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tseneipgam · 21 days ago

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"Raised from babydom into doubt, I'm as feminine as Rousseau. I, Hazel Brown, eldest daughter of a disappearing class, penniless neophyte stunned by the glamour of literature, tradeless, clueless, yet with considerable moral stamina and luck, left my family at seventeen to seek a way to live. It was the month of June in 1979. I was looking for Beauty. I didn't exactly care about art, I simply wanted not to be bored and to experience grace. So I thought I would write. No other future seemed preferable. Let me be clear: I did not want to admire life, I did not want to skim it; I wanted to swim in it. I judged that to do this, I had to leave, and to write. I wanted to speak the beautiful language of my time, but without paying. I myself was not beautiful. Moody, angular, both dark and pale, of bad posture, for I was perpetually thrust forward as if rushing into time, awkward whilst being observed, a half-broken tooth in my reluctant smile, uncertain in manners, premature frown lines between my grey-green eyes, all of this magnified by an urgency with no recognizable context: comedic in short, in the mode of a physical comedy. Prodigal, undisciplined, with an aptitude for melancholy, I left houses, cities, lovers, schools, hotels, and countries. I left with haste, or I left languidly. Also I was asked to leave. I left languages and jobs. Leaving made a velocity. I left garments, books, notebooks, and several good companions. Sometimes I left ideas. After the leaving, then what? I suppose I would drift. I had no money and no particular plan. Cities exist; hotels exist; painting exists. Tailoring also, it exists, as anger exists, mascara exists, and melancholy, and coffee. I liked sentences and I liked thread. Reading surely and excessively exists; also, convivially, perfume and punctuation. I had a fantasy and my diary. I had my desire, with its audacity, its elasticity, and its amplitude. I carried a powder-blue manual Smith Corona typewriter in a homemade tapestry bag. I was eager, sloppy, vague. I wore odd garments. I carried no letter of introduction, and I knew no one. I was only a girl bookworm. I wasn't to stay. None of this troubled me much. The nervous fluid of a city is similar to a grammar or an electric current. Loving and loathing, we circulate. I myself did not exist before bathing in this medium. The nervous fluid of a city is similar to a grammar or an electric current. Loving and loathing, we circulate. I myself did not exist before bathing in this medium. Here I become a style of enunciation, a strategic misunderstanding, a linguistic funnel, a wedge in language. Here I thought I'd destroy my origin, or I did destroy it, by becoming the she-dandy I found in the margins of used paperbacks. What do I love? I love the elsewhere of moving clouds. Reading unfolds like a game called I,' in public gardens in good weather, in a series of worn-down hotel rooms, in museums in winter, where 'I' is the composite figure who is going to write but hasn't yet. If I am not alone in these rooms, if I could be known, it would be by the skinny red-haired street singer, the secretary of Cologne in her ironical cast-off dress, the hard-shod horsegirls neighing in the dark apartment, by similarly hybrid she-strangers and foreigners, any girl with the combined rage of lassitude and complicity. They are blazons. Cool threads of anger bind me to them. We cease to be human. Were neutral, desituated clouds. There is nothing left to fear. This realization is a vocation. My name is Hazel Brown."

I awake in a hotel room. I hear gulls, the clinking and rocking of boats. I turn in the wide bed. The tightness and stiffness of the sheets feels pleasantly confining. In the first stirrings of thinking I discover within myself a strangeness - not a dislocation or a dissociation, but a freshening shimmer of sensual clarity shot through with strands of unmoored refusal and scorn. Beneath that, a slowly vibrating warp of erotic sadness. I abandon myself to this novel sensation. I open my eyes. Reader, I become him. Was that what I felt? No, I did not become him; I became what he wrote. Do you sometimes at earliest waking observe yourself struggling towards a pronoun? Do you fleetingly, as if from a great distance, strain to recall who it is that breathes and turns? Do you ever wish to quit the daily comedy of transforming into the I-speaker without abandoning the wilderness of sensing? The sensation isn't morbid; it is ultimately disinterested. For me it's a familiar moment, boring and persistent and disappointing. Again one arrives at the threshold of this particular, straitening I. With a tiny wincing flourish one enters the wearisome contract, sets foot to planks. Daily the humiliation is almost forgotten, until it blooms again with the next waking. It is an embarrassing perception best stoically flicked aside, left unreported. With an obscure hesitation one steps into the day and its frame and its costume. Between the puzzlement and its summary abandonment, between the folds of waking consciousness and their subsequent limitation, is a possible city. Solitude hotels, aging, love, hormones, alcohol, illness - these drifting experiences open it a little. Sometimes prolonged reading holds it ajar. Another's style of consciousness inflects one's own; an odd syntactic manner, a texture of embellishment, pause. A new mode of rest. I can feel physiologically haunted by a style. It's why I read ideally, for the structured liberation from the personal, yet the impersonal inflection can persist outside the text, beyond the passion of readerly empathy, a most satisfying transgression that arrives only inadvertently, never by force of intention. As if seized by a fateful kinship, against all the odds of sociology, the reader psychically assumes the cadence of the text. She sheds herself. This description tends towards a psychological interpretation of linguistics, but the experience is also spatial. I used to drive home from my lover's apartment at 2 a.m., 3 a.m. This was Vancouver in 1995. A zone of light-industrial neglect separated our two neighbourhoods. Between them the stretched-out city felt abandoned. My residual excitement and relaxation would extend outwards from my body and the speeding car, towards the dilapidated warehouses, the shut storefronts, the distant container yards, the dark exercise studios, the pools of sulphur light, towards a low-key dereliction. I would feel pretty much free. I was a driver, not a pronoun, not a being with breasts and anguish. I was neither with the lover nor alone. I was suspended in a nonchalance. My cells were at ease. I doted on nothing."

"The following morning, alone in the hotel, I awoke to the bodily recognition that I had become the author of the complete works of Baudelaire. Even the unwritten texts, the notes and sketches contemplated and set aside, and also all of the correspondence, the fizzles and false starts and abandoned verses, the diaristic notes: I wrote them. Perhaps it is more precise to say that all at once, unbidden, I received the Baudelairean authorship, or that I found it within myself. This is obviously very different from being Baudelaire, which was not the case, nor my experience. I had only written his works. It was a very quiet, neutral sensation. I associate it now with the observation of the immaterial precision of light. Such an admission will seem frivolous, overdeter- mined, baroque. But I will venture this: it is no more singular for me to discover that I have written the complete works of Baudelaire than it was for me to have become a poet, me, a girl, in 1984. I was as if concussed. Believe me if you wish. I understand servitude. My task now is to fully serve this delusion. Delusion needs an architecture; this hotel room became for a crucial instant the portal for a transmission seeking a conduit."

