Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès | Where Tigers Are at Home / 2011

unraveling the fiction

by Douglas Messerli

Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès Where Tigers Are at Home, translated from the French by Mike Mitchell (New York: Other Press, 2011)

 

 When Rain Taxi publisher Eric Lorberer asked me if I might be interested in reviewing a novel about Brazil, I readily agreed, having been to Brazil twice and having a deep interest in Brazilian literature. He did mention, vaguely, something about it being a long work. But when I received this book in the mail, I was a bit taken aback. The “novel” was not only 817 pages in length, but had been written by a French author and scholar Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès who had taught in Brazilian universities. The idea of reading a roman (the French word for novel), which its cover declared it to be,* disinterested me. Like many writers and colleagues who in the 1960s declared the “novel” to be dead, I have long been disinterested in “romances” that focus on one or several heroes involved in a series of plotted adventures and even less interested in what the novel has more recently become, now often a kind confessional work or a series of semi-linked stories told through a realist perspective.

  

    Fortunately, by the time I had read the first chapter I perceived that, despite its cover’s proclamation, Blas de Roblès’ Where Tigers Are At Home was not a novel, but an encyclopedic fiction in the manner of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and, in the 19^th century, of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Flaubert’s Bouvard et Péchucet. Like most encyclopedic works, such a fiction attempts a summing up of knowledge, which is quite perfect for this book’s central figure, the German Jesuit scholar of the 17th-century, Athanasius Kircher, who is often described as “the last Renaissance man,” a figure who, during his day, seemed to be able to brilliantly write on all subjects, from history, geology, microbiology, physics, mechanical inventions, languages, and, of course, religion, with special added interests in all things Egyptian (including his attempt to translate the hieroglyphs) and Chinese. The fact that nearly everything he believed has long since been dismissed as nonsense is perfect for this dark comic encyclopedia, at the center of which is a sizable book on which the work’s major character, Eléazard von Wogau, a retired French correspondent living in Brazil, is at work on translating and editing, a hagiographical study of Kircher by his assistant Caspar Schott.

      Floating around this encyclopedic fiction are numerous other kinds of fictions, mostly anatomies over which various other pedants rule the conversations. The anatomy, as in works such as Nightwood by Djuna Barnes and most of Wyndham Lewis’ fiction, is centered on a pedant who mostly spends his time entertainingly speaking at characters gathered round him, who represent various aspects and levels of society, from the highest to the lowest, at dinner parties and other events that bring the characters together. Perhaps the most notorious of anatomies is Petronius’ Satyricon, a work I’ve often read. I myself have attempted writing just such a fiction, adding an epistolary structure.

     Spinning out from the central story, where Eléazard and his knowledgeable friend, Eucilides dominate the conversations, are various other linked anatomies, the first of which features Eléazard’s wife, Elaine, who has recently left him, who, along with a younger student Mauro and two professors from her university, Dietlev and Milton, embark on an archeological voyage into the Amazon in Brazil’s western state of Mato Grosso. The second of these small “anatomies” centers on Eléazard’s disaffected daughter, Moéma, her lesbian lover, Thaïs, and their university professor, Roetgen, who move in and out of each other’s beds as they travel—a bit like the figures of Kerouac’s On the Road—about the country in a constant state of being drugged and drunk. A further story involves Mauro’s corrupt politician father, José Moreira da Rocha, Governor of Maranhão, his dissatisfied and abused wife, Carlotta, and various bankers and pentagon observers with whom the Governor is involved in an illegal scheme. Yet another spin-off concerns a young club-footed beggar, Nelson, and his benefactor, a truck-driver, Uncle Zé. Eventually, many of the figures from these separate strands become intertwined with each other, while Eléazard’s private notebooks bring together various knittings of ideas expressed in the adventures. At one level, accordingly, this book presents a series of dark and often bleak actions, while on another level the work explores vast areas of thinking. In Where Tigers Are at Home we get full discussions of almost anything you might imagine, from the names of various native Brazilian tribes and their languages to readings from cheap rhymed-romances sung, like troubadours, by the that country’s poor. Discussions of various automobiles are alternated with theological treatises. Listing and descriptions of animals—various cats, snakes, birds, and larger beasts—push their way into a ceremonial terreiro or macumba. Information about how to deal with gangrene alternates with interpretations of Goethe. Drag queens and cokeheads go elbow to elbow with Queen Christiana of Sweden. This is, after all, a wonderful encyclopedia!

