Unknown [sound of water against stone]

Notes for national corpse month, continued:

It makes sense to begin on the ceiling. To begin pressed against the limits of the room, whether in solitude, asylum, or restraint, beyond which spread the injunctions of the world. I envision a body shot up to the ceiling suddenly imbued with a split perspective: that of the body on the ceiling and that of the body on the ground. Isn’t there always one left? The perspective of mutual confrontation, each body bound to the tension between, the distance, a cube, like a fractured embrace—though maybe the room itself is an invention, walls crumbled, out of bounds. That is where Yanara Friedland begins. She walked, for example—among other borders, traces and ruins, natural and artificially enforced—the former East-West division through Germany. It was summer. The exigencies of life, of survival, and the forces that hang them in the shadows of violence, have inflected the gravity of so many bodies that maybe gravity has reversed, and that people who have been pushed beyond their extent, are the ennoblements of the living, looking back. To look (back) at one’s body from a limit, a place of exile; to attempt to re-member oneself with an imagination forged, by necessity, out of that distance; to look at one’s bodies, held in a fractured embrace, despite, or because of, the collapse of the world. The space between may be the price of existence.

—Brandon Shimoda

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A few months before I went on the long walk, I woke one night from a dream, or maybe it was just a noise. As soon as I woke, I lost my sense of gravity, shot up to the ceiling, and could not get back into the distant body below...

So, it started, on some level, with disorientation. A mire of ideas and answers lolly-popping through the day. A desire to return to firm commitment without a deciding form. The ways in which it would be told. Interjection, disquisition, dream, research, folding the napkin over. Acknowledgement of not knowing what needed to be told. In every mirror, in each of her faces. The winter heating up.

What stories, what memories, what histories do I take charge of, do I charge?

I kept asking.

Trying to name what I was doing, pursuing, and primarily attending to; trying to somehow get out of the enclosed isolated spaces.

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Hélène Cixous wrote that the work of Brazilian author Clarice Lispector deals centrally with what she calls “the law of the living.” Lispector intentionally breaks with stable forms of language and the constraints of genre conventions. In order to properly understand “the law of the living,” she unmasks given laws, spoken by the Bible, sociopolitical systems, and institutions. It is the breaking of the book in order for the book to become human. Lispector asks her readers to displace “all the lies that have helped us to live,” and to understand one’s stance as attentive, in a state of open receptivity.

When I first read Clarice Lispector, I felt relief. A kind of permission to go where I was being sent, and move synergistically between subjects and realms, affirming aliveness without certainty or redemption. Always the attempt...

In The Breath of Life she writes: “So writing is the method of using the word as bait: the word fishing for whatever is not word. Once whatever is between the lines is caught, the word can be tossed away in relief. The non-word, taking the bait, incorporates it. So what saves you is writing absent-mindedly.”

I am revisiting Lispector here, briefly, as someone who gave permission to a making that lingers and stares. From dream, half-wittedness, and in “foreign syntax” I felt she was assigning a place to me in an empty room. Even now, long dead, she does not belong to any particular lineage, but I associate her with a long line of visionaries that I want to be in conversation with.

I wrote in her books, wrote about her, sung to her face, briefly traversed a biography, only to take up the books again, making poems from her words, erasing those words, taking her books to the desert asking questions out loud.

In turn her oracle responds...

I am not sure if there will be an aboutness here. I think of calling this “the law of the living,” in honor of Clarice Lispector and Hélène Cixous. I also want to trace the etymology of “care” and to suggest a trust. To trust one’s questions. The scattered forms inform, eventually.  Somehow the mound, the animals confer that it will happen.

