THIS IS MESSY, WE'RE NOT SORRY: Elegant Mire with Carrie Lorig, v. 2

Carrie :  i'm in the TA office right now

because air conditioning

and because no one comes here in the summer

Cassandra:  good plan

i am at home at my desk

Carrie:  I just got to the page where Claire Lispector says in Stream of Life she's at home alone too. "On this Sunday of sun and Jupiter I'm alone at home. Suddenly, I've split in two and doubled over, as with an intense labor pain--and I saw that the girl in me was dying."

Carrie:  "Truthfully, the beauty of this mouth to mouth is overwhelming me."

Cassandra:  Wow, I need to read more of her. I need to go back to school or retool my intensity, crank it back up, the desire for many worlds/words saturation. Lately I feel muddy, bottomed out.

Carrie:  I didn't until winter break. I read the book about eating a cockroach.

Cassandra:  A lack of focus or inspiration is one of my greatest fear; like if i stop moving i will die

Carrie:  absolutely

this is partially why i'm reading CL

she terrifies me

with her inability to lose intensity

and one fear i have moving on from NODS is that that intensity has changed

and i'm not sure what it is

right now

(“WITH SUCH FRAGMENT BEFORE US” – “Modern Fiction,” Virginia Woolf, / WITH SUCH FRAGMENT BEFORE US – “Modern Fiction,” Virginia Woolf / WITH SUCH FRAGMENT BEFORE US – “Modern Fiction,” Virginia Woolf / WITH SUCH FRAGMENT BEFORE US – “Modern Fiction,” Virginia Woolf /

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU FINISH THE BOOK

EXCEPT THAT / YOU FORGET THE BOOK HOW TO WRITE THE BOOK

OR WHAT POSSIBILITY ABOUT A BOOK YOU DREAMED

OR WHEN I GET HOME FROM TEACHING I’M GOING TO LOOK UP A SHRED OF QUARTZ FROM JABÉS AND LET IT SPEAK THROUGH ME

THE GHOSTS OF THE BOOK

THE GHOST OF VIRGINIA WOOLF HOLDS A SCREAMING FLOWER

                                   

"Does the book here, stand for love? The Book is an object is an object of love. The manifestations of love in the book are the hugs, kisses, bites of sentences, words, letters, and, outside the book, an unveiled passion for the written wound, fertile lesion whose lips we spread like a vulva to allow in the sperm of death." (The Book of Margins, Edmond Jabès).

 

J told me on the phone, that this is what happens upon finishing the book / that which is possible / impossible / doesn’t matter / you feel or see all that is untouched / the deserts / the deserts of love. The book does not create meaning by standing in for life. It is a life. It is a life breaking into our life. IT IS TREMBLING. Meaning does not behave or approach us as we ask it to. Where is the event? (“There would be the event. However, does the event exist?” 91) Where is the language to describe it? To stand in for it? I do not read the book. I DO NOT WRITE THE BOOK I learn how to be haunted by it. How it gathers.

Cassandra: This is a working through with the fear intact. Slavoj Žižek has this fear of the loss of speech as a spectacle of disappearance. "My eternal fear is that if, for a brief moment, I stopped talking... you know, the whole spectacular appearance would disintegrate; people would think there is nobody and nothing there. This is my fear, as if I am nothing who pretends all the time to be somebody and has to be hyperactive all the time... just to fascinate people enough so that they don't notice that there is nothing." But, thankfully I am not Žižek or that deluded or in love with my image’s failing.

Carrie:  *nods* that's so interesting

i feel like i don't have that fear tho i recognize what he's saying

does the idea of being nothing scare you?

i fear more the idea that if i can stop speaking about what i feel i won't feel or that it will drown me.

Cassandra:  I feel, most of the time I write from the pit of that acknowledgment, (I enveloped so much of this conversation into my body / the conversation in which C reaches for C and C meets C and C weeps and C lives…. "Pit of Acknowledgement” is a phrase that cycled / eroded through me / still lives here in a jewelfire) that there is nothing. But the nothing is not my lack of speech revealing an ineluctable pit but is the riding of the sickness, or just an effect.

Carrie:  *nods* nothing is not empty

which is the opposite of what Žižek seems to think nothing is

and this seems like a male symptom to me too

the fear of being perceived as nothing

Cassandra:  but I thrive in the schizo-void and its threat is rejuvenating.

Carrie:  mm

yes

the inside of a curved bone

THE INSIDE OF A SCRAP LYING ON ANOTHER SCRAP / THE MOVEMENT FROM CORPSE A TO CORPSE B / THE PATTERN OF WAVES / THE WAVE “It’s sending and receiving, but isn’t it also inventing or mixing?” –Lisa Robertson to Etel Adnan

Cassandra:  This particular fear is not wholly ego based, rather calling into question what if the bile that backs you one day disintegrates?

Carrie:  totally

Cassandra: and the real/Realness we perceive or fail to perceive falls. True abandonment is unimaginable and that is what creates the terror.

