Break Every Rule

by Carole Maso

  From The White Island notebook, the story of August Linder, attempting to sail around the world in a hot air balloon—an opera-in-progress:

  “17 September: Sited land for the first time yet landing is out of the question—the whole island seems a block of ice.”

  Reel 7—Richter and his page turner. The score illuminated by a single lamp—all else is darkness.

  “Dear Father, the balloon is now inflated. I feel as if…” Richter looks to the sky.

  I scribble stanzas on the back of an airmail envelope. Waving to him.

  His mother: “This is the first grief you have brought me, August.”

  What is the weight of a human life high above the earth in a hot air balloon?

  Richter—his footprints in snow. His favorite way to compose.

  “Uncannily he can change the character of the music from one moment to another. There is absolutely no gap—as if he had improvised on the spot.”

  B A C H—a light in the dark.

  His lifelong idol Alfred Schnittke. Another stroke, Richter says glumly.

  One middle of the night—Is Frank Zappa really dead? Richter he is as far as I know, still dead. In a manner of speaking of course. Yes, yes, he mutters and hangs up.

  If there is one chance in a million (to be sung) then it must be Alfred Schnittke’s! If there is one chance…

  How he goes from one thing to the next without transition.

  In Garni two million fruit trees planted for the two million Armenian martyrs. A sacred forest. Richter, makes a detour on the way to

  Reel 17: The limits of snow, language, music, human sorrow. The newly fallen

  motion and the waning century and Richter waving from the

  perpetual eternal snow

  There is too much sorrow. Richter in motion.

  Richter in sound.

  Awaiting to this day its American premiere.

  Tango for Endurance Dancers—composed in the early 80s. An attempt on my part convince the Ramapo High School

  Reunion Committee into a kind of Richter marathon.

  Received this afternoon a one-sentence response: “You have gor to be kidding.”

  Collected Songs Where Every Verse is Filled with Grief.

  I see him still climbing up, up into that mountain with his metal box of 26 reels, into the music.

  Triads, he said calmly when asked over cocktails what—triads, at the top of their register.

  Meditations at 33,000 feet. Richter old and grizzled far beyond his years, slumped in his black coat looks out the window and marvels.

  The Age of Discovery. By five months many babies have both the head-up and bottom-up position perfected but cannot put the two together so as to be on hands and knees. They therefore alternate the two, and look as if they were see-sawing—first one end up and the other down and then the other up. By this stage a true crawl with the tummy clear of the floor is very unusual though quite a lot of babies will make some progress across the floor as they see-saw.

  Reels 10–26: Richter in motion. That scarf blowing around his head.

  Come on baby, do the locomotion, he sang once to me from

  Basel. Was it Basel? And then began to weep.

  He was my best friend, but I barely knew him.

  Richter on tiptoe: I ask you, what is the limit of snow?

  The weight of 26 reels of film is surprisingly light. They disappeared with Richter. I can hardly bear to think about it.

  Yes, the evidence. The proof that you are, or are not.

  I will marry a woman named Irina, he said on one of those 26 reels.

  I will have children and write them music and never, never leave the house again.

  In my head this well-behaved fictive Richter. Reclusive, OK, but safe. Safe, at any rate.

  I once heard someone found a frame of reel 17 preserved in snow in which it appears my friend, he is waving, the arm lifted, a sustained ascending scale, an instant of pure Richter. A perfect instant of Richter, lost, then found, then lost again.

  A little bit of Richter is sent back. Lifting that little bit of Richter, I wonder, what is the weight of a human life?

  Sprinkled around the potted plant. The hum of him. The little bit of Richter left.

  Who Richter was.

  Photography is born: the permanent recording of reality. So they say. So they say.

  What can be known.

  What can be loved (a part of speech, a diminished seventh, the way the ocean…the eye flickering as the day opens and the world begins again) but never known.

  A star glide, the elision of lives, an instant in time, there: preserved by the yearbook photographer: Richter and I singing on a curb, least likely to succeed, most despised. Let’s make the water turn black. Heard over the freeze frame.

  The moment. Eluding the many possible ways to memorialize it.

  I might call this little ditty “Richter, the Enigma.” Because calling is what we seem to like to do. There is silliness to us.

  He took with him the 26 reels. The evidence, we might say.

