary.

Ottilie Mulzet is an award-winning translator and literary critic.

From Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears , by László F. Földényi, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet. Published by Yale University Press in February 2020 in the Margellos World Republic of Letters series. Reproduced by permission.

The Paris Review Crossword

photo by Wil540art, wikimedia commons

With everyone staying inside a bit more these days, here’s a Paris Review crossword puzzle to while away the hours. Take your mind off the ambient anxiety by finding the writers clue-ed from our archives. Play below, or print it out by clicking here.

 

Adrienne Raphel is the author of Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures With Crosswords and The Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them.

Shirley Hazzard’s Ethics of Noticing

Shirley Hazzard. Photo: © Nancy Crampton.

“There were days in winter when the narrow spiralling streets of this town were reduced to slippery channels banked with snow; when, viewed from the foot of its hill, the city rose up like a symmetrical, frosted fir tree, branching into great terraces of church, palace, and piazza.”

“Ordinariness, the affliction and backbone of other cities, was here nonexistent. Phrases I had always thought universal—the common people, the average family, the typical reaction, ordinary life—had no meaning where people were all uncommon and life extraordinary.”

“Tancredi had grown up in Sicily, where no entertaining is ever done in the summer afternoons, where there is a solitary, almost therapeutic drinking of lemonade or almond milk in darkened rooms before the sun goes down.”

“A town of overhead wires and small discouraged shops.”

“Brick houses were symmetric with red, yellow, or purple respectability: low garden walls, wide verandas, recurrent clumps of frangipani and hibiscus, of banksia and bottlebrush; perhaps a summerhouse, perhaps a flagpole. Never a sign of washing or even of people: such evidence must be sought inside, or at the back.”

“A weatherboard town with telegraph poles and the sort of picture-house where you could hear the rain.”

“Filth was in fact on Peter Exley’s mind in those first weeks: the accretion filming the Orient, the shimmer of sweat or excrement. A railing or handle one’s fingers would not willingly grasp; walls and objects grimed with existence; the limp, soiled, colonial money, little notes curled and withered, like shavings from some discarded central lode.”

“From intersections you could see, beyond the quays, the blue harbour and far mountains, whose incommunicable grandeur might, for all the town seemed to care, have hung there on a calendar.”

*

Shirley Hazzard’s fiction depicts young women traveling to new places and reckoning with strangeness. Her first two novels end with journeys, wonderfully described. The narratives are open-ended, the women at their center moving out toward change.

The Transit of Venus, too, ends with a journey, but here the narrative is tragic, end-stopped. Travel is perilous in Hazzard’s fiction. An astounding number of planes crash over the course of her work; a ferry capsizes, ships are sunk, a man dies because a boat’s engine fails. My guess is that somewhere in her mind Hazzard associated travel with World War II—hence with danger. In The Bay of Noon, Jenny remembers the names of ships destroyed during the war; the list is impressive. Like Jenny, Hazzard was a child during that war, which she likens to “a great syphon that sprayed human beings all over the globe.”

*

Hazzard left Australia in 1947. The journey brought marvels; also appalling knowledge. One of the ports at which the ship called was Hiroshima. Hazzard was sixteen; it was barely two years after the city’s destruction. Unsurprisingly, the encounter is branded into her fiction. Hiroshima was a place where “the merciful were at an even worse disadvantage than usual.”

*

One of Caro’s female coworkers in The Transit of Venus says, “You feel downright disloyal to your experience, when you do come across a man you could like. By then you scarcely see how you can decently make terms, it’s like going over to the enemy.”

The narrator continues: “All this was indisputable, even brave. But was a map, from which rooms, hours, and human faces did not rise; on which there was no bloom of generosity or discovery. The omissions might constitute life itself.”

A map is a metaphor for faith: an agreed-on simplification of complexity. In two different books, Hazzard quotes Henry Reed’s poem about the inadequacy of maps:

Maps are of place, not time, nor can they say

The surprising height and colour of a building

Nor where the groups of people bar the way.

Novels, unlike maps, are a form of counterpoint; they exist to create fruitful complications. (Karl Kraus defined a writer as someone who makes a riddle out of an answer.) Novelists’ minds tilt to exceptions; to the omissions that might constitute life. “Singularity engaged him”: Hazzard’s remark about Graham Greene applies equally to herself. No wonder, since novelists trade in a form that fetishizes the individual—which is to say, ambiguity and contradiction, “all the movement of meaning which we know to be the nature of life.”

Politics, on the other hand, requires maps. Political life is grounded in solidarity and belief. Brigitta Olubas writes that Hazzard’s politics are “consistently of the Left.” But Hazzard remains wary of the political in the sense of formal affiliations. As a character in The Transit of Venus observes, “Even a right side imposes wrongful silences, required untruths.”

That kind of thing tends not to please anyone. But Hazzard was concerned with truth, not with finding favor. “Nothing creates such untruth in you as the wish to please.”

*

Hazzard reserves solidarity for the vulnerable—for whoever is oppressed, disregarded, or outcast—rather than for a specific cause. The victims of a Latin American dictator, the survivors of Hiroshima, colonized people, workers of all kinds, the poor, the socially inept, rejected lovers, war veterans, foreigners, stray animals, or simply the targets of ordinary, workaday malice: all engage her sympathetic attention.

She practices an ethics of noticing. Charlotte Wood, writing about The Transit of Venus, paraphrases Iris Murdoch: “Paying attention is a moral act.”

From The Transit of Venus:

My window looks on a courtyard full of flowering trees—hawthorn, a Judas tree, and, very near, a big lilac coming out in purple pyramids. There is a fountain and—concealed—a thrush. During the holiday I drove with two French colleagues to the mines near Lille, where we went down a pit. The coal-face straight from Dante, worked by boys of sixteen or so, mostly North Africans who spoke no French. Worse than this were the hovels they went back to afterwards, ten to a filthy hut.

If there had been a paragraph break after “thrush,” the first two sentences would have been skillful scene-setting. Without the break, the primary function of those sentences is to point up an obscenity; they make the shocking information that follows more shocking. It’s a lesson in how the arrangement of sentences can speak political truth.

