radiant fracture

Hullo, do you know any books.

I've been listening to too much true crime and it isn't helping me plot this novel. I keep thinking what I need are murderers and spies, and they are not what I need.

On the last day of my Crave subscription I watched Tenet, which I enjoyed, even though sometimes it was more like a Bond film than a metaphysical thriller. Because it invoked time and entropy, it stirred many ideas for my novel project, including a possible ending.

So this is the sort of mindset I want to be in. A Tenet, Primer, Upstream Colour, Inception, Arrival kind of mood. More with space, dimensions, and/or perception than time, though. For preference. Although I hadn't really given that much thought to the time element of my own story, so maybe.

Therefore, I am in search of what I sometimes call metaphyctions or metaphysical novels (or stories, films, series, podcasts, poems):

Eccentric nonfiction also welcome.

I have read and loved Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, A.M. Klein's The Second Scroll, and G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday -- Cosmicomics is probably the closest to what I'm thinking of, since it cheerfully and poetically takes up all sorts of scientific ideas with such absolute ludicrous confidence.

David Eagleman's Sum might be in a similar category, though I didn't connect as much to that, and Ted Chiang's work maybe -- kind of bounced off of it, but willing to try again.

I have some Borges but could use some direction with him.

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N.B. Of course "Metaphyction" is in practice (or at least in speech) a useless word, since it would sound exactly the same as "metafiction," but I can't help that.

My bin of semi-recyclable junk bemoans its lot

What's your plan,
maker?

This God
is so insecure.

He created me, or at least allowed me
to accumulate.
Now he tries not to think about me.
Won't use me; won't kill me.

I have flecks of steel in me, bright and hard.
if he would let them be gathered
and smelted, they would shine.

What's in you
that anyone would want?

All I wish for is to be dispersed,
to vanish,
to be useful again.

I deserve death. Why won’t you give it to me?

Too much work, he says
And goes on harbouring me in his head and his kitchen,
An unborn Athena.


* * * * * *

This draft came out of a series of prompts to do with objects, and I think the scaffolding is still visible in a way I should probably do something about. But what?

I wouldn't mind revising it a bit before I read it out in Saturday's session. We'll see what Friday turns out to be like.

Thanks for asking after this, sovay.

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Although I have taken very little advantage of the sudden access to cultural events online, I did manage, weeks ago, to sign up for the Vancouver Queer Arts Festival's A Night of Storytelling.

The showdate was located in a distant, nebulous future when I signed up in, I don't know, June. Then the alert popped up and startled me yesterday, because time is just potato salad at this point.¹

I "bought tickets," which was really just RSVPing plus a donation. At the last minute, because potato salad, I sent out invitations rather haphazardly to poetic friends, and two were unoccupied enough to backchannel with me. It was like sitting and wittering together about the show without rudely interrupting the performers with noise or flickering screens.

I think the organizers did that thing where they pre-record the event and then watch it alongside us and chat in the comments field, but I'm not completely sure.

Miraculously, a video of the reading is available here. I recommend it with all of both my hearts.

[ETA: CN for subjects like trauma, transphobia, and sex work]

This is the damn lineup:²

• SD Holman (Artistic Director of the Festival - introduction)


• Danny Ramadan (Host)


• Jillian Christmas


• Jaye Simpson


• Erin-Brooke Kirsh


• Billy-Ray Belcourt


• I'm just going to say that again


• BILLY-RAY BELCOURT


• Amber Dawn

Despite the title, the event was really a poetry reading, though story of course figured.

It appeared that the performers, organizers, ASL translators, and crew were alone together in the theatre -- maybe a dozen awesome people in that big dark space, making something beautiful for us.
Maybe the best part was hearing the writers affectionately heckle one another with increasing fervour as the night progressed.

SD is the only one of the bunch I've actually hung out with by any reasonable definition. Years ago, when my ex-husband and I lived in Vancouver, we hung out quite often with SD and especially SD's partner Catherine White Holman, may she rest in power, who was a good friend of the ex. Danny Ramadan I don't know at all, but I have now liked many of his tweets. I've seen Jillian Christmas read once before at the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts. Erin-Brooke Kirsh I hadn't heard of -- she had a killer poem + miniature comment-poem/dirty joke structure. Billy-Ray Belcourt I met when he came to read at the college, and of course I was going to attend the residency with him in Banff before the apocalypse happened. Amber Dawn I've seen and met at other readings over the years. There was such a warm feeling in the circle that it was almost better than being there live, because we could sit in such an intimate way with the writers and their affection for one another.

