The Antipodes of Me

Anne Carson, Antigonik (2012)
My problem was sudden, but not unexpected, wrenching all the same. Or it was that the entire day played out with unusual intensity. That work was an unremitting expenditure of intellectual production, and an explosive demonstration of the ability to rethink another's thought and make something new and stronger of it. That after work became an intensity of talking, more draining than filling. That I skipped dinner, too addled by thought and emotion to care about food, and still far from caring for it.

But the problem was not the day so much as its extension into night. Back at my place of sleeping, I had in my possession Anne Carson's most recent book, Antigonick, her translation-cum-retelling of Sophocles' Antigone. And Carson always kills me, she pulls me apart, or Sophocles does, or their somber duet, sung across millennia, does.

Strangely, I've never read Antigone, so the only version in my head is tonight's version, one that begins by mentioning Hegel

[ENTER ANTIGONE AND ISMENE] ANTIGONE: WE
BEGIN IN THE DARK AND BIRTH IS THE DEATH OF
US. ISMENE: WHO SAID THAT ANTIGONE: HEGEL 

one that is presented to us in nothing but capital letters, one handwritten in black and red (the latter occasionally for emphasis, but usually to show us the character who is speaking), one that is illustrated by drawings (on translucent paper) that are anachronistic and have only a tangential relationship to the text, one written by Anne Carson, but illustrated by Bianca Stone, and designed by Robert Currie, another commercial bit of book art from Anne Carson, this time with visual assistance from two other people.

The handwritten text (or "textblocks hand-inked on the page") are the more astounding part of the book, because the handwriting is rough and inexact, designed not to aid reading but to impede it, and yet, after a few minutes, I lost almost all recognition of the strange forms of the text, and I merely read into the book, reading right through it in probably half an hour. And then resting, temporarily, exhausted, after reading this great drama of unseen death. All the death takes place off stage, but there is so much of it that it is difficult not to feel. And all these deaths of family. The play obliterates two families.

And still, through all of this, I gave Sophocles too little credit, because Carson made art out of this translation. She took his text and modernize it, with heightened prose, but still prose that we might expect to hear on the streets today, and she infected the book with modern thoughts, with references to Hegel and Beckett and Wolff. But maybe Robert Currie deserves some credit for the visual display of the prose, which breaks into lines, which forms small clouds of text over the page, which runs down the sides of the page leaving the center blank, which centers itself left to right, all for intended intellectual effects, all to control our reading of the text.

Occasionally, individual letters of the text are unreadable except that they form part of a word and we can guess their context, and (at least once) the word "its" is misspelled, maybe intentionally, maybe not:

GOVERNMENT DEPEND ON  HAIMON: NO CITY BELONGS
TO A SINGLE MAN  KREON: SURELY A CITY BELONGS
TO IT'S RULER  

And other strange things happen textually: words are broken in the middle, across two lines; words are created for the text:

YOU'RE STANDING ON A RAZOR. I HEAR THE BIRDS THEY
'RE BEBARBARIZMENIZED THEY'RE MAKING MONSTER 
SOUNDS THE FIRES WON'T LIGHT THE RIGHTS GO WRONG YOU
KNOW MY TECHNOLOGIES YOU KNOW THE FALLING OF THE
SIGNS IS IN ITSELF A SIGN.

In the end, the words work, and they are powerful. The ending is stark. The single speech of Eurydike, Kreon's wife, is beautiful and harrowing. It is a dark and powerful and lightning-quick play, and one given a kind of bookish stage in this little bookwork.


Again, I have proved myself incapable of writing reasonably good postings about Carson's work, because it always overwhelms me, because she teaches me not to write any longer because she shows me how, impossibly, to write. 


But her example, and the example of this somehow arduous day, made me write. Another poem, unfortunately, more words more likely to be denigrated unread than denigrated read. But it's what I do. And it's another poem in a book I'm working on, one in which I steal words from other poets to encourage myself to write long personal poems obsessed with words and sex and death, or all that there ever is. That means it's another long poem, too long for reading, but one I produced with some ferocity tonight, one that kept almost all of my attention all night, one that took me over and I brought it into being.

Tonight's poem I began on May 9th, writing only what was intended to be and is the last line of the poem. On May 12th, I copied down words I'd collected from a book by Carl Coolidge (most of the sex), and I wrote a tiny portion of the poem, not even an entire section. Tonight, I added text from Gil Ott, Marc Weber, and just a few from Anne Carson. It's a strange combination of people, but I need diversity to write about the entire world. 


