Compendium + Correspondence
Kristina
Marie Darling. Scrambler Books, $12 paperback (87p) ISBN: 978-0-578-12349-3
Once upon a time, separate from
the agrarian economy of the countryside and the mercantile economy of the
towns, an entrenched and precarious feudal power, perched atop a high rock in
Limousin, employed a small number of young women as handmaids and a small
number of young men as clerks. With
their queen’s amused endorsement, a kind of glamor sprang up from the
amusements of this tiny semi-leisured subclass.
Naturally, these young people were interested in the arts and each
other. Also naturally, since marriage
was deferred or impossible, they considered love a condition altogether
separate and distinct from the solemn business arrangements of matrimony, and
they considered it something different from sex, too. They read Ovid and the Song of Songs. A vernacular literature of their own existed
all around them and they knew it well.
They had access to local music, and to modal traditions that reached
them from the Levant by way of Venice, and they heard polyphonic compositions
in church. Young poets took note of this
little hothouse of culture and transformed the ethos of its circle of lovers
into a poetics. The literary construct
of fin’ amor was above all a game
whose rules comprised the terms of a contract that offered entrée into the
shadow aristocracy who knew how to behave in a new generation – one with the
tiniest hint of what we now recognize as class mobility and gender
equality. An open secret, these “rules”
of love were never really codified, and they form the subtext for the
situations laid out in the poems. The
speaker of the Occitan poems is a lover, male or female, who, according to his
or her predicament, tells how he or she understands Fine Love, and explains how
it is with him or her. The poetry was only
one part of an entertainment, played out for a happy few to enjoy for an
evening while cooped up in a castle, and it developed its own conventions. In general the troubadour corpusdevalues
carnality and makes virtues of lack, absence, the ethereal, and the
disembodied. Through Petrarch by way of
Dante, Northern Europe caught on, and the rest is history. Devotion to courtliness in the love game is a
matter of temperament, and Kristina Marie Darling’s Compendium + Correspondence offers a presentation of the amorous as
if the pith of love inhered not in the story of its existence but in an aura that
encircled its effects, its blandishments, and its debris.
Form
is inextricable from format, and context from textuality, in Darling’s book, in
the sense that its lines and paragraphs are printed as if they were the
scholarly apparatus of a volume whose text has vanished. The tenor of the metaphor of which this disappearance
is the vehicle could only be the meta-narrative that Stendhal perceived from a
perspective so opposed to Darling’s that he was compelled to graph the stages
of falling in love as a crystallization of the beloved’s image within the
lover’s mind. By contrast Darling provides
an antithesis to anecdote. Several pages
consist only of footnotes listed below a lateral bar:
__________________________________________________________________
1. It was his letter, with its
intricate flourishes and belabored epigraph, that prompted her to bury the
necklace.
2. Within the locket she kept small
photographs and a loose thread from his jacket.
The little clasp at the back of her neck still gleaming.
3. “I had wanted to discard the
strange trinket, with its silver chain and innumerable compartments. Now the interior has been cordoned off with a
white ribbon.”
The peculiarities of any love
seep into its silhouette, and the fact that it is love in the first place
supersedes the wish to talk about it.
When characters appear in Compendium
+ Correspondence they possess a mannequin-esque, modeled quality, enacting
roles in a pantomime:
The Box
That
evening, the connoisseur presented Madeleine with an usual box. Despite its array of glass buttons and sheet
music, he explained, one must never open the smallest compartment. But before long the room would darken. Alone with her sanctimonious parcel, its blue
paper wrapping, and cluster of green ribbons, Madeleine heard the old piano’s
most delicate song drifting from beneath the lid. Around the box, a disconcerting
stillness. Snow falling outside the
great white house as she danced and danced.
The unexpected cinematic close of
this poem strikes us as very much an earned image, coming as it does after the
virtuoso flourish of “her sanctimonious parcel” – the pointed epithet lending
the piece a post-neoclassical froideur and exactitude.
One
problem with the human condition consists in our being endowed with a
consciousness that for all its benefits prevents us from distinguishing between
reification and cathexis. The Observer
Effect leaves no part of our lives untouched.
Compendium + Correspondence
evokes this condition with a dry warmth:
The Dress
Madeleine
began by choosing the most somber dress she could, its dark green taffeta
rustling through the halls. “This is
really the only way,” she explained to the connoisseur, “that I can comprehend
melancholy, its intricate structure.” As
she spoke , he seemed to notice the creases in her stiff white sleeves. His milky eyes adrift among their endless
glass buttons. And it was then that
Madeleine imagined herself as a spectacle forgotten on a dusty wooden
stage. She could understand the desire
for an elegy, with its starched shirts and reverent hum.
Darling’s term for the dilemma of
perception is “spectacle,” and she devotes more passages to glossing this word
than to any other single subject. First,
“Madeleine imagined herself as a spectacle forgotten on a dusty wooden
stage.” Then the protagonist withdraws,
abashed:
6. Only for a moment could she
understand their fear of a spectacle.
The red lacquer buttons gleaming from her shoes.
Perceiving and / or being
perceived bears a direct relation to love, in the following passage:
7. She realized that her desire for
a spectacle, rather than the physical presence of a beloved, was the cause of
her recurring dream.
