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The Fragility of Writing

Notes on a Trilogy

The Book of Landings consists of the second and third volumes of a trilogy. The first volume was published as Entrepôt in 2010. Around the time this volume was going to press, I started to think of lyric poetry as dubiously fragile and apt to crumble over time, to become vapor. The wordiness of the poem acted subversively, because the more words you have the further you are from the hard core of perception. But at the same time, confusedly, more words appear to lend weight to immaterial thoughts. To reach a state of durability, the poem needed fewer, not more, words. You needed words to act like stones, an indivisible geological unit. Or, you needed words to act like a mark made by the hand on the wall of a cave, like a physical cutting into a surface, such as a mark formed by cutting into a sheet of vellum with a sharp stylus. You needed a mark unifying the deformation of a surface—cutting into a block of wood—with its meaning. How to make a poem consist of such marks? What would such a poem be like? It would be brief, even fragmentary, for the operations of ordinary syntax would be minimized. Ideally, and also impossibly, such a poem would consist of one word, one mark only, a mark exactly equal to, and indistinguishable from, what it represented: a symbol. But obviously for the word to be durable it must be related to other words and to a sufficiently forceful perception of the world. A poem must consist of more than one word, and yet this plurality increases its fragility; but a word by itself is hardly anything at all.

Thoughts such as these led me to draw a grid of rectangles and to try to see by what relationships of “sight, sound, and intellection” the grid might be filled in with 12 words. I looked back at a page in Volume I of the trilogy from the poem “Gadji Beri Bimba,” where hand-drawings are imposed over text. My reason for making those drawings in “Gadji Beri Bimba” had to do with a desire to efface the previously inscribed language on the page and to accentuate the presence of alien, non-verbal forms. But for Volume II, the impulse was not to efface but to transfix the word, to isolate it, to give it due respect, to heighten its word-ness, by placing it inside a rectangle. The geometry of the grids, and the graphic markings on the page, were what drew me at first, the permanence and materiality of marks as opposed to the immateriality of verbal meanings. The defacement of the two pages in Volume I left more to do.

I must have started by writing down a word in the square of a grid—a word like souk.

To write down any next word I tested several words in my mind against words previous selected, mainly for how they might coexist and throw up an imaginary field without encroaching semantically or phonemically too much on the terrain proposed thus far by the words already present in the grid. I paid no attention to choosing words that, together, could simulate the behavior of a lyric poem, or sum up to a narrative of sorts, because what I wanted to do was counteract the lyric poem’s fragility. But there is a “logic” to the array of words inside any of the grids; the words belong together, and when read either horizontally, diagonally, or vertically, one word follows after another, but as a vector might bear away from a given trajectory.

The filling in happened intermittently, but the lexicon, or reservoir, was present right at the start. It came from the world engaged by Volume I and by the idea of an “entrepôt.” In common usage, an entrepôt is a place set up for the trans-shipment of goods. Charting a multitude of separate in-bound vectors, objects enter the entrepôt from different external sites. The entrepôt collects these objects, formerly stationed or manufactured elsewhere, in one place—arranges a temporary meeting, as it were, of the disparate and the strange. But then, the objects are dispatched from the entrepôt onto new, outward-bound trajectories, towards their final destinations.

In my elaboration, an entrepôt is not a proper place, but a noman’s-land. Entrepôt exists apart from—on the outside of, or in between—places where national identity takes root and where nations have their durable geographical dwelling. Entrepôt punctuates the passage of bodies in space from one location to another. As such, the space of entrepôt is related to the refugee camp and to the ground bordered but not occupied by warring factions. The area around the port of a city is an entrepôt: polyglot, fertile ground for the emergence of hybrid tongues and argots. A slave ship is an especially violent entrepôt, a node in a network of other sites of gathering and dispersal: the dungeon, where slaves were temporarily housed on the West Coast of Africa; and the auction blocks of the Americas, whence they were scattered again to the plantations. These spaces—refugee camp, no-man’s-land, seaport, ship, auction block, plantation—are abstracted from the geography of the nation-state. Dedicated to flux and transition, they frame the passage of bodies from nation to exile, but decline to offer the privileges of a stable society. For in the hiatus between previous origin and future destination there is a meeting of discrepant horizons. Gathered together briefly at the entrepôt is a heterogeneity of national costumes, which mingle and exert a reciprocal influence on one another, and which then emerge from the exit as hybrid or fragmentary forms. As a “no-place,” entrepôt is related to paradise or utopia. But utopia, a vision of perfected polis, is the negative face of the system of transit, the inverse of entrepôt. Utopia is the destination longed for, but never attained, the form never concluded, in the passage.

