Works by Louis Armand |
by Louis Armand |
|
beneath the window Rimbaud masturbated from
ISOLATED CAUSE (for Bruce Andrews, New York, Friday 18 October, 2005) What is less clear than this world is harder to determine. Here where we’re never faced with what’s not here— turning equivocation into a moment of possessiveness. A film of dust on a plate. Nixon in China on the kitchen radio. And from this fact, ascribing beliefs, a few “subjectivist errors.” The entry code is loser wins: the operator at the back brain will transact the pre-recorded message one-for-one— or won’t— and that will be that. FORGETTING VERLAINE (for Donald Theall, in memoriam) Before this, darkness and intervention, the mock-ironic posturing of implements that almost mitigates their cruelty. Blunted at dusk, with its sunken cataracts, who does the illusion hope to bear witness for? Arriving like so many approximations, lighting a corner of a table, the eye searching to see more. Scenes of humiliation in which an adversary awaits the signal not far from shore, a window hanging enormously over the sea, covered with green shutters. There sounds no alarm, even as the grey hull rounds the buoy, wind sweeping over water. Only the wavefall barking in cold air. Or somewhere a bell is gradually tolling, that might once have seemed ominous, but isn’t. Awaiting the arrival at that senescent plateau where “everything peaceful has a troubled past.” Its lack of punctuality is like some carefully devised stratagem, to force the issue. And the hollow muscular thoracic cone, circulating the blood for a clinical higher purpose, unaware of the distress that its activity is arousing. † 15.5.2008 THIS FICTITIOUS THING The silence went unresponded to; we lay there forming our hypotheses, colder at that time of year than it should have been, awaiting correction, thin as a film of sullied light. What looked like a wall turns out to be an obituary, blank spaces left to be filled-in by the next itinerant. Something discarded us among strange cities. Cried in the night for a sickness that couldn’t be reclaimed, Garibaldi in Washington Square, a dwarf standing on a fountain, naked, holding a balloon. People came and went, possessing themselves for hours at a time, unconsciously. Was that really you, at the Stonewall the night Judy Garland died? You looked younger then. Dancing the can-can in front of the riot squads. Yesterday the bombing began. We still look upon these rites as strangers do, although you have become us, growing old ungracefully. The lesson instructed us to oblige. Despite it you still teach children to burn down cities, stay safe from rain. And still we find ourselves amazed at our stupidity. Not knowing who unwinds the rope from the neck of adversity. Who deems. Who expects. The children laughing at our error. UNE FEMME À CLAUDEL We play at degrees of being alive. Walking along the Seine, past the bibliothèque, a circus, a wax museum. The ordinary is so freakish, unsettling, impossible to ignore. Where to next? A progress report. Immigrants waiting for a bus. Opposite the starch works, a big moon spotlights a giant’s anvil and hammer as it forges the timeless instant at hand. A marrow of forms: naked concrete, matière vivante, pieces of interior after identical interior. Their stories swept over us, we were gathered up in them. Hurrying down a street under nightlights the world at a standstill, twenty-four frames per second—a machine of seizures, violent banalities, in which everything is still unfolding, everything still in play. Few lives have the aesthetic dimension of classical narratives. Should we care? But we too become deaf to all persuasion, like God in Racine’s laughable tragedy— an anti-self who merely traverses and rates. Looking for an explanation for what’s taking place: a movement, a sound, a change of stance— something simple we could understand, that keeps the two terms of the contradiction together? Fate, you say, is just as arbitrary as a name or a shadow cast upon history as upon a wall. Hoping like a cinema parvenu to be picked-out by the appropriate ending. We climb the martyr’s hillside under drainpipes and fire escapes, air thick as oatmeal and molasses. Only to re- descend, wet coats and boots in a bar above the quays. It’s midnight, again. Wrapped in perishable words we exchange dark resolutions. Also, it’s raining. Desire and police keep vigil along rue Victor Cousin, beneath the window Rimbaud masturbated from. |
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