derived from the letter keats wrote to fanny brawne that was buried with him, unopened, because he asked for it, because he could not bear —
prologue [crooked knife]
i am out of time, terrified, a bit tired of my own interiority.
i am a bit tired of treating my own interiority as a subject worthy of this much attention, this much good lamp light, this much of the coffee that i cannot afford because i live in the city that patti smith left when she could no longer afford it and i have stayed, for reasons that seemed, at the time, like reasons.
and yet. here we are. the lamp, then, the coffee, cooling.
keats called it negative capability — the capacity to remain in uncertainty without irritable reaching after fact and reason — and he died at twenty-five of tuberculosis in a room above the spanish steps with the sound of the fountain he called like a sword coming through the window and i have been alive just a bit less than keats and have produced considerably less and the fountain is still there, still going, the city of rome having declined to pause for either of us.
this is not self-pity.
this is comparative diminishment, which is different, which is what happens when you read too much too young and built your interior architecture out of other people's genius and now must live inside it, a tenant in a house you could never have afforded to construct.
brodsky said:
there is no antidote to loneliness
there is only company
which is a different problem.
cioran said something worse, but cioran always said something worse.
i will not repeat what cioran said
because it is half past three
and i am already
leaving.
I. a vignette: the bookstore, thus the book
you are in the bookstore — the good one, the one on the street you go to when the city has gotten into your reasoning — and you pull something from a shelf, some perfectly good book by someone your age, someone your precise age, published, celebrated, already in paperback which means it has already completed an entire life cycle you have not yet begun.
you read the first paragraph.
It is good.
you put it back. you pick it up. you read the acknowledgments because the acknowledgments are where the self-construction is most visible, where the careful thanking of agents and partners and my brilliant reader performs a life that has cohered, that has found its collaborators, that has located its people in the city and held them.
my brilliant reader.
you put it back. you pick it up. you buy it. you carry it home in a tote bag that has seen this before, that has carried home many such books, that is, if tote bags have interiority — and at this point i am prepared to argue they do — exhausted by your relationship to other people's achievement.
adorno wrote that every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
you therefore have committed nothing//
you are so clean it is almost indecent.
II. the literature of productive suffering
here is the caustic-myth: that suffering metabolizes into art. that the wound, correctly tended, correctly aestheticized, becomes the window. frida kahlo's spine. sylvia plath's oven. the whole gorgeous catastrophe of the romantic tradition eating its young and calling it inspiration.
here is the counter-myth, which maggie nelson has been patiently constructing for twenty years from the ruins of the first: that the wound is not a window. The wound is a wound. the aestheticization of suffering is a secondary act, performed after, not during, and the time between wound and window is not transformation. it is just time. just the unglamorous duration of sitting with the thing that hurt, in rooms that do not know or care that you have decided to make something from it, we will not make anything today.
III. fragments from the tradition of beautiful failure
on keats: he wrote beauty is truth, truth beauty and everyone quotes it and nobody agrees on what it means and this is correct, this is exactly right, the poem that generates more interpretation than resolution is the poem that is still alive.
on fitzgerald: he said the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas simultaneously and still retain the ability to function. he did not, by the end, retain the ability to function.
on benjamin collecting parisian arcades for fifteen years and never finishing: the arcades project is a monument to the beautiful impossibility of the totalizing work, the work that would say everything. but you cannot, the saying defeats itself. the everything becomes another arcade to collect. benjamin knew this and kept collecting.
on you, specifically: you know all of this. you have read all of this. you are, in the bloomian sense, absolutely crushed under the anxiety of influence, buried alive in the library of people who did it first and better, and still, and still, you sit down. you make the lamp useful. you drink the coffee that has gone cold.
harold bloom called this the agon.
the struggle with the dead fathers.
the necessary misreading.
the strong poet wrests meaning
from the tradition
by getting it productively wrong.
i have been productively wrong about so many things for so long
that i have started to wonder
if this counts.
the keats room in rome — small, two floors, looking onto the piazza — keeps his death mask behind glass.
i have stood in front of it. i have done the thing you do, measuring the face against the work, looking for evidence of the capacity in the bone structure, which is a completely absurd thing to do and which i did anyway, which everyone does anyway, because we are all still trying to locate genius somewhere visible, somewhere external, somewhere that is not the unbearable implication
that it is interior.
that it lives precisely where you cannot see it from the outside.
that the lamp and the coffee and the half past three and the tote bag full of books by people your age, the whole embarrassing apparatus of wanting, is not the obstacle.
is the work. has always been the work.
the fountain outside is still going.
it still sounds like a sword.
he was right about the fountain.
he was right about so many things
and he was twenty-five
and the room is very small
and it is still there
and so, improbably,
infuriatingly,
with insufficient justification
and too much coffee
are you.
—N
epilogue [crooked vine]
certain was i, that blue bird slept in yellowed sky
no quiet on the western plain my seventh string
hum, delivers fable flutters deft, bring a lilac
towards raining stable comes, my left careens
unto shoulders ebony and thyme, carry
literary moon when eden seeks sycamore
three to tusk and two your mind.
skip the brook it sings.