"I'm intimate with the clumsy humour of buttons, the way a new kind of fit in a tailored jacket lifts my kidneys a little, coaxing open a readerly concave chest. At night the girls in galleries suddenly wear bright fringed shawls that move when they laugh, with hair slashed straight and high across their brows. There's a new textile, it seems, something from sports or a futuristic movie. It's lightweight and silvery, and the kids have plucked it off the internet to wear on the bus. It's being held to their skinny bodies by their heavy backpacks and the home- tattooed arms they slide across one another's waists."

"'The emotional synchrony of garments transmits discontinuously and by energetic means, thus the metaphysical appeal of fashion. I had studied this question of fashions intellectual spirit in some of its great theorists - Lilly Reich, for example, and Rei Kawakubo but also in my relationships to garments of every provenance. 'They need not have value in the commercial sense. There are the cast-offs and rejects, on eBay, in charity shops, draped over fences in modest residential alleys, swagging the rims of dumpsters by the apartment blocks, and certainly I have been a passionate amateur of their study and occasional acquisition. But here I'm not talking about the material research, as all-absorbing as it can become in its gradual, irregular advancement, but the mood of a garment, the way an emotional tone is brought forward in the wearing, in the suggestive affinities of the toilette. The unfamiliar set of a shoulder or the tugging sensation of a row of tight wrist buttons can hint at the gestural vocabulary of a previous epoch and so substitute for eroded or disappeared sentimental mores. Time in the garment is what I repeatedly sought, because sartorial time isn't singular but carries the living desires of bodies otherwise disappeared. This has been part of my perverse history of garment-love; I've wanted to inhabit the stances, gestures, and caresses of vanished passions and disciplines. And the various garments each person gathers to wear together, the way she groups fibres, colours, eras, social codes, and cuts, this mysterious grammar speaks beyond the tangible and often-cited economies and their various political constraints."

"It was Poe who said that the soul of an apartment is its carpet, and by this measure, I have rarely occupied a hotel room that could be said to have a soul. But I am not sure that I want a hotel room to have a soul, since the task of that innocuous limbo is to shelter mine, and unimagined others', with as few contradictions as possible. I go to the hotel to evade determination. What I thought of, what I imagined in this blandly contrived place as I woke, were those marvellously glowing baroque harbours by Claude Lorrain, the ones hanging in the Louvre."

"I still keep an old postcard of this image, now bleached of its warm tones after being propped for several years on a sunny window ledge, so that my imagination of Claude has transmuted to cool-grey-green-blue, like the veiled marine sun of the Pacific port I now woke to. The more the Claude postcard fades, the more it resembles what I know."

"that morning seemed in my state of half-wakefulness to contain all the hotel rooms and temporary rooms I had ever stayed in, not in a simultaneous continuum, nor in chronological sequence, but in flickering, overlapping, and partial surges, much in the way that a dream will dissolve into a new dream yet retain some colour or fragment of the previous dream, which across the pulsing transition both remains the same and plays a new role in an altered story, like a psychic rhyme, or a printed fabric whose complex pattern is built up across successive layers of impression, each autonomously perceptible but also leading the perceiver to cognitively connect the component parts in an inner act of fictive embellishment, so strong is the desire to recognize a narrative among scattered fragments of perception. My own youth seems to move in my present life in such a way - present and absent, at times incoherent, sometimes frightening, scarcely recognizable, rhyming and drifting."

"For a long time I have been more or less content with arcane researches that lead me into lush but impersonal lyric. Now I feel I must account for this anachronistic event; I'll follow it back to unspoken things. I want to make a story about the total implausibility of girlhood. This morning I'm at the round table under the linden tree, in a sweet green helmet of buzzing."

"There are turns and figures of iteration and relationship. But also times and bodies overlap. This work must annotate those parts of experience that evade determination. Here my fidelity is for the antithetical nature of the feminine concept. I was a girl. I could not escape desire, but now I can turn to contemplate it, and so convert my own complicity into writing. In this landscape time is pliable; it's a place of nightingales and poorness and wild cherry trees. Spring comes, slow and sudden. I'll work with that. I'll make this account using my nerves and my sentiment. I'm writing this story backwards, from a shack in middle age. I sit and wait for as long as it takes until I intuit the shape of a sentence. Sometimes I feel that it is the room that writes. But it needs the hot nib of my pronoun."

"...the contents of that tray in my diary: a tall glass of orange juice, a mug of very hot coffee, a demitasse of milk, a bowl of sugar, two eggs perfectly boiled, two slices of ham, a glass of marmalade, a plate with four slices of buttered brown bread and half a baguette, a tinfoil-wrapped candy, four chocolate lady's fingers, and a piece of cream-filled cake. So I would put three pieces of brown bread and all the sweets aside for my supper, returning from my day's wanderings with some cheese and lettuce to make sandwiches. He would place the tray each morning on a small table covered with a yellow plasticized cabbage-rose-patterned cloth, which oddly matched the room's small hooked carpet, yellow also, dingy, and incongruously ornamented with a brown cartoon bear. The wooden stand beside the narrow blue metal bed held a crucifix, a King James Bible, a spool of blue thread with a needle ready in it, and a 22p stamp. There also I kept the few books I travelled with - used paperback copies of Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading, Martin Heidegger's Poetry, Language, Thought, Sylvia Plath's Winter

Trees, and a beautifully bound volume of Beat translations of classical Chinese poetry called Old Friend from Far Away. Why these books? Chance, I suppose. I was ardent and inexperienced in my reading, earnestly drawing up lists of necessary future studies at the back of my diary, and as I read I seemed to float above the difficult and clever pages, in a haze of worshipful incomprehension. I imagined that simple persistence would slowly transform this vagueness to the hoped-for intelligent acuity, and in a way I was not wrong, although it was not true acuity that I later entered into, but the gradual ability, similar to the learning of a new handcraft, to perceive the threads linking book to book and so to enter, through reading, a network of relationship. I might call this my education; save my gambits in parks and museums, I had had no other. Later this network would become an irritant, like a too-tight jacket, a binding collat. To counter this sad diminishment in my credulity, and to enter again the pleasurable drift, the sensual plenum of my youth, where even incomprehension was mildly erotic, in my middle age here in the cottage I have started to read French"

"I would seek cheap city rooms in order to look out from their windows at unfamiliar surface effects and the shade the angles made. Having a soul, I thought, is about looking out. I would look out, and then write again in my diary. I exoticized Old World neglect. I was looking for a neutral place where my ambition might ripen, unhampered by scorn. Such a room could be found in the Hotel Avenir for seventy francs a night, or twelve dollars Canadian, in the currency of the time, which had the satisfying merit of being payable entirely in thick, brassy ten-franc coins. Steve Lacy's horn cuts lingeringly across a tannic landscape. I'm listening to Monk's Dream. The cold sweet plums carry the smallest possible hint of musky leather. The toughened skin gives a little beneath the teeth before it bursts to a boozy exuberance. I've reopened the old journals. Baudelaire said art must be stupid. I know what he means. Art must be as stupid as a plum. As stupid as an ankle."

