EVENING WILL COME: A MONTHLY JOURNAL OF POETICS (ISSUE 12: December 2011)

Brandon Shimoda
Winter Dwelling
fragments from a relationship                                        (page 4)
western Maine, 2010-2011


NOVEMBER 22. I've been spending 8 hours a day immersed in Hiroshima research, reading to the far ends of the history of the bomb and bombings. I haven't yet gotten to the point with my studies where I've been able to step outside the brutal facts to tender representation, even though a great deal of what I'm looking at is the very first tier of representation—I find it incredibly difficult, for example, to look at paintings or read poems about Hiroshima, without feeling the world is castrating the nightmare. This is my full-time job; I'm forgoing spending money, eating the garlic that you gave us ...

NOVEMBER 22. My Opus has become so simple that it no longer makes any progress.

DECEMBER 1. I read (reread) your book, and wrote these few lines from (how to tell you how much it became part of me?—). Let me know if you received this: To write from inside an inland sea, to look through "windows / with their shadows / on the trodden stage / and the stage goes" is to leave us in silence, to give us a world surrounded with silence. Brandon Shimoda's world is a hushed world. His book, a silent prayer, not to a god, but to life, the life of survivors. Brandon, like Orpheus, is underground, in the realm of the dead. One hears "the graceless steps of wandering spirits"; with them he wanders among trees, flowers, water ... mixing them with the equally subtle presence of women whose bodies are weightless, and who wander in his own life, his experience. He faces that ultimate question: "After Hiroshima, can one speak, can one write?" He answers that one can whisper; can join the dead, and that whisper turns into a ritualistic text, his book, a celebration of witnessing, but also of the minute manifestations of reality; because Hiroshima has contaminated reality for ever since. Therefore, insinuating itself in the memory of The Bomb, (a disaster surpassing disasters), his work is the saying of the dead who return, "speak through us / return to silence / to our silence too.", is a Requiem. Brandon barely touches his own words: they come to him from afar, float, take a sigh, haunt us and disappear, reappear on the next page, and follow their obscure journey in obscurity... in that obscurity we become bound to hear them, we follow them... they make a poem that we want to read, and mostly, reread with closed eyes.

DECEMBER 2. You asked me, "How would or do you delineate thinking and writing in the process of your thinking and your writing?" I have no idea what the question is nor what the answer might be. Sometimes I worry that all I ever want of a piece of writing, and also of a thought, is that it still my gaze, if briefly. Not forever—I do not want a single thing forever—but if I must live for now in this body, with this mind, what I want most, what I seek always, is the certainty of something bright, discarded in a field of snow. Why do I settle for a gaze stilled, when something—some idea, some written line, some burning instance of color—might rip my eyes right the fuck out of my head? If I wake up each morning convinced of the apocalypse, how do I hold onto both the yellow leaf clinging to the dripping branch and to the gradations of light that once lit the whole world? How to hold onto, as you said, as someone once said—it is written, at least, in your hand—how do we hold onto the detail and the totality?

DECEMBER 16. The snow has returned, and with it some sun, the light now racing its blinding tide from one bend to the other. It rained thirty hours straight, washing away the inaugural snow, which raised the lake a few feet, and returned the creeks to their spring. Everything became feral—wilderness frozen over, so committing a delegation of layers, with a sense that we are actually within the lake—not under it. The ice has risen against the foundations of the houses across the fire lane, turning to glass with the sun, making me think that ice is actually a more deeply engaged heat. Everything is still. Only my hands move ...

DECEMBER 23. How many poems will we actually be able to recall at the moment of our death ... or at the moment just before? And will they console us, anymore than we might already be consoled? Remembering is the poison ...

DECEMBER 27. I can see you surrounded by snow white paradise who says that paradise has to be comfortable? It has to make us happy in unusual ways—to paint things differently, to reverse weathers, to promise new and genial thoughts (just reread (very) young Nietzsche's first draft on the origin of tragedy called (at least in French), “The Dionysian Vision of the World,” a short book that makes you float on it ... made my day, and wanted to tell you about it …



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