Lisa Robertson — Excerpts from Riverwork
Liter of Vin de Rochers
Bought on the rue Mouffetard this morning from my regular wine dealer, who calls me ‘the gentleman with the deep voice’ and says from time to time ‘with what I have seen in this place, I could write a novel stretching from here to Place Maubert.’– Daniel Spoerri, An Anecdoted Topography of Chance
For we rarely meet with such spirits which love Virtue so metaphysically, as to abstract her from all sensible & delicious compositions, and love the purity of the Idea ...
– Sara Hutchinson, in The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I thought I could talk about failure with Kémi, who came to pay me a visit as my ankle healed. The steep, waxed, and unevenly worn stairway of my building was inhospitable to anyone’s illnesses or injuries or age. He brought with him lunch provisions; we would eat together. Maybe our conversation would calm me a little. Maybe he could help me find a new tangent, a new entry point, in the old material, if I dared to ask. Or his company would staunch my tears.
It was strange to share my table. As is the custom in this city, I would meet my companions in cafés, but rarely had I invited anyone to my apartment, which felt to me as intimate as would the cell of a heretic, or an old, much-mended garment – a favourite patched and ragged house robe or darned pyjama luxuriously worn in private. One wouldn’t reveal such desuetude in general company.
For Kémi I made an exception. I had consolidated my clutter of notes and paperwork but had not otherwise prepared for my friend’s arrival, although he had called me well in advance, several days earlier, in fact, to inquire after my injury and inform me of his planned visit. I had resisted, he had remained firm, the date was set. I liked Kémi, his courtly manners and his Marxist convictions, and we had shared various queer stories and obsessions, as well as an employer, but his generosity made me anxious. I doubted my ability to reciprocate.
We greeted one another with the customary bise. He was carrying his black motorcycle helmet in one hand, and in the other a cake box. I took them, telling him how the helmet had always reminded me of John Dee’s scrying glass. He laughed, glanced across the room to my bookshelves, then approached them. He ran his silver-ringed fingers gently and slowly over their spines, pausing to extract a volume, flick its pages as if in greeting, then return it tenderly to the space on the shelf, continuing in this manner until he had made his acquaintance with the entire top row, noting with his sensitive hands my pocketbook copies of Chateaubriand’s memoirs, glancing back at me over his shoulder when he discovered the intricate thatchwork of my indices. Having reached the end of the row, he turned toward me and nodded. Now he knew a great deal. My library was my great-aunt’s library, or rather it was my approximation of what I thought her library to have contained. Not that I set out to gather my collection with this idea in mind, although I had heard of obsessive scholars who duplicated the library of Charles Olson, for example, or John Keats; I would be more apt to reassemble the library of Djuna Barnes, with the wealth of English Baroque prose that inspired her style. It was more that the blue volume of Poe, which had indeed belonged to my aunt, and which I had long ago stolen from my mother’s house, had attracted to itself, over time, the appropriate companions, beginning with his translator Baudelaire. In instances of subliminal research it remains necessary to hold in mind, gently, not forcefully, an intimation of the form of the desired documents, so that when they do appear in the plenum of findings they will be recognized. In this way I had painstakingly and at some expense assembled the Pléiade set of Baudelaire’s writings, so attractive in their dark green leatherette bindings, gold-stamped, each protected by a brittle glassine membrane, then a white cardboard slipcase – the critical work in one volume, which included his essay on Poe, the two volumes of his correspondence next, and then finally the poems, including the poems on prose and his final fragmentary work, often translated as Fuses. I particularly loved this last, but my great-aunt had been an aficionada of the poems in prose, Paris Spleen, as had Benjamin. And because my aunt had been studying the stylistic and citational threads linking Baudelaire’s prose poems to the late walks of Rousseau, to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and also to Montaigne, those books had pride of place on my top shelf, in French