Notes for national corpse month, continued:

I am thinking about the garden. Youna Kwak imagines it (first). Then she remembers it. Then she is in it, walking alone. Before I fail to join her, my mind takes me to another garden. There is only one thing growing and maybe it is not even a garden. It is a place in Kumamoto, Japan, where there is an eight hundred year-old camphor tree. Growing is an imperfect word. I bet it’d block out the whole universe if you were standing underneath, Hiromi Ito says in Wild Grass on the Riverbank (trans. Jeffrey Angles). In fact, it was Hiromi who brought me to the tree, and her daughter who introduced me to one of the most marvelous things about it: the iridescent wing of a tamamushi beetle. It was on the ground. The beetle was gone. Disembodied, the wing continued to change color (iridesce) with the light, and how it was held. Disembodied: from the beetle, but also a (freed) facet of the tree. It reminded me of when Roland Barthes noted the corpses’ one bare foot. It also reminded me of when Simone Weil saw a corpse through the forbidden fruit. Returning to the garden in Youna Kwak’s writing, here, for example, is how the imagination for (and the time of) the corpse transpires through the imagination for the garden: our corpses will walk; when I was walking, thinking of my future corpse; walking alone for want of companions; and then I wander in your corpus as I walk in the garden. The corpse un/wrapped into writing. Where is it then? Has it been absorbed within a disintegration of belief? Has the corpse been unified? Is it the garden itself that must be resisted? I ask these questions yet dwell in their meaninglessness because I know I am in disbelief of what and whom I am asking …

—Brandon Shimoda

***

I don’t believe in corpses.

But I can’t apprise the corpse of my disbelief.

A corpse is an old body, a body in which belief has been extinguished.

In the material world, where belief has no purchase. The material world, where your belief only serves to make a thing unreal.

Unhappy are those who believe without seeing.

Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe. (John 20:25)

A corpse for touching, smelling, seeing, cannot be believed. An object to be looked at—cold, or soft—hot, or obdurate—under the palms.

Material things are not for belief but for touching, smelling, seeing.

You can disbelieve the corpse all day and through the long night. In the morning, there it lays, there it lies, under your eye.

All through the long night, when the necessity of speaking of the corpse overwhelms the desire to speak of the body.

Your own corpse is always in your future. In this way, it excites belief.

Never will you say: when I was a corpse, and did such-and-such.

As if corpse could be an object of poetry.

Never will I need to apologize to your corpse, or tell it: how I wish
I had…

Your corpse is also in my future: you, whom I address. Your future corpse suscites my belief.

As you excite my desire to address you.

Your corpse is in my future, or my corpse is in yours. In the realm of contingency, future corpses vie. In perpetual competition.

But one day I might choose to believe. One day our corpses
will walk in the garden.

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze. (Genesis 3:8)

Our walking in the garden in the coolness of evening.

Shan’t our corpses walk together there too?

≠

I don't believe in corpses.

To say your loss, you say: he, she, they. To say their loss you say: it.
Corpses.

In the sentence, “She's no longer suffering,” to what, to whom, does “she” refer? (RB)

Corpse says what the other has lost. Your own loss is graced by the emptiness of address. Saying she or you and the sound it makes, the sound going nowhere, and the going nowhere is where you yourself are going, following, walking in its footsteps, walking through the garden, in the cool, dim evening.

Your own loss has a name and inhabits that name, makes its home there. But the corpse has no name—has lost its singularity—has exchanged its name for a place in the lexicon. It trades its home for a room in the empty palace. Walking in the palace, following footsteps. Each room uninhabited, the gust of a she.

The proper name would have sufficed, for it alone and by itself says death, all deaths in one. It says death even while the bearer of it is still living. (JD)

The corpse hears your she and answers with it.

No one calls it: honey. No one caresses it and says: my love.

The corpse can’t be apprised of my disbelief.

It’s discreet by vocation, a stone in the garden.

What must the stone think of us? (SM)

When I was walking in the garden in the cool of evening, thinking of my future corpse, it was at once present and yet nowhere to be found.

Seeing one thing and believing another. The corpse does the job of poetry.

≠

I don’t believe in corpses.

Don’t take my disbelief for a prohibition! It only describes
what kind of narrative I would like to follow.

There is a life imagined, which excites my belief!

Now that it has happened: what comes next.

In another life, I am become a corpse.

Would you recognize me then?

What word says how I am become a corpse? Become, transform, disembody, disappear. By which senses do you apprehend a disappearance? When you have disappeared, how do I know
you’re you?