"Through this window, across the humid court, I saw a boy sitting also at his own table, a dark-haired boy in a white shirt turned turquoise by the dim light, bent a little at his typewriter. Of all stupid art the poem is the most stupid, a nearly imperceptible flick of the mop just beneath the surface of the water, an idle flutter of the hand. Very stupid; outside all good sense and discretion, because the poem must be indiscreet or not at all. It should just trail aimlessly in the hospitable water. Floating on the sea or swimming. It must be the sea, no other water. Waves, but not stormy waves, the slight rocking movement. This floating is like a hotel. Nothing interrupts sensation; the body is supported and welcomed by a gentle neutrality. Especially the sea...Such is a girl's destiny, this scant enclosure of fumy potential that later will reveal itself as the elemental core of her life. She will sit at tables eating overripe plums and burning incense, frowning a little, her sleeves rolled, no, her jacket unbuttoned at the top to show the saffron-coloured neckscarf. The narrow grey inner court of the future hotel will have become her sealike matrix."

"I learned there that when I stood in front of paintings, I could feel an inner vibration. It entered flatly through the entire surface of my body if I let myself go blank. In my adolescent movements from my grandmother's guest room to provincial art museums, I came to think of the mute mineral affinity that accompanied my blankness as a psychic life of pigment. In front of paintings, my body had autonomous gifts, useful only to my own inner experience. This pigment-sense didn't have anything to do with representation or style, yet it was dependent on the proportions and specificities of mixture. I think my feeling for painting is a deferred material telepathy, an elemental magnetism. I was noticing a mineral sympathy of my body's iron and copper and calcium towards paint. I learned to still myself to make room for this strange reception. In the spare room, I first came to the recognition that I could be changed by these little documents of admixture, through the simple attention"

"I was a girl, and my body was time. I believed in description. I would build new, ornate knowledge on the basis of this lived proposition. I mean that my shy, gawky, lusting body was constrained to undertake the ancient representation, to groom and flirt and refract as every contemporary girl seemed so constrained, to signify bounty and frailty, passivity and fate, but also at this time there was the fact that I loosely accepted the constraint. It taught me something about discipline and a lot about a history of form. Form meant my mutable body. Form could even weep. "

girlhood would rakishly embellish a margin of moody nonchalance, much as a pianist, whilst perched on a diminutive stool, hums a little during their slowed- down interpretation of Bach. To visit those fountains, I preferred to wear outmoded garments that fit poorly, garments mended or taken in with large stitches or barely hidden safety pins, or lacking a sewing kit, perchance paperclips, and I liked lugubrious coats with ample hems and the wrong cut of shoulder, the fastidiously dated lapel, the cheaply glittering brooch, the long string of chipped green glass beads. I would be the girl of my notion of literature, or rather my invention of literature, since, still lacking any concept, I could only invent. My outfits and their compositions were experiments in syntax and diction. So, much as later, in a different life, I would submit my poems to collective tables and risk embarrassed exposure, with defiant awkwardness I would take my sartorial representations to the parks and boulevards, and I would kiss, then back in my room I would write little essays"

as I was discovering in my rooms, a synthesis or recomposition of time as well as of all kinds of sensation, resurging suddenly to stay awhile like a brown spider, if part of comedy is cruelty, what of the parts of the image that were to be forgotten? Where do the forgotten parts stay? Fragments of my sensation sequestered themselves within books, or in cheap rooms. Here I uncover them again. Was this room in Avignon or was it in Marseilles? I am no longer certain. Any room near any fountain was paradise, so it hardly matters. The experience of time at the edges of rooms, at the edges of books, time disappearing or bending as I entered, this is my borderless image, the experience of the disappearance of the word at the appearance of the flower. I recall. for instance, an odd recent period when I forgot the word asphodel. The forgetting persisted for more than a week, the week in April, as it happened, when at the borders of the woods near my cottage the asphodel bloomed. I could both see and imagine the ranks of tall ghostly stalks, but the name was absent. And so I thought frequently about asphodels systematically approaching the absence of the flowers name from each vantage possible, thinking of the opening

lines of the beautiful late poem by William Carlos Williams, yet subtracted of the name, remembering the asphodel meadows that would emerge before blackberry vines, where the woods had been cut down for heating wood. 'A field made up of women / all silver-white.' At the margin of each room I enter are asphodels, womanly, at the instant they lose their name. This is a form of self-knowledge, a philosophy. The long period of my life between learning the word asphodel when first reading the Williams poem in the London hotel room. or had it been in a bookshop, just before closing - a ghost of a pressed flower had slipped out of the second-hand book, it was 1984 - and seeing the living flower for the first time only recently, walking in April with my elderly dog, recognizing the flower in the midst of the flicker of linguistic forgetting, this space so active and evacuating at its limits, so welcoming at its empty core, the entanglement of the name's absence with the striving and failing, the entanglement of gold chain and pearl, the fibs and embellishments and delusions and obfuscations: in the expanding work of forgetting the word asphodel, this flower so flagrantly inhabited the edge of every perception, every memory, that I thought perhaps I could know the name only when I did not know the flower, or only outside the brief season of its bloom, even outside the season of its black budding. I happened upon an emancipation from vocables into the substance of mortality. Slowly, obstinately, the room will be stripped of every conceptual dimension. Every word will be lost. Others will continue the kissing."

"Maybe I was studying the present in the way that I knew how, like someone not quite of the present. It seemed easy, until it wasn't. I would visit rooms like this yellow one. Others strolled on boulevards. Not all of the present was accessible. Some threads would always be bunched up, tangled, hidden on the reverse side of the garment. There, unseen, they would chafe the wearer."

