Aufgabe 12

What does it matter now? What matters now? What is the matter now? What is now’s matter? All possible transversions of Jean-Marc Desgent’s questioning title Qu’importe maintenant? The following work of fourteen writers, presented in American and Canadian English translations from the Quebecoise French by twelve translators, are possible responses.

            The selection of this work is based on which poetries in Quebec’s Francophone literary weather feel vital right now; which works seem utterly relevant and current to this moment (which is always a multiple and refracted moment); which poetries are speaking, calling, urging, moaning, crying to the reader in us; which works, in their lexicons and syntax, their movements and music, wake us up, make us feel excited and alive in language. In short, which poetries give a damn.

            The selection is not historical, generational, ideological, chronological. It is expansive, diverse, rigorous, stretching and straying linguistic, poetical and genre boundaries. It is also entirely contemporary, in the way that Giorgio Agamben thinks of contemporariness, where one has an anachronistic and disjunctive relation to one’s time. Therefore, the featured writers (and translators) represent a range of generations and experience, approaches and interests; they are artists with thirty books or one book to their name (even posthumous in one case), and their poetics touch on other fields and media. (Oana Avasilichioaei, “Now’s Matter: Work in Translation from Quebecois French”)

Out of Litmus Press in Brooklyn, New York, comes the twelfth annual issue of the literary journal Aufgabe, a journal with a deep, critical and abiding love for literary works in translation, as well as a strong machinery in place for allowing such works to be published, distributed and discussed (Litmus Press as a literary publisher is well known, also, for producing numerous book-length translated works). Issue #12 includes an opening section edited by Montreal poet, translator and critic Oana Avasilichioaei, titled “Now’s Matter: Work in Translation from Quebecois French,” including works by Geneviève Desrosiers, Benoit Jutras, Nicole Brossard, Chantel Neveu, Franz Schürch, Suzanne Leblanc, Steve Savage, Phillipe Charron, Renée Gagnon, Daniel Canty, François Turcot, Martine Audet, Kim Doré and Jean-Marc Desgent. Over the past decade or so, works translated into English has become far more prevalent in Canadian writing generally, and Canadian poetry specifically, thanks in part to a dedicated series of champions and translators such as Avasilichioaei, as well as Erín Moure, Angela Carr, Nathanaël, françois luong, Bronwyn Haslam and Robert Majzels. Through a hundred pages of translated works, this is an impressive collection of writing, and, unfortunately, highlights the oddity of the fact that it takes a foreign journal to show Canadian work to other Canadians (apart from the generous, yet much smaller, recent section of same in The Capilano Review [see my review here]), akin to the one hundred page section that Chicago Review did a few years ago on poet Lisa Robertson [see my review on such here], long before an equivalent critical exploration occurred anywhere in a Canadian journal. Why do such acknowledgements not happen up here? Or are our literary journals simply not large enough to encompass that amount of work in a single section?

Checkmated Chessboard

EXCERPTS FROM PATIENCE

Nathaniel Hawthorne, on a visit to Herman Melville, at the time employed with the U.S. Customs House for the port of New York, gave him this chessboard, adorned with two whales, no doubt to console his friend for the critical and commercial failure of his masterpiece, Moby-Dick.

            The two friends began a game that resulted in a draw, in which the black king and queen could no longer pursue the white king and queen. The final configuration remained in place until the office moved. Melville’s colleagues say that he refused invitations to play a match with the same retort that Bartleby, the Wall Street recluse walled up in infinite refusal, gave to all that life offered him: “I would prefer not to.” (Daniel Canty, trans. by Oana Avasilichioaei, “from Wigrum”)

A note at the end of the work (there are notes at the end of each of the translated works, adding information to illuminate the pieces) that reads: “Romping between fact and fiction, serial and document, neologism and collection, the misplaced and the disappeared, erudition and invention, the encyclopedia and the internet, Wigrum is the account, catalogue and legacy of Sebastian Wigrum’s (and his succcessors’) collections of surprising and sundry objects, the stories imagined through the objects’ materiality. Perec, Queneau, Borges, Pynchon, Ponge are some of the literary shadows flitting above its webs. Following Canty’s/Wigrum’s maxim, if I can believe all the stories I am told, so can you, I translated and wrote on the edge of invention.” Canty’s biographical note also notes that his first novel, translated into English by Avasilichioaei, is forthcoming with Talonbooks. The wealth of work here is incredible, and there is something about the poetic line that is entirely different done through the Quebecoise French than by English-language Canadian writers. One can only hope that all the writing covered here might possibly be available in trade form as well, without too much of a wait for those of us who never managed to learn a second language.

