Excerpt from The Middle Notebookes
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If only it were possible to wake outside from sleeping in a bed, turn over and be in the damp grass, hot sun and walk in instead of having to walk out.
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Nothing nor anyone died in my absence.
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This morning I would like to be able to go down to the river or the sea and stretch out among the algae.
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The mysoti seeds sprouted and have become paralyzed in that embryonic form. They didn’t grow and flower. It saddens me immeasurably. The possibility of these blue flowers in the blue flowerpot: forget-me-nots.—And what have they forgotten if not the vitality enclosed in each of the seeds, the suggestion of which is in each of the arrested leaves.
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Is it a forgotten life or over-much vitality? Arrested by its own momentum?
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Perversity of existence: not dying of the death of others.
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Overture (bis): the park where we meet, standing in the rain, crying or walking in silence, sitting without speaking, doing nothing, a fire in a small house or crossing the plains.
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Syncope: I skip over the present and fall into presentiment.
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At present, the present, I don’t know. The body is emitting faint, worrisome signals, I smother them so that they may cease.
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I cannot afford to be a mirror. I must be as opaque as the pavement that sops up the sun, or tar, or brick, or night. Don’t want to be the face of that death.
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You call me. You want to hear my voice. I watch the telephone ring. I wonder whether I even have one. A voice.
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By the time I gather my courage and make my way toward your city, you, like B., will already have left. Are we moving targets?
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In the change room of a jeans store, a song is playing. The voice insists: are you a boy or a girl? My jeans give no answer.
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. . . every “natural” death is foremost a violent death. (Claude Lanzmann)
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Last night I understood something that I have since forgotten.
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Of our walls, I know nothing. Of our lives, either. Of suffering or cities or animals locked in cages and the unfounded mutilations of human beings. Of knowledge or cruelty of travelled distances. There are seas that are shrinking and great expanses of garbage where habitats were, the places we wander, incapably bridled to our impossible, imperfect desires.—Must we run so far?
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There is no part of me that is not in relation with another person. It is in relation that violence is done, without even the intervention of deliberate force. Speaking is violence, as well as touch and abstaining one from the other. At least symbolically. Not the violence of decapitation or disembowelment, but a violence nonetheless that arises with the world, that is in the world, with dwelling and occupation and the face, retreat and thinking. The transcendence of this violence passes through violence, on the other side of which there is violence, again.
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And how could I have left, if not before the city began to exist again, in the plenitude of its existence, which begat me?
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There were myself and the city. There was no one. The beaches were full. I was invisible. The children in the water, the people stretched out on their towels, the gulls, the pebbles, the shore. I kept watch.—I had the strange impression of the beginning of a farewell to Chicago […] Thank you for this flame. Now the sky is silent. I’m thirty-nine. Dust.
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Whether it is a pact or a bond or a promise or a neurosis or a pathology or a headlock, I think, yes, that there is something very powerful that pulls us toward one another. It is in soft and hard parts of the body, and the elusive parts of language, the books that catch fire and the damp, soggy ground, the unfurling of flowers in the early morning and the bank of clouds here before me, the distances that pull at our mouths when we are close to one another, hungry for more mouth and the sleep that doesn't come.
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This is not the letter I am writing you. The letter written from shreds of lung swollen from sobbing, from flakes of teeth after too much tension and crumbs of bone snapping in the same dream that disallows sleeping. What I come upon in the blue cloud paper, the green and blue tie, the letters, your seal, my name written out, and this offering, which chokes me back: Rovner.
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Whether love comes as a boy with girlish limbs. (Lisa Robertson)
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And yet the ocean doesn’t break like glass.
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What is a morning garden, yes. I can see it, feel it almost, and think of the thresholds one must cross, barefoot, cool ground, dew. Sun on a horizon.—My morning garden is entangled today. Rovner in the early hours, Outside, over and over. Very little repose in sleep. Caught now in brambles and untidy gorse, the matter of my mind, sinking into dark mud with little resistance.—Between death and abandon.—I’ll walk there and back.—
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So I may be dead, because the chronology of my life is completely abolished, I penetrate its circular spirals by a thousand ways. (Lanzmann)
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Hard breaking sleep against the porch boards, wild wind, fine rain, some sun, wind mounting, paralysis inside and out, limbs heavier and heavier, sleep deeper, dreaming more and more violent, a hell, several hells, riveted like that to the wood digging into my hip, and wondering is this breathing, is this death, the sleep of the unsleeping,—forgive me, I am going to walk or sleep more, pull rain from the sky, try to find something in me that responds to the world, that is not all pain or fear or devastation (your word), and feel it, even fleeting,—I'll try again and again until I can reach you, reach out past the metaphysical blows that rain hard into my brain.
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The whole sky at my throat.
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As long as I am dreaming I am alive. The dead don’t dream. (Darwish)
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Yes, with my whole mouth.
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(On Altgeld yesterday, at California, I put my bare hand against the bare wood of an undressed frame house, very very old, with the bricks taken down and its structure exposed, the bare pine at the front and the dark weathered brown of the other planks of wood, waiting, it is waiting to be covered up. I touched the north side of the house in three places and the east side twice, feeling its fragility, the beautiful hue underneath that is usually hidden from view and the care with which it was stripped, bare. Not thinking ahead to what damage may be done in the re-covering, but at least it is not being torn down.)
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So I stay with your ash and your burn, your fleur de peau.
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