archive : s0metim3s

I keep bumping into literary references, or perhaps they bump into me. Sometimes more literally than literary and so more bumpy than I’d like, or the references are more acutely visceral than I’d prefer. At other times with surprise and delight, or simply as a prompt to overtly read what is sensed, is there.

Calypso, having asked me what I “do”, and my having answered that I “write”, decides I’m a poet. Since I feel like my writing has gone (more) essayic haiku of late, I let her think this – but I suspect her deciding I’m a poet has a lot to do with the two lines of Latin she is needling into my arm.

She asks if I’ve read Poe’s “The Raven”, and wants to know (asks more than once) which interpretation I think is more accurate. Says she’s been reading it because her partner died recently, along with some texts on it, because she’s been reading the French translation (her first language) and is not sure of which sense to give it. Her question, though I abbreviate and reword, is whether the raven is external or interior, its declaration of ‘nevermore’ an objective judgement of absolute finitude or whether indicative of an internal torment and anxiety. For her, the latter becomes an opening, suggestive of a meeting her partner again, in some elsewhere or beyond. The former a closure.

This is a persistent questioning from her, as she inscribes in black ink. I have a moment of wondering whether, given I’m dressed in black, she thinks I’m the gothic Poe or, worse, the vexing raven come to haunt her.

But I answer in the only way it seems possible to, given what’s being cut into my skin at that point: that nothing and no one disappears; there is only the transformation of atoms, permutations, though there is certainly finitude of the singular.

Much as I have to admit I’m thrown by this turn of the conversation from which font to use to death, or perhaps more by the unprovoked evocation of love and loss and death, I’m more fascinated with her deeply melancholic name, the very playfully serious identification with grief she has assumed, studies, asks those she tattoos about (assuming I wasn’t the only one). Calypso, of course, having died of heartbreak – at least in the Homeric telling of the story of Ulysses.

I wonder for a moment whether all this means I should have got one of the other two fragments from Lucretius I was considering getting tattooed instead (either viarum omnis flexus or mutatis motibus alte) since they refer to profound changes and meandering journeys. But I like the tenacious materiality of the one I got, and it’s been a longstanding favourite.

But, tonight, I end up pondering Tennyson’s “Lucretius”, that version of Lucretius’ death which casts his wife as a toxic Calypso. According to Tennyson, so jealous was Lucilla, and so bothered by his writerly inattentiveness, that she administered a love potion which – after inducing a lengthy, orgiastic delirium about breasts and planets – turns out to be fatal. I suppose that is some kind of forever, the wish for a never-ending love that, in its solicitation of a never-existing infinitude, can only but imply death, that literally morbid invocation of the “til death us do part”. This, of course, was Tennyson’s critical response to the romanticisation of suicide during Victorian times, though he retains some romantic notion of suicide as manly.

But I have to say, I’m more than a little preoccupied by breasts than usual, my having to decide on surgical procedures tomorrow. I have to blink a little when I read Tennyson’s lines about swords piercing breasts. But remind myself, smiling, of Lucretius’ spear and boundary lines; that permutations are those which cross borders, as risky as mutation can be. And I’m recalling, also smiling, some recent conversations about planets, that very Lucretian conjuncture between the atomic (cellular) and cosmic that is so very sensual and yet, consciously at least, inclined to imagine that what is sensual does not involve sex.

Tennyson’s reading certainly brings the stormy, orgiastic sense of the Lucretian sensorium to the fore, though ultimately for the purpose of dutifully tut-tutting it, in a manly way. Lucretius, too, put some effort, and failed, into cleaving from the sensorium its sexual aspects, if not exactly its feminine figures (eg, Alma Venus and Iphigenia).

Which is to say: this limit on the sensory, this specifically manly border, has its conditions, its theatrics. It requires that the woman be an agent of death, to kill herself (Calypso who dies of grief) or for her to kill (Lucilla the poisoner). Leaving aside the whole complex of sex and death, since I never understood the connection (it always seemed the inverted-premise of sex as reproduction, and so, incomprehensible to me), what fascinates me here is the way in which these narratives distinguish between movement and rest as if the parallel distinction is that between work and love, or writing and affection if this is considered more broadly.

Ulysses is seduced away from work/war and his travels to love and repose in the arms of Calypso, for a time. Tennyson’s Lucretius is depicted as inattentive to love when writing. These are heroically Homeric, and obviously Cartesian, splits – but also patenly non-existent if one assumes a less normative understanding of sex, and the sensory, let alone if one takes pleasure in those stormy, orgiastic passages from De Rerum.

Meandering around, then, I wonder if this isn’t one sense in which the tension that resides within precariousness might be reposed, to mutate into chimera rather than produce another dialectic, one that will have to cross some very normative, perhaps also Fordist boundary-lines between movement and rest, promiscuous/queer and loyal/familial, work and leisure, factory and home, writing/sense and sex/sensual, etc.

No raven here, much as I love to play with gothic. Or, perhaps if one plays with the raven, transforms its squawks into fluffy, galloping rhyme as did Poe, it couldn’t possible torment with a romanticised finitude that is also an invitation to lethal, manly dreams of everlasting.