A Peripoetext To Accompany Leukadia
Que me veux-tu?
(What Do You Want from Me?)
Claude Cahun, 1928
Bhanu Kapil: I guess I would be interested in what a companion text means to you, and what it would look like if you created one, in the form of an ancillary document of some kind, to the work already in the book…
E. Tracy Grinnell: My first thought is that a companion text is a new poem—the next poem—but in this context I am inclined towards a document that re/assembles the fragments and notes that gird the poem. Leukadia is already a double, a multiple. As its companion, this text is in the same frame—looking backwards/towards its companion, it makes a demand of the previous text. It is a double, a multiple:
The mirrors would do well to reflect further
(Orphée, Jean Cocteau)
Looking at Sappho, or rather the Leukadian precipice from which she is said to have leapt to her death for unrequited love—the artist becomes subject—peri- poetess—in Moreau she seems at once to fall, float, and fly as she leaps [
] Mnemosyne
drowned in her own waters—
But art describes fascination and—
a mirror there—beside, before, around—backward-looking, two-way
to catch the throwing back of light
or heat
or concentration of thought?
Sappho’s sexuality was sufficiently troubling to generations of poets, critics, scholars (learned men) that a myth was introduced into her biography to make of her an example: deviants suicide. There is no other way. Both artistically and romantically, Sappho has represented a threat to a patriarchal system, and so—whether or not a conflation of “the real person of Sappho with a myth about the ferryman Phaon … and the goddess Aphrodite” (Sappho in Early Modern England, Harriette Andreadis)—the Leukadian cliff becomes symbolic of Sappho’s death by disastrous desire:
…in Ovid’s reconfiguration of the myth, Sappho is seduced away both from her art and from her female companions by a self-destructive heterosexual obsession and finally commits suicide.
In the 1920s Claude Cahun wrote a series of fictional monologues titled Heroines countering Ovid’s Heroides and ventriloquizing such historical and mythical women as Sappho, Helen of Troy, Salome, and the Virgin Mary. It is not inaccurate to say that Leukadia began as a companion to these Cahun texts—drawn to the writings via hir visual art, I needed to translate first because few English translations exist (Aveux non avenus was released last year as Disavowals from mit Press). In a sense, Leukadia began as an exercise writing around Cahun and extended through Gustav Moreau’s renderings of Sappho’s leap. In writing this piece, I have considered that the remnants—residing in my notebook from that time and resulting from recent readings—may have new life, assembled and elaborated around and beside the “original” poem.
Bhanu Kapil: Your book is written afterwards. After something. Is this true?
E. Tracy Grinnell: You can tell when a war starts, but when does the prewar start?
(Cassandra, Christa Wolf)
All works, I venture, are written after, so perhaps more than a sense of after, Leukadia operates within and/or via ecstasy—from the Greek ekstasis, literally, the state of being outside oneself, or beside oneself—out of passion, rage, grief, and in the sense of exposure, consciousness, trance—the companion that is also oneself—the text itself is only beside/outside (Sappho on the cliff, mid-leap?) and yes, temporally after, but it seeks to stay in that instance, on—around—the promontory, so after is really only expansion or elaboration.
Your absence is a fiction
(Aveux non avenus, Claude Cahun)
More than after I was interested in simultaneities—Sappho, Helen of Troy, Cassandra (in Christa Wolf’s novel)—in the present, in proximity, in concert—the poem is an aggregation—overlaying multiple texts, narratives, personae—an aggregation nonetheless aware of what is lost—or what was never there—in the chaos of interpenetration—feverish connectivity—the brackets in the translations of Sappho’s fragments functioning as doorways, indicating passage, holding the place of mirrors, signifying thresholds—nothing is something—Cassandra speaking in tongues—
All those interpenetrations which seem at first glance to be hellish…are to be espoused
(Silence, John Cage)
Multivocal echo chambers—at the same time, the “striking” word for deep sleep: [kōma], the trance, the sleep, the silence silenced, the spoken for—the threshold speech encounters, the threshold that prevents speech, or distorts—trapped on one side of the mirror—madness!—the fugue—
No one can win a war waged for a phantom
(Cassandra, Wolf)
cursed that no one would believe her prophesies—they gather nonetheless—Cassandra speaks her way into the cave—“I the seeress, was owned by the palace”—a prophet possessed—contained—destroyed—
Bhanu Kapil: Write a dark fairy-tale to accompany your text.
E. Tracy Grinnell: All Sappho’s music is lost
(If not, winter, from introduction by Anne Carson)
…tout en présence de l’ennemi…
(“Hélène la rebelle,” Cahun)
This is not an excavation or recovery—we know already and only what is left—rather a continuation, reverberation—gathering—the reflections proliferate, pool, gather closer, reflect further and so, become distorted—distortion besieges each utterance at the moment of utterance—speaking out—under siege when what is pooling gains the momentum to speak—even now, even this text—distortion happens as one draws closer to the core—dispersion—
“Fugue takes its name from the words fugere and fugare—to flee and to pursue—”
(The Study of Fugue, Alfred Mann)
tightened presences delight the enemy—
a looking glass
looking back [
] What do you want from me?
Bhanu Kapil: When I think of your writing, I envisage a space beneath it, where something collects. Is that simply what time does to a body of writing?
E. Tracy Grinnell:
The body forms a second skin—
This the inability
déshabiller—
The idea engenders the existence, love precedes the organs (this, too, loosely from Cahun I think). In the streams of history, the body with no voice is terror—the walking/waking dead—
me trouble me paralyse—
Yes, something collects, first and after—as much as this poem is aggregation—multiplication, proliferation—it is also reduction, whether already fragmentary (Sappho) or fragmenting—what is missing [ ]— your absence is a fiction—the brackets indicate a passage—doors, windows, mirrors, thresholds—and yes, absence—absence is—nothing is something—
La poesie garde son secret livre son secret garde son secret livre son secret garde
(Les paris sont ouverts, Cahun)
for if she flees, soon she will pursue
(If not, winter, Sappho)
—but it is not just about a passage—this is also about architecture—perhaps in this sense coming after—there are pre-structures that brace the poem—forms, phrases, mythologies, languages—and then the poem falls around those foundations—like a sheet over furniture—or—as something introduced into the body, those fluids—humours—internal systems at work beneath the poem—rushing in, harmonically—in concert—
but I try to see the parts—as an image resolves, comes into focus—the place, the I—the determination at the promontory—
What a leap. Into a no-man’s land, an undefined—unrequited—territory between languages and through time—
But I’m bound to the fears of my weathers
(“The President of the Holding Company,” Lorine Niedecker)
I gayly threw my effeminate body
in the flames unremittingly
but the entry to Hell fills me
with hope—
There is an invisible architecture often supporting the surface of the poem…its object is to possess the poem for a brief time, even as an apparition appears…
(Invisible Architecture, Barbara Guest)
bk: I have the image of the pericardium, the double envelope of the heart, as a kind of pressured looping space that’s also the conduit for the movement of fluids. Fluids we never see, and who would want to see them, except through a lens?
etg: The mirror resides at the heart of the poem—yes—in itself, nothing—a threshold—desiring nothing—yet filled with it—or within the poem it is the invisible object—looking back at—
my sweet/
/sweet, but at last/
in the end/at last!
/light rebels/
