Nothing has ever looked
so beautiful.
Nothing has ever sounded
so beautiful.
Because of the dead
Hoichi cannot see.
Playing to the dead
Hoichi cannot hear.
Claire Lenoir
What happens in the short story “Claire Lenoir”
is strange.
Later adapted by its author, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam,
into the novel Tribulat Bonhomet, the tale
features the eponymous positivist who
elects to visit his old friend Césaire Lenoir
and his wife Claire.
During the voyage (for in decadent fiction
the plot often advances at the pace of transport
characteristic of the era of decadent fiction)
the positivist befriends a young lieutenant
who discloses (with the alacrity of revelation
characteristic of decadent fiction) that he,
the lieutenant, has recently pursued a romance
with a married woman whose description
matches that of the wife of the positivist’s friend,
Claire Lenoir.
After this interlude the lieutenant ventures
to his next post, somewhere in the South Seas,
while the positivist proceeds to the estate
of the Lenoirs.
Before he arrives at their home he pauses
to rest in a café and reads in a discarded paper
an article that tells of how no less an authority
than the L’Académie des Sciences du Paris
has verified that in the eyes of animals
butchered for our nourishment remains the image
of the butcher’s stroke, that the last thing
a mind sees before its extinction is the image
of whatever effected that extinction. Via camera.
What then follows at the Lenoir estate
is also strange:
a lengthy conversation between positivist,
friend, and friend’s wife about death, the real,
the soul, the beyond. Without warning
Césaire Lenoir falls ill, but before he dies
he learns of his wife’s infidelity and swears
vengeance upon her lover, even if he must
visit from the afterlife.
One year later, Claire Lenoir herself
is on the verge of death, hounded there
by guilt and recurrent dreams of Césaire,
dressed in blood on the shores of an unknown
island. The positivist is shocked,
for only days before did he learn of the fate
of his acquaintance the lieutenant, beheaded
by cannibals in Polynesia, for the opposite of the positivist
is perforce “the savage” and “the unknown.”
At this, Claire expires, and discerning in her eyes
an indistinct image the positivist employs
his ophthalmoscope and clarifies the vision,
which he is horrified to discover is of a man
who resembles Césaire holding the severed head
of a man who resembles the deceased lieutenant.
To understand the crisis this induces
in the positivist is to appreciate how his acceptance
of the natural fact of a photographic film
of the cause of death peeled from the lenses
of the dead means he must therefore accept
that the immediate cause of Claire’s death
is simply the sight of what she could not have seen,
an event that itself seems to have been caused
solely by the will of the dying Césaire.
The strangeness of positivism is strange:
it allows hatred and incomprehension
even as it implores us to believe what we see and only
what we can deduce therefrom but suggests
that what occurs in the mind is imposed there
by experience. Is it the horror of the decadent fiction
that we can deduce a mind from the operation
of a camera but cannot bear the thought of a mind
that is not the camera that feeds it. Knowledge
would destroy the positivist. Knowledge
destroys anyone whose knowledge is that they knew it
when they saw it, that they knew to know is to see.
Mosaic Style
For the mosaic portrait, your directions are these:
first near, then far.
If near is azure glass or white plaster,
you are doing well
and if far is the face of one of the great and good,
you are doing well.
If near is the face of those who go unpainted,
a sheaf of cracks
in the face of the glaze, a blue maiden broken
in a blue mood,
and far is nothing but blue, its affect and aura,
a dim bloom
swollen so that the white veins no longer course
across the face
of the great and good, if the face is now diffused
to blue paint
even though you know that paint is a portrait,
all edges,
not a liquid into which you could step
but a wall
that would resist your entrance and even
cut you
for your efforts. Near, no one can see what you see
as you see it,
and far, no one can know why you do not see
what they see.
Step back. Farther, farther, until even blue blurs out,
no paint
to paint faces with, no glass to find faces in,
farther, by far.
Castrovalva
the hill and stones of the mountain
close grained and dust colored by moonlight
that whitens the silver planes of the clouds
that float and recur over Castrovalva
its gardens and squares gray going to green with the sun
that rises and sets against the four-cornered walls
goldenrod tides rising and falling
against the walls and towers like the rain
from the lake
within & without
above & below
a window without glass
a window that mirrors
a city still if and as everyone in it knows every other
we know every resident of the city-village of castle-valve
every washerwoman also a tinsmith
every tool of at least two purposes
to be inside the walls of Castrovalva is to be atrial & sororal
on either side of the courtyard’s doors is the courtyard
Castrovalva curves Castrovalva cures
Castrovalva has no queen Castrovalva has no king
every book in the library of Castrovalva binds the same words
every tapestry hung on the walls of Castrovalva depicts you
in a stone chamber watching the tapestry’s tale
single thread behind & through above the warp & below
you cannot exit Castrovalva by means of entrances
beneath the city of Castrovalva lies the castle-valve
tunnels and sinks
one’s city is one’s home
the home of one’s home is also one’s home
the valve of the castle opens upon the castle
and so fall the twins of Castrovalva
to be outside the walls of Castrovalva is to fall forever
down the side of the mountain
irregular roads
steps sidereal
for the lake as you approach becomes the sky above
and you descend again into the city from which you fell
Castrovalva turns Castrovalva returns
the city t
he puzzled gear of its own rotation
as are the sky and the lake
between which hangs the castle-valve
so on its walls and in its chambers hang
the polished mirror-metals of Castrovalva
you cannot see without
without seeing within
above as below
doubled
sororal
you see yourself seeing
one sister sees in her sister a seeing
and says as they fall welcome
if this city is not my city
if my sister is not my sister
if her city is not my city
where then shall I go to make a home
The Social Realism of Negative Space
To focus only on this is childish,
and God and the world need you
to put away childish things.
