The Baudelaire Fractal by Lisa Robertson

Author:Lisa Robertson
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Coach House Books

Slowly sipping a nourishing glass of beer on the terrace at le Narval on rue Saint-Jacques in late afternoon in the autumn of 1985 while reading the TLS: at this moment I felt like a gentleman scholar obeying the clock of ages as the marvellous clouds passed over. In the diminished scale of my economic existence, the beer could replace lunch, I’d discovered; the TLS could replace university. Wittgenstein, Guy Davenport, Zukofsky, post-structuralism – they each originated in those crisp, fine-set newsprint pages on a terrace. I could buy a fresh outfit if for a week I didn’t eat lunch. I had a new teal-green suit I’d just changed into in the café toilet, carefully stepping out of my winter corduroys over the squatting hole before pulling up the slender skirt that at once made me feel like Colette. The jacket fell loosely from boyish padded shoulders to hips accentuated by the peplum-like flare of two diagonal pockets, and the fabric was a textured viscose weave that swung fluidly when I walked. It was an eighties vision of the forties, I think, by way of cheap Thierry Mugler or Claude Montana knock-offs. I took my place on the terrace. We were the clock, in our costumes and our habits, in our admiration for the simplicity of a system. There was a kind of nobility in it: insupportable nervous troubles, dusk, art, outfits, swiftening, disobedience.

The suit was a fictional garment that I liked to wear with a beret of the same colour. This green was the colour of my eyes in anger. When I say the suit was fictional I mean that it expressed one variation of a code, not to entrench me in a grid of meaning, as semiotic interpretations of fashion would have it, but to assist me in an unnamed metamorphosis. I hadn’t then decided how to become that other thing, which here I will call for the sake of brevity a poet, but indecision did nothing to lessen my vehemence about it. I had not learned the ordinary, workaday devotions; I sought a mystic portal. I was practising versions of an intensity I supposed necessary to my ambition, an earnest desire that had found in Walter Pater a little ledge of language to perch upon for a while: ‘to burn always with a hard gemlike flame,’ as he said, in his conclusion to The Renaissance, ‘a clear perpetual outline at the core of everything mutable.’ I thought I’d find the gem in sex, this being an available mythology for the seeking and sensual girl. But mostly the fleshy tempests, which I had taken to be at the heart of my research, amounted to ornate flickerings. I began to suspect that, after all, such tempests were the grid, extending outwards in a metric repetition of the beauty problem that would permit only the most asinine deviations from the assigned roles in the drama. Next, reactively, I thought I’d found the gem in solitude. The word itself had a gorgeous, monkish allure.

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