and in translation. I particularly loved the English baroque translation of Montaigne’s essays made by Florio, closest in time to their composition and the earliest editions, so very rich in their now-archaic diction, and so to me very stimulating, in the way that a darkened, much-varnished ancient painting draws one closer to the surface of the canvas, as if to taste the substance of the brushstrokes and their pigments. More than in the original French, I felt I could taste Montaigne in Florio, whose text emanated notes of clove and saddle leather and woodsmoke. Beneath the shelf of prime volumes, the lesser volumes: the sources, the research materials, the backup copies and variant editions, and the texts of the friends and mentors of my masters and of my great-aunt’s, many of these minor editions in burnished leather bindings, with loosened covers, found cheaply after months of poring through the fine print of the booksellers’ catalogues on my computer screen. I refer to Delvau, who I have mentioned several times, so fascinating are his psychogeographical digressions avant la lettre, and Privat d’Anglement, the Haitian journalist who had been a friend to Baudelaire, who described the popular Paris neighbourhoods and petty trades before these were razed by Haussmann, in now-obscure but once-popular books such as Paris Inconnu. There were two of the twenty-seven paper-bound volumes of the librarian Alfred Franklin’s La vie privée d’autrefois, so useful for his documentation of the deeper history of hankies, the bedsheet counts of the queens, and similar textile arcana. And a set of the memoirs of Bassompierre, of course, in homage to the lust of the young Vicomte, their rodent-nibbled margins having rendered them affordable. Also, the biographers, such as the Irish Enid Starkie, whose ardent book on Baudelaire, her first, had once made me weep, and Céleste Alba-ret, Proust’s housekeeper, who published her reminiscences of life with her demanding employer decades after his death, when she was seventy-nine years old, still vehemently and pointlessly defending the writer against rumours of homosexual escapades and special scopophilic tastes.
Kémi spread his gift of fruits and cheeses on the table, casting a glance at my jumbled papers. Genet’s Un captif amoureux was weighting the stack against the breeze of the open window. I removed the tangle of clothing from my second chair as the kettle heated and he smiled knowingly. – No iron, cousin? I shook my head vigorously. – I am a keeper of folds, I pro nounced. No iron had ever crossed my threshold. He disapproved. We sat and chatted about Genet. I told him I had picked up the book partway through reading Mémoires d’outre-tombe. Being familiar with my Chateaubriand obsession, he nodded. Edward Said, I told him, had said of Genet that his prose demonstrated one of the greatest formal French styles since Chateau-briand. This had inspired my curiosity. Genet, Said wrote, deployed maximal rigour and elegance in the disso lution of identity. I had been reading Said’s On Late Style as part of my study of lateness and last things. A committed amateur of dissolution, a weeper as I have made abundantly clear, I then had no choice but to seek out Genet’s book; after weeks of searching I found a used but still creamy Galli-mard edition on the quai near the Pont du Carrousel. Continuing the indexing habit I had established in the Livre de Poche paperbacks of Chateaubriand, I began my annotations of Genet.
Genet was sixty when he first went to Palestine, in 1970 – not completely broken down, but fragile and arthritic. He was perceived as an old man by the youth that surrounded him in the camps. I still can’t consider myself an aesthetic judge of French prose, I said, but what I found and savoured right away in Un captif amoureux was a mysteriously alive laying down of the image, in service to the unfixed density of inner experience, rather than in support of narrative logic. Take the first page, I explained, opening the book and reading aloud from the beginning: ‘The page that was previously white is now covered from top to bottom with minuscule black signs.’ And Genet compares the page’s blankness to the void on which revolution is written, a glorious artifice, and this he relates to the Black revolution in white America. Then he inverts his revolutionary cosmology some pages later in a description of the night sky overwritten with stars in a training camp in Jordan as he sleeps outdoors beneath trees, looking up at the Milky Way through branches, beneath the black communal vault. Genet’s images are fearless transformers.