*

Where Hazzard’s politics show unequivocally is in her refusal to be cowed by power—her scorn for it, in fact. Her two nonfiction books about the United Nations, Defeat of an Ideal and Countenance of Truth, are political in the conventional sense. The first documents the history of U.S. intervention in the organization and the consequent mutilation of its aims. The second details a story Hazzard had broken in a piece of investigative reporting, Secretary General Kurt Waldheim’s cover-up of his Nazi past.

*

Here are two passages from The Transit of Venus that are concerned with war. They’re quiet, incidental passages (one of them is literally parenthetical), told from the perspective of minor characters. A less confident writer would have made much more of them. Hazzard knew that quietness is a force.

(In 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, Charmian Playfair, volunteering as a nurse’s aide, was assigned to ambulance duty at Victoria Station where casualties were arriving on hospital trains. The loaded ambulance trundled back through dark streets carrying its racks of blanketed men—who, from their spotless newspaper anonymity of “the wounded,” were suddenly incarnate as moaning, silent, or plucky inhabitants of rent, individual flesh. Enclosed with these spectres in swaying gloom, a nineteen-year-old girl put her hand to her soft throat. Yet moved as best she could, to supply water or answer questions, among the grey blankets and the red, rusty, or blackened bandages. There was a boy of her own age to whose whisper she had to bend, her face nearly touching his: “So cold. Cold. My feet are so cold.” And, almost capably, the girl answered, “I’ll fix that”; turning to adjust the blanket, and discovering he had no feet.)

The second:

Someone came to the open window and threw a cigarette accurately into a dark pond in the garden. There was the flicker, the sizzle, and a small protest from insects or a frog.

The old physicist stood by the window, hitching his belt. Recalling a night of war when he had done fire-watching on the roof of the Savoy. The black river reflected, red and white, the flames and searchlights, the earth rocked and shuddered with the impact and recoil of armoury. And a burning plane twirled down from the sky, shedding its pilot, who plunged in his separate fire. The plane exploded in fragments before reaching earth, but the blazing man plummeted to the river, which—as if he had been a cigarette butt—sizzled him out forever.

Both passages derive their force largely from their calm accounting of the price that bodies pay in war. But that isn’t the only source of their power. In the first extract, there’s the girl’s stunned realization, shared by the reader, that nothing can “fix” what has happened.

The second passage deals graphically with war, witnessing, violent death. The burning pilot is one of those Hazzard images that remain imprinted on the inner eye long after the end of the book. But the narration of those large, horrific things, which could so easily have spun out into windy abstraction, is earthed by the specificity of a detail everyone has, at some time, observed: an old man hitching his belt. Trust is created: efficiently, without show.

 

Read our Art of Fiction interview with Shirley Hazzard here.

Michelle de Kretser was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Her family emigrated to Australia when she was a teenager, and she was educated in Melbourne and Paris. She is the author of five novels, including the Miles Franklin Award winners Questions of Travel and The Life to Come, the Man Booker Prize long-listed The Lost Dog, and a novella, Springtime. De Kretser now lives in Sydney with her partner, the poet and translator Chris Andrews. She is an honorary associate of the English department at the University of Sydney.

Copyright © 2020 by Michelle de Kretser, from On Shirley Hazzard . Excerpted by permission of Catapult.

A Poem Is Not a Frontal Assault: An Interview with Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirschfield (PHOTO © MICHAEL LIONSTAR)

I first met Jane Hirshfield about fifteen years ago, after one of her readings in San Francisco. She reads her poems with intensity, but not loudly. Her voice is even, quiet. I was struck by the many tonalities of her silences. Still, there is a distinctly recognizable passion in her quiet moments. Speaking with her, I was fascinated by how much I was able to gather from the moments between her sentences, by the way those sentences follow one another, surprising at each turn. This is also true of her poems: reading her work, I catch myself thinking that Hirshfield is the poet who orchestrates silences, which is perhaps fitting for someone who says that her medium is lyric poetry. It isn’t easy these days to find a poet who can do this while being also perfectly articulate and clear. Reading Hirshfield, I find myself coming back to Mahmoud Darwish’s idea that clarity is our ultimate mystery.

Jane Hirshfield’s nine books of poetry include The Beauty, long-listed for the 2015 National Book Award; Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award; and After, short-listed for England’s T.S. Eliot Award and named a “best book of 2006” by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Financial Times. She is also the author of two collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015), and four books collecting and cotranslating the work of world poets from the past. Hirshfield’s ninth poetry collection, newly published this week, is Ledger. This interview took place by email.

 

INTERVIEWER

Auden called art “clear thinking about complex feeling,” and in your 2015 book of essays, Ten Windows, you speak about the “extra pressure of meaning that infuses” Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”—a poem written in December 1938, a time of deep political crisis. I see a strong element of the poetics of engagement in Ledger. This isn’t new. I think of your 1994 poem “Manners/Rwanda,” for instance. Yet the element of engagement comes across more strongly in this new book. So, I want to begin by asking about the way you relate to those “extra pressures” of our own crisis today in the U.S., about how they have impacted your work and this book.

HIRSHFIELD

A poem, a poet’s life, and the larger world are one continuous fabric. Ledger is a book of stock-taking, a registration both of the personal and of the grievous era all our lives are now visibly part of. As you say, I’ve written poems for decades that speak of the environment, social justice issues, what feel like unceasing wars. What’s changed in this book is the urgency and centrality of these subjects. The time line for swerve feels shorter, the precipice raised to heights fatal not only for individuals, but for the planet.

I don’t know how a poem can touch the catastrophe of the biosphere and what feels like a breakdown of the basic social contract—that we care for one another and that we care for future beings’ well-being. It may be that poetry’s speaking is essential but preparatory, oblique. That our work, yours and mine, is the tilling that precedes planting. That our images and metaphors and statements are like the multitude of tunneling earthworms that keep the earth’s microbiome alive, its structure lightened and turnable, viable for crops. Any one earthworm seems not to matter, yet the existence of earthworms matters. An ethics of preparation means also that poetry’s work may be less to solve than to speak of, to speak on behalf of, that which needs solving. Our human capacities for imagination and art-making, for grief and joy, exist in the service of survival of the single, solitary self and of the whole. Poems sustain the complexity, multiplicity, and peculiarities of lives, not their erasure. They carry the sense of wholeness and unblind us to connection. These allegiances are currently desperately needed.

