"Neither Fear Nor Sadness"

Ay sudamerica

Canto a su amor desaparecido

Notes:

“In other words, the bodies dropped from airplanes entered the landscape and became a part of the country’s ‘natural environment’”

This goes back to violence and erasure – ways to erase memory – to disappear the things that you don’t want to see. I’m thinking – as the bodies become a part of the landscape the violence done to the bodies also becomes a part of the landscape – so that the natural and violence can never be divorced – the mountain, seas, lakes, rivers – all become one mass grave – a landscape of violence and bodies.

Paraphrase: why the recurrent appearance of the natural world in Zurita’s work:

I’m thinking: The dead/tortured/murdered end up fertilizing the landscape – the landscapes “eats” the bodies as they decompose and through agriculture we eat the bodies that have fertilized our crops – the violence done to the bodies is encapsulated in the body and we ingest the violence and their disappearance – a sort of loving nurturing cannibalism – but in the way that the decomposition fertilizes the landscape the bodies cannot be separated from the landscape and become a part of it physically – therefore we have to return to the natural world in order to return to the dead – to the body – to the self – to the people. So – are these bodies void of love? does it cycle back through? They are the disappeared, but has their love also disappeared? Like the violence in their bodies – does any love melt into the landscape as well? Is it absorbed and cannibalized too?

I’m thinking: of penetrability/permeability. The body enters the landscape – Zurita enters our heads – his poetry permeates – “now that you got in / here into our nightmares, through pure verse/ and guts” (3) – not only the reader, but the disappeared, those that remain, the criminals, the government, history, etc. The poem penetrates the heart – “can you tell me where my son is?” (3). Also a sort of morphing that comes with the undulation of identity. Though our interaction with this elegy we interact with the crimes of Pinochet, the time period in Chile, and (in a sense) become a part of this mourning: “to all of us, we are tortured, pigeon of love, Chilean Countries and murderers” (5).

Then again, Borzutzky’s introduction also reminds us that Canto a su amor desaparecido is also about the love that has disappeared. The second stanza focuses on this love – much of the poems focuses on love – “I was collapsed at your side thinking that if was the one who threw myself over you. the grass will be growing, I imagined. In reality I prefer the stones, I thought, no, the grass. I thought it was you and it was me. That I still lived, but as I crawled over you something from your life denied me. It lasted a second, because afterwards you crumbled and the love grew in us like the murderers.” (10)

“deserts of love” (8)

All of these proliferations of love – love that is desiccated – I am thinking “deserts of love” as a desiccated love that will rise when nourished – a dormant love like the desert – it’s just buried in the sand like seeds. Though I feel like this is a rather obvious metaphor (my interpretation I mean) – I still do think it’s generative for the poem.

"all my love is here and it has stayed” (8)

The people that have been disappeared and dropped on the landscape of Chile remain – love projected from those that love them – their love that the regime has tried to obliterate (feel like this is a bit contradictory to what I’ve said about obliteration and the existence of love in the dead but I’m exploring/examining more than wanting to make conclusions) the love that disappeared when they disappeared… but rather than denying the existence of love – Zurita magnifies the existence/permanence of love through sheer repetition, imagery, and calling on through incantation/invocation of the Barracks section of the book (12-19).

“but they never found us because our love was stuck to / the rocks the sea and the mountains” (9)

Likewise love cannot be captured so it cannot be destroyed – efforts at obliteration are useless. The love that has been dropped from the planes will never be found because the bodies themselves have disappeared into the landscape – their love soaks the earth (as much as the violence) – the palpability of the love – I think – flourishes/proliferates/undulates throughout Song for his Disappeared Love.

“I was collapsed at your side thinking that if was the one who threw myself over you. the grass will be growing, I imagined. In reality I prefer the stones, I thought, no, the grass. I thought it was you and it was me. That I still lived, but as I crawled over you something from your life denied me. It lasted a second, because afterwards you crumbled and the love grew in us like the murderers.” (10)

There is a sense of rebirth/re-creation and the natural versus the unnatural. Bodies thrown over one another – I’m thinking of them as copulating bodies but also bodies that protect one another – bodies that are natural – grass – not stones. Bodies that love like murderers – creating love like the murderers create violence – also a love that proliferates as the violence proliferates.

There is so much to write about this poem – this elegy – but I will try to keep this a bit shorter – the Niches/Barracks. The map – they are all at once formed like a graveyard/tomb but they are also seem like a sort of heaven/hell and sites for mass graves. Their appearance on the page makes them look like jail cells, very closed – suffocating the reader and the page. But within the individual niches there are huge spaces (absences – abcesses?) for the disappeared and for love. And as I was reading through each one I was thinking that they are also small history lessons – they are compressed on the page, compressed in language, compressed in time – I feel like I am getting a compressed violence, compressed love, compressed sadness – or perhaps distilled is a better word to describe all these things – histories – emotion, etc. in the poem.

One of the biggest things for me as I return to the text and read it again – I’m finding it to be always new when I read it. which is a strange thing to say after transcribing it and proofing it numerous times – but the text is always new to me. I see things I never saw before and notice images – sounds – words that I never caught before. There are so many details in words, in images, in their juxtaposition – in every molecule of the elegy that I think it’s impossible to read the same piece every time.