Kémi said that what had brought him to the work of the elegant thief was his alliance with the Algerian resistance and the Black Panthers in the sixties. He was fascinated, he said, by a passage in Un captif amoureux where Genet described the Panthers as tender. – Tender? Well, he said, Genet described an Austrian girl of sixteen saying to him that the Black Panthers were tender, and he, in turn, remembering this girl, the expression on her face as she spoke, said the same of the Palestinians. And Kémi said he was moved by this cited tenderness. It is true, I said, that throughout Genet’s capacious record of his journeys to the Palestinian training camps and refugee camps of Jordan and Beirut in 1970 and 1982, he paid an open attention to the many women who were participating in the struggle, the collective laughter underpinning their courage, the generosity of their conversation, the precision of their memories, their fierceness. And so we spoke of the written black light and the tenderness of revolution, then the tender camera in the films of Alain Gomis, attending to and lingering on the pores of the aging skin of Thelo-nious Monk, for example, or the sleeping eyelids of the actor Saul Williams, with the generosity of a lover. – They rage on everything. But they trust in the time of the frame, Kémi said. – That’s where the love is. Like Akerman making Jeanne Dielman in 1975. The patient frame dissolves interdiction.
We lingered then, at my blue painted table, with the idea of a tender style, a slow raging style of trusting, its revolutionary ethos, its patient frame, as we ate together. Also, Genet’s tightly rolled-up shirtsleeves, their considerable allure. And Kémi said about Edward Said’s concept of late style that I should not confuse lateness with lastness. Time being knotted, he said, now tightly, now loosely, lateness and its style could erupt at any point in a life of making. Late style could possibly arrive in the middle, for example, fully late in its unmastered dissonance, but not remain. Sometimes lateness can be sheltered briefly and tenderly by the very young. Mortality itself is splintered. Someone can be preternaturally old for a minute or a week at twelve, or twenty-seven. Anybody knows this, he said. Lateness is not linear. Given that its milieu is hopelessness, lateness is a political event, not a result of chronology. When there is no hope, style really exists.
– Cousin, he said, for hopelessness go to the Louvre and look at Poussin’s Deluge. It was his last painting. Kémi enjoyed self-contradiction.
He had brought pastries from Stohrer, three of them: a religieuse, a merveilleuse, and a nun’s fart, in a gilt cardboard coffer resembling a rinky-dink handbag. We exclaimed together over the marvellousness of the ensemble. As he delicately bisected each confection with a kitchen knife, we agreed that in spite of his preference for an anti-theatrical theatre, Genet would approve of these perishable follies. He did love a nun, and he delighted in the pleasurable desecration of sanctity. Between us we devoured them. Kémi now sported a little moustache of cream. So did I, I realized. We laughed, then fell silent beside the window.
We listened with irony to a neighbour’s radio transmitting Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge across the inner court. Synchronicity is unstable. A late-afternoon blackbird sang. After the blackbird Kémi repeated that he was certain that the lateness of Genet’s last work had nothing to do with the physiological trajectory of the writer himself. Lateness is not correspondent to age, my friend insisted. Although the writer did die while completing the final page proofs of the book, it was not Genet’s bodily ending that determined his stylistic achievement. Late style is an eruption. The late style of Un captif amoureux emanated from the unfathomable shock Genet had experienced as an immediate witness of the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camp outside Beirut in September 1982. – The lateness was impersonal, Kemi repeated. – It’s the lateness of the polis, not the body. The splintered, the episodic, the unintegrated, the abstruse: these were the necessary indices of a traumatized witnessing. There can be no false reconciliation.
The French writer was visiting Beirut when the Israeli army encircled the Sabra and Shatila camps, then permitted heavily armed Lebanese Christian militia to enter. For two days and three nights from September 16 to 18, in the name of a ‘cleansing’ of supposed terrorists, the militia murdered every living being they were able to round up, including women, children, and the elderly, as the Israeli soldiers silently overlooked the bloodbath from their watchtowers. It was impossible to count the bodies; in those three nights, between fifteen hundred and five thousand people died. Accounts differ. On the nineteenth of September, Genet entered the camp as a journalist, accompanied by photographers, and witnessed the bulldozers of the Lebanese militia preparing to plow the mangled cadavers under rubble. There were so many corpses covering the ground he was forced to navigate among them as if in a labyrinth. He was in death’s labyrinth. He spent four hours observing everything, then went home two days later to describe what he had witnessed. As Duras wrote in Hiroshima mon amour in 1959, ‘I saw everything. Everything.’
– Late is the world where Sabra exists, where Shatila exists. Late is the world where camps exist, and massacre.
