Mara
Gálvez-Bretón
Furor Aporeticus : First
Excursion
“A
shared air of impermanence, of being able to move on, shape shift, relocate to
other universities, mountain tops, ghettos, factories, safe houses, abandoned
farms. . .”
(Hakim
Bey)
1.
“no ordinary
sedentariness preexists” (Derrida)
If it
isn’t paradise but the wandering lust for it,
If it
is the ethos of limits—boundaries, circumscriptions—that must be trespassed,
If “there is no there there” and, within every
woman, there breathes a restlessness that exceeds all bounds
Unanchorable
MGB, refusing confinement in her writing and in her Beetle, once endeavoring to
travel from city to city to derange the how-what-where of writing, reading,
dreaming, wandering—unsettling even desire-delirium under different skies.
What
has happened to the pure pleasures of drifting?
Oh days of castles, not in the
air but in the sand
2.
“To
follow the flow of matter is to itinerate.” (Deleuze and Guittari)
She
said, “What would be the point of searching for places already known—dystopias
found and abandoned?” She said, “What would be the point of searching for
unknown utopias—as if our senses, imperfect, could know the if-and-when of
arriving upon ‘the perfect place’?”
Between
origin and death, between coasts east and west, between colonizer and refugee,
between intruder and exile (always already she-who-is-not- in-her-place),
between the contradictory imperatives of displacement and quest
She
said, “Santayana, into his seventies, lived the lifestyle of a wandering
scholar.” She said, “ Rilke, ‘dulled by the local scene’, needed to ‘get out
and refresh his gaze’ now and then.”
So many
lines running through her—how could she expect to feel ‘at home’ in any one pied a terre?
Oh when your mouth, your skin
were paradise enough and the only place to take up residence or flights of
fancy was in your arms
3.
“We are
looking for spaces (geographic, social, Cultural, imaginal) with potential to
flower as autonomous zones.” (Bey)
If
every culture has its own version of the Romantic quest, if the California
dreaming, the European exploration of ‘the orient’, the chase, the witch hunt,
the crossing, the search (for gold, for freedom, for adventure, for home), the
transatlantic pilgrimage, if the grass is always greener/the air cleaner/the
sand so velveteener elsewhere:
MGB
attempting to traverse Laguna Mountains in her ’74 Beetle, her breaks recently
inspected, her belly replete with cinnamon bread, her veins and her fancy
overflowing with caffeine.
In those
pre-Arizona days in which she conceived every town this side of the San Andreas
as ‘the east’, imagining an enchanting land of terra cotta hills and turquoise
skies, imagining inhabitants who looked like Joan Baez, whose skin glowed all
the more ferruginous from embellishment with earrings, bracelets, anklets of
silver and semi-precious stones. Desperately expectant MGB: driving toward New
Mexico with her text
Come, let us write a memoire, a
lesbian travelogue —a herstory-in-progress of the topographies which two women,
mad with love, traverse, colluding in words and in kisses.
4.
“How
hopeful the individual is again and again, how really well-intentioned.”
(Rilke)
if
partaking in the intoxicant of migration / the summons of the bon voyage / if a
change of direction / if a change of desire / if it is because there is no
utopia that a woman, anxious of feet if inert of mind, must persevere,
delighting-despairing in the tautology of the pursuit:
one who
recognizes that the utopian quest is a creative construct is one who is
entangled in its fictions—psychologically, physiologically—nevertheless
Oh,
MGB, whose left cerebral cortex lusts to wander and whose right brain wastes
away of mal du pays, mal du vin, nostalgic for mal du mer: implicit in the
idiom of ‘not fitting in’ is the supposition of places that might suit one
better
Oh insuperable desire to
submerge these hands in your bodiless billowing, to drench this face in your
mist of morning
If every winding road leads not
to Rome but to Mytilene
5.
“We
make declamatory breaks with it. . .We make declamatory returns.” (Didion)
If she
used to define herself self-righteously as a fugitive—one running from the
simulacrum of family, for instance / one fleeing the California dictate of
celerity, productivity, palm trees—if the discourse of displacement was
becoming more becoming / if the refugee is she who has opted to leave because
the options have become so limited/limiting, leaving no other option / if the
ensuing anxieties (no fog to shelter? no drizzle to reanimate? no sea to pacify
the fears?) are no more assuageable by a language of volition:
There
doodles MGB, imitating a Didion who doodled in that same land half her life yet
remained incapable of apprehending, wanting/not wanting her rightful place in
the grand narrative of The West, expiating or expatiating on the loss of
paradise as one who has (almost) had it—not at the nib of a Waterman but within
cupped hands, under excursion-weary feet, toes whitewashed, cozy and tepid in a
sandbank Elysium
Oh souls and soils
irregular, ever-unstable!
Oh
eucalyptus-lined highways!
Oh state of
departures / oh straying pleasures of drifting!