Chorale VII

The house was as a book. I wrote through each of its doors to each of its floors. I circulated in its syntax beyond the moulded words, the sculpted sentences. I spread my thought throughout the house, hybridized it to the foreign shape. Henceforth, its spatiality was added to my language. Through this philosopher’s house, I reflected on the convincing work, on the admirable life.

South-west servant’s bedroom

Second floor (Suzanne Leblanc, trans. by Oana Avasilichioaei and Ingrid Pam Dick, “from The House As P.’s Thinking”)

Even aside from all of that, there is still nearly three hundred pages of other writing which could easily be discussed on its own in another blog post or two, including some two hundred pages of poetry by Rusty Morrison, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Claire Donato, Edric Mesmer, Karen Garthe, Emily Abendroth and a whole ton of other writers.

THE CONFLICT BEGAN WHEN, the conflict began when the tendency to discard what doesn’t fit leads to narrative, Ahmed looked me in the eye before we drove so, to speak as one would, one-third children, one million, refugee told me EVERYTHING’S OKAY doesn’t mean it didn’t happen by its name

IT’S NOT THE WORK OF A PROPHET to rate a person on a scale of one to ten by her ability to call death death what’s the difference for example between I’m thinking about her and I remember her I’ll tell you Ahmed said but it’s a long story meaning’s going to change the way this room looks (Emily Carson, “from Sleeping with Phosphorus”)

The end of the issue includes a section of essays, notes and reviews, including a short memoir by Pierre Joris, titled “The Idiot,” that begins:

In the beginning were the words. And the words were double from the word go: the cool black on white words in the book, & the loud, fast & hot words on the radio. To begin with the word on the radio let me cold, while the word on the page was what asked me to light up my nights with a flashlight under the covers. This happened, age 5: I remember the room—it was dark & thus I do not remember what was in it except for the bed in which I lay with covers drawn up, trying to read. Later on, in daylight, this room became or had become a living room, & I sat on the daybed & I watched the green eye of Normende, the box from which the hot works came.

Another highlight of the journal is an interview Nathanaël (the Canadian poet formerly known as nathalie stephens) conducted with Catherine Mavrikakis (translated into English by Nathanaël). Over the past couple of years, Nathanaël has not only produced an incredible amount of writing (the last few titles produced by Nightboat Books), but translated a great deal of literature from French into English, including a novel by Mavrikakis, produced in English as Flowers of Spit (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2012). Nearly a dozen pages long, the interview digs deep into the work and working lives of both writers. It opens:

N: Flowers of Spit is well in the distance now. It was published by Leméac in 2005 and again in English six years later, which is more or less now, by BookThug. I am curious to ask you about this dislocation. Which, it seems to me, is constitutive of the text itself (historical disturbance especially, but not exclusively, on the part of the Crackpot who has lost his share of the present—or at any rate, he reads in the present a resolutely ineradicable past), but of our friendship as well. Dislocation of places—you born in Chicago and living in Montréal, me born in Montréal and living in Chicago. The exchange is, so to speak, inscribed in our respective geographies.

C.M.: Yes, Flowers of Spit is far. But oddly, it represents a stumbling block in my life, something I think about often and which remains present. There is in this book a relationship to time that the Crackpot has in fact, a relationship in which different periods of time are confused. The Crackpot can never mourn the past. I am like him. It is very hard for me to understand that time has passed. I am sometimes in anachronic hours. It isn’t nostalgia, it’s that I think the past has us by the throat. It torments us. Maybe that is why I like Proust so much. My father who is at the hospital right now and has gone mad (more mad, in fat, than he already was…) is now completely mixing up all time periods. The other day, he wanted to take me to his office which disappeared more than forty years ago and complained that a friend who has been dead since the ‘70s wasn’t visiting him. I’m barely exaggerating when I say that I inherited from both my parents this near impossible relationship to the present. My mother is still caught up in the Second World War.