– In this sense, too, the Lebanese writer Etel Adnan’s late style erupted decades before her 2021 death, when she was just fifty, within the percussive, tolling grammar of her 1976 poem The Arab Apocalypse, written in Paris during the slaughter of the Lebanese civil war. Her country was being bombed. ‘Beirut capsized into the suns heart,’ she wrote, ‘a dead sun was a toy in Sabra.’ HOU HOU HOU is her tolling lament; STOP is her rhythmic imperative, her text scattered with ideograms where language seized up. In the inexorable horror of world-lateness, what duty does the witness, the survivor, carry, and how does the negative force of this duty collapse expressive convention? It’s injustice, not biology or age, that tears open the question of meaning. Late style traces the labyrinth of a desecration.
Kémi leaned back pensively, tilting the kitchen chair. – Cousin, we are hopeless but accurate, he said. – Identity’s now deflagration. Now tightly, now loosely, he interlaced his long fingers. Like the precarious kitchen chair, each sentence was a theory of the person in time. – But where in language does the polis inhere. His thought moved through me and continued elsewhere.
***
Every human is thus eternal at every second of his or her existence.
– Blanqui, L’éternité par les astres
Individual interests and personal ambitions hid with their vulgarity the gravity of the moment; not registering the oscillations of current events, they are only a wrinkle on the surface of the abyss; they do not diminish the depths of the flood.
– Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe
I went to the Louvre to see Poussin’s Deluge. I was obedient in friendship at least. I would tell Kémi I had been; we would talk about rivers and hopelessness. All water moves only downward, he would theatrically declare, citing Victor Segalen. Unless it evaporates, I would reply.
It was a free night and the museum was thronging with tourists. In chattering posses they moved briskly and purposefully past the art, their telephones out. I suppressed my irritation; I too intended to document my visit. In search of the French seventeenth century, I made my way to the Richelieu wing. The closer I got to Poussin, the emptier the galleries became. Poussin is not popular. I once overheard a docent explain to a cluster of matrons that he has the reputation of being ‘difficult.’ Poussin and I have this much in common.
The Deluge is one of a series of allegorical representations of the four seasons. They occupy a full wall of the room, in the expected sequence. Chateaubriand says in The Life of Rancé that The Deluge, or Winter, was Poussin’s last work, but on the museum’s wall texts, a different painting is indicated as last: The Greek God Apollo in Love with the Nymph Daphne. Hung in the same room as The Four Seasons, it did give me the impression of being unfinished, its visible areas of tonal umber underpainting adding a contemporary rawness to the composition. The painter’s hands trembled and his brush strokes had lost their poise. Unfinished historical works often give the impression of modernity; is it the incipient disjunction of the surface, or do we now identify with the state of incompletion? Personally I do feel increasingly unachieved, as if my psyche ages in reverse. The languid pose of the aging god appears more sorrowful or exhausted than rapturous. Love, unfinished. Was Chateaubriand knowingly obfuscating? He had a taste for flamboyant histrionics and retrospective embroidery. Or was he simply unaware of Apollo in Love? Perhaps it had been inaccessible then, in some private collection. But I considered that perhaps he was not wrong: Love and The Deluge could well have been in production simultaneously in the studio, where several canvases advanced concurrently, perhaps with the assistance of apprentices, the elderly master wandering between them in exhausted indecision, until the bitter day he simply stopped. Or so I imagined.
Apollo in Love occupied the smallest wall, beside the entry to the room. Next to it, on a postmodern pale oak chair provided for the museum attendant, a slender middle-aged man with tousled hair was deeply engrossed in reading a small cream-coloured book, wearing the Louvre’s standard black tailored jacket. He made it look dandiacal. We were otherwise alone. The room was silent, but for the companionable hum and tick of building systems coming from the corridor. Like the homey kitchen of an old married couple, with its ancient refrigerator and wall clock, I thought with amusement. I turned to The Deluge, my notebook in hand.
