in front of you a mass suspended between life and death

"I saw the red Pacific Electric
city trains dismantled & replaced (L.A.) by
automative freeways, saw
the orange bulldozer, "Dad,
are we real?" "we slide our
barques … past burning parts, ports of
barbecues, seized women, farewell to the flesh
and fleas in a new vehicle 'driving … vast
distances to …'              roadside attractions, snake
farms, jelly stands with curios outside Palm City"

(Eleni Sikelianos, The California Poem, 2004)




You have in front of you a mass suspended between life and death and entirely dependent on you. I've often had this feeling of a confrontation between something that was already there and something that was about to take its place.

(Marguerite Duras, talking about writing in Marguerite Duras: Practicalities: Marguerite Duras speaks to Jérôme Beaujour, 1990, tr. Barbara Bray)

prams are pushed along

Wingfield’s innate and unconscious faith in authority and ennoblement is strangest in Beat Drum, Beat Heart, 1946, a book-length poem that spends its first half discussing the suffering of British men during and after World War I without ever suggesting that anyone was responsible for the war or that the soldiers might be annoyed at them. Instead a first-person man-voice wishes that some inhuman power would “Find me a cause | Or a catastrophe” to rouse him out of his postwar ennui, even if it kills him. Alex Davis in The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, 2003 says that Drum “counterpoints male brutality with an exploration of the ferocity that subtends female desire” but the distance between a man on a battlefield getting a bullet in the head and a woman trying to pin down her soulmate is so wide that it’s hard to take the counterpoint as seriously as the poet wants; the man-violence and the woman-violence are operating in different worlds, though Wingfield tries to bring them together by giving the woman-half of the poem language like this:

Each fibre through my frame is used, with enough
Force and guile to split apart an empire,
Or exhaust the world with strategies.

There is no corresponding reaching-out in the language of the man-part, which mirrors, apparently unintentionally, the motion that Wingfield depicts in men and women: the women grasping for the men and the men grasping for something intangible. The language around women in the man-half of Drum is casually scornful: “And tramps unwrap things from a newspaper | And women mince, and prams are pushed along”, “But now, as salesmen moving through half-lights | We might be women traipsing | The rainy suburbs, on uneven heels, | In ugliness, unkindness and in waste”. But Wingfield believes that the right man will bring a woman to a mystic point of cohesion and this will perform the same service for her as “a cause or a catastrophe” would for him.

Opening Practicalities: Marguerite Duras speaks to Jérôme Beaujour, 1987, tr. Barbara Bray, just now I found myself reading similar ideas coming out of a different writer. It would be interesting to run Wingfield’s poem through the beliefs that Duras outlines in this chapter called Men.

About writing, Duras says:

The image of a black box in the middle of the world isn't far out.

a Look of extreme Surprize

Again:

The Girl being perfectly recover'd from her Intoxication by the Fright she had been in, gaz'd upon Arabella with a Look of extreme Surprize: Yet being mov'd to respect by the Dignity of her Appearance, and strange as her Words seem'd to be by the obliging Purport of them, and the affecting Earnestness with which they were deliver'd, she rose from her Seat and thank'd her, with an Accept full of Regard and Submission.

What is the word “submission” doing in that sentence? It seems to go along by rote with “regard.” The situation that Lennox has written for the Girl is a dangerous one but as the story continues you see that -- she vanishes -- the author is uninterested in her safety. Still it is worth taking a moment to say that she submits. In the books of Marguerite Duras (I’ve been reading Emily L., 1987, The Vice-Consul, 1966, and The Ravishing of Lol Stein, 1964) submission is the sign of a great force that seems essentially disembodied, even though bodies are described carrying it. The anonymous woman in Emily L. appears to be frightened of, or depressed or repelled by, something that the author represents as writing poetry. She also might be in love. At least two forces seem to be either united or in combat against one another with this anonyme as a flashpoint. Herself, she's typically weary and still. But that doesn’t stop Duras using her as a territory where multifarious dynamics can feel themselves into being. Ann Lennox’s Arabella, who pictures herself as a heroic Romantic force, encounters the Girl who is described as a naval officer’s mistress,* and then there is this word, “submission”, that I persist in seeing as important, even though I don’t believe Lennox thought very much about writing it. I think she wanted it to be a continuation of the worry we are supposed to have, that Arabella will embarrass herself by taking the Girl home. (The imaginary reader is laughing and cringing.) If the Girl had been confused or annoyed then Arabella would have been blocked, but since she is submissive there is nothing to get in the way. I suspect I am supposed to think of her submission as a funny threat, not as part of the implied psychology of the Girl, but as one element in the unbroken flow of the fears of Mr. Glanville.



