Every day

Every day

I pull myself together;

every day,

I fall apart.

"Open outside!"

-for Morag

We'd agreed we'd do a mail exchange, a sort of "object writing;" we'd each send to the other an assemblage of objects designed to tell a story.   "Like messages in a bottle that are released into the ocean, [object writing reveals itself] to someone who is willing to unpack the sealed contents," read instructions we'd picked up from Anne West's book, Mapping the Intelligence of Artistic Work.

It had been raining for days the week I bundled my package off to Winnipeg, and so I didn't go outdoors, as I'd wished, to pick up leaves or twigs or stones or rosehips, or the fragment of a paper wasp's nest clinging to a bush that I'd wanted to send to my friend Morag. Instead, I cannibalized my office desk, the stickers and pictures and items I'd gathered there, along with a few printer's tools. I felt lost, divided, frustrated, separated from the air and earth and world, overwhelmed by duties and words. I imagined Morag would understand, if anyone would, how unhoused I felt, how astray.

As indeed she did.

A couple of weeks later, at my place at the table, when I arrived home, was a small bubble-wrapped package. OPEN OUTSIDE it said.  And so I did, although it was dark, and the stars too far off to see by.

After walking about a bit, I came back indoors with the dog to see what I could see, the scent of sea and wind and grilling sausages clinging to us.

Inside the package was another one, a clear plastic bag stuffed full of things. Crumbles of black earth fell out as I removed several items: a small cotton sack, a fragment of a poem, and a packet of items bundled together and tied with a knot.

I undid the knot and pulled out a pen, a seed pod, a bundle of roots, bits of earth, a small weaving that featured a few stitches at one end, a rough canvas swatch containing four needles, a strip of brown paper, a swatch of olive green fabric, a crumpled leaf, an unmarked label.  The writing was there, but what did it say? What would I say? I was stumped for a time.

The next morning I sat and read the fragment of poem--
(Oh people of the word, you always think words will save you.)

I was looking for a clue. What may I make of these disparate things? How do they speak? What did they mean?  I reread the words:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save

so much has been destroyed

I have cast my lot with those

who, age after age persevere,

with no extraordinary power

to reconstitute the world.

--Adrienne Rich

The message was clear, and yet for a long time I could not hear it. Could not understand it. Could not find my fate in these bits of earth or swatches of cloth, of needles and thread. Could not figure out what I was to do, ought to do, with this small collection of things.

Still, the packet haunted me and altered my imagination. Once it arrived I began to see differently, to mark form and shape and knot and handwork. Now and then, words failed me, but that wasn't a disaster. What I was after was a shape in the light, another kind of composition, a way of rendering aside from, instead of in words. 

Weeks passed.
I drew out the packet again. This time its message seemed transparent, lucid, manifest: 

Here am I. Take me, make something; make me; look at your hands.
What will you do now?

Hope angles this way--here, over there--outside!

Cast the seeds in the earth and then do other things.
In time you will see what comes up.
.
Why had I been so puzzled before?

I had had to take the time to see as if from the point of view of objects, not language. To be elsewhere, otherwise, to make some things, to go outside.

Thank you, Morag.

II. And again 

Here's something else those objects say (I hear them as they whisper in the dark):

We are newly rooted
no, we are uprooted
bound
unbound
lost.

The seeds have been 
severed from the root

Our earth is scattered:
these are the threads of my life.

I need someone else to stitch them
to write the words,
to persevere,
to hold fast to 
whatever is
outside. 

 

Our Beauty so Fleeting

Our 

beauty

 so 

fleeting

Voces paginarum/ Shouting words

Voces paginarum*

The words speak

to me

they leap

up and dance and

then

so do I.

SIT DOWN!

the teacher says.

READ SILENTLY:

DON’T MOVE YOUR LIPS.

READ TO YOURSELF.

(Shouting words,

but

Not for us

a loud clamour and

exclamation

no declamation

no exultation

nor excessive

incantation vocal

ornamentation

no

voices in the head

no

voices not your
own may pass

your

            lips

no

)

KEEP your voice DOWN

(a lady does not shout nor

a gentleman)

(then why when I look

do I see so many

shouting?)