Or that small portion of the entirety that I can see from my perilous vantage point in Albany.

 

Failure to Thrive(the first and only half)
<ἄκλαυτος ἄφιλος ἀνυμέναιος>

the αdream
Night is not the best of times for sense
bread for failurebreast for milk
the interminabilities of dreaming
The first I could remember was the longest, maybe because it contained the most frustrating aspects of dreamings, the ways in which the dream does not allow you to control anything within it, the way in which the dream fights your every attempt to make something right, to manage expectation into a reasonable representation of experience.
without strength breathing in the bluewhat might be waterwhat might be sky
Man withdraws and (in doing so) isand (in being) sins
the tone rowed upon rowin the bank of sundarkness in what’s
left of light

the βdream
All forms of earthaccept the bodies into themselves
Most forms of earthresist that entrance
every river is sticksfloating in abrogation of the dream of water
the leaves on the surface are wateror approximation of water by their lenticular formsand we hate it and hate it and slip inthe crevice that attracts all darkness
(The earth is magneticso she pulls you in)
Falling and flailing, I am floating, and the plummet is into canyon past light and tanning browns, past ochres and yellows, past the parched mouth breathing in that dry air during all that dreaming, or it is towards streets so far below that I cannot see the colors of the cars driving down and across and up (there is no sense of direction there) the streets that are black, and past the buildings in shades of greys and grays, and the dark blank spaces that are the blinkless window resting flat against the faces of these towers.
Awake and lateand drier the bind of comethat holds two togetherflagrant and flaking
as if a lash were brittle
or would fall as dust
tumbles as breath

the γdream
the nipple in the mist
(the slight firmness of her before give)
a thighway glance
(driving then a small tap at the guardrail before the spin)
as her hips heft
(what she moves is you)
What I usually recall—the dread pull of wakefulness rousing my unwilling body—is flight, not airborne, but flurry, as if in activity of, or fury, in the sense of needing the power of anger, a form of fear, to engage the body fully in the practice of escaping capture, of eluding pursuit. There are tunnels intersected with multiple tunnels piercing these crosswise, and there is ever the danger of capture, of surprise, of the slip of shoe on gravel, and the fall. And the capture I do not dream, I do not know of its terrors, for my mind won’t allow me that horror. Instead, I awake, and wish right away for the lethal pull of sleep.
Nothing vast nothingenormous beyond comprehend nothingenters usno-one enters usthe lives of us mortals shifting into or out of sleepwithout ruin
without ruinsleft behind
all around us
(why do we dream?)

the δ dream
All met and I mumbled, “I will not changemy clothes or my eyesbut I will trade Egyptfor the soft tremble of your lips”
girl who opensgirl who opens to himgirl who opens up to himand will not close
Desire is the only product of dreaming, and what it is that takes us away. In dreams lie every pummeled desire, all ambiguous and contradictory hope, the instinct for flesh so deep that a boy, too young to know how to penetrate a woman, or even what soft opening she has for such an act, can imagine a way to copulate, to sow his seed, even if vaguely, with a hand flung out from the body, the spread erratic, but memorable, and ambitious for so being.
Unwept unwed unloved we come and godreaming of archipelagos
of desire
the scattered remains of an only imagined continent
that rises out of the burgundy sea at nightfallonly high enough to let peek
or peak
what liesbelow

the ε dream
The thermous eyesof night and nightlingsand the small shelled and pinching beaststhat wander over bodies at restin darkness
my tongue stings aloneit stings aloneand O the stones it stings
There is no light in dreaming that is not noirish, that doesn’t arise from vague reflections off the dead faces of streets, for we dream across our entire nighttimes, and the only light left is imagined, or remembered inadequately, or held tight between two cupped palms of your hand. So that it cannot fly away.
And you see them in the window
every flickering of themand you imagine themas ifevery tree were a hole
through the earththrough the airthrough her floating hair

the ζ dream
It seems we are at the end of it, yet it all continues, nonetheless
a womanin pewter in water
a womanembarrassed and brassy
a womanconnubial and blissful
a womanof fiction and friction
We are blessed by the recollections of our future
Not every dream is remembered, but some are repeated, including the earliest I recall. Walking through my neighborhood in Porto, which bore no relationship to my city save for the curving intricacy of its bridges, came a giant dressed for Jack, and he would lumber forth in my direction, stomping one home into flatness and then another. With each footstep, a home disappeared, so I feared for myself and my fragile home, even though I watched this scene while floating, almost hidden, in the dark sky.
That immense postprandial age and what it will gave us
the yellow wall behind her in herglass of water
the yellowglass before her by herwall of water
the yellow bend beneath her with herwater of glass

