Deborah MeadowsThe Poetics of Drifting DevotionsThe poetry of Reina María Rodríguez
Reina María Rodríguez: Violet Island and Other Poems. Translated by Kristin Dykstra and Nancy Gates Madsen. Los Angeles: Green Integer Press, 2004. |
“under us are gravestones |
Thus, walking changes from a subjective activity to an objective one. Impersonal, it obliges the subject to renounce his or her customary practices in the interest of obtaining a kind of cure on the urban couch: to listen attentively to the city, like others listen to language, the Other having shifted. By the same token, the modalities for describing the “promenade” must also change. It might even be said that the dérive is walking purged of autobiographical representation, that it is a practice requiring the enunciatory and ambulatory disappearance of the walker. And on the SI relation to social space and structures: This becomes clear with the mythic derives (drifts or driftings), the most practical phase of the Situationists’ spatial investigations. Relating to “psycho-geography” much as textual analysis does to literature, these are exercises in territorial reconnaissance or interpretation of the urban text, exploratory forays into singular surroundings.
Before I explore the theme of iconic representations and, like selves, their lack of stability over time and dependence on shared, social context, I will first take up the theme of ruins. |
A Green Integer Volume
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A Knack for it
“You never noticed that the coins were from different eras,” he began. “For a child geography is much more interesting than history. Other countries mean more than other eras ... Perhaps we still do not need to begin our journeys in time.”
They arrive with their “coin” at a place where another urban planner lives in a condemned building. The coin ends up being a game piece for a Monopoly-type board game they can use to purchase a map of the city from the 1832 cholera outbreak. This will somehow develop his thesis. Here they experience explosions below-ground for laying coaxial cable; meanwhile, someone is removing a wooden structural support to build upward, another loft foreshadowing the social occurrence of collapsing buildings, killed residents, the transformation into ruins. Yet, we learn, a peculiar subculture of tugurs arose who built on abandoned buildings and thus began an ethos of the “true tugur [who] causes a building to fall without letting a speck of brickdust fall on him. His victories consist in returning to the house and not find it standing.” They are disliked because “They’re footloose, rolling stones, they have nomadic blood ... And it’s hard to be like that on a small island.” and “... What your blood tells you every night is a mere mirage of the open road if the land comes to an end. ...So if you can’t get out, you go in ...” so our protagonist is told by D who dies in a collapse shortly after this conversation. A book within the short story, D’s book also entitled A Knack for Making Ruins seems to bring everyone associated with it to a fatal end. Members of his research team die off one-by-one; shortly after the prior conversation, the young man’s thesis advisor dies. Left to follow a mysterious man at the train station, our protagonist enters an underground world that begins with abandoned subway or coaxial tunnels and becomes a sort of heaven, or after life too vast and bright to locate oneself, where collapsed buildings exist, like embellished, reconstructed memory. As for the players, they remain invisible, literally blending into the landscape. Their preference runs, if not to secret places, then to deserted ones, like the forementioned catacombs and houses slated for demolition — or the métro, which should be opened at night after the trains have stopped running, its corridors only dimly illuminated. Also noteworthy from this perspective is the frequency of the figure of the labyrinth from which the Situationists have no intention of exiting, a kind of ultimate refuge from the society of the spectacle. The world is to culminate in a beautiful labyrinth in which little Situationist monsters can hide to outwit the formidable beast that is the society of the spectacle, which is too large to follow them inside, or, should it manage to gain access, would summarily be devoured by them. And: ... To be an artist is to take psychogeographic bearings, to make oneself a theorist of space as others are of text... |
Perfect Copies ... don’t you know the real scope of my metaphor? yesterday I tried to explain it to you, a concept shaping my entire life: not to crush innocence, even if we have to lie for it — to “lie” isn’t the word — to kill.