Unsure of what else to say (for there is too much to say) - I will leave you with this--

Written on the sky above New York 1982:

MY GOD IS HUNGER

MY GOD IS SNOW

MY GOD IS NO

MY GOD IS DISILLUSIONMENT

MY GOD IS CARRION

MY GOD IS PARADISE

MY GOD IS PAMPA

MY GOD IS CHICANO

MY GOD IS CANCER

MY GOD IS EMPTINESS

MY GOD IS WOUND

MY GOD IS GHETTO

MY GOD IS PAIN

MY GOD IS

MY LOVE OF GOD

PASTORAL MAGIC

PASTORAL MAGIC

EPIGRAPH: "We have a winding sheet in our mother’s womb which grows with us from our conception, and we come into the world wound up in that winding sheet, for we come to seek a grave.” – John Donne, Death’s Duel

EPIGRAPH: “Vesuvius clocks all black bells and lava, Niagara clocks that cataract their ticks, old time-weeping clocks with ebony beards, clocks with no hands for ever drumming out time without ever knowing what time it is.” – Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood

EPIGRAPH: “Power lies with whatever thing should be divine, with whatever law stands firm in time by nature ever-natural.” – Euripedes, The Bacchae

EPIGRAPH: “we wander a hall full of doors carrying a memory like a key,

we wander a hall full of mirrors thinking our body is a key…

meanwhile the bird goes nowhere, is nothing but

a paper dream of the exotic in a dream made of wood

while ouside the window

language grows fertile & there’s rain & there’s rain”

-- Spencer Short, “The Hotel Eden"

EPIGRAPH: “Lie back and the body will happen.

If you need to make it proper you must speak.”

-- Mary Szybist, “Again, The Body As Temple”

EPIGRAPH: “I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.” – Sylvia Plath, “Elm”

Theatre is magic.

It turns reality into pixiedust. Or blood. Disney understands this. Fairytales are bloody but Disney makes them pretty through a kind of Tinkerbell alchemy. This is perhaps a necessary re-imagining.

Coleridge took opium and had an interrupted dream. The dream took shape in the form of a sound. This sound has form. The form manifests itself in a pleasuredome which is like a landscape made out of damsel-shaped sentences. There is a synesthesia which is like a hieroglyph dressed up like an Abyssinian maid and set free to wander the icy landscape.

So : Artaud calls for “constant magic (8) which is Bataille forgetting the self while lying beside a woman which is Keats’ romantic adoration of a drawn body which is Coleridge’s synesthesia which is PASTORAL MAGIC.

Pastoral Magic is natural alchemy. It is the world which we inhabit but it is the world from the other side of a screen. The other side is where the magic happens. It is where the hieroglyphs and the totems are drawn.

Totem-ism is magic and pastoral. Most people can only receive an audiences’ benefit from Pastoral Magic because they are unwilling to engage in the necessary separation from a defined concept of “reality.” This separation is necessary for total participation. Total participation requires removal of the screen which requires a consciousness of it which is contrary to the concept of theatre which states that one should forget that one is at the theatre.

One should be aware that one is always already witnessing theatre because all people are always performing a version of themselves through language. This performance is imitative. It is imitative because there is at the base of it the idea of a person. Artaud’s theatre of immersion is a theatre in which the people are not people. All of the people in the Theatre of Cruelty are dolls because they are playing at being people.

Dolls do not have spirits but Bataille wants to privilege the spirit. Keats wants to “pipe to spirit deities” through the silent song of the hieroglyphic figures. Coleridge’s music is like a spirit. If there is a wounded body which is reality is the spirit a salve?

In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche posits that religion is a sickness which “heals” the “sickness” of society by eviscerating the body. Artaud’s plague-theatre does the same thing. So do Bataille’s penises. Is the spirit an immunization or a bloodletting?

Is pastorality the infection? An infection which makes zombies? Undead figures written on an urn destined to proclaim the dead beauty of the never/ever-natural world.

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

What kind of reality-space do these figures inhabit? They are hieroglyphic bodies, performative language written on a vessel and based upon signifiers that are liberated because they are contained. They can never communicate through anything but gesture. Their story has already been written in their genesis which did not include the creation of a mouth through which to communicate words.

The urn, then, creates its own narrative as an object while simultaneously opening up its narrative because its mode of communication is visual.

Visual communication is a grand gesture. It is kissing the girl without a voice, kissing the dead girl, waking the sleeping girl. It is a gesture that is perhaps made with the mouth but it is not dependent upon it. It requires a body but the body need not be human. A body can be a screen. A body can be reality. Theatre can wound reality because it is an implement of the divine which desires to wound because “reality” disbelieves.

Theatre is the body of The Deities vs. the Mortal Body which is Reality.

Theatre is the implement of The Deities.

The Implement is designed to wound those things which are susceptible to it.

In Kubla Khan there is a dark chasm which is both savage and holy, which creates but which also destroys the surrounding landscape. It is an orifice, a mouth. It is unravaged but it ravages itself. A solar anus, of sorts. Perfect in its purity and subsequent putrefaction.

It putrefies because it is alive but it has been wounded by the dream. A dream intersects with reality. This causes a chasm. The chasm opens up and sends forth a wellspring which floods the sea. The sea is jerking off. The sea is drowning in itself. It creates and annihilates. There is a dramatic reciprocation.

EPILOGUE:

Hello Friends

Looking forward to a semester of brilliant and incisive comments.