Lyric Dissolvence
And or notes for a novel, footnotes for Hart Crane and a poem

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“If I am anything, it is violence.”
”The poem is a space and it hurts.”
— Alejandra Pizarnik

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What I wanted to write was something long and painful. I failed. Instead, I turned to Hart Crane.

Crane killed himself by jumping off of a ship in the gulf of Mexico. Water wrapping itself like a blanket around his body. I wanted to dissolve. To escape into a night where the lace of language was absent. Crane was obsessed with language, with archaic sounds and knowledge. An envelopment.

Famously, he wrote the antithesis to Eliot’s The Waste Land. For years I preferred Crane's lyric mastery, and hated Eliot’s fragmentary quilt. One day, I decided to go to a cafe near my new home in Washington and reread The Waste Land. I loved it. I spent hours pouring over it giving myself to it. Becoming it as much as I am able to. Each footnote giving access to some incomprehensible possibility for language.

Still it is hard to not see Crane’s mastery when compared to Elliot.

     O Lord Thou pluckest me out
     O Lord Thou pluckest

     burning

               — Eliot

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     Kiss of our agony Thou gatherest,
     O Hand of Fire
     gatherest—

               — Crane

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These lines have stuck with me for years. I am planning to have them tattooed on my body. Yet, I am unsure why I love them. This is an attempt to understand this affinity.

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Notes for a novel:

Amnesia: a character in the novel needs to have forgotten something vital. This shouldn't be the main character. Amnesia as a gateway towards becoming. False indicator of hybrid form between being A and B.

Duplicity is everything. It is the endless voyage we take in a lover's arm. It is the last thing within us that dies. Dying is just an act of plummeting. A dive seen through two irises.

Visa via Mulholland Drive, Blue Key, LA and lights.

List of all medication characters taken when entering the hospital. Abilify should be one. Nod to the author.

End: Pink with bone. He was a beast bent like the most ragged of dreams. I looked into his eyes and saw endless turquoise. I saw the fracture of reflection. My eye and his eye all at once.

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I discovered Crane in middle school through the regrettable and formidable Harold Bloom. I was immediately attracted to Crane's dizzying incantations, while, of course, having no clue as to what they were about. What I did connect with and understand however, was Cranes suicide. I felt I saw this in the Bridge, with the rippling chest and dip to pivot. Intrinsically, I felt as though I saw myself, shirt rippling with wind above a high building before that very fateful fall Crane himself would come to know.

What is a fall but a door, a window, an opening. An exertion into the known unknown. A factor of skin. Skin that breaks into the smallest of parts, and subsequently falls into the blanket of such a blue sea.

I want to write something that is vanishing, the way a fall vanishes oneself. The way there is no language for such dip and pivot, for such desire towards the natal cry of nothingness.

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Note: August 14, 2024

I have just got a new car. An old mercedes. I drive it with the windows down and I feel all that air brush past me like the oldest of friends. The way death would. The way death is the oldest of friends.

The car is my everything. Growing up in LA there is anaffinity to this object unlike anything else. Never have I cared so much about a singular thing. I want to keep it for along time.

First trip: Snoqualmie Falls and North bend

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In the dream everything is on fire. I walk alongside it. The wings on my back are becoming ashy, the eyes now closed wider than ever.

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Sailors

Crane loved sailors. Men of the sea. Obvious things to say which I won't.

Crane throughout his life was obsessed with the sea, and arguably wrote the greatest aquatic love poem of all time with voyages.

"Permit me voyage, love, into your hands ...”

The obsession with hands, with entering them. As if hands are a portal. Into what? Dissolvence? Dissolving into love and fire.

Like Rilke said, we are separated through a ring of fire yet we attempt to bury our solitude in another. A gift. A door. An opening of ourselves which is really just another way of talking about closing the door.

“That for which human lives are as yet barley large enough”

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I walked into a field and saw nothing but slits of flowers writhing up towards an endless shadow.

The shadow had my mouth.

My mouth had no language.

Night ripped open the wound of language and all I heard was a baby's cry.

The way all flesh is flesh is flesh.

The way a hand is a hand is a hand.

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When April comes, what Eliot called the cruelest of months, the call of a cuckoo is heard. The Cuckoo so secretive in its habits. While the bird does not normally choose a hummingbird to lay its egg in, it does.

Native country of tricks, of deception.

How a door can trick you when you enter. How you never know what to expect. Like we don't know what to expect when we come crashing down into the cruelest of waters.

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Exercises of a wound

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1.
Homeland:

In this country, country of wound,
Where the wound is carried in the back of the hand -
Like a Christmas present all wrapped in ribbon.

I am as light as bone.
Our hands entwined
Tell it all.

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2.
Grief Ritual:

the wound, like death, is the oldest of friends
leaves us hanging limp like loose puppets
little marionettes of the sun within suns

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3.
Lovers quarrel:

The wound beautiful and foreign is a hummingbird
Native country of hearts
Of places where no language lives except silence

There is a song of rapture
And a room of wounded
Desire for revelation

Where we expected grace
We were left like that bird
Caught in the cracked teeth of a dog smiling

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4.
A child's doll:

When you are touched by a wound embrace the ashes of it

Wash yourself in a river of daffodils

Chew bones and let them be that of a lovers

Drive to oregon

To Washington

See red mountains

Red everything

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