Carrie: that is definitely what Chris was really honing in on in his review of your book.

http://thecollagist.com/the-collagist/2013/6/27/throne-of-blood-by-cassandra-troyan.html

i have found it freeing

Cassandra:  Yes, exactly. The freedom released by dedicating one’s self to practices of rabid intensities. I am my own sacrificial object. “So, in this complicated calculus Troyan creates the idea of aliveness equating with fakeness, and deadness equating with realness. Love is real, and therefore dead. Ergo, loving someone is akin to worshiping death…Where resolution is no resolution. Where the truth of falsity and the falsity of truth shine brightly in the face of sheer brutality and gore.”

Carrie:  It makes giving myself away feel like both adding to a membrane and its disintegration.

Cassandra:  In your work too there is an effect of the excessive on a cellular level. All these gross subcutaneous blocks I must face again and again until I give up to give in. And giving up in the best possible way.

Carrie:

(PAUL THEK’S FISHMAN / THE SUBCUT SWIMMER / THE SUBCONTAINER BLOCK I FACE AGAIN AND AGAIN.)

Carrie:  Bhanu Kapil writes on her blog about wandering into a river and thinking about the body as an index

i'm not sure what that means but i like the impossible bigness of being like an infected tide pool

the constant changing of containment

I'm endlessly amazed anything holds anything

THE INFECTED TIDE POOL IS THE WOUND AND THE POEM AND THE BODY BREEDNG / BREATHING ALL AT ONCE INTO THE SIDES OF THE CLIFF / THE CLIFF FACING THE DESERT OR THE SEA OR THE REST OF THE SISTERMOUNTAINS. THE THREE OF CUPS / THE THREE GODDESSES RADIATING THE DEPTH OF THEIR WOUND. 

Cassandra:  released from form, to come back to an organized formlessness.

Carrie:  yes

organized formlessness

which is organized only in that i think it's sense are just as attuned and focused as a form's might be.

“Inventing is sending. If you are not inventive, you don’t receive. These are not dead things. They are very complicated processes. We just have a glimpse of them.”—Etel Adnan to Lisa Robertson

Cassandra: “Every day the punishment is infinite presence.”—Erika Staiti

But when deterritorialized it's the way a body's sensations are disconnected and rehooked in unseemly places, yet the river still flows. To me this is the work of your poetry. It's like fucking someone with your foot; the same moves with new actors while producing entirely different sensations.

Carrie:  hahaha

Cassandra:  with a huh, yeah, there we go, hmmmmmm, hehe. it's very freeing.

Carrie: it makes me open to inexplicable love.

Cassandra: yes!

Carrie: beyond melody and coupled love

Cassandra: impossible love

Carrie:  potholes

Cassandra: FLASHBLOOD

Carrie: potholes serve flashblood at the herd party

it spits flashblood up the nose of "the state of affairs" and "scrubbing it positive"

scrapping off all the dead skin!

why!

Cassandra:  "Your pores are tin cans"

Carrie:  this is my [make up] foundation

dead cells sexing live cells

Cassandra: "I LOSE ALL LOOFA PROOF"

Carrie:  hahaha DELETE ME

Cassandra: it's a corpse bust, fr sure. it's necromancy as a cleanse.

or that we are already so much dead

Carrie: *nods* in Throne, "i feel a rumble like a forgotten want" i like the afterlife of want and the death that keeps on giving and interrupting life

like the stupid awe ppl always have that stars are giving us dead light

extending the event

Cassandra: yeah, it's like duh! we are full of dead stars and we are always leaking them. “(Another version of the same beginning is simpler and more direct: in the long science of submission it is the mind that, quietly spectacular, unhooks the bodies and opens the face.)”—Lisa Robertson in Magenta Soul Whip

the dead face unhooks itself into a deeper stillness. a truer death.

Carrie:  the ends of your hair are dead too!

you can still twist them and turn them colors

Cassandra: or, keratin is hoof matter too, an important part of our epidermis.

we have soft shells

Carrie:  i'm so glad. i don't think i would survive if my body wasn't changing on me all the time.

Cassandra: but it's so easy to forget.

Carrie: totally. we are always trying to still them or make them stay in certain spots.

Cassandra: in NODS, "How many are you in a frozen bag? / How many are you dawned inside gymnasium flesh?"

Carrie:  i was just thinking of the jersey shore portion of Throne, "i go to the gym two/three hours a day"

Cassandra: what happens if you give into the body's demands as a sort of masochistic hedonism?

Carrie:  "MAYBE I SHOULD GET A BOYFRIEND WHO'S IN THE MILITARY"

how hard we feel we have to try in certain places

and how that trying becomes clown-ish

sometimes?

Cassandra: yes, but there is a real tenderness there

it's so earnest

even when completely fake, or feigned

there is a real hurt

Carrie:  *nods*

“LOVE ME /

THERE ARE THINGS TO BE CARED FOR”

Cassandra: and it's nauseating

when Brandon Brown read at the Poetry Foundation last week with Hannah Gamble he talked about his impulse to write coming from feeling nauseous.

Wanting to throw up, from love or disgust.

Carrie:  that is intense

i like that

the overwhelming again

Cassandra: being disgusted by your own obsessions.

if you love something hard enough is it still empty.