  Richter in reel 3 stumbling toward the lens in silence. Not quite silence. From the back of the room, the projector’s whir.

  Reel 3:

  Richter, swimming. Doing a bit of underwater photography. Singing at below sea-level.

  Reel 4:

  Ice fishing.

  Reel 24:

  Richter and Irina and baby Alfred…

  Oh why tonight all these fictive Richters mixing up the so-called real one? What is the point? What is the use?

  This figment of Richter. The moon, a sliver.

  (ev’ i d ns) n. I. ground for belief; that which lends to prove or disprove something; proof. 2. something that makes evident; an indication or sign. 3. Law. data presented in a court or jury of the facts which may include…

  4. in evidence, plainly visible, conspicuous: the first signs of spring are in evidence.

  I barely knew him. He aims his little Polaroid at the still obscured

  intent on photographing Mount Ararat, and other impossible projects. A photographic essay provisionally titled: Faith.

  From the blur after 99 days, emerges the subject.

  He goes back to work.

  He was my friend, Richter, but now he is gone. His footprints in the snow. The first signs of spring are in evidence. All that’s left is the sound.

  for G.R. 1955–1999,

  and for R. V.

  Except Joy

  ON Aureole

  Aureole CELEBRATES THE RESPLENDENCE of language and desire. It is a work of reverie and ruin. Pleasure. Oblivion. Joy. A place where we are for a little while endlessly possible, capable of anything, it seems: fluid, changing, ephemeral, renewable, intensely alive, close to death, clairvoyant, fearless, luminous, passionate, strange even to ourselves.

  It was written in a kind of waking dream, an erotic hallucination in which I was only semiconscious and yet utterly lucid. I abandoned myself to the pressure, the touch of language, its sexual slur, the trance of it. The motions of the alphabet. I have tried to be attentive to its needs—its positions and shifts, its murmurings. The word’s attraction for the word.

  I write this now in Paris, city of light, in sweet breeze, in first heat, golden square devour me—after a winter so vast and white. Aureole was composed in a blizzard of emotion, in a blur of want, in an audacity of trust. I was knowing and un knowing, conscious and unconscious, freezing and fevered. Passion pressing these pieces into shapes like the press of animal tracks in the snow. The heat of the living body. The hope was for a language as ancient as memory, as direct as a moan, as gorgeous as song, as imperfect as utterance. It is in love with beauty and abandon and excess, unapologetically. The desire all winter was for transformation, transcendence. Now when I lift my dreaming head all of a sudden spring has come, golden square, and it is Paris; I marvel as the Seine turns into the Ganges, or the Hudson River, glistening, flowing through us on a white bed, on our pleasure river bed. The river bein
g pulled through me like a miraculous, golden thread.

  Aureole was shaped by desire’s magical and subversive qualities. It imposed its swellings, its ruptures, its erasures, its motions. Sometimes wild, sometimes elusive, playful, wayward—it was driven by pleasure and forged in passion. I have tried to feel the sexual intoxication of the line or the page or the narrative—language overcome or desperate or greedy. The story staggered. The phrase gasping or begging or sighing.

  With some dismay I realize that I am content in these pages to be, as Yeats said, “for the song’s sake, a fool.” I have overexposed myself in this work. I have gone too far and also not far enough, I have wandered off hoping to get close to that translucent, ephemeral thing. That impossible thing. Escaping. And the white page whispered back, continues to whisper back, look, you’re no match for it.

  Aureole resists categorization. My desire is far messier, more voracious, stranger than any existing or prescribed shape could accommodate. In fact I felt exiled, alien among those options. I could not recognize myself there. Desire pressing itself into odd shapes insistently, urgently, in a way I did not dare second-guess. The impulse in these pieces is to free myself from constraint, from preconception. The flight is from boundaries—linguistic, sexual, intellectual. The longing is for freedom.

