in the bold imagery of poets the authorization to dream more expansively

Monday, 4 May 2020

I’m back in my living room, after a few hours rambling—distantly, of course—through the trails on Mount Tom with a friend, good for my body and good for coming back to this interior space (within the house yet possessing a semi-public character) with a refreshed capacity to perceive it as a place of collective study.

I’ve run a couple of workshops in my living room over the past couple of years, each focused on a particular text. One was Threshold Academy, which has become a sort of umbrella name for both the dream of a future space (for bookselling and workshops) and the various projects that I, my partner Britt, and other various co-conspirators do. However, it had its first iteration as a workshop focused on Hélène Cixous’s 3 Steps on the Ladder of Writing (translated by Susan Sellers and Sarah Cornell).

This is one of those books that contains a whole library. Since I first read it over a decade ago, I have delved into its canon of writers, some of which have become as dear to me as they are to Cixous: Tsvetayeva, Bachmann, Lispector, Kafka, Bernhard. 3 Steps is not just a glorified bibliography—it is also a methodological resource. In these lectures (for it is a book of lectures), Cixous is a literary critic who reads like a poet. She proceeds through the wordplay, soundplay, allusion: the letter H (hache) becomes an axe—Kafka’s rubric for literary excellence (that it must be the ice-axe for the frozen sea within us), becomes Jacob’s ladder, and we join Cixous and the angelic host on its rungs.

My next in-person workshop was called Exile Punk, and it focused on Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Call Me Zebra, a novel whose eponymous protagonist has survived death and exile, and who we encounter in the process of trying to alchemize these traumas by means of her over-developed intellect. This novel found me during a time when grad school seemed as though it was actively trying to kill me. And yet I was caught by its lures of career, achievement, intelligibility (of my work; of myself), unable to leave even as I felt something vital ebbing from me. Zebra’s autodidactic flame re-lit my pilot light and gave me back to myself—as well as giving yet another canon of writers who are in the process of becoming dear to me, like Mercè Rodoreda and Josep Pla.

I think books like these are especially prized by autodidacts (among whose number I still count myself, even though I finally got a BA at 30 and then an MA shortly after, before jumping back off the conveyor belt) because of their authors’ willingness to draw a map of literature (even a highly personal or otherwise idiosyncratic one) and to communicate the urgency of traveling of its routes. But even this speaks to utility, and although these texts happen to have been and continue to be useful, that is only a part of why I was moved to teach them.

I’ve been in two recent reading groups led by Ariana Reines: RILKING (video archive and zine at this link), on the Duino Elegies by Rilke, and INANNA: DAYS OF SUMER which focuses on Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth translated by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer. Ariana mentioned (and I wish I could remember how she put it) that she only wanted to run reading groups for texts that were very close to her heart, totemic.

I knew exactly what she meant. I have a copy of 3 Steps, but I also carry it around by heart, ready to consult if I should doubt that the writer must proceed through the Schools of the Dead, of Dreams, and of Roots. Zebra’s torch stays burning, like the holy flame of Vesta, ready to be re-read whenever my own flame falters again.

Though I had already been experimenting with models for teaching online, RILKING inspired me to accelerate the process by facilitating an online reading group—simpler than a class, since there is only one text and our discussion about it, and no assignments. The deciding factors for the text were 1) that it be close to me like 3 Steps and Call Me Zebra are, like Duino Elegies and Inanna are for Ariana Reines and 2) that it be something that would speak to our collective situation. Hence, The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, translated into English by Maria Jolas.

The spaces scrutinized by Bachelard are intimate spaces. We enter into the work first through images of houses, in chapters 1 and 2, then through a chapter on “Drawers, Chests and Wardrobes.” The last chapter I re-read, in preparation for the next group discussion on Tuesday, treats the “Miniature” and as it articulates some of Bachelard’s priorities in general, I quote from it below.

The Poetics of Space situates itself as a work of phenomenology, which, at its most basic level, I understand as the study of phenomena—things that occur. Where does that leave mental phenomena? Bachelard: “I myself consider literary documents as realities of the imagination, pure products of the imagination. And why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?”

Bachelard is a devotee of the oneiric, and with respect to understanding it, he takes pains to distinguish his approach from scientists, philosophers, psychoanalysts. “How many dreams told objectively, have become nothing but oneirism reduced to dust! In the presence of an image that dreams, it must be taken as an invitation to continue the daydream that created it.” Here is the same creative-critical impulse that marks Cixous’s orthographic daydreaming in 3 Steps. How well the Bachelard who, in a phrase, conjures up, “the vast museum of insignificant things” would understand the “chest-shaped suitcase” that Oloomi has Zebra convert into her “miniature museum”!

Earlier I invoked the cliché of a “map of literature” but I couldn’t avoid it, knowing (hoping) that I would arrive here at the question of orientation. Perhaps not a map of but a map into literature, and not just any genre but poetry. In part, I am reading The Poetics of Space, and helping make a space for others to read it, out of an orientation towards poetry. Bachelard on the poet: “He [sic] has no past, but lives in a world that is new. As regards the past and the affairs of this world, he has realized absolute sublimation. The phenomenologist must follow the poet.” And I speculate that Bachelard means this not only from the standpoint of the phenomenologist but also from the standpoint of the bashful human who has been actively discouraged from dreaming.

Bachelard finds in the bold imagery of poets the authorization to dream more expansively. We can find that in his writing, too, as well as a possible approach to the question of how to stay at home, in our rooms—our ‘nests,’ and in our physically isolate selves—our shells. “Thus the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world.” The house is an egg—why not?—gestating something within (let’s hope it’s the end of capitalism).

My partner is in the group, as are friends from high school, friends from my time in SF and Oakland, friends from my current life in Northampton, and a few folks (cheesy to say new friends?) from RILKING. I still long for a group of people sitting around my coffee table, but this group wouldn’t be possible without some serious travel on the part of its participants—and it feels like such a dream group, in both senses of the word: dreamy (heart eyes emoji) and dream-like, in the unlikeliness of the combination of its members under normative spatiality.

It feels good to host reading groups like this, and I plan to continue. There are many forking paths for readers, and I’m trying to follow two. In the first few sessions of The Poetics of Space reading group, Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology came up a few times as we attempted to define phenomenology, and to trace the thinkers and works that preceded Bachelard and the ones that followed. It feels intuitively right to me to follow a male thinker from the past with a contemporary self-styled “feminist killjoy.” Race and queerness are also outside of Bachelard’s scope, and Ahmed engages both in this text.

The other path I’m trying to follow is that of poetry. While it makes sense to follow theory with theory, I’ve been longing to do more reading aloud as a group and to encounter poetry not at one degree of separation (as we arguably do with Bachelard) but directly. And reading Inanna and exulting in the archaic mode, but also, specifically, a story in which a goddess steals power from a god, descends to the underworld and returns, makes me think of Alice Notley, whose Descent of Alette it helped inspire. Rather than Alette, which I’ve re-read more recently, it’s Songs and Stories of the Ghouls I want to return to—a text that was on the reading list for Vampire Poetics, a workshop that Laura Moriarty graciously allowed me to co-facilitate with her some years back.

Inanna founds a city. Notley has this same founding energy cathected with the millennia of gendered betrayal that turns her lyric voice into a howling wind that will raze the city, civilization, even signification itself, to their foundations.

My plan is to continue a twice a week schedule, but one meeting would be on the Ahmed and the other one on the Notley. Participants could read both or just pick one. I’ll necessarily be in both (with anyone else who’s up for it), seeing what comes out of this braid! These next groups will start shortly, so please email if you’re interested.