from The Unfounded: A Nectar Guide in Names
Vertigo
What is vertigo in a sentence? Where words askew are not stationary on page, but liquid, tilted abrasions, resins, resonance, auditory disassociations. Blemishes, treasured. A borrowed arm upon which to lean, pause—while everything spins.
I did not think of you in my leisure. I did not think of you at all. I resisted you in pieces, shards, shorn words, registers unheard.
Because the book is alive. Her book. Erotic love and divine love, and the body, and the cessation of having a body, and books are all one. So writes Hilda Hilst. I live in her world. I am a wordling.
My lungs contain remnants. Ruins of worlds. I have inhaled the very depths of dizziness.
When my written husband began to disappear I was desperate. Vertigo, in a sentence. Your mouth pressed with such force. Wherein imagination has no limit.
W.G. Sebald writes “Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet.” Stendhal writes:
“The lover’s mind vacillates between three ideas:
1. She is perfect.
2. She loves me.
3. How can I get the strongest possible proofs of her love?”
The writer’s mind vacillates, within the sentence.
My written work is imperfect. My text is incapable of love. How may I obtain the strongest possible protection against ill-verse? Thus begins vertigo. Resurrection, recurrence, blurring lines, tumbling, turning a page, recant, revisit, resist the attempt to fix, to anoint, to finish. Continue in the pitching sphere.
In Vertigo Sebald writes: “what is it that undoes a writer?”
I am resisting checking myself, checking for myself. Where might I wish to go. All of it weakness, nonsense. This attempt at work. Small black woodpecker on tree, white lined head.
Stendhal writes of the crystallization of love. What of the written crystallization of love, and connected with that love of which Hilda Hilst writes in The Obscene Madame D, that love which “This-One, the Luminous, the Vehement, The Name, I ingested deeply, salivating, licking my lips I demanded: make it such that I understand it, that’s all.”
Crystallization, an aspect of precipitation. Crystal growth. Seed crystal. Solution. Melt. Gather in clusters. When unstable, you dissolve. Gem stones. Snow flakes. Stalagtites and stalagmites. Honey.
Ciphers for your name.
Now put yourself in the place of a molecule. Dear Unfounded, you are a pure and perfect crystal, and also the external source heating the crystal. You sharply define temperature, mixing regime and vessel design. To sit and stare at your cooling profile. You are textbook liquid, suffering no exceptions. You are more simply destroyed than formed. Easier to dissolve than to grow. A well-defined pattern. A consequence.
Laynie Browne is the author of twelve collections of poetry and two novels. Her most recent collections of poems include
P R A C T I C E (SplitLevel, 2015) and Scorpyn Odes (Kore Press, 2015). Forthcoming books include a collaboration with Bernadette Mayer titled The Complete Works of Apis Mellfica (Further Other Books), a novel Periodic Companions with drawings by collaborator Noah Saterstrom (Tinderbox Editions), and a book of poems You Envelop Me (Omnidawn). She is a 2014 Pew Fellow and teaches at University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College.