Nupur Shah

Fictional Essay on the Solitude of Legs

—in the company of Anne Carson

 

On being asked: Sex? I say, it’s good to be neuter. Maybe what I mean is that I want the stars to seduce me, with their firethin voices, crumple of ash, singing. My body, as much a thing made from dying as anybody else’s, tells me, I do not want to be a person. There comes a point (at sea or in poetry) where an unnamed blankness settles, like a coat of sheen, on things tenderly majestic, such as life and those who do the living off it. This is that selfsame point now pressing me to its lips.

Two red strokes are all it takes to be-cum woman and far-too-many olives squeezed through the canvas for the setting of a night scene. What I mean to say is that I want to have meaningless legs. And I want to swim them through the ocean of your green room of which the oceans remind me, yes, of your greenness: I want. I want you cool, cooling, even though I know the Earth bears no such plant. Yet, what is (my) language but a dream of spring, a spring dreamed, a spring(ing) of dream(s)? Finger it apart, knuckle by knuckle, slurping the syllable from the slime. Drink all the sex there is, lover to lover.

Look, inside it, inside this, inside the universe, there is an image floating called I, even though (it knows) the mortal motto of still die, still die. Still, be still and weave your eyes through my tautness of skin. Say there are things unbearable. Like what? Like the greenness of love. For this verse of April, cruelest of months, is growing a tree on my head, sinking its roots in my mind where I hear them groping in the deep dark of that mental light. Telling me to tell you: My personal poetry is a failure.   

After this, interlude of isolation from thought.

After which (again and again) I tempt you. I blush you. To think, think, think (what shall we do after the end)? Alas, legs, legs (that) die despite the stanzas, the sexes, the seductions of the wideworld. No, never that enough. Little drunk; little oh; this size of their dying: my footsteps of thought roving over your taut skin.

Tell me, how am I going to end this?

Time is an interminable affair between the dead (gone as going) and the dying (we) who walk no charge, on legs like Frisbees into the unsupportable blue of pale distances. I don’t know if this is not a metaphor (inspired by Rilke) of a desire to burrow beneath a Cezanne still life painting. For isn’t all art a desperate attempt to escape the locomotive called legs? Because as far as I know this art called surviving, pears and peaches, apples and oranges are not supposed to have any aggressive instincts. Unless, of course, the eater/viewer display an iron-will to decimate their virgin flesh between his molars and bicuspids. Iron will, is there some ballet term for it? Tell me, mourning mirror, is it a fragment of foil with which I should end this, end you…and thus grasp the stillness of things with just a little spin, a little do off the ledge of consciousness? Alas, because I want to be unbearable, my hunger for life is where I (always) recede, with every leg of me. Crazy slow rocking down into the deepwell question: Who doesn’t end up a female impersonator?

To which she answers: Then you die.

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Statement of Homage

Anne Carson captivated my imagination at a time (for which the above is an elegy) when there didn’t exist any such notion (of the imagination) anywhere in my mind. Sexually, spiritually, emotionally, and financially frustrated (as I continue to be), the “wishing jewel” of language failed to shine forth until the day I came across her—I really don’t remember which work of hers was my introduction to her flowing genius. For that is just what she is, a “kind of water” that has seeped the deeps of the world while never being indifferent to the magic of giveaway surfaces. Words belong to everyone; it is sentences that individuate, said Barthes. An Anne Carson sentence bears the indelible mark of her mind, as hard as a diamond and just as lustrous.

Like a true artist, Carson performs the balancing act between body-mind, soul-sex, man-woman, self-world, travel-limbo, language-silence, original-translation, etc., by following every bend in her elastic mind as it occurs and as steeply as it occurs. Like trauma, inspiration, too, has a way of sighing open where one least anticipates it, and it this non-anticipation that startles her patient reader into a symphony of understanding; for (to me at least), Anne Carson’s mode of writing is to layer the intricacies of think and feel into structures of interpretability, so that I (try to) read her as I would a musical notation: gropingly, in the dark.

The above essay is a humble attempt to crack open the fruit of her mind’s flesh the way I tasted it in “SEXES, STANZAS, SEDUCTIONS”, one of the many pieces of poetry included in the multi-genre book, Decreation (2005). The lines in italics derive directly from this particular poem as I wanted to stage the insistent impact her own words (what’s called verbatim) has inside the writer, the reader, and the after- poem’s own (so verbatim-ed) mind (and body).

I like Anne Carson because she is beautifully weird, not unlike the intimate distance that exists between a life and the one it lives.

Anne Carson

Anne Carson is a classicist, translator, poet, essayist and genre-jarring writer who lives in Canada. She is the first female poet to win the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for her book The Beauty of the Husband (2001). This honor was preceded and followed by a dandelion-field of awards and appreciation. Fun fact: her book Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998) sold 25,000 copies, which according to The New York Times is “rare for a book of poetry.” Yes, but then, genius is rare.

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Nupur Shah (she/her) lives in Mumbai, India, where she tries to be as flippant and as furious about the shambles of the world and of herself as both will allow her to be. She tweets @notyetposthuman.