Finally a love which has
gradually revealed itself as the theme of Compendium
+ Correspondence, is named and claimed to be the source of its tensions:
ardour. The cause of a spectacle, which she
remembered for its white light and the duration of its music. As the song began her letter opener could be
seen shimmering against his discarded necktie.
The need to be seen and known,
the desire for desire, love not of another but of love itself, may strike you
as an fleeting sort of devotion, and it is.
Yet ardor is warmth,
creaturely and committed –and therefore it’s the most fitting word in our vernacular
for the affection celebrated in the days when the construct of romantic love
first came to be.
Psychology
has influenced poetry through its interpretation of the mythological corpus by
the collective unconscious and the archetype, rather than its analysis of the
individual psyche by the neurosis and the complex. Jung, not Freud, has proved useful to
poets. The advent of romantic love cast
new light on a body of mythological lore to which it was of course
fundamentally alien, and as an interpretive frame which makes room for much
else besides the individual psyche, the collective unconscious in turn
complicated this anachronistic way of reading emotions and thoughts into
stories that never contained them. Compendium
+ Correspondence affords a place for what might be called the mytho-psychic
dimension of love:
__________________________________________________________________
5. The fresco depicts a series of
exchanges between Orpheus and Euridice as they ascend from the underworld. Despite numerous attempts to unearth the
sequence, its last panel remains obscured.
6.She slipped the epigraph under
his door to preserve the ritual, its mythic stature. That was when the snakeflies emerged. Their deciduous humming.
7. The documentary (c. 1996)
follows a woman through an analysis of recurring dreams. Despite several attempts to establish
boundaries between the real and imagined, she continued to describe the
fictional beloved. His pale hands and
delicate wrists.
8. Translated from the German as The empty rooms of the unconscious.
Rehearsed, documented and
archived, the foregone conclusion of love nonetheless remains obscured from
view in an atmosphere of the Uncanny that we do not discover in love but bring
with us. This is true of everything in
life of course, and yet it has a certain piquancy when it comes to our attachment
to each other. The fact that we bother at all confers an embattled dignity upon
the trials of love.
Poetry’s
formative influence on culture in the domain of romantic love is a matter of
record, and Darling reminds us of this important distinction by making
reference to a rare instance of cultural agency in literature and
distinguishing the case in question from both verisimilitude and cooptation:
Chapter One Always begin by saying that this is not
“Romanticism.” In the work of Keats
especially, we rarely encounter a clear-cut example of artifice. Like the artist’s mind decaying amidst the
nightingales and constellations—this was
assumed to be real. And the letter, with
its intricate flourishes and belabored epigraph, gave rise to the most
startling numbness in every fingertip.
Romance is a spirit that either
inheres in a relationship or is not present at all. It’s not an -ism to be overlaid on what’s already present and evident. This is true in any place and in any
era. The reality of the Romantic
subject’s delirium is a sine qua non
of the genre, and only a meta-generic view like the one that Compendium + Correspondence affords can meet
our need for a full appraisal of this circumstance. A further question, not addressed by Darling
and probably not germane to the case of Keats in particular but to the
relationship between reality and poetry in general, is whether, by subjecting
themselves in the first place to transports of imagination and fevers of
emotion, poets in the Romantic tradition do not, with greater or lesser degrees
of self-consciousness and deliberate awareness and will, play into and play up to a prejudicial expectation on
the part of society that in order to be a real poet the person writing the
poems had better really suffer, and moreover that he or she had better do so in
a more or less prescribed and public way.
A great deal of this sort of nonsense has been laid at Keats’ door, or
rather on his grave. While Darling can
hardly share such a perspective, the reader may be excused for demurring as to
whether or not poetry is assumed to be real. It should be beyond argument that Keats’
objective, at least, was always artifice.
A
laconic humor abounds in Compendium + Correspondence. Here is the poet on human vanity:
5. The frieze depicts a series of
attempts to stave the avalanche. Despite
several excavations, the lower portion of the piece remains obscured.
And here she is on the drugginess
of Romance culture:
a. In an effort to balance desire
with restraint, the Romantics were said to take their opium in a field of
poppies.
And on the occupational
absurdities of textual scholarship:
9. See also The Cambridge Companion to English Literature.
Finally here is Darling on the
intersection of identity and art:
figure 3. A lost film still, which depicted the heroine
as she boarded a luxury rail car. The
actress would later be found lamenting the arrival of her train at the sea.
It takes an indulgent and
tolerant, if distant and cool, sensibility to encourage
us to laugh at ourselves in this way.
Out
of the few genuinely new movements that have sprung up in the brief history of
modernity, the Romantic has taken root most widely and firmly in our
imagination – and yet, precisely because of this fact,we find it nearly
impossible to tease out the threads of its growth through our lives, and to
name them for what they are. In her
brilliantly conceived and masterfully executed book Compendium + Correspondence Kristina Marie Darling abstracts a pure
strain of Romance from the confusion and strife of modern existence. (June 2013)
Reviewer bio: Erik Noonan is the author of the poetry
collections Stances (Bird & Beckett, 2012) and Haiku d’Etat
(Omerta, 2013). He lives in San Francisco with his wife Mireille.