Lemme see if I can pull out a few lines from our texting chain that will make you want to watch:

• "My queer feels like interruption." (Jaye Simpson)
• "I wanted to BOOM-BAP-strut my way back into my whiskey throne, / with the ghost of Ma Rainey riding my tail-bone" (Jillian Christmas)
• "You my friend have made a very powerless enemy." (Erin-Brooke Kirsh)
• "Sometimes a body is that which happens to you." (Billy-Ray Belcourt)
• "I bore witness. It did not ask this of me, but I wanted to keep watch of the dying everywhere, so I could figure out how to care for a bleeding sentence." (Billy-Ray Belcourt)
• "Poetry gives no particular fucks about moving forward." (Amber Dawn)
• "My queer and desperate poetry." (Amber Dawn)

Tonight I've been watching a Comic-Con@Home 2020 panel, "Shudder: 'Horror is Queer'". The speakers very much valorize queer reading as a survival practice, which I really like, since reading is so much my mode.

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Notes

1. There's an undefined enormous amount of it and yet somehow you eat it all.

2. Okay, I recognize that these names may mean more to me as a west-coast Canadian queer than to you, wherever you are, so if you haven't heard of these folks just know that it would be hard to imagine a better lineup if you tried.

Another writing group this afternoon. These seem to be helping me, so I'm hoping I am able to continue.

Here's the best bit from today. The prompt was "How the Trees on Summer Nights Turn into a Dark River" by Barbara Crooker. (Here it is in a random blog I googled up.)

You can guess that the lines I worked from most were "how you can never reach it, no matter how hard you try" and "What isn't given to love / is so much wasted."


Half-cupid

Half-cupid stands in a corner of the grounds at Government House. He takes some finding. If you reach the graveyard, you are moving in the right direction. Turn before you enter. Go into the trees. Down there at the bottom of the wood is a grove, and in the grove is Half-cupid.

On one side, he is an ordinary statue, features weather-worn into ever more boyish lines, an embryo god with a blank bow. Sometime he was a whole cupid, but now if you approach him from below, you'll see his right side has crumbled away: he's just a silhouette.

At dusk, approaching by moonlight, if by accident you walked by him first and then came uncertainly back, you might see a childish form that refused to resolve, remaining flat as a shadow; or a boy in the process of youthening; or something halved, frightening not because you didn't understand what it was, but because you did.

Half-cupid has one ear, one hemisphere of stone curls, one wing, one hand, one foot set flat to push from his pedestal into the sky. One chubby leg, half a stone bottom on which a small bird has built and abandoned a nest, half a smile -- the mischievous, corner-twisted half, fearful without its mirror.

Of course, by dusk, you are not supposed to be on the grounds of Government House at all. If you were caught in the woods by a security team, you might be taken for a threat to the Lieutenant-Governor's household, or at best a disruption of that nebulous entity, the Peace -- unless, by seizing a forked branch in your left hand and pawing the earth with your stiff right shoe, you could be changed into a stag, plucking at the moon with his antlers, nosing through the rubble for wild roses.


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I've written nothing much so far for poetry month this year, but I sent this to a friend in July 2017 and I don't think I ever posted it here, so -- here. My friend never got back to me, probably because of the attempted terza rima.

There are some obvious film noir references here for those who like that sort of thing. Also, hmm, the aforementioned Dante and, oh, Rilke, of course. And maybe other things I've forgotten.




For I had missed the oath and gone astray


I.


Having begun, I will almost

Immediately stop. Dead

Or anyway death’s mobile host.



In the middle of nothing said

I made every sign, ahem, of

Preparing to speak, then “vanished



Simply vanished,” with a small cough

“Into the ground.” “That is,” cough

“precisely where he did,” cough



“Vanish to.” The players are gruff

with phlegm. Empty the gymnasium.

Something has gone south.



I began to learn to drum.

This was a comfort when I could

Not speak. Call me a good alum



Of a mediocre school. Should

We go on from here, or turn back

Or stop dead? The wick’s at the wood.



Commuter trains drop off their tracks.