"Bizarre carries within it noisy outbursts, livid flushes, concubinage, and extravagant mixture. In old Spanish and Portuguese it meant brave, handsome. Did he think of Jeanne in these ways? It seems clear that Jeanne Duval was bizarre to Baudelaire in every sense of the word's movements and histories. He exoticized her hair, and skin, and scent so intensely that Les Fleurs du mal seems to be composed of her hair, and skin, and scent. Also her gait, and her origins, or a myth of her origins, in a picturesque framing of the mixture and distance she was constrained to express. It's not difficult for me to imagine that Baudelaire, with a grossly inevitable racism, was incapable of acknowledging to the bourgeois art-viewing public of Paris, by means of his portrait together with Jeanne, his relationship to the beauty he enjoyed privately in her second-floor room on the Montage Sainte-Geneviève, and later at many other addresses. Such an erasure could then pass as tact. It is a very ugly possibility for the poet of beauty."

"Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and Flaubert's Madame Bovary were tried under the new anti-obscenity laws for damaging public morals. Public morals are so vulnerable. A poem or a novel will endanger them, a young girl's desire will offend them, the skin colour of one's lover will diminish them. I long for moral abundance, an obscene flourishing of the category of morality. We can admit more, rather than less, embellish the capaciousness of the idea of the public. If I was a monstrous slut, if I close to disappeared, if I confused aesthetics with the feeling of bodily risk, if I mistook ideology for sensation, anger for bravery, if I belatedly evaded an ambivalent erasure, I was in very good company."

"Further to the stupidity of poetry, here I will tell about the most beautiful poem I ever wrote: I once bled out a stain on a restaurant chair, which revealed to my backwards glance a map of the arrondissements of Paris - a crooked reddish-pink spiral bisected by the serpentine slash that was the Seine. This stain was the augury that brought me to my borrowed city. What I wanted of this city, this stain, was a site for the kind of freedom I sought. Supernatural, sexual, artificial, blooming on one side. Part loss, part object, the stain, with its irregular, permeable border, its ingressions and turbulences, its fragmentary, metonymic nature, its abundance of nested contours, limitless saturation, elisions of propriety, its regime of discontinuity and contamination, was an operating force at once fractal, mystic, and obscene. My analysis of its irregularities is shameless, followed nonetheless by a small retroactive flicker of shame, which is mildly stimulating. Like a convex mirror or a cosmology, the stain revealed a macrocosm: it was a dream city, a city within a city, a mirror within a tableau. It brought me to painting and it brought me to verse. It brought me to the impure repetition of the Baudelairean authorship within myself, its formerness and presentness"

"the market of the literati didn't bother me: I was trained into the contract by my habitual reading. But then it did bother me; it saddened me considerably. I felt the sadness thoroughly. I believed it then. I wrote the sadness in my diary, I drank the sadness in my room or in cafés, I fucked the sadness. I almost believed I was the sadness. But I could not go all the way. Sadness did not utterly disappear; transformations aren't clean. Finally I preferred to have been interpolated by a stain. I discovered that it was not a loss: the stain was a thinking. Because I preferred to survive, I entered the aesthetics of doubt. With the interruption of my identification with beauty by the stain, a philosophy arrived. It was a little tool towards freedom. My youthful commitment to the identity of beauty with freedom had been experimental, in the sense that usefully recognizing oneself as a girl was an experiment."

"The man-poets scorned what they desired; their sadistic money was such that the object scorned was endowed with the shimmer of sex. How radiant we were in our gorgeous outfits and our bad moods! Oh, and this ignited poetry. Baudelaire scorned Jeanne Duval and every female he dallied with, or at least did so on paper, Ted Hughes scorned Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound scorned Djuna Barnes, George Barker

scorned Elizabeth Smart, everybody scorned Jean Rhys. Proust did not scorn Albertine because Albertine was a man. The she-poets perished beneath the burden of beauty and scorn. This is what I observed. This was the formal sexuality of lyric. Who was I then, what was I, when I, a girl, was their reader, the reader of the beautiful representations? Who was I if I became the describer, and how could I become this thing before perishing? Would I then even recognize myself? Because I saw the perishing everywhere. Daily I read it. The freedom of desiring and its potent transformations seemed not to belong to beauty, just to beauty's describer. Anyone without a language for desire perishes. Any girl-thing. My questions emerged then as a mute, troubled resistance to the ancient operation that I also craved."

"There was a communal, rust-marked sink with cold-water faucet at the end of the corridor, beside the shared toilet. I bought a plastic basin to fill at that sink and bring back to my room, and I washed in cold water that afterwards I poured out into the mansard roof gutters beneath my window. Out on the windowsill I stored my food. I had everything I needed, in a slightly diminished, awkward scale, as if I lived my life reduced by one sixth of the dimensions usually considered necessary. This awkward contraction of domestic necessity was for me utopian. The minor discomfort, unimportant in itself, was a subtle threshold to a different sensing. I poured my nightpiss also into that gutter."

"Red-haired prostitutes were highly valued then; the Goncourt brothers, in their diaries, delighted in describing the skin tone of red-haired women's sexes. Oh men. Our red haired twats and our torn skirts, you must claim them. We sing anyways."

"She sticks her lip out and doesn't budge. The short life of Baudelaire, in its dizzying, troubled decline, was defined by the poet's self-recognition in the grotesque mirror of the social abjection of women. Whatever the red- haired singer thought of this, the men's aesthetic use of her person as a masque, will now be expressed by her resistant, unnamed glance."

"The movement of perception or description, which are so closely intertwined as to be indiscernible, is not between nominal categories or aesthetic concepts. The girl is not a concept. Her idea has no core or centre, it takes place on the sills, in the non-enunciation of her name. This feminine namelessness seeps outwards with undisciplined grandeur. The girl's identity is not pointlike, so it can't be erased. It's a proliferating tissue of refusals. Unoriginal, it trails behind me, it darts before me, like my own shadow, or a torn garment. I say unoriginal because once she was named. The removal of her name is an historical choice, so ubiquitous that it seems natural. There is no nameless girl. There is no girl outside language. The girl is not an animal who goes aesthetically into the ground, as many of the philosophers would have it. The girl is an alarm. Her lust is always articulate. If her song goes unrecognized it's because its frames been suppressed; her song is enunciation's ruin. It is a discontinuous distribution, without institution. Always the tumult of her face is saying something to her world."

Your body can sometimes deter its own represertain: this breach indicates an interiorized covenant or constraint. It's called the feminine. Its a historica condition. The movement of perception or descripion. which are so closely intertwined as to be indiscernible is not between nominal categories or aesthetic concepts. The girl is not a concept. Her idea has no core or centre- it takes place on the sills, in the non-enunciation of her name. This feminine namelessness seeps outwards with undisciplined grandeur. The girl's identity is not pointlike so it can't be erased. It's a proliferating tissue of refusals. Unoriginal, it trails behind me, it darts before me, like my own shadow, or a torn garment. I say unoriginal because once she was named. The removal of her name is an historical choice, so ubiquitous that it seems natural. There is no nameless girl. There is no girl outside language. The girl is not an animal who goes aesthetically into the ground, as many of the philosophers would have it. The girl is an alarm. Her lust is always articulate. If her song goes unrecognized it's because its frames been suppressed; her song is enunciation's ruin. It is a discontinuous distribution, without institution. Always the tumult of her face is saying something to her world."