       Translator Mike Mitchell, moreover, should be given an award just for juggling so many languages, including the original French, Latin, Portuguese, native tribal languages, and Arabic!

       Ultimately, what seems like distinct stories, each headed by a kind of pedant who satirically leads the other figures into ridiculous danger, begin to coalesce in the terrifying logic of Kircher in which everything in God’s world is interrelated—with the absurd priest at its center!

       Blas de Roblés’ work depends highly on its net of plot, so I will not reveal how these events begin to wind down, as—even in such a mammoth work—we know they must. Let me just hint by suggesting that I felt “let down” or even betrayed in the end by the author’s somewhat nihilistic unraveling of his own fiction. Even though such a work always reminds us that it is, in fact, a fiction to even attempt to bring so much of what we believe as “knowledge” together, it is always a bit painful when Penelope, at day’s end, undoes the entire fabric. Where Tigers Are at Home, however, is a great enough work that I would gladly travel through its treacherous pages all over again.

 

 *Although the words “A Novel” appeared on my advance uncorrected proof, I see from reproductions of the actual book cover that it was later removed.

 

Los Angeles, April 4, 2013

Reprinted from Rain Taxi (XVIII, Summer 2013).

Cathleen Schine | The New Yorkers / 2007

doggone

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cathleen Schine The New Yorkers (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007)

 

Let me begin this short essay with a strange apologia: normally I would not have read a book like The New Yorkers by Cathleen Schine, predicting that it would not hold the complexity that I seek in art. However, when I began working on these cultural memoirs, I determined that I would also try to pay some attention to popular culture, and in a year devoted to the theme “To the Dogs,” it was impossible to ignore a book reviewed in The New York Times Book Review under the title “The Year of the Dog.”

     Indeed, this work does not hold any complexity. To even mention that word in the context of this novel seems ludicrous. For the characters of Schine’s New York are so thinly drawn that one is almost afraid that the breath one uses in reading a sentence aloud might blow the whole scene off the page.

     In New York’s Upper West 70th streets, Jody, who begins the book at age 39, is beginning to describe herself as a spinster, when suddenly she discovers her 50-year-old chemist neighbor, Everett, to whom she takes a liking. Having broken up with her lover, Chris, 26-year-old Polly moves into the neighborhood, bringing with her brother George, who, having been dismissed from a job as a waiter, now works as a bartender at the local Go-Go Grill. The Grill is run by a gay man Jaime, who with his partner Noah, is raising a rather large family of their own and adopted children. Another local, Simon, sits lazily on a park bench in Central Park. The wealthy neighborhood busybody, Doris, meanwhile, goes about the neighborhood with a scoop and plastic bag, gathering up discarded bottles and excrement left by her neighbor’s dogs.

     Almost before Jody can establish a relationship with Everett, Polly sweeps him up, while Jody turns to Simon. George moves in and out of brief relationships with women without being able to discover what he wants to do with his life. Chris remarries, Doris gets angrier and establishes a neighborhood watch group to restrict the dogs in the park and ban them from local restaurants such as the Go-Go, while Jaime and Noah blissfully continue bringing up their brood. When Simon tires of Polly, he escapes to Virginia; Polly determines to break it off with Everett; and George, asked to help train Alexandra’s (the woman who fired him) pet, discovers a new career—as well as a new companion. Jody and Everett finally come together, fall in love, and marry. Doris—the enemy of all canines—begins to breed teacup Pomeranians. The End. The New Yorkers, raved The New York Times Book Review, is “a redemptive fairy tale of urban loneliness.”

