March 10th, 2019.
Hell figures. Blood, sweat and tears. Gleaming bodies carved into stone, the megaphone, the podium. Ten days until spring. A book begs me to consort with its textual meanings as a guide to solar circulations and lunar contortions. To here and now and a trajectory after. In Hell Figures by E. Tracy Grinnell, published by Nightboat Books, 2016, a lacework of sibylline messages glide over the surface area of consciousness. Deep-seated, resilient meanings from distant eras rear up and signify – hover like fog over the ever-present now of continuum. Hard meanings applied with utter sensitivity. A queer ode to survival among the remnants, within a tyrannical system attempting to totalize. A lament of ideological convention and intersubjective relations.
The poems in Hell Figures are a vital part of the fabric of my experience of being a poet in a community of poets. I’ve listened to Tracy read these poems in many iterations, read the work as it appeared in chapbooks and journals. A near decade of thinking with these poems and tracing their contours as they arose in the space of the social. As spring approaches, I will read the book out of order, in the chaos of the immediate, puzzle where my eyes fall. Reading the entrails, the wreckage, the bent chronology– to connect with the spontaneity within time, intention and design.
how else traverse
, in loudening
howls the rendered
animal,
darkest, darkening
refraction, our
how else
stand, walk, murmur, think
, grieve? (81)
The conditions eluded to are dire. This passage seems to be about the role of witnessing abuses and coming to terms with the ways one is able to respond. So timely for our moment where response is everything. Response time is everything. The dire prognosis of the planet requires an immediate intervention. “Howls the rendered animal”. This phrase convulses with tension. The othering done in the animals’ name is an unnamed violence that permeates the book.
Western civilization boasts about the introduction of democracy during Greek antiquity – within a system that practiced slavery and didn’t extend the same social, legal and political rights to women. These discrepancies continue on into the present; a legacy that drags the tragic to the present, iterates tragedy, creates a fallacy, creates a smokescreen. The traumatic stress of these major flaws is the groundwork of this book – the PTSD of patriarchal history’s longue durée. Meanings are refracted through an historical irony that pains us in the present.
loudening illusion
, fall falsely (80)
March 11th
The words in Hell Figures feel wind-whipped, exposed, raw. The spectral drama of Western antiquity as channeled through the shadowy traces of female personas, yanked from their immobilized position as placeholders in a history that vaguely includes them. The women depicted on Greek and Roman friezes were defined by laws and cultural mores that held them in bondage. Edifices carved into stone are transformed by the elements through time. Stone turns out to be bone metaphorically speaking, the remains of sea creatures who fell to the ocean’s floor a millennium ago were transformed into stone. Metaphors are stripped of their encrusted exoskeletons. On the cover flap, Judith Goldman writes, “An erudite, elegant book, E. Tracy Grinnell’s Hell Figures reflects (on) the classical female figures that have held in place the architectonics of Western culture: Helen of Troy, Sappho, Cassandra, the Sirens, and Mnemosyne. In her dazzling, vertiginous deconstruction of perpetual patriarchal re-imagining of these ciphers in their iconic modes of compromised female agency, Grinnell refuses these women-figures the plenitude of imaginative recovery: Hell Figures instead retraces the peculiar transposability of these feminine eidolons onto one another as they are re-projected into the logics that deauthorized them, figuratively and literally killing them…” You can’t win for losing! Reading through Judith’s valence of authorial violence and female agency I am struck again by how brutal sociocultural inheritance is. A history that neglects to include women and when it has, reluctantly offers up roles that smash on contact with the present.
roses of muses
in ruses I, even I
to phantoms
every limb, armed (76)
The nine muses on a Roman sarcophagus (second century AD) — Louvre, Paris
March 12th
The snow is evaporating. Winter was not wintery. Global climate change is disrupting rhythm, growth patterns – the way time is described ecologically. Five ravens, five blue jays and more than twelve sparrows swirl and hop in the garden, search for sustenance. A momentary visitation. They fly skyward from earth – a sphere rotating in cosmic space. I swoop down on the text and glean a morsel, fly off, only to return again, diurnally. Aristophanes’ play, The Birds is evoked in Hell Figures. The Birds anticipates human-deployed war helicopters and drones – at least human operated prosthetics of aggression that mimic bird’s aviation. In the play, Pisthetaerus and Euelpides, disillusioned with affairs of state decide to build a city in the sky from which to rule humankind and the gods. They decide to transform themselves into birds. The actual birds are concerned about the problematic scheme and make rules that protect them. In Hell Figures, the sequence of poems titled “The Birds” speaks of the madness of such an undertaking in plangent lines that teeter and stagger looping in on sense.
