Читать книгу The Baudelaire Fractal - Lisa Robertson - Страница 9

I awake in a hotel room. I hear gulls, the clinking and rocking of boats. I turn in the wide bed. The tightness and stiffness of the sheets feels pleasantly confining. In the first stirrings of thinking I discover within myself a strangeness – not a dislocation or a dissociation, but a freshening shimmer of sensual clarity shot through with strands of unmoored refusal and scorn. Beneath that, a slowly vibrating warp of erotic sadness. I abandon myself to this novel sensation. I open my eyes. Reader, I become him. Was that what I felt? No, I did not become him; I became what he wrote.

Do you sometimes at earliest waking observe yourself struggling towards a pronoun? Do you fleetingly, as if from a great distance, strain to recall who it is that breathes and turns? Do you ever wish to quit the daily comedy of transforming into the I-speaker without abandoning the wilderness of sensing? The sensation isn’t morbid; it is ultimately disinterested. For me it’s a familiar moment, boring and persistent and disappointing. Again one arrives at the threshold of this particular, straitening I. With a tiny wincing flourish one enters the wearisome contract, sets foot to planks. Daily the humiliation is almost forgotten, until it blooms again with the next waking. It is an embarrassing perception best stoically flicked aside, left unreported. With an obscure hesitation one steps into the day and its frame and its costume.

Between the puzzlement and its summary abandonment, between the folds of waking consciousness and their subsequent limitation, is a possible city. Solitude, hotels, aging, love, hormones, alcohol, illness – these drifting experiences open it a little. Sometimes prolonged reading holds it ajar. Another’s style of consciousness inflects one’s own; an odd syntactic manner, a texture of embellishment, pause. A new mode of rest. I can feel physiologically haunted by a style. It’s why I read ideally, for the structured liberation from the personal, yet the impersonal inflection can persist outside the text, beyond the passion of readerly empathy, a most satisfying transgression that arrives only inadvertently, never by force of intention. As if seized by a fateful kinship, against all the odds of sociology, the reader psychically assumes the cadence of the text. She sheds herself. This description tends towards a psychological interpretation of linguistics, but the experience is also spatial. I used to drive home from my lover’s apartment at 2 a.m., 3 a.m. This was Vancouver in 1995. A zone of light-industrial neglect separated our two neighbourhoods. Between them the stretched-out city felt abandoned. My residual excitement and relaxation would extend outwards from my body and the speeding car, towards the dilapidated warehouses, the shut storefronts, the distant container yards, the dark exercise studios, the pools of sulphur light, towards a low-key dereliction. I would feel pretty much free. I was a driver, not a pronoun, not a being with breasts and anguish. I was neither with the lover nor alone. I was suspended in a nonchalance. My cells were at ease. I doted on nothing.

Now, after a long absence, I had returned to Vancouver as a visitor. I had delivered the lecture on wandering, tailoring, idleness, and doubt. I had conversed, feasted, slept. The following morning, alone in the hotel, I awoke to the bodily recognition that I had become the author of the complete works of Baudelaire. Even the unwritten texts, the notes and sketches contemplated and set aside, and also all of the correspondence, the fizzles and false starts and abandoned verses, the diaristic notes: I wrote them. Perhaps it is more precise to say that all at once, unbidden, I received the Baudelairean authorship, or that I found it within myself. This is obviously very different from being Baudelaire, which was not the case, nor my experience. I had only written his works.

It was a very quiet, neutral sensation. I associate it now with the observation of the immaterial precision of light.

Such an admission will seem frivolous, overdetermined, baroque. But I will venture this: it is no more singular for me to discover that I have written the complete works of Baudelaire than it was for me to have become a poet, me, a girl, in 1984. I was as if concussed. Believe me if you wish. I understand servitude. My task now is to fully serve this delusion.