We are not like them those others

who tooth and taste their words

or yours

KEEP your WORDS in your mouth.

KEEP them scrubbed.

Don’t meddle or mix

promiscuously

with other idioms

(lenguas, langues, zungas)

KEEP YOUR TONGUE IN

YOUR MOUTH

lest those others

(les infectes)       you

Stray not with

strange sounds and scents or

savours

Neither dance nor sing nor

poietes be;

don’t

heap up your words:

cinoti,

(I dare you

read that word

quickly

aloud)

in Sanskrit or

any other spraak of

taal

(LEAVE SOME SPACE

lest

MARK MY WORDS

YOU)

not without a little red*

can

never get

clene

again.

Notes on words

*voces paginarum (Latin: voices of the page, or reading (calling out) as it was practiced, for example, in the early middle ages in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.  For Augustine, for example, a text was meant to be followed with the lips, as much as with the eyes. In reading (from Middle English reden and Old High German rattan, to advise), one literally delivers or gives voice to and performs the assemblies noted in the text.  Or as Tim Ingold puts it, “the poetic text is…at once script and score” (Lines, 12).  But today, in school, we are taught that reading thus is bad form; unless we are performing or reading aloud to others to whisper or mouth the words we sight when we “read to ourselves” isn’t done.  The contemporary rule is clear: “read with your eyes, not your mouth”; shut up those words inside yourself, don’t mix insides and outsides; don’t get confused.

Lengua (Spanish: tongue, language)

Langue (French: tongue, language)

Zumba (Old High German: tongue)

Les infectes (French: infected persons; detritus; those who don’t count)

Cinoti from the Sanskrit, meaning to heap up; thought to be related to the Greek verb. poiein, to make, produce or create (poetry and other works of art). 

Poietes (Ancient Greek: poet, maker, creator)

spraak of taal (Dutch: speech (tongue) or tongue (speech))

* “not without a little red” Artaud, writing of the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, argues that poiesis does not happen without “a little red blood.”  Here he is making a playful—poetic—link between the expediture of a life lived for poetry and a blood price—poine in ancient Greek, poena in Latin.  The difference one letter makes is at once nothing and everything.

Clene is middle English for what is free from dirt or pollution (but the word clean, in English ultimately comes to us from the Old High German kleini, delicate, dainty, which is thought to be derived from the Greek glainoi, ornaments. Clean is thus never quite properly purged of elements not itself, never unadulterated; never pure.)

Notes on photographs

I took these photos of intertidal creatures in August 2012 on Hakai Beach, on the west coast of Calvert Island, in Central British Columbia.  

The purple and orange starfish are variants of the species Piaster ochraceus, a keystone species on the northwest coast of the Americas.  Predators of common mussels, they prevent overgrowth in mussel beds, and thus help to maintain species diversification on northwest Pacific shores.  

The green tubes are a species of anenome known as aggregating or clonal anenomes.  These creatures may reproduce sexually (two gametes fuse in the water and then settle on a rock) or asexually, by fission, which permits the anenomes to form vast clonal carpets consisting of a single genetic variant that lives as a colony, and is hostile to other colonies. The green colour of these anenomes is supplied by symbiotic algae that live within the cells of the host animal, and contribute to the primary productivity of the intertidal zone. The lessons of such visually noisy interdependence shouldn't be lost on us.

How to See in the Dark

Exercise: to see in the dark

Name some of the tongues that lick your ear
what the glass would see if it had eyes


where the flame leaps when it gutters
how the shadow lingers, draws a line


Note
See what the glass would see if it had eyes is a poetic imperative, a mode of thinking posed by George Oppen, who was a 20th century American poet, anti-militarist, sailor and, for a time, a cabinet-maker and expatriate in Mexico, where, as a one-time member of the Communist Party, he'd fled from persecution from the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. He returned to the US and poetry later in his life; he maintained that writing poetry was a particularly acute form of phenomenological investigation.
A biography and links to some essays and poems may be found here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/george-oppen#poet

See too, Forrest Gander, "Finding the Phenomenal Oppen."
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20761
and Peter Nicholls, "George Oppen in Exile: Mexico and Maritain." http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=6&fid=317818&jid=&volumeId=&issueId=01&aid=291582

On Getting Lost (Again)

It happened in mid-February, on a sunny, windy weekend afternoon.  We'd been walking on the access road to Taylor's Head Park, along the water.