     Admittedly, my brief summary is missing an important element of the book. But in terms of human characters it’s pretty accurate. They do little more throughout the work than walk the streets, visit the Go-Go Grill, and fall in love. Although we are told that these figures do sometimes take in local films, not once do they singularly or collectively discuss any aspect of cultural life. And only one character, Jaime, mentions a literary work, quoting a line from the pop-poet Billy Collins, whose blurb on the back of the book describes Schine’s work as “charmingly immortalizing” the neighborhood upon which she focuses.

     The real characters of this work, if they can be described as such, are the dogs owned by Jody, Polly, Jaime, Alexandra, and Doris, and cared for by Everett, Simon, and George: Beatrice, Howdy, Jolly, and others. And the reader is provided with a little more information about these beasts—an agèd blue-eyed pit bull, a loving puppy discovered in the closest of the apartment Polly rents (owned evidently by the previous tenant who recently committed suicide), and a schizophrenic terrier who alternates between expressions of gentleness and violent biting of its own tail and people’s faces. It appears that the author has centered her book around these dogs more as devices to bring her characters together than for any thematic purpose. The most profound level to which this novel ascends is to repeat the old saw: people often project their own joys and fears upon their pets. As Everett explains to Jody:

 

                  “When Emily [his daughter] was little, she used to tell her troubles to

                a little stuffed dog.”

                   “I suppose this isn’t too much different, is it?” Jody said, pulling gently

                on the leash until Beatrice stepped gingerly forward.

                    “Just a whole lot of projection?”

                    “Well, yes. But what I really meant was love.”

                    Everett noticed with relief that the church group was gone, and he left

                Jody and Beatrice at Simon’s door, then walked thoughtfully across the

                Street. Love. Projection. Who was to say they were not the same thing?

 

     Some readers will accuse me of asking too much from what might be deemed as an amiable satire. But even here, as a reader, I come up empty-handed. What is The New Yorkers satirizing—New Yorkers in general, New Yorkers who live on the West Side in the upper 70s, people who own dogs? I happen to know several people living in that very neighborhood who bear little resemblance to the stick figures Schine describes. And as satire this work is so gentle that any rubs can be brushed away as easily as a lipstick kiss planted upon one’s cheek.

      If I ask more of this fiction, I fear I may come off as an ogre akin to the mean-spirited Doris. Although I have a cat, I must report, I too like dogs, and I am sure that if I were to encounter Howdy, like Everett, I might—doggone it!—fall in love. However, even here I may be too churlish, for my Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary has just told me that the word "doggone" has nothing to do with dogs, but is a euphemism of “God damn,” with a meaning akin to declaring “confounded!” I am not in the least confounded, and there lies the rub. I guess what I really meant to say was “aw shucks.”

 

 

Los Angeles, October 18, 2007

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2008).

 

 

Djuna Barnes | Collected Poems; With Notes Toward the Memoirs / 2005

sleeping with the dogs

by Douglas Messerli

 

Djuna Barnes Collected Poems; With Notes Toward the Memoirs, edited by Phillip Herring and Osías Stutman (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005)

 

Let me begin by saying it’s wonderful to have Barnes’s Collected Poems finally in hand. I immediately must qualify that enthusiasm, however, by admitting that when editor Phillip Herring first proposed such a collection to me years ago, I demurred. Barnes is one of the great authors of the twentieth century, but her poetic talents are best expressed in her fiction and drama; like Joyce, her works described as poems seem oddly conservative, if only because her language has always been closer to the sixteenth and seventeenth century traditions. Her carefully wrought, often rhymed stanzas, accordingly, seem ploddingly old-fashioned when compared with Williams, Stein, Moore, even the more conservative Cummings—other writers of her own generation. The final poetic works, moreover—writing to which she devoted herself almost exclusively during her last years—were so intensely overworked that, to my eye, it seemed nearly impossible to determine which versions were to have been her final choices. The manuscripts housed at the University of Maryland library were densely written over, words and lines crossed out, associations and sources scribbled throughout the margins, so that any editor would face a near-impossible task in preparing a definitive text. Neither Herring nor Stutman seem to me to possess the understanding of poetry to succeed, and despite their brave attempt, numerous questions about Barnes’s choices in these poems remain unanswered.

