The Blue Clerk Read online

  Except to leave. I think it is to leave. She would like a nice life, the kind she hears about on the right-hand page. That life the author is always dreaming on. The one where the clerk does not exist. I would like to be plain, the author says. But, the clerk rejoins, to continue to fight is to give up, it is to acknowledge that there are people who actually have a say in anything about your autonomy. To be plain requires so much work, you have to sandpaper all the viscera, and every branchial cleft.

  VERSO 15.1

  The first bones emerged in the human zoos of the 18th century. 18th….More like the 15th, the clerk says. Columbus arrived in Seville in 1493 with eight Taíno Amerindians kidnapped from Hispaniola. They become an adjective and lose their noun-ness.

  I was reading that bit of paper when I noticed that I too lived in this modern zoo and re-enact each day a certain set of arguments, and suddenly being aware of the elaborate performances, I no longer wanted to have a part. They are horrendous. Those performances have used up generations of people, like a play being acted and re-enacted over time, the actors losing skin and bone, dying and being born again, inadvertently, to perform afresh these roles. All of my births and deaths. All of our births and deaths. On a spool. I leave my house and immediately my body is ripped from me to enact some colonial idyll. I look out a window. I wash my hands. I touch my eyebrows. I am on the eternal other stage. My teeth are examined. My arms are sized up. My hips measured. I pull my head in from the window. I try to hide. It’s useless.

  I am a watcher of the zoo, the author says. As well as a performer, this snide and dangerous clerk interjects. Even the language that we used to combat the more awful ailments, even that can be turned inward on itself. To transgress to rebel. They capitulate to the existence of a law, a truth. So you are dying in their etymology. And these words are, at the core, a construction of the zoo. A dialect. Each word that seems perfectly legitimate right now, perfectly, as the vocabulary of what is called resistance, you will notice later only reinforces the zoo.

  Essentially, as a poet. As anyone, the clerk says. As anyone, the author is trying her best to agree with the clerk this way life would be easier, so yes as anyone, you cannot be comfortable with any new arrangement. My job is to be completely uncomfortable, as painful and as horrible and sometimes as personally devastating as all that might be. You always have to distrust the comfort of solutions. It is incumbent upon me to keep being unsettled. Yet and still, the clerk thinks, you don’t tell this to everyone, I alone see these versos and must bury them on this dock.

  Back to Coltrane. Of course, you would like to go back to him, the clerk hums. Is it possible to reshape all kinds of understandings, and how would you do it?

  VERSO 15.2

  It is very difficult to get rid of aphids; they do not yield their leaves for soap and water as is commonly held. I have tried. A ladybug is required. Hippodammia convergens. Or green lacewing larvae. Chrysopa rufilabris. One ladybug can, apparently, eat 5,000 aphids over its lifetime. A year or so. It can also fly away. The clerk is thinking of sending away for a pint of ladybugs. “Due to the perishable nature of insects,” reads the clerk, “we are unable to ship outside of the continental USA.” It is not clear where the clerk is, that is, the clerk is not clear on her location. There is a dock, there is an ocean, there might be a ship, there are bales full of some urgency. But there is no address.

  VERSO 16

  On hearing of my left-hand pages, ASJ, a poet, sent me this note from Edmond Jabès:

  A book without room for the world would be / no book.

  It would lack the most beautiful pages, / those on the left, in which even the smallest / pebble is reflected.

  Then I sent away for Jabès’s book, The Book of Questions, and received it from England after some weeks. And there was his handwriting: pour Jane et Sidney Shiff / j’ai été heureux / de connaître / En souvenir et / avec la cordiale penséé / d’E. Jabès. This last note arrived with his cordial thoughts, says the clerk. Yes, so I suppose it is a sign that we continue, says the author.

  VERSO 16. 1

  I found this in Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. On page 200. Baudelaire…invites himself to absence….he presents a new vision of his soul. It is tropical, African, black, enslaved. Here is the true country, an actual Africa, an authentic Indies. It is from André Suarès’s 1933 preface to Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. What could it mean?

