THE BLISS PENDULUM
ONE
Once I was in love, so I know how to make a knife out of anything.
Most of the time, a small incision will suffice. Most of the time, it’s enough to catch a glimpse of red. Say what you will about cruelty; it does the trick— and who in love has not been cruel? (Love says: do your worst.) If you say you haven’t, then I’ll know you’ve never been in love. And I will smile politely and pity you the gauche integrity of your morality. Only when I was cruel did I understand what it means to be human— this rush, this selfishness, this red. That’s why I must have it again— love, that terrible fascination!
*
Wasn’t it by darkness and pain that Persephone gained her womanhood? Even if you don’t believe in Gods, that much rings true. I want to be shaken up, destroyed, no half-measure of ecstasy will do. I want to die of love. I want to be washed up on the shore of my life, starved for spring, picking the pips out of my teeth.
(I have re-written the story: Persephone wants Hades for herself, and disguised in shadow, mutinies. The dark god is sentenced to spring. Hope is a horrible pain in his heart.)
TWO
Nights, I walk my shadow through the streets: a black hound, a prophecy, and I am hunted by the animal of the poem— its marvellous hunger, the sleek devastation of its past tense. Some people will tell you that writing poems can save you, that it saved them, and will in turn deliver kids and prisoners and bored housewives alike. But I know the poem for what it is: an apparatus of death. (In it, I am part-ghost, part-séance, and my body is of pure dream.) Naturally, I seek it out. I am bewitched by the glitter of death-things; I hoard them like a crow.
In the legend of my birth, my mother was a wing; my father the air she married: this to explain the dark fluttering of my heart— my little breastful of flight.
THREE
THE LEPIDOPTERIST: I study the specimen beneath my lens. I know that I must kill to preserve its beauty. Beauty is a moment in time— I pin it to the wall. I kill and kill and still, my benevolence is clear: I must be a god!
THE BUTTERFLY: I am devoured by the eye. I am divorced from my delirious motion. My beauty betrays me: I am coveted by monsters. How I wish to grow old and ugly! I die and die, and my image is immortal, an omen of hope and death: I must be a god.
FOUR
I swing pell-mell from laughter to tears, fever to chill, hope to despair. My world ends again and again in fire and ice; I burn, I shiver. I am a phoenix flown south for the winter. And for my crimes of passion, I must suffer your doctor-talk. You speak of mechanism: wheel and axle, hinge and fulcrum— brilliant, useless design— the whole contraption’s fastened to the will of a mad king: watch its ecstatic oscillations! The wild pendulum of my life! Watch me do nothing to still myself, to save myself. My secret: I can endure any pain because I have tasted the bliss at the centre. Whatever storm may stir the surface, within me is an inviolable peace— my soul is a stratum of virgin snow. Untouchable and so I allow myself to be touched by all manner of hands / all manner of madnesses.
FIVE
One day, the strangest sensation of wingspan breaks across the lepidopterist’s back.
SIX
We live by a winnowing, a simplification— the “self” being an incantatory renunciation of impracticable behaviours. But we see ourselves as beings acting by some function of personality, and not personalities fabricated by the action. And so we maintain an illusion of constancy. This allows for a perceived continuity of identity, as well as irregular “departures” from selfhood. “He’s not himself,” or “that’s just like him,” it’s said, as if agency were not the primary factor of his humanity.
This I is a process. Every second, I invent my isness and my notness. But it is like a blueprint drawn in sand. Every other second, my work is erased by the tide. In this way, I cannot be defined by any series of choices. Morning will perform its uneven vivisections. Each choice stands alone and asks its question to a newborn God.
SEVEN
A chapter in blue: I am dancing nobody is watching I am singing nobody is listening I am writing nobody is reading no not even you apocryphal reader are reading though I feel your eye on me.
You gaze and gaze. Even at this distance, I can sense your attention: I prickle. But what do you think of me? Have I managed to instil love? Is that the true aim of writing— to make oneself loveable to a stranger? (But reader, I have fallen for you, too. I place my word in your mouth.)
EIGHT
The lady on the radio is singing about love again
I want her garrotted with a microphone lead
I want the machine to choke on her ridiculous sentiment
Did you hear me? I said I want a bloodbath!
Let no man think me sweet for the fact of my womanness
Let no man think me; erase me from male consciousness
I shall appear only to women and other pariahs
And I shall wear my vexed nerve as a diadem
My ruined sex, my hymnal of bees, my vagrancy
Music I have culled from a stone
NINE
I broke through the black water, witnessed by a jury of pines. The moon was hiding from my poem. Stars winked in an avuncular sky. I thought: my heart is a mechanical bird. My heart is a country of fugue. My heart is in Babylon without a phrasebook. My heart is a dark up I can’t drink from I must fill it with stones. I thought the body would break my fall. My fall broke the body. I must fill it with stones, drink. I can’t. My heart is a dark cup. My heart is a country of fugue. My heart is a mechanical bird. My heart is hiding from the poem. My heart is black water.
TEN
It’s been decided. It’s all Worth It.
PLEASE REFER TO the occasional feeling of beautiful things
PLEASE REFER TO birds in the trees & sunlight
PLEASE REFER TO the unfathomable morphology of the eye, fathoming the bodies of birds & the trees & the light
ELEVEN
We are having the obligatory time-travel conversation. Killing Hitler and the butterfly effect. Well, it makes for a compelling episode. Would we disappear? Nobody knows what they would do. Nobody knows what they’re doing now. God is a seamstress, weeping at the loom. There are parts of ourselves we come to know only when they catch fire.
TWELVE
Confusion is a form of tenderness to be cultivated in all aspects of life. Name nothing. Confess everything. Choose no gods. Never be quite certain of what you’re looking at, what you’re feeling. Pupal darkness. Chrysalis of petals. We don’t know what we are becoming. We don’t know what we have survived.
THIRTEEN
This text is a quiver in the wiring, small frenzy of a wing caught in a web. This text is a display of violence. This text is a proposal. This text is a nest of feathers. This text is my theatre of plumage. Consider these chapters each an iridescent eye.