Goethe wrote, “Do not let what matters most be at the mercy of what matters least.” The two, though, are not separate. An ants’ nest comes into a poem, and reminds that what may seem small—noticing it, wanting its continuance on this perishable and fragile planet—is what matters most. No part of existence is discardable.

INTERVIEWER

I see in this new book also some shift in style, and wondered if you might say something about that. Was it a deliberate, chosen response to the pressure of current crises?

HIRSHFIELD

The styles and textures of my work have altered gradually. Some poems have grown sparer and simpler, others more opulent, intermittent, strange. That shift comes, I think, partly just from time. A tree, over decades, changes its expression. But then, the weather and soil the tree abides in change it as well. I have changed. The world has changed. My poems’ ways of speaking and directions of looking have changed. But none of this is for me a matter of will or conscious choice. Will is too narrow to write poems. Its oxygen is too thin. I feel myself as much amanuensis as author.

INTERVIEWER

Your line “less to solve than to speak of what needs solving” reminds me of Chekhov’s statement, “Art does not provide answers, it can only formulate questions correctly.” What does this mean for an artist in our specific moment? One of your earlier poems, “In Praise of Coldness,” begins with another quote from Chekhov, “If you wish to move your reader, you must write more coldly.” It is a beautiful poem. “In sorrow, pretend to be fearless,” you say. “In happiness, tremble.” How do you relate to this statement from Chekhov now, after having written equally beautiful—but not at all cold—poems in Ledger that do, I think, provide answers, despite what you’ve said. I’m thinking of poems such as “Let them Not Say,” for instance, or “On the Fifth Day.”

HIRSHFIELD

Perhaps an answer in the realm of the arts is different from the right or wrong solution we bring to a problem in chemistry or mathematics. Arts “answers,” but in that word’s other sense of response, of reply. Both the poems you’ve named are bells rung hard. They summon attention. When you see a fire, you can’t stay silent.

I, though, do feel in them Chekhov’s coldness. A poem’s meaning requires an engineered, structural soundness, not so different from that of a building or bridge. Language, syntax, verb tense, soundscape, the placing of ink and ink’s absence on a page, are material things, just as steel is. Words experienced as comprehensible, consequential, do follow rules, though they are rules that a writer, like an architect, can test, press toward their outer limits. New materials bring new shapes of meaning and feeling. Those two poems feel strongly, but they are not an uncontrolled weeping. They argue, in the old-fashioned, rhetorical sense of that word, for something that matters, and make their argument in the ways art mostly does—from the side. I think it’s a good thing that poets work far from the center of our celebrity- and economics-driven culture. From the periphery, you can see more of the whole. From the center, any view will be partial. A poem is not a frontal assault, it is the root tendrils of ivy making their way into the heart’s walls’ mortar.

INTERVIEWER

You are deeply invested in the lyric poem. But your work has also long been interested in the idea of poetic sequence, poetic cycle. I am thinking of your Pebbles sequences and your Assays, both of which began with After, and have continued to make appearances in more recent books. Can you speak more about how you see these forms, their reappearances from book to book, their conversation between books?

HIRSHFIELD

The series poems have always begun with just one poem that felt to me different, somehow distinctive, like a horse moving into a single-foot gait. Assays began with a poem written after I’d reread Edgar Allan Poe’s stories while writing an essay on how hiddenness works in poems. Some of the qualities of essay exploration and prose step lingered in its music and mode of thinking. At the time, I was regularly seeing the journal Science. On the back would often be advertisements for half-million-dollar machines for performing assays. That word—close to essay and sharing its root in the idea of an attempt, a try—refers to discovering a thing’s nature by breaking it into its elemental parts. The poem became “Poe: An Assay.” That approach to writing, of testing a subject for its discoverable parts, imaginative and factual, caught. I began writing others. “Judgment: An Assay.” “Tears: An Assay.” “And: An Assay.” In Ledger, the one labeled assay is about capital, money. But other poems in the book also use the assay mode and strategy. They just don’t carry the label.

The pebbles are very brief poems with a certain flavor. They are individual poems written independently. I run them as series in the books because it feels rude to the trees to have so many pages of paper with so little ink on each. The pebbles, I’ll add, are not haiku and not aphorisms. They are much more hybrid. They do draw from Asian poetry’s concision and compression, but are more discursive. They draw also from Novalis, from a few pieces in Pound’s Personae, from fragments of poems from ancient Greece and early poems from Sumer and India, Turkey, and Mesoamerica. They draw from a handful of very short poems by Brecht I find irresistibly precise.

A pebble holds its rock recalcitrance lightly, portably. The pebble poems try to do large work in the smallest possible container. In their feel of doing investigative work, they are the assay form’s bookend. Both forms, when they became conscious, expanded my vocabulary of poetic exploration. Neither, I’ll add, is a radical invention. The poetic form of “a meditation on” is close in spirit to the assays. Brief poems go back to the earliest writings we have. These modes are forms for me the way the sonata form or etude function in music—they invite a particular kind of experience. They’ve become a self-propagating invitation of possibility. And yes, of course, the poems in these modes do connect across books, making their own discrete libraries of registration.

INTERVIEWER

There’ve been a few other series in your work as well. Ledger holds its notably distinctive series of Little Soul poems. How did you come to those? Were these pieces in some way a response to Hadrian?

HIRSHFIELD

Oh, yes. Since this book has no endnotes, I must trust that readers will recognize “little soul” as Hadrian’s phrase. It comes from his one known poem, written on his deathbed. He addresses his departing life with that endearing diminutive, “animula.” I looked for some equivalent term of my own, but could find nothing as tender. Hadrian’s poem also framed the mood and tone of my poems, written over months, when a friend of forty years was dying. Here is the Hadrian:

Little soul, drifting, gentle,

my body’s guest and companion,

what places do you now go to live in,

without color, unyielding, naked,

never again to share our old jokes.

(tr. JH)

Hadrian’s “little soul” made for me a door through which I could contemplate the unbearable. My friend’s death, my own death, all of our dying, are in those eight poems.

INTERVIEWER

In Ten Windows, you say, “Most good poems hold some part of their thoughts in invisible ink… Lyric poetry rests on a fulcrum of said and unsaid.” Can you speak a bit more about that, and about how the unsaid works in this book?

