eurydice to orpheus

Edmund Dulac, "Orpheus and Eurydice" (c.1934) [Watercolor & Gouache on Paper]

notes in the margins of a book i am still writing, that is not yet finished, sing to me what i am feeling; aphoristic melodies of thoughts i discover i am having before i can write them down.

and you are the author and instrument, some sort of guide across the styx behind which i have hidden. cerebus is charmed, my mind-ever-vicious, tamed; i am opened and you go into the dark and heavy what i am.

(even as a child all i wanted to do was to paint the page black, complete and entire. so i went here, to a place where finality could be attained, to a place where i would not have to hear any voice (your voice so wonderful), where i could establish the safety of a world, and leave no other space on the page for anything else.)

too light to be restrained by the inscription of laws that forbid the song C leading me outward, page by page, around the margins of the body of the text so that i am no longer trapped where i had fled and set up guards, in myself, in the interminable internality of being me C you chant and enchant me.

proclamation of resurrection

proclamation that there must be a nothingness, an other death, than the one i write: a willingness to die (like you undertook in coming to me). to cross, to step past the end of the line, to look for meaning prior to the first word, after the last period, in the space you have opened around me.

overwhelming space, refusing to let me write a life that goes to the edge of the page, that is all encompassing; leaving me to either founder in my attempts to script out the sound and to assert only eurydice C or, to admit (an olympian admission, to truly hear the song in hades) that the best of me lies with you, in the music that impinges on the margins of the page.

-LoA

on the origins of equity (a meditation on hegel’s phenomenology of spirit, iv.a)

Artimisia Gentileschi, "Susanna and the Elders" (1610)

the first experience of equality is the experience of violation. it is awakening from a dream where forces of which one is not conscious play about at their whim. awakening with a gasp, screaming, sobbing, in the night, in the bed of a stranger you thought you knew, but upon whom your eyes gaze now for only the first time

with violation there is for the first time an assertion against belongingness – belonging-to is not responsibility-to but ownedness: engulfment, a form of suicide where one has not simply given over one's will and body to another, but has annihilated the will so that the body is not one's own.

in violation, the first experience of equity, one stakes one's claim, forging the self as the labor of one's own hands. the gathering of forces which, however overpowered, are for the first time real in their desecration. violated, one gathers up the shards of self and tries to make sense.

-LoA

remembering (for metz)

"...memory is also of central importance for any theory of history and society as a category of resistance..."
-Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society (1977)



John William Waterhouse, "Sleep and His Half-Brother, Death" (1874)

and i stood and watched in horror as snow fell upward
and no one cared.

their blood stopped flowing
but they walked on

words stopped meaning
but they continued to talk

history stopped moving
and everyone forgot

a people without memory is capable of the greatest atrocity
even against themselves
without a second thought
because only memory can speak for the dead

-LoA

the daughter of jephthah hides her name in the night

Then the spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah, and he passed through Gilead and Manasseh. He passed on to Mizpah of Gilead, and from Mizpah he passed on to the Ammonites. And Jephthah made a vow to the Lord, and said, "If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the Lord's, to be offered up by me as a burnt offering." So Jephthah crossed over to the Ammonites to fight against them; and the Lord gave them into his hand. He inflicted a massive defeat on them from Aroer to the neighborhood of Minnith, twenty towns, and as far as Abel-keramim. So the Ammonites were subdued before the people of Israel. Then Jephthah came to his home at Mizpah; and there was his daughter coming out to meet him with timbrels and with dancing. She was his only child; he had no son or daughter except her. When he saw her he tore his clothes, and said, "Alas, my daughter! You have brought me very low; you have become the cause of great trouble for me. For I have opened my mouth to the Lord, and I cannot take back my vow." She said to him, "My father, if you have opened your mouth to the Lord, do to me according to what has gone out of your mouth, now that the Lord has given you vengeance against your enemies, the Ammonites." And she said to her father, "Let this thing be done for me: Grant me two months, so that I may go down to the mountains and mourn my virginity, my companions and I." "Go," he said and sent her away for two months. So she departed, she and her companions, and mourned her virginity on the mountains. At the end of two months, she returned to her father, who did with her according to the vow he had made. So there arose an Israelite custom that for four days every year the daughters of Israel would go out to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite.
-Anonymous, Judges 11.29-40 (10th century B.C.)

