Auscultation
The methodological principle that we follow in this
study is that our ignorance of an author’s motivations
in no way authorizes the presumption that they are
incoherent or faulty.
- Giorgio Agamben
I was reading The End of the Poem by Giorgio Agamben.
I was wondering how the poem would end.
In one chapter he was writing about “Comedy,” in another,
about “Corn,” used “sodomitically.”
He was writing about the “Inferno” and the poet’s decision
to abandon a “tragic” project for a “comic” poem instead.
He was saying how the material of tragedy is public,
elevated, and sublime while the “private” matters of comedy
are known to be lowly and humble.
At times I’ll admit I was lost. At times I found myself falling
into silence, but all the while there was another reader
reading alongside me; even though it was a library book,
they writing in the margins (“Comic title as rupture”); they
were underlining phrases:
comedy has a turbulent principle, [but] ends finally
in peace and tranquility. The present book altogether
conforms to this model.
So I followed the other reader through The End of the Poem,
and with them as my guide I knew when Agamben wrote:
after the Fall, human language cannot be tragic;
before the Fall, it cannot be comic
that Christianity is inherently comedic, that despite
beginning in total depravity, the end was all that mattered.
And as I was sitting there like so many who’d come before,
reading The End of the Poem at a desk in the sub-basement
of a library, I couldn’t help but wonder what my mother
would think of all this. Not of my exegetical interests—
debilitatingly arcane as they are— but of this dramatic
analysis of her faith. Of the idea that,
love [is] a tragic experience… [that] love is the only tragic experience possible in the medieval Christian world.
Or that the moral subject of modern culture (i.e. she)
is nothing more than the development of the “tragic”
attitude of the actor, who fully identifies with [their]
own “mask”
And so it was that my mother’s face was on my mind when I
found myself lost in the chapter entitled, “Corn: From
Anatomy to Poetics;” for I know nothing of Arnaut Daniel,
whom Petrarch deemed, “the grand master of love,” Dante,
“the best craftsmen,” and Pound, “the greatest poet to ever
have lived;” I am ignorant of the troubadours, in general,
and of the poem in question, specifically; so I could hardly
surmise how a 12th century sirvente, composed by a knight
to his beloved, concerns the end of the poem— let alone
when its argument rests upon her proclamation, that:
she would not love him if he did not corn her
in the arse.
So I sought the hand of the other reader— that Beatrice of
Scholia— and dove into a rigorous philological dossier
beginning in 1883 with Ugo Canello’s entry and spanning
the breadth of a century, in which he contends:
the metaphor of corn as ‘bottom’ is common, [thus]
“Cornar” means, “to use sodomitically”
But in 1910 R. Lavaud dissents:
in verse 6, cornar has its ordinary sense of, “to sound
a horn or a trumpet.”
And a half century later Gianluigi Toja concurs: the verse
should be read as flatulential, à la Dante’s martial farting
demons (“del cul trombetta” &c). And so can you blame me,
when I mistook a circled asterisk for a half-hearted codici
miniati of a sphincter— appearing next to the parenthetical:
(honni soit qui mal y pense)[1]
in the middle of the Maurizio Perugi’s gymnastic lesson in
denial, which concludes with pyrrhic authority:
there can only be one answer: the corn is the clitoris.
Was the answer to my question about the end of the poem
so crudely anatomical? Is this what they mean when they
say, “ars poetica”? And did I now hold the key to the secret
erotics behind a crown of sonnets? But perhaps most
importantly, is this contrary to— or consonant with—
Agamben’s favored concept: logopoeisis.
Which is to say, that rather than “thinking-through-poetry,”
or, viz. Pound, “the dance of the intellect among words”—
the process is much more fundamental? Wherein,
gastropoeisis, or the jejune formulation, “it is what it eats,”
best applies?
Once again, I was wondering what my mother would think
of all this— but then, with what could she possibly disagree?
After all, the homuncular nature of the poem is well known:
its nimble, metrical feet; its stanzas, face and tail; its body,
its breath, its heart and voice; signature hand; the DNA of
diction; the microbiome of declensions…
For, as it turns out, the senses of corn are doubly abstruse:
meaning more than bottom, flatus, or analingus— it refers,
as well, to a verse at the center of a strophe, floating free, out
of place, which finds its rhyme in a stanza that follows— or
as Agamben points out:
the Provençals call [this] rim’estrampa or dissolut, [and]
Dante, in De vulgari eloquentia, terms [it] Clavis
While the Minnesänger actually used the term Korn,
demonstrating, finally:
[that] the anatomy of the body of love has a strict
correlate in the poem’s metrical structure.
