Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip by Lisa Robertson

Author:Lisa Robertson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POE000000
Publisher: Coach House Books
Published: 2009-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

† (as when a swallow flies into my room – when a swallow flies into my study – being delicate and light as their bodies are light they are entirely free of trouble.)

A Modest Treatise

(an essay on perspective for Allyson Clay)

It was a warm September evening.

I dissolved corporeally into air leaving only my look.

The night was populated with images.

Some were moved easily to pity.

Some were sharp and suspicious, some credulous and pure.

Some were haughty and bitter.

Some human.

Some malleable and obsequious.

Some were gay.

Some were shy, solitary and austere.

Some liked to be praised by our work.

Some suffered when criticized.

Some were cruel in their arrogance, weak in danger and so forth.

It was a warm September evening and I entered its spaciousness,

which was not classical.

It was pleasant to violate the canons of proportion.

It was pleasant to imagine their life.

I placed my body in relation to their mystical privacies.

Nothing ever happened.

I was invisible.

My architecture was also invisible and specific and vast and it

faltered.

My architecture faltered in its complete originality.

I called it civic lust.

The romance of proportion was not for me.

I smoothed the horizon.

Here were the particulars of idling.

Here were the particulars of malleable proportions.

The verb was the plane of picturing.

The painter’s work is horizontal.

Against history I looked and against poetry also.

I looked against space that is.

A lady’s reach must exceed her grasp.

A lady must exceed space or falter.

Faltering was smooth.

This is mannerist ecology.

It was a warm September evening.

It contained old men, youths, boys, matrons, girls, domestic

animals, dogs, birds, horses, buildings and provinces.

They were properly arranged.

My technique was based on experience, not desire.

This was an ecology of distances.

I couldn’t read them in the beautiful way.

What do the shoulder, the wrist, the neck, in their various

flexures desire?

What does mortal flexure want?

As a form of modest ornament, I intend to articulate

transitions.

I saw the stranger’s wrist in the sugary light.

The soul is outside.

That evening, the monuments of the city were made known by

the movements of the bodies.

Each had the dignity of her movements.

Each sat at rest as pure and massy gold.

Care weighs so heavily.

Cloth is by nature heavy and falls to earth.

I wanted to describe the difference in sensation.

With grace the curtains when struck with the wind showed the

citizens.

I designed all these movements for painting.

The rooms felt patient, like concepts.

I disliked solitude and I also craved it.

I have given thought to making my words clear rather than ornate.

Then the windows were as ripe as fruits bleeding sugars.

That grace in bodies, which we call beauty, is born of sugars.

I wanted to see if my body could amend space.

Narcissus, who was changed into a flower according to the

poets, was the inventor of changing.

Some think that sugar shaped the soul.

I was lonely and hungry and civic.

I moved upwards in the sweet air.

Its simplicity or complexity was not my own.

It was a warm September evening with feminist emotion.

Motion contracted.

The air was destroying the layer of the future.

We were still sand or gravel or stone slabs.

How could I speak or groan or scream?

I did not wish to disrupt their ceremonies.

I sought the ornament of moisture.

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