HIRSHFIELD

One poem in Ledger is entirely ellipsis, “My Silence.” There’s a small lineage of poems that are only title—I know at least three. It’s a form that wants sparing usage, but my poem was genuinely, honestly written. It holds an unsayable grief. Its invisible ink depends on the reader recognizing that the whole book is the context for that silence. Late in the publishing process, I wondered if I shouldn’t have retitled it “My Grief.” That would have been a clearer signpost. But that choice would also trust the reader less, bully them more. Poems oughtn’t bully.

Leaving something inexplicit or unsaid in a poem risks misunderstanding. What a reader does with invisible ink is his or her mirror, revealing that reader’s mind, predispositions, and heart. “My Silence” is an extreme case. But a poem that tells everything, instructs completely, would be also unbearably plodding. Poems exist to hold what cannot be said in more ordinary speech. Poems reverse the old insult—they are ten-pound sacks holding five pounds of rice.

I’m more and more wanting to trust the reader to hear, to understand, the unsaid thing. Japanese haiku, read rightly, are built on that foundation of tact and trust and active collaboration. Good poems may always be math problems that end with the equal sign, leaving their conclusions to enact themselves inside us. The actualities of our lives are immense beyond naming. Yet we somehow raise them, honorably, with small hands and inked words. The idea of humility has become increasingly central to my sense of a correct navigation of our current age. To think the unsayable can be said would be hubris. Yet something, somehow, manages to be said, into the brutalities and the largenesses of existence.

INTERVIEWER

An old question, but one that still burns, at least for lyric poets, is, What is it that walks on four legs at morning, two at midday, three at evening?

HIRSHFIELD

Ah, when we know what it is to be human, when we become able admit to ourselves our own frailties and dependence, perhaps then we will start acting and speaking in ways more fully humane.

It feels almost irremediably late for such a hope. But as the close of one of the Little Soul poems proposes—so long as a person is alive, even now, it is early.

 

 

Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press). His awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writer’s Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, Lannan Foundation’s Fellowship, and the NEA Fellowship. His poems regularly appear in Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Read his poem “From ‘Last Will and Testament’” in our Winter 2018 issue. 

A Story in One Picture

To celebrate the bouquet of stories in our Spring issue, which hits newsstands today, we asked each of the six featured fiction writers to share an image that evokes their story:

 

John Everett Millais, Ophelia, c. 1851

I don’t know if “evokes” is exactly the right word for this painting, but I thought a lot about Ophelia by John Everett Millais and the mythology of dead women in art and fiction. To some extent, I felt like I was writing in the opposite direction of this painting. It loomed in my brain all the same.

—Senaa Ahmad, “Let’s Play Dead”

 

Kate Elizabeth Fowler, Untitled, Family Photographs, 2019

A pure baby shining in white at the center of the frame, being held by a shirtless, barefoot boy. Something about it all is so sacred. I believe my main character in “An Unspoken,” Clara Parker, would have seen this in a dream and felt happy, or could just as easily been haunted by it. And this is everything the story truly hinges on.

—Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, “An Unspoken”

 

 

This is a photograph of the Angel Makers of Nagyrév, a group of Hungarian women who killed many men in their village. I believe this was taken after their eventual arrest. My story was very loosely inspired by theirs.

—Rebecca Makkai, “A Story for Your Daughters, a Story for Your Sons”

 

 

Vasily Vereshchagin, A Resting Place of Prisoners, 1878-1879

This painting by Vasily Vereshchagin, painted from 1878–79, depicts (according to the Brooklyn Museum where it hangs) Turkish war prisoners freezing to death while being marched to Russian war camps during the Russo-Turkish War. I can imagine the characters in my story going to see this painting while in the midst of their War and Peace reading group and drawing comparisons between Vereshchagin’s project and Tolstoy’s, their various attempts to bring the reality of Russian history home to their audiences. The characters might have wondered, like I do, whether Tolstoy saw this painting, and what he thought of it. Guessing he would have hated it, but maybe he wasn’t in that phase of his life yet.

—Andrew Martin, “Childhood, Boyhood, Youth”

 

 

Lord Kitchener as a baby on his mother’s lap, with his elder brother and his sister. (published 1916 in The Illustrated War News)

This photograph does not evoke the story for me. But there is something in it. That the man who would go on to be the origin of such immense butchery–the famous British hero Kitchener–can rest this way on his mother’s lap. We go from here to there—from there to here, or do we? What is a person?

—Jesse Ball, “Diary of a Country Mouse”

 

Edvard Munch, Melancholy II, 1898

This 1898 woodcut, “Melancholy II,” by Edvard Munch. The landscape is a little abstract, but I think the woman is sitting beside the water. The coastline looks like a creature, doesn’t it? I love, especially, that you can’t quite tell where the horizon is.

—Clare Sestanovich, “By Design”

 

Keep exploring our Spring issue here

Redux: The Folded-Down Table

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

Photo: Marcelo Noah, CC by 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re highlighting three archive pieces written by authors who appear in the Spring issue. Read on for Billy Collins’s Art of Poetry interview, an excerpt from Rachel Cusk’s novel Outline, and Nathaniel Mackey’s poem “Song of the Andoumboulou: 145.” And after you finish those, make sure to delve into the new issue with Billy Collins’s poem “On the Deaths of Friends,” Rachel Cusk’s Art of Fiction interview, and Nathaniel Mackey’s Art of Poetry interview.

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

 

Billy Collins, The Art of Poetry No. 83

Issue no. 159 (Fall 2001)

The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme. Now it’s tone that establishes the poet’s authority. The first few lines keep giving birth to more and more lines. Like most poets, I don’t know where I’m going. The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you’re simply using a pen to record what you have thought out. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with. You’re trying to discover something that you don’t know exists, maybe something of value.

 

 

Outline: Part 1

By Rachel Cusk

Issue no. 207 (Winter 2013)

All this time, the air hostess had been advancing slowly along the aisle, pushing a metal trolley from which she was dispensing plastic trays of food and drink. She had now come to our row: she passed along the white plastic trays, and I offered one to the boy on my left, who lifted up his gaming console with both hands so that I could place it on the folded-down table in front of him. My right-hand neighbor and I lifted the lids of ours, so that tea could be poured into the white plastic cups that came with the trays. He began to ask me questions, as though he had learned to remind himself to do so, and I wondered what or who had taught him that lesson, which many people never learn.

