I PART II: RISE OF THE NEEDLESS MUTE MUSE
I walk down the library stairs, parting from my partner, my relief reverse belies my belief that I have just not done as well on my Final Spanish Oral Examen as I should have. Wind chill. My brogues click on the ground. I avoid a person sitting at the bus stop and walk the good quarter mile or so to eat at the campus cafeteria, the sentence accedes with these steps of these fingers right here and I’m there, I do partake in a bit of comer, I split, heading back to my dorm room which I do again in a flight forward I cannot control, for it is Friday, the dawn of Thanksgiving break. Shouts out to the Pilgrims and the Indians, the seed of imperialism has trickled up and histories later I’m in an America seeming recently internecine. I occupy my room. I’m alone. I decide to translate another Pizarnik poem. I thought it was going to be one whose title I cannot remember at this moment, but I left it behind for the one that stemmed from the sixties: LAMENTO. I realize I have reached somewhat of a triste trinity: CIELO, SALVACIÓN, y LAMENTO. The former biformes mentioned I had managed to transliterate earlier in the week. They were harder. Her third time was my charm, I cringe at that which I’ve just said, but yet it all makes the process feeding into now a lot easier.
Again, I do it. The poem is done and translated. I feel good. I post it on Tumblr. I’m not sure if it has any notes presently, but the future promises a maybe of miserly eventually. I obviously don’t know what I’m doing. I watch an episode of Lupin III. A doctor and a weasly accomplice are trying to frame Lupin, and do succeed, only for an always surprising loving and caring Fujiko to believe in his plea of innocence in the case of murder, even going so far as to pledge suicide if the earlier malpractical diagnosis is incorrect and she kills Lupin. But that doesn’t happen. Lupin and Fujiko save Lupin’s name (I guess) and reframe the impersonators and implicators. My mom calls me, saying she’s coming to get me and that I better not leave her waiting as I pack up like I always do and do again.
We drive to her house (I feel weird saying “our” as I haven’t lived there since it was bought), which by the way is relatively new on account of an earlier foreclosure. She seems as strong as ever, and happy to see me. I get to the house and greet my sisters. They’re doing well, Jnina’s on the honor roll, which, I mean whose H and R should be capitalized and quoted (the letters I just mentioned that is ), but it’s whatever now. I realize that people possibly viewing aren’t going to want to read all this shit, so I will get to the point. For dinner we have spaghetti. That’s not the point. The point begins with me on the couch, laptop in my lap’s tow as my mom watches the evening news. I don’t give a fucking shit about the news, but at the time my attitude is chill and distracted by a glowing screen and not the momentous vitriol of the –ous word I wrote one minus ous word ago. I’m not sure if that’s made sense. Fuck it. The point. I glimpse up and see cielo blue worms writing above what appear to be mountain lands on the plasma screen. I thought then and now that we have come a bit of a long way from having to bang the side of a wood-patterned fiber box. My mom deserves what she wants. The point.
I thought that I was watching some microbiotic health hologram example of some sort. This was not true, I was watching recorded footage from Argentina – what was really happening was that these cielo blue wyrms had gained sentient life and set to destroy the entire city, the city’s name I have since forgotten. That’s the point. The seemingly woolspun beasts set to slay anything in their paths, and did, apparently a man who had previously gained a bit of notoriety for solving the famous Macuto Line treasure puzzle (it was said to be miraculous, but somehow I didn’t doubt his skill, he seemed really suited for it, I’ve been speaking in this bubble too long) was crushed in his car with two still unidentified (or squashed beyond recognition) women. They sounded lovely. The man was a translator. He was stupid, or he really divested belief in the real we know and sought to charge forth in a self-gambit empowered by his internal engine of nuclear irreality. Anyway, they were all dead. The worms had destroyed the town. Military kept trying to take them out and failed. They were beginning to devastate the entirety of South America, or they were already.