    The most annoying aspect of the University of Wisconsin’s publication, Collected Poems; With Notes Toward the Memoirs, are the editorial comments on her last poetic writings. While I appreciate the editors’ comments on various editorial issues, in which they compare different versions of the poems with the manuscript she had put aside as completed, and their references to sources are often helpful, it is truly a disservice to the poet to comment on or to interpret the poems—sometimes even mocking the poet’s concerns—in passages such as this:

 

             DB had her dictionary open to the “sp” section of this poem. She

             gives us words such as “spilth,” “spelth,” “splints,” “spiles,” and “spatch.”

             One has heard of “audacity” but not “caudacity.” The subject seems to be

             a mummified woman, what was found in the grave, and what it all meant.

 

     Certainly any editor might be encouraged to interpret the work at hand, but it seems inappropriate to make such obvious snipes against the poet’s methods and end in what is clearly a dismissal of the writing which most readers are encountering for the very first time.

     Often the editors are simply wrong-headed in their assessments of Barnes’s endeavors. At one point, for example, they observe that a poem (“Laughing Lamentations”) “seems to be a collection of images that do not quite cohere.” The poem (which Barnes evidently herself felt was incomplete, and enfolded within another longer poem) is indeed a very strange one; but the images do very much “seem to cohere”: a young woman, head bowed in a kind withheld laughter (“Laughter under-water”)—a product of some unspoken sorrow presumably related to failed love, since she has been “stung by mercury,”  (an image that calls up both the poisonous “quicksilver” and the God of messages and travel)—ends with a “new nativity”—the woman with bowed head is compared earlier to a “peasant in a praying stall”—a kind of new birth. The narrative voice, moreover, “bends upon himself”—in a manner that reminds one of Dr. O’Connor of Nightwood stealthily moving home through the Paris streets—suggesting another image of the bowed. In short, the images cohere, despite jumps in narrative logic. The poem works just fine as poetry, but is perhaps more confusing if read as a kind of narrative, which it appears the editors have interpreted it to be.

     On the very next page another poem is described as “on the verge of being a finished poem, but there are still obscurities to be ironed out.” One might ask, “Isn’t that the job of the reader and/or of critics?”

    The poem from Satires, “if some noble show…,” Herring and Stutman describe as “little more than a collection of phrases that might prove useful in a more focused poem.” There is no doubt that this poem is, in some sense, unfinished, but I find its radical similes and images some of the most arresting of her later work:

 

                        his tongue

                        Like the potters thumb reams out her mouth,

                        Sea-pig

                        To sing his own and plighted song

                        To sing his journey among drought voyaging

                        Among sea-groves

                        ….

 

      This Odysseus-like male does not allow the female figure even to speak, in the very act of what might be a kiss, stealing even her potential words to sing the story of his own voyage. If only all of Barnes’s late poems were so radically disjunctive and powerfully expressed!

     While it is wonderful to read some of Barnes’s “Notes Toward the Memoirs,” moreover, mightn’t that have been included in another book where it might feel more at home than in her only volume of Collected Poems? Here it seems simply attached, as if the editors felt that had yet another piece that might round out the volume.

     I am not arguing for a sense of generic purity! Barnes herself mixed fiction, art, and poetry in her early collection, A Book (1923), and included art in several of her works. Why then present the early poems of The Book of Repulsive Women without its accompanying drawings, images intensely related to these works? On the other hand, why does this book contain a series of photographs and three drawings, two of which have nothing to do with her poetry?

    These and other issues result in a sense of frustration rather than celebration for the publication of another volume in the oeuvre of one of the greatest of American authors.