* “An Officer of Rank in the Sea Service had brought his Mistress disguis'd in a Suit of Man's or rather Boy's Cloaths, and a Hat and Feather, into the Gardens.”

they’re not such strangers

Why does Marguerite Duras in Blue Eyes, Black Hair, 1987 (tr. Barbara Bray), tell you so often that a character weeps: "He weeps" on page 46, "He weeps," on page 35, "He's weeping," on page 14, "She weeps," on page 111, "She's weeping," on page 92, "They weep as they would make love," on page 86, "They begin to weep," on page 85, "She weeps, she smiles at him," on page 69, "But no, she goes on weeping beside him," on page 10, "He asks if he was weeping," on page 71, "Her look is that of someone distraught and unconsciously weeping. So is his," on page 30 ("It strikes him they are alike"), so on, so on, not for the sake of realism or empathy but for pattern, perhaps, variations, a musical effect, the “rhythmical fullness” that Tadié assumed in Proust -- rhythmical tension in Duras, Duras in a relationship with the later twentieth-century minimalist composers, one string plucked, pause, same string plucked in a slightly different setting on every third page or so of this hundred-and-seventeen-page book. The slightness of the difference is significant, in Blue Eyes, against the straitness of the actions and the surroundings, the theatre of rigidity in which the characters would not have to be so stiff if the alertness of their sensitivity was not paralysing them inside a ritual (and the sadist author even makes them costume themselves first, outlining the couple's eyes with "traces of blue kohl" and making the man arrange his room) until the compressed emotions are pressing on the back of the story with a diseased pressure, radiating outward from the morbidly hopeful persistence with which the two people continue to despair against the constricting blanket, a persistence that the author, in the form of the story, cruelly forces into them, like someone stuffing a goose for pâté.

I know that books are written and read by the brain, not the stomach, because that drama-word, "weep," has been picked for its relationship with emotional brain-reactions and not the equivalent kinds of upheaval that would pertain to the tum, to wit, burping, farting, both releasing actions, just like weeping, though the sensitivity they require is intestinal rather than mental, honestly, they're exactly the same if you take away the bias. Why should it be sad when you cry and funny when you fart? Because the brain thinks the stomach's sensitivity is silly.

But that bigot brain wants me to sympathise with it, so I won't, I'll go to war with brains.

He has shut his eyes in order to die. She looks at him. She farts. p. 82

For a long while she is silent, farting. p. 68

Every time she stops speaking, she farts. p. 109

When they woke once more they both were farting, eyes turned to the wall, in shame p.110.

He stands there, watching. Farting. p. 111

And then she kisses him and he farts. When you look at him intently, he farts. And she farts to see him. p. 38.

She says they’re not such strangers, now he’s spoken of the farting. She lies down. p. 86

wind that flew above the sea

While the tow-boat, in which Christophe now embarked floated, impelled by a light east wind, down the river Loire the famous cardinal de Lorraine, and his brother the second Duc de Guise, one of the greatest warriors of those days, were contemplating, like eagles perched on a rocky summit, their present situation, and looking prudently about them before striking the great blow by which they intended to kill the Reform in France at Amboise – an attempt recorded twelve years later in Paris, August 24, 1572, on the feast of Saint-Bartholemew.

Catherine de' Medici: the Calvinist Martyr, 1828, by Honoré de Balzac, tr. Katharine Prescott Wormeley



Yes, that was what he was looking at, the wind. The wind that had escaped to the sea, an entire shore of wind that flew above the sea.

Yann Andréa Steiner, 1992, by Marguerite Duras, tr. Barbara Bray