Doesn’t it follow then, that the poem’s end is, to the mouth
that speaks it, like a rhyme out of place— defined as it is by
negative space— a locus of pleasure, hidden, ambiguous
meaning, nonsense, humor, and waste?
But if it wasn’t clear, already— if I’m honest— I was losing
the thread. I was grasping at straws. I was also thinking all
the while of something I’d written for my mother years ago.
About what I’d fed it; what lay at its heart:
The air clotted with light; a rush of petals, thick with pollen;
the bulbs, fruiting in the yellow, rain-heavy soil, as floods of
butterflies twisted above them in eglantine complexion:
I was feeding my poem a dream of spring. And, apropos of
that fertile season, my mom was pregnant, seemingly for the
first time and, apparently, with me.
Or, as I put it in the first couplet:
Something blooms in my mother
Under the covers she is a field of wildflowers
I was writing an ode. I was writing a reverdie.
But what’s odd to me now, is that in the poem my father is
“A minister newly frocked / Tending his first flock,” but,
though another reader wouldn’t know it, this happened
many years before I was born— and I’m not the oldest or
only child— yet in all of its 8 pages there’s no mention of my
siblings, of whom there are 6:
One who in his 40th year is digging a hole to live in in the raw
Colorado sabhka of the San Luis Valley as winter
approaches.
One who lives in a Michigan suburb with her husband and
four children.
One who is younger than me and works accounts payable at
the Gerald R. Ford Airport’s Duty Free.
One who is adopted, Inuit, and as I write this, has five little
girls and a job waiting tables at a diner called Gordo’s in
Gallup, New Mexico.
And another, who is her sister by blood and has just given
birth to a baby boy.
And finally, one who’s degenerative eye condition prevents
him from enlisting in the marines, and so, last I heard, has
been experimenting with heroic doses with his friend X— a
future Green Beret. This one, whom I remember smelling
like a river when he first came to us from Yezelalem Minch,
an orphanage in Addis Ababa for children who’s parents
have died of AIDS.
No.
I was feeding my poem personal information.
I was writing lyric poetry.
But in lieu of this brood, there was only inchoate little me.
Me, and my father, and mother, and a secret erasure.
But what does this have to do with the end of the poem— this
saccharine version of my life:
I was writing an idyll. I was writing an ode. And what’s clear
from the start is that whatever it sought, it wasn’t the truth,
though in its name,
Auscultation
it certainly pretended at it— as if it were a body who’s life
depended on it; as if it were listening nakedly for it. Like how
“the father,” who, let’s admit it, is not really my father,
Presses his cool ear there to listen,
As
A chain of daisies in her hair
On their wedding day comes unlinked
And
A gamete in the wall drifts clean,
& splits
As if you could hear that gooey detachment. My mitosis.
The delicate beachball of my blastula bouncing free.
And it’s this tender and domestic fabulation— him listening
to her tummy in bed with me in it— that for some reason
reminds him of his days in the uranium mines. How he,
Itinerate of the dark felt, a mile deep
In a stoner’s revery, the heat
Of the earth, molten through a curtain
Of dirt and heavy metals
And later, as a metaphor of birth— my birth, I think— or
resurrection, maybe— he remembers rising up with the
other workers,
On elevators as big as houses
Toward the light of sunset
Where insects crackled in the haze
Like flecks of static
As the bats swooned acrobatically
In among them, keening
Their early evening orrery
With only the gelid light of the bitumen lamps to see by,
dawn and dusk must have been to them
But a slim parentheses
Delimiting night from day
What a relief it must have been, those Sunday mornings,
waking with the sun to prepare his homilies, while my
mother in the poem
Basking in stain-glass light
Emulsified in a dispersion of motes
Arranges lilies below his pulpit
On oak boxes and damask
Whereas in life she was a nurse and probably worked harder
than he. And it’s almost funny now, to think of me then—
with dewy, voluminous eyes upturned and belladonna-
bright— laboring over each line and metaphor. But what’s
most uncanny to me now, is the sermon I composed for him
to preach, even going so far as to pretend I’d transcribed it.