Delusion needs an architecture; this hotel room became for a crucial instant the portal for a transmission seeking a conduit. Garments, rooms, paintings, desire: in each of these perceptual frames, there is the feeling of the movement of time as an inner experience made available to sensing and the wilderness of interpretation by way of material borders or limits. Time is my body, and it is also others’ bodies; it could next become sentences, and the reflexive pause within the phrase. This is grace, I think: the achievement, in the company of strangers, of the necessary precision of the pause. A sentence flourishes only as a pause in thought, which extends the invitation of an identification. The great amateurs of fashion understand this supple grace. Garments can translate a city, map a previously unimagined mode of freedom or consent. A garment is a pause in textile. The pause admits untimeliness. One part of time acts counter to the will; one part of our bodily life is always and only untimely. We enter the room at precisely the wrong moment; we trip against the furniture, bruising our hips; we wake in the morning unable to recognize a suitable pronoun among the conventional phonemes. The garment must dress our untimeliness. I’m looking for the nonchalance expressed in an oddly shaped collar, a collar that appears to want to lift in the breeze of an open window to caress the line of my jaw. I’m intimate with the clumsy humour of buttons, the way a new kind of fit in a tailored jacket lifts my kidneys a little, coaxing open a readerly concave chest. At night the girls in galleries suddenly wear bright fringed shawls that move when they laugh, with hair slashed straight and high across their brows. There’s a new textile, it seems, something from sports or a futuristic movie. It’s lightweight and silvery, and the kids have plucked it off the internet to wear on the bus. It’s being held to their skinny bodies by their heavy backpacks and the home-tattooed arms they slide across one another’s waists. There’s the erotic shimmer of a silk-thin band T-shirt on breast skin. The emotional synchrony of garments transmits discontinuously and by energetic means, thus the metaphysical appeal of fashion. I had studied this question of fashion’s intellectual spirit in some of its great theorists – Lilly Reich, for example, and Rei Kawakubo – but also in my relationships to garments of every provenance. They need not have value in the commercial sense. There are the cast-offs and rejects, on eBay, in charity shops, draped over fences in modest residential alleys, swagging the rims of dumpsters by the apartment blocks, and certainly I have been a passionate amateur of their study and occasional acquisition. But here I’m not talking about the material research, as all-absorbing as it can become in its gradual, irregular advancement, but the mood of a garment, the way an emotional tone is brought forward in the wearing, in the suggestive affinities of the toilette. The unfamiliar set of a shoulder or the tugging sensation of a row of tight wrist buttons can hint at the gestural vocabulary of a previous epoch and so substitute for eroded or disappeared sentimental mores. Time in the garment is what I repeatedly sought, because sartorial time isn’t singular but carries the living desires of bodies otherwise disappeared. This has been part of my perverse history of garment-love; I’ve wanted to inhabit the stances, gestures, and caresses of vanished passions and disciplines. And the various garments each person gathers to wear together, the way she groups fibres, colours, eras, social codes, and cuts, this mysterious grammar speaks beyond the tangible and often-cited economies and their various political constraints. I keep a home-sewn pale yellow silk shantung jacket that I haven’t worn for decades because it once matched the hair of the girl who became my grandmother. I discovered this the season I myself was pale blonde, in 1983, the year of my grandmother’s death. Garments are not signs in a signifying system, not in my cosmology. Fashion is the net of the history of love.

The hotel room was decorated with two prints of paintings, both seascapes. Around these portal-like rectangles the walls and fabrics were all placid tints of pale green and grey. It was curious that the decorator had taken such pains to establish an aquatic theme, given that Vancouver’s own harbour was visible from the window. Yet these were not port images. They showed only unpeopled, unfigured planes of sky and sea, rendered in watercolour with some expertise, bisected or linked by their horizons. This now-tasteful minimalism of the previous decade left a polite space for reverie, as did the furnishings. I can’t recall the carpet. It was Poe who said that the soul of an apartment is its carpet, and by this measure, I have rarely occupied a hotel room that could be said to have a soul. But I am not sure that I want a hotel room to have a soul, since the task of that innocuous limbo is to shelter mine, and unimagined others’, with as few contradictions as possible. I go to the hotel to evade determination. What I thought of, what I imagined in this blandly contrived place as I woke, were those marvellously glowing baroque harbours by Claude Lorrain, the ones hanging in the Louvre. Listening to the boat sounds from my bed, watching the pale light slide in from beneath the sage-tinted curtain, I pictured the tall porticos rising on both sides of the sheltered water, pale columns rhyming with masts, the cheerful flapping of faded flags, the wooden hull of a great ship discharging cattle and wrapped bundles by means of little boats, bare-chested stevedores straining at their work while others, in red-and-blue belted tunics and matching turbans, stand by and discuss serious matters: impending weather conditions or import duties or the precarity of love. A cow in a sky-blue harness is being led by a man in a loincloth across a narrow gangplank to shore. I still keep an old postcard of this image, now bleached of its warm tones after being propped for several years on a sunny window ledge, so that my imagination of Claude has transmuted to cool-grey-green-blue, like the veiled marine sun of the Pacific port I now woke to. The more the Claude postcard fades, the more it resembles what I know.