There were people, they paid
or did not pay taxes, wars transpired,
plastics accumulated massively,
the shore acquired shit and algae,
the window wouldn’t close and
the mirror got sticky with condensate,
the real sky and not the notional sky
slowly filled with debris of martial
and commercial origin and broadcast
many very special episodes now in syndication
watched by many people in jail
and those the luckiest of the jailed
but some are in solitary and none
deserve that and most shouldn’t be
anywhere but home though home
too is often hellish and you cannot
see celestial bodies from inside
catacombs and cells or even
within toxic houses even when
they have holes in the roof just
like you cannot check pretty
books out of the library if you
don’t know where it is or
if it even is and even if it was
you don’t have time because
you are trying hard not to die.
None of this happened in a dream.
It happened in the murder capital
of Florida. But you can see that
the murder capital of Florida
is epic with these dreams
and dreams like these because
they are how we endured
the state of being awake, the art
that was not for art’s sake, for
fuck’s sake, but for the sake
of somewhere to go to survive
being here, of junk for the sake
of junk because that was the yard
you had and you worked
with the world you had
but sometimes: wonder.
That which is perfect has not come.
That which is in part continues.
You think this mirrored, dim,
but look at the shape between
the face and the face it faces,
know also as I am known.
False Topographical Map of the Land of Grasses and Flowers
Again, just turn upside down:
the garden is water now, vapor and azure,
blue duotint. The deckled edges are cumulus
and towering cumulus, and cirrus is the wash
of the marble from which the garden is made.
On occasion a spiral of activity will twist upward,
and on many more occasions the speed
of the shifting ground, cloud against cloud,
will snap in half and half again spindles of light.
Sometimes the world will fall apart,
a shuttle of unwoven rain. And sometimes
after that the false blue of the night sky,
absent stars you cannot distinguish,
absent everything but the perpetual moon.
Mise en abyme
Even without the figural
the figures exist: the image
disappears into itself
but only by being placed
before itself or within
itself by confusing
upon and within
themselves. My sister says
He is looking at me funny
and my mother says
He always looks like that.
It’s true: I make the face
with my face. I only
know what I look
like when I look
at myself, but I look
mostly at what isn’t there.
I know what is isn’t
like this abyss but look,
the hole in the shield
is what makes the shield
whole.
Tricky
Our paper arts allow us
to render on the square, the mountain.
Of lamina, make the valley and the sink.
Night and day, black on one side, white the other.
That it is flexible enough to take a crease,
stiff enough to keep one. Bent into butterflies
for brides, folded into cranes to teach flight.
Siege
Whatever was left of what was once the hothouse:
six wide windows, not perfectly parallel to the shore,
angled eastward so that the rising sun crosses upward,
across the beams that separate the windows.
Thin hems, barely perceptible.
Six wide windows, two floors, the upper open
to the lower, a single spiral staircase connecting them.
Here I slept.
On my back, head tipped to watch the world through the window
that was the empty square where once the window was:
abundant sky and churning seam of sea.
Seen so, that seam looked like a fortress, its edge high on a cliff.
The cliff, lilac-white stone, dim in darkness, illumined enough to climb.
The face of the cliff was a pearlescent wall of clouds.
The city was the sea.
All possible because of the moon.
Had I seen the moon it would have been a hole in the wall of the cliff.
And I would think the sleeping city afloat on vertical leagues of silver.
Seen properly, none of it would ever have been.
To lay siege to the night’s city, sleep upside down,
hung halfway between the walls of a box of glass.
Let me tell you why the moon
because once it was only yellow as dust
or an icy isolated white
only as round as its frayed edge
a shape of a surface
on which the oil of the eye
a shape crimped to oblivion with a blink
a scrim on which cast the lashes of the open eye
imaginary weight that wrought the crest
of all our never-ending floods
watcher of water I wanted to seep into every fissure
and shatter the castle
presence that was a hole in my pending dark
because it was only an idea I could not see
I prayed to God to let me see
I begged a god I could not see for sight
and then
rightly for the first time
the moon
Notes
Agfa Lupe 8x: The phosphor bars of the Sony Trinitron hypnotized many nearsighted children of my generation, and Grover is the muppet who attempted to teach us the difference between near and far.
Wait Until Dark: This poem refers to the 1967 film version directed by Terence Young based on the 1966 play by Frederick Knott.
Landlords: The curses here are derived mainly from the book of Leviticus. The E. L. Mustee Durastall is real.
The Cataracts Page 8