Prodigal, undisciplined, with an aptitude for melancholy and autonomous fidelity: nameless girl with your torn skirt, there's nothing left for you but to destroy art. That is what Baudelaire wrote of young girls in his intimate journals: The girl, frightful, monstrous, assassin of art. The girl, what she is in reality. A little lush and a little slut; the greatest imbecility joined with the greatest depravation. I read this and then I reread it: I recoiled. predictably disgusted. Already this sort of cruelty had become familiar in my reading. Very often a text contains its own police; the she-reader is simply shut out, among various others, none of us the men of the declared inside. I read this excision everywhere. I read it in philosophy especially but also in poetry, in criticism, in history. The female is identified, then transformed to her predestined use, which is nameless. Any reader pertaining to the feminized category receives a gut punch. Would you care to be prostituted? Since I first began to read, the punch had been one part of reading. I felt it personally, that is to say, physically. Sometimes I braced myself and continued, bristling with cautious defensiveness. Sometimes I weakened and cried. ashamed even of my weakness. I believed it was my task to harden myself and persist. But gradually now the Baudelairean rant against the girl began to work differently in me. This slut insinuated attractive possibilities. What if this was not a punch but a perverse invitation? The lush imbecile beckoned me in. She begged me to become something. I paused, then I became that monster. I even expanded her grotesque domain, following the useful suggestion of Michèle Bernstein that it has become time to 'unleash inflation"

Though I liked his philosophy of tailoring very much, I did not set out to compose the work of Baudelaire. In truth I'd barely read him. I entertained no particular literary nostalgia towards his canonical image, and I knew very little about his life. Between me and the Baudelaire concept there was no articulated relationship of influence, imitation, worship, or even rebuttal. When I think about the conditions of this involuntary transmission, although I don't believe that conditions are necessarily causes, I now see that I'd been nudged a little by the presence in my life of the worn yellow volume, and by the mostly passive absorption of a received mythology, as well as by the slightly more principled reading of a Predictable cluster of critical texts, the ones more or less mandatory in my intellectual generation. Everyone reads an excerpt of The Painter of Modern Life alongside their Walter Benjamin and then moves on. Everyone reads three poems from Le Spleen de Paris."

"the Baudelaire material exerted subtle pressures whose import I didn't at first recognize, involved as I was with what seemed like more contemporary problems, such as the performativity of gender, or the politics of complicity. But I believe that there was no active sequence of cause and effect, no organic arc of development that could explain the transmission. I simply discovered within myself late one morning in middle age the authorship of all of Baudelaire's work. I can scarcely communicate the shock of the realization. What then of this authorship, this boisterous covenant? I either received it entire, as one slips into a jacket and assumes its differently accented gestural life, or I uncovered it within myself, which is to say inwardly I fell upon it."

"What happened was this: I smashed up against a violent and completely formed recognition that entered through my sleepy hands. The poems were my poems. The words as I read them were words I knew deeply because they were my own, the way my skin was physiologically my own. I'd muttered these words as I walked. I'd crossed them out after several years to replace them with other words and then changed them back. I was completely inside the poem I was reading, and also within its gradual, discontinuous making"

I’ll explain again. Waking early one morning in a Vancouver hotel room in the spring of 2016, I picked up the copy of Baudelaire that I’d been up late reading the night before. It was a wide bed; I’d simply left the book splayed open on the other pillow and fallen asleep beside it as some might sleep with a cat curled close. I’d slept only lightly. I was preparing to teach a seminar on the prose poem, connecting Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen to Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker and the Essays of Montaigne. I felt nervous about these intermittent teaching tasks and so I defensively overprepared; now those hurried studies haunted my sleep. Still in bed, barely awake, I clicked on the lamp, reached for the outdated dark blue Modern Library edition that had replaced the old paperback I’d lost. The translations were mawkish. The worn cloth cover felt comfortable and familiar. I read at random one sentence, a cry posing as a query:

Shall we ever live?

What happened was this: I smashed up against a violent and completely formed recognition that entered through my sleepy hands. The poems were my poems. The words as I read them were words I knew deeply because they were my own, the way my skin was physiologically my own. I’d muttered these words as I walked. I’d crossed them out after several years to replace them with other words and then changed them back. I was completely inside the poem I was reading, and also within its gradual, discontinuous making, which was both skin and breath"

"Here I'll call it writing. But I wish to exorcise from this domain any assumption of authority. It is perhaps a false provenance, but I recall reading somewhere that the medieval Latin root of the word author was auctore to augment. Not caring much for the scholarship of origins, I've since held fast to this etymology as a truth, and not least as a method, without ever verifying it. To augment would be my work - to add the life of a girl without subtracting anything else from the composition, and then to watch the centre dissolve."

To have been thus doubly kissed, to have been drawn by a kiss, was a form of becoming. This kiss transcribed me. And yet for a very long time the double kiss had had to ripen upon me in its cool way, until in the morning hotel bed it awoke a second time within me, or indeed upon my skin, meaning also the skin of my tongue, as the artifice of my authorship of the works of Baudelaire. Between the wide bed of the hotel and the narrow bed of the maid's room on rue du Cherche-Midi, beds like two poles of a battery, the one with a book, the other with a boy, all of my life crowded, every part of the language that figured the pause that permitted me to enter poetry. Reader, I am sad to think of all the years that passed during which that kiss was forgotten. The truth is, I only recalled the kiss because I had transcribed it. Even - or, I suppose, especially - the most delicately human truths can disappear. I had made a place for it then in the diary I have often mentioned in these pages, the heavy hard-bound diary with the brown leather spine, which weighed as much as a sturdy pair of leather boots. In black ink on blank cream-coloured laid paper, I had found a few phrases for the boy's kiss, for his silver necklace, for the soft light that afternoon, which was caught glinting in the necklace, in the midst of pages of lists and awkward drawings of coffee cups, park benches, and sculptures at the Louvre. This diary was a character in the drama I was constructing, the drama of my life, or at least my imagination of a possible

and necessary life. It was my dirty and smudged receiver. Obediently it harboured the augmented kiss of the green afternoon. I had begun the diary shortly before my first exodus to Paris, under the influence of my grandmother's death. While she was dying in a Toronto hospital I stayed in her apartment, a sparse place, since she had sold many possessions in order to get by. I took the bus to visit her every day, bringing her little puddings and treats to tempt her to eat, and a tape deck, so she could listen to music. I brought late Beethoven quartets on cassette. I applied lotion to her dry face and hands. I combed her hair. I helped her change her nightie. But what she wanted most from me, what she was hungry for, was description. She wanted me to describe everything to her and so I did: the route the bus had taken, the interiors of the various shops I visited, what trees were flowering and where, what late and where I bought it, how I had rinsed my blouses in the bathroom sink and hung them to drip dry over the tub. The vintage stay-up grid-patterned stockings I'd found in a vintage shop in Kensington Market. Nothing was too trivial. For my grandmother, in the last days of her living, description was a second life, a way of being in the world. It was what I could offer her, and it was what she could receive. Description soothed her. It was mortality's cosmetic. It enlarged the possible...