_____________________________________________________________________________________


Yuqi Wang, "Ling" (1992)

beyond the long exhale that is night
the vicious lie in wait to consume the innocent
i have wrapped the night around me
as if i could hold it there
my teeth clenched, defiant against the dawn
oh that i were a prophet, i would hold the moon in the sky
and cry out, ‘peace’

by day they trade life for life and blood for blood
but the night denies every division:
hides man from woman, ammon from gilead, the ethiopian from the egyptian
god from humanity
oh that i were a prophet, i would make the moon new
and give birth to the stars: my children

let my name be Secret
so that it cannot be taken
they will ask my father, with the red edge still in his hand
but it will slip from his mind, like a maid before her marriage: dancing, free
oh that i were a prophet, and the voice of war was swallowed by silence
and the silence would cry out, ‘peace’

-LoA

on one being told she is still young enough to have more children

William Bouguereau, "Charity" (1878)


He but throws them from his belly.
In this simplest of couplings
the egg comes to fruition, unwasted.
The uterus is not a cardboard cutout,
an organ meant to remain unfilled,
a chalice dry.

The value of the woman is
her uterine potential. How
can two arms be full with
only one child? At least
two plump babies to grow
in holding each hand.
At least two to fulfill
the empty hours of a
woman's biology, to
maintain her honor in
a world bent toward
the aggression of both sexes:

This is the ideal,
the prize of all time:
radiant mother, beyond
maidenhood but years from
the wise, silent crone.

The swaying of hips,
the arch of bent necks
and upturned pinkies?
The gentle knowledge
of years and the scientifically
applied art of nurturing?

Not to waste, not to waste!

Do not let too many years
pass in between births.
Beauty and wisdom
in the female of the species
are merely tools to be
used in nurturing creation.

Time remains.

Legitimacy lies in numbers.
Lie down and prepare
to push.

-DRG (see her full blog at Insufferable Know It All)

:from munirah

we write this to you from the desert
the letters forming: light on sand
while you wait for
the air conditioner to turn off
inside your cape cod cottage:
new england in june and the electricity costs so much

each grain of sand here is a moment of infinity
each one calls out to you
silently
in the way only infinity can
while you turn up the tv
in order to avoid that revelation

you say, the desert is a liar:
illusions of water, the blurring of distinctions; it will kill if it can
i will stay on solid ground, in the reality of
shopping malls, dairy queens and the marketing machine
but we say, the sun is the only truth
and every grain of sand, its prism

-LoA

eros (an excerpt from hypatia's lost commentary on plato's phaedrus)

Gail Foster, "Passage" (2005) [acrylic on canvas]

A desire for the caress, to be touched by another - erotics: the pursuit of proximity and tenderness, the pilgrimage to the border of one's being, to the border beyond which the beloved lies.

The lover and the beloved, together in sex do not seek identity; love of the lover is never an attempt to cross the border - to have power over the body, an act of aggression, commission of violence, rape - instead it is the acknowledgment of the gift of peace (providence itself). Giving oneself over to pure vulnerability, laying down one's arms, exposure.

The erotic finds its end, not in the beloved (who is always the theme) but, in rapture and ecstasy itself. The coming together is the denouncement of identification, which would, in truth, entail the loss of identity. Ecstasy is not a passage between borders,

(for the space between us is only the necessary counter-moment to the sensuousness, voluptuousness, nakedness of the body)

but a doxology sung to that which holds the very difference between our borders inviolable: the apocalyptic shudder that promises a final end to violence will come. It commands not only 'thou shalt not kill' but also 'love one another'.