    At their best, the poems reveal Barnes’s great love of language, her dark satiric wit, and reiterate her mythic, emblematic vision of mankind and its inevitable march towards self-destruction in its return to its bestial roots. Like Yeats’ “uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor,” Barnes’s poetic work, particularly her poetic satires, presents a world of human beasts that is both utterly fascinating and terrifying:

 

                       When beasts hump backwards for the acts,

                       The scroll of heaven too retracts

                      

she writes in “Dereliction.” Indeed, from her earliest work on, her focus is the relationship of man to beast, her fascination with “the hem that dusts [her] ankles with its fur,” (“Vaudeville,” 1923). As she writes in “Lullaby,” first published in A Book, in a series of images that remind one of the ending of her fiction Nightwood of 1936:

 

                      When I was a young child I slept with a dog,

                      I lived without trouble and I thought no harm;

                      I ran with the boys and I played leap-frog;

                      Now it is a girl’s head that lies on my arm.

 

     It may be interesting to actually compare those images. For Barnes clearly is at her poetic best in passages such as these from that great fiction; and it is in these that we recognize her poetic achievement:

 

                     Then she began to bark also, crawling after him—barking in a fit of   

                     laughter, obscene and touching. The dog began to cry then, running

                     with her, head-on with her head, as if to circumvent her; soft and

                     slow his feet went padding. He ran this way and that, low down in

                     his throat crying, and she grinning and crying with him; crying in

                     shorter and shorter spaces, moving head to head, until she gave up,

                     lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping; and the

                     dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head

                     flat along her knees.

 

Ultimately, Barnes’s world is not just a fallen one, but is a world inured to, perhaps even in love with, its destructiveness. Although Barnes was most certainly a modern woman, she was anything but a modernist, was a writer ill at ease in her own century. Sleeping with the dogs, returning to the beasts, was inevitable—preferable, perhaps—to sleeping with a man or woman who dooms one to Hell or to a life of hellish suffering:

 

                     Disintegration now is all as motion;

                     Yet cat-wise he will fall, all four feet down

                     On paradise, the upside down. (“There Should Be Gardens”)

 

Los Angeles, September 13, 2006

Reprinted from Shadowtrain [England], No. 9 (October 2006).

Inger Christensen | det (it) / 2006

the danish “it” girl

by Douglas Messerli

 

Inger Christensen det (Copenhagen: Gyldendahl, 1969), translated into English from the Danish by Susanna Nied as it (New York: New Directions, 2006)

 

It seems rather ludicrous to dredge up the name of the silent film star Clara Bow—known as the original “It Girl”—in connection with the great Danish poet Inger Christensen, but in 1969, at the time of the publication of her important collection of poetry, det (the Danish word for “it”), Christensen might have herself been so described. And while we all know that literature has a less immediate impact upon popular culture than film—certainly Christensen did not have the sex appeal of Bow and, unlike the actress, did not triple the national sales of henna (Bow’s hair was an unnatural red), nor start a craze for heart shaped red lips—the author did alter the whole scene of Scandinavian literature and bring major changes to the writing of her own nation that is felt among younger poets even today.

     Furthermore, coming as it did at the end of a decade known for its social, political, and sexual changes, Christensen’s work was very much about love—and a great many other things; Anne Carson, writing in her introduction to the new English language translation of it, suggests one must understand this work within the context of figures such as John Lennon and Yoko Ono, James Brown, Allen Ginsberg, and Valerie Solanas (of the “scum manifesto” and the attack on Andy Warhol). Translator Susanna Nied writes of its immediate and later effects:

 

            On its publication in 1969, det took Denmark by storm. It won critical praise

            and became at the same time a huge popular favorite. It was quoted by polit-

            ical protesters and politicians alike; lines from it appeared as graffiti around

            Copenhagen; some parts were set to rock music and became esoteric hits.

            When portions were translated into German, det brought Christensen inter-

            national critical acclaim. Today, over thirty years later, det is considered a sem-

            inal work of modern Scandinavian poetry. Some of its lines are so familiar to

            Danes that they have slipped into conversational use. For example, the journal

            of Denmark’s city planners took its title, Soft City, from a line in det.