How could I recognize your corpse?

Why should we think that absence will be faithful?

Or—if some other has come to take your place. When you are disappeared and no one will assure me that it is you who is absent within disappearance. Faithful by absence. To be betrayed by your absence is to become a corpse.

Within your absence, could there not have been some substitution? By which you would have given way to another?

The corpse enclosure. Closing the vista of possible lives.

Even the elephants cover their dead. But the elephant does not
ask: what if?

When an elephant dies, its family members engage in intense mourning and burial rituals, conducting weeklong vigils over the body, carefully covering it with earth and brush, revisiting the bones for years afterward, caressing the bones with their trunks… (CS)

Your future corpse. Let me come in. Let me come, as close as possible.

≠

We have so little time in which to imagine together.

You and I together, in the imagined life. Where we are not yet corpses and yet not ourselves.

You will go away. You will take your leave. You will leave me here amid the ashes. Lonely life.

Lonely without, and not within. Lonely life, my only life. I have no other lives to keep it company.

Lonely within desire’s first paroxysm.

It is a place of such feeling! We cannot remain there. If only we could. We must become corpses.

By extinguishing my desire for the other, for others, I extinguish the desire to live. (RB)

Lately when my body disobeyed me I threatened it: I’ll make you a corpse. Bold move, desire makes, to reach outside into the imagined life.

How lonely the life that yields one corpse.

Lonely life, only life.

Walking alone in the garden for want of companions.

≠

A corpse belongs to the life imagined.

I imagine a life so my life will be less lonely.

Lonely life for being the only life.

Lonely life, one life, extinguished then gone.

If you are a mother and your child has one life, what gift can you give her?

If you are a mother, must you raise a future corpse?

If you are in the closeness of my room, if you are encircled by my arms, if you are pressed against me, if you are still yet trembling,
is your future corpse becoming?

There’s nothing makes us feel so much alive as to see others die. That’s the sensation of life—the sense that we remain. (HJ)

Your corpse re-written. No yellow corpse, white corpse, Jewish corpse, black corpse, male corpse, female corpse.

I am trying to keep you close, meaning within imagination.

A rush of joy and a swell of sorrow. An accompaniment for the corpse into the imagined life. Its next life which is no life.

I had tried to live in such a way that desire would not cause me suffering.

Not to suffer is the way of the corpse.

Consider the corpses and everything simplifies.

Not the prohibition itself but how it writes what comes after.

We write corpses and our writing is our posture. Not necessary, only possible.

When you were in danger.

Descending into the basement: of vulgarity. (BS)

And in the aisle of the store at night you felt a cold fear.

And when you walked alone and your aloneness was no benediction.

The intervention of your future corpse hollowing out your expectations.

Before you, corpse, will I want for nothing.

My future corpse, do you think of me too? And feel similar longing?

Let me into the imagined life.

≠

The life of the mind is another life. Without which we could not be human. We delve beneath to where the corpse remains, bearable/unbearable, keeping score.

You asked about corpses, but I tell you I’ve none.

Once for each thing, only once. Once and no more. And we, too, only once. Never again. (RMR)

Who are we, who have our bodies, to speak of corpses, who have no longer? Let the corpses speak for themselves.

I don’t believe in corpses.

The corpse doesn’t answer. Our observation shudders the surface.

You ask a question that I can’t answer. Sheltered from the corpses’ thoughts as I am.

I don’t believe in corpses but I’d enter your imagined life. Erect a monument there. Where I cannot be forgotten.

≠

The elephant returns to the corpse, to cover its bones with brush. It owns the corpse but it has no corpus.

≠

But if I extinguish my desire. My only life.

≠

You and I, in imagined life. Neither alive nor corpses. What if the life were not so lonely? A parallel life, in contradistinction to heaven.

≠

All the while not knowing that I was not a future corpse, but the corpse’s past life, about whom the corpse would have nothing to say, so that I had to say it, now, and keep saying, and imagine as I was saying it, something, that someone was listening, there was nothing more to doing it, but doing it, that this is what it would take.

The body in the corpse, of course. How small what separates corpse from body. How minuscule what keeps the corpse at bay.

I don’t pretend to have had a bad life. A posture of desire, not of necessity.

The living speak of corpses as the healthy speak of body. But let only the sick speak of the body. Let the corpses speak for themselves.

You cannot speak of all the corpses. You cannot write about all the corpses. You cannot think about all the corpses. Therefore you cannot speak about any of the corpses. You cannot write about any of the corpses. You cannot think about any of the corpses. You cannot speak for any of the corpses.