So I described for her. In this way writing became a magical procedure: describing the world in its smallest details was a work of love for the dead."

"my inevitable failure to get it all down - the patterns of concrete floor tiles in 5 p.m. winter train stations lit by yellow incandescent light, the pink feather counterpane on the hotel bed in my room in Rheims when I went to see the twelve tapestries of the life of Mary in the cathedral and left with the image of bombed-out stained- glass windows incongruously pouring morning light into Gothic space, the riveting astonishment of the Cassavetes film Love Streams that I'd seen at a matinée on the boulevard Saint-Michel and left indelibly altered: Gena Rowlands as the questing and numinous medieval philosopher of the expansion of love, her face like a bright planet across jittering chiaroscuro. Distant love, divorced love, mother-daughter love, rejected love, father-daughter love, sister-brother love, father-son love, human-animal love, polyamorous love, earth love, holy love, ludic love, experimental love, all splintered, imploded, swirled, marbled, leaked, knit in limitless kaleidoscope; the tenderness of the boy's gaze before he kissed me."

life. I wanted to be as stupid as kissing, as dirty as a servant, as ripe as a blown-open diary, and I was. Everything will fall short of the lucidity of this stain and its proliferation of vanishing points. Also I reread to live doubly. I do now enjoy receiving the shock of audacity at the stain that I was. It is not possible that I was that girl, splintered, imploded, swirled, leaking, yet I hold here in my unmanicured hands her junky documents. Under their influence, I learn afresh the nobility of infidelity and artifice."

" I feel a faintly obscene devotion to my own ridiculousness, as if I were a perverted naturalist describing a curious form of invasive vegetation. To everything I read in the diaries I now give the name novel, I give the name knock-off. Yet I am completely disgusted by literature. That's why this is erotic comedy. A brief afternoon tempest; one petal slides under the door. The time of this cottage is kept in flowers. As a dandy fingers his lapels, I finger my book."

I recall that the room was very narrow, as was the bed, and that the wallpaper was covered in lugubrious yellow roses. Things left in hotel rooms: Swinburne, the moth-ridden morning jacket, a polished black teardrop-shaped pebble I had carried since childhood for luck, my Vivitar camera, my Canadian passport, my best brassiere, of magenta silk brocade trimmed in orange piping. Each of these items is now framed in my memory by the room where I left it behind, as if forgetting the object conceptually fixed the place and its decoration, in a perverse inversion of the often-mentioned technique of ancient memory. Here the object, the Swinburne Faber paperback, purple, absent, recalls the room, street sound and river light coming through the tall open window. and the heavy rosy Goth pulse of the amber scent in its odd flat transparent bottle."

Carved from solid walnut, it was one of those furnishings of genius, which we find in the eighteenth century, but which modern cabinet makers are powerless to imitate or reproduce. Indeed, its oval shape was endlessly transformed by inflections, apparently capricious and every-which-way, but to the contrary, the result of profound calculations. Not only did this ceaseless, undulating line seduce by way of its elegant caprice, but the table was contrived so that no matter how one sat at it, the body found itself supported, held softly, with no rigidity! Banville said that he believed the table itself was an element in the composition of Les Fleurs du mal."

"In considering the publication of Les Fleurs du mal and its subsequent trial, I believe it was the century that was obscene, not the poems. Baudelaire had composed a darkly fulgent antidote to capital's moral voraciousness, a homeopathic potion with a complex temporal structure, as the great noses compose noble perfumes based upon a necessary rot. Had the censors recognized the mortal danger to signification exuded by the infinitely proliferating folds and vortices of these flowers? They ravage all groomed certainty."

consider the narrative components of the scent; this middle trajectory pretends to a functional, developmental sincerity, which it meanwhile viciously parodies. The final temporality is the lingering, superstructural one, a rigorous and beckoning decay deeply impregnating the senses, insinuating its undesignated difference beneath and among the sanitized affects of the grid, the assassin of the very sweetness it had borne darkly forward."

"Here I want to return to the physiognomy of inflection, the figure of the table becoming the body becoming the book of flowers. I have said that I've felt that it is the room that writes, that I simply lend it my pronoun. For Banville, Baudelaire's table was a linguistic force that collaborated with the poet's desire. The edges that separate things are conventional rather than inherent or inevitable. While it may make use of these edges in passing, the work of desire is borderless. Once set in motion by a site or an image, swervelike, the line of recollection simply continues, and in multiple directions, intensities, and temporalities, becoming surface, becoming ornament. I feel it in my body as I write this. The scent of a stairway, the glance of a painting and the eyes and the lips and the loneliness nonetheless. Here's a city that calls - be glorious fully in this poor minute. There is no unidirectional lust. We lean in and it careens to an elsewhere. It's both ahead of the body and behind the body, as well as all around it, like a voluminous shawl or scarf. Curves, counter-curves, folds entangle. To be held for an instant, to bring the furling velocity back towards the more limited scale of the speaker, desire seeks a language. The work of memory also enjoys the helpful artifice of a frame, a rhyme, a room, a table, a cartouche, a grammar. Desire and memory: their vertiginous animality is the condition of all predicates. Where would the dear bare body be without these ornate garments and phrases and ointments that bind us to time"

