Publié chez Coach House

My youthful commitment to the identity of beauty with freedom had been experimental, in the sense that usefully recognizing oneself as a girl was an experiment. I had absorbed the commitment from the literature, trying it on like a rhetoric that I called passion, loving the interior thrill of difference I felt as the tiny identifications operated within me, interpreting the thrill as my own emotion, not recognizing that what this thrill covered over was a worried questioning, not yet linguistic, about the scorn that bordered beauty’s literary description. The man-poets scorned what they desired ; their sadistic money was such that the object scorned was endowed with the shimmer of sex. How radiant we were in our gorgeous outfits and our bad moods ! Oh, and this ignited poetry. Baudelaire scorned Jeanne Duval and every female he dallied with, or at least did so on paper, Ted Hughes scorned Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound scorned Djuna Barnes, George Baker scorned Elizabeth Smart, everybody scorned Jean Rhys. Proust did not scorn Albertine because Albertine was a man. The she-poets perished beneath the burden of beauty and scorn. This is what I observed. This was the formal sexuality of lyric. Who was I then, what was I, when I, a girl, was their reader, the reader of the beautiful representations ? Who was I if I became the describer, and how could I become this thing before perishing ? Would I then even recognize myself ? Because I saw the perishing everywhere. Daily I read it. The freedom of desiring and its potent transformations seemed not to belong to beauty, just to beauty’s describer. Anyone without a language for desire perishes. Any girl-thing. My questions emerged then as a mute, troubled resistance to the ancient operation that I also craved. Certainly the poem must become something other than this contract. I seemed to have been wrong about most things, except for my will to write and to read. That and the stain. Even so, I did not want to give up on beauty altogether, so gently I set it to the side, and with it the philosophical potency and freedom of the bad mood. Certainly I would return to beauty, I would return to the bad mood. I would arrive at anger.

For now I would continue to test the hypothesis of lust. I would test it in bookshops, in museums, and at fountains. I would test it, as I have described, in attic rooms, maid’s rooms as they were called. As unfixed lust, in fact a maid, I would write, I would perambulate and peruse. I would forget not to stare. I would move towards what I desired. I would make myself understood. What I wrote about in my heavy hard-bound diary : about a girl living in a room, getting dressed, buying food, fucking, the goddamned tulips ugly in the dark. These were historical records about things that might never have before existed, if I were to judge by the literature. Before I began to write what I needed to write, an event that, to my considerable dissatisfaction, would not begin for some years (lines such as ‘even the musking tulips’ would assert themselves, unwelcome even at the moment of transcription), I had to set the record straight, establish an archive. This would be my foundation. I had to describe everything, from the perspective of the lust of a maid. I did it altruistically, for the future. It would not be attractive. It would show my unkindness, the banality of my appetites, the small lies I told, the wilful omissions. My descriptions would not be about being seen, nor about the striving for that position within the lyric contract. Being seen by money was a form of incarceration within an enforced aesthetic constraint. Within this contract, aesthetic judgments are the same judgments that assess financial risk. Is the girl productive ? Lucrative ? Accessible ? Against this odious assessment, I began the slow accumulation of the documents of the incommensurable procedures, procedures for which I was not a sign, but an untrained actor, a bad actor, a hack of a sentence writer, an anonymous fuck. If the result seems merely decorative, ornamental, it’s because now realism has become another name for capital.

Baudelaire, so bitterly wracked with ambivalence, with rejection and debt, anachronistically repudiated the ideology of capital. His realism would recognize the spiritual complexity of dispossessed lives. He undoubtedly projected his aesthetic emotions on those outsiders cursed by Haussmann’s city ; he loved actresses, street singers, old women, acrobats, and prostitutes. He loved Jeanne Duval. He reconstructed the baroque city he required in Le Spleen de Paris, a city whose equivocity could enfold both pleasure and doubt. In Baudelaire’s cosmos, bizarre beauty was necessarily striated with irony, anger, and refusal.

The old pleasure had been lost, and the new had not yet been made. Jeanne’s body was not her body ; it was the field of an aesthetic proclamation and its withdrawal. Her body was the ground for the refracted self-identity of these bohemian cadets. Carmine-bronze-violet-tinted-blue-black, they described her to one another ; they recognized each other by means of the screen of her skin. She lived, as I said, on the second floor, facing the court, with her blonde maid Louise. They had no cook and no kitchen, so the two women would go to eat together in restaurants. Their home was open to any who wished to pay a visit, and from these guests she asked for nothing, since the household was entirely provided for by her lover, Baudelaire. Furthermore she was free, said Nadar, to accept any intimate attentions, since at that time their youthful circle regarded monogamy as a sort of crime. In the afternoon, between the hours of two and four only, her door was closed ; this was when Monsieur would visit her, and also every night.

Banville had first met Baudelaire strolling in the Luxembourg Gardens, by means of their common friend, the journalist Privat d’Anglemont. ‘Tiens,’ Privat d’Anglemont said to his companion, at the sight of the approach of the young poet through the foliage, ‘c’est Baudelaire’ : Baudelaire, with his little pointy beard, nipped-in black velvet smock, and silver-headed walking stick, who seemed to have stepped from a van Dyck. And then the three men spent the entire night walking together in the city.

In the morning we had more whisky, and chocolate. I was puffy and slick and my lips were kissed raw, and I went to vomit behind the plastic curtain. Magnificent. There was no need for modesty. This is what beauty was for in some songs. Some say they only flirted, but my song was not that one. Later he asked if I would care to be prostituted. No, I said.

If he could pimp, I could write.

Do you sometimes at earliest waking observe yourself struggling towards a pronoun ? Do you fleetingly, as if from a great distance, strain to recall who it is that breathes and turns ? Do you ever wish to quit the daily comedy of transforming into the I-speaker without abandoning the wilderness of sensing ? The sensation isn’t morbid ; it is ultimately disinterested. For me it’s a familiar moment, boring and persistent and disappointing. Again one arrives at the threshold of this particular, straitening I. With a tiny wincing flourish one enters the wearisome contract, sets foot to planks. Daily the humiliation is almost forgotten, until it blooms again with the next waking. It is an embarrassing perception best stoically flicked aside, left unreported. With an obscure hesitation one steps into the day and its frame and its costume.

The nervous fluid of a city is similar to a grammar or an electric current. Loving and loathing, we circulate. I myself did not exist before bathing in this medium. Here I become a style of enunciation, a strategic misunderstanding, a linguistic funnel, a wedge in language. Here I thought I’d destroy my origin, or I did destroy it, by becoming the she-dandy I found in the margins of used paperbacks. What do I love ? I love the elsewhere of moving clouds.

Reading unfolds like a game called ‘I,’ in public gardens in good weather, in a series of worn-down hotel rooms, in museums in winter, where ‘I’ is the composite figure who is going to write but hasn’t yet. If I am not alone in these rooms, if I could be known, it would be by the skinny red-haired street singer, the secretary of Cologne in her ironical cast-off dress, the hard-shod horsegirls neighing in the dark apartment, by similarly hybrid she-strangers and foreigners, any girl with the combined rage of lassitude and complicity. They are blazons. Cool threads of anger bind me to them. We cease to be human. We’re neutral, desituated clouds. There is nothing left to fear. This realization is a vocation.