The two imaginary seaports by Claude, these complex frontiers of an urban ambiance, as Guy Debord described them, were rivalled in their beauty, he said, by the Paris metro maps conveniently posted at stations. The affinity of the maps and Claude’s seaports had to do, he claimed, with his characteristically utopian vagueness, with ‘a sum of possibilities’ rather than any compositional aesthetics. It’s a literary mode of comparison, using not signs as its components, but the transformative potency of transitions. Metaphors, in other words. His method also takes into account the anticipation of transitions, not only the events themselves, which is what I like about metaphor, and about Debord: time is perversely multiplied. Nothing replaces anything else; contradictory sensations acquire contingent truth. The baroque seaports of Claude Lorrain exist right now as future potentials. I would agree with Debord about the psychogeographic equivalence of the harbour’s beauty with the modern transports, but with the proviso that the similarity holds only for the time before one has ever visited Paris, when the metro and its map is still a pittoresque novella by Queneau borrowed from a smalltown library, or glimpsed in a scene in a film by Godard, the one for example where Anna Karina, her childish face and pulled-back hair being lightly stroked all the while by her lover, looks at the presumed sadness of the other metro passengers – the moody boy with the cake box, the bored businessman reading the newspaper – and recites, then sings aloud, a poem by Aragon: Things are what they are. From time to time the earth trembles. The train pulls up to a station called Liberté. But is there a station called Liberty? I have never noticed it on any line I’ve travelled. And were the men sad? Maybe they were just angry. The tautly inflected instant of transformation between vocal recital and song, the poignant artifice of the threshold marked by a slight catch in her voice, a kind of physiological caesura or inflation that also seems spiritual, is what I recall most intensely of this film, first seen on a small static-strewn television screen in one of the shared sprawling apartments of the eighties, those roughly furnished places now mythic for their three-day parties and cut-up poems strewn across patterned blue carpets, also faded. Those carpets had soul – the pile rubbed bare to the rough jute warp in places of passage, the arabesque, as Poe called it, not only traced out in gridded botanical curlicues by the yarn of the pile, but stamped directly onto the now-visible jute backing with a kind of indelible blue-black ink. True, Poe preferred crimson carpets.

Transposed maps of different regions would be a variant explanation. The Vancouver hotel room I occupied that morning seemed in my state of half-wakefulness to contain all the hotel rooms and temporary rooms I had ever stayed in, not in a simultaneous continuum, nor in chronological sequence, but in flickering, overlapping, and partial surges, much in the way that a dream will dissolve into a new dream yet retain some colour or fragment of the previous dream, which across the pulsing transition both remains the same and plays a new role in an altered story, like a psychic rhyme, or a printed fabric whose complex pattern is built up across successive layers of impression, each autonomously perceptible but also leading the perceiver to cognitively connect the component parts in an inner act of fictive embellishment, so strong is the desire to recognize a narrative among scattered fragments of perception. My own youth seems to move in my present life in such a way – present and absent, at times incoherent, sometimes frightening, scarcely recognizable, rhyming and drifting.

I’m writing this in 2016 in a rented cottage at the edge of fields in central France. My task is to re-enter, by means of sentences, the course of my early apprenticeship. The desire to make a representative document began only with the involuntary incident in the hotel, the authorship that arrived both gradually and all at once. For a long time I have been more or less content with arcane researches that lead me into lush but impersonal lyric. Now I feel I must account for this anachronistic event; I’ll follow it back to unspoken things. I want to make a story about the total implausibility of girlhood. This morning I’m at the round table under the linden tree, in a sweet green helmet of buzzing. Each of its pendulous flowers seems to be inhabited by a bee. They don’t mind me – they’re rapturously sucking nectar. I’m at the core of a breezy chandelier of honey. I’m sitting beneath the linden tree holding at bay the skepticism of my calling, describing how all at once, in a hotel by a harbour, I was seized by a kinship; how very slowly, in a weaving between cities and rooms, I became what I am not. Time has a style the way bodies do. There are turns and figures of iteration and relationship. But also times and bodies overlap. This work must annotate those parts of experience that evade determination. Here my fidelity is for the antithetical nature of the feminine concept. I was a girl. I could not escape desire, but now I can turn to contemplate it, and so convert my own complicity into writing. In this landscape time is pliable; it’s a place of nightingales and poorness and wild cherry trees. Spring comes, slow and sudden. I’ll work with that. I’ll make this account using my nerves and my sentiment.

I’m writing this story backwards, from a shack in middle age. I sit and wait for as long as it takes until I intuit the shape of a sentence. Sometimes I feel that it is the room that writes. But it needs the hot nib of my pronoun.

