Noise That Stays Noise: Essays

Besides, of Bedouins—On Hotel Lautréamont

Besides, of Bedouins—On Hotel Lautréamont by John Ashbery A hotel is distinguished by its many rooms, and a room always stands for a moment of the mind, so ever y collection of poetr y is necessarily a hotel, a sequence of spaces threaded in and above, and therein we live, in passing, in a cor ridor, in what brushes by your sleeve, the underscore of breath. This is wealth, and we’re just passing through, as they say , there we are and then are not, another stranger , and there’ s something clean in that. And to those whose loneliness / shouts envy in my face, it’s a state of pure sunlight, pared of memory, and it’s a dream; it’s the dream: to be seen from the back, walking away until the seer fades, and the reader is left with an open book. Hotel Lautréamont traces an exile—an ambulatory self-exile in both senses of the ter m: of the voluntarily chosen, deeply wanted, and escorted, and of the self that walks out on the self until it runs out of land: There is nothing to do except obser ve the horizon, the only one, that seems to want to sever itself from the passing sky. Which is passing behind a screen on which a shadow-play keeps time with the gate swinging back and for th of the face, of the name. Lautréamont was a man who abandoned his name for another of a fictional character from a 19th-centu y sensationalist novel that no one now remembers how to write the self away and 131 make a dubious hero splinter into the actual. Isidore Ducasse, the author forever on the outside, and Maldoror , the character forever trapped within, meet in this name of another on the cover that divides one world from the next. Lautréamont exiled himself from himself, leaving his native Montevideo to go to Paris to die of the siege. And Joseph Cor nell was an exile from and within his native land and never left New Y ork. You can exile inside; you can build room after very small room with the many addresses of repeated objects. Exiled himself into a small red ball, a grid of white, the repeated word “Hotel.” Seen on a bench this morning: a man in a gray coatis always a photograph in black and white, and the stranger is innumerable and inhabitable, in a soft hat, quietly sealed. “Still Life with Stranger” is full of bees and snow. Ashbery speaks of those homeless hirsutes we call men; this is his homage to them. We see a walking line silhouetted against the horizon, letter for letter , person for person, counting in his sleep, if poetry does not keep track, there will be no more ceremony to this loss and if we are to be more than music be erased. It is this we will inter rogate. The erased conveys its passing through a split-second of unclarity , a cloud across the sur face, and the paper is no longer vir gin. It’s a white rectangle with a smudge that looks a little like the condensed breath of someone who had been standing at the window. From the outside, a hotel is no more than a patter n of windows , often all the same, counters in a game of concentration, and you will never be able to remember where you saw each one before. Ashbery also exiled himself to Paris where he fell in love with the work of Raymond Roussel, than whom no better monument to alienation both self and universal has ever been conceived. There is all that outside. It does extend in all directions becoming infinitely more grand and infinitely more precise, and a ways and essentially without depth. Which was the world he 132 built and into which he fled and lived forever among his simpl magic and unlikely machines. That these three men—Lautréamont, Roussel, and Cornell —are the same one is a law of physics that may seem to have no purpose until it emerges as this book: great rivers run into each other and graves Digression: That is, of course, a gross misreading of the line or is it. The lines run: we will meet on a stone up there, and all will not be well, but that is useful. Great rivers r...