 

     Of equal fascination is that this popular and moving document depicts the beginning of life grown out of nothingness, is a kind of cosmology of life on earth that is structured, as are many of Christensen’s works [see My Year 2004], according to systematic numeric units that could only be matched by the Oulipo writers of France. The work overall is divided into three sections: Prologos, Logos, and Epilogos. The Prologos is broken down into eight sections, the first consisting of one poem with 66 lines, the second of two poems of 33 lines each, the third of three poems with 22 lines each, the fourth of six poems of 11 lines each, the fifth of 11 poems of 6 lines each, the sixth of 22 poems of three lines each, the seventh of 33 poems of two lines each, and the final of 66 poems of one line; each line in the original Danish publication represents 66 characters. In short, as the number of poems in each section increases so does the number of lines decrease, creating a kind of double helix pattern, the very essence of DNA or life itself.

     The central portion of the work, “Logos,” is organized into three sections, each with eight subsections of eight poems, the eight poems in each section titled “symmetries,” “transitivities,” “continuities,” “variablilites,” “extensions,” “integrities,” and “universalities”—grammatical categories philosopher Viggo Brøndal (in his A Theory of Prepositions) explores, among others, that express the various “network of relationships that writing builds up as it goes along,” “terms that could stay in a state of flux and at the same time give order to the indistinctness that a state of flux necessarily produces” (statements in quotations represent the words of the poet).

     The final “Epilogos” is a long scree of 515 lines, a language after language, that alternates between a sense of despair—

 

                      losing your strength

                      your mind

                      your dreams

                      and of ecstasy

                      tremors

                      and emptiness

                      of vestiges

                      of dissolution

                                  death

                                  and transformation

                                  Fear of death

                                  Fear of death

 

—and what might be described as the ecstasy of conquering those fears—

 

                     to conquer the fear

                     of informing others of

                     your conquered fear

                     it’s theirs

                                 Eccentric attempts

                                 when a man

                                 steps out of himself

                                 steps out of

                                 his daily life

                                 his function

                                 his situation

                                 steps out of

                                 his habits

                                 his peaceful

                                 condition

                                 we call the process

                                 ecstasy

                                 ….

                                 when he says

                                 that he is dancing

                                 with the Earth

                                 hanging limp

                                 between his legs

                                 and when he summons

                                 the sea

                                 to rise up

                                 and spurt from his organ

 

     It is indeed this alternating pattern, the wonderment of life itself—the fact that our being has come out of nothingness and the recognition “it” will return to nothingness—that functions as Christensen’s engine for meaning in the poem. The bleak reality she expresses at the very beginning of “Prologos"

 

                It’s burning. It’s the sun burning. For as long as it takes to burn a sun. As

                long before and as long after times measurable in terms of life or death. The

                sun burns itself up. Will burn up. Some day. Someday. Intervals to whose

                lengths there is no sensitivity. Not even a tenderness. When the sun goes out,

                life (death) will long have been the same as it ever was. It. When the sun goes

                out, the sun will be free of it all. It. That’s it.—

 

is juxtaposed with a stunningly lyrical and joyful cataloging of the human race and their various activities as they wait for the inevitable death. And although Christensen’s humans are presented abstractly as “they” and “someone,” we begin to sense by the end of “Prologos” their possible interconnectedness with one another.

 

               They wait in incubators, beds, baby carriages, nurseries, orphanages, preschools.

               In schools, jails, homes, reception centers. Institutions for wayward youths,

               disturbed adolescents, and higher education.

 

               They wait in gymnasiums, riding schools, public pools. Wait in cars and ambu-

               lances, emergency rooms. Wait and wait in operating rooms and on respirators,

               in deeper chemical sleep oblivion hushed.

 

               They wait in barracks for draftees and conscientious objectors, contagious                                

               illness and poverty. In control towers, on permanent commissions, in supersonic

               transports. On security councils. Launch pads.

 

               …….

 

               They wait in places where they live while they wait. Wait to live while they

               wait.