I thought about it. There was but one available this transient but true kwannon dicked life of possibilities (please take the word “option” and put it in front of – or excuse me behind available. To the right of the “e” in available. Thanks. Sorry.) in front of me. I got up and went to my sister’s room. I had asked them if they had any of my Yu-Gi-Oh cards left. No, apparently most of them were thrown away. But Jnina said she had seen one of those shiny holographic ones. I told her that it would do, and she did dig around in her closet and after a few forgotten amounts of minutes she procured said card, all onesuch, yet bent around the edges. Far from first edition, it’s once possible existence as a big bank e-bay hopeful was purged by discare, and I didn’t care, it would do fine: the legendary Blue Eyes White Dragon.
Firstly, I forgot the original point of this piece was to give a “translation” of the above piece/pastiche. All you need to know really is that one time I read an interview with novellaist César Aira and found out more about celebrated Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik. A bit after that I had decided to translate some poems of hers, poems which have not been, by and large, translated in the United States. I have a thing for dead, young, suicidal, pretty (to me) women involved in the arts. It’s not a fetish, I have just recently noticed that it is an immutable and unwavering trend that will never leave as long as I have them in my memory. But that’s not the point. The point is that Aira has this idea for a novel, which he admits isn’t very good. He got half of the idea from a movie, which reminded him about Alejandra, the second half of the idea. Allow me to past an excerpt:
“He had gotten the idea from two different places, he said. One was the movie Far from Heaven, which is about a man in the 1950s who is gay and tries not to be; he’s married, he has kids, he goes to a psychiatrist to try to cure himself. But one day he comes home and sees his wife and starts to cry. He tells her he has met a man with whom he has fallen in love. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, the character says; I don’t want to offend anyone, but I realize now that I never before knew what love was.
The movie had reminded Aira of his friend Alejandra. Alejandra Pizarnik, the young poet still loved throughout Argentina, who committed suicide in 1972, at thirty-six. “It wasn’t necessarily the reason she committed suicide,” he said, “but part of the reason, part of what was going on at that time, was that she had fallen madly in love with a woman, and that woman, by chance, then won a fellowship to study in Europe, so she went to Europe and Alejandra was left behind. Alejandra was devastated. She was in and out of mental institutions.
She said to me: ‘I dedicated my whole life to literature. My whole life to poetry. I didn’t know what love was. If I had known, if I had known earlier, I wouldn’t have dedicated my life to literature. I would have dedicated it to love.’ ”
Aira then shrugged his shoulders, drank some coffee, relaxed into his chair, and changed his tone. “So it’s hard to explain, but I think the story of A and B and C and D has something to do with that. With love. With the experience of it. With the problem of trying to account for the experience of love in a work of literature. Which I guess is too ambitious. It would take twenty years, a lifetime maybe, to write such a story. Who has done it successfully? Maybe Proust. It was the wrong story to give you. It’s almost impossible. I’m sorry.”
The word “past” from earlier should have had an e attached to the back of it. The quote was from Rivka Galchen’s impeccable interview, the publication of which I have since forgotten. But anyway, at the core, her paraphrased quote served has the unconscious and autonomic system for a future decision already enumerated, but it also set the neural kiss up for the network of a new love. Upon retroreflection I have recognized the face of something: Poetry and love are convenient fictions, and yet they are real, so what’s the difference? Upon writing the poem assembled from her words exactly from said “triste trinity,” I realized that I had just made more or less a work of love – but I struggle now with finding what is missing – and I think that’s her. I miss someone I don’t even know, and she died in spite and of for love. I’m still here, loveless for all future intents and purposes, intensively, with my stupid writings signifying not much of anything. Where’s the heart in that? Can it reach through such a vast division? As the Propagandhi song says “Without love, breathing’s just the ticking of…”
Those are the points.
I call my friend Sebastian, as I remembered that at once he played a myriad of trading card games competitively, Yu-Gi-Oh specifically. He used a duel disc. I thought he was so cool for that, because I never had it and always wanted it. We are not quite those people anymore, but – I had faith he still had the artifact, the gauntlet girl repulsor of the past. As of yet, Sebastian and I are two people who haven’t given up in many ways. He does have it. I ask him to let me borrow it. He says for what? I say that I have a duel with a destiny draw and I’m going to rise for a shining melancholia trying. He does, and I do. I go to Argentina. Sebastian says he has to give me a point for trying.
“Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color”
- W.S. Merwin