Carrie: “when the wound becomes / its own place / when it has its own appetite”—Throne

i like the idea of obsessions taking on their own appetite beyond yrs and that being what makes you sick.

Cassandra: "Hello from a place bleach, Dream Girl. Hello from a sludge of crystal."—NODS

Carrie:  i think poetry allows me to not feel like that's utterly terrifying

this is the drowning thing again

if i don't live in those alter appetites

Cassandra: yes

Carrie:  they put hags on my chest every night

and i wake up paralyzed

and dream new limps

Cassandra: or, for me that the feeling of drowning is that panic of the loss of breath not even loss of oxygen or consciousness.

Carrie:  oh interesting what is the difference between those three things

Cassandra; i write mostly from that moment before blacking out.

not breathing is i-want-to-keep-doing-this-thing-my-body-does-semi-automatically. or, it depends on how close you want to be to yr own manufactured terror.

i have a higher threshold than most, haha

Carrie:  oh wow yes

i think i do too honestly sometimes because i think real versions of it will be inevitable

or that there's no difference

if we're going to touch back on real / imagined

the moment where i realize i'm having a panic attack and won't be able to remember the things i say to the person i'm about to call.

“I think these poems, then, are like a crucifixion, where the cross is never shown. Instead you see the crowds that surround the cross; finally, what is being shown is a Christ who is never present; the only thing reflected, finally, is the pain and the violence human beings inflict on other human beings.” –Raul Zurita to Daniel Borzutzky. *******Whenever I have a panic attack / it always occurs to me that I may have been drugged / that a little puncture mark appeared or opened and what seeped inside / poisoned me / altered me endlessly / without end.*********************************************************

Cassandra: yes, there is something specifically gendered about this openness to the possibility of collapse. to falling open and lost.

Carrie:  mmhmm i just went upstairs to get coffee and as i was coming back down i thought of how unafraid i am of the idea of foreign objects being inside me

and how that has everything to do with gender

women have turned collapse (the triangle shirtwaist fire factory) into powerful relooping

reversing

the pulps vs. the thrones

pulp is an ocean

thrones are mountains

one is always breaking

waves

“the hunted body”—Djuna Barnes

Cassandra: exactly

penetration as exfoliation

Carrie: revealing depth

rather than "newness"

"The hospital was like an inverted peony."—Bhanu kapil

Cassandra: reverse blossom, as a life/death invert?

Carrie:  i think so

or that healing is reverse blossom

and in-between life/death inversion

Carrie:  FOLDS. i don't know if it makes sense

Cassandra:  it does, in an open way.

i think our writing is so much THINK HARD/DON'T THINK AT ALL

Carrie: YES

Cassandra: i like that best

Carrie:  me too

i think it's hilariously important

Cassandra: like, smashing yourself in a waiting room against the two doctor doors

Carrie:  it is jack spicer's martian receiving but not letting them make you a pet

Cassandra: hahaha

Carrie:  tender/earnest/brazen personal-ness becomes a way to control the uncontrollable

or be present in it

whatever i write next

is seriously going to be called

the pulps vs. the thrones

Cassandra: that's good.

yeah, the brazen helps the cringe along

Carrie:  flashing frames / mammoth waves

Cassandra: i like what you said at one point about editing like a motherfucker's motherfucker

and i do too

Carrie:  oh i can feel that

Cassandra:  but there is a point where i have to stop. there has to be a cringe

like, my own writing has to make me sick.

Carrie:  mmm yes same here exactly

Cassandra: I need to feel ashamed or embarrassed, where fragility is a promise that I can’t admit to myself yet, where desire lies beyond my own knowledge. The moment when you realize you might be in love with someone because the thought of seeing them again or not seeing them again makes you want to puke. The suggestion or refusal of possibility is nauseating, sensitive.  “Utopia is so emotional”—Lisa Robertson

Carrie: to the point where i can love something beyond the writing

shame matters to me a lot

shame is a soft shell

a shell softener / stool softener

Cassandra: but it is difficult and necessary to self-medicate even when over stuffed by culture

Carrie: mmhmm i felt so connected to the thing you said about staying raw

about how hard it is to be in that space / tho also i feel like i am always always in that space

which is why even getting the mail is sometimes painful

Cassandra: OMG

yes, to go out into "THE WORLD" even when i am already maimed

Carrie: oof

covered in oof prints

i'm so open to wounds i know i'm only going to get more maims in mane

and that's what i want

and that's fucking foolish

but also the greatest thing i can do

Cassandra: it's the only thing to do

Carrie:  WE INITIATE THE DEATHLIGHT

***

CARRIE LORIG is the author of the chapbooks NODS. (Magic Helicopter Press), Being Stone (Big Lucks), and Reading as a Wildflower Activist / Part 1 (forthcoming from H_NGM_N). She has also written several collaborative chapbooks, including Labor Day (Forklift Books) with Nick Sturm and rootpoems (Radioactive Moat) with Sara Woods. A full length book, The Pulp vs. The Throne (Artifice Books), will be out in July 2015.