Jean Valentine: This-World Company

The Umwelt of the Question: Notes on Territory and Desire

BHANU KAPIL The Umwelt of the Question Notes on Territory and Desire What is a question? Literally, it’s a way of gathering information but not of processing it. As a mode of enquiry that’s also, linguistically , founded on doubt, on not having the words for what passed between you and another person at the end of a relationship, the question seals space. That tiny, bounded pocket of something that is also space is so free. Optically, a spore. Or: a bubble with two spherical envelopes rotating at different rates: one you can’t see, which I think of as the formless intensity or anxiety gathering in the body before speech, which is heat; and one that processes along a subtly different elliptic. That second membrane is oily, with rich blue and red hues, and in my dream of the question it’s what drives or compels the response, whether that’s a rupturing ‹ngertip or the eye tracking the color until it bursts. In a poem, a question develops a “lifeworld” or umwelt, which arises as soon as the question is asked. It simultaneously provides an extremely swift way to scan territory. In fact, according to my indelicate Punjabi logic, derived almost entirely from reading philosophies of art and sensation, the instant that the response appears marks the physical limit of what a body experiences as its environment . So what we see in the umwelt of a question that’s being asked of the body is: a body that’s breaking up before our eyes. In the poems of Jean Valentine, which appear in a section of Little Boat called “From the Questions of Bhanu Kapil,” this is a body that’s also tearing or distending the membrane of what bounds it. Two things: 1. My name is Bhanu Kapil, and 2. What information does Valentine have for us, about what happens to a body at the limit of its being? How does she record a site that’s both transgressive and failing at the same time, failing to sustain the body as an entity? And what does this body, which appears in these ‹ve short poems in such varied ways, dead ways, living ways, want? 233 In working through these ideas, which are really questions about how a ruptured body experiences desire, and asking these questions of Valentine’s poems, I’ve been accompanied by another smallish, hard-backed, smart-looking book with a blackish, shiny cover: Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, the newest set of essays by the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz. It’s from her work that I gathered the word umwelt, which appears in a quote from the Estonian biosemiotician Jakob von Uexhull: Every object becomes something completely different on entering a different Umwelt. A ›ower stem that in our Umwelt is a support for a ›ower, becomes a pipe full of liquid for the meadow spittlebug . . . who sucks the liquid to build its foamy nest. I read these words and said a question was a stem. I said the question had one function in the umwelt of the book I had written, but that something happened to snap it off. This is what happened: Jean Valentine wrote to me on thick creamy paper, or perhaps ordinary white paper, from New York City, asking if she might use the questions I had invented (for a book of poems I wrote in my twenties, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers) for a book she was writing now. Without any hesitation, I snapped the stems and gave them to her to build a foamy nest. In the ‹rst poem of her own sequence, “Where did you come from/how did you arrive?,” Valentine extends this plant matter into a domain neither of us, the speaker or the reader, can really witness: trying to follow the body up its stem to the air— I couldn’t . . . (Little Boat 53) The body in this poem is torn out from an imaginal “Tipperary” onto the “restraining blankets” of the birth bed, with tremendous force that has the register of a violation. I registered the broken stem, and how, without any information or memory supplying the duration that followed, the body became, in the next poem, a set of remains: a “ghost-body” with “Whatever kind of eyes / you have” (“What is the shape of your body?”). Then it happens again: 234 suddenly, without any...