-LoA

dreams of rebirth (imagined entries in the the diary of romaine brooks, 1911-1914)

"It fixes itself in the mind."
-Romaine Brooks, on Ida Rubinstein's face, after their break-up

Romaine Brooks, "La Venus Triste" (1914)

I

And then I dreamt that you and I were no longer who we were. Not myself, I did not know you, and passing you on an otherwise empty street, I did not recognize you. Without your words of greeting, the creation of that space we have inhabited for so long together, the warmth of a home created by that nightmarishly absent rejoinder, you were nothing to me, or more appropriately, without your words to tell me who I was, I was as nothing to me, and in my traumatics, I could not, upon not seeing you as you on an otherwise empty street, do anything except violence. I hurt you to be who I am, to constitute myself as self, to make, to find again the home we had made in a once upon a time (the confusion of dream for reality and reality for dream – I was no longer sure I was not awake). By destroying you, by seeing you no longer as you, I had a dream I would be me again, home again, warm again, not exhausted by the ceaseless wear of not-being-real.

So I attacked, negated and finally annihilated you, so that I could be home again. But still I was left with not being myself and the more desperately I destroyed, the deeper I was lost in the nothingness of who I had become – wide awake now in the dream of not-being. You as not-you reappeared at every turn and this time I thought – I knew – that your subjection would mean my completion. But each time your annihilation did not create space for me but expanded the terror of not-being without escape. Until finally, you were gone and not having recognized not-you, I finally was gone in the spaceless prison of my own indistinction, unable to slumber in the abysmal reality I had created in my dream.

Romaine Brooks, "Le Trajet" (1911)

II

I had a dream that we were reborn, you and I: you no longer you, and I no longer I. To be reborn, it is a dream; to be caught up, not in the consciousness of desire, where I would consume you and destroy you, but that we be made something new by something more holy, more damning, but oh thereby more deifying than fire. I had that dream, that we were reborn, and all our struggles, the many violences that we waged against one another, wars to conquer the space of peace that we brought one another, were ended: our bodies beaten into plowshares and our tongues prophesying only for one another.

Romaine Brooks, "Spring" (1912)

III

I dreamt we were reborn, you and I

Caught in the torrent; raindrops dancing on the ground

Water running past our feet, frenetic past our ankles

Hard into our face, stinging into our eyes

Until we were pulled under and washed away

Who we were, now completely past

Lost in the river of life

Beyond a flood, a force more than mere drowning

And behold, all things are new

I dreamt the rain, dancing all along, called out to us

Constantly speaking but one name

Romaine Brooks, "La France Croisée" (1914)

IV

I awoke with a prayer for rebirth on my lips

But every invocation is an evocation,
and the solicitude of slumber is lost at the first sign of waking

I am trying to capture stars for you

Walking to the moon

But the very prayer I speak creates the impossibility of its fulfillment

I am Eleazer with censer in hand: strange incense!

As always I seek only the instantiation of my own dreams.

Forgive me: can I ask that out without demanding,
setting out the terms of your internment, the limits,
the how and why of your actions, attempting to hold them in my hands.

Forgive me/ I will make you mine

Help me/ I know what I need

-LoA

Romaine Brooks, "Esquisse d'Ida Rubinstein" (1912)

no escape

Alan Feltus, "Melancolie" (1993)

you took me with such high hopes
your hope of forgetting that we were two
you stripped and stripped believing this was the way of intimacy
your hold on me was filled with desperation
you held us so tightly that neither could breathe
- was this your plan, it changes nothing-
you took pleasure as if it were yours to own
your ecstasy to rip out of me
as if you could plunge a hand into me, take hold of it
as easily as you push yourself into my body

somehow you never knew you had to fail
the pleasure you took could not satisfy
the hunger is something i cannot feed
and so as you crashed roughly downward
wasted and impotent, lost and still all alone
into the never-ending darkness of what i am
you now know the shame of your own being
the clear nakedness of what you are
a shame you have pressed upon me for so long
the shame of not being able to escape the name you gave me