The gilt frame, though badly tarnished, is still brighter than any other part of the surface, so one is drawn toward the picture, and into the dark storm. From a distance the activity is in the sky: the lightning bolt ripping open the darkness; the goldish glint of the small leaves moving on the boughs of a tall leaning tree to the right; a circular sun, horizontally striated by darker cloud, low on the horizon, barely visible in the heavy grey mist. The powerful attraction of the dark sky and heavy shadow pulls one into the darker blackness of the water. Between the sky and the water, the floundering people. The refraction of the lightning from their wet, shining skin and white garments makes them part of the pictorial sky. They are clinging to wooden boats or have been flung from the boats by the force of the storm. A woman in a white headscarf passes an infant upward in her raised hands to a man leaning out from the rocky ledge on the right-hand side of the painting. The infant is swaddled in red cloth. A second woman at the stern of the boat bends out over the water, manoeuvring a long pole as she looks back over her shoulder at her companion. A person in the water clings with both hands to the gunnels. In front of the boat, a man in orange robes holds desperately to the neck of a swimming horse. A second person is held aloft by a wide wooden plank, blue robes streaming in the quickly moving current. On the opposite bank of the engorged river, a huge gleaming snake moves upward over a steep black crag. In the middle ground, a second boat capsizes on a cascade of water. Someone is drowning in the white foam, someone else hopelessly grips the outside of the sinking boat, one man clasps another man in the upright bow as he prays, hands raised to the sky, his white tunic reflecting lightning. The top half of the painting is mobile, grey, and indistinct. Centuries of varnish and dust have tarnished the image to the point of illegibility. A loaded barge is just visible in the shadows – or is it the roof of a submerged house? Is it the Ark? The painting is an arm-span in width.
It was later, thinking back to the painting, or rather referring to the mental image of The Deluge I could by then produce in myself at will – and why would we go to look at paintings but to furnish our minds with images, as opaque and unknowable as persons, each a psyche, endlessly absorbing to contemplate – that I perceived the overwhelming dynamic fact of The Deluge. All the uncontrollable movement of the river, I suddenly saw, all the human catastrophe, was indeed rushing downward directly toward the viewer, who was helpless, outside the frame, fated only to witness. Looking at Pous-sin’s Deluge is to occupy the position of the already dead, just outside the plane of the human narrative, and several steps below the earthly horizon. The downward rush of water and human life stops within the viewer. This alone became the image’s truth. Only the snake moves upward. Why had I not noticed when I stood there effortfully willing myself to see everything, every detail, taking notes, observing from various distances, pausing to look at the other three seasons in the series (the bizarrely gigantic grapes of Autumn reminiscent, I realized, of Winter’s outsized snake, the green temptation of Spring, wheat-gold Summer), to next return to contemplate grey disaster afresh? I had not seen the most obvious fact, the morbid downwardness that ceased in me.
‘How extraordinary is the pitch and toss of time!’ Chateaubriand had written of The Deluge. He was a lover of Poussin. Standing in front of The Deluge and receiving its downward force is not only a hydrological ethics – it’s a position in time. Just below the dynamic force of the flow, we’re perched on the sill of the present, but with our backs to it. We’re standing backward, Chateaubriand and me, balanced on the lip of the tarnished gilt frame, in the whorehouse of the Louvre, whatever, the whorehouse of culture, entirely like Benjamin’s Angel of History, facing the tempest, unable to stop or alter any part of what time has done to politics, hopelessly navigating among jettisoned fragments.
Late style is a political transmission, Kémi had said that afternoon when we sat at the table eating pastries, talking about Jean Genet.
Then I had stubbornly persisted in thinking of an aesthetics of personal decadence, decadence having become habitual in me, archly learned in my youth as an amused plunderer of fin-de-siècle postures (Swinburne and Pater burned in me then) and duly continued in my age, an ironic and ineffectual screen for more unwilled degradations. Part of me remains irremediably Goth. But in the face of the sheer force and vio lence of collective dispossession, the elegiac is not the same as decadence. What is being lamented. Not our petty intimate grievances, not our personal mortality. We feel the deluge in our bones. Where does human grief go and what is its record. What can finally transmit.
The attendant stood, cleared his throat, slipped his book into a pocket. It was time to leave the image.
***