‘I wanted to choose words that even you / would have to be changed by.’ I have been impaled by Adrienne Rich’s words since young.
I’d always known that she was talking about magic. I never understood she wasn’t writing only about words. I only stumbled later over the lines that come next – take the word / of my pulse, loving and ordinary.
Maybe Adrienne was just romanticizing a loose common-sense about the truer-ness of mattery flesh; that the heart(beat) can neither escape nor capture being, and that words-as-we-know-them are everything but bone and breath and blood.
But must they not be? And what kind of language is pulse?
Western scientists know that the whole earth vibrates every twenty-six seconds. They glance towards this, call it a pulse, keep taking ocean’s. But they don’t deem it worthwhile to listen without their instruments of measurement for the secret of why the land is beating.
In Undrowned, Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes about some southern seals the scientists call Weddell. Whose below-ice singing they describe as alien – other beyond intelligibility. ‘You hear a spaceship and keep looking up’ she says. ‘We are here already.’
And to the seal: ‘Your movements guided by what no one else can see. Your voice a sound that no one could expect to hear, except we do. Thank you for your out of this world presence. Thank you for trusting what you feel and coming back. Your heartbeat a portal below everything else on Earth.’
And to the Lissodelphis dolphins who rhythm their movements with the waves, who ‘breathe at the rate of the ocean herself’ to escape detection within it: ‘choreographic presence, circumpolar hold, deep listening, coordination. Call back the school that fear untaught me. Give me the heartbeat I remember. Call it love.’
Yesterday, I read Thom Donovan’s piece on somatic poetics. As body writing bodys. An art to expose the conditions of possibility for different and queer and monstrous and expropriated and complicit bodies, the ‘messianic kernel’ of disabled bodies, the humanly insensible distributions of time and space, the invisible toxification of corpo-terra, the missing and amplification of senses, the many and more than human being.
‘The poetics of breath. Archaeologies of morning and mourning (moaning?). The spacious start of the miniscule. The poem as a tool for attunements, stimmung, proprioception. A site where mind and body would touch and become aware of this touching. A dance by which to coordinate multitude. A site of bodies coextensive in movement. Tactical magic that intervenes in how space exists. This becoming synaesthesic. From a position or multiple positions of culpability. A site of the body undergoing something mediated by language.’
What kind of language, whose, from which relations? What ancient and future stories are shared, what transontological weavings begin when we undergo the impossibility of thinking-speaking the luminous matter and matterings (debt to Chanda Prescod-Weinstein) that make everything matter? What happens when those of us who were dispossessed of language through worshipping words dig into the multitude of unwritten logics that might have and might yet make them work otherwise?
Like the wormholes of scent that telescope now into then and here into elsewhere faster than we can even feel.
Or like queer, rogue neurotransmitters that un/re/wire, rewi(l)den, the synaptic learnings of what it is possible and bearable to feel, to be in relation with, within and beyond these logics of flesh where multiple sense-knowings are inseparable.
Or like fugal decomposers and composters – can words otherwise help us mould, metabolize deeper and wider being-with in these ways?
Or as metaphor in its deepest sense of not comparison but transference, to bear mistakenly incomprehensibles across wounding divides, to make sensible the always-already intimacy between particular and universal?
Does word-language – as ‘form never more than condition passing as body’ (debt to Eleni Stecopoulos) – have ancestral, medicinal but discarded properties to help us heal the severences it itself has inflicted? Can we concoct somatic-poetic tinctures that allow the suppressed metabolic logics of sharing loving (gl)utterance that activate wise antidotes to the narration sickness of the modern catastrophe? If only as bridges to all the other sides.
And listen to Andrea Gibson read their poem, ‘Tincture.’
2021
Sarah Amsler 