"When I wrote sentences in my diary, willing myself to describe rooms, paintings, dreams, garments, encounters, and so to fix them against oblivion - crossing out and starting over, repeating, replacing and slightly altering, fibbing - I discovered that I wanted their edges to shimmer. I wanted the gorgeousness in the tawdry and girlish, but I also wanted the anger. Sentences had surfaces; I wanted them to begin to undo themselves, to careen into the impossible. A sentence could be a blade. My task was to free the sentence from literature. To free it from culture even, since both are owned. At the beginning of my research I tested the potentials of duration in my diary, used the leaves of the bound volume as a laboratory. Never had a girl written anything long enough. If I could open the temporality in sentences, perhaps a transformation could take hold. It was the simplest idea, but had some inadvertent merit, in that it forced me to recognize

time as linguistic material. Therefore time did become my linguistic material. Patience and impatience intertwined in a lacework. Pattern emerged. I was no avant-gardist; I had no interest in abolishing grammar. Rather, I studied it, in a casual way. I wanted to understand subordination. I thought it could be useful. I dallied with additive phrases, internal digressions, parallel constructions, and deferred predicates; I saw that the shape of the sentence could be dangerous. Instead of accommodating and representing the already- known, so limiting identity and collectivity, this shape could instead become a force of inflection. Like the baroque table, like a spiralling scene in a movie by Cassevetes, at the core of a storm a dog becomes a blonde person who speaks soundlessly into the heart."

"The sentence: subjectivity followed by a pause. Subjectivity: whatever desires or hates. Now the pronoun could be limitlessly potent instead of retrospectively descriptive; the sentence, rather than receiving the dumb imprint of my always too-limited experience, could hold grammar open to future becoming, or shut it capriciously to evade determination. Now all at once I could recognize my own anger - it wasn't hot and explosive, but an ice- edged retraction. Often this recognition had evaded me in my life. I had felt that I had no anger until I took hold of that cold blade. I came to feel grammar as an elemental matrix. All possible co-mixture and variability came into being in tandem with the technology of those prismatic constraints."

" What future strangers would recognize themselves in this charged. citational, T? What would a girl's anger be? How would each speaking girl transform her pronoun? Its a fractured citation. Everything that's ever passed through it has left behind traces of fragrance: coconut, musk, and fear. We speak the words others have spoken, in new settings, and so transform them a little, while the trace of the old speakers also remains active, moving into the potent future. The pronoun is just the most intense point of this timely reinvention. The feeling of having an inner life, animated by a cold-hot point of identification called I, is a linguistic collaboration. We speak only through others' mouths."

"Yet what I hd already, coming to this table, was something easy and useful and fresh, and was given to me by sentences: the cool sensation that my body was already in the middle of thinking and that this condition, in both its lust and its anger, was average, unremarkable, so free.I would have liked my sentences to devour time. They'd be fat with it. In what sense is anger ornamental? When it permits a girl to pleasurably appear to herself. There was never a room that could hold my anger and so I went to the infinity of the phrase. Obviously it wasn't simple like that. Anger was my complicated grace. The sexuality of sentences: Reader, I weep in it."

"I began to see the poems in their typographical arrangement on paper as kinds of portraits. They were portraits of poems, much in the way that, between exhibitions, in the temporarily emptied room of a nineteenth-century museum, the indigo or crimson fabric-covered walls will be unevenly faded, revealing the brighter shapes of pictures that had long hung there, as ghosts of previous syntaxes of display and relationship. These absent shapes were now spaces for thinking something new. Whatever newness might be - for now, like a geometer, I think there is very little that is ever new on this earth. What we name invention is mostly recombination. But then the idea of the new burned like a faith within me. After many years of such ruminations and countless moves between cheap rooms, I lost track of the book, whose covers had come loose, leaving the onion-skin paper vulnerable to damage. Still by the time it disappeared I had not actually read it, though I had absorbed it through my hands."

"The granddaughter had also given me a paperback Littré dictionary, which I continue to keep on my writing table. It is the 1971 10/18 edition from Christian Bourgois and Dominique de Roux, with a glossy purple cover showing a slash of sulphur yellow and a disk of cyan, within which nested the stern photographic portrait of Emile Littré the theosophist lexicographer. Several children's names were written shakily and boldly on the first pages of the dictionary, in various colours of ink, accompanied by geometric doodles: Emmanuel, Jean, Caron. Inside, apparently random words were highlighted with yellow bars: exacerber, pondereuse, protectorat, regressive, affecter. It was the code to my future and I could not yet read it, or it was nothing, a chance scattering of various kinds of idiosyncratic marginalia - stars, underlinings, groupings of successive entries linked by soft vertical slashes in pencil. Next to gambade is a small black ink drawing of a crystal. A gambade is a caper, a frisk, a prancing. It is also the successful evasion of the payment of a debt, especially by a poet."

"From a slightly accented waist its longish skirt fared a bit behind, encouraging a brisk, decorative enunciation of my step; this jacket added a grain of wit to its wearer's walk, like a mild sartorial drug. It buttoned to the middle of the breastbone, and the largish buttons were covered in velvet, which had frayed at the edges, as had the softly turned, broad and high lapels. I recalled the theory of lapels I had once read without retaining the name of its author: the lapel is a gentleman's expression of vulva-envy. The old jacket fit me perfectly. Wearing this garment transmitted to my own body a metamorphosis in corporal gesture; though my physique and posture were more accented than altered, my bodily vocabulary opened to movements and stances generally only intuited now with the help of old photographs, such as those by Nadar or Carjat. The tailoring of the jacket moulded a new gait, a new stance, a gestural etiquette. I say new because it was unique in my proprioceptive grammar, though in reality what I had slipped into was an all-but-vanished ethics of sensation. I felt a lightened precision in my movements, coupled with a pleasurable cast of subtle constraint. I felt the flare of my high lapels. I bought the jacket."

"All of those jackets I wore over anything at all during the long era of intensive feminist theoretical study; they accompanied my ardent forays into Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto - for indeed I was no goddess - and the world-changing texts of Judith Butler, the shockingly liberating Gender Trouble, for"

"There had been so many Baudelairean jackets, each part of the infinite cycle of clothing, pawning, borrowing, owing, which, continuously recombinant, functioned in his life as the cardinal directions or the cosmic elements did in ancient geometries. Surely some of the purloined jackets were still circulating in the rag cosmos. The poet was not alone in upholding this sartorial cosmology. Marx, too, while writing Capital in London, rhythmically pawned his coat and then borrowed to retrieve it; so determining was this mobile garment and its liquid value that he used its image to begin the great study of the production of value in modernity. 'A coat is a use-value, Marx wrote, 'that is determined by need' It was said that he could only go to the library to research his lifework on those days when his coat was out of hock. At such times Baudelaire, or so he wrote to his mother, seeking yet another small advance on his capital to again renew the cycle, would wear all of his shirts at once and not go out. So the coat was also a fungible money - at the pawnshop it represented to its temporary owner not its usefulness, but a mobile unit of value in itself. A coat became heating wood, coffee, a room, time."