  Desire has made it possible for me to write into my greatest vulnerabilities, uncertainties. It has made it possible to not worry so much about the consequences, to let go a little. Desire has allowed me to write into its danger, its bliss, its silence, its abyss. To not care about failing. Whether these pieces were any “good” or not seemed hardly to enter it. I chose not to rely on facility. If I felt I was doing something I already knew how to do well, the rule was to start again in an attempt to break habitual patterns of mind and expression. I’ve tried to write into the heart of longing, regret, unsure once I was there how I would get back or if I’d get back. I have practiced courage a long time. I think of The Art Lover. Feigned it even when I did not have it, waiting for it to come. I’ve tried to write into reluctance—to actually feel the pull forward and back simultaneously, an erotic motion in itself. In this time of witness, of storytelling, I’ve tried to allow myself to walk into forgetfulness, dissolution. To give up a little. To let the earth go, and the ones I love most. To let a new logic take over. To live at the heart of the unknown, without explanation. Desire has allowed me to stray, to wander away from the familiar, to move far off into the landscape of passion or addiction—oblivion—snow or hope—the trance of our days here…

  Language for me has always been a profoundly sensual experience. Language is emotion, language is feeling, language is body. It is not merely the sign for something, but rather also a thing in itself. It has weight and heat; it emits light. Its meaning is inseparable from its sound, its rhythms, the way it is arranged on the page. It is primitive, charmed, charged, affective. Only secondarily is it conceptual and derivative. From a different angle, and through a different process, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty knew this thing, and I would recommend anyone who cares about such matters to read his amazing Phenomenolgy of Perception. I myself have arrived at such convictions through years of devotion to its untapped capacities for expressiveness, its recalcitrance, its elusiveness. I believe like Maurice Blanchot that “language is possible because it strives for the impossible.” And “the poet is nothing but the existence of this impossibility, just as the poem is nothing but the retention, the transmission of its own impossibility.” There is a way of conveying meaning beneath the level of the meaning of the words themselves, and this for me is where the true capacities and powers and charms and seductions of language reside. Language works on one in some of the same ways music does. It shapes silence. Through an arrangement of tones and rhythms, against a shimmering backdrop of silence, music can produce subliminal, physiological, psychological, emotional, and sometimes mystical responses. The effect of key, the press of syllable, the modulation of tone, the vowel’s drawl, the rhythm of hip and word and world, the flick of the tongue, or the heat of the hand can create sublime and profound states. I am hoping in a series of books like this one to explore the erotic through the thoroughly incarnate medium of language. I am hoping to get closer to my own desire. I am imagining free. Free some day.

  In this preliminary work desire has informed and shaped diction and syntax. It has shown me how to determine the line, the paragraph. It has intimately influenced not only the trajectory of the narrative but its very definition. Desire insisted at times on a kind of formlessness, indeterminacy, excess. A series of intensities without objective. Plans are abandoned, resolutions are broken, preconceptions fall away. Desire does not follow but rather distorts and warps the usual unities and coherencies, and some of the stabilized notions of self and other. I have let it determine my notion of “character” and the treatment of time. It is responsible for the various swellings and verges and delays and elongations and collapses—it has brought a certain wildness, vibrancy, immediacy I have found somewhat lacking in my work. Aureole begins, but only begins, to explore writing as another kind of lovemaking, and love-making as another kind of writing.

  Line by line I have tried to get closer to an erotic language, a language that might function more bodily, more physically, more passionately. Enjambment, flux, fragmentation, the elision of the object, the detached clause, the use of arpeggios, a changing dynamics, dangling participles, various aphasias—the unfinished sentence, or the melting of one sentence into another, the melting of corporeal boundaries, the dissolving of a subjective cohesion—these are some of the strategies I have attempted here. For the most part they were done intuitively as I tried to surrender and enter a sexual reverie on the level of language. Blurrings, changes in focus, and contradictions abounded. The oxymoronic, the parabolic appeared, serving as—well, who knew?—perhaps as fortification against the dissolution, or a warning, of what might happen if one strayed too far from story. I have tried to explore a little the zones of speechlessness one sometimes enters during sex, the field of silence, the tug of it, the language voids and vacuums, the weird filling in with words. This called up Stein for me and her particular brand of playfulness—her baby talk, her repetitions, her abstractions, her songs. Her sense, her senselessness. The small codes, hopes, love letters she embedded in her texts.

  In the strangeness of that emptying, then empty space, odd things came to the fore or swirled around that weird vortex I tried to fill up with nonsense, odd fragments of memory, with games from childhood (You are as light as a feather/As stiff as a board), hurtful games (she loves you not), with grand pronouncements, lies, small intimacies, with playfulness (violet-breasted, Poodle Basket), and other linguistic hijinks (She lifts her hips to her thirst and vice versa).