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The walks began with a picture which began with a catastrophe. In 2012, a garment textile factory, Tazreen, in Dhaka, Bangladesh was site to a fire that killed over 100 workers and lasted for 17 hours. There is much to say about the fire, the corporate complicity of U.S. magnet Wal-Mart, and the lack of emergency exits and safety regulations at the time. It was a news item and then passed. I don't remember how the photograph emerged. It was suddenly there, terrible and connective, the way only images can be. It showed a man and a woman within the debris of the factory, the man holding on to the woman's body, his face visible, hers not. They seemed to be embracing. A crack and golden bracelet. I looked away. Tried to erase my actions that had led to the picture, to the pause, the gaze, and could not forget. There is much to say about taking pictures of the dead in rubble, and of looking at those pictures on a screen in morning light. It happened, and it returned for months amidst non-specific activities, lifting the spoon, opening a window, getting dressed. The embrace stuck in the cornea. The image turned to memory, a site of memory that I visited unwillingly (though I mean unwillfully—not a dictionary word).

Pierre Nora speaks of lieux de memoire, sites of memory in the absence of milieux de memoire, actual environments of memory (collective, ingrained, ritualistic). According to Nora, the loss of living memory has propelled an obsessive world archive, “anything pertaining to the cult of the dead, anything relating to the patrimony, anything administering the presence of the past within the present....”

The image prompted a walk that lasted for about two months. Part pilgrimage, part chorography, part ritual, I visited sites of memory and created sites of memory. The walk took me to Europe, my place of birth, the southern maritime borders. The man and woman in the image were replaced by other dead, some of them in tombs, some of them in the open sea. It never disappeared completely but comingled with the endless downpour of sight; a moment along a stretch of straight road, taking the wrong way, at a former border station between Spain and France.

I find the notion of living memory hard to grasp, maybe because it has been lost to a large degree. Though I believe a walking body is still of such nature. There, my great grandfather traveling to Jerusalem, noli mi tangere, undress and jump into the lake, missing the train to Bilbao, the man who researched how humans developed a head upon their vertebrae, the well cairned route carries on...

Everything I am thinking about somehow wants to press into this space. In an attempt to synergize, the great longing. And to treat this also as daydreaming, sitting under that large salt cedar. To give up. Up. To the way the dove coos, and branches hit my shoulder. To turn the eye and see swarms of birds absorb into the orange orb.

The actual notebook I had with me at the time is now almost illegible, and quite frankly incomprehensible. Why did I need to write down what I saw and heard, the graffiti at land's end? Memory the depository for encounter? Encounter the site of living memory? To the moving body meaning and content are migratory. There are continual points of impact, new composites of reality. David Abram has noted that “our eyes have developed in subtle interaction with other eyes.” As part of this evolution, I wonder about humans’ first embrace. One of the unadorned remains of living memory, perhaps. Or an early response to dying: to hold the body as it leaps away from the world.

Laurie Anderson: “You are not alone in leaving the world.”

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The dead are dear to me. Not because I am romantic, though probably nostalgic, but because they are good collaborators.

The dead are also a charge, and writing whether this or that, cannot escape charge: “to command,” “accuse,” “a rush forward,” “the responsibility of watching over,” and also an early etymological root for the word “care.” When writing my first book, Uncountry, I could not decide whether it was novel, a collection of stories, poems, myths or all. But I could identify that its primary impulse came from the charge and care for what is forgotten, exiled, no longer locatable. As I was thinking about the title “Uncountry” I found that it signaled, among other things, a place, a lacuna, that hovers between my own body and world. This space is movable, does not clearly belong to one subjectivity or another, and yet the moment we encounter we participate in its existence and vitality. It is the act of caring for a particular occurrence, face, roadside that catapults us into a territory slightly outside of ourselves. The question that propelled the work was not what is the story, its form, or language? Rather what meets me when I begin to (take) charge (of) this ancestor, history, memory?

And when at the large round table at my grandmother’s house, where the 20th century is handed to me, in small anecdotes, between the stirrings of tea, silences, newspaper clippings, gossip and the touch of her hands on mine, there is also the charge, the passing on of one body’s memory to another.

Once you begin with the dead, many begin to crowd by the candlelight. And there can, occasionally, be the sense of disorientation again. The sheer number of unattended bodies begin to line the line. Teju Cole once said “narrative pursues me” and recounted how the content of his book began to spell out in his own life. It may also mean that the walls between living and dead, dead familiar and dead unfamiliar, book and body, are not as firm, as isolated, as one is bent to believe.