In the cold autumn of 1984, when I was twenty-three years old, I decided to change my life. I flew from Vancouver to London with the plan to seek a new citizenship, continue to Paris, settle, and look for work. I carried one overpacked rip-stop nylon duffle bag, a sheaf of documents, and my typewriter. I found a hotel room near Victoria Station in what purported to be a Polish veterans’ hostel, or that is what the sign said, where the cheapest of the remaining rooms, at eight pounds a night, was in the basement, with the word Storage written over the door. Perhaps the proprietor referred to it as the garden level. I did not mind because beside it was the bathroom, which had a very deep and long bathtub and a good supply of hot water, making it the warmest place in London that cold month. This bath was the antidote to the chilly museums where I passed my days sketching and writing in my diary, and my vain meanderings in Bloomsbury in search of the tea room where H.D. transformed herself to an Imagist in 1912. The second and important richness of the room, beyond its proximity to the bath, was the breakfast brought singingly to my door each morning by the Polish hotelman. Incredulous, I listed the contents of that tray in my diary: a tall glass of orange juice, a mug of very hot coffee, a demitasse of milk, a bowl of sugar, two eggs perfectly boiled, two slices of ham, a glass of marmalade, a plate with four slices of buttered brown bread and half a baguette, a tinfoil-wrapped candy, four chocolate lady’s fingers, and a piece of cream-filled cake. So I would put three pieces of brown bread and all the sweets aside for my supper, returning from my day’s wanderings with some cheese and lettuce to make sandwiches. He would place the tray each morning on a small table covered with a yellow plasticized cabbage-rose-patterned cloth, which oddly matched the room’s small hooked carpet, yellow also, dingy, and incongruously ornamented with a brown cartoon bear. The wooden stand beside the narrow blue metal bed held a crucifix, a King James Bible, a spool of blue thread with a needle ready in it, and a 22p stamp. There also I kept the few books I travelled with – used paperback copies of Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, Martin Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought, Sylvia Plath’s Winter Trees, and a beautifully bound volume of Beat translations of classical Chinese poetry called Old Friend from Far Away. Why these books? Chance, I suppose. I was ardent and inexperienced in my reading, earnestly drawing up lists of necessary future studies at the back of my diary, and as I read I seemed to float above the difficult and clever pages, in a haze of worshipful incomprehension. I imagined that simple persistence would slowly transform this vagueness to the hoped-for intelligent acuity, and in a way I was not wrong, although it was not true acuity that I later entered into, but the gradual ability, similar to the learning of a new handcraft, to perceive the threads linking book to book, and so to enter, through reading, a network of relationship. I might call this my education; save my gambits in parks and museums, I had had no other. Later this network would become an irritant, like a too-tight jacket, a binding collar. To counter this sad diminishment in my credulity, and to enter again the pleasurable drift, the sensual plenum of my youth, where even incomprehension was mildly erotic, in my middle age here in the cottage I have started to read French. I began with high-brow pornography, developing a taste for Pauline Réage, and eventually I moved from pornography to linguistics, and thence to poetry, led by Émile Benveniste and his theories of rhythm and semantics, to the works of Baudelaire. I was stunned by the sheer elegance of Benveniste’s thought and puzzled by his absence from the North American canons. He led me to a fresh thinking of the movement of meaning in poetry; I abandoned the cult of the sign. I have had absolutely no irritating institutional knowledge to trouble my French reading, which is necessarily very partial and flawed. But I have with time lost the immature sense of self-incapacity, so useful in my earlier studies as a disciplining constraint. Always there would be something else that needed to be consulted before I could understand the book in hand. Always my path to that other text was slow, dependent on chance, libraries, and time-consuming love affairs. By the time I had laboriously located the errant reference, my own position had shifted. So my self-education took on an unintentional rigour. Now, with gusto, in the other language, I enter the cavalier abandonment of effortfulness.

I slept in that dark room in London for several weeks as I waited to procure a British passport. I had learned that I was eligible for this identity thanks to the accident of my father’s birth in London. I am aware of how implausible this seems from the perspective of contemporary politics, but in 1984, with the appropriate paperwork in hand, a Canadian daughter of a British-born father could expect to receive British citizenship in under three weeks. Just before the Second World War, my paternal grandfather, a young radio genius fresh from the Saskatchewan farm, had travelled to England from Canada with his new wife to take a job in early radar technology. My grandmother had told me that she arrived in England already pregnant, continuously seasick during the Atlantic crossing on the empty coal freighter in which she and her economical husband had narrow wooden berths. Could that be so? I recall her telling me that when the empty ship docked in Liverpool, they had had to disembark by way of a flexible ladder thrown down the side of the steel hull from the high-riding deck, and when she arrived on the dock, the front of her new pastel-coloured travelling suit was deeply soiled. My grandmother was proud and precariously fashionable; this image hurt us both. They made their way from the entry port to the capital. And so my father was born to his young Canadian mother in a suburb of London, and so I visited this city nearly fifty years later to make claims to my identity, by means of various paper documents proving my father’s birth, my parents’ marriage, and my own legitimate, fully breach birth in Toronto during the crisis of the Bay of Pigs. I make the point regarding legitimacy since that was the purpose of the paperwork I presented to a woman in a cubicle of the passport office late one afternoon – to show the administrative traces of a patrilineal thread of blood linking me to this inhospitable island. When asked during the perfunctory interview, I had explained that I was applying for my British citizenship in order to live in France, and that I urgently wished to leave Britain. She didn’t seem to mind. I received my new identity.