  I have wanted a little of the way lovers sound, their sputterings, their hopeless stutterings, their confessions, what is most precious to them, the specific ways they are intimate—their ability to answer questions that have not been asked (“a lot of practice”). The direct plea asserting itself, the interruptions, the intervention of thought with sensation. This sentence from “Exquisite Hour” starts as a meditation and ends as a kind of urgent instruction: “The effect of key don’t change it.” I have played with changes in tense within a paragraph and sometimes within a sentence in order to capture that warped sense of time. I have worked with imprecision and with abstraction in order to mimic the varying tempos of perception, consciousness, lucidity as we sometimes near the sacred. A slow coming to marks the beginning of “Anju flying.” Sleep and sex-drugged, dream-ridden, the images are kept deliberately fuzzy or vague as they come and go into focus.

  There are point-of-view changes within paragraphs and sometimes sentences. Quick shifts in subject occur, as invariably one lover will call up a past love or experience, or fantasy will intermingle with reality, disrupting the more usual ways of thinking. The enlargement of a small detail which results in the loss of the whole, the blurring of the greater
picture, the strange erasures of self, of place, and that other thing—is that you snow ghost?—which remains. Changes in perspective. How small and how far off the world seems all of a sudden. The trees like smoke… The attendant sadnesses, insights, dizziness, revelations. I’ve become more and more interested in trying to near the most ambiguous and ephemeral and fleeting states—“Anju giggling hope elusive stay awhile.”

  I have experimented with using language at a slight remove from its literal meaning—setting words free to act on each other in different ways. I have delighted in the pleasuring of the image by repetition or recurrence: “good girl’s knot.” The reiteration of the odd phrase (“some jumper cables”) that asserts itself and floats, existing mysteriously and autonomously in a text or above a bed. “In the liminal space.” The image culled from hallucination: “a line of girls in communion clothes.” The trust in the outlandish or off image. The creation of a place for “ovoid, opalescent, lunate,” in these pages. Such words stay with me much in the same way sensation remains in my body long after the lover has departed. The prolonged pleasure of language. “Clavicle” or “striped shirt” will set me to shudder long after because of the mark it’s made on the mind. “Bleary chalice.” I may relive this language experience later—“the way the lip clings…”

  I’ve tried to work closely with sound: the texture and friction of dissonance, the lull, the consolations of rhyme—or the sinister and constraining qualities of rhyme in a piece like “Dreaming Steven.” The derangement of syntax—to get closer to that tumult and disarray and disorientation. One of the greatest pleasures so far has been exploring the sexual energy of the sentence: “As bleary, delirious, the sound of bells, they make their way to the end of the long beach and sentence, far.” I have begun to feel the erotic surge of the phrase, and have started to think more and more about how those insistences and urgencies might dictate the shape of a line. Poets, of course, are quite adept at such things, but it has taken me, the prose writer, a long time to get here. I love the ability to create new logics, a logic of passion, a logic of the body dramatized by where the line breaks, or the paragraph, a logic of passion created in the caesuras, in the gaps, where unexpected tensions or emphases can produce effects which are, to me at any rate, quite startling. A physical gathering of linguistic force might send the reader upward where finally all the pressure is brought to bear on an unlikely and startling word or phrase. Sounds pretty sexy, don’t you think? Faltering, one stumbles perhaps, regains a kind of equilibrium and in the process enters a different realm. A realm where physical actions replace, or erase, thought (“downward stroke”). In an attempt to capture some of these swells I’ve tried to begin using punctuation to syncopate, much like a jazz musician, confident in her craft, conversant, in the hopes of bringing new pressures to bear, and also new places of release—so that a piece might tremble or shimmer or languish, surprise. I have wanted to reclaim punctuation from the prose writers a little. Liberate it, and myself. Have it make sense again. When the last double periods are placed on the lightkeeper’s last matins I want to try to feel that finality, that force. To understand that there may be an instance where the parenthesis can never close. I want one day to get that right—to feel that vulnerable on the page, that bed of language, that world. Use of the upper and lower case too are meant to try to capture erotic surges, the press of the sexual, or the flow of emotion. The sentence staggered, breathless, lapsed or desperate. The sentence insistent or lingering. The sentence reinvented—dear Gertrude. The sentence as incantation.