So the space probe I began this column with might be spared. Cassini, orbiting Saturn until the money runs out in 11 months, may receive an extension of juice and money from NASA to keep it circling Saturn’s rings until a Saptember 15, 2017, suicide plunge.
This news is my first science of today.
But the first lyric language to drip into my head belongs to Sandy Florian:
I give birth to a singing pit. Dig it all out and I lay myself supine inside. My open throat becomes the open grave where my larynx howls out. There, I give birth to all my enemies. There, I take them by the horns and string them up like bags of gold. They tear me open like a lion. Rip me into pieces. Leave me shrilling in my pit. There, my thoughts bring me back to the void where my righteousness is roughly stored.
I read from Florian’s The Tree of No– a ‘lyric novel’ Bible-and-Milton mashup, of a feminized, violent, singing-while-self-overhearing sort– as I came out of deep-sedation grog, home from the hospital, on my couch.
Florian’s novel (is that what to call it?) is the speech and psalms of a female speaker who sings like David, births nations like Eve, and self-determines, like Milton’s Satan, in sin: in the titular rejection and falling away. The novel’s revolutionary heave, sexualized energy, and sense of deep- (rather than forward-)time recall Julieta Campos’s Fear of Losing Eurydice or Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette. Its moral quandaries– its arc from “Beastly, I fall at Adam under the shade” to “But the sin in me says I”– remind Robert Oventile of Simone Weil. However, more than these, it’s the tactile environment of Florian’s novel that was perfect to read this morning: episodic, blood-kitschy, spiritual, and charged (I could sympathize) with an untameable, grotesque, generative bodyhood.
Before my operation I’d held, or tried to hold, tight onto consciousness– counting seconds on the clock when Gary the nurse gave me an IV, noting a taste like copper on my palate– before deep sedation (not sleep, quite, Gary said: I could respond to questions, indicate pain, and breathe deeply) set in. Florian:
I keep a muzzle on my tomb, then I give birth to a horse and a mule, a shield and a buckler, without understanding whose temper is meant to be curbed. By bit and by bridle, my wounds grow faster and faster, and when I am sick, I wear a sackcloth, and when I am sick, I afflict myself with fasting against those despised by the winks of their eyes.
Where does the mind slip to? Thirty minutes later I was awake, in bed and puce-curtained off from other recuperators, asking for apple juice and buttered toast. Two hours later I was awake again, craving lentil soup and feeling for The Tree of No. Here’s for Cassini: eight more years!