Ten thousand or what is innumerable … (LS)

Let the corpses speak for themselves. But another might say: there is no body without sickness. Sickness is in every body. In every body, a corpse begins.

≠

Tell where you’ve been, what you brought there, how long you stayed, what sounds you heard but wished you hadn’t, what moved in fleet silence across the landscape, what surprised you when it stayed immobile. What lay there, and what lies.

How can you talk about the corpse—as if it were nothing—and
not address it?

The corpse wriggles its way inside every body. Pushes itself in as much as it is able. Always too much, not all of it fits. The excess squeezed out. A tiny remainder. Lodged in the teeth. A slender letter. Addressed to? Single letter, addressed to you. Flaunting absence. One might think without writing, we wouldn’t know about corpses. One might think without writing, corpses couldn’t exist.

The corpse with no body, has a voice.

Mute endeavor, encompassing stillness and know-how, the body’s repertoire of fine tricks. My body knows many, fine tricks. Nuances lost on a corpse.

I sit in so many places and look at so many people and none of them can compare.

Why speak of corpses, when you can sit in so many places, and look at the people all around you and none of them can compare?

The closer you get the more dullness presides. If you could get infinitely close there would be no more detail, only an undifferentiated field of light, without gradation or hue. Extreme distance and extreme closeness are alike in this way. The abstraction of whiteness. Or dark. The corpse knows why. It was saying all along. This language is its song. The music with which the corpses sing. Otherwise they would grow unbearably silent, a dull, choked death.

Say it a different way, says the corpse—but we can’t. We don’t know how else to speak. We don’t know how else to make it matter.

And yet I have seen my father one night in the dark, weeping.

Loss has made a tenuous “we” of us all. (JB)

Use different words, says the corpse, speak to me as if you meant to be heard. But we’re timid, and we don’t know if our words have merit.

≠

I don’t believe in corpses. I believe in phantoms, for I have seen them, patiently waiting, in the corner of a room, waiting out my fear, waiting
for my address.

Violence is needed for the corpse’s becoming. But a greater violence is to speak of the corpse, without addressing it, without knowing
who to address.

Left unaddressed, a corpse is no body, attaches to no body, to
nobody, no one.

The corpse speaks and speaks, expecting a response. We don’t answer it. We behave as if it were dead.

≠

I said the words: you didn’t want to hear me.

But the corpses were brave and did not cover their ears.

When they called you crybaby or poor or fatty or crazy and made you into an alien, you drank their acid and concealed it. (AS)

The corpses wonder why we don’t speak more
together.

How we can consent to speak so little.

The corpse turns its eye blind, seeing us still.

≠

The error was mine. There is no idiolect. My mouth forms shapes and you fit yourself to them. The mouth of the corpse gapes, emptied of address. Opens the maw that we must enter.

When the corpse opens its mouth and we have no choice but to enter.

The corpse said a fugue in uncertain tongues.

You get old, then you dive.

You asked me for a word but it was not the one you wanted. When we were speaking and cut each other short. When we were afraid of what the other might say.

Regarding the corpse, we have nothing to fear.

With us, it’s a different matter.

≠

The corpse keeps its mouth closed but we long to speak. The longing is impossible to resist. But once we have spoken we’re shrouded with words. Perhaps our speaking
cannot reach one another. Perhaps we must speak through the corpses.

In this way the corpse is our dummy. Speaking of the corpse, our message is phatic.

Are you there, alive, I am addressing you.

Are you alive in the world, I’m in the world, addressing you.

Are you there, in the world, I am here, address me.

Speak to me, put your mouth on my mouth, let me feel you breathing, let me know you are alive, in the world, and addressing me. So I might know I am not become a corpse.

≠

I wander in your corpus as I walk in the garden, where you are present although my eyes can’t discover you.

I’m not ready to speak with your corpse. I need time to prepare.

For when I spoke in haste your future corpse was struck silent. It raised a finger to its lips to ward off disbelief.

Whoever sees a whole being and must reject it, is no longer in the dominion of hatred but in the human limitation of the capacity to say You. (MB)

I withhold my belief but not my address. I imagine you, as a form of address. I invite you into the imagined life.

Where I desire not to wound you. To never be without you. Let us speak of anything, and anything else. Speak with me,

while our corpses becoming.

***

[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, and Five. See also: Yanara Friedland’s "Unknown" and Caitie Moore’s "Corpse and Slur."]

Death Inside Poetry

This Having Been Earthly Seems Lasting