I suppose it happened because I was scanning the tracks on the road, looking for the ripped-off gull's wing we'd seen on the walk in, half of its feathers intact. I wanted a picture of it, and I hadn't stopped earlier. I was peering at the road so intently that I lost my place on it, and walked right by the little path that leads off to the parking spot at the end of Old Taylor's Head Road.

Not long after I walked on by, something clicked in my mind. Oops. I've gone past the lot. And so I turned back, but then somehow didn't see where I was supposed to go.

A brief moment of suspension; confusion; growing blankness.  A dense grey rain in my brain.

Oh, I thought, I'm mistaken (another little click in the brain), and I turned around again and headed back up the road the way I'd been going when I felt that I had gone too far.

After awhile, I recognized a distinctly bouffant-topped black spruce I'd photographed a year ago on another winter hike, then a boggy patch to the west, but the stone wall near the Bull's Head trail tipped me off: I'd certainly gone too far.  I knew it.

And so I turned around again, but I must admit I was confused.  I felt stupid, the way I used to feel in kindergarten when I was asked to point to something with my left hand or to turn to the right.  Which was left? Which was right?

Invariably I turned the wrong way, and the teacher said, no, no. Left. Right. What's wrong with you?

What was wrong was that I was dyslexic.  My mother gave me a ring that I wore on my right hand for a time. Asked to turn to the right, I'd check my hands. Right: where the ring is. Turn.

I continued the practice of wearing a permanent "lead ring" into adulthood, so as not to have to confess that I didn't know my left hand from my right.  If asked, left or right, I still have to look at my hands, make a gesture, sense this side of my body or that one to be sure of the direction.

Such care has perhaps made me a decent nautical navigator--I'm rarely complacent about knowing just where I am, and check my bearings often.

But there on the road I felt stumped. Then panicked.  Confused.  I'd lost my bearings in space on a familiar road. I've been here many times and yet, where was I?

Only two directions to go--how did I miss the parked car?  I'd passed it, clearly, but where? And when? And how?

I began to feel not simply stupid, but terrified. I'll admit it; I began to cry.

I ran back down the road, back the way I'd come, back the toward the place I'd been before I knew I'd gotten lost, back towards the water, away from the highway, my heart pounding, fear squeezing my throat.

Nothing was familiar; everything was. Was I going the right way or not? What did it mean that I'd gotten lost?

I felt like I'd never find my way out of this blurry zone, this loosened, fallen state. My mind was gone; I'd lost it; here was definitive proof.  Early onset Alzheimer's.

The more I panicked, the less I knew.  The less I could think.
The less I could think, the more I panicked.

And then there I was, at the path to the car. Surprise! It was here all along?

The map of the world settled down into place but not my heart.

Nor Marike's. When I hadn't come, she'd gone looking for me, back, of course, the way we'd come, to the water.  I'd already passed by while she was down at the car, and so I didn't see her head back out; I didn't hear her call me, and she didn't find me.  Classic slapstick: one goes in the front door just as the other goes out the back, and they miss one another, and run about in circles for hours, shouting.

Except. When I didn't come and didn't come, and her path didn't cross mine, there along the water, she began to imagine that I'd tumbled into the water and been swept out to sea.  She'd come back to the car to try to call out a search crew, and there I was, finally, stupified and ashamed.

Maybe something is wrong with me, I suggested. I didn't really want to confess that I thought I was done for, head all amuck, grey matter leaching, another confused soul peering nearsightedly at the world.

Don't be ridiculous, she snapped, just try to stop being so distracted!  It's that annoying camera; you can't see where you're going because you're too busy looking through it.

I'm hoping she's right. So far, the votes are on the side of distraction, not neurological contraction, though I still have moments when I wonder...

Wait. What was I thinking? Where was I? Am I where I think I am--and what if I'm not?