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Ideas kept landing, then left again. And very often I would see them shortly after materialize elsewhere, by other hands. Faster than I could firm up against. So, it also started with dyslexia, premonition, forgetfulness, anger. And hanging awkwardly from the washing line. This is as much storm as it is fog. As much woman as it is man. Stop thinking about how you will make money from your ideas.

Seeing the image from the burned down textile factory created a charge, a movement forward in this case. Charge is also indictment, is also payment, is also Jean Genet in convict garb crossing the borders between realms of enchantment, between law and outlaw. There is no exact rationale or conclusion between the walk and the image, but I remember that one followed on the heels of the other. Diogenes’s idea that “it is resolved by walking­” proved not to be true. Neither did the writing that followed.

Sometimes the charge for writing, for poetry in particular, seems high, in foreground, quite resolute. I refuse to write another essay on the role of poetry in the world, even though I love to read them. They usually carry implications and instructions beyond the line that can be helpful. But do let me say something directly here. The act of walking clarified a simplicity. Our ability to move toward an unknown horizon, one that not only changes but that we never actually reach, is ancient practice, maybe even birthright. And it is with the animate world that this occurs. I have often felt that to spell out the role of, say, poetry, is an attempt to grab hold of the horizon. I sense the effect similar to the soul, which retreats immediately, when the lights come on too bright.

My obsessions, the idiosyncratic movements do not have to be consigned exclusively to a metaphorical space; or another symbology for writing. They can also exist as “being-thus” (Giorgio Agamben) and therefore irreparable and alive. To visit a border and look at what it is made of, how it feels to cross, how it sits in the landscape, how it decays. To sit and listen to the image, embrace, walk, and their living connectivity to each other. Writing, as a continuation of that listening, in a time when we might need to engage in both environments of memory and the making of ongoing sites of memory.

Their contradictions are also my contradictions and the law of the living is thus.

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Contacts of passing. “An assemblage of disparate scenes” (Kathleen Steward). Really only between things, closer to some more distant from others. I am trying to find a synergy or a thread. My will for narrative is unending. To make all of my efforts break against the waves and be swept back onto land, whole.

I am trying very hard to remember how to do this. I am avoiding the name now and instead will write: original impulse. How to distill the tools? Find practices by the salt cedar. Inquire. Ask. Ask again. I write with the women who I sense break the waves with this desire. Ana Mendieta Take my red curtains from my siluetas to possibly use them in the labyrinth or on the beach, like a mangy aura Clarice Lispector I am Diana the huntress in heaps of bones Unica Zürn build You of the wanderer’s idea Theresa Hak Kyung Cha She calls the name Jeanne d’Arc three times. She calls the name Ahn Joong Kung five times.

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Unknown [sound of water against stone].

---

At the end of the long walk I weave along Berlin’s former east-west division for several days, and with one of my earliest friends who grew up eastern of me.

We pass the river, plaques of those shot trying to cross the river. We walk through an opening, part of the original wall, eat curry wurst by the lake and watch a thunderstorm interact with a perfect field of yellow wheat stalks. We place fern leaves between us, hold hands where once the lines ran deep through the ground.

The landscape barely reveals what once was militarized, a proper ground for random executions. Now the swans nest here.

Sites of memory, dear Pierre Nora, that we still cannot fully locate. Not even in the present tense.

Instead or alongside, a cosmogenesis: the active ongoing evolution and reconfiguration of order.

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A few months before I went on the long walk, I woke one night from a dream, or maybe it was just a noise. As soon as I woke, I lost my sense of gravity, shot up to the ceiling, and could not get back into the distant body below. As “I” was caught below the stucco, I realized this experience was an aspect of dying. That dying was awful and disorienting. No containment, specter, or periphery. A placeless drift. It lasted for only the briefest of moments, and then I returned. Back within form and skin, feeling myself against and with the world became a spectacular happiness. Feet held by surfaces, intimate movement of touch and leave. The sea travels, permeable and always meeting the edge (Rebecca Solnit).

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***

[Guest Editor’s note: Notes for national corpse month is the title of/refers back to the essays I wrote last year for Harriet, also for the occasion of National Poetry Month (2015). Re/visit parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five]