  So the clerk searches Suarès’ preface and finds more invective. He attacks Jeanne Duval, She was the wheel of this Ixion, his torture, the barrel of Sisyphus with which he was burdened…alongside this black marble the man dreamt of the hot shadow of a mountain and of stifling Africa. She was a dumb beast. Unhappy, furthermore, neglected, avaricious, greedy, she drank and slept off her wine in the arms of the water porters. The drink took away her only virtue; silence…Baudelaire so fine and with such subtle sensibility, had this daily hell in his bedroom…etc.,…etc.,…the clerk reads aloud.

  So the clerk searched and searched Les Fleurs du mal for Baudelaire’s tropical soul, his “African, black, enslaved” soul. I have searched and searched, she said, and I cannot find it. First I could not find the definition of such an object, neither the object itself, nor the manifestation of the object in Baudelaire. Except, except as a European aesthetic category. This must be what André Suarès was hammering on about in Baudelaire’s poems. Could it be that Baudelaire ate the soul of Jeanne Duval? We don’t believe in souls, says the clerk.

  And Benjamin does he use the quotation to signify the creation and commodification of this aesthetic? No. Though the work is about commodification in the end. And where are the zoos in The Arcades Project? There in the zoos, humanity is defined in the modern. Who is without, and who is within. Where that word is given more and more definition, and that definition looks more and more like a certain set of people and not like a certain set of other people, to the extent that those others are actually put in zoos. And how do they perform the body? They performed the animal; fossilized in spirit.

  The clerk searches Benjamin and this is what the clerk finds in “Baudelaire” between pages 228 and 387 of The Arcades Project: viii references of references and notes to Jeanne Duval; vi of which call her by name; ii of which call her the consumptive Negress. They are as follows:

  Jeanne Duval, Madame Sabatier, Marie Daubrun.1

  If he loved in…a Jeanne Duval some immemorial stretch of night,…2

  If Jeanne Duval played a part in the poet’s emotional life analogous to that played by Aupick, we can understand why Baudelaire was…sexually possessed by her.3

  Speak neither of opium nor of Jeanne Duval if you would criticize Les Fleurs du mal. To conceive Baudelaire without recourse to biography—this is the fundamental object and final goal of our undertaking.4

  It should be remembered that Jeanne Duval was Baudelaire’s first love.5

  “L’Architecture secrete des Fleurs du mal.” It represents an oft-repeated attempt to establish distinct cycles in the book, and consists essentially in the selection of poems inspired by Jeanne Duval.6

  The consumptive Negress in Baudelaire.7

  When he went to meet the consumptive Negress who lived in the city, Baudelaire saw a much truer aspect of the French colonial empire than did Dumas when he took a boat to Tunis….8

  Why make a verse of everything? And so what, says the author, what would be the interesting question there? Well, says the clerk, all the renovation of one thing and then another. Baudelaire, etc.,…etc.,…? asks the author. Well, we know, replies the clerk, all the bitterness toward Duval and all the jealousies, but most of all the secret architecture of modernity. Of poetry, itself.

  1 [J10, 3] i

  2 [J14, 2] ii

  3 [J17, 5] iii

  4 [J19a, 3] iv

  5 [J30, 8] v

  6 [J37, 4] vi

  7 [J51, 2] vii

  8 [J54a, 7] viii

  VERSO 16.2

  Where is the medicine for this? The author’s
hand is at her sternum. If I were some other substance I would cave like a sandhill; an anthill.

  VERSO 16.2.1

  I listened to the voice of Lola Kiepja, the Selk’nam shaman, as she moved toward all extinction. Here I am singing, she said….I have arrived at the great Mountain Range of the Heavens, the power of those who have died comes back to me, from infinity they have spoken to me. Here I am singing.

  VERSO 16.3

  Museums and corpses

  Here I am singing, the clerk said, I do not know, I do not know how I have survived the world. I simply do not know. I have such an ache in my back. All these laws so far only ever address one arm, or one foot, over the long term; they allocute one leg, one mouth; where one can sit, where one can eat, where one can travel, and so on. They leave me, perhaps, just one-legged and one-footed, one-armed, sewing our vaginas, cursing the presence of our bare heads.