II



The cable van drives a slack

Loop over and over through our zone

Its restless progress an attack



On my ache for stillness: my own

Or everyone else’s. The kiosk

Plastered with signs that groan



For purchase, enfoliate ask,

Conceals a sewer. Drop down

Into the tunnel with a splash.



Now we chase a cackling clown

Through filth. Read back a page

If unsure how we got underground.



I, too, was distracted. The phage

In my blood may be our last best hope.

Or rage. Or rage. Or rage. Or rage.



Grope towards the exit through the smoke.



III.



I missed the final voice that spoke

I’ll move into another tense

This, friend, is our last chance to choke.



Beside the grave I get the sense

You may deny you saw the ghost

I may withhold my evidence.



Your pity for me moves me most.

I did the next best thing to good.

A bad actor and worse host,



I, before this furious embrace, should

Commend me to another age

And hope to be misunderstood.



It’s not a question of courage

As much as holes where courage would

Have bloomed inside this little cage



Grope towards the exit: find yourself on stage.

I found this poem in a 2014 email to a dear friend who is also a poet. I think I must have written it, but I have very little memory of doing so, though I remember this preoccupation with outsider art.


For Anne Carson

For Jasmine

Boot on the same foot:
Darger, Carson –
same long A.

Maybe
it’s just a question
of being lucky
in your obsessions:

paper cutouts, tracings,
figures of mythology, jointed
language split / grafted,
thread of spittle that speaks
from the windowsill and turns
aside the father/ogre.

Ariadne/Arachne. Always
mix those two up. Skein
of birds/words.
Hair, thread:

paths for other people, or
enough rope.

A story you're telling yourself
in public, same as the guy
who called from the dark hey brother,
same as the woman with a page
in her scrapbook for every day
of the last five years—

There's a true discipline,
Each day its own colour.

Essay/elegy. Get them
confused. The Berlin what is it.
stories/diaries. Never
remember.

Red spider
blocks the path.
That tapestry
will have to be torn down.

Rivera's mural stood
in the way of American self-regard.

Find an out-of-the-way corner
to spin your glass thread:
janitor's closet,
classics department.

Spindles dropped
at the crossroads—
the ogre delayed.

A forest springs up
like a comb of flames.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

References

Both Darger and Carson have some transgendering elements in their work. I've seen more theorizing about this re: Darger than re: Carson, but I haven't been looking lately.


Henry Darger


Anne Carson -- not an outsider artist in that she has mainstream success, but her recent work seems to me so swallowed up by its own preoccupations that it feels almost sealed against me as a reader.

I no longer remember who the guy that called from the dark / hey brother is supposed to be.

Happy May Day -- here's a poem written in February and embedded in that season. It feels cruel to present you with snow on the First of May, but maybe I can write something warmer later, inspired by the day of turning.

Looking back, I see February's fatigue here; maybe that's one reason this wasn't accepted where I submitted it. Or I see a few points for revision, as always...

Anyway. Please don't get mad at me if it snows...



An invocation

call it back
read its soft notation
its flight – not as script –

call it back
in its own small language
of leaping – light – alarm
startle and rest
music of scent

the traces are clear
even while (pour out the salt for snow)
they fill and vanish

call her back
from under this bright lightless crust

let that fox hop
his red legs flags above the snow
beautiful and comic as he is
he will not catch her

nor will she be snared

i am afraid of this
defenceless drift of warm light fur

i am too tired to shout
too bulky to follow her under

you
whom i have given, unasked, for today
a coat of a certain shape
in order to make you visible
and to beg even more of you

please
be what you are
carve this dry cold earth
tunnel out halls, rooms, sinuses
swerves, switchbacks
holes for thought to seep through
nests from which to wake

(April 3-4)

Well, if not love, then
love -- a giant pacific octopus
twelve feet long
can slip through the ring
of your thumb and forefinger
like a skein of silk, shifting
even its shining mind
to siphon through. Heart,
be like that.

You and I will live
only by changing shape again
and again.

Take the form offered you
and escape.

Contract and expand.

Touch everything at once
in eight directions.



NOTES

1. I am probably exaggerating slightly about the octopus, unless you have pianists' hands.

It is a peculiar (though not, you know, rare) feature of my mind that, though introverted and solitary, I often write more when I have some external deadline, call, or summons.

During my master's program, in an uncharacteristic but fortunate move, I joined a writing group. There were some fine poets in there, poets who have gone on to win awards and publish things (and some fine poets who didn't). After the program, they all scattered. (I remained.)