Chicago is far, it’s my past, my birth, precisely because of the Second World War, because my aunt, my mother’s sister, went and married in Chicago an American soldier whom she met during the landings. My mother was able to give birth at her sister’s. But Chicago is your own present. As though you were haunting a time that never belonged to me (I left as an infant), as though you were giving me news of my history. I know, on the other hand, how difficult Montréal was for you. That you had to flee. Sometimes I haven’t the courage to speak to you of it. As though I didn’t want to trouble you with that city you didn’t know what to make of … Me, I have settled there a thousand times, wanting always to leave. Perplexed, like you … But I stayed, not knowing where I would be more at home. Yesterday someone was telling me that he became Quebecois reading Hubert Aquin, and I think he said something that is valid for me. It was in reading certain Quebecois texts that I became Quebecoise. In addition to which, I published here, which strangely anchored me. But you are from here also, from Montréal. There is nonetheless a tie that the publication of your books creates, isn’t there? And then between us, there is Chicago, Montréal, yes … but also France and North Africa. Our imaginations have covered the same territories. Don’t you find that strange?

Aufgabe 11

What am I doing—catless—here,

level-headed and certain,

without cause to judge?

What am I doing without my own face,

without either feet or staggering? Who is it that seeks me out

and doesn’t discover my telephone on its tiny coffee table?

    I am but scarcely

the description of someone that knows me,

an identity card that has cast off first one foot

and then the other

and who will sleep until it is far too early.

(My flesh does not know of flesh. The saliva

coagulates and, oh, once again it is mid-afternoon

and the rain has not arrived.)

What time will I be born, that I don’t remember the light?

What time will I be dead, that my hands don’t hurt? (“Untitled,” Rafael Menjivar Ochoa, trans. Emily Abendroth)

I recently received a copy of the eleventh annual Aufgabe, a journal produced out of Brooklyn, New York through Litmus Press, and edited by an editorial board of E.Tracy Grinnell, Julian Talamentez Brolaski, erica kaufman, Jen Hofer and Canadian poet Nathanaël. Along with their usual generous amount of poetry and “essays, notes, reviews,” this issue features a section of Salvadoran poetry, guest edited by Christian Nagler, including translations from the Spanish by Emily Abendroth, Karen Lepri, Christian Nagler, Jocelyn Saidenberg and Brian Whitener. In Nagler’s lengthy introduction to the section on Salvadoran poetry, he writes:

‘The quest for identity’ is a concept that perhaps signifies anachronistically in the intellectual climate of North America, where a ‘post-identity’ discourse provides some semblance of a contemporary mood, even if is not embraced or fully elaborated. We—some of us—are perhaps experiencing a milder form of what Huezo-Mixco cites as the presiding trend of the 1970s and 80s in El Salvador, when the “collision of social movements with entrenched power tend[ed] to displace identity issues.” In his lecture, Huezo-Mixco tracks the continued vitality of the concept of identity with regards to mass-events that have served to vitally confuse the idea of interior and exterior, namely a thirty year mass migration that now locates a quarter to a third of Salvadoran citizens outside the national borders. At the end of his lecture, Huezo-Mixco, arrives at a provocative conclusion that the younger generation of writers “re-creates the catastrophe of a fragmented and impoverished society.” It’s a gernation that does not write with “any enthusiasm for the political gains wrested from one of the bloodiest periods in Latin America.”

I’m impressed that a journal would so heavily and regularly be involved with translation, interested in engaging with other poetries, poetics and cultures, and in seeing the differences of subject matter, cadence and the line, as the issue features not only the special section but translated works within the section of general works. Some of the highlights of the issue include works by Noah Eli Gordon and j/j hastain, as well as Mathieu Bergeron (translated by Nathanaël). The pieces by Gordon are from a work-in-progress I’ve seen sections from before, his “The Problem,” which feature drawings by Sommer Browning. Given the drawings appear to be tailor-made for the work, one can only hope that a trade edition of the finished work might also include drawings?

What is to be done? A note on a page torn from a notebook says: a note in a defused cage. Further along, as a matter of fact, the grey skeleton of a human cage: a whole series of sawed, twisted bars. At the back, in the hay, as they say, lies a page torn from a notebook. From here, it is impossible to read it, but the repeated patterns trick the field: we are holding the page in our hand, we have already, necessarily, entered. On the front, we read: Turn the page; on the back: Turn around. Do you follow me? (“The Unformed Suite,” Mathieu Bergeron)

From the previous issue [see my review of such here] to this current one, there seems an entire different flavour, a different cadence of the works presented, and I’m uncertain if this is accident of submissions or a deliberate attempt to shape different issues (or if the difference is entirely in my own mind). 