 

 

Song of the Andoumboulou: 145

By Nathaniel Mackey

Issue no. 214 (Fall 2015)

The morning’s horn extended a palmful of

….sand. I felt a dry sprig on my face, frozen

..moment, moment’s omen, sleep’s curtain

…………………………………………………………….kicked

….on top. I’d forgotten more about time than

……I could know I got up knowing, Cold Duck

..time the time I knew best, head bad beyond

………………………………………………………………..all

….hope. Hand spread, sand uncupped, hand

extended …

 

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One Word: Bonkers

photo courtesy Harry Dodge

 

1. I want now to investigate bonkers (a word that strikes me as germane to our times), but the word busted (also a fine word) keeps popping into my head. Not at all interchangeable, busted suggests mechanicity and palpability while bonkers seems to indicate something mental and systemic. But they inhabit the same register; both words are punchy (is that a register or a tone?) and both words suggest mitigatability—they’re carrying little hope suitcases. Do you feel that? I wrote the word busted the other day to describe birds I saw in a book of photographs, impossibly bent-up birds captured during liftoff, during landing—weird contorted flight surfaces, tangled wings like flat hands, ruddering volte-face, cartoony dustups apparently necessary to occasion real-life avian landings. I like the word busted—not shattered, not completely demolished. BUSTED!, as in currently unusable: an ugly leg thrown out of the tub too wounded even to soak. But you know what? I’m a repairman. I’m a research assistant! Give me what is busted and I’ll take a look. Here. See how in the break or the torn area, let’s call it the rupture, something truly bent or baffling is sometimes lined with an undeniably fecund matrix, raw lamina where new stuff is now compelled to grow?

2. The word bonkers entered the dictionary in 1945, accompanied by other newly minted words, such as: A-bomb, allomorph, antibias, blip, chugalug, extraliterary, fissionable, gadzookery, honcho, koan, Medal of Freedom, mom-and-pop, radiomimetic, squawk box, superorgasm, unfazed, up-front, whing-ding, and zingy. I know, what a year, right? What a year for crazy words. (That last sentence is absolutely a viable segue to poetics.) Poetics is a word I tend to use as synonymous with anything unquantifiable: objects (things, ideas) that defy translation or any kind of re-rendering. Unquantifiable bosh=poetics: a license to glittering specificity, something uncategorizable that nonetheless exists. The poetics of bonkers is a tautology. Bonkers is berserk but in weirdly large hunks, big pixels. Bonkers is video noise like hail. Bonkers sounds British. Bonkers is a word used wholly positively only in the context of discussing art. Bonkers has amplitude, gleam—it is not like a puddle, it is not evidentiary of despair, but its use rather indicates (bravado through grim humor?) a reserve of defiance (think: the mouse flipping off the swooping homicidal eagle in the seventies cartoon). As it turns out, bonkers is a refusal of despair! When something is “bonkers” it is unacceptable but somehow not lethal to l’esprit de corps and thus connotes afterness: life on the other side. An online news-rag the other day published the headline, “Five of the Most BONKERS Arguments from the White House.” Or, maybe it was, “Bonkers White House Post-Impeachment Speech Explained.” (I’m doing this from memory, believe it or not.) These rotten logics distend our psyches with an unwelcome pandemonium and now our heads seem strained, about to pop! We’re trying to track it all, we’re making notes! (“we” as in hobbyist political scientists), which distracts from the gathering and crashing wave of criminality and corruption. (Tyranny is built on a manipulation of the fear of uncertainty, aka fear of death.) Bonkers is outside, as a rule or at least frequently; which is to say that when the word bonkers shows up on the tip of your tongue, from the literary alluvium, chances are you’re referring to the “not-me.” Something quixotic and vertiginous—and also vaguely humorous—taking place outside your skin. When you say bonkers you’re pointing your finger.

3. In conceiving his philosophically minded taxonomy of games Man, Play and Games, Roger Caillois coined several terms, including alea, which appertains to games of chance; agon, relevant to games of skill; and ilinx, which, in Caillois’s cosmology of play, refers to a state of transport: pure vertigo and its related ecstasies. Caillois does not define ilinx as an apex state of disarray but—rather simply—happening lostness, a temporary disintegration of perception. He writes that games based on the pursuit of vertigo, such as roller coasters, whirling and spinning games, inebriation, et cetera, generate from a common human urge to seek disorientation for its own sake. Players (and who’s not?) attempt to “momentarily destroy the stability of perception” in order to “inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind.” As I see it, and building off Caillois, the pleasure here lies not only in the fleeting (but thorough) deliverance from a perhaps lusterless chronicity but also in the erotics of “wow-this-is-totally-crazy-but-I-got-this”—which is to say: challenge followed by triumph. (Here, stolidly, I’ll interrupt myself in order to point out that I’ve had three people read this brief discursion and exactly none of them agreed that the pleasure of self-induced vertigo is always and necessarily wrapped in the pleasure of finally righting the ship. This series of responses taken en bloc suggests that the strong correlation is peculiar to me alone.) Caillois’s term ludus denotes the primitive desire to gather one’s organismic resources in order to settle problems sought for just such a purpose: the joy of solving them. (Though this relationship, ilinx to ludus, seems at first glance to be inversely proportionate, it is infinitely, open-endedly lush.) By setting obstacles into motion, we (gentle bedlamites) create opportunities to deploy the full or partial set of (too often occulted) skills we already possess (or immediately develop or suddenly expose). The practice of wrestling chaos into order is a kind of amusement: the pleasure of the gusty puzzle (my term)—because according to Caillois, not just any puzzle qualifies as ilinx (though this seems to me debatable), just the most conceptually or physically turbulent of them. (Video game developers have, by virtue of a surge in resolution, recently developed better ways of producing an experience of vertigo by generating the sensation of high-speed movement—often enhanced by creative effects that are called, um, speed haze. The Millennium Falcon’s hyperspace is an old version of this.) Ilinx is bonkers come indoors: inoculation, familiarization, a way to safely entertain chaos.