NOTES
All photos taken at Taylor's Head Park on February 10, 2012, the day in question, as I was walking distractedly.  The whole collection may be seen here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/karincope/sets/72157629762847289/
I never did find the clipped gull's wing again. It was probably the wing of a gull cut down by an eagle or a hawk, the wings bitten off as so much useless inedible weight.

"Something Wrong": Women Who Crash

-->

First edition, 1928

 (Notes on Breton's Nadja)                   

Nadja. The book looks as if it’s going to be about her. Or chance. But really, it’s all about him.

Double Breton, 1927

“Qui-suis-je?” he asks in the beginning. “Who am I?”

His first answer: “I am whom I haunt.” And then, something like this, though not in so many words: “I am incommunicable but marvelous experiences that serve up telling truths about me.”

Muette et Aveugle by Marcel Mariën

What then of her? Why call the book by her name? 

“Mute and blind, dressed in the thoughts that you here loan me.” Is that how it is in Nadja?

Rene Magritte La femme cachee, 1929

Or is it like this? A rebus: "I don't see the [woman] hidden in the forest."

After all, early in Nadja, Breton says, “I have always, beyond belief, hoped to meet, at night and in a woods, a beautiful naked woman or rather…I regret, beyond belief, not having met her…I adore this situation which of all situations is the one where I am most likely to have lacked presence of mind. I would probably not even have thought of running away.” He adds, quickly, “Anyone who laughs here is a pig.” (N 39).

After Breton dies in 1966, Magritte remembers the moment of this look, this cliché: “In 1927, André Breton and I, each in turn, caught sight of an ad for a certain aperitif hanging from the wall in a bistro. We exchanged looks that neither reason nor insanity could explain. We had the same complicit look another time, when I suggested taking his picture with his eyes closed.  Well, his eyes are closed, but eyes open or shut, one can’t forget that his mind was seeking the Truth through poetry, love and liberty."

In other words, one man catches sight of another--catching sight of a woman? Or hiding from her?--and they are friends forever.

Breton, "Eyes of Nadja" collage

Again and again Breton speaks of Nadja's eyes: “I had never seen such eyes.” (N 64)

“What was so extraordinary about what was happening in those eyes?” (N 65)

Her eyes open on hope which is “scarcely distinct from terror” (N 111)

 Envelope in Nadja's hand addressed to Breton

30 Nov 1926

  

Nadja. Who is she? Wait, I can’t tell you. Not yet. Nadja really is all about him. What an enigma he is. His dreams. His encounters. His loves.

de Chirico The Song of Love 1914

Enigma? What is that?  

In 1913 the painter de Chirico writes something that Breton admires:

One must picture everything in the world as an enigma…To live in the world as if in an immense museum of strangeness, full of curious many colored toys which change their appearance…

Enigma. In other words, a mystery--now you see it, now you don’t. (I love the way Breton cuts out her eyes but covers his own.) Is this surrealist method?

Nadja, The Lovers’ Flower

Fact. On 4 October 1926, Breton runs into a woman on the street and falls for her. They agree she will go by the name Nadja—short for Nadjezda [Надежда], or “hope” in Russian.  (Does every love affair begin thus, with a pseudonym for “hope”?) 

Despite the hopefulness of her drawing, “The Lovers’ Flower,” those who fall in love rarely have their eyes wide open.

Does the production and reproduction of this image prove she existed?

Nadja, letter to Breton
"Merci, Andre, j'ai tout recu--j'ai confiance en l'image qui me fermera les yeux/
Thanks Andre, I've gotten everything--I have confidence in the image that will close my eyes"

For nine days they see each other every day, Breton and Nadja. Then they take a trip to St-Germain by train, arrive at around 1 am, and take a room in the Hotel du Prince des Galles. (This is a detail that Breton will efface from the novel when he re-edits it in 1964.)

  

Nadja, Note to Breton

The affair ends here, apparently, despite ongoing meetings and exchanges of letters between the two lovers for several more months.

Simone Kahn, 1927

On November 8, Breton writes to his wife, Simone Kahn, and complains about Nadja, asking, what shall I do with this woman who I don’t love and whom I will never love?  She is, he says, capable of “putting in question everything I love and the way that I have of loving.  No less dangerous for that.”