Still, a particularly interesting feature of the current issue is an essay by Ariel Goldberg, “Selections from The Estrangement Principle: A Poetic Criticism,” which questions a number of different directions of art and writing, in regards to definition, self-definition and the question of “queer,” writing “NPR tells the news with clips from an old interview, with no mention Ryan is a lesbian. If there is nothing about being a dyke in her poetry then should the word lesbian be uttered? Is Kay Ryan making history as the first out lesbian Poet Laureate with a Pulitzer Prize, or is this actively not being treated as history?” The piece continues:

The term “queer art” is both persisting and failing at a rapid pace, and for multiple reasons. Mostly the anti-definition catchall capability of the word “queer” sets the stage. For instance, I am resistant to a dead on defining of the word. Different queernesses float up here, and more specific identifiers inside of the “LGBTQ” acronym come in to sharper focus. I am working backwards, piecing together scraps. There is a sort of pact, in the word queer, anyway, to resist the task of definition. I am identifying with it, but also varying from it, throwing back to lesbian, or dyke. I pluck and examine. I am inconsistent. As important as it is to identify a gender or sexuality, so is it to name my race, my white privilege. My excellent education privilege. Being Jewish, whatever that means. The identifiers don’t exactly end. Being gender queer or a dyke or both collapses in this long exhale where it’s not important that I know the answer to a question someone is always asking.

The Chicago Review 56:2/3 (autumn 2011)

Pulse

That with which a new and selected shelf lets, permits, entreats:

Sand and saw blade—she has bow to blade to breeze and

within a cross-generational miscellany

to alter the perimeters of the object, she, the one and the many.

Recent and raided, opera doing elected battle with itself

while you slow oxen turn the furrowed plain

knowing now, not known then, did know, known and not fallow

known then, but fallow since anomalous. (Marjorie Welish, “An Anthology Called Pegasus”)

After a sequence of theme issues, including magnificent issues on the work of Louis Zukofsky (winter 2005), Lisa Robertson (spring 2006), Barbara Guest (summer 2008), Seven Poets from Berlin (winter 2010) and New Italian Writing (spring 2011), it’s also good to see The Chicago Review feature a more general issue, with new poetry, fiction and critical writing by Trevor Joyce, Keston Sutherland, Stephanie Strickland, Tom Pickard, Marjorie Welish, Nathanaël, Forrest Gander, Dustin Simpson, Charles Altieri and various others, as well as a small feature of three essays by the late Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-75), introduced by Michael Hansen and Gareth Farmer. As Hansen and Farmer write in their introduction to Forrest-Thomson’s essays—“from His True Penelope was Flaubert: Ezra Pound and Nineteenth-Century Poetry,” “from Lilies from the Acorn” and “Pastoral and Elegy in the Early Poems of Tennyson”:

By the time of her death at the age of twenty-seven, Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-75) had produced a remarkable body of poetry and criticism. Her most influential work, Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry, published posthumously in 1978, turned sharply against critics of the previous generation, notably William Empson, and against emergent strains of historicism. The book is an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) defense of “all the rhythmic, phonetic, verbal, and logical devices which make poetry different than prose.” […] The essays exist only in single versions, and are clearly drafts. They have been edited for clarity. Edits are primarily orthographic and grammatical; in some instances, sentences have been slightly adjusted on a case-by-case assessment of Forrest-Thomson’s intentions. Readers interested in locating other work by Forrest-Thomson should consult Alison Mark’s excellent biography in Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Language Poetry (2001).

For a number of years now, The Chicago Review has been one of the rare American trade journals both mainstream and interested in more experimental works, a merging that doesn’t always mesh, especially on the north side of the American-Canadian border. Given that it includes reviews and review-essays, The Chicago Review’s essential rarity as a large-scale trade journal is pretty much confirmed. Brian M. Reed’s enlightened review of Cole Swensen’s greensward [something I reviewed as well, here] provides a series of long perspectives from a reader of Swensen’s work for some time, and Charles Altieri’s attention in “The Place of Rhetoric in Contemporary American Poetics: Jennifer Moxley and Juliana Spahr” seems long overdue.