the η dream
I see bodiesthe light of which I cannot touchwrapped in a thread of fabric
then the storm
these bodies to pendfrom the pen to the manythat felt lap of her
Or I could think of the female who would receive me
In any dream, a woman serves two purposes, which is but a single purpose seen from various directions. In one sense, proprioception, she is someone for me to protect, only slightly smaller than I, but less accustomed to evading those who hunt their kinblood humans. I may sometimes take her hand to guide her down a dark passage that resembles safety, or I may hold both her hands to pull her up over a wall we must hurdle. In another sense, that of scent itself, she is one who refuses me—even when she willingly accepts me into her body, it is only in the sense that acceptance is the most poignant form of refusal.
PenetrationRequires Penis
For this reason, you experiencepartitionment of every thing beyond yourself
and there are oceans of itthrough every Caribbean shade of aquamarineyou cannot ever recall

the θ dream
I comeas pleader of these things:
the day with posted sleep(the cost of dream)
the windows wetter(occurring only via the processes of difference)
the attendant cunt(whose voice is febrile)
Let me extend the term of breastinto the next dream
A dream is not a portal to the soul; it is, instead, the soul itself. A dream does not so much tell us something about the dreamer as it is the dreamer. Sometimes, we realize that we are merely ourselves, that the features that distinguish us from others are inseparable from ourselves, that we are just an accumulation, rather than a whole.
the berry of a nod
before sleep
everything lusted coveredwith rust
She placed her hand exactly at the center
our genital selves
a concerted reach

the ι dream
There Iam in the genital lightthe flowerylight
Hot from the head of acircumcised penis
but it all came apartit all came out
I dream of art that doesn't exist. A large white cabinet, but made of metal, and painted white, faced me. It was wider than it was tall, yet taller than I, and it had two doors next to each other, both of which swung on hinges attached on the right. Somehow, through the diplomacy of dreaming, I knew that this was an artwork created by da levy, the 1960s radical poet, who killed himself at age 26.
I lookinside with reachless stare
fraught with eyesovercome bythe arc breath
and breastsmoving in tightat me

the ϰ dream
To apply firm but flexible lines to the body
the hands lost
to lip it all in
so hard I poured
There was no door through the wall, so we began by pulling the bark off the wall, and what we found underneath it was living flesh. As we pulled more and more bark off, we realized we were uncovering the flesh of a giant whale and that the room we would be moving into was the body of a whale. We wondered if we could eat this flesh and how the whale stayed alive or its flesh avoided putrefaction after so many years resting upon the earth.
But the body of this dream in thoughtarises
through every seizing tempest
I do dream of conditional bodies
I may
I could

the λ dream
Newel of sexI connect myselfto correct myself
out of allthe numbers of myself
As if all my other life waswas glass
I am at work, but it is outdoors in a forest glade. Instead of an office with a desk there is a bed, and we work around the bed. No-one even sits on the bed, but we place papers upon it. We treat it as a table and we have a meeting while standing or kneeling around it. I am talking to people about a project concerning the uses of government records.
memorizing the morningthrough the circuit of the dream
My robe over flesh be thought
You’re closer tothe throat silk
at the other side of your life
To die is my only prayer
“Yahweh Elohim Yahweh”
How will you be if I still am?

the μ dream
Have the penis extendtowards her glance
a glimpse
Like the sentence that climbs
Deep love for the thought of a twig in the sand
The fear of the child is to fall into sleeping, but not because of the fear of the dream. It is because of the fear of waking, the fear of knowing the wolf that can move only when the room is dark, even of the child’s eyes. A child has but two protections against the terrors of wakeful darkness: sheets so tight around the neck that not even a breath can enter the bedsheets where the child lies, and staying awake so as to avoid being torn open by the wolf that finds that wisp of an opportunity that a child’s sleeping has allowed.
Deep thoughtfor the loveof the sandin a twig
And I bare her to meand she is without weightand  all the movement is still my own
I am dividedand become myself
Grievousat what robs me of a noble death
The body gives in                  up                                    out
ecr. l'inf.




ecr