the terroir, of amnesia
no wind, and the grey sea calm and full
the sensation of not moving on a moving staircase
time unwound– episodic blur
in flight, disappeared where you know not, lost momentarily in
your own madness, is what you see as nature turning against you
in flight, disappeared where you know not, lost momentarily in
time unwound– episodic blur
the sensation of not moving on a moving staircase
no wind, and the grey sea calm and full
the terroir, of amnesia (106)
March 13th
To come full circle and see the past from the future’s perspective. To unspool out of delusion. The lived past can seem like a hallucination. “The terroir, of amnesia”. Grains of sand that once were the edifice, now crashed and pulverized.
Human foibles are tectonic. Humans induce a topology of time that spins out of ecological time, causes havoc. Cries from a past are amplified and resonate with the cries of our times. An eerie shadow-double overlap occurs. These lines can stand for so many brutal facts weighed on persons that the ocean engulfs.
Terror of bodies, swelling the ocean’s blank stare
comely night, catastrophe’s bidding for each
hawking failures of fantasy, ghosts of restless
slaughtering tongues wail (59)
Here the killers moan as afterlives of malice. Hell Figures is terrifying in its eloquent dissertation on the weaponized and the weapon. As a footprint, a word, an argument.
March 14th
Mental telepathy and clairvoyance are a sixth sense(s). Hell Figures instigates the future by plucking ancient chords, listening for reverberations that refer to the horizons between contemporary life and its staging.
Helen of Troy. What do we know about her? What survives the scrutiny of time in a symbolic universe? Her name echoes loudly in an chamber emptied out of collective recollection. The commoditized forms of physical beauty – female beauty – is a distraction, an extraction.
the body concusses the senses
a familiar illusion (41)
March 15th
The Ides of March, day of the Pharmakos ritual.
“What tragedy depicts is one dikē in conflict with another, a law that is not fixed, shifting and changing into its opposite”
Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naguet on ancient Greek conceptions of the law: “The Greeks do not have an idea of absolute law, founded upon certain principles and organized into a coherent system. For them there are, as it were, differing degrees of law. At one pole law rests upon the authority of accomplished fact, upon compulsion; at the other it brings into play sacred powers such as the order of the world or the justice of Zeus. It also poses moral problems regarding man’s responsibility. For this point of view Dikē (justice) herself may appear opaque and incomprehensible, in that for human beings she includes an irrational element of brute force. Thus, in the Supplicants, we see the concept of kratos oscillating between two contradictory meanings. Sometimes it denotes legitimate authority, legally based control, sometimes brute force in its aspects of violence, completely opposed to the law and to justice. Similarly, in Antigone, the word nómos may be used with precisely opposed connotations by different protagonists.”(26)
March 17th
tyranny – that other state – the sea
from some surface
desires surface
the entry to hell fills me
with
hope – (125)
Psychic reversals. Hope in hell. Hell is ever present and normalized as to engender a cascade of feelings other than an expected valence for suffering and evil. Emotions crest out of bounds. When threatened to an extreme, the psyche must purge definition. Seek alternative meaning. If this is confusing, it is.
simultaneous to all
violence
so that every sense rebels
save my jealous ear (127)
March 18th
a million years of memory culminates in a point, it moves
the surge of every accident in order, descending in spiral
pale and ashen as our futures – unstrung in the ebb
wild, with the deft precision of machines, colourless as salt (109)
March 19th
but I do live
in that great deep that dying
lake a monumental sarcophagus
I cannot pry
even memory’s
overtakelessness (49)
I was brought here, to the threshold of spring within overtakelessness, an enigma of signification. Cultural memory’s overtakelessness: a dying lake as monumental sarcophagus. A strange hopefulness in hell. From a third-floor window the buds on the trees below appear. The molecular capacity of energetic emergence hasn’t totally succumbed to the emergency.
from here the world
is wrought
heads I shuffle among (95)