so when you turn away in disgust
sick at the sight of me, your cheeks flushed
with wasted passion and anger
i will know the truth: nausea is internal
i felt it long enough to know its every move inside me
more intimate to me than you will ever be
the revulsion is in you, dying to get out
you look that way at me now because i could not be your escape
you are riveted to yourself, lost
in the shame of not being able to escape your own name

so as you powerlessly shudder in the darkness of the other room
believing that i am the nausea that grips your body
trying to wash the taste of me from your mouth
purge the failed conquest from your every pore
-you were happy to leave your stain on me
but can no longer tolerate the way my scent continues to call you-
i will remain, wrapped in my sheets of otherness, alien and unfathomable to you
infinitely complex and opaque
your rage: that you can never strip me enough so that i am transparent to you
your failure: that only modesty is erotic

LoA

freedom beyond choice

LoA, "Gull on the Beach behind Fort Macon, the Tide Coming In" (Christmas 2006)


the freedom of light is to be seen;
the freedom of truth, to be embodied
so why do i stand here in this ambiguity
- a flickering light; an unstable meaning -
wavering between decisions which must be made
instead of losing myself in one of them
and becoming free:
the freedom of the infinite is found in the finite


-LoA

the lies of conscience (forgetting lebanon)

tonight i am reading kant: kant who argued that one's love of god was shown in one's attentiveness to the moral law: kant for whom god never appeared to us directly but in whom we could not help but believe because humanity was driven by a desire for the infinite: kant who dreamt that perpetual peace was indeed possible, that it was our hope.

this post from last year recalls the horrific events in lebanon last summer.

best wishes to everyone this evening,
LoA.


Chris DeBurgh and Elissa, "Lebanese Night" (2002)


We sleep peacefully
calmly
sweetly...
We sleep deeply, dreaming of
what we will do tomorrow
how we will spend our wealth
who we will love...
We sleep luxuriously, on a quiet night
with a clean conscience
wrapped warmly in the silken sheets of the blood of Others.

-LoA



"The War in Lebanon - Listen" (July 2006)

a message to my loved ones

"I am losing my voice calling you, speak to me, tell me the truth"
-Jacques Derrida, The Post Card

John Everett Millais, "Bubbles" (1886)

Postcards are alienations from life
the two-dimensionalization of existence

They are symbols of how beauty can be disconnected from context
until it is a superfluous gesture

They do not say, 'wish you were here'
but 'where are you?'
('where am I?')

I am trapped in flatness

-LoA

for mohammed

...you will always be the face of Falastin for me.


Dusty Griffith, "Resurrection" (2007)

I see an image - which one is not important -
I see an image and I rush back, once again, to the desert
I rush back to the desert as I have done so often before
to the desert of Unknowing

And I wonder - do you wonder also? -
I wonder what has transpired over the distance
the distance of years, miles, languages
that have come to separate us in the land of the Real

We were children in the desert - little ones in the Kingdom of Heaven -
We were children, free in the desert before History grabbed hold
Before History made us aware of Injustice
and we were called to account

Do you also yearn - in the disquietude of your tired soul -
Do you also miss the desert of Unknowing
Have you returned there in your moments of confusion
and found the quiet Truth once again?

-LoA

the choice

Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.
-George W. Bush, "Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People" (2001)



Arnold Böcklin, "War" (1896)

what do we choose?
in the war, along the fronts that divide us, where do we walk?
in the monumental battle between good and evil
where every other is the latter to the former,
where the forces of war call out to one another
along a front designed to maintain their animosity,
offering –
is it possibly true? –
an irrefuteable either/or
within which we must take a side,
should we not seek to walk within that fracture that divides,
the fracture that consumes declarations of war?
this is path on which the heathen rage,
along which traitors walk:
the nowhere
possessed by no one
that is the last hope of humanity.