In Fragments from a Time before This, the rectangles share a lexicon of entrepôt—that is to say, words dealing with exploration, conquest, warfare, migration, nomadism, transitional spaces like markets, sacred passages like thresholds and crossroads, voyages in time and space, together with words drawn from enterprises devoted to describing or facilitating movement, as, for example, the study of geography, cartography, navigation, even mathematics and cosmology. Because of this lexicon, the rectangles become vehicles for various specific metaphors: the grid of 12 rectangles serves to trap or arrest objects (words) in their flight; the grid reduces the chaos of forced migration, propelled by violent episodes such as wars, to the orderliness of a formal system, an abstract design; the grids clean up the situation, and impose stability on identities that are transient; the grids are formalized abstractions of various kinds of terrain, over which migrations take place. Hence, the borders of the grid are open to the border-spaces of the page, and open to the texts on other pages of the book. As the alphabet of the trilogy, words from the lexicon can “migrate” to other poems in both Volume II and III, evincing meanings from their usage in those contexts and suggesting another metaphor—another function—for the grids: origins, places to begin from, to go astray from.

Beginnings are repeated, then. The open structure of space in “Fragments from a Time before This” became clearer to me at this point. In the first volume, entrepôt is a mediating term in a binary system of source and destination. The vector of passage looks like this: here there. But in Fragments, the vector of passage does not conclude at a destination. In keeping with the metaphor of the grids as places of departure, in this book space has the structure of a sequence of origins; or what amounts to the same thing, a sequence of destinations: (t)here (t)here (t)here (t)here (t)here (t)here … without end, the form of an infinite series. Entrepôt now expresses the mobility of a diaspora that has no limit: a metamorphosis of forms already hybridized, and a perpetual yielding towards otherness.

This perpetual yielding is made palpable by the fragmentary texts scattered on the pages of the book. This is especially conspicuous in the graphic layout of the sections entitled “12 Rectangles” and “Line Drawings.” There one encounters inconclusive or distorted texts, together with brief meditations on the desert, on abstract painting, on nomadism; one encounters the parts of geometry, horizontal lines, vertical lines, spaces partitioned, words next to invisible borders. The scattering of pieces, even pieces of geometry, appeared to me as the product of a violent machine. And the ruined form of the pages brought to mind, not the detritus of the West, but that of scattered exiles in dissolution from what Empire had wrought, when the binary still held.

The explanation of the fragments was devised after the fact of the pages, upon the terrain of another metaphor. Overtly incomplete, the fragment of any object exhibits a dislocation in time from an original moment of assembly: what was once a whole has, over time, become disiecta membra (the “scattered limbs” of a body). As a synecdoche pointing to a greater whole, the fragment of an otherwise lost work is a broken piece, an intimation of more—a neverending incitement to nostalgia. It is a memorial of violence done to, and suffered by, a body of work in its tradition from the writer’s hand to the copyist or printer to the library, and down through time. Arrested in the present after a long and deleterious passage, the fragment, and the collage of fragments, both serve to mark the modernity of forms: all that we can today possess of the past are fragments from a whole that existed at some previous date.

In a serial poem, the fragment intensifies thought: “only by means of the sharpest focus on a single point can the individual idea gain a kind of wholeness,” says Schlegel in the Lyceum Fragments. In my reading of “Fragments from a Time before This,” the inscription of diaspora takes the form of the relocated fragment, the fragment of speech that has been displaced, sent out of its place and put out of its time, repeatedly. With the shift in the structure of space (here and there are identical), so that beyond entrepôt lies only another entrepôt, came a sense of limits—a boundary of which the first volume had no awareness. So long as I concentrated upon the basic structure of origin to destination, mediated by passage through an entrepôt, the future could still hold promise, which I had called Utopia in the first volume. But, now, with entrepôt generalized and equivalent to space, so that beyond entrepôt lies only another entrepôt, the promise of a destination was dissolved. The future retreated to the vanishing point of all perspectival trajectories. Entrepôt was shown to me in a new light, as the artifact of an epoch—the Age of Empire—prior to our own future, a future in which the structure of space had changed, in which transit led only to further transit.

For lots of reasons, this situation alarmed me. For one thing, it seemed as if in looking for an antidote to the fragility of writing I had instead found the opposite. What else is writing if not the future imagined? If metamorphosis is perpetual, what is the ground of poetry? Poetry needs the anchor of nations and the national language if it is to be read and kept in play, but a future in which the horizon is perpetually transcended will not have nations. This is a complicated thought, full of conflict, for me, since one of my impulses has always been to write against the grain of national culture.