But I limit my discussion here to Juliana Spahr and Jennifer Moxley, poets whose recent work is in many respects distant from the experimental tradition (Language writing) with which they are most commonly associated. These poets do not so much renounce that tradition as put the spirit of experiment to new use in exploring how poetry might take on more overt social responsibilities. In the process, they redefine received opinions of what rhetoric entails. Spahr offers what I will call a “thin” subjectivity that reduces boundaries among agents and elicits direct participation in the political situations she dramatizes. Moxley calls on rhetoric to establish a poetry with the directness of prose. She explores strategies for reducing the self-defensive postures of obscurity and tests the possibilities of what we might call “sincerity effects.” Neither Spahr nor Moxley offers a theory of rhetoric or engages classical texts on the subject. Yet an understanding of rhetoric that can accommodate resistance to the effects of well-madeness or artifactuality offers powerful insight into their poetic strategies.

I wonder what Altieri might think of, say, the work of poets Stephen Collis, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Peter Culley, nikki reimer or Jeff Derksen? But still, one comes to a journal such as this to see the new writing, I’d suspect, first; to read the poems that might otherwise have been lost, set aside, or discovered after much more effort, and the efforts here are worth it, including an intriguing sequence by Jason Harmon, the 6-part “Cento Encephalogram,” that includes:

3.

What you have doesn’t help, less is more, feathers pulled out, gradual improvement.

“A feather in the hat of indeterminacy”

I had a long pole with a chicken feather, and I would move it and then

with a feather—that circle is reminiscent of Chinese or Japanese calligraphy,

…two featherS behind Just befOre theY disappear beuys touching his forEhead with both feathers.

and trace its outline on the page with a feather dipped in watercolor

(toothpicks, matches, slinkies, piano wires, feathers, etc….

I’m always shocked at the lack of recognition for the work of Chicago-based Canadian writer Nathanaël, the poet formerly known as nathalie stephens, despite title after title of incredible work over the past two decades. Perhaps her work is so difficult to categorize, it becomes easier to overlook? I’m still struggling to articulate anything useful on her two most recent books—Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book) (2009) and We Press Ourselves Plainly (2010)—both published by American publisher Nightboat Books. With each of Nathanaël’s trade titles, the book-length fluidity of essay, philosophy, poem and fiction merged into a new, unnameable form become so much clearer, and thusly, more shocking for their brilliance. In this issue is a lengthy selection, “from THE MIDDLE NOTEBOOKES,” that begins:

[…]

*

Please forgive me, it’s raining.

*

I would like to write you the letter of that duration, but I am so stunned that I can only imagine the letter, tossed about as I am by these sorrows sometimes a strange euphoria. Tonight it is a sorrow that is as vast as this city and installed at my center. I can only look around me at these boxes and crawl across this floor before surrendering to the day ending. // I look at the horizon and I cannot distinguish the sky from the ground.

*

The tear is in stead, but I won’t make an equation out of it.

*

Today I am unspeakable, that’s not right, but I’ll say it anyway, language has no need for me.

j/j hastain, long past the presence of common

Prelude

As an ethereal angel trying to tear through to the human realms—it matters to note that when it scratched that side of the ether, clouds that looked like claw marks appeared on another side of view.

This project is a promulgating document of sounding. A cyborgian gender being expressed by way of the slow chthonic appearances—these shapes with the lover—this brutal somatic effort at materializations of flesh by way of non-linear narrative.

Oh the specifities of a most personal fascia as the deepest type of manna—for the gods, for the viscosities of the ghosts as they all become body.

Each exact cadence, the credence—the desperately pursued creed.

A turning tuning fork.

A sumptuous supplication.

A visceral astral villa.

Oh orbital incandescent velour—tipping the dyad wick to upkeep such spiral roots.

This is what a cyborg's mantra would have to be—chanting the coos and the uncouth.

Usually, to name a thing is to fix it, to reduce it, but Colorado poet, musician, performance artist and dusie participant j/j hastain's long past the presence of common (Dallas TX: say it with stones, 2011), in fact, works to achieve the exact opposite. Through a collage aspect akin to a scrapbook of poems, prose and image, long past the presence of common writes to expand the naming through multiple voices and contradiction, none of which may actually contradict, and could even be considered as much a book of poetry as a poetics statement, manifesto and essay on the self. 

Through prose, fragment and image, hastain's long past the presence of common both insists and denies presence, writing out how difference is not contradiction, and how contradiction is not only possible, but sometimes makes the only sense possible.