4. Bonkers is a mad answer, too—obliquus interruptus: a clown honking a horn riding a unicycle that caroms through a standoff between protesters and cops (makes laughter happen), or you abruptly put on a wig while hotly debating curfew with your adolescent son. As action or objection, bonkers (different again and suggested here suffused with a mote of gravitas) might be deployed oppositionally—shock and awe response to madness all around. (Or emotional pain.) A battering ram of surreality hauled out for a critical self-defense; you’re busted, say: Crazy? Meet crazy. Bonkers is meritorious every now and then, when it answers obliquely those questions asked with hammers, with nails.

5. I appreciated today that I thrill to a challenge (shocker); if I stay in the ring I get to flex (my son says, Weird flex, bro). Thrill is the wrong word. I thought just now, “Bonkers Life.” And for a split second, I was [sad-face emoji] that I have FORM and FLOW tattooed on my fingers instead of BONKERS LIFE tattooed over my knuckles, thumb, palm, and fingernails.

 

Harry Dodge is the author, most recently, of My Meteorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing.

On the Timeless Music of McCoy Tyner

McCoy Tyner in April 2012 [Photo: Joe Mabel]

There are many ways to understand the passage of time—it’s not just one thing after the next, the pinhead of the present gnarling the flesh of your foot as you try, impossibly, to balance upon it. Not just peering through the mist of memory. Not just cutting through the ice ahead. Time moves back and forth, slows down, speeds up, it eddies—it does a lot of eddying. It concentrates itself in one moment and becomes diffuse and vague in another. We’re always in the present, though we can never quite get there, nor can we leave. All of this is what the music of McCoy Tyner, who died on Friday at the age of eighty-one, teaches, though as soon as one tries to paraphrase music in anything other than other music, it’s robbed of some of its magic and much of its meaning.

Tyner was one of the defining musicians of the jazz period that began in the early sixties and which, I’d argue, we’re still in: pure art music that renews its inspiration in the the last hundred-plus years of pop music. As the pianist anchoring the classic John Coltrane quartet, Tyner’s instantly recognizable style—pendular, percussive, full of melodic flights and returns—created, hand in hand with drummer Elvin Jones, the landscapes across which Coltrane’s solos famously and fathomlessly ranged.

I’ve been gratefully lost for years somewhere between the interminable vamp of the 1961 studio recording of Coltrane’s rendition of “My Favorite Things” and the pounding sinews of Tyner’s 1976 solo track “Fly with the Wind.” The latter isn’t fusion, isn’t exactly jazz, but is all Tyner: intellect, melody, and abandon. Tyner’s art has guided my imagination, and now that he’s gone, and because the meaning of music is so slippery, I want to take a moment to say why.

I think I saw Tyner perform live twice: once at an outdoor concert at Lincoln Center, where he was a vigorously pulsing dot in the distance, and later at the Blue Note downtown, where he was only a few feet from me and I could stare, mesmerized, at his thundering left hand. He raised it high over the keyboard, above his head, before sending it hammering down, blasting open the time that followed, filling the bars with cascading showers of high notes. That, more than anything else, was the definitive Tyner gesture: opening the musical measure with that heavy left-hand chord, which was simultaneously a drum, a cymbal, and a signal to the rest of the music about where it should begin and end; more than any pianist save Cecil Taylor, Tyner understood his instrument as a series of pitched drums.

How, from that high distance, did his hand know where to find the chord he wanted when it slammed back down to the piano? But that is the least of his miracles. As Johnny Cash said, “Your style is a function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.” That’s a humbling truism about all creative work, but the limiting factors are different for each art form. Writers are stuck with a particular vocabulary, a language, and the deep memory of the kinds of sentences they heard growing up. A singer is stuck with the particular resonating chamber that is their body. Tyner was perhaps blessed by being stuck with those catapult hands and an unwavering conviction that rhythm and melody should tell a story, enact a high drama. It can be cheesy at times, but mostly I find I agree with—am glad to be a part of—the story his music tells.

It’s enough, more than enough, really, for an artist to simply find a voice, to chisel it out of the noise and to keep it ringing clear across a lifetime. Though he tried lots of modes and moods, Tyner began his professional career in the early sixties as a fully formed artist, and his last albums, from the aughts, are not unlike his first. From the beginning, his musical voice—seeking, earnest, exciting—was his alone. There was no one like him, except for almost every pianist after him. So many of the greats are leaving the earth in this dark time when we need them most. But his music is ever present, alive in so many fingers, awakening so many ears, swinging back and forth and thundering through time.

Craig Morgan Teicher is the digital director of The Paris Review and the author of several books, including The Trembling Answers: Poems and We Begin In Gladness: How Poets Progress.

Little Fires for the One Who Was Lost

Alejandra Pizarnik’s work has long served as a touchstone for Latin American writers. The late Argentine poet has been cited as an influence by everyone from Roberto Bolaño and Julio Cortázar to Octavio Paz, who described her writing as exuding “a luminous heat that could burn, smelt, or even vaporize its skeptics.” But this fervor didn’t reach the English-speaking world until some four decades after her death, with the publication of her collection A Musical Hell in 2013. Since then, translations of five more collections of her poetry have appeared to near universal acclaim, and several of her poems have been published in The Paris Review. Ugly Duckling Presse has recently published A Tradition in Rupture, which presents Pizarnik’s critical writings in English for the first time. In the excerpt below, she ponders the nature of poetry and the pain of revisiting past work.

Alejandra Pizarnik.

Poetry is where everything happens. Like love, humor, suicide, and every fundamentally subversive act, poetry ignores everything but its own freedom and its own truth. To say “freedom” and “truth” in reference to the world in which we live (or don’t live) is to tell a lie. It is not a lie when you attribute those words to poetry: the place where everything is possible.