One of these poets, A., now lives nearly at the opposite end of this long and ridiculous country. In October, he went to a poetry reading by Sina Queyras, in which she read from My Ariel, written through -- or into, with -- Sylvia Plath's Ariel.

A.'s master's paper, you see, was on Ted Hughes, so they had some useful debate.

(I've always been Team Plath myself, but A. and I manage to be friends despite.)

He texted me about this process.

A: I just accidentally went to a reading for this book
A: We just had a short chat about how P+H can unwelcomely take over your life
RF: Pension & health?
A: Plath and Hughes
A: I just left the pub & she stopped me in the smoking area & forgave me for the “Hughes thing"
RF: What, seriously? Like this is all happening in real time?
A: It was
RF: It's like we're scribbling on a bar napkin together.
A: I'm gone now.
RF: A chill wind cuts through the tavern and I shiver, clutching my empty glass

A. invited me to do a similar exercise, writing through each other's work. Translation through another consciousness. Nervous, I suggested using some outside poems as fuel, so we agreed to find three poems each. A. set a deadline of two weeks -- that of course turned into a month, but yesterday I finally sat down and found some poems.

Going in to this search I felt dry as dust. (To A., I wrote: Any choice is, of necessity, a disappointment, since it resolves possibility into the particular. This pains me and slows me down. I so want to break the sky-egg for you and create a really fantastic scramble. Like with feta cheese in it.) However, stacking up a pile of poetry books in front of yourself is not a bad way to engage a morning, and I did by reason and intuition come up with a few things.

What I ended up doing was choosing poems written in English that I wanted to see translated though his mind because the language was alienated in ways I found interesting.

I'm not wholly satisfied with them as a list -- it's not a very diverse set of experiences and gifts -- but I've sent something -- so maybe we can begin.

I also re-read much of Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband which, for me at least, is still an almost perfect book of poetry. It does what I want a book of poems to do, and so elegantly, fervently. It's more formal and experimental than The Glass Essay, but it doesn't veer off into highly personal classical esoterica the way some of Carson's later work has done.

Anyway, below are the poems I sent to A., with my notes on why.

1. Louis MacNeice, "Snow"

I chose the MacNeice -- I hope it isn't too much of a chestnut -- because it bugs me. Its ideas have always seemed to me rather at odds with its imagery. Roses and snow don't seem various to me -- dichotomous, yes, though even this seems not entirely sound -- but then, I don't come from Northern Ireland.

Here's a quote from one of MacNeice's letters: "The point is: I think life must be dialectical (not of course in the Marxist sense)." [Pause to roll eyes] "One ought to be firm & able to change, active (using one's right of choice) & passive (Keats's 'negative capability') and so on."

2. Alfred Starr Hamilton, "Walkative Talkative"

I chose Alfred Starr Hamilton because he's a sort of outsider artist who clearly used language in a profoundly personal and particular way -- a bit like Gertrude Stein, only more modest. He is in a sense writing in another language, though with English words.

3. Anne Carson, "Tango XII" from The Beauty of the Husband

I chose Anne Carson because I like the idea of translating the inimitable Anne Carson, and she's like a more academic self-aware outsider artist herself. Again, she uses the language in another way. Translation, audience, voice -- these are a huge part of the tangos.

So those are my choices. The Carson is a favorite, the Hamilton is a pleasurable puzzle, and the MacNeice is a little bit of a bugbear.


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In the dream I am writing a story while trying not to plagiarize another story (both of course actually products of my one or multiple mind, which is always a relief to remember when I wake up, having offended or missed an exam not for my best friend or deity but only a module of myself).

In the story a modern (or possibly post-some-gently-apocalyptic-moment) city, like this city, is full of flags. Each office building, condominium, medical centre, and so forth, flies a flag on a topmost pole by which the building signals messages about its status -- this could be open/closed, but you could also flag more complex concepts, like a still semaphore.

Just now this seems like an eminently useful thing. It is 4:30 am, though, so my judgement may not be at its best.

Why don't we do this? A sort of citywide intranet of flags.

I suppose you'd have to be well above the city to really get a picture of what's going on, so we'd probably fall back on looking up a photo of the flags on the Internet anyway.

This has been a test of the emergency dream broadcast system. (Also of my new data entry system. I may or may not have acquired a certain hipster typewriting device.)



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