Watteau, Embarkation for Cythera, 1717, detail

Here’s what Breton says in Nadja about the end of the affair with Nadja: Nothing can be forgotten. Nothing.  Not the glitter of rare and volatile metals like sodium, not something so unlike as phosphorescence in stone, not a burning chiming clock, not even “the fascination which, despite everything, The Embarkation for Cythera exerts upon me when I determine that despite the various postures and attitudes, it displays only one couple…nothing of what constitutes my own light for me has been forgotten.” (N 108)

Who was this dangerous woman whom he preferred not to see [again]--and perhaps, hoped we would not see either, except perhaps as a sign for his special mode of seeing, surreal vision, surreal blindness? She even signed her letters, "Nadja."

Hester Albach,

Léona, héroïne du surréalisme 

Actes Sud, 2009

On 21 March 1927, the woman known to Breton as "Nadja" had a major breakdown, thought she saw men on the roof and began banging the walls of her apartment building.  "For some time I had stopped understanding Nadja," Breton writes (N 130). "I was told, several months ago, that Nadja was mad...I do not suppose there can be much difference for Nadja between the inside of a sanitarium and the outside." (N 136).

 In fact, it seems the woman known as "Nadja" was hauled away by the police, diagnosed with “polymorphous psychic troubles, depression, sadness, anxiety….episodes of anxiety mixed with fear,” and interned.  Thus she began a sojourn of 14 years in various mental hospitals.   

She died 15 January 1941 of “cachexie neoplasique” or extreme wasting thanks to a cancerous tumor.  But it’s also thought that she died of typhoid fever, “aggravated by under-nourishment.”  In other words, she starved to death, in occupied France.  

 Forgotten. A woman-phantom who has haunted many more fantasists than Breton, but was no more substantial than a shadow, a few lines, some sketches: une femme-reve, a dream woman.  Fiction--or almost.  Until Dutch writer, Hester Albach, following the clues Breton left in his book, and the revelations of a cache of letters by Nadja bound up with his manuscript, uncovered some of the details of an identity and a life.

Leona Camille Ghislain Delcourt

Who was this “Nadja” loved and loathed and turned into a symbol of the ineffable, the mysterious, a perfection of surrealist enigma by Breton?   

The name of the author of that cache of letters to Breton was Leona Camille Ghislain Delcourt.  She was born in 1902 near Lille, gave birth to a daughter in 1920, and arrived in Paris two or three years later, likely in the “care” of an elderly patron. She frequented dance halls, bars, the streets, was perhaps a heroin addict, and made money as she could, by picking up clients or admirers or patrons. Breton was perhaps all of these things. And then he dropped her, preferring the echoes of her memory to the echoing wards of the mental hospital. 

Andre Breton and Suzanne Muzard

The second part—Nadja’s part—of Nadja ends thus: “Who goes there? Is it you Nadja? Is it true that the beyond, that everything beyond is here in this life? I can’t hear you.  Who goes there? Is it only me? Is it myself?”  (N 144).   

Andre Breton and Suzanne Muzard

The last five pages of the book, Nadja, are addressed to an "irreplaceable you." Is this Nadja?  Nadja-dream? Nadja is long gone by then. Perhaps not so irreplaceable.   

Nadja’s is not a story Breton writes for Nadja, but for someone else.  Nadja's is, the narrator confesses, the story he “yielded to the desire to tell” some “you, when I scarcely knew you” (N 156).  It is widely believed that this you is a figure for Suzanne Muzard, (who is, at the time, married to writer Emmanuel Berl). 

 Breton goes on: “Without doing it on purpose, you have taken the place of the forms most familiar to me, as well as of several figures of my foreboding. Nadja was one of these last, and it is just that you should have hidden her from me. All I know is that this substitution of persons stops with you, because nothing can be substituted for you…You are not an enigma for me. I say that you have turned me from enigmas forever” (N 157-8). 

I say even he knows he is lying.