6.
“Thus,
in justice, may we bar the poet from the city—she, who by arousing, feeding,
strengthening the emotions, destroys the soul’s most rational components.”
(Plato)
One
whose occupation (as early as the fourth century BC) had been ruled useless at
best (The Republic, Book X),
deceptive/maleficent at worst (Book II) ought not to be astonished that expulsion
from the metropolis was now the only suitable recompense for her poetic
meanderings/ furor scribendi itself—that tendency for geographical, lexical,
psychic derangements— deemed a sign of a deeper delirium.
One who
at times had been set in motion by a reposeless mind / stirred by a tedium
tremens interior/exterior was one always already fated to become one
economically exiled by her creative faculty—one banished to the land of barren
bards.
Between
the nomad who pauses by necessity and the migrant who travels by it, MGB:
hesitating at Arizona’s riparian border. Will she be stranded in a place in
which she can(not) write?
Elsewhere: the sea / elsewhere:
the forest of redwoods / elsewhere: desire
7.
“The
epidemiological literature linking somatization, depression and migration is
enormous” (Stein)
If the state she had needed to leave behind was as much
topographical as it was mental: MGB: agonizing to articulate despair—the loss
of utopia, the loss of folie (a une, a deux), the loss of the imperative for
the impossible (a trios) —because loss is a despair assented to—or, at least,
no longer disputed with conviction—because the utter absence of desire (a
plus?)—including the desire to articulate—because the resignation of the
all-too-possible— because one has a relationship to a place—a piece of mind/of
land only for the duration
If it
seemed she was becoming increasingly melancholic—so prosaic was the discourse
of nostalgia commoving/suppressing dysrhythmic pen—quixotic MGB: already
lovesick for a fantastic, an impalpable coastline
Oh nostalgia, if not for happy
bygone days, then for those places we enjoyed being unhappy
8.
“Tell
the people that when they arrive in the land, Cities of Asylum shall be
designated for anyone to flee into.” (Numbers
35:9)
MGB:
With a penchant for places where the placeless congregate, managing (almost) to
regard Arizona (for five years?) as a state of transit, a temporary refuge for
those exiled from real cities
Because
an artists’ colony could be a city of asylum;
Because
a town secluded by desert, mountains, so-called rivers;
Because
a mountain in particular is an island of land upon land—“an isolation
infinitely romantic”—a barrier metaphoric and corporeal;
Because
poets are always scrimmaging for islands: England for Sylvia, Lesbos for
Sappho, Ibiza for Benjamin
MGB
(until ‘the big one’ turns California itself into an archipelago?): immured
within her latest dwelling place and her mental dungeon, immured with
girlfriend, cats and fountain pen: pro tempore, between the urgency of
withdrawal and weary soles and will-less mind
They say it was a broken heart,
but it was expatriation, my love, that drowned the 10th muse’s rhyme
9.
“When the innocent criminal reaches any of these cities. . .the
council must let her in and give her a place among them. . .in the hill country
. . .in the wilderness.” (Joshua 20: 4)
If the
biblical-Kantian-Derridian reasons for the establishment of six cities of
asylum was to guarantee sanctuary for those who inadvertently had committed a
mortal crime;
If the only crime she had
committed—the only thing she had done away, accidentally wrist-slitting or
asphyxiating before a mountain-sick ‘retreat’—was her passion for poetry, her
(mis)belief in the mellifluousness of muses
MGB, who had been unfaithful to her imagination, misreckoning
road-trips for writerly ramblings: now struggling to return to poetry through
philosophy or through fiction, years of insentient laboriousness weighing on
her hand
MGB: who cannot think about dashing off without thinking of
Rachel, Sylvia, Nicole—all the witty wayfarers in her travel bag and in her
poems, all the titillating tour guides
MGB: whose poetry unsettles her prose all the silly seafarers: contemplativa in desierto
She, whom Rachel had forewarned, “Some palm trees are not meant
to be transplanted.”
How
do we become excursionists of genre / in a village temporarily hospitable?
Where
is our sign—the sign of the lyre—our writeful place before the pyre?
10.
“How long do you plan to stay in
Arizona?” “Just as long as it takes to get across” (Grapes of Wrath)
Oh, rainless mountain hell to
which we have withdrawn this time / oh, landscape disfigured beyond the 100th
meridian / above the 100-degree Fahrenheit / oh cuprite,
oh ochre, oh stupor, oh torpor, oh desert of the interior against
whom the oceanic imagination becomes a pittance of rain
is this what the desert
geography does to one—here, where days follow days artlessly, apluvially,
uneventfully upon scorching boulevards of dirt?
Oh crypt-house, oh ludicrous
tombstone rose, oh fatherlands ineludible!
Against the rattling intermittence of arid winds and hailing
monsoons: our feeble desire lacustrine, fluvial, pelagic