In opposition to the feeling of exile, the feeling of perpetual longing, stands the poem—promised land. Every day my poems get shorter: little fires for the one who was lost in a strange land. Within a few lines, I usually find the eyes of someone I know waiting for me; reconciled things, hostile things, things that ceaselessly produce the unknown; and my perpetual thirst, my hunger, my horror. From there the invocation comes, the evocation, the conjuring forth. In terms of inspiration, my belief is completely orthodox, but this in no way restricts me. On the contrary, it allows me to focus on a single poem for a long time. And I do it in a way that recalls, perhaps, the gesture of a painter: I fix the piece of paper to the wall and contemplate it; I change words, delete lines. Sometimes, when I delete a word, I imagine another one in its place, but without even knowing its name. Then, while I’m waiting for the one I want, I make a drawing in the empty space that alludes to it. And this drawing is like a summoning ritual. (I would add that my attraction to silence allows me to unite, in spirit, poetry with painting; in that sense, what others might call the privileged moment, I speak of as privileged space.)

They’ve been warning us, since time immemorial, that poetry is a mystery. Yet we recognize it: we know where it lies. I believe the question “What does poetry mean to you?” deserves one of two responses: either silence or a book that relates a terrible adventure—the adventure of someone who sets off to question the poem, poetry, the poetic; to embrace the body of the poem; to ascertain its incantatory, electrifying, revolutionary, and consoling power. Some have already told us of this marvelous journey. For myself, at present, it remains a study.

*

If they ask me who do you write for, they’re asking about the poem’s addressee. The question tacitly assumes such a character exists.

That makes three of us: myself; the poem; the addressee. This accusative triangle demands a bit of examination.

When I finish a poem, I haven’t finished it. In truth, I abandon it and the poem is no longer mine or, more accurately, it barely exists.

After that moment, the ideal triangle depends on the addressee or reader. Only the reader can finish the incomplete poem, recover its multiple meanings, add new ones. To finish is the equivalent, here, of giving new meaning, of re-creating.

When I write, I never imagine a reader. Nor does it ever occur to me to consider the fate of what I’m writing. I have never searched for a reader, neither before, nor during, nor after writing the poem. It’s because of this, I think, that I’ve had unforeseen encounters with truly unexpected readers, those who gave me the joy and excitement of knowing I was profoundly understood. To which I’ll add a propitious line by Gaston Bachelard:

The poet must create his reader and in no way express common ideas.

*

Nothing in sum. Absolutely nothing. Nothing that doesn’t diverge from the everyday track. Life doesn’t flow endlessly or uniformly: I don’t sleep, I don’t work, I don’t go for walks, I don’t leaf through some new book at random, I write badly or well—badly, I’m sure—driven and faltering. From time to time I lie down on a sofa so I don’t look at the sky: indigo or ashen. And why shouldn’t the unthinkable—I mean the poem—suddenly emerge? I work night after night. What falls outside my work are golden dispensations, the only ones of any worth. Pen in hand, pen on paper, I write so I don’t commit suicide. And our dream of the absolute? Diluted in the daily toil. Or perhaps, through the work, we make that dissolution more refined.

Time passes on. Or, more accurately, we pass on. In the distance, closer every moment, the idea of a sinister task I have to complete: editing my old poems. Focusing my attention on them is the equivalent of returning to a wrong turn when I’m already walking in another direction, no better but certainly different. I try to concentrate on a shapeless book. I don’t know if this book of mine actually belongs to me. Forced to read its pages, it seems I’m reading something I wrote without realizing I was another. Could I write the same way now? I’m disappointed, always, when I read one of my old pages. The feeling I experience can’t be precisely defined. Fifteen years writing! A pen in my hand since I was fifteen years old. Devotion, passion, fidelity, dedication, certainty that this is the path to salvation (from what?). The years weigh on my shoulders. I couldn’t write that way now. Did that poetry contain today’s silent, awestruck desperation? It hardly matters. All I want is to be reunited with the ones I was before; the rest I leave to chance.

So many images of death and birth have disappeared. These writings have a curious fate: born from disgrace, they serve, now, as a way to entertain (or not) and to move (or not) other people. Perhaps, after reading them, someone I know will love me a little more. And that would be enough, which is to say a lot.

—Translated from the Spanish by Cole Heinowitz

 

Alejandra Pizarnik (1936–1972) was a leading voice in twentieth-century Latin American poetry. Six books of her poetry have been translated into English: Diana’s Tree, The Most Foreign Country, The Last Innocence / The Lost Adventures, A Musical Hell, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972, and The Galloping Hour: French Poems. She died in Buenos Aires, of an apparent drug overdose, at the age of thirty-six.

Cole Heinowitz is a poet, translator, and scholar based in New York. Her books of poetry include The Rubicon, Stunning in Muscle Hospital, and Daily Chimera. She is the translator of Mario Santiago Papasquiaro’s Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic and Beauty Is Our Spiritual Guernica and the cotranslator of The Selected Late Letters of Antonin Artaud. She is the director of the literature program at Bard College.

From  A Tradition in Rupture: Selected Critical Writings , by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated from the Spanish by Cole Heinowitz, published in December 2019 by Ugly Duckling Presse.

Staff Picks: Cinema, Sebald, and Small Surprises

Still from And Then We Danced

Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire captured critics’ hearts, and seemed a sure shot to capture mine. An acclaimed French lesbian film? Made for me! And yet, though I did like looking at Adèle Haenel’s incongruously contemporary face in period garb, the overblown, gestural romance left me un-aflame. “Do all lovers feel that they’re inventing something?” Heloise asks Marianne before they first sleep together, and I wished that something more precise, more personal, were being invented. I found that specificity in a different international gay film, And Then We Danced, which follows a delicate-boned dancer as he tries to keep his hands from fluttering during traditional Georgian dance, his only path out of a country where he cannot survive. Shot in four weeks on a minuscule budget, the film received a standing ovation at Cannes. In Georgia, it was met with such violent far-right protests that it closed after three screenings, but a queer Georgian youth movement has mobilized around the film, and its soundtrack, as a beacon of hope. The movie’s portrayal of first love made me bite my lip, but even more vivid were the moments of tenderness between two brothers, between grandparents and grandchildren, and the spaces the camera inhabits in Tbilisi, from nightclubs to cramped apartments to ballrooms. It’s a love letter to Georgia that asks simply: Love me back. —Nadja Spiegelman