Dusting off,
A 3M Metafine 90min casette
Dated 5/13/1984
And inserting things like,
He pauses here, I’ve heard it
As if it came straight from the archive. As if asked in a court
of law, I could produce it, corroborating its existence.
But the sermon is as false as the idyll itself. Somehow mine,
but not mine:
Look out the window now and see
The Kingdom of Heaven in the Glory of Earth
Spoken, ex nihilo, into being: one body,
One spirit, nothing is apart
From the whole— and every inch
You have dominion over
Consider, for instance, the bee
Like her, you are more than the angel
At the center of this rind
Listen to your heart
Hive-ripe, honeywise, & womblike
And consider each cell, a hexwork
Abuzz in cortex and matrix of comb
And listen to the drone
In wattles & folds: the volt by volt
Of synapses fluttering:
The pallium of drones knows the body
Beyond the husk
It is a lullaby sung by a larynx in figments
A lexicon in movement
The hymn & hum of a living body
Press your ear to there & feel the throb
Of songs sung to out-lying organs:
Every murmur a servitude
It cannot quit, even
Arrhythmic
The heart seduces the body
I mean… Jesus.
So the bees are the congregation; the hive, the church— I get
that— but they’re also the workers, right?
And the mine is the hive? Their smell, her smell, I think—
the smell of labor; the earth and iron odor of afterbirth.
But I think the hive is me, too, in utero: the gamete’s
“hexwork of cells” etc.
Or is the hive the womb, and we— my incognito brothers and
sisters— we’re the bees?
Anyway, I remember thinking— and this is the the height of
my delusion— a reader might see in this ampersand in
parenthesis an echo of the fetus in her belly, comme ça: “(&”.
Because the bees, they’re also my mother— like her, they’re
in the field of wildflowers.
And presumably, the Holy Spirit, she’s the queen?
But what is yet incomprehensible, is what the ventriloquism
means. I don’t know. Am I speaking through my father, or is
my father speaking through me?
I think I thought the sermon should be about her. About us,
together, inseparable. Nothing to do with dogma: only the
hidden doctrines of motherhood.
But as I tried to decipher this mystery, I fortuitously
happened upon Winnicott’s “unthinkable anxieties” of the
newborn, which are as follows:
1. Going to pieces
2. Falling forever
3. Having no relationship to the body
and 4. Having no orientation
And what’s striking— and yes, enigmatic— is how it seems
to be an encomium to the pleasure of going to pieces.
Of loss of self.
Particularly in relation to the newborn.
The loss of perceivable order and a tribute to maternity’s
profound re-ordering.
But of the many sermons I’ve heard him actually preach,
there’s one fragment I remember more vividly than any
other, though the point— the metaphor’s tenor— the moral
of the story— as there certainly must have been one— has
always eluded me, even while the image itself consumes me.
All I remember is the central illustration, which is of a comic
strip in which “our hero” trips over a sign with the words
“BOTTOMLESS PIT” emblazoned upon it, sending him
hurtling down through the funny pages into the dark weeks
ahead. Day by day, three panels at a time, with no thought-
or speech-bubbles trailing behind him, the tears that once
sped from his eyes run dry; his face grows wan, then sallow,
and his nails as long as talons— while I was left to wonder,
did others followed after, too distant to matter, too far away
to call out to (as his pants raveled away into rags), did he
ever catch his breath, find rest, catch a catnap in freefall,
(even as, like a flag flung into the void, his shirt leaves him
naked), weren’t there moments for contemplation— brief
interludes of abandon— from which a philosophy might’ve
developed (however provisional), an ontology of the fall—
even as, in the end, reduced to a speeding skeleton, he is
abandoned finally for the winds of the abyss to crumble
away to fragments, the fragments to fritter away to dust—
there I was, sitting in the pew, falling
from his mouth, I was sitting at the desk, feeling diffuse,
emerging from his head, I was falling to pieces,
feeling precarious, but keeping it private, I was risking
my neck, I was writing an idyll, I was making it comic,
eating my mask and abandoning logic,
I was falling and laughing and feeling medieval,
nearly inhumane, I was almost sublime, I was eating the air
and having a gas, I was turning to dust and gasping
for breath, I was reading the end of the poem,
I was wondering how the poem would end,