-LoA

the promise of victory (a draft)

Franz Stuck, "Lucifer" (1890)



we sat amid the ruins of the new jerusalem
at the dawn of the end of the day

as the fires smoldered amid the walls
and the soldiers put on a parade

there was dancing and singing
and the leaders were there
there were horses and canons and songs
there were trumpets blaring
to drown out the noise
of the sacrifice of innocents below

in the valley of gehenna
the children were dying
and the soldiers put on a parade
marching each one
to Moloch's brash song
and to the pounding drums of rage

the war god was living
and the people were singing
and band played all through the night
his priests smiled sweetly
and promised us victories
and in the flow of blood took delight

and while death embraced us
and the people made love
to hate by the ocean that night
the screams of the children
came up from gehenna
to the ears of old Moloch

we sat amid the ruins of the new jerusalem
that city that sits on the hill

as the lights went out one last time
and Moloch walked smugly away

-LoA

on the possibility of the gift

...forgiveness and gift have perhaps this in common, that they never present themselves as such to what is commonly called experience, a presentation to consciousness or to existence...
-Jacques Derrida, "To Forgive" (1999)

Ad Reinhardt, Untitled (c.1958)

without box: cardboard, color of sturdy brown, corners sharp and well defined to provide compartmentalization and precise dimension, a place well-suited and well-confined

without paper to annouce the gaeity that must be attendent with the ripping and tearing excitement, but also declaring the limits thereof with the passing of the paper into disposibility: laughter only in its time, joy in due season

and ribbons - certainly not ribbons and lace - that tight bond of frilly, faux fraternity that is only an affect: to be untied and thus undone

but because without

i lie in bed wondering if anything has transpired at all, having long elaborate conversations of light against lattice and the silence of wind staring at the window.

-LoA

when the cold lays siege

Raymond Han, "Studio Still Life #4" (2006)


standing by the car at 3am you left a note of war
in the snow that had fallen for two days straight
the cold laying siege and putting us all in the mood
for blood-letting

you stated a refusal: you would no longer feel
i corrected it
…no longer feel anything other than anger
which made you hate all the more, but being right was my only defense

and what were these wars we fought as the cold laid siege:
over hands that touched me
lies that had been told me
violences that played themselves out on my flesh

wars that had all been fought over my body before
and so were nothing new
i knew the dance of this conflict, had laid down my armor many times in surrender
its rhythm was not unique, its cuts were always mortal

there is no defense for this when the cold lays siege
you shed my blood because it is the only way you can feel
i shed my blood because it keeps me from feeling
and i know that there is no winning this war

-LoA

weight

Christopher Cousins, "Dark Matter" (2004)


there is your body
the mass: the horror of weight
and there is
the dark: the comfort of weight

i did not need and did not ask for this
this is not what i was promised
the tangle
of lies and madness
the shaping of self so that i could
hide in the dark

-LoA

the whispered words of catherine of france to henry v, king of england, upon the night of their wedding, 1420

"The Marriage of Henry V and Catherine of France", from Chroniques de France ou de Saint Denis (1487)

when i shed blood i am hidden away
private, meditating on the curse of eve.
i step out only when the blood is past
bathing myself on the rooftop
and i am clean.

you spill blood in public
sword in hand, cursing your enemies;
armies obey your command, and die at your command;
satisfied only when your arms are red to the pits for all to see.
in whose bath will you ever come clean?

-LoA

a short rebuttal (marcella sends a note of reply to her husband porphyry)

Iman Maleki, "Dizziness" (2003?)


you wrote it out in chapter and verse, line by line.

i read between the lines. i can see what you are not saying. you wish to speak with certainty, but i make you doubt, make your hand tremble. you wish to speak rationally, logically, and you hate me for filling you with passion, for finding the emotion of your words. i relativize your objectivity; i pull the ground out from under your speech. your words float about the page. i am too close? mine is a real body, and i will break through all the words you use to contain me. the page will burst from the strain. i am the interruption and i am here to stay.

-LoA