  I do know that the bodies that we inhabit now are corpses of the humanist narrative. Awful corpses. And, when we appear on the street, that is what we are appearing as. So, I can only give you this view of it. We inhabit these bags of muscle and fat and bones that are utilized in humanist narrative to demonstrate the incremental ethical development of a certain subject whom is not we. We leave the psychiatrist’s office like the figure in Remedios Varo’s painting Psicoanalista, with a little container of our true possible selves held out at arm’s length in a plastic bag.

  My job, it seems, is to notice, the clerk says. My job it seems is to notice, the author says. Even as you are a living object, you can make note, says the author. Look at the display I am in the world, am I just that, you say. And you can’t sustain that double seeing for very long, the clerk warns, otherwise, the body would truly collapse. The 19th-century human zoos; the schesis of human bodies. That is when I left you, the clerk says, that is when I created you, the author says, that is when I created you, the clerk says, that is when you left me, the author says.

  It is a short step away, a short step away from the present. You are exaggerating and these exaggerations only pile up. I, I am exaggerating? the author asks. Look at the sky, the clerk beckons, look there is nothing else. You are living your life. Don’t be naturalistic. Where is the great arctic, the endless dark days, the endless day-lit nights? However, if you were to stop for a minute and observe yourself, you are merely the container for a set of cultural knowledges and practices which go on without you, but which you are never without. They are like a bag of…a heavy bag on you. How do I get out of this zoo?

  I can’t position, I can’t assure anyone of their ethical well-being.

  Take this engine, the clerk says. You are living your electric life.

  This organism that I am, I keep on going. But, we tend to think that as citizens…Don’t be pompous, you’re not a citizen of anything. Or…or…or…the author stutters. Or as constituted as communal, and citizen, and social, we tend to think of living as quite something more.

  The author is not talking about a physical death, but the death of certain kind of spiritual, if you will…the death of a certain set of narratives, the death of the aesthetic of imperialism. It is an aesthetic that contains narratives of the body, bodies that the poet suggests were dead anyway. There are then ossuaries of these dead; of which my bones are some, the clerk says. We are some, the author says, yes, we are some.

  The poet refuses to live in that world anymore, the world where certain bodies signify certain immovable qualities, deployed like lampposts along a route. To add yet another metaphor, the clerk sighs. What route is it and where does it lead then? So, it is the death of something completely useless, at least to the poet. Well, I can only give you a glimpse of these bits and pieces of a body that has been deconstructed as itself, and reconstructed as a set of practices in un-freedom. At least the poet, the author, well the poet is suddenly in a position where this fact is bare and raw and bald, and one may refuse habituation to it.

  You have the privilege of this avant-garde seeing, the clerk says. It is not a privilege at all, to see, the author says. I think quite the opposite, to be the only person that this seeing is available to. The only person? Let us say then one of few. I don’t think that is particularly avant-garde because people live that every day. Living that little fissure between scenes of the real. Everyone lives that everyday but we quickly seal the fissure for whatever pleasures are in the so-called reality, or, we give up on being on this side of the fissure because it is too lonely there. It is a chasm. It is a choice available to anyone, and apparent to everyone, but unfortunately, my job is…I wish I couldn’t see that chasm. There’s the pile of bones in that ossuary, where I threw the former poet. I think she is gone.

  VERSO 16.4

  Exactly.

  VERSO 16.5

  “Well, it’s much better now than it used to be,” they say. But I never used to be; I am now in the present, and what is owed is owed. My entire life’s energy is being placed…the whole energy force of my human body is being placed at the disposal of this enterprise of entering this enclosure. I enter these rooms by these skewered methods, I ask for whole humanity, they hand over my fingers; rearrange the categories so that fingers are useless. I put my whole life’s work…into attending to the new assignments for entry. The “I” that I am talking about is not me, of course…

  VERSO 16.6

  I am clinically aware. I am flying into light, that is, I am flying west, flying into the recess of light, where light is ending. I have taken each detail of myself apart and placed them on the counter. These are the individual bits of evidence. I expect an arrest to be made based on these facts. Here is my heel, here is its classification. Who is in detention except me? The commissioners and stenographers must be notified, I said. Is there no one at the desk? What will happen to my files? I am aware, always aware, clinically aware.

