The
children have spent the morning setting up what they’re calling their clubhouse,
in the centre of our living room, relocating pillows, blankets, and furniture. They
remain in the dresses they insisted on sleeping in. Christine makes coffee, far
different than mine. I am rereading Emmanuel Hocquard, from Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France (2000), edited and translated by
Norma Cole: “The fragment deserves our attention for a moment, if only by virtue
of the fact that for some it causes a technical discomfort.”
Our
six year old strolls into my office, and asks: “Can I have an apple?”
I
was gifted this anthology by Toronto writers Stephen Cain and Sharon Harris, a
decade after the book had been published, and I latched onto the prose of Hocquard’s
poems, and the shapes of the silence he managed to articulate. As part of the
catalogue copy for another of his English translations, The Invention of
Glass (2012), reads:
This is a narrative
that tries to explain and to crystalize (the fourth state of water) a situation
that has not yet been clarified. Under the guise of memory’s particular logic,
its play of facets turns to fiction because its sense takes shape only as the
series of grammatical phrases unfolds, fusing shadows and blind spots. And yet,
like glass, which is a liquid, the poem is amorphous. It streams off in
all directions, but reflects nothing. What is the meaning of blue? No one needs
to interrogate the concept of blue to know what it means.
I
am thinking about silence. And space. And the concurrent possibilities and
impossibilities of both, especially while home with two small children. I am
thinking of silence, and the gift of silence. I listen for the happy laughter,
and the complaints, of our two girls, even amid their occasional interruptions.
Before I leave my desk and attend to their needs. An afternoon of crafts, and
the possibilities of a walk around the block. Their small boots covered with
springtime mud.
Our
three year old asks: “Can I have some milk?”
Earlier
today, Vancouver poet and critic Stephen Collis tweets out a series of small
explorations, asking similar questions about distance, silence and distillations:
More from work in progress:
1 / I realized then how rarely I thought of other people. The concept was
abstract, a part of some other non-monadic world, where multiplicity and the swarm
were normal. What did people do with one another?
2 / What was small talk?
What was communicated beneath the words they exchanged—in gesture, in glance or
stare, in proximity, in display?
From
Hocquard’s A Test of Solitude (2000), as translated by Rosmarie Waldrop:
I write that in order to
write this.
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