For a reader inexpert in the language, how does Spanish represent or foreground social relations in ways that differ from English? Does that make for a different experience of the work? nude inside the typewriter: a time machine, a ridiculous simulacrum who just walks, toward the after, in this other empty machine, the time machine and I, we look for virginity, we deliver it, the dream, the insanity and something that I was going to be ... something without a grip, without an overflow of memory to interrupt and hold that discourse as if among crystallizations... Yet the suspension of time required by representation or description is driven by fascination and love, (and in anticipation of a study of the poems’ use of iconic or devotional images): ... everyone freezes something inconstant in order to possess it, which has to be called love. I already told you, all I want to find in motionlessness is the before and the after, it’s an exercise in attention |
Medieval selves ____massed_________________________________________
that not only connects us to questions of the weight of tradition on the present, but questions stability much like the opening citation from “the rafters” in this article. __________________________ Later, Fraser continues, using typos that blur “palette” with “palpate” in Giotto’s quest for a “great system of perfect color” that required his use of “real faces” in a way, I suspect, that Viola and Rodríguez could both appreciate: “His own palpate softens theory’s sharp folds |
Whether this is political or not. The failure to receive election from, presumably older men, is a wound whose injustice is nursed over in an arena where: Fighting for an area of expertise. So the agon where: “the government had ordered the clocks turned” accelerates alienation and bureaucrats ascend in malevolent power in this, Ashberyian perhaps, “system.” Somehow: Like Giotto’s frames and somehow, one survives economic duress, earthquakes, and crumbling buildings: They were floating and thus out of danger
but fragmentation, a kaleidoscopic turn can support the narration. |
Iconic Photographs and Quotidian Proliferation I always tried to see what you were seeing |
I could even photograph that distant Christ;
The narrator of the poem recalls attending school with a supposed son of Che about whom it was rumored that his mother had incestuous relations with the boy, “one I couldn’t love/ maybe because I loved him already ...” Can aura or charisma be so strong that it can cause people to transgress taboos? Then what else can it cause people to do, and are those qualities necessary to overthrow the mentality as well as the governing structures of colonial domination? Can it, in turn, bind with worship? the only thing that’s left for me is to know that I was, that I am
This is amplified by the narrator’s close identity to the supposed son of Che as a “child of the revolution” who was “... made in order to be like him/ in the real death of an imaginary past.” A striking poem leaving readers to wonder how identity gets negotiated in relation to such a tall, mythic past so that today may move forward. How can society be full of possibility and avoid becoming “the ghost of fallen leaves that was once its protective tree.” |
Scenesters and Hangers-on another woman that I don’t know, thrown on top of me
The final poem from the Páramos selection, “the work” opens on a scene of several people, actually several social roles, joined under the light of “an imitation art nouveau lamp.” They are in “the window of pretense,” and like many poetry scenes, this one has fakes, wannabes, and poseurs who “all need their own personal representations to survive” and “all aspire to some truth” but are constrained by their situation, their limits, by their quest for “preservation in the self” that will exceed their time and place. That earnest human drive is depicted as the flawed, tragic engine of continuing pursuit in full knowledge of the impossibility of satisfaction of those desires, yet “... neither do they define anything beyond our failed choice, pressured by thousands of faraway mechanisms, just one false move of an antenna ... ‘like iron filings attracted to a magnet...’ can you defend me from myself? from the narrow circle of a life ...” (105). |
In the Paris métro ...she tries to tap that harsh Lalique crystal, to sound it out with her knuckles, to live without its appearance, but you’ve taken the jar away; and the fascists, the cords, the ropes all got in as well to hang the half-beings who renounce the sanity of possession, and now nothing remains of the alternative life inside, of me inside myself, of the carousel that begins the entrance into permanent time at Les Halles; nothing remains of the uncertain attempts to experience the intertwining of the weeds, flooded with voices and voices and rallies that don’t say anything anymore. that’s why she is, I am, alone and lost in the commemoration of my red apple, of my sufficient consolation in its taste, with myself and with the apple, with the holographic memory of you, of having touched you when I looked through the skylight over the darkened silhouettes of the temples. will I take you with me from this museum to reality?
Les Halles, of course, is a central reference to Situationists, and I understand that Guy Debord includes several market scenes in his 1973 film The Society of the Spectacle.(Not to mention the well known work of Henri Lefebvre who reviews the re-appropriation of Les Halles and sees, through presence of youth culture, a shift from a site designating work to subversive play in his The Production of Space). Stricken by the virus of time. And to it — again; becoming and a bit later: A sign enters like a forged nail we hammer
The self-replicating “virus of time” can appear differentiated by position, divided by an axis or first or second placement in a logic equation, yet our most established tools of identifying and categorizing species, such as animal motility, drive toward a future that makes meaning in a meaningless world, a shoveling and hammering that can be art, science, or language. ...another language, Like the poems “twilight’s idol” and “watery light,” Rodríguez experiments with erotic poetry and finds the material sad, funny, transgressive, and oddly unselving : “I undress and there’s no me” where the presence of self can suspend the presence of “description” to use Arkadii Dragomoschenko’s term for landscape: I’ve just discovered my body and rejected it because sometimes it tries to possess a space, an obliqueness that distracts me from what is continuous, from the interruption of landscape (intimacy contained in a small flowerpot with lilies).
The poem concludes with a critique of artistic narcissism that turns the world into a projected creation of the artist, “reality as a ghost created by the author”.
(Summer 2003) |
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Works Cited
Beverly, John, ed. boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture. 29.3 (Fall 2002): 1-11. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Dragomoschenko, Arkadii. Description. Translated by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1990.
Duby, Georges and Philippe Ariès. A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World, II. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988.
Fraser, Kathleen. il cuore: the heart Selected Poems 1970-1995. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997.
Kaufmann, Vincent. “Angels of Purity.” OCTOBER 79, Winter 1997, pp. 49-68. Translated by John Goodman. New York: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.
Meadows, Deborah. “Three from Cuba.” Edited by Mark Nowak. Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics, (10: Spring 2002).
Phillips, Dennis. ARENA. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1991.
Ponte, Antonio José. Tales from the Cuban Empire. Translated by Cola Franzen. San Francisco: City Lights Press, 2002.
Rodríguez, Reina María. Violet Island and Other Poems. Translated by Kristin Dykstra and Nancy Gates Madsen. Los Angeles: Green Integer Press, 2004.
Rodríguez, Reina María. email with author. 01May2003.
Viola, Bill. Bill Viola: The Passions. The Getty. January 24-April 27, 2003.
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