  VERSO 16.7

  If you say Foucault here, the clerk arrives brimming, you will be understood. By whom, says the author. By those you want to understand, says the clerk, though for me it is too late of course, but in your world. I am trying to find a language, yes, the author says, a language without…I am trying to find a thought, the clerk says, a thought without…a thought unburdened of all you are burdened with.

  VERSO 16.8

  I went, in other words, to all the commissions. I said, here is my body, protect it. I said, arrest someone, immediately. I would like you to issue a warrant. Here is my fingernail. Send a team, a battalion if you can, arrest, seek out the perpetrators. I have given you all the evidence. Here is my signature. Nothing about me is false. I am surrendering my body to you in whole. Someone must be charged with murder. I said, why are you hesitating? I have surrendered myself as I was advised. I am naked and have no visions. Here I have signed the papers, you have my authority, such as it is. The garments of glass, my shattered self. The shatterings, I call them; my limbs, my ankles, my jaw. Nothing here is missing. Someone is responsible. I went to the quota of mornings. I said, here let us begin refreshed. When will the charges be heard? I asked. I am still here blue to the heels. I insist on my innocence, I am open like a baby, I refuse cynicism on this.

  I will wait all night, if it takes, for the report to be handled. I can hardly disappear. The bailiff, with respect, is one of them. So is the lawyer. I have brought myself as the final forensic datum. It should be plain. Arrest someone.

  I have now been here for quite some time. I no longer know what language I speak or whether this one is the original. I no longer exist, it seems, anywhere. Not this year. I have been here each spring, ready to leave, certain of what I can be certain of.

  VERSO 17

  The dock is. The clerk thinks. Lemon summary, lemon factors. In the lemon distance are lemon wasps in lemon objections. Antipodal green, brindle marrow, marrow’s satellite. What are you saying, the author says. Lemon hydrogen, the clerks thinks, insecticides. Lemon files.

  We walked and walked and walked in Buenos Aires. At the MALBA you fell in love with Wifredo
Lam for the eleventh time. We looked and looked as. You always forget him. I never do. Your love is like an annual plant. It dies down and has to be planted again.

  Remembered, not planted. As soon as I see La Lettre I remember I love Wifredo Lam. The woman is standing with the letter. Her right hand covers her right eye, her left eye is closed, an aquamarine closedness. The letter is held against her body, it covers her right breast. She is nude. The letter is her temporary and secular clothing.

  VERSO 18

  War Series

  I think Jacob Lawrence had much more love in him than you do. He had much more sympathy. When is he painting them? He has much more hope, paintings so incredible, incredibly riven with hope. He is painting them when he thinks that that declaration might work, the clerk says. You know, when am I writing this? Yes, the clerk answers, quivering. I am writing this when nothing has worked, the author says.

  Lawrence puts all of people’s ambition and all of their solidarity into those paintings. In the painting Coming Home, where there is one head, like an eggshell cracking, and they are wounded, coming home, and it is so delicate and so fragile, and what will they come home to? Of course, after having joined their sense of the human with what they thought was the universal, they come home to penitentiaries, as I’ve said. Those paintings, they were a call to the future, as much as Bird’s Ornithology, later, or Mingus’s Pithecanthropus Erectus. A massive work, Pithecanthropus Erectus. These are all works about the human. Each note has a political intent. In Mingus’s liner notes, he says, Basically the composition can be divided into four movements, evolution, superiority complex, decline and destruction. Mingus outlines the project as a dissertation on hominid to human, he says, Overcome with self esteem, he goes out to rule the world, if not the universe, but both his own failure to realize the inevitable emancipation of those he sought to enslave, and his greed in attempting to stand on a false security, deny him not only the right of ever being a man, but finally destroy him completely.