 Frances Grayson's plane before its crash in December 192

Nadja ends with the declaration, "Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.” But before that, just before that, we’re offered a small item, a clipping from the morning news for December 26, 1927. A voice has gone mute following a transmission near Sable Island Nova Scotia: “there is something that is not working” Breton writes.  Due to “bad atmospheric conditions and static” nothing more can be discovered (N 160). 

Who has disappeared thus, into foul weather and atmospheric interference? Breton does not tell us, but given the date, and the place, certain details can be discovered.   

The person who has gone missing is, of course, a woman.

Frances Wilson Grayson, aimed to be the first woman--with Norwegian pilot, Oskar Omdal, navigator Brice Goldsborough and her radio engineer, Frank Koehler—successfully to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.  Financed by Aage Anker, daughter of a Pittsburgh steel magnate, Grayson ordered a new amphibious Sikorsky aircraft (S-36), and left Curtis Field, New York, on the 23 December 1927 for Harbour Grace, Newfoundland.

Frances Wilson Grayson on the nose of the S-36 Dawn

According to the front page of the New York Times on 26 December 1927, “Grayson Plane Radioed 'Something Wrong' Friday Night; Then the Signaling Ceased, Silent for 54 Hours Since; Probably Lost Off The Nova Scotia Coast in a Storm."

Another ambitious woman, lost. Crashed.  Downed.

The name of her plane? The Dawn.

Frances Wilson Grayson with her crew in Maine

In 1928 the Ontario Surveyor General named a lake in the northwestern quadrant of the province after her.  The remains of Frances Grayson and her crew have never been found, but Lake Grayson may be precisely located on any map at 50°52'49" North latitude and 89°25'46" West longitude.

Grayson left a written statement with a reporter in case she didn't survive her attempt at flight. In it she said, "Who am I? Sometimes I wonder. Am I a little nobody? Or am I a great dynamic forc--powerful--in that I have a god-given birthright and have all the power there is if only I will understand and use it?"

That almost sounds like Breton.  Convulsive, compulsive beauty, indeed.

*****

I'll bet you think I made this all up.
And what if I did? (I didn't.)

"Photos" and "facts" are such strange tissues these days: fantastical indices, nothing more.
Still, so little of ordinary life, ordinary loves, ordinary deaths, is made up.  Most of it just happens, and sometimes, as here, it is recorded.
 

Frances Wilson Grayson, 1927

 

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---

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NOTES

Nadja is a documentary novel, the second known published novel with photographs.  The first was a Belgian book published in 1892, Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-morte.  The photos there were of Bruges, of course.

Correspondence between Breton and Kahn cited by Marguerite Bonnet in Andre Breton Œuvres complètes, “notice et notes,” Gallimard, La Pléiade, Paris 1988, p. 1514.

Hester Albach's book, Leona: Surrealist Heroine is only available, at this writing, in Dutch or French. Several reviews of the work are available in French, including this one: club/article/010809/leona-nadja-heroine-du-surrealisme

Images and letters documenting the relationships between Breton and Nadja (Leona Delcourt) and Breton and Suzanne Muzard may be found here on a French language site sponsored by l'Association Atelier Andre Breton: http://www.andrebreton.fr/fr/item/?GCOI=56600100397790
 
I am grateful too, to Susan Elmslie, for her inspired account of Nadja in I, Nadja, and Other Poems (London, ON: Brick, 2006.  See also http://robmclennan.blogspot.ca/2006/08/susan-elmslies-i-nadja-and-other-poems.html
for sample poems and a discussion of them.


Information about Frances Wilson Grayson and her crew from wikipedia; photographs of her with the plane come from a set posted by the Boston Public Library entitled "Aviation: Boardman, Earhart & Grayson at http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/sets/72157627130235229/with/5964144008/

A Pathe newsreel video clip of Frances Grayson doing a test flight in Maine in October 1927 (date has to be wrong--Grayson was dead in October 1928) may be viewed here: http://www.criticalpast.com/video/65675052496_pilot-Frances-Grayson_plane-at-beach_flight-over-water_landing

A nod, too, to Hal Foster's rereading of Breton and surrealism in Compulsive Beauty (Boston: MIT 1993).