"The systems and infrastructures were continuing to erode, as they had been doing since the arrival of Thatcher in 1979, and the defunct industrial beauty of nineteenth- century train stations was no exception. Everything had been privatized or was about to be privatized except for poetry, which was worthless. These things, and others, about the depressed local economy, the fall of the social state, and the increasing precariousness of survival, were explained to me as I walked with my hosts to the pub where the reading would be held. Emboldened by our shared contempt for capital and our appreciation for difficult syntax, we drank a great deal."

"From a slightly accented waist its longish skirt flared a bit behind, encouraging a brisk, decorative enunciation of my step; this jacket added a grain of wit to its wearer's walk, like a mild sartorial drug. It buttoned to the middle of the breastbone, and the largish buttons were covered in velvet, which had frayed at the edges, as had the softly turned, broad and high lapels. I recalled the theory of lapels I had once read without retaining the name of its author: the lapel is a gentleman's expression of vulva-envy. The old jacket fit me perfectly. Wearing this garment transmitted to my own body a metamorphosis in corporal gesture; though my physique and posture were more accented than altered, my bodily vocabulary opened to movements and stances generally only intuited now with the help of old photographs, such as those by Nadar or Carjat. The tailoring of the jacket moulded a new gait, a new stance, a gestural etiquette. I say new because it was unique in my proprioceptive grammar"

" This cottage is now my archive. I am not sure that this is what I imagined for my life in poetry as I strove away on my blue typewriter in chambres de bonnes in 1985, yet having achieved such an archive I am not dissatisfied. In melancholic moments I refer to it as my hut, as it is very cheap, sparsely furnished, uninsulated, and heated by one wood stove. Many would consider it unsuitable for habitation. I can say that it does not leak. But if it is a hut, it is a dandiacal hut; all of my early urban fantasies, sartorial, perambulatory, philosophical, are now concentrated in its rough rafters and stone walls. My walks with my dog through the fields are theoretical experiments in the association of arcane concepts with a material history of margins. The landscape itself rhythmically conceals and reveals a tracing of the seizure and scarring of the earth by capital. Here I am not so much a recluse as an archivist of the ephemeral. This is one possible fate for the female thinker; this is one of the calmants of my heart."

"Folded rectangle was stitched to folded rectangle. All edges were woven selvedges. I kept sleeping. I kept stitching. She said that before armour the beautiful power of garments was the rhythm of folds. I felt the folded beauty in my sleep. She said that the folds were inconveniently uncomfortable beneath the snugly fitted armour. They clumped up and chafed and bruised the wearer. Therefore the tailoring or cuts, drawing the garment close to the living skin. One part of the technique of tailoring was layering many mitred woollen pieces to mould a form. The woollen layers constituted a padding fitted to the body. She said that in so contriving the woollen padding, she transformed the suit of armour to a kind of furnace or chrysalis. From it the dandy inevitably emerged. I was waking, still a little moist, coyly fluttering the tails of my morning jacket."

"There only one thing to do, and I did it with a kind of quick instinct, as would an artist who all at once, in her studio, perceives the only solution to a long-standing, worried- over metaphysical problem. I removed my jacket and hung it there, respectfully and tenderly buttoning its buttons and adjusting the fall of the shoulders on the wooden hanger. I closed the armoire, then ran for my train. This is how I lost both the poems and the jacket of Baudelaire, and in doing so made my only installation work. Perhaps the armoire has never since been opened, and inside it, the jacket is now livid dust."

"Cholerous yellow bile is exuded by the gall bladder, in the bitternes of anger. 'The phlegmatic humour seems to move with the sleepy coolness of water or lymph. It is stored in the lungs Only black bile, the fluid of melancholy, whose source is the spleen, has no observable correlative among the various internal fluids of the human body. It is not like chyle or wax or semen or tears; black bile is purely imagined. It is a spurious fluid necessary to supplement and correct the asymmetry of the other three, and thence to connect the cosmical human body to the four worldly elements. The element of melancholy is earth. It is dry and cold. Each of our bodies comprises a unique combination of these four humours in always-shifting proportions; our complexions, dispositions, and health express our humoral balance or imbalance at any time. In my own humoral admixture, what is the exact proportion of melancholy to choler? It may have been a preponderousness of the darkest humour that brought me to this cold house, together with my dog, most melancholic of beasts, as Benjamin reminds in his work on the baroque."

"Rhythm, an expression of form, is time, but it is time as the improvisation that moves each limited body in play with a world. Not necessarily metrical or regular, it's the passing shapeliness that we inhabit. It both has a history and is the history that our thinking has made:. As l achieved the apex of excitement in the rereading of this beautiful document, attempting to grasp anew how a concept becomes quite: literally a landscape (for only much later in the history of this word had rhythm come to articulate and even make perceivable the repeating or cycling patterns we attribute now to nature"

"Or had the insect succeeded in slightly breaking my nape skin with its barbed, needle-like hypostome? Had it transferred to my bloodstream, mixed with a small quantity of its arachnid saliva, the virus-like paternity of the body of work that I had discovered within myself? It is likewise the contagion of a virus, I have heard, that causes the brindled beauty of the parrot tulip, the peculiar variegation so valuable and sought-after during the Dutch baroque, when tulip bulbs were first brought from Turkey to the Netherlands. In Europe a virus of the common potato itself only recently introduced. from South America - caused a mutation in the Turkish flowers, expressed in the bizarre striated colouring and feathered form of the petals, now referred to as broken. Now I must wonder whether I did not so much assume the paternity, nor receive it in the mystic transmission whose architecture I have sought so rangingly to comprehend in these pages, so much as I had been infected by it, so that at this very moment the Baudelairean authorship moves"

"Her mouth is firmly set and her jaw strong. She withdraws from the gaze; she doesn't offer herself to an interpretation. Her autonomy is the very core of beauty. The concentrated intensity of her distant and withdrawn face is a rhetorical counterpoint to the skirt's expansive, forward-tumbling froth. I recognize the future girl in her refusal, her gravitas. She is irreducible to the visible, and she is irreducible to the invisible. She is relaxed in her displeasure. She is totally modern. I'll never know her and she doesn't care. This is Jeanne Duval. She's a philosopher. She was painted by Manet in 1862, a year after Baudelaire had dedicated to her a copy of the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal: 'Homage à ma très chère Féline.' Now I meet her image in Paris, on June 13, 2019. The linden trees are in flower. I'm fifty-seven years old. I'm thinking about the immense, silent legend of any girl's life. She's leaning back, observing."

#book

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