               Live to live. While they wait. Live to live. While they live. While they wait.

               Live.

 

     Despite her obvious fears Christensen bravely moves forward with the flow of these beings, transforming the general fears she has for the human race to very personal admissions, a sudden first-person expression of her own fears and loves. By the time she  reaches the fourth section of “Stage” in “Logos,” the abstract pronouns have switched from the general to the specific as she admits her own methods and the fears behind them:

 

                I’ve tried to keep the world at a distance. It’s been easy.

                I’m used to keeping the world at a distance. I’m alien.

                I’m most comfortable being alien. That way I forget the

                world. That way I stop crying and raging. That way the world

                becomes white and inconsequential.

 

                And I wander where I will. And I stand completely still.

                That way I get used to being dead.

 

It is this utter honesty, her willingness to face the “dog’s bray,” that ultimately makes it such a glorious work. Her need to reach out to her fellow beings, to convert her fear to happiness (“Happiness is the change that comes over me / when I’m afraid”), leads her into the social, political, and sexual spheres of experience. Throughout Christensen’s career she has been notably anti-war, and in det she vents her angers and frustrations concerning the “stone-hard” society that sends soldiers to “improbable places,” to “further the interests of wealthy cartels,” in the process mutating human genes—the helix structure with which she has begun her poem—by converting “their semen” to “superheated TNT.”

     Obviously, given these concerns, Christensen is quite politically sensitive, and although she does not bog down her poem in events current to the time of its creation, she does make references to the Viet Nam War (“napalm is merely America’s trademark”), to incidents in Chile, Italy (which she refers to as Mafia), Romania and elsewhere, and to other occurrences of the 1960s (“They dance in the streets. They have flowers in their mouths.” “Naked as John and Yoko Ono.”). In a section of “Text” and elsewhere, moreover, Christensen describes various normal and abnormal sexual actions (“They masturbate their skeletons.” “The orgasm makes normal cities quiver.”).

     Such hyper-sensitivity to life, combined with her self-acknowledged fears and her sense of being “alien” all lead the author to speak throughout much of the poem—particularly in the “continuities” section of “Text”—about the psychological conditions of people institutionalized—patients in mental hospitals, workers in factories, as well as soldiers in barracks. The repeated phrase “So I don’t think he understood me” serves almost as a talisman to make sense of a mad world that often points to its prophets as being insane. And it is here in particular that Christensen reveals a wry sense of humor:

 

               Today all the patients agreed to say it was snowing. We all took our places by

               the windows and pressed our faces to the glass and exclaimed joyously over

               the snow and described it and dreamed about how wonderful it would be to

               play in it. Meanwhile the sun was shining away and the doctors got confused

               by our total agreement and couldn’t figure out if they should act like they

               were crazy and say it was snowing or act like they were crazy and say it wasn’t

               snowing. …But it really doesn’t matter. Because the press showed up and took

               pictures of the employees running around and throwing snowballs and sledding

               and making snowmen and rolling each other in the snow. In the newspapers

               it said that all the employees had gone crazy....

 

It is this kind of craziness, Christensen makes clear, that is necessary to save the world. For these are the lovers, “any and all / generously spreading their virus around / persisting in their fear / even when those in power kiss them…so it catches / fire throughout the world / so it heals all / who catch it / any and all / all who / are enthroned on the pillar of despair why not.” It is only through a parallel, non-rational language, the poet argues, that one can tell how to “waken the dead,”

 

               to let this

               parallel language

               grow

               how

               to let

               the cells

               in it

               proliferate

               find their way

               to the parallel mouth

               lips that speak

               as they never

               have spoken

               as they always

               have spoken

 

     Given the fact that the original “It Girl” spent most of her later life in mental institutions suffering from schizophrenia, a situation so well-portrayed in det, perhaps the distance between this Danish “it” girl and the sexy silent film star is not as vast as one might have thought.

 

Naples, July 8, 2007

Reprinted from Rain Taxi, Winter 2007/2008.