I am trying to say that my origin is not based in or appropriately gaused by physiological history or genealogy, nor is it able to be understood by way of polarist systems. My truest pedigree is and has always been in the future, or to the side of, because its source is ether, only partly informed by form.

All of this to say—please

somehow to turn all exiles into eclipses.

Much the way much of Canadian expat nathalie stephens/nathanaël's ongoing ouvre explores the boundaries between gender, language, languages, genre and form, so too, j/j hastain's ongoing work attempts similar boundaries between gender, language and form, such as this fragment from the author bio on hastain's site attests:

j/j defines as Trans (which is different than transgender, though not at all discounting it):

‘I am interested in the differentiated usage of the prefix Trans when it is utilized in ways that are not at all related to a previously determined model with a binary derived basis. Merriam Webster defines transoceanic as “crossing or extending across the ocean” and translucent as “transmitting and diffusing light so that objects beyond can not be seen clearly” (www.merriam-webster.com).

AngelHousePress' meta-ditch response anthology now on-line

AngelHousePress responses to poetry published on ditch: the poetry that matters, is now online,
lovingly edited + compiled by Amanda Earl

Márton Koppány on Marcia Arietta;
Jamie Bradley on Gary Barwin;
Caleb JW Brasset on Kane X. Faucher and Jamie Bradley;
John M. Bennett on Daniel f. Bradley;
Mary Kasimor on Nathalie Stephens;
Christine McNair on Amy Dennis;
Sheila E. Murphy on Camille Martin;
Sean Moreland on rob mclennan;
Lily Robert-Foley on Nathalie Stephens;
rob mclennan on Natalie Simpson;
Marilyn R. Rosenberg on Erin Moure;
Sandra Ridley on Christine McNair and Pearl Pirie;

http://www.ditchpoetry.com/anthology.htm

Nathalie Stephens' Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book)

In Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book) (New York NY: NightBoat Books, 2009) by Nathaniël (Nathalie Stephens), we are presented with an argument wrapped around the ongoing threads of her/his own writings. Is this the book that will contain parts of all her other books? Is Nathaniël (Nathalie Stephens), arguably, writing out this absence through the presence of all that had come before?

In order to locate myself : otherwise. To make of dislocation the very place, not only of annihilation, but of survival, yoked to what, of itself, is most fragile : the uncontestable breakage that comprises it, the rupture with normative temporality. A suffocation that determines breathing. The aberration of an uncontested a priori of existence. (p 7)

Where is it Nathaniel places her/himself? Where does the text place itself as well? I’m intrigued by an essay that wraps around itself; takes the ideas of many, including previous of the author’s own works, to further the conversation. Does this book, then, continue Stephens’ writing as a single entity or as simply exploring the highlight of a single bare thread?

Last summer, I set my study up in a room I have since abandoned. With each move, the books find new placements. With several exceptions, one of which is the subject of this essay.

The constitution of the shelf visible from my work table is determining. There are those books whose selection is governed by an affective consideration – my attachment to an author, a period of time, a place, encounter, a sensibility – without neglecting the importance of a text in my trajectory, the impulses that formulate it. Mourning, melancholy, languor, desires, perversions and languages find themselves juxtaposed without any reason other than that which I grant them, capriciously, intentionally. (p 10)

Exploring a philosophy of abstract, of intellectual feeling, of thinking, itself, Stephens’ work explores those spaces in between place and placelessness, confusing place, whether geographical, philosophical, gender or language, and even the gender of language. Is it as simple as wondering what an opening photograph means, and represents, beginning with (as the press release tells us) “the author’s encounter with a photograph by Surrealist artist and writer Claude Cahun”?

Through this essay, the questions might be essentially more important than the answers, but the point of the exploration isn’t to fix to a point, but to weave through the nuances of a series of fluid ideas that can never be fixed. It’s in the exploration itself that answers are found, won and discovered, even if the responses to each might confuse or contradict. Writing of the work of Simone Weil, Stephens later writes of:

The void’s malleability, its fluidity, are consistent with water’s suppleness, its vigorous, even obliterative capacity. It enrapts and submerges, batters and engulfs. Its surface, a surface of longing and discord – disagreement – is saturated with the absence of the thing, once present, anticipated, whose trace, stolen away, subsists; not visible, nor altogether disappeared: the thing, precisely, that provokes a kind of madness that language is certainly incapable of accounting for. (pp 60-1)