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  • “A Need to Mourn Abandonment in Advance” in Nathaniel Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate
  • Stephen Hock (bio)

“Melin”

In a letter that appears in Bass Cathedral (2008), the fourth volume of Nathaniel Mackey’s ongoing series of epistolary fictions collectively titled From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, the series’ protagonist, a jazz musician identified only by the letter N., pauses to ponder the title of “Melin,” the first song on Henry Threadgill’s album When Was That? (1982). N. asks, “What does that title mean?” and considers the possibility that it might be “a typo, a misspelling,” before musing, “Should it be ‘Melan,’ the root for ‘black’ in words like ‘melanin’ and ‘melancholy’?” (125). N. poses this question of homophony as if only in passing, but like so many of the puzzles that fill N.’s letters, the question echoes against the larger framework that N. has put in place. In this case, the association that N. makes on the level of the signifier between blackness and melancholy resonates with Mackey’s investigation of melancholy, loss, and trauma in the context of African American and wider African diasporic history throughout the series. In fact, over the course of the series to date—which, in addition to Bass Cathedral, comprises Bedouin Hornbook (1986), Djbot Baghostus’s Run (1993), and Atet A.D. (2001)—N.’s experiences of traumatic loss repeatedly point to an overarching sense of loss stemming from the legacy of the Middle Passage that echoes across generations. As the series proceeds, it becomes clear that, apropos of the critical ligature between trauma and repetition that [End Page 534] dates back to the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud, N.’s responses to those traumas are bound up with various forms of repetition, including the repeated textual production inherent to the series form itself as well as the musical repetitions of the improvisatory jazz he plays. Ultimately, however, these repetitions serve not to trap N. in the past but to open up for him a path to the future, with repetition functioning in the series not as a pattern one must follow compulsively but rather as a strategic tool for addressing trauma creatively.

Most important among the series’ repetitions are its many variant repetitions of words and phrases, the verbal analogue to jazz riffing that Mackey refers to as “the creaking of the word.” N.’s reflections on melin, in fact, demonstrate that word’s creaking:

But the piece that gets to me most, the one I can’t get past, the one I keep playing, is the very first track, “Melin.” What does that title mean? Is it a typo, a misspelling? (“Naima” appears as “Niema” on Shepp’s Four for Trane.) Should it be “Melan,” the root for “black” in words like “melanin” and “melancholy”? Is there an apostrophe or a “g” missing from what should be “Melin’” or “Meling”? “Meling” (or “melin’”) is an obsolete word, more often spelled “melling,” whose meanings are: 1) blending, combining; mixture; 2) copulation; 3) the action of mixing in fight or joining in combat; 4) dealing; intercourse; meddling. Or does the title refer to Abra-Melin, also known as Abramelin the Mage and Abraham the Jew, a magician from Wurxburg, Germany, who lived from 1362 to 1460? AbraMelin wrote a body of magical works that influenced Aleister Crowley, who is said to have copied from The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage to compose his rituals for mastering demons. Abra-Melin was an expert on the Kabbalah and claimed to have acquired magical knowledge from angels, who taught him how to conjure and tame demons. Legend has it that he created two thousand spirit cavalrymen to help Frederick, the elector of Saxony. This pertains to the cavalry/calvary conflation I remarked on in my letter a few months ago. Listen to Olu Dara’s cornet solo on “Melin,” its bugling of a tremulous charge, an ostensibly triumphalist rally or rescue subjected to a spiritual demur.

(125)

By this fourth volume of Mackey’s series, his readers are familiar with N.’s crafting of passages like this one, where etymologically inflected puns and associative...

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