ANIMAUX

because I want to put the x in animal, which has gender weight but which I actually visualize as the xxo that ends a letter, the duplicate, tactile kiss -- or, as in x marks the spot: predation.  How do sentences attract? What kills them? What splits them open, releasing their contents into a field?  The pale blue oval of a river?  I've been reading Donna Haraway's When Species Meet as a way to begin writing on the "metabiology" of diaspora, for a class I'm teaching this semester at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, far away, I think, from the place that you are reading this.  I don't know.  Hi.  Haraway: "The corpse is not the body."  Plus: "The world is not finished."  She writes about the ashes of her father, a Denver sportswriter, as "consigned" to the earth; her faith in the "making and unmaking" of bodies that release their material signs into the streaming of everything else that is dead and living.  As an abiogenetic model, I understand it completely -- and it makes me understand why I've killed Ban, the figure I am writing to in a new project, off.  I kill her off because you need something dead.

KILLING KANOKO.  It has a bright pink cover.  "Territory is not symmetrical," says Haraway, my favorite, though if Alphonso Lingis invited me to go with him to Bhutan I suspect I'd chuck her over a barrel of pork rinds in a Cincinnatti second: theorizing: (Haraway): the unrecorded planetary flows that "intermingle" and "knot" -- with the sense that it's in these folds or "contact zones" that life is happening.  "Infolding."  Translate to the sentence.  But when I reach for the near-red book on the shelf next to the desk where I am typing, in a village, in the countryside, it's the wrong book.  It's Christine Wertheim's "examination of the English tongue from the viewpoint of Poetry": a lipstick red book from Les Figues Press filled with "not-not"s.

In working out questions of "negation" (W.) as they intersect with an "ethics of flourishing" (H.), it's been useful, this week, to talk with my friend Melissa Buzzeo, who is basically the person I talk to about poetry every day.  Kind of what this blog has felt like the few days I've been on it/under it really -- in the vertical comment stream beneath Thom's Haneke post.  Melissa was talking about "debris flow" -- the eighty mile an hour river-like thing made of concrete and "other molecular matter"- - as the physical texture of a manuscript, The Devastation, she's completing this week.  We're trying to finish books by Thursday at noon, to then read them aloud to each other, over the phone, in the early afternoon.  Since we spoke, Haiti.  Debris flow: an anatomy that wipes out all other anatomies.

I said goodnight to my friend and wrote this sentence, a sentence I recorded, I guess, in my notebook: "he cut off her nose and she ran screaming back into the forest to her brother."  It's a sentence from the Ramayana, retold by a refugee.  I thought about how a refugee might re-tell a fairytale of the place where they were from.  How certain sentences might function as accounts of violence, the images transplanted to a different scene, which is circuitry.

It allows the death to keep moving.  "The images," said Cuc*, "leave my body.  That's good.  The negative things come out.  So many people want to hear the story, but I don't want to tell the story.  I had acupuncture, and the images came out."

*Cuc.  I met Cuc, a Vietnamese refugee, in D.C. last week.  We stood in front of the Barnett Newman lithographs, which she analyzed - - as a chemist, an engineer whose day job is "etching" radio-frequency ID ski passes with an "e-beam"  -- for their abrasion: the decayed material that refracts the light.

"The sentence as a possible record of carnage."  -- Thom Donovan.  But the book as embedding that harsh glitter too.  See: the ending of Christina Peri Rossi's State of Exile, translated by Marilyn Buck, in which falling in love is the antidote to the sentence that repeats, sustaining a moment of arrival that's such a shock, so sorrowful, it doesn't stop.  Make it stop.  What makes it stop for Rossi is the moment when she falls in love with a person of the place she has come to, and she writes this, entering what H. calls the "open."  Not that one, the Agamben one.  This one:

I think that in loving you/we will exchange syllables and words/like religious amulets/like keys to a secret code/and, happy for the first time in this foreign city/this other city,/I will let myself be guided through her passages/through her entrails/through her arches and whorls/like a traveler in a forest/in the middle of our lives' road./Cities are only known through love/and all tongues beloved."