I spent much of December working with Nathaniel Mackey and Cathy Park Hong on Mackey’s Art of Poetry interview, which is in our new issue (online now, on newsstands Tuesday). In working on the manuscript across winter’s darkest days I had a sensation not unlike that accompanying opening up an Advent calendar. Behind one paper door was the poetry of Henri Coulette, behind another was John Coltrane—both of which were familiar to me, as Michael S. Harper made Coulette required reading for his undergraduate seminars, and Coltrane, well, I was carrying a coffin-size saxophone case around Seattle at age twelve, of course I know my Trane. But other doors opened to new-to-me delights—Mackey’s epistolary novels, which are but a grace note in this Art of Poetry interview, revealed a rabbit hole, and I eagerly devoured N’s letters in Late Arcade. The epic poem Paterson wasn’t new to me, but after reading Mackey’s description of its landscaping, I’ll never look at William Carlos Williams the same way again. Behind another door was Cathy’s new essay collection, Minor Feelings, which I started one Friday night and didn’t look up from again until it was done on Saturday evening. It’s a tremendous book of essays, inquisitive and honest and necessary. It seems I’ve just picked four books and a record, which is to say I’m actually pointing to a style of creative exploration that Mackey has internalized and deployed to great effect across his storied career. One part explorer, one part magpie, he weaves his work from many threads, and that curiosity is catching. As for me, I’m keeping those doors open all year. —Emily Nemens

From Sam Youkilis’s Instagram

In the hellscape of Instagram lies a savior, Sam Youkilis. In a simplistic way, Youkilis could be described as a travel photographer, but that moniker does no justice to breadth of his work. Yes, he’s more often than not in a beautiful place, eating gorgeous food and drinking perfect wine, but he is also capturing the soul of the landscape and the people who inhabit it. A great deal of his work is showcased in the Stories feature of Instagram, where he posts moving (in both senses of the word) portraits, often in curated series. Recently he has been posting videos from Chefchaouen, a city in Morocco known for its buildings in varying shades of blue. When you click on the geotag for Chefchaouen, a grid appears, dappled with travel influencers posing cross-legged on blue steps. In stark contrast, one of Youkilis’s posts features two little boys arm in arm running down a cerulean alleyway. Often it feels like Instagram’s sole purpose is to elicit envy, and yet I, someone prone to jealousy, never feel spiteful looking through Youkilis’s posts. His ability to capture the purest moments of everyday life assures me that if anyone deserves to be somewhere exciting and new—it’s @samyoukilis. —Eleonore Condo

There are no huge surprises on this new album from jazz legend Charles Lloyd, 8: Kindred Spirits, Live from the Lobero—it sounds a lot like Lloyd’s recent live albums—except the usual surprises that come with excellent, sinuous improvisation, and the presence of once-rising, now-risen star Julian Lage on a guitar that is alternately icily cutting and warmly resonant, and the organist Booker T., who quietly adds dimensions. Lloyd is one of the last active musicians from his great mid-’60s generation, and his round tone on sax and distinctive phrasing, which alternates between long, slow notes and sudden crunched runs, is recognizable from a mile away. His music moves effortlessly between a kind of hip profundity and a funky strut. He’s backed here by longtime bandmates, including Eric Harland, one of the best drummers alive, and pianist Gerald Clayton, who comes to the forefront of this music. There’s also a very expensive limited-release deluxe edition that includes an additional hour of music that is as wonderful as the rest, except for a rather ham-fisted vocal number called “A Song for Charles” (“Charles is a gift to the world/to me and you …”), which most listeners will want to skip over. No huge surprises, but, actually, lots of little ones, particularly in the twenty-minute version of Lloyd’s warhorse “Dreamweaver,” which opens the album. —Craig Morgan Teicher

Nick Mauss, Compilation, 2020 (© Nick Mauss, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery, New York)

Nick Mauss, though a visual artist by trade, is a scrupulous scholar of modernist dance. With each new work, he tests the limits of his form, capturing, in paint, the ephemeral nature of bodies in motion. Mauss is no stranger to Chelsea, having made a home at both the Whitney and 303 Gallery, where his latest solo show is on view through April 11. In a new collection of sketches and paintings, as in his other work, Mauss pays homage to the mid-century aesthetic. His architectural compositions recall the neoclassicism of Balanchine and Stravinsky. And his tender representations of the male body evoke the poetry and portraiture of Frank O’Hara and Fairfield Porter, respectively. Upon entering through a painted door, the viewer is immediately disarmed by a sketch of nearly life-size nudes in foreshortened perspective. These figures, rendered in ink on enamel paper, appear unfinished. Like others in the gallery, the work seems as if it has been torn from an oversize sketchbook. Neighboring pieces are even stained with coffee and ring-shaped marks where cups of paint once rested. The art, seemingly a record of Mauss’s own dynamic process, brings to mind dance notation. I left the gallery imagining the artist at work, in motion, as much a dancer as he is a choreographer. —Elinor Hitt

My memory has always been bad, though the past two years or so it’s been dreadful. Sufficiently poor that, when I’m tired, it seems that the blanks extend to the most common of words. If severe, the forgetting of words is called anomic aphasia. Or so my doctor told me when—quite blithely—she dismissed my concerns out of hand. (“No, you don’t have it. Get some sleep.”) Others have different names for the condition: in my conversations with the Review’s digital director, he has referred to it as “middle age.” Regardless of the nomenclature, the rewards of the condition are few, and the frustrations are many. But my obsession did recently draw me to a collection of interviews with, and essays on, W. G. Sebald, titled The Emergence of Memory and edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, a highlight of which is Sebald’s interview with Michael Silverblatt. I had first listened to this episode of Bookworm one evening, years ago, in a small kitchen in Paris while I cooked dinner, my laptop perched precariously on top of the fridge, and the conversation between these two respectful, calmly erudite men stayed with me. Early on, Silverblatt describes the manifestation of the Holocaust in the elegiac Austerlitz as a “silent presence being left out but always gestured toward.” To this Sebald responds: “Your description corresponds very much to my intentions.” It is an inconsequential reply, I suppose, but something about it seemed so simple, so accurate, and so very full of him. I remember how formal Sebald seemed, almost weary, though still friendly and engaged. I remember, too, his tones as he spoke that phrase, and have often repeated it to myself over the years, though I don’t precisely know why. It was reassuring to see the sentence reproduced on the page. And not only because I had remembered it correctly. —Robin Jones